Everyone Knows We're Strange (John/Dave)

Johnathan Daniel Egbert was born April 13 1995 as Joanne Daniella Egbert to a proud father and a mother he never got the chance to know. His father raised him the very best he could, buying him all the dolls and dresses that any little girl could ever want, but Joan just wasn't interested in any of those things.

When he was picked up from kindergarten one day, shortly after his fifth birthday, he declared that he no longer wanted to be Joan or have pretty dresses. His father, Robert, humored him and started calling him John as his insistence. He only raised concern when Joan came to him at the start of the next school year and told him that he didn't feel like all the other little girls, and that he felt more like the little boys. Joan began questioning why it was such a big deal whether someone was one or the other.

Robert was so concerned about Joan's yearning to be a boy that he decided to take him to someone who could make sense of it. After several years of therapy and a few different therapists, the conclusion that Joan was showing all the signs of being transgendeded was come to, and he was prescribed hormones to help begin his transition to the correct body. Then, at the tender age of 11 Joan's name was legally changed from Joanne Danniella to Johnathan Daniel.

John was finally on his way to being truely happy, and his father was just tickled that he was happy, but not everyone could see what he saw. The parents of John's classmates were disgusted with how Joan just assumed she could take some hormones and change her name and everyone would accept it. Their ignorant views were transferred to their children and John suffered from near constant teasing and bullying at school because of it. The bullying worsened when John 'hit' puberty and grew taller like the boys he went to school with. John actually got suspended for being involved in a fight with several other boys, though John was only fighting in self defense.

It just so happened that Robert had been offered a promotion at work, but that promotion would mean uprooting their little family and moving away to another office, in Texas. There wasn't anything to consider and in the time it took to find a little house in Houston, they were packed and on their way to a new life where no one would know that John was ever Joan.

For a while, life was good. John was doing well in school, he had a few friends and no one was any the wiser about his past. Their first problem arose when John took a mandatory gym class at the end of his sophomore year. Legally, John was still female since he had yet to have had surgery to complete his transition, so he was not allowed in the boy's locker room, and since he looked like a boy, and everyone believed he was a boy, he was unable to go into the girl's locker room. It was the same problem that made him avoid public restrooms all together. A note from John's doctor addressed to both the teacher and the school cleared things up and kept John from having to change for class and it seemed that any problems were adverted.

And then they had a substitute teacher with a little less than a quarter of the school year left. The teacher was hard set in his old fashioned ways and talked down to John, calling him derogatory names and trying to force him to go change in the girl's locker room, even after John's insistence to look at the note in the front of the regular teacher's grade book. When John couldn't take it anymore, he fled the gym in tears.

From there, word got to the principal, who had to call Robert at work, who had to come and get John from school. After Robert took John home, he returned to the school to have a firm talk with the gym teacher. To make a long story short, the substitute teacher told Robert exactly what he thought of John's condition and it ended with two lawsuits. One lawsuit was settled out of court, and the other was sealed and kept out of the media as requested for the safety of all involved.

It was now the first day of John's junior year, and all he could hear as he walked from class to class were the little whispers of rumors of what could have possibly happened. The rumors were all over the place, but thankfully none were close to the truth. No one approached him, and it was starting to seem like John was going to have to work to make new friends again this year.

He sat alone in a corner of the cafeteria contemplating this little fact as he unpacked his lunch, half of which was cake.

Life had not been especially kind to the boy known as Dave Strider. He and his brother, his only known relative, lived in a cheap, run-down apartment in a bad neighborhood and barely scraped by. Dave knew his brother did everything he could to make life comfortable for him, though neither of them ever mentioned this fact. Because of this he'd grown up to be a man of action. He was never one to indulge whims; when he set out to do something, he did it. When he'd told his brother he wanted to pursue photography, and had gotten everything he needed to make his own darkroom, he completely intended to make a career out of it. The same went for his love of music; it wasn't just something he did out of a desire to emulate his brother or get his approval, it was something he really loved, and that was the only reason he'd asked for a turntable of his own. He would never ask Bro to buy him anything that went above and beyond their usual budget unless it was something he had a passion for.

Being poor didn't make the two of them unhappy, though you would never have believed it, looking at them. The reason they never smiled wasn't out of unhappiness, but out of strength. They were loath to show the things that made them happy, lest cruel fate take them away. They'd learned the hard way that that tended to happen, and so they kept all their emotions, even the positive ones, tucked safely away behind a wall of indifference, and it protected them. It didn't win them any friends, but it protected them.

And so it was, at the end of Dave's sophomore year, that he barely batted a lash when he was surrounded by a group of seniors just off the school grounds. They taunted him and pushed him around, but they didn't get the reaction they'd hoped for; Dave never even reacted to them except to retort snarkily to their comments. Unfortunately for Dave, this was not your average group of bullies; not only were they hicks, complete with southern drawl, from the very outskirts of the school district, but they were also thugs who ran with a gang and did not like to take no for an answer. Their usual tactics not getting the gratification they sought, they started to get a little more... physical. It was lucky that Bro had been teaching him self defense since he was old enough to walk, or Dave might not have made it out of there in one piece. As it was he left with quite a few scrapes and bruises, and a bloody nose but he definitely gave worse than he got, even though he was grossly outnumbered. The worst damage incurred, though, was by far the loss of his sunglasses. He knew the signature Strider shades were specially made for them and expensive, and he couldn't bear to think of asking Bro for a new pair. He had a little money on him, as he'd been saving up his lunch money for something else entirely, but he took his time going home to browse through some shops in search of a replacement pair of shades; something so ridiculously uncool that they were cool. It didn't take long to decide on a pair of oversized, mirrored aviators.

Unfortunately, those boys were seniors and football players, the stars of the school, and Dave was just a little too renowned for his 'too cool for school' attitude, and the public school system is just woefully corrupt; no one suspected for a minute that the principal believed the story the bullies fed him but, somehow, Dave still took the blame for starting that fight, and Dave was still the one expelled. So, Dave began his first day of junior year in a new school, loathing the thought of having to rebuild his reputation from scratch. By lunch, he had failed to really connect with any of the other students, though he knew everyone was staring and whispering about his sunglasses and just why he was allowed to wear them in the building. He didn't mind being the center of attention, but it did get tiring. After he retrieved his lunch, he paused a moment to give the room a once-over, and spotted one guy at a table by himself. Either a new kid or a loser, he thought. Either way, it was a place to sit.

He slid into the seat across from the boy with the messy, black hair and gave him a curt nod of recognition.

“Yo.”

John jumped in surprise, staring at the beshaded boy in front of him. It wasn't unusual for him to be approached, but it was if the person seemed this, well, cool. That and the guy came out of nowhere without a sound recognizable over the hustle of the school cafeteria.

"Um, h-hello?" John stammered back with a wince. His voice hadn't cracked in years, but when he was startled or nervous he tended to squeak really bad. He worried his bottom lip with his teeth, looking down at his lunch, trying to think of something to say that wouldn't make him seem like a complete and total dweeb.

"Um... Cake?" he finally offered, holding out a saranwrapped slice of the abomination to the blonde seated in front of him.

Dave raised an eyebrow and looked down at the slice of cake for a long moment before taking it and putting it on his tray, right next to his apple juice. Slowly and deliberately, he picked up his fork and started to heat his lunch, doing everything in his power to not make it obvious that he was watching the kid in front of him through his mirrored shades as they ate in silence.
He could tell, easily, that he was making this kid pretty nervous, though it wasn't deliberate. He was just feeling out the situation. Finally, though, he decided to speak.
"You new here, too?"
It was more polite than the question actually in his head, 'are you new or just a loser?'

John's face flushed in embarrassment. He knew the real meaning behind the question, and though he loathed to answer it, he knew if he didn't, someone else would.

He shook his head. "N-no... Not anymore anyway. I" he let out a forced laugh. "I used to have friends. You're probably better off not hanging out with me if you want some though. I'm bad luck now a days"

He ducked his head so he wouldn't have to look at the surely mocking gaze of the new boy. He wasn't going to get his hopes up of having a normal school year again; that ship sailed with the sub gym teacher's job.

Dave could only wonder what happened to exile the kid; he seemed nice enough. It really wasn't his place to ask, though, when he didn't even know the guy's name. He knew a thing or two about how important it was to respect a person's privacy, and he definitely knew what it was like to be the odd one out. And, so, he stood up and reached across the table, holding out his hand for a shake.

"The name's Dave Strider. And I don't believe in luck."

John blinked at the hand in awe, following it up the arm to Dave's face. "Um, oh. I'm Joe-John! I'm John Egbert!" he stammered grabbing Dave's hand in a firm grip and shaking it like his dad taught him.

"Gosh, its nice to meet you Dave!" John stated, his face stretching widely in his first grin in ages. "I guess I should say welcome to Valley High... Want some more cake?"

John's exuberance cracked Dave's poker face temporarily and the coolkid gave him an amused little smile before sitting back in his seat. How anybody could not like this kid he didn't know, because he didn't even like people in general and he already wanted to have John's back. He just seemed like a genuinely nice guy, whereas most people were assholes who pretended to be nice and have other peoples' best interests in mind.

"How much cake you got, man? Your family own a bakery or somethin'?"

John stared at Dave blankly. "Sometimes I wish that we did. Because that would actually be the only valid excuse for the sheer amount of cake that is produced from the depths of our oven daily. My dad bakes, and I don't know why he does, but he's been doing it since I was three or four, and he keeps shoving cake on me or putting it in my lunch and I have just turned into that one kid that doesn't like baked goods because of it."

John pulled the remaining two slices of cake out of his lunch box and slid it over to Dave. "He used to pack me more, when I had friends. But you're welcome to it. We'll probably be donating like six cakes to a soup kitchen tonight anyway, no sense in this going to waste too."