L'EDgendary

by dobanochi

A few years since we last saw any of them, the Peach Creek Boys and the Merry Men run into one another at just the right time, working together to undermine an oppressive city government as well as their burgeoning insecurities. An action-comedy-drama character study about friendship, leadership, self-esteem, and the divide between who we're born as and who we choose to be.

42. Foiled, Pt 2A

42. "Foiled, Pt. 2A"

By his own admission, he'd freely admit that he was dreadfully out of shape, but that wasn't the reason his heart was racing as he hurried down the stairs. He had no idea who'd be ringing the doorbell and knocking so aggressively - having fugitives in his bedroom would be worrying enough even if it were simply some bored UPS driver at the door, but dear God, this mysterious person just wanted in.

"J-just a minute!" he stammered. He may have been liable to have an actual heart attack as he disengaged the lock and deadbolt and opened the door.

And it was nothing short of a miracle that he didn't have a heart attack when he found himself looking up at someone very long and yet very round, wearing a tan button-down shirt with a radio clipped on over one pocket and a badge and name tag over the other.

"Um… h-hey, there, kiddo!" said his guest, seeming a bit nervous himself. "Heh… long time, no see!"

Double-D's mouth was hanging open for a solid two or three seconds before the words would finally come out. "Oh… h-hello, Uncle, um, Uncle Eddward…" Perhaps it goes without saying that his mind was racing to try to figure out what his uncle was doing here unannounced.

But what the young wolf didn't know was that his uncle didn't really know what he was doing here either. The sheriff was very much going in blind, having told himself that if he putzed around and tried to rehearse how he'd act in a dozen different possible scenarios that could happen when he knocked on that door, he'd never get around to actually knocking on it. When he rang that doorbell, would he be greeted by his nephew? His sister? His brother-in-law? A new nephew or niece he didn't even previously know about? Would anybody be home? And what if they moved out somewhere along the line and he was greeted by some species he'd never seen before in his life asking him "Nín hǎo?" Didn't know, didn't care. He'd figure it out as he went along. And seeing his beloved nephew for the first time in a decade, who he'd recognize anywhere wearing that hat… even if that wasn't a good omen, even if all went downhill from here, at least he got to see that kid again.

"Aw, don't worry 'bout callin' me 'Eddward,' Li'l Pup!" said the big wolf. "Yer parents just wanted ya to call me by my full name 'cause they wanted ya to be all formal. You can be Eddward, Li'l Pup, and ya can call me Uncle Ward!" He'd have let the boy just call him by his first name, but he really wanted to be called 'Uncle'.

"Oh!" And Edd couldn't say anything else. He was too busy listening to his inner voice. He was trying to tell himself that he was only nervous because he had been led to believe this was a bad man, trying to tell himself that he was only nervous because this man was not supposed to be here and he himself wasn't doing anything wrong - oh, wait, he also had this man's two greatest enemies inside his house. Okay, screw it, he had valid reasons to be terrified.

"Speakin' a' yer folks, though," said his uncle, "...they home right about now?"

Edd was talking to an adult, a family member, and a legal authority figure. Lying was futile.

"No, um… they-they're up in Wilmington for work…"

"They gonna be home anytime soon?"

Double-D checked his watch. "Um… that would be unlikely… Even if they left now, they're a two-hour drive away-"

Ward forced a chuckle. "Well, maybe it's two hours with how slow your maw and paw drive! Heh… anybody else'd be back in a hour an' a half flat, heh…"

He trailed off and they found themselves staring at one another with blank faces. They both knew that Ward wasn't welcome in that house, but both consciously decided not to say it because both assumed correctly that the other one already knew.

"Um… if you wanted to speak to my parents, I could leave a message for them-"

"Aw, naw, naw, I mean…" The sheriff struggled for words. "I'd kinda like ta' talk to 'em, but… it ain't an emergency. I didn't come here just ta' talk to them."

Double-D made sure his brain was parsing those words correctly before he replied: "I-I'm sorry, but did you say… you didn't just want to talk to my-"

"You know what, Li'l Pup?" the elder wolf asked as he smiled softly, calming down now that he realized his sister and her husband weren't here to shoo him away. "I was just drivin' through the neighborhood and I thought… I wanna talk to whoever might be home. Whether that be you, yer mama, yer papa… heck, anybody! I just wanted to catch up. Say hi to my family."

Double-D just kept staring. He hadn't a clue what to say.

"You, uh… mind if we come in? It's a mighty hot day, hate to let all the cool air out and all the m'skeeters in!"

Well, Edd had been raised never to say no to an elder… or to a cop… or to someone who might hurt him if he said no. So he said yes.

Or, rather, he said, "Um… I-I don't see why not…"

Double-D backed up and made space for his tremendously-sized uncle to enter the house. And Ward entered the doorway just like his nephew remembered. He didn't tilt his head sideways to duck under the doorway like others of his stature might; he leaned straight forward and dove into the house, raising his head at the end and straightening his back with a smile.

Now, Ward was definitely a really tall dude. Sammantha had previously cited her brother as being six-foot-seven but also described him as someone who hadn't been measured by a doctor since he dropped out of high school at sixteen because he hadn't been to a doctor since he dropped out of high school at sixteen because he didn't like doctors clearly judging him for being fat and also because the Woodlands were poor with no insurance, and anybody could see that Ward was a good two or three inches taller than the standard eighty-inch doorway. But he was nowhere near the size of someone like Little John who found himself genuinely in conflict with the standard eight-foot ceiling of medium-sized-mammalian dwellings in the United States. Yet whenever Ward entered a doorway like the Lupos' front door, he would always bow straight forward as if the crossbar was at the level of his shoulders, dive into wherever he was entering, and quickly stand up straight with a giant grin on his face, looking triumphant.

Many people in Ward's life interpreted this as a guy obsessed with his own size wanting to make a grand and elaborate entrance to draw everyone's attention to his size while still trying to make himself seem even larger. But in Double-D's mind, with his memories of his uncle coming over to spend time with him, memories of having someone to come and play with him and be genuinely interested in him while his parents and the other kids on the block wouldn't, he remembered seeing that great big wolf a foot taller than his mom and dad enter his house, diving through the doorway like he couldn't wait to come inside, smiling from up on high like he was elated just to be there, sometimes even clutching his own great big belly and laughing in a way that a lot of other people would probably find kind of repulsive but which three-year-old Edd saw and found himself thinking of this man much like a real-life version of jolly old Santa Claus… let's just say that the strangely placid memories caused by seeing the sheriff enter his home clashed majorly with the nerve-wracking awareness that things could go very badly if this man made even one step up the stairs.

"Nobody else home, right?" asked Ward. "Yer maw and paw didn't give ya any li'l brothers 'er sisters, did they?"

"Uh, no! No siblings!" That much wasn't a lie, and hopefully his new guest wouldn't realize that he hadn't answered the first question.

One thing Sheriff Woodland didn't like about being so gigantic was that carrying all that mass was murder on his poor feet, so he didn't even bother to ask whether he could have himself a seat on the couch. But as he drew closer to the sofa, he stopped and felt compelled to ask a different question.

"Hey, uh… ain't a lick a' my business, but… you have a bear an' a fox in this house recently? Swear I can smell 'em."

Poor Double-D had absolutely no ability to hide how nervous he looked when he heard that question.

"...Y'awright, Li'l Pup?"

"Oh, yes, yes, um… I'm just thinking… m-my friends Ed and Eddy were here just earlier today, sitting on that very couch, actually! So… h-hearing you ask that question, it just briefly alarmed me that perhaps they're leaving some sort of scent or, or odor in this house that I'm not aware of! Um, to-to clarify, um, Eddy is indeed a red fox and Ed is… well, some kind of brown bear hybrid, nobody seems quite sure what mixture of what, however…"

Double-D trailed off, feeling nervous but also a little bit proud of himself. Holy mackerel, he might have just pulled off a lie! It wasn't the biggest stretch, as Ed and Eddy had each most assuredly been inside this house and this very room within the last ten days or so, but a lie nonetheless.

And the sheriff bought it entirely. After all, he didn't think it was that bear and fox he smelled - why would they have been inside this house, sitting on this couch? As he put it: "Awright, just makin' sure I wasn't losin' my damn mind or nothin'... there's a bear and fox on the run in this town, so I've had 'em a lot on my mind recently, just hopin' my nose wasn't pickin' up on smells that weren't e'en there…" He welcomed himself to sit down on the couch. "And I remember now! I remember that there was a kit and cub on this street you hung out with! I remember you tellin' me how excited you were to have friends her own age! And I remember thinkin' it was a damn shame that there weren't more kids that had enough sense to realize ya really were one in'nerestin' li'l pup!"

And there, Dear Reader, was the moment that Double-D started to once again feel what it was like to love this man he had been instructed to hate. Not to say that he immediately felt complete and unconditional trust in this man, far from it, but after a short lifetime of his peers paying him no heed and his parents being workaholics who always left him to do his own thing, having someone call him "interesting"... that was a rare occurrence Edd would not take for granted.

"...You really thought that?" Edd asked, paws folded and clenched in front of him for lack of any idea of what else to do with them.

"Course I did! You were a cool kid, Eddie! I mean, I couldn't understand a word a' the science-y mumbo-jumbo comin' outta yer mouth when you were hardly old 'nuff fer preschool, but… goddamn, did you ever have a passion for that stuff, it was fun just list'nin' to ya talk about it! And you wanted to talk to someone about it, and…" The big wolf shrugged coyly. "...I like talkin' with people who like ta' talk ta' me!"

Alright, this was confusing. Edd knew he needed to keep his guard up so his uncle wouldn't get too comfortable in their house, but… it was the strangest thing, but his uncle seemed to have missed him, and the young wolf really wanted to give his uncle some comfort right about then. And with any luck, maybe receive some, too.

"Oh, well, uh… i-it was enjoyable to have someone who would listen to me talk about such things ad nauseam when nobody else would lend an ear."

Ward chuckled, and his gut jiggled - and Double-D was acutely aware of how weird it was that even though he was a skinny kid raised by very health-conscious parents with less-than-rosy opinions of the obese (obsession with pears and pear-shaped objects be damned) and consequently Edd himself would likely be deeply disgusted if he saw anybody else's flab physically moving independent of the rest of their body (maybe don't tell the grizzly upstairs, though)… for this specific guy, he just seemed like he was embodying the archetypal friendly, jolly fat man when he did it. For some reason, this wheel-shaped wolf was the exception that proved the rule.

"Ya see? There ya go again. 'Ad nauseam,' what does that even mean? Sumpthin' about noses? Honestly, Eddie, if anythin', I was jealous of how smart ya were so young!" The sheriff patted the sofa seat next to him. "Have yerself a sit, Li'l Pup. We gots lotsa catchin' up ta' do!"

Perhaps against his better judgment, Double-D obliged. Hey, maybe this would help keep his guest downstairs.

"Yer mama ever told ya about how I tried my damnedest to be smart when I was 'bout your age?" his uncle asked as Edd sat down next to him.

"Um… I-I can't say she has," his nephew stammered. "A-at least… not that I recall. She may have and I may have completely forgotten, but…" He never even attempted to finish that sentence.

"Well, I can't blame 'er," Ward said with a sigh. "If anythin', I oughta thank her fer not tellin' ya because it ain't the most flatterin' story 'bout me… I admit, Eddie, I didn't wanna be smart for the right reasons. I just wan'ned to keep my grades good enough to be allowed ta' stay on the school sports teams… did yer maw ever even tell ya I played?"

"...She hasn't."

The sheriff huffed. "Welp… I played basketball in the spring and football in the fall. I didn't even wanna play basketball, but we were kinda a small high school so they saw big ol' me and cajoled me ta' join. But football? I tell ya, Li'l Pup, one a' the proudest achievements a' my life was when they put me on varsity as a sophomore. And I was so good they didn't even know what to do with me! They had me on the O-line, on the D-line, they had me at fullback, they had me at linebacker… man, these sports words don't even mean nothin' to ya, do they?"

Double-D shook his head meekly.

"Ah, no judgment, it just ain't yer callin' - and at least you're good at yer callin'! I thought this was gonna be my callin' and I was good at it, too! They called me the 'The Big Bad Wolf', 'specially after this one game… we were playin' an even tinier school, Chincoteague, I think they had ta' force all their boys bigger'n a bunny and smaller'n a bear, all a' 'em freshman through senior, forced 'em to play football just so they could have enough to march a team out there, and they just didn't have enough fer the bigger or smaller kids ta' play football fer their sizes. But one night we're playing Chincoteague, and I'm on a roll. I knock their quarterback outta the game. Then their main running back. Then their backup quarterback, then their tight end, then their backup running back, then one a' their wide receivers, then one a' their linemen, then their other backup quarterback. And I remember that last one, the QB was this cheetah guy who was probably supposed to be another running back but hey, they needed another QB and he was one a' the last guys left on the bench, and I remember goin' in on 'im and man… I could see the fear in his eyes. He was terrified a' me, Eddie. And he was right to be, because I wound up breaking his shoulder-blade. And that was it. Chincoteague had ta' forfeit. They didn't have enough players left. Find out later that all the other guys I knocked outta the game had bigger injuries than we thought, too. Broken arms, broken legs, sprains and concussions like ya wouldn't believe - I heard their main QB, this big ol' buck guy almost tall as I was, I heard I 'shattered his ribcage,' an' I gotta tell ya, Li'l Pup, I ain't never heard 'bout somebody shatterin' their ribs before or since, though I guess that explains why he started goin' into shock right after I tackled 'im, or cardiac arrest or whatever it was, I don't remember - they had to cancel the whole rest a' their season! They just didn't have the manpower! And wouldn't ya know it, word got 'round that I was a monster on the field, who single-handedly honest-to-God ended a whole school's season, and the next week when we had to play down in Northampton County… there's scouts from UVA there, and they all seem to be lookin' at me!"

At this point, if you thought that even beyond the alien sportsball terminology that Double-D was starting to get uncomfortable listening to this man brag about actually breaking people's bones, then you'd be right. But that feeling didn't last long. His uncle wasn't done.

"But I never did get an offer ta' play for the Cavaliers," Sheriff Woodland continued, his good mood quickly evaporating. "Hell, I never even made it ta' my senior year! I just couldn't pass the tests. Couldn't figure out how ta' do math with letters involved, couldn't figure out how a cell worked, couldn't remember the presidents, couldn't write ta' save my life… and they kept tellin' me, 'hey, you can be a star football player one day, but we're gonna get in trouble with the state board a' education if we keep ya on the team when you're an eleventh-grader who can barely read like a seventh-grader.' And they gave me er'ry chance ta' get my grades up, they tried tutorin' me, and I always said yes and went ta' see my teachers after school ta' try ta' figure it out, figure all a' it out, all the things I couldn't understand, it got ta' the point where that fall basically all my free time was either at football practice or gettin' tutored…" He paused and shook his head, staring out into the empty space of the room. "...And it just never could stick. Was I born ta' be stupid? Or did they just not know how ta' teach me the way I needed ta' be taught? Now we'll never know, an' it prolly don't matter."

A few moments of silence passed. Although Edd couldn't at all relate to the feeling of being stupid beyond repair, the idea of having to wonder whether one has some sort of intellectual impairment that no amount of hard work could overcome… jeez, Double-D couldn't fathom a more torturously terrifying thought. Losing his ability to learn was probably the boy's most profound existential fear, so hearing this man lament that he couldn't be smart… Edd couldn't empathize, but he could certainly sympathize.

"Are you… alright, Uncle Ward?"

He wasn't, but hearing his nephew call him "Uncle Ward" made him feel a little better. "Aw, I'm just thinkin'... 'cuz at a certain point, they told me 'hey, just repeat junior year, you're a big strong guy and nobody's gonna make fun a' you, and anybody worth a damn'll admire that you're tryna better yerself… but Eddie, I couldn't stay in school forever! The first plan was I was gonna be a star player in college on a full-ride scholarship and then play in the pros and make money so I could put my baby sis through college - because you know yer gramma and grampa didn't have enough money to send either a' us to college! I didn't even wanna play in the NFL, I just wanted to play at UVA! But college sports don't pay and I needed the money for my li'l sister… because she was the smart one who actually had a future!" He chuckled. "And with no disrespect ta' yer daddy, Li'l Pup, I can tell ya on good authority that ya get yer smarts from yer mama."

Double-D was quietly heartbroken listening to this man speak so highly of a sister who wanted nothing to do with him.

"But that wasn't gonna happen!" Ward continued. "So the next plan was drop out soon as possible and get a job ta' support my family, that way Sammie woulda at least had a better chance a' gettin' the resources she needed ta' get into college on her own - I dunno how she woulda paid for it, but she was a smart girl, she woulda figured something out. But then guess what! There ain't no jobs in that part a' Virginia! The Seventies were around the time when places started not bein' so keen on hirin' teenagers, and with the few jobs around? Maybe I coulda gotten a job at the gas station or the ice cream shop, but who do ya think they're gonna hire? A sixteen-year-old who quit school or thirty-year-old who had a family to feed? I did get a job for a while cleaning the beaches up on Chincoteague, but not only was it so far away and paid so little that I could barely afford the gas ta' drive there and back, I kept runnin' into the families a' the people I knocked outta that one game! And they laughed when they saw the Big Bad Wolf wasn't able ta' play no more and had ta' pick up hot dog wrappers and used rubbers off the beach just ta' make a buck! They laughed, Li'l Pup. And I just couldn't take it. And then…" Another long sigh. "...Sammie got a full ride ta' Penn anyway. She didn't even need my help. And hey, I'm happy for her… God knows I couldn't help her anyway, no matter how much I tried."

Once again, Double-D didn't know what to say, so he said nothing. But his uncle was just happy to have someone listening.

Ward chuckled. "And if you're curious what happened after that? Well… yer gramma and grampa told me ta' get the hell outta their house, and by then I was old enough ta' get hired other places, but there still weren't a lot a' jobs in town… but there was one place that was always hiring… and that was the Accomack County Sheriff's Office," he ended with a tired smile, expressing that he still wasn't feeling good but was at least glad he had someone to feel bad with.

"Oh, uh… interesting, interesting… Um, no, my, my mother never has told me about the circumstances of you dropping out of school," said the nephew.

Ward wanted to make sure he was interpreting that correctly. "Does that mean… she did tell you I dropped out, though?"

Gulp. "...Yes."

"And she never told you why?"

Double-D was kicking himself for talking himself into a corner. "She… did imply there was some element of frustration with your, um… frustration with your academic difficulties."

"...What did she say I did after that?"

Edd was a scientist before he was a wordsmith. He couldn't just come up with useful fiction on the fly.

"She… never really filled in the rest of the story, actually."

His uncle looked annoyed, but not at him. "What has she told you about me? And what hasn't she?"

George Washington would blush at seeing this wolf boy's complete inability to tell a lie. Honestly, with Double-D's troublesome truth-telling, you'd think Robin and Johnny would no longer want him on their side. And speaking of the devils…

"...Are they even talking?" Robin said quietly, his ear to the air vent to try to pick up on their conversation; he'd been able to head their tones and cadences but he hadn't been able to make out a single word. "Those two are remarkably quiet. I can see this being a good thing or a bad thing."

"This is not a normal amount of bad luck for us to have in a week," lamented Johnny; like Robin, he was talking in a harsh whisper without using his vocal cords, loud enough for them to hear each other clearly but quiet enough that their voices wouldn't leave the room. "Seriously, did someone in one of our families marry into the fuckin' Kennedys?"

Robin gave a tepid nod. "It is all preposterously unfortunate, I agree." In his head, he was also thinking it was preposterous that Little John was trying to rip quips in a dire situation such as this, but he wouldn't dare say it out loud. The last thing they needed right then was more conflict between them.

Little John, of course, was specifically trying to add humor to the situation as a way of being the bigger man. He knew Robin well; Rob would accuse Johnny of being a whiny little bitch if he acted afraid or depressed in this situation, surely he wouldn't hold it against him if he tried to add some light to this cloud, right? Aw, maybe he would. Little John couldn't believe that less than a week ago he'd spilled his guts to Otto fretting that Robin was a perfect being and that he himself would always have to shiver in the cold shadow of a living deity - jeez, how embarrassing. With a clear mind, Johnny always knew that Robin wasn't perfect; he still consciously thought the stupid fox bastard was luckier in life than anybody had the right to be, but he wasn't perfect, the evidence for which was ample if you looked for it, up to and including when he made an arse of himself ten minutes ago in front of an impartial arbiter who also thought he was behaving in a particularly arsey way.

But when Johnny's head was in a bad place, and he spun his tires while Robin humble-bragged about how great he was, damn if he didn't find himself wondering if his tormenting intrusive thoughts were actually the correct ones all along. Maybe Robin really was the closest thing to perfection any sapient mammal could achieve and Little John was cosmically cursed to have to play his second fiddle for the rest of his natural life. Maybe that day he met Robin on the fallen-tree bridge over the creek, the tree had actually snapped under his weight and he'd hit his head on a rock and drowned as he lay unconscious in the shallow water, and now Robin was the little red demon guiding Johnny through his own personal hell, teasing him with the idea that someone would ever want to be friends with a dipshit-ass loser like him when in reality he could never wish for better than to be the lackey to an Übermensch whose greatness he could never hope to replicate - and just for kicks, every so often said Übermensch-demon would put Johnny back in his place lest he dare to think too charitably of himself.

And that was one thing they were both thinking: they were both quietly ignoring the heated argument they had been having not ten minutes prior. Each was telling themselves that the other surely must have been embarrassed of the respective asses they'd made of themselves with their silly and morally-questionable arguments, and now surely the other was keeping mum about all that because each was too foolishly proud to admit he was wrong.

For context, there was one other thing neither of them was saying aloud because both knew the other knew and there was no reason to say it: that there would have been an easy, easy, easy solution to this predicament if not for the elephant in the room - well, not quite an elephant. If Robin were stuck in this room all by his lonesome, he could just slip out the window - hell, for Christ's sakes, there was a tree outside the window, he wouldn't even have to jump, he could just climb down and could probably do so without even making much of a sound. There was no way in hell Johnny was getting through that window. And looking for any other room on this level of the house that might have a big enough window probably wouldn't be worth their time. They were men of the world, they had heard the news stories that would pop up every so often where a member of a larger species comes to visit a smaller-species friend in a smaller house only to get trapped in the house when a fire blocks the exit and since they can't make it through the window, they just don't make it out at all. They both knew this was the kind of house where such a situation would happen.

Robin moved away from the vent and made his way toward the center of the room, crawling so there would be no footsteps to be heard below.

"You agree it'd be best if we can find a way out of here instead of just waiting and hoping we get lucky, right?" asked the fox.

The bear nodded but didn't seem all that interested. "That'd be preferable, yeah, but I don't see any way we could."

"Well, use your resources!" Robin didn't know whether Johnny wouldn't or simply couldn't brainstorm ways to escape this situation, but one way or another, that on top of what Robin felt to be the rather pusillanimous argument Little John had earlier made reaffirmed in his head that he was indisputably the fox in charge of this operation. Robin started looking around corners and under furniture for anything and everything that might prove useful. "Look for something we can perhaps throw out the window and use as a distraction. Like… firecrackers? M-80s? All teenagers must have fireworks in their bedrooms, right?"

"You really think this goody-two-shoes kid would have fireworks in a state where anything more hardcore than a sparkler is illegal?"

Robin stopped searching for a moment to sit up and give Johnny a funny look. "Wait, they are?"

"Yeeeup."

"But people are always shooting off fireworks in the summer around here!"

"They make the trip up to Pennsylvania to get them. Pennsylvania doesn't give a shit like Delaware and Maryland do." Johnny thought this was such common knowledge that he didn't even look at Robin as he explained it. "Then people flip 'em and sell 'em to their friends. That's why when you're driving up to Philly there's a huge fireworks warehouse right on the border off I-95. Buy a fuckton, take 'em home, start your own little black market."

Robin winced in confusion. "Then how do Fourth of July events sanctioned by cities and schools get their fireworks!?"

"Government entities get a special permit," Little John said with a shrug. "Remind me how long you've lived in this state?"

Robin just shook his head and went back to aimlessly searching. "I don't understand this country. You're all enamored with freedom until you're suddenly not… What about a telephone? Does he have a phone in this room? We can call in a tip for something clear across town that would require the sheriff's presence!"

"I don't see a phone."

"Johnny, you're not even looking!"

"I've got a higher vantage point than you, little dude, I can see damn-near everything in this room. Unless you think he's hiding a cell phone in a drawer or something."

"You don't know until you check!" Robin said with his head under Double-D's bed.

"You really want my big ass moving around the room and making the floor creak? And God knows if this kid's got an alarm on his door then what else he might have guarding his drawers."

"Alright, sod it, that's a fair point-"

"And calling in a diversion is a good idea, Rob, but you really think they won't just geolocate the phone it's coming from-?"

"Alright, alright! You've made your case! You win!" Robin said as he threw his arms in the air, then started inspecting the lad's chemistry set. "Hrm… blast it, I passed the tests in school but I didn't retain any of it. If we could throw something out the window that would explode, that'd really be something. Do you remember any of your chemistry, Little John?"

"The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."

"...Johnny, that's biology."

The bear smirked. "My point exactly."

And Robin smiled back, but it was a conflicted smile. He was endlessly grateful that he had a friend to be in this sticky situation with, a friend who was trying to bring levity to their dire straits, but… goddammit, now just wasn't the time for it. Judging by the troubled look that his smile covered, Little John seemed to understand that on some level as well.

"How're you feeling?" Robin asked.

Somewhere along the line, the bear had started wagging his foot. "Not great, if I'm being honest."

"Don't worry, we'll get out of this, we always do-"

"No, it's not just the being trapped thing, there's another layer to it you don't know."

"What is it?"

"...I really gotta take a leak, man."

"Oh, for the love of God, Johnny-!"

"I told that stupid puppy that I specifically dehydrate myself to avoid situations like this, I told him! But he insisted, 'oh, Johnny, drink five bottles of water!'"

"Johnny, mellow out-"

"I'm not un-mellow, Rob! I'm just saying, next time I see Geoff, I'm gonna piss on his teeth and tell him he needs to get some liquid in him so he doesn't get de-hy-drate-ed."

Little John did indeed mellow out after he finished that sentence, and they were silent for a moment. Then Robin grabbed an empty beaker from the wolf boy's desk and handed it to his friend.

"What the hell is this?" Little John asked.

"For you to go in."

Johnny refused to take it. "Brother… put yourself in that kid's shoes. You think he'd be okay with us taking a leak in his beakers and making his room smell like piss?"

"Oh, I'll open a window and we'll tell him we'll wash it out-"

"Do you really think he'd care?"

"Well in an emergency like this-"

"Do you really… think he'd care?"

Robin simply blinked a few times. He could not deny that the wolf boy had a troubling affinity for law and order, even when it made no sense and went against his own best interests.

"You want to go out the window?" asked Robin.

"What, so the entire world can see my dick? Which apparently pales in comparison to yours!?"

"Oh my god, Johnny, I'm sorry I brought it up-"

"Does it dip?"

Robin didn't understand. "...What?"

"When you sit down on the toilet, does it dip in the water?"

The fox was speechless.

"Oh, well- maybe once in a while! You know, it depends on the toilet! ...But hey, doesn't that happen to every guy every so often?"

With a very serious look on his face, the bear slowly shook his head back and forth.

"...Oh," was all Robin could say, hanging his head in self-imposed shame. Thank God he didn't mention that that had happened a lot more frequently with all the fox-sized loos in Loxley or Johnny might have flipped out on him. (I have to say Dear Reader, between these two idiots talking about their dicks and all the strange detail Double-D wanted me to include about his inexplicable tolerance of his uncle's gut, this narrator has to wonder if someone out there is getting off to this chapter. And if that's you, well… c'est la vie, I hope it was good to you.)

Johnny sighed. "Honestly, I shouldn't a' been so surprised. Ya got a freakishly long torso, freakishly long legs, freakishly long tail… you can play where the rest would come…"

"I mean, I really wouldn't describe it as 'freakish'-" (Thank God Johnny hadn't said the word "monstrous" or Robin might have flipped out on him.)

"You literally just said you've been told you look like a porn star with your pants off."

"Oh, that was an exaggeration! Which you set up with your strange little metaphor! I just went along with it because we were arguing and I wanted to annoy you!"

"Why would you do that? Do you think a good person would choose to do that?"

Robin shook his head in frustration. "I'm sorry. Can we stop talking about this?"

Little John sighed. "I'm just sayin', Rob. Every culture in the world thinks the size of those things matters, and as much as we can say they're all wrong, having self-confidence only goes so far when basically everybody would think my dinky little shit is pathetic-"

"Johnny, yours isn't that bad."

"Oh, yeah, tell me it's not that bad because it's not literally a micropenis. And yeah, I'd seen yours before, but having the context now that it's fucking exponentially bigger than most fox dudes'-"

"It's not exponentially."

"-This is gonna be like that time we sat down and did the math and figured out there may or may not have been a time around nineteen eight-four, eighty-five where a preteen fox in fucking England may or may not have been taller than a bear who woulda been old enough to drive if I hadn't been labeled a cripple by the state of Tennessee. Just like that, Rob, I'll come to terms with it in due time, but… it's gonna take me a while."

A few seconds of silence passed.

"...Well, if it makes you feel better, Johnny, I haven't had the chance to use mine in the way God intended in quite a while, so not a lot of people have even seen it anyway." Well, not recently they hadn't.

"And for reference, my legs ain't much longer than yours, bud," Little John said, changing the subject. "I don't think I can make it up to the windowsill."

Robin smiled a little, glad the conversation had become less of a literal dick-measuring contest.

"Honestly, Johnny, just… go. I won't judge. And I won't tell a soul."

Little John was taken aback. "What, in… in my pants?"

"I mean, it's probably the responsible option. Wouldn't be the first time we've had to."

"And you really think that the moisture won't just seep through my pants and get on this kid's carpet and he won't freak the fuck out over that?"

"You know what? He might. But I'm willing to bet he'd understand-"

"I'm not. C'mon, Rob, put yourself in his shoes. This kid's afraid of his own shadow. Even if we're one hundred percent correct and he didn't call his uncle here and he just happened to show up out of the blue for the first time in years when we're at the kid's house because we're just that cosmically fucking unlucky, and he isn't trying to get us busted… he seems like the kind of guy who would find out we soiled his property and call the old wolf back and say 'actually, wait, there's some guys you're looking for who did me wrong, and I know exactly where they can be found.'"

Robin turned and looked out the window. This entire dilemma seemed ridiculous.

"I agree, man, just pissing on the carpet or in a vial would be all too easy and if this were anybody else's bedroom, they'd probably understand," Little John continued. "But this kid's clearly immature when it comes to understanding that laws can't always be followed. If we do something that he interprets as an invasion of privacy or disrespecting his property… he'll probably squeal on us. You know this to be true."

Robin turned back to Johnny with a worried look. He didn't want to accept that was true. (Though in Little John's defense, our editors have since spoken to Eddward Lupo, who confessed that with the way his mind worked at that time, if Johnny had urinated in his bedroom in any capacity, it wouldn't be likely by any stretch of the imagination that this would inspire him to turn the Merry Men in, but the thought would have crossed his mind with a nonzero chance of his following through with it.)

"What do you propose the lad would have us do, then?" asked Robin.

John scoffed. "Sneak to the bathroom and hope to hell we don't get caught."

"You can't be serious."

"You think I wanna be?"

"Can't you just hold it?"

"I did that once in first grade when my bitch teacher wouldn't let me go. I wound up pissing my pants anyway and got a bladder infection."

Robin didn't know what else to do, so he sighed. "You really think making a mad dash for it is your only option, don't you?"

Little John nodded slowly. "Well… not that mad of a dash…" The bear slowly slid himself onto his frontside so as not to make the floor creak under his weight, and started army-crawling toward the door. "Open the door for me, would ya?"

"You really want to risk your life to take a slash?"

Johnny couldn't help but smirk. "Robin, you're the one with a fear of dying stupidly. I'm the one who thought I'd've offed myself by now. I'm living on borrowed time… might as well keep gambling," he said with a smile and a shrug.

This wasn't the first time Robin had heard his friend say that, but it never got any easier to hear. He figured the least he could do was crawl over to the bear and give the big guy a side-hug.

"Well, I'm glad you stuck around long enough for me to find you," said the fox as he wrapped an arm around the bear's back as far as he could.

Johnny pursed his lips, nodded as he stared at the floor, and reciprocated with an arm around Robin's back. "Glad I could be of service."

"And maybe you're right and I really could get invited to any party in this city without even trying, but you know what?" Robin gave Little John a couple of pats on the back. "I wouldn't accept any of those invitations unless they invited you, too."

Johnny sighed and forced himself to smile at his friend. "I know you wouldn't, brother."

"And hell, with how much of a party animal you've become over the years, they'd be foolish if they didn't!" Robin said with a chuckle, but he soon didn't feel like chuckling much more. "Please be careful out there, Johnny, I don't know how long I could last out there alone." And they both understood that "out there" was a lot bigger than the Lupo house.

"Yeah… because you'd blow your brains out if you didn't have someone to talk to every five minutes," Little John joked with a smirk and a nod, but kept staring distantly at the floor.

"...Something still on your mind?" Robin dared to ask.

Johnny looked frustrated, then determined, before he answered. "Two quick questions."

"Go for it."

"...Do you think it's pathetic that I would never have learned how to make friends by myself if you hadn't taught me?"

Robin thought for a moment to formulate the best answer he could.

"No, what I think is really pathetic is that none of the adults in your life were good enough at being adults to take the time to teach you."

Little John didn't look at him, he just nodded again. They both understood that the real answer was 'It was a pathetic situation that you happened to be the star of, it wasn't a moral flaw on your part but you absolutely were pathetic,' but neither was crazy enough to outright say so at a moment like this.

"What's the second question?" Robin asked.

Johnny stared into space for a few more moments before turning to Robin to ask:

"Is it so big you gotta shove it down one of your pant legs because it won't fit in your underwear?"

"Oh my god, Johnny, I'm sorry I said anything-!"

"Because I've never noticed a lump in your thigh, but you do wear pretty baggy pants-"

"Johnny! Johnny, my lord, stop!" Robin was doing his damnedest to not start laughing out loud. "No, Johnny, as I understand it, only the lucky few have to do that!"

"Motherfucker, you just went off fifteen minutes ago about how you were the lucky few!"

"Compared to my people, sure. Compared to the general male population? Not so much."

"Then where the fuck do the terms 'dress left' and 'dress right' come from if this isn't a common thing!?"

"I think that's only for ridiculously tight suit pants with no crotch space, and even when I've had to wear those, it's been a moot point."

"How has it been a moot point!?"

"What kind of undies do I wear, Johnny?"

"...Oh."

"Between me mum buying me tighty-whiteys as a lad and Marian being the kind of girl who likes her boys with a bulge front-and-center-"

"Alright, alright, I get it-!"

"Besides," Robin mumbled, "you could still have me beat on thickness…"

"Fucking what!?"

"This! Thickness!" Robin said with a smile as he put his right arm up with a ninety-degree crook and put his left hand on his bicep. (Oh, yeah, smooth move, Robin, we all see what you pulled there.) He was drawing attention to how there was barely kind-of a gravity-defying arch of flesh that suggested the faintest of musculature as he tried to flex. "When it comes to the parts of us people actually see, you've got something that I'm never gonna have that I'm jealous of!"

Johnny didn't look any happier, and with a completely straight face, he rolled up his sleeve. "Behold how my arms are so fucking fat that you can't even see any definition. And maybe some guys would kill to have them this thick, but my brother's arms were so fucking huge that they were bigger than his freaking head-"

"Good Lord, Johnny, I was just trying to make you feel better!" Robin was giggling at the ridiculousness of the situation again.

"...I gotta pee," is all Johnny said in reply.

"Right. Go do that. Godspeed." Robin opened the door for Little John, and Johnny slowly crawled his way out, turning sideways and sucking his gut in to get through the opening.

"Hey, I'll slide a square a' toilet paper under the door so you'll know it's me when I'm back. But keep it closed until then."

"Good idea," Robin answered. He slowly and silently closed the door behind his friend, convincing himself that Johnny's trip to the john was far from the riskiest thing they'd ever had to do.

Whoever designed these Peach Creek Estates houses had a very eccentric approach to architecture. The Lupo residence was particularly geometrically confusing. It was like it was designed by some cartoonists who never had to show more than one room of the house at a time and consequently never bothered to write down where any given room was relative to any other. Think of inconsistencies of the Simpsons' house with the paradoxical bigger-on-the-inside nature of the houses in The Flintstones or Blue's Clues.

Like for one thing: Johnny hadn't realized when he came up the stairs… that there was another set of stairs? Wait, what? What kind of house shy of a straight-up mansion has two sets of stairs? It's like it was designed for families paranoid about fire who wanted as many exits as possible. And the pair of staircases were positioned so that one set of stairs was about a two-fifths of the way down one side of the hall… and the other was about two-fifths of the way down going in the other direction. So they were almost symmetrical, but they weren't so instead they looked… flipped? And, actually, wait. This hallway was running the short way across the house, not the long way. And there was only one window on the Rethink Avenue side of the house - that was Double-D's window above the garage and the front door - and there didn't seem to be any windows on the long sides of the house, at least not the side facing Harris - and the roof was sloped! Why were there eight doors in this hallway if there weren't enough windows for eight rooms? Maybe half of these were… doors to a crawlspace? He was seriously getting dizzy as he lay in that hallway.

Alright, time to take a breather and regroup. The kid's room was behind him on the left. Across from that was where the so-called "auxiliary bedroom" was. The parents' room was… up and on the right, right? So that must have meant that the bathroom was ahead and on the left.

As unlucky as this whole situation was, though, there was some very, very good luck to make up for it. The strange layout of the house meant that there was no chance of the sheriff seeing him in the upstairs hallway if Woodland was sitting on the living room couch. Granted, the staircase to the front door only ran along one wall so there was a much more direct line for any noise he made to travel to the living room, but by the sound of it, that wouldn't be too much of a problem. The wolves seemed to be deep in conversation.

"Yer mama toldja I was always this fat!?"

"Um… sh-she implied it, rather than, uh, outright stating so," the young wolf answered sheepishly.

Ward shook his head and let out a grumbly sigh. "I mean, I always been heavyset, but… ya can't get this big when ya ain't got no money ta' buy food with! When I started makin' comfortable money and realized I could buy whatever the hell I wanted, that's when I started piggin' out! 'Cuz ya know, I was a big kid who got hungry a lot but couldn't always eat…! When I finally got able to never hafta go hungry again, I was gonna make sure I didn't!"

Double-D nodded. He could understand the sentiment that someone who was raised going without would want to never even come close to depriving themselves again. Begged the question of why his mom didn't tolerate that explanation from her brother, of course, but maybe she found him repulsive for other reasons and worked backwards to include obesity as another factor.

"So if ya ever wonder why a big fat guy like me can still run so good?" his uncle asked with a smile. "I was an athlete first! ...And a fat-lete after!"

Now Edd found himself chuckling just a little. That wasn't very clever wordplay, but he was getting the feeling that his uncle was trying to be smart and clever to impress him. And it was so rare that someone would try to genuinely appeal to his intellect.

Ward was quiet as he took in a face he hadn't been allowed to look at for a decade, looking at all the ways it had changed since he'd last seen him. But there was that one accessory that would always make his nephew easy to tell no matter how different his face would come to look.

"They even care ta' tell ya that I bought ya yer first hat?" he asked with a pointed finger.

Double-D's eyes popped open.

"I mean, not yer first first hat, yer maw and paw prolly bought ya some other ones when ya were a baby… but… when yer mama told me on the phone 'bout what happened ta' ya… I had the idea ta' buy you a hat ta' wear before yer parents did."

Edd couldn't even remember what had happened back in Fairfax County; he knew it had happened, he had been told plenty of times and he saw evidence of it every time he looked in the mirror without his beanie. But it had happened when he was hardly even three years old, and he had been asleep (and later unconscious) for most of it, so there was never much of a chance that he would be able to form a lasting memory of it. And he most certainly didn't remember the fine details of where his first scar-covering hat came from. But he did remember the hat.

"Do you mean… the black baseball cap?" asked the nephew. "Or- or was it navy blue?"

"With the 'V'! And the two swords!" the uncle said, beaming as his nephew's recollection. "Virginia Cavaliers! That's where I was s'posed to play college ball! I had ta' drive all the way down to a Sports Authority in Norfolk to get it because all the stores around here only had Delaware an' Maryland shit, but if you were gonna be the closest thing ta' a legacy ol' Ward was gonna get, the li'l pup with my same name… I wan'ned ta' make sure ya' got everything you deserved!"

Hearing that, Edd could kind of conceive of why his parents would want to keep Ward at bay. I mean, think about it: how would you feel if your brother (or God forbid your brother-in-law) comes crashing into your life after your toddler son almost dies in a house fire and wants to start vicariously treating your son like his own because in his pathetic self-loathing he's already given up hope that he'll ever have a family of his own? As a kid, Double-D had always thought Uncle Ward only wanted to be a good uncle, and there was still a good chance that that was exactly what Ward was going for, but if Sammie and Vince interpreted it more as Ward trying to be a third parent when he did things like try to raise his nephew in his image, well, alright, Edd could see how his parents found that more invasive than just being a close uncle. But even if that was exactly what Ward had been doing, one had to ask-

"Hell, when you guys and the movin' truck showed up here, I was right here waitin' with the hat ta' put it on yer head - and seein' the number that'd happened ta' yer noggin, I was glad I did! I can't believe yer parents were gonna make ya just walk around forever with yer head like that! I love my sister, Li'l Pup, and your paw seems like a nice enough guy, but I gotta wonder if they always know what's best fer ya."

-was Ward evil for trying to do so?

"Oh! And I didn't even mention that I found this house for ya's! I mean… yer mama told me ta' look fer houses in the area when she said she and yer paw were transferin' back ta' Nottin'ham, but I was the one who found this house fer ya's! Yer parents didn't have time ta' come here and look fer themselves! But nevermind all that, Eddie, I wanna know… they ever tell you that Cavs hat was a gift from me?"

Considering that he was currently processing his own conflicted thoughts about his parents, Edd decided it would be healthiest for both of them if he just played it honest:

"No, sir. They… they simply said that they had gotten it for free somewhere."

Ward was shocked and he certainly looked it, his head shifting forward as if to get a closer look to the words he'd just heard. "...Well…" he eventually said, "...ain't technically a lie, now is it, Sammie?" He let out an exasperated groan of a sigh. "...You still have it, Li'l Pup?"

"Um, no sir, we, uh, we donated it to a charity resale store when I came to outgrow it." NO! No! That's bullshit! It was sitting in a box of baby clothes in his parents' closet! His parents had certainly wanted to get rid of it, but little Eddward didn't want them to throw away his gift from his uncle. Double-D had told a lie! To a fucking cop, no less! Good job, Double-D! We're all so proud of you.

Ward shook his head. "Figures. They hated the idea a' their li'l in'nelectual wearin' a sports hat. I told 'em hey, that ain't just sports, that's the University a' Virginia! Founded by none other than Thomas Hefferson! And yer li'l in'nelectual's def'nitely smart enough ta' grow up ta' be president one day iffin' he wants ta' be! But they said no and bought ya that beanie thing instead… I guess a kid lookin' like a thug in this town is better'n lookin' like a hick…"

"...You really think I look like a thug?"

The sheriff was surprised by the straightforwardness of the question; after a moment, he realized that had been one of the few sentences the kid had said without stuttering. But he remembered that Sammantha and Vincent had raised their little pup to be a very, very good boy who always followed the rules - kinda the polar opposites of those two cocksuckers he was trying to catch, now that he thought about it - so maybe the poor kid was just worried that an authority figure had told him he looked like a troublemaker.

"Aw, naw, Eddie, that's not what I meant," said the sheriff. "Yeah, some thugs wear hats like that, but… they wear t-shirts and jeans and sneakers, too, don't they? Don't worry, Li'l Pup, ya carry yerself like an upstandin' young man. Anybody who meets ya'll know lickety-split that yer a good kid, kid. They just might be confused by the hat is all."

Double-D was admittedly a bit alarmed that he might be wearing an article of clothing that could be associated with unenviable characters, but you know what? Even more than that, he appreciated the compliment that anybody who saw him could instantly tell that he was a good guy - save for the occasional fox who was such a sociopath that he couldn't even sympathize with social anxiety and regarded it as a sign of evil.

Ward saw Edd smiling a little, and that made him smile a little too. Now it was time for a leading question:

"Next thing I'm wonderin'… if ya don't mind me askin'… do ya even know how old I am?"

Edd had a feeling this was a leading question, and he followed.

"How old are you?"

A sigh from his uncle. "Forty-nine tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?" Double-D was starting to get an idea why today of all days Ward had chosen to come pay him a visit.

Ward turned and looked out the window. "Yup… Don't know where the time went."

Little John was close enough to the door that he could read the sticky notes placed upon it; this upstairs hallway wasn't nearly as littered with sticky notes as the kitchen was, but every door still had four or five or so. Judging by the messages scrawled on them - "Do not scuff tile", "Do not drip water on floor", "Test smoke detector daily", "Please use fan if necessary" - this had to be the bathroom. He wasn't using no fan, though. Now he just had to open the door without it making a sound.

Edd felt the need to say something, anything at all, so he went for the first thing that came to mind. "My… my parents only ever told me you were my mother's elder brother… they never did get more specific than that…"

"I mean, why would they?" asked his uncle. "Evidently they didn't want ya knowin' nothin' about me…" He turned back to his nephew. "Hey, Li'l Pup, I only got one chance at this, so I'm gonna ask: you wanna know what I really want for my birthday this year?"

"...Sure." Because how could you say no to that?

"Do you know why yer parents told me ta' stop showin' my face around here?"

...Crap, how was he gonna do this? What the heck was Edd supposed to say in that situation - like, pragmatically, what was he supposed to say to ensure the best outcome for everybody? Well, as his parents had raised him to believe, the truth would always be the best course of action - though surely they never thought that would come around to mean he spoke unflatteringly of them. Welp, that was their fault, not their son's.

"...I… believe it may be a combination of many factors."

Ward seemed intrigued. "Really? Shit, tell me. Are these just yer guesses or are these things they toldja plain an' simple?"

Double-D shifted in his seat a little, sacrificing proper sitting posture to turn and face his uncle a little more. "...A combination of both, I believe it would be fair to say."

"Alright… shoot."

(Poor Double-D thought he meant "shoot" as a euphemistic exclamation rather than a command.)

"...Go on, shoot, what is it?" the sheriff repeated. "What kinda things we talkin' 'bout?"

"Ah, yes, yes, um… well… as you said… with the hat thing, and… and how you wanted me to be a sort of legacy for you… and how you questioned whether my parents had the best judgment letting me walk around in the world with my… disfigurement out in the open for all the world's judgmental eyes to see and cackle at… they have spoken about feeling that you were a bit too close to me, more than an uncle should be, and… perhaps they saw that as you trying to usurp their roles as my parents."

Ward's eyes sank down toward the floor, then he turned and stared down at his lap. But he didn't question the call. "Awright… that kinda makes sense. What else?"

Now Double-D was kicking himself for saying it was a cocktail of different factors that had led to Uncle Ward being blacklisted from the Lupo household, because just saying 'hey man, you were overstepping your boundaries' probably would have been enough. But now he was in this one for the long haul.

"Well… a-and I want to clarify that I don't necessarily share these beliefs, but I am merely reporting them as my interpretation of how my parents see you… I think they… mayyy see you as too… unintellectual? And that that might consequently make you a negative role model to have around? Um-"

"So they think I was too stupid ta' be 'round a li'l genius like you, 'less I were ta' rub my stupid off on ya…" Ward was still looking at the floor.

"...I believe so. Um… for what it's worth, Uncle Ward, my parents have great respect for the law - oh, you know that, you saw how they were raising me - but… I do think that they regard the police as… well-intentioned if… um… th-they think that policing and the fire department and such are good ways people can help the world if they aren't so fortunate as to be able to… will themselves into being intelligent enough to help the world in a more profound way." And he was leaving out the part where his parents would still say a fair number of cops were mean-spirited meatheads who just went into the force for a power trip, but he had accurately described their views on who they perceived to be 'good' cops.

Ward nodded again. Edd was hoping against hope that he wouldn't ask if there was anything else.

"There anything else?"

Well.

"Um… on a related note, I suppose… they do openly regard you as a bad role model on the grounds that you're- o-or rather, you strike them as… rather slovenly?"

"'Slovenly'?"

"Um… yes."

"How so?"

"Uh… ranging from rather poor manners- or what they perceived to be poor manners, to, um… I suspect that they also regarded you as a glutton."

Ward rolled his eyes. "Course they do!"

"Did you ever have fleas?"

And now Ward's eyes shot open. "Did they tell you I was flea-bitten!?"

"They… my mother and father can't seem to remember themselves. They… they do keep switching their stories." (Which is to say Samm convinced Vin of it and then admitted the other night that it was a lie that had duped her husband as well as her son.)

"Well… no shit I had fleas when I was a kid! Everybody had fleas at least once when they were kids and teenagers, back when yer at that age where ya don't give a shit about hygiene! Yer mama even had fleas as a girl! Wasn't even 'til the Seventies or thereabouts when they finally started finding better ways to stop 'em, fancy new shots and pills and sprays and shampoos that actually worked more often than they didn't! Hell - you ever had fleas!?"

"Me!? Oh, dear, no-"

"Then yer generation's one a' the first to not have to deal with 'em! Consider yourselves lucky! The nerve a' yer mama to call me a flea-bitten filth-mongrel!" He stood and took a few steps around the living room to let the frustration out of his body. "Anything else!? Is that it!?"

Edd blinked at him.

"Ya look like there's sumpthin' else," the sheriff insisted.

This was gonna be a rough one.

Little John gave a slight tug on the doorknob just to make sure. Yes, he had successfully shut the door behind him without making even the slightest sound. By this point, he had very carefully transferred his great weight back to his feet, and now he had to deal with the toughest part: actually urinating.

With the pressure in his bladder as bad as it was, if he had had this bad an urge to pee at any other point in his life, it probably would have started coming out the second his brain saw a toilet and wouldn't even have given him a chance to unzip his fly. But it was a bitterly ironic little miracle: all that talk about how inadequate his reproductive parts were was… kinda-sorta making him feel pee-shy, almost like he was in a crowded men's room at a sporting event or at a movie theater after a show gets out. Johnny was eons more self-confident than he used to be, but he still had issues with a bashful bladder when there were two guys flanking him on either side who could be judging his junk for all he knew and several other guys behind him pressuring him to hurry up and relieve himself. Of course, nobody was in that bathroom with him, but he found it a good thing that his urethra was presently sealed off because he realized that the sound of water splashing might betray his presence in this house.

...Actually, scratch that, there was another presence in this room. All those goddamn sticky notes. There was one on the door saying "Lock door", one on the mirror saying "Brush your teeth! Mom", one on a cabinet saying "Keep out!", one on the tank of the toilet simply reading "Flush!", and two above the toilet paper roll: one that said "Walk don't run" and another that said - and Johnny did a double-take when he saw this - "Don't touch yourself". (This narrator asked Edd about this, to which he initially said that Little John misread that note and that it actually said "Don't touch the wall", only to later admit that as he became an adolescent, Edd's parents did indeed modify the message.)

Jeez, how could this kid live this way? Johnny didn't feel so crazy anymore for getting the feeling of being watched in this bathroom. He was honestly just hoping there weren't any video cameras in there. Christ, "don't touch yourself" - don't worry Mister and Missus Lupo, with this level of intrusion, Little John doubted that Double-D would have ever felt comfortable enough to disobey.

Okay, what to do about the pee situation? What to do, what to do, what to do? How could he expel without making any noise?

He had an idea.

Oh, God, he had an idea. Actually, it was an idea he'd had a few minutes prior when he was talking to Robin about his unique experiences with male issues. This was going to be fucking disgusting.

He very carefully lifted up the lid so the porcelain wouldn't clink. That's when he realized that this family had a remarkably deep toilet with a water level well below the rim. Splendid. He unzipped his pants, very gently lowered himself onto the seat, and promptly dealt with the challenges of having an enormous grizzly-bear ass that barely fit on the toilet; his front side was well beyond the lip of the rim.

Alright, he'd been in situations like this before, there had been plenty of times he'd had to use a smaller mammal's toilet, this wasn't his first rodeo. So he stood up a little, pushed as far back as he could against the tank and even letting his butt ride up it a little (so cold, so very cold) and pushed his paraphernalia inside the bowl of the toilet, and specifically tried to also force them downward as he leaned forward a little for some extra leverage.

It couldn't reach the water.

If he was too embarrassed to pee before, he had all the time in the world to figure out a new strategy, because that stuff wasn't coming out anytime soon after that. He stood all the way up, lifted the actual seat up, and allowed himself to sit directly on the bowl. Thankfully this wolf family was a bunch of neat freaks and germaphobes so there didn't seem to be even one bacterium anywhere in this bathroom, or he wouldn't have been able to bring himself to do this.

He positioned himself the same way: sitting pivoted forward, his buttocks riding up the toilet tank to the point that he could feel the top of the lid slip in the gap under his tail, his paw squeezed between his crotch and the rim trying to guide his pecker. And if the lack of a seat meant he was going to slide into the toilet, fine, so be it, whatever brought him closer to his destination.

It just barely broke the surface.

He would have breathed a sigh of relief, but the sensation was just too weird. For all his trouble to avoid producing even one decibel of sound, he was just about gagging as his body acclimated to the odd cool moisture at the end of his shaft.

"Eww, eww, eww, eww, eeeeewwwww…" Johnny whispered to himself. "Geoff, if I make it out of this house, I'm gonna fucking kill you, I'm gonna kill you and you're gonna die…"

Perhaps the greatest irony, though, was that after all this effort, he couldn't let it out. It just felt too weird. Apparently other people liked discreetly peeing when swimming in pools and lakes and rivers, but he had never been that type, so on a physio-neurological level, this just felt like a no-no. And he might have sat there forever not going had a holler from downstairs not scared the piss outta him.

"THEY THINK I DID WHAT TO YOU!?"

He wasn't angry at his nephew, but he was angry alright.

"What!?" he continued. "When!? WHERE!? HOW!? How could I even a' had the opportunity ta' do sump'in like that even if I wan'ned ta'!? They hardly ever left me alone with ya - or is that WHY they never let me be alone witcha!?"

Edd simply nodded. He couldn't disagree.

"And I ain't mad at you, Eddie, let me be clear here! Son of a bitch!" he swore as he kicked the chair in the opposite corner. "What specifically da' they think I even did!? Da' they think they got evidence a' me doin' something like that!? Because I am the goddamn sheriff a' this here town, and I know per'fessionals who'll look at that evidence good and thorough and tell yer parents to their faces that I didn't do nothin'!"

Double-D decided it was time to speak.

"Uncle Ward?"

"...Yeah?" asked the sheriff, forcing himself to calm down for at least a quick moment.

"...If it's any consolation, I have no memory of you doing any such thing to me either."

Ward's jaw hung open.

"...Did you tell 'em that!?"

"I have."

"And!? What'd they say!?"

"They said… they don't believe me."

Ward's jaw hung open again, this time more from disgusted shock than from curious surprise.

"How in the hell are they gon' tell you that they don't believe ya!? Yer the victim - or so they think!"

"They do not believe that my lack of a memory constitutes that nothing happened. They think… they're quick to bring up that it's entirely psychologically plausible that I would have been too young or too traumatized to form any lasting memory of it. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as it were."

Ward shook his head in disbelief. "Well if they feel so strongly 'bout that, they can tell it ta' the judge!"

Double-D kept nodding morosely. "I have to wonder, though… since we mentioned it earlier… if perhaps the matter of… what happened at our previous house has caused them to think that… well, if I have no memory of a moment like that, then why would I have a memory of-?"

"You were asleep when that happened, weren'tcha!?" the sheriff exclaimed, raising his arms to the air and nearly touching the ceiling. "Yer parents were too fuggin' irresponsible to check the batteries an' they think I'm a danger to ya!? I worked all night those days just ta' stay up durin' the daytimes with no sleep just ta' make sure ya had someone ta' spend time with ya while yer parents wouldn't 'cuz they were always busy doin' work shit, and they think I was doin' that because I wanted to do what to ya!?"

Edd took a deep breath through his nose. "I… must say, Uncle Ward… I'm starting to get the idea that perhaps my parents are a bit… judgmental."

His uncle couldn't help but scoff and chuckle. "No. Really. Ya think!?"

Meanwhile upstairs, Little John's butt may or may not have been stuck in the toilet. It wasn't like suction-vacuumed into there, but he was finding it harder to stand up from this position than he had anticipated. The weird forward angle of his torso and legs wasn't helping, nor was the way that every time he tried to lift off and came back down it would dunk back in the water in a way that shook him to his core. After a few tries, he figured out a solution: lean forward enough, put one paw on the ground and put his weight onto it for leverage, and grab a wad of toilet paper with his other hand to make sure his piss-soaked member didn't drip all over the floor or into his pants around his ankles.

He came to stand up, grabbing even more hygienic tissue to sop up the moisture and helping himself to some liquid soap by the sink while he was at it, just to make sure the urea was off him. And as he cleaned off his appendage, he couldn't help but fume about how much trouble the damned thing had caused.

Now, Dear Reader, you understand why we didn't just edit out all the discussion Robin and Johnny had had about their thingies: it was genuinely driving him crazy in a way that would have been journalistically irresponsible for us to merely gloss over.

Because everything he'd said earlier was true: after spending the majority of his waking moments with the guy for the last seven years, there had inevitably been moments when they would come to see each other's whatchamacallits, and while at first he of course had a major WTF moment when it first crossed his field of vision, but eventually he came to realize that this was a good dude who (he thought) would never want him to feel inferior over something so arbitrary, and besides, the all the rest of the little guy's body was obscenely stretched out, it only made sense everything matched. But also, yes, he had always only been mentally comparing it to those he saw on his father and his brother and his brother's skinny-dipping friends in which context it wasn't that jaw-dropping, but no, the thought had never crossed his mind that compared to his own people it would be even proportionally off the charts, and holy shit, he really didn't need to know that this guy who was already so blessed in so many other facets of his life was a grower on top of being a shower. Meanwhile, his own ding-a-ling had been probably the only body part that didn't visibly change size or shape during Johnny's enormous early-to-mid-twenties growth spurt. Maybe it was a good thing he wasn't even using his for that particular purpose because a lot of people in society would tell him he barely had anything to offer. And what was really fucking with his head was the thought that those pure-ass-evil teenagers from the day before were more right than they knew.

No, an hour prior, Little John had absolutely no insecurities about the size of his genitals. But first you take his worry that he wasn't being treated as an equal in this group. Then add his worry that other people didn't see him as an equal either. And his worry that there are people out there who are honest-to-god born genuinely gifted at everything physically, mentally, and interpersonally and that he'll always be outshined by them. And his worry that his closest friend didn't even like him that much but was damned good at pretending he did because he found Johnny to be a useful idiot. And the worry that without this douchebag friend of his that he'd still be a socially stunted weirdo - and that he might still be stunted and playing catch-up, and that if Robin bailed on him tomorrow he might be back to where he was ten years ago without his little limey wingman to give him confidence. And tying that back to the first worry, there was the worry that he really did lack the self-esteem and social skills to be a leader and that he really didn't deserve to be Robin's equal. And certain things reminding him of that disturbing and intrusive dream he'd had in the ER the other day that he had been this close to forgetting about. And then, just for good measure, you toss in what's perhaps the most common male insecurity under the sun - man, at the risk of sounding like the manager of a Nova Scotia trailer park, this was the cherry on top of a shit sundae. Johnny was losing his goddamn mind, and this wasn't helping.

Okay, here's a cool party trick: watch Little John transmogrify this insecurity into an entirely different one. Was he an asshole for feeling like he as a great big brown bear was entitled to superior body parts over a skinny little red fox? Actually, broader question: was he an asshole for emotionally needing a roughly equal number of things he could say he was superior to Robin at than vice versa? There were definitely people out there who would tell him the only healthy option was to come to terms with who he was and make peace with the fact that he at least has a life and a body because today is the envy of the dead; would these same people think he was evil if he needed to feel like his relationship with his best friend was balanced? As they say, such anxieties are the greatest form of narcissism, because nobody cares as much about these things as you do. So was he a narcissist, one of those loser narcissists who scratches their head and can't figure out why they aren't getting the recognition they deserve as they fail to realize that the rest of the world is running laps around them? Was Little John being selfish? Was he being immature? Was he being toxic? Was he being stupid? And perhaps the most important question of all, when Robin yankee'd his doodle, did he have to use both hands?

I'm just saying, Dear Reader, this narrator is as weirded out by this part of the story as you are. But if Johnny Little felt compelled to disclose to me all the worries he had about his dickular matters that day and why they were relevant to that day's events, then I felt compelled to oblige. He desperately wanted us to know about those intrusive thoughts in great detail so we could all fully understand what was going through his head and clouding his judgment as he tossed the wad of Charmin in the bowl and flushed.

"...Wait," he said to himself as the toilet roared into action.

The sheriff's eyes darted straight up to the ceiling.

"I thought ya said nobody else was home!"

Poor Edd's vocal cords were paralyzed. But the look on his face made one thing abundantly clear: it wasn't merely an oversight that he hadn't disclosed he had other guests over. Ward saw that petrified look on his nephew's face and could tell immediately something was up.

"Who's up there!?" he asked his nephew, but when he repeated himself, he addressed the stranger upstairs: "WHO'S UP THERE!?"

And maybe if there had been no response, Ward might have thought that it was Edd's bear and fox friends who he thought he'd smelled earlier, or possibly even Sammantha and Vincent refusing to acknowledge his presence in their house after their son had let him in against their wishes. But the person who had flushed the toilet was still mired in a bout of deep personal frustration and was not exercising good judgment, so that person gave a response loud and clear, delivered in a distinctively deep voice with just a touch of Southern twang:

"GAHHHD, DAMMIT!"

And proving that he was indeed a fatlete, the sheriff ran around the corner and all the way up the stairs in approximately five seconds.

Robin heard the toilet and the exchange of screams, and his blood ran cold as a river in winter. "Dear God, Johnny, what have you done?"