All that time never truly seeing the things the way they were...

[moneymatters]

Scrooge walked away from the balcony room, shaking his head lightly and chuckling, faintly, to himself. What an interesting day this had turned out to be.

At a thought he glanced beside him, watching Louie out of the corner of one eye. When he figured they were far enough away from their other guests, he spoke.

"I never would've figured you for a romantic, lad. That seems more Huey's area than yours." A more defined chuckle. "No offense at tha', o'course."

Comments

[gobetween]

He watched Louie, his reply simple.

"I bet you they're not as confident with those as you think they are."

[talkyourwayout]

"Maybe, but..."

But man, the grass really did always seem greener on the other side. Louie shrugged as he trailed off, before passing the peels from his own orange over to Gobo.

[gobetween]

Gobo nodded his thanks as he took them, adding them to the rest of his that was left, as he ate on them.

"Did you know Red tried to be Mokey once?"

[talkyourwayout]

"Red... Tried to be Mokey?" Best friends though they were, you didn't find many Fraggles more different from one another. "Why?"

[gobetween]

"She was jealous. She'd been trying to get me or the others to do stuff with her, but all we were interested in was hanging out with Mokey, listening to her poems and stuff. Even the Trash Heap was seemingly hung up on Mokey, appreciating her art and such, and not listening to the problem. So, Red's solution was to just be Mokey. Everyone wanted to hang out with her, so obviously that'd be right, right?"

A short laugh, as he popped in another peel. "Not even close. Red's a pretty poor Mokey, and she learned that over the course of the day. But it helped her see why we appreciate her, and it helped her figure out her own self, too." He glanced at Louie. "We've all gone through times like that. I told you one of mine, that one was Red's, Boober has the whole Sidebottom problem, Mokey's lost her muse once or twice, and Wembley had a pretty bad time of juggling all our requests with what he wanted to do."

[talkyourwayout]

"I didn't realize that happened to all of you guys. It's really just that normal?" He scratched at his cheek, right along the side of his beak. While it was a bit of a weird blow to the ego to find out what felt like a big, strange problem was just part of life, apparently... It was more reassuring than anything else. "Huh."

Louie swung his legs back and forth, drumming on the space on the bench between himself and Gobo with his fingers. "What's a Sidebottom?"

[gobetween]

"It really is just that normal." He finished the last peel, and brushed his hands off.

"Sidebottom is the side of Boober that he keeps on the bottom, so to speak. He's like... this whole other different Boober, that actually likes parties and fun and jokes, and all that Fraggley stuff. We met him in a dream of Boober's once, and a couple other times since then."

[talkyourwayout]

"What do you mean, you met him in a dream? How did that even happen?" Louie asked. That was his main focus at this point, but his brain was quietly turning over his little discovery about identity, as well.

[gobetween]

He blinked, then laughed lightly. "Man there's a lot I haven't shown you, is there?" Smiling, he spread his hands. "Fraggles can share dreams, if we fall asleep with our heads touching, though every now and then we all get a mass shared dream for one reason or another even without that."

[talkyourwayout]

"That's so weird, though," Louie said, tugging at the sleeve of his hoodie absent-mindedly. "What if you do it accidentally? Can that happen? You don't feel strange, having someone literally get into your head?"

[gobetween]

"Accidentally? No, not really. We have to consciously decide to share dreams. The only thing that happens on its own is either the mass shared dream- which isn't even 'inside another's head' more like, a normal sort of dream that everybody has? Or nightmare... Or sometimes the odd singular Fraggle will have a dream about something that's currently going on."

[talkyourwayout]

"Huh... Well, that's not so bad, then. Does it happen with Fraggles and not-Fraggles, too?"

Look, he wasn't saying he was curious, but... Well. It sounded kinda interesting.

[gobetween]

Gobo looked at him a moment, tapping his chin. Then he smiled and shifted, motioning for Louie to do the same.

"Only one way to find out! Here, lay down until we can get our heads touching."

[talkyourwayout]

Louie blinked. Sure, he wasn't exactly surprised Gobo had called him out, so to speak, on being curious. It was just that...

"Gobo, it's still pretty early. I'm not even tired." Still, even as he spoke, he started to lie down.

[gobetween]

"Don't worry about that, just repeat after me. 'Dream a dream and see, what a dream can be.'" He settled down, moving a little until he could feel Louie's feathers against him.

[talkyourwayout]

"Alright, man, if you say so... Dream a dream and see, what a dream can be," Louie repeated - and it was beyond strange, how the feeling of sleepiness seemed to wash over him after that. It wasn't an unpleasant exhaustion, either, more like a cozy - albeit heavy - kind of tired. He couldn't keep his eyes open, and his mind started to go fuzzy until, just seconds later, he was out like a light.

[gobetween]

He felt the same sensation blanket around him, and he breathed out a sigh as he closed his eyes.

When he was aware of his surroundings again, so to speak, he found himself in a large cave with lightly glistening walls and several ledges and passageways. The main feature, though, was a large, round archway, too perfect to be natural though it looked very old. Through it ran a stream of impossible clarity, disappearing off somewhere into the cave system. Smiling to himself, Gobo walked over and sat beside the water, waiting.

[talkyourwayout]

They'd just been discussing the dream-sharing, yet the concept was so foreign - and the cave looked so Fraggle Rock-ish to him - that for a moment, Louie had to think on where he was and how he'd gotten there.

Once he collected himself, he walked over to stand just off to the side of, and behind, Gobo. "It's a nice place. I would have thought inside your head'd be messier."

[gobetween]

He laughed and nudged him with his elbow.

"Maybe! But I wanted to show you a specific place. This is the Everspring."

[talkyourwayout]

Louie chuckled, and took a seat at Gobo's side. "The Everspring, huh? I don't think you've mentioned this place before. Why'd you want to show me?"

[gobetween]

"Because of what it took to find it." Resting back on his hands, he looked up and around them at the cavern.

"Not that long ago, really, I think just before I decided to leave Fraggle Rock and explore... There had been a drought. All the water had dried up for us, the Doozers, everybody. The problem was that the flow from the Everspring here wasn't reaching us, so the Five of us set out to find out the problem.

"Thing was, it came at a pretty low period for me. I've always wanted to... well, to make my mark, you know? In a positive way." There was no secret he'd messed up a lot in his life. "I wanted to create something that would solve everybody's problems, would be some kind of force that would help people long after I was gone."

He shifted some, resting his arms across his legs. "Taking a perilous journey down to the very center of the Rock wasn't exactly what I had wanted to do... Especially not after the last time I did something like that." He chuckled weakly; being privy to Gobo's thoughts, for just a moment there Louie would feel a little bite of cold air, the ringing of distant bells; then Gobo spoke again.

"We still set off though, because it needed to be done, and only Fraggles would be able to make the trip since Doozers are so small. Down, down, down we went, until we got here." He sat up and held up his hands together, then spread them apart. The view around them shifted, until the mouth of the Everspring was absolutely choked with trash. "It was a pretty massive problem, and it took two teams of Doozers, including some we'd picked up on the way, to help us figure out how to do it." The memory played of the trash giving way, and as it flew out it dissolved into nothingness, restoring their surroundings to the proper flowing water. "Mission done! We collected the trash, carted it off to the Trash Heap, and that was that..."

Except.. by the tone of his voice and that look on his face, that wasn't quite it.

[talkyourwayout]

"Woah," Louie uttered, in reaction to the information about the drought. But he stayed quiet through the rest - there was a reason Gobo was telling this story, after all. He didn't want to interrupt was clearly an important tale to his friend, though it was tempting to do so when Gobo made that remark about a good kind of mark to leave behind.

Gobo tried a lot, didn't he? Sure, things seemed to come so easily to him sometimes, at least from Louie's point of view... But it wasn't the case, was it? Gobo had to try to hit the right note. It was kind of like how things didn't come easily for Scrooge - either Scrooge - or how Louie himself wasn't as collected as he strived to appear.

So while he didn't say anything even then, he did put a hand on his friend's back, and left it there as he listened on... Ah. That was that, huh? Louie was familiar - to say the least - with things being hard to say. So he recognized that in Gobo, now. But he also knew that sometimes, a person needed - maybe even wanted - the push to talk.

"Oh, yeah? But... What else?"

[gobetween]

Gobo glanced aside at Louie, flashing him a brief smile. Then he sighed, and continued.

"Except the whole time, I still felt pretty lost. In the caves, in myself... I didn't think we were making good time, considering how important it was. When Wembley and Boober had an issue with part of the journey, it was Mokey that led the charge to cheer them up. It was Red and Wembley who made a deal for food supplies with some Doozers we found on the way. It was Boober who kept us grounded during the whole trip. And, when we couldn't figure out the blockage problem, it was Red who went all the way back to call in the calvary and get our homeground Doozers.

"Basically, everyone seemed to do something... except me."

[talkyourwayout]

Louie blinked in surprised confusion at that admission. "What are you talking about? You had to have done something, right?"

Gobo was the guy in charge; him not filling that role was near-impossible to imagine. It just didn't add up.

[gobetween]

"I'm getting there, I'm getting there." He chuckled softly, waving a hand, then sighed a bit. "It took talking to the Trash Heap afterward to make me realize it, but I'd been doing something the whole time, and not just during that adventure, but so many times before.

"I'd been leading. On our way down to the Everspring, it was me who'd been carrying the map and was keeping us on path. And it was my idea of what to do with the trash, and who delegated everyone's job in doing that. I'd even been the one who'd gotten us all ready in the first place. She helped me realize... no, remember... that that's what I do. I lead. I keep everybody together, I give them direction, and I find what everybody's best suited to. Just because I don't always seem to do any of the really big moments doesn't mean that I don't have meaning. The others can do what they do best... because I'm there leading them."