Air

a fic by lint. zzzz

Summary: A road trip, complete with Greek takeout and denial. Roughly 2007-movieverse.

Warnings: Swearing. OCs. Angst. First person present. More angst.

Notes: This story takes place one year after the events of the 2007 CGI movie. See end for more specific notes.

Disclaimer: I own no copyrighted characters contained herein. (As if I'd want responsibility for these guys. Shyeah, right.)

Length: 4054

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8. Mathematics

Sofa, blanket, heater. Nice. Warm. Smell of coffee.

Coffee?

I crack my eyes open. There's a mug on the overturned milk crate, covered with a soggy paper plate. I sit up slowly, running a hand down my face; my neck's stiff from using the armrest for a pillow, and it protests as I try to force it into movement. My right shoulder pops hollowly, a painful pinch under the end of my collarbone. Probably slept on it funny.

"Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Welcome back to the land of the living."

I nearly jump out of my shell, accidentally hitting the milk crate with my foot. Mug on the milk crate; mug has coffee. Don't knock the mug over...

Taki's at the table, studiously marking up yet another tax form. He glances over at me before looking back to the calculator. "What'd you do yesterday? You were sleeping like the dead when I got here this morning."

The coffee's safe. I push the paper plate to the side, take a sip. Lukewarm. Gross. "Got some bugs in my teeth." Taki nods, punches a few buttons on the calculator, frowns at the result. My back creaks as I stand up, go over to the kitchenette. Mug in the microwave.

"Didn't know if you liked coffee. There's cream and sugar by the sink if you want."

"Coffee's okay." I'm not Donnie; I don't live off the stuff, but I don't mind a cup first thing in the morning, especially if I wake up early enough that I've got time to enjoy it. I watch the mug spinning on the carousel. Twenty-nine seconds. Twenty-six. Eighteen. I bite back a yawn. Don't think I've slept that hard since...ever. The aftertaste from the first sip's bitter in my mouth; usually I don't use cream, maybe a little sugar if it's strong, but for this coffee I might have to make an exception.

Taki clears the display of the calculator with a sigh, starts punching in numbers again. "I got breakfast too, if you want." He indicates a paper bag by the sink, with the small pile of cream and sugar packets. "Thought you might get a kick out of it."

The microwave beeps and I take the coffee out. I get a spoon from the cabinet and stir in half a sugar. Take a sip; still tastes like mud. Half a packet of Coffeemate. Better. I look in the bag; they're some sort of pastry, vague scent of cinnamon. "Um. Thanks."

He chuckles, doesn't look up from the numbers. "There's this Mexican bakery near my house. They're called conchas. Means shells in Spanish."

Yeah, funny. They smell good, though; maybe later, after coffee. "You have a house?"

"Apartment. Whatever." He clears the screen of the calculator again, hitting the button with more force than necessary, and tosses his pen down on the table in frustration. "Look, you wanna do me a favor and try this? I keep getting a different number every time."

I drag the other chair over to the table and pull the calculator towards me. "What am I doing?" Not like I've got any pressing social engagements or anything.

Taki hands me an inch-thick stack of receipts, paperclipped into piles by month. "Just add it all up. Business expenses. I've been staring at numbers all morning and I keep transposing things."

The calculator's got tiny buttons, and my fingers keep hitting them wrong; I lick the spoon clean of coffee and use the handle to punch in the numbers. One big advantage to being a mutant is that I never have to worry about things like this; there's no way in hell I'd be able to sit down and muddle through this much red tape in real life. "Can't you hire people to do taxes?"

"Costs too much. It usually doesn't take me this long to do all this; I've just been...y'know. Kinda distracted." I look up; he's staring down into his own coffee mug.

As if I needed another reason to feel like crap. "Sorry."

"No, man. That's not it. It's not you. Well, not everything." The tap of the mug being set down on the table; I'm afraid to look away from the receipts, that I'd lose my place and have to start all over again. "Y'see, there's... Was. Not is. This girl I used to know."

Shit. Like I'm Dr. Ruth or something. I am not awake enough to deal with this.

The sound of the mug being shifted around on the table. "We went out for, like, eight years. And then she broke up with me, three years ago this July."

$24.70 at Gilberto's Taco Shop. Didn't think tacos were a business expense.

"We've been friends since then, sorta. Like, we talk. Sometimes. If I'm not drunk when I call her."

It's like quicksand. All the people in the world, and he chooses me to confess to. "You got pen and paper?" $112.11; phone bill.

Taki hands me the post-its and the ballpoint he had tossed on the table earlier; I copy down the number on the calculator screen and set the first pile of receipts aside. "So, yeah. I found out a few weeks back she's getting married to the guy she's going out with now. And it's like, what am I? So this guy's a big-shot lawyer, he's got, like, a million-dollar condo and he knows all the right people. He doesn't know her, not like I know her, and I know she's not going to be happy with all that, in the end. Y'know what I'm saying?"

Not a clue. Like I've got any experience with girls. "Sure." $97.28 for office supplies.

"Right." He doesn't sound convinced. $431.78; A & L Refrigeration.

I spare a glance up, my finger marking the spot I left off on the receipts. "Look, I don't know jack about relationships. If you're looking for advice, you're asking the wrong guy."

"Not advice, no." Taki fiddles with his coffee for a moment, picks it up and takes a sip. "I had my chance, I blew it. That's how things are, and I know it. There's nothing I can do." He sets the cup back down, leans back in the chair, crosses his arms. "It's the big picture. I just hate thinking about it; about her and this asshole, and he probably uses more hair gel than she does, y'know that? I just want her to be happy, and I don't think she's gonna be, not with him."

April and Casey are getting married in two months, beginning of June. I hope they don't ever turn out like this, because Case's my best friend and April's like a sister, or a mother, and I don't know if I could ever favor one over the other if they split.

$2443.54, electric bill. Damn. I shove the paper across the table. "Is that right?"

Taki shrugs. "Dude, you're sitting under what's basically a big-ass fridge. It takes a lot of power to keep things cold." He hands the bill back to me, and I add it to the tally. "Seriously, though. Things get rough, and what do you do?"

"Get some bugs in my teeth." For three days straight. Don't want to think about that. "Hit things, sometimes." Most times. Like he couldn't figure that one out.

"Yeah. Um." He watches as I set aside another stack of receipts and stick a note with the total on top. "Speaking of...hey, I never got the thread out of your hands. Do you need me to–?"

I shake my head. "I pulled those out a week ago. They were getting itchy." Half an hour plus nail clippers and the needlenose pliers from the bike toolkit means no more stitches. $44.93 at Wal-Mart.

"You can do that?" He reaches across the table and grabs my left hand, making me drop the spoon. "Lemme see."

Not sure quite what he's looking for; the smaller cuts are all healed over, and the bigger ones mostly so. There's nothing really left to see but the raised, pale line of the scar across the heel of my hand, and the rows of pocks on either side where the thread was. I'm not going to tell him the stitches were too tight and that's why the extra marks are there; they'll fade with time, like everything else. The first time I sewed someone up didn't turn out nearly as good; Mike's still got a funny scar on the underside of his foot. I let Taki get a good look before I pull my hand back. "Do you want me to add up all this crap or not?"

"Um, yeah. Sorry." He watches as I finish up the March receipts and start on the April pile. Another monster electric bill; more Mexican food. The room's silent except for the low hum of the space heater and the tick of the spoon as I tap the hard plastic calculator keys. $99.18, Costco. "So." I glance up; Taki's got his elbows on the table, holding his coffee cup in the bridge of his hands, that half-confused, half-contemplative look creasing his forehead. "What kind of life do you live?"

Suddenly I can't focus on the receipts any more.

"Oh, shit. I didn't mean– Please tell me you're not going to start that whole catatonic business again; that's not what I meant." Does he really think I'm that fragile? I'm just dealing with stuff, and sometimes I can't think about things. His mug's down on the table now, and he's frantically gesturing around, as if he could swat away my problems like flies. "What I was saying, was, um. Like, you know how to do things. That normal people wouldn't know. And it's like, how'd you learn that? I mean, you know all about me. I've got this business, and it's not the most lucrative thing in the world, especially with the economy the way it is, but it's mine; it's my life. That I had this girl, and it's been three years and I can't get over her, and I don't wanna be at home because there's still empty drawers and her stuff's never going to go there again. I got half a bottle of her shampoo in the shower and I can't get rid of it because it's still good shampoo, but I can't use it; I'm a guy, it smells like flowers. And it's hers. So, yeah." He sits back, arms crossed. "Enough about me. Tell me something about you. Like, where'd you learn to sew up cuts like that? Anyone else, they'd go to a doctor and they'd have all this special stuff. Sterilized or whatever. But you say it's okay to just use peroxide and my secretary's sewing kit, you've done it before, no big. Seriously. Where does that come from?"

There's no way I'm adding stuff up now. All the random things he could ask, and that's it. "Can't exactly go to a doctor, you know."

"Yeah, the whole turtle thing. But–"

"And you just gotta make do with what you got. There's a lot of things that aren't necessary." I point out the scar on the left side of my face; first real-weapons practice, eleven years ago. "Vodka and threads from a sheet." A nasty, jagged two inches near my left elbow, half hidden under my gear; scrap metal plus horsing around in the junkyard when I was fourteen. Lucky I didn't get tetanus. "Carpet fibers and more fucking dish soap than I even want to think about." One of the Nightwatcher's, along the thigh muscle; some punk with a Bowie knife I thought I'd knocked out. "Expired polysporin and dental floss." The life I've led, I'd be nuts if I didn't know how to deal with things like that.

The scar on my cheek's not big, but Taki can't stop staring at it; like trying not to look at the white elephant. "Yeah, but how'd you learn in the first place?"

Donnie's holding the flashlight, his eyes big with fear and curiosity. Leo matches me stare for stare, his fingers tight around mine, clenched as hard as my teeth. I'm not crying, not a bit, because ninjas don't cry. It's the fumes from the alcohol making my eyes water, sharp and oily and musty; industrial, like the tunnels we're supposed to stay away from. I wonder how this can be a good thing.

I'm not crying, though Mike might be, a bit; he's in the corner, saying over and over that he can't look, it's gross, but I catch sight of his face from time to time. The alcohol stings, worse than anything I can remember, but I can still feel the needle as it runs through my skin, burning as if it were still hot from being passed through the candle flame. Callused hands, gentle, delicate, making rhythmic, even stitches; a soft, raspy voice chanting quietly in Japanese, for my ears alone. Even the finest of silk can be repaired, given a caring hand.

"Doesn't matter how I learned." A closed book. Dishonorable.

Taki's looking at me, and I feel as if I were about to burst into flames. "Um. Okay." He doesn't sound convinced. "So what about... Like, the bike stuff. I bet you're gonna say you just read a couple books, and it's like putting Legos together, right?" He picks up his coffee, takes a sip, and grimaces. "And how the hell's a turtle learn to ride a motorcycle anyway?" He turns to the microwave and sticks the coffee in. "I mean, that's just not... It's not simple, like brushing your teeth, the fuzzy end goes in your mouth, y'know?"

That's actually an easy answer. What does he think I am, a complete moron? "It's amazing what you can find on the internet."

The microwave beeps and Taki takes his coffee out, blows across the top of the liquid before taking a sip. "You're shitting me."

"Nope."

"You learned to ride a bike off the 'net. And you're not dead."

Okay, not that part. "A friend taught me that." Although learning to ride from Casey probably wasn't safer in the long run; when he was teaching us to drive up at the farmhouse, April locked herself in a bedroom and pulled the shades, every time. Said she couldn't watch. But we all survived intact, more or less, and we all knew the exact turning radius of a 1951 Chevy truck, down to the inch. I think the field's still got donut tracks in it.

"You have friends?" I don't think he means to sound as surprised as he does.

"Yeah, I got friends." Casey, April, Mrs. Morrison, the Professor, Leatherhead, various aliens. My family. Got enemies, too.

Taki sits back down at the table, puts the mug down but doesn't let it go, like he can't decide if he wants a drink or not. "Ever think about calling them?" I look up; he meets my glance briefly before retreating to his coffee, safe within the circle of his hands.

I pick up the spoon and start crunching numbers again. Back to the beginning of the month; I've lost my place. $2612.90, electricity.

"Look, all I'm saying is that they're your friends, they might want to know where you are. If you're safe."

$35.84 at the taco shop. I've got my finger on the receipts, pinning them down. Not losing my place this time.

"It's been, what, three weeks?"

Three weeks, three days, sixteen hours, forty-eight minutes. Back to $99.18 at Costco.

Taki pulls the spoon from my hand, tosses it in the sink. Should've seen that coming. "They know you've gone on this little vacation?" Asshole.

I pick up the pen, use the end to punch in the numbers. $102.87, phone bill. Taki tries to take the pen away, but I'm on to his game, and I wrestle it out of his grasp. "Gimme that. Your calculator's got fucking tiny buttons and I have big fat fingers." Half a dozen ways to kill with a ballpoint pen, just off the top of my head. But Taki just reaches over, clears the calculator screen with the tap of a button. I miss pinning his finger to the table with the pen by a fraction of an inch, and the black plastic of the pen's barrel cracks under the impact.

"Fuckin' A, man, you trying to skewer me or something? I'm just saying, if they're your friends, they might just give a damn about your welfare. 'Cause it's pretty fucking obvious you don't care about them."

The pen drops to the table, a hollow clatter. I care, and it hurts that they're an honor I don't deserve. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"No, I don't. You won't tell me, and that's okay. Everyone's gotta deal with things in their own way. But shit, man, you gotta deal with it sooner or later, whatever it is. You don't, and you end up like me. I haven't been able to sleep the night through in my own apartment for a month, and that's pretty pathetic."

Yeah, it's pathetic, but I'm not really one to be talking. My way of dealing with things is usually to run away until they sort themselves out, and try not to get myself killed in the meantime. Leo says I just don't want to face my problems, Mike says I draw trouble like ants to sugar, and I'm sure Don thinks I have a death wish; he's usually the one to patch me up afterward. Casey says fuck it, let's go find some punks to bash. I think that's why we get along so well.

Taki's slumped back in his chair, arms crossed. "You don't want to talk to me. Fine. That's nothing new."

I shrug. Anything else, that's okay, but I'm not about to spill my problems like a soap opera sob-fest. And I can't to talk to anyone from home; there's nothing to say. There's a gouge in the tabletop, the size of the pen end, and I run my finger over it. This is what I do; I break things, not fix them, no matter how hard I try. A flash of a hand on my side of the table, and Taki's grabbed the calculator and the remains of the stack of receipts. Three weeks in a basement, and my reflexes are completely gone. "I was doing that."

"Yeah, and you broke my pen trying to stab me." He's hunched over the papers, typing in numbers as if he could punch through the table. "Crazy motherfucking shithead."

So he's pissed off. Whatever. I pull my coffee cup over, and try not to crush it. He wants me to talk? Fine. I'll talk. Just not about that.

"First bike I had, I kinda inherited it. This old guy I barely knew, he just hands me the keys, says there's some things he doesn't want his family to know about, and the bike's part of the deal. Crazy old man; he wants to trust me? But I can keep a secret."

"Fuck, man. What is this, like, your twisted version of an after-school special or something?" Taki's hunched over the calculator, frowning and prodding aimlessly at the buttons.

I take a deep breath, let it out. Not getting mad at him. He's just wound up about his girl. "So, I've got a bike. And gear." And a whole vigilante legacy to go along with it, but I don't want to dig into that can of worms. "Only thing is, it's been sitting around for about thirty years. It might've been fine to just leave it for winter like that, but over that long, and just sitting in a garage, it's basically scrap on wheels. Looks halfway decent on the outside, but mechanically it's all rust and dry rot. There's even been a family of mice living in the seat at one point."

"Yeah, so?"

I'm ignoring him. "But obviously it meant something to this old guy. And it's an old Harley; I fix it up and it's gonna be a pretty sweet ride. So I start looking up stuff online, and looking through junkyards for parts." I take a sip of coffee; it's lukewarm again and on the near side of hideous. "One thing leads to another; I clean out the gas tank, and find that the fuel line's rusted through, or replace the clutch cable just to find that the transmission's frozen up. It's a good couple months, working all night long, every night, before this thing's in running condition, and it doesn't matter that I've got brakes from a Honda on there, or the seat from a Yamaha, or that the wire wheels aren't the shiniest things in the world. The sound it makes when the engine finally turns over...I think it's the sweetest thing I've ever heard."

Taki's stopped abusing the calculator for the moment, and he's got this half-incredulous look. "Dude, you need a tissue or something? You sound like a Hallmark moment."

If it were Mike telling this story, or even Leo, he wouldn't be mouthing off. But I don't have their art with words; the only good stories I tell are jokes. "It's something I've taken care of, taken responsibility for, and it's actually turned out to be worthwhile. No, there aren't going to be parades in Times Square just 'cause I fixed up an old bike, but that ain't the point." No parades because people could walk down the street at night in Harlem, either, but I wasn't looking for anything like that. The Nightwatcher happened because it was something I was asked to do, and more importantly, something I could do. My brothers all have things they enjoy, things they're good at; I watched over the city that year and a half, and nothing had ever felt more right. "It's an accomplishment, even if nobody else knows it. And that's what's important."

"Uh-huh." Taki's leaning back in his chair, cracking the broken plastic bits of the pen together. "So if it was so important, why don't you still have it?" He levels the pen up at the stairway. "I may not know much about motorcycles, but that's not a Harley up there."

I shrug. "That's not–"

"Don't tell me. You crashed it, didn't you?"

I'm trying very hard not to be offended. If Taki knew how close he had come to getting strangled over the past three weeks, he wouldn't have said half the things he did. "My friend's got it. The one who taught me to ride." And Casey was completely ecstatic when I tossed him the keys and told him not to park it on the street without a cover, because his bike was a total piece of crap. "It was his idea to build this one, and he even went shopping for parts we couldn't dig out of junkyards. And when we figured out we were in way over our heads, another friend stepped in and pretty much built it from the ground up." Brother. Donnie's my brother, and he deserves more credit than I could ever give him. "It's a total mutt, but it runs better than most of the stuff on the road. Better than the one I fixed, anyway."

Taki's abandoned the pen for his coffee. "And you don't want to have to tell this guy you broke the bike he built. Is that it?"

It's the least of my worries. "Sorta."

"That's the fucking lamest excuse I've ever heard."

Yeah, it is. I take back the calculator and pen, and pull the stack of receipts back over to my side of the table. "You gonna let me do this now?"

A noncommital wave of the hand. "Hey, you actually want to do my taxes, feel free." I've finished the April pile and have gotten halfway through May before he pipes up again. "Why'd you give away the old bike, anyway?"

Because I was given an ultimatum. Because the Nightwatcher was a threat to my family. Because the people above had police, and government, and laws, and all we had was each other. "It was just a machine, in the end."

$109.94, phone bill.

I am such a fucking hypocrite.

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Notes: So. This is all I have written. I originally conceived of this story in three parts; these first eight chapters make up part one. This story is completely still alive in my mind; it has one of the loudest, most persistent voices of anything I've tried to write. But my biggest problem right now is time–time to sit down and listen to the characters and actually put words on the page. But this is one of those things where I've pretty much dug my own hole, and until I can figure out how to climb out, this is where things stand. My deepest apologies for leaving you hanging.

I never intended to post an incomplete story, but when I began writing this, I promised myself that the only situation in which that would happen would be if the idea behind this story actually happened to me. Well, it happened. Close enough, anyway. And my horoscope really did say to share things. I'm not big into astrology, but coincedences do happen. Sometimes they're good; sometimes they run over you with a bulldozer. It's been a rough road so far, and everything ahead looks rocky, but I can't thank you all enough for helping me through this.

No Greek food this time. To everyone who has reviewed, alerted, favorited, or simply just read this brainchild o' mine, you get fresh, homemade conchas. Still warm from the oven, cloud-soft and chewy at the same time, with coarse-ground cinnamon crisp in the dough and the butter-flour-vanilla-sugar icing just cool enough to hold its shape. My infinite thanks to you all.

Dagnabbit, I wanna bake now!