fic: Dreaming of Places (Where Lovers Have Wings)
Dreaming of Places (Where Lovers Have Wings)
Whimsical fantasy gen: Brendon goes on a roadtrip and meets Ryan, thrice. There are moving toyshops and towns made of paper. (Actually, just one of each.)
G | gen | Ryan + Brendon | 2962 words
Many thanks to egelantier who read through this when it wasn't quite completed, and to fictionalaspect who gave me details on small towns and the like. ♥ Title from cannibalized from Sunset Rubdown.
Brendon is travelling, on and on and on, in his car.
He doesn’t know where he’s going, much. Technically he is going to his sister’s wedding, but technically the wedding is in ten days’ time and technically it only takes two to get there. But it’s a roadtrip. When the road is easy he sticks his arm out of the window and cranks it up and down like a lever, delivering mechanical waves to whoever might be watching.
No one watches much, but that’s okay.
Brendon slumps back in his car, posture bad on purpose, and watches the road move behind him, but the horizon is still always the horizon.
When the wind roaring into his window gets too loud he shuts it, and turns up the mixtape he’s got playing, singing along to all the words he knows and making up some of his own besides.
---
Brendon passes through a place and decides now is as good a time as ever to get out and stretch his legs. He stretches everywhere else - arms, ribcage, waist, reaching up to the sky. It feels pretty good. That being done, Brendon sinks back to himself and strolls around town.
It’s an impossibly small town. Now at the dead end of summer the streets themselves seem barely alive. A couple of people pass by him and give him the once-over before walking past. Brendon doesn’t mind. He walks around with his hands in his pockets and tries to pretend he’s the only person left on earth, hence the silent streets, and maybe if he squashes down his head and doesn’t look for long enough, when he finally does there’ll be a hovercraft sparking above his head, ready to take him in its wings and fly, off to outer space…
Brendon stops, examining the window in one of the shops. From the reflection he can tell there is no rocket yet. Inside, the shop is curiously dark; Brendon can tell it’s open, but - if this doesn’t sound silly, because either shops are open or they aren’t - only barely. It’s a toyshop. Brendon presses his nose against the window, ignoring the smudges his nose makes against the plate glass, feeling like a greedy kid around Christmas time.
A bottle of marbles, a teddy bear, a railway miniature. Try as he might, Brendon can’t see any playstations or nintendos - although there’s a hula hoop, lying sheepishly off to the side and looking more battered than the other toys.
A mannequin winks at him, slyly.
Brendon gasps and pushes off the window with such force he almost falls over. As if on cue, the door swings open. Someone around his own age stands in the doorway, arms tucked around his armpits.
“May I help you?” the boy says. He’s got on a paisley shirt and the strangest hat, with weeds that look like flowers tucked in. Skinny trousers.
Brendon swallows. “Ah,” he says, “Your mannequin just - it just winked at me. I think.” He wipes his palms on his jeans and tugs on his jacket. (What the fuck is a mannequin doing over here anyway?)
“It does that sometimes,” the boy says. “And who are you?”
Because Brendon must have skipped the class not talking to strangers, he says, “Brendon.” Then he regrets it almost immediately, says, “I’ve got to go,” before going, and drives out of town before he can look back at the toyshop, even though he really wanted to.
---
Brendon finds a place to stay in for the night, in the next town. Since the town is near a city there are a whole bunch of guesthouses, Brendon’s for the picking. He picks the closest one with light purple walls, run by an elderly couple who’re one day away from closing on the off-season.
He eats a bag of Lay’s for dinner because he can’t be bothered with a proper one, thinks of lugging his guitar out the van and changes his mind, switches on the TV.
Then he lies on his back in the bed so he can’t see any of the program, just the patterns of light the screen throws up on the ceiling, and falls asleep that way.
---
The next day at breakfast, Brendon asks the woman for directions, just in a general ‘how to get out of town’ kind of way. He should know how to get out of town, though, shouldn’t he? He just drove in yesterday. He should.
The woman says, “Do you want to go to the city?” Her arms are wattled with age and when she moves them they shake. His mom had the same thing, too. Brendon tries not to stare.
She repeats, “Do you want to go to the city?” and Brendon realizes what she’s asking, and takes another ten seconds to think about it before realizing, no, he doesn’t want to go to the city. He wants to move, but he doesn’t really want a big city.
“No,” he says.
The woman gives him directions and he nods at her, thank you.
---
Brendon in the van on the road, doing a roadtrip, day two.
He taps his fingers on the steering wheel and bounces around in his seat, but the sound of the motor is driving him a little manic, there. He wonders if he’s tired; it’s hard to tell without anyone in the seat next to him to talk to.
Brendon’d read somewhere that, if you got tired on the road, you should basically just pull over and rest on the road shoulder until you’re capable of driving.
Where Brendon comes from, pulling over on the road shoulder is a sign of weakness.
Here it actually seems possible. But Brendon’s not tired, so he just takes another sip of his Coke (which by now tastes flat) and puts it back to rest in its cup holder, and motors on.
---
As far as Brendon can tell, this town is a slightly bigger one, there’s a Wal-mart and everything.
Brendon dusts his hands on his jeans and waits for the old automatic doors to crank open, before stepping in there tentatively. He wonders if that isn’t a contradiction or something, the doors aren’t automatic. Technically.
He buys some food, and wanders around, chomping on the dubious macaroni salad, and tries to find a place to sleep for the night.
He stops by a clothing shop and stares hard at the window display, thinking, Kara would like that.
Brendon moves on.
The door to the next shop bangs open, and Brendon stumbles back just in time. It’s the same dude from the previous town over, leaning against the interior and looking vaguely hassled. Brendon stares at him, horrified. Behind the strange guy, Brendon can’t help noticing that it’s the same toyshop, the same layout, the same toys. He gets the feeling low in his gut, like something is wrong.
“What are you doing here, dude?” Brendon asks.
The guy looks up, surprised and vaguely affronted, as if Brendon’s somehow insulted him. Brendon didn’t mean to, of course. He’s just dazed and confused and startled. He thinks he knows what happened.
“Actually, my name’s Ryan,” the guy - Ryan - says.
Brendon flees.
---
He spends the night in bed tossing and turning and flipping his pillow to get the cool sensation of cotton against his cheek again, but for all that he can’t sleep.
Clearly something is wrong. He must have followed the wrong directions, or something. He is still in the same town - seriously, seriously, how dumb can he get? He must have taken a huge loop and ended up in the same town, and stopped at a different part of it. All that driving and driving and driving, and Brendon’s gotten nowhere.
Brendon turns on his side, in almost a huff, before sitting up and punching his pillow one last time. As he drifts off to sleep images of a town whose boundaries keep expanding, the next town impossibly beyond his reach, dance in front of his eyes.
---
The next day Brendon drives very carefully. He listens to music on a lower volume and hunches over his steering wheel, glaring at the horizon. He will make it out of this town if he has to.
Eventually he knows he’d ended up in a different place because the landscape goes white in front of his eyes. Brendon emits a little ‘bzuh’ of confusion, close as he can get to pronouncing a question mark. He pulls over as soon as he possibly can.
It’s not snowing. It’s not even September yet.
Brendon gets out of his car and stares at the new town.
It doesn’t stare back, but there it remains, blankly white. When he treads on the road it makes a faint crinkly sound. Brendon stares hard, and tramps even harder on it. The same sound, like paper.
Brendon paces around and goes up to a building, white and impossibly smooth to the touch. He fingers a corner of it, and winces when he gets a sudden pain in his finger.
It’s a paper cut.
When Brendon looks back, he sees dirty footprints marking the loopy route he’s just walked.
---
Eventually Brendon gets used to the thought that he’s walking on paper. He tries not to hold his breath, even though he can’t help like feeling the entire street is going to collapse beneath his weight.
The trees here are also made of paper. Brendon shades his eyes against the sun - thankfully emitting real light and not paper glares - and watches as a wind rustles crumpled fan-shaped white leaves to the creased pavement. It makes him think of how he’d tried to catch leaves as they fell, back when he was a kid in Las Vegas.
The landscape is too severe here. Not a single person in sight, and Brendon’s glad for that. He doesn’t think he could deal with seeing paper humans.
He walks around a little trying to wrap his head around the whole idea - definitely he can’t stay the night on a paper bed. Soon he’ll move on. He wonders why he never heard of this town.
It’s when Brendon thinks he might go back and move on, that he passes by a shop and doubles back. It’s the same fucking toyshop from yesterday and the day before.
Everything else is still made of paper. Except for the toyshop, which remains the same as it ever was - plate glass and wooden beams and golden storefront lettering, stolid in the middle of the paper street.
This time Brendon is angry. He is pretty sure that toyshops shouldn’t be following anyone from town to town to town. All he can think is, I didn’t even want to buy anything the first time! He marches right in, ignoring the screech of chimes above him and makes straight for the counter.
The shop is empty. Momentarily robbed of his righteous anger, Brendon exhales, looks around. The mannequin is still in the window. It’s a faceless mannequin - more of a dressmaker’s doll, or something. The figure picks up its hand and waves to him. Brendon stares back, entranced. He’s thinking about whether or not to return the greeting.
“May I help you?” the guy - Ryan - appears at the counter. Brendon spins back and looks at him wildly. Ryan must have appeared through the bead curtains cordoning off the back of the shop where he works on making toys magic, or whatever, only Brendon could have sworn he didn’t hear a thing. Not even the soft flush noises of strands of cheap glass beads smacking against each other.
“You’ve got to stop following me,” Brendon says as calmly as he can manage. “Ryan.”
Ryan frowns. It’s like he’s confused. “I’m not following you.”
“Why are you packing up your toyshop every night and going to the same town I go?” Brendon demands.
Understanding dawns on Ryan’s face. “Oh,” Ryan says, “I didn’t mention. It’s a moving toyshop.”
Brendon emits a short bark of laughter and surprises himself. “Right,” he says, feeling weirdly defensive. He slips his hands into his jacket pockets, and the feel of the leather makes him feel safer. “Because you moved it.”
Now it’s Ryan’s turn to roll his eyes. “No, I mean the toyshop moves by itself.”
“It… flies into the air and transplants in a new town.”
“I wouldn’t know, man,” Ryan shrugs. “It does any moving when I’m asleep, I just wake up and I’m in a new town, I never notice anything in the night.”
Brendon is charmed, despite himself. Even if he doesn’t believe it, the thought is pretty cool. He’s about to say something else when a thought occurs to him.
“Why’s it following me, then? Every town I’ve landed up in so far, the toyshop’s been.” Unbidden, he can’t help but think of cooler places a moving toyshop could go, unfettered by the usual constraints of the space-time fabric…
Ryan shrugs. “Why do you end up in every town the toyshop moves to?” he counters, his eyes sharp and questioning.
Brendon’s had enough. This is too much weirdness for one day. He points a threatening finger at Ryan and backs away, careful not to trip over the carefully arranged crates of teddy bears on the floor. “I’m going to some place out my usual route - don’t you stalk me,” he says. He’s still walking backwards.
He turns around as he reaches the door, but he’s not too late to witness Ryan’s irritated huff and his shoulder shrug. As he reaches for the door handle Ryan calls out, “I told you - I can’t navigate this thing.”
Ryan, Brendon decides, is a pathological liar. Even if it’s true - Brendon wonders how Ryan manages to sell anything anyway. As the door swings open Brendon gets a last glimpse of Ryan’s face through the reflection on the door, his own expression vaguely puzzled, the weeds on his hat from two days ago still there but barely alive.
Brendon leaves.
---
The next day Brendon circles the closest town on the map in red ink, more savagely than he’d intended. He ends up ripping through the map. He sends decisive thought-vibes at Ryan and his toyshop, just in case, and packs up and drives out and goes half the distance to Little Lakes before doubling back and driving around in circles for fifteen minutes before deciding where he really wants to go, and making for that.
---
It’s late evening when he pulls up with a sigh, having lingered at two truckstops. He feels jittery like his heart is bursting in his chest; caffeine does that to him.
Brendon checks the fuel gauge in the car. He probably needs to fill up, but that can probably wait. Suddenly he’s feeling energized and hungry, he wants to eat a thousand elephants or something.
Elephants unfortunately can't be arranged, but he gets what he wants at a diner - hot chocolate, cheese fries, veggie sandwich. So he’s feeling happy and burpy by the time he swaggers out the diner, treading harder on the pavement almost by accident.
He strolls past the playground, inhabited for now by teenagers making the best of the last week of summer, holding hands under the streetlights which don’t do anything to drown out the glow from stars overhead. Brendon, alone as he is, trots around such that his sneakers scuff up obnoxiously against the cement.
He deliberately doesn’t look around; just drives to the tiny motel they have and gets a bed and falls asleep, thinking only a little bit about Ryan and the toyshop. It’s the best sleep he’s had since the trip began.
---
The next morning Brendon decides, on an impulse or compulsion maybe, that he should go check out the town even though he knows what he’s going to see.
A row of shops and nothing else beyond the high street, basically.
Brendon sets down the street, deliberately casual. All the while he is clutching his fingers too tight, but who’s looking?
He wanders in and out of various shops, ducking his head when the sales ladies say, “Can I help you?” He doesn’t buy anything today.
He’s nearly at the end and nothing special has popped up when - there it is. Brendon stares at the toyshop with growing happiness and relief. He wonders why his face feels so weird, then he realizes, oh wait, it’s because he’s grinning.
This time, without any hesitation, he pushes the door open. Ryan is at the back and straightens up as soon as Brendon enters, his eyes going wide.
The shop buzzes warmly.
“I made a detour and went off-course,” Brendon says. Ryan nods meaninglessly.
“I’m not chasing you!” Brendon says, and bites his tongue.
Ryan smiles, and says, “I know.”
Brendon can’t quite bring himself to leave. “How do you actually sell anything?” he says, curious. Because, here, he really wants to know.
Ryan smiles, a sly secretive smile. “Why don’t you come in to the back, and find out.”
Something flares, bright and beginning, behind Brendon’s eyes. He says, “Not now, dude,” backing away because he can’t wait to get on the road again, to test his theory. He’s kind of grinning a lot.
“I’m going to tempt your toyshop one more time,” Brendon says.
Whimsical fantasy gen: Brendon goes on a roadtrip and meets Ryan, thrice. There are moving toyshops and towns made of paper. (Actually, just one of each.)
G | gen | Ryan + Brendon | 2962 words
Many thanks to egelantier who read through this when it wasn't quite completed, and to fictionalaspect who gave me details on small towns and the like. ♥ Title from cannibalized from Sunset Rubdown.
Brendon is travelling, on and on and on, in his car.
He doesn’t know where he’s going, much. Technically he is going to his sister’s wedding, but technically the wedding is in ten days’ time and technically it only takes two to get there. But it’s a roadtrip. When the road is easy he sticks his arm out of the window and cranks it up and down like a lever, delivering mechanical waves to whoever might be watching.
No one watches much, but that’s okay.
Brendon slumps back in his car, posture bad on purpose, and watches the road move behind him, but the horizon is still always the horizon.
When the wind roaring into his window gets too loud he shuts it, and turns up the mixtape he’s got playing, singing along to all the words he knows and making up some of his own besides.
---
Brendon passes through a place and decides now is as good a time as ever to get out and stretch his legs. He stretches everywhere else - arms, ribcage, waist, reaching up to the sky. It feels pretty good. That being done, Brendon sinks back to himself and strolls around town.
It’s an impossibly small town. Now at the dead end of summer the streets themselves seem barely alive. A couple of people pass by him and give him the once-over before walking past. Brendon doesn’t mind. He walks around with his hands in his pockets and tries to pretend he’s the only person left on earth, hence the silent streets, and maybe if he squashes down his head and doesn’t look for long enough, when he finally does there’ll be a hovercraft sparking above his head, ready to take him in its wings and fly, off to outer space…
Brendon stops, examining the window in one of the shops. From the reflection he can tell there is no rocket yet. Inside, the shop is curiously dark; Brendon can tell it’s open, but - if this doesn’t sound silly, because either shops are open or they aren’t - only barely. It’s a toyshop. Brendon presses his nose against the window, ignoring the smudges his nose makes against the plate glass, feeling like a greedy kid around Christmas time.
A bottle of marbles, a teddy bear, a railway miniature. Try as he might, Brendon can’t see any playstations or nintendos - although there’s a hula hoop, lying sheepishly off to the side and looking more battered than the other toys.
A mannequin winks at him, slyly.
Brendon gasps and pushes off the window with such force he almost falls over. As if on cue, the door swings open. Someone around his own age stands in the doorway, arms tucked around his armpits.
“May I help you?” the boy says. He’s got on a paisley shirt and the strangest hat, with weeds that look like flowers tucked in. Skinny trousers.
Brendon swallows. “Ah,” he says, “Your mannequin just - it just winked at me. I think.” He wipes his palms on his jeans and tugs on his jacket. (What the fuck is a mannequin doing over here anyway?)
“It does that sometimes,” the boy says. “And who are you?”
Because Brendon must have skipped the class not talking to strangers, he says, “Brendon.” Then he regrets it almost immediately, says, “I’ve got to go,” before going, and drives out of town before he can look back at the toyshop, even though he really wanted to.
---
Brendon finds a place to stay in for the night, in the next town. Since the town is near a city there are a whole bunch of guesthouses, Brendon’s for the picking. He picks the closest one with light purple walls, run by an elderly couple who’re one day away from closing on the off-season.
He eats a bag of Lay’s for dinner because he can’t be bothered with a proper one, thinks of lugging his guitar out the van and changes his mind, switches on the TV.
Then he lies on his back in the bed so he can’t see any of the program, just the patterns of light the screen throws up on the ceiling, and falls asleep that way.
---
The next day at breakfast, Brendon asks the woman for directions, just in a general ‘how to get out of town’ kind of way. He should know how to get out of town, though, shouldn’t he? He just drove in yesterday. He should.
The woman says, “Do you want to go to the city?” Her arms are wattled with age and when she moves them they shake. His mom had the same thing, too. Brendon tries not to stare.
She repeats, “Do you want to go to the city?” and Brendon realizes what she’s asking, and takes another ten seconds to think about it before realizing, no, he doesn’t want to go to the city. He wants to move, but he doesn’t really want a big city.
“No,” he says.
The woman gives him directions and he nods at her, thank you.
---
Brendon in the van on the road, doing a roadtrip, day two.
He taps his fingers on the steering wheel and bounces around in his seat, but the sound of the motor is driving him a little manic, there. He wonders if he’s tired; it’s hard to tell without anyone in the seat next to him to talk to.
Brendon’d read somewhere that, if you got tired on the road, you should basically just pull over and rest on the road shoulder until you’re capable of driving.
Where Brendon comes from, pulling over on the road shoulder is a sign of weakness.
Here it actually seems possible. But Brendon’s not tired, so he just takes another sip of his Coke (which by now tastes flat) and puts it back to rest in its cup holder, and motors on.
---
As far as Brendon can tell, this town is a slightly bigger one, there’s a Wal-mart and everything.
Brendon dusts his hands on his jeans and waits for the old automatic doors to crank open, before stepping in there tentatively. He wonders if that isn’t a contradiction or something, the doors aren’t automatic. Technically.
He buys some food, and wanders around, chomping on the dubious macaroni salad, and tries to find a place to sleep for the night.
He stops by a clothing shop and stares hard at the window display, thinking, Kara would like that.
Brendon moves on.
The door to the next shop bangs open, and Brendon stumbles back just in time. It’s the same dude from the previous town over, leaning against the interior and looking vaguely hassled. Brendon stares at him, horrified. Behind the strange guy, Brendon can’t help noticing that it’s the same toyshop, the same layout, the same toys. He gets the feeling low in his gut, like something is wrong.
“What are you doing here, dude?” Brendon asks.
The guy looks up, surprised and vaguely affronted, as if Brendon’s somehow insulted him. Brendon didn’t mean to, of course. He’s just dazed and confused and startled. He thinks he knows what happened.
“Actually, my name’s Ryan,” the guy - Ryan - says.
Brendon flees.
---
He spends the night in bed tossing and turning and flipping his pillow to get the cool sensation of cotton against his cheek again, but for all that he can’t sleep.
Clearly something is wrong. He must have followed the wrong directions, or something. He is still in the same town - seriously, seriously, how dumb can he get? He must have taken a huge loop and ended up in the same town, and stopped at a different part of it. All that driving and driving and driving, and Brendon’s gotten nowhere.
Brendon turns on his side, in almost a huff, before sitting up and punching his pillow one last time. As he drifts off to sleep images of a town whose boundaries keep expanding, the next town impossibly beyond his reach, dance in front of his eyes.
---
The next day Brendon drives very carefully. He listens to music on a lower volume and hunches over his steering wheel, glaring at the horizon. He will make it out of this town if he has to.
Eventually he knows he’d ended up in a different place because the landscape goes white in front of his eyes. Brendon emits a little ‘bzuh’ of confusion, close as he can get to pronouncing a question mark. He pulls over as soon as he possibly can.
It’s not snowing. It’s not even September yet.
Brendon gets out of his car and stares at the new town.
It doesn’t stare back, but there it remains, blankly white. When he treads on the road it makes a faint crinkly sound. Brendon stares hard, and tramps even harder on it. The same sound, like paper.
Brendon paces around and goes up to a building, white and impossibly smooth to the touch. He fingers a corner of it, and winces when he gets a sudden pain in his finger.
It’s a paper cut.
When Brendon looks back, he sees dirty footprints marking the loopy route he’s just walked.
---
Eventually Brendon gets used to the thought that he’s walking on paper. He tries not to hold his breath, even though he can’t help like feeling the entire street is going to collapse beneath his weight.
The trees here are also made of paper. Brendon shades his eyes against the sun - thankfully emitting real light and not paper glares - and watches as a wind rustles crumpled fan-shaped white leaves to the creased pavement. It makes him think of how he’d tried to catch leaves as they fell, back when he was a kid in Las Vegas.
The landscape is too severe here. Not a single person in sight, and Brendon’s glad for that. He doesn’t think he could deal with seeing paper humans.
He walks around a little trying to wrap his head around the whole idea - definitely he can’t stay the night on a paper bed. Soon he’ll move on. He wonders why he never heard of this town.
It’s when Brendon thinks he might go back and move on, that he passes by a shop and doubles back. It’s the same fucking toyshop from yesterday and the day before.
Everything else is still made of paper. Except for the toyshop, which remains the same as it ever was - plate glass and wooden beams and golden storefront lettering, stolid in the middle of the paper street.
This time Brendon is angry. He is pretty sure that toyshops shouldn’t be following anyone from town to town to town. All he can think is, I didn’t even want to buy anything the first time! He marches right in, ignoring the screech of chimes above him and makes straight for the counter.
The shop is empty. Momentarily robbed of his righteous anger, Brendon exhales, looks around. The mannequin is still in the window. It’s a faceless mannequin - more of a dressmaker’s doll, or something. The figure picks up its hand and waves to him. Brendon stares back, entranced. He’s thinking about whether or not to return the greeting.
“May I help you?” the guy - Ryan - appears at the counter. Brendon spins back and looks at him wildly. Ryan must have appeared through the bead curtains cordoning off the back of the shop where he works on making toys magic, or whatever, only Brendon could have sworn he didn’t hear a thing. Not even the soft flush noises of strands of cheap glass beads smacking against each other.
“You’ve got to stop following me,” Brendon says as calmly as he can manage. “Ryan.”
Ryan frowns. It’s like he’s confused. “I’m not following you.”
“Why are you packing up your toyshop every night and going to the same town I go?” Brendon demands.
Understanding dawns on Ryan’s face. “Oh,” Ryan says, “I didn’t mention. It’s a moving toyshop.”
Brendon emits a short bark of laughter and surprises himself. “Right,” he says, feeling weirdly defensive. He slips his hands into his jacket pockets, and the feel of the leather makes him feel safer. “Because you moved it.”
Now it’s Ryan’s turn to roll his eyes. “No, I mean the toyshop moves by itself.”
“It… flies into the air and transplants in a new town.”
“I wouldn’t know, man,” Ryan shrugs. “It does any moving when I’m asleep, I just wake up and I’m in a new town, I never notice anything in the night.”
Brendon is charmed, despite himself. Even if he doesn’t believe it, the thought is pretty cool. He’s about to say something else when a thought occurs to him.
“Why’s it following me, then? Every town I’ve landed up in so far, the toyshop’s been.” Unbidden, he can’t help but think of cooler places a moving toyshop could go, unfettered by the usual constraints of the space-time fabric…
Ryan shrugs. “Why do you end up in every town the toyshop moves to?” he counters, his eyes sharp and questioning.
Brendon’s had enough. This is too much weirdness for one day. He points a threatening finger at Ryan and backs away, careful not to trip over the carefully arranged crates of teddy bears on the floor. “I’m going to some place out my usual route - don’t you stalk me,” he says. He’s still walking backwards.
He turns around as he reaches the door, but he’s not too late to witness Ryan’s irritated huff and his shoulder shrug. As he reaches for the door handle Ryan calls out, “I told you - I can’t navigate this thing.”
Ryan, Brendon decides, is a pathological liar. Even if it’s true - Brendon wonders how Ryan manages to sell anything anyway. As the door swings open Brendon gets a last glimpse of Ryan’s face through the reflection on the door, his own expression vaguely puzzled, the weeds on his hat from two days ago still there but barely alive.
Brendon leaves.
---
The next day Brendon circles the closest town on the map in red ink, more savagely than he’d intended. He ends up ripping through the map. He sends decisive thought-vibes at Ryan and his toyshop, just in case, and packs up and drives out and goes half the distance to Little Lakes before doubling back and driving around in circles for fifteen minutes before deciding where he really wants to go, and making for that.
---
It’s late evening when he pulls up with a sigh, having lingered at two truckstops. He feels jittery like his heart is bursting in his chest; caffeine does that to him.
Brendon checks the fuel gauge in the car. He probably needs to fill up, but that can probably wait. Suddenly he’s feeling energized and hungry, he wants to eat a thousand elephants or something.
Elephants unfortunately can't be arranged, but he gets what he wants at a diner - hot chocolate, cheese fries, veggie sandwich. So he’s feeling happy and burpy by the time he swaggers out the diner, treading harder on the pavement almost by accident.
He strolls past the playground, inhabited for now by teenagers making the best of the last week of summer, holding hands under the streetlights which don’t do anything to drown out the glow from stars overhead. Brendon, alone as he is, trots around such that his sneakers scuff up obnoxiously against the cement.
He deliberately doesn’t look around; just drives to the tiny motel they have and gets a bed and falls asleep, thinking only a little bit about Ryan and the toyshop. It’s the best sleep he’s had since the trip began.
---
The next morning Brendon decides, on an impulse or compulsion maybe, that he should go check out the town even though he knows what he’s going to see.
A row of shops and nothing else beyond the high street, basically.
Brendon sets down the street, deliberately casual. All the while he is clutching his fingers too tight, but who’s looking?
He wanders in and out of various shops, ducking his head when the sales ladies say, “Can I help you?” He doesn’t buy anything today.
He’s nearly at the end and nothing special has popped up when - there it is. Brendon stares at the toyshop with growing happiness and relief. He wonders why his face feels so weird, then he realizes, oh wait, it’s because he’s grinning.
This time, without any hesitation, he pushes the door open. Ryan is at the back and straightens up as soon as Brendon enters, his eyes going wide.
The shop buzzes warmly.
“I made a detour and went off-course,” Brendon says. Ryan nods meaninglessly.
“I’m not chasing you!” Brendon says, and bites his tongue.
Ryan smiles, and says, “I know.”
Brendon can’t quite bring himself to leave. “How do you actually sell anything?” he says, curious. Because, here, he really wants to know.
Ryan smiles, a sly secretive smile. “Why don’t you come in to the back, and find out.”
Something flares, bright and beginning, behind Brendon’s eyes. He says, “Not now, dude,” backing away because he can’t wait to get on the road again, to test his theory. He’s kind of grinning a lot.
“I’m going to tempt your toyshop one more time,” Brendon says.