Kennedy and Eliot
comethru - jeremy zucker
Kennedy was given the pendant in a dream. Well, not really. Well - sort of. It depends upon how he’s feeling when he’s telling the story. Truth be told, he isn’t sure. He remembers waking up in the middle of the night to a strange figure with glowing blue eyes standing at his bedside. He remembers the creature reaching out and handing him something, and then waking up again, finding a bizarre artifact laying on his chest.
Upon inspection, it was a triangle made of some sort of cold, dark grey metal, and within the center floated a glowing blue orb. No matter how long he held it in his hands, the metal never warmed, and the orb in the center remained freely suspended no matter how many times he prodded it. The whole thing hung on a simple length of black leather. He didn’t know what it was or who it was from, but he immediately looped it over his head and tucked the pendant under his shirt. What else was he to do with a gift given to him by a strange dream spirit?
He never told anyone about it, knowing they wouldn’t believe him if he did. For all he knew, it was a strange gift from his parents, though they never mentioned it to him either. Perhaps an estranged godfather. Weirder things had happened. It wasn’t for several weeks that he accidentally began dimension hopping.
When Kennedy and Eliot first met, Kennedy had just gotten the hang of ‘jumping,’ as he called it. ‘Met’ is a loose term, considering they’d been going to the same school for a year and a half already without realizing it. They weren’t on each other’s radars until Eliot wandered into the ice cream shop where Kennedy worked and they started chatting. The courting period took a while, as Eliot wasn’t out yet and Kennedy wasn’t the biggest fan of commitment, so by the time they decided to give dating a go, the boys were close enough that Kennedy felt he could entrust his friend with his biggest secret.
Their first date was to an alternate reality where nature consisted of brilliant neon colors and bold, curious creatures. There weren’t any humanoids to be seen, and Kennedy and Eliot spent the day walking and talking and admiring the purple sky. Eliot took to jumping like a champ, hardly even freaking out. Kennedy felt a huge weight lifted off of himself, having finally shown someone else this part of his life. After a few dates, they made it official. Though they were both busy in their real lives, they were inseparable when they jumped. They were always walking hand in hand, talking to people from all time periods and all different dimensions. They befriended creatures, saved lives, diffused bombs, ate many strange fruits.
They had a blast together. People marveled at how close the two of them were, but it felt as if they had known each other for centuries (mostly because time didn’t pass while they were Elsewhere - as Eliot so eloquently put it - so whenever they returned home it could have been months for them, but only a second later to the real world).
One their first anniversary, Kennedy and Eliot decided to give the planet they’d visited on their first date a visit. They wandered around in awe, joking about how far they’d come since that day. As they wandered, a creature with pale blue fur wandered across their path. Kennedy immediately bent to greet the critter, getting a closer look. It was cat-like in appearance, and the boys were delighted to realize it had six legs, four purple eyes, two tails, and cerulean blue stripes along its back and sides. Though they couldn’t be sure, they came to the conclusion that she was a girl.
It was Eliot’s idea to name her Fluoride, though he insisted with the same breath that naming something meant you were more likely to keep it, and they obviously couldn’t keep whatever this creature was. It could upset some sort of balance between time and space, Kennedy pointed out half-heartedly.
But after a while, sitting in the strangely plush dirt, petting Flor, all three of them seemed to come to the same conclusion: they were a family now. So, when the boys got up to head home and Flor followed them, neither of them even blinked. Of course, hiding an alien(?) cat in a one-bedroom apartment would be tough, but love makes you do crazy things sometimes.