Timeline note: Set shortly after Sulley and Mike become a Scare team.

Note: In my headcanon, they first had an apartment different from the one we know. There's no way they could have afforded that one with their early salaries.

Sometimes, Sulley wished Mike would listen to him for a change. It might have prevented that huge crashing sound.

"Are you okay?" he called mildly, pausing his kitchen dusting duties for the moment to poke his head into the apartment's main space. But there was a faint grumbling coming from the room they had declared Sulley's this morning, so at least Mike had not knocked himself out with any of the larger boxes.

With a faint sigh, Sulley left the feather duster on the kitchen table and went over to his room, and into the open closet when he could not spot Mike anywhere. "I told you I could take care of these, you know," he finally scoffed, leaning against the door frame to regard the pile of books and other old stuff in front of him, and the two green arms sticking out of it as the only indication of his friend's presence.

Now Mike dug himself out of the mess and scowled up at him. Whether the expression was actually meant for him, or just the situation in its entirety, Sulley could not tell. "It shouldn't be that hard!" Mike spat. "They're just boxes!"

"Heavy boxes," Sulley corrected coolly, "which you're trying to heave on too high a shelf."

"They need to be high up!" Mike argued. "If they're too low and you have to bend down every time you're looking for something, you're gonna have a back problem in the long run!"

Sulley snorted. That was such a Mike thing to worry about. "If I used this stuff frequently, it wouldn't be in those boxes. And you couldn't carry them when we brought them, either. You think the gravity is different in the new apartment or something?"

"Very funny," Mike snapped, throwing a book in his general direction, but the action lacked actual malice, so Sulley barely even felt it when it bounced off his shoulder.

"I told you I'd do it later," he repeated himself. Much later. Like, in a few years. It was not as if he needed any of this stuff.

"We have to store these properly before we clean your room!" Mike announced yet again, for the umpteenth time today. "If we clean it while they're still in there, it's not gonna be clean!"

"When'd you turn into a cleaning maniac?" Sulley sighed, rolling his eyes a little as he returned to the kitchen. Honestly, Mike could just have cleaned the living room first. Or his own room. Sometimes, he really got on Sulley's nerves with the everything-needs-to-go-my-way thing.

But it did not matter how many bad qualities Mike had, Sulley reminded himself. He more than made up for them with all the good ones. That, and Sulley knew that he himself was in no way perfect, either.

Slightly shaking his head, he picked up the duster again and resumed his task. He liked the new apartment, he really did. It was so big, and it had such a great view! He was a bit wary of the separate bedrooms, though - he had shared one with Mike for years now, so he was somewhat afraid of waking up in the middle of the night and panicking at not hearing his friend's breathing nearby. Still, at the rate Mike and Celia's relationship was progressing, Sulley would not even be surprised if she moved in sooner or later, so he saw the necessity in the decision.

He could hear Mike rummaging with his stuff now, probably trying to get it back into the box that had fallen down, so he could not be too injured. Sulley smiled to himself at how accustomed he was to this sort of thing by now. He remembered the early days of their friendship, back in the Oozma Kappa fraternity house, when he had kept rushing to Mike's side at every small noise, terrified that something serious might have happened.

The relative quiet did not last for long, though. "Sulley, I told you not to mix our stuff!"

Before Sulley even had a chance to ask, Mike had already stomped over to the kitchen, waving a framed photograph around. "If you mix yours and mine, I won't be able to find my things when I look for them, and I will look for them, I like looking at my old pictures!"

"I didn't mix our stuff!" Sulley argued, and quickly took the photograph from Mike before he could accidentally smash it onto the edge of the table in his agitation. "Remember, you packed everything we had in the storage closet. Because you didn't want me to mix it." And because they had been in a hurry, and Mike had been impatient and had accused him of being too slow.

But then Sulley found himself drawn in by the picture in his hand. "Wait, where did you find this?"

Immediately, he felt a fond smile sneak its way onto his face. This was his elementary school graduation picture. It did not take him long to spot himself in the front row, due to the vibrant blue color of his fur, but recognizing himself was harder. He had still been so young that his spine had not been fully developed, so he looked more like Archie than like himself.

"In your unused stuff!" Mike answered the question, and for some reason, there was accusation in his tone. "Where it doesn't belong!"

Sulley looked up from the picture to frown at him. "Er… where do you figure my graduation picture belongs, then?" The closet was the perfect place. He had not looked at that thing in almost a decade.

"This is my graduation picture!" Mike snapped, snatching the photograph out of his hands. "So it belongs in my closet!"

Sulley rolled his eyes - again. Had his friend taken stupid pills this morning? "What's with you today, Mike? Of course this is mine! Look, there I am!" And he pointed to the blue ball of fur grinning into the camera. Even with the child anatomy, he had been rather big for his age, bigger than most monsters in his class, so he had no idea how Mike could have missed him.

Mike did not reply. Instead, his eye widened, and he fell silent all of a sudden, staring at the picture so intently that it could have burned a hole through the frame.

And a moment later, the lack of a response made sense to Sulley. Gently, he took the picture from his friend's hands and turned it around to look at it himself. "Where are you?" he asked softly, scanning the group of students.

Still not saying a word, Mike slowly raised one hand and pointed to a spot in the topmost row.

At first, Sulley doubted his friend's sanity a bit, but then he did spot Mike. Or what could be seen of him behind one particularly large classmate. Half an eye and two minuscule horns were all the sign there was that Mike had been in the room at that time. No wonder Sulley had missed him.

He tore his gaze away to lock eyes with Mike. "This… wow."

Mike nodded, and Sulley could not help but to laugh a little at how he was still so uncharacteristically mute.

"I remember you," Mike finally mumbled, and Sulley felt an odd feeling creep up inside of him at the words, one he could not name. But he liked the feeling, he decided. It was warm, and a bit fuzzy.

"You kept being cheeky with the teachers," Mike continued slowly, staring at the picture again. "And you kept basking in the glow of everyone's attention. …I was so jealous."

With his free hand, Sulley rubbed the back of his head, in a way he knew he had picked up from Mike in the last few years. "I'm afraid I don't remember you at all," he admitted.

To his surprise, Mike suddenly smiled at those words, finally snapping out of his stupor to slightly shake his head. "I don't blame you, I was in your class for half a year at most. Dad had gotten a new job, so we moved to the Sludge Falls to…"

"The transfer student!" Sulley blurted out, and in front of his inner eye, he suddenly saw a vivid mental image of a tiny green cyclops who could not write his name onto the blackboard because he was too small to reach it. "The teacher got that little footstool for you, didn't she? So that you could solve tasks on the blackboard?"

Mike's smile widened. "Yeah, that was me." For a moment, his eye looked unfocused, as if he was lost in some sort of memory. "I knew I'd heard the name before," he then mused aloud, obviously to himself because Sulley had no idea what he was talking about. Finally, Mike gave a small chuckle. "Maybe I should call Terry. This would make great story material."

Sulley was surprised to feel a slight pricking at his eyes. Great story material indeed. Did he dare believe in fate? He was not quite sure.

"I don't believe this," Mike also muttered, staring at the picture yet again. "I… I don't think I would have made the connection if you had not pointed this out."

"Me, neither," Sulley agreed. Why was he beaming like that? "But I'm glad we noticed."

He was a bit surprised when all of a sudden, Mike started giggling. "You looked ridiculous," he snickered.

"Well, we can't all be lean and handsome!" Sulley snapped in good humor. Then he smirked, and clutched the picture to his chest in what he hoped was recognizable as an overly dramatic act. "But we're positive now that this is mine, aren't we?"

At that, Mike stopped his guffawing to grin at him. "Well, I kept wondering when I had changed the frame, so I suppose this is yours. Think I should go through my stuff and find mine?"

Sulley considered it for a moment, but then he shook his head. "Nah, you won't need that to look at the picture again. We're definitely putting this one on display somewhere."

And this, he could see in Mike's suddenly shimmering eye, in his suddenly brilliant smile, this was a suggestion his friend did not mind in the slightest.

Note: This still seems to contradict the teaser, but keep in mind that Sulley never said he was there in fifth grade; Mike could have told him about Suzie. And everything else fits together now. :)

Yeah, there was a tiny Toy Story reference. And Terry writing stories based on Mike's backstory is a slight in-joke with Ava-Kane's "The Musings of Terry Perry." Go give it a read, people. But not before leaving a review, please. ;)