PEPPER P. (saltedand) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-06-28 15:14:00 |
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Entry tags: | pepper potts |
Who: Russ Campbell
What: Russ grows a pair. Or a heart. Something like that.
When: Immediately following this
Where: The garage
Nothing that opened up the wide dusty-yellow sky and made more of things than cracked asphalt outside and an empty office and fucking pop-music playing, tinny and low. There weren't nothing to it like a great big hand in the sky or something that said this, this is different. Weren't nothing at all to the big man who curved over the workbench like he was intent on something, until you looked up close and saw it weren't work but a notebook, small and leather-bound, messy like it had been done by hand. Most knew the way Campbell looked when he was good and mad and there was a little to it now, all that anger wound up tight inside like a spring coiled down until it was flat. It looked like all the bones in his face had ground themselves tight, like he wanted something that wasn't the little stub of pencil he threw on down until it bounced on the workbench and disappeared under the tires of the nearest car.
Russ didn't know in the hell what it was he wanted.
He knew it wasn't the kid. The kid was blocky, bull-headed. Blue-eyed like the way he looked in the mirror to shave. When he'd been the kid's age, he'd been putting together engines without looking at 'em, got a job at a chop-shop that had closed down five years back. Weren't clean work and it weren't legal, half the fucking time but it was work that paid the bills. And wasn't that the fucking point? You made it through school and you made it out and you learned how to put your shoulder up against it and work, not piss away the whole thing?
Except. I want to help written out and those weren't words you heard a lot round the 'park and you didn't hear them in the shop either. Wasn't a fucker alive who didn't want something for nothing but he wasn't going to offer it. And the kid said no - polite, like someone had dragged him up and stuffed manners down his throat (and that wasn't Lou, too fucking drunk or out of her head) - said no until Russ felt the full color of relief and annoyance blur together until he couldn't tell them apart.
Annoyance. Blew all things out his head as he set back to work, loud and aggrieved and the music on the radio turned up high until it drowned out every damn thing. Drowned out the uncurl of a voice in the back of his head that was somehow pointed, even when silent and he didn't notice when the little handmade book didn't stay on the bench, when something else replaced it.