Chapter Text
“I spy with my little eye, something beginning with… B.”
“Bastard!” Shouted Vyvyan, taking a hand off the steering wheel for an over-excited point to land as a jab at Rick’s temple.
“OW!” came a screech from the passenger seat, Rick clutching at what he was sure was now a developing bruise.
“Vyvyan! play the game properly”
“But I thought it was meant to be fun?”
“It will be fun, as long as you play it properly and stop behaving like a child. Now, I spy with my-”
“Bastard!” Vyvyan yelled again, this time managing to secure a jab right on the side of the other boy’s nose.
“OW!”
Rick quickly pinched his nose as it began to leak blood onto his hand. He looked over to Vyvyan, whose sneering smile only succeeded in making Rick angrier.
“You utter tosser, Vyvyan! Why did you do that? Look! Now you’ve made me get blood all over my favourite trousers!” He said as he briefly removed his hand to assess the damage to his bright yellow trouser leg.
“Because this game is boring!” Vyvyan exclaimed, “Oh! Is that what you saw? Boring?”
“You can’t see ‘boring’. How can you see ‘boring’?”
“Well, I can see you, and you, Rick, are very very boring. So boring, in fact, that I had to give you a nose bleed just to make you interesting enough so that I don’t throw you out of my car”
Rick was just about to start another shouting match when a voice from the back seat chimed in.
“Alright, Alright!” Mike barked, leaning forward in his seat to get closer to the two in front “Now, there’s no need for another fight, you hear me? Rick, Vyvyan’s right, you are incredibly boring. Stick this up your nose.” He handed him a rather old looking tissue, and Rick obliged.
“Right,” Mike continued “Vyvyan, where are we actually going?”
“Well, I don’t really know Michael. You see, I thought it’d be fun if I just sort of drove until the car ran out of petrol”
“Aw great.” came another voice from the backseat.
“What’s wrong with you, Neil?” Rick snapped, the tissue stuffed in his nostril waving around as he spoke.
“Oh nothing, nothing” grumbled Neil “Only that, like, we’ve been in this car for three whole hours now, right? And like, so far it’s just been a really bad time and I don’t suppose it’s going to get any better… So I was just wondering, right, like, why we’re even going on this holiday at all?”
All three of them turned to look at Rick.
“I uhm… I don’t… I have no- uh no idea” said Rick, folding his arms tightly around his own chest.
Rick and the rest of them all knew why they were going on this holiday. Apart from Neil, who had seemingly forgotten. Or perhaps wasn’t paying attention in the first place. But the other three of them definitely knew.
Rick was still halfway in denial that it was entirely his fault, but from the stares he could feel on him, the others disagreed.
A couple days before they had ended up in Vyvyan’s car on the way to god-knows-where, they had all been planning to spend the summer in the sharehouse. Mike, Neil and Vyvyan because they always did, and Rick because he had to. After his parents passed away he had nowhere to go and no one to support him other than his housemates, and they could hardly be called ‘supporting’. The only support he got from them was if he nicked a couple of quid from their rooms when they were out. He would only ever do that for noble causes though. Like for buying the new issue of a comic he was reading, or replacing the biro that Vyvyan had stolen again.
As everything else seemed to with Rick, his emotions towards his parents all boiled into some kind of confused anger, his sadness all turning into fury. A week or so after Mike had given him the news, he was pacing his bedroom in the very early hours of the morning.
The only thing he could hear was the padding of his bare feet on the wooden floor of his room, and he could hardly even hear that through the pounding thoughts in his head. His parents were gone and it wasn’t as if any of his other family would put up with him. God, they were so selfish. They probably didn’t even think about that, did they? The fact that he had been left, alone, with nothing but this shitty house and three people who openly despised him.
He sat down at his desk and grabbed the nearest pencil to him, tearing open his little red notebook to a random, empty page, before attempting to scribble his feelings out onto the paper.
Mum! Dad!
You make me feel
So very bad
Now that you have died
Are you glad
Mum and Dad?
Or are you sad?
Mum an-
Rick tore the paper out of his notebook and screwed it up into a ball, throwing it at the wall in front of him. The paper bounced off the wall and landed back on the desk, next to his notebook.
Why couldn’t he write? He was usually an excellent writer, especially when it came to feelings, and he’d written some poems about death before that he was very proud of (it was a very profound subject for a poet, even if it was a bit cliché). So what was going wrong this time?
In any case, writing that poem had only made Rick more frustrated, and just scrunching it up wasn’t enough. He strode over to his coat hanging on the back of the door and reached into the pocket, retrieving his box of matches. He hastily lit one and chucked it in the general direction of the unsuccessful poem sat on his desk.
Rick was so wrapped up in his own anger that he didn’t seem to process his mistake until the flames were licking the ceiling and spreading across the room. He ran and quickly snatched the red notebook from his desk before legging it out of his bedroom and downstairs with the fire lapping at his heels.
It was about twenty minutes of Rick screaming, Neil occasionally shouting something along the lines of “Oh no, heavy!” and Vyvyan trying to stamp out the fire, before Mike strolled in carrying a large firehose and put it out.
“Where’d you get that from, Mike?” asked Neil as the three of them spread out from the corner they’d all been huddled in, brushing soot from their clothes.
“I know a guy”
Rick was grateful that when Jerzei came round later the other boys told their landlord they didn’t know how the fire was started. Maybe they were more supportive than he gave them credit for. Or maybe Vyvyan and Neil were just trying to cover their arses because they couldn’t do anything to help put the fire out. Either way, Rick was thankful.
Although the fire had spread, luckily it had only damaged the inside of the house. However, Jerzei insisted that he would need the four of them to leave for a few weeks while he got the house back to its ‘former glory’. The guys weren’t quite sure why Jerzei was helping them like this, but he insisted, and so they went upstairs to quickly pack their suitcases.
When Rick entered his room he found it pretty much destroyed. His bed was almost non-existent, as well as his curtains and most of the clothes he had left on the floor, the papers that were on his desk now just ash. Apart from one ball of paper, with only a tiny burn mark on the corner. That fucking poem.
He sighed and slid his suitcase out from underneath the bedframe, brushing soot from the top of it. He stood up and opened his wardrobe, finding most of the clothes in there intact and hurriedly reached his arm to the back, digging around behind a pile of off-colour vests.
Rick breathed a sigh of relief as he pulled back his hand, an old teddy bear in its grip. It was the only thing he had left of his Mum and Dad, the stuffed animal they’d gotten him for his third birthday, and no matter how pissed off he was at them, he was glad it was safe.
He grabbed the rest of his clothes out the wardrobe and stuffed those, his teddy bear and his red notebook into the suitcase and headed downstairs, where Jerzei was already ushering them out the house.
“You know perfectly well why we’re on this holiday, Rick” said Mike “but we shan’t dwell on it right now. Vyvyan, how much petrol have we got left?”
Rick looked anywhere but at Mike and fiddled with the tissue that was still up his nostril. He really hoped Mike wasn’t annoyed with him. Vyvyan and Neil didn’t seem to be, but then Neil had apparently forgotten, and Vyvyan had given him a nosebleed.
Vyvyan checked one of the dials behind the steering wheel.
“Uh, not very much, Mike. I think we’ve probably got about another-”
“I- uhm, Vyvyan?” Neil interrupted “Can we like, stop the car for a sec please? I really need to go to the toilet man”
“I just said we haven’t got much petrol left, couldn’t you just wait and-”
“No way man, I really need to go like, now, you know?” said Neil, beginning to fidget in his seat.
“Fine! Fine, hang on a second, I’ll find somewhere to pull over.” Rick could just about see Vyvyan roll his eyes from behind his glasses.
Vyvyan eventually stopped the car just beyond an old looking bus stop on the side of the road. Although really it was less ‘stopped the car’ and more ‘drove the car almost straight into a hedge’.
Rick immediately jumped out the car and slammed the door shut, purposefully putting his hands on his hips.
“Vyvyan! What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?!” he screeched
“Well I don’t want anyone to crash into my car do I? It’s already damaged enough from having you sat in it for this long” said Vyvyan as he stepped out the car, Neil sprinting behind the bus stop to pee.
Rick would usually have argued back, but his nose was still throbbing and he could feel the beginnings of a headache seeping through his skull, so he just walked over to in front of the bus stop and sat down on the curb instead.
It had already been bad enough sharing a house with Vyvyan, but sharing a very small car with him for an extended period of time? It was more than he could deal with when he had a headache, that was for sure. Rick had tried to initiate several games with the others while they had been driving so that they could pass the time without being bored to death, but not once had Vyvyan taken a game seriously. It was infuriating! Rick was trying to do something helpful by distracting everyone from this stupid holiday they were having to go on which was definitely not his fault, and all Vyvyan seemed to be capable of was behaving like an infant! He was pathetic. They’d all been up most of the night, Rick for the whole of it, and it was already mid evening. Why couldn’t Vyvyan just give him a break for once in his life?
Rick finally took the tissue out of his nose and rested his forehead on his knees. He wanted to sleep but knew that he should probably just wait until they got to wherever it was they were going.
He heard the rattling of chains approaching and attempted to make it go away by wrapping his arms even tighter around himself.
It didn’t work.
“What’s wrong with you, girly?” he heard Vyvyan say from beside him
Rick sighed and lazily turned his head, resting his cheek on his knee in order to face the other boy.
Vyvyan was sat on the curb next to him and had a cigarette sticking out his mouth as he lit it with a match. Rick watched him absentmindedly as he took a drag of his cigarette, blew the smoke out and lent back on the pavement, using one of his hands to prop himself up, the chains on his jacket clinking again as he moved. He turned to face Rick, and Rick noticed that he still had his glasses on. He didn’t wear them very often, but they sort of suited him. They looked quite nice.
God, he really was tired.
Rick blinked several times and averted his gaze as he realised that Vyvyan was probably still waiting for an answer to his question.
“Nothing is wrong with me, Vyvyan” he said, hoping he hadn’t noticed him staring “I’m just pretty tired is all. I was up all night, you know”
“Well you shouldn’t have burned the house down, then”
“I didn’t burn the house down, it’s only damaged on the inside, and most of that’s my room anyway so why should you even care” Rick murmured
Vyvyan didn’t reply, but instead turned around to find that Neil was now sat cross-legged at the side of the bus stop, and, according to his closed eyes, was either asleep or meditating. Neither would have got in the way of Vyvyan dragging him back into the car so that they could continue driving, but Rick suddenly becoming this tired meant that he wouldn’t argue back, and very rarely did the redhead get to torment him without any backlash.
Vyvyan looked back to Rick.
“What did you see that began with a ‘B’, then?”
“What?” Rick replied, plonking his forehead onto his knees again
“In that game. If the ‘B’ you saw wasn’t ‘bastard’ or ‘boring’ then what was it?” asked Vyvyan, flicking his cigarette butt into the road.
“Bird”
“As if you’d even know what a bird looks like, virgin”
“Not a girl, Vyvyan, a seagull”
“Oh. Well, you’re still a massive virgin. And a bastard, and very boring. In fact, I’m not sure how you’ve made it this far into your life without boring yourself to death yet.” Vyvyan continued to throw insults at Rick, but he wasn’t really listening. He was too tired to care what Vyvyan had to say at this point and he could feel himself nodding off as the boy hurled abuse at him.
Vyvyan eventually trailed off as he realised that shouting at Rick really wasn’t as fun without him shouting back. He sighed and lit another cigarette just as Neil stood up from his space next to the bus stop.
“Uh, guys?” said Neil as he approached the other two “We can, like, go now, if you want.”
“Alright, Neil” Vyvyan got up from the curb and bent down so that his face was as close to Rick’s ear as it could get it.
“RICK!” he screamed
Rick’s head shot up and he made a noise somewhere between a shriek and a grumble, looking around wildly for whatever had woken him up from his half-sleeping state.
Once he spotted Vyvyan turning to walk back to the car he scowled, grumbled again, and then dragged his own limp body after him.
Mike had stayed in the car while the other three had been getting some fresh air, and was scribbling something down on a piece of paper when the others started to get back in the car. As Neil sat down next to him he stuffed the paper into his pocket.
Neil noticed the paper but chose not to mention it, it was usually best not to ask with Mike.
After reversing his car out of the hedge, Vyvyan continued to drive as he had before, going down whichever roads he wanted and hoping they’d end up somewhere even slightly interesting. As he drove they passed fields and houses stood all by themselves, often interrupted by a brief mass of trees, only to be followed by more fields and lone houses.
Rick had fallen asleep in the passenger seat and so now Vyvyan didn’t even have anyone to pester whilst he was bored shitless by the scenes out the window.
Luckily, as the scenes of fields turned into ones of winding streets and rows of tiny houses, the yellow car began to splutter. Vyvyan steered it toward the pavement and it continued to splutter until it stopped altogether, half off the road.
He slapped Rick to wake him up, and all four of them looked out the windows.