Valentine's Day Celebration
Happy Birthday to Calacious! Set between Mystery Begins and Curse of the Lake Monster, set a few months after my other fic, Birthday Celebration. Slightly late for Valentine's Day, but oh well. Characters not mine. Kudos and comments are awesome!
This is stupid, Shaggy thinks.
He's stupid.
He feels like he did back when they solved their first mystery, four months ago now, when he hadn't really known how to interact with people suddenly calling him a friend, suddenly sticking up for him, suddenly making plans that included him by default. Having people sit with him on the bus or at lunch was a novel experience. Then there'd been his birthday – he'd been surprised that they'd cared about it at all, that they even knew when it was, and that they wanted to celebrate it with him.
Awed as he was by their actions, then, he'd rallied his courage enough to ask Fred out before the day ended. They'd gone on the date, to the Commander Cool and Mellow Mutt movie when it came out a week later, and then they'd gone back to Shaggy's place and made out until Fred had to leave. They'd gone out on another date a week later, to an MLE event, and then again a week after that, they'd stayed in binge watched some new Netflix series with some take-out, and now it's been three months and they're still together. He loves Fred and he has absolutely no reason to doubt that Fred has feelings for him and yet…
If celebrating his birthday had been a new concept upon finally making friends, the idea of celebrating Valentine's Day is even more foreign to him.
He paces anxiously across his bedroom, Scooby Doo watching him curiously as he thinks this through: Should he do something big, some grand romantic gesture? Should he keep it subtle and subdued? Should it be a surprise? Is Fred planning anything? There are too many questions and he does not have the answers and he's running out of time. It's Monday night and Valentine's Day is Friday.
He resolves to ask for help.
He finds Velma in the science lab before classes start on Tuesday morning. She's keeping logs on a project she's been working on since they got back from winter break, checking data read outs and making notes on the experiments progress. "Good morning, Shaggy," she greets, when she sees him enter the room. "If you're going to be in here, you'll need to wear suitable eye protection for your own safety."
There are goggles in a bin and he puts a pair on before approaching. "Like, how goes the experiment?"
"Oh," she hums, gestures to the carefully labeled specimens, "The results I've obtained thus far leave something to be desired. I anticipated much clearer reactions as opposed to the ones seen in the control tests, but I suppose it is still early."
Shaggy almost understood that (he's gotten better since he started hanging out with her, but there are a lot of nuances to science, he's learned (just like there is also a lot of nuance to theater and also sports)). He waits while she neatly copies down the next few lines of data before he asks, "Do you have any plans for Valentine's Day?"
She eyes him curiously, unsure where he's going with this question since he is obviously not asking her out. "As a matter of fact, I do," Velma answers, her cheeks flushing with color, "Why do you ask?"
Shaggy fidgets with his hands, "I just… I've never dated anyone before and I don't… really know what I should do. I want to do something cool for Freddy, but… what?"
"There's nothing wrong with the classics, Shaggy. Dinner and a movie?"
Shaggy frowns, "Shouldn't we do something different for Valentine's Day than our usual dates, though?"
"Do you like your usual dates?"
He does, very much so, but he doesn't want Fred to get bored with their typical routine and the dinner and a movie combination has been a regular choice even if it occurs in different forms. Before he can explain as much to her, though, the bell rings, signaling that everyone needs to get to their homerooms. He bids her goodbye and heads out still no closer to a plan than he'd been before.
Daphne is actually the one to come to him. She catches him in the hallway between classes, on Wednesday. "Shaggy," she calls out, "There's a new escape room opening downtown. What do you say?" she asks, conspiratorially, "You and Fred, me and Daphne? Double date next weekend?"
Double date? That's new and certainly explains the blushing when he'd asked Velma about Valentine's Day plans. "You and Velma? That's finally happening?"
She seems very happy with the idea. "It is. We went out on Saturday night – one of those paint night things. It was fun even if neither of us is any good at painting. We're going out again on Valentine's Day."
Ah, a perfect time to ask, then. "What're you doing?"
A fond smile crosses her face at the thought, "Velma suggested a play Coolsville Community Theater is putting on, so I think we're going to go to that and then to that fondue place." She stops at her locker, spins in her combination. "What're you and Fred doing?"
Shaggy sighs, "I don't know. I feel like we should do something different than usual, but I don't know what, exactly. We haven't talked about it yet."
Daphne hums in thought as she swaps out her books. "If you don't want to do your typical dinner and a movie thing, maybe just switch it up a little. Find something in town that isn't a movie – the arcade, the bowling alley – and then get ice cream or coffee after?"
Those sound like good ideas, he thinks. He thanks her for her help and bolts off for the usual fight with his own locker.
It's entirely possible that he spends most of his math class looking up things to do on his phone, but by the time he leaves the room, he has a plan if not a clear understanding of sine waves versus cosine waves. Now he just has to run it by Fred.
That happens afterschool on Thursday. Fred has basketball practice and Shaggy offers him a ride home. They head back to Shaggy's place to play some video games. "So, tomorrow…" Shaggy starts, juggling plates of leftover pizza out of Scooby's reach. "Valentine's Day."
"It is," Fred agrees, setting up the game. "We meeting here for our usual date night, or should we do something else?"
Shaggy bites his lip. "I was thinking… Could I surprise you? I have an idea for what to do."
Fred smiles in agreement, steals a kiss when Shaggy sits beside him on the couch, "That sounds great."
Friday, Valentine's Day, dawns with an unexpected text alert from the school. 'Due to the inclement weather, Coolsville School District will be closed today. There will be no after school activities,' Shaggy reads, and he feels his stomach sink. Inclement weather? He rolls out of bed and over to the window, where a substantial amount of snow has blocked the view from the basement. He moves to the door where he can see out – it's still snowing, coming down hard.
"Oh, no," he frowns, checking the weather on his phone. This snow storm wasn't supposed to amount to anything, it was just supposed to breeze through overnight, maybe drop some flurries, but apparently the front stalled out directly over Coolsville and based on the things they're saying on the news, it's not going anywhere. "So much for Valentine's Day, Scoob," he laments to his loyal canine companion. What is he going to do now?
Despite the weather, Fred shows up in the afternoon. It's still snowing, but not as hard as it had been earlier, and the roads are somewhat clearer. Fred greets him with a kiss, a "Happy Valentine's Day, Shags!" and he pulls out a wrapped gift from his backpack.
Shaggy unwraps the box to find that it's filled with different kinds of chocolates, all different flavors and with labels in various languages. "I've been getting these together for a while – they're from all over the world, they're mostly weird flavors that I thought you'd like to try," Fred explains, pulling out a wasabi Kit Kat and a Cadbury bar that's Vegemite flavored along with some sort of strange peanut and ketchup flavored chocolate concoction from Austria.
He's in awe, and he pulls Fred into another kiss. "This is amazing!"
Fred grins and kisses him back.
"So Old Town Coolsville has this really cool ghost tour that I thought you'd like. I got tickets for us, but it's kind of hard to do a walking tour through the city when there's a foot and a half of snow on the ground," Shaggy explains. "They cancelled the event, obviously, but we can pick another day to use the tickets. For tonight, though, I have another plan," he assures Fred.
Instead, Shaggy makes a quick dinner with the food available in the house. It amounts to breakfast, mostly. Chocolate chips pancakes, eggs, bacon, some fruit. Fred helps out as Shaggy needs – the two of them working together seamlessly around the kitchen, even if it involves frequently dodging Scooby's attempts at stealing key ingredients. They have fun cooking together, especially when they accidentally break into a powdered sugar fight when they're finishing up. After dinner, they use some of the chocolates to play a daring game of chocolate roulette, where the flavors can be delicious (the bacon chocolate Shaggy pulls) or terrible (the soy sauce Kit Kat Fred gets) to just plain normal.
From there, they settle together on the sofa, wrapped under a blanket on a cold, snowy evening while the Commander Cool and Mellow Mutt movie, their first date movie, newly released on DVD, plays on.
"This is perfect, Shag," Fred assures him, the two of them settled on the couch together. "Wouldn't trade it for anything," he says, pulling Shaggy in for another kiss.
Shaggy relaxes into his boyfriend's side, an arm slung around Fred's shoulders over the back of the couch. Maybe he shouldn't have been so worried about Valentine's Day after all.