Disclaimer: I do not own the characters from, "My Babysitter's a Vampire." This is a work of fiction, and no profit, monetary or otherwise, is being made through the writing of this.
A/N: Written for the trope bingo square fork in the road. This is imperfect. Future fic. Written with TeamEthanMorgan in mind. Thanks for listening, and for encouraging me when I was down about writing.
Benny laid down on his bed, kicked off his shoes, and wrapped himself up in the afghan his grandmother had made for him when he'd been younger. It was a comfort now. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. It had been a rough couple of days, and Benny wanted to forget it all, wanted to think back to simpler times.
Of course his mind would think back to that day. The last day that he and Ethan had spent together before Ethan left for college.
He laughed at the memory, but it came out as a choked, hollow sound. The sound of a heart breaking. He forced himself to remember, though, because it was the last memory that he had of Ethan, and one of the best.
The fork in the road.
It was an inside joke. Something between just the two of them, and that's why Benny clung to it after Ethan left home for an out of state college while Benny stayed and attended the local community college. It was cheaper, and he didn't really know what he wanted to do with the rest of his life as of yet.
Remembering their inside joke helped keep the memories he had of Ethan alive. Made the missing of him more bearable somehow.
The vampires had long since left town as well - onto college, or another coven - leaving Benny completely alone, unless he counted his grandmother, and Ethan's little sister.
He didn't.
His grandma was family, and while he loved her, it just wasn't the same. Not the same as the love he felt for Ethan. A love that he'd never actually admitted to himself until it was too late. A love he'd never actually admitted to Ethan.
And Ethan's little sister, while not a pain, was more of a responsibility. One that he didn't feel equal to, no matter that Ethan felt he could trust Benny with her life. He'd even asked Benny to look after him while he was away.
Ethan's parents had never really seen Benny as anything more than a nuisance. Ethan's best friend who got him into trouble from time to time. Though, they also acknowledged that their son got his best friend into trouble as well. The way he saw it, he was not really accepted by Ethan's parents, but merely tolerated by them.
As much as he hated to admit it, Benny was lost without Ethan. There was nothing funny about this fork in the road that had led to them being separated by hundreds of miles.
It was nothing at all like the literal fork that they'd placed in the road as a joke, their own personal joke for a road that Benny liked to think of as theirs.
There was even a spot on the road that Benny considered their spot where he wished that he would've had the courage to do what had been building inside of him since he'd first discovered that he liked boys a little more than he liked girls way back in the seventh grade. That he liked Ethan a lot more than he liked any other boy.
He wished that he'd kissed Ethan that day, at their literal fork in the road. Not declared his undying love, or anything like that - though, Ethan had that, if he wanted it.
Just a kiss. A kiss that would tide him over between Ethan's visits home from college, and the empty, dead spaces when Ethan wasn't around.
His cellphone vibrated, and Benny frowned at it, wiped at his eyes to clear them of the grit. He'd been going on no more than three hours of sleep a night for the past week and a half while he sorted through the latest threat in town - some kind of zombie catopolypse that had turned out not to be a case of undead cats, but rather a case of an elderly cat lady accidentally leaving the door to her home open one night, allowing a ton of her cats to get out. It hadn't been pretty, but Benny had managed to solve the case, and return the waylaid cats to their rightful place.
He didn't recognize the number, but pushed the green bar anyway, putting the phone up to his ear and sitting up in bed.
"Hello?" His voice sounded like he had a frog stuck in his throat.
"Benny?" Ethan sounded breathless, mildly panicked, and the exhaustion that Benny'd been feeling fled.
"What's wrong?" both of them asked at the same time, and, after a second, or two, of silence, they burst into nervous laughter.
"I had a vision," Ethan admitted, voice soft and strained. "I was worried about you. Did you...are you...what happened?"
"I'm okay," Benny quickly assured his friend, heart hammering in his chest. "Catopolypse averted."
"Catopolypse?" Ethan's voice had a hint of a smile, and Benny closed his eyes, pictured his friend as he'd been their last day together - dark hair falling into his eyes, a shy smile on his face, cheeks a rosy red...
"Yeah," Benny said, and he launched into the whole sordid tale, sending both of them into gales of laughter by the time he was done. It was good to laugh again. He hadn't laughed since Ethan had left.
"Gosh, I've missed you," Ethan said, breathless from laughter. "I..."
"I've missed you too," Benny confessed. "When are you coming home?"
"I'll be home for Thanksgiving, we've got two weeks off." Ethan was definitely smiling. His voice was a little husky. "You'll join us for Thanksgiving, right?"
"Yeah, definitely," Benny agreed. He drew the afghan around his shoulders, pretended that it was Ethan holding him so tightly.
"Good," Ethan said the word like it was a promise in and of itself, like he'd expected Benny to say no, and was prepared to argue. "I've...I'd...that is..."
"What is it Ethan?" Benny asked, suddenly worried for his friend.
"Benny, I miss you, and I can't...I...that is, I thinkImightmaybekindofsortofbeinlovewithyou," Ethan's words came out in an almost indecipherable rush, and Benny had to close his eyes and focus on what he thought his friend might have said. It wouldn't be good for him to get this wrong.
Benny's heart felt like it was going to pound its way out of his chest, and he bit his lip, pulled the afghan tighter around him, as though the action could bring Ethan home to him that much quicker.
"Ditto," he said, not trusting himself with bigger, heavier words, knowing that it would be enough for Ethan, and that, when Ethan was there, in front of him, there would be more words. And there would be actions, actions that would make the words real. Would prove to him that this conversation was not a dream, as he half feared it was.
Benny fell asleep, listening to Ethan's voice as he told him about his classes, about some of the friends he'd been making. About how much he missed Benny and his family. About how he couldn't wait to come home and see them, and revisit their fork in the road.