*sigh* Surprise! I'm not dead, and I'm still trying to finish this thing! T_T
March. Friendly fire p.1
"Okay, let me get something straight," Vic said at Gar over the top of the store aisle that separated them. "How does this manager guy think you're called Logan Zabinski?"
Gar snorted at the nail polish bottles he was browsing and told the story. "I don't know where he got Zabinski from. But he came up to me and was like, Okay Zabinski. So I said, It's Logan. And he went,We go by last names here, junior." He shrugged. "And so that's how I got written down. Logan Zabinski."
Dick's laughter came from another aisle. "Gar, why didn't you tell him?"
"I tried to! He just told me to knock it off!" Gar picked up a pair of gold-trimmed sunglasses and tried them on. "Kinda makes me glad I didn't get the job."
"I would not have gone if I had known we would be competing for the same role," said Kori, from the other end of the store where she was browsing headbands. "They said they had two spots."
"Kori vibed with the manager because they've both been in Italy," Gar told the group. "They bonded over that."
The door opened with a ring of the bell above it, and the Five paused their browsing to look over. A middle-aged couple walked in, and the Five relaxed.
"A flower store suits you better anyway, Kori," said Gar. "How's the garage going, Vic?"
"Fine," Vic grumbled. The garage was actually going badly; he felt customers openly ogled at him, wondering if his multiple prosthetics were real or a gimmick for the store. That would be fine on its own, except his boss put him at the front of the store too often for it to be accidental; it made him feel he was being used to attract clientele. "But the pay's crap. I might quit soon."
"I'm gonna get fired soon," said Dick.
"Because you keep taking illegal orders," said Gar.
Dick had taken a pizza delivery job. It should've been straightforward enough, but somehow he'd managed to muddle it: sometimes, his deliveries turned into getting people necessities they asked for—toilet paper or milk. None of his friends understood how this had happened to him, since they'd never had a pizza delivered and thought to ask the person to run an errand, but the fact remained that the people who petitioned Dick were right to assume he'd do it, because he always did it.
Dick's boss didn't know what to do with him anymore. Dick was his fastest rider hands down, but every time he went out the door there was the fifty-fifty chance he'd be back hours later because he'd taken a particularly difficult detour.
"They're not illegal-" was all Dick could say before the door opened again.
Two teenaged boys walked into the store, so Dick glanced at the girl behind the counter. She shook her head, and the Five resumed browsing.
Gar said, "That just leaves you and me, Rae. We gotta get jobs."
Raven was on the cosmetics section, trying to settle on a new black eye-shadow. "I have a job," she said.
Her friends turned to her. To achieve this, Gar stood on his toes to look at her over the shelves and Dick appeared at the end of her aisle.
"You do?" he asked.
Before Raven could expound, the bell rung again, and two boys came in. They sauntered to the counter with such arrogance that the Five didn't need to be told—these were the guys who'd been stealing and wreaking havoc on the store. The Five got to the front before one of the boys could trash the box of nail polish he'd picked up and was currently swinging around.
They had a stable checklist they always went through by now. First, they threatened the offenders—this was peppered with a one-liner if Dick felt like giving one. Today he said, "Let me make this simple, guys. Either you pay or you pay."
When the boys blew them off, Dick offered they take this outside. One of the boys didn't wait for outside; he flung a fist at Dick—Dick ducked, Gar went under the boy and held his arms to his body. Kori took on the other guy, who had lunged at Raven. The ensuing fight was only as long as it was because the Five were careful not to bring more damage the store. It finally broke when one of the boys ran away, after which the other lost his mettle too, and followed him out.
The Five walked out of the store with gift cards and the counter girl's eternal gratitude.
However, once outside the store they had to run from security, because they had made a small commotion, and someone must have called it in.
In the cafeteria, Vic looked up from his food and across the room and sentenced, "That's just sad."
Dick, Kori and Raven didn't look up, because they already knew what Victor was referring to: Gar was carrying out his daily ritual of going over to the table where Terra usually ate alone, to try and get her to join them.
"Honestly, if I was Terra," said Vic, "I'd be blowing him off by now too. If only out of spite."
But no laying on the subject got his friends to look over or weigh in, and Vic got why: it was too cringe-worthy watching Gar edge his tray on as Terra scooted away, pretending she didn't see or hear him. Vic finally did like his friends and turned away from the scene. "Anyway. How'd we celebrate the mall mission? I say movie marathon. 'Cause we did pizza party last week, right?"
"Why not both?" said Dick.
Vic looked pleasantly surprised. "Ooh, are you that happy?"
Dick shrugged, but smiled. In truth, he was proud of his team's progress. The mission had gone flawlessly, from the understated stakeout and surprise attack, to the half-hearted, preventive fight, to the final escape from authorities.
"Both it is," said Vic. "Who's down? Everyone?"
Dick and Kori raised their hand when Victor did, but Raven refrained.
"I can't tonight," she said.
"What are you doing?" asked Kori.
"Um…" Raven faltered. "I'm babysitting," she said, as casually as she could.
Her friends predictably ogled her.
"…Who? The same neighbor kids?" asked Dick.
"You got roped into that again?" asked Vic.
"How?" asked Kori.
"Oh, you know," Raven said, messing with her food. "It's a buck."
Dick stared at her searchingly. "Wait. It was on purpose this time," he deduced. Raven was glaring at him for daring to turn his detective skills on her even before he started smiling as wide as he did. "Raven, did you have fun babysitting?"
"Aw, Rae, you like babysitting!" Victor supported.
"They're nice kids. Easy," Raven tried to say. "So it's nothing."
"The three kids under ten years old who wouldn't stay in a single room and ran you ragged crying and asking questions and screaming?" Vic recounted.
"Oh, Raven, you got attached to them!" exclaimed Kori.
"Shut up," said Raven.
But clearly they all felt this was one of those occasions where it was safe to tease her—or else they thought it too good an opportunity to pass up. They kept asking her about the kids, and when she had found her calling in childcare, and at that point Gar came back to the table, dragging his feet and changing the mood.
"No luck?" Vic asked, sympathetically.
Gar shook his head sadly. "I just don't get it," he said. "I'd understand if she had other friends she'd rather be with. But she doesn't! She prefers to be all alone than with us?"
Terra had had a lasting effect on Gar. Vic could see it: even though Gar seemed perfectly fine most of the time, he looked sad whenever he saw Terra –sometimes he looked sad unprompted, and Vic imagined he was thinking of Terra-, which meant she had stuck on his little goldfish heart.
Vic had even begun giving him driving lessons to distract him, letting him drive his car despite the fear in his heart. It kind of worked at cheering him up—at least in the moment.
"I think she's made it pretty clear that she does prefer to be alone," said Raven. "If not back when she first walked out on us, then at every single turn when you've asked her to hang out and she's said no." She punctuated her words by stabbing her fork into her salad.
"Look, I regret showing her the score," said Dick. "I wish I hadn't. But Raven's right. She's made her decision. We can't force someone to be our friend."
"I'm not trying to force her to anything," Gar stated, looking at his friends with a seriousness he didn't usually adopt. "But did all of us become friends immediately? No," he answered himself. The others looked to each other, recognizing the truth in that. "So I'm not giving up," Gar finished, and buckled down on eating his lunch in the last minutes he had left in his lunch hour.
On top of everything else, Gar was grounded at the moment.
Or at least that was how he saw it. Steve had sat him down and said something about "There's gonna be some changes around here." He'd started yelling about how Gar was out of the house too much and he needed an attitude adjustment, so he was to stay home for the next week, to focus on studying, with limited screen time and no other privileges.
Gar went home straight from school the first day of this new era, to keep the peace and because he knew by now that Steve's bouts of renovating zeal didn't last. He ran out of steam before Gar did—Gar just had to let it run its course.
But then he got to his room and reached out for his guitar, only to find it wasn't there. He looked over to the other end of his room and, sure enough, his game console was gone too. Steve had outdone himself this time.
Gar didn't even have homework at the moment. For the first time in his life, he kind of wished he had.
He decided to work out. A while ago, when Dick first started training them, he'd asked for Steve's old dumbbell to be put in his room, and that had made Steve happy—which he showed by making comment after comment about how Gar might finally buzz up now, and then quizzing him on whether he'd used the dumbbell every other time Gar came down from his room. Gar figured working out might earn him some points now.
But that activity lasted for all of half an hour. He then took a shower, and thought about wandering downstairs. But Rita was at work, and though he could hear the TV, even sitting down quietly to watch something mindless with Steve wasn't a pleasant experience.
He threw himself on his bed. Steve made it so hard to follow his own rules.
Being home was boring, so he wasn't home a lot because of it. And he didn't have his friends over a lot because Steve didn't like them, and a while ago the thin layer of agreeableness Steve had worn with them had peeled off, as it always did—he got tired of keeping it up.
Besides, Gar didn't agree with the notion that there was a set amount of time he had to be at home or else it meant he was spinning out of control. All of his old foster homes had had different ideas as to what was the right amount of time a child should stay inside, ranging from the criminally neglectful, through the benevolently hands-off, to the ones who were like Steve and tried to keep them all behind doors, which was the version of parenting Gar hated the most.
When Steve and Rita had first adopted him, they had sat Gar down and told him –well, Steve had told him- they wouldn't tolerate the behavior he'd been exhibiting thus far, the running away from foster homes when he got bored or upset with them, the slacking off in school and generally being a little rascal. Back then it had unsettled Gar, who had already made up his mind that this would be his forever home before he said that. The Daytons had known his parents; that, to twelve-year-old Gar, seemed like a sign that this was to be his real house.
Gar didn't think being a foster kid had made him have an attitude, like Steve would say on and off again for years. But as he grew up, Gar thought he understood what he saw in Gar that made him say that: the fact that he'd experienced different houses, different families in different cities, had made him realize that every family was its own construct; parenthood wasn't set in stone, it was all just different approaches, with varying degrees of success. Steve's punishments were just one version of punishments, and his rules didn't make inherent sense. Other kids who had one family their whole lives probably thought normal life was just the way their parents introduced. Gar knew better.
Steve didn't get that he didn't scare Gar with his fatalistic warnings of what would happen to him if he didn't buckle down and get some discipline. Because Gar had used to be worse: now, at least he didn't carry most school subjects to summer school, or end up in the police station before the older kids convinced him to shoplift, or stay away from home for weeks at a time.
Gar had never set out to disrespect Steve; he just didn't think the man was right about everything under the sun—and he understood both looked the same to someone like Steve. He was an authoritarian who'd had the bad luck of adopting a kid who was basically an anti-afterschool special: he'd done all the bad things and survived.
He'd had the feeling Terra would have understood all of that, better than anyone else could. If only he'd had the time to find out. But he'd lost that possible connection, and now he'd likely never know whether she could have been the one to get him. He couldn't stop thinking about that.
Gar checked his alarm clock –he'd had to turn in his phone when he came home. It was only five o'clock, and it was torture knowing his friends were meeting up for the mission celebration right now. When it got to six pm, Gar said screw it. He opened the window and snuck out. He'd just deal with the trouble later.
He showed up at Kori's building and called through the intercom, which they never did unless someone's phone was dead. Kori smiled and hugged him when she opened the door for him, and Gar's spirits immediately lifted.
Raven eventually figured out that the phone interview with Mrs. Tanner had been so long and thorough because the woman apparently didn't plan on having a conversation with Raven ever again.
As soon as Raven arrived to the house, either Mrs. Tanner was out in a whirlwind, somehow always late for something despite Raven always arriving a little earlier to her appointments. The same was true of the husband; Raven exclusively saw the two of them in flashes of spasmodic energy, always striding somewhere and out of breath. She had yet to see them both in the same time slot.
Raven had shared her bafflement with her friends, now that the cat was out about her babysitting. "A married couple with children should have their lives more together by now," she'd told them. "It's like, if you're that busy, don't have kids."
What she didn't tell her friends was that going to the Tanners regularly had kind of saved her. Flawed and hectic as she saw it, that was a real house, with a strict schedule and clockwork routine.
For Raven, the past few weeks of her living in Azarath by herself felt like complete anarchy. When her mother had been there, the day seemed to be split into neat portions: Arella would have breakfast ready when Raven woke up, and by the time Raven was done with homework in the evening, Arella would be back home from working around Azarath; she'd get dinner ready, knock on Raven's door when it was done, and then they'd hang out until bedtime. If Raven had been out, she was sure to come home and find her mother had stayed up waiting, and she'd still close the day by her mom.
Without Arella, a day was a formless blob of indistinguishable hours. Raven could do whatever she wanted, and she hated it. If she took a nap during the day, the day just stopped—no one else was up, wandering around the house, putting a kettle on, washing dishes, reading a book, putting the radio on really low. Raven had always thought she'd be great at living alone; now she was having second thoughts.
She'd been dealing with it a lot better, though, since she'd bit the bullet and told her friends Arella was travelling for a while, just so she could have them over more often. Having her friends in her home infused it with warmth when she was home alone, she'd discovered it made things easier if she closed the door to Arella's room, and pretended her mother was there just taking a nap. It was dirty denial, and it worked wonders.
School and babysitting gave Raven's life structure, and her friends gave her solace; all things considered, she had enough.
On the night of the mission celebration, when she got off work, she found her friends had texted her they were still hanging out if she wanted to come. She told them she was on her way. That day officially marked two months since Arella had left; Raven had no interest staying in.
When Gar opened the door, he had barrettes on his hair and some tufts of it were up in hair bands, and he was looking at her with a plain face, as if he'd never suspect he'd be wondered at. "Weren't you grounded?" she said as greeting.
"Was I?" he replied, and went right back to sit with his back to the couch, where Kori got back to arranging his hair. That explained the how, if not the why, thought Raven as she closed the door.
She caught the last movie of the marathon, and ended up staying over at Kori's.
In the morning she woke up before Kori or Galfore, so she slipped into the kitchen and made herself some tea. For some reason, it came out quite weak. Raven added another bag and waited for it to seep. When she went to drink it, it still tasted weak.
She looked at her cup in wonder. She'd had tea at Kori's before; she knew Kori kept normal tea bags. But no matter what she did, she couldn't get this cup to work.
Nothing is gonna go right today, she thought before she could help it. Immediately she chided herself for being superstitious, and put the thought out of her mind.
Steeeveee: Hi :) The irony of your comment right before I went on another hiatus! T_T Aaahh life. Anyway, I hope this update gives you joy too! As always, thank you!
~The Lighthouse
