fic: bare bones (ficuary)

[csi_sanders1129]

Title: bare bones
Chapters: 1/1
Author:csi_sanders1129
Genre: AU.
Ratings: T
Word Count: 935
Pairings/Characters: Shaggy Rogers/Fred Jones, Scooby Doo, Daphne, Velma
Synopsis: In which Shaggy inherits a creepy, old house and hires a local handyman to help him fix it up.
Comments: Written for Ficuary 2021, Prompt: Heirloom. This is the start to a fic I’ve been working on off and on for a while. AU. Comments and kudos would be awesome. Enjoy!

"Like where do we even begin to sort this mess out, Scoob?" Shaggy wonders aloud, standing in the front entrance of the sprawling plantation house that now belongs to him, his loyal canine compatriot at his side. The entire estate is his now, inherited from a great uncle he didn't even know he had until the certified letter came in the mail informing him of the contents of Colonel Beauregard's Last Will & Testament.

Scooby takes a few careful steps into the main room, dodging around the piles of accumulated clutter. Turns out that old Colonel Beauregard may have been something of a hoarder.

Shaggy sneezes, coughing on the cloud of dust Scooby's cautious movements stirred up. Colonel Beauregard may also not have been much of a cleaner.

The sound of another car pulling up outside keeps Shaggy from the mounting panic of just what he's supposed to do with this place - with its shoddy electrical work and leaky pipes and all its broken bits – or what he's supposed to do with all of the things within it. He steps out of the house, off the rickety wrap-around porch and the meager shade it provides and back into the blistering Georgia sunshine to see if it's who he thinks it is.

Parked beside the colorful van he borrowed from a friend for this adventure is a much less colorful work van, emblazoned with the name 'Jones & Sons' and a man, not quite as tall as Shaggy himself, but broad shouldered and well-muscled, exits the van. He is stupidly attractive. A friend of his, Daphne Blake, the same one who'd lent him the van, had contacts everywhere and she'd been quick to offer up the number of a local handyman who'd be able to help him out with assessing the house before he made it to town (and when the assessment had been less than ideal, to help fix the place up). It's entirely possible, however, that she may have had an ulterior motive, Shaggy thinks, for choosing this particular handyman.

"Okay, I've had a lot of people tell me that they live in the middle of nowhere, but this is the first time it's ever actually been true," the man starts. He's not wrong, either – there are at least a dozen different backroads required to get here, some of which are less so roads and more so vague meandering suggestions of paths through the woods (and in one stretch, through an old cemetery, where a haphazard maze of scattered headstones jut up into the 'path' unexpectedly). The man approaches, offers a hand and a smile, "Fred Jones – you must be… Mr. Rogers?"

"Let's go with Shaggy," he offers.

"Fred, then."

"And this is Scooby," he adds, gesturing to the dog at his side. "Can I interest you in a tour of this deathtrap of a house that we'll be spending an absurd amount of time in together?"

"Lead the way."

---

"So, what are you planning to do with the place?" Fred asks, the two of them sitting in the room that's masquerading as a kitchen, full of rickety cabinets and old, broken appliances. "You just want to fix it up and sell it as soon as possible? Or set it up as a business? Or are you planning to stick around?"

Shaggy watches as, out the window, another few bricks from the chimney come loose and plummet to the ground. "Definitely the first option. I just need the place to be something moderately above condemnable so I can get this place on the market and off my hands."

Fred nods, and points out that no matter what he's doing with the house, it's going entail a lot of work. The list of projects is extensive for both of them. On Fred's side of things, there's the plumbing and the wiring in the house, which both need to be almost entirely redone to be brought up to code (Shaggy suspects the codes just plain didn't exist when the last renovations on the house took place). The roof is a mess, full of broken and missing shingles, and the deteriorating chimney isn't helping. They need to install phone lines and fix a lot of the light fixtures in the house.

Shaggy's responsibilities are just as numerous. The house is just plain gross, for one thing. It's going to need a thorough cleaning just to figure out what else needs to be done to it. The hardwood floors need to be refinished (in some places just finished), the walls need painting. Weeds have overtaken most of the grounds. And then there's all of the stuff in the house – a library full of books – none of them published in the last thirty years, a basement full of Civil War memorabilia and a bizarre collection of family heirlooms, a sitting room where every available surface is covered in taxidermy animals, a bedroom stacked nearly floor to ceiling with years, maybe decades, of old newspapers.

Once again, Shaggy finds himself overwhelmed by the sheer number of things he has to do and he wishes, not for the first time, that Great Uncle Beauregard had just left this place to someone else.

"Look, we'll figure it out, okay? Let's just take it one step at a time," Fred assures him, and Shaggy's not exactly surprised that the other man noticed his growing sense of impending doom. Still, the knowledge that he doesn't have to deal with all of this house's problems by himself helps a little and he finds the panic edges off a bit.

"Yeah, okay," he agrees. "Let's make a plan."

Chapter 2 --->