Made Visible and Permanent 4/? Error in the Universe
A/N: This chapter was slightly troublesome, so it's slightly short, and only Dick and Nix. But hey, that's not a bad thing. :3
In which Dick smells like sweat and unspent generosity, Nixon skips to the inevitable outcome, and then conveniently passes out.
Cross-posted to no_vices and my journal. Please forgive any spamming.
O4. Error in the Universe
After practice, Dick circled back to retrieve the cooler. Now refilled with the empty bottles, he hoisted it out of the grass and settled it in the back seat. He slid back into the driver’s seat and restarted the engine. The radio resumed whatever musical suggestion Harry forcible fed him and the clock flickered into life-10:45-over a flurry of ska trumpet and jumping electric chords. Dick routinely reached to shift into reverse, turn his hand-me-down car around and head for home, but the sight of dark jeans crumpled up in the backseat suddenly reminded him. One more thing to accomplish.
Lewis, all sour on the lawn, shivering, dazed and unfortunately no longer drunk. His seemingly abandoned clothes were washed and dry, ready to return to their owner. Dick couldn’t resist a tug of a smile, recalling a drunken lump snoring out in the lawn, dark hair tousled and clumped around his face, legs splayed awkwardly, the unblemished soles of his Chuck Taylors jutting at odd angles.
Despite his best efforts, Lewis’ clothes still retained the character of the bars he’d frequented that night. An extra rinse cycle and they still sung of cigarettes and whiskey-now perversely of cigarettes and whiskey and lavender detergent. Dick skimmed his fingers over the grass stain in the knee he’d been unable to get out. He felt a twinge of guilt. The black of the t-shirt had faded a shade, pilled along a few seams.
Dick suspected he could care less about one set of clothes, so whatever the condition in which they were returned, he probably wasn’t going to act terribly grateful. But-ingratitude or not-Dick felt obligated to return property not his own. He shifted the car back into drive and instead headed toward the city. Ska blared on and trees and suburbia eventually gave way to business and brownstones.
It was no shock that the gardener simply opened the gate with a smile and clapped him on the back. Thankfully, he was neither a gossip nor a cop and resumed dutifully ignoring Nixon’s existence. Simply slid his hands back into his dirty gloves and knelt down, bent on completely eradicating dandelions from the landscaping. His ignorance meant his father’s disowning was a silent action; the missing persons report purely a social ploy to placate anyone’s suspicions. God fucking forbid anyone know anything was amiss in the Nixon kingdom, his head sung bitterly over and over, climbing one stair at a time.
Blanche was predictably absent. Off perfecting her tan, sucking down half the blended fruity ice drinks in the city, keeping the fashionable boutiques well funded-whatever. His father was off somewhere. Nixon didn’t know, didn’t care. Without a soul to bother him, Nixon went upstairs, retrieved his camera off his dresser and slung it around his neck. The weight felt strangely comforting. Nixon then wrangled up a few hundred dollars from the loose floorboard under his four-poster bed like a fox hungrily raiding a winter store. Zippo, aviators-what else? Out of habit, he pocketed his cell phone, but not before flicking it open out of curiosity.
“No missed calls,” he scoffed. “Quite the concerned parent. Probably didn’t even give the police the right goddamn number.”
“Mr. Nixon-?”
Nix immediately froze and stared at his open bedroom door. The empty frame felt like an exposed wound, another opportunity for his father to tear asunder with his prying, salty fingers. He finally let out his caged breath when he recognized the voice. “Yeah?”
“There’s someone here looking for you.” the gardener’s voice echoed through the marble-floored foyer and drifted up the staircase. “I’d come up, but my shoes are dirty-”
With a practiced eye roll, Nixon stalked out to the railing. The gardener’s figure stood cautiously in the doorway, dwarfed from Nixon’s vista on the third floor. “Well, who is it?”
“Some kid-he says he’s here to return your clothes. Said you’d know him.”
Nixon would have laughed at the awkward color in the gardener’s voice if he hadn’t immediately felt his stomach drop out anxiously beneath him. Runner. Winters. Captain Kick. Apparently loves a charity case. Yeah, I know him. Whatever the cause-somehow this visitor felt worse than an incensed Stanhope Nixon storming through the door. He collected himself and called back. “Let him in. I’ll be down in a minute.”
The maid had wasted no time in neatly tucking in the bed, replacing the broken clock with one equally expensive and antique, sweeping away all the incriminating details. Made scrounging for his stuff all the more annoying, everything relocated in an act of nervous vanity. He collected extra clothes into a bag, topped the pile with Zippo, extra cigarettes, skinny wad of emergency money. He slipped on his aviators and the world again cooled to a more bearable temperature, all the colors of the home he hated turning dark, enriched. The weight of his camera tugging at his neck and bumping his sternum as he trotted down the stairs partially restored his nerve.
Unfortunately, the minimal benefit of material objects was quickly burnt away to see the runner standing so calmly in the foyer, quietly examining the architecture. Out of place, though-as conspicuous in a citrus orange shirt, gray running shorts, red-trimmed running shoes as a blaze orange hunter against the forest. Like he was a conspicuous error in the universe that escaped correction. And instinctually, charmed by the runner’s contrast and misinformed color choices, his fingers itched to snap a picture. He smothered it just as instinctually.
Winters watched Nixon approach with a mute quirk of his mouth, and then held up the folded stack of clothing. They smelled suspiciously of lavender detergent. “Thought you might want them back.”
“Yeah.” Nix arched a brow above his silver-rimmed sunglasses. “So, you knew,” he said.
“Knew what?”
A puff of incredulous air escaped through his lips and Nixon grinned around it. “That my name doesn’t end with just Lewis. Otherwise you’re one hell of a good guess.”
Winters’ pale-colored eyes seemed to gauge him, but the gesture was skewed, the runner unable to distinguish Nixon’s eyes through the dark sunglasses. Instead, his unreadable gaze focused just shy of their mark. Nixon felt oddly transparent and shivery. “No, it doesn’t. I saw the missing persons report,” he said, running his thumb along a seam in Nixon’s folded jeans. Again, that intriguing half-twitch busied his mouth. “It took me a little while to remember where I’d seen your face before, though. By then, I’d already invited you inside.”
“Uglier than you remember, huh?” Nix smirked, taking the pile of folded clothes just to make him quit that nervous fidget. Stuffed them into his bag. “Pride-and-joy son that you are, you didn’t call the authorities, return me to my distraught family?”
Winters shrugged. “I assumed you had your reasons to be missing. You obviously weren’t kidnapped and forced to get drunk against your will.”
“Well spotted,” Nixon muttered. “Well, I appreciate you returning my clothes. Washing them, too,” he said with the practice of a usually ungrateful rich offspring talented at hiding that fact. “But I can’t really return the favor at the moment.” He pinched the shoulder of the black shirt and tugged it. “Still using’ em. Unless you want to just exchange them, right here, right now-” An involuntary grin cracked his face.
“No, no,” Winters quickly corrected, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I see your point. They could use a wash first, anyway.”
And inevitably-because Nixon could nearly smell it coming, beneath the sweet-sour of sweat, sunshine, and plain deodorant, the current of unspent generosity thrumming, burning just beneath his skin-his expression filled with caution, concern. Blue eyes swept down to the bag slung over his shoulder, then snapped back up, this time hitting their mark.
“Are you going somewhere?”
Nixon laughed to avoid a scoff. “Uh, yeah-anywhere but here,” he answered, smirking. “And preferably before anybody of consequence comes back home and finds me here.” And, even without that hint beneath the smell of sweat, Nixon could feel Winters’ next words forming and decided to preempt them. Circumvent the fruitless resistance, fast forward to the inevitable outcome. Because God knew, if you asked Dick Winters for a cookie, he’d probably give you a glass of milk, then a straw, then ask if you needed a napkin-
“And sure, Winters, I’d love a lift.”
He smiled, but it was a small, quiet one. Just enough to avoid cosmic detection.
When as they stepped outside, Nixon shot the gardener a quick appraising gaze-no, still thankfully dumb to all, focusing his entire universe on digging out those treacherous white roots, sweat-soaked back turned to them. Abruptly a horrific image of a lone redhead loping throughout the city, to come to a panting halt at the Nixon gate flooded his head. “You did drive here, right?”
When the sunlight shock faded, the colors shifted back into view. The unassuming shape of Winters’ gray sedan sat parked in the driveway, the wrought iron gate closed behind it.
“Yes,” Winters said, thinly managing to hold back his amusement.
“That’s a relief,” Nix muttered.
Even the boy’s car seemed a fascinating blemish against this lavish backdrop, another cosmic fugitive that had yet to feel the smear of the universe’s corrective thumb. Both were oddly whole, calm things. It intrigued him. Nixon elbowed the bag slung over his shoulder out of his way, clicked the camera on with a twitch of his thumb, and paused to snap a picture. The runner hesitated beside him, craning his neck to watch quietly. But momentarily, Winters’ blue-green eyes fell on his face, attempting to read it as if it were some pretty arrangement of Latin he didn’t understand-yet. Nixon was too absorbed to notice.
The LCD screen flickered and the captured image reappeared. Nixon instinctively muttered something obscene beneath his breath. The lighting was slightly hot from the reflective surface, washing out some color. Winters’s shoulder nudged his as he leaned close to see. He hummed thoughtfully beside Nixon’s ear. “Photographer, huh?”
“I suppose,” he answered, fingers working quickly to turn the camera off again. "Thought I might invest in a creative habit, not just all the destructive ones."
“You can call me Dick, by the way.”
Nixon smirked, but did not turn to look him in the eye. Then they’d bump noses.
“Well, Dick,” he replied, “if you don’t mind, I’d like to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Fine by me.”
Nixon swore he heard him smile an honest, toothy smile, but only that quiet, careful expression remained when they both settled into the car. Nixon remembered-as he began to realize the weight of his camera against his sternum was a little too comforting, Winters’ unspent generosity a little too accommodating-Dick asked, “Where to?”
“Anywhere but not here,” he’d said. But because he’s always fallen asleep too easily in moving cars, and Dick's car smelt of an intoxicating mix of endorphins and sweat, Nixon knew he went out like a light the moment his temple touched the window.
O5. One-Hour Photos
In which Dick smells like sweat and unspent generosity, Nixon skips to the inevitable outcome, and then conveniently passes out.
Cross-posted to no_vices and my journal. Please forgive any spamming.
O4. Error in the Universe
After practice, Dick circled back to retrieve the cooler. Now refilled with the empty bottles, he hoisted it out of the grass and settled it in the back seat. He slid back into the driver’s seat and restarted the engine. The radio resumed whatever musical suggestion Harry forcible fed him and the clock flickered into life-10:45-over a flurry of ska trumpet and jumping electric chords. Dick routinely reached to shift into reverse, turn his hand-me-down car around and head for home, but the sight of dark jeans crumpled up in the backseat suddenly reminded him. One more thing to accomplish.
Lewis, all sour on the lawn, shivering, dazed and unfortunately no longer drunk. His seemingly abandoned clothes were washed and dry, ready to return to their owner. Dick couldn’t resist a tug of a smile, recalling a drunken lump snoring out in the lawn, dark hair tousled and clumped around his face, legs splayed awkwardly, the unblemished soles of his Chuck Taylors jutting at odd angles.
Despite his best efforts, Lewis’ clothes still retained the character of the bars he’d frequented that night. An extra rinse cycle and they still sung of cigarettes and whiskey-now perversely of cigarettes and whiskey and lavender detergent. Dick skimmed his fingers over the grass stain in the knee he’d been unable to get out. He felt a twinge of guilt. The black of the t-shirt had faded a shade, pilled along a few seams.
Dick suspected he could care less about one set of clothes, so whatever the condition in which they were returned, he probably wasn’t going to act terribly grateful. But-ingratitude or not-Dick felt obligated to return property not his own. He shifted the car back into drive and instead headed toward the city. Ska blared on and trees and suburbia eventually gave way to business and brownstones.
It was no shock that the gardener simply opened the gate with a smile and clapped him on the back. Thankfully, he was neither a gossip nor a cop and resumed dutifully ignoring Nixon’s existence. Simply slid his hands back into his dirty gloves and knelt down, bent on completely eradicating dandelions from the landscaping. His ignorance meant his father’s disowning was a silent action; the missing persons report purely a social ploy to placate anyone’s suspicions. God fucking forbid anyone know anything was amiss in the Nixon kingdom, his head sung bitterly over and over, climbing one stair at a time.
Blanche was predictably absent. Off perfecting her tan, sucking down half the blended fruity ice drinks in the city, keeping the fashionable boutiques well funded-whatever. His father was off somewhere. Nixon didn’t know, didn’t care. Without a soul to bother him, Nixon went upstairs, retrieved his camera off his dresser and slung it around his neck. The weight felt strangely comforting. Nixon then wrangled up a few hundred dollars from the loose floorboard under his four-poster bed like a fox hungrily raiding a winter store. Zippo, aviators-what else? Out of habit, he pocketed his cell phone, but not before flicking it open out of curiosity.
“No missed calls,” he scoffed. “Quite the concerned parent. Probably didn’t even give the police the right goddamn number.”
“Mr. Nixon-?”
Nix immediately froze and stared at his open bedroom door. The empty frame felt like an exposed wound, another opportunity for his father to tear asunder with his prying, salty fingers. He finally let out his caged breath when he recognized the voice. “Yeah?”
“There’s someone here looking for you.” the gardener’s voice echoed through the marble-floored foyer and drifted up the staircase. “I’d come up, but my shoes are dirty-”
With a practiced eye roll, Nixon stalked out to the railing. The gardener’s figure stood cautiously in the doorway, dwarfed from Nixon’s vista on the third floor. “Well, who is it?”
“Some kid-he says he’s here to return your clothes. Said you’d know him.”
Nixon would have laughed at the awkward color in the gardener’s voice if he hadn’t immediately felt his stomach drop out anxiously beneath him. Runner. Winters. Captain Kick. Apparently loves a charity case. Yeah, I know him. Whatever the cause-somehow this visitor felt worse than an incensed Stanhope Nixon storming through the door. He collected himself and called back. “Let him in. I’ll be down in a minute.”
The maid had wasted no time in neatly tucking in the bed, replacing the broken clock with one equally expensive and antique, sweeping away all the incriminating details. Made scrounging for his stuff all the more annoying, everything relocated in an act of nervous vanity. He collected extra clothes into a bag, topped the pile with Zippo, extra cigarettes, skinny wad of emergency money. He slipped on his aviators and the world again cooled to a more bearable temperature, all the colors of the home he hated turning dark, enriched. The weight of his camera tugging at his neck and bumping his sternum as he trotted down the stairs partially restored his nerve.
Unfortunately, the minimal benefit of material objects was quickly burnt away to see the runner standing so calmly in the foyer, quietly examining the architecture. Out of place, though-as conspicuous in a citrus orange shirt, gray running shorts, red-trimmed running shoes as a blaze orange hunter against the forest. Like he was a conspicuous error in the universe that escaped correction. And instinctually, charmed by the runner’s contrast and misinformed color choices, his fingers itched to snap a picture. He smothered it just as instinctually.
Winters watched Nixon approach with a mute quirk of his mouth, and then held up the folded stack of clothing. They smelled suspiciously of lavender detergent. “Thought you might want them back.”
“Yeah.” Nix arched a brow above his silver-rimmed sunglasses. “So, you knew,” he said.
“Knew what?”
A puff of incredulous air escaped through his lips and Nixon grinned around it. “That my name doesn’t end with just Lewis. Otherwise you’re one hell of a good guess.”
Winters’ pale-colored eyes seemed to gauge him, but the gesture was skewed, the runner unable to distinguish Nixon’s eyes through the dark sunglasses. Instead, his unreadable gaze focused just shy of their mark. Nixon felt oddly transparent and shivery. “No, it doesn’t. I saw the missing persons report,” he said, running his thumb along a seam in Nixon’s folded jeans. Again, that intriguing half-twitch busied his mouth. “It took me a little while to remember where I’d seen your face before, though. By then, I’d already invited you inside.”
“Uglier than you remember, huh?” Nix smirked, taking the pile of folded clothes just to make him quit that nervous fidget. Stuffed them into his bag. “Pride-and-joy son that you are, you didn’t call the authorities, return me to my distraught family?”
Winters shrugged. “I assumed you had your reasons to be missing. You obviously weren’t kidnapped and forced to get drunk against your will.”
“Well spotted,” Nixon muttered. “Well, I appreciate you returning my clothes. Washing them, too,” he said with the practice of a usually ungrateful rich offspring talented at hiding that fact. “But I can’t really return the favor at the moment.” He pinched the shoulder of the black shirt and tugged it. “Still using’ em. Unless you want to just exchange them, right here, right now-” An involuntary grin cracked his face.
“No, no,” Winters quickly corrected, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I see your point. They could use a wash first, anyway.”
And inevitably-because Nixon could nearly smell it coming, beneath the sweet-sour of sweat, sunshine, and plain deodorant, the current of unspent generosity thrumming, burning just beneath his skin-his expression filled with caution, concern. Blue eyes swept down to the bag slung over his shoulder, then snapped back up, this time hitting their mark.
“Are you going somewhere?”
Nixon laughed to avoid a scoff. “Uh, yeah-anywhere but here,” he answered, smirking. “And preferably before anybody of consequence comes back home and finds me here.” And, even without that hint beneath the smell of sweat, Nixon could feel Winters’ next words forming and decided to preempt them. Circumvent the fruitless resistance, fast forward to the inevitable outcome. Because God knew, if you asked Dick Winters for a cookie, he’d probably give you a glass of milk, then a straw, then ask if you needed a napkin-
“And sure, Winters, I’d love a lift.”
He smiled, but it was a small, quiet one. Just enough to avoid cosmic detection.
When as they stepped outside, Nixon shot the gardener a quick appraising gaze-no, still thankfully dumb to all, focusing his entire universe on digging out those treacherous white roots, sweat-soaked back turned to them. Abruptly a horrific image of a lone redhead loping throughout the city, to come to a panting halt at the Nixon gate flooded his head. “You did drive here, right?”
When the sunlight shock faded, the colors shifted back into view. The unassuming shape of Winters’ gray sedan sat parked in the driveway, the wrought iron gate closed behind it.
“Yes,” Winters said, thinly managing to hold back his amusement.
“That’s a relief,” Nix muttered.
Even the boy’s car seemed a fascinating blemish against this lavish backdrop, another cosmic fugitive that had yet to feel the smear of the universe’s corrective thumb. Both were oddly whole, calm things. It intrigued him. Nixon elbowed the bag slung over his shoulder out of his way, clicked the camera on with a twitch of his thumb, and paused to snap a picture. The runner hesitated beside him, craning his neck to watch quietly. But momentarily, Winters’ blue-green eyes fell on his face, attempting to read it as if it were some pretty arrangement of Latin he didn’t understand-yet. Nixon was too absorbed to notice.
The LCD screen flickered and the captured image reappeared. Nixon instinctively muttered something obscene beneath his breath. The lighting was slightly hot from the reflective surface, washing out some color. Winters’s shoulder nudged his as he leaned close to see. He hummed thoughtfully beside Nixon’s ear. “Photographer, huh?”
“I suppose,” he answered, fingers working quickly to turn the camera off again. "Thought I might invest in a creative habit, not just all the destructive ones."
“You can call me Dick, by the way.”
Nixon smirked, but did not turn to look him in the eye. Then they’d bump noses.
“Well, Dick,” he replied, “if you don’t mind, I’d like to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Fine by me.”
Nixon swore he heard him smile an honest, toothy smile, but only that quiet, careful expression remained when they both settled into the car. Nixon remembered-as he began to realize the weight of his camera against his sternum was a little too comforting, Winters’ unspent generosity a little too accommodating-Dick asked, “Where to?”
“Anywhere but not here,” he’d said. But because he’s always fallen asleep too easily in moving cars, and Dick's car smelt of an intoxicating mix of endorphins and sweat, Nixon knew he went out like a light the moment his temple touched the window.
O5. One-Hour Photos