This Fanfiction is about ScruffMcGruff, real name Cameron, who is a associate of mine. This story is completely fictional, and does NOT reflect on the viewpoints of Cameron or our associates. Also, this is more a story about Scruff and less a story about Rocket League. Rocket League plays a key role in this story, but it is not necessarily the point of the story.
Toxin Cleansing
"CAM! I asked you to bring down your laundry 10 minutes ago, if I need to come up there, I'm disconnecting your game!" Scruff's mom was in a rut, he, once again, had failed at doing the one thing asked of him. All Scruff had to do was bring down his family's laundry twice a week. At this point, his mom was already collecting from every room except his. She had realized that if she was not collecting her family's dirty underwear, no one was.
"Alright MOM! Just let me finish this game and I'll have it all down, promise." Scruff was having difficulty hiding his true emotions. He wanted to shout, scream, tell her how 'I didn't ask to be brought into this world, I don't wear your guys' clothes, why should I be responsible for it? I stay out of your way, so stay out of mine!'
Silence was the only response from Cameron's mom. It was the only response one could give to Scruff, anger would only elicit more anger, and compliance would only elicit more abuse.
A smell of gym socks clogged the room. Not that Scruff had seen a gym since high school, but rather as a result of constant wear of one set of socks. Scruff would rather sit in his own filth for days rather than bring his clothes down to be washed. His curtains were drawn; spider webs held them in place, as they have for years. His bed was his hair: unkempt. His sheets were worn and stained with back sweat. His walles oozed with the smell of vapor and musk. His floor was carpeted with hairs and skin flakes. Only his desk saw any sort of neatness, with a square space allocated to his mouse. Even then, various college applications were encroaching on this sacred space. The letters on his keyboard were worn with use; his W, A, S, and D keys no longer bared lettering. The scratches on the floor beneath his computer chair had been etched in deep enough that the wheels of the chair slotted into the floor. Scruff and his room had a lot in common.
"CAMERON!"
"30 seconds remaining."
A marching came from downstairs. Thunder under her feet and rage in her eyes. A matriarch without subjects is a force of nature. Like a hurricane in a bath or a tornado in an alley, his mom was pissed. If only she knew. Laundry can always wait, there is no time slot for laundry. You can do laundry at 5 P.M. or 5 A.M., the difference is none. But if Scruff were to leave now the game would be over. No do overs, no second chances, nothing. The time was now, but the time was coming to an end.
The magic of a breaker switch is how immediate it is. No warning, no backup, like a nuclear blast on an orphanage: immediate destruction. Actually throwing a breaker was almost a magical experience. The power of electricity at one's fingertips. It was not everyday that someone got to control the flow of electrons in a house, but for Scruff's mom today was that day.
Thanks to the blackout curtains, Scruff was enveloped in darkness. A total nothingness unlike the death of the universe. If a baseball player was throwing Malcolm X, it too would be described like Scruff's room: pitch black. So there he sat, under the warm glow of a monitor beating off the heat from his game; the only thing that was ever physical of his game. The heat from the computer and monitors still licked at Scruff's legs, even if they were now shutoff.
He felt cheated. Cheated that there was no altercation, he had no chance to give his story, no chance to stop her. She did not even need to put any thought behind her actions, to think about the consequences. For the beauty of a breaker switch is that it requires no thought for the strength it has. Flip the switch and all is lost. And Scruff's switch was sure flipped.
"THE HELL MOM! IT WAS ENDING IN 20 SECONDS! WHAT DID YOU THINK I FORGOT ABOUT YOU AND THE LAUNDRY! I SAID I WAS COMING AFTER THIS GAME! WELL THE GAME NEVER FINISHED SO YOU CAN COME GET YOUR LAUNDRY!" Needless to say, Scruff was upset. He was not a bad guy, he only sometimes made bad choices. How could he help it if he became addicted to a game? He would love to just get up and do something else but why bother when Rocket League was just that fun? He was not doing heroin, as he loved to remind his mom, only playing a game.
His mom was still downstairs, silent. If Scruff wanted to keep playing, he had to go downstairs and face her. And that was the last thing he was going to do.
"God damn it." From under his breath. He pulled his phone out to text Tommy that he was sorry his deadbeat Mom cut the power, and to ask to see if he was still able to win without him. His phone was like his power, dead. Rather than go downstairs, he pulled his charger out of the wall where it had been connected for over eight months now and began to creep outside his room into the bathroom. Immediately, he noticed how dark it was on the landing outside his room. She cut power to every room in the house, every room except the laundry room where the breaker box and the laundry machines were, of course.
"No, she wants me to go downstairs. She wants me to apologize and offer to do the laundry. No! I would be as stupid as she is to do something like that! She thinks she's won, she thinks I'll come crawling down to her since I don't have power. Ethiopians do this everyday, I don't need electricity!" He began to clear out a space on his bed, the shirts and pants that used to call that place home were gently thrown on the floor. Scruff brushed the cobwebs off his curtains and slowly opened the blinds. Like water rushing through a dam, a horde of ants smelling food for the colony, a guitar pick thrown into a crowd, light flooded into the room. The stains shimmered on the floor, cracks bulged on the walls, dust floated in the air.
His eyes dilated, his mouth dried, and his head instinctively winched down to avoid his vampiric fear. Not that Scruff had not left the house in weeks, but the sudden burst of life was shocking to a room which had not seen it since Scruff built his computer years ago.
The first thing Scruff tried to due to satiate his boredom was read. His closet was a microbiome of his room: dank, dark, dingy, dirty, and dusty. Where his computer would be in this metaphorical room instead lied his bookshelf which he pushed into the closet after he built his computer. Therefore, that bookshelf had not seen any attentions since the build. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, The Hunger Games, Guinness World Records 2009 were at eye level with Scruff. Well, eye level with Scruff if Scruff had not grown since he built his computer. Luckily, he had not. But the book which he was drawn to was no book, but rather a binder.
Carefully, he slipped the three ringed trapper out of the shelf and onto his bed. In hindsight, he wished to have blown off some dust before putting it onto his bed but what was done was done. He could already see paper flopping out of the binder, not properly secured or perhaps ripped from prior years of use. Flipping to a random page, Cameron was greeted with a drawing of himself and three other nameless individuals. He drew this when he was seven years old, but the concept remained.
Forgetting about how careful he had been seconds prior, he launched the binder into his garbage, not caring about even his better drawings that he would never get back. Scruff threw a shirt on, buttoned his pants, and began his walk downstairs.
He had two sets of stairs to conquer, one to get from the upstairs to ground level, and another to get from ground level to the family's basement. 14 steps, first 6, then 8. Only 14. One set after another. Hmm. Scruff was standing on the landing looking down at the first flight. Only 14 steps. He breathed out, knowing the verbal lashing he was about to endure. Or worse, having to endure NOT getting a verbal lashing. 13 steps. He began plotting out what he would tell his mom, whether or not to apologize even if he still thought he was in the right. Could he go against his moral code and lie to himself? 12 steps. Surely Tommy won the match for them. It was a tied game but Tommy was the last one in control of the ball AND he had it on their side. If anyone could score, it was him. 11 steps. But even if he did score, could he have withheld 20 second of a 1v2? Against bots of course he could stay strong, but against champs? 10 steps. "Oh yeah, my laundry".
The moment he turned around, he heard it. Nails to a chalkboard, a jackhammer near a poolside, a dog yelping in the city. "Where do you think you're going, Cameron?"
"Umm, to get my laundry, Mom?" His heart was pumping, he was sorry, he really was. But he could not just flat out say it. She was still in the wrong, in some sense, and he could not just admit defeat that easily. His mom taught him a lot of things, wearing the skin of a liar was not one of them.
"Hurry and bring it down, I have the water running."
"O.K., I will."
