Back Before the World Turned Crazy
Oct. 21st, 2011 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
morrobay1990Title: Back Before the World Turned Crazy
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
morrobay1990
Warning: see genre
Genre: post canon
Word count: 2200
Disclaimer: Jack & Ennis are AP's
♥ Jack
He dropped quarters into the slot, heard them hit, circuits click in, three seconds of silence.
The phone was ringing.
“Hell-o.”
“Hello, this is Ennis del Mar.”
“Who? Who is this?”
The phone was ringing.
“Hell-o.”
“Hello, this is Ennis del Mar.”
“Who? Who is this?”
The phone was ringing.
“Hello? No, wrong number.” He slammed the phone down.
His phone never rang unless it was bad news: one of the girls was sick, or Alma needed more money this month. A wrong number was better than either one a those things, but…
Shit! He hated calls like that - especially when he was dreaming.
He’d been dreaming that he was trying to call Jack in Texas, and a woman had answered, her voice real flat like. Why the hell’d he try to call Jack? They were due to meet up in Pine Creek pretty soon, and he was of two minds how he felt about that.
After that last time at the trailhead he’d had times when he wanted to talk to Jack so bad he could taste it. Then again when he thought of what he’d said, and remembered the look on Jack’s face before he drove away, it haunted him, made him want to call off the trip even. That’s probably where the dream had come from. Shit, who understood crap like that - don’t mean nothing.
He dragged on his jeans and boots, went to the kitchen and turned on the burner under the coffee from yesterday.
Thinking about it full awake, he was looking forward to seeing Jack, 'course he was. He, they both, were getting to an age where what they had was starting to make some kinda sense. And even though that scared the shit out of him, he could at least think about it for a minute or two.
He'd admitted to himself last April that he was ready to give up, couldn’t stand the thought of admitting that he was in love with Jack. Christ, he’d heard nothing but out-right hatred his whole life towards guys who did that…the crude names and jokes, the threats he’d heard from guys at bars around town…wasn’t no joke here. These guys even got a hint of something like that, he knew what would happen.
But comes a time when you gotta start to listen to your own mind, your own heart - but make no mistake, still keeping your wits about you. He’d seen friends he’d known from when he was a kid die way before their time - his best friend Pat from a drug overdose...and Jan, a girl from a nearby farm, from a brain tumor - neither had been 40.
If you let other things, other people, set your life up for you, time it's all over you're dead and all you’d have is a bunch a assholes at your funeral, drinking your liquor and flirting with your wife, saying at least you’d had a good life. Fuck that.
He and Pat had grown up together, gone to school until ninth grade, when Ennis’s parents had been killed in the crash. As kids, when they weren’t doing chores or homework, they learned every hill and ravine, every tree and stump on their hunting grounds.
They played at cowboys and Indians, taking turns being the bad guys robbing imagined stagecoaches, hiding behind trees, dodging arrows and bullets.
Then later as teenagers, they’d hunted and fished, and talked about girls - how to do it, and with whom and where best to do it so they didn't get caught.
Pat had been the only living person who had ever mentioned what had happened to Earl. Only talked about it once, Pat saying poor bastard, Ennis saying nothing.
After Ennis dropped out of high school Pat had carried on through, graduated, and, Ennis heard, had even gone a few months at a community college, didn’t know for what. After that he’d lost track, heard much later that Pat had started running with a rough crowd, was into drugs...then he was gone.
Jan had lived on a farm nearby, a couple years older than him, had been the first girl he ever kissed.
They’d got on good from the start, no expectations from either side. But for a few years they had been there for each other, not that he knew what that meant at the time...didn't really understand it til she was gone.
She’d come to him crying one day when her favorite horse had colic and had to be put down. She’d cried and cried, and he didn’t know what to do...but she hadn’t asked him to do anything - had just grabbed his hand and they ran and ran, disappearing into the woods where they just sat and were quiet, backs leaning up against a big oak, his arm around her shoulders, her hand squeezing his, while she tried to come to grips with it, and she had.
He had seen her one day in town after he’d left school. He’d been so down that day - his parents were gone, school was gone, the ranch was going. She’d given him a lift home and they’d sat in her truck at the end of his drive, staring out the windshield to the fields and horizon beyond, each lost in their own thoughts.
They’d started to talk at the same time, laughed, then he’d been humiliated when he’d started to cry with no warning, quiet tears running down his face. She’d said nothing, pulled his head to her shoulder, let him stay until he was through. Somehow, he had looked up and kissed her, his first kiss - not with passion but with the quiet innocence you feel for someone who knows you, who knows what you’ve been through, who understands that it’s too much for a sixteen year old to bear alone.
Took him a good while to get over her passing, when he’d heard. He found himself going back up to the same woods they’d gone to that long ago day when she had suffered her first loss, and they had sat together as she faced it down.
That’s when he started thinking that maybe he and Jack stood a chance, that maybe if he didn’t stand up for what he wanted, he’d never have anything, could die alone…and so now he was lookin’ forward to the next trip.
Yeah, he could think about Jack now, and how maybe it could work. Shit, didn’t nothing else seem to be coming out right.
He loved his daughters and saw them when he could, but they were getting their own lives, trying to figure out the same things he had faced at their age. But he needed something for himself - and though he had fought it for nearly 20 years, he knew now it was Jack.
Sometimes he got a damn headache trying to figure out how they’d do it. Living together, explaining to the girls, Alma - the whole damn town knew your business almost as well as they knew their own, wasn’t no way to hide something like that.
Best he could figure was to live separate and see each other when they could, which, since they would be in the same town, would be a helluva lot more than what they‘d had over the past 20 years.
Not perfect, but they’d be together and they’d be alive.
He turned the truck and drove slow towards the camp where he knew Jack would be...didn’t see him right off, but Jack was always early so Ennis knew he was close by. He parked close to the trail, put the brake on, reached in and took his stuff out of the back and threw it next to the truck, then walked back to the trailer to unload his horse
“Whoa, whoa,” he spoke soothingly to his mare, even though he knew she wasn’t skittish and took readily to the trailer. He put a lead rope on her and walked her down near the river, wrapped the rope around a low branch. Then he took his saddle and the rest of his gear to where he thought the camp would be and started settin’ up.
“Well, look who finally decided to show up.”
Jack was smiling as he said it, no tension in his voice. He walked up to Ennis and the two threw their arms around each other, talking at the same time, saying the same thing - good to see you, missed you, how’ve ya been?
Jack started to turn away, saying something about starting a fire, when Ennis grabbed him by the shoulders and kissed him hard, surprising them both. They stood for a minute, Jack staring into Ennis’s eyes, searching for something that he didn’t see.
Ennis turned away, mumbled, “Missed ya, bud.”
Their camp food over the years had improved considerably, owing mostly to Jack’s largess. Replacing the beans and biscuits they’d often endured on Brokeback, he now brought good steak to fry with the potatoes...the whiskey, again thanks to Jack and though aged much longer than Old Rose, was still drunk from the bottle.
Occasionally he would also bring some high grade pot and that plus the whiskey added up to a pretty fair time, when you put in the cold mountain air, sky lit by moon alone, and the two of them straining at the bit to get their hands on each other.
Now as they sat by the fire smoking a joint, Ennis though how much it was like the last time. But he knew, even if Jack didn’t, that it would end up much differently...just didn’t know quite how to go about it...so he smoked, drank a bit and waited to see what happened.
“I think Lureen wants a divorce.”
That caught Ennis by surprise.
“She said she wants more out of life before she retires and dies - that gal sure can get a little testy at times.”
“So what’re ya gonna do?”
Ennis’s mind was racing - this was perfect - and it wasn’t. He knew what he wanted and it was Jack, but shit, this was kinda quick, wasn’t it?
“She’ll give me part of the business, so I guess I‘ll go along if that's what she wants. Her old man’s gone, thank God, that’ll be one less thing I have to worry about. Our marriage wasn’t never what it shoulda been, but that wasn’t all her fault, a course. I wasn’t exactly a model husband....not with you around.”
Ennis tried to get his mind to work. He knew this was exactly the situation he needed to let Jack know that he wanted to try it, wanted them to be together. But between the pot, whiskey and the idea that it would really be happening, he couldn’t get his mouth to say anything.
“So, Ennis, what do you think?”
All of a sudden, Ennis felt a calm come over him.
He took a deep breath, let it out and said “I think we should start our own life together.”
The mountain was quiet, the river slow, the wind calm. Ennis closed his eyes and breathed slow and deep - had he said something out loud?
Jack sat up straight, suddenly, glaringly sober. He looked at his friend and saw Ennis with his eyes closed, head tilted back, as though imploring answers from above.
He didn’t mean it, Jack thought. It’s just something to say to make up for last time, when he said he couldn’t stand it.
Jack thought he’d never felt as sad and alone as he felt right now.
The seconds ticked by, Ennis waiting for an answer, Jack sure that he’d heard wrong or had heard nothing.
“Jack.” Ennis started, looked at Jack to make sure he wasn’t making a mistake, that Jack was there, that he wanted this.
“What do you mean, our own life together?” Jack was suspicious, didn’t want to assume anything, couldn’t stand to make a mistake like that.
“I’ve been thinking that you’ve been right all along, and it just took me a long fuckin’ time to get to the same place, but here I am. If we can figure out how to do it, I want us to try to make it. I want to try.”
He really had heard it right, now all they had to do was make it work. They leaned into each other, Ennis pulling Jack to him, kissing him long and deep, what he had dreamed of doing all these weeks. And Jack responded, going down with him...
He dropped quarters into the slot, heard them hit, circuits click in, three seconds of silence
The phone was ringing.
“Hell-o.”
“Hello, this is Ennis Del Mar.”
“Who? Who is this?”
"Ennis Del Mar, an old friend of Jack's..."
Author:
morrobay1990Warning: see genre
Genre: post canon
Word count: 2200
Disclaimer: Jack & Ennis are AP's
♥ Jack
He dropped quarters into the slot, heard them hit, circuits click in, three seconds of silence.
The phone was ringing.
“Hell-o.”
“Hello, this is Ennis del Mar.”
“Who? Who is this?”
The phone was ringing.
“Hell-o.”
“Hello, this is Ennis del Mar.”
“Who? Who is this?”
The phone was ringing.
“Hello? No, wrong number.” He slammed the phone down.
His phone never rang unless it was bad news: one of the girls was sick, or Alma needed more money this month. A wrong number was better than either one a those things, but…
Shit! He hated calls like that - especially when he was dreaming.
He’d been dreaming that he was trying to call Jack in Texas, and a woman had answered, her voice real flat like. Why the hell’d he try to call Jack? They were due to meet up in Pine Creek pretty soon, and he was of two minds how he felt about that.
After that last time at the trailhead he’d had times when he wanted to talk to Jack so bad he could taste it. Then again when he thought of what he’d said, and remembered the look on Jack’s face before he drove away, it haunted him, made him want to call off the trip even. That’s probably where the dream had come from. Shit, who understood crap like that - don’t mean nothing.
He dragged on his jeans and boots, went to the kitchen and turned on the burner under the coffee from yesterday.
Thinking about it full awake, he was looking forward to seeing Jack, 'course he was. He, they both, were getting to an age where what they had was starting to make some kinda sense. And even though that scared the shit out of him, he could at least think about it for a minute or two.
He'd admitted to himself last April that he was ready to give up, couldn’t stand the thought of admitting that he was in love with Jack. Christ, he’d heard nothing but out-right hatred his whole life towards guys who did that…the crude names and jokes, the threats he’d heard from guys at bars around town…wasn’t no joke here. These guys even got a hint of something like that, he knew what would happen.
But comes a time when you gotta start to listen to your own mind, your own heart - but make no mistake, still keeping your wits about you. He’d seen friends he’d known from when he was a kid die way before their time - his best friend Pat from a drug overdose...and Jan, a girl from a nearby farm, from a brain tumor - neither had been 40.
If you let other things, other people, set your life up for you, time it's all over you're dead and all you’d have is a bunch a assholes at your funeral, drinking your liquor and flirting with your wife, saying at least you’d had a good life. Fuck that.
He and Pat had grown up together, gone to school until ninth grade, when Ennis’s parents had been killed in the crash. As kids, when they weren’t doing chores or homework, they learned every hill and ravine, every tree and stump on their hunting grounds.
They played at cowboys and Indians, taking turns being the bad guys robbing imagined stagecoaches, hiding behind trees, dodging arrows and bullets.
Then later as teenagers, they’d hunted and fished, and talked about girls - how to do it, and with whom and where best to do it so they didn't get caught.
Pat had been the only living person who had ever mentioned what had happened to Earl. Only talked about it once, Pat saying poor bastard, Ennis saying nothing.
After Ennis dropped out of high school Pat had carried on through, graduated, and, Ennis heard, had even gone a few months at a community college, didn’t know for what. After that he’d lost track, heard much later that Pat had started running with a rough crowd, was into drugs...then he was gone.
Jan had lived on a farm nearby, a couple years older than him, had been the first girl he ever kissed.
They’d got on good from the start, no expectations from either side. But for a few years they had been there for each other, not that he knew what that meant at the time...didn't really understand it til she was gone.
She’d come to him crying one day when her favorite horse had colic and had to be put down. She’d cried and cried, and he didn’t know what to do...but she hadn’t asked him to do anything - had just grabbed his hand and they ran and ran, disappearing into the woods where they just sat and were quiet, backs leaning up against a big oak, his arm around her shoulders, her hand squeezing his, while she tried to come to grips with it, and she had.
He had seen her one day in town after he’d left school. He’d been so down that day - his parents were gone, school was gone, the ranch was going. She’d given him a lift home and they’d sat in her truck at the end of his drive, staring out the windshield to the fields and horizon beyond, each lost in their own thoughts.
They’d started to talk at the same time, laughed, then he’d been humiliated when he’d started to cry with no warning, quiet tears running down his face. She’d said nothing, pulled his head to her shoulder, let him stay until he was through. Somehow, he had looked up and kissed her, his first kiss - not with passion but with the quiet innocence you feel for someone who knows you, who knows what you’ve been through, who understands that it’s too much for a sixteen year old to bear alone.
Took him a good while to get over her passing, when he’d heard. He found himself going back up to the same woods they’d gone to that long ago day when she had suffered her first loss, and they had sat together as she faced it down.
That’s when he started thinking that maybe he and Jack stood a chance, that maybe if he didn’t stand up for what he wanted, he’d never have anything, could die alone…and so now he was lookin’ forward to the next trip.
Yeah, he could think about Jack now, and how maybe it could work. Shit, didn’t nothing else seem to be coming out right.
He loved his daughters and saw them when he could, but they were getting their own lives, trying to figure out the same things he had faced at their age. But he needed something for himself - and though he had fought it for nearly 20 years, he knew now it was Jack.
Sometimes he got a damn headache trying to figure out how they’d do it. Living together, explaining to the girls, Alma - the whole damn town knew your business almost as well as they knew their own, wasn’t no way to hide something like that.
Best he could figure was to live separate and see each other when they could, which, since they would be in the same town, would be a helluva lot more than what they‘d had over the past 20 years.
Not perfect, but they’d be together and they’d be alive.
He turned the truck and drove slow towards the camp where he knew Jack would be...didn’t see him right off, but Jack was always early so Ennis knew he was close by. He parked close to the trail, put the brake on, reached in and took his stuff out of the back and threw it next to the truck, then walked back to the trailer to unload his horse
“Whoa, whoa,” he spoke soothingly to his mare, even though he knew she wasn’t skittish and took readily to the trailer. He put a lead rope on her and walked her down near the river, wrapped the rope around a low branch. Then he took his saddle and the rest of his gear to where he thought the camp would be and started settin’ up.
“Well, look who finally decided to show up.”
Jack was smiling as he said it, no tension in his voice. He walked up to Ennis and the two threw their arms around each other, talking at the same time, saying the same thing - good to see you, missed you, how’ve ya been?
Jack started to turn away, saying something about starting a fire, when Ennis grabbed him by the shoulders and kissed him hard, surprising them both. They stood for a minute, Jack staring into Ennis’s eyes, searching for something that he didn’t see.
Ennis turned away, mumbled, “Missed ya, bud.”
Their camp food over the years had improved considerably, owing mostly to Jack’s largess. Replacing the beans and biscuits they’d often endured on Brokeback, he now brought good steak to fry with the potatoes...the whiskey, again thanks to Jack and though aged much longer than Old Rose, was still drunk from the bottle.
Occasionally he would also bring some high grade pot and that plus the whiskey added up to a pretty fair time, when you put in the cold mountain air, sky lit by moon alone, and the two of them straining at the bit to get their hands on each other.
Now as they sat by the fire smoking a joint, Ennis though how much it was like the last time. But he knew, even if Jack didn’t, that it would end up much differently...just didn’t know quite how to go about it...so he smoked, drank a bit and waited to see what happened.
“I think Lureen wants a divorce.”
That caught Ennis by surprise.
“She said she wants more out of life before she retires and dies - that gal sure can get a little testy at times.”
“So what’re ya gonna do?”
Ennis’s mind was racing - this was perfect - and it wasn’t. He knew what he wanted and it was Jack, but shit, this was kinda quick, wasn’t it?
“She’ll give me part of the business, so I guess I‘ll go along if that's what she wants. Her old man’s gone, thank God, that’ll be one less thing I have to worry about. Our marriage wasn’t never what it shoulda been, but that wasn’t all her fault, a course. I wasn’t exactly a model husband....not with you around.”
Ennis tried to get his mind to work. He knew this was exactly the situation he needed to let Jack know that he wanted to try it, wanted them to be together. But between the pot, whiskey and the idea that it would really be happening, he couldn’t get his mouth to say anything.
“So, Ennis, what do you think?”
All of a sudden, Ennis felt a calm come over him.
He took a deep breath, let it out and said “I think we should start our own life together.”
The mountain was quiet, the river slow, the wind calm. Ennis closed his eyes and breathed slow and deep - had he said something out loud?
Jack sat up straight, suddenly, glaringly sober. He looked at his friend and saw Ennis with his eyes closed, head tilted back, as though imploring answers from above.
He didn’t mean it, Jack thought. It’s just something to say to make up for last time, when he said he couldn’t stand it.
Jack thought he’d never felt as sad and alone as he felt right now.
The seconds ticked by, Ennis waiting for an answer, Jack sure that he’d heard wrong or had heard nothing.
“Jack.” Ennis started, looked at Jack to make sure he wasn’t making a mistake, that Jack was there, that he wanted this.
“What do you mean, our own life together?” Jack was suspicious, didn’t want to assume anything, couldn’t stand to make a mistake like that.
“I’ve been thinking that you’ve been right all along, and it just took me a long fuckin’ time to get to the same place, but here I am. If we can figure out how to do it, I want us to try to make it. I want to try.”
He really had heard it right, now all they had to do was make it work. They leaned into each other, Ennis pulling Jack to him, kissing him long and deep, what he had dreamed of doing all these weeks. And Jack responded, going down with him...
He dropped quarters into the slot, heard them hit, circuits click in, three seconds of silence
The phone was ringing.
“Hell-o.”
“Hello, this is Ennis Del Mar.”
“Who? Who is this?”
"Ennis Del Mar, an old friend of Jack's..."
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Date: 2011-10-21 11:11 pm (UTC)thanks for reading and for your comments...