theintercessor | [psl - parker] the scholarship

The Capello's shop is home away from home. If home is actually the cab of his truck, or the mountains, and not the trailer at the foot of the hills. Jude couldn't count the number of afternoons he's spent on a bench, sketching engines, inking the grease stains on his best friend's face, or picking at homework with looming deadlines. There's the silence of the dark pines, and there's the clatter and rumble of Parker's shop. Both make sense. Both make him feel like he's here.

Where he feels he is the rest of the time, he couldn't articulate, and Jude's articulates little as it is.

Charlie had sent him off after dinner--take away from the diner, extra slices of pie and a more solid hug than the man's given him in years. Than Jude's allowed in years, but. Charlie's proud of him, and that means something. It pierces a layer that had built up between them, like smog carrying from the factory across the pass. Charlie was the one who dragged him here, but he never meant for him to stay.

Jude isn't sure how he feels about that. How he feels about any of it. Feelings can be like rats in a maze. Albino things that don't see the sun, twitching whiskers looking for a way out, or a sense of anything at all. It makes the silence of him a nervous thing, his eyes flicking over the garage repeatedly, looking for a place to settle, to commit to the page.

He's drawn it all. The only things that really change are the cars. Even the angle of Parker's knees, jutting out from under the frame, are familiar. The coveralls, the folds, the idle angle of his foot in his boots. Jude keeps tracing that line of him like he's afraid he'll forget it, and the letter Charlie had put up on the fridge burns at the back of him, signalling change with its smoke.

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Parker knows. He doesn't know why he knows, but he knows. He's unusually agitated today, though a large portion of that is because he woke up to his dad pounding at his door to get up. Sleeping through alarms will do that. Sleeping just outside in the backyard for no reason will do that, too, but he'd managed to shimmy along the back like usual.

They've been slammed all day with a soccer team's bus breaking down and the fact that they're the only ones that take their certain amount of insurance. It's only starting to die down and Parker's underneath a car that's been a month long wait, an older car all fixed up for some aficionado in the city over.

It's typical: the moment Parker can breathe and stop being annoyed, Jude has to walk in. Jude doesn't normally make him annoyed, either, but he's quiet. Jude's always quiet. Parker rephrases that in his head--it's the quiet that permeates the area, that leaves Parker with a strangely coppery tang in his mouth and makes the back of his hair stand up. Something's wrong.

And, finally, Parker lets the wrench clatter noisily to the floor.

"What, Jude?"

Even though Jude hasn't said a single word in the past forty minutes.

The pencil goes still over the page, Jude already stilled around it. His gaze checks over the lines, their angles, the suggestion of form in his hatching. That he doesn't answer immediately is a given, lapsing from weighted silence to something softer. Not quite ashamed of his hesitance, but acknowledging and stewing in it.

There, the shadow isn't right. Jude fills in the shading a bit more, pencil scratching in the silence following Parker's outburst, until it feels right.

The silence and the sketch.

"Nothing," he says, turning over a fresh page, starting the bench in the corner from memory so he won't have to look up yet. "Got my letter from that school, is all."

That sure as fuck isn't 'nothing.' Jude's downplaying it. Parker can tell, because he flicks the page. He suspects it's to buy time, not to start a new drawing, though it's not like he can confirm that.

Jude keeps drawing and Parker stills, car forgotten. This is bullshit, and he wants to say that out loud--Jude just doesn't want to answer because he thinks Parker won't like it. The problem is that Parker doesn't know which answer. Either way, he'll be frustrated. He's a hard person to please.

The 'letter' is obvious, too, they both know what they're talking about. That's always been the best thing about them--they don't have to say a single word to each other and still speak in entire conversations. Very slowly, Parker moves from under the car.

"And it said?" he asks, but only when he's sitting up, hair touseled, grease on his face.

He could have asked from under the car, but he didn't: Jude could answer with his head down in the book, but he doesn't. Lifting his head, he looks right at Parker, finger twitching over the pencil, wanting to pin down the fall of his hair, the firm line of his brows.

A hundred drawings over the years, and one letter making him feel like it isn't enough.

What do you think, he doesn't say, just one hard gaze meeting another, and his eyes dropping first. "You 'n' Charlie are the ones who made me apply," he says, retiring into the set of his shoulders, looking sideways along them.

He points the wrench like a word, nearly fencer-like, en garde and all that. Like he wants Jude to lower his defenses, and he does, but he also wants to throw the wrench.

Parker already knows the answer. He just wants Jude to say it. He watches the other carefully, dark eyes meeting darker, and his lips press into a hard, thin line.

"So did you get in, or am I gonna have to break into your house or read the letter myself?"

His eyes travel back across the line, up the shine of the wrench, along Parker's arm to his face. Obtuse meeting obtuse, heels dug in on both sides, and there's a line of grit in him that wants to shrug in his face. Wants to wind Parker up until he does throw it, just to see how bad this can really go, and get it over with.

There's someone else whose job it is to wind Parker up, though. Jude doesn't need to help it out.

"Of course I fucking got in, Parker." He'd dragged his feet so long applying because there wasn't any doubt, the size and breadth of his portfolio. "Scholarship and everything, they want me up there in a week to look at the fucking dorms."

A week.

Parker has only a week for him and the only person who understands him to hang out. That's what Jude's telling him, Parker decides. It's overdramatic but he's never been anything but.

He sniffs loudly, nose wrinkling, and after a brief moment he spits on the floor like it was hard packed earth and not his place of work. Clearing his sinuses, he'll say if his dad catches him. Mostly, it's because he can't punch Jude without feeling bad.

"Good," he says, because he started this, he's pushing him to actually get out of this shithole, he's pushing him to do something with his life. Parker knows he's going to be stuck here, he knows he's going to rot in this shitty mining town, but there's hope for Jude.

So why is he so pissed?

"Still gonna make comics, right?" His words sound hollow. Weak, almost, despite his rage.

Sometimes Parker is a storm on the horizon--distant, but known over enough time that it can be read before it breaks. Sometimes he's the dark beyond the horizon, the sun setting opposite--you know it's there, you know it's coming back, but you're still standing in the light of day.

Sometimes he's the folds of Jude's favorite shirt, and he knows him. Not the way he knows those dark and absent parts, the negative space of everything inside Parker that isn't himself. Maybe the dramatic and angry parts should be that dark space, but it isn't. Even some of the bad is just his friend, as welcome as the sun rising again.

Jude folds the pages over his pencils and sets the book aside, crossing the garage in a few loping steps to sit next to Parker on the exposed creeper. "It's just to look at the dorms," he repeats, finally holding Parker's gaze. "Then I come back, and I don't have to enroll 'til after summer." You fucking idiot, he doesn't bother saying. Knowing Parker, he already wants to clock him.

He's still leaving.

Parker isn't sure why he's more pissed--that Jude is going or that Jude is making some weird attempt to soften the blow. 'It's alright, I'm only leaving for a week before I just go and leave completely.'

Worst of all, he's mad at himself for being so upset after this whole thing was his idea. His lips press into a thin line, brows forced to smooth out instead of knit together.

"Good," he says, and for some reason, he's absolutely invaded Jude's space. He's chest-to-chest, almost, and while he's trying not to glare there's still a bit of stink eye.

"You're gonna be the first person to get the fuck outta here. That's good."

Jude stares placidly back. Nothing is his own around Parker. Not his time, not his space, not half the thoughts in his head or the impulses in his hands. Parker sits up into his face, Parker narrows his eyes, and Jude bears it with a hazel blink.

"Do you want to come with me?"

He finds the words spoken between them without a thought for how they got there, in his head or out his mouth. But there they are, and he has to--clarify. Damage control. "To drive out, Charlie--he's working." He's always working. It stopped mattering a long time ago, except that it hurts his dad too, that he won't be seeing his son see a college campus for the first time.

[psl - parker] the scholarship

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god i still need icons srry my dude

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tryin to get the swing of things back sorry for the delay bb

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