Chapter Text
If John had to describe Kankri Vantas and everything he knew about him in one word, he would use the word ‘red’.
Even their first meeting stood out as a red flag against the blue and black of the LOWAS dungeon lobby, sparsely populated as it had been during Sburb’s closed beta testing phase. He’d been trying to get a group together, with the rest of his usual merry band-of-four doing non-internet things (ridiculous though the notion might be), when suddenly a lone racist slur from some jackass playing a stupidly unbalanced tank that nobody wanted on their team invited a phenomenon that would later become known as ‘the red miles’, named after one of the deadliest enemy attacks in the game.
Paragraphs upon paragraphs of retina-searing red text had flooded the general chat, speeding by so fast there was no way, John had foolishly told himself, that this was not some pre-prepared trolling lecture. The wall of text was, ironically, missing any kind of red thread or red herring, more focused on shoving as many buzzwords and trigger warnings down people’s throats than actually making any kind of coherent point to the extent that even after reading the entire thing twice, John wasn’t actually sure what any of it was about.
He’d been so impressed by the sheer ridiculousness of the whole thing that he’d promptly invited the new player to come along with him, never even mind that having a healer a good twenty levels lower than him tagging along would only cause him trouble and that approximately everyone else in the entire game avoided teaming up with him whenever he took Kankri along for anything. Three months later the two of them pairing up for quests had snuck around the corner and become a ‘thing’.
There was something magical about watching Kankri play the unwanted red knight to the unknowingly ignorant player caught red-handed saying something dumb enough to warrant them being subjected to the raging red miles of pseudo-patient tailchasing lectures that would leave his poor so-dubbed ‘students’ either red-cheeked in shame ready to droop off or seeing red with anger but unable to get a word in edgewise while the red letters kept rolling.
Kankri was the kind of person who took offense to everything, and John was the kind of person who took especially much pleasure in offending, but somehow their partnership managed to stick. John was there when Kankri’s frantic, rapid-speed typing managed to bust up his ‘b’ and ‘o’ keys, when the sgrub and sburb beta servers crashed so badly most of the data on it was corrupted and Kankri’s character was amongst the losses and when Kankri’s little brother discovered the internet, and the less than savory expansions of his vocabulary that came with that development. In turn, Kankri had vaguely attempted to be less involuntarily offensive when John hit a rough patch with his dad. Which was probably enough to make them friends.
Then John ran into a very short, very angry preteen he recognised by vocal volume alone, and suddenly the safety net of distance was uprooted herrings and all, and suddenly things had gotten tense under the weight of a possible meeting looming over their heads. What if they’d already met, known each other all along? It’d taken him a while to convince Kankri to let go of his strict internet rules and agree to meet up with him, just a few streets away from his school just to clear the tension from the air.
But when John walked into the cafe they agreed to use as their meeting spot and immediately caught sight of a red dot in a blue-tinted room, a single dude with carrot-red hair, a face-full of freckles and the most hideously bright red sweater he’d ever seen, he got the sudden feeling everything was going to be just fine.
With a resolute grin he walked over to the table, shook Kankri’s hand buzz-ring first and sat back to let the red miles wash over him. When the server came to ask if they wanted anything to drink, he ordered tomato juice.
Kankri got offended.