and all the long drives
this is a mini-surprise for sonstoodstammer, who is, very factually and with absolute certitude, everything in the entirety of the whole wide world to me.
we_are_cities, feb 03 07, 825 words:
the world owes us nothing (we owe each other the world)
pete/patrick: something about nothing turning into everything.
+
measuring at the equator, all it takes to circle the earth is about 25 000 miles; somewhere around santa fe, the van’s odometer hits 73 000, almost enough to circumnavigate the world thrice over.
at least that’s what andy says, though not in so many words, and with much less metaphorical meaning attached.
pete will still remember it differently anyway. he always does, because, well. they can’t explain the reason but it’s important that he does this, that he rewrites everything everyone does and says in his head, that alternately he is a novelist and a historian. the fact that the rest of their lives will be laced with a little fiction is inevitable. it has been inevitable for a good long while now.
pete takes a blurry, pixellated picture of the dashboard, because it’s an accomplishment, okay, they’re fucking circumnavigators. there is a tone to his voice that feels like finally.
- oh, you mean like Columbus? joe asks pete, mouth loose around the vowels, lisp not quite closing around the s.
- Magellan, actually. or Marco Polo? some guy with a hat.
- pete, dude, i think you’re thinking of cap’n crunch a little but okay.
and they do feel like explorers, sailing right to the edges of maps, right into the uncertain parts that fearful people used to label here be dragons. what lies beyond the horizon could be their drop into oblivion, swallowed and dead, or a new world completely their own: some kind of terra incognita within reach.
*
somewhere, just before a show, joe is helping andy tape up his fingers, threading gauze over the torn skin on his knuckles. in that same somewhere, patrick is singing the same lines over and over and over, his throat warming with every repetition. and there is this moment, right there, where pete realizes they were built to be history makers.
hand to mouth is no way to be remembered, and yet (and still) here they are: breaking hearts and taking names and taking their share of shit-talking, heavy lifting, dream-chasing. eating candybars for dinner when it’s all they can afford. stomachs and hearts and gas tanks all running on half-empty.
of course they drive on through the night. they will every night, if they have to. they’re just four boys who came from scenes they didn’t start themselves, from big ideologies and wild imaginations, from suburban homes with action figures and comic books preserved in bedroom shelves and closets.
they didn’t quite know what they wanted, every single goddamn starlit night of their lives, but now -- with all the awe and urgency and momentous wordlessness those three letters will ever carry, now -- they have it.
*
interstate 25, 2:37 a.m., 85 kph:
the reason pete usually takes the wheel at this hour is because he can’t sleep anyway. night driving settles something in him, dulls the ache in the back of his skull.
- pat. paaaaat. you’ll be my co-pilot, right? patrick!
- God is everyone’s co-pilot, pete, patrick yawns. it’s too risky to put me in that kind of position.
and yet here he is already, right up front in the passenger seat. patrick takes off his cap and pulls up his hood, curls up tiredly. he doesn’t really say much more as the streetlights blur past his window, his eyelids fluttering into sleep.
pete lets his co-pilot rest.
*
interstate 25, 4:26 a.m., 71 kph:
pete is taking a sidelong glance at his life’s living breathing golden ticket at the exact moment patrick sneezes in his sleep, the sound muffled by someone’s worn-out blanket and one of joe’s dirty 80’s metal t-shirts. patrick’s head rests uncomfortably in that corner-space between window and seatbelt, making a disconcerting tpff tpff sound against the pane everytime the van rolls over a speedbump. patrick’s asleep, he doesn’t notice.
pete checks the rearview mirror before reaching over and pulling the shirt away gently. he tosses it behind him at an equally asleep joe, who is curled ungracefully in the backseat littered with coke cans (sticky) and stray cheeto puffs (stale).
one good deed done, pete’s hand drifts back to push patrick’s glasses up a little, and then maybe to ghost a line across his cheek. patrick’s asleep. he doesn’t notice.
but then:
- watch the road, fucker, patrick mumbles softly, eyes still shut. i’m too young to die.
when pete laughs to himself, he exhales a breath he didn’t know he was holding. he withdraws his hand quietly, taps out a softly coded message on the steering wheel. the road stretches far ahead, and the exit signs glow green and hopeful with every pass of their headlights.
they were built to be history makers, pete thinks, but hand to mouth is no way to be remembered. so they mark their maps with fingers pressed into skin, with their onstage adrenaline, with sloppy kisses pressed to cheek and temple, with tiny everyday miracles, with overcoming and unrelenting and driving fast into forever.
there aren’t highways long enough, pete thinks, glancing back at patrick, for how far all this is going to go.
- fin -
this is kind of the same theme as this, when by theme i mean 'sneezy sleepers and people who think too much and talk too little'.
and oh! dudes, b.h. Fairchild, okay? inspiration/variation. imma cite sources now, no lie.
thank yous aplenty for _dum, stereomer, matchsticks_p, and fizzyblogic! i wanted this to be really nice for the beffy, and if anything good happened, it was because of their help. \:D/
!! ETA: now feat. comment!fic + art by my one and my lonely (♥) in comments! she wins.