39. "Foiled, Pt. 1A"
It was almost lunchtime on Dr. Fort's day off, and the Saint Bernard was running on a treadmill in his basement, trying desperately to circumvent his people's poor metabolic rate which he felt especially compelled to do because he was literally an authority on health, a TV in the corner quietly playing Cheers reruns, Geoff not really processing a word they were saying but having it on so the voices would make him feel less alone, trying to take his mind off his lament that his altruistic career in health had ironically left him without much time to go out and develop a healthy adult social life, and how he would have gone out last night but was too tired after work or would love to go out tonight but he knew he'd have to be up at 4:30 to get to work at 6, and how it was a travesty that he was the only person at work who didn't adore Scrubs because he just felt annoyed by how easy they made it look to find love in a hospital setting, which made him wonder if all the other staff at Bethlehem general were hooking up without him, and he was so in the zone that when the doorbell rang, he was so spooked that his foot landed halfway on the side runnings while the other half hit the moving track and he almost twisted his ankle and fell off the treadmill.
"Hello? Who is it?" he called as he walked briskly to the door.
"UPS!" said someone in a comically deep voice that was clearly artificial.
Geoff could see out the window on the top of his front door who it was. And while he wasn't going to deny the company, he didn't exactly know what they were doing here.
The dog opened his door and saw the full picture. A brown bear was standing on his stoop, holding his little fox buddy in his arms like a baby. And Robin appeared to be… asleep? Little John didn't seem too worried about him, so Dr. Fort didn't know if he should be either.
"Uhhh-"
"Package for a Dr. Geoffrey Fort!" said Johnny cheerfully, although it looked like he was having trouble keeping his eyes open. "Imported straight from Great Britain!"
"Um… hi? What's…" Geoff gestured broadly to the odd sight before him "...this?"
"Well, they had to put on the package what was inside so it could make it through customs! Let's check the label!" Little John freed an arm and grabbed Robin's tail like he was inspecting it for clues. "Ah, says here that it's an industrial-sized batch a' dildos!"
"Uh, yeah, that's… that's not an immature joke or anything."
"Looks like you ordered so many dildos that they didn't have a box big enough to fit them all, so they put it in a burlap sack that's… hey, it's kinda shaped like a really big fox!" Johnny gently shook Robin up and down to assess the weight of his parcel. "Ooh, they packed this one good and heavy!"
Dr. Fort was staring at Robin, who appeared to have the slightest of smiles on his face. Was he playing dead or something?
"Is- is he okay? Is he unconscious?"
"Ah!" said Little John. "But we'd better open the package now to make sure they sent us the right items! Otherwise we need to send them back before the refund window closes!"
Geoff turned his head up toward Johnny's face again. "...Are you two drunk?"
And now safely below the big dog's field of vision, the fox, hiding in plain sight, started undoing his pants.
"Tell us, Geoffrey!" said Robin as he liberated an appendage. "Is this the right size!?"
"Oh, Jesus Christ, guys!"
The two outlaws cackled as Robin leaned forward to present his surprise more prominently to the doctor, but he leaned too far forward and fell out of the bear's arms, landing on his chest. Thankfully his bad arm took no major impact.
"Oh, shit, Rob, you alright?" Little John asked.
"Robin, you okay?" Dr. Fort echoed.
But Robin just rolled over onto his back, his frontal male parts still out, and pointed up at the dog.
"Made you look again!"
And he and Johnny started laughing like schoolboys all over again while Geoff turned his gaze down the street to look at nothing in particular and just stew in annoyance.
"Ah, those were some fine improv skills, eh, Johnny?" asked Robin as he put his package back in its packaging.
"Man, you even had me fooled!"
"Okay, so… you guys are drunk," Geoff grumbled. "This much has been established."
Robin and Johnny both looked offended that Dr. Fort kept saying that.
"Man, why do you keep thinking we're drunk!?" Little John growled.
"Would sober people knock on their friend's door just to show them their dicks?"
"Would drunk people be able to orchestrate such a plan so well?" asked Robin as he got to his feet. "We're not drunk, Geoffrey, we're just really, really hungover."
"Yeah, Geoff, we both got nasty-ass headaches and now we got two options," said Johnny.
"We can either moan and groan and be miserable arseholes who nobody would want to be around…" Robin started.
"...Or we can make stupid, stupid fuckin' jokes to amuse ourselves and hopefully use that to get some fuckin' endor-phines pumpin' to make our headaches go away!" Johnny finished.
"Endorphins," the doctor corrected.
"That's not making our headaches any better, mate," said Robin.
Geoff kept glaring back and forth at the two of them. "So… you two aren't drunk… but for all intents and purposes… you're both gonna act like you're drunk."
"Hrm, yes, pretty much," mumbled Robin.
"Uh… yeah, basically," muttered Johnny.
"...Cool. Groovy. So! That means you two lied to me about cutting back on the drinking-"
"Naw, man, we didn't fuckin' lie to you!" Little John protested. "When we said that, that was true!"
"Yeah," added Robin, "but after yesterday, we had… another bad day, a deplorably bad day, and we decided that taking ourselves too seriously hasn't been helping us, so we're gonna go back to our roots and start making merry like the Merry Men should!"
"Aaand you think it's a good idea to tell a medical professional that you think it's a healthy coping mechanism to drown your sorrows in large amounts of what is effectively a mild poison?" asked Dr. Fort, skeptical.
"Aw, naw, man, we weren't just getting wasted for getting wasted's sake!" said Johnny. "We were lettin' loose, havin' fun! You can't tell us that being miserable is any less unhealthy than getting a little tipsy!"
"And don't worry about this old boy's consumption, because he got tipsy after hardly half a rum and Coke!" said Robin, pointing to his friend. "Really must have been a while since we've made merry, because you've lost your tolerance, Johnny!"
"Jesus, Robin, I'm not a lightweight!" Little John protested. "I just got woozy really quick because I was majorly dehydrated!"
"Well, as a doctor, I have to ask why you were majorly dehydrated," said Dr. Fort, at once concerned and confused.
"Because I wasn't drinking water all day."
"And you weren't drinking water because…?" the dog asked with a raised eyebrow.
"Because I'm stupid!" Johnny growled. "And because we've been doing this for seven years now and I've lost count of how many times me, Rob, or one of the rest of us reckless retards almost had our safety compromised because we desperately needed a latrine at the worst possible time!"
"Well, uh… I- I hafta recommend you stop depriving yourself of, uh-"
"You should join us next time we party, Doc!" said Robin. "You could use some lightening up yourself! We drank, we danced, we told funny stories, we played Memory Karaoke-"
"'Memory Karaoke'?" the doctor asked.
"Yeah, y'know," said Little John, "it's like regular karaoke, but you don't have a screen or a mic or background music, so you just sing your favorite songs from memory and you lose a point when someone nails ya for getting a lyric wrong. Course, there's no penalty for losing, 'cept… y'know… shame."
"Truly a fate worse than death! Though the game is a great deal more fun when the person you're playing with actually knows your favorite songs, ahem…" Robin said as he playfully nudged the bear. "Geoffrey, help me out here: do you Yanks really not know The Stone Roses? Because this geezer's never heard of them!"
"Uh-"
"Rob, I toldja, I've heard of them, I just don't know any of their songs! And why would I? They weren't big over here!"
Robin scoffed and rolled his eyes as he turned back to Geoff while pointing at Johnny. "'She Bangs the Drums'. Quite possibly my favorite song, I know it inside and out. I sing the lyrics and get the melody perfectly and it still isn't ringing a bloody bell in this guy's head! And I know I heard it on the radio when I was living in New York, I know I did!" he said as he turned back to Johnny, flailing passionately. "Because I remember being in the back of a taxi with Marian and we asked the driver to switch the radio to some music and they played that song and I started mouthing the lyrics and she was giggling and the driver was all ech and- Fuck off, Johnny!" Robin said with a chuckle as he started pointing repeatedly at the bear's face. "You can be reasonably expected to know that song! Fuck off! The past was yours but the future's mine, Johnny! Don't you forget that!" he admonished playfully.
Little John shook his head with a sly smirk. "Oh, you hush brother! It goes both ways! Geoff, can you believe that this guy's lived in America for thirteen years and I still had to teach him the words to "American Pie'? Fittingly… it was while we were drinking whiskey and rye. But I can neither confirm nor deny that the levee was dry, and I definitely hope that this won't be the day that I die."
Dr. Fort kept glancing back and forth at the fox and the bear, completely unamused as they smiled bright smiles and utterly confused about why any of this was pertinent information.
"Oh, and I'm also reasonably certain I don't own a Chevy," Little John added. "By the way, can we borrow your computer for, like, not even two minutes? I forgot some of the words to 'Let Her Cry' and it's bugging the shit outta me. That use'ta be my Memory Karaoke go-to, I can't let that one slip away."
"Is that why you're here?" asked Dr. Fort with a dirty look. "To Google fucking Hootie and the Blowfish lyrics?"
Robin and Johnny gave the dog confused looks.
"Dude… no," said Little John.
"We're here for this," said Robin as he raised his right arm with his quickly-deteriorating plaster cast.
"JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, what happened!?"
"We told you we had a rough day yesterday!" said Robin. "Surprised you didn't notice while I was laying on the ground."
"Wait a minute…" Little John pondered. "...You really were looking at his dick!"
"What!?"
"His fucked-up cast was right in front of your eyes but you were focused on his dick!"
"Yeah, that's a pretty intelligent conclusion!" Robin concurred. "Lord, you'd think a physician would be desensitized to basic anatomy by now, but I guess there was just something compelling about my old chap down south!"
Dr. Fort's concern about the state of Robin's arm was gone as he was annoyed again. "Fine, your shock humor worked on me and I looked at a body part that our society says is taboo. What, now you gonna accuse me of being gay for that?"
"Oh, heavens, no, sweetheart!" Johnny teased.
"If anything we're the gay ones for showing you!" Robin smirked.
"Wait…" Okay, now Geoff was confused. "Are you two actually…? Um…"
The duo let out nasal chuckles and shook their head at this poor sap.
"Let this be a lesson to you, Geoffrey!" said Robin. "A woman worth keeping will be attracted to a man who's comfortable enough in his masculinity to not be afraid to do un-masculine things!"
"What, like look at other men's dicks?" asked the doctor, seriously lost.
"Among other things," said Johnny, smirking.
Dr. Fort blinked. "So… you two aren't actually-?"
"Oh, lord, Geoffrey, of course not!" said Robin, chuckling. "Only thing Johnny here's into is getting off imagining himself another foot taller!"
"And the only people Rob's into are chicks who look like himself if he were a girl!" added Little John.
These two were giving Geoff a serious mindfuck and he had absolutely no idea how to respond. "I think I've lost the ability to tell when you two are joking."
"Doctor, Doctor, please," said Robin. "We're just trying to help you out here. We know you're a good man, but you're a lonely man, and if you ever want to find a decent woman, you need to work on your confidence and learn to not get so easily skeeved out by things that might make other people think you're - heaven forbid - gaaaaayyyyyy."
"Yeah, Doc," said Little John, "we're just tryna give you practice to learn how to play things cool when you get thrust into weird situations! Here! Here's another one! How ya gonna respond to seeing this!?" And with that, the bear grabbed the fox and picked him up. This was not preplanned, but Robin trusted whatever Johnny was going to do with him, so in the fraction of a second that he saw the look on his friend's face and saw where this was going, Robin didn't just acquiesce, he just got ready to play his part.
"Mwah!" they both went for a quick moment of oral contact.
And as Little John put Robin down, they both took in the St. Bernard's fractured countenance, which looked like he had just walked in on conjoined twins pleasuring themselves to newsreel footage of faraway genocides while two completely separate people dressed like astronauts had acrobatic intercourse in the corner.
And the bear and the fox started cackling like hyenas at their friend's twisted expression.
"Oh, my God!" Johnny howled as he pointed at Geoff. "The look on your face, dude! The look on your face!"
"We're usually above 'gotcha' humor, Doc," giggled Robin, "but… dear God, that FACE!"
They kept laughing, doubled over, briefly making time to exchange a grandiose high-five, before going back to guffawing to the point of crying.
Dr. Fort couldn't help but feel mortified to have been made an example of. Yeah, these two probably had a point that shock humor like that shouldn't jar him so deeply, but mocking him for it wouldn't help him get better. But as he refused to keep looking at them and instead looked off into the distance again, he saw something legitimately jarring.
A neighbor, a hippo, was standing on the sidewalk next to her daughter, who was sitting in her pink Barbie-themed toy riding Jeep. And while the daughter looked at the scene on Geoff's stoop in confused fascination, the mother was giving the three men a look of disgust not unlike the look Geoff had just given the Merry Men.
How long had she been there? How much had she seen? Was she repulsed because of these two cackling like madmen and disturbing the peace or had she seen the gag PDA that had preceded it? And perhaps a better question: did she know who they were? Hopefully not, and as far as Geoff knew, the only neighbors who knew of the fox and the bear were not neighbors who knew he was friends with a fox and a bear. But Geoff was lonely enough in this wealthy neighborhood because a lot of its residents already knew him to be a self-hating rich person, so even if this woman was just offended by the boorishness of the men on his doorstep, he wasn't taking any chances.
"C'mon. C'mon," he said quietly as he ushered them inside. "Both of you, c'mon." And he shut his door, giving the woman a dirty look to hopefully remind her to mind her own goddamn business.
-IllI-
"Jeez, I knew I told you guys that teenagers are chemically programmed to be nasty sons of bitches, but I didn't think they'd be this evil," Dr. Fort remarked as he ran Robin's freshly-plastered arm under his kitchen sink.
"Well, can't say I'm too surprised, in retrospect," Robin mused, sitting on the dog's kitchen counter. "We've never had the best luck with winning over teenagers, and looking back on it, it's a miracle that something like this hadn't happened sooner… Johnny, you okay out there?"
Little John was in the adjacent living room, hunched over a computer between taking huge swigs of water and trying to remember the people favored by a character in a guilty-pleasure song of his.
"'She says Dad's the one she loves the most, but Stripe's not far behind'..." he muttered to himself, trying to make sense of it. "...Wait, 'Stripe'!?"
"Johnny, you alright?" asked Robin.
Little John walked into the kitchen shaking his head incredulously, looking both amused and irritated. "I remember now! It was something I thought was stupid when I first heard it, then I got used to it, then I forgot it… and now I think it's stupid again! The bitch's second-favorite person was fucking Michael Stripe from R.A.M.! Like… him!? I mean no disrespect, but who has a celebrity crush on him!? Are we sure Hootie's a lion? I know it's not polite to say an African mammal doesn't act African, but that seriously sounds like something a deer would write!"
"Well, John," Geoff quipped, "I know you've been living away from civilization for seven years, but in that time the rest of our society has decided that Hootie and the Blowfish sucks. Maybe lyrics like that are the reason why, eh?"
"Naw man, I know they're old news, I'm just hung up on how depressing the idea is that someone's celebrity crush is that skinny little tiger!" Little John groaned. "And R.A.M.'s a perfectly decent band, but… shit, the idea of someone crushing on that little dork above everybody else on Earth is honestly kinda making my headache worse!"
Dr. Fort was feeling confident for another one-liner: "I guess you could say… 'Everybody Hurts'!"
Johnny and Robin both gave Geoff a displeased look.
"...What? I thought you guys said that stupid jokes were helping your headaches go away!"
"There's a difference between stupid jokes and jokes that are stupid, Doctor," said Robin. "Honestly, that bit hardly even made any sense."
"Dead serious though, can we bum some aspirin or something?" asked Little John.
Dr. Fort found that a reasonable request. "Yeah, it's in the- wait, hold on. Good time to ask. You two didn't do anything other than booze last night, did you?"
"Well, neither of us are Alan, you know we weren't messin' around with heroin," said Johnny, to which Robin chuckled.
"I'm serious! What about- what about your medicine, Robin?" Geoff asked the fox worriedly. "You taking your Advils and Tylenols? Because you shouldn't be mixing that shit with booze."
"Actually, er," Robin mumbled as he wondered how to explain this. "We maaay have gotten in a sticky spot right after you dropped us off the other day, so we-"
"We immediately lost your car medicine and wound up at Thor's," interrupted Little John, getting straight to the point. "He wound up cutting up some of his polar-bear sized Tylenols after giving us basically the exact same warning speech as you did."
"He gave you what?" asked the doctor incredulously.
"Cut-up polar bear pills," said Johnny nonchalantly as he started digging in his pockets. "Ya wanna see?"
"Please!" said the dog as he grabbed the Ziploc bag and inspected it with a worried look on his face.
"Yeah, he gave it to Johnny so I won't be tempted to take too many," said Robin. "So if those are Tylenols, you said I should be taking them with Advil?"
"Man, I'm not sure anymore," said the doctor, eyeing the chunks of chalky pills. "I mean… they're just acetaminophens, but… they're really big acetaminophens… or, Robin, you might know these as 'paracetamols' in your country, they're literally the same drug, but… shit, I told you about the damage this does to the liver and the healing process." He kept pondering the pills as he tried to unravel a moral dilemma. "Is- Robin, be honest, are you only taking these? As opposed to taking these in conjunction with other meds?"
"Yes, sir," Robin said with a smile.
"And you're taking… one a day? Please tell me you're not taking two."
"One, Doctor. At least now. Had to get over the initial hump, but I'm stabilized at one a day now. Johnny won't let me have more than that."
"And… for the love of God, be honest… is it enough? Is the pain bearable with these?"
Robin kept smiling, but looked like he didn't want to anymore. "Erm… sometimes. Some times more than others for sure. Other times… not really."
Dr. Fort turned to face a neutral spot, took a deep breath and groaned a sigh as he rubbed his temples. "Okay… if this Thor guy was here, I'd tell him to cut these even smaller, then you could mix them with Advils… hrm-"
"Well, why don't we just do that?" asked Little John. "Got any razorblades?"
Geoff was feeling deeply uncomfortable in this predicament and just wanted to get out of it.
"John… your dad was on Oxy, right?"
"Yup."
"Aaand you know firsthand the damage it does, right?"
"Oh, most positively."
Dr. Fort's stomach was wrenched - or maybe that was just because his lunch had been delayed. "And your paws aren't too big for razorblades?"
"I can do it myself!" Robin piped in as he raised his freshly-cast right arm. "I can probably still grasp things with this hand, don't you think?"
Geoff threw up his arms. "Okay, fuck it, we'll get the razorblades and you can have some of my Advil. I'm just thinking that if it's huge doses of Tylenol with no ibuprofen, that might mess everything up. Thank God this guy didn't give you bootleg Oxy or something."
"Awesome!" said Johnny! "So where's the razors?"
"In the bathroom under the sink, but don't rush, we gotta take this guy to the bathroom anyway to blow-dry his cast," Dr. Fort said as he patted Robin on the back and the fox slid off the counter.
"Doctor, we really do appreciate all that you've done," Robin insisted.
"Yeah, well, don't thank me yet if we keep meeting like this," the St. Bernard grumbled. "I don't mean to be such a crab-ass, but jeez, I had a day planned and now I'm babysitting your two hungover asses."
"Oh, we won't bother you much longer," Robin said before adding something cheeky. "You won't mind giving us a ride back to Sherwood, right?"
"Oh, Jesus Christ…"
"By the way! Doc!" said Johnny. "Ya mind if I print out some song lyrics while we're here? I've got a funny feeling I'm gonna forget a bunch of them as soon as we leave anyway."
"And if you're going to be doing that, I've got some song requests!" said Robin. "I can't remember the second verse of 'Paint It Black' and it's just driving me mad. Oh, and 'Bohemian Rhapsody'! A classic!"
"Jesus, you guys are taking my Advil, my printer paper, my toner, my gasoline, my time!?" barked the dog as he came to a complete stop to face the bear and the fox at the same time. "Is this just Steal Shit From Geoff Day?"
Robin and Johnny just exchanged sly looks.
"Geoffrey. Buddy. Sweetie. Honey Bunches of Oats," Little John cooed. "We steal from the rich, remember?"
"Surely you didn't think you were exempt from that, didja, love?" asked Robin.
Geoff just rolled his eyes and went back to escorting Robin to the washroom.
"By the way, Doc," asked Robin, "a friend of ours had a good question: if you aren't in medicine for the money, why haven't you just joined a charitable group, such as… like the Peace Corps or something?"
"Hell, you two keep showing up at my door whipping your cocks out and kissing each other just to fuck with me, and I just might," Dr. Fort grumbled.
-IllI-
"Actually… could you drop us off somewhere else?"
"What? Where?"
"Yeah, good point, Rob. Geoff, couldja take us to the junkyard off of-"
"No. I didn't mean the junkyard, Johnny," Robin turned around to face the bear squeezed in the back of the Escalade. "We have a friend who we're worried about, don't we? Worried about his home life? And you remember his address because he lives on a street with a silly name."
Little John remembered. "Oh, yeah! Good call. No time like the present. And best we do it while we're in a car so we can look for the house faster than we could on foot."
"Who is this person?" asked the dog in the driver's seat.
"One of the lads we asked to join us in our adventures," answered Robin.
"We think his parents are molesting him," said Johnny rather matter-of-factly.
"Oh my god," was all the shocked doctor could murmur.
"I mean, we're fairly certain he isn't," Robin clarified, "but… better safe than sorry, eh?"
"Does this kid know you're coming?" asked Geoff. "What about his parents, will they be home?"
"We're kinda getting the impression that these're latchkey kids," said Little John.
"It's Saturday though."
"Then we'll cross that bridge when we come to it," said Robin before nudging the dog. "You saw just today how good my improv skills are, now haven't you?"
Dr. Fort rolled his eyes and threw his car in reverse to pull out of his parking spot at the entrance to Sherwood Forest Nature Preserve. "Alright, screw it. Where we headed, John?"
"201 Rethink Avenue in Peach Creek."
"Where's that?"
"Somewhere near the junkyard, head that way to start and we'll find our way from there."
"Alright, alright," the doctor muttered.
Robin, meanwhile, was thinking about that wolf boy as he looked out the window, as well as thinking of a different boy he'd once known. "There's another reason we ought to talk to that lad, too, come to think of it."
"We do?" asked Johnny. He probably had meant to say 'There is?', but the sudden confusion scrambled his speech.
Robin nodded. "Though I'll admit… perhaps it's self-serving of me, but I still want to tell him. I want to try one last time to win him over to joining us. Maybe he'll be more open to it one-on-one."
"Rob, what happened to you swearing off working with teenagers after yesterday?" asked Little John, confused. "Besides, this kid's told us to fuck off like two or three times now, why are you still so hung up on him?"
"Yeah, I'm curious, too," said Dr. Fort as he put on his turn signal and started looking around to see if it was safe to turn out of the parking lot. "So this kid doesn't wanna join you? Like, hey, I'm a healer, I shouldn't be condoning you dragging literal children into your crazy world, but I get the argument that you two aren't gonna find any more adults crazy enough to join you so you might as well get some wayward teenagers whose parents apparently offer them no fucking guidance, but still… why wait on a kid who's apparently already told you no?"
Robin was thinking carefully about how to phrase this. "So… to answer your first question, Johnny… I'm forcing myself to reconsider that, given our dire straits. I don't want to, but I'm doing it anyway because I think it's the right thing to do. But to the bigger question, I… I've just been thinking of… people from my past who that wolf lad reminds me of."
"Who?" asked Johnny.
"Oh, someone I've never had the mind to tell you about."
Little John rolled his eyes. Nobody noticed.
"But suffice it to say," Robin continued, "this was someone who… they could have done great things, they had a great opportunity to do so, but they… they just didn't feel like it. Didn't even miss the call to action so much as they just declined it. And… y-you know, it's quite paradoxical, actually," Robin said as he put his busted arm up and to the right. "On the one hand… this person- this person ridiculed and rebuked me for trying to do good because they thought it was too foolish and risky… and mocked me for when I failed… a-and genuinely made me believe they were right to do so… and all I had wanted to do with them was be great with them, so when they belittled my efforts, I- I kind of still hate them for that… but at the same time-" Robin moved his outstretched arm over to the left. "-at the same time, I… kind of feel like if I was in that situation as an adu- as who I am now… perhaps I could have convinced them to stand up and fight for something when they had a golden opportunity. And since I was too young to convince- well, to convince that person from my past, I feel almost obligated to try that on this lad. Perhaps this time I'll actually know what to say…"
The bear and the dog could both tell that Robin was getting oddly emotional, not on the verge of weeping or anything, but certainly not speaking with the confidence they had come to expect from him, as though he was processing his thoughts as he spoke.
Little John was still a bit peeved that these moments of genuinity were so rare coming from Robin, but now that he had one, he wasn't going to ruin it. "Alright, then… You wanna talk to this kid one more time? Fine, if it'll make you feel better, then that's what we're gonna do, and I'm gonna have your back."
"You always do, Johnny, and I appreciate you for that more than I can ever express to you." Well, you don't always have my back, but… nobody else ever seems to anymore, so...
"So what do you wanna say to him?"
"I won't be happy to use this line because stupid Alan liked using it against us when he thought we weren't radical enough, but… yeah, it's true what they say, in the face of injustice, neutrality favors the oppressor."
"Which is why the Swiss should be KILLED!" exclaimed Geoff.
Robin and Johnny were predictably taken aback by that.
"I… beg your pardon?" was all Robin could think to say.
"Well- b-because the Swiss stayed neutral like they always do e-even in World War II when Hitler was doing, uh, y'know, Hitler-y stuff, s-so, y'know, you could make the argument that it was morally reprehensible of them to, to, to, y'know, not join the war against the Na-"
"Jesus, dude, the guy's opening up for once and you wanna kill the mood with a dumb joke!?" Little John growled.
"I know he was having a moment! I was trying to lighten the mood!"
"I think you'd best stick to practicing medicine, Doctor," said Robin, "your jokes haven't been quite landing today."
"Shit, let's make sure we don't bring ol' Geoffrey here around any Swiss people," Little John quipped.
"I am Swiss!" Geoff protested. "Where do you think St. Bernards come from!? Zimbabwe!?"
"All I know is that I had a very anti-Irish history teacher at school once in England," said Robin, "and he hurled that same accusation of moral cowardice at the Irish Republic for similarly not joining World War II when he should have known as a history teacher that that country was in no position to join a skirmish that big, all the while contradicting himself and saying the Irish were overly-aggressive mongrels who loved bombing things, slipping in references to 1974 Birmingham whenever he could - and that geezer didn't know me granny's maiden name was O'Halloran! And statistically, I likely wasn't the only mixed-breed in that class! But oh, with that arsehole, it was probably better he didn't know! Miserable bastard probably had a shrine to Cromwell in his bedroom."
The doctor just kept driving, wondering what the hell had happened in Alabama in 1974 that he hadn't been aware of.
"Speaking of moral cowards," Little John spoke up, "I really don't think this kid is… neutral to oppression, just… he seems afraid to break the rules more than anything."
"Fine," Robin said with a shrug. "Then we'll tell him his cowardice is making him seem neutral, which is immoral. Moral cowardice."
"Aaand I thought we agreed to not be dickbags going around calling people evil for being afraid because we're supposed to be understanding enough to know that being afraid isn't a choice and we'd rather help them to stop being so afraid than shame them for being afraid."
"Yes. And I intend to help this lad by giving him a firm push instead of just writing him off like we otherwise would be doing."
Johnny didn't get what the difference was. "Mmmkay. Whatever."
"Well if you insist on dragging kids into this," said Dr. Fort, "I'd be remiss not to tell you to go easy on the booze when there's kids around. And especially if you're taking painkillers, Robin! At best, the alcohol might just negate their efficacy; at worst, the combination could knock you out and screw with your brain."
"Oh, Doctor, you know I'm careful," said Robin with a dismissive smile. "If I weren't careful, would I have survived doing this for seven years?"
"Well you weren't very careful with that arm, now were you!?"
"Oh, right right right right right!" Little John cut in. "I forgot all about the part where us getting gangbanged by psychotic teenagers was a fucking choice."
"Hey! Hey! I'm just saying! Maybe if you weren't in that part of town in the first place, this wouldn't have happened. I know it's completely useless to tell the two of you to avoid risky behavior, but… yeah, if you can, fucking do it."
"But hey, on the bright side, Doc!" said Robin, holding up his arm. "Now that I've got metal reinforcements in my arm, it should be stronger than ever!"
Dr. Fort took his eyes off the road for a moment to give Robin a confused look. "Robin…" he murmured as he turned back to face forward. "...metal bends. It breaks."
"But surely it's stronger with the reinforcement than without, right?"
Geoff was flustered by Robin not immediately conceding. "R-Robin! It can break! Why do you think I checked your arm for fractures again before recasting it!? I-!" In a fit of frustration, the doctor leaned over to open his glove compartment, trying to keep his eyes on the road as he negotiated one of the many twists and turns through the forest, eventually pulling out a silver-colored-but-probably-not-actually-made-of-silver spoon, which he then put up against his temple and pushed until there was a ninety-degree bend in the utensil. "SEE!? Metal! Is malleable! It can bend! It can break! Y'see!?" He then glanced at the spoon, realizing he had just ruined it in a fit of frustration. "Goddammit, and that was a perfectly good spoon!" In further frustration, he tossed it out his window without looking - and without remembering that it was June and the air conditioning was on and the window was consequently rolled up. Upon hearing the tink! sound, all three glanced at the window, where upon close inspection one could see a Y-shaped crack in the glass about a half-inch in diameter.
None of this assuaged Dr. Fort's frustrations. "FUCK!"
"Yet as malleable as it is," observed Robin, "it seems metal is still stronger than glass."
"Geoff, why do you even have a spoon in your glove compartment?" asked Johnny.
"Because sometimes I eat my lunch in my car because I don't like the other doctors at work! Okay!?" Geoff hollered. "DON'T JUDGE ME FOR THE WAY I LIVE!"
"Geoffrey, Geoffrey," Robin begged, "please, calm down!"
"Geoff, you're not gonna get better at socializing unless you practice," said Little John, trying to be gentle.
"I told you! The fucking doctors there are only in it for the money! They think I'm weird for wanting to actually help people! You agreed I shouldn't bother fuckin' fraternizing with them, so I don't!"
"Geoffrey," Robin implored, "for your own sake… calm yourself."
The St. Bernard took some deep breaths and didn't say anything as he dried to focus on driving. After a few seconds of silence, Little John put his paw on the dog's shoulder.
"Geoff… buddy… I'm sorry if that seemed like it was out of line, but I saw a problem and I offered a solution. I didn't have any friends for thirty fuckin' years and even then I just stumbled ass-backwards into meeting this dude, so when I see something like who I used to be reflected in you, man… I'm just trying to help. I don't wish loneliness on anyone, not even my greatest enemy. Alright? You feeling better now?"
Dr. Fort took a few more breaths before speaking. "I… I appreciate it, but… I wanna get better on my own terms, y'know?"
"I know, man, but I tried that, it didn't work. I had to learn from an expert," Johnny said, gesturing his eyes toward the fox. "And getting over my jealousy of my brother and taking some inspiration from him didn't hurt, either. So I'm just trying to help you out here so you don't waste as much time as I did."
Robin didn't want to ruin Little John's attempts to help the doctor, but he had a funny feeling that this conversation wasn't going to help the doctor feel any better. "You alright now, Doctor?"
Dr. Fort nodded. "Yeah, I… well, I'm feeling less nervous, that's for sure. But I'm still a little nervous about your safety what with the broken arm and the painkillers, and I honestly think that that's a valid reason to be a little worried."
"Yeah, that's legit," Johnny nodded.
"And I'm still not sure how I feel about dropping you off at the house of a random kid who wants nothing to do with you, who doesn't even know you're coming, and whose parents could be home for the weekend anyway."
"Well, if his mum and dad answer the door, then we pretend to be Jehovah's Witnesses," said Robin. "Nothing we haven't done before when ringing a doorbell to gauge whether a house is occupied or not."
"Oh, we can tell them that we're Summertime Carolers!" quipped Little John. "Fuck Christmas tunes, let's sing them some copyrighted music! It'll be a great opportunity for this little guy to catch up classic American standards, like, uh…" Johnny went flipping through the dozens of sheets of song lyrics he'd printed out to find the most poignant examples. "...like 'Sweet Home Alabama', or… 'Hotel California', or, or… or 'If You're Gonna Play in Texas, Ya Gotta Have a Fiddle in the Band'. By a band that just happens to be called Alabama."
"Alright, in Robin's defense, I've never even heard of that last one," said Geoff. "Is that, like… a country song?"
"Yes, but! But! I might be a Dixie boy, but I'm a man of the world and country isn't my favorite genre. I know country songs can be the dorkiest tunes ever if they're not done right, and since I grew up with this stuff, I'm your preeminent expert on good and bad country. Example given: don't bother listening to country radio stations, modern country sucks. Long story short, if I'm recommending you country songs, you can trust my seal of approval. That's why me and Alan made the gutsy move to play country music for all the city-slicker yankees and the couple of Brits at the party after the archery contest: because me and him knew what we had wasn't trash. It's a shame you had work that day, Doc. You shoulda been there."
"I'll confess, Johnny," said Robin, "the one and only country song I've ever enjoyed was your song about old Prince John being a twat."
"And I appreciate that, but Alan did all the writing and composition. I don't actually know shit about writing my own tunes. Still can't read sheet music. Honestly, I didn't even care for the lyrics."
"What was wrong with the lyrics?" asked the dog, who despite having missed the party still had a familiarity with the song because it was just that much of an earworm that summer.
"Honestly…" Little John looked just a teensy bit bummed out. "...I can't help but think the words were a little too mean-spirited. Like, there's plenty about the son of a bitch to make fun of, but being a loser? When plenty of people would say that I was a loser for most of my life?"
"Don't be so hard on your past self, Johnny," said Robin. "You were never so bad that you took your frustrations out on an entire town of people, and more importantly, you're better than that now."
"Yeah, yeah, that's what I wound up telling myself." There was a weird vibe of defeatism in his voice. "So I forced myself to do it for everyone else's enjoyment. Plus, Alan wanted to do the song one way or another, and he agreed my voice sounded better for it. He knew damn well that even when he was trying to sound lively, even when he was off the needle, his singing still sounded like his fuckin' face was melting." Little John nudged Robin with his paw. "But seriously, Robin, you don't even know 'Hotel California'? You really ain't even heard it, like, playing ambiently in the background of an Applebee's or sumpthin'?"
"Oh, I know of it, Johnny, I'm just not familiar with it!" Robin quipped, playfully mocking the tone of John's earlier remark. "I'm sorry I don't know all your favorite songs by heart, but you don't know mine either!"
"Man, I don't even like 'Hotel California', but it's just a song you should know as a permanent resident of this country! Hell, I actively hate the Eagles as a band but I'm still willing to admit they're an important piece of Americana!"
"You hate the Eagles-the-band, but you're wearing an Eagles-the-football-team t-shirt," Geoff dared to observe.
"Why do you think I scratched all the letters off!? To make it easier to hide, yeah, but also because I would rather blow my fuckin' brains out than risk having someone see 'Eagles' without the 'Phila' and think I liked the band! Like, fuck, my old man loved the Eagles, I don't know why - h-here's my expert analysis as a certified redneck: the Eagles tried to be rock and country at the same time and wound up making both sound generic and boring! Just the kind of trash my old man would like!"
"John, maybe you need to simmer down now," said the doctor, feeling emboldened.
"Aw, hush, puppy," Johnny grumbled. "Shit, now you got me thinking how weird it was that my dad liked 'Hotel California' because he usually hated anything else to do with California. Reminded him of his dad. And… I can't see him liking any other songs about California for that same reason. Like… shit, what're some California songs? My dad probably woulda loved the chance to beat the crap outta any member of the candy-ass Beach Boys, and… he probably woulda hated that song we heard a few weeks back when Otto was giving us a ride and we were messing around on the radio stations, but he'd've hated it for sounding too sissy for his tastes, not for the California parts-"
"Wait, what song?" Robin had tuned out a bit, but this caught his attention. "I don't remember any song like that."
"The one that sounded like it was ripping off Tom Petty, I think it was by the Chili Peppers...?" Little John thought more about it before he began chuckling nervously. "Oh, wait, crap! That song doesn't exist yet! My bad!"
Robin chuckled along. "Oh, Johnny, you silly billy!" And their laughter escalated back to that hangover-calming cackling that they had been displaying earlier.
Geoff was confused. "Okay, so now your stupid half-drunk jokes are getting into random anachronistic pop-culture references that question the integrity of our reality?"
Robin and Johnny stopped laughing.
"Man, we never said our narrator was reliable!" argued Little John. "You assumed that. You did that. You try collecting details about conversations from fifteen years ago and getting every word exactly right! The big important shit is still mostly right; nobody was questioning if this story was more exaggeration than reality before you put the thought in their heads!"
"Now I'll confess," said Robin, "I'm not sure how I feel about the creative decision to use realistic if excessively long-winded conversations to weave self-amusing jokes in with subtle plot points and foreshadowing hints and telling character moments, but… as an artist, I can respect the boldness that takes to try to make it work. Have to say, though…" he said as he repositioned himself in his seat, "...Come now. There was every opportunity to ask me to proofread the last chapter to see if the Britishisms and Sheffieldisms all sounded right. Didn't ask me until after it was already posted to the blog, though. Almost as if checking to get it right was irrelevant. Ah, maybe I just misunderstand creative nonfiction."
Well, hey, Robin, I was just transcribing what you said in the voice recording, so maybe you're really just forgetting your own accent after all twenty-eight years in America. Fucking asshole. Actually… hold on, I've got an empty water bottle and he's in the next room, I've got a clear shot of him. Vengeance shall be mine… and, okay, wow, that missed badly. Thank God the lamp didn't fall over. Welp, I guess I'm not athletic like he got to be, although that kind of makes sense. God knows my parents always encouraged me to be proud of my brain because the world I grew up in would never see me as a good physical specimen for reasons beyond my control. Or maybe he's not even really particularly athletic and the couple of people I've interviewed about him who called him that had really weird standards for what 'athletic' means, and now that combined with all the other good things I've heard about him is mixing badly with my deep-seated inferiority complex, who knows at this point? Suffice it to say that this is just one of the many reasons why Little John has been by far the easiest out of all these people for me to gel with in our ongoing interviews.
But as confused as you surely are now, Dear Reader, Dr. Geoff Fort was even more confused, and decided to change the subject. "So… you guys happen to know anyone who does car windows?"
-IllI-
His eyes were burning from staring at screens all morning. Part of it was boredom; he didn't just like school because of course someone like him would like school, but he also liked school because of the structure it provided him. Not to say that he abhorred summer vacation or anything, but his parents had done well to make him adore law and order, two things that school had amply provided for him.
But it seemed like he would find this particular summer vacation boring because the two boys he usually spent his free time with evidently wanted to engage in activities he found abhorrent. You know, he had always been accepting of his status as an outcast among this neighborhood's children - something not helped by the fact that he didn't even join them all in public school until the fourth grade - but he had been okay with it because there had always been at least two other outcasts on this godforsaken street who he could bond with. Now one of those two wanted nothing to do with him and the other was likely to follow the first one. He had been cast out from the outcasts. Splendid.
And usually when he was bored, he would happily bide his time engaging in independent study and research into whatever topics crossed his mind. But on that early Saturday afternoon, as he sat alone in his house as his parents worked extra hours to advance their careers, his mind was not in its usual place. No, one of those two fellow outcasts had gone as far as to suggest that despite his ulterior motives, his decision to participate in some silly extrajudicial crusade for justice made him the moral superior, in contrast to the quiet boy who would rather obey the rules and consequently accomplish nothing toward the end of seeking that same justice, within his own moral code or otherwise. Double-D was actually well aware that he could have and should have been spending his time brainstorming ways that he could do just that, to come up with his own solutions to remedy wide-scale societal ailments without having to resort to mild domestic terrorism. But the way that Eddy had dared to suggest that Double-D was actually, actively a worse person for not joining them in some absurd and unlawful exploits that were certain to get them killed had led him to dwelling on a time when some evil people had told him something very similar. Eddward Lupo had tried taking justice into his own hands once before, and that had been quite enough for him, for he had learned his lesson.
Therefore rather than think of ways to strengthen his own case of fighting for social change being more moral and more effective when done within the confines of the law, he was instead finding himself obsessing over tearing down the opposite argument. And that once again found him turning his attention toward that damned children's movie.
He had found himself thinking numerous times that daring to watch that stupid cartoon had been one of the worst decisions of his life, having caused him to spend what many would consider an unhealthy amount of time thinking about it, but honestly, he was more often than not glad he had made that decision; to defeat one's enemy, does one not first have to know ones's enemy? And now that he was once again ruminating on the detestable exultation of such primitive ideas of heroism as portrayed in the story of Adam Bell and related media, he had found himself spending most of his waking hours to that point researching further into the movie to try to find some weakness in the argument it portrayed that such well-intentioned recklessness was a good thing - of course, because there was one particular version of that story that could give him a weird sense of tranquil while it still boiled his blood with its implied message, he made use of some Boolean operators to look for philosophical criticism of the Sidney movie specifically.
Really, Robin and Johnny's repeated allusions to the character of Adam Bell, and to the animated feature specifically, were actually kind of tarnishing that odd sense of peace he had gotten from thinking about that movie and the happy thoughts it made him have about a beautiful world where such adventures were actually possible. The way that it was now tied in his mind to these two men for whom he did not care was ruining that enjoyment he got out of it, and he could no longer completely enjoy indulging in such forbidden fanciful thoughts without remembering that the story had been appropriated by two criminals who were likewise trying to sell him on the idea that he was evil for not breaking the rules. What was once a piece of media that represented a sense of innocence that he had been denied as a child was now marred by its association with two men who took its message far more literally than any adult should.
He felt like he was on a warpath as he furiously searched for someone who could provide a negative view of the morality that film presented, a negative view which he hoped he could present to the Merry Men and would convince them to abandon their foolish and immature endeavors - and, with any luck, allow him to once again enjoy the abstract idea of that movie without thinking about them. The things he liked about that film, after all, were the thoughts and feelings about its tone and mood and atmosphere that mostly lived in his head, whereas everything in the text of the film actually represented what he hated about it and its philosophy. Somewhere along the line that morning, it crossed his mind that it was odd that he cared so deeply not only for a children's film but for a film he had never actually watched all the way through with the sound on, but he didn't let that stop him.
Something else did sidetrack him, though. After trying and failing to find people online admonishing the film's morals - he found plenty of people dismissing it as even more childish than other Sidney movies in its writing and still others writing it off due to its poor animation budget due to the company being broke at the time, but nobody taking a stand against its advocacy of anarchy - he had to try new tactics, and therefore he used a few more Boolean operators to specifically seek things that people hated about the movie besides claims of dumbed-down scripting and taking shortcuts with its physical production.
And he found something, alright. In those days, list websites were still in their youth, but as the internet continued its rapid growth, those listicles soon found themselves germinating. And Double-D found one such listicle, a very tongue-in-cheek piece wherein every one of the ten entries was the author bemoaning how much it confused her as a young girl that she found the main character so compelling in both his appearance and mannerisms and how embarrassing it always was when she would tell her female friends that her sexual awakening came at the sight of a cartoon human - and how odd it was when they invariably admitted that they had felt the same way about said character.
Now, for context, Double-D had always been someone who had prided himself on his intellect, and while he tried to dress nice on school picture day and such, he wasn't too overly concerned about his appearance as long as he didn't look actively repulsive. Edd being jealous of another man's body was simply something that heretofore had never had a reason to happen. With this established, surely it will stress how significant it was when Double-D read this and was simply struck.
Like, for Christ's sakes, a large part of the joke of the listicle was how it devolved into an open and unambiguous lust for the character, with the final few entries being more screenshots of Adam in increasingly impossibly cool poses and the author blurbing something to the effect of "You see this!? How are you supposed to see this and NOT think this cartoon character is hot!? Sidney, why did you draw a human so frikkin' HOT!?" And to be crystal clear, there was absolutely nothing indicating that this woman nor her friends were members of the "skinny" community; these were just regular people who had been bewitched by a cartoon character who was devoid of fur apart from some stylistic scruff around the crown of his head and around his mouth and chin.
And then he did something he shouldn't have done: he went looking for other people to corroborate this. And he found plenty. Nothing too earth-shattering, but a few forum posts about first fictional crushes here, an inclusion in other listicles about cool or attractive cartoon characters there, and so on and so forth. Apparently it was a Thing that all around the world, many, many straight women and gay or bisexual men who otherwise had no interest in the skinny subculture had found themselves smitten by this damned cartoon character as kids. Him among other characters, of course, but this guy seemed to be one of the most frequently cited.
Double-D's first feeling was anger. It wasn't anger because the character was a human - Edd of course could be by many metrics considered a "skinny" himself so he was not going to join the camp that saw the entire community as disgusting people who got their rocks off to drawings of a species that for all intents and purposes only existed in fantasy like dragons or unicorns, and honestly he privately thought that those skinny-haters would have had a much stronger argument if they pointed out that humans did in fact exist once before going extinct and that this was more tantamount to necrophilia. No, Double-D was angry because not only had the Sidney company evidently brainwashed a substantial amount of people into thinking its pro-rebellious message was virtuous, but it had further entrenched itself into the minds of its audience by using sex appeal on children.
That listicle author had sarcastically posed what was actually a really good question: human or not, why did Sidney design their human hero to be so… well, conventionally attractive? Double-D had done plenty of research into this silly little movie and had heard several sources cite that the company was aware that making a criminal a hero to children was a risky move, so they had to make Adam squeaky-clean so he would be unambiguously a good guy, hence why he honestly wasn't the most well-written character, not really having any substantial flaws besides an extremely brief lapse in self-esteem when he learns that fair Eve was actually an undercover spy for her aristocratic father and worries that their mutual attraction would be impossible to pursue further assuming it hadn't been fraudulent all along, something he snaps out of in no time after William of Cloudsley and Clym of the Clough convince him that from their outsider's perspective, Eve clearly hadn't been faking having the hots for him too. The hero not feeling like a hero for not even a couple minutes was the full extent of the flaws the writers and animators felt comfortable giving their child-friendly outlaw, so it wasn't outside the realm of possibility that in their efforts to make him as perfect as possible, they also wound up making him tall, handsome, and charming. It was entirely possible that they hadn't consciously tried to make their main character romantically attractive to children to further imprint him on their minds - after all, the idea of finding cartoon characters sexy in the 1970s was surely an alien concept - but regardless of intent, that was what they did. Come to think of it, there was that one scene where Adam is visiting a needy family and one of their daughters, about the film's target-demographic age, just happens to remark apropos of nothing that Adam, an adult, was so very dreamy, a scene which Double-D had always found, uh, shall we say… an odd addition, to say the least. And as he looked at that first listicle he found gushing over how hot Adam Bell was to young girls around the world, Edd looked at the images included, and despite their grainy Web 1.0 quality, he had to admit… despite being a cartoon human, the son of a bitch was a looker, alright.
This realization led itself to a second feeling which seemed more out of place: despite not having any history of physical vanity, Double-D now found himself jealous of the appearance of this man who only existed on celluloid.
Think of it this way, Dear Reader: have you ever been so jealous of someone for one thing that you find yourself becoming jealous of other things about them that you wouldn't have otherwise cared about? For example, have you ever looked at a picture of someone on social media who's inexplicably financially successful despite (or perhaps because of) their terrible personality, and as you sit there staring at this picture of them in front of a car that costs six figures or a house that costs seven and you find yourself thinking damn straight you're bitter and you're right to be so because work ethic be damned, this person is still a shitbag and their success is an injustice, you just keep staring at their wide smile and then it clicks in your head holy shit this person has perfect teeth, and you've never cared too much about your teeth being perfect, you had braces as a kid and now your teeth are just a little crooked and just a little grayish-yellow but you don't look like a meth addict or anything so that's good enough for you, or at least it was until you saw this person who has had fortune smile enough upon them and on top of all of that they got teeth that were as straight as an arrow and as white as the driven snow, and now all of a sudden you envy their picture-perfect smile?
It was kind of like that with Double-D. He had originally dared to watch Adam Bell to see what all the fuss was about and to give the pro-rambunctiousness faction a fair chance to challenge his beliefs, and while he didn't ultimately totally agree nor disagree with the film's message completely, he did hold a kind of respect for the character of Adam and how he felt so comfortable in himself to abide by his own moral code and not give a damn what anybody else thought, and that respect had bordered on jealousy. And now realizing that this character who harbored an inner feeling of security that Double-D often wished he had also looked like the kind of guy who would archetypally be that self-contained found Edd catching himself kind of wanting to be like that both inside and out. His therapist would have had a fit; the doctor had always praised Double-D for being so content to be who he was, but after all those years of Edd being content to be a stereotype of a quiet nerd, he found himself wishing he didn't necessarily look like a stereotype of a quiet nerd.
And maybe he should have seen this coming. Double-D had found himself jarred to see that so many people found this cartoon character genuinely attractive, but perhaps Adam's self-confident and bold personality were a precursor to that, if not the entire cause of that. After all, the traditional wisdom is that women adore a lovable rogue who plays by his own rules.
The thought that it could all be a case of attraction to personality begetting an attraction to looks rather than vice versa did nothing to make the young wolf feel better; looking at the evidence he had gathered, it still seemed to paint a picture of both being true. The question of whether or not he would ever come around to espouse Adam Bell's way of thinking almost seemed irrelevant now that he had seen evidence that seemed to suggest that no matter what Edd chose to preach, people would be more inclined to listen to him if he was more like that guy. Yeah, he could think of plenty of real-world leaders who were closed-hearted curmudgeons and uglier than sin, but now Double-D was wondering whether people who were blessed with attractive bodies and personalities had a sizable advantage over a wimpy-looking all-the-charm-of-a-dead-fish loser like himself. Not an insurmountable advantage, but enough of an advantage to get him feeling like the effort to overcome might not be worth it.
Okay, no more of that. Double-D was willing to drive himself crazy until he made up his mind on how he should feel about the legend of the famous English outlaw, but he recognized that he may have been driving himself a little too crazy. In his continued adventures of trying to seek a flaw with the Adam Bell model, he soon discovered the magical world of fanfiction, which seemed to be a promising avenue to find someone who had discovered and explored some inherent shortcomings the Inglewood Outlaws might have had.
Again, Adam Bell was far from the most beloved Sidney property, so there weren't too many options, but there were certainly a few. Ever the quick reader, Double-D skimmed a few which seemed like cute little tales but not really presenting anything new, stories in which the main characters' challenges amounted to "welp, that wasn't quite as easy as we thought and our enemies are more competent than we gave them credit for, but we'll try harder and overcome them!" - and then they do. But then he discovered crossovers, fan works that mixed Adam Bell and his friends with characters from other copyrighted properties. Most of these crossed the Adam Bell with other skinny-fandom characters, and again, they were cute and decently written, but nothing too philosophically challenging. Then he found an odd one that had Adam, William, and Clym meet characters who were not bare of fur.
In the real world, it still had not been settled when the tales of Adam Bell were supposed to take place - some traced them way back to the 10th century, others said they happened concurrent to the Crusades at the tail end of the 12th century, and still others think it happened in the mid-14th century around the time of Edward III; the story Edd found seemed to have mixed all of these theories together and took some historical liberties to get the plot rolling. In this story, Adam and his right-hand men are nearing victory over the barons of Carlisle when they come down with a mysterious disease that the reader is meant to understand is the bubonic plague - just like the "real" Adam Bell and his men were thought to have died of in the later-set versions of the story. Grief-stricken Eve hires a "mysterious healer" (a witch doctor? a wizard? surely the author understood this was ridiculous so intentionally kept the details vague) to try to save the men. This healer has a remedy, but it will not be a preferable result: to trick their bodies into thinking they're operating normally, this healer has to put them "at rest for a good long while" - basically, an induced coma. The healer warns that while they will not age, it may take many, many years for them to respirate the disease out of their body, and Eve likely would not be around anymore when they did. Deciding that a man as noble as Adam and his loyal lieutenants were three people the world deserved to have and that she shouldn't be so selfish as to make him die with her, Eve tearfully blows her beloved Adam a goodbye kiss while the healer gives them the Sleeping Beauty treatment, though Adam and his men are incapacitated with illness and barely know where they are. So imagine how surprised they are when they wake up in Inglewood Forest to see dozens of loyal followers who have been continuing their fight against the wealthy for hundreds of years while waiting for the fateful day the legends themselves would arise.
Adam, William, and Clym, however, cannot find it in themselves to be flattered because they simply refuse to believe that it's now the year 1628, and they have no idea who this new bloke Charles is on the throne, but something bad must have happened to the king they knew. They take off for London where they take in the culture shock of hundreds of years worth of new technology as well as learn from the unalarmed locals that, er, no, yeah, this Charles dude is a tyrannical arsehole but he was the legit king. Their questioning of the monarch gets them in trouble with the law (which isn't in and of itself anything new to the trio, but these lawmen have some scary new contraptions called guns), and while Adam and his boys are still as good as ever at evading capture, they fail to find a place in England to lay low and wind up having to stow away on a ship to Calais. When they land in France, they're arrested as foreigners trying to sneak into the country, and the language barrier doesn't make anything easier, but as they repeat their names over and over in a desperate attempt to communicate, it finally works: one of the guards realizes that although he doesn't speak a lick of English, he recognizes those three English names. He knows the legends from across the sea, and he convinces his cohorts to take these men to the king. They manage to escape custody as they near Paris, but now they're even more lost, and then they should just so happen to run into four men with muskets: D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers.
The author clarified that if they were making no claims that the Musketeers presented here were faithful to the Alexandre Dumas novel, because just like how these versions of Adam Bell and his men were based on the Sidney cartoon rather than real-world folklore, these Musketeers were based on some Eighties cartoon Double-D had never freaking heard of. Some quick searching told him that it was a show written and produced in Spain, animated in Japan, and dubbed into English in Los Angeles for the sole enjoyment of British kids, hardly even airing in America except for maybe briefly on the USA Network (as an aside: USA aired cartoons? When?). In the original Dumas novel, the characters were horses and deer and wolves and such, but this cartoon had made them dogs to play up their loyalty to one another ("D'Artagnan" becoming "Dogtanian" [Jesus, really? That's what we're going with?] and the Musketeers being referred to as "Muskehounds" in the title, but strangely not in the actual story, go figure), so the author of this work - who wasn't spelling words in a particularly British way, so they may have been ESL - evidently saw it as no big deal to take these characters who were already species-fluid and make them human to match the world of Adam Bell, a decision made easier by the fact that… well, screw it, the author was a skinny. Thus were the versions of the four French heroes who the three English heroes encountered.
And thus began a tale of conflict that Double-D found truly fascinating, one in which Adam Bell faces a challenge unlike any he's ever encountered before: not having the plot be in his favor. His mastery of a bow and arrow is largely obsolete, his skills with swords and staffs are similarly outdated thanks to the pioneering of new and foreign techniques and theories of battle, and guns and pistols are a complete mystery to him; he doesn't get to occupy the leadership role he's used to because he and his boys are dependent on these conveniently-bilingual Musketeers and need to help them stop a plot by the Cardinal Richelieu to puppet the French king before the quartet will help them get back to England; similarly, Adam's famous charms are completely negated by existing in an environment where eighty percent of the people don't speak his language and most don't care for Englishmen anyway; and to add insult to injury, the famously joyful warrior he was once known to be is nowhere to be seen as he sees no reason to be happy, and the Musketeers - still very dog-like in their personalities, usually cheerful and eager but unafraid to show their teeth at a moment's notice if someone pisses them off, like stupid Adam making a joke about the Anglo-Franco rivalry that does not go over even remotely well - not only view him as an enormous killjoy devoid of a sense of fun, but actively wonder aloud how such a whiny little bitch ever became the leader of a noble band of chivalrous outlaws. Complicating things further is the fact that William and Clym start losing faith in Adam's leadership and becoming malcontent with their roles as his designated sidekicks - something not helped by witnessing him fail over and over again while turning into a moody moper as they also see the repeated successes of a group of four men who kind of have a de facto leader in the reserved but cerebral Porthos but he doesn't make a big show of his lead role like Adam does - and, oh yeah, they're also dealing with that fact that everyone they know from their own time and place has been dead for centuries, that sucks too.
It wasn't quite Hamingway; there were some careless grammatical and typhograpical errorrs that went overlooked, it was rather slow-paced (thankfully Edd was a fast reader), it spat in the face of the three-act structure, and it just generally gave off the vibe that its entire plot was being made up as it went along. But it was exactly what Double-D needed. As much as that silly children's movie filled him with a sense of peace and escapism, that didn't change the fact that it was pushing a worldview that he still wasn't entirely comfortable with while also using a character who was a little too perfect (to the point that, as he had just discovered, his compelling characterization was spilling over into the real world). Seeing this guy struggle honestly made Double-D feel less bad about himself for having flaws. Just prior to reading this, he was starting to worry whether there were people in the real world who were like what Adam was in his, someone who was born perfectly equipped for their world and destined for greatness - someone Edd wasn't. He had plenty of faith in his intellect, but intellect alone doesn't get you very far if you can't figure out how to implement it, and if a majority of people in his life thought he was a terribly off-putting nerd who would be held back in life by his dearth of social skills - something he hadn't been too worried about until a few hours ago when he realized that a damned cartoon character was better at drawing people in than he was - they couldn't all be wrong. But now seeing said character start to question his own greatness provided Edd with a great sense of relief that such lofty levels of greatness really were restricted to the realm of fiction.
...It seemed like cheating.
Maybe it was a residual sense of glum from the stupid listicles, but the joy Double-D had experienced reading this piece quickly evaporated. He realized that to finally give this character a challenge, they had to severely bend and break the rules of his own universe and toss him into some bizarro scenario that would perplex God Almighty with the question of how such a situation even came to be; some might even argue that giving Adam these new flaws fundamentally misunderstood him as a character, because the Adam we know wouldn't even let circumstances as bad as these completely derail his personality as it did here, that's what made him heroic in the first place.
And you know what else? There was nothing here Edd could use in his case. Plenty of Adam struggling for once, but still nothing that actually condemned his morals. There was nothing here to inspire Double-D to mount an argument that might finally convince the Englishman and the Southerner to abandon their wicked ways. If he was going to find a way to deconvert them, he would have to go back to square one. And it was a shame, because they seemed like nice enough fellows, they just happened to embody all the irreverent recklessness that opposed everything he stood for as a person.
There had to be something he was missing. Why would a bunch of wealthy Hollywood elites produce a film indoctrinating children to take up arms against the ruling class? Surely there was some other motive besides just underhandedly selling an anti-rich story to make themselves richer. Kind of like how he had thought it curious when he had found out that the original legend had actually first been documented by the English gentry - which made some sense, since the peasants of ye olden days couldn't read or write, but still an odd bit of irony that could get one wondering if there was a reason why the well-born were all too comfortable with preserving a story where people not unlike themselves were the villains.
He kept staring at that screen, his dehydrated eyeballs adhering to the insides of their lids, wondering what the heck he was going to do about the fact that his only two friends were going to abandon him out of a childish need for adventure and a conceited need for glory. Therefore he kept staring at that strange story on his screen, his mind trapped in a trance that seemingly could not be broken.
Diiing-dooong.
...Hey, in my defense, Dear Reader, I said "seemingly".
"Wh-who could that be?" he asked aloud to nobody at all, a bad habit he was getting better at quitting but which he still fell back on when his mind wasn't in a good place. He stood up from his chair, his skinny legs shaking from anxiety as well as a lack of circulation, and he made his way to the front door. Hopefully whoever it was would be someone he could have a normal conversation with to get his mind off of those meddling Merry Men.