A/N: Wow! This is so late! I'm sorry you guys! Combined with college and writer's block, I haven't gotten much done lately! But I hope you like this! I enjoyed writing it!

Thank you Delgados for the idea. :)

And a big thanks to all of you for making this story what it is. It would really be nothing without all of you.

Story Eleven

Dally and Darry

"That was Enough"

"You can't keep on like this you know."

Darry felt his shoulders tighten and he set his jaw. "I don't know what you're talking about." He raised his gaze to the figure of the blonde boy in his kitchen doorway. Dallas smirked and nodded as if to say yes, you do and you know I'm right. Severely rubbed the wrong way, Darry turned back to what he was doing. But no amount of preparing for Ponyboy's birthday dinner would distract him from this.

He thought it all the time himself. He himself was always wondering how much longer he could go before he'd crack. He told himself all the time that he could make it. He wasn't going to crack. He could keep going. But who could keep going through all this?

When his parents died about seven months ago, he had made the decision to stay with his brothers and take care of them. If he didn't have them, what did he have? He had to do right by them. They came first. It had always been that way for him. Ponyboy and Sodapop were everything. They came first. So why was it so hard now?

Darry opened the oven and reached in to pull out the cake. The minute he touched the pan he realized that he'd forgotten a oven mitt. With a grunt, he quickly pulled his hand out and shut the oven. Swearing, he moved to the sink. Dally loped to it and turned on the cool water. Sticking his hand under it, Darry let out a breath and contorted his face with pain and relief at the same time.

"I mean it." Dally's voice was less taunting now and more stern. "You can't keep doing this. Do you see what you just did to yourself?"

Slamming the water off, Darry fixed him with an icy look. "So don't distract me."

"I'm not the distraction and you know it. Darrel, you can't be superman all the time."

Darry felt his eyebrows practically vanish into his hair. "Oh? Is that so?" He crossed his arms across his broad chest. "That's funny. You see, I recall everyone calling me that since I was seven so you see if I'm a bit used to assuming-"

"I mean," Dally went on talking as if Darry had never started, "that you aren't invincible. You miss them too. And you seem to be set on denying that."

"Since when do you meddle?" Darry asked, refusing to acknowledge the point his friend had just made. He knew he was right but there was no way that he was about to take advice from Dallas Winston, not when he refused to admit even to himself that he had a problem.

"Well, we've all been waiting around for seven months and someone had to talk to you. You're killing yourself. And when you run out of energy it ain't gonna be any good for Soda or Pony."

"I can handle it," Darry said darkly, turning back to the oven.

"Don't forget the mitt."

Darry threw him a venomous look and picked up the oven mitt pointedly before reaching into the oven. Dally clapped twice in sarcasm and Darry ground his teeth. He might just get jailed for murder today.

"I'm sorry," Dally said smoothly. "Am I making you angry?"

Darry exhaled and tried to ignore him as he set the cake down on a potholder. "I'm fine."

"You look angry to me, football star."

"What do you want, Dal?" Darry turned to him, eyes hard.

"You have to admit that you have an issue. Admit that you miss your mom and dad. Admit that you don't know what to do. Admit that you ain't having an easy time."

"What's the point? What's the point of that? All that's gonna happen is I'll feel worse than I did when I refused to acknowledge it and I'll be thinking about it a lot more and feel kicked and pushed down."

Dallas rolled his eyes. "Damn, you're a pessimist."

"Coming from you that ain't good."

"Can't you see that this is killing you?" Dally leaned forward. Everything but his eyes had a lazy, apathetic sense to it. His arms were crossed casually, he had one booted leg crossed over the other as he stood, and he as leaning against the fridge as if he didn't have a care in the world. But his eyes were set and determined. "If you keep this up, you will die at a young age. It's obvious to everyone that you ain't been sleeping and you don't eat much anymore but then you go and work like a war horse. It's gonna kill you, man."

Darry almost flinched by the words but held himself back. He knew it was true. He hadn't been feeling well lately and he knew it wasn't from a cold. He was getting weaker from exhaustion. But how could he stop? How could he stop working as hard as he could for his brothers, even if it meant working when he felt like eating or sleeping?

He opened his mouth to explain but no words came out. It had finally happened, then. His fight was drained. Filled with nothing but a depressed emptiness, he leaned back against the sink. He did miss his parents. He hadn't just lost his mother, he'd lost his confidant. He hadn't just lost his father, he'd lost his best friend. Not to mention all of the dreams that he'd had for himself since he'd learned what college was.

He looked at the floor, suddenly overwhelmed with anger at his weakness. He had to be there for his brothers. His pain didn't matter, theirs did. He had to make Ponyboy's birthday as wonderful as he could. It was the least he could do. He'd never be able to replace their parents. He didn't even think he'd ever be able to guide him right. No, he could never make things right. So what right did he have to feel this way?

"Maybe it's time to move past all your shit."

Darry flicked his eyes to Dally, too exhausted to tell him to screw off, too exhausted to ask him how. He was too drained to say a word. So he just looked back down at his shoes.

"Let it go. Whatever it is that's holding you back. Let it go."

He wouldn't go as far as to call Dally's tone gentle and it certainly wasn't as close to gentle as he had heard Dallas Winston get, that honor went to interactions with Johnny. But his tone was much less harsh than usual, although still tough and commanding.

"Move."

Darry's gaze flicked up again to see Dallas push himself from the wall.

"You heard me," he said impatiently. "Move."

Darry hesitated before shoving himself away from the sink. Dally, muttering crossly to himself about how no one ever listened to him, went and began icing the cake. Watching Dallas Winston ice a birthday cake had to be one of the strangest things Darrel Curtis had ever witnessed. But it got him thinking.

All this time he had been thinking about what he'd lost. But what had he gained? For starters, there was a self-awareness that he hadn't had before. He'd always thought of what his actions did to others, sure, but not like he did now. Now he studied everything, except, perhaps, eating and sleeping.

He had a chance to stick with his gang, his real friends. He'd had friends in high school who were now already in college or on the way, such as Paul Holden. But announcing that he was sticking with his brothers had been a quick and thorough weeding out process. Most, like Paul, had abandoned him on the pretense that he truly was "just a greaser". Some stuck through. But he still had the gang. He'd always have the gang.

Lastly, he had a chance to really have a close relationship with his brothers. He had a chance to have one of those family relationships between siblings that one mostly read about. Who was he to throw that away? Why not make the best of this situation? Why not be there for them in a way that didn't cause him to collapse in bed at night, too exhausted to move but too overworked to actually sleep?

"Damn, are you still thinkin' over there?" interrupted Dallas's harsh voice. "How long so I have to keep doing this? Is that enough frosting?"

Darry saw, with some amusement, that Dallas was in the process of adding too much icing, which would have been perfect for Sodapop but not so much so for Ponyboy. He moved forward to show him. In the end, Dally got frustrated and whipped his knife full of frosting in the air so violently that some of the frosting flew off the blade and hit the wall.

Both boys looked at it for several minutes before Dallas threw his hands in the air. "I am not cleaning that," he announced.

Darry felt a smile prick his lips as he went to clean it. Some things, he thought, never changed. Dallas would always be Dallas. He would help his friends in his own, unique way but he would not, under any circumstances, clean. The thought was oddly comforting.

Dally was nothing like Paul, who was a neat freak and worked at school and had high standards for nearly everything. Dally was messy and extraordinarily lazy at certain things and accepted nearly anything as food.

It was in this moment, this moment of comparing and contrasting the life he could have been living for this life he had now, that he realized that he really wouldn't trade it. He'd chose the messy and lazy Dallas Winston over the demanding and ambitious Paul Holden any day of the week. In this dark time of his life, this time when he was weak and falling apart and wilting away, one of the boys had stuck around and made a gesture to help when most days he acted as if he didn't care, while the other had fled off to college because Darry had proved to be "just a greaser".

Maybe, Darry thought with a jolt, a greaser isn't such a bad thing to be after all.

"Here."

He looked in surprise as an apple was shoved in his direction. He turned his blue gaze to Dally, who was holding out the food.

"You need food," Dally grunted. "Here."

Darry took it. "Thanks."

"If you're going to take forever to register when I'm actually trying to help, I'm going to stop doing it," Dally warned him, moving out of the kitchen.

Darry snorted a small chuckle and took a bite of the apple. He looked around at the kitchen. The kitchen with its peeling paint and its old appliances and its stained counters. His kitchen. He glanced after the other boy, the tough boy who didn't need anybody. The tough grease who had actually grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out of the darkest place he had ever been in.

"Dallas," he called. "Why did you come to talk to me?"

He watched Dally's eyebrows raise calmly. "Simple," he replied. "I drew the shortest straw."

Darry laughed lightly, a feeling that felt good and foreign. It wasn't hard to hear the sarcasm dripping in Dallas's voice. Sarcastic or not, it was a reassuring answer. Nothing was going to change. His gang was still the same gang with the same members. Dallas was still never going to admit he gave a damn about them.

But they would always know different. And that was enough.