secret agent man pt 2: electric boogaloo 👀
OKAY SO. this is actually a fic for the adventure zone: amnesty! and a sequel to be careful what you say (or you’ll give yourself away). (side note: sorting chronologically, this is the first barclay/stern fic posted on ao3! and like … i’m 100% sure that that’s because the few that were posted before mine were multi-chapter ones that updated, but still. i’m proud of myself for it.)
so the basic idea of the fic this would be a sequel to is: what if the guy who shapeshifts into bigfoot and the federal agent desperately trying to get proof bigfoot is real (to the detriment of his own career) went on some dates?
but i wrote it when the show was still on, before the story ended, so i also eventually got curious: what happens after the end of the story? because by the end, in canon, stern knows that barclay is bigfoot (and also that he’s an alien; it’s a whole. thing.) and that he’s been bigfoot the entire time they’ve known each other, and that a lot of the people living in this town are also aliens, and … there’s a whole The Veil Has Been Pulled Back thing going on.
but also, crucially, barclay and stern don’t actually get together in canon until the epilogue, but there’s a big chunk of time in there where barclay and the rest of Our Heroes have to go live a different place than they were because stern calls in the feds, so nobody talks to stern for Quite A While. and then things more or less immediately kick off into the climax/ending, and then the epilogue is months later, so we never actually see stern’s immediate response to all the everything, or barclay’s, which i find to be a real goddamn shame.
(also, it’s possible this won’t ever actually get written all the way, because i would really, really want to re-listen to the whole thing, but i’ve already tried that once and i couldn’t actually finish it, because i knew the ending was coming up and i was so dissatisfied with the ending for a number of reasons, so … yeah. who knows honestly.)
and anyway, a snippet, because it turns out i had significantly more of this written than i remembered:
“You’re worried about being rude?” Barclay can’t help but laugh, although he knows he’s the one being rude now. He can’t help himself. “I think we passed that a while ago.”
There’s another pause. It goes on for longer than he expects. “Look,” Tom says, “I know I have a lot of apologizing to do. I did a lot of shitty things and I refused to think about them too hard and I hurt a lot of people, either directly or indirectly. I hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you,” he says, and it’s such a cliche, and Barclay doesn’t want to believe him.
He’s pretty sure he already does. He’s pretty sure he’s forgiven him, already, for all the things he’s planning on apologizing for. Breakups are so much easier to handle when they’re just because the love runs out. This is so much messier.
“Just ask,” he says. “I can take your intention to apologize as a given, for the time being. Then you can just lump them all in together.”
(ask me about any of my WIPs, if you’d like!)
