Fic: How Dave Met Everyone Else
Title: How Dave Met Everyone Else
Fandom: Happy Endings
Pairing/characters: Dave-centric ensemble, Dave/Alex, Jane/Brad
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2300
Warnings: sexual content
Summary: Dave meets the group. Not at all at the same time, though.
Author's Notes: Is this the first fic in the fandom? Oh, God, it might be. Anyway, this is also my 600th entry, so yay me!
1. Penny
How Dave met Penny is the stuff of Nicholas Sparks novels. Only without the cancer.
She moved in next door when she was eight, and yes, she had pigtails and a lisp. Yes, they did spent the summer going to the pool and climbing trees and being rambunctious. And, yes, when they went to school the next fall, Dave tried his hardest to ignore her.
Only, instead of nobly mourning the death of their friendship and re-entering his life only when she was sixteen and gorgeous, Penny pushed him down the slide and he knocked his two front teeth out.
Penny, being Penny, sat with him in the nurse’s office until the ambulance arrived, alternating between profuse apologies and yelling at him for being mean. Dave didn’t dare ignore her for the rest of their school days.
They never went out, as such. The closest they ever came to it was when Dave slow-danced with her at a seventh grade dance, and she ended up hurling on his shoes - not because she’d had any of the spiked punch, but because someone had brought in shrimp cocktails and Penny was the only one who didn’t notice that they’d been sitting out there for a while.
Penny was always painfully bad at math, and Dave couldn’t get his head around Spanish, so they traded homework. No one seemed to catch on to the fact that both of them regularly got perfect scores on their homework and bombed their tests, which sort of goes to show you the quality of public education in America.
When it came time to apply to colleges, they never even considered not going together.
Every so often, they (OK, Penny) panic about the state of their friendship, and how they’re not as close as they used to be. After a couple of lunches and a few futile attempts to figure out something that they still have in common, they figure that, given that they still hang out after all these years, the State of Their Friendship is probably just fine.
Besides, even if Dave hangs out with Max and Brad more, it was Penny he went to when he decided he was going to propose to Alex.
2. Jane
Jane was Penny’s friend first. Neither of them can really remember how they met, but Dave thinks it was somewhere around fifth grade, because that’s when he made friends with Tom, the kid whose dad had a big gun collection.
(Tom added Dave on Facebook recently. Apparently he lives in a commune and calls himself Dolomite.)
Even though Dave stopped being friends with Tom, Penny continued being friends with Jane, and they occasionally hung out together, even though they didn’t really like each other all that much.
Jane was Dave’s lab partner in seventh grade. This was the first class he’d ever actually had with her, because she was really smart and Dave liked playing video games and finding out ways to get his hands on Playboys more than studying. Jane, on the other hand, was the kind of nerd who refused to use the school-issued agendas, because they didn’t conform to her exacting standards of organization. She would argue a 97 to a 99, and still be pissed that she didn’t get a 100.
Dave thought he was taking the easy way out by picking her. Boy, was he mistaken.
Jane refused to write all of their lab reports. She insisted that he do his fair share. However, even when he did do his homework, he would have to give it to her the day before so that she could correct it and hand it back before they could turn it in, so really Dave didn’t understand why she bothered with the intermediate stage of him doing stuff. Plus, she’d always yell at him if he didn’t use a ruler to draw labels, or if he didn’t wear his safety goggles at all times. She was also the only person in the class who didn’t see the humor in those posters with the blind girl with the cane.
(And, OK, yeah, maybe one time Josh Strauss did get acid in his eye, but he only had to wear those dark glasses for two weeks.)
Even Penny sort of lost track of Jane during her senior year escapades, after she got rejected from Harvard and then spent most of the rest of the year drunk, and it was only when they wound up in the same dorm that they started hanging out in a social context. It was fun - after all, everyone knew that repressed people partied the hardest, and Jane had stopped making sneering comments about his personal hygiene. She was still a control freak, but a slightly more fun one.
It was only when one day, early in the second semester, Jane came up to him and advised him about the benefits of color-coding his binders and Dave didn’t tell her to get a life, that he realized that he actually liked her.
3. Alex
Alex started out as Jane’s kid sister (even though she was only a year younger than them), barely glimpsed as she ran out the front door with her friends. Combine that with the fact that Dave was rarely ever at Jane’s house, and they didn’t really get to know each other until they started dog-walking.
Dave was fourteen, Alex thirteen. They had both hit on the same idea at roughly the same time, but Alex’s mom didn’t want Alex walking the neighborhood all by herself with strange dogs. Dave, on the other hand, had bit off more than he could chew, and one day ended up chasing five dogs in five different directions all around town. Working together was a fairly effective compromise. And, as it turned out, Alex was a pretty cool kid.
One day, after a long hot day of walking, they decided to go to the pool. Alex put on a white bikini which had probably been totally innocent the year before, but she’d recently gotten breasts and hips, and it’s the first time Dave can remember wanting someone that badly (well, in real life, anyway).
That day was also the first (but not the last) time Alex pantsed him.
They barely saw each other during the school year. Occasionally, when Jane and Penny were watching a girly movie after school, Dave went to play soccer outside with Alex. And the next summer, when she suggested starting up the dog walking again, he leaped at the opportunity. They talked on the phone sometimes. Dave remembers these little snippets of time with her, and how every time they spoke, he wondered what it would be like if their conversation never ended.
(Alex said, later, that she felt the same way.)
Although Dave kind of hates (kind of likes) the John Hughes-ness of it all, they lost their virginities to each other on Prom night. Her Prom night, that is - the junior Prom was a week before the senior Prom. He’d considered asking her to his Prom, but she had a boyfriend, and it would be weird, and also she was Jane’s little sister, so he wasn’t planning on going to Prom at all.
Whatever. It was stupid, anyway.
So, on the night of the junior Prom, Dave’s parents were out, he doesn’t remember where or why, and Dave was… doing something? He doesn’t know, none of that matters, because the next thing that happened was Alex knocking on the door and Dave opening it.
She was standing there, in her pretty pink dress, and her eye makeup was running, but of course she still looked beautiful.
He guided her to the couch and got her a glass of water, and it turned out that her boyfriend was cheating on her and he decided to tell her on Prom night.
“And I bought condoms and everything!” she said. “Do you know how embarrassing it is to go up and just buy condoms?”
Dave nodded, knowingly, except no, he didn’t know that, because the time he’d ever bought condoms was when he was twelve and got a box of Magnums, and he was giggling the whole time.
“Well,” she said, wiping her eyes, and looking resolved. “One way or another, I’m having sex tonight.”
And then she kissed him.
And before you say anything, he did try and talk her out of it. A little. To be honest, he didn’t try very hard, because he’d been dreaming of this moment for years. So, despite his feeble protests, they ended up in his bedroom, her in her dress, him in his T-shirt and jeans, and they slept together for the first time.
He didn’t ask her out, and he didn’t tell her that it was his first time, too. Those came later, after they’d both slept with other people, at the end of her first year of college and his second.
A few times, in the bitter aftermath of their not-wedding, Dave thought that his life could’ve been a lot better if he’d just slammed the door in her face.
But, really, he knows that was never an option.
4. Max
Max was actually Dave’s second roommate. Dave’s first roommate, Karl, had been a repeat violator of UW’s no-streaking policy. He was about as charming as that fact would lead you to believe.
Surprisingly, Karl had been the one to request a room change, and Dave never could work out a reason. Not enough nakedness?
Dave got to keep the room, though, so there was at least that. Dave asked Max, while he was unpacking, why he’d moved out of his old room.
“Oh, you know. Something about ‘man should not lie with a man as he would a woman’. I tried telling him that that passage leaves a lot of room for leeway. I even drew him a diagram, but he freaked out and requested a transfer. Go figure, right?” Max looked up. “You’re all right with having a gay roommate, right? Because I’d really rather not have to pack again.”
“Sure!” Dave said. “Yeah, it’s… great that you’re gay.”
Max paused to consider. “It is pretty great.”
Dave wasn’t really all that OK with it. Not that he was homophobic or anything - just nineteen. He (unconsciously) kept his back to the wall for the first week, until Max told him not to worry about him losing control and raping him, he wasn’t that irresistible, and Dave stopped.
Dave usually hung out with girls more than guys, so Max was a welcome change. Max never forced him to talk about Meg Ryan movies or try fruity cocktails. Also, Max could chug more than any guy he knew and you can’t not be friends with someone like that, even if is his explanation for it is “I lost my gag reflex when I went to San Francisco last summer”.
When Penny tried to go out with Max, Dave probably should’ve filled her in. And he did - once it stopped being hilarious, that is.
5. Brad
For a while there, it was touch and go as to who was sluttier - Max or Jane.
Max had to be commended for his work within a limited resource pool, but Jane’s competitive edge made her squeak by with the lead. Plus, she had more experience with girls than he did (Penny remained tight-lipped as to exactly how far they’d gone during their week of passion).
So, when Brad turned up at the beginning of senior year, Dave sort of assumed that it wouldn’t last very long.
To be fair, Brad seemed like a perfectly nice guy, and he made every effort to make friends with him and Max. But so had that last guy that Jane had gone out with for more than a minute, Andrew, and things had gotten awkward and Max and Dave had decided to spare themselves the heartache.
Brad, as they later learned, was not a guy who was used to rejection, so he started sending them bribes. At first it wasn’t all that obvious - just the occasional six-pack he would “share” with them (he’d hold one the whole night, and then ask if anyone wanted to finish it off) - but reached a ridiculous level when he gave them a “used” TV which still had some of the plastic shrink-wrap around the base.
“Is it possible to ignore him more? My car needs new tires,” Max said, as he plugged it in.
Finally, one night at around 3 in the morning, there was a knock on the door, and Dave went to answer it. Brad was standing there, and he gave a speech about how, fine, maybe Max and Dave didn’t like him, but he loved Jane and he wanted to get along with her friends, but either way he was going to keep dating her.
“Um, OK,” Dave said, not entirely sure that he’d actually head anything Brad had said. “Want to get a beer sometime, then?”
When Dave closed the door again, he briefly wondered when he’d become a supporting character in a romantic comedy, before falling back on the bed and going to sleep.
A few years later, when Brad took Dave aside and said that he was planning to propose to Jane, Dave told him that he still didn’t like him. He’s 98% sure that Brad got the joke.
So Brad proposed, and Jane accepted, and the morning after their wedding was when Dave decided to ask Alex to marry him (he wanted to do it during the reception, but he figured it was probably better not to risk Jane’s ire). When they told the group, Penny got really excited and started to name their future children, and Max moaned that everyone was abandoning him, but congratulated them when he was drunk.
After the break-up, the group stayed together. After all, Dave didn’t know how to make any new friends, and he didn’t really want to learn.
Fandom: Happy Endings
Pairing/characters: Dave-centric ensemble, Dave/Alex, Jane/Brad
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2300
Warnings: sexual content
Summary: Dave meets the group. Not at all at the same time, though.
Author's Notes: Is this the first fic in the fandom? Oh, God, it might be. Anyway, this is also my 600th entry, so yay me!
1. Penny
How Dave met Penny is the stuff of Nicholas Sparks novels. Only without the cancer.
She moved in next door when she was eight, and yes, she had pigtails and a lisp. Yes, they did spent the summer going to the pool and climbing trees and being rambunctious. And, yes, when they went to school the next fall, Dave tried his hardest to ignore her.
Only, instead of nobly mourning the death of their friendship and re-entering his life only when she was sixteen and gorgeous, Penny pushed him down the slide and he knocked his two front teeth out.
Penny, being Penny, sat with him in the nurse’s office until the ambulance arrived, alternating between profuse apologies and yelling at him for being mean. Dave didn’t dare ignore her for the rest of their school days.
They never went out, as such. The closest they ever came to it was when Dave slow-danced with her at a seventh grade dance, and she ended up hurling on his shoes - not because she’d had any of the spiked punch, but because someone had brought in shrimp cocktails and Penny was the only one who didn’t notice that they’d been sitting out there for a while.
Penny was always painfully bad at math, and Dave couldn’t get his head around Spanish, so they traded homework. No one seemed to catch on to the fact that both of them regularly got perfect scores on their homework and bombed their tests, which sort of goes to show you the quality of public education in America.
When it came time to apply to colleges, they never even considered not going together.
Every so often, they (OK, Penny) panic about the state of their friendship, and how they’re not as close as they used to be. After a couple of lunches and a few futile attempts to figure out something that they still have in common, they figure that, given that they still hang out after all these years, the State of Their Friendship is probably just fine.
Besides, even if Dave hangs out with Max and Brad more, it was Penny he went to when he decided he was going to propose to Alex.
2. Jane
Jane was Penny’s friend first. Neither of them can really remember how they met, but Dave thinks it was somewhere around fifth grade, because that’s when he made friends with Tom, the kid whose dad had a big gun collection.
(Tom added Dave on Facebook recently. Apparently he lives in a commune and calls himself Dolomite.)
Even though Dave stopped being friends with Tom, Penny continued being friends with Jane, and they occasionally hung out together, even though they didn’t really like each other all that much.
Jane was Dave’s lab partner in seventh grade. This was the first class he’d ever actually had with her, because she was really smart and Dave liked playing video games and finding out ways to get his hands on Playboys more than studying. Jane, on the other hand, was the kind of nerd who refused to use the school-issued agendas, because they didn’t conform to her exacting standards of organization. She would argue a 97 to a 99, and still be pissed that she didn’t get a 100.
Dave thought he was taking the easy way out by picking her. Boy, was he mistaken.
Jane refused to write all of their lab reports. She insisted that he do his fair share. However, even when he did do his homework, he would have to give it to her the day before so that she could correct it and hand it back before they could turn it in, so really Dave didn’t understand why she bothered with the intermediate stage of him doing stuff. Plus, she’d always yell at him if he didn’t use a ruler to draw labels, or if he didn’t wear his safety goggles at all times. She was also the only person in the class who didn’t see the humor in those posters with the blind girl with the cane.
(And, OK, yeah, maybe one time Josh Strauss did get acid in his eye, but he only had to wear those dark glasses for two weeks.)
Even Penny sort of lost track of Jane during her senior year escapades, after she got rejected from Harvard and then spent most of the rest of the year drunk, and it was only when they wound up in the same dorm that they started hanging out in a social context. It was fun - after all, everyone knew that repressed people partied the hardest, and Jane had stopped making sneering comments about his personal hygiene. She was still a control freak, but a slightly more fun one.
It was only when one day, early in the second semester, Jane came up to him and advised him about the benefits of color-coding his binders and Dave didn’t tell her to get a life, that he realized that he actually liked her.
3. Alex
Alex started out as Jane’s kid sister (even though she was only a year younger than them), barely glimpsed as she ran out the front door with her friends. Combine that with the fact that Dave was rarely ever at Jane’s house, and they didn’t really get to know each other until they started dog-walking.
Dave was fourteen, Alex thirteen. They had both hit on the same idea at roughly the same time, but Alex’s mom didn’t want Alex walking the neighborhood all by herself with strange dogs. Dave, on the other hand, had bit off more than he could chew, and one day ended up chasing five dogs in five different directions all around town. Working together was a fairly effective compromise. And, as it turned out, Alex was a pretty cool kid.
One day, after a long hot day of walking, they decided to go to the pool. Alex put on a white bikini which had probably been totally innocent the year before, but she’d recently gotten breasts and hips, and it’s the first time Dave can remember wanting someone that badly (well, in real life, anyway).
That day was also the first (but not the last) time Alex pantsed him.
They barely saw each other during the school year. Occasionally, when Jane and Penny were watching a girly movie after school, Dave went to play soccer outside with Alex. And the next summer, when she suggested starting up the dog walking again, he leaped at the opportunity. They talked on the phone sometimes. Dave remembers these little snippets of time with her, and how every time they spoke, he wondered what it would be like if their conversation never ended.
(Alex said, later, that she felt the same way.)
Although Dave kind of hates (kind of likes) the John Hughes-ness of it all, they lost their virginities to each other on Prom night. Her Prom night, that is - the junior Prom was a week before the senior Prom. He’d considered asking her to his Prom, but she had a boyfriend, and it would be weird, and also she was Jane’s little sister, so he wasn’t planning on going to Prom at all.
Whatever. It was stupid, anyway.
So, on the night of the junior Prom, Dave’s parents were out, he doesn’t remember where or why, and Dave was… doing something? He doesn’t know, none of that matters, because the next thing that happened was Alex knocking on the door and Dave opening it.
She was standing there, in her pretty pink dress, and her eye makeup was running, but of course she still looked beautiful.
He guided her to the couch and got her a glass of water, and it turned out that her boyfriend was cheating on her and he decided to tell her on Prom night.
“And I bought condoms and everything!” she said. “Do you know how embarrassing it is to go up and just buy condoms?”
Dave nodded, knowingly, except no, he didn’t know that, because the time he’d ever bought condoms was when he was twelve and got a box of Magnums, and he was giggling the whole time.
“Well,” she said, wiping her eyes, and looking resolved. “One way or another, I’m having sex tonight.”
And then she kissed him.
And before you say anything, he did try and talk her out of it. A little. To be honest, he didn’t try very hard, because he’d been dreaming of this moment for years. So, despite his feeble protests, they ended up in his bedroom, her in her dress, him in his T-shirt and jeans, and they slept together for the first time.
He didn’t ask her out, and he didn’t tell her that it was his first time, too. Those came later, after they’d both slept with other people, at the end of her first year of college and his second.
A few times, in the bitter aftermath of their not-wedding, Dave thought that his life could’ve been a lot better if he’d just slammed the door in her face.
But, really, he knows that was never an option.
4. Max
Max was actually Dave’s second roommate. Dave’s first roommate, Karl, had been a repeat violator of UW’s no-streaking policy. He was about as charming as that fact would lead you to believe.
Surprisingly, Karl had been the one to request a room change, and Dave never could work out a reason. Not enough nakedness?
Dave got to keep the room, though, so there was at least that. Dave asked Max, while he was unpacking, why he’d moved out of his old room.
“Oh, you know. Something about ‘man should not lie with a man as he would a woman’. I tried telling him that that passage leaves a lot of room for leeway. I even drew him a diagram, but he freaked out and requested a transfer. Go figure, right?” Max looked up. “You’re all right with having a gay roommate, right? Because I’d really rather not have to pack again.”
“Sure!” Dave said. “Yeah, it’s… great that you’re gay.”
Max paused to consider. “It is pretty great.”
Dave wasn’t really all that OK with it. Not that he was homophobic or anything - just nineteen. He (unconsciously) kept his back to the wall for the first week, until Max told him not to worry about him losing control and raping him, he wasn’t that irresistible, and Dave stopped.
Dave usually hung out with girls more than guys, so Max was a welcome change. Max never forced him to talk about Meg Ryan movies or try fruity cocktails. Also, Max could chug more than any guy he knew and you can’t not be friends with someone like that, even if is his explanation for it is “I lost my gag reflex when I went to San Francisco last summer”.
When Penny tried to go out with Max, Dave probably should’ve filled her in. And he did - once it stopped being hilarious, that is.
5. Brad
For a while there, it was touch and go as to who was sluttier - Max or Jane.
Max had to be commended for his work within a limited resource pool, but Jane’s competitive edge made her squeak by with the lead. Plus, she had more experience with girls than he did (Penny remained tight-lipped as to exactly how far they’d gone during their week of passion).
So, when Brad turned up at the beginning of senior year, Dave sort of assumed that it wouldn’t last very long.
To be fair, Brad seemed like a perfectly nice guy, and he made every effort to make friends with him and Max. But so had that last guy that Jane had gone out with for more than a minute, Andrew, and things had gotten awkward and Max and Dave had decided to spare themselves the heartache.
Brad, as they later learned, was not a guy who was used to rejection, so he started sending them bribes. At first it wasn’t all that obvious - just the occasional six-pack he would “share” with them (he’d hold one the whole night, and then ask if anyone wanted to finish it off) - but reached a ridiculous level when he gave them a “used” TV which still had some of the plastic shrink-wrap around the base.
“Is it possible to ignore him more? My car needs new tires,” Max said, as he plugged it in.
Finally, one night at around 3 in the morning, there was a knock on the door, and Dave went to answer it. Brad was standing there, and he gave a speech about how, fine, maybe Max and Dave didn’t like him, but he loved Jane and he wanted to get along with her friends, but either way he was going to keep dating her.
“Um, OK,” Dave said, not entirely sure that he’d actually head anything Brad had said. “Want to get a beer sometime, then?”
When Dave closed the door again, he briefly wondered when he’d become a supporting character in a romantic comedy, before falling back on the bed and going to sleep.
A few years later, when Brad took Dave aside and said that he was planning to propose to Jane, Dave told him that he still didn’t like him. He’s 98% sure that Brad got the joke.
So Brad proposed, and Jane accepted, and the morning after their wedding was when Dave decided to ask Alex to marry him (he wanted to do it during the reception, but he figured it was probably better not to risk Jane’s ire). When they told the group, Penny got really excited and started to name their future children, and Max moaned that everyone was abandoning him, but congratulated them when he was drunk.
After the break-up, the group stayed together. After all, Dave didn’t know how to make any new friends, and he didn’t really want to learn.