Rereading Worm for my purposes and the early sections are giving me unexpected emotions about, of all things, the dynamic between Brian and Alec.
They have such a quiet teen boy sort of back and forth, is the thing. Like, yes, Brian finds Alec profoundly annoying, Alec is being profoundly annoying on purpose - but one of our earliest examples of Alec laughing is when he trips Brian and Brian goes across the room to put him into a headlock and starts punching him in the shoulder.
With Brian gone and Lisa absorbed in trying to patch up Bitch’s ear, I was left with Alec. To make conversation, I said, “Alec. You were going to tell me what you do. You go by Regent, right?”
“The name is a long story, but what I do is this.” He looked over his shoulder at Brian, who was returning from the washroom with a damp washcloth in hand. Brian, mid-stride, stumbled and fell onto the floor.
“Way to look good in front of the new girl, gimpy!” Alec mocked his teammate, laughing. Grateful for the break in the tension, I couldn’t help but laugh too. While Alec continued laughing, Brian got to his feet and ran up to the smaller boy, at which point he got Alec in a headlock and began punching him in the shoulder repeatedly. This abuse only made Alec laugh harder in between his cries of pain.
I mean, there's the casual ableism and Alec being a little shit at an inappropriate time, but it's also notable to me that Brian, the stiffest man-teen in the world, is still roughhousing with Alec instead of actually being angry. It's also a lot that Alec, given what we know about his relationship to touch, likes this. Getting a headlock from Brian probably feels the closest to a hug Alec gets, well. Ever.
Then there's the sparring moment before Taylor gets her first bout with Brian, where Alec wears basketball shorts (???), gets bored, and fucks off to play video games - but Brian still cares enough about Alec to want to teach him. He cares about Alec to the extent he goes 'easy on him' (read: just teaches him like you should teach people to fight), which Alec takes as a slight (slightly sarcastically, because it's Alec), but we learn not too long after that Brian's father's method of teaching him how to fight was basically just short of actively kicking the shit out of him. But Brian doesn't do that to Alec, or to Taylor.
Then later on, in Shell 4.4, Brian gets Taylor that dragonfly in amber for her room in the loft (Brian!! down bad for the bug girl), Taylor hugs him, and we get:
“Hey!” a voice from behind me startled the wits out of me, “No romance in the workplace!”
I turned around to see Alec and Lisa standing in the hallway, grinning. In Lisa’s case, grinning more than usual.
I must have turned beet red. “It’s not, no, I was just thanking him for-”
“I know, dork. I was with him when he bought it.”
And I'm entranced by the concept of Alec and Brian on their separate side shopping trip while Lisa and Taylor were having that Very Straight Shopping Date. Brian contemplating a giant Declaration of Paying Attention To The New Girl in this big open air marketplace while Alec stood there in his new Kid Win shirt laughing like a little cartoon hyena.
It just makes me rotate things in my brain at high speed about both of them.
(This is also good foreshadowing for what Aisha is going to be like when she comes onscreen because you can feel the Exhausted Big Brother rolling off Brian in waves.)
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