Conor and Jjaks thing
Written by Anakin McFly
Conor O'Neill and Jjaks Clayton are pretty bad for each other. Jjaks almost hero-worships Conor in spite of – or perhaps because of – his inherent screwed-up-ness, harbouring an awed admiration for the way Conor tackles life with complete disregard for the bruises it leaves on him, emerging from the worst situations broken and scarred but with a reckless, almost desperate grin on his face.
Conor likes how Jjaks doesn't try to arrest him the way their resident cops would love to do if it weren't for that pesky legal factor of being from different universes. He appreciates how Jjaks is messed up in his own, quieter way – enough for them to find a common ground, but at the same time capable of making Jjaks feel almost like some form of assurance that Conor hasn't gone too far over the line, and that Jjaks has got his back when they're doing something exceedingly foolish: like attempting to rob Kevin Lomax with nothing more than empty threats involving rocks, or seeing how much Bordeaux they can sneak and drink from Keanu's private collection before Mr. Reeves finds them and throws them out.
They usually plan escapes. They usually fail, and they end up running to Alex requesting urgent asylum in his "this is not a hotel" lake house. After Ludlow wised up to that, they switched to hammering on Keanu's door pleading for entry, because Keanu never turned them down, no matter how mad he was at them. And he always agreed, no matter how reluctantly, to keep Ludlow out. He didn't like seeing his characters pummel each other with phonebooks.
They got drunk together, at bars in various worlds, exchanging sympathetic rambles about their lives and loves and other problems: on failed job interviews and disgruntled girlfriends and being expected to live normal lives when the whole multiverse was waiting for them to explore it. They talked about exploring the multiverse a lot, but even in other worlds, they rarely got outside the familiar zones, sticking to the people they knew or finding bars where they had yet to garner a reputation. Sometimes they complained about Ludlow and his noble but woefully misguided attempts to keep them in check, because they supposedly made the rest of them look bad or something dumb like that.
At some point, Conor would have imbibed enough alcohol to begin jumping on tables and yelling incoherent rude things at people while Jjaks nodded solemnly in agreement. It usually wasn't much long after that that they would get thrown out.
And then they'd just stumble off together, slurring curses at the bartender; safe in the shared knowledge that, hey, at least they still had each other as friends, and there were worlds more that still didn't know them; and if they were up for some swimming and breaking and entering, the guest beds at Alex's house should be available when it finally came time to sleep.
#