"Written for my buds viridian-suntacticalnymphomania on tumblr!

Disclaimer: I do not own Scooby-Doo or Johnny Bravo; this story is purely for entertainment purposes without monetary gain.

One of the first thing Velma notices herself noticing is that when she actually reflects on it, Johnny is a lot more a gracious player, whether losing or victorious, than she might have expected.

She is in the habit of thinking about these things. Not active studying, not spending a lot of time carefully examining their time together and piecing together relevant data from that. She's a little beyond that kind of thinking: Velma has spent a lot of time with her friend working out the mysteries that inexplicably popped up around them on their cross-country roadtrips (so that she concluded that it only really happened because they were with Shaggy and Scooby who, poor doomed souls they were, seemed fated to constantly have interesting experiences), and one of the most important things she learned doing that was that she did things best just looking at stuff and letting her sub-conscious work them out. The data filtered into her mind, like night clouds parting for unexpected starlight.

She's learned a lot about Johnny Bravo this way. He doesn't really know most of it, because Velma is good at mysteries and problem solving and just hitting on the best way to win at pretty much anything, but she's not so great with words. She doesn't know how to tell him about all the ways he's really a pretty cool guy.

(At least, Velma reflected, because she is fundamentally honest in the same way that lead is heavy, as an expression of a basic element of its own being. When he's not concentrating all his mental energies on being as big a dorkmangle as possible.)

Playing games with him through the night lends itself to these kinds of thoughts. Laying on the couch, his back against it and her legs tangling around his chest and shoulders in the kind of loss of bodily focus that often happens when they're so invested in a game that they forget about the rest of them, hours flow by with little conscious awareness.

And Velma observes a lot of little details. The way he, when the mood takes him and he can see that she is totally in the zone and it'd suck for her to fail, deliberately lets his character suffer so her's doesn't. The way he stays calmer under pressure than she'd think he would be. That he responds virtually the same amiably dorky way to losing or winning (and she returns the favor, because it's not a competition between them). That he honestly feels that they're having fun.

So it gets put together for her, and she realizes it. Not all at once, a gradual understanding that soon becomes so apparent that she wonders how she never noticed it before.

Johnny was... not the most graceful of men. She knows this; that he can be crude, boorish, had no real sense of personal boundaries and often seemed totally unaware of the significance he had on things around him. But he was definitely not a jerk, and had about the same level of malicious thought that a snowball had any percentage of surviving inside a volcano; just barely conceivable, but it was so far a stretch you just had to wonder how.

Here and now: Velma grins, and gives him a little squeeze with her legs. She's run so much and so far that she can give a pretty good impact with the muscles thickening her thighs and calves. Johnny feels it.

He looks back at her as best he can and says, amiably, "What's up?"

"Nothin'," she said, feeling rather pleased with the world and her place in it. "Just. You're a pretty cool guy."

He wiggled in place, plainly unsure of what to say in response; he just smiled sheepishly, and then they soon returned to gaming../p