Title: E Pluribus Gunmen Author: Rainee Scott E-Mail: lgwoman1013@aol.com Rating: PG Category: SH Spoilers: Keywords: Alternate universe Summary: "Out of many..." It's been said that you're born with your personality, but the tiny quirks that make you unique are acquired in childhood. Hey, how else could you explain these guys? Archiving: Anywhere, just credit it to me and send an email telling me where it is. Author's Notes: Yes, I know the contents of this story make "Unusual Suspects" completely implausible. *sosumi* The original inspiration came from Miss Elise's "The Truth Is In My Lunchbox", but I've expanded from the second-grade genre and edited the other characters out entirely (aside from short cameos by Scully and Fowley). Disclaimer: Carter owns them all. I don't. Foo. He owns the upcoming spinoff too. *HSD!* ********** Mirror Lake Elementary School Third Grade Art Class 11:21 AM "Who's the new kid?" "I dunno." "What's his name?" "I dunno." "Where's he from?" "For the last time, Byers, I don't KNOW." John Byers winced slightly. They'd been friends since they'd first started kindergarten together, but Frohike could be rather intimidating when he felt like it. Well, intimidating for a short pudgy kid with clay all over his hands. The girl across the table looked up. "Jenny said Meg said he told Lucy his name's Ringo." "Ringo? Like that guy from that band my mom listens to?" Frohike wrinkled his nose slightly, mashing the clay between his fingers. Frohike winced visibly. "Leave him alone." Byers' chin jutted out indignantly as he gave the dark-haired girl a glare across the table. Diana was solid proof of his theory that girls are just plain icky. Frohike offered his friend a grateful look before going back to his art project. Mrs. Henley peered over her glasses, looking down at his clay model. "And what is it you're making today?" Frohike beamed down at his creation; a tall, spindly creature with a large round head and thumbprints for eyes. "It's an alien." Mrs. Henley smiled slightly. "I see. Are you going to take that home and keep it with the other sixteen aliens you've made this year?" "Yep." Frohike grinned up at the teacher. "I'm makin' a whole army of 'em to take over the world." "I see." The teacher chuckled and started to critique the next student's work when the bell rang. "Alright class, recess," she called, over the stampede of footsteps out the door. "And remember, everybody, PLAY NICELY!" As Diana stood up, one of her books slid off her pile and landed on Frohike's alien. "Oops..." She smiled witheringly at him, picking her book up and turning away. "Sorry." Frohike looked down at what was left of his alien, crestfallen. "Well... we don't know." He eyed the flattened piece of clay carefully. "Maybe the aliens are little puddles or something." "They couldn't be," Byers retorted as they walked outside. "How can they move if they don't have any brains or nerves or anything like that?" They continued their argument, sitting on the edge of the merry- go-round and pushing it with their feet, until a scuffle from across the playground distracted them. They both looked up interestedly. "What's going on?" Frohike murmured, peering through his slightly smudged glasses. Byers scowled. "Diana's picking on the new kid." The "new kid" was a scrawny boy, with black plastic glasses and shaggy blond hair hanging just above his shoulders. Diana was running circles around him and singing as he tried to cross the yard. "Ringo-round-the-rosie, pockets full of posies--" He just stood there, watching her run circles around him for a moment, then stuck his foot out. She stumbled to the ground. The playground fell silent. Byers' eyes widened. "Did he just--" Frohike shook his head. "Poor guy. Toast on his first day." Diana stood slowly, teeth clenched, eyes ablaze as they lit on the boy. A low hiss escaped her throat -- "Hairy little TWIT!" "You're one to talk, Diana Cow-ley." The new kid folded his arms, looking at her calmly. Diana's eyes were practically glowing red by now. "WHAT... did.. you... just... call... me?..." The boy smirked. "You heard me, Cow-ley! You only talk so much 'cause you forgot how to moo." That was pushing it too far. Diana lunged after the boy, pinning him to the ground and pounding the stuffings out of him. He kicked and punched back, but she was the schoolyard bully for a reason. By the time Mrs. Henley got there he had more scrapes and bruises than he'd probably had in years. "DIANA FOWLEY!" The girl froze. "I always knew you were a rabblerouser, but I didn't think you'd stoop this low." The teacher took her sternly by the arm and pulled her off her opponent, then knelt beside the boy. "Are you okay, sweetie?" The boy mumbled to himself, standing up. "I'm fine," he murmured, sulking off towards the swingset. He took a seat on the middle of the three swings, shoulders slumping a bit. As Mrs. Henley took Diana inside, serenaded by the excited moos of her classmates, Byers and Frohike glanced at each other. Wordlessly, they stood from the merry-go-round and sat on the swings beside the other boy. He blinked, looking questioningly over at Byers, who smiled. "Hi." "Hi..." He looked uncertain. "We're not going to beat you up," Frohike piped up, grinning. "Ringo" bit the inside of his cheek. "Good. I've had enough of that for one day." He scratched at the back of his neck awkwardly. Byers pushed off with his feet, swaying back and forth a bit in the swing. "Is your name really Ringo?" He shook his head. "So what's your real one?" "Not tellin'." Byers smiled. "Fair enough." Frohike mumbled to himself. "I wish I'd thought of a fake name before I started here and got all this lip about mine... so what's the rest of your name?" "Ringo Langly." He offered a smile now, swaying his own swing to the sides. Byers nodded. "John Byers. But everyone calls me Byers." He paused, gesturing to Frohike. "Well, he does. Nobody else talks to me." The boy in the middle nodded. "I know the feeling." He looked to Frohike. "And you're..." "Melvin Frohike." Frohike almost had to force the words from his mouth. "Same as him, though; just Frohike." The blond nodded. "Maybe I should do that too, since everyone picks on my first name." "Langly." Byers thought on it a moment. "I like it." Frohike nodded. "It works." The newly-dubbed Langly began pumping his legs, swinging a bit higher. "How did that start, anyway? With your names?" Frohike grinned. "Well, we both said nobody ever respected us or anything. So we started calling each other Mr. Byers and Mr. Frohike, as a joke. And then later we shortened it." "If I wanted respect, I'd want more than that," Langly answered, attempting to talk to them both while still swinging. "I'd be King Langly. Or maybe Emperor Langly!" "Omnipotent Langly?" Byers cracked a grin, only to recieve blank looks from the other two. "Omnipotent. 'Omni-' means all, and '-potent' means powerful." Langly and Frohike still looked confused, but moved the conversation onward. They kept talking all through recess, and the rest of the class day. As they marched out to the carpool line, Langly tugged the other two over to where a tall, slender blond woman was standing. "Hi, sweetie," she chirped, kneeling down to hug him. "How was your day?" "Great!" Langly beamed, rushing through introductions and explanations, finishing it off with a breathless "Can they come over, Mom, please?" "Well, I'll have to talk to their parents..." She chuckled at her son's enthusiasm, then frowned, examining his face. "How did you get all these scratches?" "Oh, that's just where the cow beat me up. But Mrs. Henley took her to the principal's office." A couple of hours later they were all sitting around the kitchen table yapping up a storm. The afternoon flew by as they went from playing video games to poring over comic books to raiding the fridge to watching TV to a few more video games. Soon enough Langly's mother poked her head in his bedroom door. "Honey, it's 6:30. I think your friends need to go home now." "NOOOOOOO!" The cry went up in a chorus as Frohike and Langly abandoned their controllers and Byers leaped up from the seat he had taken behind them. The young woman chuckled, speaking back into the phone. "We'll have to drag them out kicking and screaming, Lisa... hm? Really." She listened intently for a moment. "Well, I'll call Nancy about it, but I don't think there'll be any complaints here..." She looked up at the boys. "How does a sleepover sound?" She covered her ear and the telephone from the resulting cacophany of cheers. "I'll get the OK from Nancy, then. You go ahead and bring John's things over." **later that night** The three boys lay in the living room floor, nestled into sleeping bags. The discussion was wandering from subject to subject as it had all day, but they were all beginning to get tired. "Guys?" Langly's voice broke a lull in the conversation. "I know this sounds weird... since we just met and all... but I really think you guys are my best friends. I mean, I had friends where I used to live, but none of them were like you. I couldn't talk to them like this." Frohike shrugged. "The whole 'best friends' thing is misconcieved. You don't have to know someone a long time to be close. Sometimes I think you just... know." Another pause. "And I think I'm knowing right now." Byers grinned. "Me too," he murmured over the hum of the air conditioner. "I think we're going to be friends for a long time." "A thousand years," Frohike predicted. "A thousand and one." Langly smirked, rolling over. "Maybe a million. A thousand and one million." Byers' soft voice intervened once more. "How about just forever?" Frohike leaned back into his pillow, contemplating this. "Yeah," he murmured, as they all drifted off into dreams -- of faraway places, of fantastic beings, or perhaps just of what they'd be doing the next day. "Forever sounds good." ********** Riverview Middle School Common Grounds (Free Period) 9:17 PM "Hey Doohickey, think fast!" Frohike winced at the basketball bouncing off the back of his head. He glared over his shoulder at Langly. "Are you ever going to stop calling me that?" "No." Langly grinned, wandering towards the table where Frohike sat, Byers trotting behind him. "Twenty or thirty years from now, when we're all old bald guys, I'll still be calling you Doohickey. How goes things?" Frohike shook his head. "Slowly and painfully." He peered cautiously down at his algebra book, biting his lip. "Whatever idiot first decided to stick letters in a math problem should be shot at dawn." Byers glanced over the book, upside-down from where he stood on the other side of the table. "Polynomials, huh? Rough stuff. Took me a while to get it, too." He sat down beside Frohike, starting to explain, but Frohike just closed the book. "Later. I need a break. If I have to factor one more equation today my head's going to explode." Langly took a seat on Frohike's other side. "I know the feeling, man. Spanish is the spawn of Satan, I swear. I have a hard enough time with 'quesadillas', let alone the rest of it." He bounced the basketball a few more times, then sat it on top of the algebra book. He glanced down the table towards Byers. "How's life on your end of the spectrum?" Byers shrugged. "In a word, monotonous. Get up, go to school, shoot some hoops, do homework, go to bed, with a little bit of eating sprinkled in." "Speaking of which." Langly pulled three individually-wrapped Twinkies out of his backpack, offering them two. Frohike took one eagerly, but Byers shook his head. "No thanks. I'm swearing off plastics." "Ha ha ha." Langly laughed sarcastically through a mouthful of crumbs. He polished off the snack in about forty-five seconds and scooped the basketball up. "How about some two-on-one? I'll let you guys work together, maybe then you'll have a chance." Frohike smirked, wandering towards the court with the other two behind him. "You can't even stand up to me alone." Byers lifted an eyebrow. "Earth to Frodo," he announced, knocking on Frohike's head. "You looked at your hook shot lately?" Frohike glared. "What do you have against my hook shot?" Langly tossed the ball from hand to hand. "Your hook shot sucks." "My hook shot is the BEST." Frohike continued towards the court, but then stopped abruptly, eyes widening as he stared at something on the other side of the schoolyard. Langly and Byers stumbled, knocking into him, but he just stared. Langly peered carefully at him. "Hello?" He followed his compadre's gaze across the basketball court... Walking along the sidewalk not a hundred feet away was a petite girl, around 5'3" or 5'4", with blue eyes and red hair. She was strolling along, books clutched to her chest. The boy she was talking to was tall and lanky, with darker hair and a gym bag thrown over his shoulder. Byers blinked. "Oh, lord..." Langly just groaned, clapping a hand to his forehead and leaning back against a tree. Frohike just stood, gaping. The two of them walked across the yard and into the building, as Langly and Byers grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him back towards them. "Did... did you SEE that..." Frohike's mouth was hanging open slightly. Byers shook his head. "She's taken, man. I've seen that guy, he's on the swim team and everything." Langly snorted. "If she's taken she needs to get more taken. I think he's in my biology class. He'd hit on a cow if you put it in a short enough skirt." Frohike kept staring after her. "Must just be a good friend." Langly rolled his eyes. "I never see her without her nose in a book. If she's going to be a geekoid doofus she could at least be a cool geekoid doofus." Frohike paid no mind. "Smart AND gorgeous. She's got it all. Absolutely all of it." Byers shook his head and dragged Frohike back towards the court. "Come on, man. Ball now, dream girl later." Langly took to the court, bouncing the ball against the ground and passing it artfully from hand to hand. "I'll give you guys a minute to get ready for this..." "Minute's up." Byers ducked under his arm and made down the court with the ball. He bounced it to Frohike, who shot for the hoop and missed by a good two feet. Langly caught the rebound and tipped it into the net. Byers caught the ball as it fell, glancing over towards Frohike and attempting not to laugh. "What was it we were saying about hook shots?..." "Oh, shut up." ********** Bryant Park High School Cafeteria 12:17 PM "Ravioli, ravioli, ravioli, do they EVER stop serving ravioli here." Frohike's complaint registered loud and clear as he put his tray on the table with a thump, sliding into the seat next to Langly. "If there's such a thing as ravioli poisoning, I'm bound to have it by now." "Shuh bruhng ruhnch." Langly's reply came through a mouthful of Twinkie. "Translated into English?" Frohike lifted a brow. Langly swallowed. "So bring lunch," he recommended, finishing off the cake and starting in on a bag of Cheetos. Frohike shook his head, eyeing his friend's meal. "If that's as healthy as pre-packaged food is these days, I'd rather take my chances with the ravioli." He opened the chocolate pudding cup that came with his meal, struggling to tear his plastic flatware from its cellophane package. "Need some help?" A hand from nowhere reached down, tearing open the plastic wrapper and dumping Frohike's fork and spoon unceremoniously in his food. Frohike glared up at the culprit, eyes following him around the table as he sat across from the other two. "You don't ever get tired of that, do--" He stopped, brows furrowing slightly; then stood up with a hand raised as if to backhand his friend. "Hold still, Byers. There's some kind of furry thing crawling all over your face." "You're a riot, Frohike, really you are." Byers offered a cockeyed smirk, opening his lunch sack and pulling out a BLT. He ran his fingers a bit self-consciously over his new goatee. "Seriously... you don't like it?" Langly crunched thoughtfully on his Cheetos, observing Byers carefully. "It looks fine," he said, dusting the orange dust from his fingertips. "Granted, a bit of a shock, but..." "I'd have told you..." Byers took a bite of his sandwich, gesturing slightly with one hand as he spoke. "But I just decided to grow it on Friday. I didn't see you guys all weekend, so..." "So you decided to see if we'd notice," Frohike pointed out, finishing his pudding and moving on to the carton of chocolate milk that was practically mandatory with a school lunch. "Do you really not think we're any more observant than that?" "And not only that," Langly chimed in, "did you really not think we'd figure that out?" Byers cracked a grin. "You're smarter than you look," he replied, with a tone of mocking admiration in his voice. "'Course, that doesn't take much..." Langly smirked. "You're one to talk. You look thirty with that thing, you know." He pulled a bottle of Snapple from his paper sack. "Wow," Frohike remarked. "He's actually ingesting something with a limited content of healthful material in it. Must be a sign of the apocalypse." Langly just offered his same old self-satisfied smile, taking a long swig of juice. "Just full of surprises, aren't I?" Byers shook his head. "You guys are nuts, you know that?" He tore into a bag of Fritos, smiling. "I can't believe I've lasted this long around you." Frohike grinned. "I could say the same." He finished his meal, save the ravioli, and pushed it aside. "Between the two of you I'm bound to be up for a Nobel Peace Prize." Langly smiled. "Hey, it's only been eight years." He took a large bite from his other Twinkie. "We've got a long ways to go before we can afford to get sick of each other." Byers grinned slightly, dim memories of early childhood resurfacing. "A thousand years." "A thousand and one." Frohike smiled to himself as well, glancing to Langly. He took his cue. "A thousand and one million." Byers leaned back in his chair, smiling, eyes drifting between the two people he knew the best; that knew him the best; that understood every quirk and flaw of his personality and stuck with him anyway through the dangers, toils and snares of childhood hymns. Friends. Confidants. Brothers. "...or maybe just forever." The End.