Title Universal
Series SpongeBob SquarePants
Pairings Squilliam/SpongeBob
Rating K+ to T-
Warnings Slash, adult concepts, sucky writing.
Notes This story sucking fucks and sucks, but it's a (late) birthday gift to the amazing Teems, and I can't delay it anymore otherwise she'll be furious, and besides it's been a while since I threw this fandom a bone (AoStH got the best of me) so... here you go. I warn you, though, it will suck. It's merely the prologue to a much better story.
Disclaimer For the first time in a LONG while, I can say I don't own SpongeBob.
Summary They had never been in love before. Until now. And only one of them liked it. Prologue to Tampon Masturbation's "Codependency".

SpongeBob SquarePants had never been in love before.
Hard to believe, wasn't it? That a being so lovable could have never actually experienced the emotion before.
…Well, that wasn't quite true. He had loved, that was for certain. He loved everything around him: the jellyfish, the scallops, the water, his friends and relations and the world. And he was loved back by most of the world. (And hated in equal measure by a select few, but he ignored their cruelty and just got on with treating them as best friends.)
But "loving" and "being in love" aren't quite the same thing, especially if you're an extreme being for whom love is the default response to someone, as SpongeBob was.

If you merely love someone, or at least hold an affable respect for them, it may be a plus to spend time with them, but you wouldn't want to do so 24/7. Even spending so much time with the best of people, a flawless character, would eventually drive you crazy. So it wouldn't break your heart if they left for a few days.
It would crush you if they died, left you behind forever. But it wouldn't be so bad if they merely left for a weekend-long convention, or on a simple shopping trip. Once that time extends beyond its agreed limit, you would worry, but only when that time extends beyond.
Above all, you would love them but hate their flaws, as few or as many as they are.

If you're in love with someone, on the other hand, they become your whole world. The center of the universe, the sun around which the planet of insignificant you revolves. You'd spend a lifetime with them if you could.
Therefore it wouldn't crush you if they died – it would tear you completely asunder. Render you useless, heartless, broken. A shell where a living creature used to be. Worries would plague you every time they left, fearing for them, wanting them to get back so you can bask in them again.
And although you wouldn't be blind to their flaws, as few or as many, you would treat them as positive things, play them up to love's advantage, until they are hardly flaws at all.

Believe it or not, SpongeBob could distinguish between the two states, despite having been in one but not the other. True, he hadn't been looking for the latter, leastwise not outwardly, but the former he craved and cherished, so he knew the difference when he felt it.
Social being that he was, he wanted to love and be loved. Love as an 'in' concept, on the other hand, had been an entirely different …
Would it be offensive to say "kettle of fish", considering he and everyone else was technically a fish?
Oh, whatever. The concept remains the same no matter what the phraseology.

SpongeBob had never had a fellow being for the center of the universe.
Indeed, he had never been the center of someone else's universe either.
Until now.
And he loved every minute of it.

Squilliam Fancyson III had never been in love before.
This, at least, was a little easier to understand than the circumstances of the other: as he used to understand it, he couldn't love someone beneath him, and given that most of the world was in fact beneath him, it hadn't crossed his mind.

Rich, fantastic, handsome and charming, Squilliam could have had his choice of men… or women, if he wanted to put up a façade of heterosexuality today. If only they weren't all peons, peasants, scavengers for his 'hard-earned' fortune and experience. Not a living being in the ocean was as rich as he, and what they lacked in money they made up for in consciousness of this.
So they tried to take it from him by the most seductive means necessary. Ever since he had entered the business of making businesses to make money to make more businesses, he had been charmed and sucked up to and generally had his pants charmed off by seekers of a piece of Squilliam.

When I say "pants charmed off", I mean that in a literal as well as figurative sense. For Squilliam may never have been in love before, but he sure could make his pursuers squeal in bed.
And on the desk.
And in the shower.
And… barnacles, pretty much anywhere. They didn't call him "Gilded Doorknobs Fancyson" only because his mansion was showered in them.

But believe it or not, he wasn't inhuman. Or, uh, inoctopus. He may have only been conscious of those beneath him as sex toys (or occasionally test subjects for his sex toys), but even he had limits. He'd never told them it would be any more than a brief fumble under the sheets and then a casting aside, a kink made in the steel, and a calm collected waiting for the next tempter to lead him back.
With the exception of one guy, his first, but the less said about Squidward Tentacles the better.
In fact, his relationship with his newest one started in the same way – no promises, no commitments, just one fumble.
Except there was no fumble. This one wasn't looking to be a bednotch. He was looking for more. Squilliam was not.
But he gave more, despite himself. Mistake #1.
They started slowly. Hands held. Hugs. Kisses - mistake #2.
Then, all of a sudden, emotion, Squilliam rapidly being dragged against everything he believed in. Mistake #3.

Squilliam had never had someone besides himself to be the center of his own universe.
And he had never expected said someone, if it ever came, to be but a peasant.
Until now.
And he liked it, albeit internally, and uncertain if he should.

SpongeBob SquarePants and Squilliam Fancyson III had never been in love before, nor would at least one of them really care to admit it. But the fact remained, acknowledged or otherwise, that they were in love right now, with each other.
They hadn't had sex. They hadn't gone beyond kisses. Beyond emotion locked inside, and mostly expressed outside only by the smaller and yellower of the two.
But they were in love.

And it would have gone on like this, locked in a struggle as to who would break and admit first, whether one would just take him and hope to lose the emotion that way, or whether one would say the word and break the silence and the spell, much as they were loathe or love to admit it. Wondering, wondering about the other, about themselves.

Until it happened.

Then there was no more time for wondering. Not on the inside. Only on the outside, where things can be heard more clearly, felt more vividly.

For why bother with introversion when your entire universe is caving in?