Chapter Text
It was one of the very few times he was not absolutely choked by noise and lights.
Between sets, when the studios were still shifting variables—trying to determine which modern action star needed his blood or which multi-million-dollar stunt sequence required his specific, structural expertise—Colt would catch a flight back home to Florida for a few days. He kept a secluded, edge-of-city place near Miami, situated where the winding, brackish roads around the swamps always managed to make the paparazzi lose their trajectory. The city was a distant, neon smudge on the horizon, its high-frequency hum swallowed by the heavy, humid density of the Everglades.
Inside the apartment, the environment was carefully, defensively calibrated. The overhead lights were never turned on; to Colt, a bare ceiling fixture was the devil—a harsh, sterile white that flooded the senses and stripped away any illusion of safety. He had enough bright ass evil lights ant work, he didn’t need them at home. Instead, he insisted on the dim, warm amber provided by low-wattage lamps scattered like embers across the floorboards. The shadows they cast were long, soft, and predictable.
On quiet nights like this, where he could be fully himself without the fear of a lens catching his structural weaknesses, he would obsess over his beloved jacket. It was a twenty-year-old relic from his very first stunt show: heavy black canvas with deep red detailing and the pristine, embroidered Miami Vice logo stretching across the back. He kept it in as perfect condition as possible for a garment that had survived concrete scrapes, fire gels, and two decades of aging. It was his anchor. When the world became a chaotic blur of explosions, directors screaming through megaphones, and the bone-deep ache of a body that had dropped from too many ten-story ledges, the weight of that canvas on his shoulders was the only thing that kept him from floating away.
It still smelled faintly of cordite and regular gunpowder from the last set he’d run in Atlanta, a bitter, chemical scent baked deep into the fibers by the heat of pyrotechnic flashes, but that didn’t bother him. It was a familiar data point. It smelled like survival. It’d be replaced by something new next week.
What did bother him—what caused an immediate, high-frequency panic loop to short-circuit his processing—was the popped seam on the left shoulder.
He’d tried slipping it on the night before during his usual routine. He’d been sitting on the floor, reviewing blueprints for an upcoming vehicle pipe-ramp stunt, when he slid his arm into the sleeve and felt the thread give way. Pop. A small, violent sound that felt less like tearing fabric and more like a structural failure inside his own body. He had frozen instantly, his arm half-extended, breath catching in his throat as the reality of the damage registered.
With age came shape changes; he was painfully, acutely aware of his weight fluctuations. Even if he didn't personally care if his frame carried a bit more density now, stunt doubles had to physically match the actors they were replacing. His shoulders had grown wider from decades of pulling cable rigs; his arms were thicker, heavier with dense muscle built to take impacts. The jacket was simply running out of tolerance. It couldn't accommodate the mass he had added to keep himself from breaking on the tarmac.
To put it briefly, Colt had not slept. Not a single wink. Usually, his wind-down sequence involved curling up in bed, pressing his head against the drywall to feel the cool, dead static of the architecture, and holding the heavy weight of the jacket against his chest like a shield. But last night, he had just sat on the edge of the mattress, fussing over the split, running his calloused, scarred fingers over the loose golden threads, trying not to cry over a piece of cloth.
It was stupid. It was really, deeply, fucking stupid. He was a grown man, a professional who jumped out of helicopters for a living, and he was falling apart over a seam.
When the sun rose, the anxiety only escalated, turning the small apartment into a cage. He spent the daylight hours pacing the narrow perimeter of his living room, staring at the exposed white lining of the sleeve and scratching his nails through his beard until the skin went red beneath the hair. He wasn't in California anymore. He couldn't just drop it off at his regular Hollywood wardrobe specialist—the guy who knew exactly how to reinforce seams for safety harnesses without ruining the silhouette. He didn't have the time parameters to fly across the country when he had a live tech-rehearsal shoot in exactly four days.
He’d have to find someone new. Here. In Miami. Today.
Needless to say, that calculation failed. The friction of the idea was too high; he couldn't trust a stranger with it. What if a local tailor split the seams further? What if they looked at the fraying canvas, noted the faint smell of smoke, and declared it a lost cause? What if they didn't treat the thing with the exact, delicate reverence he required?
Not wearing it wasn’t an option. The equation didn't balance without it. For Colt, the jacket wasn't wardrobe; it was a secondary skin. Taking it off permanently felt like exposing raw nerves to the elements—if he didn't have that heavy, protective layer between himself and the circus of the industry, then what? Then people might start seeing right through the performance. The media jabs might hit something vital. The reality of his own mortality might finally catch up to him. He didn't know, and frankly, his system couldn't handle the diagnostic check to find out.
By midnight, the routine had completely degenerated. He was sitting on his low-slung, sagging couch, watching grainy, poorly converted 80s stunt movies where you could clearly see the safety wires catching the light on screen. It was a form of self-flagellation, watching an era where everything was raw and dangerous, while he sat paralyzed. He was eating cheap mint ice cream straight from the plastic tub with a heavy metal spoon, the darling jacket draped uselessly over his bare shoulders like a broken wing, the split seam gaping open like an unhealed wound.
It was pathetic. Really, deeply pathetic.
Usually, on his maintenance days, he’d find an outlet—karaoke at a local dive bar where the music was loud enough to drown out his internal static, or a long, mindless drive into the keys. Because that hadn't happened, his proximity network began to notice the lack of data output. First, Grace had called from across the country, demanding to know why Colt’s phone hadn't changed coordinates in ninety-six hours, his twin-sense clearly picking up the low-frequency distress signals. Then Luke had actually driven over, broken in through the back door with a pocket knife, turned on the evil overhead lights, and watered the dying monsteras because he thought Colt might have legitimately died on the floor. Luke had pestered him, thrown a few jabs about his dramatic isolation, and left only when he verified Colt was still breathing. His weird little house keeper who probably didn’t even think to check the front door cause the back was always supposed to be unlocked for him when Colt left town.
And finally, Driver arrived.
The front door was always open for him. Typically, Driver followed a strict, quiet protocol: he would knock politely, three precise raps against the wood, even though he possessed a key, and wait for Colt to fling the door back and drag him into a massive, heavy dog-hug, his rough beard brushing against Driver’s neck until the smaller man let out a rare, quiet huff of air.
But tonight, the door remained shut. Driver knocked once—a clean, rhythmic sound against the wood—and waited. He didn't knock again. He just stood perfectly still in the humid Florida air, patient as a machine, waiting for the system to respond. He waited for ten minutes, his presence a silent weight on the other side of the panel, until the sheer density of the silence made Colt feel physically sick with guilt.
Colt shuffled to the entry, his bare feet dragging on the wood. He unlatched the deadbolt with a heavy click. When the door creaked open by a few inches, Colt could instantly see the tension manifest in Driver’s frame. The reedy technician sidestepped slightly, his hyper-vigilant eyes looking through the narrow crack like a stray animal evaluating an aperture for threats. He was clearly anticipating the mandatory physical impact of Colt’s usual greeting—the loud voice, the heavy arms, the sudden invasion of his perimeter.
When it didn't arrive, Driver’s shoulders slumped by a fraction of a degree. The lack of energy from Colt was a negative data point, an anomaly that required immediate analysis.
Without uttering a single syllable, Driver used the toe of his boot to gently push the door open the rest of the way. He slipped past Colt into the dim, amber gloom of the apartment, their shoulders brushing together as he crossed the threshold. It wasn't a hard shoulder-check, but something incredibly soft, like a familiar stray cat rubbing its side along your leg as it passes by, establishing presence without demanding too much interaction.
Neither man spoke. The silence returned, thick and heavy with the scent of melted ice cream and old canvas. Colt leaned back against the door as it slowly clicked shut, his jaw locked tight, his arms crossed over his chest as if he could hide the damage. He watched as Driver’s eyes performed a rapid, systematic sweep of the space. Driver didn't look at the television, where a car was currently flipping over a dirt mound in low-resolution glory. He verified Colt’s physical integrity first—noting the greasy, unkept hair, the untrimmed beard, the deep, dark bags under his eyes, and the way his large thumbs were frantically picking at the raw skin around his cuticles until they bled.
Then, Driver’s gaze locked onto the couch arm where the jacket now sat, having slipped from Colt's shoulders when he rose to answer the door.
Driver crossed the living room in slow, deliberate strides that made no sound against the rugs strung about. He stopped right before the Miami Vice jacket, his pale, rough fingers rising from the pockets of his own jacket. With a lightness that suggested he was handling fragile glass, Driver let his fingertips trace the ruptured golden thread of the shoulder seam. His thumb moved back and forth over the frayed edge. One, two, three. He didn't look up, but his head tilted, his ears tuning into the specific texture of the canvas, his mind mapping the structural failure of the garment.
Driver knew what it was like to rely on a jacket. He knew the weight of a quilted satin scorpion against his own spine; he knew how a specific piece of clothing could act as a firewall between a fragile mind and a violent world. To him, this wasn't a cosmetic issue. It was a breach in Colt's armor.
Driver looked back across the room at Colt. The showman was completely uncalibrated, his internal diagnostic monitor clearly running hot, his broad chest heaving with thin, inefficient hitches of breath. He looked smaller despite his size, swallowed by the amber shadows of his own making.
Driver took a slow, deep breath, pushing the toothpick to the side of his lips. When he spoke, his voice was a flat, low-frequency vibration that barely carried through the quiet room, stripped entirely of social performance or the stilted, theatrical cadence he sometimes forced when dealing with the public. It was a simple, child-like delivery of data.
"I know someone."
Colt’s head jerked up, his spine straightening against the wall. A tiny, microscopic shift occurred in his eyes—a sudden, desperate catch of amber lamplight as his pupils dilated with a fragile, sudden hope.
Driver didn't look him in the eye; his social programming didn't allow for that kind of direct load under stress. Instead, his gaze dropped back to the canvas, his fingers testing the tension of the surrounding stitching to ensure the tear wouldn't propagate. Inside his own sleeve, his free hand hummed with that constant, hyper-vigilant static, but his touch remained perfectly steady, perfectly calibrated, gently tracing his own seams.
"How fast?"
Colt took three heavy steps forward, the floorboards groaning beneath his weight. Even though Driver was a safe entity, watching someone handle something as close to his bones as that jacket made his heart rate spike. He felt naked without it, exposed in his own living room. His nails bit into his palms. "Three days," he murmured, his voice thick, rough from hours of silence. Instinctively, Colt reached out, his large, scarred hand hovering over the fabric, wanting to pull it back to his chest.
Driver tracking the movement, relinquished the jacket instantly. He stepped back by exactly half a meter, smoothly returning Colt's perimeter to him without any struggle for possession. He let his arms drop back to his pockets, his thumbs tucking into his cuffs.
A tiny, faint trace of a genuine smile flickered at the corner of Driver's mouth—the soft, unaligned expression he only used when the world wasn't looking, entirely devoid of the showman's dimples Colt usually deployed—before his eyes darted away toward the dark window. He had processed the problem; he had provided the vector for calibration. There was a pleasure in helping those that were his. "Okay."
He turned on his heel, heading back toward the exit with that quiet, mechanical stride that seemed to defy the physics of the small space. "An hour?"
Colt froze in place, the heavy, gunpowder-scented canvas clutched tightly against his ribs. The leather details on the cuffs were still warm from where Driver's fingers had rested, a small lingering thermal signature in the cool air of the room. "What?"
Driver didn't stop walking, his hand already reaching for the brass doorknob, but he tilted his head slightly toward the world outside, his voice dropping into that absolute, minimalist simplicity that required zero processing power to maintain.
"Drive you."
Colt’s throat tightened so hard it felt like a mechanical constraint. His lungs stalled entirely. Driver was offering his network? He was going to take him to the custom leather specialist who maintained his own pristine, cream stain jacket? In Colt’s world where stunt coordinators and drivers gatekept their connections like state secrets, where everyone was cagey about their resources, Driver was just opening the door. No questions asked, no lecture about how pathetic it was to spiral over a twenty-year-old piece of pop-culture wardrobe, no demands for explanation. Just a quiet, steady hand offering to steer through the dark.
A small, ragged hiccup caught in Colt's chest when he tried to formulate a proper thank you. The emotional data was too large for his current processing capacity. Unable to find the words, he just nodded aggressively, his head throbbing from the sudden rush of blood to his temples.
Driver gave one final, low-load nod from the doorway, his silhouette cutting a clean, sharp line against the faint light of the corridor, then slipped out into the humid Florida night. He left the door perfectly balanced on its hinges, an open invitation.
The heavy, suffocating static that had trapped Colt on the couch for two days suddenly broke, the gears of his motivation finally catching after hours of spinning in the mud. He scrambled into motion—dropping the metal spoon into the empty ice cream tub with a loud cardboard clatter, smoothing down his wrinkled shirt, his mind repeating the incoming transmission over and over and over like a life-raft protocol as he rushed to get ready:
It'll be okay. It'll be okay.