Work Text:
Delaware
Helly doesn’t know why it came to mind.
She doesn’t know anything about Delaware, beyond the name. It’s boring, she thinks. Unremarkable.
Maybe it’s where she’s from. Maybe it’s where they are. Maybe it means something.
But she doesn’t want maybes to cling to, the way the others all grabbed onto something.
Irving to the rules, Dylan to his finger traps and Mark to Petey, who he quotes every other sentence, eyes big and wide and sad like they were from the start, watering from being hit by a speaker and his absence.
Helly doesn’t want to ponder scraps. She wants to be fucking free.
Helena is excellently, proudly educated, in all virtues, tempers, work ethic and especially in family history.
She knows Delaware is The First State, because on December 7, 1787, it became the first of the 13 original states to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Its other nicknames are The Small Wonder, The Blue Hen State and The Diamond State but these are less important.
What matters is to be first, to forge the way, to begin a legacy.
Kier was the First, and from him the Eagans will birth a nation to rival them all. No matter what she has to sacrifice, down to her own life.
California
Dylan doesn’t know any movies, per se (Irving taught him that phrase, but it was Petey who grinned when he used it correctly) but he has an idea of them.
All cool blonde babes and fast cars and sun and sand. Hollywood is probably where his outie is from, and that’s why he lives on a kickass painted houseboat and has ladies in and out of there all the time.
Probably, they begged him to be an actor, because his skills have to be good. Sticky Head wouldn’t be super beloved the way he is if he wasn’t.
But he’s here now.
D fucking hates the smell of popcorn, from the hours spent working his second, later third job, at the multiplex since he was sixteen, too tired and too poor to watch the movies himself.
But that’s where he met Marisol, and that’s the one good thing he’s done, her and the kids, every one of them making him feel like a box office hero.
With the money he’s pulling in now, getting home with the energy to be there, Carli on his shoulder saying “Daddy, could we go to Disneyland?” and realizing they actually could one day, now, he can’t be sorry.
Minnesota
Mark thinks Minnesota is cold. With a lot of lakes too, which is funny somehow, but he can picture it in his head more or less and it’s always dotted with water. Like Mark himself.
Sometimes the edges of his cuffs, the hems of his pants, are damp. His outie must like water, and maybe that’s why he sniffles so much, not the elevator.
Mark knows it’s his fault he’s not used to it, always cold and off kilter, like he’s been sitting out in the rain.
Petey notices sometimes, settling a warm hand on his shoulder, eyes kind, and Mark tries to smile back.
Mark’s spent most of his life in the same county: shuttling between Ganz and school, then up to Kier. His mom and sister too, but his dad’s folks came from Wisconsin and he would watch the game between them and Minnesota religiously.
They had a Great Lakes calendar in the kitchen and they sat under it for every meal.
He and Devon made blanket forts, pretending they were sailing the waters.
He doesn’t know when he stopped feeling safe there, but he knows when he stopped feeling safe at all, anywhere, the cops coming up the drive to tell him of the accident.
Florida
Petey can only think of two things about Florida: oranges and beaches.
He’s never had an orange, or orange flavored anything, in his whole time at Lumon. He doesn’t know if he’s allergic, because it hasn’t come up so he can’t be sure.
So he dreams of oranges, if you can call it dreaming, makes the water a little too hot and steamy when he washes his hands.
The hand soap, the good soap, smells a bit like citrus and he’s careful with it, helping Mark wash the bad kind and the feel of Graner’s touch off when they send him back from the break room.
Peter spends almost every summer down in Miami with his grandmother in the same studio apartment his mother and aunts grew up in. He loves it there almost as much as he hates it, the stifling humidity and the bugs.
When he and Nina get married, up North long after his grandmother went in the ground, they splurge on a honeymoon to Key West, nothing but sun and sand and love.
They make June on that trip, and that alone makes it all worth it, every second, every bitter fight. It’s her he thinks of, wanting her to be proud, when they make the offer.
New York
Irving likes order and stability.
It wasn’t there, at first. He understands why, the department was so new, the rotation so constant.
But, to paraphrase the Handbook, beginnings are very delicate times, and much care is needed. Irving began his so inauspiciously, naked even! They didn’t have the conference room table set up then, none of the kinder protocols there are now.
Irving hardly remembers it. Chooses not to, because the kids are here now, at last and finally, things won’t change.
Kier’s words have come true and his faith has been rewarded. He believes that, truly, he does.
Irv was born in the Philippines, and named after a dead Marine, because that’s where his father was stationed and that had been his best friend.
He doesn’t remember it, or half the other bases they lived in, his father’s chest heavy with medals, eyes heavy with the cost.
His mother praying the rosary, Catholic discipline as tight as the Navy’s. Annapolis for a while, Brooklyn for even less.
He liked New York better in the songs he listened to, sounding the same no matter where he played them: a city big and bright and open with possibility and as real as a dream.