Who: riven lund & mike gideon What: a chance meeting on the street When: backdated, sunday, 9/16, late evening/after-dark-thirty Where: a sidewalk on a street in the city Warnings/Rating: none that i know of; general audiences or maybe teen at best Notes: i'm sorry i let the week get away from me. <3
Another guy might have told Phil Coulson, potentially imaginary friend or potentially irrefutable evidence of mental instability, to stop stating the fucking obvious already. That other guy might have told Mr. So-Secrect-Special-Agent-of-S.H.I.E.L.D. that he could suck his dick since he didn't need a damned GPB to get around in a city with a grid structure. There were street signs. Everything ran in straight lines. The other guy would have probably mentioned that any idiot could get around a place laid out on a grid.
Riven Lund wasn't any other guy, definitely not that other guy. Instead of saying anything snappy or sarcastic, he simply shrugged a perpetually bowed shoulder and looked up then down the street he was on. It was a little farther out than he thought he could have walked. His feet felt fine which meant he hadn't spaced too long. That used to be an issue for him when he was a kid walking home from school. He'd get distracted thinking about school, the girlfriend he didn't have, the activities he wasn't a part of, the people who mocked him, and a thousand other things that could only be pushed out of his mind through endless repetition of chord structures or algorithms that he shouldn't be able to remember without a math text in front of him.
Once he had walked nine miles before he'd realized it. His feet had been bleeding because his stride was too long and his shoes had been too loose. Riven thought his feet were fine at the moment which meant he was doing better than that time if nothing else. He was lost, Phil was right there, but it wasn't too bad. There wasn't anyone waiting on him at home. He'd already been to work. There wasn't any reason for him to hurry home.
"This isn't the country. You know that? There aren't always going to be nice strangers around after dark in the city. You should want to get back to your car, back to your apartment, or at least back to some people for that."
Phil was chiding him again, Riven thought with another sigh.
He had moved across the country for the guy. Who no one else could hear since he lived in Riven's head. The guy who probably wasn't real, had never been real, and was only proof that Riven had finally failed his family in the most ridiculous way possible since he'd given in to having an imaginary friend at twenty-five when he'd never had one at simply five.
It was a little more than tiring to have the guy constantly telling him how he could do better or should do more or would be able to get further if he only had some more motivation to do more.
Riven wasn't the kind of guy who needed to do more. He was used to being a disappointment. That was okay with him. He knew that someone had to be the guy on the bottom of the pyramid in order for someone else to reach the top.
There wasn't a lot that worried Riven when it came to his ambitions or, more aptly, lack thereof, and there was even less that scared him. Instead of heading back toward the direction he'd come, he took another glance around the street to realize that there were still a few people milling about. They all looked fine enough to him. People on the street. That was all they seemed to be to him. He didn't get what Phil was all up in arms about with a few more people on the street.
Taking a seat on the sidewalk, he slumped into a resting position against the side of a closed shop. Riven let his worn guitar case flip open with a soft thump onto the concrete. He'd long since forgotten the weight of the instrument when walking, but he had never, likely would never, forgotten how the piece felt in his hands. A disgruntled sound echoed in his head as his pal Phil thought to remind him again that he thought this was a dumb idea; all Riven could feel was the perfect way his fingers curled around to cradle the neck of his guitar, the comforting mass of it as it rested on his lap, and the way that his lanky frame felt completely proportional with the instrument there to fit himself around.
He didn't bother to tune it. It was fine. His ax was always fine. Riven had great pitch.
The song had words though Riven didn't bother to sing. His voice wasn't that great and he knew it. The music was good though. The feel of it. There was a twang to an electric that spoke to Riven. He had never failed to find a little peace in the haunting whine of it without the generous echo of an amp to chase that lonesomeness away.
Riven hadn't noticed he wasn't alone until he was about to pick his brain for another piece to try and a shadow darker than the night came to pass over his sidewalk studio.
Glancing up with a cautious squint, he asked, "You stopping to listen a while or to tell me I might want to consider the time before playing anything else? I'm good with either, man, but I gotta say if you want me to pack up and move on, I'd appreciate some directions to do that. I got lost. It happens."
It went without saying that he wasn't the kind of guy who immediately went looking for directions when he got lost. Riven thought that should be obvious enough. Well. Considering.