orange!verse fic: Open Carrier, Part 1
Sep. 16th, 2017 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanter1944This is part 1 of, for now, 4, and there will be more. It's been sponsored by the midnight sponsor, mama_kestrel.
Fair warning: Kendra has a potty mouth, a case of internalized biphobia, and a rough view of the world.
It builds up.
It's not the sort of decision that happens all at once. It takes months; a hundred nights under a snow-covered roof with a radio speaker turned down low, a long Galena winter, the adjoining fall and spring. It takes talk from three sides, from the town and the state and the country all lumped together, from the broadcasts she drinks up like hot coffee in December, from inside her own head. Kendra's not sure which one's the loudest in the end. They're all competing for the title, really, and put together they're a hell of a racket.
The truth is--the truth is. The news and the feature stories and the names attached, the crimes she's never heard of before, the other girls and their--hell yes, damn her--low necklines in the hallways, the black eye she earned and that brush with the green police that made her father yell, the loudness and the information and the details and the kind of headlines that actually come before a whole story, the whole story--the truth is, it all builds up until it's close to blowing like a gas line and she just. can't.
The truth is, it's too damn much.
Not that she's ever heard the term critical mass, but the point of no return is familiar enough in a couple of ways to make sense, and even leaving out the lewd examples Kendra knows perfectly well just what happens when you put too much weight on one end of a two-ended teeter-totter. Up it goes, and unless something big changes, up it stays.
Like any of this is going to change.
Making up her mind doesn't happen while she's watching. She doesn't just sit down one day and say hey, guess what? I'm going to try and go to Canada. One night it's not there, not really, not so she can grab onto it and think about it consciously. The next day it is, like it's always been in her head. Ka-plunk, brick on the back doorstep, and it just gets plainer the longer it sits in there.
The hell if it doesn't tear at her, though. Mom. Dad. One'll kill me, and then they'll have to dig me up so the other one can put me in the ground again. This is home, Galena's home, and I don't know anything about what it's like anywhere that isn't Illinois. Hell, I don't even hardly know Chicago. How am I supposed to manage in a whole other country? I'll be on the run from my own damn nation, and doesn't that just sound like a daytime TV melodrama? It'll all be true too, what they say about me; I made the big exit, I played the drama queen, I stirred up trouble. I know that's not why I'm doing it. I know I've got reasons. But nobody else is going to know that, and where'll that leave me or the rest of this house? And I won't see Brad graduate, or Kathryn either, and damn. They'd kill me too. I'll get myself dead four times over if I--when I--if I--when I do this thing. And I'll miss them--I'm going to miss them so much.
The fact that she's certain about what she's going to do even while she's trying to talk herself out of doing it hurts as much as, probably even more than, the reasons she gives herself for not doing it at all. the arguments against going are valid enough to sear like knife slashes. So is her stinking stubborn foolish commitment in the other direction. So she bleeds, and she keeps quiet.
And she holds her head up, just a little.
mama_kestrel. Fair warning: Kendra has a potty mouth, a case of internalized biphobia, and a rough view of the world.
It builds up.
It's not the sort of decision that happens all at once. It takes months; a hundred nights under a snow-covered roof with a radio speaker turned down low, a long Galena winter, the adjoining fall and spring. It takes talk from three sides, from the town and the state and the country all lumped together, from the broadcasts she drinks up like hot coffee in December, from inside her own head. Kendra's not sure which one's the loudest in the end. They're all competing for the title, really, and put together they're a hell of a racket.
The truth is--the truth is. The news and the feature stories and the names attached, the crimes she's never heard of before, the other girls and their--hell yes, damn her--low necklines in the hallways, the black eye she earned and that brush with the green police that made her father yell, the loudness and the information and the details and the kind of headlines that actually come before a whole story, the whole story--the truth is, it all builds up until it's close to blowing like a gas line and she just. can't.
The truth is, it's too damn much.
Not that she's ever heard the term critical mass, but the point of no return is familiar enough in a couple of ways to make sense, and even leaving out the lewd examples Kendra knows perfectly well just what happens when you put too much weight on one end of a two-ended teeter-totter. Up it goes, and unless something big changes, up it stays.
Like any of this is going to change.
Making up her mind doesn't happen while she's watching. She doesn't just sit down one day and say hey, guess what? I'm going to try and go to Canada. One night it's not there, not really, not so she can grab onto it and think about it consciously. The next day it is, like it's always been in her head. Ka-plunk, brick on the back doorstep, and it just gets plainer the longer it sits in there.
The hell if it doesn't tear at her, though. Mom. Dad. One'll kill me, and then they'll have to dig me up so the other one can put me in the ground again. This is home, Galena's home, and I don't know anything about what it's like anywhere that isn't Illinois. Hell, I don't even hardly know Chicago. How am I supposed to manage in a whole other country? I'll be on the run from my own damn nation, and doesn't that just sound like a daytime TV melodrama? It'll all be true too, what they say about me; I made the big exit, I played the drama queen, I stirred up trouble. I know that's not why I'm doing it. I know I've got reasons. But nobody else is going to know that, and where'll that leave me or the rest of this house? And I won't see Brad graduate, or Kathryn either, and damn. They'd kill me too. I'll get myself dead four times over if I--when I--if I--when I do this thing. And I'll miss them--I'm going to miss them so much.
The fact that she's certain about what she's going to do even while she's trying to talk herself out of doing it hurts as much as, probably even more than, the reasons she gives herself for not doing it at all. the arguments against going are valid enough to sear like knife slashes. So is her stinking stubborn foolish commitment in the other direction. So she bleeds, and she keeps quiet.
And she holds her head up, just a little.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-17 08:28 am (UTC)Not that she's ever heard the term critical mass, but the point of no return is familiar enough in a couple of ways to make sense, and even leaving out the lude examples Kendra knows perfectly well just what happens when you put too much wait on one end of a two-ended teeter-totter. Up it goes, and unless something big changes, up it stays.
A couple of typos there:
"lude" should be "lewd"
And "too much wait" should be "too much weight"
no subject
Date: 2017-09-17 02:12 pm (UTC)Wow!
Date: 2017-09-21 07:55 am (UTC)Re: Wow!
Date: 2017-09-21 11:29 am (UTC)Your subject line made me go :)! by the way.