mutilfandomdaeny

He's always crying ;(

Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends tees.

Officer Nina Valerosa was what most called a very career oriented woman.

She just simply found herself too busy for romance most of the time. Being one of the uniformed officers of the Los Angeles Police Department demanded so much of her energy she barely had the time to spend with her family and friends, let alone a boyfriend.

She also felt disillusioned with men most of the time anyway. The majority of her job was spent arresting the worst men Los Angeles had to offer: murderers, thugs, thieves; the same kind of people she used to be afraid of when she was small. The worst part about them was that they didn’t always look the part either; several of the men she arrested could have looked like any friendly citizen she passed by on the street. She often found that to be the most deceiving thing about people that hurt others; a lot of the time, they try to be your friend first.

That just made what happened with Derek all the more painful.

She still found herself questioning how on earth she let him convince her to go on “one little date” with him. Maybe it was his ocean blue eyes, maybe it was his stupidly charming toothpaste commercial smile, or maybe it was the part of her that genuinely didn’t want to be single for the rest of her life, but “one little date” turned into two, and two miraculously transformed into a six month relationship.

At first, she’d thought she’d finally found The One. Derek was kind, passionate, shared a lot in common with her and he didn’t even seem to mind all that much when she told him she still talked to her Imaginary Friend at almost 30 years old. In the back of her mind, she was already making plans for him to meet her parents. Maybe then they’d stop asking her about when she would give them grandchildren!

But then she found out he’d been two-timing her with the barely legal office intern. The day before Valentine’s Day, no less.

The next few hours afterwards are genuinely a blur for her. After screaming every obscenity she knew in English and Spanish at them both and storming off, she somehow finds her way home and drinks the night away while ignoring all of Douchebag Derek’s calls and texts before eventually crying herself to sleep.

She wakes up the next morning with the worst headache of her life. All she wants to do is to go back to sleep and never wake up again; not if it meant dealing with people like Derek.

However, Los Angeles is a city of deep cracks and rough edges, and like her city, she needed to be tough. She peels herself off the couch and, after a long hot shower and an obscene amount of coffee, manages to pull herself together to a state presentable enough to drag to work and trudge through just one more day before her weekend off, Valentine’s Day be damned.

Thankfully, Douchebag Derek and the Barely Legal Office Intern don’t bother to show their faces at all today. If she’s grateful for anything from those two, it’s that.

After the day finally ends, she makes her way up the stairs to her apartment with the full intention to sleep all weekend once she gets inside.

She opens the door, turns on the lights, and -

“SURPRISE!”

Nina gives out a startled shriek as Eduardo pops up from behind her couch, an enormous bouquet of flowers in hand. She wants to be shocked that Eduardo found a way into her apartment while she was out, but then she remembers that Eduardo knows where she keeps her spare key.

But then an even bigger question comes into her mind; what is Eduardo doing here in Los Angeles? Obviously to see her, but why didn’t he call her first?

The answer hits her like a ton of bricks as memories from last night return.

Because she called him, that’s why.

It was probably around one in the morning when, tired of her phone ringing with calls from the last person she wanted to talk to, she dialed the first random number in her contact list. Hearing Eduardo’s voice when she honestly didn’t expect it was probably what drove her over the edge into becoming a crying mess. After spilling out all of her woes; being stressed out at work, getting her heart broken, feeling used, Eduardo must have been the one to convince her to lie down and try to go to sleep.

The only way Eduardo could be here, right now, was if right after that phone call, he dropped everything, packed a weekend’s worth of stuff, and flew down to Los Angeles on the first plane he could get his hands on in the middle of the night. That likely wasn’t an easy feat either; most airlines gave Eduardo a hard time due to his size, but the fact that he made it here anyway in spite of that, just for her, made her feel all the more guilty.

Eduardo was such a good friend. She didn’t deserve him.

“Ay dios mio, Eduardo, I’m so sorry,” she sighs, feeling tears prick at the corners of her eyes. She holds out her arms for a hug and Eduardo responds in turn by sweeping her off of her feet and into his embrace. “You didn’t have to come all the way down here for me.”

“I did it especially for you, mija,” Eduardo replies, squeezing her tight. She’d almost forgotten how great Eduardo’s hugs were. “I didn’t want you to be sad anymore.”

It was times like this that Nina loved to remember that Eduardo was her best friend in the whole wide world for a reason. No matter how old she got or how far apart they lived from each other, he would always look out for her, no matter what.

“Gracias, Eduardo,” she sighs, giving him a kiss on the forehead, “You have no idea how much I needed this today. I feel so much better already.”

Even though she was still a little hurt from what happened, Nina was already starting to move on from that Douchebag Derek. A weekend with her best friend was already a way better Valentine’s present than anything Derek ever could have come up with.

Besides, while romance was just fine in its own right, maybe it just wasn’t what she needed right now.