Title: One of Those Days 
Author: Julie (julz91@hotmail.com)
Rating: PG-13 (mostly language)
Classification: Gunmen; silly
Spoilers: LGM "Like Water For Octane" and 
I think that's it
Archive: Countermeasures, my site, LGM Fic Archive, 
anywhere else, just ask
Feedback: Please, please, please! I think it's 
funny, but we all know I'm warped.
Summary: 2/3 of the Gunmen and Jimmy are bizarrely 
obsessed with a kid's show. Frohike tries to figure 
out why. 

Mucho thanks to Kim, “who gives really good beta 
when you ask for it.” 

Disclaimer: You know the drill. Chris Carter, 1013, 
Fox - all those guys own Our Boys, body and soul 
(damn, and I wanted Langly's body!). They aren't 
mine, never were, and never will be. If they were, 
Langly wouldn't be a 32-year-old virgin, Byers and 
Fro would be getting the girls they want, Yves would 
have more to do, and Jimmy...well, okay, Jimmy would 
be pretty much the same. No copyright infringement 
intended, I'm just borrowing them. Same for Blue's 
Clues. Don't sue me, I'm a graduate student in theatre. 
It goes without saying that I have no money, and probably 
never will. 

And the Blue's Clues Fruit Snacks are mine. You can't have any. 

-------------------------

Gunmen HQ
12:30 PM 

It was one of those days.

Langly was distracted by something on TV when 
he let me in. Not a good idea- what if it hadn’t 
actually been me, but someone in disguise? 
Someone bent on sabotage? Someone who wanted to blow 
the building up and wipe the Lone Gunmen off the map? 
I was just about to tell him this when I got a look at 
what he was watching. It was disturbing to say the least.

It wasn’t anything gruesome – no alien autopsies here. 
It wasn’t even a skin flick. Actually, if it had been 
that, I would have understood the fixation. Yelled at 
him for being careless, but understood all the same. 
We’ve got some pretty good movies, after all. But no, 
this was something entirely different.
Little talking cartoon animals and household appliances 
were talking to each other, and to add to the chaos, a 
man in a green striped shirt came on the screen and started 
talking to them. Not an animated man, either. A real man, 
as 3D as the rest of them were not, and whose name was 
apparently Steve. It was reminding me a lot of a bad acid trip.

“Langly, what the hell are you watching?” I asked. No response. 
He had gone to sit on the couch, and his eyes were starting to 
glaze over behind his horn rims. “Langly?” I said again, shaking 
him this time. Still nothing. “Punk ass!” I yelled, which worked 
for exactly one second. He came out of the trance for precisely 
one second; long enough to say “blue,” and then I lost him to 
the TV again.

“Blue? What are you talking about?” Too late – he was sucked 
back in. This was worse than the Barney fixation of ’93. Byers 
and I had foolishly thought that he’d outgrown that kind of 
thing. He didn’t watch Barney videos anymore; he had never 
really watched Teletubbies except to prove that the show was 
actually a form of subliminal mind control… But there he was, 
eyes riveted on a blue dog on the TV, a faint idiotic smile 
replacing the smirk that was normally on his face. The boy 
ain’t right. I think he needs to get laid – after 32 years 
with nothing but a little hand action, the tension must make 
you a little Fruit Loops. Byers doesn’t think that’s the 
problem, but then again, he isn’t exactly a Lone GunStud, either.

Right as I was thinking of him, the conservative member of our 
little group appeared on the hall monitor. He does that a lot. 
If we hadn’t already tested him for it, I’d swear that Byers was 
psychic sometimes. I let him in, and started to brief him on the 
new developments when I realized he wasn’t paying attention to me. 
He was looking over my shoulder at Langly.

“Did I miss it?” he asked as he hurried over to the couch. 
“I got us chips and soda.”

“Cool,” Langly said, never taking his eyes from the screen. 
“They found the first clue already. It was a table. But they 
haven’t sung the Mail Song yet,” he added. Whatever the Mail
 Song might be.
“Good, that’s my favorite part,” said Byers. 

“Mine, too,” Langly said before they both lapsed into silence. 
Langly’s idiotic little grin seemed to have duplicated itself on 
Byers’s face, and it didn’t look good there, either. They were 
quiet for a few more minutes, and I figured I would do some 
surfing on the Net to check out what this little addiction was 
all about. Langly getting sucked in by TV was one thing; it 
happened on a fairly regular basis. FCC Boy Byers getting 
sucked in was something else entirely.

I had just made it over to the computers when music started. 
Annoyingly cheerful music. And then something happened that 
I never would have expected. Both of them, hippy boy Langly 
and clean cut Byers, started singing along. “Here’s the mail, 
it never fails, it make me want to…” It makes me want to what? 
This called for desperate measures. I picked up the phone and 
started to dial up the lovely Agent Scully. I knew she was busy, 
but this was an emergency.

And no sooner had I picked up the phone than Jimmy showed up. 
Out of nowhere, as usual. He at least managed to say hello 
before making a beeline for the TV. Three lost to the black 
hole known only as “blue.” Funny thing was, the smile that 
made the other two look so stupid actually made Jimmy seem 
smarter. For once, Langly didn’t greet him with any snide 
comments, just told him to move over so he could see the 
screen. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what “Muvovvercannsetv” 
translates as.

Scully wasn’t answering, and the Twit Trio was singing again. 
I looked on the internet, but have you ever tried to search 
with only the keywords “blue” and “cartoon”? It ain’t easy, 
I’m tellin’ you that. I was getting bubkis, and decided that 
a little hard research was in order. In other words, I sat 
down in front of the TV with them.

Jimmy at this point was babbling about seeing a clue, and 
the idiot’s ringleader (Steve, in case you’ve forgotten) 
was responding to him. Sort of. There was actually a chorus 
of children’s voices dubbed into the show, and Steve was 
responding to that. Jimmy was just yelling along with them. 
I looked over at Langly and Byes and was somehow not surprised 
to hear them mumbling about seeing a clue, too. No idea what 
they meant by that – all I saw was a blue paw print.

The blue paw print was apparently pretty important, though, 
because that moron Steve got really excited when he saw it. 
I’m talking excited in an unhealthy way. The kind of excited 
most men get after a trip to a peep show. Okay, maybe not 
that excited, but it wasn’t normal, that was for sure. The 
next stop was a trip to a big red chair (which Steve called 
a “Thinking Chair” – good God, does the stupidity ever stop?) 
where he sat and looked over a notebook. The notebook had 
drawings like a four year old would make. None of them made 
any sense to me, but never fear, the merry band of morons to 
my left knew what they were, and suddenly an argument broke 
out between the three of them.

“Blue wants to go camping!” Jimmy said, wildly excited about it.

“No, she doesn’t, you idiot,” Langly shot him down. “What 
does a table have to do with camping?”

“I think it’s a picnic,” Byers said, quietly. The other two 
looked at him as if he were insane. Well, at least I wasn’t 
the only one thinking that.

“Can’t be,” Langly said. “You don’t need a flashlight for picnics.”

“Well, then, what do you think it is?” Byers asked, irritated.

“I think that Blue wants to take the flashlight and beat Mr. 
Salt down for the Fascist bastard he is,” Langly declared. The 
little idiot grin had disappeared and been replaced by the 
trademark smirk. I couldn’t remember what was so bad about the smile now.

“Oh, no, Langly. They wouldn’t do that on this show,” Jimmy said, 
but he looked worried. As if maybe it could happen on this show.

“Jimmy’s right, Langly. Where do you get these ideas? 
You’re always wrong, anyway.”

“Maybe, but that’s what Blue would do if they let her,” he answered, 
smirk still there.

I couldn’t take it any longer. “It’s a cartoon, for Christ sakes!” 
I exploded. All of them turned to look at me, their argument forgotten.

“You shouldn’t say that,” Jimmy said, his lower lip trembling.

“Yeah, Fro. That was just wrong,” Langly chimed in.

Byers just gave me that “how could you” look of his. I sighed. “Whatever.”

The three of them looked back to the TV, and damned if the little
 dog wasn’t waving goodbye.

“We missed it!” Jimmy yelled. “Now we’ll never know! Man, 
Frohike, how could you do that?”

They all had murder in their eyes, and I was just starting to 
think that my life could be in danger when I was saved by the 
bell. The buzzer to be more precise. I ran to the monitor, 
checked it quickly, and let Yves in. Thank God.

“All right,” she said in very even tones. That’s always a 
bad sign from her. “Which one of you called and asked for 
Blue’s Clues fruit snacks? This is the last time I do 
grocery shopping for you. Got it?” She held a box out 
in front of her, and the other three pounced on it. 
Crisis averted, at least from my standpoint. I shrugged 
my shoulders at her, one of those “I had nothing to do 
with this” gestures. And looking at the box of fruit snacks, 
something hit me.

“Blue’s the dog!” I yelled.

Langly responded. “Well, yeah,” he said. “What’d you 
think she was?” I wanted to slap him. 

It was one of those days. 

(Fin) 

Like it? Hate it? Thought it was way too silly? 
Lemme know – I’ve never done this before. julz91@hotmail.com