Dive Deep into Creativity: Discover, Share, Inspire
Prev - Next - Masterpost
Ao3 Link: Here
Buddy really liked his friends. They were fun, and always fixed him up when he got torn up. They were great!
Sometimes they got torn up too. But it was different than when he was ripped. A bit of tape and paper and he was fine, but his friends didn’t work like that.
They leaked when they got a tare, apparently it was called “bleeding,” and they needed to wait a long time to get better. Thankfully Blue-Friend was very good at fixing human rips and holes, they also were harder to rip them than Buddy.
But there was another thing that was different.
He had been confused when his Orange-Friend made a huge amount of noise as Blue smeared a green cream over his fingers. When the smaller one had yelled as he ripped his hand from the hot pan, Buddy had thought that it was to call the Blue one to help. But even as he was getting fixed, Orange kept yelping and shouting. Why? Blue was already here.
It had been very confusing.
-
He ended up asking Red-Friend. It was hard since he didn’t know how to say a lot of words, although Purple-One was teaching him more.
“Hey, Buddy. What’s up?” Red asked as he walked into the dojo.
“Buddy!” The paperman said. He found out that his name was also a used to say friend. That was very fun! He waited till he was closer before beginning to piece together his question.
“Why... do... Orange... make noise... when...” Buddy paused, trying to grab the word. “...he touch... hot?” That worked.
Red furrowed his eyes.
“When he got burned?” Burned! That was the word. He’ll try to remember that.
Buddy nodded.
“Well, it hurt. That’s kinda what you do.”
Hurt. That wasn’t a new word, Buddy had heard it before, but he didn’t know what it meant.
“What... ‘hurt’?”
Red looked shocked, before shaking his head.
“Right, forgot that you don’t know this stuff. Hurt is... uh, like when you feel pain.”
“Pain?” He didn’t know that one.
“It’s like-” Red started but stopped and stared at Buddy. Buddy stared back. “Do you... like feel pain? It’s just that your paper and-” He stopped again, and Buddy just waited. “Pain is like when your body is yelling at you. That something is hurting- uh, that something is wrong. Do you... have that?”
Buddy thought about it. He always knew when something was wrong with his body, but it never yelled at him. (He thinks Red meant that part ‘figuratively’. (Good word, Buddy!)) It was just him knowing that it wasn’t right.
He eventually shook his head.
“Oh. Well, that makes sense. Don’t worry about the noises, Buddy. It’s just something we do.”
Buddy nodded and left to go think.
So, his friends got “hurt” and felt “pain.” That did not sound fun. Buddy thought of other times his friends were hurt. He recalled their scrunched-up faces and the ugly sounds they made. He thought of the way they squirmed, trying to get away from their rips, or how they clenched their teeth. He decided that he didn’t like seeing his friends be hurt.
But if it was bad for him to see hurt, was it worse to have pain?
Buddy decided that he was happy he didn’t have pain, and he was also going to make sure that his friends didn’t need to get pain.
Buddy smiled tucked away this line of thought and wondered off to see if anyone wanted to play a game with him.
Prev - Next - Masterpost
Ao3 Link: Here
Please check out @zee-rambles who came up with this challenge and take a look at @rise-april-art-challenge for more submissions from other fans. Feel free to give me feedback if I need to work on anything.