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magibrainTitle: The Wind Will Ruin Everything – (i) St. Louis to NYC
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] The Wind Will Ruin Everything - Index
(i) St. Louis to NYC
Home for fifteen years was a brick building in Dogtown with flower boxes out front, stuffed with bluebells and lilies-of-the-valley and other flowers that hung their heads. He didn't remember the three years before that, in some hole-in-the-wall apartment in DC, and after that, well, that was a different story.
For fifteen years he walked the same streets and played or lazed or flirted in the same parks, and found Ellen in the yard on the weekends, on her knees, with her gloved hands in the earth. She was always coaxing something to grow, which the kid known as Danny Brooks didn't see the appeal in – he liked things like art and magic tricks and pool, hobbies dependent on his own skills or, when there were other living things involved, hobbies on people whose heads he could get inside.
Home for most of those years was Ellen, because it wasn't long before he'd figured out that his mother had packed her bags and moved to somewhere in the back of her head, and she wasn't letting him move with her.
Ellen's apartment was in the Central West End, and had a balcony, but no yard. He tended to walk over there after school or on the weekends; eat pizza at her diningroom table, badger her out to the shooting range in High Ridge, or talk her around to telling him stories about a life she wasn't supposed to admit to having. Every year he got a little better at talking people around, and measured how good he'd gotten against Ellen; she figured it out, of course, and started regarding it with amused tolerance.
"You could be a great salesman," she said, at one point, scrubbing down a glass casserole dish, evening sun coming in through the window. Danny was hanging out by the end of the counter with a dishtowel, because Ellen didn't let him wash the dishes when he had cooked, and he was a better cook than she was. He'd learned from the best. Cooking was just about the only way to get his mother to rejoin reality, these days. "Really. Your poor marks wouldn't have a chance."
"I could be a great detective," Danny offered.
Ellen looked at him, and her smile cooled. It was still there, but she was forcing it to be there, and he never talked her around to explaining that.
"You could be," she agreed.
Ellen seemed to enjoy telling him about her life in DC. Airing out a part of her past no one but he and his mother were ever allowed to know. She told him about busts and searches, trials and investigations, and the assorted madnesses of being a woman on the force in the 1970s, and one particular favorite story that ended with his father taking a dunk in the Potomac while she commandeered the Beetle from a senator's aide to run down the gang leader who'd stolen their patrol car.
She never told him the story of his father's death.
He made it to eighteen before he learned why.
And at that point, he ran.
-
He didn't leave Ellen's apartment with the intention to leave the state, but as soon as the option presented itself, every other option seemed like a dodge.
The St. Louis - New York line had a bus going out ten minutes after he arrived at the station, and Danny – Neal, apparently; that's what Ellen told him, though he wasn't sure how much he should trust anything told to him, really – bought a ticket and walked onto it and ignored the concerned glances of travelers who saw an angry-looking young man with no luggage on an interstate line and jumped to the obvious conclusion. By the time they started moving he'd stuck himself in a seat in the back corner and put his knees up against the seat in front of him, and was hopefully radiating enough leave me alone to insulate him for the trip. It lasted all of seventeen minutes before a woman edged back to talk to him.
"Hi," she tried.
He turned to glare at her.
She wasn't that much older than him – mid-20s maybe, but in professional dress, brown hair up in a no-nonsense bun. She gave him an awkward smile. "Are you all right?"
He glared at her some more, trying to think of a way to chase her off without causing a scene that would draw more unwanted attention.
"I work with youth in the St. Louis area," she offered. "If there's something you're having trouble with..."
Have to convince her there's no chance of this conversation working out, he thought, and cursed at her in French until she gave him a lost look, then an even more uneasy smile, then backed away.
That gave him a vicious thrill of satisfied amusement, but it didn't last long. It vanished like everything else, into the undercurrent of anger which was swallowing everything.
The ride was long, and it took barely two hours for him to start regretting his lack of foresight in failing to bring any form of entertainment. Even his application for the police academy had been left at Ellen's. He could have drawn a visual novel in the margins, with all the time he had; instead, he just sat in his seat and wallowed in anger, and got out when the bus stopped for breaks, and fell asleep through the night and woke up with a crick in his neck and a pounding headache, and sat and wallowed in his anger some more.
The anger didn't disappear by the time he got to New York City. It had become a sort of monotonous droning in the back of his head and the tension in his shoulders, and it had twisted up his stomach and made him feel vaguely ill, but it was as present as ever.
He was pretty sure that you were expected to cool down and see the error of your ways after stepping out into a new city and realizing you'd just taken the nuclear option on whatever problems you were getting away from. He was pretty sure you were expected to suffer a crisis of conscience; go running back home again. Instead, every minute on the bus had just increased the pressure-cooker anger to the point where he stepped off the bus and was just about ready to set fire to the thing, like Cortés.
The anonymity of the New York City streets absorbed him like he was nothing, and he let the controlled chaos close over his head. He wound up checking himself into a motel, and two days later, when he was still waking up with knots in his shoulders and a bitter taste in the back of his throat, he made a decision.
He didn't know exactly how one went about leaving witness protection; in the end he wrote a letter, official as he could make it, stating his intent to leave the program, signed it, and mailed it to the US Marshals. No one came after him to drag him back to St. Louis or give him a new placement, and a few days later, a certified package came to the motel in the mail – proof that the Marshals could still find him, if they cared enough to try.
The package contained a birth certificate for a kid named Neal Bennet and a social security card, and just like that, Danny Brooks was dead.
-
Days in New York City were all noise and crowds and people, and nights weren't much better. Danny hadn't done much traveling – school trips, here and there, but summer vacations were spent at home, and it wasn't as though his mother had been eager to give him a car – and Neal spent the first days trying not to be jostled in the crowd and trying not to rubberneck at the buildings and trying to be the same guy who could charm his way through or out of anything in the Gateway to the West. He spent the first nights pressing his face into the motel pillow and cursing the noise outside for never slowing in this city that never slept, and cursing himself for floundering and not knowing what he was doing here or where he was headed, and cursing the ground for not being solid beneath his feet. Surely, if there was one thing the ground was obligated to be.
A week passed. Then a few more days. Then at three AM on a hazy Thursday when the same room that was always too hot without AC was too cold without heat and he had his face pressed into the bed, trapped with his own breath forced back over his cheeks by the mattress, with the noise from outside pushing through his hands and the pillow over his head and the blood running through his ears, impersonal and invasive as the press of shoulders and elbows on the subway, the resolve he'd thought was made of iron a week and a half ago ruptured and gave out and flooded himself with enough homesickness to make him sick a couple different ways. He wanted St. Louis pizza with Ellen at the diningroom table and the mindless excitement and anticipation of the last days of senior year and the uncertainty of what was to come. But he was all too aware that he wanted the lie, the remembered security of knowing his own name and having a plan for his future and footsteps to follow in and the pride of being told that the US Marshals who checked in avery month or two were doing it out of respect for his father, who'd died a hero. There was no getting any of that back.
But still, but still, but still.
Punching the mattress only got him so far, and he refused to break down crying in a motel room no matter how far he was from home, but by the time morning rolled around and the sun stretched taunting fingers through the motel window, he'd decided to go back.
Not to stay. He'd just go back for a weekend, eat at a few of the chains that didn't exist in the Big Apple, check himself into a hotel somewhere where taxis weren't honking and people weren't yelling and conversations didn't go on and on at all hours through the night. He'd just see that the city was still standing and he could get his head on straight and start, maybe, planning out a life that wasn't built on layers of falsehoods and half-truths.
He had more money than either his mother or Ellen knew about, from years of pool and other extracurriculars, and a few experimental days in the subway and the park here told him it'd be as easy to get more. He didn't have to have it all figured out. He could waste a little time.
Time, he thought, was one thing he had plenty of.
-
St. Louis was the same when he came back to it, big and mostly low and open and full of sky and light, compared to the bristling skyline of Manhattan. He took familiar buses on familiar streets and walked the last few blocks to a red brick building with flower boxes in the yard and a FOR SALE sign standing blunt by the sidewalk.
For a moment it didn't compute, and then his eyes went to the empty driveway and the open, empty garage; he walked up to the front window and looked in to see bare floors and empty walls. Everything was gone. He'd turned his back for a second and the only home and family he'd had just slipped away.
He'd thought he'd just casually walk by, and leave again. Instead there he was, staring dumbly at the house's emptiness, and it occurred to him that he should have seen this coming.
You couldn't just leave your family and come home whenever you feel like it, not when your father was a murderer and he was the blue in your eyes, the blood in your veins.
He didn't stand there long, with the people out walking their dogs and the cars of middle-class folk with their solid, domestic lives glinting in the afternoon light. Not long enough for someone to recognize the boy who grew up there and ask him why his mother had moved so suddenly, why he wasn't with her, wherever she was. He turned his back on the house. Left its blood-red brick and its flower boxes, one of which had been cleared of bluebells and replaced with another small, blue flower, this one showing its face to the sun.
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] The Wind Will Ruin Everything - Index
So we let go of the ones
who called us by our names. We make
ourselves new names by tracing letters
in a sand tray with sharp stones.
This is called Patience or Practicing
Solitude or The Wind Will Ruin Everything
but what does it matter...
– "Match", Brynn Saito
(i) St. Louis to NYC
Home for fifteen years was a brick building in Dogtown with flower boxes out front, stuffed with bluebells and lilies-of-the-valley and other flowers that hung their heads. He didn't remember the three years before that, in some hole-in-the-wall apartment in DC, and after that, well, that was a different story.
For fifteen years he walked the same streets and played or lazed or flirted in the same parks, and found Ellen in the yard on the weekends, on her knees, with her gloved hands in the earth. She was always coaxing something to grow, which the kid known as Danny Brooks didn't see the appeal in – he liked things like art and magic tricks and pool, hobbies dependent on his own skills or, when there were other living things involved, hobbies on people whose heads he could get inside.
Home for most of those years was Ellen, because it wasn't long before he'd figured out that his mother had packed her bags and moved to somewhere in the back of her head, and she wasn't letting him move with her.
Ellen's apartment was in the Central West End, and had a balcony, but no yard. He tended to walk over there after school or on the weekends; eat pizza at her diningroom table, badger her out to the shooting range in High Ridge, or talk her around to telling him stories about a life she wasn't supposed to admit to having. Every year he got a little better at talking people around, and measured how good he'd gotten against Ellen; she figured it out, of course, and started regarding it with amused tolerance.
"You could be a great salesman," she said, at one point, scrubbing down a glass casserole dish, evening sun coming in through the window. Danny was hanging out by the end of the counter with a dishtowel, because Ellen didn't let him wash the dishes when he had cooked, and he was a better cook than she was. He'd learned from the best. Cooking was just about the only way to get his mother to rejoin reality, these days. "Really. Your poor marks wouldn't have a chance."
"I could be a great detective," Danny offered.
Ellen looked at him, and her smile cooled. It was still there, but she was forcing it to be there, and he never talked her around to explaining that.
"You could be," she agreed.
Ellen seemed to enjoy telling him about her life in DC. Airing out a part of her past no one but he and his mother were ever allowed to know. She told him about busts and searches, trials and investigations, and the assorted madnesses of being a woman on the force in the 1970s, and one particular favorite story that ended with his father taking a dunk in the Potomac while she commandeered the Beetle from a senator's aide to run down the gang leader who'd stolen their patrol car.
She never told him the story of his father's death.
He made it to eighteen before he learned why.
And at that point, he ran.
-
He didn't leave Ellen's apartment with the intention to leave the state, but as soon as the option presented itself, every other option seemed like a dodge.
The St. Louis - New York line had a bus going out ten minutes after he arrived at the station, and Danny – Neal, apparently; that's what Ellen told him, though he wasn't sure how much he should trust anything told to him, really – bought a ticket and walked onto it and ignored the concerned glances of travelers who saw an angry-looking young man with no luggage on an interstate line and jumped to the obvious conclusion. By the time they started moving he'd stuck himself in a seat in the back corner and put his knees up against the seat in front of him, and was hopefully radiating enough leave me alone to insulate him for the trip. It lasted all of seventeen minutes before a woman edged back to talk to him.
"Hi," she tried.
He turned to glare at her.
She wasn't that much older than him – mid-20s maybe, but in professional dress, brown hair up in a no-nonsense bun. She gave him an awkward smile. "Are you all right?"
He glared at her some more, trying to think of a way to chase her off without causing a scene that would draw more unwanted attention.
"I work with youth in the St. Louis area," she offered. "If there's something you're having trouble with..."
Have to convince her there's no chance of this conversation working out, he thought, and cursed at her in French until she gave him a lost look, then an even more uneasy smile, then backed away.
That gave him a vicious thrill of satisfied amusement, but it didn't last long. It vanished like everything else, into the undercurrent of anger which was swallowing everything.
The ride was long, and it took barely two hours for him to start regretting his lack of foresight in failing to bring any form of entertainment. Even his application for the police academy had been left at Ellen's. He could have drawn a visual novel in the margins, with all the time he had; instead, he just sat in his seat and wallowed in anger, and got out when the bus stopped for breaks, and fell asleep through the night and woke up with a crick in his neck and a pounding headache, and sat and wallowed in his anger some more.
The anger didn't disappear by the time he got to New York City. It had become a sort of monotonous droning in the back of his head and the tension in his shoulders, and it had twisted up his stomach and made him feel vaguely ill, but it was as present as ever.
He was pretty sure that you were expected to cool down and see the error of your ways after stepping out into a new city and realizing you'd just taken the nuclear option on whatever problems you were getting away from. He was pretty sure you were expected to suffer a crisis of conscience; go running back home again. Instead, every minute on the bus had just increased the pressure-cooker anger to the point where he stepped off the bus and was just about ready to set fire to the thing, like Cortés.
The anonymity of the New York City streets absorbed him like he was nothing, and he let the controlled chaos close over his head. He wound up checking himself into a motel, and two days later, when he was still waking up with knots in his shoulders and a bitter taste in the back of his throat, he made a decision.
He didn't know exactly how one went about leaving witness protection; in the end he wrote a letter, official as he could make it, stating his intent to leave the program, signed it, and mailed it to the US Marshals. No one came after him to drag him back to St. Louis or give him a new placement, and a few days later, a certified package came to the motel in the mail – proof that the Marshals could still find him, if they cared enough to try.
The package contained a birth certificate for a kid named Neal Bennet and a social security card, and just like that, Danny Brooks was dead.
-
Days in New York City were all noise and crowds and people, and nights weren't much better. Danny hadn't done much traveling – school trips, here and there, but summer vacations were spent at home, and it wasn't as though his mother had been eager to give him a car – and Neal spent the first days trying not to be jostled in the crowd and trying not to rubberneck at the buildings and trying to be the same guy who could charm his way through or out of anything in the Gateway to the West. He spent the first nights pressing his face into the motel pillow and cursing the noise outside for never slowing in this city that never slept, and cursing himself for floundering and not knowing what he was doing here or where he was headed, and cursing the ground for not being solid beneath his feet. Surely, if there was one thing the ground was obligated to be.
A week passed. Then a few more days. Then at three AM on a hazy Thursday when the same room that was always too hot without AC was too cold without heat and he had his face pressed into the bed, trapped with his own breath forced back over his cheeks by the mattress, with the noise from outside pushing through his hands and the pillow over his head and the blood running through his ears, impersonal and invasive as the press of shoulders and elbows on the subway, the resolve he'd thought was made of iron a week and a half ago ruptured and gave out and flooded himself with enough homesickness to make him sick a couple different ways. He wanted St. Louis pizza with Ellen at the diningroom table and the mindless excitement and anticipation of the last days of senior year and the uncertainty of what was to come. But he was all too aware that he wanted the lie, the remembered security of knowing his own name and having a plan for his future and footsteps to follow in and the pride of being told that the US Marshals who checked in avery month or two were doing it out of respect for his father, who'd died a hero. There was no getting any of that back.
But still, but still, but still.
Punching the mattress only got him so far, and he refused to break down crying in a motel room no matter how far he was from home, but by the time morning rolled around and the sun stretched taunting fingers through the motel window, he'd decided to go back.
Not to stay. He'd just go back for a weekend, eat at a few of the chains that didn't exist in the Big Apple, check himself into a hotel somewhere where taxis weren't honking and people weren't yelling and conversations didn't go on and on at all hours through the night. He'd just see that the city was still standing and he could get his head on straight and start, maybe, planning out a life that wasn't built on layers of falsehoods and half-truths.
He had more money than either his mother or Ellen knew about, from years of pool and other extracurriculars, and a few experimental days in the subway and the park here told him it'd be as easy to get more. He didn't have to have it all figured out. He could waste a little time.
Time, he thought, was one thing he had plenty of.
-
St. Louis was the same when he came back to it, big and mostly low and open and full of sky and light, compared to the bristling skyline of Manhattan. He took familiar buses on familiar streets and walked the last few blocks to a red brick building with flower boxes in the yard and a FOR SALE sign standing blunt by the sidewalk.
For a moment it didn't compute, and then his eyes went to the empty driveway and the open, empty garage; he walked up to the front window and looked in to see bare floors and empty walls. Everything was gone. He'd turned his back for a second and the only home and family he'd had just slipped away.
He'd thought he'd just casually walk by, and leave again. Instead there he was, staring dumbly at the house's emptiness, and it occurred to him that he should have seen this coming.
You couldn't just leave your family and come home whenever you feel like it, not when your father was a murderer and he was the blue in your eyes, the blood in your veins.
He didn't stand there long, with the people out walking their dogs and the cars of middle-class folk with their solid, domestic lives glinting in the afternoon light. Not long enough for someone to recognize the boy who grew up there and ask him why his mother had moved so suddenly, why he wasn't with her, wherever she was. He turned his back on the house. Left its blood-red brick and its flower boxes, one of which had been cleared of bluebells and replaced with another small, blue flower, this one showing its face to the sun.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-28 10:45 pm (UTC)I will be looking forward to more of these!
no subject
Date: 2013-07-28 11:31 pm (UTC)Thank you! I think Ellen may be the best thing about this fic, and I still kinda wish I'd been able to work in a paragraph about plants and transplant shock. (Unfortunately, there was just no way I found to make it flow, even if the image of Ellen teaching tiny!Danny all about gardening is just too adorable.)