Chapter Text
They called it a game, because calling it what it actually was left a weird taste in everybody’s mouth.
That, and you could make a lot of money at it if you knew what you were doing. Reno knew what he was doing.
Trying to judge how much time you had by sight didn’t work, not in this part of the tunnels. The headlights came on blinding almost at once. You’d either bail to early, or end up a stain on the tracks like Jamie last week.
You had to go by feel, and sound, which is probably why his buddies all started to panic when they saw he was standing there with his eyes closed, listening hard and letting his bones rattle as the train bears down on him.
"The hell are you doing?"
"Move, Red!"
"He’s going to-"
There are gaps in some parts of the track, places you can drop down between the boards into the disused service tunnels well after you’d have run out of time to jump away, and Reno’s still skinny enough to fit between them.
He thinks he hears Lisa screaming in the heart-stop second where he steps back and just drops, trusting memory to catch his hands where they need to be, but it’s swallowed by the bellow of the train, close enough to feel, and he just hangs on, lets the sound and weight of the thing knock his teeth together, crashing through him until he can’t feel his hands or his arms or his fucking lungs anymore.
It takes about ninety seconds for the train to pass, and when he climbs back up, pulls himself back to steady ground the horrified faces of the other teens flash rapidly through confusion, disbelief, happiness, anger, happiness again.
He was alive, and now he’d have the money in his pocket to keep himself that way another week.
What mattered other than that?