Work Text:
It happens a little differently for them. Velma doesn’t really believe in the supernatural; she’s a scientist and she’s seen enough men in masks to have a healthy amount of skepticism. But most everyone, skeptics included, have accepted that colors come to you with soulmates.
In 7th grade, Daphne Blake asks her for a pencil and her world lights up with purple. Daphne blinks at her, turning the pencil in her hand and asks, “Is this what orange looks like?”
(They don’t really talk about it, they’re in middle school and Velma doesn’t understand why everything is black and white except for Daphne’s bright, bright purple dress and the grimy lilac tile in the bathrooms. Daphne keeps the pencil, sharpens it down to a stub, and sometimes alone at night she’ll thumb it in her nightgown pocket. She’ll pull it out and stare at it and she doesn’t tell her parents she can see color at all, even if it’s just one. Especially because it’s just one.
They’re friends in passing, exchanging kind smiles and pleasantries, but neither girl wants to think about the implications of being the soulmate of the other. They don’t even know if they are, because everything is still grey around the edges.)
Fred is entirely oblivious. Shaggy toddled into him in the sandbox when he was four and green has been a part of his life for the better part of twelve years. He’s never really thought about sexuality or romance or love in the grander scheme of things. He’s got a big heart and Shaggy is, in some way, his. If he thinks back, he can still remember the fond, exasperated look his dad had given him when he’d come home from school and told him he’d been able to see color since recess.
“So what’s your favorite one then, bud?” Back then, the mayor was a little kinder, still fresh in his grief and seeing too much of his wife in his son.
“Uhm, green?” Even as a child, he’d had some sense of self-preservation. He knew when people saw colors at all, they saw them all at once. He only had the one. But that was okay, Fred would give it time. He’d only played with Shaggy for a couple of minutes before his teacher had rounded up his class.
(Shaggy hadn’t understood, not really. He’s seen blue since he was four or five and at 13 when he passes Fred in Coolsville Junior High and catches his eyes he has the first sparks of a crisis. He’s a slip of a boy, tall for his age, wiry and so skinny he can see his ribs no matter how much he eats. He’s got his dad’s floppy, sheepdog hair and his mom’s thin nose and his first name is Norville and he doesn’t even have to try to attract attention to be bullied without being gay, so he squashes it down inside him, hoping, praying, ignoring.)
And then Mystery Inc. happens.
For Velma it goes: Fred is assigned as her partner in sophomore year chemistry, and she doesn’t understand how a 4’11 pale, chubby, nerdy girl like her could have broad, striking, handsome Fred Jones as a soulmate. Then he opens his mouth, surprisingly smart, endearingly oblivious, and she gets it. She really does. She gets why, last year, Daphne had been zoning out mid-study session regularly and finally gushed about her crush on him.
(“Well have you ever talked to him?
“No! How could I!? I’m so… And he’s just so…” She waves her hands wildly. Velma doesn’t get it. “-and besides, I have you.” The smile Daphne gives her is private, intimate. Velma thinks she’s seen that look on her mom’s face in the privacy of their home, aimed towards her father. She blushes and looks away. They still don’t talk about it, because Velma has ambitions for MIT and Daphne has a heart too fractured and small from a childhood of parental love split between four other siblings.)
For Daphne, it happens like this: she’s coming out of the gym after tennis practice, adjusting her ponytail, and heading to the water fountain. Halfway to the girl’s locker room, she hears muffled shouts from the boy’s. She’s always been a little too curious, so she pokes her head into the front portion of the locker rooms and is thankful for six year of mixed martial arts training; she has ample ability to kick her soulmate’s attacker’s asses as they try to give him his fifth swirly.
She’s still breathing hard when Shaggy slumps back against the bathroom stall, tucks his knees up to his chest. He’s like a bird, she thinks, awkward angles and curling into himself. He pushes his hair out of his eyes, sopping wet, and musters up a ‘thanks’ as she passes him a towel.
“Don’t mention it.”
(He realizes throughout the day, he’s not hallucinating; he can see purple now and when he gets home he cries and cries and cries, so thankful. He knows and doesn’t know what it means, can’t comprehend two soulmates.)
It culminates in a blackout at the end of their sophomore year. They’re at the homecoming dance, all four of them in different areas giving each other meaningful looks when they pass. The gym fills up with frightened screams and calls, people searching for their friends. The four of them end up together and it’s not until the dust settles, a MacGyvered trap creaking under the shared weight of the Biggle twins (mock-banshees terrorizing the school over a petty misunderstanding), that they all look at each other. They can see on the other’s faces the moment it occurs to them.
(Velma looks at Shaggy and says “You?” and Daphne gives her a surprisingly sharp look. Fred grins and crows “A great trap, a mystery solved, and I have three soulmates? This is awesome!”)
They can see every color now. Daphne appreciates the red flush that Shaggy has when she so much as holds his hand. Fred changes his mind on his favorite color. (Green holds a fond spot in his heart, but orange is bright and warm.) It accents well with his clothes; it contrasts even better with Velma’s freckles and pale skin.
There are easy connections between them; there’s the shy dance Shaggy does around Fred, who’s always patiently waiting for when he’s brave enough to take his hand or kiss his cheek. Daphne has sleepovers with Velma, who steals her shorts and sprawls in her large bed and wakes up cuddled close. Fred and Velma delight in mathematics and physics together; between the two of them, there’s no trap that can’t be slapped together. Daphne likes the way Shaggy grounds her; she thinks it has something to do with being the youngest of five kids and Shaggy being an only child.
(But there are rough spots, too: Velma wants Shaggy to change too much. He over-eats, under-sleeps; he’s sloppy and late and passes everything with Cs at best. Fred barely has a romantic bone in his body- which while okay for Shaggy and Velma, down-to-earth and overly logical respectively- Daphne hates it. She likes dates and flowers and wooing. There are hurdles.)
Not the least of which is when Velma leaves for MIT. How can Shaggy keep track of how many times Daphne cries on his shoulder, falls asleep sniffling from missing her so badly? How often does Fred hole himself up in his lab and not come out for hours? Sometimes, when they’re sad or bitter or both, he Skypes with Velma in their stead. It’s awkward at first- they’re the least comfortable with one another, resolutely ignoring the other means something significant if only because they butt heads too much. Somewhere during an all-nighter and Shaggy’s third edible they find common ground.
(“You’re a nerd but I’m a dork.” He says simply, leaning back in the plush leather computer chair and closing his eyes. Velma wants to bristle, but she’s tired and stuck on an equation, so she takes the bait.
“What’s the difference?”
“Do I know something Ms. Dinkley doesn’t?” He smiles at her and it’s sleepy and she thinks, oh.
“C’mon, Shag.”
“Okay, well.” He wiggles to get comfortable in the chair, folds his hands over his stomach. “A nerd is smart, and sometimes they’re a jerk, but I think mostly people pick on them because, like, they’re smarter, yanno? And sometimes need to be knocked down a peg. Like, there’s some back-and-forth or whatever. But dorks! Dorks are just weird.” He says this with an acute sense of finality and knowing. “Dorks get picked on, like, because it’s easy.”
After that, the Skyping isn’t just for Daphne and Fred.)
After their gap year, it’s Daphne and Fred’s turn to go off to college. Shaggy takes turns crashing in their apartments, working the odd job to get by. During her year off, Daphne had had to settle- it had been a long, grueling process for someone as enamored with investigative journalism as she was with fashion- and she’d decided on sports therapy at a university between Coolsville and Caltech. Fred had landed a full-ride to the engineering department with a (frankly impressive) trap.
So they make due, for four years, scattered on the wind.
(The first Christmas back in town, Daphne gives Shaggy the cutest, tiniest Great Dane puppy. He looks at them through small wrinkly eyes and Shaggy blubbers for an hour.)
Shaggy posts a video online some time during their senior year. His phone camera is fuzzy and going in and out of focus as he pulls a pan of homemade dog treats out of the oven. He sets them on the stove top and focuses the camera, begins a spiel about all-natural ingredients. In the background the tiny-pup that was, (an insatiable beast who could only scare a plate of undefended hot dogs and a fifty pound bag of dog food,) now stood level with the counter. He’d lifted his head right up to the cooling rack and eaten every single still-warm treat as Shaggy rambled on, oblivious.
It had gained a lot of attention, and apparently even the right kind. Shaggy surprises them all six months later when he announces that a dog food company had offered him a deal for a full line of dog snacks.
“I can’t believe you invented something before me!” Fred pulls him into a bone-crushing hug, and after they call the girls he takes his boyfriend out to eat.
Then they’re all 23, back in Coolsville, and Daphne has to cry when she sees Velma again. They hug it out, and the boys can’t separate them for anything.
Their life becomes a series of mysteries that follow them on family vacations, work ventures and right back to their front door. Would-be ghosts and goblins, a false Sasquatch, and a memorable trip to Loch Ness. Fred designs an engine coolant system that makes him an instant millionaire at just 25. Daphne gets a hookup through a mystery and does PT for WWE. Velma goes to space for two years. Shaggy… lounges around their house with his would-be lap dog, eating Scooby Snacks and living up to a vicious fan following of vegans and animal enthusiasts.
(And their life is: a strawberry-blonde baby in Daphne’s arms at Coolsville Memorial Hospital. Fred’s powder-blue suit at the end of the aisle waiting for Shaggy. Velma’s horn-rimmed glasses forgotten poolside as she urges messy, auburn-haired Norville Rogers Jr. to paddle across the shallow end. Scooby nudging little Judy Jones back from the top of the burgundy-carpeted stairs. A wealth of happiness, all in vibrant color.)