Chapter Text
Have you ever stopped to think about where your journey began?
…Seriously, have you ever?
I do it every once in a while. You know, just to keep myself on my toes, remind myself how far I’ve come. From humble beginnings greatness rises, as they say—at least, I think that’s what they say. I’m not really what you’d call an ‘academic’. That’s more Felicity’s thing. All I know is that I grew up with all the world laid before me, served up on a silver platter, and it wasn’t until it was ripped away that I had any reason to actually, you know, try to be a better person.
Anyway. Reflections on the possible nature of humanity and the acknowledgment of how far away the beginning of this story is to me now aside, there is a reason I’m here to tell you this tale. That reason is a man only known as Pascal, aka the man in the pharmacy whose day me, Felicity, and violin boy were about to ruin.
I’m sure you remember how we got there, but if not, let me recap real quick. Our dominoes looked like this so far:
1) Looking for alcohol.
2) Finding The Paperwork.
3) Trying to run away with my sister in the car.
4) High speed car chase.
5) Accidental airbag inflation.
6) Unintentionally taking my sister hostage fleeing from tranq bullets on the side of the road.
7) Running into violin kid in the wilderness.
8) Violin kid having a seizure.
And 9) Taking violin kid to dinky little pharmacy with the cops hot on our tails.
All well thought through and entirely sound decisions, clearly. Decisions which led me to…
10) Begging the pharmacist, who looked up and was staring at us with an unreadable expression on his face as we dumped the kid on the pharmacy’s linoleum floor, to hide us.
And without further ado…
“Hide you from what?” the man asked, carefully marking his place and setting his book aside.
Felicity, leaning over violin kid and tapping at his face, was too engrossed in pretending to be a doctor to answer. Looked like the pleasantries were up to me.
Which of course meant that the first words out of my mouth were, “The cops are after us.”
“After you, you mean,” Felicity said, because of course she wasn’t too engrossed to snark at me.
Peering nervously out the front window, I sighed. “Yes, fine, whatever. The cops are after me and this kid had a—a—what was it?”
“Seizure.”
“—a seizure. And you’re a pharmacy. So you can… help him. Us. All of us, really, but mostly him and—am I making any sense?”
The man blinked at me. I blinked back. Then, before anyone else could say or do anything, a cop car pulled into the empty parking lot, slowly creeping around toward the front of the pharmacy.
I yelped, ducking down behind some shelving and nearly knocking down a little magazine rack as I did. The kid was starting to come around, blinking and groaning while Felicity spoke calmly to him. I looked frantically over at the man behind the counter, my fingers tight on the shelf before me. “Please,” I said.
The man began to stand, shaking his head. My stomach dropped down into the ninth circle of hell as he stepped to the side, toward the ancient telephone sitting on the pharmacy counter. I watched, dread building and building in my chest until I could hardly breathe around it. I was going to die. Except I wasn’t, I was going to suffer a fate worse than death, one that was legal only because I wouldn’t be dead, I would be 99.44% alive, just in a hundred—little—pieces—
—and then the man opened the divider between the front of the store and the back, gesturing us through.
I could hardly believe it. I almost didn’t. It wasn’t until Felicity cleared her throat that I jerked into motion, seizing violin kid’s gangly legs and dragging him back behind the counter with Felicity’s help.
We got there just in time. It was barely a moment later that the bell over the door jangled, just as soon followed by the sound of a walkie talkie buzzing.
“You’re trouble,” the old man said to us from the corner of his mouth, eyes on the front of the shop.
“We’re in trouble,” I corrected in a whisper. I then slapped a hand over my mouth to resist the urge to say anything else and give us all away.
The sound of boots on the linoleum rang softly around the quiet shop, the only other sound the walkie talkie crackling on and off. I had never heard such a weighty silence in my life. There wasn’t even music playing on tinny speakers, okay. It was footsteps and static and that was it. It was so silent that I felt like I could pinpoint the cop’s exact location in the room, like I was triangulating the echoes bouncing off the walls.
He was walking along the front wall, now. And now he was peering down the rows of shelves as he crossed around the side. And now he was giving the little magazine rack a twirl. Getting closer and closer by the moment to the counter in the back, the counter behind which we had so haphazardly tucked ourselves away.
I breathed slowly through my nose, schooling myself into silence. It felt like every twitch of every muscle would be the one to expose me, the bastard that would rat me out. I was sweating like there was no tomorrow. I’ll be honest—I’ve been a lot of places I shouldn’t have been, and I’ve been pursued by a lot of people and/or animals intent on sniffing me out. On the roof of the science building at the high school, in the crawl space of our house hiding bottles of alcohol in the ducts, out in the trees behind the house with a girl with her panties around her ankles… I have no shortage of memories wherein I’m crouched just out of sight of the principal or my father or my father’s dogs. I’ve had to hide away and wait for some danger to pass more often than I can count.
Still, no matter how many times I’ve done it nor how many close calls I’ve had, I have never in my life felt as terrified of being caught as I did then. And it really didn’t help when violin boy moaned softly just beside me.
I jumped and flinched, my heart hammering so loud I was sure it would give me away. God, what I stupid way to go—I planted my free hand over the kid’s mouth, willing him to keep it down. Bleary brown eyes focused hazily on my face and I pressed my finger to my lips. He was going to stay quiet or I swore to god—
The heavy booted footsteps swerved, then, coming right up to the counter. The cop tapped the little service bell, leaning on the counter with a creak of old wood. I looked straight up and saw the tips of gloved fingers, curled around the edge of the counter over my head.
“Can I help you, sir?” the pharmacy man asked. He hadn’t moved an inch, and from what little I could see of his face he was as stoic as ever.
“…We’re looking for a pair of kids,” the cop said. “Wrecked a car on the highway and took off. You haven’t seen them around, have you?”
I twitched, squeezing my eyes closed as the cop presumably handed over a tablet with our faces on it, probably snapped from a traffic cam.
There was a long, dragging moment of silence as the pharmacy man studied the photo. He was looking at it for so long that I could have sworn I was going to drown in my own sweat. I was getting more convinced by the moment that he was going to sell us out, until, finally…
“Hm. Can’t say I have. Been an awful slow day, you know.”
“…Well. If you do, call this number. These kids are dangerous.”
Yeah, sure, buddy. Dangerous… pff. As if. The only person I was ever a danger to was myself. My father’s reputation, despite the massive size of his ego, did not count. I wouldn’t have crashed the car on the highway if my parents hadn’t signed the unwind order in the first place, so who was really to blame?
…Which, okay, in hindsight doesn’t sound that great, either. You’re going to find a lot of moments like that in this story. What can I say? It’s the deviant little shit in me. I’m not here to argue that I’m a good person. All I’m here to do is make a pitch that I was worth something, that my life, as worthless and meaningless as it seemed from the outside, was worth living. I am human, therefore the story I have to tell means something. No matter how many mistakes I made or how many rules I broke.
…This isn’t to say that I didn’t deserve the heart attack the pharmacy man gave me when, just as the officer was about to turn away and head back out of the shop, he piped up and asked the man about a cold sore on his lip.
“That’s not your concern,” the cop said, and I could imagine him staring down at the pharmacy man. In my imagination he had a huge handlebar mustache that barely hid the cold sore in question, a pair of aviators complete with a reflection of the pharmacy man that looked like a fly caught in a trap perched on his nose.
“I’m sorry, it’s just that I have a few different balms that might help,” the pharmacy man said with a shrug. “If it’s a recurring issue you might find better use from an anti-viral cream rather than a—”
“It happens every few months,” the cop snapped, his disdain bleeding through the air of professionalism he’d upheld thus far. “Does that help your diagnosis, pharmacist?”
God, could the pharmacy man just let the cop leave already?! I screamed internally as he offered his professional opinion on cold-sore creams, my breath coming shorter and shorter in my chest. When the pharmacy man leaned over us to pluck a tin from the little shelf just beside the counter, nearly tripping over me in the process, I saw my life flash before my eyes. There was some shuffling, an exchange of money, the cash register opening and closing. Then, all at once, the cop’s boots marched back across the shop. The bell above the door rang once more, and then… he was gone.
I wheezed a sigh. God, my nerves were jangled. I then flinched as something moved beneath my hand.
It was violin boy, who I realized belatedly that I was still holding onto. “Sorry,” I said, letting go.
“Whuzzgoin’ on?” he asked. His eyes were looking sharper now, but not by much, and the clarity was offset by the way his tongue slurred the words.
“You had a seizure,” Felicity said on his other side, all fake professional. His hazy eyes slid over to her. I, meanwhile, went to push myself to my feet—she could playact like a doctor all she wanted, I was getting out of here.
Or I planned to, up until the pharmacy man spoke up. “They’ll be watching the traffic cams for a while yet,” he said. He’d picked up his book again and was flipping through it toward his bookmark, looking entirely uninterested in our fate.
I snorted. “Thanks, grandpa. Any other fun facts you’d like to tell us?”
“You know, a little gratitude wouldn’t go amiss,” he said.
His tone wasn’t sharp, but I still felt the words like a knife in the gut. It was thanks to this man that I was still free to walk around and sass to my heart’s content. For a good ten minutes this man was the only thing that stood—or sat, kinda—between me and a harvest camp. My issues with authority could sit this one out for a hot second.
“…Sorry,” I said again, the second time in less than three minutes. I glared preemptively at Felicity just in case she decided to hassle me about my manners, but she was engrossed in cross-examining violin boy’s head, so I turned back to pharmacy man, taking a deep breath as I did. “Thank you,” I said, avoiding his eyes in favor of staring at the name badge on his collar—Pascal, it said.
“…You’re trouble,” he said, with a sigh.
I bit my tongue against the retort that wanted to come out, waiting for him to go on.
He did, after a moment, looking at me with a seriousness that made me want to shrink into myself. “…But I suppose you can stay today, so long as you’re gone tomorrow morning. Once you leave you can never come back—I won’t be able to save you from the cops if they come sniffing again. Do you understand?”
I nodded, my mouth dry as the reality settled in my bones. I was a fugitive now—I owed this man more than I could ever repay him. Pascal, the man who saved my life as I knew it.
I promised myself I wouldn’t forget that name, and I never have.