A brief summary: Melvin falls in a forest, and nobody cares.
Whoops here I am again with a post-S3 fic. How'd that happen? Anyway takes place at the end of S3 Ep 12 Sugamechanger.
"...I was just lying there on the ground, waiting for someone to come get me. 'Any second now', I kept thinking. 'Any second now'. But yea, nobody came, so..."
― Val Emmich, Dear Evan Hansen
"When you're falling in a forest and there's nobody around, all you want is for somebody to
find you. When you're falling in a forest, and when you hit the ground, all you need is for somebody to find you" - "Disappear" from Dear Evan Hansen
Melvin rubbed at his sore arm, and his sore back, and his sore head, and his sore just about everything as he sat up from where he lay on the forest floor, and looked at his surroundings. He was somewhere in the woods across the lake. By his rough estimate he had been shpronged around a mile away, and it was really a wonder of fantastical levels that he wasn't more seriously hurt. Wrapping his arms around his legs, he glared into the distance and pouted. Well that didn't go as planned. He couldn't believe that George and Harold had decided to side with Mr Krupp after all.
"I'm going to have words for them when they find me" he muttered into his crossed arms, "What were they thinking designing a sugar robot anyway? It's a ridiculously impractical design." (Naturally the thought did not occur to him to ridicule himself for building such a silly thing.)
He sat quietly, listening to the sounds of the forest around him and waiting for the other campers to come and get him. (Of course, they were all idiots, so it was bound to take a little while.) Despite the relatively warm day, he shivered as a cool wind blew by him. Perhaps taking off his shirt had been poorly thought out. Then again he had been expecting to be back in his cabin excitedly anticipating a future visit to space camp right now, not stuck in the middle of the woods with no shelter.
He checked the time on his phone (which was also by some fantastic miracle unharmed beyond a cracked screen), and noted that he had been out here for at least fifteen minutes.
They'll find me any minute now. And then I'll just glare at George and Harold, and tell them how horrible of an idea their "Sugamechanger" was, and they'll feel bad about what they caused to happen to me. Any minute now.
Looking for something to do while he waited (and starting to get chilly in the shade), he used the lenses of his glasses to start a small fire, and settled beside it to wait, arms still crossed and expression still stormy.
Other than occasionally rubbing at a sore limb, or flailing to prevent mosquitoes from sucking his blood, he did not move from his spot.
When he next checked his phone, it had been an estimated forty-five minutes since he had gotten launched away from camp. "What is taking them so long?" he groused, starting to get a little worried as the sun sunk lower towards the horizon, "Even an idiot like Krupp should have found me by now. Not to mention how skilled I'm sure Erica is at forest tracking" he couldn't help how his voice wavered thinking about Erica searching the woods for him, but the good feelings he had from thinking about Erica looking for him were replaced by a renewed anger when he remembered how Krupp had stolen his chance to dance with her the night before. Which reminded him about how the camp was destroyed, which reminded him why he was out here and why she would have to be looking for him in the first place.
"I suppose I'll also have to yell at George and Harold about taking so long to find me, whenever they get here. In addition to everything else that they've done wrong".
He sat by his small fire, occasionally poking at it to prevent it from going out, and looked worriedly at the low hanging sun. At this rate it was going to be dark by the time anyone found him. He tried not to panic at the idea, or the quickly growing thought of the worse-case scenario of no one finding him and him being left alone in these woods overnight with possibly vicious animals and no supplies of any kind. Scared, though he wouldn't admit it out loud, he anxiously checked his phone again. That didn't help, as he saw that he had been alone in these woods for approximately two hours.
"What is taking so long?!" he shouted, angry and afraid. Enough of his passive-aggressive plan of waiting for them to find him, for once getting found was more important than being petty. Pulling up an app on his homescreen, he decided that he would just have to check on them and see what the hold up was.
Using his eye-in-the-sky 2000, a robotic spying vuture he had built in his off time, he directed it to fly over the camp and see where they were in their search efforts.
He gawked for a moment in disbelief when the vulture had flown all over the camp, and there was no sign of any search party at all. Everyone in the camp had seemingly resumed their normal activities.
"That-that can't be right. Someone has to be looking for me" he stammered, and he directed the vulture to focus in on Mr Krupp. He was lounging in a beach chair eating guacamole and looking very proud of himself and not the least bit concerned.
"Well we all know Krupp is hardly the paragon of humane concern" he reassured himself, flying the invention to look at George and Harold, who though they were enemies would at least remember his unfortunate outcome in their alliance. And they were a couple of bleeding hearts anyway, surely they were trying…
The eye-in-the-sky 2000 found them in their cabin, drawing comics on their new luxury funded-by-the-func beds and not looking like they were planning to move any time soon.
"Who needs those two bent coatracks anyway!" he yelled at his phone screen, growing steadily more panicked, "I'm sure at least Erica is attempting to organize these rejects into a useful search party. She's the only other person in that camp that has any sense!" But when the camera focused on Erica eating sushi and laughing casually with other camp members, Melvin nearly dropped his phone in distress.
Eyes locked onto the the perversely normal and happy images, he stood up and kicked roughly at his little fire, causing it to flicker out, shouting, "Have they all forgotten that I got launched into the middle of the woods!? I could be seriously injured, I could have broken my arm, I could be being eaten by wild animals, and they're not even looking for me!"
Do they just not care? he thought, desperately looking over the camp once more for any sign that his absence had been noticed. No matter how many times he circled the camp, though, there was no trace of concern among any of the campers.
As the sun started to set, casting long shadows on the ground, he threw his phone onto the forest floor and started to pace in angry circles.
"Well, I don't need them anyway!" he shouted to the empty forest, voice a pitch higher than normal from the fear and despair that he couldn't completely get rid of, "I'll be fine out here on my own, because I'm smart. Better than fine. I'll create something to get back at those lazy, careless, mis-shelved books. Then they'll see that they should have looked for me sooner!"
His monologue to himself was doing a lot to distract him from the dread of the darkening woods, at least until he heard a high-pitched howling that made him jump.(He knew, factually, that it was coyotes and not wolves, but somehow that did little to make him feel any better.) After that he decided to make his pacing a bit more productive, and, scooping his phone back up, went to look for shelter. Could he have found his way back to camp on his own? Of course he could, he was a genius, he knew how directions worked. But then he wouldn't be able to make the rest of the campers sorry. So he obstinately walked away from the direction of the camp to find someplace less out in the open. Maybe if he just stayed out here then people would care to try and find him.
A few minutes later, shivering in the night air and guided by the flashlight of his phone, he finally found what seemed to be a relatively sound and sheltered cave, and settled down on a convenient rock inside. He pulled back up his spying app, and looked through the camp one last time. Despite how angry he wanted to be, a part of him was still hoping that any moment someone, anyone, would look around and say, "Hey, where's Melvin? Hasn't he been gone a while? Hmm, didn't he get launched by that giant robot?" That he could know that he mattered to someone.
Of course, the hour got later, and no one did, and he allowed himself to be fully mad at them again. Come morning, they were going to regret this, he told himself despite how the call to Mel-vindication made him feel slightly sick (you said you weren't going to do this anymore. You don't want to end up like him). Throwing those cautions to the wind, he plotted several different ways of getting back at everyone, rationalizing that this time he was justified. They had abandoned him, which as far as he could tell was a perfectly reasonable call for vengeance. Especially for George and Harold, since this was their fault in the first place. Turning off his phone - partially to save the battery and partially because he didn't want to look at the camp anymore- he curled up on top of the solitary stone and decided to spend the night in this cave. Shivering once again, and a part of him still hoping that someone would come looking for him, he tried to go to sleep. Mel-vindication would begin in the morning.
Ugh, rewatching the end of season 3 was a mistake. The last two episodes are literally my least favorites in the entire series, because Melvin is right to try and get Krupp fired, and he tries to be friends with G&H (he even literally says that. He literally says "the enemy of you enemy is your friend" and he's pretty adamant about it), but gets violently launched into the woods, no one looks for him, apparently, and the last episode is just him being sad and lonely FOR NO GOOD REASON. Gah! So here's another S3 fic where I just express my bitterness.
Anyway, I'll stop being depressing and melodramatic eventually. With any luck what the Hack-o-Ween special started will stick. Fingers crossed for that.
R&R etc, thanks for reading. See you next oneshot, which I promise will be a happier one.