mechanics gotta stick together WHO:tulip + jaxon WHEN: afternoon WHERE: the garage connected to the house Tulip is staying in SUMMARY: a girl becomes an apprentice STATUS: in-progress WARNINGS: tba (language, for now)
She didn't know a lot about cars but she knew enough to be able to hotwire one if she had to.
Except her latest project, an old jeep that had been in the garage since she came to Seattle, was giving her grief. Headaches. Nightmares. More than the ambling dead outside the city boundaries. She knew a little about car mechanics, having gone through all her step-dad's old car manuals that he'd kept in their own dusty garage, but even manuals only held so much information. The unfortunate problem was .... well, Tulip didn't know. And that was the issue. The Jeep wouldn't start up at all and when it did, it would sputter and then die and then there was smoke everywhere.
Even if she kind of liked the smell, she knew smoke coming out of a car was never a good sign. Not unless it was intentional.
It didn't help that the few adults she did ask for help knew next to nothing about cars. Not anything more than flipping the key and pressing on the brake. Big fucking help they all were. Adults were useless. How was she supposed to fix her precious Jeep?
So the Jeep sat in the garage and little by little, she tried to fix it. Little by little, she failed. Somehow, she got the radio to work and she still had no idea how she managed that. Whenever she was feeling particularly low, she would go into the garage, open the big door and just blast whatever old cassette tape that she'd found. Whoever had lived here had kept a huge case of the weird tapes and the music wasn't half bad.
After a particularly awful day of just .... well, nothing happening and Tulip thinking she might die of boredom instead of infection, she went in and put in one of the tapes and turned the volume all the way up and then sat in the driver's seat and pretended she was going down the highway, including a broken pair of sunglasses someone had brought for her. Since she'd played the song so many times, she knew the words by heart and sang poorly along.
I've listened to preachers, I've listened to fools I've watched all the dropouts who make their own rules One person conditioned to rule and control The media sells it and you live the role ~