K_the_Day

I am a multi-fandom account but I am mostly into The Outsiders! I love writing, reading, music, and trees. Requests are open! (Writing requests will always take a little longer)

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There was rarely a moment where the two of them weren’t high anymore. Not that Sandy was complaining about it. She liked all of her problems being locked so far back in her mind that she couldn’t touch them. She liked not feeling so aware of herself and everything she was doing wrong. 

It was just two weeks ago that Sandy had gone to the Curtis home for dinner and they’d had to carefully explain that she and Soda had spent most of the summer hooking up in secret. Surprisingly, it hadn’t been awkward and Darry didn’t mind. Sandy got the feeling that he had more than a couple of his own secrets he was hiding anyway. Ponyboy had been giving her weird looks, like he was sizing her up or something. Soda had explained to her later that he told him there was a possibility of her being pregnant. It was only so that he wouldn’t assume they were using. 

It had gone well all things considered. Sandy could only hope that the christening went well too. Kathy ended up having the baby only two months previously and now they were finally ready to christen and baptize her. Sandy hadn’t seen the baby in person. Sometimes she really couldn’t stand being around other peoples babies, she was so scared of fucking up their perfections with her obvious imperfection. It was one of the reasons she didn’t want to see Kathy or Evie that much. She couldn’t stand being around Kathy in her emotional dripping motherhood. Evie was doing her best to do damage control but Sandy couldn’t stand to be around either. She’d seen Evie around, but it had been tense interactions maybe once a week. Sandy had all but moved into Soda’s apartment. 

She suspected that she and Steve had switched places. Steve stayed over at Evie’s while Sandy stayed here. It wasn’t ideal but it was fine for now. 

“It would be cool man.” She can hear Two-Bit garbling through the phone line as she sits, holding onto Soda’s waist while the phone cord curls around them both. “Both you and Stevie back in uniform. Like proving that you made it.”

Soda’s face looks pained at this. “Steve can do whatever he wants but I ain’t putin’ that uniform back in. Especially not to go into a church.” 

Coming out of the nightmare panic was probably the worst part. It left Soda’s body shaking and his heart bursting out of his chest. It was strange though, no matter how shaky and off kilter he felt, his hands were steady. It was like he’d trained himself to be able to aim and fire under the worst of circumstances. He hardly remembers the nightmare anyway, just the memory that it constantly clashes with. The alka-seltzer wasn’t helping either. 

Soda had slept most of the night on the couch, after being scared that his own nightmare would wake Sandy who was in his bed. He was still just the slightest bit put off by Sandy’s questions and admissions last night. He knew that she’d struggled with darkness and everything like that but her little admission had stilled him. 

“I really tried to hurt myself.”

He was still unsure of what that meant. The way her eyes had shown in the moonlight when she’d said it was what really freaked him out. He loved Sandy more than life at this point but he hadn’t wanted to think about her in that way. He only wished that she could feel about herself the way he felt about her. It had chilled his blood. Soda needed another hit before he threw up. 

“Soda?” His head snapped to where Sandy was standing in the hallway. She was in one of his shirts and little pair of shorts that she’d left at his apartment the last time she was there. 

“Hey…” He said, not looking at her china blue eyes that had so thoroughly freaked him out last night. 

“You okay?” She asked, moving forward. 

“Sure… are you?” 

Soda had always liked the farm. At least that’s what he kept telling Sandy on the way there. That it was one of the first places they had treated him like a human being after coming back from his service. Sandy couldn’t say that she minded all that much. Getting high off of someone else’s dime was much better than wasting her own money to shoot up. She’d never been to the farm in Tulsa but she knew the type.This type of crowd was more hippie than anything else while the druggies in Buck’s crowd were dangerous. Sandy and Soda fit very well into the hippie crowd, especially with her clothes and his longer hair. 

“Do they even do heroin?” Sandy asks then, finding that she doesn’t mind Soda’s hand on her thigh as they drive. It’s twitching, a sure sign that he’d taken something else before they had even left. Sandy had seen him do it a couple times. She knew enough to know what it was, cocaine, amphetamines, whatever would help him stay up during stuff like this. But Sandy never called him on it, she’d let Soda keep his secrets. 

“Sure, probably not tonight. But they smoke a lot of natural stuff. Mushrooms, peyote, that kind of thing. It’s fun.” 

“Okay.” Sandy says. She isn’t nervous by any means but she still has everyone's warnings about Soda being messed up at the back of her mind. Even though she didn’t mind this version of messed up and she figured that he wouldn’t hurt her, he was still a killer. Sandy wanted to ask him about it all the time but she didn’t know if she had the right. “They ain’t gonna mind that we’re moochin’ off of ‘em, right?” 

Soda snorts, keeping his eyes on the road as he pulls down a rural street. “Nah, they like me too much.”

“They like you too much? You got little kids runnin’ around that I should know about?” Sandy asks with a grin, hoping that it comes off like a joke. She’d been trying it out again… joking. It had seemed so wrong to do it back when she lived with her uncle in Florida but now it seemed alright. What was it called? She was finding herself.

It wasn’t all that often that Soda went to dinner with his brothers anymore. He had been staying away from it since he’d been spending so much time with Sandy. It didn’t help that it had been revealed that apparently both Steve and Evie knew about their little habit. This also meant that by extension, Darry knew too. Steve and Darry hadn’t always been close but they’d both been on the same page with trying to fix Soda. Something that he hated. He didn’t need fixing, he’d been independent since their parents died. He’d always been the kid that Darry never had to worry about but it seemed that things had changed. Darry was focusing significantly more energy into him than he was with Ponyboy. 

Soda had come back over to the house to grab a part for his car and possibly stay for dinner. Walking in, he didn’t know if it was a ploy by Darry to get him to stay for a while so that he could talk to him but Soda really didn’t care. He didn’t feel much like being alone and with Sandy working the evening shift at her new job, he would be. Sometimes he couldn’t stand his own apartment, the silence and dinginess. It was better when he was getting along with Steve but even since that one night where he’d fucked everything up, it had been just a place to sleep. Until Sandy had come back into the picture. 

“How is work anyway?” Darry asked him as Soda looked into the sink. Darry had been complaining about the garbage disposal, something that Soda had ruled would be an easy fix. It was something Darry easily could have repaired by himself. 

“It’s fine.” Soda says. “Same thing every day. You know how it is.” He says, just to fill the silence. 

“Yeah I get it.” He isn’t looking at Darry because his head is under the sink but he can feel the tension coming off of him. He was gearing up to ask Soda something. He was nervous about it too, something that he had never really been around Soda. “You know you can tell me anything, right?” 

Soda pokes his head out. “Sure?” 

Sandy really ought to feel worse about sharing needles and hooking up with Sodapop Curtis but she doesn’t. It wasn’t anything they hadn’t done before. They’d mixed blood and sweat before, in all those ways that kids do before real life can really set in. Sandy misses how things used to be, romanticizing a time she hated when she was fighting for her life nearly every day. 

It has been happening more and more frequently. Sandy and Soda finding a back of something for the both of them to shoot before they would collapse into his bed, all Sandy’s own issues with intimacy gone with one needle prick. Evie knew she was disappearing too and Sandy didn’t know when she would face her about any of this. All she knew was that she needed Soda more than she ever had before.

Instead, as she lies in Sodapop's bed, feeling the rest of last night’s high drain right out of her, she can’t help the perfect contentment that sits on her stomach and is heavy on her mind. Sandy didn’t know why it felt better here than at Evie’s house. Maybe it was the fact that she felt like an outsider there, like she was intruding on their little family in some way. Here, she knew what she was. She was stripped right down to her bones but it didn’t seem to matter because Sodapop liked those bones. 

He had left for work an hour ago, kissing her head while she pretended to sleep, and telling her softly that she would always be welcome here. It was a sentiment that had not been echoed in many places and Sandy couldn’t help but to appreciate it while she could stand it. 

After a minute, she gets up, pulling her clothes from last night back on along with her shoes and socks. Soda said that Steve suspected something too but she was quiet enough that he had never found her. It didn’t help that the both of them were fighting and Steve spent as much time out of their apartment as possible.

Sandy pulls her sweater over her tank top and leaves the apartment, locking the door behind her. She refuses to think of Steve Randle or any of Evie’s brothers for that matter. Boys who didn’t know the extent of the damage done to her but liked to point fingers nonetheless. She already knew that Steve was cross with her for taking up Evie on her offer to stay at her house but he would be even more upset if he found out about what she was doing with Soda. Not that Sandy was scared of Steve Randle, it just cut her sometimes. 

It’s been a while since Soda slept through the whole night. Not that he’ll ever tell anyone that. It makes him feel like a newborn baby, ugly and crying as he tries to find his way back in a world that was ripped from him. It makes him feel stupid to say the least. 

Soda is surprised to find that Sandy is still in his bed. Even in his muddled state last night, he was sure that she was going to sneak out before the sun could come up. She had a tendency to do that, run off with no good reason because she was scared to get too close. Maybe she thought that it would hurt Soda less and that he’d stop trying to find her. Soda couldn’t explain why he was so drawn to her, couldn’t explain why he still wanted her even though she was deftly out of reach. 

Last night seemed different, at least in the way Sandy approached it. There were hardly any words spoken between the two of them. Just two bodies moving in synchronization like they had never been apart. It was unlike any other time that they had been together in that way. Soda can still remember all of those times right under his parents nose and later under Darry’s. He hadn’t minded walking her through it then, making sure not to hurt her and keep talking so that she wouldn’t get scared. She had seemed like a timid animal then, one that he was trying not to scare off. Soda had to walk that line between instruction and reassurance and he’d walked it well. Though he hadn’t realized what he’d been doing until last night. 

He sits up, looking over at Sandy who is bathed in the golden light. He watches the slight rising and falling of her chest, the way that her eyes are missing the lines around them. He’d always liked it when she was asleep. She looks so content in sleep, her face free of any kind of pull that it would usually take. Her blonde hair shines with the morning sun, making Soda smile. 

She stayed.

He knew that deep down this wasn’t going to be good. He was getting his hopes up for a girl that had always seemed to stomp them down again but he couldn’t help it. Nor could he explain the way that he was tied to her. Soda found himself hoping that Sandy had meant what she’d said last night about not judging his worst mistakes, god knows he has a laundry list of them now. But he didn’t think she was lying, not about that at least. She’d lied about plenty else but she’d looked completely sincere when she said that.