Fic: We Can Just Runaway

[csi_sanders1129]

Title: We Can Just Runaway
Chapters: 1/1
Author: csi_sanders1129
Genre: Drama. Friendship. Kid!AU.
Ratings: K+
Word Count: 2,815
Pairings/Characters: Fred Jones, Shaggy Rogers.
Synopsis: It’s sunny on the day that a seven year old Fred decides to run away from home.
Comments: Written in response to hc_bingo prompt: runaways and cottoncandy_bingo prompt: platonic love. Characters not mine, please enjoy! Comments are awesome. Set in the Mystery Begins/Curse of the Lake Monster!Verse, only, well, before that, mostly. Also contains some references to A Pup Named Scooby Doo!Verse.



It's sunny on the day that Fred decides to run away from home. It's ridiculously sunny and way too happy and nice and perfect outside, but inside it's all just yelling and shouting and his mom talking about going away, but just her and Freddie and he... he doesn't like it.

He never likes it when they get like this.

So he sneaks up to his bedroom and throws his most prized possessions into his backpack - his favorite football jersey, his Pokémon cards, his really cool new Batman watch, and the stuffed dog his grandma gave him when he was little (they can't have real ones because his daddy's allergic) and then sneaks back downstairs and slips out the backdoor without being seen.

And he might only be seven years old, but at least he knows where he's going.

The park is less than a five minute walk from him house, but it's across the street that his parents never let him cross without a grown up. Today, though, today he's going to. He looks both ways, clutching at the strap of his backpack, and waits for the one car he can see coming in his direction to pass by. Once it's gone and he's sure that the street is clear, he quickly jogs across to the other side, feeling a thrill of pride at having managed it alone as he races toward the playground.

Lots and lots of people are there, enjoying the sunny summer day. There are families on colorful blankets eating picnic lunches (his stomach gives a jealous growl because he ran away before his momma made lunch but he's not a baby, he can wait a little while), there are older boys throwing around a football, older girls sitting around in a group, laughing high-pitched laughs and being all girly (which, ew, Fred thinks).

There are a few kids his own age. He even recognizes some of them from school. The girl sitting in the dirt looking for bugs, which is cool, he guesses, for a girl - she's in Miss Brown's class with him. Then there's the red-headed girl on the swings who looks like she's trying really, really hard not to even touch the dirt, he sees her on the school playground sometimes, bossing around the bigger kids. Fred doesn't care about them, though, not now.

He needs to find somewhere to hide so his parents can't find him and drag him home, back to the arguments and scary shouting.

Thinking about it makes him sad, so he rubs at his eyes and tries not to let anyone see him crying as he heads toward the towering playground gym, with its many tunnels and slides. He bravely climbs up to one of the highest tubes (even though his momma never lets him go that high), hoping that he can hide out there without being spotted.

Just when he thinks he's found the perfect spot, he runs into another boy who's sitting in his path. He recognizes this one, too, but only kind of. He's older, Fred is pretty sure he's already in 4th grade, which seems so amazingly far ahead of his 2nd grade status.

"Sorry," Fred mumbles, because he doesn't know if this boy is one of the mean ones or not.

"It's okay," the other boy tells him, looking up at him from the comic book he'd been reading. When he gets a good look at Freddy, he seems to notice the crying, so he asks, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Freddy sulks, sitting down across from the stranger in the cramped space afforded them in the tubes.

"Well, I'm Shaggy. Do you wanna read with me?" He holds up his comic, the title decorating the front reads 'The Adventures of Commander Cool and Mellow Mutt' which Fred has never heard of. It has a dog on the front that looks like his stuffed animal, though, so it has to be interesting.

"Okay," he agrees with a nod, sliding across the plastic to sit beside Shaggy. "I'm Freddy."

"It was a dark and stormy night in Coolsville and Commander Cool and Mellow Mutt found themselves trapped in the lair of the evil Dr. Croaker!" Shaggy reads aloud, as they both follow the pictures. They take turns reading the word bubbles and they both laugh when they have to shout out the loud-noise words: Bang! and Crack! and Slam! sort of things that lose their point when giggled out. They sit there together and they read the whole comic through to the end and only then does Fred dare to show Shaggy his stuffed dog, which Shaggy just finds about twenty different kinds of amazing.

"You are the coolest!" Shaggy declares, admiring the dog with something akin to awe as it bears an uncanny resemblance to Mellow Mutt when he's not in costume, a tan Great Dane puppy with black spots on his back.

He grins, glad his new friend likes him. "One day I wanna get a dog that looks just like him. Even more, now!" He says, fully convinced as to the awesomeness that is The Adventures of Commander Cool and Mellow Mutt. He doesn't know what he'd name it, or even if real dogs actually look like that, but he definitely wants one if they do. "My dad says dogs make him sneeze, so we can't have one now..."

Shaggy frowns. "I don't have one either."

Fred's stomach gives an audible growl that makes Shaggy laugh.

"I do have lunch, though!" He pulls out a wrapped up sandwich, a juice bottle and a couple of cookies from his own backpack (which is also emblazoned with Commander Cool and Mellow Mutt). "Wanna share? It's a peanut butter and bologna sandwich!"

"A what?"

"Peanut butter and bologna," Shaggy repeats, unwrapping the sandwich and giving half to Freddy. "It's good. I promise. Commander Cool and Mellow Mutt eat them all the time."

Fred's not sure he believes that, but when his momma wanted him to try eating broccoli for the first time, it turned out okay, and he already likes both of those things separately so how bad can they be together? So he takes a bite. It's... not bad. Sweet and salty and actually pretty good, now that he thinks about it. It's an interesting combination of flavors and also he is really, really hungry. "Mm," he mumbles around, devouring his half of the sandwich while Shaggy does the same. "That was good," he admits when it's gone. "Thanks for sharing."

They split the juice and the cookies, too, and Fred's stomach stops its relentless growling, happily full now.

"When do you have to leave?" Shaggy asks him, glancing at his Commander Cool watch.

"Uh," Fred starts, "I'm not. Leaving, I mean. I'm staying here. I'm not going home."

"Why not?"

He's not sure he wants to say because saying it will make him cry again and he doesn't want Shaggy to think he's a baby and leave him alone. But he also doesn't know what else he can say so he bites his lip and mumbles out a response of "My parents won't stop fighting, so I left."

"You're running away?" Shaggy asks, surprised. "To the playground?"

"I didn't know where else to go," Fred defends. "My Mom wants us to move away and I don't want to go, and she says my Dad won't come with us if we do. They're always yelling and I don't like it when they do that." He sniffles, crying just as he thought he would if he talked about it.

Shaggy shifts closer to him, pulling him into a hug. He lets Freddy cry on his shoulder and definitely does not make fun of him for it at any point. When he finally calms down, Shaggy makes his own admission. "My parents are never at home. They're always away on business trips. They hire a babysitter, but she's no fun. All she ever does is talk on the phone to her boyfriend. She doesn't even know I left the house today."

Fred thinks that Shaggy's parents might actually be worse than his parents. At least his are there, even if they're shouting and mad at each other for reason he can never understand. "'M sorry," he says, both for crying and for Shaggy. "Wanna run away with me?"

"Okay," Shaggy answers without hesitation, like it's the easiest answer in the world. "Can we stop at my house?"

"Yeah."

After they gather up their respective belongings, they climb down from the tubes. It only takes a few minutes, especially with Shaggy helping Fred down the difficult parts that he'd barely managed getting up. When they're back on the ground, Shaggy motions him toward the line of trees at the edge of the park. "It's this way. Just on the other side."

"Okay," Fred says, following along behind his new friend as they weave through the woods and then across another street, this one completely deserted. There's a big house in front of them, at least it's bigger than Fred's, but not as big as the mansions that are on the other side of town.

Shaggy leads him to the side of the house, to a basement window that he shimmy's open with practiced ease. He ducks through the narrow gap and helps Fred down after him. "I'm just gonna get some stuff," he explains, dumping out his backpack. He grabs his comic collection from under his bed and carefully stuffs them all in his bag. With this complete, he grabs a flashlight (because it'll be dark soon) and then he heads for the stairs with a whispered "Be right back," for Fred's benefit.

He returns just a few moments later with food - chips, cookies, bread, a jar of peanut butter, juice boxes, a few pieces of leftover pizza, whatever else he could scavenge from the kitchen, apparently. He puts all of this into another bag and stands on his bed to toss them back out the window.

"Where should we hide?" Shaggy asks, once he and Freddy have both escaped his bedroom. "They might look for us at the playground. My babysitter might not know I was gone, but she knows that's where I usually go. We could maybe hide in the woods?"

"I don't like the woods," Fred protests, even though he doesn't have any better ideas (so he's afraid of the woods at night, so what? He's seven). He'd thought his playground hiding space had been a great idea. "I don't think they'll look in the towers."

"Okay, we can go back there, then." Shaggy leads the way back to the park, which is mostly vacant now with only a few lingering people, mostly older kids. They sneak up to the play tower and back to their earlier spot. "This should be good."

Fred sits down next to him, huddled close in the setting sun that they can see out of the nearby window cut into the plastic structure and he tries not to listen to the sounds of the late-evening. It doesn't work and he can make out the sound of an owl hooting and something howling in the forest nearby. "Can... can we read another comic?"

Shaggy pulls out the first issue of Commander Cool and Mellow Mutt and he sets the flashlight aside for when it gets too dark to see and together they sit and read again, effectively distracting Fred from the dark. They read issue after issue of the comic book, they stop to snack on the food that Shaggy brought, and then they read some more. By then, it's totally dark and exhaustion starts to win out over fear for Fred, who's slowly falling asleep against Shaggy's shoulder in the middle of the Commander Cool and Mellow Mutt Christmas Spectacular issue with the flashlight clutched in his hand.

"In the morning, we can find a better hiding spot," Shaggy promises, getting sleepy himself.

And they do both fall asleep, eventually, because they're woken some time later to the sound of people shouting their names. Flashlight beams dance across the windows in the plastic and frantic voices follow after them. "Shaggy!" one will call, followed by, "Fred! Fred Jones!"

Then they hear the sounds of someone climbing through the tubes, though clearly it's someone not meant to be climbing in them. Fred's father appears at the opening to the high tower a minute later, shouting out a relieved "i found them!"

Fred and Shaggy are only kind of awake at this point, and Fred finds himself hauled into his father's arms with a frantic, "Don't you ever do that again, okay?"

"Dad?" Fred mumbles, "What's going on?"

"Where have you been? Your mother and I have been worried sick!"

Fred frowns, "I'm sorry, Dad," he says. "I just didn't want to hear anymore fighting."

His father doesn't have a response to that, he only hugs Freddy tighter. "Come on, let's get down from here," he says. "You, too. Your babysitter's looking for you," he says to Shaggy, glad that someone had spotted the two boys going back to the tower and had connected the dots when they'd seen people frantically running around with flashlights in search of them. They'd been about five minutes away from calling the police. "Get your stuff, come on."

Shaggy packs up his bag silently, sad that their adventure ended so soon, but he obediently follows after Fred and his father as they head back to the ground.

The second they're out, Fred is being swooped up in his mother's arms and she's yelling and apologizing and crying all at once. Fred hugs her back, but looks back for Shaggy, who doesn't have anyone here except for a grumpy babysitter who looks about ready to haul him back home and bar all doors and windows.

He squirms out of his momma's arms and hugs Shaggy. "Thanks," he says, "will always be friends, right?"

"Right," Shaggy agrees, hugging him back. He shoves a copy of Commander Cool and Mellow Mutt into Fred's hands, "you can have this one, it's an extra one," he explains. His babysitter approaches, and Shaggy lets go, mumbling a sad 'goodbye' as he walks away.

Fred doesn't like it, but he goes back to his parents and they take him home.

And so the day Fred runs away from home ends with happy, relieved tears, a stern talking to, and parents who seem less inclined to fight after the shock of their sons disappearance.

But life gets in the way of Fred and Shaggy's plans to stay friends. Just a month later, right as school starts, Shaggy's parents transfer him to a school in London, where they are stationed on an extended business trip and when he comes back he's in 6th grade, which puts him at Coolsville Middle School. In the meantime, Fred reads every Commander Cool and Mellow Mutt comic he can get his hands on and drives his parent's nuts with requests for peanut butter and bologna sandwiches, but neither is the same without Shaggy around.

***

But with this in mind, it's not exactly surprising how Fred acts around Shaggy as the years pass. They're in high school now, in the same grade because Shaggy was held back twice. Fred's on the football team and Shaggy's... well, Shaggy is Shaggy.

Despite this, and the fact that Fred doesn't even know if Shaggy remembers that day they spent on the playground, Fred does everything he can to help Shaggy.

He's always the first to back up Shaggy's plays when things start to spin out of control at school.

He's the first one to jump into the fight on the school bus once Scooby-Doo starts it, protecting the boy who protected him that day.

He's the first to cop to being at the school when Shaggy offered to take the fall for all of them, unwilling to let Shaggy sacrifice himself.

He's the first to agree that finding the time capsule for the phony specter is worth it if it means saving Scooby-Doo, the dog who looks exactly like the superhero puppy they read about together up in the tunnels.

Really, he's the first one to ever try to stand up for the ever awkward, ever unphased Shaggy in the face of the idiots who bully him, unaware of his awesomeness. Even before they were united as a group against the Phantom Specter terrorizing the school, Shaggy has to hear Freddy try to stop Red from picking on him. It doesn't work, but at least he tries, which is more than can be said of the others.

So the first time Shaggy shows up at Fred's place after a particularly stressful mystery with peanut butter and bologna sandwiches and the Commander Cool & Mellow Mutt live action movie, all Fred can do is smile.