Archive of Our Own ^beta

For a full five minutes, Ponyboy can't believe what he's seeing in front of him: the crumbled up jean jacket hanging from his fingers, his heart pounding in his head, his face flushing instinctively, his eyes burning hot yet unable to deny that all five of his senses are telling him that the lump yards away from him is Johnny Cade's dead body.

In the bright Spring of 1965, it feels strange to stand there, to be drenched in sunlight yet acutely aware that he is no longer looking at his best friend.

He is looking at a body. A thing without a soul, without animation, without recognition.

There's no way that Johnny's alive: the scent of blood is too thick in the air, the slight tint of death has an acrid sting against Pony's nose, the blue of his skin that he can see has him wanting to throw up. Except he keeps moving forward, one step at a time. Moving and moving, hearing his brother's calling for him until he's staring at Johnny's body properly beneath the spring sun.

It doesn't much look like Johnny, the Body: his friend's face is smashed in ways and places it shouldn't be, rendered mostly unrecognizable if it weren't for his scent or his clothes. Parts of his scalp have been yanked out, his teeth have penetrated his cheek and his eyes are left staring vacantly into a vast nothingness.

His brothers call his name again. Ponyboy lets out a pained, awful noise.

He doesn't realizes it's screaming until someone grasps him, turns him around and —

"Pony! Pony!" He's jerked awake, gasping for air. Above him, Dallas looks at him with worry etched on his face. He's still got most of the greasepaint he uses, forehead to the top bridge of his nose smeared in the he ink black stuff. The two lines Ponyboy painted, running down from his eyes, look a bit smeared from the sweat of the show, and he can tell Dallas' scent is worried.

He swallows the cold air of the apartment, shivering on the couch in the early morning. Sunlight is already streaming in, showing that they barely stumbled in together after last night's show to collapse on the couch together. All the evidence is there, from Dallas' bag on the side, their boots off and placed beside the television, and their coats both thrown over the loveseat. He can feel the greasepaint still on him sticking to his skin, running his fingers over his face. "Shit — Sorry, Dal. Fuck, I thought – I was having dreams about Johnny."

The alarmed look on Dallas' face fades at that, the alertness bleeding out of his scent, relaxing more into the couch. His hand reaches out, his fingers warm against Ponyboy's skin. "It's about that time of year, ain't it?"

"Yeah," Ponyboy sighs, allowing Dallas to keep touching him, to keep sending those happy signals down his spine, reminding him where he was.

It's not 1965. He's not thirteen on the cusp of fourteen, looking at his best friend's body in a Spring Day.

It's 1978 — and it's not warm like it was that day. This year it's unseasonably cold, their building not very good dealing with said cold, and he's twenty-six going on twenty-seven.

Still, it takes time to blink out the memory of Johnny's body and his own screaming, focusing on Dallas' dark eyes and hair. In the meager sunlight, Dallas looks pale beneath the paint, probably as exhausted as Ponyboy is. The sleeveless shirt he's wearing looks a little more worn for wear, the skull that Ponyboy had painted on it weeks before flaking in ways that makes it look interesting.

"What time is it?" Ponyboy asks, his eyes taking in Dallas' strong jaw, the column of his neck with the mating mark looking good against his skin. "We must'a just stumbled in, threw down our shit and passed out." He groans, moving up on the couch to get better leverage. "Is Angela here?"

"Nah, I'd scent her," Dallas uses a nail to prod at the flaking make up on Ponyboy's face. "She'll probably be here in an hour or so though. We should probably clean up before she comes around." He sniffs, rubbing at his nose, not sure if he really wants to do much.

This time of year always stings for Ponyboy — the reminder that Johnny had only been sixteen for a week before he'd been killed always comes as a cold shock to him. Yet every time the year comes around, Johnny's phantom seems to show up to dog him.

Always, his death is a reminder that the last vestiges of childhood ended — and everything after that day, up until that day in the reformatory still tug at him no matter what he tries.

All he can do is let his mate help him stand up, wobbling from the couch to make their way through the apartment to the bathroom. For a place that seemed to always go up in rent yet always diminish in other areas, it's still pretty good for a place in Tulsa: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a huge kitchen, a balcony, and an ample space in the living room and dining room. Granted, it's helped that the place is technically a loft of sorts.

The place used to be a factory, and in the last ten years they'd done their best to turn it into a housing most people could live in. A noble effort, sure. Just most people remember it as the site of the Holden Auto Factory before it went bust. Even with the fresh coat of paint on most things, the bit of architectural face lift it had, couldn't totally scrub that away.

One thing he likes about it, what made him buy it in the first place is living room. The real estate agent had looked like she might vomit out of nervousness when she showed it to them early morning. It was clear she thought they'd said no, not understanding that being able to see the sunrise come gleaming through the high windows would only make Ponyboy smile at the warmth. The slant wasn't perfect; they needed some thick curtains for the windows whenever they wanted privacy, and sometimes the way the rain hit it wasn't fun.

But in the early morning, watching Dallas pick his way through their musical equipment, their books (well. Ponyboy's books, really), the little cot they have out for Angela whenever she wanted to come over, and past the bowls they kept out for whatever stray cat wandered in still makes it perfect for Ponyboy.

The sight of Dallas' long legs, his wild shaggy dark hair — he never could keep a style as a greaser, and being in a punk band hadn't changed that – around his shoulders, yawning in too tight jeans is perfect as Ponyboy follows him. The warmth of the sun isn't strong yet the light does it's damned best to cast Dallas in light that Ponyboy wants to bask in just for a minute.

If he closes his eyes, the light can almost look similar to that day in the reformatory, so many years ago.

"What's he in for?" The woman at the reformatory desk appears a little sympathetic as she looks at Ponyboy, standing there in his ratty old clothes, head still head high even though he wishes the cop would let him go, let him run away. Let him go miles and miles away from here, to the countryside, to Dad's cabin, hell even to just sleep on his parents' graves if he couldn't go to Johnny's.

The cop sighs – of course he has to keep Ponyboy here, grip his shoulder tighter as if it will make anything about all of this better. As if he can undo so much awful shit. "Christ, Carla, what ain't he in for? It's the Curtis kid from the papers."

Her eyebrows jump toward her hairline, her eyes sliding down to look at Ponyboy. He's probably one the smaller end of the hoods she's taken in and the one who looks the least tough.

Or maybe she thinks he shouldn't be here. Maybe she'll take pity on him, turn him out, tell him that he's a good kid who doesn't deserve here, that he's a greaser who's done nothing wrong.

But that's just his wild imagination again as she picks up her pen again, her voice adopting a more professional tone. "Well, Wendell, I can't just go by what's on the news. You know protocol — you have to give it to me straight."

Ponyboy has no choice, no savior on the wind, no one to help him.

He has to stand there, cuffed, as the police officer says, "Truancy, for two weeks. Grand theft auto, took his brother's truck for the first one. Assault with a deadly weapon, and another charge of theft. He's been sentenced to three months."

He wants to tell them about that awful night: about falling asleep in the lot crying about Johnny again, about everyone's indifference to his death, everyone moving on by the time fall came around. Except him. It's him who sees Johnny's ghost as surely as he sees his parents, it's him having nightmares about Johnny's body, it's him who can't look at the cars that Socs drive without suspecting them. It's him who daydreams about his parents in the country with him, alive and well riding horses and eating apples with a yellow cur. It's him who dreams about Johnny with them, free of his parents, and able to play with Ponyboy beneath the sunlight as if there are no troubles.

How could he tell them about walking home in the dark, looking over his shoulder for a car? How could he tell them that being an omega out there was dangerous — sometimes having to hide whenever a car's headlights went over him? Seeing boys in Madras shirts even a street over sending him into either crouching low to not be seen or to run as fast as he could to the nearest greaser place?

There had been a car that night. There had been a car full of drunk Socs and he'd done his best to avoid them. It only made coming home from the lot even longer, and by the time he'd gotten in, it was almost three-thirty at night.

He should've known better. He should've stayed out all night rather than be stupid enough to come home to Darry furious. What it felt like to try to tell him what was going on only for Darry to yell at him, to remind him as if he didn't know what happened to Johnny, what happened to Cathy Carlson? What it felt like to stand there, with Soda quiet as Darry have him yell at him again, until he was spent.

There had been a moment, just a moment for Ponyboy to go to his room, to let Soda diffuse it all.

And then Darry had to take it out his anger at Ponyboy on Soda. The one person Ponyboy had left, and Darry took it out on him — all for the festering well of anger sitting inside Ponyboy for months, that he tried to keep a lid on to get through things, just suddenly overflow without his permission.

Would they understand why he yelled back? Would they understand how much it hurt him that Darry had hit him that night in a way that their parents never had? How humiliated and scared he felt as the silence settled on the house. The anger that rose up in him didn't go away the way it had been, the shame growing so much that all he could do was react.

They weren't there. They couldn't have seen him spit in Darry's face or seen him throw the vase — their mother's favorite blue vase — at Darry nor could they have heard Soda yelling as Ponyboy aimed true.

Would they have understood him in that moment? Understood him grabbing the keys and running out the door, driving out into the night away from a home that didn't feel like home anymore.

All he'd been thinking was he couldn't stand it there anymore. All he'd been thinking about was trying to find a way to Dad's hunting spot, just for awhile. All he'd been thinking about was running away from Johnny's dead body and the Socs that bragged about it.

But maybe he hadn't been thinking at all.

All he knows is that the State of Oklahoma has taken him away, put him in a reformatory. And that he is going to be outnumbered by 50:1 as an omega in the reformatory. He's heard things, so many things about how it is.

And yet, being buzzed in, walking into the reformatory is very different than he thought it would be: there are less kids here than he thought he'd see, and most of them are hoods he's recognizes as they lift their faces to scent him, to see him. There's Mark Jennings smoking a cigarette in a corner; a Brumly Boy by the name of Bear who looks at him curiously from the food he's eating; Steve Randle's other cousin, who stares as Ponyboy walks past.

The person who catches his eye in the sunlight is different, someone who he's only seen a time or two yet Ponyboy knows him by scent: Dallas Winston, standing tallest, hands in his pockets, dark eyes curiously fixed on Ponyboy. He'd been at rumbles before, Ponyboy bumping into him a time or two when he'd snuck in.

He'd just been a pup, who hadn't presented then. Now that he's an omega, now that he's aware of himself an dhis body, he can tell that for the first time he's interested in an alpha, in someone at all. Maybe it's the confidence that Dallas has when he takes in Ponyboy or the coolness to him when he doesn't seem frightened of the cop who pushes Ponyboy along or the concentration on his face that's there as Ponyboy is escorted past him or the sheer tuffness that comes off of him in waves, from his long limbs to the sharpness of his teeth when he gives Ponyboy a wink.

Whatever it is, Ponyboy looks back at him, curious and unafraid — smiling at the wink when he'd never smile at someone from another pack doing it. Something in his chest sparks, remembering Dallas hauling him up during a rumble, shoving him back towards Johnny. Something in Dallas' demeanor doesn't make Ponyboy feel unsettled or afraid, and when he's left in his room to get himself together he knows that as soon as he can he's going to talk to that tough hood.

"Shit, it's too hot again," Dallas curses under his breath as he ducks some of the spray from the shower. Ponyboy can tell just by the steam coming up as he continues to wipe at his face to get the last of the make up off. "Didn't we fucking tell them last month about this?"

"Yeah, we did," he grimaces, using more of the cloth to rub at his skin. It's gonna be red and raw by the time he's done — and Ponyboy already is dreading how the cold will feel against his skin when he's got to get to the Rex-All for his shift. "I'll go down to the office after work."

In the mirror, he can see Dallas throw off his shirt, displaying the scar on his side from the time he'd gotten knifed during a rowdy show, alongside the old scars from running heroin with Tim Shepard. He stretches — all six feet, six inches of him – before he reaches over to grab his own towel to scrub at his face.

It's a routine they're used to, even though it's better to scrub the make up off before sleeping. Ponyboy groans as he finally gets the last of it off his face, looking at the dirty, cracked mirror. God, they needed to replace it.

At least his reflection looks like himself again: the long auburn hair framing his face that still had a decent amount of puppy fat on it, the wide hazel eyes on his face, the mole beneath his eye, both ears pierced with gold hoops hanging from them, the slight inward slant of his teeth still sharp after all these years. He looks for features of his brothers like he quietly has since he was fourteen years old, stuck in the reformatory: hoping to see maybe Darry's jaw or Soda's soft mouth.

He only finds someone who's tired, who hasn't even spoken to his brothers in over five years, and who needs something to eat. And to maybe get in the shower with his mate already. If he didn't get in there, Angela was gonna get mad at them if she came and there wasn't breakfast cooking.

So all he can do is put the towel down and go join Dallas in the shower — yelping at the cold, Dallas giving a mean bark of a laugh.

At least he shuts up when Ponyboy kisses him beneath the spray. And at least he has the decency to catch Ponyboy when he almost slips — both of them laughing at the flail of limbs.

It's not perfect, not when Ponyboy finds himself thinking about how old Johnny might be now if he had lived. Not when he wishes he could pick up a phone and call his brothers as if nothing sour happened between them, as if Darry hadn't hit him.

But to get that, a lot of things would have to change.

And he's not the one who needs to change here.

All he needs to do is grab a towel, snap it at Dallas and then run as fast as he can before Dallas catches him, cursing up a storm and ready to pin him to the bed, wet and happy.

That's all.