Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.
Author's Note: Second installment of Mackenzie Shepard's series 'Absolutes', the building of her core beliefs. Trigger warning for implied abortion. Please enjoy.
Cranes' Wings
"The axis of Shepard's world now spins around just two simple things: the boy she wants, and the baby she doesn't." - Shepard in the early days.
A wide arc of red sprays along the wall.
The acrid smell of paint, wet cement, rotting garbage in tepid water. The dank dregs of Earth on a nameless night.
Mackenzie Shepard sniffs loudly, wiping the sleeve of her sweatshirt across her nose. The air is chill and fog-touched in their little darkened alley, a lone lamppost spreading a hazy cone of light across their forms, and Shepard shakes the spray-paint can in her hand, glancing at Darren out of the corner of her eye.
He's crouched before the graffiti-strewn wall, spraying something crude and purposely offensive along the brick. He grins, wide and unapologetic.
She rolls her eyes and looks back to her own work.
She never did like the color red.
Shepard frowns, huffing a breath of air out into the cold and shoving her hands, spray can and all, into the pockets of her hoodie. "Don't you ever get tired of this shit?" she asks wearily, eyes raking up over the high wall, up and up and away, somewhere into the dark sky where beyond the buildings are stars and beyond that are worlds and beyond that is more precious dark space she has learned to yearn for rather than fear.
Her mother had always loved the blank space between stars and some part of her that remembers that – that remembers how her mother smelled liked ink and bread rolls, how her cups of ginger tea were always lukewarm and the color of straw, how she can't remember the color of her hair but she remembers the intricate web of braids that had always adorned her head – that part of her wonders if something so dark and so far is worth loving.
Worth yearning for.
Shepard pulls her lip between her teeth at the thought of 'mother'.
Beneath the heavy layer of her sweatshirt, her hand grips at her still-flat stomach.
"Marking walls is better than marking fucking lives, babe" he answers, like a sigh, like a regret. He stands from his crouch and surveys his work.
Shepard takes the moment to look at Darren – the torn sleeve of his leather jacket, his chapped lips, his thick brows, his lazy lean, his skin the color of burnt cedar. Something swells in her chest when he glances at her, a quick flash of teeth, a careless grin, a reminder that they were but children themselves.
Drawing indecencies on the walls of public service buildings and calling it rebellion.
Because if they were out painting society then they weren't out busting kneecaps, and Shepard had held enough bodies down in the name of gang honor to last a lifetime. Or seven. Torque had been the most ruthless leader the Tenths had seen this side of Harlem in a long while, and no one, not her, not Darren, not any of the others, had enough lives saved up to test him. So they took their uneventful nights and savored them.
"Marking lives", she mumbles into the cold air, pulling her shoulders in tighter. Her thumb strokes along her stomach absentmindedly beneath the fabric of her hoodie.
She can't even remember a time she hadn't run the Tenth's colors. A time she hadn't lived each day just to see the next.
And then Darren had come along. Funny, uncouth, upfront, reckless, free Darren. Just another Tenth at first, until he wasn't just.
She likes to think it's something called love she feels but she's never felt it before – not even for her mother, because that was too young, and too abrupt, and she's woken too many nights in tears to think anything less than regretful about her past – and she's afraid this thing called not-love isn't enough to bear this new weight between them anyway.
This new weight called 'pregnancy'.
Because she hasn't said the word aloud and doesn't think she ever will. Not when they are each seventeen and stupid and rife with self-righteousness. The wronged youth of the world. The reckless rebellion. The owed, the misplaced, the misused. The forgotten.
How many years and how many crimes has it been since she first joined the Tenth Street Reds?
Shepard looks down at the scuffed leather of her boots.
It doesn't matter really. It doesn't matter how long it's been because it's all ending now anyway.
The axis of Shepard's world now spins around just two simple things: the boy she wants, and the baby she doesn't.
"You got the white?"
Shepard blinks at Darren's question and stares blankly at him.
He's standing with his hands curled before his mouth, blowing hot air into his palms, one eyebrow cocked her way.
And he looks so charming and so mischievous and she finds herself licking her lips unconsciously. Her hand still has not moved from over her stomach. "What?"
He chuckles, stepping closer to her, his head cocking contemplatively. "I asked if you had the white." His eyes trail down her form, hidden beneath her baggy sweatshirt and loose jeans. His hand reaches for her hip and stays there.
She watches him a moment, her mouth open in sudden fearless need. But the words halt on her tongue. And as his fingers dip along her hip, and the heavy cold settles deeper into her bones, and she remembers just what kind of a world she'd be bringing a child into, Shepard finds this isn't love at all.
Her mouth shuts tight, and she flicks her gaze to the floor by her feet, nodding to one of the cans spread along the alley floor. "There," she says, chin jutted at the lone white spray can littering the cement.
White like their hearts might have been, in another life.
White like the crisp, linen-fresh uniform on the Alliance rep she met just the other day, lingering in front of the recruitment office, staring through the too-clean window with a used pregnancy test stuffed in her jacket pocket, held tight in a clenched fist. The Alliance rep had stepped up beside her and just stood with her, looking in with her until she finally turned to him, a sneer on her lips.
Even she couldn't deny the hidden hope in that sneer. The desperate plea.
She thinks he might have known even then. He might have known she needed saving.
The man's gaze falls to her busted lip and her bruised cheek. Fights are easy enough to find on the streets when you're looking for a beating, looking for a deck to bring you back to reality – that sharp, jaw-cracking punch to remind you – this is your life.
So wake the fuck up.
He had taken one look, one slow, long look, and he had sighed. Sighed like he knew what she clutched in her hand, and what she clutched in her heart. Like he knew how brittle and worn her bones had grown just standing there. Just waiting for more. Just…waiting.
For a thousand years maybe, or just a moment, or just an eternity.
And then he had smiled. Not wide, not tender, not friendly.
It was a sad kind of smile, like the horizon at low tide. And then he said, "It doesn't have to be this way, you know."
Her throat had constricted at the words, the salt sting of tears fresh on her lids, and the rage that crept through her seething teeth had tasted like copper. Sharp and branding and bitter.
But she had nothing to say. So she just blinked at him, let her gaze linger on his dark skin, his close cropped hair, his unwavering eyes. Her stare followed the broad line of his shoulders and the barely discernible lift of his chin, the steady pulse along his throat, the starched and ironed collar of his spotless uniform.
The letters printed into the fabric read 'Anderson' and she tells herself to remember this name.
"It doesn't have to be this way," he had said.
Shepard watches Darren as he releases her hip with a smirk, leaning down to grab the white paint can. He gives it a good shake, the rattle of the metal pea inside the can suddenly jarring, suddenly loud.
Shepard blinks back into awareness.
Darren finds a clean stretch of wall and sets to work. He grabs the black can at his feet and adds on, and then the blue, and then back to white. Many moments pass between them with only the visible puff of their breath in the chill air, and Darren's soft humming.
Shepard notices what he's drawing just as he finishes a wing. "Is that a bird?" He's never drawn something quite so…common before.
Darren flashes a rakish grin her way. "It's a crane."
Shepard pulls her hood closer around her face, some of her dark curls peeking out from the fabric. "A crane?"
"Yeah." He stops to look at his work, and then leans back in to continue. The sharp prickle of the paint lights along the back of her nose as she watches him. "Old man Keito got me thinkin' on it," he says in explanation.
"What the fuck's Keito got to do with cranes?" She doesn't know why she says it so harshly, but something in her is quietly desperate and she wonders if maybe that's how she's always sounded.
There are old-timers in the gang that could tell you stories you wouldn't believe, stories Shepard still doesn't believe. And Keito was one of them. Old butcher down on Eighth Avenue, just across from Sal's Subs. Says he used to run with the Eastland Locks, when they were still relevant. Now he cuts hide and tattoos on the side. Another life of nothing. Another window she's tired of looking through.
"I saw him tatting this huge ass bird on some fucker's back and shit looked hot, right?" Darren started, still spraying the wall with stark colors in the night. "So I asked him. 'Hey man, what kind of bird is that?' And he tells me it's a crane."
Shepard's eyes are fixed to the white stretch of neck he's just painted along the brick.
"So I said, 'Cool, man, but why a crane?' And he said, 'It means creation through focus'. And I thought that was pretty fucking tight."
Shepard blinks at Darren, at this man, this boy, this one-time almost-love of her life, and nothing has ever made more sense. Nothing has ever been more instinctual. He wipes a dirty thumb along his nose and Shepard suddenly realizes, without warning, without reason, that she will never see him again.
Up and up and the fuck away. Up and up and out of there.
"Creation through focus," she repeats beneath her breath, almost reverently.
"Hm?" Darren stills his arm mid-stroke, and the abrupt end of the white streak catches her eye.
It's so bright in the night, so stark and simple and everything she suddenly realizes she needs.
"It doesn't have to be this way."
She still wants the boy, but she finds she wants freedom even more, and – as she clutches her stomach – she doesn't think she will ever want this reminder that she had put one away for the other.
So she chooses a different kind of creation.
And when next she sees that crisp, that linen-fresh white, that white like cranes' wings, and white like a heart she might have had, in another life – her stomach has not grown larger, and her bruises have not grown lighter, and her love has not grown deeper.
But she is closer to the blank space between stars than she has ever been before.
Up and up and out.
This time, a wide arc of white.
This time, like the long stretch of cranes' wings.
This time, free.