Work Text:
i keep feeling smaller and smaller
+
remember when you lost your shit and
drove the car into the garden?
you got out and said “i’m sorry”
to the vines and no one saw it.
- i need my girl, the national
+
Asuka’s red truck is a giantess on the road. The radio plays a song that Rei knows only the melody to, the words lost to her, and so she just hums quietly to herself because she knows Asuka doesn’t do well with silence. Someone has to be making noise, and if it isn’t Asuka doing it, then Rei supposes it’s her duty to do so. She’s okay with that.
There are nights like these that come every few months in which Asuka can’t speak, save for a quick phone call consisting of only “I’m coming over” and “be ready” and Rei giving a soft affirmative before slipping on her shoes or a jacket, depending on the weather. Tonight, it’s cold, and so she’s bundled up in the passenger’s seat in a scarf and a parka, her hands tucked into wool mittens. Asuka’s in her pajamas – ratty sweatpants and her lacrosse jersey with SORYU emblazoned on the back in big black letters. She doesn’t seem to notice the cold, but Rei still wishes she’d brought an extra jacket for her, even if Asuka would turn her nose up at it in some strange act of defiance against someone loving her.
Yet, even in the midst of that defiance, Rei is always the one person Asuka calls during these moments, these mute nights in which all Asuka can do is drive. And sometimes the drives go on for hours; the shortest one, last summer in the middle of July, had clocked in at an hour and a half. Asuka had driven in just her panties and a tank-top, her hair piled up on top of her head in some complicated bun with a million hairpins. Sunglasses hid her puffy, sleepless eyes. She hadn’t even been wearing shoes. People turned and stared at her at red lights and stop signs. Rei stared them all down, and they quickly looked away as if they saw nothing.
That time, Rei wore a white sundress touched with tiny embroidered lilacs. The skirt of it fluttered in the harsh breeze, showing her white legs. She felt overdressed. All the windows were down, and the radio was on, and the only time Asuka spoke was to hiss out a string of curses when someone on the road cut her off.
Rei had hummed to some song on the radio that time, too. She wonders, now, if it was the same song she’s humming to this time. She hadn’t known the words back then either.
The lights of the city zip by them as Asuka pushes sixty-five miles per hour on the interstate. There’s a crack in the driver’s seat window so the icy air still nips into the truck, but Asuka doesn’t shiver. Her eyes are hot with a numb sort of fire, weak blue flames that fizzle rather than blaze. She never burns hot during these times. She never looks as if she feels much of anything; she just looks vulnerable and tired, needing a nap, needing four naps, needing a cigarette and a song she knows the words to and a hand to hold.
Rei doesn’t expect them to pull over, but Asuka spots a drive-thru café and seems to decide at the last minute that it’s where she wants to be. Rei doesn’t question it. It’s hard to question any of Asuka’s whims during these drives. Asuka flips on her blinker for a split-second before pulling into the right-hand lane and then through the café parking lot up to the speaker. When she turns to look at Rei, she almost looks like herself again, but Rei knows she isn’t. It’s never that simple. “Anything you want?” she asks, her voice hoarse. “I’ll pay.”
Rei admittedly isn’t all too familiar with fancy coffees or teas, and so she only says, “Whatever you’re getting.”
Asuka gives a quick nod and shouts out her order into the speaker. Something with caramel in it, something sweet and sugary with a complicated name. The cashier on the other side of the intercom seems alarmed by the urgency in her voice before warily telling her to pull up to the window. When Asuka hits the gas again, she hits it a pulse too hard, and she curses beneath her breath, an arm flashing out as if to keep Rei from hitting the dashboard.
“I’m okay,” Rei says, touching the girl’s forearm with two fingertips. “It was only a jolt.”
Asuka gives another quick nod, her eyes everywhere for a moment before she refocuses on the skinny lane of the drive-thru. She slowly pulls her arm away from Rei’s chest and takes hold of the steering wheel again. Rei can see that her hands are shaking.
The song on the radio ends. A chirpy, cheery advertisement takes its place, many people talking all at once. Asuka’s hands shake harder, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. Rei gently turns the volume down.
+
“I think we should pull over for a little while,” Rei says, because it needs to be said, and because there’s no one else here to say it.
Any other time, Asuka would gripe that she’s perfectly capable of driving while drinking a damn coffee, she can multitask for fuck’s sake – but during these moments and these drives, she’s strangely docile, not putting up a fight against any of Rei’s tiny requests to slow down or press pause on Asuka’s whiplash thoughts and whims.
And so they take a time-out in the parking lot of the café, the big red truck leaving an enormous shadow to spill out across the pavement like a black ocean. Asuka stands in the glowing yellow sphere of the streetlamp, sipping her coffee and pacing. Rei remains tucked in the passenger seat, turned sideways, the door open and her boots dangling a foot above the ground. When she stretches out her legs, her black boots are touched with the same yellow light that glows down onto Asuka’s skittish, back-and-forth figure just a few feet away. Rei watches silently as Asuka’s mouth touches the lid of her coffee. She can see a thin stream of steam rising from the opening of the lid, breathing out onto the cold air; she hopes it’s keeping Asuka warm. (She tried to take off her parka and offer it to her but, just as expected, Asuka shook her head, mumbled for her to keep it for herself. Now it’s draped loose over Rei’s shoulders, hanging from her like a helpless thing that’s trying its best.)
Rei sips delicately at her coffee. It’s sweet, a spoonful of sugar too much for how she’d normally prefer it, but it’s something Asuka likes, and that adds some charm to it. She takes another sip, watching Asuka over the rim of the plastic thermos. It tastes better now.
Asuka’s pink slippers are wet around the edges from the light dusting of snow on the ground. Rei can see that her socks are mismatched, one red and one blue.
Asuka tosses her empty coffee cup into the trash bin by the streetlamp and tilts her head back to look up at the sky. Rei sees her shoulders rise and fall in a slow, shaky breath. Her long hair stretches far down her back, curling lazily at the ends. In the light of the streetlamp, she looks otherworldly, her grace accidental and slapdash. Eighteen-years-old for Asuka means long, lanky legs, her body straight as a rail, all angles and lines in place of curves. Beneath her baggy clothes are freckles by the hundreds; and every summer those freckles multiply, but winter makes her cover them all up. (But Rei has seen them, all of them, those hundreds of tiny stars dotting Asuka’s skin.)
“Good to go?” Asuka asks, the question short and quiet as she approaches the truck.
“Are you?” Rei asks her.
Asuka nods, staring at the ground. “Yeah. I’m good.”
“Okay,” Rei murmurs, swinging her legs back around into the truck. “Then we can go.”
Asuka climbs up into her seat and slams the door shut. She starts the engine, keychain jangling down onto her thigh. The heater only breathes cold air. Seeing Asuka’s bare hands, Rei takes off her mittens and sets them in the other’s lap. Asuka opens her mouth to give some protestation, but Rei speaks first. “Just in case you want to use them. You don’t have to.”
Asuka looks sidelong at her. She’s beautiful and sharp and tired. “Fine,” she mutters, looking down at her lap as she waits for the heater to kick in.
They sit in silence. The radio mumbles some soft rock song from the 90s. Rei doesn’t know the words to this one either, but she knows the melody, and so she hums.
+
Two hours later they’re cruising through some generic suburban wasteland, all the houses lined up like identical soldiers in the night, every lawn cut to an eerie neatness that makes the place look as though it’s been fashioned out of construction paper.
Asuka drives slow, eyeing up the houses with her eyes full of hate. Rei’s mittens remain unused in her lap.
Rei doesn’t have to ask what’s on her mind. She knows any sort of organized display of normalcy makes Asuka’s blood boil, and the suburbs are the pinnacle of that; which is why Rei doesn’t understand how all their drives always seem to end up in these places, these perfectly paved rows of houses that look like precise clones of each other, all assigned numbers…
I hate imagining how happy those people are, Asuka told her once, another drive at another time.
But you don’t know them, Rei had told her. You’re only seeing what’s on the outside of their lives.
Sometimes that’s all it takes.
And Rei hadn’t agreed with that, still doesn’t, but that’s when Asuka had stopped talking again, some invisible meter in her head running out of words, and so the silence had bridged between them like something sentient, whispering to Rei don’t push it.
Most of the houses have gardens; if not gardens, then pools, or patios, or doghouses, or a grab-bag of other assorted everyday things that populate the suburbs by the dozens. But gardens are what seem to appear the most often, Rei notices. The winter has made the once-flourishing yards quiet and modest, unfeeling ice in place of flowers; the vines on the trellises are touched with frost which glitters somber and soft in the night. Everything is pale with cold, every bloom closed up tightly into itself until spring breaks.
Asuka stops the truck in the middle of the street. Rei can hear her strained, uneven breathing. When Asuka remains silent, Rei takes her chances at speaking. “You shouldn’t come to these places if they only hurt you,” she murmurs. “We can always go home.”
Asuka is quiet. Her eyes are straight ahead of her, staring at some stranger’s garden like she has a score to settle with it. Rei says her name very softly, reaches over to touch her hand.
And Asuka was always a loose cannon but Rei never expected the day to come where she’d floor it on the gas pedal, gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles as the truck crunches into the garden, hitting a wooden trellis and cracking a quarter of it clean off. Icy vines throw themselves over the windshield like skinny bodies in defeat. Asuka’s arm flashes out again to make sure Rei doesn’t hit the dashboard from the force of the acceleration; in the midst of her numb shock, Rei is almost bemused at how Asuka thinks to protect her while destroying something else.
The truck lurches to a stop, just barely avoiding crashing into the picket fence. Asuka is hunched over the wheel, breathing heavily. The arm belted around Rei’s chest is taut and trembling with tension.
The song on the radio ends. Rei hears everything in pieces, every sound separate from one another: a commercial break cutting in; men talking, advertising, cheerful voices; Asuka hyperventilating; Asuka apologizing to the whole universe; Asuka crying; a door opening outside. Rei looks to the porch of the house. A light flicks on, showing the frantic figure of a middle-aged man in a bathrobe and slippers bustling down the steps to survey the scene. Through the crack in the driver’s seat window, Rei can hear the man cursing loudly, demanding an explanation.
“Go away,” Asuka gasps out, hiding her face. “Tell him to go away – ”
Rei blinks at her. Then she looks back out the window. She meets the man’s eye, soundless and sharp. His angry words dry up. He stumbles back into the house, clumsy and bewildered, as if his eyes had only played some bizarre trick on him. As if he’d never seen anything at all.