A/N: Wowzas. I'm so sorry for this wait. I'm such a crappy updater and person. Oh, well. It's 1:53 AM where I'm at and I just was in the mood to post this. Angst-a-riffic chapter ahead. Hope you enjoy; I've been sweating over this. Eek. Please tell me if I'm making them out of character.
Disclaimer: Cursing, angst, belongs to SE Hinton. Decent length chapter, I guess. But this was never really meant to have long chapters. Next chapter is the last, bt dubs. :-) I'll miss it. Pardon typos.
This is chapter part one of two.
Black Pearl
by Begonias
It's a balmy eighty-four degrees outside and Sodapop fans himself against the summer heat. You'd think Soda would be used to it by now, the heat—spending months in the dense, muggy foliage of the Vietnamese jungles really was awful. But no matter what, the heat just gets to him. Tulsa's known for its unpredictable weather patterns anyway. One day it could be snowing and the next it's like walking into a sauna.
Ponyboy lies spread out, yet curled inside on the couch, pale and sweaty. Darry goes to work, leaving Soda to watch out for Pony, who's been off and on sick all day. But it's okay; Soda doesn't mind looking out for his kid brother. In fact, there's nothing he would rather do.
Soda wishes he could pick up some more shifts at the DX. His boss was never known to be a major prick; he knows if he wanted to he could get his job back in an instant. After all, Sodapop and Steve were his best workers.
Sodapop remembers the times he and Steve worked together, and it ain't all sunshine and rainbows. They'd fight over dumb little things sometimes, like carburetors and who's got dibs on what girl, that whole fuckin' Soc and greaser mess. It all seemed so goddamn important when he was sixteen; so freakin' awful. But he'd give anything to have such petty little bullshit problems again. Because they don't even come close anymore.
Because when Soda was sixteen he didn't ever think he'd die. Sure, he knew everyone dies eventually and that his time would come just like everyone else's (hell, he experienced it first hand with his parents, Johnny, Dally, etc.), but he could never fathom that he could actually die. That one day he would just cease to exist.
Because he was young and free and happy once.
In that jungle, that fucking jungle, everything changed.
For the first time ever, he felt his mortality, the crippling little handicap that he could die any second.
The realization that he's just another useless little speck of creation. Unimportant. Will have made no change in this godforsaken hunk of rock we call a planet.
When he dies, no one will remember or care.
He won't live forever, even though sometimes it used to feel like it.
Whether it be from a bullet to the gut or getting nailed by shrapnel or a car accident or a fire, or even a goddamn heart attack, it could just happen.
He remembers when he was fifteen, bored out of his skull in school—before he dropped out. Mr. Aubuchon was goin' on about how everything happens for a reason.
Sodapop always thought that was bullshit.
Not everything has a reason, a because. Everyone has motives for what they do, but that doesn't count for a good reason. Whether they be good or bad, that's the question. Sometimes things just happen for no reason; that's one of the stupidest things he's ever heard (and with Two-Bit around, he has a lot to compare it to). Things may happen, but a lot of times there's an explanation. For example: Mr. Aubuchon's a bad teacher because he's an idiot, and vice versa. Sodapop's a bitter freak because of this war, this life. Pony tried drugs because...because...
Soda doesn't know. Because he was gone? Because of this war?
And how does everything lead back to this war?
Soda can't imagine a time without it.
How different his life could be, how wonderfully innocent (well, maybe not innocent. They were never innocent, even Pony) without it ever existing. How great and perfect.
And maybe while he's imagining highly improbable things he can imagine his mother and father never dying.
Sometimes when Sodapop tries real hard he can smell his father—the musk he wore and the scent of the leather interior of the car they were driving in when they got in the auto wreck—the wreck that changed everything.
And his mother always smelled of perfume and always sang as she walked around the house, always sang him and Ponyboy lullabies before they went to bed. Sometimes even Darry, too, even though he was a macho twelve year old, and didn't need his mother to be singing him songs before bed.
Soda always loved when she sang "You Are My Sunshine". Karen, his mother, even used to call him her little sunshine.
Sometimes Sodapop misses the way that he used to feel: his freedom, his youth. He feels robbed, cheated, tricked. He feels as though he's aged ten years through this whole experience.
But that's par for the course, Soda supposes.
Soda watches the even rise and fall of his little brother's chest.
It keeps his attention more than The Dick Van Dyke Show.
"Ponyboy." Sodapop shakes him awake. "Ponyboy, wake up. Darry'll be home soon."
"Great," he says quietly, hugging himself.
"Are you okay?" Soda asks. He doesn't know how to broach this kind of subject. Life has prepared him for a lot of things he never thought he'd need to be prepared for but one thing it didn't come with was a construction manual. He's just gonna have to be straightforward.
"I'm fine," he lies, but he looks a little better, so Sodapop lets him.
"Good." He sits beside Pony. "You're tellin' Darry tonight, ain't ya?"
At this, Ponyboy seems to shrivel up a little, his young, pale face crumbling, his shoulders sagging more prominently than originally thought possible. Soda watches as his demeanor cracks. "Do we have to?" he chokes, obviously knowing how serious the consequences are and how seriously pissed Darry's gonna be.
"I think we do," Sodapop mumbles, his voice a comforting drone to both of them. "He deserves to know."
"Does he?" snaps Ponyboy.
Sodapop can feel his eyes shoot open.
"What do you mean?" he hears himself ask.
"Nothin'," Pony says hurriedly, the sound of the screen door opening. He makes a beeline for his bedroom, but Soda grabs his arm before he can go. He shoots his younger brother a look: it's you and me against the world, kid.
He needs him to see that.
Darry makes dinner and doesn't even say anything about Pony's "hangover".
"Uh, Dar?" Pony's voice is small and cautious with shame. "I think we need to talk."
"Oh, we do." Darry's voice is calm but from the way he's slamming the pantry doors shows how mad he really is. "Listen, Ponyboy. I know you're seventeen now and that you're gonna be drinkin' sometimes but I told you to stay home from that party—"
"I gotta be honest with you, Darry." Soda watches wide-eyed as Ponyboy swallows nervously. Soda wants to take it all back, tell Pony to forget it, don't tell Darry 'cause he ain't gonna be nearly as understanding, but it appears as though this is what Pony wants too. "It—it wasn't...alcohol."
"What?" Darry turns around. "Then what the hell was it?"
Pony wipes at his face. Sodapop answers for him, maybe hoping to soften the blows he's inevitably going to get. "Now, Darry, it ain't exactly his fault..."
Darry ain't down for bullshitting. "What. The hell. Was it?"
"Heroin." Pony stares down at the table in obvious sorrow, shame, embarrassment. His self-hatred is almost downright palpable. "I, uh...got it from Steve."
Darry runs a hand through his hair, trying to grasp the hydrogen bomb that was just thrown at him. Trying to triage things as usual, 'cause that's what he always does. Over analyzes.
Sodapop makes sure he doesn't do that. He'd go crazy in a heartbeat, trying to evaluate this shit storm—it's a weakness both Pony and Darry share; they're more alike than they know.
He wonders how Darry does everything.
"What?" Darry doesn't sound mad. Just shocked. Hurt. Hell, aren't they all.
His oldest brother stands straight and tall, broad-shouldered. He paces anxiously. Pony bursts into tears.
"How..." Darry looks like he's inwardly counting to ten, a telltale sign that he's gonna blow, and it'll all be directed at Pony.
"Don't get too mad, Dar," Soda whispers.
"Don't get too mad?" Darry's voice rises. "Don't get too mad? Why the hell are you stickin' up for him, when he's done somethin' like this?"
"Dar, you gotta understand," he pleads, because he's starting to see why Ponyboy did it in the first place, and that's what scares him.
"There's nothin' for me to understand, Sodapop!" He turns to Pony. "I thought you were better than this, kiddo. I thought I did better than this." He shakes his head in wounded disbelief. Pony just has his head in his hands, shoulders shaking from crying. "You could have just talked to me, Pony. Instead, you—you turn to...drugs?"
Pony's head shoots up faster than Soda's ever seen. He's surprised he doesn't hear bones popping. "Oh, don't say I could talk to you," he spits, voice sounding ever so wicked. "Don't you even say that."
"What?" Sodapop can't help but gasp out at the sudden tenser change in the conversation.
"I know it was hard on you, too, Darry," Pony says, and he looks like he's gonna crack again. "I do. I know it was. But I needed you here, too! And you never were!"
Soda's head swivels back and forth from Darry to Pony. "Okay," Soda says on an exhale. "Somethin' tells me I've missed out on a lot."
"Don't even say I could have talked to you! I tried talking to you!" Pony's rambling. "You shoulda been here when all you wanted to do was go to the bar after work." He gives Soda a hurt, almost accusatory look. But Soda knows the accusation isn't towards him. "Bills went unpaid, our power went out once, Soda."
Pony's eyes have the most life Soda's seen since he got back. Darry just sits, stunned and speechless. He and Darry both. Ponyboy's got the floor for once.
"I miss the days where you'd never touch a drop of the stuff." Pony laughs, forced and bitter. "Seems so long ago." He shakes his head, turns to Sodapop. "It started a few weeks after you left. He'd go to that dive bar off 55, usually just once a week. I was fine with it. He needed a release, and if that was how he was gonna get it, fine. I was fine with it.
"But then...it just got worse. He'd go every night of the week and wouldn't come back until late at night. I remember seein' that big red envelope stuffed deep in the back of the cabinet. Overdue, unpaid, the likes. I didn't know what to do."
"Holy shit," Soda says on an exhale, wanting to cry.
"I can be mad all I want, but I really ain't," Pony says. "Because I get why he did it now, I think."
His little brother looks expectantly at Darry, as though waiting for him to say something. "Oh, feel free to join the conversation," Ponyboy says, trying desperately to regain his faltering composure. He's gonna cry again. He looks as awful as Soda feels.
Darry's lips flap open uselessly like a fish on land's. He's been rendered speechless.
Sodapop leans forward, almost as expectantly as Pony, waiting and bracing himself for what happens next. For when Darry says something.
But when that doesn't happen, Ponyboy slumps into a miserable heap of pale skin and bones. His eyes are still on fire.
"I don't know what to say," Sodapop finds himself saying, maybe mostly just to fill the deafening silence. "I—I just..."
The fight dies out in Ponyboy's eyes. He sags weakly into the chair next to Soda."I'm sorry, Sodapop," his little brother states softly. His voice is thick with unshed tears. "You just got back—you shouldn't have to clean up all our messes. Lord knows you've been doin' it long enough."
Soda swallows a lump deep in his throat. Jesus, this kid has more on his mind than most people.
Happy fucking homecoming, Private.
Thanks so much for the reviews! Really means a lot to me. :-)
Darry's behavior will be much more explained in the next chapter, I promise. This chapter is part one of two.
Also, I'm pretty sure I stole the last line from another Outsiders fic somewhere but I don't know which one. I just don't think I'm witty enough to come up with that line.
