Peanut Butter Banana Sandwiches

Woke Up This Morning


Sportacus opened his eyes, breathing deeply. He sat up and looked at Robbie, who was just starting to stir awake. Stephanie was pouring cereal and looked up when Sportacus had sat up.
“Good morning,” she said. “Want breakfast?”
He nodded. Robbie was just starting to open his eyes, before he groaned at the brightness of the air ship and groped around for a pillow to shove over his head. He settled for pulling the duvet up higher and over his eyes. He started to curl up, but there wasn’t enough room and he started to fall off the edge.
“Ah!” Sportacus reached out and grabbed him, pulling him back onto the bed. “Be careful,” he warned. Robbie was fully awake at this point.
“What am I doing in your bed again?…”
“Again?” Stephanie chirped from the other side of the room, grinning widely. Sportacus shot her a look and she pretended to be very busy pouring out cereal into bowls for the two of them.
“You fell asleep and I put you here,” Sportacus explained to Robbie. The man nodded slightly, still piecing together his memory. Sportacus knew when he remembered, because Robbie tensed up immediately.
“Time for breakfast!” Sportacus said suddenly, bouncing out of the bed and diffusing the situation. Robbie narrowed his eyes and Sportacus was relieved to see that he was relaxed again.
“If it’s granola, I don’t want any,” he grumbled, swinging his legs over the side and sitting up. He paused when he felt cool floor under his bare feet. He looked down and stared.
“I could make some toast,” Stephanie offered. “We don’t have any sugary cereal.” Robbie looked up blankly for a moment.
“Oh,” he said finally. “Toast.” Stephanie looked at him curiously for a minute, before shrugging and popping two slices into the bread-slots that would toast them.
“How about eggs?” she said next. She stuck her tongue out at Sportacus, who wrinkled his nose at the prospect of them. He’d just have sports candy and granola, thank you. She looked back just in time to see Robbie nod in response and stand up.
Sportacus flinched at the creaking and snapping sounds Robbie’s body made as he got up. He didn’t pause doing his pushups though. Robbie looked at him.
“Aren’t you supposed to do warm-ups first or something?” Robbie inquired.
“Those are his warm-ups,” Stephanie commented, cracking an egg and scrambling it. Robbie sneered.
“Disgusting.”
“Not as gross as those popping sounds you make getting out of bed,” Sportacus said calmly from the floor, going straight into sit ups. Robbie scoffed.
“That’s not my fault.”
“Yes it is,” Sportacus said again. “If you tried to be active and eat a little healthier your body would like you more.” Robbie just rolled his eyes.
“Pixie?”
“Yes?” she looked up from cooking the eggs.
“Slather that toast in butter and sugar.”
“That’s not fair Robbie!” Sportacus protested, sitting up from the floor. Stephanie tapped her chin thoughtfully, sensing an argument.
“Honey.” she said after a moment. They both looked at her blankly. “Honey and butter. It’s still sweet, but it’s not sugar.”
For once, both Sportacus and Robbie looked disturbed at the same idea at the same time. She nearly started laughing, but she just stirred the eggs instead.
“Steph, we don’t have any honey…” Sportacus protested. She looked up.
“The store should be open.”
“He’d probably buy sugar-free honey,” Robbie made a disgusted face.
“You could go and make sure,” she replied evenly. Sportacus was giving her a look that said he knew what she was up to.
“In fact,” she continued. “That sounds great. You guys could go grocery shopping while I fix breakfast.”
Robbie opened his mouth to protest, but she was pushing both of them towards the door.


They stood outside of the store.
“I don’t know what you’re teaching her,” Robbie said dryly. “But she’s getting to be an incorrigible brat.”
“Says the man who bought her an entire new wardrobe and hair cut,” Sportacus shot back, grabbing a cart. Robbie snorted.
“You owe me for that you know,” he replied, quickly grabbing a bottle of soda as soon as they entered the store. Sportacus eyed it with a look akin to despair.
“Couldn’t you at least try juice?”
“I don’t know how many times you’re going to ask me that. The answer is still no.”
“They make sweetened flavored water now…”
“It’s still water.”
“It doesn’t even taste like water! Here,” and Sportacus grabbed a bottle of it and shoved it into the cart. They glared at each other for a moment before Sportacus’ eyes were drawn over to the produce section.
Robbie shuddered at the way the elf’s eyes lit up like a kid in a toy store.
He was scolded five different times for pulling off dangerous stunts with the cart, before Robbie finally got fed up and forcibly wrenched it from his control, and for the rest of the time refused to let Sportacus take it back. Sportacus finally whipped out a list and looked it over.
“We’re out of milk,” he commented, then posed heroically and started toward the right aisle… he stopped about five steps later.
“Oooh, pineapple!”
“For the love of god!” Robbie snapped, stomping over to him and grabbing him by the back of his shirt.
“But, but,” Sportacus protested, snagging only a single pineapple before Robbie dragged him back to the cart.
“If you got any smaller, Sportaflop, I’d strap you into the child seat in this stupid cart,” Robbie growled, annoyed. “Can you not concentrate for ten seconds? You’re worse than a kid.”
“But Robbie!” he whined, looking longingly at the multitudes of sports candy. “I haven’t had breakfast yet, and they… oh, they have oranges!”
“No!” Robbie snapped again, and dragged the reluctant sports elf away from the produce to get milk. He grabbed a carton of chocolate milk and shoved it into the cart.
“Hey!” Sportacus protested, finally noticing. “Not that!”
“Oh, right,” Robbie said, rolling his eyes. “It has to be healthy. How forgetful of me.” Sportacus frowned at him and quickly swapped the chocolate milk for some two percent and fat free. He would have just gotten fat free, but Stephanie flat out refused to drink it. She said it reminded her of opaque water.
The entire trip was an exercise in compromise. When Robbie shoved bags of candy in, Sportacus didn’t say anything, though Robbie did not miss the extremely pained look on his face. And when Sportacus piled sports candy into it, Robbie didn’t complain.
Well, not a lot anyway.
“I can’t push it with all that junk!” he said. Sportacus looked surprised and paused.
“I could,” he said simply. Robbie glared at him and resumed pushing the cart, straining but refusing to let him win. Sportacus sighed and rolled his eyes, moving to the front of the cart and pulling it behind him as they kept going.
There was a minor scuffle over the honey. Sportacus kept trying to find the “sugar-free” brand, and Robbie insisted there wasn’t sugar in it to begin with, so they could just forget it and get to breakfast already. Sportacus ignored him and went on examining the labels of various brands. Robbie finally gave up and stalked off to the frozen section.
Sportacus tilted his head at the ingredients.
“Huh… maybe it doesn’t have sugar…” he mused. He tried to think if he had ever had honey before. Maybe, when he was very young and had tea once… did that have honey in it? What exactly did bees use to make honey anyway?
He shrugged to himself and tossed the bottle in. Stephanie wanted it. He pulled the cart, looking for Robbie.
“Robbiiieeee? Where are yooouuu?”
“Stop that!” an angry hiss interrupted him.
“Ah! There you are!” he grinned and strolled over to the frozen food section.
“Are you done yet?” Robbie complained. “I’m starving.”
“Yep, all done,” Sportacus confirmed. He eyed the package of ice cream in Robbie’s arms doubtfully, but shrugged it off. He was going to let Robbie have whatever he wanted to today.
Not that he could’ve stopped Robbie from eating all that junk normally, of course.
There was another mini crisis at the checkout.
“Um,” Sportacus looked at the price nervously. Robbie narrowed his eyes at him.
“How do you pay for this stuff anyway?” he interjected. “Do tricks at kid’s parties?” Sportacus glanced at him, unamused.
“Oh? How do you buy all that cake?”
“Simple. I sell things. I am a genius you know.”
Sportacus rolled his eyes, and smiled apologetically at the impatient cashier for holding everything up.
“Ugh!” Robbie finally said, pulling a card from out of the pocket of his vest and slapping it on the counter. “There! Use that!”
“No!” Sportacus cried, horrified. “I’m supposed to buy it!”
“Shut up Sportakook. I already said you owed me. You just owe me more now.”
Sportacus looked at him doubtfully. Robbie poked him in the side, indicating that the groceries were bagged and he certainly wasn’t going to carry them. Sportacus shook his head and scooped all of them up.


“I had an interesting dream last night,” Sportacus remarked as they walked back to the air ship’s ladder. Robbie grunted, not really caring very much as he drank his bottle of soda. Sportacus continued, regardless.
“It was actually about you.”
Robbie glanced up at this, paying attention.
“Oh?” he said, taking the edge of the bottle away from his lips. “What kind of dream?”
“A nice one. Sort of.” Sportacus replied vaguely. Robbie arched an eyebrow up.
“Hmm. What kind of nice?” He was getting butterflies in his stomach from the vague kind of smile the elf had.
“A nice nice kind,” Sportacus said. He finally took pity on Robbie’s insatiable curiosity. “You said you loved me. It was really sweet. Granted, we were something like five or six years old, but it was still sweet. You looked adorable as a little kid.” There was a pause.
“You dreamt of us as kids?”
“Yeah,” he replied easily. “Well, that was just the end part of it. We were different ages in other parts… it’s kind of fuzzy.”
“I’ll bet.”
“You looked really happy at the end though. I remember that. That’s what made it such a nice dream.”
Robbie fell silent after that, trying to not blush, and also trying to not feel dirty by comparison.
Sportacus has nice dreams that involve being happy. Robbie had nice dreams that involved distinctly clothes less sports elves. The comparison was mildly shaming.
“Really,” he finally said.
“Yeah,” Sportacus responded. They were almost back to the air ship. “Oh! I remember something else too. We were both teenagers at one point.”
Robbie looked up again, questioningly. Sportacus smiled slightly at him.
“Your hair was really nice, I remember. It was long, and you had it just hanging in your eyes.” He paused slightly, and Robbie found it amusing how the elf’s forehead wrinkled when he thought too hard. “But it was weird,” he continued. “The times when you were small in my dream, you had curly hair. I wonder why it changed?”
Robbie was staring at him.
“My hair straightened out as I got older.”
“Oh. So my dream was true?”
“I guess. What did I look like?”
“As a teenager? You looked sad. Your lip was bleeding and you had jeans on that were too big, and all ripped up.” Robbie thought for a moment.
“That sounds right.”
“Really?” Sportacus turned to look at him. “So you really looked like that?” Robbie eyed him mistrustfully.
“Yeah,” he replied slowly. Sportacus smiled slightly.
“I liked your hair long like that. Even if it was cuter when it was all curly.”
There was another pause, and Robbie started fingering a lock of hair self-consciously.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “But I liked it better when it started straightening out. My… anyway, he didn’t think it was as cute, so he started letting up. I had to cut it short after awhile though.”
Sportacus was concentrating very hard on keeping his face as neutral as possible.
“Really,” he commented. “How’d you get the bloody lip?”
“Fights,” Robbie responded flatly. “I’ve always been scrawny, but when I was at that age I got… angry, I guess. Got into a lot of fights.”
Sportacus frowned, not really understanding that, but he let it go.
“I’d break his neck if I could,” Sportacus said suddenly. Robbie blinked in confusion for a moment before he understood.
“If I let you.” he replied evenly. “Are we still talking as teenagers? I would have fought you for it.”
“I would have won though,” Sportacus countered, secretly glad that at least Robbie was talking about it without having an attack. It was progress.
“I doubt it,” Robbie shot back. “You’re too honest to have won in a street fight with me. I was a slippery bastard.”
“You mean you’re not now?”
Sportacus grinned broadly as Robbie threatened to spill the rest of the soda over his head.
“Careful, or I’ll turn all the soda in Lazy Town into fizzy water,” he warned playfully. Robbie looked horrified and clutched the half-empty bottle to his chest.
“You would, you health freak.”
Sportacus laughed and grabbed a ladder rung, climbing up expertly. Robbie watched with disgust before following, much more slowly.