fic: cars and guitars
Title: Cars and Guitars
Characters/Pairing: J/B.
Summary: Jacob tries to keep on driving, as if that’s enough to leave the past behind. Funny how that never really works. Post-Eclipse, AU-ish. BD? What BD?
Warnings: Severe fluff.
Notes: Inspired partly by American Gods. Based on one of these prompts from
the_angry_pixie, which
haydn_hottie threw my way - but I won't tell you which prompt. ;D
Dedicated to: To everyone who organized, participated in, and voted in the sortofbeautiful awards, and also to everyone who - even more than a year later - still remembers my wee little fics and keeps the love alive. You guys rock.
Cars and Guitars
If I choke, boy, you start me up again
Restring my wires, y'know
This gearbox can make the shift polish my rims
… Still the rain can't confuse the thoughts that come in rhythm
'Cause it never was the cars and guitars that came between us
Still, a thought says, what if I keep on drivin’? Keep on drivin’?
- Tori Amos
Growing up means growing sad. Growing up means giving up. Failure can make even the proudest boy’s shoulders bow until he grows into a man heavy with the weight of broken dreams. And most of all, growing up means moving on.
So Jacob moves on, and on, and on. To places like Kampsville, Illinois; Merrimac, Wisconsin; Fairfax, Minnesota. Places no one’s even heard of, not even the people who live there. There’s always a garage that won’t ask too many questions and that can use an extra set of hands, a clever mechanic who can lift the rear end of a Chevy all by himself, even if he doesn’t say a word.
So that’s what he becomes: a set of hands. His world condenses into the guts of a car, the popped hood becomes his sky. He never has to look any farther than that, above or ahead or behind; his brain is so focussed on what is right in front of him, on gearboxes, wires, crankshafts, that he doesn’t have to think. What he brings from his old life is his knowledge and his kinship with machines. What he leaves behind is everything else.
And after a while, it begins to seem like a dream. His old life. The broken antennae on the TV from a fight with his sisters. Fur and snarls, following the scent-thread through the forests and the mountains. The feeling of a worn brown basketball sitting cradled in his palm, just waiting for the lay up. The pounding of the surf on the bone-white beach. Flour and sugar dusting his mother’s cheek and her long, gentle hands. The bonfires where he watched the tongues of fire turn witch green from the sea salt in the driftwood, while people sang very softly in the darkness, and someone played the guitar.
And the girl. Her. She. Her name is written in water, just as insubstantial as anything and anyone else. His memory tells him, but with a dreamy illogic, that yes, once upon a time, he loved someone - loved her - fully and recklessly, with everything he had and many other things that he didn’t but that he chose to give up anyway, before he knew what they were, before he knew how much losing them would hurt. It seems ridiculous now - practically Arthurian - to think that he threw a whole life away because a girl got married.
But that was what happened and that was all that happened. It’s the most important thing that has ever happened in Jacob’s entire life, and it’s so small, really, when you put it into the proper words: A girl got married. She turned to stone.
And then he moved on.
And now, how many years later, he can’t remember what it felt like to be so young that love, and only love, could make the world move.
~
He’s in Boise, Idaho. On his menu for that afternoon, he’s got a green ’65 Chevy Impala, the cherished pet of some old grandmother in town. After that, a ’94 Dodge Caravan, the classic family shoebox (shove everybody in), nothing weird about the make or the model; its eccentricity comes from the fact that it’s painted a deep, crazy shade of tangerine. Jacob tinkers with the Imapala as his boss Marty does his patter with the dad sitting at the wheel.
The mom has gotten out of the car too, she’s talking to Marty now. Kid in her arms, she’s asking Marty something about a grocery store, or somewhere to eat. Even from the back, he can tell the mom’s not bad looking - brown hair, almost red, just curling around her face, a few modest curves, a neat waist, one you could easily fit your arms around… She almost looks like -
The kid catches sight of him. Cute kid. Brown-eyed, brown-haired, just like the mom. Grin so wide you could shove a whole pie into it.
Cute kid, he thinks again. And before he can stop his brain, his brain says, Completely human, too.
Kid’s squirming now, making faces, grabbing at the air like she’s trying to snatch at Jacob, standing fifteen feet away.
The mom turns.
The world turns.
Time stops, slows, re-starts again.
And Bella just gapes. The kid, her kid, keeps on fussing in her arms, and Bella hoists her up in that automatic way that moms do, while their brains are on vacation. The guy - the father - stands next to her, casually protective, still chatting up Marty, not even realising the staring contest of all staring contests is going down right in front of them.
Bella’s mouth makes the shape of his name, and that’s when Jacob does some very rapid math.
She was eighteen, then. The kid looks maybe two or three. It has been four years since then, since she got married, got dead, upped and disappeared or whatever it was she did.
Four years, Jacob thinks. It seems like so much, when you think of it like that. It seems like so little, faced with her now. Faced with that little grinning goblin face, peeping over her shoulder. Curled up against her, so comfortably, so casually, as if Bella is the safest place in the world. As if she has a right to those arms, to that warmth.
He wants, more than anything, to not care. To be strong enough and tough enough, cold and hard and numb enough, to look her in the eye and say, I’m not in love with you anymore, and to have it be true. To look into the mouth of the wound and to say with all the bravado of a little boy or a teenage boy or a man-child who never quite left his boyhood behind, It doesn’t hurt.
He can’t say either of these things, so instead he -
Walks away.
Growing up means accepting the failures of the past. Growing up means falling out of love, and staying that way. Growing up means you don’t pull that Orpheus shit, you don’t look back when love calls your name -
“Jacob!”
He looks back of course, because really, what else is a boy supposed to do?
Jacob has always been bad at doing what he’s told - come down from the roof, get off that cliff, hand in your homework, don’t touch that you’ll break it, stop pulling Rachel’s hair, don’t fall in love with me - so this time should be no different, even if it’s himself that he’s not listening to.
She’s nearly out of breath, running after him onto the street. And the damn kid is still in her arms, looking completely nonplussed.
And just like that, four years’ worth of numbness completely melts away.
“What the fuck, Bella? What the fuck what the fuck whatthefuck? You can’t just do this, you can’t just breeze into my life in some sort of crazy coincidence, you can’t wreck everything I’ve made here! And a kid? A kid? A human kid!? What happened to giving up being human and growing old and having children for the sake of being with someone ‘forever’? What happened to true love and white weddings and all that crap, and if you gave that up too, what did you give it up for and why didn’t you tell me? If you wanted a kid so badly, I would have given you kids! I would’ve been happy to give you brats! God damn it!”
Bella watches him through this entire tirade, not interrupting even once. Her face alternately flushes and goes pale, and settles for pink splotches that spread across her cheeks and throat. He refuses to find it beautiful.
“Jacob,” she says with a strained sort of calm, at the end of this little speech, as she hoists the little girl up in her arms (the kid looks faintly impressed at all of Jacob’s noise and yelling and hissing and spitting), “meet my half-sister, Asha.”
~
Hours later, she’ll tell him about how her marriage fell apart before it even began, about their current road trip out to Idaho to visit some of Renee’s relatives, about heading back to her mom and finding her pregnant, about her failure to keep her mom from naming the little girl after a Phoenician goddess of love and war (Ashtoreth), about the first time she saw Asha and the way it almost made her cry, the beauty of it, her crinkling nose and her fragile-lidded eyes and the rounded belly and each tiny finger and toe. Life. And knowing that there were some things that she never could give up. Because everything perfect about Asha was another thing worth living for.
Hours later, he’ll tell her about what it’s like to wake up with a face in the back of your eyelids every single day and then, every day, to push it down and push it away. He’ll her about trying to be numb, about the hours spent in sports bars or underneath the hoods of cars, about the places and the people that seem like ghosts, about sleepwalking through life and then the brutal shock of awakening, seeing her. Being brought back to life.
Hours later, they’ll talk about what life is like when you’re trying not to think of the past because you can only think of it as dead, because forgiveness was something she never expected or deserved but always hoped for, because forgiveness was the one thing he thought he could never give her but that was because had already given it to her, long ago. They’ll talk about how hope hurts in the worst possible way. They’ll talk, and they’ll talk, and then they won’t talk at all. They’ll reach deep down in the dark space where their hearts continue to beat, despite the wear and tear of countless years and endless battles, and they’ll be brave enough, this time, to use the word love.
But right now, they’re in a tiny gas station café in Boise, Idaho that smells like grease and old cheddar, a place with pink wallpaper peeling from the walls and greying tiles that in their past life might’ve been white. Two cups of coffee on the table in front of them. Hands curled around hands. Not quite looking at each other, but watching the steam rise up from their coffee cups, still untouched. Not saying a word. Not having to.
That’s how Renee and Phil and Asha find them, just like that. And Renee turns to Phil and says, “Honey, you might want to clear out the rest of the back seat. I think we just gained another passenger.”
“For how long?” her husband asks, looking a little surprised. He doesn’t even notice Asha fondly chewing on his hair. “The rest of the trip?”
“For a long, long time,” Renee says, grinning to herself a bit, because even as she watches Jacob and Bella’s heads bend towards each other like flowers in the rain, she still doesn’t like using the word forever.
Not out loud, anyhow.
~
Jacob folds up his limbs and tries not to bump his head as he crams himself into the crazy tangerine-coloured minivan, but winds up hitting it anyway and Bella laughs and mocks his giant height and he in turn calls her a dwarf and Renee says, “Children, please,” and Asha burbles delightedly and a thumb war between Jake and Bella happens right then and there and then they’re heading out of Boise, Idaho, down long dirt roads among the hills that are lined with long grass and wildflowers, all of it rippling in the sun.
For all of his wandering over the last four years, Jacob never realised he was actually standing in the exact same place, waiting. Hoping. But when he lets her win the thumb war and Bella’s hand slides into his, he knows that he is precisely where is meant to be, with who he is meant to be with.
Growing up means moving on, and Bella’s hands is very warm in his. So he moves towards her until she stops him with her mouth but she doesn’t really stop him - and then he moves on, and on, and on.
He can feel her smiling against his lips and he knows it the way he did when he was young: love, and only love, can make the world move.
end.
Characters/Pairing: J/B.
Summary: Jacob tries to keep on driving, as if that’s enough to leave the past behind. Funny how that never really works. Post-Eclipse, AU-ish. BD? What BD?
Warnings: Severe fluff.
Notes: Inspired partly by American Gods. Based on one of these prompts from
the_angry_pixie, which
haydn_hottie threw my way - but I won't tell you which prompt. ;D
Dedicated to: To everyone who organized, participated in, and voted in the sortofbeautiful awards, and also to everyone who - even more than a year later - still remembers my wee little fics and keeps the love alive. You guys rock.
Cars and Guitars
If I choke, boy, you start me up again
Restring my wires, y'know
This gearbox can make the shift polish my rims
… Still the rain can't confuse the thoughts that come in rhythm
'Cause it never was the cars and guitars that came between us
Still, a thought says, what if I keep on drivin’? Keep on drivin’?
- Tori Amos
Growing up means growing sad. Growing up means giving up. Failure can make even the proudest boy’s shoulders bow until he grows into a man heavy with the weight of broken dreams. And most of all, growing up means moving on.
So Jacob moves on, and on, and on. To places like Kampsville, Illinois; Merrimac, Wisconsin; Fairfax, Minnesota. Places no one’s even heard of, not even the people who live there. There’s always a garage that won’t ask too many questions and that can use an extra set of hands, a clever mechanic who can lift the rear end of a Chevy all by himself, even if he doesn’t say a word.
So that’s what he becomes: a set of hands. His world condenses into the guts of a car, the popped hood becomes his sky. He never has to look any farther than that, above or ahead or behind; his brain is so focussed on what is right in front of him, on gearboxes, wires, crankshafts, that he doesn’t have to think. What he brings from his old life is his knowledge and his kinship with machines. What he leaves behind is everything else.
And after a while, it begins to seem like a dream. His old life. The broken antennae on the TV from a fight with his sisters. Fur and snarls, following the scent-thread through the forests and the mountains. The feeling of a worn brown basketball sitting cradled in his palm, just waiting for the lay up. The pounding of the surf on the bone-white beach. Flour and sugar dusting his mother’s cheek and her long, gentle hands. The bonfires where he watched the tongues of fire turn witch green from the sea salt in the driftwood, while people sang very softly in the darkness, and someone played the guitar.
And the girl. Her. She. Her name is written in water, just as insubstantial as anything and anyone else. His memory tells him, but with a dreamy illogic, that yes, once upon a time, he loved someone - loved her - fully and recklessly, with everything he had and many other things that he didn’t but that he chose to give up anyway, before he knew what they were, before he knew how much losing them would hurt. It seems ridiculous now - practically Arthurian - to think that he threw a whole life away because a girl got married.
But that was what happened and that was all that happened. It’s the most important thing that has ever happened in Jacob’s entire life, and it’s so small, really, when you put it into the proper words: A girl got married. She turned to stone.
And then he moved on.
And now, how many years later, he can’t remember what it felt like to be so young that love, and only love, could make the world move.
~
He’s in Boise, Idaho. On his menu for that afternoon, he’s got a green ’65 Chevy Impala, the cherished pet of some old grandmother in town. After that, a ’94 Dodge Caravan, the classic family shoebox (shove everybody in), nothing weird about the make or the model; its eccentricity comes from the fact that it’s painted a deep, crazy shade of tangerine. Jacob tinkers with the Imapala as his boss Marty does his patter with the dad sitting at the wheel.
The mom has gotten out of the car too, she’s talking to Marty now. Kid in her arms, she’s asking Marty something about a grocery store, or somewhere to eat. Even from the back, he can tell the mom’s not bad looking - brown hair, almost red, just curling around her face, a few modest curves, a neat waist, one you could easily fit your arms around… She almost looks like -
The kid catches sight of him. Cute kid. Brown-eyed, brown-haired, just like the mom. Grin so wide you could shove a whole pie into it.
Cute kid, he thinks again. And before he can stop his brain, his brain says, Completely human, too.
Kid’s squirming now, making faces, grabbing at the air like she’s trying to snatch at Jacob, standing fifteen feet away.
The mom turns.
The world turns.
Time stops, slows, re-starts again.
And Bella just gapes. The kid, her kid, keeps on fussing in her arms, and Bella hoists her up in that automatic way that moms do, while their brains are on vacation. The guy - the father - stands next to her, casually protective, still chatting up Marty, not even realising the staring contest of all staring contests is going down right in front of them.
Bella’s mouth makes the shape of his name, and that’s when Jacob does some very rapid math.
She was eighteen, then. The kid looks maybe two or three. It has been four years since then, since she got married, got dead, upped and disappeared or whatever it was she did.
Four years, Jacob thinks. It seems like so much, when you think of it like that. It seems like so little, faced with her now. Faced with that little grinning goblin face, peeping over her shoulder. Curled up against her, so comfortably, so casually, as if Bella is the safest place in the world. As if she has a right to those arms, to that warmth.
He wants, more than anything, to not care. To be strong enough and tough enough, cold and hard and numb enough, to look her in the eye and say, I’m not in love with you anymore, and to have it be true. To look into the mouth of the wound and to say with all the bravado of a little boy or a teenage boy or a man-child who never quite left his boyhood behind, It doesn’t hurt.
He can’t say either of these things, so instead he -
Walks away.
Growing up means accepting the failures of the past. Growing up means falling out of love, and staying that way. Growing up means you don’t pull that Orpheus shit, you don’t look back when love calls your name -
“Jacob!”
He looks back of course, because really, what else is a boy supposed to do?
Jacob has always been bad at doing what he’s told - come down from the roof, get off that cliff, hand in your homework, don’t touch that you’ll break it, stop pulling Rachel’s hair, don’t fall in love with me - so this time should be no different, even if it’s himself that he’s not listening to.
She’s nearly out of breath, running after him onto the street. And the damn kid is still in her arms, looking completely nonplussed.
And just like that, four years’ worth of numbness completely melts away.
“What the fuck, Bella? What the fuck what the fuck whatthefuck? You can’t just do this, you can’t just breeze into my life in some sort of crazy coincidence, you can’t wreck everything I’ve made here! And a kid? A kid? A human kid!? What happened to giving up being human and growing old and having children for the sake of being with someone ‘forever’? What happened to true love and white weddings and all that crap, and if you gave that up too, what did you give it up for and why didn’t you tell me? If you wanted a kid so badly, I would have given you kids! I would’ve been happy to give you brats! God damn it!”
Bella watches him through this entire tirade, not interrupting even once. Her face alternately flushes and goes pale, and settles for pink splotches that spread across her cheeks and throat. He refuses to find it beautiful.
“Jacob,” she says with a strained sort of calm, at the end of this little speech, as she hoists the little girl up in her arms (the kid looks faintly impressed at all of Jacob’s noise and yelling and hissing and spitting), “meet my half-sister, Asha.”
~
Hours later, she’ll tell him about how her marriage fell apart before it even began, about their current road trip out to Idaho to visit some of Renee’s relatives, about heading back to her mom and finding her pregnant, about her failure to keep her mom from naming the little girl after a Phoenician goddess of love and war (Ashtoreth), about the first time she saw Asha and the way it almost made her cry, the beauty of it, her crinkling nose and her fragile-lidded eyes and the rounded belly and each tiny finger and toe. Life. And knowing that there were some things that she never could give up. Because everything perfect about Asha was another thing worth living for.
Hours later, he’ll tell her about what it’s like to wake up with a face in the back of your eyelids every single day and then, every day, to push it down and push it away. He’ll her about trying to be numb, about the hours spent in sports bars or underneath the hoods of cars, about the places and the people that seem like ghosts, about sleepwalking through life and then the brutal shock of awakening, seeing her. Being brought back to life.
Hours later, they’ll talk about what life is like when you’re trying not to think of the past because you can only think of it as dead, because forgiveness was something she never expected or deserved but always hoped for, because forgiveness was the one thing he thought he could never give her but that was because had already given it to her, long ago. They’ll talk about how hope hurts in the worst possible way. They’ll talk, and they’ll talk, and then they won’t talk at all. They’ll reach deep down in the dark space where their hearts continue to beat, despite the wear and tear of countless years and endless battles, and they’ll be brave enough, this time, to use the word love.
But right now, they’re in a tiny gas station café in Boise, Idaho that smells like grease and old cheddar, a place with pink wallpaper peeling from the walls and greying tiles that in their past life might’ve been white. Two cups of coffee on the table in front of them. Hands curled around hands. Not quite looking at each other, but watching the steam rise up from their coffee cups, still untouched. Not saying a word. Not having to.
That’s how Renee and Phil and Asha find them, just like that. And Renee turns to Phil and says, “Honey, you might want to clear out the rest of the back seat. I think we just gained another passenger.”
“For how long?” her husband asks, looking a little surprised. He doesn’t even notice Asha fondly chewing on his hair. “The rest of the trip?”
“For a long, long time,” Renee says, grinning to herself a bit, because even as she watches Jacob and Bella’s heads bend towards each other like flowers in the rain, she still doesn’t like using the word forever.
Not out loud, anyhow.
~
Jacob folds up his limbs and tries not to bump his head as he crams himself into the crazy tangerine-coloured minivan, but winds up hitting it anyway and Bella laughs and mocks his giant height and he in turn calls her a dwarf and Renee says, “Children, please,” and Asha burbles delightedly and a thumb war between Jake and Bella happens right then and there and then they’re heading out of Boise, Idaho, down long dirt roads among the hills that are lined with long grass and wildflowers, all of it rippling in the sun.
For all of his wandering over the last four years, Jacob never realised he was actually standing in the exact same place, waiting. Hoping. But when he lets her win the thumb war and Bella’s hand slides into his, he knows that he is precisely where is meant to be, with who he is meant to be with.
Growing up means moving on, and Bella’s hands is very warm in his. So he moves towards her until she stops him with her mouth but she doesn’t really stop him - and then he moves on, and on, and on.
He can feel her smiling against his lips and he knows it the way he did when he was young: love, and only love, can make the world move.
end.