Fic: Gone With the Rebels of Heart (Tom/Danielle, PG-13) - 14valentines
Title : Gone With the Rebels of Heart
Author : atomichatred82
Pairing : Tom/Danielle, implied Tom/Sean
Rating : PG-13
Word Count : 1,908
Author's Note : Written for 14valentines Day 14: International.
Disclaimer : Here be lies, untruths, and reckless imagination. The real Danielle and TomRad are happily, drunkenly in love and MFEO. (In other words, please don't kill me with your brain, Danielle)
Summary : Between Tom and Max and the constant noise coming from their basement, Danielle feels as if she'd walked into a darkened theatre in the middle of a movie in progress, and nobody bothered to catch her up on what's going on.
Gone With the Rebels of Heart
by atomichatred82
Danielle blinks awake, dragged from sleep by a noise coming from downstairs. It's early in the morning and the rest of the house is still and quiet around her, sunlight just barely creeping past her bedroom window. Her clothes from last night are still in a messy heap by her bed, her bag slung carelessly over the back of a chair. Her laptop sits idle on her desk, beside the mug of coffee she didn't quite finish and has probably turned to sludge now. There's a desk calendar sitting on top of a pile of chick magazines she's given up on reading, its dates marked and scribbled with notes--and suddenly Danielle remembers, the realization jostling her eyes open.
She pulls herself upright, swinging her legs over the side of the bed to find her slippers. She slips on a t-shirt over her pyjama bottoms and quietly opens her bedroom door, closing it behind her as she makes her way towards the stairs. From the landing she can make out the light coming from the kitchen, and as she nears the bottom of the stairs she can hear the low gurgle of the coffeemaker. The foyer leading to their front door is nearly blocked by a towering array of crates and boxes of varying sizes, each one labeled and marked in what she recognizes as Tom's handwriting.
Danielle nearly trips over a guitar case and hisses, "Shit!" as she stumbles into the kitchen, her legs not quite as awake as the rest of her body.
Max looks up from his coffee, looking unsurprised to see her. "Hey..."
"Morning," she says, voice still raspy from sleep, making a beeline for the coffeemaker.
"They're late," Max mutters, as if he'd been waiting for someone to say it to. "They were supposed to be here ten minutes ago."
Danielle grabs a souvenir mug from their parents' trip to San Francisco and tilts the pot onto it, watching the steaming dark liquid fill it up. "Did you actually expect them to be on time?"
"I thought they'd at least try," Max sighs, and she can sense the anxiety in his voice.
"Were you planning on sneaking out and leaving without saying goodbye?" she says as she sits down beside him.
"Didn't want to wake you," Max says softly. His eyes are bleary behind his glasses and she knows he hasn't been sleeping well for the past few days. "I said goodbye to Mom and Dad last night, they knew I'd probably be gone before they woke up, but you weren't home yet."
Danielle sips her coffee, letting the steam waft across her face like smoky whispers. "You got everything ready?"
"I think so," Max says. "I went through my checklist twice, even."
Danielle smiles and reaches over, placing her hand on Max's. His skin is rougher now, calloused from guitar-playing, a world away from the pudgy toddler whose hand she took in hers everytime they went to the supermarket with their mother, her stern warnings of "Don't you let go of your brother, Danielle" still ringing clear in her ears. Little Danielle had held on tightly, afraid she was going to lose him in the crowd, afraid someone would take him away, afraid he'd wander off into parts unknown and not come back.
She wonders if she'd known, even way back then, that she'd lose him anyway, that Max would grow up beautiful and talented and that eventually he'd follow the music out the door and into a world where she couldn't follow him, could do nothing but stand on the fringes and watch.
"Where to first?" she asks, just to have something to talk about.
"Aurora, then St. Louis the day after," Max says.
She nods along as he recites the dates and cities, his fingers warm underneath hers. She's memorized their tour itinerary weeks ago, long before Max started losing sleep over it, she just wants to hear the soft drone of his voice as they sit there, waiting for his band to arrive and pick him up.
"When did you finish packing last night?" she asks.
"Around midnight," Max says. "Did you have trouble getting in? I know we put a lot of our stuff by the door."
"I went in the back," Danielle says, lips poised over the rim of her mug. "Drink your coffee before it gets cold,"
Max does, and she ponders for a moment about how he he still does that, still does what she asks of him without question, still knocks three times before he goes in her bedroom, still helps her up the stairs when she stumbles in drunk in the early mornings and holds her hair back as she's bent over the toilet bowl, pushing the door closed with his foot so their parents wouldn't get waken up by the sound of her retching.
He's tolerated everything from her noisy girlfriends coming over for slumber parties when they were in school, to the chemical stench of her nail polish when she first started experimenting with makeup, and opened their front door to countless fake-smiling boyfriends who looked at him condescendingly, the annoying little brother getting in their way.
Except for Tom, of course.
Tom didn't fake-smile at Max--in fact he didn't smile at all, didn't talk down at him or even say things like, "Can you tell your sister to come down?"
She knows the story because Max has told her countless times, how Tom stood awkwardly at their front door and said, "You must be Max. Danielle said you played the guitar,"
It seems now that everything that happened from that point on has been leading up to this, and she was merely along for the ride. Between Tom and Max and the constant noise coming from their basement, Danielle feels as if she'd walked into a darkened theatre in the middle of a movie in progress, and nobody bothered to catch her up on what's going on. She learns to decode everything from the look on Max's face, the scowl over breakfast when last night's practice didn't go so well, the satisfied twitch in his lips when he finalizes a mix.
She must have known, must have figured it out by then, that she'd have to let go sooner and not later.
Tom was always a wanderer, drifting both in body and mind, focused only through a camera lens and then dissolving into shapeless blurs again, and Danielle's learned that the way to hold onto someone like that is to make them believe you're not holding on at all, never let them think they're about to be tethered and caged.
Max is different. Max has been a constant presence in her life, tugging at her skirt on the first day of school, sharing her a slice of his pumpkin-flavoured birthday cake on Halloween, helping her zip up her prom dress, driving her to work when her car breaks down.
She reaches up, touches his cheek with the back of her fingers. Max doesn't flinch, just gives her a knowing look with his eyes. I'm gonna be okay, he seems to say, and she smiles to let him know she gets it.
Later, when the rest of the band finally shows up, forty minutes late with Ryan bouncing from feet-to-feet and saying he desperately needs to use the bathroom, Danielle sits back and watches the scene unfold before her, hands warmed by the coffee mug in her hands. They stumble around each other, not quite a well-oiled machine yet, none of them looking more awake than she feels. Max is right in the middle of it, chiding Sean for almost dropping his guitar case and yelling for Ryan to hurry the fuck up and help them out.
Danielle catches Tom's eye and smiles at him, trying hard not to think of the last time she saw him out the door like this, guitar case in hand, trying not to remember how he came back to her broken and burnt out, everything inside him shaken loose from their places and scattered for her to pick up and try to put back together.
She never really succeeded, she thinks to this day.
It's not that Tom didn't want to be fixed, it's just that he seemed inclined to feel out every last inch of his misery before slowly scraping himself back up, and Danielle will be the first to admit she wasn't always as patient as he probably needed her to be. She always knew that he wasn't her puzzle to solve, not alone at least. There were always pieces of him she was never intended to have, they were Sean's or Jon's or even Nick's, and now Tom's standing in her kitchen talking to her brother about routes and schedules, like a structure burnt to the ground and rebuilt in slow phases, the scaffolding around him teeming with her wishes and Max's hopes and Sean's touch.
"Okay, that's the last of them," Mike says from the foyer. "We should get going."
Danielle stands up and walks over to hug Max, ignoring his muffled protests when she kisses his cheek wetly and runs her fingers through her hair. "You take care of yourself, baby brother," she whispers.
"I'll be fine," Max insists when he pulls back. "Say bye to Mom and Dad for me."
"I will," she says, and watches him pick up his backpack and traveling bag, walking out the door and blinking in the sunlight.
Tom stays, his gaze lingering over her, his hands held stiffly at his sides.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," she says before pulling him into a hug, clasping her arms tight around his shoulders. He's lost weight over the spring, his arms bonier than she remembers when he brings it around her back, one hand moving up to cup the back of her neck.
"I'll look after him," Tom says, his voice thick and low against her ear.
"You look after yourself, first," she warns him, leaving everything else unsaid.
She starts to push away from him but he tilts her head back, keeps her close and leans down to kiss her, his lips dry and the stubble on his chin scratching against her. She opens her mouth to him, tastes the residue of his first morning cigarette and the minty bite of his toothpaste, his nose ring digging into her cheek. It lasts only for a few seconds but she keeps each one for herself, those precious snatches of time where she gets to call him her own.
She sees him out the door and onto the driveway, giving Sean and Ryan a hug and stealing a cigarette off Al, letting him light it for her as Mike starts up the engine. Max is buckling himself into the passenger seat and the others are piling into the back seat, Al shoving Ryan unceremoniously into the back and scrambling over to join him. She laughs with the cigarette between her lips, the summer sun warm against her face, watching as they pull out of the driveway, not waving her hand to bid them goodbye because she's not some 50's housewife in an apron sending her children off to school or her husband to work.
They'll come back to her eventually, Max and Tom both, with stories and photographs and sunburnt strips of their skin.
She won't get to keep them for long, but she'll take what she can and live off what they leave behind, the knowledge that she brought them together and won't let them get picked apart.
~FIN~
Author : atomichatred82
Pairing : Tom/Danielle, implied Tom/Sean
Rating : PG-13
Word Count : 1,908
Author's Note : Written for 14valentines Day 14: International.
Disclaimer : Here be lies, untruths, and reckless imagination. The real Danielle and TomRad are happily, drunkenly in love and MFEO. (In other words, please don't kill me with your brain, Danielle)
Summary : Between Tom and Max and the constant noise coming from their basement, Danielle feels as if she'd walked into a darkened theatre in the middle of a movie in progress, and nobody bothered to catch her up on what's going on.
Gone With the Rebels of Heart
by atomichatred82
Danielle blinks awake, dragged from sleep by a noise coming from downstairs. It's early in the morning and the rest of the house is still and quiet around her, sunlight just barely creeping past her bedroom window. Her clothes from last night are still in a messy heap by her bed, her bag slung carelessly over the back of a chair. Her laptop sits idle on her desk, beside the mug of coffee she didn't quite finish and has probably turned to sludge now. There's a desk calendar sitting on top of a pile of chick magazines she's given up on reading, its dates marked and scribbled with notes--and suddenly Danielle remembers, the realization jostling her eyes open.
She pulls herself upright, swinging her legs over the side of the bed to find her slippers. She slips on a t-shirt over her pyjama bottoms and quietly opens her bedroom door, closing it behind her as she makes her way towards the stairs. From the landing she can make out the light coming from the kitchen, and as she nears the bottom of the stairs she can hear the low gurgle of the coffeemaker. The foyer leading to their front door is nearly blocked by a towering array of crates and boxes of varying sizes, each one labeled and marked in what she recognizes as Tom's handwriting.
Danielle nearly trips over a guitar case and hisses, "Shit!" as she stumbles into the kitchen, her legs not quite as awake as the rest of her body.
Max looks up from his coffee, looking unsurprised to see her. "Hey..."
"Morning," she says, voice still raspy from sleep, making a beeline for the coffeemaker.
"They're late," Max mutters, as if he'd been waiting for someone to say it to. "They were supposed to be here ten minutes ago."
Danielle grabs a souvenir mug from their parents' trip to San Francisco and tilts the pot onto it, watching the steaming dark liquid fill it up. "Did you actually expect them to be on time?"
"I thought they'd at least try," Max sighs, and she can sense the anxiety in his voice.
"Were you planning on sneaking out and leaving without saying goodbye?" she says as she sits down beside him.
"Didn't want to wake you," Max says softly. His eyes are bleary behind his glasses and she knows he hasn't been sleeping well for the past few days. "I said goodbye to Mom and Dad last night, they knew I'd probably be gone before they woke up, but you weren't home yet."
Danielle sips her coffee, letting the steam waft across her face like smoky whispers. "You got everything ready?"
"I think so," Max says. "I went through my checklist twice, even."
Danielle smiles and reaches over, placing her hand on Max's. His skin is rougher now, calloused from guitar-playing, a world away from the pudgy toddler whose hand she took in hers everytime they went to the supermarket with their mother, her stern warnings of "Don't you let go of your brother, Danielle" still ringing clear in her ears. Little Danielle had held on tightly, afraid she was going to lose him in the crowd, afraid someone would take him away, afraid he'd wander off into parts unknown and not come back.
She wonders if she'd known, even way back then, that she'd lose him anyway, that Max would grow up beautiful and talented and that eventually he'd follow the music out the door and into a world where she couldn't follow him, could do nothing but stand on the fringes and watch.
"Where to first?" she asks, just to have something to talk about.
"Aurora, then St. Louis the day after," Max says.
She nods along as he recites the dates and cities, his fingers warm underneath hers. She's memorized their tour itinerary weeks ago, long before Max started losing sleep over it, she just wants to hear the soft drone of his voice as they sit there, waiting for his band to arrive and pick him up.
"When did you finish packing last night?" she asks.
"Around midnight," Max says. "Did you have trouble getting in? I know we put a lot of our stuff by the door."
"I went in the back," Danielle says, lips poised over the rim of her mug. "Drink your coffee before it gets cold,"
Max does, and she ponders for a moment about how he he still does that, still does what she asks of him without question, still knocks three times before he goes in her bedroom, still helps her up the stairs when she stumbles in drunk in the early mornings and holds her hair back as she's bent over the toilet bowl, pushing the door closed with his foot so their parents wouldn't get waken up by the sound of her retching.
He's tolerated everything from her noisy girlfriends coming over for slumber parties when they were in school, to the chemical stench of her nail polish when she first started experimenting with makeup, and opened their front door to countless fake-smiling boyfriends who looked at him condescendingly, the annoying little brother getting in their way.
Except for Tom, of course.
Tom didn't fake-smile at Max--in fact he didn't smile at all, didn't talk down at him or even say things like, "Can you tell your sister to come down?"
She knows the story because Max has told her countless times, how Tom stood awkwardly at their front door and said, "You must be Max. Danielle said you played the guitar,"
It seems now that everything that happened from that point on has been leading up to this, and she was merely along for the ride. Between Tom and Max and the constant noise coming from their basement, Danielle feels as if she'd walked into a darkened theatre in the middle of a movie in progress, and nobody bothered to catch her up on what's going on. She learns to decode everything from the look on Max's face, the scowl over breakfast when last night's practice didn't go so well, the satisfied twitch in his lips when he finalizes a mix.
She must have known, must have figured it out by then, that she'd have to let go sooner and not later.
Tom was always a wanderer, drifting both in body and mind, focused only through a camera lens and then dissolving into shapeless blurs again, and Danielle's learned that the way to hold onto someone like that is to make them believe you're not holding on at all, never let them think they're about to be tethered and caged.
Max is different. Max has been a constant presence in her life, tugging at her skirt on the first day of school, sharing her a slice of his pumpkin-flavoured birthday cake on Halloween, helping her zip up her prom dress, driving her to work when her car breaks down.
She reaches up, touches his cheek with the back of her fingers. Max doesn't flinch, just gives her a knowing look with his eyes. I'm gonna be okay, he seems to say, and she smiles to let him know she gets it.
Later, when the rest of the band finally shows up, forty minutes late with Ryan bouncing from feet-to-feet and saying he desperately needs to use the bathroom, Danielle sits back and watches the scene unfold before her, hands warmed by the coffee mug in her hands. They stumble around each other, not quite a well-oiled machine yet, none of them looking more awake than she feels. Max is right in the middle of it, chiding Sean for almost dropping his guitar case and yelling for Ryan to hurry the fuck up and help them out.
Danielle catches Tom's eye and smiles at him, trying hard not to think of the last time she saw him out the door like this, guitar case in hand, trying not to remember how he came back to her broken and burnt out, everything inside him shaken loose from their places and scattered for her to pick up and try to put back together.
She never really succeeded, she thinks to this day.
It's not that Tom didn't want to be fixed, it's just that he seemed inclined to feel out every last inch of his misery before slowly scraping himself back up, and Danielle will be the first to admit she wasn't always as patient as he probably needed her to be. She always knew that he wasn't her puzzle to solve, not alone at least. There were always pieces of him she was never intended to have, they were Sean's or Jon's or even Nick's, and now Tom's standing in her kitchen talking to her brother about routes and schedules, like a structure burnt to the ground and rebuilt in slow phases, the scaffolding around him teeming with her wishes and Max's hopes and Sean's touch.
"Okay, that's the last of them," Mike says from the foyer. "We should get going."
Danielle stands up and walks over to hug Max, ignoring his muffled protests when she kisses his cheek wetly and runs her fingers through her hair. "You take care of yourself, baby brother," she whispers.
"I'll be fine," Max insists when he pulls back. "Say bye to Mom and Dad for me."
"I will," she says, and watches him pick up his backpack and traveling bag, walking out the door and blinking in the sunlight.
Tom stays, his gaze lingering over her, his hands held stiffly at his sides.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," she says before pulling him into a hug, clasping her arms tight around his shoulders. He's lost weight over the spring, his arms bonier than she remembers when he brings it around her back, one hand moving up to cup the back of her neck.
"I'll look after him," Tom says, his voice thick and low against her ear.
"You look after yourself, first," she warns him, leaving everything else unsaid.
She starts to push away from him but he tilts her head back, keeps her close and leans down to kiss her, his lips dry and the stubble on his chin scratching against her. She opens her mouth to him, tastes the residue of his first morning cigarette and the minty bite of his toothpaste, his nose ring digging into her cheek. It lasts only for a few seconds but she keeps each one for herself, those precious snatches of time where she gets to call him her own.
She sees him out the door and onto the driveway, giving Sean and Ryan a hug and stealing a cigarette off Al, letting him light it for her as Mike starts up the engine. Max is buckling himself into the passenger seat and the others are piling into the back seat, Al shoving Ryan unceremoniously into the back and scrambling over to join him. She laughs with the cigarette between her lips, the summer sun warm against her face, watching as they pull out of the driveway, not waving her hand to bid them goodbye because she's not some 50's housewife in an apron sending her children off to school or her husband to work.
They'll come back to her eventually, Max and Tom both, with stories and photographs and sunburnt strips of their skin.
She won't get to keep them for long, but she'll take what she can and live off what they leave behind, the knowledge that she brought them together and won't let them get picked apart.
~FIN~