[id: two digital drawings of Jet, Rita, and Juno from The Penumbra Podcast as “how to talk with short people” memes. the first has “how to talk with short people” in black text at the top and two grey boxes, the left one captioned “Yes ✓“ in green and the right one captioned “No X” in red . on the left, Rita and Jet stand at their full heights (4′8″ and 6′8″ respectively) talking normally. on the right, Jet bends his knees and stoops down to talk to Juno (5′4″). Jet smirks and Juno looks angry.
the second image has “how to talk with tall people” in black text at the top and two grey boxes, the left one captioned “No X” in red and the right one captioned “Yes ✓“ in green. on the left, Rita and Jet stand at their full heights talking normally. on the right, Jet stands at his full height while Rita sits on grumpy Juno’s shoulders with her arms spread out. because he is stooped down, their combined height is still shorter than Jet.
Rita is a very short fat black woman with medium-brown skin and hair that is dark at the roots with bright blue afro pigtails. she has freckles and a tooth gap in her front teeth, and is wearing dark blue lipstick, yellow-lensed pink glasses and a pink triangular earring. she is wearing yellow dungarees over a turquoise t-shirt, and has pink socks and blue mary-jane shoes.
Jet is a tall Indigenous man with light brown skin, dark brown eyes, and dark grey hair with a messy fringe and a short ponytail. he has pale veiny scarring on his face and a bit of stubble. he is wearing a brown leather jacket over a dark green shirt, black fingerless gloves, beige cargo pants, a belt with utility pockets attached, and green boots. he has many crisscrossing scars on his fingers.
Juno is a stocky, fat black lady with dark brown skin, bubblegum-pink hair in short locs, messy dark brown stubble, and several scars on his face and hands. his right eye has a purple eyepatch over it and his left is black. he is wearing a purple turtleneck, grey trousers, black boots, and a silver stud earring. /end id]
happy 1 year anniversary to this post (described below). i love this trio
[id: a screenshot of a tumblr post by genderbinaryisforlosers that reads: “good evening if rita sat on juno’s shoulders they still wouldn’t be as tall as jet and that’s just what it is” /end id]
juno and rita being besties?? sign me up. the title is… it’s an artistic choice. warning for self harm mention and unwise levels of alcohol consumption!
juno’s sad and i’m sad and everyone is sad except rita, who is awesome
Posted to AO3 here!
Rain hisses against the cheap window panes, curls of steam rising from wherever it has the chance to soak for more than a few seconds.
Juno sits on the floor and chews on his knuckles till they bleed, mutes his comms and his eye and anything else that could possibly interrupt the worst damn pity party this side of Mars. He stinks like stale whiskey and sweat but standing up is a lot of effort and standing for the entirety of a shower? Forget about it.
Grit rubs against his eyelids every time he blinks, even the fake one. He needs to sleep.
Every time he closes his eyes he sees that damn badge.
Barton Pollock.
He’s been blackout drunk and puked his way back to sobriety and gotten halfway to passing out again before giving up and leaving the bottle sloshing on the floor, and he still can’t unsee that name.
Whatever. Juno doesn’t deserve the blissful forgetting part of this shitshow, because he made this bed with a blaster he stole from the only good cop in the whole city and now he’s got to lie in it.
Barton’s family has probably been notified that he hasn’t come home yet.
That he’s never coming home.
Juno tips his head back, the cheap wood peeling up from the floor and catching on his hair when he tries to move. So he stops trying to move, stops trying to do anything except lie there and just wallow in his own toxic self pity, staring at the stained ceiling of his apartment and wishing he deserved anything but this.
He closes his eyes, and just for a second imagines a world where he hadn’t left that hotel bed hours before dawn. A world where he’d watched N… Where he’d watched someone sleep and smiled when they murmured his name, laid back down beside them and let the sound of their heartbeat lull him back to sleep.
“I miss you,” he says aloud, testing the words.
They hurt. More than he’d thought they would.
It doesn’t matter, no one’s here to hear him say it.
Juno breathes in as deeply as he can bear. A lump in his throat stops the breath halfway, threatening to flood his eyes with tears if he tries to take in any more oxygen. He’s not gonna cry, everything here is his own damn fault and he’s just gotta buck up and keep going. Do better next time. Pay the piper a little sooner, stop letting those dues rack up. Stop letting innocent people take the fall.
Barton Pollock is dead. Shot in the head on a museum floor, and Juno didn’t pull the trigger for that particular shot but he might as well have.
He curls into himself here, hopes that maybe if he pulls his arms tight enough around himself they’ll stop feeling like his. They’ll feel like someone else is be here holding him, someone else who would pull him up to his feet and flirt with him until they got in the shower together and make him clean himself up before they got dirty.
Oh, would you look at that, Juno’s tearing up.
The tears burn down his cheek like the rain scorching the walls and windows, and sting wherever they hit a not-yet-scabbed over knuckle. He should be glad he’s not sitting on the couch right now. Bloodstains are hell to get out of upholstery.
Juno tells himself that’s the only reason he’s not on the couch.
It’s not like he doesn’t have the will in him to get up off his damn floor, it’s not like someone he loves dies or is taken away or will do anything to leave his presence whenever he tries to do anything good on this miserable planet.
How’d it go, “No good deed goes unpunished?” Some shit like that.
Someone knocks at his door. Dammit. After a couple seconds they knock again, a little louder.
He decides to leave them to it.
Someone unlocks his door, and Juno had replaced the flimsy padlocks that came with every apartment with something more secure years ago. So, that’s not great.
He resolves to leave them to it.
It’s not like he’s got anything of any value except his eye, and that won’t work if they rip it out of his head so there’s no reason they’d kill him.
“Mister Steel!” There’s a high-pitched voice from the other side of his door and Juno kind of wishes he hadn’t left them to it. “I’ll be here as long as it takes, Mister Steel, I barely got the key in the lock here, I’ve got a whole ton of stuff and this carpet looks really gross, no offense, so I don’t want to put any of this down on the floor but my arms are reaaaally starting to hurt so can you please let me in?”
“Go away, Rita!” he shouts.
Which was a mistake, because now she knew both that he was here and awake.
“Come on, I got your favorite! Those big old brownies with all the frosting and sprinkles fresh-made in that little bakery right by work. Don’t think I haven’t seen you looking at ‘em, boss, because I know you have! You’re a real great detective but kind of bad at pretending you don’t like good things. And you’ve been working so hard lately, I know you haven’t taken a break. Everybody needs breaks sometimes! I got romcoms and just coms and all the good old earth movies and some of the less good old earth movies because I know you like making fun of ‘em, and-”
“Jesus, Rita, if I let you in will you stop talking for two seconds?” And Juno’s on his feet, a little shakier than he should be but he’s standing for the first time in… All day.
“No,” she says promptly, but he’s standing now anyway and she did say she had brownies, so he might as well let her in.
True to her word, Rita’s arms are filled with bags from the bakery and the grocery store a couple blocks down and cases of old holodisks. “Okay, no judgement here,” Rita says with what appears to be sincerity in her ridiculously friendly face, “but you kind of smell like a liquor store. And maybe some of your other friends think that’s cool, but if you want any of these brownies I think you have to go take a shower. Or at least change. Is that the same shirt you were wearing when you left the office on Friday?”
Juno just shrugs. Rita starts setting stuff down on his counters, brushing them clean with one sleeve. “I’m gonna put some stuff away, I had a bunch of leftovers and they’re all just gonna be wasted on me, there’s no way I can finish this. You don’t mind taking them off my hands, right? You’d be doing me a real favor, boss.”
He’s not smiling yet, but the lump in his throat is receding just a little. “I mean, I guess if I’m doing you a favor.”
Rita beams at him. “Great! Now go shower! Oh, oh, and if you have any nail polish you should bring it out, I brought some but I didn’t have enough space for all the colors I wanted to bring.”
And, well. It’s not… It’s not the man he left behind, smirking at him and calling him darling and following him into the shower. It’s not exactly what Juno wanted, what he imagined when he let himself down time and time again and desperately needed to be someone else.
But if he’s honest with himself (and this is one of the few times he is): It’s exactly what Juno needed.
Juno smiles at Rita, just a little. “I got a bottle or two. Be right back.” And he leaves her to pull out paper plates he didn’t even know he had and start setting out snacks, and heads into his bathroom to take a quick shower. And if he takes a quick moment to read that note he’s had since the case with the mask that still sits in his bedside drawer after getting dressed but before heading back out to Rita, well…
He’ll probably tell Rita a little bit about it. And she’ll gasp and ask “What happened next?!” in all the right places, and won’t pretend he’s not crying but will probably tear up with him and compare the whole story to a stream that ends in happily ever after that she’ll then somehow convince him to watch all seven seasons of.
psych! no angst allowed here, only rita and juno having fun and bonding.
it’s gonna be alright
“Don’t you dare die on me!”
“Rita, he’s definitely going to die, he just got shot seven times in the head.”
“You never know, Mister Steel, you never know!” Rita was on the edge of her seat, elbowing Juno in the side every time she bounced up and down in excitement.
So maybe Juno had had a really long day and maybe he had taken up Rita on her offer to come home with her and watch shitty Martian soaps and do their nails and eat cheap takeout. And maybe he was even enjoying it. It’s not like he needed to admit it or anything.
“My darling, my Mars Bar of delight, how could you die and leave me all alone, a lonely homesteader widow in this great desert.”
Mrs. Almelialily Jonesmithton stands up from her husband’s still body, and there is a shot of her face staring out the anachronistic shielded glass windows. It reveals a single perfect tear sliding down her face, not disturbing her perfect eyeliner or fake eyelashes.
“I fear I shall live the rest of my life in solitude… Unless…”
Rita was tearing up, trying to wipe her eyes without smudging her nail polish. Life’s A Beach, a teal color that Juno had picked out for her. It went with a coat she really liked to wear to work, and fine okay maybe Juno noticed stuff like that every now and then. It was his job to notice things.
“Boss,” she said through sniffles, “how are you not affected, by, by any of this? Do you have no heart!” Rita threw herself sideways across him and stared up with big Disney eyes. “Nothing?”
He nodded, doing his best impression of a straight face. Heh. Straight. Him. “Nothing, Rita. I’ve got Hyperion’s coldest soul.”
She shook his head. “Mister Steel, how on Mars have you made it this far without letting yourself cry at sad streams?”
Juno raised his eyebrows. “Like this?”
Onscreen, the door to the Jonesmithton household is slammed open and a woman with a shirt strategically ripped to reveal at least twelve rippling abs runs inside.
She’s apparently the dead guy’s sister, here to claim the heroine as her wife.
Rita nodded emphatically. “Like this! See, I’ve been following the Jonesmithtons for AGES, Mister Steel, AGES, and this scene!” She jabs at the holoscreen with one teal-painted finger. “This scene! Is the culmination of seasons worth of tension - both negative in Almelialily’s and Joeadam’s marriage AND sexual tension between Almelialily and Jennysarapril!”
“Wait, Jennysara?”
“Abs.”
“Oh, I see.”
Rita giggled. “And come on, boss, I know you. Jennysara is gorgeous, right?” She grabbed a handful of popcorn out of the bowl on the floor - smearing teal nail polish over half a dozen other kernels. It would probably be fine.
Juno hummed. “Ehhh, I don’t know, Joeadam has a real strong jaw. I like that in a man.”
“Don’t you mean had a real strong jaw?”
He looked her in the eyes. “You never know, Rita, you never know.”
While Jennysarapril and Almelialily embrace tenderly in the foreground, something moves behind them. It’s Joeadam, struggling to stand up from the floor! “Somethin’ I never told you,” he rasps. “I was born half-Martian, so I’m immortal.” He sees his wife and sister locked together, and tears immediately well up in his eyes that now glow purple.
“That’s not how Martians work!”
“It is now!”
Juno shook his head. “I’ll let it go if you stop getting nail polish in the snacks and paint my nails black instead of whatever neon shade you were going to go for.”
Rita sat back on the couch digging through a box held together with duct tape and hope to find a bottle of nail polish. “No can do, Steel, I have the perfect color for you and I will not be dissuaded. Rita is unstoppable!” She pulled a deep navy bottle from the box and held it out to Juno. “ ‘The Midnight Fox’, see? Gorgeous.”
“Fiiiiine.”
“I know you love it. C’mon, c’mon, tell me you love it!”
“Maybe I tolerate it. Now shut up and do my nails, I wanna hear what Juliesue thinks of her half-brother being Martian.”
Rita beamed ear to ear, and mimed a zipping motion across her face and throwing away the key. Juno smiled back at her, for once not thinking about the rent due in his apartment or how many months it had been since he’d smelled Nureyev’s cologne or any of the million things that weighed on him every day. Just sat on a couch with someone who was probably his best friend, getting a little drunk off nail polish fumes and laughing at soap operas.
The first good night he’d had in a long, long while.
