Forward
Notes:
Mild shounen-ai, if you squint and lean in from your chair. And, if
you can, put on Radiohead's "The Tourist".
- - -
The countryside blows past, the faint twinklings of sunrise behind trees blurry with their speed. The night is cool, and the wind howls hungrily into the cracks of the windows. Trunks knows that there is a speed limit on this road, but he cannot think of a policeman who would be up at this hour, and here. This is empty space that goes on for miles, lit only by the stars and the artificial lights on the face of the car, which hums and whirs steadily under his best friend's foot.
Inside this empty space, where the car is standing still and the entire world pretends to be moving, Goten has his arm thrown over the back of Trunks' seat. He leans into the cloth backing of the driver's side, easy and languid like, his dark eyes tired but content. He doesn't seem to be affected by the motion sickness that much of their extended family tended to suffer when in automobiles: the sensation, unfamiliar and distant from flying, turns his stomach and makes his eyes complain.
"Hey man, slow down." he says, and Goten calmly increases speed to 70, then maybe 90. Maybe he smiles, holding the lips over so that it can barely be classified as one. Trunks holds his breath for twelve seconds: and while he slowly lets it out, he calls Goten an ass and thinks about puking on the dashboard. When he opens his eyes again, the man next to him still looks sleepy, but a little bit more cheerful. He ignores Trunks, which isn't the way it should be, so Trunks tells him about his plan to puke and Goten slows down, silent, smiling with the barest hint of teeth.
Trunks doesn't tell him that his smile looks nothing like his father's. It's secret and practiced, and his eyes don't close when he does it; he has smaller lids than his father and brother, almond shaped and distinctly brown, if one looks close enough. He makes sure that Goten doesn't know by turning away, pushing his head out the window to pear through the dust on the road, behind and further in. Behind there is nothing but the dark, and a while afterward, distant speckles that he recognizes as his city. Ahead, the wind peels back his eyelids and he faces the bright, heavily red sun, which blocks out the details of their destination.
When he pulls back in, rubbing the dirt from his face, Goten's opened the window, and puts his arm around Trunks' shoulders, not the chair. They keep driving, and Trunks no longer feels sick.