Work Text:
After two very awkward job interviews in the morning - not really much demand for ex-military with Special Ops training in the general job market, apparently - John walks into „The Machine“, a repair garage with a reputation for accepting tricky cases, without much hope.
He takes three steps before a compact Persian woman with an angry facial expression slides out from under a convertible and nearly hits his shin with a wrench.
“Move,” she grunts, and walks straight past him to retrieve a different tool.
Even her ponytail looks pissed off.
There are a dozen cars propped up on two-post lifts or with their hoods opened in the main hall, parts of the engines or frames missing. Through the windows of the far wall John can see office spaces and a lounge for customer reception, there’s a man with a headset typing away at a computer, probably making appointments. His nametag reads “Leon”.
Across from the reception, there is a dog curled up on a large pillow and chewing on a plastic toy - a Belgian Malinois, John notes, a beautiful animal.
John walks around a little, taking in the place.
There’s a desk in the corner where a woman is working on a set of electrical parts, hands wrapped up in multicolored wires. There are tattoo sleeves curling down from the straps of her black tank top, black nail polish on her fingers. She has a hearing aid in one ear, John notices, but quickly averts his eyes when she looks up at him and catches him watching her.
John passes a red Ford Mustang before taking notice of the man who is working on the car engine, bent over the opened hood.
“Sorry, do you probably know where I can find the owner?” John asks.
The man straightens and turns, wiping his hands on a piece of cloth. He wears round spectacles and, surprisingly, a vest and tie combo that John wouldn’t have placed in a car garage at all: The other workers are in blue overalls, ratty jeans or work shirts.
He looks at John with blue, owlish eyes behind his glasses.
“Do you have a problem with your car?” He asks.
He sounds polite, educated. John squints his eyes at him. How does a guy like him end up fixing cars?
“I heard there’s a job offer for an, uhm, mechanic? I don’t really have much experience with cars, but I thought I’d try my hand,” John admits, a little sheepishly.
“What is your experience with cars, Mr.--“
“Reese. I mean, John. I’m John.” The man nods without offering his own name, so John goes on. “My experience with cars is, uh -- I know how to drive stick?”
The blue eyes sparkle with humor.
“I see.”
John pushes his hands into the pockets of his pants. He’s not particularly looking forward to yet another rejection, and he actually enjoys having a conversation with someone that lasts longer than three minutes.
“So, the guy who runs this place - is he an okay boss?” John asks.
The man seems to consider that.
“He doesn’t particularly enjoy dealing with people, and you’d probably consider him… eccentric, I guess. Rather demanding, too,” he adds, with a secretive little smile.
“I’ve had much worse,” John says.
“Why did you choose this particular place to try your luck?” The man asks.
John shrugs.
“I heard that you like to try the tough cases: Vintage cars that are supposedly beyond fixing, the kind of vehicles that would end up on the scrap yard because nobody would even try their luck on them. I’m… kind of a tough case, myself, so.”
The man crosses his arms in front of his chest.
“Ex-military?” He asks.
John blinks at him.
“How do you--“
“You checked all the exit routes when you came in, surveyed the perimeter, which hints at military tactic. If you were this thorough in your job, you were probably a good soldier, too, so: Competence but not many applicable work skills outside of the military?”
The man rearranges a line of wrenches of different sizes on a tabletop while talking, not bothering to look at John, as if he’s sure that John listens attentively.
“Especially if you were involved in some kind of Black ops business, you would have ended up with large holes in your biography that you would have trouble explaining to a future employer. Which is why someone who would have an obvious, profitable future in private security ends up applying for a mechanic job at a repair garage,” he finishes in a bored tone, like John is being extremely obvious.
John feels like somebody emptied a bucket with cold water over his head.
“Uhm,” he says, eloquently, and the little man smirks at that.
“Harold, I don’t know how to tell you this, but when I said “Miss Groves can’t have that expensive piece of equipment that she’s been wanting”, that didn’t translate to “Please build her one out of spare parts while ignoring your actual responsibilities”,” a man with a Texan accent says behind them.
John turns around.
He’s tall and blonde and has the air of a salesman, handsome with a winning smile on his face.
“Nathan Ingram,” he says, extending a hand to John, “co-owner of this delightful venture that will certainly go bankrupt in the next few months if my business partner keeps hanging out in the repair hall and playing with technical equipment instead of taking care of his business,” he adds.
John turns around.
“You own this place?” He asks.
Harold, or whatever his name is, makes an unimpressed face.
“Nathan and I came up with the idea in college,” he says. “I had assumed that he would take care of all of the parts that have to do with people and I would end up fixing things all day.”
Ingram rubs his eyes with the palm of his hand.
“We wrote our business plan on a napkin in a bar, I don’t know what I was expecting,” he says.
Harold huffs at that.
“Also, Root - she prefers to go by her artists’ name - is a magician with electrical parts, and you refuse to buy her things.”
”Because things are expensive, Harold, and we have no money,” Ingram whines, but John can hear the fondness in it.
“I’m done with the Pontiac GTO,” the angry woman calls from across the hall. “Should I go and tell the owner that he’s screwing up the engine with his terrible driving?”
“Dear god, no,” Ingram mutters and walks away quickly, probably to stop her from actually talking to any customers.
John chuckles.
“Eccentric and demanding, huh?”
Harold pushes his glasses further up the bridge of his nose.
“So I’ve been told,” he says, and motions for John to follow him.
--
Sameen is on her back beneath a 1963 Austin Healey, only her legs and a pair of heavy leather boots sticking out.
“How about a break?” Root asks, leaning against the edge of the desk.
There’s the sound of metal on metal and then an unpleasant screeching noise.
“Why don’t you go bother Harold,” Shaw’s muffled voice says from under the car.
Root takes the plastic bag and lets it crackle in her hands.
“I brought food,” Root says.
Sameen rolls out from under the car in one swift move and stands up from her creeper, dusting off her pants.
Root fusses with her hair, the side without the undercut, in an attempt to hide her smile.
There’s an oily smear across Sameen’s right cheek and her ponytail has suffered a little, hair falling into her face.
“Spare ribs from that BBQ place on 26th that you like,” Root says, handing her a white bag and a handful of napkins, and Shaw gives her a suspicious look.
“You went all the way down there to get spare ribs from a place that you once called a glorified sports bar full of dead meat and bourbon,” Shaw says, retrieving a rib dripping with sauce and heartily biting into the soft meat.
“I had some errands to run there,” Root says vaguely, drinking a strawberry milkshake and occasionally snatching fries out of the plastic bag with her fingers.
“Illegal errands? Did you buy drugs? Rob a bank?” Shaw asks.
“So I did time, never let me forget it,” Root says, pretending to kick Shaw in the leg with her half-boot and missing by a few inches.
Shaw balls up a napkin and throws it into Root’s general direction, and Root gives her a mean grin.
“Remind me again, why were you kicked out of active service at the NYPD?”
“Use of excessive force,” Shaw says, baring her teeth.
She works through her spare ribs at an alarming speed, the remains landing on a napkin on her work desk.
“If you could not make your workspace look like the Elephant Graveyard from The Lion King, that would be great,” Nathan says while walking past, probably to charm some old dude into trusting them with his beloved 1960s Jaguar.
“You’re hilarious, I don’t understand how you ended up divorced,” Shaw calls after him still chewing.
She kicks the collection of bones into the trash with her foot anyway.
“Hanging around with all of you people in a loss-making repair garage 24/7 surely had nothing to do with it,” Nathan calls back, disappearing through a door.
“How did you even get them to hire you in the first place?” Root asks, still grinning widely. “You’re so mean all the time.”
Shaw licks some BBQ sauce off her fingers, and Root quickly busies herself with her milkshake, feeling herself blush.
“You’d scratch people’s eyes out in a second if Nathan actually let you interact with any customers, don’t give me a speech about niceness,” Shaw says.
Root shrugs. So maybe she has a bit of a short fuse when it comes to incompetence, so what.
“The only reason you’re allowed to work here is because Harold threatened to lock himself into the tire storage cage until Nathan signed your employment contract.”
Root shrugs. “Harold has an eye for talent?”
Shaw huffs at that, and grabs the bag to look for more edible things in it.
“Either that or he was tired of being the only misunderstood genius in the repair garage,” she says. “The two of you would make the most nauseatingly sweet couple.”
Root throws her empty milkshake cup into the trash.
“It’s rather tragic how gay I am, otherwise we would be making out in some backroom right this second,” Root says dreamily.
Shaw gives her a look that expresses just how much she wants to imagine her boss making out with anyone.
“God I hate the both of you, I don’t know if I’ve made that clear,” Shaw groans, folding up the remains of her lunch and disposing of them in the trashcan.
“It wasn’t a lecture, by the way,” Root says. “I like mean.”
Shaw gives her a doubtful look, then points at the white edge of the band-aid that is pointing out from under Root’s tank top, covering her right shoulder.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“Oh, no, new tattoo,” Root says, slipping the fabric down over her arm and peeling off the edge of the band-aid to reveal a delicate pattern around a string of numbers.
“The first ten digits of pi and the beginning of the Fibonacci sequence,” Root explains.
“Forget the back room, you and Harold would be fucking married at this point,” Shaw groans. “Still pretty, though.”
“The ink or the canvas?” Root asks, giving Shaw a teasing look under thick black lashes and artfully curled winged eyeliner.
Shaw rolls her eyes.
“I need to get back to work,” she says.
“No dessert for you?” Root asks, holding up two candy bars.
Shaw shrugs. She opens her ponytail and shakes out her hair before gathering it back up again and redoing it neatly.
“I’m not much for sweet,” she says.
“I should have figured,” Root tells her, not breaking eye contact.
“Thanks for the food,” Shaw says, disappearing under the car again.
“Anytime,” Root says.
--
John follows Harold into an office that looks like it should belong to the headmaster of a boarding school:
Bookcases covering the far wall, an antique-looking globe in the corner, books stacked on every available surface.
“I have, uh - a bit of a hobby of picking up books from flea markets and garage sales,” Harold offers when he notices John’s surprised expression.
He takes a stack of books from the chair in front of the desk, “An Introduction to Electric Circuits” sitting on top of the pile, and puts it to the side, motioning for John to sit down.
“Nathan just calls this the library.”
John sits, watching while Harold settles in behind the dark wooden desk, pulling out some loose papers from a drawer.
“Mr. Reese, I’m sure you have noticed that this business is not, currently, making a lot of profit, so your starting salary would be humble,” Harold says.
John wonders if the exhaust fumes from the repair hall are giving him auditory hallucinations.
“I’m sorry?” He asks.
Harold looks up from his papers.
“You did come here looking for employment, yes?” Harold asks, as if John was a particularly dense third-grader.
“I just - I essentially told you that I have no work experience and no qualifications, and now you want to hire me?” he blurts, wincing at his own words. Foot in mouth much, John?
Harold looks at him like he probably looks at copies of secondhand books in a really terrible state.
“I see now why you struggle with getting a job, you are not exactly underlining your most favorable qualities in job interviews,” Harold says, but John thinks that he can see a spark of humor in his eyes.
“You’ll have to pick up a lot of new information rather quickly, and it would probably help if you spent as much time as possible familiarizing yourself with the workings of a car. I’ll ask Sameen to give you an introduction, and you can watch her work and ask questions. We’ll also have to make sure that an experienced mechanic is double-checking your work at first, the last thing this place needs is a negligence lawsuit.”
Harold raises his eyebrows at him.
“Do you still want the job?” He asks.
John’s first impulse is to say But why are you even doing this, I don’t understand, but he just takes a deep breath and says: “God, yes.”
There is a knock on the door, then Ingram appears, carrying two brown bags that probably contain lunch.
“Harold, are you -- oh, you cannot be serious,” Ingram says, voice rising on the last word when he looks at the papers in Harold’s hands. “Please tell me that is not an employment contract.”
“Why don’t you read those and fill out the personal information,” Harold says, handing the sheets to John and getting up, “While I have a little chat with my business partner?”
“Sure,” John says.
Harold follows Ingram into the hallway and closes the door, but John can still hear their voices:
“We can barely afford to pay the workers we already have --“
“You told me to get more involved in business decisions, so here I am, getting involved.”
“That was really not what I meant and you know it, Harold. Please tell me that his recommendations are sound at least.”
“He has no prior working experience in car repairs, but I’m sure--“
“Please say that again, it sounded like “I decided to throw money at somebody who can’t even open the hood of a car.””
“He’s ex - military and desperate enough to apply for a position here, if we send him back out there he’s going to starve in a few weeks or end up putting labels on soup cans in a factory somewhere for the rest of his life --“
“Harold, this is not a home for stray ex-soldiers and delinquents!”
“To be fair, I feel that the judiciary system failed Root completely, they should have congratulated her on managing to hack the Pentagon and NASA computers at 19, and probably revising their ridiculously bad security protocols while doing that--“
“Not the point, Harold!” Ingram hisses, just as John knocks on the door and opens it.
Ingram’s hair is standing up from his head like he had been running his hands through it in frustration, while Harold just stands there, arms crossed in front of his chest, unwilling to budge an inch.
“I just, uh -- It says place of residence here and I don’t really have a permanent address yet,” John says, sheepishly. “Also I couldn’t help but overhear some parts of your conversation, and I just wanted to say that if you think it’s a bad idea to hire me, I absolutely get that - hell, I agree, even,” he adds, with a self-deprecating smile.
“So, Harold, I really appreciate what you’re trying to do for me here, but I don’t want your business to suffer because of it, so --“ John makes a vague gesture with his hand.
Harold looks at him like John emptied a cold bucket of water over him.
“Oh, for -- Where are you living right now?” Ingram asks, turning around so he’s facing John.
“227 Bowery,” John admits, shrugging. “I couldn’t afford a hotel room anymore, and getting an apartment requires steady employment, so--“
“That’s a homeless shelter,” Ingram says, his eyes going soft, and then he produces a pen from his pocket and takes the paper out of John’s hand, folding it in half to write something down.
“This is the address of a friend of mine who runs a small Inn, you can get a room for a few days there if you tell her that Nathan sent you, and tomorrow we’ll figure out the whole employment contract thing.”
He hands John the paper, a name and an address written down in neat cursive.
“I--“ John says, but it’s all he manages because his throat suddenly seems to have the diameter of a straw, and he blinks until the prickling feeling in his eyes goes away.
“Thank you,” John says, wonderingly.
“Did you eat?” Ingram asks, and John barely has a chance to say no before Ingram presses one of the paper bags into his hands.
“Come on, we’ll introduce you to everyone,” Harold says.
John doesn’t miss the way Harold puts his hand on the small of Ingram’s back for a moment, a small, intimate gesture, and then John follows them down the hallway.
--
“Is the negative cable still on the battery?” Sameen asks in the same tone of voice other people would ask “Is that gun loaded?” and slaps the wrench out of John’s hand.
They’ve been working together the whole morning, or rather:
Sameen has been working and John has been watching her work, and now that he’s finally allowed to try his hand on the inside of a car, he has apparently disregarded at least five Important Rules of Car Repair in the first hour.
“Is that a problem?” John asks, while she dives down beneath the hood and removes a cable while cursing profusely, five foot four of tightly condensed rage.
“You absolute idiot,” Sameen says, reappearing again.
She punches his shoulder, not in the joking, friendly way, but in the way that actually hurts.
“If your wrench slips and touches something metal, your wrench can fuse to the part like an arc welder.”
“And that’s bad? That’s bad,” John says, because he apparently has lost control of his vocal chords.
Sameen stares at him like she is two seconds from flat-out murdering him.
“So how is our newest employee doing so far?” Harold’s voice asks from somewhere behind them.
John turns to see Harold and Root approaching.
Harold is in tie and vest again, but John can see the grey and black smears on his forearms where he was probably messing with the inside of a car before.
Root has her arm linked through his, she is wearing a tiny white shirt that shows off the extensive tattoo collection on her arms and cleavage, color exploding between black lines on her skin, the dark red in one of the motives on her shoulder matching the shade of her lipstick.
“Don’t even talk to me,” Sameen says, drying off her hands on a rag.
“That great, huh,” Root says, giving Sameen a blinding smile.
“If I’m supposed to babysit him, I want a raise,” Sameen grumbles, before biting into a sandwich, chewing open-mouthed and glaring at John.
“You do realize that I can hear you, you’re not communicating telepathically,” John says.
Harold’s mouth twitches for a second before his face returns to his usual unimpressed state.
“We might have to get Mr. Reese a bit of a crash course in car repairs before he’s fit to work with you,” Harold says, considering.
“Sure, or, you know, hire somebody who actually knows how to do the job,” Sameen says, sitting down on a workbench and kicking her feet up on the table. “What are you? Ex-convict? Military?” She rolls her eyes. “Police?”
“Yes to one, no to the others,” John says.
Sameen rips a piece of meat out of her sandwich with her teeth. He has never seen somebody who looks so ready to get into a cage match at any given time.
“Well, as enjoyable as it is to watch Sameen explain the details of your incompetence,” Root says, pointedly ignoring John’s “I can still hear you.”
She pats Harold’s arm.
“I need to search some black market car part boards on the internet to find that 6 Volt control box I’ve been needing.”
“Have you checked your desk?” Harold asks, all innocence, and Root beams at him.
“Oh you did not,” she says.
“Jesus, get a room, you two,” Sameen says, polishing off her lunch and getting back to the car.
“Aw, Sameen, don’t be jealous, you know I like you best,” Root says.
“Can everyone please go away,” Sameen says from somewhere beneath the opened hood.
“You spoil me,” Root says, and kisses Harold’s cheek before sauntering off towards the back of the garage.
“You really do,” Nathan says, who John has only ever seen moving from one place to another, either entertaining a potential customer or talking on his phone.
This time, he hands a stack of paper to Harold.
“Read this, then sign,” Nathan says, and then he’s off again.
“You didn’t have to circle the signature lines with a red pen, I understand how to do paperwork, Nathan,” Harold calls after him.
“I also put a reminder into your phone,” Nathan calls from across the hall.
“And stop messing with my phone!”, Harold calls back.
John just smiles. He doesn’t know what he’s done for these people to take him in, but he’s surely glad that it happened.
--
“What kind of system is this,” Shaw calls from behind a metal shelf, rummaging through a box.
Root, leaning against the doorframe in a purple blouse and a short black skirt, considers her clipboard.
“It says here “Row 2, 3rd shelf”. Or maybe that’s a five. God, Leon’s writing is a mess.”
Shaw reappears, a box in her hands, and puts it on the table with the rest of her findings so far.
“What else?” She asks.
The backroom mostly serves as a holding area for all the things that they have no current use for, from spare car parts to a sad potted plant in the corner.
Shaw knows that she has seen the electric fuel pump she needs for Carter’s gorgeous 1950s Ford somewhere in the mess.
“What customer is this for, by the way?” Root asks, doodling on the corner of the inventory checklist with her pen.
“Joss Carter, the NYPD Detective?” Shaw calls from where she is kneeling down to fish around in a box with spare cables.
“Oh. Joss, right,” Root says, pressing her lips together. “Your special friend.”
“She’s not my special friend, she just drives a really nice car and knows how to handle a weapon, two things I admire greatly.”
“I can hack into a government database, if that’s your thing,” Root says, quietly.
“What?” Shaw calls from the other end of the room.
Root sighs.
“Nevermind.”
--
“John, are you listening?”
John is blinking up at the sky where he in crouched down next to Harold, apparently not exactly intrigued by the specifics of brake repair.
He blinks a little before turning his head back to Harold.
“Yes, I -- I’m sorry, I got a little distracted,” John admits sheepishly.
It’s a nice Saturday afternoon and Harold had suggested for them to take their weekly tutoring lesson outside into the parking lot. There is a large, clean towel spread out on the ground where Harold is arranging the different parts in reverse order, teaching John a system that will allow him to put things back together again after he took them apart.
Bear is spread out on the tarmac, watching them work.
John is a quick study, and Harold can tell that he is eager to please in everything he does, following Harold’s instructions to the letter. Today, though, his mind seems elsewhere.
“I guess a break couldn’t hurt,” Harold suggests, making an attempt to get up.
He has been crouching down for a while, completely caught up in his task, and his legs seem less than pleased about the change of position. Despite his daily runs in the park, he is not getting any younger, he thinks, just as John reaches out a hand and catches his arm, pulling him up.
Harold has opted for a short-sleeved shirt as a concession to heat, so John’s palm closes around the naked skin on his arm, soft and warm.
Harold lets him, displeased when John takes his hand away too quickly.
John retrieves two beers out of the cool box in the corner, courtesy of Nathan, who is in his office and working through mountains of paperwork.
John bends down to close the lid of the box and Harold swallows convulsively at the way John looks: Washed out jeans fitting snugly around his legs, smears of oil and grease all over his arms, his white T-shirt riding up to expose the skin beneath.
“Is something the matter?” Harold asks, softly.
John hands him a bottle, his hand brushing Harold’s, and Harold can feel his skin tingling at the contact. Oh, come on.
John takes a sip, the muscles in his throat working, and Harold is suddenly very aware of many things:
His simmering, impossible attraction to the mysterious soldier he has taken under his wing, how long it has been since somebody touched him, kissed him - god, just the thought is making him lightheaded. Harold tries to concentrate on something else, anything but the fact that John seems completely oblivious to the effect he has on Harold, bent over a car with the muscles of his back working under his shirt, or that slow, lazy smile he gives Harold, all soft-looking lips and long lashes.
John scratches at the label on the bottle, peeling it off with his thumbnail.
“It’s just -- It’s really nice out here, you know?” John says, shrugging, and Harold tries to see his surroundings the way John does:
A task, a purpose, the bright sunlight beating down against his neck, a cool bottle of beer waiting in the shade, Bear coming over to let himself be patted or for John to throw his tennis ball across the parking lot. And this, too: Companionship, the odd family of the repair crew.
Harold knows that Root has found John an apartment and hacked into the website to change the address, making sure that he would be the only person showing up. It looked like a lovely, spacious loft in the pictures, overlooking the park.
Despite her apparent hostility towards John, Harold has caught Sameen dropping off her old tool belt on John’s desk, line wrenches, pliers, a selection of hooks and picks. “Keep it or whatever,” she’d said, and stalked off somewhere to get food or punch a wall or whatever Sameen does when she’s not in the garage.
And Nathan, too, not complaining once even when it was clear that Sameen took longer getting her work done, that he would need to invest money in an employee with barely any qualifications. Instead, he had been ordering absurd amounts of takeout food and talked John into taking the leftovers home with him, making sure that he would be ending up having at least one warm meal a day.
“He looks starved,” Nathan complained, leaving a box of energy bars on John’s table, and Harold had loved him so much in that moment that it felt like a sharp pain in his chest.
“It’s a beautiful day,” Harold agrees, even though that wasn’t what John was saying at all.
John smiles a little, like he’s not sure if he’s allowed to.
They drink their beer in companionable silence.
Harold thinks about what he should show John next - maybe some essentials on car batteries next week, and a lesson on air filters? -, when John scratches his neck, carefully avoiding Harold’s eyes, and asks: “So, how long have you and Nathan been a couple?”
Harold chokes on his beer and gives a very undignified cough.
“I- what?” He asks, and laughs a little, because, well.
John gives him a confused look.
“I didn’t - I didn’t mean to imply --,” he starts, looking mortified, but Harold just waves him off.
“No, that’s not - I’m not offended,” Harold says, like the thought is ridiculous. “It’s just that Nathan is very decidedly heterosexual, and has an impressive track record of female companions and an ex-wife to prove it.”
“Oh,” John says.
Harold wonders if he noticed that Harold didn’t elaborate on his own inclinations in that area, but even if he did: It’s apparently a habit for him to fall for absurdly attractive, straight men, and John knowing that Harold came out to Nathan in his second year at MIT and has basically had a nonexistent love life ever since might just make things incredibly awkward.
“We’ve been living in each other’s pockets ever since MIT, I see where you might get the idea,” Harold says. “Actually, the team of the “Machine” is a very tight-knit family, as you’ve probably noticed.”
John nods.
“I was thinking that Root had a thing for you, but I think she’s crushing pretty heavily on Sameen,” he says.
Harold tilts his head a little.
“You’re very perceptive,” he says.
John just sips his beer.
“She’s not terribly subtle about it, so.”
Harold looks out over the street. The sun is wandering lower in the sky, in one or two hours they’ll either have to pack up or go back inside.
“Is there someone - Was there someone waiting for you, when you came back?” Harold asks.
John looks down at his bottle, running his thumb over the little drops of perspiration.
“There was, once,” he says. “But it didn’t last.”
“I’m sorry,” Harold says. He is.
John puts away the bottle, and picks up a small silver wrench again.
“So, you were going to tell me about the difference between a disc brake and a drum brake?”
Harold quickly drains the rest of his beer and crouches down next to the hood again.
“Right, you probably have somewhere to be on a Saturday night,” Harold says.
“Not really,” John says.
Bear has trotted over to them, nosing at John’s leg until he puts down a hand to pet him and scratch behind his ears.
“Actually, this is the highlight of my day,” John admits, and Harold tries to find a hint of sarcasm in his voice, of irony, but John seems perfectly serious.
“When I left that part of my life behind me, I didn’t think there’d be much of a future for me. Hell, there wouldn’t have been, probably - I was pretty much out of options the day I showed up here.”
Harold pretends to be working on the car, he has found that John talks more openly if Harold doesn’t look at him, if he can pretend that they’re not talking about anything of importance at all.
“I woke up this morning and felt, took me a while to put my finger on it, but I felt happy. Must be this job.”
Harold feels that pain in his chest again.
“Would you pass me that brake spreader, please,” he says, and when John hands it to him, he lets their hands touch on purpose, a little longer than necessary.
“There’s always a place for you here, John,” Harold says.
John swallows. He gives the slightest nod, still stroking through Bear’s soft fur, and Harold talks about screws and brake fluid and disc brakes until it’s getting too dark for them to see.
-- fin