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Ordinarily, Ash would resent having to spend her Saturday at work, but it’s been raining since before she woke up today. If it’s between sorting books in the back of Nockfell’s one secondhand store or being expected to drop everything to keep Ben both indoors AND entertained, she knows what she’d rather be doing.
“You know I found a whole pot leaf in the last batch?” Sal asks, carrying in another box of donated books from the back room. He sets it down by her knee, where she’s already opened up a box of her own, and then joins her on the floor. “Somebody had in there as a bookmark, not glued on paper or anything, just. Leaf. It was ancient, too, I tried to pick it up and it disintegrated.”
“Now we’ll never know what aged weed is like,” Ash shakes her in in mock regret as she examines a self-help book. They’re supposed to be sorting through the donations and throwing out anything too damaged to sell. This one seems in good condition, but Ash still has a hard time imagining anyone buying it. “What was the book, anyway?”
“I think Midsummer Night’s Dream?”
“Perfect. Read exactly as Shakespeare intended.”
“Did Shakespeare know about weed?”
“If he did, that’d be what he intended. Did you get breakfast?”
“Uh-” Sal seems startled, then pauses, taking a moment to think about it. “I...”
“If you’ve gotta think that hard, I feel like that’s a no,” Ash snorts, with an affectionate eye roll. “Hang on, I figured-”
She leans back, groping behind her until she finds the bag she left on the lumpy armchair nobody ever uses. Triumphant, she pulls out a packet of cookies she’d smuggled out of the house before Ben could demand any, and tosses it to Sal. “Catch!”
He catches it with both hands, then throws them back to her. “These are YOURS.”
“I brought them for YOU,” Ash corrects, accidentally dropping them almost immediately after they land in her hands. “Shit. Did you break these? I bring you cookies and you break them? Horrible manners, Fisher. Where’d you grow up, a cave?”
“A tiny one up in the mountains, a few miles away from the circus you were abandoned at,” Sal agrees, craning his neck over to inspect the damage. “Sorry. Are they all broken?”
“I think just a couple,” Ash decides, opening the bag. “But fortunately still edible. Here.”
She hands him a half, stuffing her own in her mouth before it can crumble further. She knows Mr. O’Leary won’t be in today, but she’s still half expecting him to burst out of the backroom, shouting about food around books being a sin.
Although the store’s always closed on Saturdays- supposedly to clean and take inventory- Mr. O’Leary is usually there anyway. He doesn’t do any work, he just tells Ash and Sal what to do, hovering disapprovingly nearby and barking out corrections while he watches them. This is the first time he’s had them do the maintenance on their own after nearly a year of working for him. He claims it’s to see if they’re competent enough to handle things alone, but Ash suspects that he just saw the weather report and decided he wanted to spend the weekend at home.
Sal hesitates a moment, then sets the cookie down on his knee while he undoes the bottom straps of his prosthetic. Rummaging in her bag for the thermos of tea she brought with her, Ash takes a swig, then passes it over to Sal for whenever he’s ready.
“Thanks, by the way,” Sal says, after finishing the cookie. She can see his chin and lower lip, but not much else. “You didn’t have to bring me anything.”
“I wanted to,” Ash says simply. Since discovering he has something of a sweet tooth, she’s started keeping things she thinks he might like on hand. He forgets to eat too often.
And anyway, she..
...she likes giving him stuff.
He always seems surprised.
----
“Do you think Mr. O’Leary would care if I took this?”
Ash blinks herself awake from her half-doze against the armchair, rubbing her eyes and shaking her head a little bit to clear it before looking over to see what Sal’s talking about.
He’s taken the prosthetic off completely- presumably for better access to their dwindling supply of cookies, secure in the knowledge that the door’s locked and no other employee is going to bother braving the weather to come in if they don’t have to- and is holding a truly enormous book. It looks thick enough that if it landed on someone’s head, they’d be lucky if all they got out of it was a concussion.
She cranes her neck to read what’s written on the spine. Lord of the Rings. Sal seems delighted.
“I think you’d be doing him a favor by taking it off his hands, because I can’t imagine anybody else buying it. It’s bigger than my head.” Ash says honestly. She has no idea where he finds the patience for stuff like this, but the fact that it makes him happy means, as far as she’s concerned, that he should have it.
“Just cuz it’s all three put together,” Sal assures her, cleaning some dirt off the front cover with his thumb. “It looks a lot more intense than it is, on their own they’re like... reasonably sized books. Each one only takes a couple of days.”
“A couple of days, he says,” Ash repeats, dryly. “Like how Frankenstein was only supposed to take a couple of days, or..?”
“It would’ve just been a couple of days if Mr. Leon didn’t keep confiscating it. I could’ve finished it in under three days if he’d left me ALONE-”
“Or if you stopped reading during class,” Ash suggests, giggling as Sal looks up to give her an affronted look, evidently betrayed. “Y’know, before then, I think he actually liked you-”
“I was DONE! I finished everything he gave me, I had literally nothing else to do-”
“You could’ve done the extra credit.”
“I didn’t WANT to do the extra credit. I wanted to read Frankenstein. I should’ve been allowed to read Frankenstein! Frankenstein is an amazing piece of classic literature, and any other teacher would’ve let it slide, but just because it wasn’t written in French, suddenly it’s a distraction. Who’s side are you even on?”
“It’s not playing sides, it’s just being the devil’s-”
“THE DEVIL HAS ENOUGH ADVOCATES.”
Ash bursts into giggles again as Sal scowls at her. It’s so rare to see him being petty, that’s usually her thing. Ash has a list of minor enemies dating back to the guy who stole three different erasers from her in third grade and never said sorry. Sal, meanwhile, believes in forgiving and forgetting every major offense ever committed against him but does have the occasional sticking point- and for some reason said points are almost always things nobody else would remember, much less care about. She gets an endless amount of joy out of listening to him when the roles are reversed and he’s decided to hold a grudge.
"Devil's advocate," Sal grumbles to himself again with more grouchiness than Ash knows he actually feels. She scoots closer to him to give him a pair of melodramatically remorseful puppy dog eyes, which he refuses to acknowledge for almost a minute before cracking with an exaggerated sigh and squeezing her hand. "I guess you're forgiven this time."
"This time."
"But only this time!"
"Oh, yes, only this time. I'll be very careful from here on out."
"Liar."
It's Ash's turn to give a gasp of exaggerated affront, making them both laugh.
"So I take it you've read these before, then?" Ash asks, resting her head on his shoulder and looking down at the book. It looks like it's seen decent care, by paperback standards. Either not read frequently, or previously owned by somebody who'd liked it enough to treat it gently.
"Oh, yeah. We used to have a really old copy of Fellowship of the Ring when I was little, and I think that was the first real book I ever read. Started me down the path of- what's Larry call it?"
"Nerd Lore?"
"Nerd Lore. There was this one librarian who was always at the library whenever I came by, and when I first came to the desk to ask if they had The Two Towers- well, in the beginning she kept asking if I needed any help reading it or anything, which was sort of annoying, but in her defense I was like, six. I think she was just worried I might’ve bitten off more than I could chew and didn’t want me to get discouraged. When she finally realized I was managing it fine on my own, though, she had tons of suggestions for other books I might be into- Dracula, The Tempest, David Copperfield. I spent almost the whole summer there.”
He smiles a little, as if remembering.
"I think they discuss a lot of those in Lit Club," Ash recalls. She's not a member- Literature Club is mostly an after school hang out for the AP students to talk about the enormous books they read and projects they do, and she most assuredly does not qualify for those circles. But Sal probably could, if he wanted. He's not in any AP courses right now, but she knows he's been debating about it for next year, and even if he doesn't, he's SMART. Their classmates know that. He'd fit in with the Lit Club kids just fine. "I know for sure they like Lord of the Rings, anyway. You should check it out sometime."
"I did visit for a couple of meetings, but..." There's a vagueness to his tone that he reserves for when he's purposefully being diplomatic, but personally feeling disapproving.
"Not up to standards?" Ash fills in, surprised and amused as always at how polite he is, even about things he doesn't like.
"I think we just appreciated different things about it," Sal finishes, leafing through the first few pages. "I wouldn't have been a good fit there."
"What, just because you don't like the same bits of the books they do? That seems a little overkill. Were they seriously giving you grief about that?"
"Not the books, exactly. It's not really about- well, it is sort of about them, I guess? Less the books themselves, and more what they represent."
"What do you mean?"
It’s like, uh...” Sal furrows his eyebrows while he tries to work out what he wants to say, torn lips twisted to one side in contemplation. One of the things Ash loves about seeing Sal’s face is that he’s endlessly expressive- behind the serene neutrality of the prosthetic, every facial feature plays an active role in the conversation.
(“I would love to play poker with you sometime,” Todd had remarked on it once, as Sal carefully applied bactine to a cut above his eye. “I would clean you the fuck out.”)
“I’ve noticed that a lot of people who’ve read this stuff kind of act like it makes them... better than people who haven’t, if that makes sense? Like it’s some kind of badge saying ‘I’m smarter than you, I’m deeper than you, what I do for fun is challenging for you but not for me, because I’m just so much better than you are’, and I hate that.”
“Oh,” Ash says, slightly taken aback by the intensity with which he says it. She’s familiar with what he’s describing- she’s used to being the person that the readers like to feel superior to. She didn’t realize anyone who wasn’t on the receiving end of it ever noticed, though, much less felt bothered by it.
“It drives me insane. I want more people to read the stuff I like, because it’s awesome and I know a lot of them would be into it if they gave it a chance. But then I go hang out with other people who HAVE, and I listen to them talk about it, and every third sentence is making fun of people who only ever read The Hobbit, or who didn’t know obscure fucking pieces of elf-lore that are mentioned for two goddamn seconds in Return of the King, or who have difficulty understanding some of the language or references because Tolkien was a professor and all his stuff is written like it- and I sit there, staring, because are you kidding me? No wonder nobody wants to read anything new. The people who already know about it make them feel stupid for even trying!”
"True," Ash says, partly because it IS true- the way the Lit Club kids talk about Lord of the Rings has always sounded sort of like voluntary school, and while that's fun for them, it cemented to her that it's not for somebody who has to work to maintain a B average- and partly as a prompt for Sal to keep talking. It's unusual to hear him go this in depth about his opinions. He generally plays them pretty close to his chest in an effort to get along with everybody.
In a weird way, getting to see a facet of who he actually is, no downplaying, no masks, nothing stifled or silenced in the name of making himself unobjectionable- like he doesn’t feel he needs to make himself unobjectionable for her- that’s making her feel...
....well.
It's making her feel.
"Bottom line, anyone who does the 'If you're not like me, you're not good enough for my hobbies' thing is a jackass."
"Amen."
“Like- setting aside how goddamn pretentious that is, I feel like that attitude goes completely against what half of those writers intended, anyway. Shakespeare? His shit wasn’t supposed to be high art, he just wrote plays for normal, working people at the time to come and enjoy, and guess what? They were still good! Something doesn’t have to be aimed specifically at rich people, or educated people, or any one group of people to be meaningful, and you’d think this would be proof of that- but somehow it’s been taken in the other direction. They’re like ‘Because it’s good, because it’s worthwhile, that makes it our thing’, and go out of their way to make it as inaccessible as possible for anybody else. Nobody should feel intimidated to read something- not Shakespeare, not Tolstoy, not Tolkien- you shouldn’t feel like ‘Oh, I’m not smart enough for that’, they’re stories. They’re supposed to be for everybody who’s ever had the emotions the characters have had! They’re supposed to make you realize that we’re all just people, and we’ve always been people, they’re-”
He trails off. Ash waits.
“They’re meant to make you feel less alone.” Sal says finally.
And there’s a warmth in the way he says it, like there is nothing that could possibly be more important than that, a strength like if he has anything to say about it, no one will ever be denied the chance to feel less lonely, and before Ash is even conscious of making the choice, she's kissing him.
Sal makes a startled sound, going almost cross-eyed trying to look at her as she pulls away to give them both a chance to breathe- and then his hands are in her hair, holding her close as she kisses him again, and again, and again.
---
“So, just curious,” Sal says sometime later, lazily scanning the description on the back of an album somebody stuffed inside Leaves of Grass. “But you've had to sit through me rambling like... a million times before, and that was the first time that, uh...”
His eyes flick towards hers. Ash gives a shit-eating grin, waggling her eyebrows.
“Stop,” he tells her, stifling a laugh as he rolls his eyes and still somehow manages to blush, for all the world like he hadn’t just had his tongue in her mouth twenty minutes ago. Ash bats her eyes with an inquisitive humming sound as though she can’t imagine WHAT he means, and breaks into a smile when he chuckles.
“Just... any particular reason that really did it for you today?”
“I dunno." She says honestly, shrugging slightly. It's difficult to pin down what, exactly, makes her want to pounce on Sal in moments like these. Maybe it's a combination of things. He'll just be sitting there, completely engaged in something, and as he does it or tells her about it, the unconscious passion he has makes her want to kiss him absolutely stupid.
He gives whatever he cares about 100 percent. She likes that a lot.
"Sometimes when we're talking, I just realize it's a crime nobody's making out with you," Ash airily tells him in an effort to make him laugh again, because she suspects if she tries to put her real thoughts into words, they won't come out right.
"Is there some magic word I can say to get you to kiss me, then?" Sal asks in the half teasing way he gets when they joke, amused, fond, but still the slightest bit tentative, as much as he tries to cover it up.
"Oh, absolutely."
"Yeah?"
"Two words, actually," Ash tips her head to the side, with the overly innocent expression she uses when she's doing a Bit. 'Kiss. Me".
Sal gives a small huff of amusement, rolling his eyes as she drags him over into a hug and allowing himself to be manhandled.
-----
He never asks for anything.
Ash notices that, at some point.
He’s quietly self sufficient- a product, she suspects, of spending his formative years in a home that wasn’t… terribly attentive.
(She doesn’t know- at least not for sure. She doesn’t see Henry much, but she notices Sal doesn’t seem to either, and that doesn’t seem to be a new development. The few times she comes over when he is home, he always seems to be asleep, and Sal always hesitates for just the barest second before inviting her into a different room.)
Whenever he needs something, if he can get it himself, he does. If he can’t, he just does without, as though it were never that important in the first place.
----
Sal laughs quietly, just a quick little huff of amusement that disappears almost as soon as it happens. If it’s something really funny, she’ll see his shoulders still shaking a little while after, as though he’s still giggling about it, but there’s no sound, like he’s trying to restrain himself. He’s just… quiet in general.
It’s not that he’s shy- he gets along with people, even people who aren’t particularly pleasant to him, and has been known to mouth off on occasion- he just doesn’t talk a ton, and when he does, it’s never very loudly.
---
He isn’t particularly big to begin with- short, slight, with deceptively fragile looking bird wrists and thin arms- but sometimes…
...his posture’s a little bit hunched in general, and that Ash could put down to inadvertance, something he doesn’t notice he’s doing, it’s not as if she or Larry is a prime example either…
But there are times when she notices him drawing himself even further in, like he’s trying to pull himself out of the way. He doesn’t take up much space in general, but he seems to want to take up even less.
He goes out of his way to make his presence as minimal as possible to everyone around him. To stay out of the way, to be quiet, to never trouble anyone with anything, almost apologetically, as though he’s trying to make up for being there at all.
He goes through life as though he’s an inconvenience, and the realization makes Ash’s heart hurt.
She doesn’t push him. She knows that if she acknowledges it at all, he’ll start trying to hide it, which is the last thing she wants him to do. The only reason she ever knows something’s wrong is because he doesn’t notice when he’s accidentally given her signs. She’s gotten good at guessing when and how he needs help, and can step in now to do it without him even mentioning the problem.
(He always seems dumbstruck when she does.)
He’s stopped protesting when she does things for him, which she considers a step in the right direction. Progress is slow, but it’s still progress.
She hopes that over time he’ll get used to the idea that there are people in his life now who want him to be in theirs, and asking for something is not going to scare them away.
------
"Hey, Ash?"
She recognizes the tone, easy, casual, and only ever in use when he's nervous and trying to cover it up.
He knows it doesn't work on her, and it's been a long time since she's heard him try- a long time since he's had any reason to be nervous around her. She frowns, slightly. He's still carefully looking in the other direction.
"What's up?"
He takes a deep breath.
"Kiss me?"
He asks it like it's a question, like there's a chance she could say no, like it's unimaginably presumptuous of him to even ask. There's a half joking edge to it that she hears him slap onto anything he feels is too honest, an almost protective thing- like at the faintest signal of surprise, or humor, or discomfort from his audience he can turn it, turn himself, into a joke. Just kidding, I wouldn't do that to you, I would never really ask someone like you to give something to someone like me-
She surges forward and kisses him.
He makes the faintest noise of surprise, and then relief, melting into it and responding in kind.
“Anything you want,” Ash says, breaking the kiss at last, still cradling Sal’s face in her hands. There’s something heartbreakingly vulnerable in the way he's looking at her- no defenses, nothing hidden, no protections and no jokes- just a strange mix of wonder and fear and want, like in a single moment she’s given him everything he’d never dared dream to hope for and could take it all back in a instant.
There’s nothing there to protect him. She’s never seen him completely unguarded the way he is in this moment, and if she lets him fall, she knows that he’s not going to be able to get back up.
‘Never,’ she thinks, and the thought thunders and roars and BURNS through her mind as she gently presses another kiss to his mouth in a silent reassurance. ‘Never.’
She wishes that words came as easily to her as they do to Sal in moments like this.
“Anything you want,” she repeats, pressing her forehead to his. “Anything you ever want, anything at all, you can have it.
“All you ever have to do is ask.”