Note: I am still taking song requests and have decided that those that do not fit into the plot of this story I will compile into a series of oneshots; though, if no song requests are given no oneshots will be made. If you have a particular story line in mind to go along with your song feel free to tell me. Also, please remember I will not be using modern songs.
Song: Dancing Days by Led Zepplin
Like a Rolling Stone
Chapter Four: Dancing Days
Dancing days are here again
Summer evenings grow
The memories of her parents are scattered, a collage of childhood dreams and immortal people with age that colors their eyes, the aching bones of growing up and the empty realization that Mom and Dad won't always have the answers… won't always be around to give those that they do.
Even when she was a child she knew that it had to end, that it already was; it was something dark, almost too harsh to hold within her small body, too sharp to grip between weak fingers, but it was there all the same. It was right next to that voice in her head that told her to run, run quick before you're caught because once it has you it wont let you go. But what she never realized is that it will happen to her anyways, that nobody can outrun time.
Sometimes Ruby sees her mother in herself, pieces that her father pulls apart from the whole of her puzzle in nights too dark and whisky too deep to feel timid within. The light of the stars does not reach this time, leaving these moments cast in shadows, the thick haze of drifting recollections. Hair of thick honey, a shade of candlelight and dark, melting wax, pooling upon fingertips and burning skin; eyes that sear, liquor down the throat; slim shoulders and the bones of a bird, light, and too easy to be blown away in the wind.
Her father is there too, though, because nothing can be entirely pure, not on this side of town. And when he leaves, stretches of days always unpredictable, and often without a goodbye before tires roll across barren pavement and he peddles himself away at another's home, words to be spoken to the wind and toes to have doors closed upon, these parts of herself are all she has to remember him by. To know that the whole of her face slopes, round from cheek to chin, the face of a child; and her personality that clings to things like a burden to the mind—addictive—nicotine, and alcohol, and sex, sometimes its all that she has to remember he's real, that he wasn't buried along with her mother.
A traveling salesman, he is. She once asked him what it was like, to go places where stars shine undisputed and the grass grows too long, not because no one cares to tend to it, but because it is too wild to be cut away, trimmed of the length of its life. "It's ugly everywhere," he had said, gruff and unforgiving, questioning her dreams.
She hopes he makes it somewhere beautiful one day because she isn't sure she'll be able to herself.
I got my flower, I got my power
I got a woman who knows
Within a house that is empty, perched upon a stretch of land that is always ugly and never missed, four girls draw upon the night, silhouettes of mischief and shadow.
"—Absolutely gorgeous," Kathy puckers her lips and purrs, a cat, limber and with great hair, all blonde and thick as her skin and bones, it curls in the same way as her sharp tongue, a dagger to the heart, golden across her breast.
Jane nods her head, almost solemn in the way she moves, humming an old tune that plays only when there are fireworks in the sky, flaming bombs and thick smoke to be remembered. She takes the small photo, four sides creased between lace and skin, and tucks it away between the strap of her bra, covering the face of the man she claims to adore, gentle hands and gentle words winding in the center of her stomach and curling her toes: short crew cut and stiff back, uniform ironed and clean, far more clean than anything on this side of town. She loves his stories, is all, that he can make her heart beat fast with nothing more than words of bullet shells and bleeding hearts. All anyone wants to feel is alive and people too often mix that with love.
"It's the uniform," Jane says.
"He looks so goddamn good you just have to corrupt him," Angela's smile folds around the neck of a beer bottle, lipstick staining the dark glass. The color in her eyes sloshes with the drink in that bottle. She'd shown up like this, eyes outlined in charcoal and lips plumped, two bottles, one in each of her hands. The second had shattered upon dropping, shards of glass and bitter alcohol staining the concrete. "Like Ponyboy," she says, her eyes narrowing, sharpened with wayward intentions.
"Now if you want to talk about the Curtis brothers…" Ruby holds up her own bottle as if in a toast, to good looks and good wills, things that run out too fast, faster, even, than the drink in her hand.
"You know," Angela speaks, looking at the others through the reflection of a mirror marked with lipstick and fingerprints as she rolls the hem of her cotton shirt above her peddle-pushers, dark denim, purple cotton, and wicked grin. "Pony always hangs out at the movies…let's go to the Drive-In." She straightens the length of her neck, pale skin to be drawn between warm lips when she allows herself to only be scorched, blistering wounds that she allocates her pride upon.
"Sure, Angie," Ruby humms, music spilling, sloppy, messy, and fading away on impact.
"Don't fuckin' call me Angie."
"Hell," Kathy pinches the stem of a flower freshly bloomed in a vase of withering stems and fallen leaves like dreams, her own mind cloving through the hot color of wild nights, "that sounds like an okay idea," she tucks the blossom behind her ear, sweet honey and soft petals contrasting with lips dipped in poison and fingers stained with wine.
I said it's alright, you know it's alright
I guess it's all in my heart
You'll be my only, my one and only
Is that the way it should start?
The night air hangs heavy with cigarette haze, people mill about with hollow faithless eyes, and when they smile their dried skin cracks. They know nothing. Because there's something about summer nights that makes you feel as though you can't remember anything, like the name of that boy you just bumped into, the one you used to play with in your front yard before your older brother chased you off. But now you're all too old to play; and all the grass has died, yellowing in the sun; and you've since learned that there are far more frightening things to run from than your brother.
"Sorry," he says. His eyes are reckless, the sort of danger that comes only from caring too much, his jaw broad and yet his chin still narrow, the type of face that's too handsome to believe.
Maybe that's why Ruby blinks twice, eyes darkening each time her heart beats too hard within her chest and rattles the cage of her ribs. She wonders what she's keeping trapped inside there and whether or not it'd be a good idea to let it out. "Sodapop," and so it seems she hasn't forgotten, at least not entirely. "It's alright."
"What," He says, and his smile speaks for him, more words that Ruby cannot understand, pressed between his contrasting realities, "you're not gonna' ask me to dance this time?"
"This don't really seem like the time to dance," Ruby says. And it's odd the way actions are shared between siblings, like the way Ruby's eyebrows turn downward and inward, akin to the compression of Steve's features whenever he's serious. It is something more often seen on the boy, rough and callous and bitter enough for the both of them, rather than his sister, a daisy, a comely weed to grow between the cracks of society and soon be plucked away.
But Sodapop laughs anyways, as he often does, because it's the only thing he knows how to do; that's what all of his teachers once told him at least. But he doesn't have to hear from them anymore; their opinions are left in red ink to smear upon papers to be shredded. "You're an odd girl Ruby Lee," he shakes his head with the same fondness he captures within his eyes.
"Randle," Ruby adds, folding the plastic of her straw between her fingers.
Soda leans in, "What?" He asks just as Ruby uncoils her fingers from the straw, the plastic straightening, and Coca-Cola creating a smattering of syrupy freckles across his nose.
"My last name's Randle," Ruby answers, looking beyond the boy rather than at him as he straightens and wipes away the sweet fluid. But, still, more important things have been swiped from the pair of dreamers with less care than that and it ruined them. "I thought maybe you'd forgotten." But the way the corrupted light of the night creates an angle of Ruby's usually gentle face, slicing across the blackness of her pupils, and falling past her lips as though this wrecked radiance belongs within her rather than about her, makes her look like the forgetful one.
And she is, too—so absentminded that she has forgotten even that.
"'Course I didn't forget! It's my best friend's name too." Soda wipes his hands down the front of his jeans, dragging sweat and grease and the very bearing of his name across threads of denim that tear too easy; they rip against concrete and time like so many other things that he has learned to know and let go of.
Ruby sighs, her eyes gliding across Soda's face before falling into the distance again. She seems to look somewhere further than the splintered wood and metallic shine of the Drive-In, searching for something more. "Stevie," she answers as though not to let this conversation fall away from her grasp, to tease it with her attention before soon depriving it. And she has learned this in so many ways… to tease and deprive.
"Yeah," Soda says, looking behind himself to catch a glimpse of what Ruby's eyes may see but there is nothing more than a moving picture, black and white in the fall of night from a purple twilight long ago, and the passage of time, a painful progress that always moves either too fast or too slow but never in-between—never what they need it to be. "And I don't think he'd take too kindly to hearin' you call him that." Sodapop grasps her elbow, long fingers against skin that has grown thick in its time to hide sorrow and unfinished dreams. He pulls her forward, somewhere new. "Come on, why don't ya' show me where your friends are."
The crowd breaks away, harsh and unwilling, strained leather and nowhere near as slick as the grease in their hair; and there are those too that have learned to move for no one, that the shine of their shoes and the stripes on their clothes makes them better than those whom wear their gilt upon their skin and that shine within their hair. Neither has yet learned that either way it is a reflection of the light.
When Ruby moves it is without commotion, as though she is floating rather than stepping through space, the stars at her toes and the blank void of the unknown gliding upon her fingertips, and she dips below elbows so to slide away unnoticed. Her body seems so light and so fragile that it breaks for even the passing of the wind. She turns to him, one last time before this unforgiving crowd swallows her whole, and smiles.
Crazy ways are evident
In the way you're wearin' your clothes
Sippin' booze is precedent
As the evening starts to glow
Jane's car burns blue, a reflection of starlight and sound, light shimmering off windowpanes and car rocking under impassioned nights. Their bodies radiate heat and misdemeanors without the release of air-conditioning; the warmth seems to boil upon leather and skin beneath stitching.
Kathy leans forward, her body curving against her new companion; two pairs of humor filled eyes and a set of bowed lips that never learned when to stop. "Ruby, when you said you were gonna' get a Soda I thought you meant a tall glass of drink not a tall glass of hunk." She falls backward again, body shaking with laughter that comes too hard and fades too fast, and leaning in to murmur into the ear of the boy whom cackles with her, two wolves to howl at the moon.
Jane leans out the door of her car, a long length of leg and eyes that turn with the confusion of misery and life. "Heck," she hums, lips slanting in the same way as her body as she leans outward as though to fall away into nothing, "if I knew that's what you meant I would've asked for one too." Her words are lost upon her own ears; face too close to the speakers that carry drifting sounds to disinterested people.
"Lo', Sodapop," Kathy's companion speaks, loud words still rocking with laughter that has since been lost upon the others. The steel tone of his eyes is misleading in his simple nature, rust colored sideburns to cloak him all in metal hues. He seems to dance without moving, the alcohol twisting his body from the inside out.
"Hey, Two-bit," Soda says, words that conform to his casual demeanor. When he smiles again it's too gentle among this scattered rubble, broken pieces like the aftermath of a storm. But the tempest has yet to pass.
Angela drapes herself across the back end of the car, skin burning where the metal retains the heat of a past sun, but she ignores it as she does most things, allows her body to carry this heat within itself and burn throughout her veins. "Is Ponyboy here?"
Soda's lids fall across his eyes, shading them from the processions, but even then he can still see clearly; the grinding of his chin that pulls forward bare thoughts to be torn away from his mind. "Yeah," he scatters the gravel with the toe of his shoe, "he's here somewhere."
You know it's alright, I said it's alright
You know it's all in my heart
You'll be my only, my one and only
Is that the way it should start?
Dig!
Ruby procures a cigarette, her insides leeching to be blackened, and lights it, allowing the fire to hang in the air long after, until the flame of the lighter flickers in the wind and chews away at her sanity, burning the edges of her fingertips.
"You want a cig?" Ruby asks Sodapop, her own stick of cancer hanging from her lips, loose enough to fall away, but it hangs there, surly as the rest of them, tips reddening and will maddening in a way that only makes them tighten their grip.
Soda shakes his head and Ruby tosses the paper carton in the backseat of the car, shrugging casually, the cigarette staining her tongue with sickness and sin as she exhales ecstasy.
"Ain't you gonna' offer the rest of us one?" Angela asks. She's the kind of girl that only takes, fingers reaching farther than the complex upon her mind.
"Nahh," Ruby shakes her head, cigarette bobbing with the curl of her lips, "I'm alright." She has since learned to grasp tightly onto what is hers. Some things are too easily lost.
You told your mamma I'd get you home
But you didn't say I had no car
I saw a lion, he was standin' alone
With a tadpole in a jar
Ruby seems separate from the rest of them, from this broken world, the smoke of her cigarette hanging long upon the dreary air. She walks only in shadowy paths, keeping herself simple and childlike, a dewy temperament and words of thoughtful disposition. But she is lost, plagued to wander alone and desperate throughout all her life.
A passing realization seems to dawn across her face, the widening of her eyes of addiction before her heart falls away. She sees him, even as he stands darker than the night, his harsh obsidian outline dwarfing the light of the stars. She lifts a gentle hand and waves even as the saltwater in her veins rushes to her heart. "Oh," she says, resting her palm over the frozen center of her chest, her lip quirking upward. "Oh."
You know it's alright, I said it's alright
I guess it's all in my heart, heart, heart
You'll be my only, my one and only
Is that the way it should start?
Two-bit looks at her curiously, the light of a child in his eyes all drawn up with the refusal to grow old. "You okay?"
"Yes," Ruby says, as sure and sharp as the cut of a jewel. "It's just Jack." She straightens herself, the ashes of her cigarette falling across her skin in their own fire of red and orange, but she ignores them and without the tender care to stoke their burning desires they fall away, withered and gray, leaving only their mark upon her skin, throbbing and red as her heart.
So dancing days are here again
As the summer evenings grow
You are my flower, you are my power
You are my woman who knows
"I haven't seen him in so long." Ruby tells them, reaching outward to pull the flower from Kathy's hair, it falls away, a curtain of gold between mystification and hungry need. The petals blend with the softness of her skin, fragile things that wither too easily in angry hands.
Kathy shakes her head; fingers plucking away at the sepals that build a delicate tower about the mind, each one shatters like a nerve in pitiless hands. They fall away and rest to weep at the girls' feet. "It's only been two days," Kathy puckers her lips, a drawn and heavy glower without the anger to make it sting.
"I know, Doll." Ruby says, swatting away Kathy's hand, her body drawing in on itself, eyes wide, questioning, and fingers tangling in the threads of her hair where a few petals have caught. But she never gets her answers, never even allows the questions to fall past her lips. They are poison to the brain. Let her be happy, let her ache with it.
I said it's alright, you know it's alright
You know it's all in my heart
You'll be my only, yes, my one and only, yes
Is that the way it should start?
I know it is, yeah!