Hi all. It's been a long time for this one and I know that is very bad of me. I just lost the voice to keep it going. But I have been working hard on it lately and here it is. I've been sitting on this chapter and the next three for a few weeks and hope that it sounds...right, that the character voice is there. Anyways, this one is completely un-beta'd since I just can't sit on it any longer, you know? If I go over it again, it's just going to end up deleted. So here it is, mistakes and all. Perhaps Zickachik will be nice enough to fix it for me later :).

Disclaimer: The usual

Chapter 21

My life was officially at a standstill. But this time, I was alright with it. There was really nothing I could think to change and change wasn't all it was cracked up to be. I had a best friend in Dottie, my brothers were all getting along for once, my repaired relationship with Ponyboy was coasting alright, and even my nightmares were fading. I was content and even, dare I say, happy? Yeah, I didn't dare say that, but I was as close to it as I could remember being in a long time. I didn't even mind going to work. I never saw myself staying with that – the bar I mean. It was a simple, peaceful job most of the time, and I liked it. I owed Mrs. M a big thank you one of these days. It was one thing on my long to-do list.

The plus side to all of that was that there seemed to be so much time in my life now. I worked all night, slept 'til mid-morning, got some cleaning in, and usually ended up out at Buck's on the back of one of the horses. No matter what, I managed to come home tired and hungry at the end of the day. Today was no different.

Well, maybe it was. The house smelled like smoke instead of food today and that put my appetite right off.

"Dar, who's watching this?" I hollered, opening up the oven door to a burnt chicken. No, not burnt – cremated.

"Shit."

I glanced over my shoulder and gave Pony what I hoped was an admonishing look. He came to stand beside where I had the oven door open, smoke billowing into the kitchen. He groaned and ran a hand through his hair – a very Sodapop gesture – before reaching for the oven mitts. He pulled out the chicken and cursed again before throwing it in the sink, pan and all. I wondered what had him so distracted for an entire chicken to turn to ash, but knew there was probably a good book behind all of this.

"Darry know you can cuss like that?" I asked after a moment.

"Where do you think I learned it?" He replied, eyes focused on the chicken. "Darry lost a bill last year while you were gone and they shut off the power. Everything in the ice box melted and we came home to everything spoiled. Soda said he heard Darry cussing all the way down at the DX he was so loud. Since then, he doesn't say much when I randomly cuss."

"Sounds like a Darry response," I replied, talking about both the cussing over the wasted food and how he would react after Ponyboy heard him yelling like that.

Pony grunted in agreement, going over to the cupboard. He looked at it for a minute and sighed. "Darry hasn't been shopping in a while. I have no ideas for dinner."

"Yeah, he said he's going to go tomorrow," I replied, opening up the fridge to take a look for something to make into a meal.

We had some potatoes and a plate of left over pasta, but that was about it.

"Any soup in there?" I chanced and Pony shook his head.

"Just a can of beans. That won't stretch far." Pony looked over at me for the first time, looking tired and frustrated. "Do you have money to get something?"

"Yeah, I have some tips stashed up. Get your shoes on and we'll go to the store."

I walked out of the room to go and grab some cash from where I had it stashed under my mattress. When I came back out, Pony was still standing in his stocking feet, looking over at me with a frown.

"You don't want to come?" I asked and he shook his head.

"Maybe I should just go," he suggested.

I leaned back against Darry's chair with my arms folded over my chest and waited. Pony looked at me for a minute before shrugging a little.

"Last time we went to the store together, we didn't speak for three months."

I felt like laughing, but I didn't. God, that kid had a way of holding onto things. I hadn't even thought of that. I figured since we were talking now, it might be nice to have some company. That and I had no idea what I wanted for dinner beyond a batch of dirty carrots. I had enough sense to know that no one else in the family would eat them, though. They'd probably just give me strange looks, just like they did every time I wanted something out of the ordinary. I had been home nearly four months and I still had strange cravings for things I swore I would never eat again after surviving in the jungle. We didn't wash vegetables in Nam since there wasn't time or water to spare most of the time. Dirty carrots sounded just right. Nice, raw, crunchy, dirty carrots.

"Well, you know, three months of silence is overrated," I offered with a shrug. "So I'll give you a list. Alright?"

Pony nodded, looking grateful. Something told me he would always be a strange kid, no matter how old he got.

"You gonna go out in your socks?" I asked, nodding at his feet.

He shook his head and flopped down on the floor, fishing out his shoes from under the couch. Well, good for him. I wouldn't have looked there first, but then again I knew better than to leave my shoes anywhere but at the front door. I turned to the kitchen and wrote down a short list of things that were good to eat, hoping he could find dirty carrots and some hot peppers in the same store as corn flakes and gravy mix. Soda had always been the one with the strange tastes in the family, but this list was right on par for the way my mouth was rewired in Nam.

Pony glanced over the list with a frown but he didn't comment. They all just put on that look when I came up with something odd to eat. Last week it had been pasta, greens and fried spam in soy sauce with some ginger and garlic to taste. Gabe Roy used to cook up something similar back in Nam when we had the greens and noodles or rice. Usually, it was just the fried meat or even jerked meat from our survival packs. Needless to say, none of my brothers touched it and Two-Bit made a lot of comments, but that was alright with me.

"Here, take the T-Bird," I suggested, fishing my keys from my coat.

"What if you want to go somewhere?" He asked and I felt like shaking my head at him. For all those brains, sometimes he made me wonder if he was just using his head to grow hair on.

"I'm hungry and you're going to get dinner. Believe me, don't plan on going anywhere." I shook my head. "Even if I did feel the sudden urge to take off, I have two feet. And one finger."

Pony frowned, probably trying to think on what I could use one finger for. The answer was simple – dialing Buck's phone number and threatening him to get here in ten minutes or less.

"I'll be back in a bit, then."

I nodded, hoping that he wouldn't take too long. Now that I had those carrots on my mind, I was tempted to go back to the stable to get some. They never washed the ones in the barrel.

I sighed and headed over to the fridge, deciding that a little left over, normal looking pasta wasn't going to hurt my returned appetite. I was still eating that when I spied the mail and shifted through the usual bills and mess of stuff that Darry kept around for reasons I didn't get. For example, there was a letter around here somewhere that had declared Darry a fit guardian and flyer for a plumber friend of Dad's. It was the kind of stuff I would have thrown out years ago because it was all just paper. Paper burned, paper got wet, and paper didn't capture anything. We remembered that moment and getting a hold of Dad's friend was as easy as hollering out the back window. I just couldn't put any stock in paper.

What did catch my eye was an advertisement to enlist that was tucked between the water bill and a letter that was addressed to one of the neighbors – the post man never did try too hard in this neighborhood. Even though sometimes it was fun to open the neighbor's mail, it was the enlistment advertisement I focused on. It was just aggravating. People weren't supposed to be solicited like that in their own homes. That was almost as bad as the Cong going in and recruiting by killing some of the locals to get the others to fall in line. At least they were more direct with their propaganda than Uncle Sam.

"What burned in here?"

"Chicken," I replied, leaving the mail on the table, minus the enlistment notice, which was stuffed in my back pocket for safe keeping. "Ponyboy went to the store to find something not burnt."

Darry hummed in a distracted way, pulling the chicken – pan and all – from the sink.

"He told me about the bill last year that had this place full of spoilt food and your cussing," I told him and he hummed again. "By the way, I got drafted. Technically, redrafted."

"Hum."

It figured that he'd ignore me when I was the only other person in the house. There were a hundred different times while I was sixteen that I could have only wished for Darry to be so disconnected. Now, I didn't know what to make of him. I shook my head and went down the hall to my room, flopping on my bed, and pulling the book I'd been reading out from under the shirt I tossed over it. Something clanked in the sink and Darry's footsteps stomped down the hall until they stopped at my open door.

"Redrafted?" Darry demanded, steeled for the worst.

"Relax, Darry. Uncle Sam's trying, but I'm not putting out," I replied, digging in my back pocket and tossing the flyer at Darry. "You should really pay more attention when I'm talking to you."

Darry slumped against the door jam and ran a hand through his hair, looking more like an old man than I'd seen him in a while.

"God," he sighed and I felt a little bad about catching him off guard. "I suppose this teaches me a good lesson."

"What? To always pay attention when someone's trying to criticize the example you set for our kid brother?"

"No. I should never leave the mail where you can find it," he replied. "And I didn't mean to ignore you. I was thinking about something."

"Yeah?" I asked, flipping the page of my book, even though I never read a word of it.

"Yeah. My thumb is throbbing."

I set my book down then. "Bull shit."

"And you were criticizing my swearing?" Darry asked, shaking his head.

"Darry, your thumb," I reminded.

Back in high school, Darry got caught under what was probably the entire Defensive line during a practice. His thumb took the brunt of the fall, both breaking and dislocating under the face guard of some guy's helmet. Now every time his thumb throbbed bad weather was soon to follow. I always thought it was a neat quirk, but cold weather was not something I was looking forward to.

"Ached bad enough I was tempted to hit it with a hammer."

"Damn."

Darry nodded. When that happened, we got worse weather. I had to admit we were getting unusually nice weather, seeing as how it was the first of November and we were barely getting frost at night. This time last year I'd been in the tropics of Laos and it had been the middle of summer down there. I shivered once, feeling the difference between here and my memory. The difference was like night and day. Was it any wonder I couldn't acclimatize? My body didn't even know what time of year it was supposed to shiver through. I knew if I could just trick Darry into turning up the thermostat, I could actually survive to spring and might even find that warm. Tricking Darry was harder than you'd think, though. He relied on his thumb, after all.

"You know what cold weather means," Darry sighed and I nodded.

Cold weather meant that there would be more days off on the site for Darry. In the past, that meant that he had always fallen back on his night job. Since he was making more by building houses these days, he didn't have a night job. That meant he was going to be short a lot of money, depending on how bad the weather got.

"Pony's got an after school job and I'm getting steady wages from the bar. We'll make out fine, Darry."

"It's my job to be the one to take care you, not the other way around."

"We've had this argument a hundred times, Dar. So if we hand you the money, just do me a favour and try not to scowl too much, okay?"

Darry shook his head, a slight smirk on his face now. "Sure. So, what did you and Pony decide on for dinner?"

"Another jungle creation, if he brings the right stuff home," I replied, watching Darry's expression go sour. "Pony's probably going to bring home something generic, though. Like more chicken or something."

"With any luck," Darry commented, turning to leave.

"Love you too, Dar," I called after him, turning another page in the book I wasn't really reading.

As it turned out, Ponyboy did bring everything I wanted home, but he also brought back all the fixings for fried chicken and mashed potatoes. I just shook my head and helped peel the potatoes as Soda went through the cupboards looking for the green food dye. He said he was feeling in an Irish mood. I was, too, but my idea of Irish food was a tall glass of black ale and a shot of whiskey to go with my potatoes and red meat. I didn't bother pointing that out. I just stripped the potatoes of the skins and made sure to keep them in a separate bowl. Dad always kept them and fried them up in the pan the chicken was in. I absently popped a raw chunk of skin into my mouth and thought they tasted fine either way.

"So, how was work, Soda?" I asked, concentrating on the huge potato I was working on.

"You want to know how work was." He shook his head. "Should I be asking you if you're sick?"

"You know, I'm not gonna ask anymore if the only two times I do get me reactions like that," I pointed out. "And I'm not sick."

"Well, Detective O'Toole stopped by to get his oil changed and asked after everyone," Soda offered. "First thing he wanted to know was if you're sick or something."

"You know, only a cop would assume you're sick because you were keeping out of trouble." Pony shook his head, helping Darry set the table.

"Nah. I'm sure there are plenty of people who think that," I offered. "You know, if Dal kept out of trouble for a week, Pripich used to go over to his place to see if he was alive or not. I suppose O'Toole at the DX after a couple months is okay. Not as impressive, but okay."

"Just shows how far down the food chain you are," Steve hollered from where he was kicking back in the living room.

"Randle, you want to see how far down the food chain I am, then just come on in here."

"I don't need to see it to know it," he replied.

"Pepsi," Soda said, eyes pleading with me to keep peace in the house, with Steve, for one night.

"Yeah, he's got that right," I commented, not responding to Steve. "He knows it because he's pretty much at the bottom."

Steve didn't hear me and Soda was quick to change the subject as he started plunking the potatoes into the pot of boiling water he had going on the stove. "So, how much snow do you think we'll get?"

"A lot," Darry replied, rubbing at his sore thumb. "Probably a lot of ice, too."

"Great."

"What do you mean?" I asked, watching as Pony shrugged.

"If it's bad enough, they might cancel school. That would be great."

"I thought tomorrow was that writing class you like," Darry commented and Pony nodded.

"Yeah, but lately it's the only class I like on Tuesdays. Don't tell Miss Richards I said that," he added, looking over at me seriously.

I was starting to suspect Pony had a thing for Dottie. I wasn't worried about it – Dottie was too wrapped up in her own life and Pony always did pick unattainable girls. I still thought he was pining over Bob Sheldon's girl. That showed how much I knew about his life these days.

"Miss Richards." I smirked at the sound of that. She was always just plain old Dottie in my books. "Just doesn't sound right. It makes me think of some little old bitty of a teacher with a ruler. Like what's her face…"

"Mrs. Johansen," all three of my brothers threw in when I failed to come up with a name.

"That's the one. I used to come home with whip marks from that thing."

"And claw marks on my ears," Soda threw in.

"And Bs even though I was handing in A grade work," Darry huffed like his grades still annoyed him after all these years.

"She was alright," Pony offered with a shrug. "She used to help me with my math after class and there were always cookies in this little red tin she kept in the bottom drawer."

"Cookies? How did you manage that?" Soda asked and Pony shrugged.

"You were cute and shy and probably didn't think math class was better used for spit ball practice." Darry turned a harsh eye on Soda and me then.

I shrugged and Soda smiled innocently. We were in the same math class back then. We had to have been twelve at the oldest. I was always excellent with numbers and had a lot of free time on my hands in that class. Soda was terrible with them and usually figured that spending his time on something fun got his mind off of how much he hated that class. Add in Two-Bit and Steve and you could see why Mrs. Johansen hated us. Darry…well, I had no idea why she disliked him. He was a goody two shoes pre-jock. Heck, he was a taller version of Pony back then. I didn't bother asking, though. If I really wanted to sit through a long list of occasions she was being unfair, then I would ask. But I'd had her as a teacher. I knew probably everything Darry could complain about, Soda and Steve probably did, too.

"I think this chicken is nearly done. Where's Two-Bit?" Soda asked, checking the meal.

"He said he and Rachel had plans tonight, but that he'd probably be here in the morning," Pony replied, getting up to sprinkle more pepper on the chicken.

"Man, if he spends any more nights over at Rachel's, they're going to end up parents." I shook my head and tried to picture Two-Bit as a dad. I just couldn't do it. He was nothing like our dad or Dallas' or Steve's or even Johnny's. I didn't know what to think of that.

"Well, you can give him a lecture on that tomorrow morning, Mr. No Action," Steve offered, coming into the kitchen to see how everything was going or something.

I just levelled Steve with a cool look. He knew absolutely nothing about anything. So I didn't bother trying to make him understand. Before I left, there were some girls at Buck's and Lily, but nothing rough or too serious because it was fun. Over there, sex was about power and fear. I'd seen women after rapes that had been so brutal they had literally killed them – tore them in half and made them bleed until there was nothing left. I was helpless to do anything but bury the bodies. Steve had probably been too high to remember any of that. If he did, he probably wouldn't be quick to jump into bed with anyone he didn't trust. So if it meant no action, then fine. At least I wasn't bringing any more kids into this messed up world any time soon.

"Steve," Soda hissed and I shook my head.

"No, he's right," I replied, leaving the kitchen. "Who am I to preach to anyone?"

Someday, I was going to manage to leave the war behind me, but it looked like today was just not that day. And until then, I was going to have to keep walking away from Steve or I was going to lose my patience and show him just how much of the war I was still carrying with me.

Well, it was clearly a nice filler chapter for everything else I want to have happen in the next few. Thanks for reading.

Any comments at all are welcome and flames are accepted.

See ya in the funny papers!

Tens & Zickachik