Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Huey!”

Initially, his eyes remain shut. A strikingly blue sky seeps behind his emptied vision. It’s humid out. Thick air hangs like fabric over the trees, into his lungs.

“Hi!”

She aligns herself an arm’s length away, plopping unceremoniously into the grass.

“You look sleepy.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“Can I join you?”

Just presses his folded arms firmly into the ground behind his head. Her naïve perceptiveness of concepts she couldn’t possibly register intellectually is frustrating. He’s not tired, in a physical sense. He’s simply thinking. Enjoying a thin reprieve of peace on a hill up the pavement road from Grandad’s house. Or silence. Maybe it wasn’t quite peaceful if one’s mind continuously rattled with the tribulations of their lives. Silence it was, then.

“Have you ever had a bad dream?”

He frowns.

“A really bad dream. Scary. Or kind of sad. Mostly scary. Like, where monsters run after you, or you lose something or somebody you love, or you feel like you’re falling through the air. My dad says these are normal, sometimes. But why would any of these be normal?”

In his ten years of living, he had dreamt about everything she had described. Monsters, green and cartoonishly grotesque, had run him through the hallways of his old house. He had lost Riley and his parents and Grandad in a multitude of ways. He had fallen through the air, dark hands dragging at clouds as if they would have steadied his inevitable descent.

“Do you get them?”

He offers her a thoughtful hum. She rustles through flora, soft voice becoming slightly clearer. She’s probably facing him now.

“They’re horrible, aren’t they? I had one last night. My hair and teeth were falling out and I couldn’t do anything! It was so scary, I cried when I woke up. People say these dreams have meanings. But what would this mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Why nothing?”

“Everything is meaningful to some degree. Yet some things mean just that. Nothing. Unless your hair and teeth fall out regularly. Then your dreams are simply a reflection of your reality. Don’t let it happen on a carpet.”

He imagines her gawking, bug-eyed.

“You’re really weird, Huey.”

“Hmm.”

“That doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” he can hear the smile in her voice.

“I know.”

“Of course you do. You know everything. Or at least you think so.”

“Hmm.”

She slides closer, and the sun’s probably beating against her face, painting her biscotti hair as ringlets of orange flame. He knows she would never mind. She enjoys spring, watching the flowers grow with rapt, green awe, watching the perennial drizzle cascade along her too-large window frame.

“You still look like you’re falling asleep.”

“I’m awake.”

She giggles like one would after reaching the apex of a carousel. “Thanks, Huey.”

He offers a nod. She rolls even closer.

“Can I tell you a secret?” She leans in against his cheek, cupping her lips as if she were about to commit murder.

He doesn’t move. Just inhales, exhales, feels a burgeoning breeze against his nose.

“You seemed really mean and scary when you first came here.”

He jerks away, rolling onto his stomach, and she bursts into that same fit of endorphin-drunk laughter.

“No offense! Let me finish!”

He grunts.

“What I meant to say was… you’re not bad. Or mean. Or scary. Or angry. You’re just Huey. And maybe Huey is all of these things sometimes. But you’re just Huey, still.”

“Appreciate it.”

“See?”

“What?”

“You’re just being Huey now.”

“Oh.”

“Never change.”

She’s nestled into his neck now. His eyes open. The sun never hides away. That fresh breeze continued to trickle across the minuscule hairs on his face, ruffling the golden curls grazing his collarbone.

“Never change,” she repeats, gently.

She doesn’t talk much after that. He can’t see the way her face moves or contorts with that same childish naïveté when it’s buried into his own. Her breathing evens out.

“Thank you.” She’s probably asleep. He wonders if those dreams about lost fragments of hair and teeth have returned this afternoon. Minutes have probably become hours.

He sighs. She tugs in a state of subconsciousness. Yet, the world continues to spin, the ground beneath him is impossibly green, the sun seeps bright through branches of redwood, and he never finds it in him to move away again.

Chapter Text

The dying trees line up with the sidewalk like security guards overseeing Huey’s path — tall and imposing yet withered and poignantly gray. Sequoia red leaves shrivel and crunch beneath the soles of his shoes. It’s a familiar sound floating to his ears; a welcomed comfortability and satisfactory break from the scenery clogging his senses.

Perhaps if he were a romanticist, autumn would be his favorite season. It symbolized death, and therefore rebirth; necessary components of life that many seemed to skirt away from. It wasn’t absurdly cold nor disgustingly hot — no, it was the perfect amount of both, the kind that smelled like antiques and pumpkin seeds and the old-time records Granddad owned. Autumn is sentimental and Huey is blatantly not, but the world is still spinning and maybe there’s value in enjoying certain facets of pointless, trivial things.

Maybe.

As the sidewalk stretches along the bend of a cul-de-sac, he tightens his fingers around his hoodie and walks along with a little more intent, counting the cadence of his footsteps. One, two, one, two, crunch. Granddad’s house is a simple five minutes away and there’s probably nobody home yet — Riley doing God-knows-the-fuck-what — so he dips his head down for a moment, not-quite trusting the deceptively quiet environment around him but —

“Huey!”

There it is.

He whips his head around, met immediately with the scene of Jasmine drowning in a makeshift bed of leaves. There’s fragments of a few still carelessly left in her hair — sun curls thick and matted in the aftermath of her childish fun. She smiles at him, all white teeth, jabbing at the unsightly mess she’s created.

“How are you,” she’s courteous enough to ask, “why don’t you hop in?”

He fishes his headphones out of his pockets and shoves them into his ears, kicking at errant rocks as he begins to walk away —

”Wait!”

It used to surprise him whenever his body begrudgingly reacted to her words; so thoroughly dissonant from everyone around him except for her. It used to bother him, even, the concept of not being able to walk away, because he knows he could, and he does it with damn-near everyone else — he couldn’t make sense of it, and that’s what terrified him. Not that she would understand.

But it’s one of her many kindnesses that she never asks. She listens, pesters, grins like the spoiled brat she is. But she never asks.

He wonders why she’s starting, now.

“My mom has brownies in the oven,” she yells out. “Sea-salt almond, milk chocolate! Your favorite, right? Even though it’s wasteful and puts us at death’s doorstep because of how much it raises our blood pressure? But you love it anyway? ‘Cause you took three of them last time and didn’t tell anyone, but it was obvious, ’cause obviously you seem like someone who would like brownies?”

It’s amusing, not funny, for him to process the innocence of her words, despite the substance of them, because she wants to drag him into her leaves dirtied with lawn exhaust and dog shit, but he’s not viscerally disgusted by her proposition. Her mom’s brownies are a waste of shoddily-processed chocolate harvested from poor cacao farmers in the Global South for middle-class America to gorge on, but people like Jasmine don’t care about that. People like Jasmine don’t think about that. People like Jasmine don’t think, at all.

“Come on,” she calls out, “please?”

His shoes spin 180 degrees on the sidewalk and tread forward similarly without thought. The smile etching itself on her face is absolutely golden. He couldn’t conceive a better word for it.

“I don’t like brownies,” he says, simply, as he looms over her pile of leaves like a shadow.

“You don’t have to lie, Huey,” she laughs, balling a few in her hands — red and yellow — before throwing it at the cuffs of his jeans. “Tag! You’re it!”

They slide off his pants like sludge, wet and slimy from last night’s thunderstorm, and he opens his mouth to say something but she’s gone in a burst of giggles and muddy footprints, running back inside her gated house with the pumpkins and scarecrows propped up front, with the capitalist-concoction brownies stinking up her kitchen, with the same mom and dad who smile at him like she does, telling him what how great he could be one day, with that mind of his.

He sighs, face twisting in a perpetual frown. Granddad’s going to be interrogating him like he committed murder for ruining these jeans, and he’d come up with all sorts of euphemisms as to why, because he doesn’t really have the capacity to come out with the truth — as awful and uncharacteristic that sounds. He slipped in the mud. He didn’t know it was going to rain. He liked the route he took without Riley to accompany him on the bus and a car flew past him on a pothole.

Jasmine peers through her screen-door, bright-eyed, shrinking away as she realizes, predictably, he could still see her. He is not a romanticist by any means, but every time he’s with her, he grows — something about himself being decided on a whim. Right now, he could imagine, just like she does.

Chapter Text

Okay, here’s the thing: ice cream is universal. Whether that be in a palpable sense (the thought of a cold strawberry-vanilla swirl on a day like today) or in a figurative sense (the one that authors use to symbolize pleasure as hedonism or debauchery or whatever else), it’s everywhere, and Huey, deep down, knows that he’ll never escape it.

Doesn’t stop him from trying, though.

He’s sitting on Granddad’s porch, thumbing through The Wild Iris when it comes to him through sound — chimes ringing loud and sharp down the block, like cymbals right in his brain. When he lifts his eyes from the page and squints, the sunlight cuts through the redwood trees and obscures his vision. Whatever. It can’t stop the way his body reacts, Pavlov’s principle in motion: hands wandering towards his pockets where a few crumpled dollar bills lie, leaving the book woefully forgotten beside him.

He thinks of the weather. It’s supposed to hit ninety degrees at noon sharp. With around seventy-percent humidity, that would create a Feels Like temperature of above one-hundred degrees — a particular sort of hell that Huey is neither equipped nor inclined to deal with. However, it’s been a nice morning so far, and any minute he spends away from Riley’s bullshit is an extra minute in heaven.

Huey stands up, taking slow, measured steps as he hears the truck drawing closer to his street. He can already picture what it looks like: a smattering of colors and cartoons on an old, fucked-up stepvan, with the dude driving it being probably twice its age. They’re all the same, anyway, with their red faces and pit-stains and smiles that could put Jigsaw to shame.

It’s crazy, a decade-old contradiction; him and Riley were taught not to take anything from anyone, let alone funny-looking men in white cars.

The truck pulls in, crawling like a tiger on the prowl, and stops right in his line of sight, engine sputtering and obviously aged. He sees a flood of kids chasing after it, money and credit cards clutched in their little hands, and slips behind them like a shadow.

“That one,” a little girl says, tugging her older brother towards the window. She giggles, and he does too, fishing out his wallet, brushing past the picture of their family to find some cash. “She wants the SpongeBob,” he says, and the driver — old and sweaty and balding just as Huey predicted — nods, and turns away, like a secret agreement.

Maybe it’s wrong of him to do this. Any of this. Waste Granddad’s money on something so trivial. Listen to the pair of siblings talk as if their words mean anything at all. Look at the young girl’s hair done up in those knotless braids and baby-blue beads and watch as the brother pats her right on the head and hand her the ice cream.

When they walk away, he’s carrying her on his shoulders all the way down the street, and Huey doesn’t realize he’s staring until they’ve disappeared around the bend.

What the hell has been wrong with him lately?

“Young man,” the driver grunts, voice heavy and thick with phlegm build-up. Gross. “What would you like?”

Huey takes a moment to analyze his options. When his mom and dad were around, they’d take him hand-in-hand to get his favorite vanilla soft-serve — but how could he trust that this man’s ice cream machine worked properly? Or that it was even clean?

He exhaled, taking the money from his pockets. Something prepackaged would have to suffice.

“Klondike bar and Choco Taco, please,” he said, sliding the dollar-bills into the man’s clammy hand and waiting back on his heels. Riley’s ungrateful ass probably won’t even take this for the gift it is — probably would inhale it in one bite and throw the wrapper on the floor and laugh as Huey watched.

He really doesn’t know why he’s doing this. Nothing makes sense anymore. Society has always been this fucked-up web of lies and unclarity, but he’s always been able to dissect it for what it is. Now, he can’t even think straight. Now, all he thinks about is Riley and Granddad and school and the kids down the block and Jasmine and everything he’s never wanted to name before.

“Here ya go,” the driver tosses him his ice cream, and sidles back into his seat all lazy and slow like this kind of job requires the Lord’s work. “Thanks for buying.”

As Huey turns on his heel, he hears the stepvan rev up and drive away. He can almost see the back of it in his mind’s eye, the big bold letters spelling out TURN THAT FROWN UPSIDE DOWN. It brings bile to his mouth, makes him want to vomit.

Sifting through the packages in his hand, he looks at the Klondike bar, then the Choco Taco, then — wait, did he order a strawberry shortcake bar? Where did that come from? Why did…

He hears someone laugh behind him. High, loud, excited. He knows exactly who it belongs to before he even sees her; sun-blonde ringlets bouncing in the wind, rubber gloves muddled with dirt, with a peony pinched between her little fingers.

“I knew you were out here somewhere,” she smiles, big and bright. “Mom and I were gardening. This reminded me a little of you.”