A/N: MMMKAY. First ever serious fic. First ever Fraggle fic. This chapter's pretty short, but any *tentative* updates will be much longer. *Tentative* meaning I'm not gonna update this unless I know someone's reading it. :P
So...if you're reading this...please let me know! :D I like constructive, meaningful criticism, but I equally enjoy a silly, pointless comment, and yes, I even love getting flamed! Anything you've got to say, I want to hear!
The fraggles produced a lot of dirty laundry on a pretty regular basis.
Not many fraggles ever really stopped to think about laundry, though; why their clothes were always so spotless, even if a day or two before they had been filthy from playing in the mud or a little stained from lunch. All they knew was that they gave their clothes from the day before to the fraggle who went 'round gathering them, and usually got the same clothes back at the end of the day.
But Boober Fraggle was just the opposite. He rarely stopped to think of anything but laundry. It was just so perfect: when he received the clothes they were ruined, ugly, and stinky; when he was finished with them they were sparkling, fresh. Sometimes Boober would compare his laundry to his own life – how he sometimes felt ugly, worthless. How his friends, usually effortlessly, refreshed him with their positive outlook and made him feel like dancing with their carefree songs and games. When Boober thought about it this way, everyone in Fraggle Rock was a launderer, cleansing and revitalizing each other every passing day. Fraggle Rock was a very good place to live, to be sure, and even if there was no one to wash clothes or metaphorically wash fraggles, death was almost nonexistent aside from occasional cave-ins and epidemics, and even still, those were unintentional. Doing everyone else's laundry gave Boober plenty of time to think about things like this. It made him thankful for the relatively safe home he had.
Boober's dedication of so much time to laundry also meant that he was pretty hygienic. He smelled crisp and clean like the soap he used, and, it's not that fraggles smell bad, but, you could tell a difference if you stood between him and, say, Wembly. His cave was tidy and sanitary, too, but that was more of a personal thing than a laundry-related thing.
That was something else Boober was proud of, his cave. Only his. Most fraggles didn't like having a whole cave to themselves, it made them feel lonely and nervous. Boober had his own cave, a haven of sweet solitude for when he felt overwhelmed or depressed. Most fraggles read too much into this and saw Boober as a perpetually gloomy, slightly unsociable, alienated sort of fraggle. His four friends, Gobo, Mokey, Wembly, and Red knew better than this. They knew it was perfectly normal to feel anxious or beset at times, and that Boober just felt that a little more frequently than they did. Boober's cave was a little out of the way of the Great Hall, so he didn't receive many visitors, and any talking he did with his fun side, Sidebottom, was as secret as anything he might hide under his bed because, lucky for him, his cave was situated so that any eavesdropping fraggle would practically have to put his ear up to the doorway in order to understand any conversation coming from inside.
One morning the laundry came in earlier than usual, before he even started on his own. The fraggle delivering the laundry was unfamiliar to Boober, and when he asked where the usual laundry-deliverer Tosh was, the strange fraggle simply shrugged and fled.
"You'd think he hasn't ever seen a pile of laundry before, the way he shifted around and ran off like that," Boober sighed. "Oh well, I guess I'll just have to do my load right along with everyone else's. Now let's see…" He began to sort out the clothes based on their soil level. "Light, Medium, Heavy, Blood stains, Food stains, Grass stains…Blood stains?" Boober wildly threw clothes behind him, into the air and out of his way, searching for the two shirts he had thoughtlessly categorized as 'Blood stains'.
He let out a high "Heahahaha!" when he found them, his mouth curling into a disgusted cringe and his body shaking and shivering like the time Gobo refused to ring the bells and the whole Rock froze over. Blood. Blood was thoroughly soaked into one ripped shirt that looked like it was originally white, and seemingly smeared over another shirt, originally light blue. It stank, too. Boober had never seen so much blood in his life before. He had treated, with his various home remedies, various cuts and scrapes that were unavoidable when living in a cave, in a giant rock. But never, never had he seen this much blood come out of one fraggle before. He didn't even want to think about how many cuts a fraggle might have to sustain to produce this much blood. He felt dizzy. He had to sit down and think. He couldn't think. All he could think was: Someone is hurt. This blood came from a fraggle. There is a fraggle, somewhere, hurt, missing this blood. With cuts. Lots and lots of cuts…or one big cut. Or something. And…there's another fraggle…who knows about it. Who tried to clean it up.