Work Text:
Impulse eyes the different items in the isle for menstrual products before picking out a box of pads that seems appropriate. Then another, just in case. And maybe one more.
His younger just got her first period – boy, do they grow up fast – but nothing they have at home seems appropriate. His older, Gem, swears up and down on menstrual cups, but, surely, eleven is way too young for that…
As he's double checking everything, he notices – or, more like, finally pays mind to the person passing through the isle for the third or fourth time, like they're looking for something. Now, that’s nothing out of the ordinary, Impulse is also far too stubborn to ask an employee for help – but when they pause at the shelf behind him, his ears alert him to… The absence of noise, strangely enough. There’s an incredibly off-putting silence he can’t quite put his finger on, at first, but he just thinks people aren’t meant to be this quiet – and it’s then he realizes that not only is this person tiptoeing around, it’s almost like they’re barely breathing.
He cautiously turns his head to see a… Well, Impulse can't really tell from this angle. The kid faces away from him and is looking at a shelf with various sleeping aids – earplugs, masks, melatonin. He has a messy head of overgrown brown hair and the oldest red jumper Impulse has ever seen. He could be anywhere from his teens to his twenties. His shoulders barely move as he stands there contemplatively – it’s a tension Impulse implicitly recognizes: He’s holding his breath. Poor kid must be having an anxious day.
Impulse gets that and, since he’s done, decides to leave the isle to give him some space. He checks around for anything else he might need – aftershave and deodorant come to mind, and by the time he goes to check out, the kid with the red jumper is just entering the queue in front of him.
He places the separator between their items on the conveyor belt, at a neat ninety degree angle to the edge of the checkout desk, because anything else might be blasphemy.
As they wait for some third person to check out, the kid reaches to the small shelf of overpriced snack bars, candy and travel toiletries – this is a drugstore, after all – but interestingly, picks out a small, retro brand of chewing gum. It's "Pedro" and Impulse resents that he has to call it retro, now, since that means he's that old, but it's still better than when Gem told him it's ancient, and way better than when Pearl, eleven, sincerely asked if he had light bulbs, growing up.
He picks one up himself, then smiles at the kid and says "Man, I didn't know they still made these" because, if someone likes retro chewing gum they might also still appreciate small talk by the checkout counter. Look, Impulse doesn't know, but it makes sense in his head.
The kid only seems to register that he's been spoken to after a second or so, at which point he slightly turns his shoulders in Impulse's direction, though his eyes don't follow.
"Oh. Uh… Yeah"
… Is the answer that comes and man, this kid looks awful. There's no real descriptor that does it justice – it's the kind of wrinkles you only get if your eyebrows are knotted together for weeks, the dark spots under your eyes you only get when you haven't slept regularly in months.
It's then, just as the cashier finally starts ringing him up, that Impulse's eyes drift to what he's purchased and –
He thinks he might never be able to erase it from his mind, maybe because he feels some sort of kinship with this kid for liking the same, shitty brand of chewing gum he likes, maybe because that same, single, childish item sits so innocently in the middle of what is one ingredient shy of a death sentence.
The cashier rings him up.
Chewing gum.
Duct tape.
Plastic bag.
Sleeping pills.
15,20€, in cash.
The girl at the till doesn't notice what Impulse does, she's a kid, too, she could be his daughter, and so he wonders if this, like the chewing gum, is behind the times – whether it is an old-fashioned way of killing yourself.
(It's ineffective, that's why – because he still had enough presence of mind to tear a hole through the polyethelene before he passed out on the floor.)
By the time he blinks away the image, the kid in the red jumper has fumbled through his wallet for a twenty euro bill and the cashier asks whether he has twenty cents. At this, he gets so nervous that he says it's fine, she can keep it – the cashier blinks, like he's lost his mind – and, in some desperate attempt to get a foot in the door, Impulse places a coin on the counter.
"Chewing gum's on me" he says, because, yeah, that’s how much it costs. It's been basically the same price for forty years, only raised twice, once during a global recession.
The girl at the till seems relieved and the kid in the red jumper mutters a "Thanks…" like this is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for him.
"Glad someone's still keeping that company in business" he chuckles and cautiously eyes the kid packing up into a backpack that has seen better days, mentally hurrying along the cashier so he can be out the door at the same time.
The girl isn't quite fast enough – he quickly swipes his card, grabs everything and speed-walks out the automatic door before the receipt has even finished printing.
(Hours later, he woke up in his own vomit wondering if he'd died.)
Impulse's breath catches in his throat – it shouldn't, he's forty and carrying a plastic bag of hygienic pads, chasing a ghost – as he walks around the corner of the building, because that's the only place this kid could have disappeared to this fast. He spots him, just a bit ahead.
It's not the direction his car is in and he does have a very grumpy daughter to get home to. His feet stop, rooted to the ground.
It's none of his business, right?
… What if it was one of his kids?
…
(He never tells anybody, because he's self-reliant to a fault. Nobody ever considers how that self-reliance nearly killed him.)
It looks like the kid is heading for the bus stop. Then, so does Impulse. He doesn't know where the bus goes from here. He supposes he'll find out.
He shoots Gem a message that something has come up. She's a big girl, now, she can handle things for a bit. She might even appreciate being relied upon – Impulse has learned that kids eat that stuff up, if it comes in appropriate doses. He'd never known. He always had to do everything himself, as a child.
Impulse walks up to the bus stop, next to the kid in the red jumper.
"Sorry, where does this go?" he asks, attempting to strike up a conversation.
The kid looks up. It's around now that he tries to narrow down in his age, and he lands on somewhere between fifteen and eighteen.
"Lower Rye" he says, then thinks for a bit. "It stops in Altdala and Coat Town, though…" He shuffles his feet around. "I think it goes all the way to the Bastion, but I always get off at Lower Rye, so I'm not sure"
"I see" Impulse replies, then quickly adds "I'm in the right place, then. Thanks"
He racks his brain for something to say. He can't just ask "Are you planning to kill yourself?"
(They keep the pills in leaves, now, so it's more difficult to overdose. They used to come in a bottle.)
"You know, I worked a lot in Lower Rye during the telecom boom" he starts, and that's not a lie, "If you have a house that wasn't built recently, we probably laid the cables for it"
It's absolutely nothing, but it finally seems to get some sort of response. "Did you guys do wiretapping?"
The question catches him off guard, but sure, he chuckles, why not, if the kid wants to know about wiretapping, he'll tell him about wiretapping.
"I mean, we didn't" he starts, "But some guys from the government had a black box installed on some of our switches. We weren't allowed to look at what was inside"
The kids eyes turn wide and he seems a little afraid, but also kind of excited. "Wait, really?"
Impulse nods. "Yeah, and then they'd periodically give us a big scary knock on our office door about how it had stopped working. Like every week – it wasn't very successful wiretapping" he snorts.
"My dad's always complaining about how the government is spying on his calls" the kid says, shifting back and forth from his toes to his heels, then shrugs. "No wonder"
Impulse's mouth pulls into a line before he decides to ignore how that's a mildly concerning thing to say and, instead, continues. "I mean, nowadays with cell phones and 5G, most networks use packet switching" he explains, then remembers that normal people don't know terms like packet switching, nor do they have strong opinions about it like Impulse does, "Basically, your message or call is split into thousands of little pieces and those pieces might take entirely different routes to the destination. I'm not saying wiretapping can't happen, but it's far more difficult than literally tapping a wire, now"
The kid seems to think about it, before getting a smug little smirk. "You seem to know a lot, Mister Wiretapper"
Impulse raises his hands defensively. "What? No!" he laughs, "Besides, I haven't worked in telecom for years" – god, he's old – "I install solar panels, now"
It goes on like that. The bus comes. Gem texts back that it's fine, she has Pearl sorted out with what they have at home, for now. Impulse buys a ticket to Lower Rye. He asks if he can sit next to the kid on the bus. They introduce themselves to one another. The kid's name is Grian.
Grian seems very interested in phone and internet networks – almost defiantly so, when he asks things like "So, cell towers can't actually, like… Transmit things into your brain, right?" and is seemingly delighted to have an expert tell him that it's not the case, as if he's… Vindicated, almost.
He doesn't ask him what he wants to be when he grows up. Impulse always hated that question when he was younger – instead, he asks Grian whether electronics interest him and, surprisingly, he says no, not really. He's really into art, though – and from that old, gray backpack splitting at the seams he procures a sketchbook that's absolutely filled with magnificent building designs and landscape sketches. And as soon as Impulse shows even marginal interest he starts talking and talking and cannot be stopped, like a man dying of thirst that has just found an oasis.
It's then that Impulse let's slip that his older daughter also does art – though, she draws people and characters and… What was it? Manga? Grian nods, so it must be correct – and after a couple of sentences Gem's name slips from his mouth and he realizes he's fucked up.
They're just past Coat Town, one stop from Lower Rye, when it happens. Grian freezes on his seat by the window, his eyebrows drawn together as he stares down at a page of his sketch book.
"You're Gem's dad?"
And, shit, this kid knows Gem. And he suddenly seems really uncomfortable and Impulse can guess why, because…
"Do you guys live in Lower Rye?"
Impulse weighs his options. They don't, for one. And if Grian knows Gem, he also might know that, or, at the very least, find out eventually. He considers lying – his mother lives there. Or, he has work there. All easy to prove wrong, all things that might cause problems for Gem if not for himself, because, yeah, following a teenager home is sketchy, no matter his intentions, he really should have thought about that, god, Impulse is fucking stupid.
He looks around the bus to see whether anyone is in earshot – not really, they're somewhere in the middle and the only other people are a couple of kids in the back and some pensioners in the front. Impulse lowers his voice, anyway.
"No, but…" he starts, choosing honesty, and Grian furrows his brow further. Impulse sighs. "It – You know, I might have read the situation totally wrong, but…"
(He can't drink alcohol for years, after. Every time he does, he throws up instantly. His psychologist says it's medical. His doctor says it's psychological.)
"When I saw the stuff you bought at the store, I got really worried" he admits and Grian's expression softens, if only a little.
"Oh, it's not – Uh…" he shakes his head, then smiles. It's off. "Why?"
The bus slows. The village of Lower Rye slowly comes into view. The stop is on the outskirts – lines like these aren't used by enough people for the government to spare the gas price, or the bus company to spare the time to go further in.
"I'll tell you when we get off, I guess" Impulse says, and they do. He takes a step back to let Grian go first towards the door.
The bus drives off, leaving them in what is the edge of nowhere. Impulse grew up in a relatively bigger town, though plenty of his friends were from places like these. Barking dogs, smoke-filled chimneys, chickens and church bells, surrounded by wheat and corn in all directions as far as the eye could see. The bus stop is a small, concrete hut with a single wooden chair inside of it. Power lines cross overhead, splitting the fields and sky in two.
Impulse is forty and in the middle of nowhere with a box of hygienic pads in a plastic bag, trying to talk down a teenager from killing himself.
"I was just worried you might do something stupid"
He expects to be laughed at, or for Grian to offer some sensible excuse for his purchase – there ought to be many, the combination of items is not so ridiculous as to be unexplainable. But it's not what happens.
"Oh… The next bus only comes in two hours" he says, like he's offering condolences while drawing lines in the gravel with his shoes. "Don’t worry, I… I won’t. Thank you for talking with me. Sorry for wasting your time"
They stare at each other.
The late spring sun shines blindingly overhead.
(He wonders why nobody ever asked him any of the obvious questions.)
"What are they for, then? The things you bought"
Grian takes a shaky breath and seems like he might run for it. It's a long road to the village, though.
"Grian – bud. I have two hours, at the very least" he offers. "I know what it's like. I know it's not nice to talk about, but we can talk about something else, then, yeah?"
He seems to accept that lifeline.
"Can we go that way? It smells like shit here" Grian says, and frankly, it does, literally, then points at a dirt road paved by tractors and other machinery, down into the fields and an eventual treeline.
They make more small talk on their way – more things about cell towers and power lines, Impulse shares anecdotes from the dot-com boom, then the dot-com bust. Grian inexplicably starts crying between two sentences, but continues like nothing is wrong until they have to stop for a bit because he's shaking too much.
Between the two of them, there isn't nearly enough tissues for him – Impulse only had half a pack to begin with and the logical next best thing occurs to him when he looks at the plastic bag he's still carrying.
And Grian laughs, it's miserable, but he laughs as he blows his nose into a menstrual pad.
"My life is a fucking joke" he sobs before tossing it between the corn shoots, and, while Impulse tries to do his best for the environment, he thinks that in this case littering is probably justified.
They're not far from the treeline, anymore, and Impulse's common sense says that a river must be beyond there, because the wheat, corn and rapeseed fields would extend into the horizon if only they could, but unfortunately something has to hold bodies of water in place so that floods don't devour the plains whole.
Grian straightens himself once he's calmed down a bit – straightens is too strong a word, perhaps, he's still hunched, but at least isn't keeling over – and they keep walking. The sun is so, so bright.
"I don't want to go home" he whispers.
(He tries to run away when he is seventeen. Everyone always likes telling you you can do that, but those people are never there when you're sitting in the street, distraught and hungry. He goes home and his mother looks past him, as always, but wordlessly serves him a whole bowl of hot meat stew with noodles. It's the worst day of his life and it's somehow the best thing he ever eats.)
"Are things rough at home?" Impulse asks.
(He sometimes wishes things were worse so that someone would intervene. But they never do anything bad to him. They just don’t do anything, at all. Impulse can't even formulate that thought at the time – He just feels an aching void and figures the problem is with him.)
Grian fumbles his words for a bit, starts then stops sentences and thoughts as they reach the narrow strip of forest. By the smell of mud, water and driftwood, Impulse can tell there is, indeed, a river nearby.
"Y-Yeah. I think" is what he comes up with, in the end. "But it's not like they're abusive or anything" and he says it like that's not the lowest of low bars. "I, uh… I come here to hang out, sometimes" he deflects, pointing at a small clearing by the edge of the river. Impulse's shoes keep sinking into the smooth pebbles.
His phone rings. Grian jumps at the sound.
Impulse raises a finger, "Sorry, just a moment", then picks up. "Hi, Gem!" he smiles, slightly pulling his ear away as…
"Dad, where the fuck are you" comes through the speaker in that deadpan voice Gem has started doing since she's discovered she likes sarcasm.
"It's a bit hard to explain…" he says, scratching his neck.
"Did you get lost in the hardware store, again?"
He shakes his head. "I would not, not at Pearl's greatest time of need" he promises. "I swear"
There's a break where he can almost hear his two girls exchange side-eyes on the other side. "… Is everything okay? When will you be home?"
"Yeah, just…" he wonders how he should phrase it as he watches Grian throw a rock into the river, "A friend had a bit of an emergency. I don't know when I'll be back, but I have my phone, okay?"
While waiting for him to finish his call, Grian sits down on a boulder.
"If you guys need something, I can call Skizz – "
Gem almost sounds offended. "No, no, we’ve got things under control. I found some in my gym bag, so it’s fine. I washed out her stuff, too, it’s on the clothesline"
"Yeah? That's great, then, thank you for taking care of things. I'm proud of you" he smiles.
Gem calls him a sap on the other side. Grian silently bursts into tears.
"Anyways, you better take us to McDonalds tomorrow" she demands and he can hear Pearl laughing in the background, like they’ve planned for this.
"Got it, got it. I have to go, you two hang in there, okay? Have supper without me if you need to"
He can practically hear her rolling her eyes. "You'll have some explaining to do"
"I know, I know. Over McDonalds"
"Over McDonalds!" comes the cheer from farther beyond the speaker.
"Goodbye, love you two"
Gem and Pearl say their goodbyes and Impulse hangs up, slowly lowering the phone as he watches Grian bury his head between his knees, hand over his mouth because they still don't have any stupid tissues and Impulse wishes his car was here.
(Nobody ever tells him he's unwanted. He's left to come to that conclusion on his own, because nobody ever says anything else, either.)
He kneels down in front of Grian in the pebbles. A long string of snot and saliva drips down from between his fingers onto the rocks and he’s heaving.
Against all odds, Impulse does find tissues on his person – they're in the pockets lower down on his thigh and god, cargo pants are stupid. He cautiously reaches a hand to Grian's shoulder and hands them to him.
"I think you're a good kid, Grian"
And it might be the wrong thing to say, because his body shakes so hard Impulse worries he's suffocating – and for a moment he very well might be as he chokes on all the tears he'd held back, hacking for a good few seconds before he finally stops crying, seemingly only because he physically can't, anymore.
It takes him a while to calm down, after that.
Impulse just sits there and tries to be a reassuring presence.
"Have you ever tried to kill yourself?" is what Grian abruptly asks, once he’s caught his breath.
Impulse leans forward on his knees and looks to the side, out over the river. The shadows have gotten longer as the sun has moved lower in the sky. He nods. "When I was fifteen"
That was a long time ago, but it never really feels that way.
"… And why didn't you – How – …"
The question is probably "Why are you still alive?"
Impulse sighs.
Does he even know the answer? It’s been over twenty years, but, somehow, he’d never thought to ask why.
“I don’t think most people who try to kill themselves actually want to die” he realizes. It’s not like suffocating to death in a plastic bag was some sort of life-long dream of his, akin to becoming a firefighter or an astronaut. “People sometimes say ‘oh, they’re just doing it for attention’ – but… Yeah, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Asking for help is a base human instinct”
Grian scoffs. “Yeah, but it’s a load of bullshit, though. If you ask for help, you’re clearly not suicidal enough, but if you actually do it they’re like ‘But where were the signs?’”
Impulse gives a sympathetic nod, because, yeah, that’s exactly it, though it stings to hear from a teenager’s mouth. And it clearly has Grian riled up, because he continues.
“It’s like people only give a shit if I’m dead, but as long as I’m alive it’s fine, no matter how miserable I am!” his voice breaks at the end and he half-laughs, half-sobs into his hand.
“And do you think you dying would make them understand?”
(Impulse really does hate her, in that moment – but as his nails dig into the plastic it’s accompanied by the image of her coming home to find his corpse in the bathroom. It’s not an emotion that has any name. He just sees it from the outside, her looking at him no different than she always has, and he’s shocked to consciousness, his heart breaks that violently.)
Grian drops his hands between his knees. “… No.” His mouth pulls into a thin line and his lips quiver. “No, it wouldn’t – They, they’d say some stupid shit at my funeral, too, god”
It’s accompanied by a small chuckle and Impulse smiles in turn. “See?”
“… And my dog would miss me”
“You have a dog?” Impulse asks,
And Grian nods and pulls his legs up on the boulder. “M-hm. Golden retriever named Scruff” he mumbles before burying his head and breaking into sobs. “And she’d be so confused and lonely and – ”
He can’t continue, not in any coherent manner, anyway, and Impulse decides to pull him into a hug. The floodgates are flung properly open and he vents about everything and anything in seemingly in no discernible order. Impulse catches something about how Grian has something wrong with him that his parents think is caused by 5G towers, smartphones and the internet – and the saddest thing is that while it doesn’t seem like he believes that, he doesn’t sound too sure, either. He complains about only having an old flip phone he got from a friend that he has to keep in a tin box when he gets home. Impulse can't resist pointing out how that doesn't block any sort of signal and it's the first time he sees Grian get truly mad when he spits "Well, yeah, that's what I said!"
And he thinks it's healthy and good for him to be angry.
It never does come to light what might be "wrong" with Grian. He seems like a perfectly normal kid with a good head on his shoulders – and that's taking into account all the "Nobody would miss me"-s and other nonsense, because Impulse knows too well that reasonable kids can be made to believe that, given unreasonable circumstances.
Before they get up to leave, Grian silently hands him the pills he bought at the pharmacy. On their way back, he lets loose a frantic string of apologies for everything – one that Impulse doesn't interrupt, but does politely reject, in the end. What he does accept is "Thank you".
He wishes he could take Grian back with him. But they both know it doesn’t work like that, because Grian is someone else’s kid and Impulse is a forty-year-old he met five hours ago at a drugstore. They exchange phone numbers before the bus comes and Impulse tells him to call him if anything comes up. To definitely text him when he gets home.
(It's years later that he bawls his eyes out in his dorm room before Skizz can even finish saying "I'm so sorry that happened to you" and he realizes that it’s the only thing he ever wanted to hear.)
And that’s that.