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Dottore looked at his phone as if it was a very horrific thing. More horrific, perhaps, than anything he'd ever made, which was really saying something. He was pretty sure the police back home still had his record on file.
His phone currently didn't hold any of his experiments or creations, but a single text thread.
“Hey,” Childe had said. “Do you want to go to the Lana Del Rey event at the gun range with me?”
Dottore had– foolishly– hit the auto response text reading yes. He did not want to go to a Lana Del Rey event at the gun range with Childe, but the man was already on the way. He thought about texting Pantalone and seeing if they could come up with some excuse together, but unfortunately Pantalone was employed and did actually need to do his job on occasion. Sighing, he resigned himself to his fate.
A loud honking outside his window alerted him that Childe had arrived. He took a deep breath, savoring his final moments before he had to endure this, and went outside. As a small mercy, Childe drove a Subaru, so there wouldn't be a repeat of the Sandrone Tesla Incident.
“Yo!” Childe greeted. Dottore nodded curtly.
Childe was a nice enough guy, and in fact probably the nicest person Dottore was friends with, but that unsettled him on account of the fact that he also had a deep, unquenchable thirst for violence. His would-be friends tended to leave quickly after noticing the endless well of darkness within him, but Dottore had ended up sticking around. He didn't really want to admit it, because he liked to think of himself as a lot more of an intellectual than Childe, but they were actually somewhat similar in this regard.
“Are you feeling Born to Die or Ultraviolence?” Childe asked.
“... Well, it has to be Ultraviolence. We're going to a gun range.”
“Eh, it's pretty American, you know,” Childe said, but he threw on his suggested album without further complaint. The gun range was only a few minutes away, after all.
Dottore watched the scenery as Lana’s voice came in over the speakers. He had to admit the sound system was better than in his own car, but he would never say that to Childe.
“I'm glad you agreed to come. I wanted to talk to you, actually.”
“Oh?”
It was an unusual thing for him to say. He and Childe didn't hang out one on one that often. They were both a little strange in ways that didn't compliment each other– Dottore enjoyed building various contraptions of dubious legality, and Childe liked the mutual combat ring that met up behind the store where he worked. Dottore couldn't understand him, and he suspected the feeling went both ways.
“So you started– ah, hold that thought. We're here.”
Sure enough, they had arrived. He'd passed by this place before, but hadn't ever gone in. Childe, however, seemed quite familiar with everything.
It was easy even for a novice, though, to tell that there was a Lana Del Rey event ongoing. Her face was pasted everywhere, and once they got out of the car, Dottore could hear her music playing over speakers strewn about the place.
“The actual shooting is over here,” Childe said, moving down a gravel path while beckoning for him to follow.
“Don’t we need to buy a ticket or something?”
“I have an annual pass,” Childe said cheerfully. Dottore figured that made sense.
~
It turns out that, as part of the Lana Del Rey night, the gun range had set out a selection of guns they thought were Lana Del Rey themed– whatever that meant. The meaning sort of escaped him.
Childe looked over the options with a serious spark in his eye that only appeared when physical combat came up. Rumor was that it also appeared when big ass water bottles you could bludgeon a man to death with and such came in at his job, but Dottore hadn't been able to confirm that himself.
Childe eventually settled on a little pistol with a pearl handle– opalite, perhaps, but Dottore didn't say anything. He had a reputation to maintain.
Gun chosen, Childe walked over to the targets, took aim, and promptly emptied the clip. Now out of bullets, he lowered his arm, and sighed.
“Damn, only 4 headshots? Ranged weapons really are what I'm the worst at.”
Dottore inspected the target. Two shots had, in fact, missed the head, but still were cleanly through the neck. He glanced somewhat nervously at Childe.
“Anyways– you started dating Pantalone, right? How'd you manage that?”
Snow on the Beach started playing, which pissed Dottore off because that wasn't even a Lana song. Surely, she had enough music for this event without having to resort to playing features– not that he disliked the song or anything. Taylor Swift was the music industry. He just was the sort of man who had opinions.
Anyways. The question Childe had asked him.
“... I mean, he asked me out.”
That wasn't exactly what happened, but Dottore wasn't exactly happy to dredge though all those details again if he didn't have to. It was somewhat embarrassing, and enough of his friends knew more than enough about that already.
“Oh, yeah– wasn't he in love with you for years?”
Dottore sighed, and decided he didn't want to know the full extent of how obvious Pantalone’s crush on him had been. He had enough going on at the moment.
“I suppose,” he answered.
Childe nodded earnestly as he lost himself in thought. He still had the gun in his hand, holding it as if it was an extension of himself, which made Dottore try very hard not to look worried.
“I don't know if that's gonna work for me,” he said.
“Are you– trying to get a–”
“A boyfriend, yeah,” Childe said. The word sounded very embarrassing somehow. Dottore feared he would have to propose immediately to rid himself of its stigma.
“I have my reasons,” Childe continued, ominously.
“Well. If I hear any word that someone's in love with you, I'll let you know.”
“Thanks,” Childe said with a pleasant smile. He reloaded his gun, and landed every bullet in the middle of the target's chest.
~
“... So yeah, that's what happened,” Dottore told Pantalone, who was currently visiting. His boyfriend– he liked the word better now, actually– was resting on the couch, his eyebrows creased as he absorbed the story of Dottore's trip to the gun range.
“So he wants to know if anyone's in love with him? That's–”
Suddenly, he sat up completely straight, his eyes wide.
“Oh my god,” he said quietly. “My boss went to school with him, and has been talking about the one who got away for as long as I've worked there.”
He continued to sit there, shocked. Silently, Dottore offered him a S'mores Brownie Cookie from Crumbl.