Chapter Text
Bender Rodriguez is not the type to give a lot of fucks about how other people want him to live his life. He took up the name Bender after a memorable week at Uni (for other people.) He himself has no memory of what he did, but he always escalates his tale of whatever he was said to have done. He's the life of the party that way. He shows up to class reality blurred by drinks, drugs, and sex, and somehow still passes all his exams. He sleeps with boys. He sleeps with girls. He sleeps with robots. Bender doesn't really give a fuck, save that it's a good fuck that he's giving. Or getting. He's not choosy.
One day he meets a mutant who crawls up from the sewers. She doesn't really look like a mutant beyond being a Cyclops. Her name is Leela, and she insists she's an Alien.
"Sure. And I'm a robot." He tells her.He asks her if she wants to have sex, and she declines.
He's not sure why she decided to follow him home, or what it means that she insists on sleeping in the closet. She's bossy, and naggy, and gets all in his business, and somehow he never sleeps with her, or gets around to kicking her out.
They become sort of friends somehow, and Bender doesn't know what that means.
He's not a good person. He's stolen her blood and possessions, and she's established firm boundaries, with the sole of her boot. He respects it somehow. He's supposed to be an asshole, who moves through people's feelings, not get caught up in them. He has a son who he's abandoned, crushed countless hearts beneath his heels, so why is he caught up on the opinions of some some woman who crawled up out of the sewers.
He's just some human asshole.
So why is he showing her how the surface world works instead of blocking it out behind the sweet sweet call of booze?
It's in asking himself that question that he decides things in his life aren't going the way he wants. So he's going to go kill himself.
He's threatened it in the dramatics of yelling with exes before, but the decision to do feels easy. It's almost as if he has been waiting for this. So he goes off to find one before he chickens out.
He doesn't die that day. Instead he meets a robot named Fry who is trying to kill himself after finding out his life as a chef has no true purpose, since as a robot he has no taste buds.
Bender can almost understand that. Life would suck without no tastebuds.
But the booth fails, cheep piece of shit that it is, and Bender is bored of trying to die.
"Let's get drunk." He suggests. Fry agrees to that easily enough.
Leela finds them like that, opens her mouth to scold them, and then seems to change her mind.
"Oh, What the hell!"
She joins them in drinking.
When Bender wakes up back at his apartment, he now has two freeloaders, and no clue what to do with them.
Maybe he will make them fight. There's no way he's keeping both of them
(Spoiler, he keeps both of them)