||goldfish currency

||notes.

- Keith x Shadow; summer-flavored AU with a dash of lulz. aka, THIS IS CRACK (and/or the half-hour result of boredom.)

- in this drabble, I mention beaches with bad timing. I'll take this opportunity to say "Nice one, BP Oil Company."

- the title does in fact have something to do with the plot. -rolls eyes-

- no, I won't apologize for whatever mental scarring this story might cause you~

- this might just end up multi-chaptered, despite my aversion to posting anything more than drabbles on this account, hmm.

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—goldfish currency

|let's write a summer scandal|

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"I could ruin you spectacularly."

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He was at the age of legal consent and dehydrated. So he did what high-school graduates do and set his responsibilities afloat across a sea of jade merchants and drunken parties. Gasoline marked his getaway trail, and for nine blissful weeks, he'd make umbrella'd cocktails his beach house lullabies.

So he came there (to biting sand and sun and warm wind) to leave behind his ragtag hit men, his clingy sister, and his furious father, who'd thrown crumpled-up college applications at him as he'd walked out the door.

It was a nice kind of feeling, really. Being able to walk out of someone's life.

Though he hadn't counted on a stowaway.

Of all people, of course Shadow would hide in his trunk, being fucking crazy and all. And nothing appealed Shadow more than the prospect of liquor and half-clothed women.

Keith had opened the trunk to retrieve his lone suitcase, seen the eighteen-year-old curled up in the corner, and stared blankly. He'd then informed Shadow that he would be expected to cover half of the rent.

Shadow had complained, predictably (his starry-eyed little sister and her bad habits of stalking his friends were starting to catch up with the both of them). Keith absently wondered if having him along for the summer would increase or decrease his chances of getting laid, promptly realized the statement could be wrongly interpreted, and then mentally rebuked himself for being calculating. This summer, he resolved, he would be neither snake nor scientist.

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"You're drunk." At this point, he was too similarly intoxicated to point fingers, but the difference between he and Shadow was that Shadow had the alcohol tolerance of Mira.

"Uh-huh," Shadow slurred, fairly collapsing onto him and leaving a trail of saliva down his arm. Keith inched away, feeling unremorseful as the other boy teetered off the bar stool and became acquainted with the floor. He glanced down at the pitiful sight, raising the glass to his lips again.

"Get up," he said in-between sips.

"Guh," Shadow replied intelligently. "Which way's up?"

Two seats down a pair of girls giggled with starchy smiles, glittery gold lipstick dark in the bar's light. Keith wondered where Mylene was, and what she'd do if she knew her boyfriend was half-conscious on the floor. He thought maybe he should attempt to resuscitate Shadow's reputation amongst strangers (who were no strangers to drunken antics, clearly), and leaned down to pull him up by his collar.

Shadow apparently found this extremely amusing and cackled, painted nails digging into Keith's forearm as he fumbled for his rescuer. Upright on the barstool, he eyed Keith's drink.

"What."

"Th' cherry, man. Ain't popped or nothing."

His eyebrows rose to his hairline as the girls two seats down snorted into their drinks, hiding tangerine laughs.

Shadow tapped a filed nail against his glass. "Is' just…there."

Keith glanced down to see an artificially-colored cherry, bright red and inviting, sitting at the bottom of the otherwise empty glass. "Take it."

Shadow didn't hesitate, stabbing the fruit with his pinky nail. He rolled it around with his tongue before puncturing it with a canine tooth, flashing Keith a red-stained grin. "So when we get back, I can tell Gus and them I popped this, right?"

"It's a little late for that," he muttered. The tangerine girls, now under the affect of two bubbly imported bottles, were all but shrieking with laughter. Shadow directed his grin at them.

Green eyes watched behind frosted glass as they came and went over the course of the next two hours, fellow graduates and more mature women with cabana boys in tow. Shadow didn't discriminate; affixing them all with flashy feral smiles, not noticing that most of their attention was lavished on his companion.

Decrease, Keith thought savagely, suppressing the feathered red demon that was his temper. Decrease decrease decrease.

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Forty-five minutes later, he was doubting his concrete-in-the-moment hypothesis.

Shadow, who he didn't find attractive under normal circumstances, was even less so half-sprawled across his lap, red gaze unfocused. It was surprising he was still conscious.

"Get up," he said for the second time that night.

Shadow whined for the twentieth time that night. "I can't feel my tongue."

He then shifted to bury his face in the curve of Keith's left knee. It was at once awkward and exhilarating. And Shadow really, really needed to move. Like, now.

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"Let's be infectious."

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The carmine-eyed trickster was no more coherent than bleary cell-phone signals when the clock struck thirteen; it didn't strip the words of their sugar-synthesized implications.

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Keith didn't remember college applications or noble contradictions or snuffed-out cigarettes when he woke up at two in the afternoon.

All he knew was that he'd been wrecked in the worst and best way possible.

Shadow tightened a lazy arm around his waist, turning his head away from the sunlight. Keith closed his eyes.

It was a nice kind of feeling.