Andrew, Jonathan: Desperado
Jun. 7th, 2004 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleTitle: Desperado
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Andrew and Jonathan, not overtly slashy
Rating: G
Notes: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
for_no_one for the Andrew ficathon.
Andrew wanted them to sneak across the border like the desperate fugitives they were, but Jonathan told him not to be a moron. The checkpoint had MEXICO across the top in big, coloured letters, and Andrew peered regretfully out the windows at the Rio Grande. It was a lot less grande than he’d pictured.
“Do you think it gets wider further out?” he asked, when they were through the check and into Mexico and he was over the initial awe of being outside the United States for the first time ever.
"It's not the Rio Grande, it's the Tijuana River," Jonathan snapped, and then he didn't say anything else. He had hardly spoken to him at all since Sunnydale. Whenever he did, he snapped and was mean. Maybe that meant he was their leader now, because it reminded Andrew of how Warren got a lot of the time when plans went wrong. Andrew didn’t want to be the leader. He wanted to be led, and Jonathan had the experience – two years as secretary of the Sunnydale High computer club, plus that spell a couple of years ago where everybody’d thought he was the boss of them.
So, he could follow Jonathan now. But then he remembered that Warren had only started to get really mean after they made him their leader, like the power made him kind of crazy, and he decided he’d follow his new alpha in secret.
He poked at the memory of Warren like it was the rotten tooth he’d had extracted in tenth grade, only the pain felt more like appendicitis than toothache. He’d known a bunch of people who had died. Growing up in Sunnydale, everybody did. He claimed lactose intolerance for three years to avoid finding out which kid from his school was on the milk carton this week. Nobody he’d loved had died before, though. His parents, both sets of grandparents, even stupid Tucker, they were all okay. His Aunt Molly was the only Wells so far to not make it out of Sunnydale, dead in her backyard of ‘neck trauma’, but he was only five then, too young to even really know her.
He was sure he loved Warren now. He’d thought he was sure before he died, but the sureness now was so much surer than the sureness then that he knew this was the real deal, and untwisting all of that in his head made him think of the Princess Bride, and he pretended to be looking out the window just in case he started to cry. Jonathan, before he went all speak no evil, said some stuff about Warren that had made Andrew almost want to get out of the van and find some way to make it on his own. Called him a psycho, called him a murderer, and Andrew knew none of that was true because it would make Warren a bad guy. Not a Lex Luthor supervillain: a for-real bad guy like that clown serial killer or Osama Bin Laden.
It couldn’t be true because Andrew wouldn’t be in love with someone like that, and because it’d mean the two of them weren’t bold antiheroes who had barely escaped with their lives. They were just… henchmen. Running away.
Suddenly not happy to be in the quiet with his thoughts, Andrew said, “I think the Rio Grande was the best of the DS9 runabouts.” No response. He forged ahead. “It was cool how they kept track of when a runabout blew up and they had to get a new one. Not like Voyager. They went through, like, fifty shuttlecraft and they were seventy thousand lightyears from a starbase.”
“They explained that, lamebrain,” Jonathan said. Still hunched tight to the wheel and not looking at him, but he was talking. That was good. “They had crewmembers building them.”
“Maquis crewmembers,” Andrew said. “Which was really unfair. ‘Oh, please come aboard our ship and join our crew, brave freedom fighters, but we’ll give you all the crappy jobs.’” He was ready to get into the fact that Tom Paris’s while arc was played out in the pilot, a subject that never got old, but Jonathan said:
“Do you think that would really work?” It was the first thing all day he hadn’t snapped. He sounded tired, Frodo-on-Mount-Doom tired.
“What’d work?”
“The Maquis were fighting against the Federation,” he said. “They were the bad guys, and they thought that Starfleet were the bad guys, and they all had to work together.” Andrew was watching him carefully, but his eyes never moved from the road in front of them. “I mean… can you be on the opposite side from somebody and then come back?”
Andrew didn’t know what he was supposed to say, what his friend wanted to hear. Finally, he just said, “Voyager was lame, anyway.”
Jonathan didn’t say anything else.
They were coming up a town. Andrew wondered what ‘motel’ was in Mexicoan. Motela, maybe. Nada vacancias. They could sleep in the back of the van, but he thought about bandits and coyotes and hurriedly decided he’d really prefer to be inside.
He tried to look on the bright side, because Jonathan could be so mopey when he was upset that Andrew sometimes wondered why he wasn’t just a goth, and because all the books his mom liked talked about the power of positive thinking. They'd thwarted the evil sorceress and fled to the peaceful lands of the South. Willow hadn’t come after them yet so maybe she’d had time to chill and realize they were innocent. The policia couldn’t touch them now they were out of the US. Warren was dead, and there was no bright side to that, and he’d never heard of anybody coming back from the dead even in Sunnydale. But when real life failed him there were movies, and he smiled to himself as he remembered Obi-Wan and Yoda and Anakin at the end of Jedi. Patrick Swayze appearing to Demi Moore at the end of Ghost and saying, “The love inside, you take it with you.”
Two months later, when he first had the nightmare and jerked awake to find Warren standing over him, he was hardly even surprised.
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Andrew and Jonathan, not overtly slashy
Rating: G
Notes: For
for_no_one for the Andrew ficathon.Andrew wanted them to sneak across the border like the desperate fugitives they were, but Jonathan told him not to be a moron. The checkpoint had MEXICO across the top in big, coloured letters, and Andrew peered regretfully out the windows at the Rio Grande. It was a lot less grande than he’d pictured.
“Do you think it gets wider further out?” he asked, when they were through the check and into Mexico and he was over the initial awe of being outside the United States for the first time ever.
"It's not the Rio Grande, it's the Tijuana River," Jonathan snapped, and then he didn't say anything else. He had hardly spoken to him at all since Sunnydale. Whenever he did, he snapped and was mean. Maybe that meant he was their leader now, because it reminded Andrew of how Warren got a lot of the time when plans went wrong. Andrew didn’t want to be the leader. He wanted to be led, and Jonathan had the experience – two years as secretary of the Sunnydale High computer club, plus that spell a couple of years ago where everybody’d thought he was the boss of them.
So, he could follow Jonathan now. But then he remembered that Warren had only started to get really mean after they made him their leader, like the power made him kind of crazy, and he decided he’d follow his new alpha in secret.
He poked at the memory of Warren like it was the rotten tooth he’d had extracted in tenth grade, only the pain felt more like appendicitis than toothache. He’d known a bunch of people who had died. Growing up in Sunnydale, everybody did. He claimed lactose intolerance for three years to avoid finding out which kid from his school was on the milk carton this week. Nobody he’d loved had died before, though. His parents, both sets of grandparents, even stupid Tucker, they were all okay. His Aunt Molly was the only Wells so far to not make it out of Sunnydale, dead in her backyard of ‘neck trauma’, but he was only five then, too young to even really know her.
He was sure he loved Warren now. He’d thought he was sure before he died, but the sureness now was so much surer than the sureness then that he knew this was the real deal, and untwisting all of that in his head made him think of the Princess Bride, and he pretended to be looking out the window just in case he started to cry. Jonathan, before he went all speak no evil, said some stuff about Warren that had made Andrew almost want to get out of the van and find some way to make it on his own. Called him a psycho, called him a murderer, and Andrew knew none of that was true because it would make Warren a bad guy. Not a Lex Luthor supervillain: a for-real bad guy like that clown serial killer or Osama Bin Laden.
It couldn’t be true because Andrew wouldn’t be in love with someone like that, and because it’d mean the two of them weren’t bold antiheroes who had barely escaped with their lives. They were just… henchmen. Running away.
Suddenly not happy to be in the quiet with his thoughts, Andrew said, “I think the Rio Grande was the best of the DS9 runabouts.” No response. He forged ahead. “It was cool how they kept track of when a runabout blew up and they had to get a new one. Not like Voyager. They went through, like, fifty shuttlecraft and they were seventy thousand lightyears from a starbase.”
“They explained that, lamebrain,” Jonathan said. Still hunched tight to the wheel and not looking at him, but he was talking. That was good. “They had crewmembers building them.”
“Maquis crewmembers,” Andrew said. “Which was really unfair. ‘Oh, please come aboard our ship and join our crew, brave freedom fighters, but we’ll give you all the crappy jobs.’” He was ready to get into the fact that Tom Paris’s while arc was played out in the pilot, a subject that never got old, but Jonathan said:
“Do you think that would really work?” It was the first thing all day he hadn’t snapped. He sounded tired, Frodo-on-Mount-Doom tired.
“What’d work?”
“The Maquis were fighting against the Federation,” he said. “They were the bad guys, and they thought that Starfleet were the bad guys, and they all had to work together.” Andrew was watching him carefully, but his eyes never moved from the road in front of them. “I mean… can you be on the opposite side from somebody and then come back?”
Andrew didn’t know what he was supposed to say, what his friend wanted to hear. Finally, he just said, “Voyager was lame, anyway.”
Jonathan didn’t say anything else.
They were coming up a town. Andrew wondered what ‘motel’ was in Mexicoan. Motela, maybe. Nada vacancias. They could sleep in the back of the van, but he thought about bandits and coyotes and hurriedly decided he’d really prefer to be inside.
He tried to look on the bright side, because Jonathan could be so mopey when he was upset that Andrew sometimes wondered why he wasn’t just a goth, and because all the books his mom liked talked about the power of positive thinking. They'd thwarted the evil sorceress and fled to the peaceful lands of the South. Willow hadn’t come after them yet so maybe she’d had time to chill and realize they were innocent. The policia couldn’t touch them now they were out of the US. Warren was dead, and there was no bright side to that, and he’d never heard of anybody coming back from the dead even in Sunnydale. But when real life failed him there were movies, and he smiled to himself as he remembered Obi-Wan and Yoda and Anakin at the end of Jedi. Patrick Swayze appearing to Demi Moore at the end of Ghost and saying, “The love inside, you take it with you.”
Two months later, when he first had the nightmare and jerked awake to find Warren standing over him, he was hardly even surprised.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2004-06-07 07:50 am (UTC)Neat that he remembers "Superstar", too.