PEPPER P. (saltedand) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-05-11 05:58:00 |
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Entry tags: | robin hood, sam winchester |
Who: Russ & Ford Campbell
What: After the violent bit. Discussion of sex ed, awkwardness, bonding and resolutions.
Where: The garage.
When: Just before FT plot kicked off.
Warnings: Themes? Language. Sex ed given by Russ.
There wasn’t nothing satisfying about hitting something that didn’t hit back. Russ had hit him a couple times and then a couple more after that, until blue light painted the pale walls and the wail of sirens below said there wasn’t much good in sticking around and beating on the kid some more. He didn’t give a damn who called the cops but he knew plenty well there wasn’t bail money in a bank account somewhere and there wasn’t a person to call - just money shoved under the box-spring and he weren’t calling Ford or Lex. No, Russ ran and he lit out of there straight into the crackle of radios and the heavy tread of police officers came toward him, a damn pair of bracelets on his wrists and metal mesh in front of his face. He’d been arrested plenty times to know how it went and there wasn’t much different to it this time, except half an hour after he’d been booked in - shirt drying some in sticky blood - they came back to let him out and there wasn’t anyone with money that he owed, but charges dropped.
Russ ran that time, instead. Ran on home, where he left the clothes on the bathroom floor and he stood beneath the water until it went cold, scrubbed his hands clean the way they taught in school, until his hair dripped down the back of his neck as he reached for the towel and he tossed the jeans and the shirt just in case they came on back and said charges were picked on back up (Russ didn’t trust anyone who didn’t want revenge sometime). He was clean jeans and clean white shirt and damp hair the color of wet sand when he walked back into the garage, tools on the workbench and the comforting familiarity of things that made themselves real easy to fix.
There wasn’t much else Russ could fix anyways, but he could fix something. He drank cold coffee from what was left in the office and he flicked the radio off until it was the hollow sounds of metal on metal, the clink of tinkering and no soundtrack to it at all but the work itself.
It took Ford hours to find his brother. He went to the apartments first, but he wasn’t brave enough to try to find his way in through a wall of patrolling cops and a private security company, armed uniforms that all looked the same to him. He didn’t see any sign of Russ or March, and he was worried about both of them, but it was easier to face Russ than March. March, who he probably wouldn’t be able to talk to except on paper anyway. Ford left again and checked the motel, thinking maybe Russ may have gone there when he didn’t get arrested, but there was nobody. Finally Ford found his way to the garage.
The heavy boots made slushing sounds on the old stained concrete, sounds too soft for proper construction regulation but too heavy for a customer’s loafers or squeaky tennis shoes. Ford looked like someone there to rob the place, his one pair of jeans and fraying second shirt somehow yellower than his skin. His veins were blue down the taut line of both arms, his eyes serious and straight, and there wasn’t that much difference from the man Russ had seen before.
When he got close enough, Ford sat down on the same stool he had perched on the last time he was there, emitting a quiet sigh that moved through him very long and soft.
Russ didn’t do much listening for other people. He recognized Sam now; lighter tread than the rest of the guys and she was loud when she came on in like she had to fill the place up with noise. He didn’t think he’d recognize Lex and he didn’t think about it hard or what it meant but Ford’s footsteps were noise to ring against empty corrugated walls, distorted by them and he didn’t turn and look. Russ was the stretch of worn cotton over muscled back, white gone thin with washing and the dark of something on his back bleeding through the fabric. He was bared arms up to the elbow and the oil on the backs of his hands covered up anything that looked like the reddened knuckles of hitting hard and hitting good, and the faded gold and sand of hair on his arms caught in the fluorescent bulb overhead.
He didn’t stop and he didn’t turn and he didn’t say nothing at all but the tinkering slowed down until it was deliberate, it was not-stopping because he didn’t want to stop but it wasn’t getting anything damn fixed. He didn’t say a damn thing because Ford likely wanted words, apologies, something and Russ didn’t have a word on it, sand-dry in his mouth and scowling over engine oil. He let him sit, until the knowing he was there filtered into the air, until Russ could have turned and pointed at him without looking at all.
Ford was accustomed to silence, because he let it sit when he knew people expected him to fill it with words. Ford poured music from tinny headphones into his silences, a pitcher that never emptied and never filled. He liked hearing other people be eloquent, liked the rhythmic words other/better/richer people used to bring meaning into their lives, people like March. Right now, though, Ford wanted to talk, with an almost compulsive need driven by the same feeling he sometimes experienced in nightmares when he couldn’t run fast enough. He was willing to fight through the syllables to do it.
The hard “d” got stuck behind his teeth for the first ten seconds, but once he got past it, the rest of the sentence came quickly, breaking only a few times in a mad dash for the finish. “Did you hurt him?” The emotion was obvious, because Ford was shit at hiding his emotions and he’d never bothered to try. Worry, guilt, enough twisted conflict to call high school one bad day. The heel of his foot started jumping against one leg of the stool, bouncing at high frequency.
Russ didn’t do much with words on a good day. He could talk slow and easy, honey stirred in like tea and he could make it sound like he had words enough to talk until the talking was done and it was all bodies. It worked real well for the most part and there wasn’t much that could be done with words that couldn’t be done without. He got tired of words before the words were done, rippling on like water above his head and people who liked words had a fondness for them that didn’t take account of his listening. Last time Ford had had words to say to him they’d been a torturous knot of syllables and there wasn’t much Ford had to say that Ford hadn’t said plenty fine by knocking him on his ass and punching him plenty back. The tinkering stopped the first time the ‘d’ made the air and it was real quiet in the garage with no one else there. Just the hiss of the air conditioner and the metal clatter as Russ set things down and wiped the palms of his hands up his jeans, dirty black streak on clean, blue denim.
“Yeah,” Russ said looking at the car and not Ford. It was edgy, and it sounded maybe like Russ was guilty about it but didn’t want to be guilty at all. It was defensive, all brushed up bristle and hunched shoulders and Russ didn’t try so much to hide emotion as he did to make the emotion not matter in the first place. He didn’t say March didn’t fight back and he didn’t say that March had looked on up and smiled like he was expecting it to be something it wasn’t. The stutter of Ford’s foot against the wood was a rattle-tap-tap. Russ hunched further.
The jump of Ford’s foot stopped and he rocked back on the stool, making it creak under his weight. His hands gripped the edge of it under each thigh, as if he was trying to stay grounded to where he was. Ford moaned in time with the stool, agonized impatience. “Wuh-why? I ask-ask-ed-asked you n-n-n-not t-t-to-to. To.” The guilt overtook the rest of it, until it sounded like Ford was physically in pain, something he felt in his bones, to match the other phantom pains he began to feel as soon as March told him about the fucking tests. Ford didn’t think the pains were real, but even the faint lingering cough from the cold-or-flu thing scared him. It stayed in his throat and rubbed sandpaper against his words, tickling until he gave in and coughed.
Russ flinched. It was a rasp of a sound over the rest of them and somehow more real for it and guilt crept in like damp cloth, draped itself sticky-close over his shoulders and settled. Coughing was residual as sick and Russ didn’t know much about a disease he’d avoided as much as he damn could, cold sweat wicked away to nothing when there’d been clean paperwork after the only accidents he’d had, but he knew it began with sick. “Because he deserved it.” He said it firm, like he believed it and Russ did: you didn’t go walking around with a time-bomb inside you and pass it on to other people and he blamed March with the resolution of trailer-park justice and the kinds of arguments that were solved with a scuffle in sand. He blamed March the same way he’d have blamed any man who laid a hand on Lex and he wasn’t sure that it wasn’t the same when it came down to it.
“Because he didn’t stick around.” Russ said that firm, too and he turned around then, folded his arms over all that white until it smeared grey where he tucked hands into his armpits like he didn’t trust himself not to touch a thing. His eyes were very bright and very steady and he didn’t look away or look down like he was guilty, it was chin up like he thought he was right even if the kid hadn’t hit him back. There wasn’t a mark on Russ but the light painted the tan sallow-yellow and he looked at Ford, all defiance. “Because if he got you sick, he deserves it.”
Ford looked straight into his face. Ford didn’t have much of a voice or presence, but he had ice in him way down deep and sometimes it showed up behind the innocent crayon blue that usually kept his gaze totally without threat. For some reason it made him feel better to set his heels flat on the concrete and rock upward so that most of his weight was on his feet, but the stool teetered under the tail end of his spine and he scraped his hair back over his ear with one shaking palm. “N-n-n-no, he doesn’t,” Ford insisted, shredding syllables since he was in too much of a hurry to get them out. His fingers shook and moved in wild circles. “I’ve b-b-been with p-p-p-pple-plen... with people, lots, too. Since then. Since. Ssssso, so, me too. I c-c-could be him.” Ford jabbed helplessly in the general direction of the Strip, not that it helped much. He had no idea if what he was trying to say made it out whole.
Russ had given lectures, once. He’d been seventeen and his hands had shaken a little bit and his belly had cramped and he’d wanted to laugh because who the hell talked an eight year old through what it meant? But the men Lou brought home got meaner, they got less interested in the drinking and they brought things into the trailer like mud on boots, things that stayed like dirt ground into cheap carpet. He’d sat Lex opposite, all feet dangling and he’d talked at her like they’d talked at school because there wasn’t nothing worse than being trapped in the park, like the fourteen year olds who walked around like a belly made them something bigger, something older than a kid. He’d handed over packets with his mouth dry and sour, and he’d glared at her something awful because there’d been planning to leave since before. He’d told her because he was going and because Lou weren’t going to tell anyone shit and because it was that and needles and she knew plenty about needles already. He’d figured - somewhere, in the place where he’d taken on board that his brother liked boys (he called him that, brother in the same thoughtless glide over things as he’d taken the men) that Lex would’ve given lectures plenty. He could picture her, blue eyes snapping like she’d stood on his doorstep.
“For fuck’s sake,” Russ said, all violence coiled thick in the back of his throat and he threw out one arm and he knocked the tools sevenways, until they were metal plinking all over concrete and the workbench was clear and he was hard-breathing, knuckles white around solid wood. “For fuck’s sake did you not fucking think?” He held on tight, because panic beat hard and sick below his breastbone, because if Lex hadn’t sat him down and explained foil and how it worked, hadn’t spoken high-school words back at him then it was like lecturing an eight year old meant nothing. He glared at all that icy blue and he was obstinate blue right back. “You ain’t him.”
Ford had never been much for lectures. He thought that like so many other things at school, he must have skipped this lesson, or not listened in the way the sometimes he used to not listen--an intentional act, as if willful deafness might keep the world in general at bay. He was regretting it now, because he didn’t really understand this type of sick, and he didn’t get half of the things March said about antivirals and getting sick when you were already sick. He wasn’t stupid, but he kept collecting small pieces of information from different people, some from March (though not fucking much), some from Russell, and now a little bit from the other doctor, October. Combining that with bad rumors, things written on bathroom walls, and a serious dearth of anyone that set out to explain the exact nature of anything like a STD except in the more general sense, resulted in a man that assumed protection was mostly about pregnancy, and when it wasn’t, to protect yourself from something that would be obvious if you saw it on somebody’s skin, like chicken pox.
Much of Ford’s bravado came from a defensive place, working away from being a victim at school and at home. He didn’t have much of that right now because he needed to be angry in order to fight back, and he didn’t have room for anger right now. The things that Blake, October, and March had said about Russell needing to hurt something made sense to Ford, and he didn’t blame his brother for the way he dealt, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid the violence was something set to explode at any moment. He backed away out of the blast radius, quickly, expression transparent. He wouldn’t leave and he wouldn’t turn his back, but the titanium ends against the pinging concrete scared him enough for it to show in his eyes. “W-w-we d-d-d-di-didn’t know, then.”
There wasn’t a bit of Russ that wanted to hit Ford. He had, before - before, wrestling on cold concrete until his nose was busted and Ford was solid muscle hitting wildly back at him. That had been the last time Ford was there and Russ had wanted to beat him until he was gone, skedaddled back to dust and dirt and metal sitting in desert sunshine until you baked in it because if Ford was here it meant Russ wasn’t damn done when he left and Lou had spilled venom over like vodka soaking into the carpet, had damn near ruined his getting out. Russ thought of it that way, like Ford was another piece of chain weighted down to that point in the desert, a map point he’d kept his back to and moved away from, determined. There wasn’t much of Russ that wasn’t right close to the surface, molten enough to break free: anger set there beneath his skin hot enough to scratch at and the desperation of it being nothing you could run from. You could run from a girl, you could get a course of treatment from a clinic if you did something stupid. There wasn’t nothing to run from here, and if you couldn’t hit it and you couldn’t run from it, that meant living with it whether you were young - so young it looked out through all that steady blue like terror - or not.
“It ain’t about knowing.” Russ folded his arms up again, tucked hands in his armpits and thumbs either side, like he was squeezing them tight lest he do anything with them. He stood solid, height and broad and desert-grey and sand and he glared at the fear in the kid’s eyes because that wasn’t nothing you could hit or run from either. “You do it so you don’t have to fucking know, Christ, Ford.” He didn’t bend to gather up the scattered things and he didn’t make one move forward. He stood solid in boots and dirty denim and his jaw twitched, set muscle like he didn’t care Ford was backing up.
When the noise stopped and Russell folded up again, creasing and winnowing down into shapes until he was completely condensed and still, Ford stopped retreating and stepped again forward. He just didn’t want to get hit, and he would not give up on the conversation. Determination still written in thick dark lines over his lashes and through his mouth, he rejoined the stool in confrontation and gave Russell a glare that said Ford would like to be in the blame game too, but he was too busy being terrified. “D-d-d-do what?” he asked, confused and frustrated and on the edge of screaming if Russell said this was his fault, because he fucking knew it was his fault and saying it just made him feel like he couldn’t go back and fix it. It just made him feel that everything was too late and long gone and being alone had never been such a fucking problem before. Ford worked his lower lip up against the hard wall of his teeth, angry that he couldn’t say anything worth saying. ...Huh, it looked like there was always room for a little bit of anger.
Russ wasn’t real interested in hitting and he watched Ford come on back close and sit down on the stool with the apprehension of drawn-together blond brows and solid annoyance. There wasn’t a damn thing he knew about men with men - just the jokes that got handed around, colorful and blue when you worked tight with men who were obvious about their hetereosexuality and made damn sure you knew it. You worked close and you didn’t say a word and he’d bunked down in rooms with men when he’d been young enough to need to share who’d maybe given a hint or two and had been plenty good with a message that was plain and unopen to discussion. He didn’t think on it much - if at all, and he didn’t want to and he scowled on back at that glare because his hands were clamped tight against his sides. He’d learned fast - the gaps in between filled up by the same jokes over tools and machinery and not wanting any kid left behind in any of the cities he passed on through.
“You use a fucking condom,” he said, furious and embarrassed and angry at both and the muscle at the side of his jaw flicked some, biting down on words that tasted like copper and bile. “You fuck anyone you do that, what the hell do you think?” It was words in a line he didn’t want to say and the kind of words that usually came with jeering and laughter if someone new joined the line, someone who couldn’t grow a beard properly yet. There was ribbing, and teasing and maybe someone would scout out where the women were in that town and make a joke about that. Russ was old enough and sober enough to remember, even when he was drunk.
Ford was embarrassed too, and he actually turned red around the neck and ears. The stool turned into a witness stand and things got real awkward real fast. Talking on paper was always easier for Ford, but this was a whole new kind of awkward. He stood up again, because he wasn’t going to have a conversation like this sitting down like some school kid behind a desk. A quick chorus of emotions went over Ford’s face, rising and falling like many voices in a din, embarrassment, confusion, quick crescendos of surprise and discomfort. Ford’s brows went down and then up as he shoved his hands in his pockets and brought his elbows in toward his ribs. His silhouette slimmed to something tight and long, something hard to target. “Y-you-you m-m-m-muh-mean that would ha-have helped. This? With M-march. Now? I mean, n-n-not-not now.” A spasm of frustration. “Then. Then?”
Russ dropped gaze and the muscle in his cheek stopped leaping when he turned his head and looked at a smear on the wall, something that wasn’t a kid stretched out to nothing in embarrassment and discomfort. His shoulders pulled up and pulled in, like Russ didn’t want to be there, like he was making himself small enough that he wasn’t there, not really and the discomfort echoed right back in the heavy planes of Russ’s face, sparking at the back of eyes gone steely and set, as if he wasn’t looking at anything, much less Ford. His mouth pulled tight, into flat thinned line and his back hunched up. “Yeah,” he said and the word was mostly spat out like it was bad-tasting, “Yeah, kid. It’s how it goes.”
The metal legs of the stool screeched at a high note that made all the nerves in Ford’s spine shiver. He kept his feet even as he pulled back. “What, that’s th-that’s it?” The frustration and disbelief on his face was obvious, a quick twitch of his chin to one side. Even if Russell wasn’t looking, the shift of Ford’s speech as he moved away, and then back again. “I thought it, was for k-k-kids.” If there was one thing that Ford knew he did not want, it was children. He’d assumed, though, when it became clear you needed to fuck women for that, it was not longer a problem. He.. had not really been explicit to his sister about that. Some things you weren’t explicit to your sister about. So anything she’d said, or anyone else, he’d generally dismissed as not applicable.
The noise jarred the teeth inside Russ’s head until it tasted white but he stood without swaying on the spot and he didn’t turn toward Ford even if he heard the judder of sound go distant and then swing back like Ford himself had turned. He knew Ford not even a little bit, he didn’t know how he’d grown up and he didn’t know when he’d decided he’d wanted men and not women - he didn’t want to know, same way he’d not wanted to know about Ford in the first place. It wasn’t personal but it was Ford’s own business who he slept with and it wasn’t something you wanted to know about one man or another, especially if he was your brother. (Russ assumed that Lex knew because they were close, defended one another like they’d stood back to back plenty of times and he assumed knowing went along with that.) “Yeah,” he said finally, and his jaw worked some and his eyes finally flicked on back to Ford stood there, all flint and nothing. “It’s for that too. But it works for other shit, don’t they tell you fucking anything?”
He’d left around the time kids started dropping out. He’d left after the first couple girls and he’d not bought condoms because they cost money he didn’t have but after, when he had a paycheck and a place, he used them and when he didn’t, he’d wound up with tears behind his eyes when he pissed until he’d gone back to using them same way some people got about religion. “That’s it. You wrap your dick up, you don’t get shit, that’s it.” It came out maybe a little louder than it should have. It was a lecture Russ hadn’t intended to give. He’d gone red a little, around by his ears and the brows had drawn together even tighter.
Ford didn’t react quite the right way to that. The same doubts that kept any previous lessons from sinking in took over and he tried to imagine that making a difference in all the (quite varied, actually) ways he’d had sex, and he had to assume it was different for Russ. Ford looked doubtful, tilting his head like a confused cupid on a mural. Only the sharp lines of his cheeks and the hard line of his mouth kept him from being completely naive in the one movement alone. “Are you sure? I’m not, with girls...” He trailed off, and leaned forward to put both palms on the stool. He rocked back and forth against his shoulders.
Russ was anything but sure. He was women only, and women frequently and there was nothing that connected them except that everyone knew it was temporary and fun. There had been once - a while back, long enough to keep it locked down where it didn’t need to resurface, when it had lasted long enough that it wasn’t the same but since and before it was keeping yourself clean because trips to a clinic were damn uncomfortable and having some nurse shove hands where you didn’t want them to be was worse. He shuffled, foot to foot and he looked a little less solid then and a little less certain, the set lines of his face that were desert-worn, folding and refolding like a worn out piece of paper. “I don’t know,” and it wasn’t hard and it wasn’t flat, it was a little helpless and it was enough anger to put grit on the edge of the helpless.
“I don’t know about,” a pause, because there wasn’t a way of putting that. Russ put tongue against the back of his teeth and he frowned. “That.”
For the first time that day, the fox’s grin flashed, red fur in the heather. “N-n-nn-no, I guess you wou-wou-wouldn’t.” Ford finally pushed away from the stool and stood on his two feet. He looked fine. Young, healthy, a little tired maybe, a little nervous as he moved away from the car and toward a window. He smelled old coffee and wondered how old was old with his nose in the air. He curled his fingers onto his palms. “Oct-oc-octtober said that if I’m b-buh-bloody and somebody gets it on them, I c-c-c-could make them ssssick.” Ford frowned. “G-guess I g-g-got to go.” Sideways glance at Russell. Ford had no idea where to go and desperately didn’t want to, but apparently this chance of spreading it without further direction overcame that.
Russ didn’t know about blood. He knew veiled remarks and he knew jokes and he knew that March had been real clear about getting blood on everywhere but he didn’t know exactly why. He knew lectures from warm-handed nurses and pamphlets he’d walked on past and he knew the garage and places like it. He frowned, and Russ wasn’t scowling so much as the lines of his face stood in sharp relief. He looked old, the kind of old that was a little seedy beneath yellow light and he looked like he didn’t know what to do which was true: he was blue eyes narrowed down and no smile at all for the grin or for October. The grin made him twitchy.
“Who’s October?” Russ had yelled at a lot of people in print and capitals, had yelled at anyone who came on in and got in the way and he hadn’t looked at names, he’d just set things down in blocky print. The confusion set the frown sliding sideways: he wondered if October whoever he was was knowing enough about blood to be clear, and he wondered if it was actually true with the doubt of knowing a little about something but not a lot. “Guess you got to,” he agreed, allowing doubt to be overcome by certainty in that. He knew enough to know that the relief, damp and cold and breathing like there wasn’t something tight-closed around your lungs, came sweeping in after. He looked at Ford, solid where Ford was sideways, and it was uncompromising. “I know a clinic?” It was almost an offer, as awkward as everything else. He scratched behind his ear, hair damp under his fingers.
Ford took in a breath so long and so deep that he tried to wrap oxygen around the last ribs on either side of his body, a breath like the breath was his last. “Oct-oc-oct-to-ber is March’s brother. You show-sho-shouted at him, on the dj-dj-dj... the...” Ford shook himself, flattening his hair against the back of his neck. “The b-book.” He looked afraid again, an intensely apparent fear, completely settled on his face. It was starting to get down under his skin and settle on who he was, and he was having trouble shaking it off. “Wh-where d-d-do I go?”
Practicalities were easy things. They did not require thought and they did not require dealing with all that obvious terror, thick on the tongue as syrup. Russ didn’t care who he’d shouted at, one set of handwriting or print very much like another and all of them the same. He had half expected - half wanted - March’s folks (family or otherwise, it didn’t much matter - Sam managed more not-family than family) to come crawling out of the woodwork so there were more of them to hit but in the end there hadn’t been none of them but March himself. Russ had tucked his hands back into his armpits again, thumbs flat along the creases of where his arms met his ribcage, and his face flattened down to nothing but features, not a damn sign that he was scared for the kid stood across from him. Not a damn sign and that was sign all by itself.
He eased out breath past his teeth, and he said, “Shadow Lane,” like he knew the place well enough to rattle it off like it was an answer. “There’s a clinic there.” He didn’t say nothing about it being free because it wasn’t and he said it heavily, like it was foregone conclusion that there were plastic chairs and antiseptic and clocks ticking down as you waited and pamphlets on the wall to stare at. “You need a ride, I’ll take you.” That was flat, all the air pressed out of it.
Ford looked at once eager and terrified. The blue eyes focused on Russell’s face as if he had only seen him just now for the first time. “I...” he couldn’t seem to decide. “I muh-mean no. You don’t. Have to. I c-c-can get there.” He looked at him as if watching to see if this was the answer Russell was looking for, or if it was the wrong one. It was the question of acceptance or rage, because at last, it seemed that Russell was no longer able to ignore him completely. Ford would have been pleased that his ultimate goal had been met, but he no longer even knew he had one. Survival changed that. Survival changed a lot of things. Ford thought he would go to this place and then maybe, tails to heads, they would tell him he was dead, the way cereal boxes had expiration dates. Sooner or later. He was trying not to shake.
Russ winced. It wasn’t nothing to do with the stutter and it wasn’t nothing to do with the answer. It was the naked look to Ford, the way he was bare out there, fear settled up close to something else that Russ didn’t much know but it made him uncomfortable. He rolled his shoulders like he was trying to shake out the too-tight clamped feeling that had settled heavily over them and he rubbed his knuckles over the bridge of his nose, as if the pressure might help. “You want to go there alone?” That seemed, to Russ, to be the reasoning behind it. He didn’t think about wanting acceptance and he didn’t think about arm’s length and holding Ford there to swing at him, he thought about misery and he thought about licking wounds in private. That was how Russ would have dealt with it, on his own so that no one saw it. It seemed reasonable to him but he sounded doubtful, like he wasn’t damn sure Ford wasn’t about to split apart under all that fear.
There wasn’t a bit of rage to Russ then, stripped down to the mechanics of it. He was unprepossessing lines and sallow skin and the splay of wrinkles at the corners of pale blue eyes as he looked at Ford, and folded himself back up, awkward. “I can. If you want.” It wasn’t the most gracious of offers. It wasn’t mean, either. There just wasn’t much of Russ that was give.
Ford let his eyes rove all the way around the room, trying to decide. It took him some time, because he didn’t hurry, even knowing that Russell was waiting for an answer. The effect was a lot like watching a philosopher think without purpose, a meandering movement as his feet refused to follow his thoughts, the compulsive working of his throat as he not only tried to find what to say, but how to say it without choking on it. “C-c-c-cou-could--fuck!--use a ru-ruh-ride.” Ford chewed on his lips and risked a glance at Russell’s face. “I dun-no where it’is.”
Russ was rigid-tall, all that height set like steel. He waited out the roaming without flinching: Russ was, at least, some measure of patient when the anger rode itself down to nothing and he was patient now, solid like he wasn’t going anywhere. He bent, instead and he began to pick up the tools he’d set to scatter: they clattered as he gathered them up and dumped them in a hard metal jitter onto the wooden bench and he looked over his shoulder at Ford as the word was strangled out, and he waited for that, too. There was something to do in that, something that wasn’t waiting and something that wasn’t feeling bad and something that wasn’t biting down until his jaw ached something awful. He moved, sharply, with the jangle of keys in his palm. “You want to go now?” It was strident, and the movement was sharp, like a loosened spring. Russ dealt with tension the same way he dealt with anger, it was better moving than it was to be still.
The decision now made, Ford was still scared, but resigned with it. His shoulders settled down low on his spine and all the effort went out of his shoulders. “Yeah,” he said, hiccuping on the word, gulping it down and then forcing the rest of it out. He coughed again, almost guiltily, smothering it and wondering how such a thing could be more than a cold. People coughed all the time, why was he only starting to hear this one? Somewhat belated, Ford directed his steps after Russell, still pressing his elbows in tight to the length of his body and somehow managing to work his hands deeper into his pockets as he did so.
There were cars Russ had the keys to but none that he actually had himself. His car was currently in the ownership of the mad millionaire who had got real pissy real quick and Russ didn’t think he’d get it back unless he figured out how to get hold of one enough like it that he could work it up in exchange. He missed the car but the bike was fine mostly, to get around and it was the bike Russ headed for now. It was outside the building where the concrete sloped down to oil-stained tarmac, around the side where a tarp had been thrown over. Russ didn’t look back at Ford, a miserable outline in his wake: if the kid wanted to go, he wanted to go and it was, Russ thought, better over with than anything. Ford would be fine and then he obstinately refused to consider if Ford got anything other than a clean result, because that wasn’t allowed to happen. Russ strode with rangy lines, like he would have run, if he could and he hauled the tarp off the bike with a snap of plastic. Belatedly, he turned, “You good with bikes?” It sounded like there was no other answer than affirmative.
The dejected figure stopped short in the doorway to stay clear of the tarp and a brief flicker of deer in headlights moved over his face. Ford had no idea if he was good with bikes because he’d never sat on one. He’d never even touched one, come to think of it, having no particular skill for tools and a survival instinct that told him to avoid people who liked loud engines and fighting (unless, of course, they were related to him). Ford wasn’t going to admit that, though, and he’d pretty much exhausted his will to struggle through sticky syllables to make himself understood. He hadn’t talked that much in a long time and realized he had only felt stupid for trying it once or twice, something of an accomplishment. He looked at the bike and then nodded, assuming he could just sort of hang on to the back and hope he didn’t fall off and ruin some paramedic’s life if he was positive. (If. If, if if.)
He hadn’t waited for the response. Russ preferred motion to stillness even on good days and he was sharp, blocky movement now, the relief of being in action once more in the uncoil of strangled muscles, of the stillness and quiet of concrete swallowed almost entirely whole by the crackle of plastic crinkling back in his hands. Blue eyes slid over the morose curl of Ford’s shoulders and the boots on his feet that were too worn-in to be much use on the back of a bike. Russ’s jeans were soft, well-washed denim but the jacket he was shrugging on was thick, battered leather, the kind that took no chances. He handed across a helmet, wordlessly. It was a practical thing rather than anything of beauty, the shell wasn’t lacquered but dull, black pressed plastic and the minute Ford reached for it, he had his own. Russ liked fighting fine, and he’d take what got meted out but he’d picked pieces of grit from the road out of his arm enough times not to risk it much.
“Handles under the seat,” Russ said curtly. He had little practical experience with people who required thoughtfulness and consideration: the last time Ford had turned up at the garage with need naked behind fox-sharp eyes he’d hit him clear into the following week and he’d felt good about doing it. The only person he’d much bothered with that had been Sam and that was his jaw clamped tight around anything he might say that jostled the broken-glass pieces a little further. Ford reminded him a little too much of that and the instruction was as bitten off as if Russ had the rest of the breath tight, too tight for talking. “Or you can hang on to me.” Jerk of shoulders. Russ didn’t much care, the journey was something to be over with. He threw a leg over the bike in an easy thoughtlessness, and he waited.
Ford eyed the bike for a brief second, trying to figure out how best to be on it without looking like a toddler on a tricycle, until finally gave it up as a lost cause, mimicked Russell’s movement, and ended up perched behind him with the helmet down over his thick curls. He hadn’t thought to bring a jacket in his wandering, and now he was regretting the lack of protection that the ponderous pace of the bus had, up until this point, made unnecessary. They made an unlikely duo up there on two wheels, but like Russ, Ford was thinking only of the destination. He wished that he could just go on as he had, pretend for a little while longer, but it looked like nobody was going to let him do that. Ford said nothing more even when there was an engine to shout over; his fist wrapping around the seam of Russell’s jacket under the bigger man’s left arm.
It was only when the bike slowed and then stopped did Ford stir. He tried to make his hand let go of Russell’s jacket, or at least start moving off the bike, but he fell more than dismounted. Catching his weight he straightened upright and gave Russell another transparently desperate look. “You c-c-c-can...” unable to fight his way through more words, Ford pressed his lips together and made a short wave of his hand in the general direction of somewhere else. He thought if Russell was waiting he might have to tell him bad news, and he wasn’t sure he could face that. (If. If, if, if.)
Whilst they were in motion, Russ didn’t care. Couldn’t care. Distraction on a bike was the fastest way to totalling the thing and the weight on the back dipped the bike lower on the road than he was used to, made the turns heavier, like dragging through syrup. But it didn’t make it a damn bit easier, the ride and when he put down a boot on the stretch of road right outside the cusp of the building, the tight, heavy stretch beneath his breastbone and encompassing his lungs was still right there and when Ford half-stumbled off the bike, he braced the thing in surprise, and the helmet hung from his hand by its strap. The frown he shot Ford was all the bike but it looked, for a minute, unduly forbidding.
“You want me to go?” Russ’s surprise was blue eyes narrowed in bright sunshine, was the thoughtful pass of his hand across his chin. Russ liked things private himself, and he liked messing around in other people’s private even less than he liked them in his, so it made a certain, immediate kind of sense. He’d expected the kid to want company; all that fox-sharp caught out in the rain, he looked damn miserable and as if he might bolt. Russ shrugged, “I can hang around, give you a ride on back.” It was laid down as casual as the first card on the baize, the jacket pulled tight over his shoulders. “You want to go in on your own, that’s fine.”
Ford kept turning his head to stare at the double doors and smoky glass. The muscles at the tops of his elbows kept convulsing under the hard flex of every knuckle, and his throat worked to suppress another cough, intent on refusing anything that might sway fate from his favor. “I’m g-g-go-go...” Ford paused, licked his lips, and tried to suppress an frantic words trying to force their way out of his mouth. He made a sharp motion toward the door. “Alone. Sssee you.. um. In a few.” He decided not to make a question out of the last words. If Russell wasn’t there when he got out, then he wasn’t. He’d have to take care of himself. Nothing new.
Ford turned without further comment, abandoning bike, brother and helmet behind. He disappeared into the dark panes of glass, and the utterly ordinary building swallowed him up entirely.
The building was shiny-clean from the outside; the tarmac was the spackled black of something freshly laid, an antiseptic-clean sheen over the glass and the building and the shellshocked walking in and out, pale in desert sun. Russ had left the bike by the side, gleaming-battered metal leaned up in the shadow the building cast and he was sat with his feet stretched out in front of him, lanky length sprawled on the sidewalk just to the right of the door. It wasn’t inside, it wasn’t waiting on plastic chairs and listening to medical people talk funny, and it wasn’t gone, either. It was the halfway place between as Russ leaned his head back against the glass and chased idle-guilty thoughts around in his head, the what-ifs lined up neat as a carnival attraction, tin targets that he’d never hit. He waited, his hands a loose, tan knot in his lap and he watched people passing without a damn bit of interest and the sick twist of his guts at the thought of Ford coming out with a piece of paper that said he was was the slow roil of a sinking ship into sea. He watched the door, the pneumatic hiss and slide of the glass and the puff of artificial cool air into the street beyond.
Russ looked like maybe he’d come that far and stopped just short, like maybe he’d sprawled himself down rather than take bad news. His eyes were steady and blankly blue as they passed over the count of people in and out, a thin trail, until they lit on the one he was looking for.
“Hey. Kid.”