21st Century Liability

[Dr Adjective]

[Return of Heather Klein]

Maybe they made an unlikely pair. In fact, no maybe, they just did make an unlikely pair. But perhaps they also had more in common than one might think, too. That was what Heather aimed to find out, she supposed.

Late winter hours rolled out a blanket of stars across the cloudless desert sky. A tall blonde teen ignored the intended seat of a worn-down bench, choosing instead to perch against its backrest, eyes flicking between the charming cosmic vista and her much less prepossessing surroundings. It was safer that way, as a young woman in a notoriously rough part of town she preferred to be on her feet and mobile, no matter her imposing build. All the muscle in the world wouldn't be of much use if someone decided they really wanted to cause a problem.

Who was she waiting for?

Earlier that week, Heather had sought out Manuel Hernández, asked if he partook. He'd made a good impression on the basketball court, it'd gone a long way in undoing three years of assumptions and small interactions, brought out some true colours in the way that only honest competition could. Between that, and her recent mixed-at-best results in reaching out to cop girl Meggy, she'd decided he should be next on her list for (re-?)building bridges. Didn't hurt that, like Meggy, he wasn't bad looking either. Something to file away under maybe, if things went better with him than they had with her. As if it was even her fault? Heather'd spent her high school career declaring all cops to be bastards, was Meggy really that surprised?

Fingers idly fiddling with the zipper of her hoodie, Heather sighed and looked back up to the stars. Was she wrong, wanting to chance someone's mind so radically? Only her mind, of course. She certainly appeared to have a good heart.

[LYourLocalAutist]

Malone Circle Park. Concrete sanctuary within the larger jungle that was Las Vegas downtown... or at least it was, until some ten years ago. Memories of swings and slides and playtime with parents and friends felt utterly smothered by a now nigh-omnipresent pressure, substantiated by the tags on the walls and the creakings in the equipment and the shattered glass on the floor. A pressure as dull and grey as the concrete it now lingered in. It would either hold dominion over this place for the rest of eternity... or it would be struck down in its entirety to give rise to something new, throwing the last of whatever ashes of happiness or nostalgia for those good old days remained in this world to the wind for good.

...The basketball court was still fine, so it was cool, though.

[Manuel "Mañana" Hernández continued from Shakes 'n' Bakes]

Melancholy contemplation on the state of the stretch of downtown land he so fondly remembered from his lil' Manny days aside, Manuel had something else on his mind as he marched on down through the streets and into the park, hands in the jacket pockets and eyes on the lookout, sifting from spot to spot in the dark veil of winter evening.

Who was he looking for?

Earlier that week, Manuel had been found by Heather Klein, and had been asked if he was hitting that shit fr (approximately). He'd somehow managed to persuade her into a 1v1 they had some genuine fun with, Manuel being able to shine the self that was beyond the dirt of the jerk, bringing out his true colours in a way that only honest competition could, all in a way that the tall twitter woman was apparently really into. Enough to switch up her whole attitude towards him, it looked like... maybe he was getting ahead of himself, he thought with a furrowing brow, but there was a certain base level of trust you had to have in someone to invite them to a smoke sesh. And this was... Heather. Huh.

...It felt a little good. Shit, it felt pretty damn good, knowing he still had it in him to make connections like that. Either way, blech taste be damned, a smoke sesh was definitely something he needed after the particularly hard shift at the Shake 'n' Bake which saw not one, not two, but three separate family tables where the kids were throwing food. Lunacy experience which shattered his previous expectations of a peaceful position. Bit of hash could make that all better.

As soon as his eyes came upon that striking shine of blonde hair through the night, they lit up themselves, and Manuel broke into a waving jog.

"Yo!"

Very distinguishable voice, very distinguishable tone (positive). He slid right up next to her on the bench, completing the "group of unruly teens in a rundown park" stereotype, and got right down to business as he rubbed his hands in seeming preparation.

"Got the stuff, yeah?"

[Dr Adjective]

By comparison, to her? It was just some shitty run-down park, another data point in an argument about the sorry state of public services, of third spaces, of where obscene police and military (as if those were even different things…) budgets could be better allocated. Heather’s childhood nostalgia lay in Santa Monica, in the sound of waves and the warmth of sand between her toes.

So her eyes were on the stars when Manuel approached. Even out in the desert 300 miles away, they shared the same sky after all. Until the moment he took his place beside her, Heather’s thoughts stayed with Meggy. How do you bring someone like that around? Maybe it was impossible. For the garden variety, dyed in the wool blue-lives-matter diehards, she wouldn’t even begin to care. But…

“Yeah.”

There was lingering wistful tone to her voice, which she deflected from by reaching into the front of her shirt for a little something literally kept close to the chest. Factually, but not figuratively, close to her heart. Out came a small, nondescript metal box, still warm from proximity to her core. Within? Papers, and just about enough to not feel too bad if cops showed and she had to ditch it.

Now. Was it time for speaking, or just… being?

Normally she could do either. Just comfortably existing in someone’s company was usually right up Heather’s alley, content in the presence of one of her few real friends. But she had words burning in her throat, silently demanding to stop being so.

Something else demanded burning too, however.

The roll? Kind of scuffed. The fucks? Not given. She wasn’t here to impress. Then, she reached down past the carabiner at her waist into the pocket below, with a millisecond of wry smirk on remembering the presently-questionable queer signifier, and retrieved a lighter. After seeing to herself, Heather offered both tin and tool to her guest.

“I feel like you’re a guy who prefers it forthright, so,” the butch blonde began. Bridge-building, go.

“I’ve been a piece of shit to you until now. Maybe I started it, maybe you did, don’t care, it doesn’t end anywhere good. So… sorry, for that.”

Beat.

“World’s fucked enough. Last thing we need is more enemies, right?”

[LYourLocalAutist]

Manuel made himself comfortable as best as one could on the creaking wood and shedding paint of a dilapidated park bench. It was neeever easy on the back, especially for one of his proportions. Heather probably wasn't having the best time lumb-wise either, he thought. He considered, as Heather nodded and began to reach for the wee smokebox that would contain their means of ascension, the reasons for their event having to take place inside such a cold and empty place. Yeah, yeah, illegal grass contingency incognito spot easy to run yadda yadda couldn't they have found somewhere with like a pillow or whatever maybe gone to California with fake ids

...Well, shit, anything was better than actually going to California.

Manuel did a little extra stretch, as much as he was allowed to by the size of the bench and the presence of the Heather. A small natural gesture indicating casual comfort. Who it was meant to be comforting was up in the air even to himself. He was still aware of what Heather's attitude towards him had been not a damn month ago, and what it had been for the years preceding that. This was change, and there was always a level of caution you had to take approaching it.

It made it easier when you had a familiar-feeling piece of rolled-up paper in one hand and its corresponding fire-starting tool in the other, ready to kick it back. And when you had someone by your side speaking in a manner more genuine than anything else you'd heard outside your family in a while. He was still while Heather talked, and considered her words. Despite himself, he felt slightly surprised; despite everything, wasn't this still Heather Klein?

...Well, she probably thought the same thing about him.

Huh.

Manuel smiled broadly, genuinely, the smile he only gave to those friends of his. With a flick of his thumb, a warm and bright spot in the dark was created, its purpose bent to lighting up the greenest grass, their own miniature sweet(??????) smelling hearth. As the fire began to take, he opened his mouth to speak, his dark eyes lit up lightly by the newborn kindling.

"The hardest thing someone can do is make amends, I was always told."

Memories of Grandma came through a moment, anecdotes and sayings passed down and always applicable. As he put the spliff to his mouth and inhaled the smoke, letting it sink deep in and spread throughout his lungs, his system, he felt nothing but grateful. All the cold in the body was comfortably replaced, not only with psychedelics, but the satisfaction of a bond newly forged. The blunt left his lips with a satisfied sigh.

"...But I think you've got it pretty spot on."

The smile came back, turned towards her now, as he extended an arm in offering of the fat one. He only needed the one puff for now. Any time with new friends, or with friends in general, was a time for sharing.

"Quieres?"

[Dr Adjective]

Want? Alas, for Heather, she spoke Spanish well enough and memes poorly enough to simply be mildly baffled by the question. Of course she wanted. So of course she accepted with a nod and a nonspecific Mm of affirmative.

Inhale, exhale.

The sense of relaxation came over her swiftly, drawing from the pleasant familiarity of the ritual itself much more quickly than the introduction of new chemicals to her body could be held responsible for. This was the kind of thing she did with people she felt comfortable with, after all, and hopefully Manuel was to join that small circle. Why him? He certainly wasn’t the optimal choice for securing herself a cleaner reputation.

She held the joint back out in Manny’s direction, not an active offer, more an open invitation. It was there, he could take it if he wanted it, if he took too long maybe she’d have another.

“I don’t want to be hated any more. It felt good, you know, being the rebel, if you’re pissing people off you’re doing something right, all that shit. But it isn’t getting me anywhere.”

With her free hand she gestured broadly at everything, at nothing. The freshly inked circle-A on her forearm caught the light, and Heather’s crooked nose wrinkled in a momentary scowl. She still believed in what it meant, getting it tattooed had been an affirmation, not desperation.

So why’d this all feel less like a change of tactics, than giving up?

“I dunno why I’m telling you all this. Had to be someone. Invoice me for the impromptu therapy.”

[LYourLocalAutist]

Puff.

Manuel let the warmth of the smoke and its effects spread in a careful and calculated pace. He let the relaxation and its pulse settle into every fibre of his muscles before it finally began to reach his head, beginning the slow, gentle and pleasurable effects of what felt like a massage directly applied to the brain. The smile at his lips relaxed, lowering and widening, as he let himself descend. There was a beauty in the warmth within the pocket of the winter night's cold, even if it was solely sourced from the odd herbed being burned at the stake for the pleasures of an unlikely pair at the park. The tiny hearth which burned ever onwards.

Puff.

Heather's words reached Manuel as he partook of her re-offering. The conversation beyond the dancing steps of the blunt. His brow furrowed slightly. Not out of confusion, or aversion, or out of any sense of negativity towards the words of the woman who sat by his side. It was a blooming sense of melancholic empathy. It felt good being the rebel. Manuel thought back to middle school, to the arms extended to him by the dregs and delinquents who seemed to be the only ones there for him at the time. He thought back to where his associations with them had led him. And he thought to where he was now. Mañana, the delinquent, talks shit at school, douchey dirtbag bully-man. It was getting him just about nowhere as well. The effects of the drug were putting him a bit on the emotional side.

...What had he been doing for so long?

Pass.

His arm outstretched to his smoking partner, a look of almost melancholic longing for a time which never existed plastered on his face, he began to speak his own piece.

"...When I started the whole 'delinquent' thing, it was because there wasn't anything else there for me at the time. Now that there could be, it's impossible for me to get out. It's... fuck, I hate being hated, too. I hate having to look like I hate. It's just..."

He didn't know what was in this particular strain that made the pair spill out the contents of their respective hearts to each other on the dead winter night at the even deader park, but telling someone did feel good—despite everything else, despite their relationship, circumstance, and life as a whole.

"...It gets so tiring."

[Dr Adjective]

The blonde accepted, but didn’t partake for a moment. She listened, she took in the words, she looked down at the smouldering paper perched between her fingers. A little star embedded there between them, to go with the tapestry of light up above… such as it was, with the lurid glow emanating from the Strip washing out the sky.

For him, it was much more a mask. A role he’d fallen into through a lack of better options. For her, there was an element of a mask too, but that wasn’t really the problem.

Sorry, Meggy. They are all bastards.

She’d never really misrepresented her beliefs. Just presented them more aggressively than was maybe optimal. It wasn’t that she didn’t want friends, that she didn’t want people to be happy. Her whole worldview was built on particularly radical ideas for making more people suffer less.

Puff.

Maybe some subtler anarchist background noise would’ve been more successful than the loud approach she’d always had.

Sigh. Puff.

Maybe she just wanted her last couple of months in Vegas to go more smoothly before she fucked off to college. Make some memories, maybe take someone to prom, all that banal teenage stuff, before she had no choice but to be a grownup instead.

“I feel that. It… fatigues, wears you down, right? Still. College is right around the corner, I’m not even going to see half these fucking people ever again. Maybe it doesn’t even fucking matter.”

Heather shook her head slowly, and held out her hand once again.

“But it’d be nice, finishing on a high note. If I can.”

[LYourLocalAutist]

Fatigue. Fatigue was right. Manuel tried his best to relax into the usual sublime warmth the tainted smoke of a blunt provided, but the subject matter at hand made it... a bit hard to do so. That, and the cold, both physical and mental. It was hard to think about them, about the choices he'd made which had led to his reputation as it was now. About each cascading maleficent happenstance and bad choice as a result thereof which gradually led to the mask of delinquency shifting in form to fit him better and better. RumoursM, racism, canon, solidarity, necessity... no matter how justified the result could possibly sound as a result of the process, and conversely no matter how much he could hem and haw over what he would've changed, Manuel was a man of the present and not the past. Looking up at what cold and lonely stars obscured by the ever-present light show of the strip could still be perceived in the blackened sky, he thought as clear as he'd ever had under the bud's influence. What could he do now?

The answer came to him as his neck craned down and the words of the blonde sitting next to him, melancholic as they were genuine, reached him in a slowly, imperceptibly forming kinship. Here and now, he could listen. He could empathize. Always was the team player, and a team doesn't function unless everyone's on the same wavelength. He leaned forward slightly and gently clasped his hands together, fingers interlocked, friction against friction, a measure against the biting, shadowy cold of the night beside the warmth the subliming smoke in his bloodstream provided. And Manuel listened.

"...Yeah."

...Alright, he couldn't stop all of his influence from getting to his proper abilities of cognition. He could try to clear his head, though. Make an attempt at processing the words that'd reached him, that'd touched him in a way very little else had before. He reached out himself, his fingers lightly brushing against Heather's in a slight haze-induced fumble as he made for the pass. Number 5 wasn't all on the ball tonight.

"Yknow, it- it really shouldn't. It shouldn't matter."

Puff.

At all. Once Manuel got his scholarship, once he got shipped off to New York or Detroit or wherever across the country to play on a college team, to get his new start, everything would be behind him. All the harm and foul and memories of him as a slop-slinging bully. Bully. With those days so tantalizingly close, it made no sense to mentally whine about the thoughts of others, of the people.

The people you were also leaving behind. Their memories.

But no.

"But... these people... they're gonna remember you. Me. We. Whatever... there's gonna be... 'something we leave behind'. Something... an image. A remnant. Legacy. That they'll... everyone will have. That they'll keep."

Puff.

Manuel's hands began to shake slightly, imperceptibly, some subconscious, minuscule fear taking hold of his nervous system. Something deep and primal in his heart and soul no haze induced by fiery greenery could cover it up. He exhaled, then took a deep breath as he stuck his hand out once more. Not of the smoke, but of the air. Frigid, sobering air. Reality and the world. Something he could trust and latch onto even when it seemed like there was nothing. Even so, when he spoke... the voice was ever so smaller. The look in his eyes, in his face, ever so weaker. Something getting to him, besides and despite everything.

"...I just don't want my remnant to be of my worst, yknow? It- it shouldn't matter, but... I don't want to be remembered for my awful and my shit and my fake. So even if it's just a few people..."

His head raised, and his eyes turned to meet Heather's. The light in them, however slightly, had brightened. Maybe from the small, shining embers of the blunt, maybe from something else, deeper. Some kinship. Some small smile that spoke volumes. His voice rang out again, clearer.

"...I wanna be remembered for whatever I was that was good, yknow?"