( Nothing Gold )

BY xheartmehorrid
CHARACTERS BY S.E. hinton
warning: mentions of mild slash.

"If I never see you again. . .
If I never touch your skin
Touch your skin."
- ECSTASIA francesca lia block.

No one imagined. No one ever imagined. He could remember a few things--some hurt less than others but they hurt all the same--though he tried most nights to wash the thoughts out of his head with alcohol and sometimes drugs though he didn't much care for those. He went out prowling at Buck's and The Dingo and the alleys near the tracks more than ever, looking for a fight. It didn't matter who it was or what they'd done. If it walked and talked and could at least put up a decent fight he was hot on to start a brawl with it. He'd gotten hauled out of bars and movie theaters. He'd staggered home rip-roarin' drunk with a broken nose (his fourth) two cracked ribs, a fat lip and a bad eye all in the span of a couple of nights. Still lean and catlike but the bones showed through his white t- shirt and there were spaces in his ribs just wide enough to stick his fingers in, shadows between every rib like the rungs on a ladder. He wasn't eating so much these days; partly because he wasn't hungry and partly because he couldn't afford it.

Curly and his outfit found him drunk in the gutter and passed out in the streets some nights and hauled his ass home reeling. Angel snarled when he walked through the door. She may have been a greasy girl, but this no good hood behavior as of late was getting out of hand even for Angel, holding up gas stations and lifting packs of Camels and mugging some junior high kids on their way home from school, most days making off with twenty bucks out of Soc pockets just to blow it on half-assed bets and gambling at Buck's. Well, she wasn't about to take shit from him no matter how tough he was. Frankly, she didn't try to hide the way she felt about it; she mouthed off to him when he was home and he would have popped her if she'd been anyone but Angel. Even Curly who worshipped the ground he walked on was starting to grumble. But Angel and Curly being ticked off at him was nothing new. If it would have been anybody else he would've skinned their asses.

You wouldn't recognize the daring few who'd been so bold as to ask him about his more off-the-hinges than usual behavior to his face. He'd leave them heaving on the corner, black and blue and picking up their teeth. Couldn't see for a week after he was done with them.

Tim's infamous black eyes were set at a slow boil these days. And the fire inside was just starting.

He remembered. The sunlight was filtering in through his curtains, checkered across his pillowcase. It was rare for him to wake up in his own bed nowadays. He vaguely recalled having been with a girl last night--a good lookin' little broad--skinny and blonde and he wasn't sure if he'd slept with her or not but he remembered lipgloss sticking to his lips and a deep feeling like wanting to throw up and so he'd come home and heaved up his guts and then passed out cold on his bed. He remembered her manicured red nails dragging down his back and leaving little indentations in his skin. Fake red nails tearing off in the skin.

But no one ever imagined. That he, Tim Shepard, the toughest hood (now that ol' Dallas was gone) on the East Side, leader of the Shepard Gang and just about the most dangerous cat around, was in a spiral of mourning. He had tried--no he'd given up trying--to claw his way out and he failed. Now he laid back on his bed chugging a bottle of stale beer and wishing that there was a reckless cunning towheaded teen as tough as nails and twice as hard with a record at the station 'bout a mile long to run around slashing his tires and throwing bricks through his windows.

He missed it: drinking with Dally and cracking three of his ribs and then laughing about it afterward because no matter what happened they were always buddies. He missed gambling at Buck's and milling around in the lot and on corners smoking cigarettes and bragging about jail and broads and rumbles. He missed the way Dallas was cold and hard and tough and had this wicked wolfish grin and sharp blue eyes like shards of broken glass and he was skinny and so blond his hair was almost white. He liked the way Dallas rode the ponies and the way he swore. He liked his New York Stories. He liked his smell-- salty and baked. All skin. His sharp teeth and elfish features. He liked how Dallas didn't look at sunsets and he liked the way he looked leaning against a barb wire fence smoking a Kools and blowing perfect circle rings like smokey haloes in the dark. He just plain liked Dallas Winston.

And now Dallas Winston was dead. Crumpled under a street light two blocks from the place where they'd first met bluffing with an empty heater. But Tim knew Dallas better than most and he knew that at seventeen Dallas was quick and smart--maybe quicker and smarter than he had been at seventeen--and that he could outrun the fuzz any day because he had so many times before; Dallas was just good at things like outsmarting cops. He knew. He knew it now. He hadn't just been reckless that night. Dallas had wanted to die. And it was true when they said that Dallas Winston always got what he wanted.

Dallas had been friends with the Curtis brothers, hadn't he? And their little group. Oh yes. He remembered now. A boy with big dark eyes and long dark hair and smooth dark skin and a quick little body. What had they said his name was in the papers? Johnny Cade-- that was it. Johnnycake they called him.

It had been a big deal when Cade and the youngest Curtis boy had rescued those kids from the fire in Windrixville. "Hoodlums Turned Heroes" the headlines had read. Dallas had been with them then. He

had gone back into the flames to rescue the nervous dark-haired kid. And he remembered thinking that Dallas's picture in the paper should have been followed up with a 'wanted dead or alive'

cash reward offer--he'd joked with him about that in the hospital--but instead he was a hero because he had gone back for that boy. He knew it now. Dallas never loved anyone but himself; and maybe then not even that. But he would have done anything for that boy.

Died for him even.

If the kid wasn't already dead. . .he thinks he might have killed him himself one of those days; for stealing Dally's heart that way.

And he remembers. He's tried to forget but he remembers. Kissing the sly upturned lips until they turned the blood red color of a bruise and holding his wrists in his hands as they thudded with life and their veins rushing escalating as he pinned him up against the wall in one of Buck's upstairs bedrooms--Dallas always got a room because he knew how to handle Buck like no one else--kind of melding with each other because of the alcohol. The bruised bone basket hips and slim knifeblade shoulders. Dallas had a delicate throat--pale with his adam's apple bobbing up and down under the skin like it was raw and it might hurt him just to speak. He remembers how aggressive he was and how wasted; how those slim white hands moved all across him burning trails of fire scarring something stirring in the marrow of his bones.

The half-light from the window carving Dallas out of ash, strange and sharp and beautiful. And dangerous. Always dangerous.

He had never wanted anybody more.

He had woken up that next morning staggering out with the dawn over the sleeping bodies. He had zipped up his jeans and leather jacket and run a comb through his hair. His lips were blued in the mirror. his eyes were bright and shining like a cat's. And even then he knew he'd never want a person more than he could want Dallas Winston.

Dallas never cared as much as he did. He was on and off with that Sylvia broad, and even then he two-timed her as much as she did him. Mostly he and Dally were just buddies. When they did meet up for something more, they'd been drinking and it was rough and passionate and being with Dallas, well he was so cold he burned, and after they smoked cigarettes beside the stars and fell asleep, if they were sure they wouldn't get caught, fit together better than he'd ever fit with a person before in his whole entire life. He'd beaten up two boys for holding hands on a street corner once; he understood that it was different with Dallas. He and Dally, well, they were both tough and bitter and mean, and neither one of them were any good to anybody, but somehow, they fit. They were two of a kind. And when they fell asleep curled up together that way, with all the stars out and Dally's fingers twining with his, he was almost sorry he had mugged those kids before. Almost.

But there was always something. Someone, now that he knows. Always someone else that made up the difference for them between just good buddies and people that could learn to be together. He could have stayed with Dallas. Could have been more than his friend.

Fuck, he could have even learned to love him if they both hadn't been so damn hard and bitter and if either of them had so much as a honest to goodness feeling heart in the first place. But there was something. Dallas would stand around in the kitchen in just his jeans, barefoot, scratching the pale hair on his chest and his hip bones sticking out--eyelashes casting spider web shadows on his cheek--drinking milk out of the carton and wiping his mouth on his arm. And even then he was thinking about something. Something that hurt more and in a stranger place than it had hurt to grow up on the wild side of New York with nobody, and getting arrested at ten--and you know what they do to ten-year-olds in prison--and even more than it had hurt before he was tough and cool when he'd had to learn how to not give a hang if his parents didn't love him (they didn't) or being allright with not having a damn thing in this world and learning the score; how to survive without needing jack shit from anybody. Fending for himself.

Even more than that hurt he could see it, something else that gave Dallas this kind of strangely aching look when he thought no one was watching. Kind of like the adam's apple in his throat or how the veins in his wrists glowed so blue that it looked painful.

Johnny Cade. The beat up puppy dog kid who loved too much and saw too much and never knew enough to be tough enough or smart enough to not care. The Curtis's pet from a broken home. He was Dally's pet too. And Dallas had loved him. Maybe loved nothing but him till the day he died.

He had seen them together a few times. Smoking in the empty lot or drinking Cokes at gas stations and sometimes going to double features at the drive in, although Dallas usually went off hunting action before they could get through the first showing and left the dark-haired boy sitting by himself. Slim sharp Dallas and his faithful shadow; following him with those big admiring eyes and that dark tiny body wherever he went. Wherever Dally would let him go.

Maybe he knew it even then.

The youngest Curtis--Was it Pony? Horse? He didn't know--he had cornered him one day a couple months after Dally had died. For a couple of hoods who were on the same side but had never particularly liked eachother they had sure talked up a storm. The Curtis kid had been real broken up about that other one. The quiet one. Dallas too, though Tim suspected he had never much liked Dallas.

Well, once he got the kid started, he never wanted to stop. He told him all about how he'd used to like to draw Dallas in dangerous moods and the girls he'd hit on at the Nightly Double, how he'd talked dirty to them that night when they had met this chick named Cherry Valance; who was a backstabbing Soc from what he gathered. How Dally had handed them his jacket, fifty dollars and a loaded gun and helped them hide out in that church in Windrixville until the fuzz were off their trail. He told him about the strange sick expression when the Cade kid had been jumped and how the gang respected him, hell, Two-Bit and Steve and Sodapop even had liked him, whoever they were, and how Dallas was good in a fight, something he already knew too well. How he had been afraid of him sometimes, Tim knew most people were, and how Dallas had been in the hospital the night when that kid died. The way he ran out like the devil was after him. Maybe he was.

He talked a lot about that kid. Maybe because he'd meant something to Dallas. The more he talked, the more it seemed that Dallas had also meant something to Cade, and he wondered. . .

Told him how that boy had worshipped the ground Dallas walked on right from the start. What he'd said about when Dally had been hauled in for breaking windows at the high school when it had really been Two-Bit Matthews, and the way he'd thought Dallas was tuff and gallant-- a cool ol' guy though he was only seventeen, even with all the things he'd done.

Also the note he'd found in a book that Johnny had been reading before he died in the hospital.

Tell Dally that it's not too late. There's still good in this world. I don't think he knows. Tell Dally.

It was the Curtis kid who had told Tim about the way Dally died. Sure he'd heard things. But he didn't know for sure until he'd heard it from him. The reason why he had died. He had died wild and desperate; able to handle everything but somehow unable to handle losing that kid. It was stupid, what he did. Robbing the grocery store and everything.

Well Kid, Tim thought. I guess you wrote that letter for nothin'. 'Cause you were the only good left in Dally's life and now you're dead and so is he.

And so, in the end, Tim tells the ending to his own story. He thinks:

I guess you could say that all us hoods wind up lying full of lead in the gutter someday. That's just the break we got handed in life. But the thing about Dallas Winston is that even now that he's gone there's something about him that's kind of immortal; that if nobody drinks him away, and I ain't denying that I've tried to, he's going to live on forever. And maybe in death with that kid instead of roughing it out here on the streets he's a heck of a lot better off. But the thing is, the thing that no one ever imagined, is that I loved Dallas Winston. I was fucking in love with that towheaded greaser. As much as I tried to hate him when he died, and hell, as much as I tried to not give a hang one way or another about him while he was alive, I fucking loved him. And since he never knew that, since he ain't ever gonna know that now, I guess that's why it hurts just a little bit more.

More than it should, I'll tell you that. But you know what? The Curtis kid told me something else that day. He said, "Nothing gold can stay," and he looked right through me. And when I think about Dally--everything he is and was and all the things he sure as hell wasn't--I know damn well that that's the truth.

Because Dally was gold. To the Socs and the cops and even to his own folks he was trash. Just another mistake that society couldn't fix. Even to his own group maybe he was just another hood. But to me he was gold. He was an asshole and a liar and a law-breaker or whatever else but he was gold. And I ain't ever getting him back.

Because you know what? It's the straight truth:

Nothing gold can stay.

And there isn't any way I could have ever said it better.