A sequence that will become part of Cabbie's Uncomfortably Emotional Subplot in my gradually-upcoming Epic Cars Fanfiction (Explicitly Not 'OF DOOM'), which Wally demanded be posted here in the interim. Warnings for oblique references to internalized homophobia.
IN A SMALL PLACE
"Knight to E3."
Cabbie surveyed the board in front of him with a critical eye before glancing back to Wally, no more than a pale suggestion of a face in the bright mid-afternoon sunlight pouring into his hanger, then back down at the chessboard between them.
"Are you sure about that move?"
"Hey, when you can beat Windlifter and Blade both, three games outta four, then ya get to question my technique," Wally shot back, and Cabbie heaved a sigh and moved the knight as requested. Beating Blade wasn't really a problem; they were evenly matched when the Fire Chief could bring all of his formidable attention to bear on the game - something that became far more difficult for him when Nick inevitably decided to entertain himself in close proximity to their matches.
Windlifter, though, could probably trounce Cabbie on the chessboard with both eyes shut.
"I'm still not sure we're looking at the same board," Cabbie grumbled, eyeing the game speculatively. Wally was a... unique strategist, to say the least, and difficult to anticipate.
Their Colonel had called him six kinds of crazy, which probably wasn't too far off the mark.
Even with his gaze on the board and his mind wandering, Cabbie could feel when Wally's attention shifted and refocused elsewhere - the faint tingle in his plating told him, even if decades of familiarity with his partner didn't.
What had captured Wally's attention became evident a second later, when Maru's familiar, sardonic drawl rose from the doorway. "Your kids are causing trouble."
Cabbie neither lifted his gaze from the board nor bothered arguing the terminology, knowing full well that Maru teased him all the more mercilessly if he objected. "And this is surprising, how?"
"Avalanche isn't."
That caught Cabbie's attention, and his gaze snapped up to meet Maru's. "Avalanche? What's the matter?"
"Dunno," Maru answered, spreading his tines in a broad shrug. "Haven't heard a peep out of him since the mail came this morning."
Cabbie frowned, dropping his mouthstick on the board and shifting out from around the table. The mail had come in almost five hours ago, an unheard-of length of time for Avalanche to be silent without catastrophic injury involved. A night of concussion watch had taught Cabbie the kid couldn't even sleep quietly.
"And you're just mentioning this now?" he demanded, feeling all his flaps twitch in agitation. A shifting brush of aching cold - Wally - slid along his port wing and over his back to settle against his starboard engine, the biting chill soothing in its reassuring familiarity, and Cabbie forced himself to stillness, drawing in a deep breath.
The kid was fine - had to be fine, someone would have noticed something sooner otherwise. Dynamite and the other Smokejumpers would never have left him alone if bad news had come from home. And on the off chance he'd fallen ill, Dynamite or one of the ghosts would have told them, or Windlifter would have divined a negative energy shift from the direction the pine needles were pointing, or Avalanche would, possibly, have had the sense to roll the few hundred feet from the Jumpers' hanger to Maru's workshop and tell them something was wrong.
Or just tell them without leaving the hanger. It was Avalanche, after all.
None of which stopped Cabbie from rolling out of his hanger and heading for the Smokejumpers', the sharp chill of Wally's presence right beside him.
"I checked on him at ten and again an hour ago," Maru countered, turning and rolling alongside Cabbie nonetheless. "He's fine, he got a book in the mail and wanted to read it rather than go do... whatever it is the others are doing."
On cue, a distant shriek - Drip - echoed out from the woods behind the Base, followed by howls of laughter from Dynamite and Pinecone and a great deal of yelling from Blackout.
"...I don't even want to know," Cabbie sighed, checking his rapid roll towards the Smokejumper's hanger for to a slightly more sedate pace, more reassured than he should have been by Maru's explanation.
While none of the Jumpers were exactly what you'd call intellectual types, it wasn't unusual to find any or all of them relaxing with a book at the end of a long week. Admittedly, with Drip it would be a comic book, but still. Finding one of them - particularly Pinecone or Avalanche, both of whom tested the practical limits of their lockers by storing their personal libraries in them - reading rather than wreaking havoc wasn't cause for alarm.
Even if it was in the middle of a truly beautiful afternoon following three weeks of keeping a seemingly endless series of small spotfires contained, a task that was more aggravating than actually taxing, and the other four Jumpers seemed intent on goofing off as loudly and enthusiastically as possible.
Sighing to himself, Cabbie rolled the last hundred feet a little faster.
As Maru had told him, though, the kid was hunkered down in a patch of sunlight with a book, a big, navy-blue hardcover, sans dust jacket, and absorbed enough by it that he didn't notice their arrival until Cabbie inadvertently blocked his sunbeam.
Avalanche glanced up at the sudden shade, his familiar, painfully-wide grin flashing over his face as he spotted his honorary uncles and Maru. "HI GUYS!"
Cabbie merely chuffed in response, but Wally sharpened his outline enough for his returning grin to be visible. "Heya, kid. Y'scared us for a bit when Maru said ya weren't out with the others."
"I'M GOOD. I WANTED TO READ -" Avalanche started to gesture back to his book, but then abruptly snapped his mouth shut, an expression of wide-eyed alarm passing across his features.
Rather against his will, Cabbie felt both his curiosity and his eyebrows rise. "Embarrassing book?"
"NO!"
Which did not in the least explain why the kid was trying to hide it from Cabbie's view with his dozer blade.
Wally apparently had the same thought, and Cabbie watched in amusement as his partner zipped forward, nearly passing through Avalanche's blade before the dozer rolled backwards, carefully drawing the book with him.
"Not embarrassin', huh?" Wally chuckled, retreating a few feet to grin mischievously down at the dozer rather than chase him across the hanger. "What is it, the pornographic frescoes of Pompeii? A history of prostitution in Ancient Rome?"
"GET YOUR MIND OUT OF THE GUTTER, UNCLE WALLY," Avalanche shot back over Cabbie's sigh and Maru's chortling, although he made no move whatsoever to share the actual contents of the book with them.
And try as he might, Cabbie couldn't help the mingled spark of affection, bewilderment, and fear that danced through him at hearing one of 'his' kids call Wally 'Uncle'. The entire team had accepted the unspoken truth of his relationship with Wally without so much as batting an eye, and seemed quite unlikely to change that opinion, despite Cabbie's concerns.
(Even having witnessed them cheering Blade and Nick's marriage, everyone's unblinking acceptance of such relationships still astounded him on a daily basis.)
"You're the one with the embarrassing book, kiddo."
"IT'S NOT EMBARRASSING," Avalanche protested, although he did sound distinctly sheepish - a feat Cabbie wouldn't have imagined possible at eighty decibels - and he made no move to reveal the book. "AT LEAST NOT THAT WAY. IT'S KINDA AWKWARD, THOUGH."
"What, you order the helicopter Kama Sutra instead of the grounder version?"
"...THEY MAKE THAT?"
"What do you think I'm getting Nick and Blade for an anniversary gift?" Maru snorted.
Cabbie rolled his eyes ceilingward and sighed. In the first place, Nick and Blade most definitely did not need more ideas on how to be publicly indecent, and in the second, this conversation was going in circles. Staggering, lopsided, filthy-minded circles.
On the other hand, Avalanche's theatrical horror at Maru's suggestion did mean that he lifted his blade away from the book, allowing Cabbie his first good glance at the kid's reading material.
The grainy, black-and-white photo on the page made him suck in a breath, sharp with shock and recognition.
Avalanche, his eyes widening, made an abortive move to cover the book once more, only to freeze when Cabbie shot a quelling glance in his direction.
"Hell In A Very Small Place, huh?" Wally murmured, staring down at the image as well. The caption beneath the photograph, of four planes conferring around a map posted on a roughly constructed wall, read simply 'American and French air troops discuss their plan of attack,' with no names given.
Not that Cabbie needed them. Not when one of the faces in that grainy photo was his own, and the other three were those who had died in the sky beside him.
It was strange, looking back at himself, captured decades ago by one fateful snap of a shutter. There hadn't been many photos of him taken in those days, and he'd kept even fewer. Somehow, he'd always thought that photos of himself from before the Siege would have captured someone young, stupid, and terrified.
Oddly, his photographic self bore the same look of exhausted determination that fire seasons showed him in every reflective surface.
"Where did you even get this?" he asked, finally, tearing his gaze away from the page. (He and Wally were so close in the picture, Wally's wingtip pressing against his starboard engine, as close as they'd always been, and how had nobody ever noticed?) "I didn't think there were many copies left."
"THERE AREN'T. MISS ELIZABETH GOT IT FOR ME."
Frowning, Cabbie set his jaw and tried not to think uncharitable thoughts of the Jaguar in question. As much as he liked Liz, she could be entirely too free with things he would have preferred to keep under his plating.
"DON'T MAKE THAT FACE, I ASKED HER TO."
"You sent Liz chasing down a book on a war that was over decades before you were born? Why?"
Avalanche shrugged, resting the edge of his blade carefully, almost protectively, against the book in question, as though he was afraid Cabbie would try to take it from him. "BECAUSE I'M CURIOUS ABOUT STUFF THAT YOU WENT THROUGH, BUT I DON'T WANNA MAKE YOU RELIVE BAD MEMORIES. I FIGURED THE BOOK COULD TELL ME SOME OF YOUR STORIES, SO THAT YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO."
Which was... so ridiculously, stupidly sweet of the brat that, for the briefest of seconds, Cabbie felt a suspicious sting behind his eyes. It went away with a few quick blinks, although the tilt of Wally's head, half-visible though it was, told him it hadn't gone completely unnoticed.
"Tell you what, kid," Cabbie sighed, ignoring the slight rasp in his throat, "just... come over when you don't feel like tearing around in the mud, and I'll tell you the stories I can manage. Deal?"
Avalanche's grin could have lit half the valley. "DEAL!"
~ END CHAPTER ~
The book mentioned and (inspiration for the chapter title), Hell In A Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu, is real, published in 1966 by Bernard Fall, a war correspondent and historian who embedded with French troops in Vietnam during the First Indochina War.
The photograph described, as you can guess, is me taking liberties. Aside from the obvious reasons, American participation in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu was kept under wraps until 2004.
The Pompeian frescoes Wally mentions are also real - beautifully intricate, exceptionally well-preserved, and incredibly filthy pieces of pornographic artwork.
Much in the same vein, the Kama Sutra, or Kamasutra, is an ancient Hindu text that is still considered one of the more comprehensive practical guides to human sexual behavior.