Fic | Forget All My Songs About Trains
Title: Forget All My Songs About Trains
Author: attilatehbun
Fandom: Young Avengers
Rating: PG
Pairing/Characters: Eli Bradley,Kate Bishop, Tommy Shepherd
Word Count: ~2000
Summary: "Tommy, it's the middle of the night," Eli says, passing a fist over his eyes to clear the sleep away.
"Take it up with Kate," Tommy shrugs, already digging Eli's old duffel out of the detritus at the bottom of the closet and tossing random handfuls of clothes into it.
Eli gets out of bed, crossing to the blinds and splitting them apart with his fingers. He can just make out the bulk of Kate's car in the dim glow of the street lamp.
"I take it we're going somewhere."
A/N: Very late birthday fic for my darling arachnidism. Thank you for being you, my love. ♥
This follows As In An Empty Station, forming something of a series I'm calling A Mess Is Still A Moment I Can Seize. While these two can be read independently, they definitely inform each other and are best read together. There also will be, at some point in the future, be a third to complete the set. And while it can easily be read as Gen/Friendship, there is a certain amount of implied Kate/Eli/Tommy.
Title of this comes from Me and Jiggs by Josh Ritter. Over arching title comes from All Will Be Well by The Gabe Dixon Band.
::
The night splinters around the sound of a car horn and the abruptness of it drags Eli out of sleep. He wakes in the space between two heartbeats, the familiar cadence forcing him into more alertness than usual, but even so, he's barely managed to sit up when he hears his front door open. The next instant, Tommy is leaning against the bedroom doorframe.
"Tommy, it's the middle of the night," Eli says, passing a fist over his eyes to clear the sleep away.
"Take it up with Kate," Tommy shrugs, already digging Eli's old duffel out of the detritus at the bottom of the closet and tossing random handfuls of clothes into it.
"Why are you- you know what, nevermind," Eli says. He gets out of bed, crossing to the blinds and splitting them apart with his fingers. He can just make out the bulk of Kate's car in the dim glow of the street lamp.
"I take it we're going somewhere," he says finally, feeling his mouth twist around the words.
Tommy simply shrugs again and tosses him a shirt.
Kate is waiting for them in the car, drumming her fingertips against the steering wheel. The sloppy braid she tends to sleep in is tossed over one shoulder: when Eli peeks down a little, her feet are bare on the pedals. She taps her fingers on the steering wheel again and stares expectantly at them, ducking her head to peer out of the passenger side window.
"Wake me up when we get there," Tommy says, pushing Eli towards the front.. He tosses Eli's bag into the backseat and crawls in after it, pulling it under his head like a pillow as he stretches his length.
"You don't sleep," Eli says as he opens the passenger door. "And where are we going?"
"Buckle your seat belt," Kate says, checking only that all the doors are shut, and puts the car in gear.
::
When Eli first came out here, he flew with one suitcase and a duffel. He shipped just one box. When it was all unpacked, his bare dorm room looked equally as bare, as if he had yet to step foot in it, and his brand new roommate started calling him The Monk. Eli turned the picture of his grandparents more in towards his bed and went with it.
Now, Eli thinks he could fill the UHaul the three of them have rented just by himself. Instead of six hours, their return will take six slow days and there's a map folded neatly in Kate's glove box next to a stack of napkins and an ancient pot of Vick's Vap-o-rub that has lines drawn in six colors, routes volunteered and rejected and sights circled and argued about and crossed off and circled again in three different sets of handwriting.
He hasn't figured out if he wants to examine what that means.
::
More than an hour's worth of highway stretches out behind them, the fog rolling off the bay and closing each minute off, and Tommy is not asleep. Tommy is not asleep. He's not asleep and he's tossing a wadded up hamburger wrapper at the ceiling of the car. It's barely making a sound, not really, but it's not working with the tension held in the line of Kate's shoulders. Eli cranes his neck to make him stop, to catch it out of his hand or glare him into quiet or maybe even ask nicely, but Tommy lobs it at his forehead before he can do any of those things. It bounces to rest in Kate's lap.
"I will make you walk home," she says, and it's an empty threat with how Tommy would probably rather be on his feet anyway, but it's also the first complete sentence she's said since they all got in the car. Eli looks at Tommy in the side mirror; he's turning over on the seat instead of balling up another piece of trash.
"We should really be doing this in a convertible," Tommy says, tilting his head back to stare up out of the window.
"What are we doing?" Eli says at the same time Kate says, "Well we don't have a convertible, so deal."
Kate did have a convertible, once. Her father sent her across the country with a shiny new BMW, not even test drive miles on it, so she sold it as soon as she could and donated the money to a women's shelter. She spent the next year saving up her wages from her meager student union job to buy this car, which Eli tends to describe as a pile of scrap metal and duct tape. When he's feeling kind.
Eli isn't feeling kind right now. Every time they go over a bump, he expects the entire heap to shudder itself to pieces around them. He hates to agree with Tommy, but he agrees with Tommy. He would much rather be in that old convertible than this.
"We could just take the roof off," Tommy says, sitting up and ignoring Eli trying to catch his eyes in the side mirror.
"Tommy, what the fuck," Eli says.
"What?" Tommy says. "Between Mr. Muscles," he kicks Eli's seat, "and me," he wiggles his fingers, "it should be no problem."
"Tommy, we are not destroying Kate's car," Eli says, even after this time not believing that that's a thing he has to say. He twists in his seat to face Tommy, like that might actually work.
Tommy smirks and leans back out of range. "You know Billy can just fix it when we get back to New Y-"
"What is wrong with you-"
"Guys."
Kate is looking back at them in the rearview. Her voice is uninflected, her forehead smooth, leaving Eli with nothing he can do. He can't even take some of the driving off her.
He doesn't know where they're going.
::
There are a few things Eli always carries with him, no matter when he goes: a picture of his grandparents, young, smiling, waving at the photographer; a tarnished and dented throwing star, rescued from the floor of a church on fire to change everything; a four year old bus ticket that never had a chance to get used because other things are faster. These are the things he has, carried inside him, even at the times he wishes they weren't.
He used to think he had it figured out, at least mostly. It was as easy as holding a broken bottle against people three times his size. As simple as putting on a mask, and fuck you to anyone who says he can't, they can't, we can't. As obvious as being angry enough, long enough, that everything that made him want to yell and hit and push stayed external. When the fight in front of him was clear.
But he carries these things with him. And carrying them makes him want to fight, fight for them. The struggle is muddy now when it's not just splitting things apart. When it's not standing firm and stubborn and defiant, but taking the next step, and knowing which one that is.
::
They almost make it to dawn. Almost. The sun is still just a promise in the sky when Kate's car shudders itself to pieces around them. It gives a gasp and a tremble and lets Kate have enough time to coast them to the side of the road before coughing its last. Eli watches as she hunches over the steering column, twisting the key three four five times, muttering under her breath.
"Dammit," she whispers, hand finally stilling. "Dammit," she says again, sitting upright. She wrenches the door open and gets out, slamming it shut behind her. "Dammit," she screams.
They're alone on this little backroad, snaking between two farmers' fields. There's no one out there to hear her.
Eli follows her out of the car, any griping about having taken her car in the first place dying unsaid in the back of his throat. She's already jumped the fence keeping them from the field, and as he sets off after her he hears Tommy's door open and close.
Out farther in the field, Eli can just make out a small pond, just big enough to be the kind for kids to play in and get full of parasites. Maybe it's a watering hole, if there's livestock. Maybe it dries up between rains. It's still dark enough that even with his heightened eyesight Eli can only barely make it out. He's a little amazed Kate can see it at all.
Tommy is suddenly at his side, and he doesn't jump because he learned a long time ago that it was pointless. "Okay, seriously," Tommy says, "what is going on? What are we doing?"
"We're following Kate," Eli says.
Kate is sitting at the edge of the pond when they catch up to her. The pond is bigger than Eli expected, though still not large, and there's a rickety looking wooden dock stretched out into it. He's prepared to smash it to splinters if anyone seems like they've gotten the brilliant idea to take a running jump off it.
"Ta-da," Kate says, and her voice is like breaking glass. "I went looking for a lake, and the universe kindly provided."
Eli hunkers down next to her, mud seeping through his pajama pants, because he's not sure what else there is to do.
"Kate," he says.
"This was a stupid idea, I know," she says, staring out at the muddy surface of the pond.
Eli looks over at Tommy. Tommy has picked up some small rocks, like he wants to skip them; his hands are a blur as he tosses them back and forth.
"We don't even know what the idea is," Eli says because Kate should be fighting with him.
"There's this lake- It's not important, it's- This was so stupid, I-" Her hands are fists tearing into the sparse grass.
Tommy tosses the rocks at the pond and doesn't turn into the splash. "I know we don't- I, Kate. You can tell us," Tommy says.
"We're leaving soon," she says abruptly. She punches into the mud. "We're going back in three days. And then-"
Eli doesn't have anything to say to that. He's felt the weight of that, digging his feet into the ground. He reaches behind her and starts to comb out her braid with his fingers.
"And there's this lake," Kate says, "my mom always wanted to see it, and she- And I just woke up tonight and I realized we're leaving in three days and when are we going to have another chance, you know? What if. I didn't want-"
She looks down at her muddy fingers. "I just knew we had to go."
Eli is sitting beside her and he has a choice that's not really a choice at all. It's no more a choice than making a fist when he needs to. So he uncurls and slides behind her, wraps his arms around her shoulders and catches her body between his knees.
Instantly - because that's what Tommy does, instantly - Tommy's kneeling in front of her, sliding between her legs and slipping his arms around her waist. Eli can feel the heat of Tommy's hands pressed against his stomach, and he opens his wrists to catch Tommy's shoulders too.
They sit like that, just breathing, until Kate unclenches her arms and wraps one easily around each of them. She laughs, and if it sounds a little wet no one says anything. "I guess I'm going to have to change our rental, get a truck instead." She squeezes a handful of each of their shirts. "Since my piece of shit finally bit the dust and all."
"Told you we should have had a convertible," Tommy says into her neck, his hair brushing Eli's jaw.
"And we still shouldn't have made her car into one," Eli says, and Kate laughs again, stronger this time.
"Blah blah blah," Tommy says and snuggles in a bit tighter.
Eli looks out over the water. The ripples from Tommy's rocks have faded, but it's too dirty to really catch the stars. They're above, pressing down, Eli can still feel them, but somehow when they're like this, sharing it, the weight feels...
He presses his nose into Kate's hair. They can support all of it.
::fin::
endnote: while it ultimately did not matter, and thus was not explicitly mentioned, in my head Eli & Kate went to school in and around San Francisco and the lake they are heading towards is Crater Lake
Author: attilatehbun
Fandom: Young Avengers
Rating: PG
Pairing/Characters: Eli Bradley,Kate Bishop, Tommy Shepherd
Word Count: ~2000
Summary: "Tommy, it's the middle of the night," Eli says, passing a fist over his eyes to clear the sleep away.
"Take it up with Kate," Tommy shrugs, already digging Eli's old duffel out of the detritus at the bottom of the closet and tossing random handfuls of clothes into it.
Eli gets out of bed, crossing to the blinds and splitting them apart with his fingers. He can just make out the bulk of Kate's car in the dim glow of the street lamp.
"I take it we're going somewhere."
A/N: Very late birthday fic for my darling arachnidism. Thank you for being you, my love. ♥
This follows As In An Empty Station, forming something of a series I'm calling A Mess Is Still A Moment I Can Seize. While these two can be read independently, they definitely inform each other and are best read together. There also will be, at some point in the future, be a third to complete the set. And while it can easily be read as Gen/Friendship, there is a certain amount of implied Kate/Eli/Tommy.
Title of this comes from Me and Jiggs by Josh Ritter. Over arching title comes from All Will Be Well by The Gabe Dixon Band.
::
The night splinters around the sound of a car horn and the abruptness of it drags Eli out of sleep. He wakes in the space between two heartbeats, the familiar cadence forcing him into more alertness than usual, but even so, he's barely managed to sit up when he hears his front door open. The next instant, Tommy is leaning against the bedroom doorframe.
"Tommy, it's the middle of the night," Eli says, passing a fist over his eyes to clear the sleep away.
"Take it up with Kate," Tommy shrugs, already digging Eli's old duffel out of the detritus at the bottom of the closet and tossing random handfuls of clothes into it.
"Why are you- you know what, nevermind," Eli says. He gets out of bed, crossing to the blinds and splitting them apart with his fingers. He can just make out the bulk of Kate's car in the dim glow of the street lamp.
"I take it we're going somewhere," he says finally, feeling his mouth twist around the words.
Tommy simply shrugs again and tosses him a shirt.
Kate is waiting for them in the car, drumming her fingertips against the steering wheel. The sloppy braid she tends to sleep in is tossed over one shoulder: when Eli peeks down a little, her feet are bare on the pedals. She taps her fingers on the steering wheel again and stares expectantly at them, ducking her head to peer out of the passenger side window.
"Wake me up when we get there," Tommy says, pushing Eli towards the front.. He tosses Eli's bag into the backseat and crawls in after it, pulling it under his head like a pillow as he stretches his length.
"You don't sleep," Eli says as he opens the passenger door. "And where are we going?"
"Buckle your seat belt," Kate says, checking only that all the doors are shut, and puts the car in gear.
::
When Eli first came out here, he flew with one suitcase and a duffel. He shipped just one box. When it was all unpacked, his bare dorm room looked equally as bare, as if he had yet to step foot in it, and his brand new roommate started calling him The Monk. Eli turned the picture of his grandparents more in towards his bed and went with it.
Now, Eli thinks he could fill the UHaul the three of them have rented just by himself. Instead of six hours, their return will take six slow days and there's a map folded neatly in Kate's glove box next to a stack of napkins and an ancient pot of Vick's Vap-o-rub that has lines drawn in six colors, routes volunteered and rejected and sights circled and argued about and crossed off and circled again in three different sets of handwriting.
He hasn't figured out if he wants to examine what that means.
::
More than an hour's worth of highway stretches out behind them, the fog rolling off the bay and closing each minute off, and Tommy is not asleep. Tommy is not asleep. He's not asleep and he's tossing a wadded up hamburger wrapper at the ceiling of the car. It's barely making a sound, not really, but it's not working with the tension held in the line of Kate's shoulders. Eli cranes his neck to make him stop, to catch it out of his hand or glare him into quiet or maybe even ask nicely, but Tommy lobs it at his forehead before he can do any of those things. It bounces to rest in Kate's lap.
"I will make you walk home," she says, and it's an empty threat with how Tommy would probably rather be on his feet anyway, but it's also the first complete sentence she's said since they all got in the car. Eli looks at Tommy in the side mirror; he's turning over on the seat instead of balling up another piece of trash.
"We should really be doing this in a convertible," Tommy says, tilting his head back to stare up out of the window.
"What are we doing?" Eli says at the same time Kate says, "Well we don't have a convertible, so deal."
Kate did have a convertible, once. Her father sent her across the country with a shiny new BMW, not even test drive miles on it, so she sold it as soon as she could and donated the money to a women's shelter. She spent the next year saving up her wages from her meager student union job to buy this car, which Eli tends to describe as a pile of scrap metal and duct tape. When he's feeling kind.
Eli isn't feeling kind right now. Every time they go over a bump, he expects the entire heap to shudder itself to pieces around them. He hates to agree with Tommy, but he agrees with Tommy. He would much rather be in that old convertible than this.
"We could just take the roof off," Tommy says, sitting up and ignoring Eli trying to catch his eyes in the side mirror.
"Tommy, what the fuck," Eli says.
"What?" Tommy says. "Between Mr. Muscles," he kicks Eli's seat, "and me," he wiggles his fingers, "it should be no problem."
"Tommy, we are not destroying Kate's car," Eli says, even after this time not believing that that's a thing he has to say. He twists in his seat to face Tommy, like that might actually work.
Tommy smirks and leans back out of range. "You know Billy can just fix it when we get back to New Y-"
"What is wrong with you-"
"Guys."
Kate is looking back at them in the rearview. Her voice is uninflected, her forehead smooth, leaving Eli with nothing he can do. He can't even take some of the driving off her.
He doesn't know where they're going.
::
There are a few things Eli always carries with him, no matter when he goes: a picture of his grandparents, young, smiling, waving at the photographer; a tarnished and dented throwing star, rescued from the floor of a church on fire to change everything; a four year old bus ticket that never had a chance to get used because other things are faster. These are the things he has, carried inside him, even at the times he wishes they weren't.
He used to think he had it figured out, at least mostly. It was as easy as holding a broken bottle against people three times his size. As simple as putting on a mask, and fuck you to anyone who says he can't, they can't, we can't. As obvious as being angry enough, long enough, that everything that made him want to yell and hit and push stayed external. When the fight in front of him was clear.
But he carries these things with him. And carrying them makes him want to fight, fight for them. The struggle is muddy now when it's not just splitting things apart. When it's not standing firm and stubborn and defiant, but taking the next step, and knowing which one that is.
::
They almost make it to dawn. Almost. The sun is still just a promise in the sky when Kate's car shudders itself to pieces around them. It gives a gasp and a tremble and lets Kate have enough time to coast them to the side of the road before coughing its last. Eli watches as she hunches over the steering column, twisting the key three four five times, muttering under her breath.
"Dammit," she whispers, hand finally stilling. "Dammit," she says again, sitting upright. She wrenches the door open and gets out, slamming it shut behind her. "Dammit," she screams.
They're alone on this little backroad, snaking between two farmers' fields. There's no one out there to hear her.
Eli follows her out of the car, any griping about having taken her car in the first place dying unsaid in the back of his throat. She's already jumped the fence keeping them from the field, and as he sets off after her he hears Tommy's door open and close.
Out farther in the field, Eli can just make out a small pond, just big enough to be the kind for kids to play in and get full of parasites. Maybe it's a watering hole, if there's livestock. Maybe it dries up between rains. It's still dark enough that even with his heightened eyesight Eli can only barely make it out. He's a little amazed Kate can see it at all.
Tommy is suddenly at his side, and he doesn't jump because he learned a long time ago that it was pointless. "Okay, seriously," Tommy says, "what is going on? What are we doing?"
"We're following Kate," Eli says.
Kate is sitting at the edge of the pond when they catch up to her. The pond is bigger than Eli expected, though still not large, and there's a rickety looking wooden dock stretched out into it. He's prepared to smash it to splinters if anyone seems like they've gotten the brilliant idea to take a running jump off it.
"Ta-da," Kate says, and her voice is like breaking glass. "I went looking for a lake, and the universe kindly provided."
Eli hunkers down next to her, mud seeping through his pajama pants, because he's not sure what else there is to do.
"Kate," he says.
"This was a stupid idea, I know," she says, staring out at the muddy surface of the pond.
Eli looks over at Tommy. Tommy has picked up some small rocks, like he wants to skip them; his hands are a blur as he tosses them back and forth.
"We don't even know what the idea is," Eli says because Kate should be fighting with him.
"There's this lake- It's not important, it's- This was so stupid, I-" Her hands are fists tearing into the sparse grass.
Tommy tosses the rocks at the pond and doesn't turn into the splash. "I know we don't- I, Kate. You can tell us," Tommy says.
"We're leaving soon," she says abruptly. She punches into the mud. "We're going back in three days. And then-"
Eli doesn't have anything to say to that. He's felt the weight of that, digging his feet into the ground. He reaches behind her and starts to comb out her braid with his fingers.
"And there's this lake," Kate says, "my mom always wanted to see it, and she- And I just woke up tonight and I realized we're leaving in three days and when are we going to have another chance, you know? What if. I didn't want-"
She looks down at her muddy fingers. "I just knew we had to go."
Eli is sitting beside her and he has a choice that's not really a choice at all. It's no more a choice than making a fist when he needs to. So he uncurls and slides behind her, wraps his arms around her shoulders and catches her body between his knees.
Instantly - because that's what Tommy does, instantly - Tommy's kneeling in front of her, sliding between her legs and slipping his arms around her waist. Eli can feel the heat of Tommy's hands pressed against his stomach, and he opens his wrists to catch Tommy's shoulders too.
They sit like that, just breathing, until Kate unclenches her arms and wraps one easily around each of them. She laughs, and if it sounds a little wet no one says anything. "I guess I'm going to have to change our rental, get a truck instead." She squeezes a handful of each of their shirts. "Since my piece of shit finally bit the dust and all."
"Told you we should have had a convertible," Tommy says into her neck, his hair brushing Eli's jaw.
"And we still shouldn't have made her car into one," Eli says, and Kate laughs again, stronger this time.
"Blah blah blah," Tommy says and snuggles in a bit tighter.
Eli looks out over the water. The ripples from Tommy's rocks have faded, but it's too dirty to really catch the stars. They're above, pressing down, Eli can still feel them, but somehow when they're like this, sharing it, the weight feels...
He presses his nose into Kate's hair. They can support all of it.
::fin::
endnote: while it ultimately did not matter, and thus was not explicitly mentioned, in my head Eli & Kate went to school in and around San Francisco and the lake they are heading towards is Crater Lake