Chapter Text
He thought he was overselling himself.
Pete was told to not get too close to anybody, and he answered that it wasn’t his fault he was so charming. He was joking, he knew he was a disaster, he knew he was going to drive people away, knew it wouldn’t be a problem.
But then Pete met them. Then Pete got external support, laughs, encouragement. He wasn’t sure if it was Andy getting a library card for the sole purpose of helping him read The Little Prince or Joe sneaking in free sodas with his order or Patrick getting him to Lake Michigan’s beaches in the middle of winter to look at the sunset... but Pete was itching to crash.
Why wasn’t he allowed to grow close to people? Becaus Pete was an Android in the Intertime Witness Protection Program. Yes, really. He wouldn’t have been allowed to become friends with a human in his own era anyways, but he logically assumed it would’ve been that much harder to become friends with three humans in 1947 Chicago where he was sent.
And it turned out he was wrong; because emotions he didn’t know he could feel were sneaking up on him like fingertips on his neck and tearing him apart like nails on a chalkboard. The only thing keeping him from telling his friends the truth was the number 207 imprinted on his shoulder as if he were cattle...and by that point he had started covering it up with a Band-aid.
He found himself on 63rd Street once again, throwing back a frisbee at some white kid while trying to write. Human speech was always off for him, but he had become addicted to it. He couldn’t think his thoughts in code, not anymore.
Spring was setting in,as was construction around the Chicago power grid after the war; electricity Pete depended on to survive. Diners fed the workers, diners like Joe’s.
Well, it was an exaggeration to say the diner was his. That place was the Trohman family’s, and Joe had occasionally (constantly) described it as a fungal rot on his sandwich.
That thought made Pete drop his focus and he eventually closed his notebook, a notebook full of lines he’d try to sell to make a living. It was like spraying and praying with a non-automatic gun, disorganized thoughts shooting everywhere when he couldn’t afford them to.
Oh, yes, back to the diner. The only place in Chicago that exclusively played Charlie Christian on a jukebox despite no legal obligations to do so. Employing wannabe guitarist Joe Trohman and mysterious-gentleman-who-is-mysteriously-happy-about-not-cooking-the-meat-for-burgers Andy Hurley.
And then there was Patrick, Joe’s older best friend and certified musician better than any Muddy Waters or Charlie Christian. At least from Pete’s point of view, because due to some atrocity of the universe he was struggling to get signed.
Notes and receipts were flying between Joe and Andy during the workers’ lunch break, most of them with inside jokes on the back. It was like a completely different tongue to Pete, so stealing them from Joe at the end of the day was always a highlight. The doodles about the guy with the bird’s nest on his head? He had seen them a million times already and he’d yet to find the poor man.
Patrick was patching up the dying press in the back, son of a technician that he was. Pete and Patrick actually bonded over it when they met... Patrick has forced him to read H.G Wells at some point. Pete was flabbergasted by the lack of accurate time travel and joked as much. He preferred Hemingway like that.
Pete leaned over the counter, looking at Patrick with a smirk.
“Ya looked at the ink cartridges yet?”
Patrick sighed “If it’s the cartridges again I’ll murder Joe in cold blood...”
“Wow, we got an Al Capone code red over here.”
Joe ran about, whistling along to the yet another Charlie Christian song innocently as Patrick’s worst annoyances were confirmed. Like clockwork, Andy walked over to Patrick with a cheese grater in his hand as he cooked, which probably took Patrick’s plans from an 11 to a 6.
Pete couldn’t wait to see the prank war unfold over the next few days, inevitably breaking the press down again. As if Chicago teenagers hadn’t driven the place to the ground yet, a bunch of grown men in their 20s were going to do the job for them.
Pete may have been able to survive any magnitude of car crash, but he knew for a fact that his heart wasn’t going to live this spring down.