Tin Man/Life Fic: Live Every Day Like Your Hair Was On Fire.
Someone, please. Shoot me. I have the prison!fic epic, and now a crossover prison!fic drabble. I solemnly swear that I will never watch Folsom Prison Blues again. *angst*
Title: Live Every Day Like Your Hair Was On Fire
Fandoms: Life/Tin Man fusion.
Warnings: Violence, horrible characterization, hardcore Ambrose AU-ing, non-slash, not-Ambrose/Charlie (aka they're Just Friends), seriously messed up zen quotation.
Summary: Nothing is exactly as it seems, nor is it otherwise. - Alan Watts
My heart burns like fire but my eyes are as cold as dead ashes.
Sayen Shaku
He met the guy in the halls of Pelican Bay. He was too skinny for his own good, too bright and unbroken in the eyes. Charlie had been in prison long enough to know the world didn’t end at 2000, that George W Bush was president, that there were prequels to the Star Wars movies. He’d never heard of anyone that looked like this guy, though.
All smiles and pleasantries, chained at both ankles and wrists, with four guards walking him down the hall. The blue of the prison uniform made him look gaunt and almost dead, like he hadn’t seen the sun in years. Then again, with that amount of security, maybe he hadn’t.
The guy smiled at Charlie. Looked younger than anyone else in solitary, and it was probably the fact that he really did smile. It was a short sort of smile, like he was expecting some sort of rebuttal.
Charlie smiled back. There was nobody else in the hall, no weaknesses he had to protect.
And that was how Charlie Crews met Ambrose.
---
The next time Charlie saw him, he was getting stitches again, sitting on a bed while the doctor fixed up a cut on his arm. By now he barely noticed how it felt. He was coming up on something around one hundred and fifty stitches, but when a guy was rolled in with a gut wound that looked very obviously fatal, the unnoticed pricking stopped and the doctor ran for the dying inmate.
The other man’s entrance was practically unnoticed, aside from Charlie and the four guards walking him in. Nothing but a gash on the cheekbone, and the man looked guilty as sin. More importantly, he looked repentant. Charlie hadn’t met anyone who ever looked repentant since he’d been here.
Then again, he’d never met a skinny guy who was surrounded by four guards and had more than likely just stabbed a man to death, either.
Charlie himself was still bleeding, but moved aside, slightly closer to the other man and his guards. He looked back at the screaming man before turning to the assailant. “You do that?”
There weren’t any juries in jail, just judges, and evidence was probably planted all over Pelican Bay, so it wasn’t particularly surprising when the other man nodded with a sigh and finally looked over at Charlie. “He wouldn’t leave when I said no.” Guilt, guilt, guilt with a dash of shame and disgust on the side. He cleared his throat, mustering up a weak smile. “I’m Ambrose.”
“Charlie,” he said. You picked either your first or last name in here, and Charlie was much less known than Crews The Cop, so Charlie he remained. “I’m sentenced for life.”
“I was only supposed to be here two years.” He sighed. “Murder upped that quite a bit, though.”
Charlie couldn’t help it. He grinned, nodding. “Killing people does that, yeah.”
Ambrose frowned at him. “I don’t mean to. It’s…it’s either them or me-”
The man let out one more scream, and the doctor cursed, stepping away as the hastily-attached heart monitor flatlined.
“How can a skinny guy like you manage that?” Charlie found himself asking despite himself.
“Practice,” Ambrose said dismally. “And extensive knowledge of anatomy, physics, and some combat.” Charlie stared, and Ambrose looked aside. “There’s only so much to do in prison, Charlie. I’ve been here a while. I read a lot.”
The guards were listening, of course, so instead of asking for some suggested titles, Charlie just said “huh.”
“Maybe I’ll send the book cart with some suggestions for you,” he said with an incredibly innocent face. “Peter’s fond of me.”
“Fond like he was?” Charlie couldn’t help but ask, motioning to where they were still filling out Time Of Death and other information, and the darkness that suddenly swamped Ambrose’s eyes made Charlie really wish he hadn’t asked. “Hey, I didn’t mean-”
“It’s jail. The only relationships in here are bitches and gangs.” Ambrose stood up, getting off the bed just fast enough to put the guards on age again. “I’ve been here six years and stayed out of both.”
Which really made Charlie wonder how many people Ambrose had killed in prison. A slender guy with a face like that would have problems spending a month in here, let alone six years.
“Crews, get out of here,” the doctor snapped, obviously angry about losing a patient, even if they’d been a rapist and in the room for two minutes.
“Oh, the cop,” Ambrose stated.
Charlie didn’t wait for anything else Ambrose could say. Joe the guard was already waiting to escort Charlie back to solitary anyway.
“See you later, Charlie!” Ambrose shouted. Despite himself, Charlie waved a hand in the air.
Joe was smirking. “Making friends, Crews?”
“With a skinny guy who took out Bill the Rapist and only ended up with a scratch on the forehead,” Charlie added, and that certainly shut Joe up. Bill was six foot four, nearly three hundred pounds of muscle. Or had been, at least.
The lip earned him another few bruises, but it was worth it.
---
Peter came around that week with three books for him, which was especially surprising because Charlie hadn’t even asked for any.
Basic Human Anatomy, Catcher In The Rye, and The Art Of Zen.
Peter didn’t like him. None of the guards liked Charlie. None of the guards and definitely none of the prisoners. But Peter hesitated, and then muttered, “Ambrose says hi” before pushing his cart away.
---
He didn’t see Ambrose for another three months, but he kept reading. Apparently Ambrose got reports from Peter on what he read, because Charlie ended up with one nonfiction and semi-textbook-ish book and a good detective novel every week. You were only allowed three books, and The Art Of Zen wasn’t leaving Charlie’s cell any time soon.
Charlie suggested a book on conflict resolution for Ambrose one week. Peter gave him a strange look, but the next week he got an actual note from Ambrose, right along with the conflict resolution book.
Exchanged this for your Poirot. Try and pick a better book for next week.
Charlie was smiling to himself for those three months. Well, when nobody was looking, at least. Friend or not, there were a lot less people with him than against him.
---
Charlie was getting the shit kicked out of him the next time he saw Ambrose, and he didn’t see much of him, that was sure. Out of solitary for less than a week and he was already being beaten by inmates again.
All of the significant battles are waged within the self. That thought didn’t work so well when the battle was a fight where three guys were trying to beat you to death.
“Charlie?” he heard a voice shout out, and barely managed to see a very surprised Ambrose before one of his attackers was laughing, and lunging, and then punched hard enough in the face to back off. Charlie didn’t even see the shiv before it slipped under the stunned man’s ribs and Ambrose was already onto the next guy while the first bled and fell to the floor. He was trying to get off the floor and help…well, when he saw Ambrose dropkick one of them and slam the guy’s head into the cement, he wasn’t sure who he should be helping.
“Ambrose,” Charlie rasped, having already been strangled, but apparently the other man was seeing nothing but red, and it took the third man’s shriek and Charlie grabbing onto Ambrose’s pants for Ambrose to stop, homemade blade being wiped on the first man’s shirt before Ambrose was crouched next to Charlie, all earnest concern and…sweet, while the third man ran out of the room. He wanted to ask if Ambrose was bipolar or something, he really did, but instead Ambrose was hoisting him up carefully and his brain had decided to give him a concussion.
“Did you read any of those books I sent you?” Ambrose grumbled, practically carrying Charlie despite the fact he was at least twenty pounds lighter than Charlie. “Maybe I should start suggesting combat books.”
“You…you didn’t learn that out of books,” Charlie rasped. A frowning Ambrose hoisted him onto a relatively close table, taking a deep breath with the weight of Charlie off him.
“I said I read a lot, not that I learned how to fight out of a book. I just got better with the theoretical information added in and - how bad a concussion do you have?” He paused, hand going around Charlie’s skull and feeling for any sort of bump. “I’m escaping in a few months, by the way. Want to come?”
Charlie stared at him. He understood prison. Well, everything in prison except for Ambrose.
“How?”
Ambrose blinked at him. “Are you talking about escape or the double entendre?”
He felt like reminding Ambrose that he had a massive concussion and possibly a broken rib and shouldn’t be required to answer questions in such a state, but something like this? Charlie didn’t think he’d be any good at answering that even without the concussion.
“I have a wife.”
Ambrose nodded, and finally winced in sympathy as his fingers felt the bump. “I might have a wife too, for all I know.” When Charlie gave him a disbelieving stare, he shrugged. “First week someone gave me head trauma. I don’t remember much about my life outside of Pelican Bay. I might even have kids out there, for all I know. You need ice or something.”
“What are you in for?” Charlie asked.
Ambrose shrugged. “Apparently I didn’t pass something by the FDA or someone or violated a patent or plagiarized or something. It was some white collar crime.”
Thinking of Ambrose as a happily married husband and father who invented things and had a steady suit-wearing job was practically impossible. “Do you ever get visitors?”
“No,” Ambrose said, and pulled off the overshirt, leaving his tank top on and balling the larger (and bloody) shirt into a makeshift pillow for Charlie to lean against. “You?”
“Rarely,” Charlie sighed, and Ambrose nodded. It was quiet in the room. “I’m innocent.”
“I know.” Charlie stared at him, and Ambrose looked a little guilty. “If you were a murderer, you wouldn’t take the beatings so personal. You don’t like hurting people.” He hesitated. “I can send you the book about reading body language and a good psychology one.”
“I went to college,” Charlie said.
“So did I, according to my records,” Ambrose said, hands moving down to check for any broken bones. It felt like the most bored massage known to mankind. “I went to a lot of college.” Charlie winced when Ambrose hit a rib, and Ambrose winced right along with him. “Are either of your legs broken?”
“Didn’t even hit them,” Charlie rasped out. “Too busy trying to kill me to torture me.”
And Ambrose laughed. “Kids these days! What crazy ideas they get in those tiny brains of theirs!”
Charlie really, really had no idea what was wrong with Ambrose. Maybe that knock on the head had done more than cause this strange form of amnesia. Or maybe Ambrose was just going insane from the prison, and solitary, and nothing but books and books and books to entertain himself with.
“So I guess you don’t want to come with me,” Ambrose assessed, not seeming terribly surprised or even really all that affected by Charlie’s nod of confirmation. “It would have tacked on another year to fit you into the plan. I just worry about how you’ll be doing when I’m not here to take care of you.”
“’Life is the only thing worth living for’,” Charlie found himself quoting, and he got a grin out of it.
“I’ll look you up when you get out, then,” Ambrose smiled, and before Charlie could even say another word he had a tiny, incredibly lethal bit of iron bar that had been sharpened and squished and smoothed to look like the deadliest piece of scrap metal in the world. While Charlie was staring at the thing, he got a light peck on the cheek too.
“I’m in for life, Ambrose,” Charlie said, looking up to see he was alone in the room.
---
The books stopped, which was fine. He had zen. Books were knowledge compressed into a lesser form than what you learned with your own mind. Charlie was learning the bricks, the feel of paper in his hands, the facets of remembering that people didn’t remember to remember. It is better to practice a little than talk a lot. He practiced a lot, and spoke very little. At this rate he would reach enlightenment long before he died.
Six months after the last time he’d seen Ambrose, he got A Farewell To Arms from a pale, nervous Peter. Two days later, alarms were blazing as Pelican Bay realized it was missing an inmate.
---
Sometimes he thought about what would have happened if he’d gone with Ambrose. And then he’d turn to page 94 and read the words better to sit all night than to go to bed with a dragon and feel like he’d made the right decision.
Probably.
It was also the page with Live every day like your hair was on fire, though, and really, that was just contradictory, which gave him more to practice and contemplate.
---
A year after he got out of Pelican Bay, a grubby copy of The Sun Also Rises was sitting on his porch.
He bought a bookshelf he wasn’t attached to, the most expensive bookends he could find (crystal cherubs that he wasn’t attached to at all), and put the book on the top shelf, right between them.
“Do I even want to know?” Ted finally asked one day while Charlie stared at the shelf like it was a work of modern art.
“Is everything you see a flower, Ted?” Charlie asked, and received the ‘please don’t bullshit me right now’ look. He shrugged. “I’m attached to it.”
For a while, Ted stared at the shelf and the bookends and the book with him, until finally turning back towards him. “Why?”
“Because it’s not A Farewell To Arms.”
Somehow that was a good enough answer for Ted, and he was left in peace to stare at the book he hadn’t even had the courage to open. If there was anything written inside, he didn’t want to know. He wanted to earn the knowledge.
If you do not get it from yourself, where will you go for it?
----
I CONSOLE MYSELF WITH THE FACT IT'S SHORT.
Title: Live Every Day Like Your Hair Was On Fire
Fandoms: Life/Tin Man fusion.
Warnings: Violence, horrible characterization, hardcore Ambrose AU-ing, non-slash, not-Ambrose/Charlie (aka they're Just Friends), seriously messed up zen quotation.
Summary: Nothing is exactly as it seems, nor is it otherwise. - Alan Watts
My heart burns like fire but my eyes are as cold as dead ashes.
Sayen Shaku
He met the guy in the halls of Pelican Bay. He was too skinny for his own good, too bright and unbroken in the eyes. Charlie had been in prison long enough to know the world didn’t end at 2000, that George W Bush was president, that there were prequels to the Star Wars movies. He’d never heard of anyone that looked like this guy, though.
All smiles and pleasantries, chained at both ankles and wrists, with four guards walking him down the hall. The blue of the prison uniform made him look gaunt and almost dead, like he hadn’t seen the sun in years. Then again, with that amount of security, maybe he hadn’t.
The guy smiled at Charlie. Looked younger than anyone else in solitary, and it was probably the fact that he really did smile. It was a short sort of smile, like he was expecting some sort of rebuttal.
Charlie smiled back. There was nobody else in the hall, no weaknesses he had to protect.
And that was how Charlie Crews met Ambrose.
---
The next time Charlie saw him, he was getting stitches again, sitting on a bed while the doctor fixed up a cut on his arm. By now he barely noticed how it felt. He was coming up on something around one hundred and fifty stitches, but when a guy was rolled in with a gut wound that looked very obviously fatal, the unnoticed pricking stopped and the doctor ran for the dying inmate.
The other man’s entrance was practically unnoticed, aside from Charlie and the four guards walking him in. Nothing but a gash on the cheekbone, and the man looked guilty as sin. More importantly, he looked repentant. Charlie hadn’t met anyone who ever looked repentant since he’d been here.
Then again, he’d never met a skinny guy who was surrounded by four guards and had more than likely just stabbed a man to death, either.
Charlie himself was still bleeding, but moved aside, slightly closer to the other man and his guards. He looked back at the screaming man before turning to the assailant. “You do that?”
There weren’t any juries in jail, just judges, and evidence was probably planted all over Pelican Bay, so it wasn’t particularly surprising when the other man nodded with a sigh and finally looked over at Charlie. “He wouldn’t leave when I said no.” Guilt, guilt, guilt with a dash of shame and disgust on the side. He cleared his throat, mustering up a weak smile. “I’m Ambrose.”
“Charlie,” he said. You picked either your first or last name in here, and Charlie was much less known than Crews The Cop, so Charlie he remained. “I’m sentenced for life.”
“I was only supposed to be here two years.” He sighed. “Murder upped that quite a bit, though.”
Charlie couldn’t help it. He grinned, nodding. “Killing people does that, yeah.”
Ambrose frowned at him. “I don’t mean to. It’s…it’s either them or me-”
The man let out one more scream, and the doctor cursed, stepping away as the hastily-attached heart monitor flatlined.
“How can a skinny guy like you manage that?” Charlie found himself asking despite himself.
“Practice,” Ambrose said dismally. “And extensive knowledge of anatomy, physics, and some combat.” Charlie stared, and Ambrose looked aside. “There’s only so much to do in prison, Charlie. I’ve been here a while. I read a lot.”
The guards were listening, of course, so instead of asking for some suggested titles, Charlie just said “huh.”
“Maybe I’ll send the book cart with some suggestions for you,” he said with an incredibly innocent face. “Peter’s fond of me.”
“Fond like he was?” Charlie couldn’t help but ask, motioning to where they were still filling out Time Of Death and other information, and the darkness that suddenly swamped Ambrose’s eyes made Charlie really wish he hadn’t asked. “Hey, I didn’t mean-”
“It’s jail. The only relationships in here are bitches and gangs.” Ambrose stood up, getting off the bed just fast enough to put the guards on age again. “I’ve been here six years and stayed out of both.”
Which really made Charlie wonder how many people Ambrose had killed in prison. A slender guy with a face like that would have problems spending a month in here, let alone six years.
“Crews, get out of here,” the doctor snapped, obviously angry about losing a patient, even if they’d been a rapist and in the room for two minutes.
“Oh, the cop,” Ambrose stated.
Charlie didn’t wait for anything else Ambrose could say. Joe the guard was already waiting to escort Charlie back to solitary anyway.
“See you later, Charlie!” Ambrose shouted. Despite himself, Charlie waved a hand in the air.
Joe was smirking. “Making friends, Crews?”
“With a skinny guy who took out Bill the Rapist and only ended up with a scratch on the forehead,” Charlie added, and that certainly shut Joe up. Bill was six foot four, nearly three hundred pounds of muscle. Or had been, at least.
The lip earned him another few bruises, but it was worth it.
---
Peter came around that week with three books for him, which was especially surprising because Charlie hadn’t even asked for any.
Basic Human Anatomy, Catcher In The Rye, and The Art Of Zen.
Peter didn’t like him. None of the guards liked Charlie. None of the guards and definitely none of the prisoners. But Peter hesitated, and then muttered, “Ambrose says hi” before pushing his cart away.
---
He didn’t see Ambrose for another three months, but he kept reading. Apparently Ambrose got reports from Peter on what he read, because Charlie ended up with one nonfiction and semi-textbook-ish book and a good detective novel every week. You were only allowed three books, and The Art Of Zen wasn’t leaving Charlie’s cell any time soon.
Charlie suggested a book on conflict resolution for Ambrose one week. Peter gave him a strange look, but the next week he got an actual note from Ambrose, right along with the conflict resolution book.
Exchanged this for your Poirot. Try and pick a better book for next week.
Charlie was smiling to himself for those three months. Well, when nobody was looking, at least. Friend or not, there were a lot less people with him than against him.
---
Charlie was getting the shit kicked out of him the next time he saw Ambrose, and he didn’t see much of him, that was sure. Out of solitary for less than a week and he was already being beaten by inmates again.
All of the significant battles are waged within the self. That thought didn’t work so well when the battle was a fight where three guys were trying to beat you to death.
“Charlie?” he heard a voice shout out, and barely managed to see a very surprised Ambrose before one of his attackers was laughing, and lunging, and then punched hard enough in the face to back off. Charlie didn’t even see the shiv before it slipped under the stunned man’s ribs and Ambrose was already onto the next guy while the first bled and fell to the floor. He was trying to get off the floor and help…well, when he saw Ambrose dropkick one of them and slam the guy’s head into the cement, he wasn’t sure who he should be helping.
“Ambrose,” Charlie rasped, having already been strangled, but apparently the other man was seeing nothing but red, and it took the third man’s shriek and Charlie grabbing onto Ambrose’s pants for Ambrose to stop, homemade blade being wiped on the first man’s shirt before Ambrose was crouched next to Charlie, all earnest concern and…sweet, while the third man ran out of the room. He wanted to ask if Ambrose was bipolar or something, he really did, but instead Ambrose was hoisting him up carefully and his brain had decided to give him a concussion.
“Did you read any of those books I sent you?” Ambrose grumbled, practically carrying Charlie despite the fact he was at least twenty pounds lighter than Charlie. “Maybe I should start suggesting combat books.”
“You…you didn’t learn that out of books,” Charlie rasped. A frowning Ambrose hoisted him onto a relatively close table, taking a deep breath with the weight of Charlie off him.
“I said I read a lot, not that I learned how to fight out of a book. I just got better with the theoretical information added in and - how bad a concussion do you have?” He paused, hand going around Charlie’s skull and feeling for any sort of bump. “I’m escaping in a few months, by the way. Want to come?”
Charlie stared at him. He understood prison. Well, everything in prison except for Ambrose.
“How?”
Ambrose blinked at him. “Are you talking about escape or the double entendre?”
He felt like reminding Ambrose that he had a massive concussion and possibly a broken rib and shouldn’t be required to answer questions in such a state, but something like this? Charlie didn’t think he’d be any good at answering that even without the concussion.
“I have a wife.”
Ambrose nodded, and finally winced in sympathy as his fingers felt the bump. “I might have a wife too, for all I know.” When Charlie gave him a disbelieving stare, he shrugged. “First week someone gave me head trauma. I don’t remember much about my life outside of Pelican Bay. I might even have kids out there, for all I know. You need ice or something.”
“What are you in for?” Charlie asked.
Ambrose shrugged. “Apparently I didn’t pass something by the FDA or someone or violated a patent or plagiarized or something. It was some white collar crime.”
Thinking of Ambrose as a happily married husband and father who invented things and had a steady suit-wearing job was practically impossible. “Do you ever get visitors?”
“No,” Ambrose said, and pulled off the overshirt, leaving his tank top on and balling the larger (and bloody) shirt into a makeshift pillow for Charlie to lean against. “You?”
“Rarely,” Charlie sighed, and Ambrose nodded. It was quiet in the room. “I’m innocent.”
“I know.” Charlie stared at him, and Ambrose looked a little guilty. “If you were a murderer, you wouldn’t take the beatings so personal. You don’t like hurting people.” He hesitated. “I can send you the book about reading body language and a good psychology one.”
“I went to college,” Charlie said.
“So did I, according to my records,” Ambrose said, hands moving down to check for any broken bones. It felt like the most bored massage known to mankind. “I went to a lot of college.” Charlie winced when Ambrose hit a rib, and Ambrose winced right along with him. “Are either of your legs broken?”
“Didn’t even hit them,” Charlie rasped out. “Too busy trying to kill me to torture me.”
And Ambrose laughed. “Kids these days! What crazy ideas they get in those tiny brains of theirs!”
Charlie really, really had no idea what was wrong with Ambrose. Maybe that knock on the head had done more than cause this strange form of amnesia. Or maybe Ambrose was just going insane from the prison, and solitary, and nothing but books and books and books to entertain himself with.
“So I guess you don’t want to come with me,” Ambrose assessed, not seeming terribly surprised or even really all that affected by Charlie’s nod of confirmation. “It would have tacked on another year to fit you into the plan. I just worry about how you’ll be doing when I’m not here to take care of you.”
“’Life is the only thing worth living for’,” Charlie found himself quoting, and he got a grin out of it.
“I’ll look you up when you get out, then,” Ambrose smiled, and before Charlie could even say another word he had a tiny, incredibly lethal bit of iron bar that had been sharpened and squished and smoothed to look like the deadliest piece of scrap metal in the world. While Charlie was staring at the thing, he got a light peck on the cheek too.
“I’m in for life, Ambrose,” Charlie said, looking up to see he was alone in the room.
---
The books stopped, which was fine. He had zen. Books were knowledge compressed into a lesser form than what you learned with your own mind. Charlie was learning the bricks, the feel of paper in his hands, the facets of remembering that people didn’t remember to remember. It is better to practice a little than talk a lot. He practiced a lot, and spoke very little. At this rate he would reach enlightenment long before he died.
Six months after the last time he’d seen Ambrose, he got A Farewell To Arms from a pale, nervous Peter. Two days later, alarms were blazing as Pelican Bay realized it was missing an inmate.
---
Sometimes he thought about what would have happened if he’d gone with Ambrose. And then he’d turn to page 94 and read the words better to sit all night than to go to bed with a dragon and feel like he’d made the right decision.
Probably.
It was also the page with Live every day like your hair was on fire, though, and really, that was just contradictory, which gave him more to practice and contemplate.
---
A year after he got out of Pelican Bay, a grubby copy of The Sun Also Rises was sitting on his porch.
He bought a bookshelf he wasn’t attached to, the most expensive bookends he could find (crystal cherubs that he wasn’t attached to at all), and put the book on the top shelf, right between them.
“Do I even want to know?” Ted finally asked one day while Charlie stared at the shelf like it was a work of modern art.
“Is everything you see a flower, Ted?” Charlie asked, and received the ‘please don’t bullshit me right now’ look. He shrugged. “I’m attached to it.”
For a while, Ted stared at the shelf and the bookends and the book with him, until finally turning back towards him. “Why?”
“Because it’s not A Farewell To Arms.”
Somehow that was a good enough answer for Ted, and he was left in peace to stare at the book he hadn’t even had the courage to open. If there was anything written inside, he didn’t want to know. He wanted to earn the knowledge.
If you do not get it from yourself, where will you go for it?
----
I CONSOLE MYSELF WITH THE FACT IT'S SHORT.