Chapter Text
It took a while to keep himself from spraying him again, and even longer for him to recognize Spamton’s face.
“Oh! What! You’re? You’re sure? You’re? Are you sure? Really? So. Let me get this straight. You’re…”
“YES! YES ALREADY! YOU CAN [Can it!] [scrap heap]! I’M THE [Real Deal.] THE [Real Meal.] IT’S STILL ME!” Spamton shouted, head turning red in anger.
Tenna took a moment to process this, eyeing him up and down. It was hard for him to grasp that this darkner was the same one he’d worked with so long ago. “Spamton? You look… only 75% more mutilated. Wow!”
“WATCH IT.”
“Watch who? Me? I’m flattered.” Tenna smiled at the Addison, who only seemed to grow more and more angry. “Only teasing, haha.”
He didn’t know what to do. He felt uncomfortable. He felt under pressure, too. If he left, who knew when they would meet again? Hopefully never. Tenna had no idea how to talk to this man anymore.
“So, it’s, um, really you, huh?” he asked for the trillionth time. Spamton didn’t bother responding, instead choosing to grumble.
“Spamton,” he began, voice lowering to a more serious tone, “now that Kris has set me up for success, I don’t want to worry about what happened anymore. I want to shed my past before I move. I want to forgive you. I will forgive you. Despite all your… youness.”
In all honesty, Tenna had been wanting to forgive him for a while. He didn’t want to carry around this stupid weight anymore. He didn’t need it. He hated unhappy endings, and so he wanted their deal to end on a good note, even if it was undeserved.
Spamton only stared at him. Tenna shifted where he stood, unnerved, but kept his smile on his face.
“Uh. Are you—”
“YOU? FORGIVE [lil ol’ me]?” asked Spamton.
Tenna could only smile for so long. His face was starting to hurt. “Yes siree! I’m turning a new leaf, that’s what I—”
“YOU FORGIVE ME!” Spamton shouted. Another silence followed. It wasn’t a thoughtful silence, or an awkward silence, just an unsettling one. Spamton kept staring at him without blinking, an occasional glitch running through him.
Tenna was beginning to get irritated, but there was nothing he could say before Spamton suddenly jolted upright and began to speak again.
“YOU. YOU? FORGIVE ME? HA! EAHAHAHA! [%$#@] YOU MAN! [#@!] YOU MAN! [@#!] YOU MAN! IT’S ME WHO SHOULD BE FORGIVING YOU!” Spamton was laughing maniacally, tugging on his hair. Tenna was at a loss.
“Huh?”
“NOT! BECAUSE I WILL NEVER FORGIVE! I WILL NEVER [forget] I WILL NEVER [remember] AND I WILL NEVER [Pay $4.99] AGAIN!”
“Oh. I see what’s happening here,” Tenna tsked. “You’re blaming me for our deal going wrong. This is news to me! (And I should know, I run the news channel.)” he said, automatically turning towards an audience that wasn’t there, expecting a laugh track. He coughed awkwardly in the silence that followed. “Right. Hm. How about the part where you failed to uphold your end of it, huh? I wasn’t running a charity!”
“I DIDN’T EVEN [No] YOU KNEW WH4T A CHARITY WAS!” Spamton yelled, arms crossed.
“Well, I’ve never needed one, unlike you!” Tenna yelled back. “…until now, at least.”
Kris really was doing him a huge favor. And Susie had saved his life.
Before this, before he’d gotten old, he’d never even known what loneliness had felt like. Maybe at night when everyone was asleep, sure, but then the morning would come again, and the kids would be watching television before school, or watching movies on the weekend, or playing games before bed. Now that time had passed, now that nobody spared him a glance unless under a contract or bribed with POINTs, he needed a little more generosity.
It felt bad to know he wasn’t at the top anymore. It felt good when others needed him, but when he needed others…
He hated being broken.
“ARE YOU GOING TO APOLOGIZE FOR [showering] ME IN [Burning Foam], OR JUST [sit and look pretty]?”
It took a moment for Tenna to figure out what Spamton was mad at him for. It reminded him of the old days, a bit. Trying and failing to see why Spamton was annoyed. Offering him deals, sweet talking him, the works. Feeling crushed when he realized it wasn’t going to work.
Of course, he didn’t need to bother with pleasantries now. He wasn’t even on the air.
“What? The foam? Oh please! That was an honest mistake. Why should that even need an apology?”
At this rate, Tenna was second-guessing how hard letting go of his past would be. Spamton was still just as stubborn as he remembered.
“[TV]. MY EYES [—are burning! Help! I can’t see—]! YOU [drowning me]! YOU SAID I’M A [common pest] AND NOT EVEN AN [ultra rare]!”
Tenna stuttered through a response, and was taken aback by his own stuttering. How horrible. He didn’t stutter, he was a gameshow host for crying out loud! He was made for presentation! Enunciation! But something in Spamton’s voice had caused him to trip over his own words. It had sounded like screaming, and he felt faintly concerned, but had no idea what to say about it. He wasn’t good at talking about serious subjects, and even worse at bringing them up himself.
Instead, he clasped his hands together and finally formed a response. “…Okay. Listen. I love drama. You know I love drama. …But! I can see why. You would not like me spraying you with a fire extinguisher.”
“AND?”
God. God this man was insufferable.
Tenna drew a breath. “And I—keep in mind, after I say this, this story can no longer be used against me in any possible future arguments—am so very sorry for the inconvenience.”
Spamton smiled smugly. Tenna, with his height, could’ve squashed him right there like the bug he was. Of course, he did not do this. In fact, he quickly pushed all those thoughts away. They weren’t appropriate for television.
“THANKS [junkyard].” said Spamton, and that could’ve been the end of it. But it obviously wasn’t.
“BUT THAT WON’T BE ENOUGH TO CONVINCE [#1 Rated Salesman 1997] TO FORGIVE. I NEED [cold hard] FACTS! AND [cold] DRINK! AND BUY ME A LUNCH 2! DEAL?” he asked, holding out a hand to shake.
And there it was. The same old manipulative Spamton he always knew. Tenna stepped away, shaking his head.
“What! No! No deal! I’m not buying you jack, pal. I’m not that desperate little CRT anymore. Either take my apology, or buzz off!”
“YOU CAN SHOVE YOUR APOLOGY UP UR [smokin hot @$$]!”
“Fine!”
“YEAH!”
Both of them immediately began to angrily walk away… in the exact same direction. Tenna seriously reconsidered stomping on him.
It was awkward enough that Tenna expected Spamton to maybe feel self-conscious and go the other way, but both were too determined to keep going, and Spamton had no self-awareness anyways. They kept walking silently until Tenna suddenly stopped in his tracks, turning to face the small Addison.
“Could you…?” he tried and failed to ask. Spamton was staring at him again, unmoving.
It wasn’t easy to make someone like Tenna personally angry. Yes, he could get snappy with his employees, but he didn’t really care about them enough to get truly angry. He tried to uphold a certain ideology with his personal relationships: shouting never helped. Bad moods never helped. Fighting was normal, and so the best you could do was smile through it. But God.
Spamton.
Spamton, who was still following him.
Tenna smiled hard to keep himself from frowning, fangs showing as he balled his hands in fists.
“I have had it up to here!” he yelled, raising his arm into the sky, then quickly lowering it so as to not seem too aggressive. “If you’re going to follow me, at least pull out a camera,” he said angrily, trying to soften his voice.
“I’M NOT FOLLOWING YOU! I’M [unfollowing] [blocking] AND [report to moderators?]! I’M GOING TO THE CAFE TO [smuggle goods out the back]. AND YOU’RE NOT GETTING A SINGLE [scent].”
“Yeah? I was ALSO planning on going to the cafe.”
“MAYBE YOU SHOULD [plan a vacation] [STRAIGHT TO HELL]!”
“Maybe hell is just a conversation with you, buddy!”
Tenna expected a quick comeback, but all there was was more silence. He looked down to make sure he hadn’t left. Sure enough, Spamton was angrily walking below him, a hand on his head.
He didn’t know what he’d do if he left. He was annoyed, but he hated silence. He hated being alone. He hated himself for needing others so badly, and he hated others for being so unpredictable and unreliable.
He pushed these thoughts away. There was no room in his mind for hate. The point was, he felt a little relieved there was someone walking with him.
“Spam?” he asked, just to fill the quiet.
“SPAMTON G. SPAMTON TO YOU.”
Tenna sighed.