[psl - parker] the scholarship

[theintercessor]

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.

Comments

[theintercessor]

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.

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

[theinticer]

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."

[theintercessor]

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.