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Saturday was the one day of the week that none of them went to campus—usually, unless some vital experiment needed to be tended to, or plates needed to be moved out of the incubator, or work had been put off all week and had to be done.
But usually, Saturdays were their days off. Such was this Saturday, and the three of them had spent it eating, napping, grading papers, watching terrible movies, and playing the new video game Altair had gotten.
Well, Altair and Maria were playing the game—Malik had found them somewhat…difficult, ever since his run-in with that tiger shark off the coast of Florida, when he had been 8.
So he was sprawled out on the couch behind them, making an effort to go through one of his ornithology reference books, but really, he was enjoying them swearing at each other as their chosen characters beat each other up on the screen with absurdly large weapons.
(Maria was winning. Maria always won.)
“How are you doing this?” Altair hissed between clenched teeth as another good chunk of his character’s health blinked red and faded away.
“I am literally just button-mashing,” Maria replied, delivering the final blow to win the round.
The screen asked if they wanted to continue, and Maria stood up.
“Hey, no, where are you going? Best thirteen out of twenty-four!”
“Dude, no, I’m hungry. That leftover pizza is calling my name,” Maria replied, pointedly walking away from him into the kitchen.
“Oh, come on, one more! I just want to beat you once,” he said after her, flopping backwards to peer after her.
“What part of pizza don’t you understand? Ask Malik to play; he doesn’t look busy,” she said, opening the fridge.
“Maria, I think we all know how that would end,” Malik said, flipping a page in his book uncomfortably.
Altair sat up and looked at him.
“Actually, she has a point; pretty much all the controls are on the right hand.”
Malik leveled him with a stare. “You really want to win, don’t you?”
Altair looked shamelessly back. “I really do.”
Malik closed his book with a snap, and knew he had already conceded Altair one victory. He made a motion that Altair should hand him Maria’s controller, because he damn well wasn’t getting off the couch for this, and Altair complied with only the slightest of eye-rolls.
The screen changed to one that announced in a booming voice that he should “choose his character.” Malik raised an eyebrow and went through the lineup. He noticed that one of the playable characters had one arm. Out of spite, he chose the next one over, a tiny pink-haired girl in sci-fi armor.
Altair picked an arena seemingly at random, and then there was a countdown telling them to begin the fight. Maria had said that she had won by button-mashing. Malik shrugged. Maybe it would keep him alive long enough to wipe that smug grin off Altair’s face.
He began hitting buttons are random, unaware that it was doing him any good until he noticed Altair’s character fall backwards and land on his back, a good portion of his health gone. Huh. Malik’s character’s bar was hardly down at all.
Well, how about that. He continued mashing the buttons, laying Altair’s character out flat a few more times, and still managing to take hardly any damage. This was the first time since he’d been eight that he’d not sucked at video games. It was invigorating.
The fact that it was Altair’s ass that he was kicking probably had a lot to do with it, too.
A few more random buttons, and he was announced as the winner.
“I…lost,” Altair said.
“You lost bad,” Maria agreed around a bite of pizza.
“That was exciting,” Malik said calmly, “Let’s do it again.”
“Ugh, maybe later,” Altair said glumly, “This is a stupid game. I’m done with it. I’m going to play Hitman’s Doctrine instead. Stabbing some Illuminati will make me feel better.”
Malik forfeited the controller with a smile, because he knew that Altair would inevitably want a rematch, and that he would defeat him, then, too.
He opened his book again, flipping through to the section on corvidae, and pretending to read up on his birds.
-3 AM that night-
His door opened with a bang.
“Malik, I just had the worst dream about you!”
He didn’t open his eyes at first, hoping that if he ignored his best friend and roommate (and currently least favorite person), that he would go away and let him sleep.
Neither of them moved. With a disgusted sigh, Malik sat up and turned on his bedside lamp, growling out, “What?” in a voice roughened from sleep.
“It was awful!”
“It was so awful that it couldn’t possibly have waited until the morning?” He rubbed at his eyes with his hand, and sat up against the wall behind his bed. It wasn’t an invitation, but Altair took it as one, coming into the room and closing the door behind him, perching on Malik’s shitty computer chair.
“Well, are you going to get on with it so I can go back to sleep, or are you just going to stare at me?” He snapped.
“Right! So it started with you yelling at me for the shark thing and I felt really bad,” Altair began, and Malik grimaced, bracing himself to interrupt him.
“Altair—you know I’m over that. I only bring it up when I want you to do something, now,” he said.
“Yeah, I know…I know, but…In my dream you were really mad so to make it up to you I thought I had to make you a new arm? So I carved you one out of cheese, with my teeth.” The delivery was so deadpan that Malik had to struggle to keep from laughing at the absurd image.
“You’re lactose intolerant,” he said instead, because he had a reputation as a grumpy, humorless bastard to uphold.
“I’m entirely too aware. But this is where the dream gets weird. You rejected my cheese arm and, to spite me, became a Nazi. And then I walked in on you having sex with Hitler.”
“What,” Malik said flatly.
“You’re telling me,” Altair said, covering his eyes like he could block out the trauma.
But then Malik smirked. “What I’m getting from this conversation,” he said, and Altair looked up, “Is that you had a sex dream about me.”
His friend’s face contorted into disgust and terror. “What? No. No! It was terrible!”
“That doesn’t change the fact that in your dreams, I was still having hot, passionate, national-socialist sex with the fuhrer.”
“Malik can you not!” Altair exclaimed, but Malik went on, “…despite the fact that I am literally nothing that the Nazi party liked in a human being.”
“Well, I apologize for my dream’s historical inaccuracy.”
Just then, there was a knock on the door, and Malik said, “Yeah?”
Maria opened it, wrapped in her bathrobe. She said, “I heard your guys yelling; are you okay?”
“We’re fine,” Altair said quickly, but Malik smiled a dark smile and said to her, “Come in, Maria; Altair was just telling me about the sex dream he was having about me and Adolf Hitler.”
She laughed, and gave Altair a saucy look. “This is a story that I want to hear.”
And if they didn’t all get back to their respective beds until five in the morning, Malik just took that as a sign that he had, despite everything, picked good roommates. There were—and he counted—exactly three people in the world that he would allow to invade his bedroom at three in the morning, and the two that weren’t his brother were present.