For ctoan ...finally
Title: Driven
Author: fredsmith518
Beta: shakespearebint, plus some technical help on the language front from beachtree
Rating:tame
Disclaimer: Nothing owned.
Summary:
A/N: This is for ctoan. She wanted to read about Ryan learning to drive. This sort of goes there…
Much thanks to Shakespearebint for the swift beta and the title and to Beachtree for checking my use of language…until I added stuff.
Driven
The first time Ryan drove a car he was thirteen.
He’d always remember how that summer had been unbearably hot. The sort of sticky heat that molds clothes to skin in seconds and produces foul tempers in the most reasonable of people. As Ryan wasn’t surrounded by reasonable people in the first place, he was screwed. School had been out for a month. The temperatures had gotten higher and higher as the weeks passed. Ryan had tried to find a job, but he was too young for most places to hire and looked small and scrawny besides, which didn’t help any, so he’d had to resort to cutting lawns, cleaning cars, basically anything he could think of to earn a few dollars. His neighborhood was poor, so he’d had to stray further afield and that had been the cause of the trouble.
On one particularly scorching day, the pickings had been slim, even in the moderately more affluent part of town. What work he’d found had been sticky and hot. At the end of the day, Ryan had weighed up his options and figured that it wasn’t worth spending the bus fare on a ride home. If he’d done that, he’d have had nothing left to show for the day’s work. So he’d walked and it had been slow. As he finally approached his home, he picked up the pace a little. The falling dusk had brought a slight diminishment to the day’s heat. When he turned the last corner, he sworn out loud at the sight that had greeted him. To his disgust, his mom’s asshole boyfriend was lounging on the porch. There was no way around him. This guy was the first man his mom had brought to live in their house and Ryan was certain he knew why. It was because Trey’d moved out. He wouldn’t have put up with it. Ryan didn’t have any choice.
Ryan had hated the bastard on sight. He contributed nothing to the household except making Ryan feel uncomfortable in his own home. And his mom was all over him. It was disgusting. Moodily, he kicked at a stone. He could understand why Trey had moved out - there were days when he wished he had the same choice. He and their mom had been on each other’s backs for years. Privately, Ryan thought it was because they were too alike for their own good - both liked to drink to excess and they both liked sleeping around. It had all come to a head a few weeks earlier, when Trey had called finally their mom on her hypocrisy after she’d thrown out one of his girl friends.
Their mom had come home unexpectedly in the middle of the day. Ryan had found out later that was because she’d lost yet another job, which in turn had put her in a vile mood to start with. He’d suspected she’d had a few drinks on the way back to drown her sorrows too. Ryan had been sitting on the front porch reading, wanting to avoid the noises coming from Trey’s room. He’d tried to divert their mom, but the combination of thin walls and a piercing scream from the girl had given her a very clear picture of what was going on inside. She’d barged into the house, gotten a glass, which she’d filled with water, then proceeded into Trey’s room and flung it over both him and the girl. She’d called the girl a whore and told her to get out.
Ryan had been torn between embarrassment and fascination at the unfolding drama, until Trey had faced up to their mom and said, well, if his girlfriend was a whore, they should get along just fine. Which Ryan had thought was the wrong thing to say on several levels at once and had also been the point at which he’d realized the confrontation was going to get uglier than usual. He’d felt bad for the girl standing there embarrassed, desperately trying to dress herself in front of everyone. She hadn’t looked that much older than him. With her make-up all smeared, she’d looked more like a little girl caught playing dress up, although he knew she was, in fact, the same age as Trey, he knew her from school. Trey hadn’t said one word to defend her, which Ryan had thought was mean - he’d seemed oblivious to her continued presence once he’d gotten into the slanging match with their mom and the girl had taken the opportunity to slip away, still with her feet bare, carrying her shoes. Also, it was just plain stupid to have antagonized their mom - Ryan hadn’t been able to see what Trey thought he’d gain by doing that.
The angry imprint of their mom’s hand had still been clear on Trey’s face the next day, when Ryan had finally located him at Eddie’s. Trey’s things had followed him out the door and when Ryan had tried to plead for his brother to stay, Trey had silenced him with a look and Ryan had understood that Trey had somehow wanted this, but had needed a push to go. Ryan had wished with all his heart that Trey would have wanted to stay.
Ryan shrugged off the memories, squared his shoulders, then thought better of it and slumped, sidling up to the house, head down, eyes averted. Ernesto shot out a hand as soon as he put a foot on the porch. Ryan’s reflexes were dulled by the long walk and the heat seemed to have leached out part of his intelligence.
“Where have you been?”
That was a stupid question for a start, seeing as how the same guy had told him, ‘get out and stay out, you hear?’ that very morning. Actually, every morning. Ryan bit back the impulse to smart-mouth him. He’d tried that once. The guy was huge, built like the side of a house, solid. He’d simply lifted Ryan off his feet and flung him into his room, like he weighed nothing. Ryan had landed on the bed and he’d been pretty sure that’s where he’d been aimed, but it had still knocked the breath out of him and the whole episode had frightened him, not least because his mom had done absolutely nothing to help him. She’d agreed he was getting too cocky and then left Ernesto to it.
Ryan had quickly understood his new place in the pecking order and he hadn’t liked it. Before, Trey had been their mom’s chosen whipping boy. Their mom had taken out any bad temper on him. Now Ryan was coming in for criticism every time she needed to sound off. He hated it and he understood Trey far better than he ever had - being told you were a good for nothing little shit time after time ate away at his self- esteem and he could see how it would become a self- fulfilling prophecy before long.
“I went for a walk.” Well, that was beyond lame, but Ryan was damned if he was going to let Ernesto know he’d been out trying to get some cash.
Ernesto tipped back the chair so that he was balancing on just the back legs and stared at Ryan appraisingly. Ryan tried hard not to shuffle his feet. “Okay,” Ernesto finally intoned, “so, go walk some more. I don’t want to see you back here tonight.”
Ryan thought about asking to get his duffle bag, but it didn’t seem worthwhile, so he simply nodded and headed off back the way he’d come to the boarded up house where Trey was crashing. The electricity was cut off and there was no running water - frankly the place stank- but he had to go somewhere. En route, Ryan stopped in at a run down convenience store and bought a bottle of water and some donuts so that he wouldn’t be arriving empty handed.
He could sense the tension in the room when he squeezed in past the board, pried open from the doorframe, just far enough to let a body through. To his surprise, Trey and the guys he squatted with were standing around in the shadowed hallway. Most often, Ryan had only ever seen two or three of the guys together. He wasn’t entirely sure just how many of them lived there or if some just used it as a crash pad occasionally. He was pretty sure Sam, Joe and Julio lived there with Trey. Whatever they were planning, it was obvious they didn’t want a thirteen-year-old tagging along, as the animated conversation ceased as soon his head poked through the gap.
“Could I stay here tonight, maybe? I brought donuts.” He ventured to break the silence, starting hesitantly then gaining in confidence and evidently the food tipped the balance because Trey broke into a huge grin and then said to his guys. “You’re learning LB, bringing food. How about we take the little f*** with us and teach him some other stuff? ” Ryan got the uneasy feeling that perhaps he’d walked into something more than he could handle, but he could see no way out as he needed a place to stay.
Four of them piled into a beat up car and drove out to a deserted factory on the edge of the town. The carpark was huge. There had originally been sheds that had been knocked down, leaving a large, dusty, open space. Joe and Julio, Trey’s other ‘house’ mates, turned up later as did several other guys driving cars in various degrees of decrepitude. Ryan begun to get a bit excited despite himself. This was so wrong, stealing cars to race - because had figured out what was going on almost immediately - but the buzz was undeniable. It was almost as if the air became more and more charged as each car drove in. When the races started Trey let him come in the car with him. Ryan was petrified and puked immediately after getting out of the car on distinctly unsteady feet, which apparently formed part of the entertainment for the other guys. However, he had to acknowledge the exhilaration too. And it was addictive. Like getting off a fairground ride when he’d been a kid, he just wanted to go again, to feel the car accelerate, to swerve and dash forward, turn on a dollar and to beat the other guys into the ground. Because Trey was good, a fearless driver, and they’d won.
After that first time, Ryan worked out the race night schedules and went around to Trey’s on the correct nights as often as he could. Ernesto was still ensconced at home so his mom never missed him, not even when he stayed out all night - part of him wished she would, just once. One evening Trey and he had arrived before everyone else and without any preamble, Trey started to teach Ryan how to drive. He was so small, he needed the seat jammed forward as far as possible and an old rug bundled up and shoved behind his back to boost him even further before his feet would touch the pedals. Ryan was a bit dubious why Trey had the rug and what he used it for but he was way too excited to waste much time thinking about it. He squirmed around some to get comfortable and then looked up eagerly at Trey to await his instructions. Trey was a surprisingly calm teacher. He remained patient through each hiccuping lurch Ryan put the car through. Trey said it was important that Ryan learned to drive, otherwise he’d have to have the Camaro all to himself when they finally got to drive away from Chino together. The reference to the car games they’d played when they’d been younger and the promise of better times, served to distract Ryan just enough that he became less tense and the lesson progressed. Throughout a sultry August with long light evenings, Ryan’s driving improved.
The following summer, when Trey had been eighteen, it wasn’t the same. Trey was edgier and less connected with him. The patience had gone. Ryan knew the spell in Juvie accounted for that. It was something of a miracle that Trey hadn’t gotten caught taking the cars before. Their mom had thrown a fit of hysterics and had been no help. Without her consent, Ryan wasn’t even able to get in to see his brother.
Ryan still managed to work on his driving skills with some of the other guys, who he’d kept up with while Trey had been away. By the time he was fifteen he was racing himself. He didn’t pick up his own rides, but he was good enough that some of the guys were prepared to let him race for them. He rarely let them down. He won far more races than he lost. Ryan had a cool head behind the wheel and didn’t let himself get wound up by the taunts thrown his way.
So when Volchok tried to run him off the road, he knew all the right moves. He didn’t panic. He could predict what Volchok might try and was certain of what to do to counter each attempt. So when they finally crashed, to his eternal regret, deep down, he still knew that he did the best he could. Later, maybe some day, there would be some solace in that.
But not yet.
Chaz, if you read, I had horrible doubts I'd nicked the Trey leaving from you, but I checked 'Abandonment', similar, but I hope different enough...
Author: fredsmith518
Beta: shakespearebint, plus some technical help on the language front from beachtree
Rating:tame
Disclaimer: Nothing owned.
Summary:
A/N: This is for ctoan. She wanted to read about Ryan learning to drive. This sort of goes there…
Much thanks to Shakespearebint for the swift beta and the title and to Beachtree for checking my use of language…until I added stuff.
Driven
The first time Ryan drove a car he was thirteen.
He’d always remember how that summer had been unbearably hot. The sort of sticky heat that molds clothes to skin in seconds and produces foul tempers in the most reasonable of people. As Ryan wasn’t surrounded by reasonable people in the first place, he was screwed. School had been out for a month. The temperatures had gotten higher and higher as the weeks passed. Ryan had tried to find a job, but he was too young for most places to hire and looked small and scrawny besides, which didn’t help any, so he’d had to resort to cutting lawns, cleaning cars, basically anything he could think of to earn a few dollars. His neighborhood was poor, so he’d had to stray further afield and that had been the cause of the trouble.
On one particularly scorching day, the pickings had been slim, even in the moderately more affluent part of town. What work he’d found had been sticky and hot. At the end of the day, Ryan had weighed up his options and figured that it wasn’t worth spending the bus fare on a ride home. If he’d done that, he’d have had nothing left to show for the day’s work. So he’d walked and it had been slow. As he finally approached his home, he picked up the pace a little. The falling dusk had brought a slight diminishment to the day’s heat. When he turned the last corner, he sworn out loud at the sight that had greeted him. To his disgust, his mom’s asshole boyfriend was lounging on the porch. There was no way around him. This guy was the first man his mom had brought to live in their house and Ryan was certain he knew why. It was because Trey’d moved out. He wouldn’t have put up with it. Ryan didn’t have any choice.
Ryan had hated the bastard on sight. He contributed nothing to the household except making Ryan feel uncomfortable in his own home. And his mom was all over him. It was disgusting. Moodily, he kicked at a stone. He could understand why Trey had moved out - there were days when he wished he had the same choice. He and their mom had been on each other’s backs for years. Privately, Ryan thought it was because they were too alike for their own good - both liked to drink to excess and they both liked sleeping around. It had all come to a head a few weeks earlier, when Trey had called finally their mom on her hypocrisy after she’d thrown out one of his girl friends.
Their mom had come home unexpectedly in the middle of the day. Ryan had found out later that was because she’d lost yet another job, which in turn had put her in a vile mood to start with. He’d suspected she’d had a few drinks on the way back to drown her sorrows too. Ryan had been sitting on the front porch reading, wanting to avoid the noises coming from Trey’s room. He’d tried to divert their mom, but the combination of thin walls and a piercing scream from the girl had given her a very clear picture of what was going on inside. She’d barged into the house, gotten a glass, which she’d filled with water, then proceeded into Trey’s room and flung it over both him and the girl. She’d called the girl a whore and told her to get out.
Ryan had been torn between embarrassment and fascination at the unfolding drama, until Trey had faced up to their mom and said, well, if his girlfriend was a whore, they should get along just fine. Which Ryan had thought was the wrong thing to say on several levels at once and had also been the point at which he’d realized the confrontation was going to get uglier than usual. He’d felt bad for the girl standing there embarrassed, desperately trying to dress herself in front of everyone. She hadn’t looked that much older than him. With her make-up all smeared, she’d looked more like a little girl caught playing dress up, although he knew she was, in fact, the same age as Trey, he knew her from school. Trey hadn’t said one word to defend her, which Ryan had thought was mean - he’d seemed oblivious to her continued presence once he’d gotten into the slanging match with their mom and the girl had taken the opportunity to slip away, still with her feet bare, carrying her shoes. Also, it was just plain stupid to have antagonized their mom - Ryan hadn’t been able to see what Trey thought he’d gain by doing that.
The angry imprint of their mom’s hand had still been clear on Trey’s face the next day, when Ryan had finally located him at Eddie’s. Trey’s things had followed him out the door and when Ryan had tried to plead for his brother to stay, Trey had silenced him with a look and Ryan had understood that Trey had somehow wanted this, but had needed a push to go. Ryan had wished with all his heart that Trey would have wanted to stay.
Ryan shrugged off the memories, squared his shoulders, then thought better of it and slumped, sidling up to the house, head down, eyes averted. Ernesto shot out a hand as soon as he put a foot on the porch. Ryan’s reflexes were dulled by the long walk and the heat seemed to have leached out part of his intelligence.
“Where have you been?”
That was a stupid question for a start, seeing as how the same guy had told him, ‘get out and stay out, you hear?’ that very morning. Actually, every morning. Ryan bit back the impulse to smart-mouth him. He’d tried that once. The guy was huge, built like the side of a house, solid. He’d simply lifted Ryan off his feet and flung him into his room, like he weighed nothing. Ryan had landed on the bed and he’d been pretty sure that’s where he’d been aimed, but it had still knocked the breath out of him and the whole episode had frightened him, not least because his mom had done absolutely nothing to help him. She’d agreed he was getting too cocky and then left Ernesto to it.
Ryan had quickly understood his new place in the pecking order and he hadn’t liked it. Before, Trey had been their mom’s chosen whipping boy. Their mom had taken out any bad temper on him. Now Ryan was coming in for criticism every time she needed to sound off. He hated it and he understood Trey far better than he ever had - being told you were a good for nothing little shit time after time ate away at his self- esteem and he could see how it would become a self- fulfilling prophecy before long.
“I went for a walk.” Well, that was beyond lame, but Ryan was damned if he was going to let Ernesto know he’d been out trying to get some cash.
Ernesto tipped back the chair so that he was balancing on just the back legs and stared at Ryan appraisingly. Ryan tried hard not to shuffle his feet. “Okay,” Ernesto finally intoned, “so, go walk some more. I don’t want to see you back here tonight.”
Ryan thought about asking to get his duffle bag, but it didn’t seem worthwhile, so he simply nodded and headed off back the way he’d come to the boarded up house where Trey was crashing. The electricity was cut off and there was no running water - frankly the place stank- but he had to go somewhere. En route, Ryan stopped in at a run down convenience store and bought a bottle of water and some donuts so that he wouldn’t be arriving empty handed.
He could sense the tension in the room when he squeezed in past the board, pried open from the doorframe, just far enough to let a body through. To his surprise, Trey and the guys he squatted with were standing around in the shadowed hallway. Most often, Ryan had only ever seen two or three of the guys together. He wasn’t entirely sure just how many of them lived there or if some just used it as a crash pad occasionally. He was pretty sure Sam, Joe and Julio lived there with Trey. Whatever they were planning, it was obvious they didn’t want a thirteen-year-old tagging along, as the animated conversation ceased as soon his head poked through the gap.
“Could I stay here tonight, maybe? I brought donuts.” He ventured to break the silence, starting hesitantly then gaining in confidence and evidently the food tipped the balance because Trey broke into a huge grin and then said to his guys. “You’re learning LB, bringing food. How about we take the little f*** with us and teach him some other stuff? ” Ryan got the uneasy feeling that perhaps he’d walked into something more than he could handle, but he could see no way out as he needed a place to stay.
Four of them piled into a beat up car and drove out to a deserted factory on the edge of the town. The carpark was huge. There had originally been sheds that had been knocked down, leaving a large, dusty, open space. Joe and Julio, Trey’s other ‘house’ mates, turned up later as did several other guys driving cars in various degrees of decrepitude. Ryan begun to get a bit excited despite himself. This was so wrong, stealing cars to race - because had figured out what was going on almost immediately - but the buzz was undeniable. It was almost as if the air became more and more charged as each car drove in. When the races started Trey let him come in the car with him. Ryan was petrified and puked immediately after getting out of the car on distinctly unsteady feet, which apparently formed part of the entertainment for the other guys. However, he had to acknowledge the exhilaration too. And it was addictive. Like getting off a fairground ride when he’d been a kid, he just wanted to go again, to feel the car accelerate, to swerve and dash forward, turn on a dollar and to beat the other guys into the ground. Because Trey was good, a fearless driver, and they’d won.
After that first time, Ryan worked out the race night schedules and went around to Trey’s on the correct nights as often as he could. Ernesto was still ensconced at home so his mom never missed him, not even when he stayed out all night - part of him wished she would, just once. One evening Trey and he had arrived before everyone else and without any preamble, Trey started to teach Ryan how to drive. He was so small, he needed the seat jammed forward as far as possible and an old rug bundled up and shoved behind his back to boost him even further before his feet would touch the pedals. Ryan was a bit dubious why Trey had the rug and what he used it for but he was way too excited to waste much time thinking about it. He squirmed around some to get comfortable and then looked up eagerly at Trey to await his instructions. Trey was a surprisingly calm teacher. He remained patient through each hiccuping lurch Ryan put the car through. Trey said it was important that Ryan learned to drive, otherwise he’d have to have the Camaro all to himself when they finally got to drive away from Chino together. The reference to the car games they’d played when they’d been younger and the promise of better times, served to distract Ryan just enough that he became less tense and the lesson progressed. Throughout a sultry August with long light evenings, Ryan’s driving improved.
The following summer, when Trey had been eighteen, it wasn’t the same. Trey was edgier and less connected with him. The patience had gone. Ryan knew the spell in Juvie accounted for that. It was something of a miracle that Trey hadn’t gotten caught taking the cars before. Their mom had thrown a fit of hysterics and had been no help. Without her consent, Ryan wasn’t even able to get in to see his brother.
Ryan still managed to work on his driving skills with some of the other guys, who he’d kept up with while Trey had been away. By the time he was fifteen he was racing himself. He didn’t pick up his own rides, but he was good enough that some of the guys were prepared to let him race for them. He rarely let them down. He won far more races than he lost. Ryan had a cool head behind the wheel and didn’t let himself get wound up by the taunts thrown his way.
So when Volchok tried to run him off the road, he knew all the right moves. He didn’t panic. He could predict what Volchok might try and was certain of what to do to counter each attempt. So when they finally crashed, to his eternal regret, deep down, he still knew that he did the best he could. Later, maybe some day, there would be some solace in that.
But not yet.
Chaz, if you read, I had horrible doubts I'd nicked the Trey leaving from you, but I checked 'Abandonment', similar, but I hope different enough...