rps: freedom hangs like heaven: fernando torres/sergio ramos: (1/?)
title: freedom hangs like heaven
author: fiveto_midnight
rating: nc-17
fandom: football rps (au)
warnings: (future) language, sex, mentions of alcohol and drugs,
pairing(s): fernando torres/sergio ramos
word count: (chapter) 2.175
disclaimer: nope. don't own a thing here.
notes: basically, i’ve gone around thinking about writing this au for a while. and now i’ve finally started it! it’s loosely based on the movie into the wild, but focuses more on the aspect of freedom, complete freedom. it’s chaptered, and hopefully i’ll get around to updating it very frequently. feedback is, as always, very very appreciated! ty as always so much, to matryoshkha for being idea bouncer and beta! ♥ title from iron & wine's freedom hangs like heaven, summary a mix of that and ron pope's improvised lyrics for a drop in the ocean live in new york.
summary: and i know just where you are, you're not so far away (and freedom hangs like heaven for everyone)
He takes off on a Sunday morning. It’s neither something surprising, nor expected. Had anybody been awake at five thirty when the sun rises and the asphalt is hot and the wind bare, they would’ve seen him. He wears jeans sawed off by the cut of his knee and a white t-shirt that’s slightly hitched down his shoulder due to its size, worn out combat boots and a back pack.
Had anybody been awake in the villa that stands too quiet in the perch of the hill, they would’ve heard the rattle of the engine on his old ford. It gives a groan, and Fernando pats the headboard. “C’mon, you can do it,” he ushers, and eases his foot off of the gas.
As it is, nobody is awake when he leaves his life behind with only a couple of dollar bills counted and shoved into a back pocket, a change of clothes, a map and his old ford.
The high tail out of the city is sparsely crowded, a couple of cars coming and going. He doesn’t mind, but sticks safely to the speed limit. Some might’ve been inclined to ask why? You’re barely twenty and escaping the confines of a safe, staked out life in practical luxury and independence, why aren’t you reckless?
Fernando boots up the volume on the stereo, and he sings along to the 80’s classic rock hits. He doesn’t have an answer, so instead he reaches over, hand patting on shotgun seat, until he can grab the bottle of water lying there.
It’s hot, leaning towards humid, and it’s barely seven am. Fernando manages the wheel with one hand and the bottle in the other. He doesn’t think. Thinking gets to you. Figuring out everything, he can do later.
By upbringing, he’s not any of the things he’s doing. He’s calm, relatively quiet, he’s a Stanford baby, meant to be a lawyer, or a doctor, or to simply study hard.
But crossing the California Bridge, he doesn’t mean that.
He’s going too fast to not feel the pressure the wind is putting on his ear drums. But he rolls down the window anyway, and it’s freedom.
As San Francisco’s skyline becomes a distant mark on the map, and in his rear mirror, he chokes out a laugh. He doesn’t quite know why, as much as he doesn’t know the next thing he’ll be doing. But he’ll do it.
By afternoon, when he’s stopped outside of San Jose, he knows one thing: he’ll be going down to Mexico. No ties, there is nothing that brings him closer to Mexico than any other country or city happens to. But he’s going to Mexico.
The sun beats down on the back of his neck when he gets out of the car, immediate and ruthless, but there’s something about it that nothing else can beat.
He slings the backpack over his shoulder and locks the car. The motel and its connected restaurant looks like anything and nothing you’ll find by the road, carcass like in its bleak, yellow surroundings with bleached wood and a general shabby look to it.
Fernando grins. Fuck, this is what he wants.
The guy behind the counter bears the look of endless despair and boredom as though it’s by default what he was born with. Fernando winces, he can sympathize. He does, however, perk up surprised at the sound of the door whining open and shut.
He orders a coffee that’s black and takes about twenty minutes to make, while he waits on a worn out leather chair by the counter and counts in which how many rays of sunlight manages to spill over the walls.
“What’s the longest route you can take to Mexico?” he asks, and sips coffee. It smells stale, watery, like the run down asphalt outside. And Fernando savours the feeling of the tip of his tongue slightly scalded and the light sweat coat over his brow.
The guy behind the counter, name tag scrubbed and washed with letters unrecognizable, looks at him. Strange, he probably thinks, fuckin’ kid.
He shrugs, “Dunno, never been outside of town. Suppose you could hang around, drive around everything, y’know? Take a loop,” he says, grins, and leans back against the counter and watches the road outside the dusty windows like that’s what he always does.
And Fernando does the same, trying to fit against the counter but his spine digs into the wood from the wrong angle. He hops down from the chair when he’s done, and the guy is smoothening a dollar with his thumb and salutes.
The door hits empty air after him. He unlocks the car and rolls down the windows, today it’s necessary. Outside, on the northern wall where the wall cast shadows over the drive way, there’s an old tap which he uses to refill the bottle with water.
The road is dusty and its jagged edges gives it the feeling of abandonment, of carelessness, of where Fernando wants to be.
He knows he can’t sing for fifty dollars or to save a man’s life, but he does so anyway. There’s some sort of station that recycles 70’s pop and Fernando can’t say he knows any lyrics, but he hums and can’t stop smiling. Everything seems endless and endless seems just about the right amount of miles to go.
The shores seem far away and yet not, when nightfall creeps upon Fernando. He scratches at the back of his head, keeping an eye on the road and where he’s going as he leans forward to search the headboard for the map.
The roads wind where he is, by no means wide, but small lines that snare themselves around and across rocky grounds and hot desert. The pacific sticks in and out of the side of the country like spikes and he vows that he’ll go there, soon.
Soon being, just soon, Fernando decides. He nods to himself, and continues following the road, two fingers working on folding the map right again.
Inside his head he misses home, and at the same time he wonders why the hell he didn’t do this sooner. Twenty years has passed and now he’s on the road.
He’s managed to grow up, turn eighteen, drunk so much he’s forgotten his name and his last four numbers and slept for two days, lost his virginity, thought he’d fallen in love, and then fallen out of it.
The car comes to a slow stop that seems to have punched the air right out of her. Fernando strokes the wheel lightly, talking soothingly to the old pickup.
There isn’t much to say when there’s only a pickup truck and the wind to talk to, but Fernando figures he’ll manage. Soon enough he’ll have to start picking up jobs, meet some people, experience all of those things he wants to experience, he’ll manage.
“For success,” he says and pours water out the window. To irony, he thinks. To life, is maybe what it’s supposed to be.
For now Fernando is perfectly happy with curling up in the back seat even though his legs feel too long and his fingers too bony to fit right underneath his chin. He’ll manage, even without a proper blanket, and the engine cut out and casting silence across the deserted landscape.
the next few days pass in a blur of strong sunshine, living sparsely on bread that’s dried already but Fernando doesn’t mind, and wishing he had a camera to capture everything he sees.
He thinks he could stay at some bar somewhere road alongside and hustle pool, but he’s always sucked at it so it’s a never mind case.
The afternoon is pervaded with a thick layer of grey clouds and it could rain any minute. Fernando rests his arm over the rolled down window. He’s stopped for gas twice, and soon he’ll have to start road tripping.
The car is his baby and he’d do whatever he could to ensure she came to a right home, and not just left to corrode and break down somewhere in the shoulder of the road where anyone can come for her.
The next gas station he stops at, Fernando takes a shot. The cashier looks vaguely disinterested when he steps through the door, hair combed from his face and jeans shorts dirty.
“What’d you say if I told you I’d give you my car, he pickup parked just out there?” the cashier looks up, surprised, an eyebrow arched as he looks outside. The ford has seen its better days, and road dust and speckles of dirt are recoloring it, but it’s nonetheless a well-kept one.
“I’d tell you you’re kiddin’ me and wouldn’t give me one cent,” he replies. Fernando looks at him, head to toe, musing.
“I’d want to keep her, but soon the money’s going to run out, and I ain’t gonna let the road get her,”
The cashier, tall and gangly and curly blonde, lifts the cap with the shop’s logo imprinted front, off, and tips his chin into his palm, “Hell kid, what’s it you’re gonna do anyhow?” he asks.
“I’m going down to Mexico,” Fernando replies.
“Without a car?” the cashier asks, a hint of a grin in his lips.
Fernando smiles back, “Without a car,” he confirms.
“Fuck, you’re going to have to explain this to me when it’s not melting hot outside. You’re legal, right?”
The bar is smoky, air nicotine and perfume and oiled wood where Fernando is tucked against the wall and the leather seat behind him. Llorente - Fernando Llorente Torres, which is a big fuck with the head to meet someone with your own name - is back with beer, work clothes gone and t-shirt and long, stainless jeans in place.
Fernando is almost legal, and maybe a little bit reckless. He takes a gulp of the beer, cool against his throat that’s been feeling more and more sandpaper for each passing hour.
“So, all in all, you ditched the cash, your family, your life and just… took off?” Llorente asks, arms crossed on the top of the table. He looks vaguely wondrous, puzzled. “Where’s the moral in that?”
Fernando shrugs, but it is true, and once again guilt is an insect in the pit of his stomach.
“I’m not here for any morals; I’m here to get down to Mexico.”
Llorente snorts, but there’s no maliciousness behind it, “yeah kid, I figured as much. What I’m saying is, you ever thought of them?”
Fernando sips his beer, looks at Llorente, long. Llorente looks back, like both of them are trying to figure something out.
“Of course I’ve thought of them. Thing is, I don’t think they’ll notice, not really,”
There’s sympathy in Llorente’s eyes for just a second that Fernando doesn’t want, and just like that it’s gone. For the duration of the night Fernando dances, and Llorente keeps him busy with the jukebox and with more drinks. Fernando remembers later that they played all too little Beatles and puts on Hey Jude because it seemed like it fit there.
He says goodbye the next day, because Llorente says with the corner of his mouth slightly turned down apologetically that sorry, he hasn’t got any jobs to spare. But he’ll take the car.
“There’s an old truck stop five miles down the road, get yourself a lift and I’ll come pick your girl up after my shift, yeah?” Fernando thanks him, smile relieved, and clasps his hand.
“I’ll come back, when I’m done, you know,” he says, and Llorente grins, blinks.
“I’ll take good care of her, that’s a promise.”
At the truck stop - a barely held together place with tire tracks pressed permanently into the asphalt and a sign that shows that it’s indeed a restaurant - he empties what he needs into the back pack again, folding and packing meticulously and right. The water bottle goes into his hand, the few dollars he’s got left in his right front pocket, map and a few cassettes and clothes in the rucksack.
He turns on a cassette, studying it, smiling. It’s a Beatles cassette and believe him Fernando wouldn’t go anywhere without them.
When he locks the car for the last time in a long time he stares up at the sky and hums The Long and Winding Road underneath his breath.
He strikes a deal with a truck chauffeur that’s going through to Ford City and he can ride along if he wants, so long as he’s quiet and can get food on his own whenever they stop.
Fernando considers it a fair deal and shakes the driver’s hand, fitting easily but alien into shotgun seat that smells of coffee and smoke and gasoline. In his head he’s compiling a letter. It reads I’m sorry for doing this, I love you, but I am and I need this and think of it as that trip you do in life, that everyone needs to do. I miss you.
In his head, he sends it to no one, but the recipient on the envelope is his siblings.
author: fiveto_midnight
rating: nc-17
fandom: football rps (au)
warnings: (future) language, sex, mentions of alcohol and drugs,
pairing(s): fernando torres/sergio ramos
word count: (chapter) 2.175
disclaimer: nope. don't own a thing here.
notes: basically, i’ve gone around thinking about writing this au for a while. and now i’ve finally started it! it’s loosely based on the movie into the wild, but focuses more on the aspect of freedom, complete freedom. it’s chaptered, and hopefully i’ll get around to updating it very frequently. feedback is, as always, very very appreciated! ty as always so much, to matryoshkha for being idea bouncer and beta! ♥ title from iron & wine's freedom hangs like heaven, summary a mix of that and ron pope's improvised lyrics for a drop in the ocean live in new york.
summary: and i know just where you are, you're not so far away (and freedom hangs like heaven for everyone)
He takes off on a Sunday morning. It’s neither something surprising, nor expected. Had anybody been awake at five thirty when the sun rises and the asphalt is hot and the wind bare, they would’ve seen him. He wears jeans sawed off by the cut of his knee and a white t-shirt that’s slightly hitched down his shoulder due to its size, worn out combat boots and a back pack.
Had anybody been awake in the villa that stands too quiet in the perch of the hill, they would’ve heard the rattle of the engine on his old ford. It gives a groan, and Fernando pats the headboard. “C’mon, you can do it,” he ushers, and eases his foot off of the gas.
As it is, nobody is awake when he leaves his life behind with only a couple of dollar bills counted and shoved into a back pocket, a change of clothes, a map and his old ford.
The high tail out of the city is sparsely crowded, a couple of cars coming and going. He doesn’t mind, but sticks safely to the speed limit. Some might’ve been inclined to ask why? You’re barely twenty and escaping the confines of a safe, staked out life in practical luxury and independence, why aren’t you reckless?
Fernando boots up the volume on the stereo, and he sings along to the 80’s classic rock hits. He doesn’t have an answer, so instead he reaches over, hand patting on shotgun seat, until he can grab the bottle of water lying there.
It’s hot, leaning towards humid, and it’s barely seven am. Fernando manages the wheel with one hand and the bottle in the other. He doesn’t think. Thinking gets to you. Figuring out everything, he can do later.
By upbringing, he’s not any of the things he’s doing. He’s calm, relatively quiet, he’s a Stanford baby, meant to be a lawyer, or a doctor, or to simply study hard.
But crossing the California Bridge, he doesn’t mean that.
He’s going too fast to not feel the pressure the wind is putting on his ear drums. But he rolls down the window anyway, and it’s freedom.
As San Francisco’s skyline becomes a distant mark on the map, and in his rear mirror, he chokes out a laugh. He doesn’t quite know why, as much as he doesn’t know the next thing he’ll be doing. But he’ll do it.
By afternoon, when he’s stopped outside of San Jose, he knows one thing: he’ll be going down to Mexico. No ties, there is nothing that brings him closer to Mexico than any other country or city happens to. But he’s going to Mexico.
The sun beats down on the back of his neck when he gets out of the car, immediate and ruthless, but there’s something about it that nothing else can beat.
He slings the backpack over his shoulder and locks the car. The motel and its connected restaurant looks like anything and nothing you’ll find by the road, carcass like in its bleak, yellow surroundings with bleached wood and a general shabby look to it.
Fernando grins. Fuck, this is what he wants.
The guy behind the counter bears the look of endless despair and boredom as though it’s by default what he was born with. Fernando winces, he can sympathize. He does, however, perk up surprised at the sound of the door whining open and shut.
He orders a coffee that’s black and takes about twenty minutes to make, while he waits on a worn out leather chair by the counter and counts in which how many rays of sunlight manages to spill over the walls.
“What’s the longest route you can take to Mexico?” he asks, and sips coffee. It smells stale, watery, like the run down asphalt outside. And Fernando savours the feeling of the tip of his tongue slightly scalded and the light sweat coat over his brow.
The guy behind the counter, name tag scrubbed and washed with letters unrecognizable, looks at him. Strange, he probably thinks, fuckin’ kid.
He shrugs, “Dunno, never been outside of town. Suppose you could hang around, drive around everything, y’know? Take a loop,” he says, grins, and leans back against the counter and watches the road outside the dusty windows like that’s what he always does.
And Fernando does the same, trying to fit against the counter but his spine digs into the wood from the wrong angle. He hops down from the chair when he’s done, and the guy is smoothening a dollar with his thumb and salutes.
The door hits empty air after him. He unlocks the car and rolls down the windows, today it’s necessary. Outside, on the northern wall where the wall cast shadows over the drive way, there’s an old tap which he uses to refill the bottle with water.
The road is dusty and its jagged edges gives it the feeling of abandonment, of carelessness, of where Fernando wants to be.
He knows he can’t sing for fifty dollars or to save a man’s life, but he does so anyway. There’s some sort of station that recycles 70’s pop and Fernando can’t say he knows any lyrics, but he hums and can’t stop smiling. Everything seems endless and endless seems just about the right amount of miles to go.
The shores seem far away and yet not, when nightfall creeps upon Fernando. He scratches at the back of his head, keeping an eye on the road and where he’s going as he leans forward to search the headboard for the map.
The roads wind where he is, by no means wide, but small lines that snare themselves around and across rocky grounds and hot desert. The pacific sticks in and out of the side of the country like spikes and he vows that he’ll go there, soon.
Soon being, just soon, Fernando decides. He nods to himself, and continues following the road, two fingers working on folding the map right again.
Inside his head he misses home, and at the same time he wonders why the hell he didn’t do this sooner. Twenty years has passed and now he’s on the road.
He’s managed to grow up, turn eighteen, drunk so much he’s forgotten his name and his last four numbers and slept for two days, lost his virginity, thought he’d fallen in love, and then fallen out of it.
The car comes to a slow stop that seems to have punched the air right out of her. Fernando strokes the wheel lightly, talking soothingly to the old pickup.
There isn’t much to say when there’s only a pickup truck and the wind to talk to, but Fernando figures he’ll manage. Soon enough he’ll have to start picking up jobs, meet some people, experience all of those things he wants to experience, he’ll manage.
“For success,” he says and pours water out the window. To irony, he thinks. To life, is maybe what it’s supposed to be.
For now Fernando is perfectly happy with curling up in the back seat even though his legs feel too long and his fingers too bony to fit right underneath his chin. He’ll manage, even without a proper blanket, and the engine cut out and casting silence across the deserted landscape.
the next few days pass in a blur of strong sunshine, living sparsely on bread that’s dried already but Fernando doesn’t mind, and wishing he had a camera to capture everything he sees.
He thinks he could stay at some bar somewhere road alongside and hustle pool, but he’s always sucked at it so it’s a never mind case.
The afternoon is pervaded with a thick layer of grey clouds and it could rain any minute. Fernando rests his arm over the rolled down window. He’s stopped for gas twice, and soon he’ll have to start road tripping.
The car is his baby and he’d do whatever he could to ensure she came to a right home, and not just left to corrode and break down somewhere in the shoulder of the road where anyone can come for her.
The next gas station he stops at, Fernando takes a shot. The cashier looks vaguely disinterested when he steps through the door, hair combed from his face and jeans shorts dirty.
“What’d you say if I told you I’d give you my car, he pickup parked just out there?” the cashier looks up, surprised, an eyebrow arched as he looks outside. The ford has seen its better days, and road dust and speckles of dirt are recoloring it, but it’s nonetheless a well-kept one.
“I’d tell you you’re kiddin’ me and wouldn’t give me one cent,” he replies. Fernando looks at him, head to toe, musing.
“I’d want to keep her, but soon the money’s going to run out, and I ain’t gonna let the road get her,”
The cashier, tall and gangly and curly blonde, lifts the cap with the shop’s logo imprinted front, off, and tips his chin into his palm, “Hell kid, what’s it you’re gonna do anyhow?” he asks.
“I’m going down to Mexico,” Fernando replies.
“Without a car?” the cashier asks, a hint of a grin in his lips.
Fernando smiles back, “Without a car,” he confirms.
“Fuck, you’re going to have to explain this to me when it’s not melting hot outside. You’re legal, right?”
The bar is smoky, air nicotine and perfume and oiled wood where Fernando is tucked against the wall and the leather seat behind him. Llorente - Fernando Llorente Torres, which is a big fuck with the head to meet someone with your own name - is back with beer, work clothes gone and t-shirt and long, stainless jeans in place.
Fernando is almost legal, and maybe a little bit reckless. He takes a gulp of the beer, cool against his throat that’s been feeling more and more sandpaper for each passing hour.
“So, all in all, you ditched the cash, your family, your life and just… took off?” Llorente asks, arms crossed on the top of the table. He looks vaguely wondrous, puzzled. “Where’s the moral in that?”
Fernando shrugs, but it is true, and once again guilt is an insect in the pit of his stomach.
“I’m not here for any morals; I’m here to get down to Mexico.”
Llorente snorts, but there’s no maliciousness behind it, “yeah kid, I figured as much. What I’m saying is, you ever thought of them?”
Fernando sips his beer, looks at Llorente, long. Llorente looks back, like both of them are trying to figure something out.
“Of course I’ve thought of them. Thing is, I don’t think they’ll notice, not really,”
There’s sympathy in Llorente’s eyes for just a second that Fernando doesn’t want, and just like that it’s gone. For the duration of the night Fernando dances, and Llorente keeps him busy with the jukebox and with more drinks. Fernando remembers later that they played all too little Beatles and puts on Hey Jude because it seemed like it fit there.
He says goodbye the next day, because Llorente says with the corner of his mouth slightly turned down apologetically that sorry, he hasn’t got any jobs to spare. But he’ll take the car.
“There’s an old truck stop five miles down the road, get yourself a lift and I’ll come pick your girl up after my shift, yeah?” Fernando thanks him, smile relieved, and clasps his hand.
“I’ll come back, when I’m done, you know,” he says, and Llorente grins, blinks.
“I’ll take good care of her, that’s a promise.”
At the truck stop - a barely held together place with tire tracks pressed permanently into the asphalt and a sign that shows that it’s indeed a restaurant - he empties what he needs into the back pack again, folding and packing meticulously and right. The water bottle goes into his hand, the few dollars he’s got left in his right front pocket, map and a few cassettes and clothes in the rucksack.
He turns on a cassette, studying it, smiling. It’s a Beatles cassette and believe him Fernando wouldn’t go anywhere without them.
When he locks the car for the last time in a long time he stares up at the sky and hums The Long and Winding Road underneath his breath.
He strikes a deal with a truck chauffeur that’s going through to Ford City and he can ride along if he wants, so long as he’s quiet and can get food on his own whenever they stop.
Fernando considers it a fair deal and shakes the driver’s hand, fitting easily but alien into shotgun seat that smells of coffee and smoke and gasoline. In his head he’s compiling a letter. It reads I’m sorry for doing this, I love you, but I am and I need this and think of it as that trip you do in life, that everyone needs to do. I miss you.
In his head, he sends it to no one, but the recipient on the envelope is his siblings.