Steve flopped down on the couch with a bag of chips and offered some to Robin after grabbing a handful. “I still can’t believe you’re here. It’s awesome,” he said with a big smile. He had had a little of a rough week when he got his memories back and Atlantis decided to put him upside down for the day. Upside down... Atlantis had a really twisted sense of humor sometimes.
“Should we order pizza when Charlie comes over? I’m kind of hungry.”
“Is that even a real question?” Robin countered, looking at Steve like she thought he was bat-shit crazy. “The answer is always yes when it involves pizza.” They could scavenge all night on it, for as long as they were up hanging out. Cold pizza was just as good as hot pizza, in Robin’s opinion.
“Can we get breadsticks --”
Charlie felt bad for bailing on Movie Night the night before, especially since he knew that Steve hadn’t been having the easiest of weeks. Still, he knew he couldn’t have sat through The Princess Bride, staring at his dad’s face and silently seething. Rey had helped him salvage what was left of the night, even though he’d been reeling from what he’d seen on the internet about his own story, and he was feeling slightly better after a good night’s sleep. He’d text Steve when he’d woken up, apologising for the cryptic messages of the night before, and said that he’d come over later in the day.
Pausing at the foot of the steps up to Steve’s front porch, where he and Rey had sat the night before, Charlie flicked the butt of his lit cigarette out into the street and let out a lungful of smoke before climbing up onto the porch and approaching the front door. Steve was his best friend here in Atlantis and he wanted to give him some kind of explanation for his shitty behaviour. A bit tentatively, he knocked.
Even though it was Steve’s house, technically, Robin was the first to jump up when they heard the knock. She grinned when she saw it was Charlie on the other side, and she slid to the side to wave him on in. Steve’s friends were her friends as far as she was concerned -- in part because she didn’t know anyone else. “Good timing. We were about to order pizza.”
Charlie was pleasantly surprised to see Robin when the door opened. She’d only been in Atlantis a couple of days but, since Steve’s memory update, she and Steve seemed to come as a package deal. Charlie didn’t mind in the slightest. He liked Robin - he thought she was going to be fun to work with - and he could tell she and Steve were good for each other. He could use a bit of that too.
“Oh cool, can we get breadsticks?” he asked, as he walked into the house. Although he’d had pizza the night before with Rey, he wasn’t opposed to eating it again, especially if it came with sides.
Spotting Steve on the couch, Charlie crossed over and threw himself down beside him.
“I’m sorry for ditching you last night, man. Things got really weird really quickly when the movie started. The fucking farm boy was my dad! Or, he had my dad’s face,” he explained, correcting himself. He’d told Steve a little about the tempestuous relationship he had with his dad so he knew the other man would have an idea of why he might have been so affected by the situation. For Robin’s benefit, however, he added, “My dad’s an asshole.”
“We can get as much food as we want,” Steve said with a grin in response to Charlie’s mention of breadsticks. The more he thought about food, the hungrier he was getting.
He shook his head lightly and smiled. “It’s okay, man.... Wait, your dad looks like our Mayor? Well, former Mayor,” he corrected and looked at Robin. “The farmer boy kinda looked like a younger version of Mayor Kline.. you have to have seen that, Robin.”
He turned from Robin back to Charlie. “You better now? We can go to the base and shoot at things if you want. I don’t think they’d say anything if we say dad issues. Or you can smash watermelons with my bat.... That came much more violent than I thought,” he chuckled.
Robin’s eyes widened. So that was why Westley had looked to familiar. And it explained why Charlie had gotten weird. “Oh, shiiiiit.” It made sense, really. All of their worlds were interconnected, overlapping -- what was fiction in her world was real to someone else, so of course someone might exist in a different way somewhere else. She and Steve were probably entirely different people somewhere else.
“I’d be game for smashing watermelons,” she added. “Just for the record.”
Charlie let out a whistling breath, lifting his hand to mess up his already ruffled hair. He hadn’t been paying enough attention to the other titles on Cary Elwes’ IMDB page to remember whether he was the same guy as Steve and Robin’s Mayor Kline but it didn’t matter much. It was fucked up all the same.
“I’m okay,” he replied on reflex, then added, “I’m glad Rey was there though. She’s the kind of person who just… knows what to say to me when I’m feeling dark, you know?”
He cast a furtive, sideways glance at Robin as he finished. Steve knew all about Charlie’s issues, or enough to put the pieces together into a fairly comprehensive picture, but he wasn’t sure how much Steve had told Robin. He didn’t mean to be cryptic but he found it all hard to open up about.
“I like the watermelon idea too, though,” he added. He and his dad had come about as close to making peace as he thought they were ever likely to just before he’d arrived in Atlantis so, while he didn’t think he’d exactly be picturing his dad’s face on them, smashing a few watermelons might help him work out some of his residual frustration.
“What was your mayor like?” Charlie asked after a moment, out of morbid curiosity.
”Yeah, oh shit for real,” Steve said with a nod. “We can smash watermelons after pizza then,” he said with a smile. “It’ll help us get rid of our stress or whatever shrinks say,” he chuckled.
Steve caught the sideway glance and gave Charlie a small smile. He hadn’t told Robin anything. It felt like it wasn’t his story to tell, it wasn’t his place. “Rey’s pretty awesome,” he said with a smile. “I’m glad she was there with you, man.”
He shrugged lightly. “He was an okay major for the most part... But then we found out he was involved with the Russians and they had wanted to open the Gate again. So I guess he was pretty shitty, now that I think about it.”
“Typical politician,” Robin grumbled, allowing her inner skeptic to shine for a moment. It was easier to focus on that than on how she could tell from the way the boys carried themselves that there was a lot more that she didn’t know about. It wasn’t her business, not unless they wanted it to be, so she wasn’t about to ask -- but that didn’t mean she couldn’t read between the lines. “They always have a hidden agenda. Always out for what gives them more power. More money.” Hopefully things would be better now, she thought, but she didn’t really trust the new options would be any better.
“Fucking tell me about it,” Charlie replied with a mirthless laugh. He crossed his arms over his chest, feeling the familiar, uncomfortable sensation that he got whenever people started talking about his dad or his family. Still, he knew that he was among friends here.
“My dad’s the brand new Governor of California,” he explained to Robin with a sigh. “Believe me, I know all about politicians’ hidden agendas. He once told me I had criminal charges pending against me to keep me in rehab long enough that I didn’t interfere with his campaign.” He paused, glanced at Steve then back at Robin, then looked down with an embarrassed smile.
“I guess that was quite a revealing sentence, wasn’t it?”
“Look at me, Robin. I’m best friends with a criminal. What would my dad think? The scandal,” Steve joked lightly, hoping it would relax them all a little bit. Talking about asshole fathers was never easy, but Charlie had a harder time at it than he did. His dad was just a Grade A asshole, Charlie’s father was a whole new meaning of that word.
“You know what, fuck our dads. They’re not here. We’re free to do whatever we want with our lives and be good people.”