“yo,” he says in a completely unfamiliar monotone. “is, uh, feetman here?”
Freeman raises a single eyebrow, looking him up and down. It’s not Barney, no, but the resemblance is uncanny. If Barney were more malnourished and sleep-deprived, that is. He’s unkempt, dressed in a scuffed-up hoodie and… not shorts, but boxers, he realizes. As if he quite literally rolled out of bed and walked over as-is.
The other Barney isn’t faring much better. He’s always been fond of a five-o-clock shadow, but this one lacks the same ability to pull it off as his— as Barney himself does. He’s softer, too, lacking in a certain edge. Freeman can’t put his finger on it. Beyond the obvious differences in build, anyway. That said, there’s a commonality to them, a distinct facial shape - thin lips, rounded jaw, dark, narrow eyes with a heavy brow - and he suspects that if he were to line them up, he’d find their heights within microns of one another. Assuming he can get the one in front to stand up straight.
The man in the back, however, is a curiosity unto himself. He’s taller, lankier, possibly older, and is in no way, shape, or form a Barney. And thank goodness for that. He doesn’t want to have to worry about a fourth pair. That said, it still leaves the question of what he’s doing with these two. As far as he’s aware, no Barney from any universe has much in the way of friends.
“uh, hello, earth to egghead,” snaps the Barney in the rear. “where’s the dogboy?”
In lieu of an answer, he backs away, holding the door open for them to enter. He doesn’t expect them to know sign, for one thing. And for another, this poses an excellent research opportunity. How does FT interact with confounding variable BB in the flesh? (He’s assuming the more haggard-looking of them is BB, on account of his search for… Feetman. A tasteful moniker, that.)
“Thanks for letting us in, Mister, uh, Freeman,” says the taller man as he closes the door behind him. “Freeman… 2. Benrey wanted some, I think, emotional support—“
“nuh-uh,” Benrey says, shoving his hands deep in his pockets.
“yeah-huh,” butts in… well, he hasn’t given a name yet. Maybe an acronym would work best. BF? For Barney (Freemind)? In any case, BF slings an arm over Benrey’s shoulders. And promptly gets it slung back off. “you were all, ‘bluh bluh, i’m too high to get back to feetman on my own, ‘cuz i’m a little baby boy who can’t handle my weed’— oww!”
He rubs at his arm, where Benrey’s slugged him, hard.
“I’m— I’m Tommy, by the way.” The last unknown variable extends his hand. At least one of them has manners. Freeman takes it and shakes it, finding that he’s got a light grip. Soft hands. “This is Benrey, and, uh…”
“barmey,” supplies BF, irritation obvious.
Perhaps he should be BM, then. Or, on second thought, maybe not.
Freeman simply nods in acknowledgment. Then he holds up a finger, gesturing for them to wait while he goes to fetch a clipboard. “what’s his deal,” he hears Barmey try (and fail) to whisper behind him. “he’s like some kind of mummy.”
“What do you— What do you mean by that?”
“he doesn’t talk!”
Freeman pretends like he hasn’t just heard the stupidest thing anyone could possibly say. It’s a skill he’s had to hone lately. He grabs his clipboard off the kitchen counter, but on his way back, he feels more than he hears a thud. As if something human-sized has just hit the floor.
“what the fuck, man?!” whines Barmey. “not cool!”
“you’re so fucking, idiot, stupid-ass,” says Benrey, standing over him, arms retreating back to his sides as Freeman approaches. “don’t… don’t fricking touch me. it’s gonna— you’re gonna rub your stupid off on me.”
Barmey lets out an offended noise. “seriously? what ever happened to ‘bros before hoes’?” He clambers back to his feet, snagging his trilby from across the floor. Freeman locks eyes with Tommy, who looks just as horrified as Freeman feels. “this dogboy crap has you actin’ cray-cray—“
“What’s going on?” comes Feetman’s voice from the hall as he pads out of his bedroom at last. The faint sound of mid-2000’s alternative follows him. “I thought I heard something—“
When he steps into the living room, he freezes. Benrey does, too.
“Benrey,” says Feetman. His tail starts to wag behind him.
Benrey shoves his hands back in his pockets as though nothing had happened. “yo.”
“What do you mean, ‘yo’? What are you doing here?” He pauses, taking in the rest of the scene. The motion of his tail slows until it comes to a stop. “What are they doing here?”
“Hi,” Tommy says. He waves.
“your stupid boyfriend dragged me along,” Barmey huffs. “and his freaky-ass drug dealer, too!”
“Freaky-ass— wait, do you mean Tommy?”
Benrey shoots daggers at Barmey with his gaze, all but daring him to speak. Unfortunately, they seem to bounce right off of him, and he says, “brain genius over here got too high and forgot how to get to your house.” He sniffs. “can i go now? i didn’t sign up for this.”
Freeman remains silent, though his pen scratches furiously at his clipboard
Gears turn behind Feetman’s eyes. “Hang on. You bailed on me to smoke?” he says slowly.
“He— I didn’t know you guys were busy,” pipes up Tommy.
Barmey takes the opportunity to rub it in. “oooh, didja ditch date night with dogboy? for lil’ ol’ me? now who’s the stupid idiot?”
He’s immediately elbowed again.
“owww! stop hitting me!”
“why don’t you go tattle on me, you… baby’s bitch,” Benrey snaps.
Feetman watches it all unfold, mouth parted. Thunder roils in his expression. “Are you kidding me? Like, is this some kind of joke?”
“no,” says Barmey savagely. “your little boytoy was too busy kissin’ on me to come over. doing his stupid sugary crap in my mouth.”
Benrey and Tommy’s eyes go wide. Evidently, that was the wrong thing to say, as Feetman’s mouth closes, then opens, then closes again. Then he— he laughs. A quiet little ‘ha’ of disbelief. It soon turns into another, louder.
“No, yeah, of course,” he says, a hand pressed to his forehead. “Of course you walked out on me to do Sweet Voice to fucking Barmey!”
His voice raises as he speaks until he’s yelling, spit flying, brow knit tight in anger. He stomps up to Benrey, and up close, the difference in their builds is especially noticeable - Benrey shrinks back, shoulders hunched, and Feetman looms above him, a figurehead of righteous fury.
“What color was it? Huh?! Pink to blue means I love you?!”
“Actually,” Tommy starts, “pink to blue is—“
“Not the time, Tommy!” snaps Feetman. Then he rounds on Benrey again, who stares up at him. “Go on! What else did you do to him while I was waiting on you? Did you suck his dick? Huh? Did you fuck him?!”
“no, jesus,” mutters Benrey. “calm down, maybe?”
“Don’t you fucking tell me to calm down!” He jabs at Benrey’s chest, hard enough to make him stumble backward. “You don’t get to tell me how to feel anymore!”
“heh. down boy,” Barmey says with a smirk.
The look on Feetman’s face does not suggest that this was a smart move. “And you,” he starts, stalking toward Barmey, a growl rumbling deep in his throat, “if you don’t get the fuck out of my sight, I’m gonna rip your head off and fuck it!”
His eyes, too, go wide. Unlike with Benrey, however, there’s a genuine fear there. “PMS-ing much?” he says regardless. Brave words. Until Feetman lunges at him, and he squeals in terror, scrambling for the door before Feetman can get to him.
Gravel crunches underfoot, audible until the front door finally swings shut behind him.
“Get out! Everybody just get the fuck out!” Feetman snarls. His voice cracks, just a little. Freeman pauses in his note-taking to raise an eyebrow. “Yes, I am talking to you, too! Both of you just— just fuck off! I need to yell at Benrey in peace!”
Well, that’s his prerogative, he supposes. Freeman takes his leave, though not before gesturing for Tommy to follow. He leads him toward the lab, where they might be able to have a more constructive conversation.
“I— I’m sorry about this, Mister Doctor Freeman,” Tommy says as he follows Freeman down the halls. “We— There’s a— There’s a lot of stuff Benrey didn’t tell me about, I think.”
Freeman doesn’t respond. Instead, he holds the door open for Tommy and follows him inside. The privacy is good, to be sure, but his greater motivation lies inside his observation room, where a wall of monitors stacked from end-to-end tracks the goings-on of the house from every conceivable angle. For his studies, of course. It’s important to be able to survey his subjects in their natural habitat.
Tommy blinks up at the display as Freeman flicks a switch, and all the screens wink on at once. It offers a comprehensive view of the house: the actual test chamber, naturally, but also the outside, surveying both front and back yards, and the inside, too; the kitchen, the den, the hallways all lie before him, and most important of them all, the foyer, where Feetman silently shouts and waves his arms at a petulant Benrey. The one grace he allows them is the privacy of their own bedrooms. He doesn’t need to see all that.
He flicks another switch, and sound pours in from the speakers, isolated from his camera of choice.
“—humping a pillow like a goddamn animal,” comes Feetman’s tinny voice. “Does that even matter to you?! Does any of it?!”
Benrey mumbles something inaudible. His mouth is obscured from this angle, making it impossible to read his lips.
“You got a real funny way of showing it!”
“Wow,” says Tommy, awed. “You could— You could watch every episode of WWE Raw at the same time!”
He supposes that’s only slightly inaccurate. ‘I prefer the older stuff, myself,’ he signs, momentarily forgetting that Tommy can’t understand him. Probably.
“Oh! Are you—“ He cuts himself off to painstakingly sign, letter by letter, ‘A-r-e y-o-u d-e-a-f, D-o-c—‘
Freeman shakes his head, hoping to head him off. ‘You don’t have to do that.’
Tommy’s brow wrinkles in confusion, and he slowly mouths what he thinks Freeman’s saying to him. In fairness, it’s pretty close for a guy who isn’t deaf or mute himself, but it’s also distracting, and he needs to focus.
“…not very nice to me, either,” he catches Benrey saying. “always yellin’ at me… bossin’ me around… you frickin’— shoots me and kills me, all you guys did—“
“That is so not the point! Besides, I thought we were over that! You were the bad guy, so I treated you like the bad guy! That’s how this world works!”
“yeah, well, i’m not the bad guy no more, so… so why’re you all, yellin’ and crappin’ your diap at me, bro?”
Feetman’s hands fly up to his head to grip his hair. “Because! You keep treating me like crap! What’s not clicking?!”
“They, uh, they seem pretty mad at each other,” says Tommy. “Are you sure we should be watching this?”
‘Research,’ signs Freeman, a finger stroking his open palm.
“Do you have—“ He pauses, struggling to find the words. “Something on your… hand?”
‘No,’ he signs irritably, and Tommy’s eyes light up in recognition. At least he knows that much. Instead of wasting his time spelling it out letter by letter, he simply writes ‘research’ out on his notes. And circles it for emphasis.
On the monitor, Benrey’s voice takes on a different tone. More saccharine. Almost insulting. “c’mon, puppy, whatcha so mad about? i’m here, right? just like you wanted?”
“I am not a dog, Benrey!” It comes out loud and harsh, practically a bark. “I am a real human guy! With human thoughts and human feelings! This is what I can’t fucking stand about you, you know— you always treat everything like a joke, you treat me like a joke—“
“yeah, well, you’re not much better,” sulks Benrey. “treatin’ me like a corn dog… boiling me in oil—“
He’s cut off by a sudden laugh from Feetman. Then Feetman covers his mouth, as if he hadn’t meant to.
“Sh-Shut up! Stop making jokes! This is serious!”
Freeman scribbles furiously.
(insert some science-y crap here. i don’t know how to write it)
“like you care. you didn’t even wanna wear the stupid collar,” Benrey sulks.
“Yeah! And this is why! Because, believe it or not, it’s a big fucking deal! Do you even know what being collared means?! It means ‘I own you’! And I don’t wanna be owned by some thoughtless jackass who ditches me to smoke weed and jerk off with his stupid clone!”
Benrey says something inaudible, but whatever it is, it’s clearly the wrong thing to say, as Feetman lets out a long, angry noise and stomps away. Freeman follows him on the cameras until he gets to his room, at which point he opens the door and slams it behind him. Approximately one minute later, Benrey follows. But instead of knocking on the door, he simply leans in and— and phases his head clear through it, as if it weren’t even there.
Freeman blinks and rubs his eyes.
Suddenly, he jerks back out, rubbing his forehead and swearing. Then he storms away, too, back out to the foyer and out the front door, slamming it behind him so fiercely that Freeman can hear it all the way from the observation room.
He and Tommy meet each other’s eyes. “Well, I think that went— that went well,” Tommy says.
‘Does he normally do this?’ writes Freeman.
“Um,” starts Tommy, “yeah, they kinda— they’ve always been, um, kind of, contentious?” He belabors the word in a way that suggests he rarely uses it. “But the— the sex part is new, to me.”
He shakes his head. It takes him a moment to think of how to word it. ‘He phased through the door.’
“Oh! Yeah, he— he does that,” says Tommy.
His handwriting gets quicker, sloppier. He finds himself frustrated - writing is slow and tedious compared to signing, but spelling everything out letter by letter is simply unbearable. ‘Has he always been able to do that?’
“Yup,” says Tommy. He doesn’t elaborate.
Freeman’s mind races with questions. How is he able to do that? Is it just him, or has Feetman been sitting on a similar power, keeping it hidden from Freeman’s prying eyes? (He’s failed to keep every other aspect of his life private, but nothing’s impossible.) And what else is Benrey capable of, if the laws of physics are a mere suggestion to him? The mind reels. It’s so, so tempting to speak, and voice all of these questions aloud, but something stops him. Tommy’s— well, he’s virtually a stranger. And, given the mysterious, reality-bending forces at play in Feetman’s home universe, it’s impossible to get a read on him. All of this conspires to keep his mouth shut.
‘Do you have his phone number?’ he settles on at last.
“I guess so,” says Tommy. “I, um— I don’t know how much he wants to talk right now? But here, let me…” He takes Freeman’s pen and jots down some digits. Perfect.
There’s a pause. Tommy rubs the back of his head. “So, um, how long have they… I mean, I didn’t think that Mister Freeman was, interested, in that kind of thing. With Benrey. It’s weirder than a… than a fish on a bicycle.”
Freeman shrugs. He hadn’t considered it to be his business, beyond BB’s influence on his experiments. But it never struck him as particularly strange, either. If there’s a Barney and a Gordon in every universe - or at least, in the universes that he’s privy to - it stands to reason that some of them would be close. Some of them would just be coworkers, of course. Some of them, friends. And some of them are destined to be lovers, that string of fate knotted tight around their hearts.
“Not in a— a bad way,” Tommy says suddenly. “Gay is o-kay!”
He finds his brow tense all of a sudden. It takes a concerted effort to relax it.
Feetman’s hands shake as he fumbles with the collar, struggling to undo the stupid fucking latch on the back. He should have known this was a bad idea - he did know, and he should have just left this thing in the package, is what he should have done. Thrown it in the trash as soon as it landed on his doorstep. He doesn’t know what fucking possessed him to entertain this in the first place.
Something dark and cruel swells in his chest, almost like the urge to scream. But he doesn’t. Because he’s not a fucking animal. He’s a man, and he’s capable of making rational decisions under duress, and this just happens to be the most rational thing he could do, under the circumstances. Much more rational than keeping the fucking thing.
A growl hovers in the back of his throat. A quiet, subconscious noise. Then he catches himself.
At long last, he uses his distinctly-human opposable thumbs to undo the collar, and he yanks it off with such a force that it abrades his neck a little. Not much. It’s nice leather, with a suede interior that’s pleasantly creamy against his skin. But that’s not important right now. What matters is that it’s off of him for good.
Feetman stares at it with a dark expression. It’s really pissing him off, just how nice it is. He doesn’t know where Benrey got the money for this, and he’s not sure he wants to know, but what he does know is that it’s more than Benrey’s spent on him, like, ever. There were no sweet little gifts, no dates out to nice restaurants. No cheap ones, either. The only thing Benrey put a single fucking iota of thought and care into was— was this. A sex thing. A control thing.
His fingers tighten around the band. Fuck it. He doesn’t care how much Benrey spent on it. Mind made up, Feetman hikes up his window and hurls the collar away, into the darkness, ears perked up to listen for the resulting thump.
He closes the window again with an air of finality. It feels… good. Like a weight’s been lifted off of his shoulders. He doesn’t need Benrey. He doesn’t need any of them.
That last thought slots appealingly into place next to all the others. Like the last long block in a Tetris four-stack. He doesn’t need to deal with any of the crazy sex games anymore if he doesn’t want to. Which he’s— he’s never wanted to. To be clear. He’s never wanted any of this dogboy crap, never wanted ears or a fluffy tail, never wanted to be Freeman’s fucking subject, and he’s especially never wanted Benrey.
Decision made, he grabs a duffel bag from his closet and gets to packing.