Before Tupac Shakur and Randy “Stretch” Walker became one of hip-hop’s most tragic footnotes — a friendship that collapsed into suspicion following the 1994 Quad Studio shooting — the two were inseparable. In a candid moment from his interview with WWETV, Mopreme Shakur, Tupac’s brother, pulled back the curtain on just how close that bond really was.

Mopreme recalled a moment that captured the two at their most unguarded: Stretch taking an elbow to the mouth, his tooth knocked loose, and the pair dissolving into laughter over it. “I was like, ‘N—a, your front tooth! The front tooth, this little gum,'” Mopreme remembered, still amused by the memory. “And he was just laughing.”

It’s a small, human detail — the kind that rarely makes it into the retrospectives built around Tupac’s final, most turbulent years. But for Mopreme, it’s exactly the point.

“That’s how close we were at the time,” he said. “Pac and Big Stretch were best friends.”

The moment stands in stark contrast to the fractured relationship that would later define Stretch’s place in Tupac’s story, when questions about his alleged involvement in the Quad Studio shooting cast a permanent shadow over the friendship. Mopreme’s recollection is a reminder that before the fallout, before the theories and the trial testimony, there was simply a friendship — close, easy, and full of the kind of laughter that doesn’t make headlines.

Full interview available on WWETV.