Chapter Text
In retrospect, the fight had been your fault—at least a little bit.
The rain comes down in a steady downpour above the shelter of the bus station; a frustrated huff lingers on your lips as you absently drum your fingers against the clammy metal armrest of the bench you’d chosen to lounge on.
A heavy, duffle is resting at your feet; the bright orange of it’s material is harsh and vibrant as all get out, and the sheer color itself and the immediate recollection it invokes is more than enough to plant a spell of feint nausea in the pit of your stomach. You focus instead on your mercifully gray hoodie strings, setting your jaw tensely as an unpleasant feeling of irritation wells in the back of your throat.
You tap your fingers harsher against the metal.
Dirk’s duffle bag is like a thorn in your side, it’s bothersome, prying, and nosey just like him, and fuckfuckfuck you for being pissed off enough to accidently snatch the wrong one from the top most shelf of your shared closet.
Then again—maybe you’d been seeing too much red at the time to notice or care.
You kick a stray, littered, can into the street with your sneaker; glancing down at the sidewalk again with a frown. ‘Home’ wasn’t something you were feeling to be totally honest here—hell, you probably wouldn’t be feeling ‘home’, for a while, yet. Maybe you’d shack up at Rose’s for a few weeks until you cooled down a bit (until both of you cooled down and Dirk wasn’t threatening to tell your secret to everyone and their fucking grandmas).
The bus schedule feels like a heavy piece of lead in your back pocket, it weighs you down, makes you feel a dozen times heavier—like you might fall straight through the damn bench, splinter right through that wood.
You bite your lip.
Unfolding the schedule, you, not for the first time, wonder how far you could go before D figured things out and cut off your credit card to make you come home. The fake ID could get you pretty far you think, but even seventeen was pushing it for most people with the sophomore-ish baby face you’d been sporting all year; forget about twenty-one.
You take your wallet out of your back pocket, clipping and unclipping the magnet almost monotonously with a slight frown and a thoughtful furrow of your eyebrows. Bro might kill you—D would kill you. So, you try not to think about catching the next six buses to the nearest state border, you draw in a deep breath, crumpling the schedule messily as you hastily shove the thing in your back pocket as if it might sting you or some shit. The frustration burns in the back of your throat anew and seems to spread to your chest. Your jaw tenses and you’re suddenly so, so, so fucking tired and irritable and holy hell you hate this. You hate all of this; you are officially calling bullshit on the universe for putting you through even a minuscule fraction of this shit.
Your name is DAVE STRIDER you are SIXTEEN YEARS-OLD and you want to FLY.
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For the longest time, since you’d turned thirteen, you’ve felt restless—impatient, even, though you hadn’t known for what exactly. You’d thought of asking Rose, of course you did, but the thought of your cousin getting her slimy, slippery metaphorical tentacles around your brain was the furthest thing you ever wanted to be 100% honest with yourself, here.
So, you’d kept the feeling inside. Bottled it up, locked away the key and tossed it into the middle of the Indian Ocean—it stirred once in a while, of course (what secret didn’t?) but you dealt.
At least until you realized everywhere else you could be.
It happened early in the morning, you had been on one of your caffeine fueled studying binges, you hadn’t slept in at least 72 hours minimum and in hindsight you probably should’ve made more time for power-naps. You know, instead of flipping on the TV and plopping face down on the opened futon like a giant, study-resilient, unproductive couch potato—just food for thought.
Your hand had groped around for the remote, a short break, you’d promised yourself, a short break should get you going again; at least until noon rolled around, anyway.
A special on “Most Beautiful Places in America” had been showing on some no-name History network you hadn’t cared to remember the name of that time of morning—you’d been fully prepared to pass out before the program ended, again, to be totally honest with yourself.
You’d stared blankly at the screen for the longest time, as you remarkably managed not to clonk out during the commercials, in your exhausted haze, however, when the documentary finally got going? You remember feeling a tiny little ‘spark’.
It’s hard to explain; even to you, it’s always been hard to explain. It ignites something, something small granted, but it’s warm and there and it makes all the tiredness, all the wariness lift from your shoulders and you’re suddenly light as a feather. Everything seems to just go ‘poof’, it all floats away and you find yourself focused on the images flashing before your eyes.
You’re still so, so tired, but you suddenly want to see. You want to see everyone and everything, you want to go everywhere and witness so many things. The Sequoia Redwoods are so overwhelmingly large and they look so massive you wonder what it’d be like to just stand and front of one and put your hand to the bark and compare how much wider its trunk is. The Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Great Lakes, you just want to see so much. The need is so there, and so strong, sudden, that you’re not even sure what to do about it, how you’re even going to handle it, not yet at least; you about ready to overflow—you’re wide-awake and antsy now, for the first time in a long while, you don’t feel tired.
Your hand starts itching to sketch more often after that.
You borrow Dirk’s colored pencils, climbing the stairs to the roof starting that very morning, and outline the sunrise with vibrant reds, oranges, and sharp, defined violets. Bro gives you hell for all the times you end up sleeping up there some mornings, Dirk is just pissed his pencils keep disappearing. D isn’t there but that’s okay, you’re plenty used to it already.
Practicing stubbornly and persistently, to your surprise you start to get good just as good as Dirk, just as good as Bro’s sketches and robotic diagrams, you get good and the itching grows, you grow tired of that same Houston sunrise and you still want to see so much more, so much more it turns into an ever constant ache that never, really leaves.
(Come December 3rd, your fourteenth birthday, you get a professional set of pencils—ones of your own, from D. Mailed apologetically from Hollywood for the third year in a row, but they’re shiny and new and yours, so, you’re grinning far too much to care for once.)
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Junior year you get an offer for a hefty scholarship from some prestigious art university up North on the west coast after you place first in several state contests and place second in a national. Your guidance counselor calls you out of pre-Calc and tells you that your motivation is lacking, your grades aren’t as high as they were last semester, work harder, try harder, blah, blah, blah, blah.
“Ma’am, can I go back and sit through pre-calculus now? If I don’t I’ll end up bein’ behind again, wouldn’t want that now would we?” You had faintly muttered in a dull, droning tone, tracing your finger over and over the coarse surface of Ms. P’s desk. You watch the small, tiny dwarf of a woman puff out her rosy cheeks in clear frustration and you almost feel bad. Ms. Paint had that effect on people.
“Mr. Strider--!”
“Sorry, I should probably split, I’ll do better in Physics, alright—? Don’t even sweat it Miss P.” You’d wanted to take Anatomy. You still did, but the school had insisted on your classes in particular being centered on math for some (likely rigged) assholish reason.
Mrs. Paint sighs and runs a hand through her whitening hair, “Dave, you’ve had all A’s since first semester of freshman year, you were up there with your brothers.” Your mouth presses into a thin line at that and you visibly dunk your head to hide the troubled furrow of your brow, “You have several D’s and an F, the only classes you’re getting A’s in are art and creative writing.”
She frowns hard at you and you slump into your chair, taking a sudden interest in the wall, you mentally say the next words that come out of her mouth along with her in near perfect sync—you’ve heard them repeated more than enough to know them by heart, after all.
Please Dave, you have so much more potential, you can do better than this.
“Please Dave, you have so much more potential, you can do better than this.”
That day, you ask Bro to pick you up early from fourth period and he does, he doesn’t say a word on the way home but you somehow get a sinking feeling in the pit of your gut that he’s disappointed in you too. Everyone seems to be disappointed in you these days.
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The bus pulls up and you sullenly stand to your feet, making a grab for your (Dirk’s) duffle bag, your only thoughts are of how to deal with Rose’s usual prying questions when you pop up on her door step at three in the morning (again) and of how cowardly you feel, not having the courage to move forward. Striders weren't cowards, Striders were strong, they took risks; they made things of themselves. They were a lot of things but they sure as hell weren't cowards (maybe you were never really a Strider to begin with).
These thoughts, ironically enough, are the last tangible things you recall feeling before your entire world changes—for better or for worse? You don’t think you’ll ever know.