[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.

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[theinticer]

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.