Howard paused as the sun began to set.
He had a can of Mountain Dew in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, his backpack shoved full of comics he'd lifted from the comic store and candy bars he'd lifted from the grocery, and now the sun was setting. He didn't know exactly why, but he'd kind of expected it all to be over by the time the sun started to set. With the dark came… well, a lot of stuff that he'd rather not deal with without his parents.
He took a swallow of his Mountain Dew and wondered where Orc was. If night was falling, he wanted to be around Orc. He really liked the power that came with being Orc's number one man, and he liked the power that came with the adults disappearing, but he wasn't a huge fan of the power that the night had.
The problem with the night was that you couldn't see what was out there. It was dark, even with streetlamps turning on as their light-sensors caught no light. Apart from the few that nobody'd bothered to go turn the lights off in, the houses were dark. Kids were flitting into them like moths, drawn by, if not light quite yet, the possibility of light. Howard wanted to be one of them, and he even turned around to go home, but then stopped.
Who said he had to go home right when the sun set? Nobody. Even before this had happened he hadn't really had to be home before dark. He'd stayed out after dark with Orc more times than he could count. Sometimes these forays into the nightlife – the nightlife that was always so much more welcoming with cars driving to bars and older people watching TV, and stuff – would begin and end with Howard wriggling through his window, but he'd stayed out after dark before.
Maybe his problem was that he didn't have Orc around. If he had Orc around, he wouldn't be scared anymore. Simple.
Last he'd seen Orc, the guy had been digging through the grocery store. Howard had gone off on his own because he'd seen a bunch of kids at the comic shop, and he didn't want all the good ones to be gone, so he'd grabbed a baseball bat from Cookie and scared them off. As a result, he had a backpack full of X-Men and Deadpool and even a few issues of Iron Man, though most of the Avengers stuff had been gone by the time he'd chased the kids around. Howard hadn't really been up for more of Orc at that point, so he'd walked down to the park and read some comics. It had been nice, until some kid biking past had knocked over a previous can of Mountain Dew he'd had, so he'd dug through some houses until finding some more…
And, long story short, he had no clue where Orc was. He could hunker down underneath one of the streetlamps and read some more, read cross-legged with his back to the pole and, this time, can in his hand, dragging across his bottom lip instead of on the ground where any idiot could knock it over. But that didn't really appeal to him.
Mostly he just wanted Orc.
He started up the long trek of going up and down streets, not calling Orc's name because of two reasons – one, he'd look like he was scared, and even though that there were some goosebumps rising on his skin the darker it got, he didn't want anyone to know, and two, Orc'd probably be somewhere Howard could see. Not an easy guy to miss, Orc.
He did hum a little as he walked, some snatches of whatever shitty pop music he'd heard last. The dragging of his baseball bat against concrete sidewalks was a consistent noise that didn't freak him out.
He eventually found Orc sitting on his porch.
"Dude, you have a house, too," Howard pointed out, even though he was really glad that Orc had chosen Howard's.
Orc made a non-committal grunt and gestured to Howard's backpack. "Whaddaya got?"
"Huh? Oh, comics. Candy. Stuff like that," Howard said, shifting from foot-to-foot. Now that he'd found Orc, he didn't really know what to do with him. "Do you want to come inside? It's getting…" He'd been about to say dark, but that sounded stupid. Especially to someone like Orc, who had a lot bigger things to fear than the dark. "Cold."
He finished lamely, but Orc wasn't ever really the kind of guy that picked up on verbal tone, so he just went inside. Howard followed, shutting off the porch light out of habit. He flipped on the kitchen light and tossed his backpack on a chair.
"You want something to eat?" he asked.
"Yeah," Orc said, sitting down heavily in the chair he used whenever he hung out with Howard. "Can you cook?"
He looked absolutely baffled at the thought of Howard cooking, and Howard snorted with laughter.
"Uh, sort of," he said. "What I meant was, we have some Easy Mac and that just goes in the microwave, so it's within my capabilities."
"Okay," Orc said. He watched while Howard dug around in cupboards and pressed buttons on the microwave and found some cups and filled them with milk and soon the both of them were eating. Every room in the house except the kitchen was dark, and Howard had the insane instinct to run around, turning all of the lights on so that it wouldn't be like they were hunched over a table with a single light above them. It was creepy as hell.
"You wanna stay here tonight?" Howard asked. Orc nodded a few times, averting his eyes. Howard would have thought that, with his dad gone, he'd be glad to stay at home, but maybe Orc was scared, too. The thought was kind of ridiculous – a kid like Orc, being scared in a situation like this, but… maybe.
After a while, after some more wandering the streets and doing some stuff, the both of them ended up straight back at Howard's house. Howard wondered if he should let Orc sleep in his parent's room, because before when the dude had stayed over he'd just slept on the floor with a blanket, but he really didn't want to be alone right now.
He cleared his throat when they got to his room. "If you want to sleep in the bed with me, that's – fine," he said, turning away to change into oversized clothes he sometimes used as pajamas when it was cold.
"Okay," Orc said. When Howard looked back at him, he looked more like a kid than he ever had – standing there, looking at the ground with his hair all messed up, all malice gone from his face, and Howard felt a lump of something rising in his throat.
"You okay, big guy?" he asked, sort of reaching out, feeling for the tone of the situation.
"Yeah," Orc said. He looked up and met Howard's eyes and Howard took a step back automatically. "I'm happy he's gone. I'm happy I'm the biggest guy around. But I can't go home. I don't know why."
Howard's mouth dried up. He knew some vague theories or whatever that could maybe explain Orc's reluctance to go back to the house where he was beaten up every time he put a toe out of line, but he was pretty sure Orc didn't want to hear it.
"Man, it's…" he trailed off. "It's, like, instinct. You don't wanna go home because home sucked, even if it doesn't now."
"Right," Orc said. He latched onto it with a fervor that Howard didn't know he'd had in him. Either way, Howard didn't want to talk about this anymore, because a vulnerable Orc was really weird to him. But, thankfully, Orc just got into bed, and Howard turned out the light. Orc scooted over to the wall side so that there would be room for Howard, and they slept curled up together, Howard's hand catching Orc's sleeve and Orc's chin on Howard's head.
It was just about the last moment of peace they'd get.
It's so rare that I get Orcward-y ideas. This is one of those rare ideas. I dunno, I experimented a bunch with, like, the writing style and stuff.