Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

We begin with a party. Oddly enough, a lot of you are probably still surprised by this.

This party is for Michael Bluth, who currently isn't here, but - if you were still wondering - is the middle child of Lucille and George Bluth Senior, who both seem to have forgotten that the party was planned for him in the first place.

Not like it was that easy to figure out, though. On top of Michael not even being present, another layer of confusion was added due to the fact that they were reusing the same party banner they'd used for everyone else in the family. Just about every name had been both added and crossed out over the years, so it really was pointless trying to distinguish who it meant this time, anyway.

Of course someone could just buy a new banner for each party, or simply go about remembering the purpose of the parties in the first place. But for what purpose? Making someone feel special? Lucille would argue that everyone should grow up and forget about being cared for. And, while they're at it, get her a drink.

The banner problem and the not-knowing-who-to-celebrate situation, however, were both the least of the two seniors' concern. As they stared up at the reused, reduced and recycled banner hanging indecisively from the doorframe, knowing which name to focus on was the second-to-last thing on their minds (the first-last thing being the fact that Michael hadn't shown up yet, tied with something along the lines of magic tricks or associated people, which also meant their oldest son. Oh, and also empathy. But that wasn't really on the list at all).

"Why do we throw all these parties, anyway?" George Senior asked, his legs crossed as he sat back in his false leather seat. "It's like we have one every month."

"Well, it isn't every week that one of our family members gets let out of prison," Lucille replied. Her fingers wrapped themselves around her wine glass in a way that displayed a high level of pristine experience. Which, with context, also means alcoholism. But focus on experience.

George Senior turned to his maybe-sorta-ex-wife with a sudden look of philosophical all-knowingness etched across his features. "Was anyone in prison, though?" he asked. "I mean, other than Buster."

Lucille paused and stared importantly at the bland beige wall ahead. "I can't be sure," she replied, and then repeated, in a softer, inquisitive tone: "Was anyone in prison?"

They weren't.

"You know, I think this time it was Franklin," she decided. "Buster got ahold of him again and felt so bad for what was said that he tied him to the ceiling fan with floss until he moved past the event." She took a sip of Whatever Was in her Glass™ and pursed her darkly-colored lips.

"Oh," George Senior replied, only somewhat interested due to a lack of surprise. "What did he call you this time?"

"A dick-slapping man whore," Lucille sighed nonchalantly. "Nothing nearly as bad as last month."

We'd let you know what was said last month, but Franklin was a bit too verbose that time for us to release it to the public.

Franklin was a puppet used for ventriloquism that made many notable appearances in the family since his purchase. Over the years, he'd shown up to court cases, stolen audio from unsuspecting medical officials, and even released a less-than-classy album. Recently, though, he'd been stored away in the attic until he was found by the one person who really shouldn't have stumbled across him.

The youngest (and slowest) son to the seniors of the Bluth family, Buster, had taken him out of his box and started using him as a form of self-expression, often releasing both incredibly enormous waves of anger and words that most family members were surprised he even knew. After this happened every few days, he would go through the process of punishing the puppet until he felt he'd done his time.

In this instance, however, Buster actually freed him because he missed his "comforting" presence (even though he really shouldn't).

Someone who didn't miss him who should have, though, was this man (just imagine your view has been directed away from the current scene. God, writing shows into novels is already too hard), standing in the corner of the kitchen like a lost dog, currently too occupied with what he considered a different kind of puppet.

"We agreed to be on straight terms again, but I've already broken the oath because I wasn't able to take his number out of my phone yet," he explained somewhat monotonously, with a newfound air of Heterosexuality™ to him.

This is GOB. Since you're reading this and can't hear how to pronounce it, we have to tell you that it's unfortunately pronounced Jobe. Regardless, saying it like it looks-

Regardless, saying it like it looks-

gob
/ɡäb/
informal
noun: gob; plural noun: gobs
1.
a lump or clot of a slimy or viscous substance.
"a gob of phlegm"

-is both more fun and more accurate. Just don't tell him we said that.

GOB liked to consider himself a magician. He had recently been dealing with a situation regarding his nemesis in the world of illusion, Tony Wonder. In attempt to sabotage a trick of his, GOB had pretended to be gay in order to con him. It might have gone too far when they actually hooked up, though.

However, they had recently both agreed to go back to being straight with one another. Which meant going back to being rivals.

"What?" his one-person audience replied, discarding his slice of cheap pizza and the fork and knife that he used with it for some reason. "Can't you just... I mean, friends keep each other's numbers."

And this is George-Michael, which we have to tell you is unfortunately pronounced the same as the gay singer/songwriter from the eighties who died from fatty liver disease. He's been trying to come to terms with that for a while. I mean, not the death. Just the fact that they have the same name.

Actually, he'd recently been savoring the hyphen between his two names because it so easily set him apart from the actual celebrity. He found hyphens to be very important and telling in that sense, and he groveled at the hyphen's... hyphen because of it.

"Yeah," GOB replied with a false chuckle that was actually a lot closer in resemblance to a forceful exhale, "but I don't have friends. They're too lame for me. I thought you'd remember." This was followed by an insecure foot shuffle. "God."

"Well," George-Michael suggested, standing up from his seat at the table and walking over, "if you're having such a hard time actually doing it then why do you want to delete his number in the first place?" He crossed his arms then because he felt important and mature. God knows why.

Actually, I know why. It was because he, indeed, was relatively important and mature, especially when in the room with his uncle.

"Oh, nephew," GOB droned, roughly slapping his hand onto George-Michael's shoulder with an inauthentic-looking smile, "you aren't as experienced with relationships, so I get how you wouldn't understand. You see-" He prepared to explain his predicament for the seventh time that day (yes, seventh; we counted) by motioning with both his hands at whatever was in front of him. When he explained, he explained at the floor.

George-Michael, bored at the speech being repeated again since he'd already heard it earlier, didn't listen but rather set his brain a subconscious timer so he could nod every five seconds and say something stupid and generic like "yeah" or "mm-hm" whenever GOB's voice raised or lowered a bit more than normal. He'll remain zoned out of the explanation for the next nineteen paragraphs or so.

George-Michael was actually quite good at not paying attention. Not only was his sense of time absolutely flawless, but he had another asset he liked to call Selective Hearing. This meant he could completely dissociate from the TED Talk currently being performed and still instantly catch what comes right after the end of this sentence.

"I know exactly what you need," said a head, popping in horizontally from behind the doorway next to them. "I couldn't help but hear you moaning from the other room and I had to shove my way in and... intervene, if you will."

"No, I think we can handle it," GOB declined, to which George-Michael helpfully, yet weakly, paraphrased:

"Yeah, we really don't need-"

"Sounds like someone is in need of a new start," the head smiled enthusiastically.

This head is Tobias. His body is also Tobias; don't be alarmed. Actually, the entire man, in complete entirety, without a doubt, is Tobias Fünke, the perfect candidate for helping someone be straight.

He wasn't actually invited to this party but is essentially just here for plot convenience. As he mentioned, Tobias liked having a new start every now and then, so much so that his license plate itself read ANUSTART... which admittedly could have been better planned.

"You desire a spring cleaning, perhaps. A pick-me-up from big ol' daddy Tobias," he said as Tobias' head was joined in the room by Tobias', well, the rest of him.

"I still can't believe I had sex with a man before you did," GOB muttered under his breath as he looked over the monstrosity of clothing before him. "Is that sweater cashmere?"

"Oh, right," George-Michael piped in after five seconds. He nodded, detached, his eyes unfocused as he stared at the wall. "I couldn't have said it better myself."

He really could have said better, though. The autopilot listening he'd been using wasn't doing its best job.

GOB's previous comment was met by a dismissive chuckle. "The real question here is: What, exactly, is your current predicament?" Tobias asked. "See, sometimes we close ourselves within certain limits when, usually, the reason that the limits are there is because there's a blockage inside us that must be removed. Sometimes," he added, pacing back and forth, two steps each, "it's up to someone else to help remove it with their own bare, sweaty, hardworking hands, or hand, if you're-" He chuckled and motioned with his hand to the other room. "-talking about your brother."

He was referring to Buster, who, at this moment, was sitting cross-legged on the carpet by the television, probably watching one of those DVDs he really shouldn't, like those homemade videos GOB used to make of girls on the street exposing themselves for attention, or, even worse, The Lion King. His socks were hiked up below his knees today, which was actually surprising. But the even stranger thing was that his prosthetic hand had been replaced by nothing other than a new, beautiful, round, polished, sparkling silver doorknob.

After his other hand replacements caused too much destruction, the entire family opted to come up with an idea a little softer around the edges.

GOB, remembering the conversation and how Buster was, in no sense, related to it, turned back to Tobias.

"So... you're saying...?"

"Mm-hm," George-Michael nodded on autopilot. "Yeah. Great."

"I'm perfectly qualified to help you widen that opening of yours," Tobias explained, about to unintentionally make that innuendo even worse. "I am the first-ever analrapist, as it were-"

George-Michael, upon hearing this, finally emerged from his multiple-paragraph-long session of zoning out. He is risen.

"You know you can just say analyzing therapist, right?" he asked, although the undertones of the sentence were more of a demanding instruction.

Tobias could, of course, do what was suggested, but since you're reading this on a screen, it has a better visual effect than it would if we decided not to write it in.

"The first step is to pinpoint precisely what you want to happen," Tobias instructed. "In this case, you are appearing to delete contact information from your handheld mobile device, if my-" He chuckled. "-deductions are correct. Now if I-"

"Yes, exactly," GOB interrupted shortly. "I'm deleting a number. And that's my entire problem. That's literally the only reason I-"

"Wow," George-Michael interrupted unconsciously, having already slipped back into his Selective Hearing coma. "Yeah, crazy."

"Well, if you can't do it yourself," Tobias suggested, happily motioning to the phone with his petite, feminine hand. "Would you like me to do it for you?"

GOB forced another laugh, leaning over and crinkling the corners of his mouth up at the edges. "Uh, only if you a.) think it's more efficient-" He pointed at the floor for some reason, "-and b.) actually do it efficiently, which-" He forced another wheezy laugh before mumbling, "-I'm on the fence about, actually..."

Luckily, for the sake of the plot, Tobias didn't hear that part - nor did he care to listen - because he was already busy prying the phone out of GOB's grip.

"Alright, which contact would you like me to delete out of the four that you have?" he asked, trying to be helpful but instead just pointing out how goddamn lonely the guy was. "Pizza Hut, the one that says 'not really Houdini's number. They only try to take your money', Franklin-"

"No. Nope," GOB said, opening the cupboard to his left in search of something to do or eat and nonchalantly putting an entire unshelled walnut in his mouth. "it's, uh, that last one."

"Ah, Toned-D Wonder," Tobias said, clicking the screen.

"Yep, Tony Wonder. That's it," GOB replied, his face appearing to regret his food decision as he failed at chewing it.

George-Michael had now, yet again, brought himself back from his accidental impersonation of a reanimated corpse from The Walking Dead and was immediately leaning over to stare at the screen of GOB's phone. "Wait, he's in your contact list as Toned-D Wonder?" he asked.

"Yeah," GOB replied through a nervous chuckle and a whole walnut. "It was just... my voice dictation feature is terrible. I'm always calling Steve Jobs and asking-" He made air quotes, already confirming how untrue everything he said just was. "'-Why can't you fix your voice dictation? Why can't Apple spell names? I'm gonna beat you up if you don't fix it!' So..." His own chuckle cut him off before he made a face and walked over to the garbage can. "Ugh, I need to get this nut outta my mouth."

George-Michael squinted down at the phone. "Yeah, but voice dictation wouldn't add the hyphen there," he pointed out, one of his still-crossed arms pointing at the contact name. "Also, this is a Samsung."

Tobias laughed, confusion glazing his eyes. "I thought Steve Jobs was dead."

"Maybe it added a hyphen in when I sat on my phone," GOB replied, still leaning over the trash after spitting out the walnut. "Like how you can accidentally call people. They call it a butt dial, I think."

Tobias lifted a thoughtful finger to his mustache. "Is that a heart emoji there in the description section?" he asked.

George-Michael nodded. "Yeah, I don't think voice dictation adds those, either," he added, to which GOB returned the trash can to its designated place under the cupboard and retrieved a random hammer from another one.

"Well, guys, it was probably just an accident," he chuckled, taking the bowl of assorted nuts and trying to figure out how to crack them open. "What else could it have been?"

"Oops, that's not the delete button," Tobias helpfully announced as GOB efficiently smacked the hammer into the actual bowl and shattered more ceramic than he did nut shells.

"Wait, what?" he asked, walking back to the phone and leaving the disaster where he made it. "What did you do with it?"

"Oh," Tobias laughed, tilting his head back at the ceiling and rolling his eyes. "I pressed the button shaped like the phone instead of the trash icon!" He laughed again, this time shaking his head. "I don't know what I thought..."

The phone began to ring.

"Oh, no," GOB panicked, yanking the device out of Tobias' hands. "Hang up hang up hang up-" His thumb quickly moved to the red button on the bottom.

"He'll still see you called in his inbox," George-Michael pointed out. "How long have you used technology?-"

The phone stopped ringing, immediately met by an unpromising bout of static.

"Hello?" the alleged Toned-D Wonder spoke.

"Shit," GOB whispered, shoving Tobias back into the other room and lifting the phone to his ear. Desperately trying to remember if this rebelled against magic code, he came up with the most neutral response he could. "Tonyyyyy."

"GOB? I haven't heard from you in, like, seventeen hours and twenty-seven minutes," Tony replied. "What's up?"

GOB looked helpless as he tried to think of an excuse. "I'm just... uh."

Tobias' head peeled itself back in through the doorway. "Tell him you're deleting his number," he suggested in a whisper, but was immediately shoved completely back into the other room again.

"Uh... How's the straightness going?" GOB asked, straining as his hand shoved against the bald top of Tobias' egg-shaped noggin.

The straightness was going well. How Tony explained it was a lot longer and more extravagant, though (which honestly defeats the purpose of his role in Brad's Status), so we cut it out for the sake of everyone's self esteem.

"How's your straightness going?" Tony finally asked, which earned another very fake laugh on GOB's end.

"Oh, good, yeah," he made himself say. "Really good. So good that I actually called you by mistake!" He chuckled, explaining himself further. "You know, like a butt dial when your phone's in your pocket."

"Oh," said the phone, not in GOB's pocket and also not butt-dialed on.

"Yeah," GOB replied. "Well, actually, my ex-brother-in-law was the one who actually did the butt dialing."

"Oh," said the phone again. "Wait, okay. So he accidentally called me through your phone?"

GOB nodded. "Yep."

"Which was in your pocket?" Tony clarified.

GOB paused, trying as casually as he could to take a partially-opened almond out of its shell without slicing his hand on the shattered bowl. "Would it sound straighter if I said yes?"

Meanwhile, just outside the door, Michael was preparing to arrive to his own party, and he was happy.

Why? Because he wasn't charged with murder, wasn't sent to jail and additionally barely even remembered enough to know if he was guilty in the first place.

Well, actually, if Buster hadn't told the entire family that he was the one who pushed a woman down some stairs and killed her as a result, this situation would actually be quite the opposite of its current state.

Yes, the most delayed son in the family was a murderer. And Michael wasn't even surprised.

Taking a breath, he turned the loose doorknob and entered the room.

"Hello, everyone," he said in an attempt to sound enthusiastic, which actually came out as his usual sensible monotone.

"Oh, hi, Michael," Buster greeted him, now sitting cross-legged in a different spot on the floor and polishing the doorknob on his wrist with a rag intended for cleaning a flute. Nobody knew where he found it. "I wasn't expecting you to be here. I thought you'd decided to leave the family and not show up until you remembered it was an immoral idea again."

That actually was what happened.

"Uh, nope," Michael replied, placing his hands on his hips and staring up at the nearly-illegible party banner before explaining, with less confidence than he'd originally had, "It is my party so it'd defeat the purpose if I wasn't even here."

"Oh, it's your party?" Buster asked, furrowing his brow. "Franklin told me it was because I spared his life out of manic loneliness and everyone was happy for me."

Michael narrowed his eyes. "Do I wanna know?"

Buster turned the flute rag over to the other side and started dusting off the bottom of his new hand. "I tied him to the ceiling by the wrists after he jumped on my door hand and said some crazy things to Mother."

"...Door hand?" Michael asked before remembering there were more important things to ask about. "I thought GOB said he was gonna hide Franklin somewhere because that kept happening."

"He probably forgot," Buster shrugged. "It sure was hard tying those knots in the floss, though." He stared down at his hands in slight disbelief while Michael tried to distance himself from the conversation.

"Is George-Michael here yet?" he asked. "He asked me to drop him back off by his car almost immediately after we tried to leave again, but he never told me if he made it here."

"Oh, yeah," Buster replied. "Last I saw him, he was awkwardly eating pizza with a fork in tiny pieces because he says choking is a lead cause of death nationwide."

"Great; thanks," Michael replied, eager to speak with the only person here who was actually sort of sane: his son.

Chapter Text

"George-Michael!" Michael greeted his son, giving him a reason to step away from GOB's awkward phone call. "Hey!"

"Oh, hey, Dad," George-Michael replied. "I thought you weren't coming. I sorta had the impression the other day at the whole wall event that you were leaving."

"I was bringing you with," Michael replied, "and you had second thoughts, so then I had second thoughts, and then Mother told me Buster actually did kill Lucille Two and it was just..." He sighed. "...extra confirmation that I should try and stick around."

Lucille Austero (otherwise referred to as Lucille Two due to her sharing Lucille Bluth's first name) had owned the Bluth's family company. After taking Buster under her wing when he had a falling out with his mother, Lucille One, Buster had become attached to her, resulting in a few affairs and a strange eventual realization that she was just a replacement for a mother figure and he really probably shouldn't have been sleeping with her. So he became detached from her again, becoming more and more manic as the role of a mother became less and less prominent in his life.

And then he pushed Lucille Austero down some stairs.

"Yeah, well, I've always kinda felt the need to stick around here," George-Michael replied. "I mean, we kinda owe it to everyone to represent some sanity in the bloodline and keep them from digging themselves deeper into the hole of doomed ignorance than they already have."

Michael didn't know how to respond.

"Oh, there's pizza, if you're starving," George-Michael announced. "You'll have to step over all the broken shards of ceramic, though. Also it's cold and... the cheese tastes like plastic."

"You know, I actually had lunch already, um," Michael said, staring unfavorably at the food, "yesterday. I had lunch yesterday and I think that's all the lunch I'll be needing."

"No, yeah, I understand," George-Michael agreed. "I ate some of it but the crust was so rock-hard that my knife couldn't cut through any more than a centimeter. I think Lindsay made it."

"Is someone talking about my pizza?" Lindsay Bluth, Michael's sister-aunt... thing, asked as she walked overconfidently into the room.

"Yeah," George-Michael said, honesty unhelpfully being his immediate gut reaction to everything. "How did you, uh... How'd you make it?"

"Oh," Lindsay shrugged, giving a coy smile and explaining, "I bought it frozen from a gas station and I put it in the oven."

George-Michael paused.

"Did you take off the plastic wrap?"

Lindsay blinked. "The what?"

"See, that explains it," George-Michael nodded, and Michael closed his eyes in a fashion that screamed "Of course," without him even needing to say it aloud.

"Well, I thought it tasted good," Lindsay replied. She'd actually never had pizza before until that day, which was definitely the reason she thought that.

"Hold on, Tony, gimme a sec," GOB muttered into his phone before turning to them and calling, "You're so full of plastic that you're too used to the taste to notice!" while laughing proudly at himself and bringing the phone back up to his ear.

A moment later, upon thinking of another joke, he added, "You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a - a... penis and a dil-"

"And a what?" Lindsay interrupted with a warning smile.

GOB shrunk back against the wall, his expression miraculously staying smooth and calm even though his entire existence felt suddenly threatened. "A, uh..." He swallowed, suddenly illiterate. "A bull pickle. I mean a bowl - a dill pickle."

Lindsay narrowed her eyes. "That's what I thought."

This was a confident statement coming from someone who wouldn't know the difference between a penis and a bull - I mean dill pickle.

Tobias seemed to materialize then, suddenly appearing next to Michael and analyzing the pizza that George-Michael had left on the table.

"You know, I had a piece or two of that myself and had thought the coating on top was a sort of clear glaze," he informed everyone. "Although it did have an aftertaste quite like the smell of polyethylene, which, in retrospect, really all adds up now." He laughed. "I probably should have eaten less than seven pieces then."

"Yeah, I'd agree with you there," Michael said. "Sounds... well, concerning, as usual."

"Oh, come on, Michael," Lindsay butted in with an eye roll. "When has my cooking ever hurt anyone?"

"Someone died eating your chicken," everyone said at once (which was true but not worth recapping), and the Michael added, "and July seventh, 2009," which you won't understand the reference to because we haven't mentioned it yet.

About a decade prior, Lindsay had taken inspiration from some street food she'd tasted around the Fourth of July and decided to cook it for the whole family. We still aren't sure what it was she was trying to cook or what she actually ended up cooking because it didn't resemble anything. A few family members got salmonella, though, which narrows it down a bit.

"Okay, so maybe a few people were in the hospital for a week," Lindsay said, her arms spreading out into the air in exasperation. "Nobody died. Everyone makes mistakes in cooking."

"I was in the hospital for half a month, actually," Tobias piped in cheerfully.

"Wow, thanks, Tobias," Lindsay said in reply. "Now I look like the mysterious, dangerous bad guy."

"Which brings up the question," Michael intervened, changing the subject to a direction he found somewhat necessary, "Where exactly have you been for the past few months, anyway?"

George-Michael furrowed his brow, turning to his aunt-slash-great-aunt... thing. "Yeah. What have you been doing?"

Lindsay smiled blankly at everyone for a while before taking a breath and hesitantly answering the question.

"I, uh..." She paused. "I worked with a company called TSM for a while, and then I got let go so I came back."

Surprisingly enough, this was true.

Lindsay's daughter Maeby, walking into the room with a suspicious look on her face, narrowed her eyes. "Did I just hear you say you worked?"

Lindsay nodded. "Yes," she said. "I really worked."

"Like..." Maeby ripped a piece of pizza off the paper tray. "Like a sex worker?"

Lindsay sighed. "No," she said. "Real, important work. Voluntary sort of stuff."

"Like, what, volunteering to be a sex worker?" Maeby asked again, taking a bite of the pizza and immediately unhinging her jaw again. "I think I just ate the paper."

"No, that's just how it tastes," Tobias and George-Michael replied in unison. Lindsay set her jaw and turned away.

George-Michael, suddenly uncomfortable with the conversation, wandered away from it, ending up in the other room where Buster still sat on the floor and GOB sprawled himself across the couch, one foot crossed over the other. He held the pieces of a broken bowl in one hand and some superglue in the other.

"How'd the phone call go?" George-Michael asked, watching GOB fit three ceramic pieces together in lazy dedication. As he pressed them together with the glue, they snapped apart again, falling onto the carpet in more pieces than they started in as he finally gave up and left them there.

"Straight," he said.

It actually had. After putting a partially-cracked almond in his mouth during the phone call, GOB had decided not to try and eat them anymore and announced, "God, nuts are disgusting." to which Tony replied, "Tell me about it." and GOB realized he had just said the straightest thing he could have possibly ever come up with.

So, deciding not to test his luck, he immediately hung up. Because that's what rivals do: hang up without saying goodbye.

-

Michael had been planning to get into the family computer for the past week. After getting a few sudden suspicions that things weren't as perfect as they seemed, he thought it'd be a good idea to see if there were extra bank accounts he hadn't been aware of again.

"Hey, Buster?" he called, opening up the laptop and poising his fingers over the keys.

"Yeah, brother?" Buster replied, walking a bit pigeon-toed into the room.

"Can you give me a hand quick?"

"Sure," Buster replied, and Michael immediately began explaining what he was trying to do.

"I need the password for this computer. I'm a little suspicious after finding those extra bank deposits a few weeks ago and... Buster?"

He stopped when he realized Buster was gone.

Michael narrowed his eyes. "Is his attention span getting shorter?"

It wasn't, but his comprehension skills certainly weren't improving.

Buster ran back into the room with a rather large cardboard box. "I've got big, small, all ethnicities, robot, a rubber hand skin without an actual inside but it might fit over the robot frame if you tried, my hook, the little metal fence that went over the hook, Franklin, and that one foot from those Chinese people."

It was then that Michael realized that he'd used the wrong choice of words when talking to such a literally-thinking amputee as Buster Bluth.

"No, I mean... Help me with the password," Michael explained again now that Buster was actually present to hear it. "Mother's been smiling about a half inch too widely lately and I need to get into the computer to find out why."

"Oh," Buster replied, adding a small pause before adding, "I don't know the password."

Michael sighed. "Well, could you ask GOB? You'd think with his self-proclaimed magic capabilities he'd be able to get through. I mean, not like his tricks ever really work except for that strange one at the ceremony the other day."

Buster's door hand hit the laminate countertop with a heavy thunk as he stood next to his brother. "The only part that worked was the visual stuff, really. I mean, he'd been pining in the kitchen all day until that broken bowl gave him something to do." He rolled his eyes, oddly able to successfully attempt having an attitude.

Michael's eyes widened in intrigued surprise. "Was he really?"

"Yeah," Buster replied. "He couldn't even watch those homemade tapes of girls lifting their shirts up by the beach. He made me switch it to a random television channel which ended up being one of those obscure Christian shows that teaches children math by relating it to Jesus."

Michael paused. "Did you learn math, at least?"

"Not really," his younger brother replied. "It was just a refresher on my shapes. Oh, speaking of which, I think the password is written on that two-dimensional square right there." Buster pointed with his three-dimensional sphere at a slip of paper adhered to the cupboard.

"You know, you could just say sticky note, Buster," Michael said, typing in the passcode. "I'm well aware you know what a square is."

With a victorious tap of the enter button, the laptop was unlocked.

"Now, if I can access the recent files..." Michael trailed off, clicking through the already-open ones.

Buster's door hand pointed vaguely at the screen, although it was hard to figure out which edge of the sphere he was pointing with. "Oh, this one has an obscure name to it. Maybe someone's hiding something from us there."

"Good point."

Click.

What they found was incredibly surprising. But it really wasn't the surprise they were expecting.

Michael pursed his lips. "That's a vagina."

"It appears to be so," Buster confirmed, and they both stared at the screen in shocked silence.

The idea was gruesome, but both of them were internally praying that it wasn't their mother's.

"Well, since Mom dumped Dad, I guess it'd make sense he'd have this," Michael reasoned with himself. "I mean, if he's desperate."

"Yeahhh..." Buster agreed slowly, giving a shared sigh of relief as Michael clicked out of the file.

"So I guess, if this is all that's on there, Mom doesn't really use this computer," Michael said. "So maybe she's just excited to have the party so she's able to drink so much alcohol. Maybe I'm just paranoid." He moved to shut down the computer again.

"Oh, before you close out, though," Buster interjected, trying to point again as if he didn't realize that his other hand literally had fingers that were good at that. "What about that next file that says 'Annyong'?"

Click, again.

Michael shrugged. "It's just a normal picture of him."

Annyong was a child Lucille had adopted from Asia to make herself look like a caring mother. His name actually wasn't Annyong (Annyong translates directly to hello) but it's what they all falsely assumed was his name. He hadn't made a big appearance on quite some time.

"Whatever happened to that kid, anyway?" Michael wondered aloud, biting the inside of his cheek while buster daintily crossed his normal hand over the bulky one.

"I think he was deported for some reason having to do with using our money," he answered. "At least, that's what Mother told me."

Michael tilted his head. "And you believe that?"

"I mean, I guess," Buster replied, seeming unsure now that he was being questioned.

"Sounds to me like a big bowl of bull," Michael remarked, turning back to the computer.

Buster sulked. "I was hoping you wouldn't say that. Rats."

"Is this a payment made to an extermination company?" Michael asked, clicking on another file and reading through it. Buster leaned over next to him and did the same.

"Looks like it," he said. "Rats?"

"I don't know," Michael replied, "but I was never told a single thing about this."

"And therefore it's suspicious," Buster guessed, pointing at Michael (probably) but also possibly pointing at the floor because it's hard to tell due to his hand being a goddamned knob.

Michael nodded. "Suspicious," he agreed.

And this is how his usual cycle restarted itself.

Michael stormed his way importantly into the family room where everyone had since gathered, and, like many times before, he had something to discuss that only he really cared about.

"Hey, what's going on with the bank account?" he asked, his voice raised ever-so-slightly in pitch as he placed his hands on his hips. "The new payment made for extermination?"

Lucille sipped at Whatever Was in her Glass™ as she narrowed her eyes. "Michael, I don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about."

"Alright," Michael replied, turning to the rest of the family, who were all staring back without the faintest hint of surprise on their faces. "Does anyone else know what's going on?"

"No," GOB replied disinterestedly, propping his sandaled feet up on the footrest in front of him, "but does anyone else smell dead mice? I just got a random waft of it. I think it might be coming from this wall." He slapped a tight fist against it as his pitch raised in legitimate intrigue.

Michael sighed, closing his eyes and tilting his head back. "Look, I'm so sick of the lying in this family," he said for about the twentieth time that year. "I can't manage everything myself. Come on, guys! We're family! We're a team!"

Lucille shrugged. "I honestly don't understand where you get that idea," she replied. "We only seem to be on the same side because you're the one making it happen."

Michael paused. "Is that supposed to be a compliment or an insult?" he asked, barely really caring.

"Oh, I don't know," Lucille replied. "I just thought I'd point it out."

"It's an insult," George Senior translated.

"Look," Michael suggested, "maybe I'll stop keeping us a team for a while and see how you handle it."

"Michael, you say this every month," Lindsay butted in, her face not believing a single word her brother-nephew... thing had to say.

"Yeah, it's like every other party we have, you announce that you're leaving," Maeby contributed, eating from a paper plate in the corner. "By the way, the pizza tastes better if you take the toppings off."

Michael disregarded the remarks, looking everyone in their disinterested, bored eyes and giving a curt nod. "Well, this time, I'm really leaving," he announced. "You won't be hearing from me at all. Not even tonight, like... how it usually goes."

Violently turning towards the family room door, Michael grabbed the jiggly handle and yanked it open, pulling it shut behind him as everyone redirected their attention elsewhere.

"Talk to you tonight!" Lucille called after her son, who, this time, didn't respond.

"Well, that was rather melodramatic, wasn't it?" Maeby asked, discarding more plastic-infused mozzarella onto her plate. George-Michael, sitting next to her, could only sigh.

"He'll be back tonight," he said.

Maeby nodded. "I'd be worried if he wasn't."

George-Michael chuckled, leaning back in his chair and nodding at the wall. "So would I."

Chapter Text

It was the morning after the party, and George-Michael was in the middle of leaving a very important, mature voicemail.

"Hey, Dad. Hope you're doing well. Listen, uh... I'm looking through my old room and can't find my box of diaries and stuff from when I was younger. Just wondering if you put them anywhere. Let me know. Alright, bye."

Actually, they weren't exactly "diaries and stuff". Mostly, they were love letters. Love letters that he'd written years ago. To his cousin.

"Jesus, I hope nobody found them already." he whispered to himself as he re-checked the cupboards, proving that to definitely be the case.

He and Maeby had always been attracted to one another, which really wasn't ideal considering they were both related in some way to Lucille. When George-Michael was younger, he had no idea how to keep this under-the-radar, so he'd written and drawn letters upon letters for Maeby and hidden them all in a box.

Maeby walked into the room, apparently also somewhat nostalgic as she started looking at all the posters they'd hung up on the wall that still hadn't been taken down.

"Hey, Maeby," George-Michael said, shuffling through the closets for the third time already. "Have you been in the attic recently?"

"No," Maeby replied. "And what in the world is Add-A-Kratz?"

She took a poster off the wall, showing it to George-Michael, who shrugged and turned away.

"No idea."

Both of them were lying.

Add-A-Kratz was a sitcom geared towards middle-aged white women, complete with a laugh track, constant relationship drama and overdone makeup. George-Michael, emotionally close to fitting that criteria, was an avid watcher in his teenage years. So avid that the producer, Mo Lee, caught wind and sent him a personally-signed poster.

And Maeby certainly had gone into the attic. She did this to find her birth records so she could try to get an old job back (she was fired a few years back for being underage). But her birth records, just like George-Michael's box of letters, were nowhere to be found.

"I'm trying to find a box of old papers," George-Michael explained. "Drawings and stuff. I don't know exactly what the box looks like but it probably takes up a square foot or so."

"Nah, haven't seen it," Maeby replied. "You know what I have seen, though?"

George-Michael was suddenly extremely nervous. The possibility that she could have found the letters without the box around them was also likely, and the possibility of her finding something even worse of his was even more so. "What?"

"Remember the wall event last week?" Maeby asked, pulling out her phone. "You know how the press showed up and took pictures of everyone?"

George-Michael's breath caught. "Oh God. Did they get us kissing?"

"No," Maeby replied, holding the phone up to his face. "But they did get a normal, average picture of you. I mean, other than the red hair, but still."

When George-Michael failed to comprehend what Maeby was showing him, she sighed and rolled her eyes. "Read the caption."

"Oh," George-Michael said, following her directions. "George-Michael Bluth, youngest son of the Bluth family, sparks media uproar as fans of local television point out how much he looks like a mixture of every character from Ratatouille. Are you serious?"

Maeby nodded. "It's an awfully long title," she said, "but it isn't all. Just read the comments."

George-Michael pointed to one. "Did that person just call me a rat man?"

"They did kinda hit the nail on the head," Maeby confirmed. George-Michael set his jaw.

"You know, you could have just showed me the article without telling me that."

"Oh, George-Michael," Maeby replied, "it would be so, so cruel and wrong for me to hide the truth from you."

Although this set up the situation perfectly, Maeby still did not tell the truth about being up in the attic.

"And, really, are you surprised?" she added, getting the quiet response of "A little," as she put her phone in her pocket. "You know, at least the rats they chose to compare you to are more sophisticated than, I don't know, attic rats."

George-Michael, suddenly forgetting about the rat problem due to feeling guilty about Maeby's statement on honesty, decided to finally come clean about himself.

"Add-A-Kratz was my favorite show in high school."

Maeby nodded. "I figured."

"Look, let's just... forget about all this rat stuff for now," George-Michael proposed, "but let me know if you find that box."

"Sure."

"And don't look through it!" George-Michael added, leaving the room and making his way down the stairs.

He took his own phone out now, checking the time and seeing no new notifications on the screen.

It was then that he realized he still hadn't received a call back from his father, and it was then that he started to get paranoid.

Michael always called him back. Even if he said he wouldn't.

Looking up from his phone, George-Michael's head was immediately flooded with worst-case scenarios. Car accidents. Murders. Overdoses. Shooters. Choking.

One had to have happened. If it hadn't, Michael would have called back.

His son took a deep breath, trying to calm himself but really not doing a good job as he let the air out.

"Shit."

-

"Has anyone heard from Dad?"

The house was emptier today. Tobias had gone out, and God knows where George Senior was. GOB was laying horizontally across the sofa, as usual, and Lindsay was forced into the chair next to it.

"Not since he stormed out of the house and promised we wouldn't be hearing from him," she replied casually, looking through some stupid magazine nobody - even miraculously including herself - really cared for. Probably junk mail.

"Doesn't it bother you that he hasn't broken the promise yet?" asked George-Michael, paranoia pricking at his stomach.

"Actually, George-Michael," Lindsay contradicted, closing her magazine and looking up at her nephew... thing, "it's a relief."

George-Michael responded with an anxious sigh, fully disagreeing.

"Yeah, it isn't every day we can exist without hearing a rant about morals," GOB added. "If Michael were here right now, he'd get mad that Mom canceled the visit from the extermination company and claimed she'd paid more up-front than she actually did so she got extra money back with her refund."

Lucille, sitting quietly in a metal chair in the corner, gave a halfhearted chuckle, sipping at her cocktail of ambiguous origin and adding, "And then he'd get mad about Lindsay selling nude photographs of herself online in exchange for free clothing from all those rich men."

"Tell me about it," Lindsay agreed, wearing a Gucci dress which - now that this was brought up - was definitely the real thing. "And then he'd be furious about GOB not getting rid of that French erotica book yet and letting Buster look through it."

"Okay, for the record, I didn't 'let him' look through it," GOB defended himself. "I was laughing at one of the pictures and he wanted to see what was so funny."

"So you let him look through it," George-Michael said.

"I mean, yeah, but it's not like he hasn't seen wrinkly breasts before," GOB pointed out. "He was banging Lucille Austero for years."

"Oh, you're no better, GOB," Lucille replied. "At least Buster was able to keep a relationship with a woman for more than a solid week."

GOB set his jaw.

"In all honesty, though, Buster's mind shouldn't be any more desensitized than we've already made it," Lindsay said. "He watched Pinnochio the other day and didn't even scream when his nose grew."

"That's right," Buster added from behind the couch. "I'm a man now."

"Buster's in here?" George-Michael asked.

"Yes," Buster's muffled voice replied. "I'm in my fort."

"You gotta give him props for that," Lucille pointed out. "He spent four hours making it out of his old laundry. It's one of the few things in his life he's ever done successfully."

It was true. After Michael melodramatically made his exit from the house, Buster silently made his exit from reality, taking all his used clothing from his laundry bin and sewing it together into a large tarp-like thing. He then proceeded to nail it to the wall and the back of the sofa without washing it.

"Oh, that's why the room smells like corpses," GOB remarked.

It was not.

Meanwhile, Tobias was trying to find work. And by this I mean he was doing yet another audition.

He had dressed his best today, putting on his loose pants and a mahogany-tinted argyle sweater. He completed the look with a bright blue scarf, which he claimed brought out the brown in his eyes.

He had been practicing his script all month, rereading all of his many... line over and over until he got it all memorized perfectly. He considered himself quite prepared for this ultimate test of skill, and he was ready to take on the challenge.

"Hello, there!" he said with a rather large smile, taking off his glasses and hanging them on the collar of his shirt. "My name is Tobias Fünke and I will be trying out for the part of..." He re-checked his script. "...man."

The casting director, sitting back in what appeared to be excruciating boredom, nodded. "Go ahead," she urged him. "Please."

Tobias took a deep breath, gathering his thoughts and deep emotions together, and began.

Well, maybe not.

"Before I begin, is it alright if I go a bit off-script?"

The lady sighed. "I ask that you stay as on-script as possible."

"Is that a polite no or a hesitant yes?" Tobias asked, leaning over and swinging his arm... confidently?

"Please just perform your audition. Thanks," the lady replied, leaning back in her seat. She really hated her job, and she had the feeling that she was about to hate it even more.

This was a very satisfying answer to Tobias, because she didn't actually decline improvisation. Going off-script was his absolute favorite thing to do in auditions in order to make them more enhanced and unique, much to the dismay of the casting directors who often just wanted him to say a catchphrase and leave.

But Tobias had a good feeling in his gut today. Maybe it was just because of the plastic-glazed pizza he had last night, but his digestive system felt high, which made him more confident.

Taking a deep breath, Tobias harnessed all the emotion he had left inside of his empty soul and poured it out into the line.

"Ever since I was diagnosed with erectile dysfunction, my life has never been the same."

That was the entire line. But he wasn't going to just leave it there. Oh, no. God forbid. Absolutely not.

"I used to take my partner into the bedroom and strip off all my clothing to reveal a length and density that anyone would hope for. But after the... bullfighting accident..." He sighed, searching for the most poetic way to add to the performance. "...Well, I haven't been able to get fucking hard."

And perhaps it was because the fluorescent lights were brighter than the flames of Hell itself, or perhaps he fact that he had taken off his glasses and his eyes were all messed up from trying to adjust to it all, or maybe it was because he related quite a bit to what he was saying, but Tobias shed three individual tears that day.

"But, thanks to my new BULKO-K™ pills, I don't have to worry about that anymore," he said, dabbing his wet eyelids with his scarf. "Now I can please any little hole with my big sugar pole."

We have to admit that the last improvised chunk of dialogue there would have made a really nice catchphrase, but the casting director was too busy wanting this unfair life to be over with to notice.

Tobias took a breath, composing himself. "Side effects may include-"

"You don't read that part," the lady interjected. "We already have someone for that."

He paused. "...Does that say penis cancer?"

"No."

Tobias unfolded his glasses and slid them back on his nose. "Oh, you're right. I'm sorry; it says penile cancer. Ha! How silly of me." Reading on, he added, "Funny that it also says cardiac arrest. Probably just a typo."

He took another breath. The casting director closed her eyes in dread.

"I will now be performing Hallelujah by—"

"No, we're good, I think," the woman interjected. She stood up, approaching Tobias to anxiously shake his hand. "Well, it's a... pleasure seeing your audition today," she said with a forced smile. "I'll let you know within the next few hours if we want you for the position."

She took a small bottle out from her purse and handed it to him. "And here's a free sample of the product for your cooperation."

"Oh, lovely," Tobias replied and, without warning, opened the lid and immediately swallowed three capsules.

The casting manager was taken aback by this, but Tobias merely smiled in return, experiencing a completely separate emotion.

"Wow," he said, the drug already starting to really kick in. "Has anyone ever told you how attractive you are sexually?"

And that's how Tobias actually ended up landing a job.

"Huzzah!" he exclaimed as he entered proudly through the front door at the family home. "I got a job! I'm a real actor now! I have achieved the climax of my life!"

Because of his past history with accidental innuendos, nobody actually thought he really meant the last sentence as it was implied. Of course, now that they didn't question it, it was actually intentional.

"What?" Lindsay asked, doing a double-take from her position in the kitchen.

"Are you sure? What's your part?" Lucille asked suspiciously. Tobias briskly paced over to the kitchen before explaining himself.

"It's in a new erectile dysfunction medication commercial," he informed them. "I am now officially..." He stopped to check his script again. "...A Man."

"No, I'm a man," Buster's voice squeaked dramatically as he ran out of the living room and into the kitchen, his door hand swinging heavily at his side.

"But they didn't hire you," Tobias replied in legitimate confusion. Buster, already worn out from the short bout of sprinting, panted and raised his door hand to point menacingly in the general direction of maybe (we're guessing because his hand was still round) Tobias' face.

"There ain't room in this kitchen for the both of us," he growled.

Which was a valid point. It really was starting to feel crowded over there around the refrigerator.

"I'm going back to my fort," Buster announced, and then turned tail and left.

The kitchen was silent for a few moments, everyone knowing what to say but nobody really wanting to say it. So it was George-Michael who ended up speaking once his morals got the best of him.

"Congratulations, Tobias."

"Yeah," GOB choked out hurriedly, masking his voice with a glass of water. "Congrats, I guess."

Lucille said nothing by choice, giving Tobias a strange look and downing a martini. Lindsay was still in a state of shock and couldn't even listen to them all in the first place.

"Out of purely innocent curiosity," Lucille asked slowly as she leaned against the countertop, "how did you manage to land that job?"

"Well," Tobias replied, "Funny story, actually. I read my script - and it got very emotional, let me assure you - and then, we decided, uh..." He nodded. "I had sexual relations with the casting director."

Everyone gave him a variant of the same fazed, alienated stare.

Tobias simply laughed and added, "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned."

GOB's water spewed out of his mouth. He coughed, hunching over and experiencing Christianity-related flashbacks of his own. Lindsay merely closed her eyes and held her face in her hands.

Tobias chuckled. "Those laminate tiles are just about as wet as—"

"Shut up, Tobias," everyone interrupted in unison, now beginning to wonder if, in the past, he really had meant all the innuendos he'd said.

"...I was going to say my eyes while crying during my performance," Tobias said. "Actually, the sexual aspect of it all was quite dry on her part."

"Well, at least she even got a sexual part," Lindsay muttered, grabbing some car keys from the counter and standing up from her chair. "Alright, Tobias, forget the remarriage. I'm moving into Lucille's apartment."

"No, you're not," Lucille replied. "I'm retired and single; I deserve to live in peace."

Lindsay gritted her teeth together. "Fine. I'll be at the beach house."

"Dad has the only key," GOB said. "I tried getting in myself, which really..." He cleared his throat. "I mean, that door is really protected against magic. Lemme tell you—"

"Well, since you're just rolling in it from selling photographs of your nude body online," Lucille suggested, "how about getting your own room?"

Lindsay shrugged. "Or I could sleep with Maeby and George-Michael instead," she suggested aggressively, her arms flailing out from her sides. "We could all take turns sharing beds."

"Alright, wow," George-Michael, now even more uncomfortable with the situation, interjected. "What a fruitful conversation this is turning out to be. I'm, uh, I'm leaving."

That was a cool idea. It's a miracle nobody else closely related to him had come up with that sentence before.

Of course George-Michael didn't actually mean "leave" in the way his father had, though. He instead decided to temporarily escape while also doing some important searching. Naturally, he headed for the attic.

Maeby was already shuffling through boxes and papers when he got up there, waist-deep in legal documents she didn't need nor care for.

"Oh, hi," George-Michael greeted her before jokingly adding, like an inmate, "What are you in for?"

Neither of them actually found that joke funny due to almost half their family having a history of being either arrested or put in jail in the past. Maeby ignored it and moved on.

"Looking," she replied simply. George-Michael stepped over a few stacks of old photographs.

"For what?"

Maeby paused, clearing her throat. "Uh... your box, I guess."

Which was a lie, obviously. She was still trying to find her birth certificate.

"Aww, you're so sweet," George-Michael smiled. "Here. Lemme help you."

They read the sides and labels of just about every box in their immediate area, but they found it took way too long to get through even five, and the attic was full of them. So George-Michael decided to phone a friend and see if he could get this over with any quicker.

Opening his contacts, he decided to text GOB. Because, if anyone was going to use a box for any reason without telling anybody, it'd be him.

Did you use any of
my boxes for tricks? >

He waited anxiously for a response as he dug through the boxes to his left. It wasn't too long of a wait before his phone pinged and he got a reply.

They're illusions,
< dumbass

George-Michael sighed. After a few long moments, though, he received a morally-regretful addition.

Sorry. Voice dictation
< heard me wrong

So, rapidly typing back, he wasn't even slightly fooled.

Voice dictation
doesn't swear >

< Dammit

George-Michael shook his head, sitting on a box and focusing on his phone. "Dumbass."

Maeby's head poked out from between two tall stacks of boxes. "What's that?"

"GOB. He thinks he can blame anything on voice dictation and get away with it," George-Michael explained. Maeby scoffed.

"I learned early on its better to just go downstairs and talk to him yourself," she said, "not like it'd turn out any better, but at least he'd know who he was talking to."

"Know who he's talking to?" George-Michael asked just as his phone sounded with another notification.

By the way who the
< hell am I talking to

"He doesn't have a single contact from a family member in his phone," Maeby explained, which George-Michael did vaguely remember finding out.

George-Michael >

"Hey, do you ever notice how the walls smell worse and worse each day?" Maeby asked, wrinkling her nose as she delved deeper into the corner of the room.

"Yeah," George-Michael replied. "We might have needed that extermination company after all."

"Yeah. I wonder how many corpses they'd find," Maeby remarked, to which George-Michael added:

"Yeah, or what kind of corpses they'd find."

This was actually a legitimate concern of theirs after finding Lucille Austero's cadaver inside the concrete at the wall event last week.

Maeby leaned up against the wall. "Hello in there," she called at it sarcastically. George-Michael, at this moment, got another text.

Try the farthest corner
< from the stairs

So he did. Stepping over mountains of storage, he reached the back corner in a staggering record of forty-seven seconds. Immediately looking for his box, he read the scribbled names on the sides of them all before stopping at one in disbelief.

It was not his box; no. But it certainly was a box of interest.

"Annyong has a box?" he asked suspiciously. "Why on Earth..."

"Yeah, I'm looking through another one of his over here," Maeby replied. "Looks like Gangy keeps all the fake information about him in them for proof to show off to friends."

For those of you that are lost, Gangy was a possibly-loving term they used for their grandmother, Lucille.

George-Michael opened the box, looking through the papers. The most recent ones at the top had deportation written all over them. Literally.

"Wait. Was Annyong really not deported, then?" he asked, and Maeby shrugged.

"I don't—" she began to say, but interrupted herself with a startled blood-curling scream.

George-Michael jumped up. "What is it?"

"Rats!" Maeby whispered, pointing at the box as she tried to calm herself down. "Jesus."

And there they were. Annyong's box was full of rats.

George-Michael warily plugged his nose. "They smell awful."

"Yeah," Maeby agreed. "Kinda like the living room."

"We really should reschedule the exterminators—" George-Michael began, but screamed as well as a rat crawled out of the box and scurried toward his feet. This became a domino effect, and all the rats were soon running around the attic in a way that made George-Michael agree that it really was considerate of the media to compare him to nicer rats from an animated children's film.

Both of them screamed like it was their last day alive, which it felt to them it might have been. Even all the rats were squeaking a bit, almost as if it was peer pressure getting to them.

And then, in that moment of desolation, they all were saved.

Tobias, overcome with an overpowering sense of self-confidence from landing his first job, appeared at the floor as he peeked inside.

"What's going on up there?" he asked. "I sure hope you two aren't having one of those raucous good times!"

"Rats!" George-Michael yelled back. "Everywhere!"

A strange superhero feeling came over Tobias just then. Perhaps it was the hormones in the drugs that hadn't quite faded off yet, but he felt he could handle this perfectly well.

Rushing up into the attic, he grabbed a broom from the corner and narrowed his eyes. Running over to George-Michael and Maeby, he desperately started trying to whack each rat with the handle, meticulously aiming for their heads. The others helpfully kept screaming, backing away from the rodents as they all ran around the room. It took them all a while to realize that Tobias was screaming, too.

He was finally able to clock one rat over the head, flinging it against the wall with a sense of importance about him as he did. It hit the floor with a thud most satisfying, and he put one hand victoriously on his hip as he watched it.

This shouldn't have been his reaction, though, because the rats found a fun activity to take on while he wasn't looking. Possibly out of spite, three rats climbed up the pole of the broom, immediately running over his arm and gripping onto his sleeve. Once he noticed, Tobias released a scream so loud and so high that the recently-repaired ceramic bowl downstairs just might have shattered again.

One of the rats, flying at Tobias midair like a famous wrestler, lunged at his throat.

Chapter Text

An ambulance was busy picking up Tobias. Everyone else was busy not being worried.

A paramedic stood in front of George-Michael with a clipboard as Lindsay stared, somewhat miffed, at the cart he was being wheeled away on.

"And what happened then," the paramedic asked, "when the rat jumped at him?"

George-Michael shrugged, observing the back doors of the ambulance as they closed. "Well, uh, he screamed," he explained, "and then he passed out. It took him thirty seconds or so to wake back up again, though, and he said something like 'cardiac arrest warning' and called you guys himself. We honestly wouldn't have dialed a single number for him based on the situation."

"Oh," the paramedic replied. "So maybe we should ask him about it instead."

"Yeah," George-Michael replied. "Probably."

"Before I do that, though, did the rat actually break any skin, or—?"

"I don't actually remember it even touching him," George-Michael recalled. "Really, I don't think there's much to be worried about."

The paramedic nodded and turned away, motioning for the other first-responders to get ready to leave. George-Michael sat next to Maeby on the front step, watching all the vehicles drive away in the hot Southern sun.

"Out of curiosity," he wondered aloud, his mind immediately forgetting Tobias, "does anyone really know what became of Annyong?"

Maeby shrugged. "I don't think anyone really saw or talked to him—"

"—except for Gangy," they said in unison, which sparked Lindsay's attention. Turning around and tipping her expensive sunhat over one part of her face, she narrowed her eyes.

"Lucille's the only one who knows where Annyong went?" she asked, her new dress reflecting the sunlight into George-Michael's overly-sensitive eyes. "For real?"

"Yeah," Maeby replied. "Can't find any documents on him, either. Only thing in his boxes upstairs are some dumb rats."

Lindsay thought for a moment, trying to look smart and sophisticated but not pulling it off since the only thing actually covering her nipples was a tight pink latex dress and the only thing covering most of the area around them was nothing.

"Grab the keys," she said finally, to which Maeby searched her own pocket in confusion.

"Why?"

Lindsay walked over to the driveway, opening the driver's door of the Stair Car and stepping halfway in.

"We're going to lunch."

Meanwhile, Tobias was sitting on a bench in the hallway of a hospital, about to receive some news. Two doctors sat next to him, one on either side, and delivered it to him as straightforwardly as possible.

"The good news is the rat didn't actually bite you. We're guessing that shitshow of a scarf got in the way," the first said, pointing to the bright blue fabric around Tobias' neck. The other doctor nodded.

"You weren't having a heart attack, either," she added, "so there's nothing wrong in that department."

"There is one problem, though," the first doctor said solemnly.

"What is it?" Tobias tried to ask, but he couldn't find his voice in order to say it.

The two doctors shared a long look before turning back to him and explaining the problem.

"The screaming did a lot of damage," the second doctor reported. "You got some vocal nodes, which is why you can't find your voice."

The first doctor nodded. "You shouldn't be talking for the next three weeks if you'd like everything to heal properly."

Despite their predisposed belief that he wouldn't, Tobias took this news quite well. Standing up and preparing to leave, he nodded and tried his best to sign "Thank you," in ASL. Unfortunately, this was physically close to "Fuck you," which he ended up signing instead and honestly still worked as an adequate response. Then, quite proud of himself for using sign language at all and unbeknownst to the words that actually came out of his hand, he smugly left the hospital, overly excited for dealing with this new physical ailment.

The doctors didn't know sign language. They thought it was a theatrical bow or something.

Here's a question: Why would one be excited about having vocal nodes? Tobias could go on and on about the matter if only he could talk. In all essence, short story long, he had been meaning to study people with physical misfortunes for years. After watching The Theory of Everything and having the strange realization that acting as Stephen Hawking was one of the greatest challenges an actor would likely ever have to go through, he was inspired. And so, now that he couldn't use his voice, it was the perfect opportunity for character work.

He didn't feel like doing the obvious and studying a voiceless character such as Ariel from The Little Mermaid. No. Tobias had other things in mind. Bigger, more extreme things. Ariel was a little rowboat, and Tobias was looking for a role the size of the Titanic. Putting aside, of course, the fact that the Titanic sank and caused major disaster and nobody ever wanted to step into a boat again.

Tobias was ready for taking on a mothership. And he knew exactly where to start.

Back with the others, Lindsay had just parked the Stair Car in front of a rather large restaurant that they all felt rather low-class even looking at. She tried to hide the feeling, though, stepping out in such a manner that one might not even think the rusty, inexpensive mode of transportation was her own. The diamond-studded leather bag she was carrying also helped.

"How in hell are you able to afford this restaurant?" George-Michael asked, self-consciously straightening out his buttoned shirt.

Maeby crossed her arms. "Nudes?" she asked, and her mother shrugged.

"That," Lindsay validated, "and TSM gave me a few free meal vouchers." She led them both inside, and intrigue got the best of George-Michael as they were shown to their seats on the fancy tan patio.

"Yeah, and what's TSM again? What did you do there?" he asked. They sat down at an oversized table with an oversized candle as Lindsay failed to directly answer the question.

"Look, that's not why we're here," she replied shortly. "We need to find Annyong so I can get back at Mom— Lucille, I mean."

Maeby narrowed her eyes.

"Okay," George-Michael hesitantly agreed. "Fine."

Lindsay skimmed through her menu, trying to act classy before people started noticing she wasn't. "So, the first step to finding Annyong—"

"Hello," a waitress interrupted, walking over to their table and introducing herself. "I'm Chef Remi and I will be serving you today. What can I get for you?"

Lindsay, panicking due to the extremely short decision time, picked the first thing on the menu. "Let's do the, um," She took a breath. "V...itchy...sauce..."

"Vichyssoise soup?" the waitress guessed.

"Yes," Lindsay replied. "Vicky-hose. Soup. Yep." She handed her menu to the woman, who turned to George-Michael and Maeby expectantly.

"And for you?"

Maeby shook her head. "I'm not hungry, but thanks," she refused, and George-Michael nodded in agreement.

"Yeah, these prices alone put me in survival mode," he replied. The waitress smiled in understanding, making them all assume that was common customer feedback.

The waitress left, leaving the three of them to resume their conversation where they left off.

"You know, maybe my dad knows about Annyong. He seemed to know something," George-Michael suggested. Lindsay snorted.

"Does he ever not know something?" she asked, which was a valid point.

George-Michael took out his phone, standing up and stepping away from the table. "You know what? I'll call him right now."

"And I will... do it with you," Maeby followed, not wanting to be left alone with her mother under any circumstance.

"Hey, Dad," George-Michael spoke into his phone as he and Maeby walked back to the car. "We found a box of strange things regarding Annyong in the attic and were wondering if you had any idea where he went. No big deal; just call back when you can."

It was then that George-Michael remembered that his father still hadn't returned his first call. Anxiety pricking at his stomach, he leaned against the car and crossed his arms in attempt to look like he wasn't so nervous.

"Should we go back and join Lindsay?" he asked, trying to give himself a distraction.

Maeby peeked back at the table where her mother was sitting and shook her head. "Nah," she replied. "She's busy eating that itchy vag soup."

"Vichyssoise," George-Michael corrected. Maeby didn't give a shit.

"Well, what now?" she asked, clearly bored. "I kinda wanna get outta here."

"Leave?" George-Michael asked. "We can't just abandon Lindsay."

"Right, but we can make her ditch with us," Maeby replied. "Get us all kicked out so she's got no choice. Cause a scene. Ruin the ambience. Be just distracting enough for the manager to spare our interest."

George-Michael gave an insecure laugh. "Yeah, haha—" He cleared his throat. "Why?"

"Mom's only here for her image," Maeby explained, pointing at her (quickly, too. It wasn't hard to locate her because the bright pink fabric was too obstructive to not notice). "Look at her. It's all fake and I want her to know it. I want to make her focus on the things that actually matter, you know?"

George-Michael shrugged. "I mean, that's fair, I guess—"

"Let's make out," Maeby commanded intensely. George-Michael blinked.

"What?"

"Make out," Maeby repeated. "Didn't you hear me? If we're able to distract customers enough—"

"You want to distract them by making out."

"Look, if we make enough noise," Maeby said, peering over at the outdoor tables, "it'll be an easy ticket out."

And before George-Michael could try to convince her against the plan, she turned around, grabbed him by the shirt collar, and started kissing him.

"Oh, George-Michael!" Maeby called theatrically, glancing sideways at her mother, who was currently on her phone.

Upon hearing her call his name, though, George-Michael's second thoughts ceased to exist, and he began kissing her back – something he had often done before and regretted every time.

As Maeby kept yelling louder and louder between breaths, Lindsay still failed to notice them even as the other customers did. She kept scrolling through her phone and eating her unpronounceable Voldemort soup, and, as Chef Remi disapprovingly began to walk over to them, George-Michael realized something he should have known about thirty seconds prior when this all began.

He had made a huge mistake.

Tobias, in the meantime, had done something he viewed revolutionary as an actor.

He had taken a wheelchair from the hospital and carried himself out on it, doing a bit of a DIY project as he put his phone in the cupholder and opened Google translate, turning the volume all the way up and typing in the words he wanted to say. He then hit the talk button, and, in a moment of theatrical bliss, a miracle occurred and he became Stephen Hawking.

"This is the perfect opportunity to grow as an actor," he had his phone declare as he wheeled himself down the sidewalk and in the direction of the nearest bus stop.

What he had completely forgotten, though, is that while he was busy improving his acting skills, he was also busy ruining his acting career.

That's right; Tobias had missed his shooting as Man in the erectile dysfunction commercial.

Not like this could have been avoided, though. Regardless of whether or not he had made it there, his voice didn't do anything anyway. And nobody watching an advertisement for a medication would want to see the patient sitting in a wheelchair and rattling the side effect warnings through Google translate.

So the job was naturally handed over to the next-best candidate in need of a quick buck, which just so happened to be another man who also hadn't had a stable job in his entire life: Tony Wonder.

After deciding on starting a short hiatus from his magic shows after faking his own death, Tony had been pressured by his girlfriend, Sally Sitwell, to start to focus on publicity. She was a politician, after all, and thought it would be best for the two of them to appear more often on television.

Tony had done many advertisements in the past month for everything from cereal to Celtic flute stores. And he had to admit it: the pay was fantastic in comparison to the amount of effort it actually took.

"Hi. I'm Tony Wonder," he said in last week's shooting. "Have you ever had an identity crisis?"

This commercial had been playing during almost every ad break on popular channels recently, and, coincidentally, GOB had just stumbled across it at this very moment.

"I had a big episode recently where I wasn't exactly sure who I was. I did some crazy things that I'm still questioning to this day. Therapy hasn't worked at all. I was actually kicked out from it when the priest said I was too extreme to even attempt conversion. Funny story."

GOB narrowed his eyes at the screen. "What the fuck?" he would have exclaimed if we hadn't bleeped it out.

"So I began to feel like I had no options," Tony continued in the ad as the saturation turned black-and white and Mad World started playing in the background. "I felt hopeless and confused and also really... hungry."

GOB became even more confused. He leaned forward, trying to figure out what the hell he was watching or if he was actually conscious at all. "Is this a fever dream?"

We were actually wondering the same thing. And we hate to break it to you: We don't know.

The advertisement switched to cheery rock music with bright colors as Tony was handed a cereal box and a biodegradable Californian spoon probably made out of straws and weed, giving the camera a fake smile.

"Food is the best distraction for misery, isn't it?" he asked rhetorically, taking a mouthful of dry cereal and mumbling the next lines through it. "Stress eating is great, and food this good will get rid of all those pesky little mid-life crises faster than you can memorize and recite the national crisis hotline! Sometimes all your questions will be answered with one little bite out of an innocent-seeming bowl. Mmmm!" He shoveled more food into his mouth. "Good stuff!"

The ad abruptly cut off, leaving GOB wondering if he was on drugs without knowing it. Genuinely concerned for his magical nemesis, he took out his phone and clicked his contact, hitting the call button and hoping for the best.

A groggy voice picked up. "Hello?"

"Tony?" GOB asked, sitting back in his chair and staring awkwardly at the irrelevant history documentary now playing that was talking about herding cattle in the nineteenth century. "It's... me."

"Yeah, I know," Toby replied. "I have your contact saved."

"Oh, same," GOB replied before scrunching up his nose in confused thought. "I, um... Your commercial..."

"Which one?" Tony asked. "Sally's been having me convince everyone I'm straight and sane for publicity, so I've been doing tons."

"Nobody would be dumb enough to just ruin their entire career like that," GOB said, after having already been dumb enough to ruin his entire career like that.

"Well, if I'm going to make it official with her," Tony reasoned, "I guess I'll have to take the blow."

"Yeah," GOB replied with a forced chuckle. "But, really, I'm, um..." He stood up, starting to pace the room. "A little put-off by your ad. I don't know what to—"

"Oh, just wait for the next one," Tony interrupted. "It'll be— Shit."

GOB furrowed his brow. "It'll be shit? What are you doing? Advertising for manure?"

"No, I'm late for it," Tony said. "I need to hurry up and get to the studio."

And, like any good enemy would, he hung up without saying goodbye.

"Tony?" GOB said to the dead telephone line before getting even more confused and putting the device back in his pocket. Not wanting to see any more advertisements for the rest of the day, he turned off the TV just as the front door opened and the two of today's three musketeers walked through it.

"We got kicked out," Lindsay immediately announced as she and George-Michael stepped inside. GOB turned to them, not very surprised.

"Why?"

It actually wasn't because Maeby was yelling. The waitress had only assumed she was intoxicated and was making sure she had a safe ride home. However, things really turned out on the bright side for the two of them when Lindsay was told that her dress was so bright that it was distracting the customers and she was forced to leave.

Then, embarrassed that her mother was kicked out instead of her, Maeby decided to walk home on her own. It was a hot day, though, so she found herself going inside a random building in hopes of cooling down. She still was not on her way back.

"Lindsay's dress got in the way of things," George-Michael replied, still surprised about how it turned out. GOB, however, was still not surprised by this in the least, and nodded understandingly before tossing the television remote across the room like a frisbee, failing to aim at the table and landing it on the floor in the corner, and heading upstairs.

There was a sudden knock at the door.

Actually, it was more of a deep thunk, followed by a short pause and a robotic "Ow." George-Michael turned back to the door, opening it and looking out at Tobias Hawking himself.

"Uncle Tobias?"

Tobias nodded, and then leaned forward to reach for his phone, typing furiously and hitting the play button as he sat back.

"Hello. I am practicing my acting."

"You won't need that," Lindsay said. "You'll never land a role as Stephen Hawking himself."

Tobias disregarded the remark and wheeled himself into the house, immediately greeted by the two steps leading down to the dining area. Grabbing his phone again and preparing another sentence, he readied himself to face them.

"Here we have two stairs. Now, I could easily get up off my wheelchair and walk down them," his phone reported, "but I am going to work on my role and go down them like I am."

"You know, people in wheelchairs have ramps in their houses for these sorts of things," George-Michael replied, and Tobias waved his hand in dismissal. He grabbed his phone and typed out a reply.

"No, they don't," Google Translate replied forcefully, and Tobias then grabbed his wheels and pushed himself toward the stairs.

This act didn't last long. Upon his front wheels hitting the bottom step, they got caught in the corner as the momentum continued to carry him down. In a moment of shocked desperation, Tobias gripped his armrests with all the life left in him as a silent scream left his throat and his wheelchair threw him face-first onto the floor.

Google, after accidentally being tapped by his hand on the way down, repeated its last phrase in what sounded like mockery.

"No, they don't."

This event would result in Tobias needing an ambulance for the second time that day.

Chapter Text

Lucille, for once, was being productive. And not in the alcoholic sense. Well, actually, yes in the alcoholic sense, but even more so in the normal sense.

After waking up to her usual lonely apartment and drinking her usual morning cocktail, she got incredibly bored and decided to do something she hadn't done in years: She wanted to clean out her storage closet.

Of course, this wasn't out of the goodness in her heart; her heart didn't exist. It disappeared with Cinco De Mayo. Her burst of energy truly came instead out of the sudden realization that people were starting to catch wind of things she had been trying to cover up.

Taking a box out and rustling through all the papers inside, she found nothing of interest and wondered with a jolt if her family had already found the things she'd been looking for. She closed the box and put it back, going through her other storage bins and looking specifically for one with an obscure Asian name written on the side of it.

What she found instead was a small shoebox, about one square foot in size, with the name George-Michael scribbled in thick sharpie on the side. She looked down at it in silent contemplation before her landline began to ring from the living room.

"Oh, that dumb phone..." she muttered, stepping back out of her storage area and rushing to it, taking it off the hook and holding it to her ear. "Hello?"

"Lucille," George Senior said on the other end. "How are you today?"

Lucille gritted her teeth, turning to her patio doors and staring out at the coastline. "I was better before you called," she growled, narrowing her eyes and pursing her lips. "I think they're onto me."

George Senior, miscalculating this moment as a good time to try and earn her back, replied with, "Well, I'd certainly like to be onto you, if you catch my drift."

Lucille only sighed, closing her eyes in frustration and pacing back and forth. "George, I don't want you back even when I'm fully plastered. Why would you expect my mind to change when I've only had..." She took a moment to count the glasses on the kitchen table. "...four martinis?"

"Not the time?" George Senior asked dejectedly, and Lucille shook her head as if he could see it.

"Not the time."

"But, just for reference, when is the right time?" he asked in return, "because I just want you to know that I spend all my time thinking about you and I don't know what to do and—"

Lucille, suddenly in need of some fresh air, left the phone on her coffee table and stepped outside, closing the door behind her as George Senior rattled off on the phone to nobody in particular, almost getting away with pretending he wasn't just paraphrasing the lyrics from Falling For You by Colbie Caillat.

"—and I just can't take it," he went on. "I've been waiting all my life and now I've found you... again, and I have no idea what to do—"

The ceiling thought he was putting on a wonderful show. And it wasn't the only ceiling in town that was experiencing this.

There was another very specific ceiling of a small shooting location in a creepy little building that was seeing the performance of its life. And, surprisingly, we are not talking about the soft-core porn shootings we've mentioned in the past with Tobias' ex-girlfriend. We're talking about the commercial.

Tony Wonder had failed to make it in time for the shooting. In addition, he and Tobias were the only two people who auditioned for the role, so the producers decided to take the first person they could find to read off the script. Luckily for them, Maeby, who had just walked inside to cool down before making her way home, seemed to them like the perfect candidate. Upon hearing about the amount of money she'd be paid in compensation, she didn't give a second thought to doing the job.

The producers slapped a baseball cap backwards on her head, putting a tight leather jacket over her and doing the best they could to make her seem as masculine as possible. Rolling the cameras, they gave her the signal to start reading off the cue cards, and so she began.

"Hi," she rasped out in a deep voice. "My name is Skyler Jones. I used to have a problem."

Suddenly feeling quite in-character, she crossed her arms and looked at the ground in shame.

"I used to get with someone and not be able to perform how I'd like. I just wasn't working... down there." She pointed with her two thumbs to her clearly feminine crotch as she continued. "But that was before I found the solution to it all."

Someone behind the camera tossed her a bottle, which she caught and held up cheerfully next to her face. "But now that I have BULKO-K™ in my life, my good ol' dong is always strong."

The cue cards stopped, and Maeby felt just confident enough to add a tagline the company would soon pay her extra for as they used it on their actual slogan. Leaning towards the camera, she winked and whispered, "Not to mention pretty long."

The cameras stopped rolling then, and the director looked at the filming team and nodded. "Yeah, that's a good take. I think we're good here."

"Great," Maeby replied, hopping off the stool she'd been sitting on and returning the clothes to the people in the back. "I should probably get home, anyway."

"You're good," someone in the back remarked. "For a second I actually was convinced you had a penis."

"What's your name?" a crew member asked, coming up and shaking her hand. "It'd be cool to have you come back sometime. And we also need your contact info to know where to send your money."

"Maeby Fünke," she replied. "And I'll just leave my number with you so we can figure it out when you're ready." She scribbled her phone number on a slip of paper and handed it to the woman, who punched it into her contacts.

"Wait... I know that name," she responded. "Maeby... You used to work in the film industry, right?"

"Yeah," Maeby replied. "I did."

"Cool," the lady said. "I was actually hired into your spot when they kicked you out. I left after a while, though. They're a failing business now that they've got no good actors around." She scoffed. "So many auditions from this one Tobias dude. They were just sinking slowly into the water, but then Tobias tied a brick to their ankles, like, three times per film."

Maeby forced a laugh. "Damn," she said. "I'd hate to know that guy."

"Tell me about it," the lady replied. "I'm Alicia, by the way. Alicia Goldstead."

They shook hands, Maeby's mouth starting to grow weak from the excessive fake smiling, and Alicia put a new thought onto the table.

"You know, that company would die to have you back," she replied. "You killed this ad. Maybe you could try to get in as an actor. I know a few of the projects they have coming up."

Maeby contemplated this. Tobias would be jealous. Lindsay would hate it.

That was a quick decision.

"I'm in."

-

Tobias had just received some crippling news.

"You have a concussion," the same two doctors told him, "and both your knees are split. You won't be able to walk for about six weeks."

Tobias grabbed his phone from his cupholder and punched in a response.

"Oh, rats," Google groaned. Tobias still had a smile on his face, though, which they both found concerning and somewhat terrifying.

"You seem happy about this."

There was a long pause full of slow clicks from the keyboard on his phone, and then Tobias' device replied.

"I'm more in-character than I've ever been."

Which, in the reader's sense, might be accurate, since this is one of the most Tobias-esque things to recently happen to him, but, in a much less meta sense, it wasn't anything compared to Mrs. Featherbottom.

Quite some time ago, Tobias created a character of his own: Mrs. Featherbottom, an old English nanny, and used her to try and get closer to Maeby. Given the circumstances, it was almost exactly identical of a situation to Mrs. Doubtfire, parallel all the way down to the costume. He always seemed a bit more dedicated to that role than his new Stephen Hawking one. He really did try a lot harder at it.

Tobias, with an inspired sense of confidence, now wheeled himself out of the hospital for the second time that day, speeding down the sidewalk and heading home.

"Excuse me," his phone said on full volume as he tried to get through the crowds of people in his way. "Coming through. You're blocking the way of a disabled actor."

"I dunno. You seem pretty enabled to me," a pregnant woman said, also trying to get through the jam in the opposite direction. It seemed endless with all these people in the same spot. Perhaps there was a fire sale or something.

Coincidentally, as Tobias was stuck in all the chaos of the sidewalk traffic, something you probably expected would happen then happened: his daughter stepped out of a shabby old building into it.

"Dad?" she asked, more surprised to see him in town than she was to see him in a wheelchair. Tobias turned to her and smiled, typing into his phone in greeting.

"Well, slap my ass and take my tunic!" Google exclaimed, the sentence even seeming to make his phone somewhat confused. "Daughter."

"Why are you here in town?" Maeby asked, not even giving a second through to his physical state. Tobias shrugged as his phone explained.

"Well, I tried to get down, as it were, but my knees hit the floor a bit too hard," the robotic voice replied.

"I'm gonna take a shot in the dark and guess that doesn't actually mean what it sounds like it does," Maeby replied. Tobias tipped his head to the side.

"Well, lovely daughter," Google proposed, "would you be willing, perhaps, to push me home? I have no means of getting there quickly and safely other than getting assistance from."

The voice cut off, and Tobias pursed his lips in frustration.

"There's a word count," his phone explained. "It cuts off after a while."

"Look," Maeby said, "I wouldn't be caught dead pushing around someone trying to imitate Stephen Hawking. And besides, I need to get home, too. I have some birth records to look for."

Tobias was, as usual, silent while he typed his response with his first finger. Maeby turned and began to walk off, her patience at an all-time, record-breaking low.

"You wouldn't be caught dead pushing me around," Google interrupted her as she tried to leave, stopping her in her tracks. "but would you be caught alive?"

Maeby closed her eyes. "That was a terrible joke and it wasn't even supposed to be one."

"Please, M-A-E-B-Y," Google spelled her name because it couldn't process it, "do this for me and I'll do something for you."

Ah. A reward. That didn't sound too shabby.

Turning around, Maeby gave in. Fueled by the promise of a favor in return, she grasped the handles of Tobias' wheelchair and began wheeling him home just as the sun began to set. He'd do something for her in return, now, would he? She'd have to think of something really big.

Speaking of thinking of big things, Tony Wonder had just received the news that he had missed the commercial shooting. So, flopping back down on his bed and looking for something to do with all his time, he immediately thought of GOB. Yep, GOB and his big, long, exotic, ten-unit, overwhelming, enticing, completely unique phone number.

Feeling confrontational, he felt like letting him know he'd missed the shooting and blaming it on their phone call. But, as soon as he'd already dialed his number, he remembered that the phone was actually what woke him up in the first place and, if anything, actually helped him. So he didn't exactly know what to say.

"Hello?" the familiar, low, raspy voice asked from the other end.

"I missed it," Tony replied.

GOB hesitated. "Oh."

"Yeah," Tony said, leaning back and resting his head on his pillow. "I don't even know what to do with the rest of my day. Or why I called."

"Well, you know, if... if you've got nothing to do," GOB said I confidently on the other end, "I mean, we... could... meet up...?"

"What?" Tony asked. "That doesn't sound very straight of you. I thought we discussed this."

They sort of had. Briefly. Vaguely. They agreed to go back to just doing things "with their hands" together, meaning magic. However, the agreement did leave a few gaping loopholes.

"What? I wasn't trying to sound gay," GOB said with a forced laugh. "Um... Voice dictation. You know how that is."

Tony did. He'd been bullied for his entire elementary school career because he used to have a speech impediment concerning the letter R. The few kids who were dumb enough to not bully him didn't do it because they thought he had a British accent. One can only assume that the bullies knew the difference.

"Yeah, I mean, I would meet up," Tony sighed, "but Sally's starting to get suspicious of my devotion to her, you know?"

GOB laughed. "Ha. Women. Yeah."

"But I guess we could, like..." Tony shrugged. "...seek out some magic gigs or something. Get a feel of the town, you know?"

"Oh– Okay, yeah," GOB replied nervously, surprised that his idea was being agreed to.

"I'll just tell Sally I've got work."

"Cool. Sure."

Tony sat up, deciding to make one thing clear because, even to us, it really wasn't. "But it's just on enemy terms, okay?"

"Okay, GOB agreed, "and, speaking of which..."

"What?" Tony asked.

GOB hung up.

-

"Hey, Dad," George-Michael said into his phone, pacing back and forth across his old room. "I haven't heard from you in a while and I'm starting to really get worried—" He dodged a few rats running between his feet. "—so I'm coming over. You know, to the house we have in Sudden Valley. Because there's nowhere else you'd be..." He swallowed anxiously. "So I'm just warning you that I'm gonna come over just to check up on you. Like, maybe your phone is just dead, right?"

He gave a nervous laugh and took a breath. "Alright. Hope you get this. Bye."

He ended the message and grabbed the keys from the kitchen counter, passing Maeby, Tobias, and a runaway rat as they all got through the door.

"Oh, hey," he said, and Maeby gave a bombarded smile as she set all her things – including a sample bottle of BULKO-K™ – on the counter. Tobias cheerfully wheeled himself to the stairs again, where he had Maeby help him down.

"Where are you going?" Maeby asked upon seeing keys in her cousin's hand, leaning in and adding, "I need somewhere to go so I'm not stuck caring for his ass all month."

"Well, we're not gonna be gone for a month," George-Michael said. Maeby rolled her eyes.

"I know that," she said, "but if he gets used to me caring for him now, he isn't gonna stop expecting me to be the one to do it. I need somewhere to go."

"Well, I'm going to Sudden Valley to look for my dad," he replied. "It hopefully won't take too long."

Maeby nodded and followed him out the door. "It'll be good no matter the length," she replied, and George-Michael narrowed his eyes.

"Maybe it's just that my mind is used to hearing your dad say innuendos all the time," he replied, "but I feel like they're starting to rub off on you."

"Shit," Maeby exclaimed. "I walk with him for thirty minutes and then I become him. Just more proof that we gotta go. Hurry. Get in the car."

They rushed in, closing the doors behind them as George-Michael gripped the steering wheel and prepared to go.

"Do you think we should spare everyone else from this misery and invite them, too?" he asked hesitantly, his key still not in the ignition as he pondered aloud.

"No, it's okay," a voice answered from the back. "I'm already in here."

They both turned around. "Buster?"

And there he was, sitting in the added storage compartment under the stairs, cleaning his door hand anxiously with the flute rag.

"Can we please listen to the nursery rhymes CD while we drive?" he asked. "Otherwise I'm gonna have flashbacks and remember pushing Lucille Two down this car."

Maeby closed her eyes. "Oh, God, really, Buster? The nursery rhymes CD?"

"And then we can all sing along," Buster replied.

"I thought I burned that CD in the fire with Anne," George-Michael whispered, thinking back to his first girlfriend. But he proved that theory wrong after shuffling through the armrest for ten seconds and finding it, lo and behold, without a scratch or burn. He sighed, pensively taking the disc out of its case and entering it into the car radio.

"Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?" about fifty off-key children and adults trying to sound like children yelled at the same time while a glockenspiel played in the background. Maeby immediately but the stereo button and turned it off.

"I thought I could last longer," she sighed. "I really did."

"You're really sounding like your dad," George-Michael began to say, but was cut off as Buster started to whine.

He placed his door hand on one side of his head and his human hand on the other, rocking back and forth as he had a panic attack. Maeby set her jaw, knowing the CD was the only option.

"Oh, eat my meat and call me Taiwanese," she muttered under her breath, and hit the button again. The song continued. Buster did not.

George-Michael turned the key and pulled out of the driveway just as another figure ran out of the house, waving its arms at them. George-Michael stopped.

It was GOB chasing after them, his phone in one hand and his jacket in the other, carrying a pill bottle of what everyone guessed was Ativan between his teeth. It seemed to be a great balancing act as he opened the door to sit in the back with Buster, setting all his things on the floor.

"I have somewhere to be," he explained. "I might have to take the car while you're in Sudden Valley. Shouldn't be too long."

"And I'll have to tag along, too," Lindsay announced as she also rushed inside. "I spent the last five seconds alone with Tobias and I already need a break."

"Alright," George-Michael sighed. "Great."

At that moment, the front door opened again and Tobias began to wheel himself out.

"Oh, shit," Lindsay exclaimed. "Go, go, go!"

George-Michael slammed his foot down on the gas before Tobias could fully leave the house, speeding out of the driveway and down the road and leaving Stephen Hawking to fend for himself in the harsh, difficult world he was left with.

"Well," Tobias said through his phone, still able to hear the nursery rhymes blasting from the car as it sped away and probably foreshadowing his own future, "things probably can't get any worse than this."

Do I really have to mention that he was wrong?

Chapter Text

George Senior had planned an agenda, and it was as follows:

1. Spend more time with the family to impress Lucille

2. Spend more time with important work to impress Lucille

3. Spend more time with the upper-class to impress Lucille

4. Spend more time with Lucille to impress Lucille

Now that he was on his own in the beach house, he felt lonely. No women ever showed any interest in him, even near midnight at bars, and all the sane people would run once he revealed he'd gone to jail so many times. So his plan was to get his ex-wife back. He had known earlier when signing the divorce papers that he had made a huge mistake, and the long-term effects were really starting to catch up with him.

This plan was going to start to come to fruition about yesterday, but once he got the call from Lucille talking about how she thought she was in trouble, George Senior did the smart thing and decided to just skip to step four and pretend to help her hide all her evidence while really just trying to win her over.

So here he was, in all essence, in the middle of Lucille's apartment, looking for two boxes that said "Annyong" on the side.

"Why on Earth would anyone else take his boxes?" he asked after admitting to himself that he, too, couldn't find them. Lucille paced back and forth, pursing her lips and staring out the window in thought.

"The bigger question," she replied, "is who would?"

The truth was that nobody really cared about Annyong (at least not enough to take all his information and hide it away like this), so the fact that the only personal family belongings in this room were George-Michael's was shady, to say the least.

"What if George-Michael knows where it is?" George Senior suggested. "Since he used to keep his things back at the house, what if he switched them out for some reason?"

Lucille set her jaw in thought. "What if he's turning out to be like Michael now that he's really left?"

"How would switching out boxes make him like Michael?" George Senior asked. Lucille swallowed a rather large sip of alcohol as she contemplated her reply.

"He could be hiding all the incriminating information in that box," she conspired, "because he wants to use it against me later." She sighed and sat on her chair by the window, pursing her lips and look if regretfully at her boring beige wallpaper.

"Oh, George," she tsked, "why the hell did we raise three out of our four children to have a basic sense of morals?"

"Well, technically, Lindsay isn't our child," George Senior interjected, and Lucille rephrased her statement.

"Why was it that we raised all our children to have a basic sense of morals?"

Actually, they had really done the opposite. Due to the psychological manipulation the four children had grown up with, they'd all turned out to be somewhat resentful of their parents. Michael took the hardest blow but in the best way, putting morals first on all occasions but, on the downside, always wanting to be the hero. Buster took a blow in the worst way, becoming emotionally and mentally delayed, probably due to trauma and neglect. And GOB took a few hard blows after childhood had left him, too, one being his lack of respect for women, Franklin and elderly people, and the other being from Tony Wonder himself.

So, really, although their children could have turned out worse, George Senior thought it was best to look on the bright side.

"Well, at least they didn't turn out nicer," he remarked, sitting on the sofa across from Lucille and taking out his phone. "We could've had, you know, an activist for a child." He seemed to be forgetting that one of the children they raised did turn out to be an activist.

"Or, even worse, an – Oh, I don't know – an inauthentic child," Lucille added, seeming to also forget that they had raised two children that weren't theirs.

George Senior then made the executive decision to text his grandson and save Lucille's day to impress Lucille (he would later add this as the fifth step on his agenda), so he promptly selected George-Michael's contact information and typed out a short, innocent message. With some hopeful romantic confidence to him, he hit send, sat back, and waited.

Have you been in
the attic recently? >

-

George-Michael was legally driving to Sudden Valley, and most of his family was illegally riding along in the back. And the legality was something nobody really gave much of a thought to right now because the actual conditions were much more noticeable.

GOB, Lindsay and Buster were all being thrown around in a way quite resembling the fish at Seattle's Pike Place Market. Oddly enough, they never actually collectively decided to sit down, but that was partially because they were forced to do so when they were thrown to the ground and couldn't stand back up without falling down again. And, on top of all this, an amateur recording of Rock-a-bye Baby was blasting through the speakers.

Lindsay was beginning to doubt her decision to ride along with everyone as she started feeling motion sick. Curling up into a ball and resting her head back against the inner wall of the stairs, she squinted her eyes shut and motioned to the bottle on GOB's hand.

"What do those pills do?" she asked.

"They're, um..." GOB sighed. "They're for anxiety. Not like—" He stopped to force an insecure laugh. "—Not like I have anxiety. I just—"

—had felt nervous about meeting Tony Wonder for the past thirty minutes and, if we're all being honest here, was having a spurt of anxiety.

"Gimme a few," Lindsay replied. "I'm sure they'll help." She reached out her hand, and GOB hesitantly handed her the bottle and watched her immediately take a pill before putting the bottle in her jacket pocket. "I wish I'd never gotten on this ride."

"Yeah," GOB replied. "And to think I could have just waited five more minutes for a Lyft..."

In fact, he had been desperately close to doing just that. But, upon opening the app and selecting his desired location, GOB had been interrupted by Tobias, who had been wheeled back up onto the raised front entrance again.

"I was going to ask you about your thoughts on magically healing my knees," Google monotonously reported, "but I admit I got distracted when I gained interest in your pants."

GOB turned to Stephen Hawking. "What?"

"They look just like my cutoffs," the phone explained as Tobias pointed at GOB's choice in attire and GOB began questioning his own sanity due to the oddity of the conversation.

"They're skinny jeans," GOB replied. "Of course they look like your cutoffs. They're the same fabric."

"I didn't think you were one to wear such things," Google remarked after Tobias furiously typed the sentence in. GOB scoffed and shrugged, turning to the door and looking back down at his phone.

"Well, every gay man loves a guy in skinny jeans."

He then stopped, his attention immediately focusing back on his smiling uncle/brother-in-law... thing as he narrowed his eyes.

"...which is why I should go," GOB added, and, grabbing a bottle of pills from the counter and a light coat, bolted out the door. He promised himself he'd rather deal with a bumpy ride than Tobias as Professor Hawking hitting on him, whether or not it was intentional at all. So he left the temporarily-disabled failed actor back in the house, stuck above the stairs again with no means of getting down other than the exact same way he did when he broke his knees.

To say that GOB regretted his lack of tolerance is an understatement.

And it certainly wasn't because of the bumpy ride that he hated this, but rather because of how much Buster was enjoying himself during it.

His youngest brother was sitting cross-legged and bouncing along to the CD, which now was playing It's a Small World in a rendition that had one chorus repetition too many. And, even worse, he was having a great time.

Yes. Byron Buster Bluth, sitting in the caved-out back of the family Stair Car, was enjoying himself.

This was annoying to GOB, and it was bothering Lindsay, who was beginning to feel worse and worse as the car gained more and more speed along the road.

"I think I'm gonna have to get off," she groaned, dragging herself to knock on the dividing window between them and the actual seats of the car. "George-Michael! We have to pull over."

But her nephew/great-nephew hybrid, much to Lindsay's dismay, was currently on conversation autopilot, which didn't help much as he replied with "Yeah, that sounds great," and continued to not stop the car. Lindsay laid on her back then, her head vibrating uncomfortably against the floor as she clutched her stomach and swallowed the hyper-accumulating saliva that her wooziness was providing.

"Please tell me we at least have a pillow or a blanket back here I can put my head on," she growled, and GOB and Buster shared a mutual "I'm not giving up my jacket" glance instead of responding morally.

Up in the front seat, Maeby wasn't exactly having the time of her life, either.

It had finally come to the point where she had begun to sing along with the nursery rhymes, which really explains exactly how downhill everything was going. And downhill isn't an overstatement. The road they were on certainly wasn't flat, but was more of a steep decline as they neared the lower part of the unpopulated land around them. The stair car barreled downwards much like a zero-gravity jet as Maeby and Buster sang the third verse of John Henry, GOB questioned his decisions, and Lindsay felt increasingly worse.

"I'm gonna throw up," she announced like a proud Shakespearean king.

"Oh, God," GOB muttered. "Please don't."

"I'm going to," she declared again as if it was a personal choice. She leaned to the side and dry-heaved a bit, and GOB took his jacket off the floor in preparation.

"If you puke that pill back up it'll be completely wasted," he warned. "You might as well just buy me a new bottle."

This wasn't a good threat, especially since pharmacies don't sell medication to people who don't need it and doing so would be illegal.

"He picked up a hammer," Buster unhelpfully belted out with the music, hitting his door hand repeatedly on the metal floor as he continued with, "a little piece of steel and said, 'hammer be the death of me—'"

"Yep, that's it," Lindsay said. "I'm gonna throw up." She heaved again, but nothing happened.

GOB, now guessing that she wasn't actually sick enough to vomit, put his jacket back on the floor. Lindsay, spotting it, grabbed the jacket and put it under her head.

"Oh, come on!" GOB exclaimed through Buster's wild singing. He reached for his jacket, trying to dodge Lindsay as she swatted him away. "If you heave on that I'm going to throw you out of the car."

"Win-win," Lindsay replied after curling up and gagging in nausea, and so GOB kicked open the makeshift door on the wall and, as promised, threw her out of it.

"Well, that was easy," he sighed, pulling the door shut and gathering his phone, jacket and a lonely pill bottle in the corner as Buster began screaming along to This Little Light of Mine. The Gen Z children out there would probably describe the whole situation as cursed, and I'm sure you don't need much of a definition of it to agree.

Back up front in the legal seats of the Stair Car, George-Michael's phone had just received a text.

"Hey, can you read that for me?" he asked, nodding to the phone with his head, and Maeby opened the notification.

"It's from Pop-pop," she announced, yelling through the music. "It says: 'Have you been in the attic recently?'"

"The what?" George-Michael called back. "Have I been in the what?"

"Attic," Maeby half-shouted in return. George-Michael looked quite visibly confused.

"The addict?" he asked, turning into a new street, which caused a bit more havoc in the back. "What addict?"

"No, not addict," Maeby hollered monotonously. "He isn't accusing you of sleeping with Gangy. I said attic. A-T-T-E-C-K– Wait, that's not how he spelled it."

"Well, yeah, I was in the attic," George-Michael replied. "I was in it with you. You knew I was up there. You could've replied yourself."

Maeby poised her thumbs over the keyboard, basking in the short silence as the song ended and switched to Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore. Raising one eyebrow, she waited for instructions.

"Okay, just say 'Yeah', and then, out of curiosity, add 'Why?'" George-Michael directed her, so she promptly typed "yeahy" and sent it, which was a message they'd soon learn would take George Senior seven minutes to decode.

"We're here," George-Michael announced, stopping the car and abruptly turning the music off with it. He and Maeby both gave a sigh of relief at the lack of noise before stepping outside.

"And look. We all made it in one piece," Maeby marveled sarcastically as GOB and Buster hopped out of the stairs.

"Well, if you're talking about us as a family unit, we actually didn't," GOB contradicted. "Lindsay hopped off a few miles back. Which is fine, because she was about to hurl all over my jacket. Also she was being a bitch."

Buster would normally butt in to explain that it was actually GOB who pushed her out, but they had just discussed that this was under assistant magician's code and that he shouldn't tell anyone anything related to it.

George-Michael nodded, not very surprised that they were missing someone. If anything, he was relieved that there were still four of them at all.

"Hey, look," Maeby said, pointing to Michael's driveway. "It's your dad's car."

And so it was. Matching all the other driveways on the block, sitting there for all to see, was Michael Bluth's company car. George-Michael was immediately flooded with relief as he locked the Stair Car and made his way to the house.

"Oh, come on, you don't need to lock that," GOB said, motioning to the car with his hand. "I sold all these extra houses to sex offenders. I'm sure stealing the car is the last thing on their minds."

"You're phrasing that almost as if they aren't criminals," George-Michael muttered back, stepping up to Michael's front door and knocking.

"Well, I'm sure they'd be willing to bang the tailpipe, but there really isn't much other than the car's virginity for them to take," GOB said with a forced laugh. Buster crossed his arms.

"Yeah," he added, "But they might steal my nursery CD."

Maeby's eyes shot open, her hand immediately grabbing for the keys. "Let me unlock it quick," she offered.

"Oh, seriously. Buster, nobody would have the guts – or ears – to steal your CD," George-Michael pointed out, brushing Maeby away as he knocked again. "Now let's just leave the car alone."

Buster gave a satisfied smile, not trusting that a criminal would leave the album alone but happy with the car still being locked. George-Michael knocked on the door again.

"Hey, Dad," he called at the door. "It's me."

"Well, if I lived here, I wouldn't worry at all about locks," GOB remarked under his breath, just as George-Michael knocked again and the front door swung open.

"Well, I'll be," Maeby said in surprise. "Seems like Michael doesn't, either."

"Dad?" George-Michael called, stepping inside. "Hey, Dad?"

They were all greeted with silence. Maeby shrugged and flopped down on the sofa, pulling out her phone and checking out. Buster didn't know what to do, so he sort of wavered by the wall where he stood. George-Michael ventured farther into the house, peeking through all the rooms.

"Maybe he just went on a walk," Maeby suggested. "His car's here."

"Maybe he got stolen by a sex offender," Buster whispered. George-Michael sat down next to Maeby and decided to call him again.

"Well, while you wait for him to get back," GOB said, approaching his nephew with an outstretched hand, "I need the keys. I'm meeting... someone... somewhere."

"Oh, God, for how long?" George-Michael asked. GOB shrugged.

"I don't know. A few hours?"

It would be more than a few hours.

"Can't you just get a Lyft?" George-Michael suggested, and GOB violently shook his head.

"No," he replied, snatching the keys from his nephew and putting them into his pocket. "I figured out earlier I don't have the patience for those sorts of things."

"Okay, fine," George-Michael sighed, dialing Michael's number and putting the phone to his ear. "Just please don't take forever."

GOB would take forever.

He knew this as he walked out of the door and into the Stair Car, shooing away the people that had congregated around the tailpipe as he put the key in the ignition and sped off. He had little intention of coming back today at all. Maybe he would in the morning. That seemed fair.

George-Michael was sent straight to voicemail, which he was used to at this point. His phone beeped, and he was already prepared to speak into it.

"Hey, Dad," he said. "Just warning you that we're at your house. GOB stranded us here, so I'm guessing well be here when you get back later. If you're getting back later. Anyway, see you soon. Bye."

He hung up. Maeby sighed, tapping away at her own phone and beginning to disappear into the sofa cushions.

"I don't think he's coming back this time," she announced. George-Michael felt his anxiety peak again, but he couldn't ignore how much the statement made sense.

"Yeah," he admitted, swallowing his fear and leaning back. "I think you're right."

Chapter Text

Lucille had decided on a whim to go look for Annyong's old boxes at the model home. She quickly packed the essentials: her money, her purse, two hip flasks, a smaller purse-sized flask – with all these flasks, she might as well have bought a multipurpose holster to strap them all to – a bottle of wine for the trip back—

"You're not driving," George Senior decided. Lucille narrowed her eyes.

"Why?"

"Because you're an alcoholic," he replied, taking her keys off the drawers by the door before she could. Lucille only laughed and rolled her eyes.

"Really, George, I prefer the term alcoholist. I'm a professional. It's what I do. Hell, it could be an art form if I only declared it," she contradicted. "And there certainly isn't a rule that you can't do art and drive, is there?"

"I don't know," George Senior replied as they headed out the door. "I'm pretty sure you'd get pulled over if a cop saw you remaking The Mona Lisa on a four square-foot canvas instead of steering."

"But it's not a rule," Lucille restated, waltzing to the elevator in the style that only an alcoholist would. "I've never heard of it."

A life lesson from Lucille Bluth: if you haven't heard of it (or seen it moping over an enemy in your living room) it doesn't exist. This is why it took her so long to believe in homosexuals. They were like leprechauns to her. Not real.

"Alright, fine," George Senior replied. "But you're still not driving. I don't want to die today."

"And I don't want to live," Lucille replied.

They shared a quiet glance then, both of them internally agreeing and then externally bursting out with a fit of laughter. The elevator doors closed, luckily keeping all the noise inside of it so everyone else living in the godforsaken apartment building could exist without fearing the confirmed existence of The Joker.

They descended to the garage.

"But really, though," George Senior breathed after he'd gotten himself under control again, "you're not driving."

"Well, what are we gonna do, then?" Lucille asked, tipping her head. "You can't drive. Your legal record forbids it."

George Senior, suddenly remembering that he was living in a time after having committed multiple felonies, nodded in confirmation.

"Well."

He took a breath.

"I mean... shit."

Lucille... "drove".

-

Lindsay was making her way to the Sudden Valley home on her own. She had been walking for the past hour or so, and was so concentrated on doing it that she didn't even notice the Bluth family Stair Car as it flew past her in the opposite direction. Nothing could break her determined glare as she narrowed in on the line of houses in the distance. She had just half a mile to go. In fact, she could see Michael's house in just enough detail to know that she was making progress.

She took a lot of personal pride in making this journey. One small step for man; one huge leap for womankind. At least, that's how it was when she was thrown out of the car and onto the grass by the road. Now that she was actually walking, though, it was more like one step for man; multiple more steps for a privileged, blonde, sour cream-colored woman in heels. But this wasn't going to bother her. Absolutely not. Lindsay Bluth-Fünke was one-hundred-percent prepared for this hike.

"These stilettos were made for walking," she muttered to herself with the confidence level of a middle-aged white man, even though her stilettos were not made for walking and were turning her feet a brighter shade of red with each step she took. "One of these days, these stilettos will take more steps than a boot."

And that's when her right heel broke off of her shoe and she rolled her ankle in.

You can't hear the sound it made, but I'll explain it for you by saying this: Imagine the heel coming off with a triumphant snap sound, and then imagine a recording of a chiropractor appointment with the audio boosted all the way up, followed by a bleeped-out string of curse words as Lindsay fell to the ground.

She'd be sitting there and holding her ankle for the next ten minutes or so. Luckily, she only had a good twenty meters left to walk.

She couldn't walk, though, and neither could her stilettos, so she left them on the road and ended up hopping on her left foot all the way to the house. Because, as they say, these feet were made for hoppin'.

Meanwhile, GOB was busy picking up a guest.

"Hey," Tony Wonder said, opening the passenger door of the Stair Car and stepping inside. "Thanks for picking me up. Sally hid my keys so I couldn't exactly get anywhere myself. I almost decided on waiting for a Lyft."

"Oh, same," GOB replied nervously, grabbing the steering wheel white-knuckled and starting the car.

"She tried to convince me I'd made them disappear in a trick, but I haven't done one of those acts since, you know, the closet thing," Tony rambled, kicking one of his knees over the other. "I'm really starting to think she has some sort of possession issues."

"Uh-huh." GOB grabbed his pill bottle from his pocket, shakily throwing one into his mouth as he began to drive. Tony, who had been looking out the window this whole time, sighed and kept talking.

"I don't think I've actually left the house in days, now that I think of it," he added. "Ever since I bought that purple trench coat to match my whole image, I think she's been suspecting something."

"Right," GOB muttered mindlessly, screwing the cap back on his medication bottle. Glancing over at it as he tried to fasten it completely, he was immediately thrown into a state of confusion.

Something about the bottle, even though the road was too bumpy to completely read it correctly, told GOB that he had not just taken an Ativan.

"What the hell is BULLKOCK?" he asked in an interrogating tone, as if questioning the drug itself. Tony, who hadn't actually seen him take it and was just as surprised to see it in his hand as he was, leaned over and read the label.

"Oh, that's BULKO-K™," he said. "I almost did an ad-read for it. It's some erectile dysfunction medication."

"Oh," GOB replied, knowing he had made a huge mistake. "Well, thank God I didn't take it, right?" He forced a laugh, as did Tony, and then the Stair Car was unbearably quiet.

GOB's recent anxiety was now skyrocketing more. On one hand, he was driving Tony Wonder somewhere to spend time with him, and he had just taken a penis pill that was probably illegal and therefore powerful as all hell, and, to top it all off, he had no idea what happened to the Ativan. He could have mistaken the bottles for one another in the back of the car, or he could've done it all the way back home, but he'd have to drive in a panicked state regardless. He needed a distraction. Anything to take his mind off any of this at all.

Tony, on the other hand, was just introverted and thought it was a nice time to be quiet. Granted, he thought that most of the time, anyway.

"Feel free to turn on the radio," GOB offered quietly, although it was phrased more as a desperate request than an actual option. Tony nodded and reached for the stereo, hitting the outdated power button as it slowly came to life.

It was quiet for a bit, and then hell broke loose at once.

"The itsy, bitsy spider went up the water spout," the radio burst out. Tony blinked, experiencing an emotion he hadn't come in contact with before.

"Oh, God," GOB said, a strange look coming over his face that seemed to be some vague sub-genre of distress. And so it was a combination of this, his crippling nervousness, and the fact that Tony now likely thought GOB had chosen this CD that caused him to rapidly spin the old-fashioned window crank next to him, hit the brakes, and projectile vomit out the window.

"Down came the rain and washed the spider out," the CD narrated for us as the BULKO-K™ pill was discarded from his system and donated kindly to the street. This part was a relief, actually. GOB was glad it was the concrete below him that would end up getting an erection – or penile cancer – instead of him.

Out of all the possible people that could have puked in the Stair Car today, GOB Bluth had not expected it to be himself. So, surprised at the turn of events, he let out a long breath of relief as he sat back down in his seat, his foot still firm on the brake, and stared out the windshield at the ominously setting sun.

"That sunset is the color of my vomit," he observed nonchalantly, taking long, deep breaths as he felt a lot of his anxiety slipping away from him. "So coordinated. That's insane."

"What—" Tony exclaimed, turning off the radio in concern. "Are you okay?"

"I wonder what I ate," GOB replied. "Why is it so orange? I haven't even seen a carrot since, like, February."

Tony opened the passenger door and started to step out. "Feel free to let me drive," he offered quietly, although it was phrased more as a desperate command than an actual option.

Stopping over to the driver's side, though, he stopped and examined some of the vomit trail that had been left on the door. Leaning over, he wrinkled his nose as he stared.

"Is that a whole entire Dorito?"

"That's it," GOB pointed at nothing. "Doritos. I must've been stress-eating again. You know how that is."

Tony did not. Sally had hidden all the Doritos they owned, likely in the same spot that she'd put his keys.

"It'd be helpful if you could let me in," he said. "The door handle certainly wouldn't be pleasant to touch right now."

"Oh, yeah," GOB replied, opening the driver's door for him. "Come in."

Tony stared. GOB stared back.

"You'll have to move first," Tony pointed out, to which GOB promptly hopped over to the passenger's seat as if he had been thinking of that all along.

"Yep," he said, pretending he was fully-functioning as he closed the door on his side and latched his seatbelt over his shoulder.

"Unless, of course, you wanted me to sit on your lap," Tony joked as he climbed in to the driver's side. "Pretty sure that's illegal, though."

GOB tried to give a convincing-sounding laugh, suddenly realizing there was still a bit of BULKO-K™ left in his system. Yanking his seatbelt tight against his lap, he cleared his throat.

"I, uh..." he said, trying to gather his thoughts. "I thought gay people became legal back in 1999 or something."

Tony chuckled, casually wiping the sweat from GOB's hands off the steering wheel with a flute rag he found in the cupholder next to him. "You're funny," he said. "Did you know that?"

And it was at that moment that GOB realized what it really meant to be a disaster gay. Urban Dictionary doesn't explain it well enough, but we sure can, and what we can tell you is that the definition is nothing other than George Oscar "GOB" Bluth himself.

During all the chaos, George-Michael had failed once again at contacting his father back in Sudden Valley. Lindsay, who had finally made it to the house and had wrapped her blue and swollen ankle up with ice, really wasn't helping, either. In fact, she had been sort of glaring at him the whole time, probably because he'd screamed and tried to lock the door when she hobbled up to it. In his defense, he had thought she was a sex offender.

"Don't you think it's a little strange that he's been gone for almost two weeks and won't even answer his phone?" George-Michael asked, because it sure as hell was strange to him.

Maeby looked up from her round of Crossy Road at the question. "Oh, George-Michael, you're getting ahead of yourself," she said. "Remember when he left on that boat with you and we didn't hear from you for much longer than just two weeks?"

"Well, we came back almost immediately," George-Michael reasoned. "I was just extra quiet for a while."

Maeby scoffed. "Yeah. You didn't talk for a good three weeks after coming home," she said. "Makes me wonder if you even liked us."

George-Michael sighed, putting his phone in his pocket and standing up. "Look, Dad always picks up when I call," he said. "And he isn't back yet. We've been here for hours."

Buster finally piped up, his door hand submerged in a piece of floss he was winding around it in pure, concentrated boredom. "Well, what are you gonna do? Worry about it?"

George-Michael shrugged. "I mean, well... Yeah."

Lindsay, finally giving up on her dirty looks, repositioned the ice around her ankle and leaned back. "Okay, fine," she said. "I do admit it is a little strange."

George-Michael nodded. "Thank you."

"But I also think he probably needs a break," Lindsay added. Her nephew... thing felt immediately betrayed by this sentence.

"What?" he asked in the tone of someone who had just been thrown off of the Titanic by their own parent. Lindsay shrugged, looking up at the ceiling as she tried to speak eloquently about the subject.

"I left everyone for a few months," she explained, "and it was the most peaceful, liberating, freeing, happy, joyful, extraordinary, amazing–"

Maeby rolled her eyes. "We get it."

"–slutty time of my life," Lindsay finished. "So, really, I don't blame him."

George-Michael crossed his arms, glancing nervously around the room and not taking anything that Lindsay said into perspective by intentional choice.

"I'm gonna email him," he decided, pulling out his phone again. "When all else fails, email is the way to go."

It wasn't. I can name seven people who haven't answered their emails from me in years. So good luck to him, I guess.

Chapter Text

Hey, Dad.

I've called you and you haven't picked up. I'm at your house and you aren't. At least just let me know you're alright. I'm getting worried.

Also, please tell me where my old boxes are if you know.

Thanks,
George-Michael

Sent from my iPhone

-
Life in Sudden Valley could have been better.

First off, the four of them – George-Michael, Maeby, Lindsay and Buster – were all stranded in the Sudden Valley home together with no means of leaving other than calling some sort of modern carpool service for a ride, walking, or stealing Michael's car (they would have done the latter but they couldn't find the keys). Second, Lindsay had decided she was at the top of the pecking order, claiming she was disabled and deserved extra respect because she was a woman with a sprained ankle. Buster had since been delivering her food from the refrigerator and changing out the ice on her foot whenever she asked him to while she sat on the couch and watched overrated talk shows with the volume up to 77. Even Maeby had to leave the room, and she was the least sensitive out of all of them to any sort of stimuli.

So she and George-Michael climbed the stairs and closed themselves in the quietest place they could find, which just so happened to be Michael's closet. They could still hear Wendy Williams, but at least it was less of a 77 to them and more like a 39.

"God, I'm so glad to be away from all that," George-Michael breathed in relief. "I mean, Aunt Lindsay's behavior was nothing new, but I really didn't enjoy how the television volume wasn't a multiple of five, and I guess that's just my own anxiety talking, but—"

"Hey, you thirsty?" Maeby, who gave zero percent of a shit, said suddenly, leaning back against one of the walls and shoving away the long shirt that had blocked her face from view. "There was wine downstairs. And I'm guessing the Stair Car won't be back for quite some time."

"He said he'd come back in a few hours," George-Michael replied, meaning GOB, not the car. "It's already been about two. It shouldn't be too long."

Maeby scoffed. "The bitch can barely even drive. Don't hold him in such high regards." She stood up and shoved the closet doors open, the television immediately escalating to a 58 in the closet as she prepared for her trip. "I'll be right back."

And then George-Michael was left alone in his missing father's closet with nothing other than his own thoughts to keep him occupied. This really wasn't helpful, either, because his mind wandered back to people comparing him to rats, and then even further back to the last time he and Maeby shared a bottle of wine.

It was then that he realized that this was a terrible idea.

"Hey, Maeby," he yelled over Wendy Williams' voice as his cousin ran back into the closet with a bottle of wine and two cups. "I think this might not be the best idea."

"Oh, lighten up," Maeby replied, pouring a glass for each of them and passing him one. "What's the worst that could happen?"

"Remember when we were younger and did something quite similar to this and ended up making out all night?" George-Michael asked, to which Maeby merely scoffed and waved a hand in dismissal.

"Making out isn't bad," she said. "I didn't get pregnant and the authorities never found out about a thing. Loosen up."

George-Michael swallowed nervously. "Yeah, well, that wasn't even real wine," he pointed out. "It wasn't alcoholic at all and we still went pretty far."

"Well, what do you suggest?" Maeby asked sarcastically. "Adult supervision? You know we're adults, right?"

"Incest is illegal," George-Michael muttered weakly in response.

This was a pretty strong argument, I must say. And Maeby knew it, so she didn't try to respond. Instead, she kept holding the cup in front of George-Michael until he took it. And that alone was a good argument, too.

-

Lucille actually wasn't a bad driver when she was drunk. But she wasn't actually a bad person when she was drunk in relation to when she was sober, either, so maybe the alcohol just made her better at everything. Or perhaps it was that the more she drank, the less you'd suspect her of it. It was an oxymoronic paradigm that may never be scientifically explained; a phenomenon that not even Elon Musk could get down to unraveling. And believe me when I say we tried to ask him to, but he has not yet responded to our emails. Although, really, who uses email anymore?

Lucille parked expertly outside the family home, taking her sunglasses off and leaving them in her seat as she and George Senior stepped out. She ignored the fact that her ex-husband opened the door for her, which was disappointing in his eyes but honestly not very surprising in ours. In her eyes, however, was shock.

"Oh, hello, Lucille," Google Translate greeted her as Tobias smiled at the two visitors.

"Tobias," George Senior exclaimed. "You're in a wheelchair."

Tobias nodded as his phone explained. "I had a few hard blows, if you were wondering, and my knees really took the worst of the bruising."

"I don't even want to know," Lucille sighed, stepping completely inside the house and checking her hair to make sure the stagnant Californian air hadn't rustled it in any way.

George Senior closed the door behind them as he walked in, wrinkling his nose in disgusted surprise.

"It smells awfully fishy in here," he said, meaning it quite literally (and he was right; the walls had begun to reek more and more each day). Tobias began to suddenly type into his phone as Lucille looked around the room.

"I was going to say the same thing," she said, meaning it quite figuratively. "And the stench should lead us right to Annyong."

With that, she turned and headed up the stairs, George Senior right behind her as Tobias clicked his screen and asked a question far too late for them to hear.

"You know, I've been trapped in this entryway for hours. It'd be lovely if you could guide me down the stairs so I don't have to break another—"

Since the sentence was too long, the voice stopped. Not like it would have made any difference if it hadn't, because the two other people in the house were already up the stairs and out of earshot.

So, sighing and keeping himself occupied by watching absolutely nothing happen outside, Tobias patiently waited for a second chance. Lord knows he loved getting those.

Meanwhile, the Stair Car had been parked in a bustling part of town that GOB was admittedly unfamiliar with, and he found himself surrounded by shops, food, bars and entertainment.

It had taken Tony about thirty minutes to introduce the city to him, giving a complicated backstory on how he was connected to the place and somehow relating it to his magic career through it all. GOB half-listened, getting the gist and simultaneously worrying about the BULKO-K™ while following his nemesis' lead around town.

"—and down the block there is where I first got my beard in the shape of a W," Tony pointed. "I had to start doing it myself after that though because the barber died, like, two days later from some sort of hemorrhage. Or maybe it was hemorrhoids."

It was actually both. Tony had magically made nickels shoot out of his barber's anus, causing such violent shock and bruising that his vessels burst. The hospital wouldn't take him in because they were convinced he was lying once they heard the backstory and came to the conclusion he was just a junkie looking for drugs. So he really died on Tony's part, which went unmentioned.

"I'd hate to go that way," GOB remarked with a laugh, which Tony reflected back.

"Yeah," he replied. "Pretty unfortunate. I'd rather be stabbed to death in an arena and carried off in a bright red sheet for everyone to see instead of dying from an ass problem."

They shared a moment of silent agreement, both wondering what it'd actually be like to recreate a much more eventful, adult version of Ferdinand instead of dying of hemorrhoids.

"So you frequent here?" GOB asked. "Is this where you learned magic?"

Tony had been waiting for this question the whole entire time. He had practiced somewhat of a monologue in the mirror all day, actually, and had been just itching to perform it. So, remembering the precise tone he wanted it delivered in and the specific poetic order of the words, he took a breath and replied.

"Yeah," he said, which was the entire thing.

There was a beat of silence, GOB shuffling his feet as Tony gave an awkward nod. Getting the sense that more information was expected, he improvised more of a legitimate monologue and fired off into it, pointing to a small shop across the street. It was the only store in sight that currently had no people crowded around it. In fact, it quite resembled GOB's latest magic act, aside from the fact that there were two people actually paying attention to the shambled old thing at all.

"I got my first magic set there," he explained. "I used to bike over and take classes after school. I would take you inside to show it to you, but the owner is pretty senile now. He's got some screws loose. Last time I went in, he asked me if I had any interest in a seventy-pound slab of steak, and when I said I didn't, he glared at me and told me he'd turn me into a seventy-pound slab of steak."

"So you left?" GOB asked, and Tony shrugged.

"Actually, I, um," he swallowed. "I bought the steak. It's in my garage right now. Starting to smell, but at least it wasn't me that was chopped up like beef, right?"

GOB narrowed his eyes, tipping his head at the reply. "I... guess."

Tony motioned to the sidewalk ahead of them. "You know, we should probably walk around," he said. "We're only, like, a yard away from your..." He squinted questioningly at the Stair Car. "...vehicle."

He was right. They hadn't really moved much, and I was quite bored at this moment just because there was no change of scenery at all. God, imagine how lame the cameramen feel.

"Oh, look, a kiosk," GOB said helpfully, motioning to a place for them – and the plot – to actually go. Tony squinted at it, pursing his lips and realizing that he'd forgotten his contacts at home.

"Yeah," he said. "That really is vaguely the shape of one, isn't it?"

So, crossing the street and making their way up to it, the two Hetero™ magicians finally started doing something a little bit interesting.

The kiosk was actually a sample stand positioned sloppily outside of a somewhat-sketchy Taiwanese joint. Small servings of some kind of meat were all laid out in little paper cups – you know, the Dixie kind they serve CapriSun in at childrens' birthday parties so the kids don't get too much and find their way through the drywall – with toothpicks that were colored red for some reason.

"What's this?" GOB asked as he pointed to a very specific cup, even though all the cups were exactly identical.

"It is from bull," the man behind the stand said cheerfully as they both reached for a sample. Tony chuckled for a moment, absentmindedly sticking the meat with his toothpick over and over again.

"That was my nickname in high school," he said quietly, causing GOB to have a nervous laugh attack, only stopping for breath and to finally speak.

"Like, for real, though?" he finally asked once Tony's expression hinted it. "Like, not as a joke?"

Tony shrugged. "Whenever I told people I was doing magic, they'd say something like, 'Oh, that's bull,'" he explained. "Pretty common they'd say that. Even after the trick was done."

"Oh," GOB replied, staring down at his toothpick. "Wait. Actually, I guess that was also... my nickname in high school."

It was silent for a while, but you might want to imagine the saturation slowly fading to black-and-white while the first few piano measures of Mad World play softly in the far distance. We'd continue our old trendsetting meme and use The Sound of Silence, but the rights to the thing are harder to get, especially when you already don't have the rights to Arrested Development in the first place.

"You know, this actually doesn't taste anything like beef," GOB remarked after finally trying the vague Taiwanese sample. Tony nodded in agreement, furrowing his brow at the experience.

"Yeah," he said. "It's more like chicken or something."

"Mine tastes like pork," GOB said, and Tony leaned over to closely examine his sample.

"Oh, really? Let me try," he said like an average Heterosexual Cisgendered Man™.

So they both offered the other some of their sample, which immediately turned into them mercilessly shoving the bull into each other's mouths like small children on two Dixie cups worth of CapriSun. This escalated until they were throwing bits and pieces at one another, laughing about five decibels too loudly as the chef watched them with a blank expression often seen on people dissociating due to stress-induced psychosis.

GOB gave the taste of Tony's sample some actual thought before saying, "Yeah, neither of our samples tastes like beef."

They laughed explosively for some reason. I really can't even guess why that might be. Maybe anxiety on GOB's part, and maybe Tony forgot about acting Hetero™ for a second. Regardless, my ears are bleeding, and are about to bleed more.

"Ah, but it is not just beef," the chef interjected cheerfully, cutting off their laughter before it hurt anyone else. The two magicians turned to him in silent, intrigued suspicion, Tony's hand resting on GOB's shoulder after giving him an amused shove. This caused GOB to inwardly panic a bit, so he outwardly spoke to distract himself.

"Oh," GOB replied to the chef, narrowing his eyes. "Then... what is it?"

The chef gave a big smile, seeming very proud of what he had cooked and gingerly offering the main ingredient of the cursed recipe the two were about to realize they had just ingested.

"It is bull's penis," he announced. Shocking.

So shocking, in fact, that the entire street seemed to fall completely still upon hearing this. The sudden silence itself was so abrupt, too, that even the man behind the stand looked taken aback.

Neither GOB nor Tony could decide how to react then. On one hand, they had just shared two different samples of a bull cock, but on the other, they couldn't deny it had actually tasted pretty good. No homo, though. It was probably because of the barbecue sauce.

This situation was disastrous, sure. But at least there were morals involved, unlike a different storyline I'm about to pull you back into.

In a straighter part of California, Lucille was waist-deep in storage boxes, shuffling through them all with a strained look on her face. George Senior stood behind her, trying to scan the room. Since he lived up in the attic for years, he was confident he could at least try to remember where the boxes were. Alas, he was just a dumbass. The boxes were nowhere to be found.

"We've been up here for hours, George," Lucille sighed, closing the lid of a box full of extra kitchenware and shoving it back against the wall. "I dont think it's here."

George Senior sighed and put his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels and giving a casual shrug.

"Well, I guess we have no choice but to go back home," he said, "and maybe... sit down, get a glass of wine, look out at the sky..."

"I'm out of wine," Lucille replied dismissively, shutting one more box and heading to the stairs. "And it smells awful up here. It's like we're hiding a dead body again."

"We should reschedule the exterminators," George Senior said, following her as she climbed down the ladder and reached the second story of the house again.

"You do that, George," Lucille responded. "I'm gonna find that box."

So the two rushed out of the house, moving too quickly past Tobias for him to ask again for help with the stairs.

"And we should restock my wine on the way back," Lucille thought aloud as the two seniors left the model home and stepped into her convertible. "You're not getting any of it, by the way. No 'us'. And especially no... whatever you said about the sky."

She hit the gas, and George Senior took out his phone again, typing out another one of his rare texts.

Do you know where
Annyong's boxes
< are?

This text sent itself to the phone of one person who, unlike the two of them, had no shortage of wine on his hands.

That's right. George-Michael, who was always insecure and bad at enforcing boundaries, had given into the peer pressure and had swallowed down two Solo cups worth of wine. I'm guessing the ratio of Dixie cups of CapriSun to small children was the same as Solo cups of wine to him, because he was starting to lose his grip on reality. This just showed how little he actually drank. Maeby, on the other hand, relatively wasn't the most affected by what she'd had, and she was on her fourth.

"I don't know about you," she said a bit drowsily, "but I'm really gonna have to piss later."

George-Michael nodded, his eyelids drooping heavily over his vision. "Yeah, I will, too. Probably."

His phone buzzed again in his pocket, lighting the closet up a bit. He ignored it.

"This closet reminds me of our closet before we moved out," Maeby remarked. "Remember how we shoved all our stuff in there? Super cramped with all those boxes and posters and stuff."

"Yeah," George-Michael replied slowly, leaning his head back against the wall.

"It's empty now, which is too bad," Maeby added. "Looked for all our things and couldn't find them. If they're not in the attic, I bet Michael moved it all to Gangy's place since we were all there more often anyway."

George-Michael nodded.

And then he blinked.

And then he nodded again.

"Yeah," he repeated himself, realizing he might have just found the solution to his problem of finding his old things. "Yeah, that sounds right."

So, opening his phone and selecting the message from George Senior, he finally replied with something a little bit shady (which really wasn't on purpose but worked to his advantage). Although he could have helpfully answered the question directly, he decided not to.

Do you know where
my boxes are? >

This would result in George Senior feeling pressured to make some sort of under-the-table deal that his grandson really hadn't been intending to happen in the first place. However, if it meant getting all the incest-ridden love letters back in their original hands, George-Michael was really up for anything.

He was also scared of going to jail.

So he just rolled with it.

Chapter Text

Masculinity can be fragile. This fact shows itself in multiple different forms, whether it be two men constantly trying to convince the other that they're straight even though they've already slept together, or those same two men sprinting full-speed away from a sample stand as if they're running from Freddy Krueger after realizing that they've both just force-fed each other an actual penis. Although maybe that's normal, though, because I feel like women wouldn't have the best reaction to finding out they've eaten cow labia, either. I can't decide whether or not that's beside the point.

GOB and Tony had run like mad ants away from the Taiwanese restaurant, not knowing how to react at all to anything that had just happened. They were now positioned in an alley a street away, leaning against the decaying brick wall and panting like they'd just run a marathon. I mean, in an emotional sense, they kind of had.

"I haven't eaten..." GOB gasped, his hand grasping his side, "...a penis... before."

"Well," Tony replied, swallowing as he tried to catch his breath, "there's a first for everything..."

He paused, a blank expression crossing his face as he lifted up his first finger.

"...but, actually," he self-contradicted, giving a sly look at his co-magician-enemy-partner-thing, "it really wasn't your first."

"What was..." GOB furrowed his brow, leaning over and resting his hands on his knees. "What do you mean?"

Tony pointed at himself. Although it was a simple reply, it still took a few moments to sink in.

"Oh," GOB said with a nervous laugh, pointing at Tony along with him. "Your penis."

Tony nodded, chortling at his own joke as GOB slowly started losing his sanity. He laughed again.

"What I had meant, though," he clarified, "was that I, uh... I was talking about actually swallowing a... Wait, no, that still doesn't change the context, does it?"

Tony knotted his brows together and offered a confused wheeze.

"Your penis," GOB repeated breathily, as if he was coming to terms with it for the first time (there's a first for everything, you know). "Hah."

"Yeah," Tony replied. GOB did not seem to hear this, though, because he was starting to have an emotional breakdown in the middle of the alley after thinking too much about Tony Wonder's magical schlong and then beginning to have a panic attack after remembering he'd swallowed a BULKO-K™️, furthermore remembering he was only allowed to be here on straight terms and hoping it wasn't too obvious he was failing.

It was obvious.

"So what," GOB stammered through pained, panicked laughs, "what-wha-wha-what should I– shou-sh-should should I should shou-should-shou-sh– should I do with kn-knowing that I– that I– I– ce-cement-trick-ce-ce shou-should I– s-s-straight should–"

We'll leave him there for Tony to deal with until he calms down. Emotional support isn't my job.

-

Lindsay's ankle could have been a hell of a lot better. At this point, it was swollen up to the size of her thigh, which made for an awfully strange visual experience along with an awfully inconvenient lack of transportation to the hospital. They'd already had to pay two ambulance bills that day for Tobias. They didn't need a third.

And besides, Lindsay wanted her ankle to magically fix itself. If she ended up with a cast, that would mean she'd be bound to the house and therefore bound to Tobias (not counting that she had already been bound to him by marriage), and that was something she could not let happen. So she pretended her injury didn't exist.

She had switched the channel to Dr. Phil now, which was arguably a lot better than the crap she'd been watching prior. This show was a lot quieter, even when still cranked up to 77, and this was much appreciated in the dark closet upstairs where Maeby and George-Michael were very predictably making out.

"This is a bad idea," George-Michael whispered, keeping the bad idea going. One of his hands was still on his cup of wine so it wouldn't spill on the carpet as he spoke. Maeby, as usual, didn't fully get the memo.

"Yeah. Isn't it great?" she asked in reply, pushing him against the wall and kissing him more. He only pretended he didn't like it. To try and distract himself, he focused on keeping his wine cup level with the carpeted floor so it didn't end up looking like someone died behind the walls.

"Illegal, incestuous and immoral," Dr. Phil explained from downstairs. "First cousins Angie and Michael say no laws or opinions can keep them apart."

George-Michael wasn't surprised that such a coincidental episode was playing. In fact, he had already watched it on YouTube when researching the legalities of his situation (which is how he knew "incest is illegal") and also knew that it would be a rerun this week. He had hoped to somehow get Maeby to watch it and realize that what they were doing wasn't worth it. But, really, she probably wouldn't care.

Actually, she didn't care, and this displayed itself quite majestically as she started nonchalantly unbuttoning George-Michael's shirt, much to the startled dismay of him.

"Dr. Sophy, do you have any concerns here?" Dr. Phil asked helpfully from downstairs.

"Oh, like, I can't even begin to tell you," came the reply. George-Michael really resonated with that. So much, actually, that one might even think he'd want it tattooed.

"What are you doing?" he asked his cousin. "You know it becomes, like, seven times more wrong when clothes start coming off?"

"Isn't that the fun of it?" Maeby asked, and the downstairs television offered a word of support.

"I understand," a voice from it said. "It's still incest."

And in that moment, while Maeby was too busy giving him a scrutinizing stare to continue unbuttoning his shirt, George-Michael forgot Mo Lee and Add-A-Kratz and decided that Dr. Phil himself was his hero.

He would never have a hero for a shorter time. Just when he'd proclaimed it to himself, an even better one arose: his own grandfather. And this was surprising, considering this man committed arson, treason and multiple accounts of fraud, not to mention being an overall terrible human being and especially drab recently now that Lucille had rejected him, resulting in his personality turning into that of a teenage white girl probably named Grace and probably living somewhere vaguely between Tennessee and Pennsylvania who likes "deep" posts on Instagram, carries around a hydroflask, and wears the sluttiest mandala-patterned yoga pants ever seen on God's green Earth, complete with a thong and seven best friends that all look and act like exact clones of her. The only difference was that George Senior was in his early eighties, was a man, and had no friends.

But what he had, in fact, done, was become his grandson's biggest hero, even if only temporarily. To elaborate, he had texted him at such a perfect time that George-Michael was able to take out his phone before Maeby could go back to her diabolical plan and pretend to care about responding.

What do you mean,
< your boxes?

George-Michael was quick to answer initially, but kept going back and editing what he typed to buy himself time to think of how he could go about stopping his cousin from seducing him, which was proving to be quite difficult now that they both had wine in their systems.

You know, all
my drawings and
letters from my
childhood? >

Are you missing
< boxes, too?

Yeah >

Well, that's too bad.
Really unfortunate
for the both of us.
< I'll keep a lookout

George-Michael found this last message suspicious. In fact, he suddenly decided that his grandfather actually did know where his letters were and was trying to blackmail him because he probably thought he had Annyong's boxes. And thenceforth, Dr. Phil was, yet again, George-Michael's hero.

Meanwhile, George Senior thought George-Michael was not only aware of where Annyong's boxes were, but additionally trying to distract them from that by asking about his own keepsakes. Therefore, he became suspicious that his grandson knew why they wanted the boxes and was trying to gain leverage on them.

What he then realized was that he actually had seen a box of George-Michael's in Lucille's storage closet at the apartment. And this sparked multiple conflicting thoughts in his mind at once, his weak morals and weak sense of confidence battling to see which would give out first before he could take any sort of relating action on it.

But before he needed to do so, George-Michael texted back, setting the stage for his choice by proposing somewhat of a ransom note.

If you're thinking of
some sort of trade,
I could find you the
box by next week >

And this was true. George-Michael also remembered seeing a few of Annyong's boxes in the attic, so he and his grandfather were really in the same boat at that moment. Taking out of consideration, of course, a first cousin attempting to illegally and drunkenly seduce one of them. Maeby would argue that this was beside the point, and probably redirect our attention to the fact that Lucille had finally rescheduled the exterminators to go through the walls at the model home.

And so she had. In a perfume-soaked frenzy, she saturated herself in any scent she could find to distract herself from even the faintest memory of what the family house smelled like. This included strongly-smelling alcohol, although that was usually a given anyway. Holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder, Lucille even rubbed some perfume into the soles of her flat shoes with an expensive ivory-colored cloth as she directed them to inspect the premises immediately.

They said they would, and so they promptly got in their trucks and drove directly to... eat, where they took an efficient 36.7 minutes to thoroughly consume their late dinner, only proving their strong work ethic, and then realized none of them had a wallet, so they all drove back to retrieve their wallet and went back to the fast food joint to pay for their food. And they made good time, too. They were called at eleven at night and they got to the house at four in the morning. And, being payed both by the hour and for gas mileage, they had already made a good two hundred bucks before even getting into the house.

"Hello," Google Translate greeted them properly as they came in. "I didn't know anyone else would be coming in today."

Tobias had been stuck in the entryway for twelve hours.

"Yeah, we got a call from a Lucille Bluth," one of the exterminators said, casually walking past him and plugging his nose with his fingers. "God, it stinks."

"That it does," Tobias said via his phone. "Anyway, I was wondering, because I've been waiting here all day for someone to come by, if any of you three fellas would be willing to lower down—"

Google, once again, stopped in the middle of its sentence. Tobias sighed and retyped the rest of what he was aiming to say.

"Since my ass is so tight from just waiting around here all day."

He smiled innocently at the three men that had congregated around the nearest wall. The first sighed and shook his head.

"Look, we get that a lot," he said, "but those days are behind us now. We left the porn industry years ago and are trying to establish better futures."

"Well, good for you," Tobias replied. "It would be great, though, if one of you could kindly do me a solid—"

Technology really wasn't on Tobias' side that day. Neither was life in general, actually. Because not only did Google decide the sentence was too long to go through, but his phone, being an Apple device on 30% battery, decided it was a valid time to die.

So Dr. Tobias Fünke, bound to a wheelchair without a voice or means of getting himself down the two stairs that already ruined him and preferably wouldn't again, could only sit in his spot and make prolonged eye contact with the ex-pornstars that had been hired by his mother-in-law to clean out his walls. Don't take that sentence out of context.

"Look, we already told you," the second exterminator said, swinging his sledgehammer up onto his shoulder, still under the impression that Tobias was asking for sex. "We aren't interested."

"Also," the third added, "we don't know how to handle people who are..." He motioned to the wheelchair. "...quadriplegic." This term also did a great job of showing off his stunning vocabulary and common sense, especially considering Tobias had been fully using his arms and upper body ever since the three men walked through the door.

Tobias was in no state to retaliate and explain what he meant by what he said. His phone, as explained, was dead. He had no charger or outlet he could plug it into without getting down the stairs. So, wallowing in his own internal misery, Tobias could only sit in his wheelchair and give a silent, defeated smile.

"Alright," the second worker said, taking a look at the first wall in front of them. "Where shall we start?"

"Sounds good," the third said, not hearing the "where" in the sentence and immediately swinging his sledgehammer into a random spot on the wall. The others joined him, completely destroying the plaster until they were surrounded by white dust, which Tobias leniently breathed. "Good thing we know what we're doing!"

They did not.

As they pounded away at the house, a huge part of the wall gracefully detached from the rest of it, toppling over and landing with a loud thud on the stairs. The three men had not predicted this would happen. In fact, they just stood there, looking down at the thing they'd done. They weren't even qualified to know if this was normal. But Tobias didn't mind.

In fact, Tobias was grateful. The wall had landed on the stairs in the form of a perfect ramp. So, suddenly thinking that the men actually had known what he had meant and did this on purpose to help him down the stairs, he wheeled himself to the ground level, turned around, and did his best "thank you" in sign language. Which, by the way, he was still signing as "fuck you". And the second man did know sign language.

"He just said 'fuck you'" he whispered to the other two. "Probably because we ruined his wall."

"They signed a contract up front to pay for our hours regardless of outcome, right?" the third asked, to which the first nodded.

"Then let's get out of here," they all said in unison as if they were on a scripted television show, turning around and rushing out of the house and to their van, which Tobias now realized didn't look too much like a legitimate company van as much as it did a stairless Stair Car.

Feeling strangely nonchalant about this whole series of events, Tobias decided that, while he charged his phone, he should use a replacement method of communicating with the outside world. So, with the newfound liberated determination of a handicapped person rolling all the way into a separate room by themselves, he grabbed the family laptop from the counter and opened it up.

Staring down at it, he remained phased for a few moments until Google translate, rattling out of the old built-in speaker, narrated what was before him.

"That's a vagina," said the device. Although nobody who had ever opened that laptop before would be surprised.

Next on: Arrested Development

GOB gets some news delivered to him straight.

"You know," Tony said, tapping the edge of his water with the plastic straw it was provided with, "I just saw you were in an episode of that one show, um, And Such Unto You Be It As It'll Be..."

GOB piped in as a waitress set a glass in front of him on the old wooden table, trying to help but really making the situation worse. "And Unto Us Also Would It Become As Such..."

"...And Alas It Is Without Question," Tony added before both of them confidently ended with, "Unto You."

What Tony had meant was And As It Is Such, So Also As Such Is It Unto You, the Christian television show hosted by the father of GOB's ex-accidental-fiancée, Ann. He had made many appearances on it, especially during his big gay phase which he definitely was not in anymore at all in any shape or form, by the way.

"Oh really?" GOB finally reacted, both of them taking a huge sip of water and ignoring the menus before them (the only reason they were in a restaurant in the first place was to get the sweet taste of bull's penis out of their mouths, and water seemed to be doing the trick). "How did you, uh... You knew I was on it. Like, did you look me up? Because, I mean, I'm fine with that; I'm just... wondering."

"Wonder-ing," Tony replied enthusiastically, pointing across the table at his magic nemesis. "Ha."

"Oh!" GOB joined in, another nervous chuckle leaving his lips as he pointed back. "HA."

They were both quiet for a moment, not in the pleasant way but in the way that's tense because you've both just eaten a penis and are trying not to talk about it. Relatable, right? Hate it when that happens.

GOB awkwardly took a sip that was incredibly premeditated, for the sake of something to cope with the silence rather than for the common sake of being hydrated. Tony Wonder stuck his straw in his cup and decided to talk again.

"Yeah, but no," he said disappointingly, which was a sentence that made sense for some miraculous reason. "I just accidentally switched to that one Christian channel that's in those creepy high numbers on cable. I was trying to punch in 5-7 but I forgot the hyphen, so..." He left the sentence hanging, taking a sip of water and relishing over how much it didn't taste like a dick.

"Oh, yeah, hyphens can be really important," GOB replied. Tony didn't seem to register that response as particularly important or interesting, judging by how quickly he skimmed over it.

"Yeah, anyway, it was a rerun from a while back and... you were on it, and... I mean..." Tony forced an expression of concern. "You maybe... seemed pretty gay."

"Oh, really?" GOB asked, sitting back in his chair and incredulously crossing one of his plaid-jean-possessing legs over the other. "I didn't even notice."

Tony narrowed his eyes. "That's why you were there, though." Then, if possible, his facial expression said, "...?"

GOB's facial expression, in response, said "...,,,:.~" as he weighed his conversational options. If he confessed to that, then that meant not being able to hang out with Tony Wonder. And he'd been a liar his whole life; there wasn't too much of a problem in keeping up the tradition for just a bit longer.

"...Whaaaaat?" he then asked aloud, as if his life was innocently unbeknownst to himself. Tony took another sip of water before shrugging and giving a long sigh.

"Are you ready to order?" their waitress asked, standing uncomfortably close to their table and being uncomfortably pushy about them buying food.

"What do you suggest?" GOB asked absentmindedly. The waitress pointed to the Specials section of the menu.

"Pizzle tartare," she said. "It's our newest dish. Very exotic, with both French and Taiwanese roots."

They ordered it, unaware that it was exactly what they had just eaten across the street. Tony went back to his last point.

"Look, if you're gay, I..." He paused. "It's my girlfriend. You know her."

"Uh huh," GOB replied, trying his best to sound like he liked her as a person. But GOB was never a respecting-women type, especially when the said woman was dating Tony Wonder himself.

Tony looked down at the table. "She's just... I've started waxing my legs out of pure choice and she's just starting to get a little suspicious of us..." He trailed off, the point of that information completely missed by his audience.

"You... wax your legs?" GOB asked, intrigued.

"Look," Tony added, "I need to stay with her because otherwise she'll ruin my reputation, and if you're still gay, I don't think we'll be able to hang out anymore."

"Not even as rivals?" GOB asked, and Tony shook his head.

"No."

The waitress arrived again with the food, showing up so quickly that it was quite clear the food had been frozen and microwaved. Looking down at it, though, GOB's paranoia made the connection that it was, indeed, another penis, and decided not to eat. Tony took a bite, nodding as he placed the fork down.

"Oh, this is good!" he exclaimed.

"Okay, look," GOB said with a breathy chuckle, making the point that he had been trying to all along. "I'm not gay. I'm straight."

Technically speaking, he wasn't really either of those things (once we looked it up we suspected he might align best with the title of homoromantic bisexual), so he honestly was only half-lying.

"Are you, though?" Tony interjected interjectingly.

GOB sighed for a very long time, staring at the grains in the dumbass table in stressed contemplation.

He decided to go in for a follow-up.

"Welcome to And As It Is Such, So Also As Such Is It Unto You," Pastor Veal announced, sitting pleasantly on the whitest sofa GOB had possibly ever seen and was surprised by every time he showed up. "Now we're here today with someone who has made multiple appearances not only on this show but in my life as well, who has a topic he'd like to speak to us about."

GOB shifted in his seat, glancing nervously at a banner across the room that read GOD in big, bold letters. It reminded him of his own name, and he pretended there was a horizontal line in the middle of the D so it would read his name for encouragement purposes.

"Yeah," he forced out, keeping his eyes locked on GOD. "So, um... I just wanna make sure I'm straight, you know?"

Pastor Veal tipped his head. "My son, did the conversion not work?"

GOB felt himself slipping deeper into his seat. "...No?"

Although admitting the fact was difficult to do in front of a pastor, he did feel a wave of relief at the realization that he now had finally fulfilled the request the Gay Mafia had set out for him last month.

"And why do you think that was?" Pastor Veal asked. "Do you think you're confused about women in the way you're confused about God?"

"I'm not confused about GOB- God," GOB stuttered. "Conversion therapy just doesn't work. Also, I never actually went through with it, so."

"Tell me, GOB," the Pastor sighed, leaning his elbows on his knees, "when the last time was you've come in touch with... male genitalia."

GOB tipped his head, counting the days. "Well, I ate a penis earlier," he admitted. Pastor Veal gagged, either out of disgust for what the sentence sounded like it meant or because his guest said that on live television, and the cameras were shut off.

"No, don't worry," GOB corrected. "It was just a bull penis. It wasn't, like, a sexual thing!" And then, remembering that Bull was Tony's nickname in high school, added, "Although it had been before."

Pastor Veal had left the stage at this point in time. Oddly enough, after being accidentally torn down by the cameramen too-quickly packing up, "GOD" was also missing. Although, when this family was concerned, when was he not?

Chapter Text

Upon arriving home, multiple things went through everyone's heads.

On George-Michael's part, he was worried about his father, who hadn't shown up all night and still hadn't contacted him back. Lindsay was cursing as she hobbled like Gollum on her good foot all the way to the kitchen, passing Maeby, who was trying to figure out how to not make it too obvious she was drunk off her tits on cheap wine. GOB - sweating feverishly as he practically drop-kicked everyone out of the van onto the front step of the model home with enough potential force to punt them no further than to the center of the asteroid belt - had already left to talk to Pastor Veal, and so, in all the commotion, Buster was the only person that was willing to worry about the obvious thing.

"Why are we missing a wall?"

Of course, he was only doing his job. Byron Buster Bluth was brought into the world with the title automatically bestowed upon him: the worrier. It was his place in the family to worry about things since nobody else ever did.

He stepped over all the plaster and particles of wallpaper, dodging the flakes still falling to the floor. Nobody else seemed to notice, casually avoiding the rubble as they dealt with other things. George-Michael leaned against the side of where the last wall ended, crossing his arms in deep thought.

"Why are we missing a van?" Lindsay complained rhetorically in reply, but everyone immediately gave her an answer anyway.

"Because GOB thinks he's gay," they all replied in unison.

Lindsay sighed. "Well, why does he have to be gay now?" And she had a point. It would have been a lot more convenient in the event that his attachment to Tony Wonder could have been meticulously rescheduled.

"At least once this all happened he immediately acquired some moral standards," George-Michael remarked absently, staring at his phone and pretending he was actually reading something instead of anxiously awaiting a text back from George Senior. "You've noticed he's been nicer, right?"

"Less racial ignorance, maybe. Dunno; not important," Maeby said with a bit of a slur to her voice, "but what is important is the fact that my pills are missing."

"Pills?"

"Yeah. They're missing. Probably went to the same place as, uh, y'know..." Maeby tripped a bit over her own feet and leaned against the wall. "...Annyong."

"Hey, Tobias," Buster sighed as he sat down in the living room. His brother-in-law was still, of course, bound to his wheelchair, looking a bit fazed as he tapped his fingers on the closed laptop below him. Forcing a smile, Tobias nodded at Buster in greeting, wanting to open Google Translate to explain everything that had happened while his phone was charging but not wanting to reveal the vagina right front and center on the screen. He feared he'd accidentally hit the full-screen option as he closed it, too.

Buster took out his flute rag and started cleaning his door hand. Tobias stared in uncomfortable silence as everyone else settled in.

"Everyone, shut up," Lindsay said, even though nobody was talking to begin with. "I have an announcement." She paused melodramatically, looking down at her swollen ankle as she propped it up on a chair. "I think I have to go to the hospital."

"Okay, see you later," George-Michael replied, texting rapidly as Lindsay fished desperately for any sort of attention.

"It's... really blue," she whined. Nobody really paid much attention. They had all been desensitized to the color since Tobias used to be covered in it for his stand-in gig with the Blue Man Group and therefore were never alarmed when it appeared on a body.

Speaking of Tobias, he was starting to lose his sanity now that he realized that he could no longer sing theatre songs until he got his voice back. The Annie soundtrack was eating at his mind. If only he had feeling and strength in his limbs, he'd jump up right now and perform a silent rendition of Easy Street to lighten the mood. He'd do an incredible job, even with the only sound being the shuffling from the fabric of his pants as his legs kicked themselves around, and, of course, the additional soft clomps of his rubber-soled leather slippers. It would be so glorious that Maeby just might look him in the eye and say, "Wow, Dad, you are so talented. Why did I never see this before? You are so cool. I can't wait to tell everyone I know that you are a triple threat!" and Tobias would place a hand on her shoulder and let out two silent "Ha ha"s before becoming immediately famous. Of course, none of this would happen because he couldn't walk at the moment. Unbeknownst to him, though, it wouldn't happen anyway.

On the other hand, he was more reasonably losing his sanity because three men had come into their house, brutally removed one wall and left, releasing whatever smell was trapped inside the wall so everything now smelled significantly worse, and nobody was batting an eye.

"That's it," he wished he could say as he set the computer down on the floor and wheeled himself to the middle of the room so he had space. Clearing his throat and cracking his knuckles, he took a deep breath and prepared to show the world what an incapacitated person could really do.

"Oh, God," Lindsay sighed as everyone realized what was about to happen.

"You know you'll be stuck with him if you go to the hospital and get any sort of direction to rest," Maeby pointed out, to which Lindsay immediately plopped her foot back onto the floor and pretended a searing pain didn't radiate all the way up her leg when she stepped on it.

Tobias, in his element, ready to take a stand, gripped the wheels below him.

-

Lucille's place in the family was to always need someone to call. The 2003-era cordless tan phone was so often seen in her hand that you'd typically not notice it and rather pay attention to the constant presence of a martini instead. But, because Lucille Austero was dead and couldn't annoy her, her maids had all been fired, and nobody had been convicted of a crime in... I mean, weeks, at least — she had run out of people to call.

So, sighing and leaving her apartment, Lucille drunkenly drove, once again, to the model home.

"Oh, god," she exclaimed the moment she walked inside, finding a bit of peace knowing she might have to call someone now. "What's this?"

George-Michael, who was helping Buster drag Tobias from his face-down position on the floor, was first to explain. "Tobias collapsed after deciding to get up and dance."

Lucille gawked. "And the walls came down?"

"They haven't noticed the walls, Mother," Buster said. "But I did. And I told them. But they wouldn't listen."

Tobias, ignoring the fact that his nose was gushing with blood, decided that he was through with not being able to tell everyone about what happened. Racing purposefully back to the computer and yanking it open, he clicked right past the labia awaiting his return and typed furiously at Google Translate, his nose sputtering bloody mucus all over the keys.

"Three former pornstars came over to get the rats out, but they took down the wall and left. I don't think their company was real. You should demand a refund. This family is far more respectable than this. VAGINA.JPG," Google said.

George-Michael, perhaps taking after his dad, was the only person present to narrow his eyes at the last bit. "Where in God's name did Google get-"

"What did they find?" Lucille interrupted, suddenly very curious. "Was there anything in the walls?"

"Hello," Lindsay said then. "There are bigger things to address, like, I don't know, my ankle, Tobias in general, the fact that we have no vehicle here because GOB keeps running off in those... What does he call them?"

"Gay panics," Buster and Maeby offered in unison. Lindsay nodded.

"That."

"Okay," George-Michael replied, "But none of these things even hold a candle to the fact that Dad has been gone for about a week and we can't get ahold of him at all. Whenever he disappears, someone always knows where he is. He checks his texts." He forced a nervous laugh, holding up his phone and scrolling through the endless messages he'd sent him. "Not one says 'read'. Not a single-"

"Well, what do you expect we do? Find him?" Lucille asked casually. "Look at us. Nobody here is in any state to go out and-"

"Have you never heard of a missing person report?" George-Michael pointed out. "That's sorta... what people do."

"Well, it's not like we know for sure that he's missing," Maeby said. "When he leaves all the time, he's gone most of our lives anyway. It's all one big gray area. How do we know it's a problem?"

"The real problem here," Lindsay remarked, "is my ankle. I want to get it fixed, but I can't drive and I dread hearing the doctors tell me that I have to... quarantine myself with-"

"Your husband," Lucille deadpanned. Lindsay shrugged.

"I didn't know you hurt your ankle," Google Translate spoke for Tobias. "Did you get down too hard, too?"

Lindsay gritted her teeth. "No."

"Well, as they say," Tobias continued, "these boots are made for walkin'."

Lindsay took a long breath in through her nose, gagged a bit at the stench, closed her eyes, and started walking out the door.

"I'm taking your car, Mom," she said. "I won't be back."

"I thought you said you couldn't drive," Lucille questioned, to which her daughter-sister-thing spun around with a maniacal eye twitch and replied: "I'll use the same foot for both pedals, then."

"How about the clutch?" Buster asked.

Lindsay looked down at her brother-nephew thing with a distasteful glare. "I'll use my foot for that, too."

"As you should," Google Translate cheered her on in a counterproductive manner, making her the slightest bit more angry. And I say slight, but so do news reports warning slight hurricanes.

Lindsay, almost meaning to say 'thank you' but not really, nodded courteously at her husband. "Fuck you, Tobias."

And with that, she finally left, thank God, muttering the whole time about the stupid idiot bimbo asswipe fuckface crazy hellish lunatic asshole dickwad gay theatre never-nude ambiguous incel she was still somehow married to. And, although she didn't want to, she drove herself to the hospital because god damn it, she was resourceful and intelligent and proper and not at all a slut and she was going to prove it then and there.

She would never admit this, but she ran over a cat on the way there because her foot was so used to being on the wrong pedal that she hit the gas instead of the brake. She left it on the road and kept going, planning on never coming back to it. But don't worry; we will.

-

George Senior, by the way, is in the fucking state of Florida and nobody has noticed yet.

That's right. He'd been texting his grandson in attempt to make him think he was still in Orange County while, in fact, he was flying to the Keys to go to some sort of weird singles retreat for the weekend.

Not like he didn't care about the box he'd been asking about. There were things in there that could get him in trouble. But he knew there wasn't any more earning Lucille back, so he figured he might as well fight for the box because he cared about himself rather than simping for it. And the only way to not simp for Lucille was to find a stand-in. Some sort of hot woman to drag him out of the bleak pits of hell for just a little while as he scrambled to get his life together.

He was on the plane now. His phone was off. He knew George-Michael would be anxiously awaiting his next text, but he figured it'd be fine if he left it for a few hours.

It had been three hours. George-Michael was beginning to squirm.

Of course it was because Michael was mysteriously gone that he was so anxious. But George Senior almost always texted back immediately. This was all too unsettling. He didn't like it.

Lucille, now stuck at the house with everyone else, had inspected the walls for a lot longer than normal, resorting to drinking cooking wine since there wasn't anything else she could drink other than water. And who the hell drinks water?

Tobias now had a bloodstain roughly the size of a pizza on the front of his shirt, but his nose had luckily clotted. The problem now was that the clot clogged his sinuses and he now had to breathe out of his mouth. Whenever he swallowed, he could feel the clot suctioning back into his throat, and he was equally scared to swallow it down as he was to breathe orally for the rest of the day.

They all sat in the living room in silence, everyone thinking about separate things; things ranging from a potential missing person to who planted a clit on the family laptop. All valid things, of course, to wonder.

GOB walked inside through the door. "I'm back," he announced. "Physically."

"Good," Buster remarked. "And you should stay that way. You left us without a car."

There was a small silence; a wince from GOB that could only be read as instant regret and a mental kick at oneself to not be such a scatterbrained twit.

"Are you still cleaning your hand with a flute rag?" GOB redirected. "Where did you even get that? The... music... store?"

"I got it in the attic," Buster answered proudly. "Wasn't even scared. I made friends with the rats in there."

GOB flopped down on the couch and looked up at the ceiling with a subtly panicked expression, not processing anything he had just heard but rather fearing the heteronormative wrath of the sour cream-tinted Pastor Veal himself.

"They told me to go to conversion therapy again," he whined aloud. "And so I said nothing, and then they said that if I wasn't going to do that I should at least give up my magic career because Christianity doesn't support witchcraft and also magic is gay."

"Since when are we Christian?" Maeby asked fittingly, still buzzed from the wine. "We're not even close to being morally correct enough."

"Like Christians are any better," Buster remarked with a throat-clearing. "I think the Sitwells are Christian."

Lucille gritted her teeth. "That makes so much sense."

"Point being," GOB said, sitting up and trying to make a point, "I can't give up magic. What do I do?"

"Yeah," George-Michael replied, his mind still on his texts that hadn't yet been answered. "I think a good first step, really - I mean, if you're up for the challenge, though I don't get why it's a challenge in the first place - is honestly to not go to a pastor for insight on your... sexually ambiguous magic career."

GOB, being the absolute genius he was, had not yet thought of this.

"Oh," he said, with an air of realization. "Yeah."

"Also," Lucille said with a vague point in her son's direction, "nobody cares. We're all sick of your problems. Get a therapist."

"That settles it. Great," George-Michael said. "Anyone else need common sense counseling before I ask for some in return?"

There was a collective sigh. Lucille pursed her lips.

"What do you want?"

George-Michael had to think for a moment. What did he want? He hadn't been asked that yet, and now that he had, there was a sort of vagueness to what he thought about it.

"Well," he said, "First I'd like to know where the hell my dad is." He gave a humorless, breathy laugh. "But, since that won't happen for a while, there's one thing that can help. Well, more than one thing. It's like, you know, hypothetically, like a list system..."

"Please just say it," Maeby prompted, causing him to stand a little straighter and clear his throat.

"What we need," he announced, "is organization, communication, and-"

"Oh, no," Lucille groaned.

"-togetherness."

There was an outburst of swearing from everyone in the room other than Buster and Tobias, who stared silently at everyone for completely different reasons.

"Look, I hate you guys just as much as you hate each other," George-Michael continued with an ironically lighthearted tone about him, "but if we're gonna keep ourselves from falling apart as we navigate all this, we have to try to be normal. That means no trying to seduce me in my dad's closet, no stealing, and GOB, you really gotta stop running off without warning. Come on, guys; we really need to stick together before we're too far apart."

He said this a bit too late, though. George Senior was already flying over Georgia and would land in about an hour, all the way across the country from the rest of them. Furthermore, he even planned to separate himself further by falling in love with someone else. But nobody ever liked him anyway. Bad character development. So maybe it's good to have a break from him.

"Question," Maeby said with a floppy hand raise. "What if we decide to seduce you outside of a closet? Like maybe a room?"

George-Michael set his jaw. "Any other questions?"

"Uh, yeah," GOB replied. "What the fuck?"

"That's not a question."

"It is. There's a question mark at the end."

"Can you please be less vague, then?"

"Okay. I'll come up with something specific. Whatever," GOB replied, letting his hand flop over the edge of the sofa and land on the carpet. Still, of course, attached to his arm (Buster was slightly jealous). "What if I have to go somewhere?"

"Then you'll let us know ahead of time like a normally-functioning member of society," George-Michael explained. "Come on, you should know this. You're the oldest child. Isn't that, like, a trait you should maybe have? Natural responsibility and leadership?"

GOB laughed nervously, quickly sitting forward and looking around the room. "Responsibility? I'm not... I'm not the president of the... leadership?! I'm not- I can't- I have never- can't- the- the- president of the- responsi- United States of- America- leadership- fifteen- the, the- suit- the- magic- gay- a- closet trick-"

"He's unqualified," Maeby said helpfully for him. "He's never worked more than one day in his life. He has no grasp of responsibility."

He had worked one day, though, as a waiter, by accident, trying to spy on Lucille. He learned nothing.

"Alright, fine," George-Michael said. "But someone has to step up and start caring about something."

"You just did that," Lucille said detachedly, sipping cooking wine out of the flowery mug she'd found in the cupboard. "And, frankly, nobody really cares."

"I care," Buster butted in, mostly in rebellion against his mother and just a little bit truthfully.

GOB tipped his head. "We care a little bit."

Maeby narrowed her eyes. "Do we, though?"

"Yes, we do," George-Michael decided in a very non-democratic way. "And, what the hell. Until you all get used to working as a team, I'll be setting things in motion on my own. Starting with a police report."

Tobias breathed in reply.

"Ohhhh, you don't wanna contact the police here," GOB advised quickly, snapping out of his nervous stuttering and moving immediately into petrified warning. "They're, um... incompetent."

"Besides," Lucille droned, "the immigrants never call the police and they get along just fine."

There was a very white silence in the room. Tobias contributed in a very lively way by adding mouth-breathing noises while George-Michael thought of something less insensitive to reply with.

"Immigrants call the police," George-Michael contradicted. "And when they don't, it's because calling them is damn near being a suicide mission for minority groups."

"The reason," GOB contributed, lifting his first finger in thought, "that they don't call the police... is probably because the police are incompetent."

George-Michael sighed. "Oh, for the love of God. The least we can do is let law enforcement know that my dad is missing."

GOB pursed his lips. "You really don't have to do that."

"I'm doing it," George-Michael decided, taking out his phone and dialing 911 into the keypad.

"No," GOB replied. "Hang up."

"You can't hang up on 911 dispatchers; you'll get a fine," Buster informed them all. "I know because I've done it because I'm a bad little boy." He finished this sentence by giving a sly, rebellious glare in Lucille's direction. "I'm also a murderer." Which was true, and a fair addition.

"Put the phone down," GOB said. "The fine is probably what, two cents? It's worth it. Hang up."

"Yeah, George-Michael," Maeby added. "Scared of giving up a quarter?"

George-Michael blinked. "Do either of you know how money works?"

"Hang up," GOB urged. George-Michael merely turned away and focused on the wall as the phone was picked up and his call was answered.

"911, what is your emergency?" the dispatcher on the other end asked. GOB gritted his teeth, attempting to grab the phone and hang up as his nephew brought it up to his ear.

"Yeah, I'd like to report a missing person," George-Michael said. "Yeah. Orange County... Yes. Absolutely... Yeah, that's the address."

"Shit. That means they're gonna come over," just about everyone else said at the same time for suspiciously different reasons. GOB, immediately deciding to use his gay occupation usefully, bolted away to try to somehow make himself invisible. Maeby just sat there, deciding that anyone suspecting of her drunkenness would be thrown off by Lucille's drunkenness and therefore wouldn't think much of it. And Tobias would change his bloody shirt, but he had no way of getting privacy and could absolutely not be seen without an article of outer-layer clothing absent. He also couldn't completely move his arms. Not without inevitably hurting them, at least. He was taking a sort of vow of motionlessness until he stopped being cursed by a new fractured bone every time he decided to do anything physical.

The walls could not be fixed, though. Neither could the smell. So the environment the police would be walking into really was less than ideal. They might even suspect them for the disappearance of Michael. But, then again, Buster had killed someone before, so it wasn't too far off of a suspicion.

George-Michael hung up the phone, turning back around and seeing that half of his family was still in the room. He decided that was fine; they'd fuck things up with the police anyway.

He did still have one dilemma: Tobias looked like he had just eaten a human being alive. With the added problem of not being able to change his shirt, he grabbed an apron from the kitchen to cover it up. Maeby had already thought of this, and helped slide it over her father's head as she coaxed him into being less of a nuisance.

"Dad," she said, making sure the neck of the apron was tight enough to cover up all the blood, "I have an acting job for you. While the police are here, can you pretend you have dementia?"

Tobias, now with a Purpose™, looked seriously at the two and gave a courteous nod. Opening Google Translate, he typed in a few letters and set his job off.

"Oh, dear. It seems I have forgotten everything. VAGINA.JPG."

-

"On behalf of our airline, the flight crew would like to welcome you to an unnamed airport near Orlando that has no name attached so the writer can't be sued. We will be arriving at the gate momentarily. Please remain in your seats with your seat belt securely fastened until the aircraft has come to a complete stop at the terminal gate. Welcome to Florida."

George Senior took out his phone immediately, seeing he now had signal, and sent a text back to his grandson in attempt to not seem too suspicious.

Busy right now. Make
sure the box is in a
safe spot when you
< find it.

...

Sorry, no can do.
The police are here >

< Oh
< Have fun

You too? >
Where are you,
by the way? >

George Senior decided then that it was time to exit the plane. Closing his phone and nervously grabbing his suitcase, he stepped into the airport at sonic speed, pretending he could leave his text messages, along with his strange family, behind.

Another person who was intending to do the same was none other than Sally Sitwell, who had hopped off of a plane on the same route about ten hours prior with the intent of going to the same resort and being part of the same program. She had been asked to manage the retreat this year for a pretty large sum of money, so she decided it was worth giving up politics for a weekend. In her frenzied rush out the door, she had accidentally let Tony Wonder's cat out into the street, not like she wouldn't have intentionally done it given the chance anyway. It was kind of a shitty cat. And now it was dead, thanks to Lindsay Bluth's foot.

She had also locked the door from the outside and brought the spare key with her in attempt to keep her boyfriend from doing normal human things like going out with other men and... shaving his legs? But once he found out he was locked in the house, he decided in contempt to shave his legs with even more force than he had before. And he also planned on escaping. But first he needed a reason to. So thank god his cat was rotting in the street! Oh, joy. How things work out. Marvelous. Perfect. A corpse.

Chapter Text

"George Bluth here for the singles retreat," George Senior said, his bags wheeled meticulously behind him as he stood at the front desk of the resort.

"May I get a middle name?" the bored teenage receptionist asked, his personality so outwardly friendly that he was likely reading off some sort of script.

"Uh," George Senior pondered, "Senior?"

The receptionist typed on his keyboard for a moment before shaking his head. "Yeah, that isn't in our records."

"Okay, well I don't have a middle name, then," George Senior decided. "I guess they never... wrote me one."

He was right. We didn't.

"Did you get a confirmation text or email when you signed up?" the receptionist asked. "That'll have your reservation info which I can use to check you in."

George Senior opened his phone with his first finger like seniors do, scrolling through his texts. "Is it the five-digit number?"

"Yeah. Just read the whole thing to me."

"Should I read it slowly or quickly?" George Senior asked. "Or should I give you a number and wait to hear you hit it on the keyboard-?"

"No, just," the receptionist sighed. "Just read it. It doesn't matter."

"Okay," George Senior replied. "Six."

The two stared at each other for a few moments.

"And then?" the receptionist asked.

George Senior paused. "I thought you wanted to hit the number before I continued."

"No," the boy replied. "Just tell me the number."

George Senior looked back at his phone. "The whole thing?"

"Yeah."

"All at once."

"If you will," the receptionist replied. "Please."

"Okay," George Senior said. "Oh, wait, I just accidentally deleted the text."

The boy, in exasperation, sighed intensely and leaned back in his chair. "Holy sh—"

It was a mediocre day back in Orange County. As Lindsay opened the door of her hospital room to finally leave, a cast roughly the thickness of a small sumo wrestler wrapped around her entire foot all the way up to her knee, she was informed in a way that she found very distasteful that she was not allowed to drive herself home.

"Why can't I drive?" she asked directly to the doctors who were absolutely not prepared for this question.

"Well, I mean, look at you," the nearest doctor said, pointing her pen at the cast. "Absolutely not. You're also on a dose of Ativan that's far too unsafe to drive with."

"And you think I can't manage myself?" Lindsay challenged, straightening her spine even at her leaned-over, crutches-in-armpits angle. "Is it because I'm a woman?"

"What? I'm a woman," the doctor said in return. "Obviously not. It's policy that we do not let you leave until someone else can drive you home."

Lindsay glowered impactfully at the air. The air predictably did nothing back, so it's barely worth pointing out that it happened given the fact that it resulted in nothing.

"Look, my car is here and I have nobody to drive me with it, so if you don't mind, I can take myself-"

"I can drive you."

Lindsay looked up to see a tall male doctor that looked very much like every tall male doctor on television. Very white, very male, very tall, very chiseled jawline and very much man with beard while also having not so much of a very much face mask, for the very purpose of exposing very much face. Lindsay was very much smitten, very much still mad but very much liking what this was turning into very much indeed so.

Although honestly he was so generic that we can confidently say the following: the vagina on the family laptop was somehow still better-looking.

"Oh, not again with the foot casts," a nurse in the corner groaned at the man, but Lindsay paid no notice.

"I, um," she swallowed, giving a nod and a smile at the floor, which did not return the gesture because it was the floor. "Sure. Of course. Thank you."

"That isn't your job, though," the other doctor reminded him. "What if someone needs you?"

"Take my pager," he replied, tossing his radio on the counter and heroically walking Lindsay to Lucille's car. Kind of a dick move. But he did have a dick, so it wasn't the biggest surprise that he'd act on it.

"What's your name?" he asked politely as Lindsay handed him her keys.

"Lindsay," she replied. "Oh, it's this car here. The one that makes any middle-class person weep."

"Lindsay," the doctor replied. "Nice to meet you. My name's Chris." We weren't surprised by this, either. "Gorgeous vehicle you've got here."

"My mom's. Not mine. I spend money too liberally to be able to afford it," Lindsay explained vaguely as if that would provide enough context for it to make sense, stepping into the passenger seat as Chris took the driver's side. He started it up, and away they went.

"So what happened to your ankle?" he asked, following her directions as she pointed their way home.

"I walked a few miles in heels and my foot rolled out," Lindsay replied.

"Ah. I've seen that before. A 'these boots were made for walking' kinda moment, huh?" Chris asked. Lindsay sighed in contempt.

"Common?"

Chris made a tsk noise. "I wish."

He turned onto the next road, his fingers tapping the steering wheel as Lindsay fought to contain her feelings for this run-of-the-mill generic white asshole of a doctor.

"So, uh... what sort of heels were you wearing?"

Lindsay gritted her teeth. "Stilettos."

Chris bit his lip and nodded. "Hm." he said, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead, seeming to be straining at the effort.

"Something wrong?" Lindsay asked, making him tense up even more.

"Uh, no," he said, clearing his throat and turning again. "I just can't look down at your cast or my feet on the pedals. Sometimes it's just too distracting. You know what I mean?"

Lindsay, not seeing completely what this meant, was eager to please him rather than understand, much like an ignorant celebrity at a human rights protest. "Oh, yeah, absolutely."

"Really?" Chris asked hopefully, turning to look her in the eye. He pulled over to the side of the road, taking a deep breath and unlocking his seatbelt. "You mean it?"

Lindsay was quick to take her seatbelt off as well, not completely sure about what she was signing up for but knowing she'd probably seen worse in her years of sluttiness. "I..." she hesitated, but then decided it was best to lie, much like an ignorant celebrity at a human rights protest. "I do."

You could imagine how she lost her footing with what came next.

-

There were three strong knocks on the front door. Given the mental solidity of them, the entire house knew immediately that it wasn't family coming to visit.

Maeby straightened her spine, trying her best to look professional as George-Michael put his phone back into his pocket.

"Police," the visitors announced outside, as if that wasn't inherently clear already. They were aware they were beating a dead horse, too, but really they just liked advertising the title to look macho and powerful and like they had their lives together even though five of their coworkers had been fired in the last hour due to brutality footage that was starting to become accessible to the public, god damn it, and all of them had been divorced within the past half decade, and they all had abandonment problems, and this sentence is getting to be uncomfortably long, and I promise this isn't intentionally politically charged, but people are gonna get mad regardless so fuck it, and their fathers were never present growing up, and all the women at work they hit on were lesbians, and 75% of them were telling the truth about this, and—

Well, either that or announcing this was just policy. Which is also likely.

"Hey," George-Michael greeted them, opening the door and stepping aside. "Come on in."

"Oh, god," the officer in front asked upon stepping in. "What is that smell? And what is wrong with the wall?"

"Botched extermination job," George-Michael replied. "Just don't breathe too deeply and you'll be fine."

The officers took a moment to compose themselves and get used to the thick air before moving on to why they were here to begin with.

"We hear you have a missing family member," the first officer prompted, and George-Michael nodded.

"Yeah. My dad. He's been missing for maybe a week now."

"Did he show any signs before he left?"

Lucille spoke up about this one. "He got mad at everyone and stormed out. We knew he was leaving."

"But he's never been gone for this long before," George-Michael explained. "Not without responding to calls or anything."

The first officer nodded, taking out a notepad and a pen. "That happened to my dad, too. Found him in a river. Shot himself in the head after accidentally running over an old woman with his car in a mad race to the Mexican border."

"Wow, thanks for that," George-Michael swallowed. "Really comforting."

"Sure thing. Anytime," the officer replied. "Any history of mental illness in the family?"

They all expectantly looked up at him. George-Michael, for a moment, didn't know what to say. Obviously everyone he'd ever met was problematic, but that really wouldn't help his case.

"Um!" he panicked a bit. "Well..."

"Not diagnosed, at least," Maeby piped up, pointing to Tobias. "Except for him. Dementia."

Tobias, for some reason, decided to prove this fact by making it less believable. He nodded, clicking a button and letting Google Translate ask, "Who am I?" as if it was a philosophical genius.

"You're Tobias," Maeby played along. Lucille, attempting to look unbothered even though that was the polar opposite of what was going on, rolled her eyes and took another sip of wine, pretending that she didn't wish Tobias didn't exist.

"Do you mind if we have a look around?" the first officer asked, and George-Michael motioned with his arm to the rest of the house.

"Be my guest."

Tobias began wheeling himself around the room, a stupid smile plastered on his face that clearly wasn't on purpose for his role as a dementia patient but fitting nonetheless. Another officer looked at him, walking up to George-Michael and offering some words of empathy.

"You know," he said, "my mom has dementia as well. It's very hard to adjust to them knowing less and less."

"Oh, absolutely," George-Michael forced himself to reply, watching Tobias run himself full force from wall to wall in a pacing fashion and hoping to whatever was out there that the apron wouldn't fall off. "It's a tricky thing."

"It really is," the officer replied. "There comes a point where they can't even remember you. Happened about a month ago to my mother..." He began tearing up, slapping a strong arm on George-Michael's back.

"Yeah. It was definitely a very..." George-Michael paused. "...sudden transition. And then you start feeling paranoid for yourself, wondering if this hopeless situation will end up hurting you in the near future..."

"Yes, that's exactly it," the officer wept. "It's just so hard to see."

"Oh, is it? Your glasses are in your front pocket," George-Michael replied, and the officer looked down.

"Ah," he said. "So they are." He slid the glasses back on his nose and continued on. "You know, my sister always felt that it was unfair that Mom forgot her name first, but really it was because she's younger, you know? The deterioration pattern..." His voice fades out here so you don't have to endure it.

Upstairs, the police were met with a strange welcome as they opened a bedroom door to see Buster sitting cross-legged on the carpet and talking to his door hand in whispers under his breath, polishing it with the flute rag and barely moving a muscle to hear them arrive.

"Wait a second," an officer said from the back. "We arrested you, didn't we?"

"Yes," Buster replied casually. "Because I killed Lucille Two."

"Lucille too?" the officer asked. "Do you mean to say there's someone else you've killed that you haven't been found innocent for yet?"

"No," Buster replied, "unless I forgot because of my brother's pills."

"Which brother?" the officer asked. "The one that's missing?"

"Oh, no, silly. You'll know him when you see him," Buster replied. "You arrested him once, but it's possible he also forgot because of the pills."

"Do you know anything about the disappearance of your relative?" another officer asked, and Buster shook his head.

"I've been busy in my fort."

This took a few moments to sink in, but the crew understood after these said moments that talking to this man-child was a lost cause. They all moved collectively to the next room like a group of nuns on hoverboards, congregating around the door, which they immediately found to be locked.

"Police. Open up!" the first officer commanded. There was a brief silence until a weak confession leaked back through the doorframe.

"Sometimes I get anxious and lonely," the locked door whined. The officer looked down at his feet, his hand falling slowly back to his waist.

"Me, too," he said solemnly before lifting his gaze back to the door handle and rattling it. "Can you let us into the room, though? When I said to open up..."

"If I unlock the door, can you give me, like, thirty seconds before you open it?" the voice pleaded. "I really need to, uh... get something settled."

"Okay, fine," the officer replied, and the lock on the door clicked. "Thirty. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven..."

-

"Just, for the love of god," the receptionist said in a manner of complete exasperation, "check your email."

"My email," George Senior reflected. "Yeah, you see, there's a small dilemma about that, you know. I have eleven email addresses and I use them all for different things, like free trials and such. Do you happen to know which one you sent it to?"

The receptionist sat up, making his name tag - NATE - finally visible. Clenching his jaw, he looked down and shook his head.

"No," he explained. "I can't track that down because your name is not in our system."

"So I will have to check all the different emails to get in?"

Nate nodded. "That's completely right," he said. Noticing that there was a line of people waiting, he forced a tight smile. "If you would be so kind, could you shuffle off to the side while I get everyone else checked in?"

George Senior looked up. "But I'll lose my spot."

Nate, having no idea what to say, stared emotionlessly at the old man in front of him, wishing that both of them were dead, specifically George Senior and then him in that order, just to make sure.

"Okay. Email numero uno," George Senior said in the most American-sounding Spanish accent humanly possible, quite like when the narrator says 'Cinco de Cuatro' (which is in the script, but come on, guys. I think I pronounce it well enough). "That's not the one. All the emails in here are talking about the sexy milfs in my area ready to meet me. Next account..."

Nate, still, was absolutely silent. He sat back in his seat in utter awe of what was happening. We feel for him over here in the writing room, even though we're making his torture continue further. Poor guy.

"I forgot my password for this one, so hopefully it's in one of the other nine accounts," George Senior announced as if he was proud of it. Nate sighed and looked back down at his computer, opening a new tab and starting to play Geometry Dash.

"Alright. 69421," George Senior said. The receptionist smirked as he typed it in.

"That's hella close to being the coolest confirmation number possible," he muttered to himself, but was overheard anyway.

"What? Why?" George Senior asked. "And what's 'hella'?"

"Your room number - oh my god, that's so funny - your room number is 419," the boy said dismissively, handing the key over the counter to the confused boomer in front of him.

"I don't understand," George Senior said. "Why is that so funny?"

The kid looked him up and down with an air of immediate realization that no explanation could possibly translate to this man due to his original birth date likely being somewhere in the Jurassic period, sighed, and said, "It's... an inside joke. Go ahead to your room. There'll be a pamphlet on your door with all your needed information."

So George Senior, in a confused frenzy, took his luggage and wheeled it to the elevator, making his way with his almost-420-69 text to his almost-420 room. So close to greatness, yet so far. A common theme of his.

-

"—Three, two, one, and we're coming in."

"Dammit!" the voice replied from behind the door. "Hold on. I just need to—"

But the officers had already opened the door, surprised to see none other than GOB Bluth standing awkwardly in a magic box, a small kerchief draped over the top of his head and a wand in his left hand.

"I just– Guys, come on," he said, trying to slur the next words so they wouldn't completely process them. "I was gonna try and disappear so you wouldn't notice—"

"Hey, haven't we arrested you before?" an officer in the back asked.

"You're mistaken."

"Aren't you that gay comedian that always shows up on channel 57?"

"I..." GOB set his jaw. "You're still mistaken."

"Aw," another officer whined in disappointment. "That's hard to hear."

"Yeah, your hearing aid is falling out," GOB replied, and the officer pushed it back in.

"Ah, yeah, that's better."

GOB nodded. "I'd imagine."

"But really, I had to escort you from the set last week," the other officer said, crossing her arms. "Remember that? And you started panicking because you thought that meant you'd stay gay forever and then you said a really long sentence that was cut off and made no sense and I think at some point you hyperventilated and passed out so I just left you in the front seat of your car and hoped you'd wake up."

GOB swallowed. "You're mistaken," he decided. "But thank you for doing that, though. I..." He took a breath and nervously chuckled, his eyes darting around the room. "Last time I was left somewhere after an episode like that, I got stuck in a marriage with an underage Christian. She somehow conned me into it with a... plate of eggs?"

The officers contemplated this for a moment.

"Whatever. You're still mistaken." GOB added. "And so am I for being here. I bid you all goodbye." He waved his wand dramatically.

But instead of making himself disappear, though, an explosive ball of fire popped out of his sleeve, singeing the plastic edge of the nearest officer's hat.

Immediately taking this as a sign of aggression, the officers all huddled around him, putting handcuffs on his wrists and leading him out of the bedroom.

"You're mistaken," GOB argued. "Please, no. I can't go to prison again. They don't have private toilets— and the— if I— should— should I— should— go to— eat— three dollar— suit— should— eggs— and if the— pastor— scrambled? why?— should— could I?— should— shoul— shou— sho— sh— s—"

But nobody listened to his broken cries for help, and before long, GOB was ushered out the door and into the police car.

The rest of the family watched in casual silence, not very surprised at this turn of events at all. Tobias, who at this point had stopped acting as a dementia patient, sighed and typed a bit out onto Google Translate.

"Thank god they're gone," it said. "Now I can take this apron off."

But, pulling at the fabric, Tobias realized something less than ideal.

"The blood seems to have cemented the apron to my shirt and my shirt to me," Google explained. "We are all one now."

"Glad to see you've been enlightened, Tobias," Lucille sighed passively. Tobias nodded graciously in reply.

"VAGINA.JPG," he responded. How modest.

-

Lindsay and Chris has just had an emotional roller coaster of a sexual encounter. Lindsay, on one hand, was grappling with the fact that the man who had just parked her mother's too-expensive convertible in the driveway not only had a foot fetish but also had just finished rubbing off against her cast. Chris, on the other hand, had never been better.

"You know, they ask me why I became a podiatrist," he said, zipping his pants back up and leaning back in his seat. "It's times like these that really pay it off."

"Pay what off?" Lindsay asked, still incredibly shaken by the encounter. Chris shrugged.

"Partly the student debt— Well, mostly the student debt. Actually, yeah, that's it. That's the only thing it makes up for because it's the only flaw I have." He gave her a sparkly white smile that she wasn't sure she had the capacity to return.

"Everyone that enters this car for the next month is gonna know what happened here," Lindsay realized, and Chris didn't seem to understand why.

"How do you know that?"

"Because," Lindsay replied in exasperation, "your... it really..."

She sighed, closing her eyes and tightening her lips.

"Look," she blurted, "your semen smells... really strong. Like the living room, except if it also had spilled bleach in it."

"Oh, yeah," Chris replied. "That's because I found out I'm allergic to mayo so I have to stop eating it. I'm detoxing now so that's why it smells so strong. Oh, man, you should smell my shits—"

"On the contrary, I don't think I should," Lindsay interrupted.

"Two words," Chris replied. "Rodent. Curry."

Lindsay decided not to egg him on any longer, looking blankly out the windshield and wondering what she'd just let herself get into. This forced them both to think about the important things they were forgetting about, such as the fact that a squad of police cars had just left the driveway with GOB in one of them while they were talking, and also—

"Wait, what now?" Chris asked. "How do I get home?"

They both contemplated this for quite some time until Lindsay piped up with a somewhat-worthy response.

"I could bring you back to the hospital and drive myself home again," she offered.

"Well, actually, no, you can't," Chris replied, that being the only intelligent thing he'd said for the entirety of his fictional existence in this small, insignificant window of storytelling (congratulations!).

"Okay, well," Lindsay said, "I don't know. Get an Uber."

"They don't let me use their service anymore," Chris replied solemnly. Instead of giving any response time for this, he asked, "Why didn't you get an Uber?"

Lindsay scoffed. "Because you offered to drive," she replied. "And that's not my fault." She opened the door, stepping out of the car without the intention of saying goodbye.

"Wait! Can I have your number?" Chris called out after her. She turned back to him, looking rather distraught.

"Do you only like me for my feet?"

Chris was silent. Lindsay nodded.

"I was afraid of that."

Storming to the front door with her crutches and her hospital bag, she turned back to proclaim one last thing.

"You know what, Chris?" she hollered over to him. "It's people like you who make me wish I didn't have limbs."

Throwing her hand onto the door handle, Lindsay angrily turned it and yanked to display her fury. Instead of the door opening, though, she was incredibly surprised to find Buster's arm having been yanked through the door along with the handle it was attached to. She also found out, with Buster's help via talking through the door, that his elbow was out in the open of the front step and there was no way it was physically capable of going back in.

Lindsay left him there and came in through the patio door out back, because fuck it. But not literally, though, please. She'd had too much literal fucking of it today already.

Chapter Text

It was the same boring day in the same boring book, and boring ass white ass jawline ass medical degree ass normie ass foot fetish ass probably STD ass slacker ass Chris (surprising that he actually has some defining qualities now) was walking back to the hospital from the Bluth family model home, sweating profusely in the blistering sun that's to be expected on a summer day in Orange County, California. Which it was.

Common knowledge is that history often repeats itself. Sometimes in ten years, sometimes in hundreds. Today, though, it repeated itself almost immediately because Chris, out of boredom and malicious vengeance, began singing "These Boots Were Made for Walkin'" as he dragged himself along the seemingly endless road.

"One of these days, these boots are gonna walk all over you," he grumbled, adding a dramatic gasp of despair at the end, but no tears came out because all his water had been used up to sweat in the almost-deadly heat, and also to ejaculate into Lindsay's ankle boot, as one does.

The reason he was attempting to cry was because he meant the line of that song literally in terms of the boot. In his perspective, the song perfectly displayed how he felt about Lindsay Bluth and her ungrateful cast crushing the very essence of his soul. Unbeknownst to him, though, his soul wasn't the only thing it was crushing.

In fact, Lindsay was currently beating her cast against the edge of the almost completely-deconstructed wall in their front entrance.

"Yeah," Google Translate cheered her on unenthusiastically, although it's the thought that counts. "Yes. Perfect."

On a side note, I just got word that Google is still extremely protective over the rights to the usage of their brand and its name in media, but I decided to put the word in anyway instead of sticking with "something" as a replacement because fuck you and fuck long-term joke consistency. If you're reading this, Google, you can eat my ass. I'm sure you could probably sue it, too, but how can you sue something you already ate? Asshole.

The wall chipped then, and dust from the sheetrock spewed onto the floorboards. Tobias raised his fists triumphantly in the air. Nobody else moved. Nothing was ever new anymore.

Lucille heard all the thumping from upstairs, where she was digging through the attic boxes again in search of the box belonging to her missing exchange student. She closed her eyes in irritation with every new thump she heard, getting consistently more agitated as more and more boxes marked Annyong were empty when she opened them.

"Will you stop that thumping?" she called down the stairs.

"No!" Lindsay called back. "I need to do this!" And so she continued.

The reason all this was happening was because, upon getting inside and moping about how she'd have to be bedridden with her own husband and actually start spending time with him, Lindsay discovered that her cast was starting to itch incredibly bad. Tobias assured her, however, that this was completely normal with casts (and he would know; he'd had something around seven so far this week) and that whacking your injured bone against something as hard as humanly possible was a fantastic way to soothe the skin outside it.

So here they were, doing a better job of taking down the wall than the pest control pornstars themselves. Although Lindsay had to argue that this hurt her foot a lot more than helped, judging by the fact that her skin was just as itchy as before and also her ankle was starting to give her shooting pains again even though she was on three different painkillers and a suspiciously high dosage of Ativan.

"I think I might have just re-fractured my ankle," Lindsay realized aloud in a eureka moment of pure enlightenment. Her third, fourth and fifth eye opened at once and she promptly removed her foot from the wall.

Something fell out of the hole she'd just made, though, a bunch of dust hitting the ground with it. Lindsay peered down at it with her two real eyes and her three spiritual ones and naturally wondered why it was there.

"Who put a sandwich in the wall?" she asked.

"No wonder we have so many goddamn rats in here," Maeby groaned from the other room, nose-deep in some dumb fishing magazine she found on the counter and decided to read so she didn't have to face the insanity of her outside world; something she got mad at her one therapist for suggesting to be a habit of hers (she fired him on the spot. It was their second session) just last year.

"Well, there must be some reason for a sandwich to have made it in the wall in the first place," Lindsay pointed out. "They don't just show up in the woodwork like that. Like, hello-"

"Anneyong," the wall interrupted in a rather muffled tone, adding an e into the spelling of Annyong to satirically point out how both the author and characters have been spelling it wrong this entire time.

They all looked blankly at the wall. The wall looked blankly back.

And so the Bluth family had one less problem on their hands: they now knew exactly where their exchange student had disappeared to. And it wasn't Korea.

-

GOB was busy doing important things, these things specifically being:

a.) proving his innocence regarding the ball of fire that was released from his wrist, and also

b.) being in police custody in general.

"Are you GOB Bluth?" an investigator asked, walking into the room with a clipboard of papers.

"You're mistaken," GOB replied reflexively, and the investigator sighed and took a seat across from him.

"Are you telling me that the identification information you gave us was untrue? Because then we'll have to add a fraud charge to your bail."

GOB set his jaw, readjusting his wrists inside of their respective handcuffs. "No. That's. No. Yeah. It's a thing I... a thing I say when, you know...? Yeah, no. Yeah. It's... it's correct."

"So you're that gay Christian magician, huh?" the investigator asked, which was exactly what GOB was hoping he wouldn't hear. Every time he spoke to a new person, they'd say something along those lines, so he'd been avoiding new people until it all boiled over, hence the panic when George-Michael called the police in the first place. The thing was that it wasn't boiling over, in fact, and GOB was now victim to his own life, causing a major addition of social anxiety to his social anxiety that already existed.

GOB said nothing. The investigator nodded, looking through the papers and laughing softly.

"Can you do a trick?"

"It's not a trick. It's–" GOB stopped himself. "I performed an illusion earlier and now I'm here, so it'd be great if we could just–"

"Hey, Carrie, come in here," the investigator said into his radio. "We've got the gay magician."

"The normal one or the Christian one?"

"Come on in here and you'll see."

GOB sat up. "Look, are there any papers I need to sign or... people I need to contact or something?"

"Yeah. We'll get to that. Hold on," the investigator said with a wave of his hand. The door opened and he waved again as his coworker entered the room. "Ta-dah!" he chortled, pointing at GOB, who severely wished he would have mastered the invisibility illusion by now.

"GOB Bluth," Carrie gasped. She pronounced it, however, like–

gob
/ɡäb/
informal
noun: gob; plural noun: gobs
1.
a lump or clot of a slimy or viscous substance.
"a gob of phlegm"

-which really wasn't ideal.

GOB shifted in his seat. "You're mistaken." Because, in a way, she was.

"My kids think you're hilarious. Could I get an autograph?"

GOB blinked slowly, taking a deep breath to regain his sanity. This was why he found law enforcement incompetent. This reason and this reason alone. He wasn't socially aware enough to even consider the others.

"I..." He swallowed and motioned behind him with his head. "My hands are cuffed."

"Oh, right," Carrie replied. "Maybe a tongue print then. You know every tongue has a unique print? Like snowflakes–"

"Or... fingers?" GOB suggested, but was ignored.

"I think we have some edible ink in the next room. Don't worry. The taste will go away pretty quickly as your spit cleans it out."

The investigator furrowed his brow. "Can't we just take his handcuffs off?"

"Yeah, I think I'm subconsciously retaining saliva due to my intense dislike for you and the current situation anyway, so I'd rather go with that," GOB said, subconsciously retaining saliva due to his intense dislike for them and the current situation anyway. "But also, please do what you normally do with straight, agnostic non-magicians when they're in your custody because I really need to get back."

"And do what?" Carrie asked, which was a damn fair question.

"Be gay?" the investigator asked, suggesting that being gay was some sort of extracurricular activity that one would do by conscious choice.

"Okay," GOB laughed anxiously in fear he'd never leave this room. "Police raided my room, I was startled, I accidentally released my fireball in their direction. I also resisted arrest because I didn't want to come here just to be called the gay Christian magician for three hours. That's it. Do I get to leave? Do- do I- sh- should I-"

"Oh, no, we have all our information. We've pretty much been good to go since you got here," the investigator said. "There is a bail fee, though, so someone will have to come pay your way out."

GOB gritted his teeth. "Okay, so–"

"Shut up for a second."

The investigator reached into his front pocket and pulled out a large round candy, placing it on the table in front of him. "You have been stopped."

It was a gobstopper. The investigator laughed explosively.

GOB tried again. "So do I call someone or have you already contacted people?"

"Oh, yeah, that," the investigator replied, easing the gobstopper into his mouth with his first finger. "That's on you. You can make one call." He pointed to the landline hanging on the wall opposite them.

"Dammit," GOB snarled. "None of my family cares enough to bail me out."

"Isn't there, like, some sort of magician league that you can call? Some sort of alliance?" Carrie asked. And then GOB realized that maybe the police force wasn't completely incompetent, because she'd just helped him remember someone who might actually care.

And it wasn't George Senior, but we're focusing on him anyway to break up the long ass scene that we don't want to make boring by any means.

George Senior was on the way to his room. He stepped into the elevator, hitting a button as a middle-aged blonde woman stepped in next to him.

"You here for the retreat?" George Senior asked her, and she nodded.

"Yeah, actually," she replied, offering a handshake. "My name's Sally."

"You look familiar." George Senior remarked as he shook her hand. She merely shrugged, deciding it wasn't likely that someone who had any connection to her in real life would be in front of her right now for the same event in the same location, especially considering they'd have to come from the exact same very specific section of Orange County, California that she did, which she deemed 100% impossible and immediately dismissed.

"Might've seen me in the papers," Sally decided. "I'm a politician."

George, suddenly realizing he didn't remember what his own daughter looked like, made the connection that Lindsay was not only blonde and white but was also a politician as well. Furrowing his brow, he pointed at Sally and narrowed his eyes.

"Are you my daughter?" he asked, wondering briefly if he had dementia but then realizing that the reason he didn't know was because he couldn't care less about his children.

"What?" Sally asked. "No."

"Oh, okay," George Senior nodded, giving a sigh of relief as they both silently waited to reach their floor.

"So," he continued now that he knew for sure he wasn't doing anything incest-y, "Are you free for dinner? Or–"

"No," Sally replied shortly.

"Oh, okay," George Senior nodded again.

It was quiet.

The Bluth model home would beg to differ, however. Since Buster was still stuck in the door, he had become hungry and couldn't get his own food. Tobias immediately took this as another calling for an acting role, this specific one being of a mother figure (putting aside the fact that Lucille wasn't only here but also very available), and decided to start practicing.

So he began speeding his way back and forth between Buster and the kitchen, still using the broken – and now talking – wall as a ramp to get up and down the dips in the floor, bringing spoon after spoon of Goldfish crackers and yogurt directly to Buster's baby bird mouth, pouring them in, and bringing them back, not stopping to rest or type and therefore never allowing himself to speak. This gave him a newfound appreciation for mothers. He realized that they worked very hard very constantly and it was a lifelong commitment.

Lucille, after grumpily returning from the attic, quietly watched them both during this discovery, immediately proving this realization of Tobias' wrong and drinking her cooking wine out of a bowl now because nobody had done the dishes since 2004 when the show first aired.

-

"Someone confiscated my phone. Do you have it?" GOB asked the investigator before he and Carrie left the room. He had finally been freed from his handcuffs, and his fingers were poised over the number pad on the landline phone.

"Yeah. Need a number?"

"I do," GOB replied. "Go to contacts and read off the number for, um... tonedwondrksjffjdjfk."

The investigator paused. "What?"

GOB sheepishly took a breath and closed his eyes in discomfort. "Tonedwomnmdr," he mumbled, hoping the asswipe could just figure it out without him having to say it aloud.

"You only have five contacts in your phone?" the investigator asked. GOB turned to him with a glare, expecting credit for adding the fifth one just the other day (granted it was his own number, but a big step nonetheless).

"Toned-D Wonder," he demanded. "For the love of fucking–"

"Bullshit," the man laughed. "Franklin Delano Bluth? I loved his single album. I can't believe you have his number."

GOB shrugged. "Well actually that's... my number. It's for a performance we did. Just... please. Tony's number. Now."

"Well, you must have changed the contact information, because that isn't in here," the investigator said. "We've got Franklin, yourself, Pizza Hut, 'not really Houdini's number', and a bull emoji."

"I don't remember changing anything," GOB thought suspiciously aloud before pointing confidently at his phone. "But it's definitely the bull one. Do that."

And so the asshat investigator finally gave GOB one thing he asked for by reading out a number, checking a second off the list as he eventually left the room.

GOB dialed Tony's number, listening anxiously to the ringing and wondering why and how he was now a bull in his phone.

The line picked up. "Hello?"

"Tonyyyyyyy," GOB said in the same way he always said it.

"GOB? Hi," Tony said. "This isn't... the usual number you call from, is it?"

GOB cleared his throat and pursed his lips, hesitant to get into the very important details. "Did you change your contact in my phone?"

Tony snickered on the other line. GOB was quiet as he awaited the answer.

"Uh, yeah," Tony finally said. "Snuck it in when we went out on the town last week. Our little joke. Like it?"

GOB actually did like it (he found it, in fact, very funny and also equally charming; a 2-in-1 deal), but he didn't want to admit it aloud. "Hey, do you know how to escape a building?"

"Ah." Tony clicked his tongue in disappointment. "Thought I did, but-" He then stopped to continue sawing through a door handle with a small butter knife. "No; I'm actually stuck in one myself. In a bit of a pickle, if I'm completely honest." For the visual experience, he was also wearing a flowy purple robe with his smoothly shaven legs completely exposed.

"What?" GOB asked. "How? Why?"

"Sally locked me in the top level of the house when she left for Florida yesterday and she took the fire escape ladder with her," Tony replied casually. "I can't really... leave."

"Can't you call the police?" GOB asked, and Tony scoffed sarcastically.

"Why would I call the police?" he asked. "They're totally incompetent."

"Yeah, good point," GOB replied. "Plus I'm using their phone so they might not be able to take the call."

Tony stopped sawing, leaving the knife in its position on the door and leaning against the wall. "So... what? Are you saying that the building you're stuck in is..." He tilted his head back in realization. "GOB, are you in police custody?" And then, because he knew he was: "What did you do?"

GOB rolled his eyes, twirling the spiraled phone cord around his finger. "Fire came out of my sleeve and they felt threatened. Maybe they thought I was gonna cook them or something."

Tony furrowed his brow. "Were you?"

"What?"

"I heard they make a great cop salad."

GOB paused, the phone cord completely covering his entire finger at this point. "Oh," he said, laughing nervously again. "Cobb salad. Ha... haha. You're so funny. And you know, what's also funny is the reason I called you."

"Yeah?" Tony asked, going back to sawing at the door handle. GOB hesitantly bit the inside of his cheek, twirling the phone cord again.

"Look, Tony, I just need someone to come pick me up. There's, like, a $200 bail fee–" It was actually $700, but he didn't want to say that up front– "but I'll pay you back. Really."

"Look, GOB," Tony replied, "I would, but since I last told you, I'm still stuck in my house, so I can't." He took a moment to think. "Is there someone else you can call?"

GOB, at this point, had wrapped the phone cord all the way up his arm. "I have one call, so no, actually."

"Well, you could email someone. Like your son."

GOB was now slowly spinning, the cord wrapping around his shoulders and down his torso. "My what?"

"Yeah, that jackass who shouts his name all the time," Tony replied, holding his phone to his ear with his shoulder and jiggling the knife.

GOB pointed his corded finger menacingly at the air, which was very frightened indeed. "Don't you dare call my son a jackass," he threatened before very calmly adding, "Who is he, though?"

"All I remember is that he's in pest control or something," Tony recalled. "You probably have him in your contacts."

"Time's up," the investigator called from the other room. GOB, who had now gotten the cord wrapped all the way down his left leg, wondered how in hell he'd be able to hang up at all.

"Okay, thanks, Tony," he said. "Gotta go. The cops are being all... strict again."

"Yeah," Tony replied. "Hate it when they do that."

"Yeah," GOB chortled. "With all their..." He paused as a few officers entered the room and approached the phone. "...law stuffseeyoulatermaybe–" The police grabbed the phone (and his hand, as it was now attached to it) and hung it up, giving him a disgruntled look.

"Did you call us incompetent?" the one in front asked. GOB accidentally removed the phone from the wall again, which seemed to trigger some more irritation from them.

"Could you hear that call?" he asked, and the officer pointed to the room through the one-way mirrored window.

"We monitor all calls made in our building," he explained. "In there."

"Oh."

"Hey, let go of that damned phone, will ya?" the officer demanded. GOB started unwrapping it from his hand, but it didn't seem to be fast enough for their liking, because the officer yanked it from his grip, somehow detaching it from the cord itself and smashing it back onto the wall.

"And give us that cord so you can't kill yourself with it."

GOB hesitated. "Why would I kill myself–"

"People don't like being in custody. Just give me the damn–" He stopped talking in complete agitation, grabbing the cord too and pulling it so quickly that it mostly came off of GOB's arm. The rest of it didn't come off because it had somehow knotted with itself, the pulling from the officer only making it more concrete. This cut off circulation immediately, giving GOB a quick trip to the hospital, and also an easy way to bail himself out of police custody.

And, at the same time GOB was admitted to the emergency room, Lindsay was calling it.

"Hi," she said to the woman who picked up. "I'm wondering if I could get a new cast."

"Tell me more," the receptionist prompted, knowing exactly what this was about because she wasn't the first to request it since Chris was hired.

"My foot is really itchy and my skin is red and swollen," Lindsay replied, and the receptionist nodded.

"Come in immediately," she replied. "Also, you might have STIs now."

"What?" Lindsay asked.

"I said 'might' so you wouldn't be as pissed when you got here. But you definitely have something."

"So this entire time I've been whacking my foot against the wall was because my skin wasn't normal in the least?"

The receptionist paused. "You've been what?"

"Just..." Lindsay sighed. "I'll be there in ten minutes."

"Alright. We'll put you in the same room as your brother if you'd like."

Lindsay tipped her head. "Michael's in the hospital?"

"What?"

"What?"

(He wasn't.)

"Please just come to the emergency room before we have to cut anything off." And with that, the receptionist somewhat ironically cut off the call, and Lindsay left, deciding that this time, she was going to drive her goddamn self.

Chapter Text

Lucille was, as expected, "driving" herself home.

Swaying a bit as she approached her car door, she decided she didn't need to open it, but rather stepped over the door and into her seat, feeling proud of this for some reason and outwardly remarking that "This is what convertibles are for."

"Smells like semen," she whispered to herself after sniffing the car suspiciously. "Also... the wall?" Which, by the way, she still hadn't been told that Annyong was alive and well inside. The family had collectively decided to leave her out of this.

Lindsay was also, as expected, "driving" herself to the hospital.

Itching her foot by twisting it in a likely incredibly damaging fashion inside her cast, she peered over her tinted sunglasses to examine a slump of what looked like dead flesh on the side of the road. It wasn't the cat she'd run over earlier (that was on the other side of the road but, fear not, still there), but rather someone she knew: an old friend named—

"Chris?" she asked over the window that she'd rolled down.

Chris looked up, his skin red and hot and dehydrated, a quick flash of hope filling his eyes. "Lindsay," he breathed gratefully, trying to stand up and approach the car. "I'm so sorry for giving you an STD; I mean, assuming that there's only one because I never got tested so I'm not sure what it is or how many I've got. Can I get a ride, though? I won't do it again; I swear."

Lindsay had slowly been inching the car forward the whole time.

"Please, Lindsay," Chris begged, his eyes softening like a dog's as he pretended he had done nothing wrong and that his college debt truly was his only flaw. "This could save my life."

And so, that sentence being the deciding factor, Lindsay promptly drove off, leaving him in the minimal wind and high-heat sun. And that's alright. It wasn't worth bringing him back to the hospital; regardless, he would have been promptly fired upon arrival.

Not long after Lindsay abandoned him, however, he ended up calling 911 anyway, and was admitted to the hospital as a patient this time due to suffering from heat stroke. But at least he got there.

"Good thing you're here, because I wanted to give you some advice," his coworker said in the tone of Neil Gaiman in his Masterclass ad, connecting him to fluids and his daily hepatitis medication that he'd forgotten to take earlier as they set him on a hospital bed and intentionally made his pillow flat and shaped wrong.

"You know, my mother always said that if there isn't any reason that your subject will enjoy it, don't fuck it," he said wisely, and Chris glowered flatly back.

"God, Chad. Is this because of the feet?"

"Look, I'm just saying that foot babies wouldn't be very pretty. Probably end up kicking them out of the house. Foot joke," the doctor replied with a snort, putting his hands into the air in mock defense, putting them back down, and directing a nonchalant pointer finger at Chris' head. "Oh, also you're fired."

"Is this... also because of the feet?"

Chad shrugged. "It's one of your only flaws."

While Chris lost his job for malpractice, though, back at the model home, Maeby was busy picking one up for almost the same reason.

"Hello, this is Alicia Goldstead, the girl who has your job," a voice said over the phone. Maeby sporadically clicked her pen against the marble countertop.

"Hey," she said, forcing herself to sound extra friendly. "How's it going?"

"All good things, all good things," Alicia said, lying, because you're encouraged to lie if things actually aren't all good due to the questionable culture our society has raised. "I'm calling you with an inquiry."

"Yeah?" Maeby prompted, leaning back but quickly leaning forward as she remembered that the stool she was sitting on did not have a back to it. "I'm listening."

"Since we know you are, in fact, over eighteen now," Alicia said, masking the fact that Maeby had previously lied her way into an extremely high-paying job with a subtle enabling of paraphrasing, "we'd like to hire you back. Whatever role you'd like. We have positions open for camerawork, directing, writing, managing..."

Maeby, at this point, was no longer listening, trying her best to harness the autopilot that her cousin could so easily summon when in the middle of listening to a long paragraph of words.

"...Does that sound good to you?" Alicia finished, to which Maeby said, "Mm-hm," and Alicia replied, "Good! I'll meet you in front of Building D tomorrow at eight. Welcome back to the business."

Luckily, Maeby had stopped using autopilot at this point and had finally registered that she'd just received a job again and didn't know what it was. Instead of asking, though, she nodded and pretended she knew exactly what she was talking about.

"See you then!" she said. "Alright. Bye."

She hung up, placing her phone back on the counter and sighed, leaning forward this time in a mixture of satisfaction and complete exhaustion (her antisocial tendencies had to work really hard in that minute-long conversation).

"Who was that?" a voice asked anxiously in her ear. Maeby screamed and leaned back, slipping off her stool and somehow landing crookedly on her feet. Attempting to regain a casual stance, she awkwardly straightened back up, leaning on the stool with her hand.

"George-Michael," she sighed. "Holy moly."

"Did I startle you?" George-Michael asked, still looking dazed with paranoia, his eyes somewhat marbled over as he stared expectantly into the depths of her soulless self. Maeby narrowed her eyes.

"No," she said, and was surprised that her cousin thought nothing of the statement and moved on.

"Who was that calling?" he asked, his shoulders stiffening with nerves. Maeby thought she saw one of his eyes twitch. "Was it Dad?"

"No," Maeby replied. "Why would your dad call me?"

George-Michael thought about this, nodded because it was a fair point, and left the kitchen without another word, confusing Maeby immensely and patting Buster's head as he went up the stairs. "Morning, Buster."

Buster, who had been sleeping – which was suspicious because it was already the afternoon (maybe he took too many vitamin gummies) – jolted his head up and immediately presented them with the fact that "I have to pee."

This was ignored by both people nearby, who were preoccupied with either worrying about their dad or wondering why their cousin was worrying about their dad in such a paranoid way, so Buster had to do some problem solving, opening the door, thinking of Flat Stanley as his inspiration while trying his best to maneuver his midsection out of it, and peeing on the concrete front step so that it wouldn't soak into the floor inside.

"Okay. Good," he sighed in self-praise, crouching back inside and nodding proudly to himself. "Good little boy."

He then realized, with a wave of panic, that at some point in the near future, "I'll have to poop as well?" which caused a mini panic attack, and then a string of more panic attacks as he finally realized that he was stuck in a door, and furthermore his arm was stuck outside of it.

It would take a wondrous miracle to get him out.

-

"What's the total on our hospital bills?" GOB asked, signing papers with Lindsay and looking up at a doctor (who looked a lot like Chris but, luckily, wasn't). "I need to text them to my mom because she's the only one who has money, really."

"It'll..." the doctor said, but he cut himself off with a wheezy laugh. Lindsay and GOB watched him expectantly, but nothing came of it as he kept snickering to himself, slapping his knee with his hand and giving himself a congratulatory snort.

"What?" Lindsay asked irritably, too fed up with doctors to put up with this bullshit any longer. The doctor, whose name tag read CHAD (of course), courteously found a way to sneak in the rest of the sentence through his laughing.

"It'll cost you..." he wheezed, "...an arm and a leg."

They all stared silently at each other, Chad's laughing dying down as he realized that was not the response they were looking for at the present time. Chad cleared his throat, nodded, and replied with:

"Thirteen thousand dollars."

"Holy moly," Lindsay whispered. A decent, but very white, response. "But why?"

"Yeah," GOB added. "How does all that add up?"

Chad froze, keeping his manufactured smile plain on his face in such a painful way that one could have guessed it was nailed there, and took a painfully long breath in.

Clearing his throat, he looked down at the floor and mumbled, still smiling, "One thousand dollars. You can pay us... one thousand dollars."

GOB nodded as if in complete understanding. "You probably added the price of an ambulance ride by accident," he said. Lindsay, who had never used an ambulance ride, laughed sarcastically, because how could an ambulance ride possibly ever be $12,000?

"Just," Chad said, suddenly under an intense amount of visual stress, "sign the form so we can charge you... one thousand dollars."

In Florida, George Senior was being told something of a very similar tone.

"If you'll sign all these forms," Sally instructed, handing clipboards to all the people who had gathered in the conference room rented out for the retreat, "We can bill you for your time, which, as we said on the website, would be $400 per day. You'll be charged for however many days you signed up for on our site, meaning that if you've signed up for the minimum of one day, you'll be charged for one day, and if you signed up for the maximum of nine days, you'll be charged for that, etcetera."

George Senior, who had signed up for, predictably, nine days, was all too eager to hand over a third of an ambulance ride's wages to a pretty politician that, since he'd checked, was not his daughter.

Signing the forms, he handed them back quickly to Sally, finding pride and superiority in the fact that he was the first to give them back. He gave her a coy smile as he did, which she returned with a professional head nod, miraculously not denting his confidence at all but rather egging him on.

"While you're filling those out, I'll begin a short introductory presentation," Sally announced, turning on a projector and pulling a PowerPoint up on the wall.

"So, we are all gathered here today because of one thing we have in common," Sally said. "We are all single." She forgot to mention that she didn't count as part of "we all". Oops? "And that's no big deal! Look to the person on your left. Look to the person on your right. Everyone in this room is in your shoes! Give them a high five."

George Senior, quick to impress, made an effort to high five everyone in his area, stepping over a few chairs to do so as Sally hesitantly continued, clicking to an introductions slide on her presentation.

"Let's go around the room and introduce ourselves. We'll start in this inner circle and then wrap around through the next one. I'll go first," Sally instructed, bringing a chair to the front of the room and sitting down in it.

"My name is Sally," she said, to which the rest of the room replied, "Hi, Sally," like they would in an AA meeting. "I am 41 years old, and I am a politician. I became single very recently because my fiancé got locked in a room and died of starvation."

Everyone in the room went "holy shit" to this, and so did we.

Sally pointed at the nearest person in the first row, who was, quite predictably, George Senior. He sat up straight in his chair, looking around the room and waving.

"So sorry about that, Sally," he began. "You know, since meeting you in the elevator and getting to know you, I can tell you really don't deserve that. And I'm sure he didn't, either. Anyway..." He took a slow breath, not noticing Sally closing her eyes in extreme remorse for taking this job. "My name is George, I'm 78 years old, I'm retired–" (he meant from jail) "–and I became single something like last year when my wife filed for divorce. We just didn't completely get along, and also she had a thing for my twin brother whom I forgot existed until now since I'm saying this–" (So did we. I apparently just forgot to write him in) "–so it just didn't work all around. But I miss her very much."

Then, remembering to make himself seem available, he added, "But I'm also ready to start anew. I'm very open. Extremely... here. Very much." He nodded and sat back in his seat. Sally took a deep breath and, because she was required to, replied: "Welcome, George!" and clapped three times.

George Senior, for some godforsaken reason, did not make the connection that this was not a personal come-on. He took it to be Sally's confirmation that he should just go ahead and ask her out a billion more times or something. Each clap gave him more and more confidence in her interest. Even when she had the same response for the rest of the 37 other people in the room, his interpretation did not vacillate nor waver.

Completely lovestruck with this woman, he watched her throughout, intensely fascinated with everything she was saying as if it was a TED Talk and she was explaining the secrets of the universe. Every time she'd say, "Welcome, (insert name here)!" and clap, she'd give him an uncomfortable glance to see him staring into her soul and, every now and then, giving her a wink. But she could barely back out of this; she had, of course, implied that Tony Wonder was dead and she had nobody in her life.

But Tony Wonder, even though potentially intended to be dead, was actually very much alive, and had successfully sawed through the handle of the first door he was locked behind. There were two more he had to get through, though, and his butter knife was wearing out. He needed to get out quickly, he knew. Not only did he have to eat and drink and all that jazz, but his leg hair was starting to grow back, and even worse, his wax was currently in an inaccessible bathroom.

Losing patience (and knife quality), Tony stabbed the hollow wooden door, realizing quite quickly that this was a lot more efficient than cutting through metal knobs, viciously sawing around the handle and pushing it out of the door itself. Although still trapped inside a small section of the upper level of his home, he could at least access the bathroom and wax his legs now, which he promptly went to do.

-

"Which car did you bring here?" asked GOB, looking around the parking lot with narrowed eyes and sunglasses, which really didn't help him in the quest of answering that question himself. "Mom's or–"

"The one you can climb," Lindsay interrupted shortly, her brand new cast scraping against the ground as she pointed to the Stair Car with her crutch. They both hurried inside, blasting the air conditioning and taking off.

"I'm a little teapot, short and stout," the CD player sang joyfully, and both of them simultaneously yelled out in inexplicable agony and made a violent move toward the stop button.

Glorious silence ensuing, GOB breathed in relief as Lindsay turned toward the passenger window and glowered out of it. This was noticed immediately by her brother... thing, who took off his sunglasses (George-Michael said this was an easy way to appear more likable) and tucked them into the cup holder.

"Are you mad at me because I threw you out of the car and that's why you irreversibly shattered your ankle?" he asked. Lindsay set her jaw and sighed.

"You know what?" she asked rhetorically.

"What?" GOB replied anyway.

"I had honestly forgotten about that," Lindsay admitted, giving the roadside trees a dirty look intended passively for her brother, "but now that I remember, yes. I'm mad about that and I'm mad at you."

GOB nodded, putting his sunglasses back on because his empathetic work seemed done in his eyes, and additionally, the sun was really goddamn bright, also in his eyes. Making an unexpected turn in the road, he parked in a small lot and opened his door.

"Well, you'll have to get used to being mad at me, because I need to make a stop and leave you in the hot car while I go do something very important."

"What?!" Lindsay called after him as he closed the door and headed to a small strip mall they'd parked by. She viciously rolled the crank window down as fast as she possibly could and leaned her head out of it. "I have to avoid heat to keep my skin from being moist and worsening the infection! You know that, asshole!"

"Oh yeah?" GOB called back. "Well, I also know that it's really fucking easy to not let a questionable guy plant a seed in your foot! I'm not giving you special treatment–"

"You're just mad that, unlike you, I actually have the guts to get with someone!" Lindsay called out the window. "When's the last time you went down on a girl, huh?"

This actually took GOB off guard. Stopping in the street, he tipped his head and tried to jog his memory. "How present have you actually been since... Do you even remember... Were you around for..." And then his face went "...???-:.," as he slowly realized that none of his gay storylines had overlapped with Lindsay's endeavors at all – except for the wall trick, which she likely took as a joke – and she still assumed that the reason he hadn't had any recent straight engagements was because he just couldn't find any women.

Both of them equally confused, GOB intelligently decided to resolve this by not explaining anything and turning back around, promptly walking back into the store he'd come here for without another word. Lindsay's foot began to sweat.

And it wasn't just her foot. People all over Orange County were in the process of perspiration for various reasons, the most common one being that it was hot enough to cook a whole chicken in a windowless basement after placing it in a cooler with a bag of ice, and the outlier being that some people – specifically George-Michael – had some anxiety on their hands.

George-Michael was leaving yet another message for his father. Sitting on the plaster-dusted living room sofa, he coughed the rodent-reeking drywall out of his lungs as the phone beeped and sent him straight to voicemail.

"Hi, Dad," he said, his voice raised a few tones out of complete fear, "We found Annyong, by the way–"

"Anneyong," said the wall.

"–so don't worry about that anymore. But you haven't returned any of my calls or texts or even emails and I'm getting really worried. I filed a report saying you're missing since we have absolutely no contact. So if you're around, please call me back. Please, Dad. I'm begging you. And the police would appreciate it, too. They can't find people for shit so it'd probably take a lot of pressure off their hands..."

George-Michael then realized that maybe GOB was right about them being incompetent.

"Anyway, call me back. Oh, also Lindsay has another STD now. And GOB was arrested. And Buster's stuck in the door, and Tobias..."

He looked over at his uncle, who was sitting emotionlessly in his now permanent apron and smiling blankly at the wall.

"...is scaring me, but no more than usual. Save me from this insanity. Please," George-Michael pleaded again. "Alright. Bye."

"Bye," said GOB at the same time, leaving the store he'd stopped at with a dove. This one, due to some sort of strange, other-worldly mistake, was actually still alive by the time he got back to the car, and would continue to be this way for quite a long time later.

Lindsay didn't even look up to see what he had when he got back in the diver's seat.

"Drive," she commanded, and GOB, still not sure of how to react to such authoritative requests, slammed on the gas and efficiently drove them home.

Making their way along a familiar road, GOB looked out the window, both him and his new dove squinting at whatever was there.

"Is that a cat?" he asked. Lindsay craned her neck upwards to take a look.

"Oh, yeah," she said nonchalantly, looking out her other window and feeling pissed to see that Chris was no longer there. "I ran over that earlier."

"You ran– Hold on," GOB reassessed, slowing down the car to get a good view of the roadkill. "That's Bullseye."

Lindsay looked back at him. "What?"

"Tony's cat," GOB said, stopping the car and getting out, almost impressed as he got a closer look. "Jesus, you flattened him."

"Tony?" Lindsay asked in confusion, not necessarily because she didn't know who GOB was talking about but more precisely because GOB actually seemed to have at least one relationship outside of the family and those Christians.

GOB squatted next to Bullseye, trying to figure out what to do with the corpse. He had the strong sense that he needed to bring it back, and this was solidified as his dove, who had been previously perched on his shoulder, hopped down and started pecking at it.

"No! Don't do that. Doves are herbivores," he scolded in shock, shooing it off of the cat and forcing it back on his shoulder. "You're not even supposed to eat that."

This sentence would become so commonly called out that the dove would end up being given the name Hannibal to match the catchphrase.

"What's taking you so long?" Lindsay asked. GOB looked up at her through the open driver's door, motioning to the flattened cat.

"How do I get this back home?" he called back to her, and she motioned disinterestedly at the dashboard.

"Lay it on the hood," she suggested impatiently, which was a fair enough idea (until later when they would realize that the smell of dead cat wafts in quite easily through the air conditioning system).

GOB found it difficult to get Bullseye off the road in one piece. He discovered that he had to peel him off, as the blood and fur from him had cemented to the ground and trying to pick him up any other way would likely break his already-decomposing body into more pieces than were ideal. So he detached the feline cadaver from the road much in the fashion of a fisherman flipping over a fresh-caught carp to get a look at the other side, carrying it disgustedly by the ear and flopping it onto the hood of the car, stepping back inside the vehicle with his dove.

"Man," he said with a forced exhale of a laugh, staring with a crinkled nose at the flattened animal. "You really hit that one right on the target." He have Lindsay a proud look, chortling to himself. "Get it? Because a bullseye–"

"Get. Me. The. Hell. Home," Lindsay commanded through gritted teeth. GOB, miffed that all his jokes throughout his life had been so quickly rejected, slammed on the gas.

Their mother was arriving home as well, deciding to go back to her apartment due to needing real wine in a real glass, and also looking through boxes to find the one titled "Annyong" without an e, even though she didn't need it now that he was back safe in the wall (of course, she wouldn't be looking if she knew).

"I swear, if I don't find it this time..." she growled to herself, not even completely sure what she'd do. She'd threaten a wall, but after seeing what happened at the model home, she decided against directing her anger at that.

Tearing through her storage closet once again, Lucille called out in complete exasperation as not a single one of the boxes marked Annyong were anywhere to be found. Slumping over on the floor and looking up at the ceiling, she closed her eyes and sighed in exhaustion.

"Just like George suspected," she grumbled to herself. "George-Michael must have..."

She paused, her eyes resting on another shelf that she hadn't noticed before.

"...hidden them for some reason..."

Grabbing a stool from the kitchen, Lucille peered up at the shelf, gasping as she found it: a shoebox labeled "Annyong" in sharpie on the front flap.

Pulling it down, she opened it quickly and sighed in relief to find a stack of papers inside.

"Now to find the certificates," she whispered forebodingly to herself, but slowed down as she realized that all these letters weren't actually legal papers, or even the fake ones she'd printed off the internet. All of them, each and every one, were drawings and love letters for none other than her granddaughter/niece... thing, Maeby.

"Oh," Lucille said, doing a double-take at the writing. "I didn't know Annyong was that good at English."

She missed, of course, the date on the top of the pages (all written before he had come to America or even filed for studying abroad), and also the name George-Michael signed at the bottom of all of them. But neither George-Michael nor Annyong were her actual children; paying attention wasn't her job (not to suggest that she deemed it her job with her legitimate children either).

"Hm. Maybe Maeby should see these," she decided.

"Maybe Gangy should see these," George-Michael said simultaneously back at the model home. Having found a box with "George-Michael" on the side, he had opened it to find a bunch of illegitimate legal documents, all mentioning Korea and guardianship. Immediately he knew that this was what his grandparents had been looking for all this time.

But then, slowly but surely, it naturally registered to him that, if Annyong's things were in his boxes, that meant...

"Oh, shit."

Pulling out his phone immediately, George-Michael anxiously texted his grandfather to try and prompt information out of him in the event that his love letters to his cousin had been found. Unbeknownst to him, his grandfather knew of no recent developments, as he was busy trying to find new singles across the country, ironically only being interested in the one woman he could have just as easily found at home.

< I found one of my boxes

Oh. Nice >

< It isn't my stuff though

George-Michael bit his fingernails in anxiety, closing his eyes and awaiting a text saying something like "Interesting you bring that up..."

But it never came.

It's progress! >

George-Michael furrowed his brow. Though he was relieved, he became just as easily concerned with his grandfather. Either he'd found some joy in his life and was feeling enthusiastic or he'd been murdered and the killer was texting people and trying to cover it up; both equally unlikely situations.

"What a weird fucking thing for him to say," George-Michael whispered just as his uncle oiled his way into the room.

"I'm leaving," GOB announced, to which Buster sighed from his spot by/on/in(?) the door.

"Oh, no. You're turning into Michael," he whined. GOB put his pointer finger into the air in casual retaliation, turning to Buster and leaning down a bit.

"Don't worry," he said in a lighter tone than usual. "I'm coming back when I'm done. I have no choice. I need the money. Obviously."

George-Michael rested his fingers on the bridge of his nose. "Where?" he asked, irritated that he was still running off whenever he'd appear.

"A funeral," GOB said hurriedly, which sounded like a dumb excuse.

"For who?" Maeby asked dryly from behind her fishing magazine. "You have, legitimately, no connections."

"Well, it isn't for me," GOB said with a small laugh, heading for the door as he was interrupted again.

"Well, no shit," Lindsay remarked. "You're alive."

"No," GOB said with an eye roll. "I mean, it isn't a connection of mine; it's for Tony Wonder's fuckass cat. Found it rotting in the street a few minutes ago." He motioned outside with his thumb.

"And you have to attend?" Buster asked as GOB tried to figure out how to even open the door with him in it in the first place. He decided there would have to be a lot of foot coordination on Buster's part.

"Well, I mean, long story short, Sally Sitwell locked him inside his house, so I might have to help get him out," GOB explained, trying to pry open the door, his dove cheerfully cooing in encouragement, "which is the main reason I'm going, really."

"Why doesn't he call the police?" Tobias asked through the laptop. A short silence ensued as GOB dramatically turned around and stared him directly in the eye until he realized the answer and typed a response into his keyboard again.

"Oh."

"By the way," George-Michael asked, turning off his phone and sliding it back into his pocket, "how long are you planning on leaving us without a car this time?"

GOB, suddenly presented with conflict he didn't like nor know how to respond to, narrowed his eyes, turned toward Buster, and silently made an attempt to leave the house.

The family was not surprised by this. Maeby went back to faking interest in her magazine.

"As long as you're home by morning," she said. "I'll need to drive to work around 7:30."

Not even her parents were previously aware or currently interested in this fun fact. They all sat silently, painfully aware of GOB trying his hardest to slip through the front door, and preparing to be stranded together again. Lindsay, dreading this the most out of them all, decided that this couldn't get much worse. At least the amount of people in the house was decreasing temporarily. At least she still had that. At least that wouldn't be changed within the next twenty-four hours, specifically in the early hours of tomorrow morning. At least she'd stay sane enough that way.

Chapter Text

When Sally Sitwell left for Florida, she knew exactly what she was doing. She locked everything behind her, and this included the upstairs doors, the downstairs doors, the windows, the basement doors, all emergency exits, the front door, the back door, the balcony doors, the cupboards (she didn't need Tony escaping in any Half-Blood Prince-esque cupboard teleportation tricks), the refrigerator (same reason), the mailbox, the front gate, the back gate, the five middle gates (they had a long house. Shut up), the air vents, and every possible drawer she could think of. Not to mention adding extra layers to her self-installed home security system, which didn't allow any sort of unlocking to happen without her approval.

So to say that this was a hard plan to cut around... is inaccurate. Cutting the doors with a butter knife was the only thing keeping security from going off at all. But to say that this was difficult to maneuver is very fitting.

One can imagine the confused turmoil as GOB Bluth pulled up in the Stair Car with a dove and a rotting cat without any means of actually entering the premises. In fact, his vehicle had already been spotted by the camera out front and the alarm was so goddamn ready to go off that you could practically see it glare at him. He did not notice this, however, because of how used to being glared at that he was.

So, knowing that there was no way to get in without causing mass destruction, GOB contemplated calling Tony again. But then the realization hit him that if Tony was trapped upstairs, he couldn't help GOB get in just as equally as GOB couldn't help him get out. So he stood there in anxious contemplation, holding Bullseye in a limp Target bag that was tied at the top to prevent Hannibal from eating him, and waited.

During his waiting, however, GOB noticed a shattered window on the upper level of the house. This gave him hope, so he made the bright decision to yell at it.

"HI!" he called up to the hole.

And, like magic, Tony's head popped up in the window.

"OH, HI!" he yelled back. "YOU GOT OUT!"

GOB squinted up at him. "WHAT?"

"YOU GOT OUT!" Tony repeated, cupping his hands over his mouth to project the noise but ending up muffling it more.

"...WHAT?" GOB asked again, and Tony intelligently gave up and pointed at the Target bag instead.

"IS THAT MY CAT?" he asked, because he'd been missing Bullseye for a few days and it only made sense that this was why GOB had shown up in the first place.

"YEAH," GOB hollered back up at him. "MY SISTER RAN OVER IT."

"SHE WHAT?" Tony called. GOB sighed.

"SHE RAN OVER HIM!"

There was a hesitant silence.

"WHAT?" Tony asked, and GOB changed his approach. Lifting the bag up and pointing to it with his dove-carrying finger, he reported:

"HE'S DEAD!"

Tony leaned a bit out of the window. "I SEE THAT!"

"YOU WHAT?" GOB asked, and, at this point, we'd honestly had enough, so we wrote an ending to the whole bit.

"WILL YOU COME INSIDE?" Tony asked, to which GOB muttered, "I can try," and stepped over the front gate, immediately setting off a myriad of screaming alarms and scraping his crotch painfully against the spikes. The only thing stopping him from bleeding at this point were his tight, ripped, heterosexual skinny jeans.

Although, actually, they weren't his, now that I think about it. Those specific jeans he was currently borrowing from Tobias. So gay skinny jeans.

-

George-Michael was busy with his favorite hobby: being unbearably anxious.

He'd consumed roughly six bags worth of Sun Chips in attempt to drown out his fears of his dad being dead or held hostage or kidnapped, but this proved futile as it became quite clear that, regardless of what he was shoving into his mouth, the fact of the matter remained the same that Michael Bluth was gone.

So he reverted to something he'd only seen on one episode of Sherlock, yanking the family laptop from its position on the kitchen counter, clicking casually past the HD photo of someone's elegantly dangling clitoris and searching for a tracking website.

Just as he'd hoped, these were, in fact, real, although he severely questioned the accuracy and legality of it all. Typing his dad's phone number into the first site that appeared, he hit enter and waited for it to find the geological location of the cell phone. This, as he was soon to discover, took a long time, and also required him to download Clash of Clans and share a strange link to Facebook, which took an extra twenty minutes due to him setting up a whole entire Facebook account to begin with.

He also choked on a chip, which got stuck on its way down his esophagus and made him feel as though it was cutting him open, which he almost took as a sign from the universe to stop what he was doing, but caught himself and went through with it anyway because, hell or high water, he was going to find his dad.

And, in a way, the website kind of, sort of... did.

After the laptop contracted roughly eight viruses, the site made up for it by zooming in on a small alleyway in town, where it had located a signal from Michael's cell phone. Jumping off his chair in alarm and grabbing the laptop to bring with him, George-Michael headed for the door with an incredible amount of determination, as if he was James Bond himself. But he wasn't, which became very apparent as he shoved Buster and the door open to remember that—

"GOB took the car."

Yes. GOB took the car.

And this car was currently not planning on making it home anytime before nightfall. It was parked sloppily in front of Sally Sitwell's house, which was beeping and ringing from every possible alarm system it had.

This system, by the way, was linked to Sally's phone, which was currently buzzing nonstop as it tried to notify her that her house was being either broken into or broken out of. She didn't see them, however; she was currently busy avoiding George Senior while she hosted the singles retreat, having switched her phone to Do-Not-Disturb mode.

Not like she could do much if she had seen what was happening. She was all the way across the country. And besides, she'd just pronounced her husband dead, anyway. She really shouldn't care less about his whereabouts at this point.

But someone did, because, back in Orange County, California, they were busy trying their very hardest to get him out.

GOB had dismantled the security on the front gates after tripping over a wire and disconnecting it, so he was confident walking through the front door. But this set off a completely separate alarm, and he soon learned that every single item in this home that moved or could be used in any wad also had a security system. So, as he rushed through each door, he tried to trip over every possible wire near it in hopes that his luck would continue and the alarm would turn itself off.

This only worked three times out of the eleven doors he went through, but it was worth a shot. And, to be fair, it's hard to disconnect eleven wires while holding a dead cat in a garbage bag and keeping a living dove from eating it at the same time. And GOB wasn't used to doing tasks, or working, or being a responsible adult, so all this was really new territory. He decided to cut himself some slack and instead feel proud for getting into this place at all.

He kicked one last door open, resulting in a painful thud on the other side of it and a groan of discomfort.

"GOB? Jesus," Tony remarked from inside the room, and GOB noticed with a look of sudden understanding that Tony Wonder had just been attempting to saw himself out of the room with a butter knife. "You could have knocked."

"If you look at it in some... perspective, I suppose it..." GOB paused in contemplation, staring blankly at the open door in front of him. "I mean, it kind of was a knock."

Both of them had tuned out the house alarms at this point, sort of like how some people can get so used to tinnitus, or like how one can grow up in a dysfunctional household and get so used to it that they form an incestuous crush on their cousin, or like how someone can grow up in that same household one generation earlier and disappear from a family gathering when met with one thing they find slightly irritating and not coming back or showing any signs of life for however long it had been at this point. GOB didn't know. He wasn't keeping track of the reality of his missing brother, being the caring civilian he was.

Tony pulled open the half-cut door, looking down at the trash bag in GOB's nervously tight grip with an air of alienation. He hadn't seen another human being in a while. This felt new.

"What were you saying out there?" he asked through the screaming alarms. GOB plopped the bag of disintegrating cat into his free arms and replied as coherently as he could in the given moment.

"I said, uh, my, the, so— okay, here's the thing, really, if you..." GOB said, forcing a laugh before stopping himself and starting over. "It's just... such a big coincidence, right? Because, like, if you look at it in some perspective, like I said earlier, I... the... the thing is..." He sighed. "My sister ran over him."

"Ah..." Tony replied, squinting as he took in the bundle of unnecessary words. "She never was a good driver. And, you know..." He motioned to the bag, which he dangled with slight disgust from his first finger and thumb, "he was an old cat. Would have died in a few months' time anyway."

GOB, noticing how Tony was looking so longingly at the trash bag, glanced uncomfortably around the room before asking a rather guarded question: "Are you sad?"

Tony shrugged. "Only a bit."

"Okay," GOB laughed in relief, pointing lazily at the carcass, "because I was gonna say a joke about how... how he was sort of your eye, because he looked out for you and his name was Bullseye and — you know, our little joke you put into my phone, about the bull? Haha — anyway, I'm not gonna say it now because my nephew told me to be sensitive."

George-Michael had, in fact, told GOB to be sensitive. The message didn't communicate completely, but that was definitely more of a problem of GOB's wiring than anything else.

Tony took in a long breath, furrowing his brow and pointing to the bag. "Well, by explaining it," he countered, "in essence, you implied the joke anyway, if you look at it theoretically."

There was a beat of silence, except it wasn't silence because the alarms were still yelling out of every possible crevice in the wall. GOB nodded quickly, awkwardly attempting to compensate for his social losses. "Right, yeah," he said. "Yeah. Sorry."

"No, it's okay," Tony replied with a shrug, tossing the bag onto the floor and gripping the butter knife with the intention of getting it out of the door. "It's a good joke. I mean, people are allowed to tell jokes at funerals. Like, hello."

They were both quiet again, GOB frozen in place and Tony frozen because of mirror neurons.

"Oh, right, sorry," GOB apologized again. "Thanks."

Tony gave him a confused stare. "Sorry for... what?"

"Not responding," GOB chortled, giving a small snort as he laughed at the beeping room. "Almost expected the walls to say something for some reason."

The real reason was because he was actually too nervous to respond.

"No, it wasn't," said GOB.

"What?" asked Tony, and we were honestly wondering the same thing.

It was quiet again, except, of course, for the unchanging dose of not-quiet that was still there and hadn't changed since it was last mentioned. Tony Wonder changed the subject, diverting their focuses to the bird perched on GOB's shoulder.

"Oh, hey," he said with the tone of voice of someone who had only just noticed the bird, "who's this new little fella?"

GOB, who had almost forgotten about the thing, showed more genuine surprise at its existence. "Who? Oh! The... the bird, yeah." He cleared his throat out of 100% concentrated anxiety. "Got him a few hours ago. His name's Hannibal because he eats things he isn't supposed to."

It was strange that he'd forgotten that Hannibal was still with him, especially considering how difficult it had actually been to get him out of the family home. George-Michael, upon noticing not only the existence of the five but furthermore the reality of where it was going, had immediately questioned the reasoning behind it.

"Why are you bringing that?" he interrogated nervously, not comfortable with the task of confronting his chaotically-acting uncle with low reasoning ability. "Isn't it insensitive to bring your living pet to a funeral for a dead one?"

GOB only scoffed, grabbing a walnut and a hammer from the counter again because he had nothing else to do. "Oh, come on! You bring living grandparents to funerals for dead ones!" he argued, smacking the hammer straight down onto his own fingernail and dropping it on the floor in searing pain. "Besides," he hissed through gritted teeth, "do you expect me to leave him home? Are you kidding? He's my wingman!"

George-Michael eyed the walnuts on the counter. "We have tools other than hammers that you can use for those."

"A tool?" GOB replied, holding his thumb and making a dash for the door. "Uh, yeah, I don't think Mom can be used to open walnuts."

With this dramatic exit quote, GOB finally attempted to leave. But it was hard getting out the door. Three people moved to grab Hannibal, one of the people being Buster's free arm, so GOB merely swung the door open all the way so he had space and couldn't be reached by his younger brother, running into the car and driving off with a kind of urgency not typically associated with a pet dove.

And here he was now, standing in the house of the Rapunzel-esque figure he needed to save, minus the hair. Although it was debatable whether or not a Rapunzel comparison could be made for someone with normal hair, as hundred-foot locks were really Rapunzel's only attribute.

They opened the cat bag outside. Actually, Tony opened the cat bag outside. GOB spent his time physically detaining Hannibal and additionally hiding from the horror of whatever mystery scent was about to waft out of the cat cadaver. But it wasn't that bad, actually. He was pretty used to it.

"Huh," he said. "Smells kind of like my kitchen."

Tony ignored this fun fact, grabbing a shovel and aiming it at the dirt. Stepping on its edges and sinking it into the soil, he gripped the handle again and threw the dirt to the side.

But the shovel hit some sort of wire in the ground, setting off yet another alarm that was significantly more annoying than the others inside, so he made the intelligent decision that the hole really didn't have to be that deep. Tossing the corpse into the tiny divot in the soil, he covered it as much as he could with the dirt he'd removed, staring with satisfaction at the half-buried cat as its decomposing muscles sunk into the hole.

These muscles unfortunately also hit the wire, and, like a morbidly accidental re-enactment of Frankenstein, the cat began convulsing and sizzling as it was electrocuted, deeming it a fantastic time to leave the property. It began to cook, hitting an outdoor smoke alarm, so they both backed away from it as efficiently as their Very Heterosexual Legs™️ could carry them, heading quickly to the front fence gate.

"Hey," GOB said, still gripping Hannibal tightly to his chest to avoid the bird itself becoming electrocuted upon eating the live-wired dead cat, "you should probably get out of here." He fished his keys out of his pocket, opening the driver's side door of his car and inviting Tony in with a tilt of his head.

"Yeah, probably," Tony agreed, eagerly jumping in through the passenger's side. "Wouldn't want to be here when the cops show up."

"God forbid the cops," GOB whispered, revving the engine and taking off down the road. "And, also, Sally tried to keep you locked in your room for weeks, which probably..."

"Isn't ideal, no," Tony finished. "Also, I really wasn't enjoying her waxing supplies. Nothing compared to the stuff they have in the magic show dressing rooms. I don't know what's been keeping me from leaving."

GOB shrugged. "Probably about twelve doors."

It was quiet then, and this time there was actual silence. As the alarms all faded into the distance, the absence of noise became uncomfortable, feeling unnatural to the ears. Tony turned on the radio. Even a fifth-grade choir rendition of The Itsy Bitsy Spider was soothing to the soul. It never would be again, and they both knew this, but now, it really hit different. When they said, "down came the rain and washed the spider out," they really felt that.

Presented with a new feeling of clarity at the deep, inspiring lyrics, Tony crossed his arms in his seat and looked out the window.

"I'm never getting involved with a door again in my life," he announced to himself, leading GOB to silently wonder how the fuck this was actually possible. But he came to the conclusion that we did as well (and good for him):

It wasn't.

Chapter Text

Because opening the front door of the model home had quickly become so difficult for the members of the Bluth family, they collectively had decided that this was a problem of theirs that was actually worth fixing. Through some form of chaotic decision-making, they had finally made the plan to add holes for Buster's legs and put wheels beneath his ankles for a more efficient sliding method.

George-Michael, who had been forced into putting the work into this plan, did not quite see the purpose, however.

"It's just... maybe it's a bit odd, I think, with the..." He jumped as Maeby drilled a circle in the door with a hole saw bit and Buster screamed with such force that the door itself quaked. "It's just that, like, you could have just cut his arms out instead of cutting his legs in, you know?"

Lucille, who watched them work with a stoic expression on her face and a hard glass of liquor in her loose-fingered grip, was quick to disagree. "Oh, we can't do that, George-Michael. His fort is starting to smell and I'm afraid he's connected it to the wall. I don't want him going in there."

Buster, who still had one free hand before putting it into the fresh hole in the door, used it to swing himself violently back, opening the door so he could face his mother.

"My fort doesn't smell, Mother," he declared, "and how would you even know? You aren't allowed into it, anyway."

Lucille must have been somewhat upset by this, because she sipped her drink and left the room as George-Michael swung the door back shut again.

"You really think that all scents are contained beneath the sheets, Buster?" he interrogated. "Isn't that... lacking foresight, somewhat? Are you currently aware in any sense that all fabrics have tiny holes in them, making them breathable and therefore easy to filter air through?" And then he realized that he was sounding a lot like his father, so he stopped talking entirely.

Buster giggled. "Oh, the holes are bigger than that. Some of them I can put my entire hand through."

"Buster, just a thought," Maeby commented as she duct taped a wheel from the bottom of an unused dresser upstairs to the heel of his velcro tennis sneaker. "Maybe you wanna stop putting your hand into holes. I feel like we wouldn't have to drill you into the door if you hadn't decided to fist it."

"Oh, fisting," said George-Michael with an awkward laugh. "An adult joke." He did not know what fisting meant.

"So, what?" Buster challenged abruptly to Maeby, quickly fueled by a burst of irritability and glaring steadily at his niece or cousin or whatever she was now. "You're going to just strip a man away from his natural curiosities? Remove him from all sense of rarity?"

But Maeby wasn't listening as she was now stopped inside the front hall, looking through the destructed side wall into the living room. "Hey," she asked, although it came out as a statement, "what the fuck is Tony Wonder doing on our couch?"

George-Michael sighed and let go of the door, holding his face in his hands. "Shit," he hissed. "I might've accidentally said 'wonder.'"

Actually, we did, two chapters ago.

Tony, lying on his back with a glass of milk poised in his hand like it was wine, shook his head and waved his hand dismissively at the statement. "No, don't worry," he assured them, though it was not assuring. "GOB invited me here to escape my crippling domestic abuse."

Lindsay, who had just then limped her way into the room with a fresh cast and a sexually-infected rash beneath it, ignored the concerning comment like the shrine of ignorance she was as she knelt down on the floor and gave him a look of complete astonishment.

"His legs are smoother than my own," she breathed, reaching out to touch them, which he for some reason let her do. "How do you shave so well?"

"You look a lot like my ex," Tony replied through a mouthful of milk, and Lindsay mistook this for a compliment, bashfully looking away.

"Thanks."

It wasn't meant to be a good thing, but Tony didn't tell her this.

Lucille, at this point, had returned again with the Annyong box she had found, clearly intending to show Maeby its contents, which included the love letters from her cousin. She stopped in her tracks, however, when she looked into the family room and saw terror just like that of her own son. "Oh, no, not another one!" she exclaimed. "Look: he's even draped over the couch the same way... and in a robe!"

"I, uh, I bet you do fisting in that," said George-Michael, completely unprompted, and he laughed tightly. "You know, the adult sex joke."

"The only fisting I do in this robe happens when my fist elegantly grapples with my cards," Tony replied, looking broodingly far off into the indescribable distance that was the table by his feet. "And also the fisting that I do to men."

Lindsay laughed heteronormatively, taking that as a joke. "You're so funny. Just like any man should be. And I'm very good at womanly things. Watch. I'm gonna go cook lunch."

"I already ate," said the entire state of California, and whatever living being might have been lurking in the walls of their living room. And, on the subject of being inside walls, it was at this moment that George-Michael spotted the box that Lucille had set on the floor, and decided that the wall was the perfect place to put it.

So, making sure everyone was involved with the surprise of Tony Wonder on the living room sofa, he grabbed the box and shoved it quickly into the nearest hole in the wall before they could notice. And, be it their lack of reality or their preoccupations, it seemed that Lucille barely noticed its absence. Instead, she was busy downing a martini and wishing that the number of magicians in the house had never surpassed zero, let alone one. And she blamed herself, which may have been the first time this had happened in her entire parenthood.

Annyong, at this point, heard the commotion of something being put into the wall, and soon crept over to see the box with what the family assumed to be his name on it. Pulling the box over, he sat down and went through it, coming to the unfortunate conclusion that all these letters from George-Michael had been addressed to him. In a stunned curiosity, he spent the next few days going through and analyzing each one.

"Hey, Maeby," George-Michael said, attempting to change the subject before anyone noticed the missing box, "how was your morning?"

Maeby paused. "Oh, I never knew Lucille Austero, so I didn't mourn, actually. But thanks for checking in."

"What?" George-Michael asked. "No, how was the start of your day?"

"Oh," Maeby replied. "Good."

It actually wasn't. Maeby, upon returning to her old workplace, realized she had forgotten what her new job description was supposed to be, so she spent her entire morning going through her old office and reading files that had been kept there since. In her investigation, she had come across a folder of past rejected auditions, and was mortified to see her father's name on nearly every project title. Most were filled with notes on his performances and the various traumatizing things he said to the casting managers on each occasion. Feeling rather unclean after all this, Maeby had promptly returned home and was not planning on going back.

"I'm glad I'm done," she added.

"With your morning?" George-Michael assumed.

Maeby shook her head. "I told you I didn't mourn."

In this moment, GOB materialized in the room, grabbing the keys and shoving his way out of the door. Buster, who was still attached to it, swung out and hit his door hand on the exterior siding of the house. He made a most considerable dent, which Annyong appreciated as it gave him some fresh air from the outside world, and some light by which he could read his love letters from his adoptive nephew.

"So am I," said GOB quickly, "because we need the car."

"What?" George-Michael asked. "Why?" And then, peeking out at the damage Buster had made to the house, added: "We should install a doorstop on that."

"You can look up phone signals," GOB explained, which was something he saw on a murder show and didn't come up with himself, though he acted quite proud and self-righteous about it. "No big deal; I only... found Michael's phone on a map."

"Oh, sh...oot!" George-Michael replied, running out to the car. GOB started the engine, slapping the dashboard as the children's CD began to play out of it, and drove off before his nephew could fasten his seatbelt.

—

GOB, now realizing that slapping the radio had not been the best idea, felt intense discomfort in the pit of his heart as the music continued to play and the old, breakable volume button flew off of the module. George-Michael, sitting comfortably in the passenger seat, was acutely aware of this, not because of his empathetic range, but because of the fact that GOB had started fiddling with the radio in attempt to get it to turn off, subsequently beginning to swerve rapidly across the expanse of the road.

"You should probably watch where you're going," George-Michael suggested, his palms sweating as GOB drove off of the road and into the wide-open spaces of grass. GOB fished around in the glovebox, speeding up as he stretched himself across the car and accidentally put his foot harder down on the gas. George-Michael gripped the handle on his door for dear life, his hands pouring in sweat so thick his grip could slip off at any moment.

"Do you want me to drive?" he asked quietly. GOB shook his head and stuck his arm farther into the glovebox.

"Oh, that's where they put Buster's hand!" he exclaimed, pulling out the lone metal head of a hammer and using it to try and hit the stereo. This only made things worse, denting the CD entry shut. Tossing the hammer head behind him, he paid no notice to it shattering the window and exiting the car as he looked into the glovebox again.

"Oh, it looks like all of Buster's stuff is in here."

George-Michael was not interested, but GOB heard him say something along the lines of "Holy moly," as he looked with a heightened expression out the window, and assumed that he was talking about the same subject, not where they were going or what they were passing as they... "drove."

"There's gotta be something I can replace the volume button with," GOB decided, turning the steering wheel and unintentionally driving in a wide circle around the not-street. "If you had to guess, who would be responsible for shoving all this useless junk in here?"

"Dad?" George-Michael suggested, which made sense to GOB as he pulled out the only thing he thought might make for a good volume button replacement, shoving it onto the stereo and twisting it until the music finally was mute. At this point, they unintentionally made it back onto the road, though who knows in which direction.

"I can't get it off, now," he realized as he tried to pull the button replacement, which happened to be the open end of a flute (and perhaps this was where Buster found that flute rag), away from the stereo. "Not good. It's kind of in the way. Don't know if I can reach the glovebox now."

"I can reach the glovebox," George-Michael said quickly, and that's when it hit him.

Actually, it hit the windshield: a full-grown man that George-Michael repeated his exclamation to.

"Holy moly!" GOB heard as he slammed on the brake and pulled the car to a complete stop in the middle of the grass. The man rolled off the hood of the car, and GOB nodded.

"You got that right."

"No, you just— GOB, you just hit— GOB, that's Mo Lee!" His eyes now glazed over in shock, George-Michael stared out the windshield and quietly added, "he played the priest on Add-A-Kratz."

"Attic rats?" GOB asked. "We didn't have a priest in the attic, unless you're talking about when Dad hid out up there."

"Do you have a phone on you?" George-Michael asked, his hand slipping off the wet door handle as he tried to open it in three consecutive tries. "We should cal 911."

"They don't deal with rats," GOB replied, and then decided to answer the first question dishonestly due to how things went last time he gave his phone to a family member. "I left my phone in the... bird bag."

"Bird bag?"

"Buried it."

"Ohhh, for the love of all that is holy," George-Michael said quietly, his limbs shaking as he got out onto the road and stared down at his idol lying unconscious on the pavement. He fell to his knees and checked for a pulse. "Ohhh, we might've killed an actor. How will the show get another series now?"

Which was a fantastic question; I don't know how much funding we'll get for more content if our cast is convicted of vehicular manslaughter.

GOB, who was leaning nonchalantly now against the dented hood of the car, pointed haphazardly at Holy Mo Lee's robes. "We can use his phone to call police."

George-Michael put his face in his hands. "He's a priest! He wouldn't have a... phone..."

But their eyes both locked onto a device that had fallen out from beneath the dirty fabric, which looked strangely familiar.

"Is that dad's phone?" asked George-Michael.

"Figures," GOB remarked, picking it up and turning it over in his hand. "He probably ran out of kids to touch and had to settle on Michael."

"How sweet, too," George-Michael said. "He touched my heart so strongly when I was a kid, too. What a guy."

GOB turned on the phone to find it still had power, or, at the very least, had been charged by its captor (Odd, too, as usually it's the priests getting charged). Unlocking it, he found the last used screen and inhaled.

"George-Michaelllll," he said, handing the phone over. "Looks like your dad was trying to reach you after all."

On the screen was a drafted text to George-Michael himself. It was half a message, clearly cut off by some sort of circumstance, and George-Michael shakily read it aloud.

"I'm fine. Don't tell the family. I'm going away for a bit and I'll come to pick you up in a few days if you'd like me to. I'll probably be located around—"

He stopped as the message did, staring down at the screen and trying to find some sort of clue hidden between the lines, but found himself hopeless— both because he knew his dad had tried to reach him but didn't know where he was, and also because the priest below him had just woken up.

"Did you just... run me over?" said Mo Lee, and GOB shrugged.

"You probably shouldn't have been in the way of my car."

"You should've stopped! The right-of-way is owned by pedestrians!"

GOB tilted his head at this. "I thought you were Catholic."

George-Michael pocketed the phone, an odd sense of protectiveness washing over him. Lifting Mo Lee to his wavering feet, he guided him back to the vehicle and shoved him inside.

"Let's take you home," he said, "and on the way, you're gonna tell us what you did to my dad."

GOB, after a few moments of thought, decided this was the best plan anyway so he wouldn't have to report an accident to insurance, and started the car again. To break the tension, George-Michael poked the end of the flute into the center console, and found solace in the children's CD running in the background.

"Ah, do I love this record," the likely-concussed Mo Lee exclaimed, shoved between GOB and George-Michael and nearly being pinned to the seat by the flute. "This is usually the music playing when I get down and dirty, if you feel me."

George-Michael took a breath. "I hope you mean dirty as in diaper changing in a safe and supervised childcare setting."

"Oh, no," Mo Lee responded. "I typically have my caretakers change them for me, and not at all near children."

At this point, Michael's phone pinged with an Ashanti Alert for an adult missing from a group home. George-Michael closed it out. It didn't apply to him.