second son.

✦ NOAH VON the THIRTY-SIX year old has been in Hidehill for 36 YEARS ON/OFF and was a FRENEMY to Ronnie Nilsson, the most recent shadow of Hidehill. Whispers on the streets are that the MECHANIC who lives in HADLEY PARK are said to be QUICK-WITTED and VIOLENT but I guess we’ll find out for ourselves. 

tws for biography: violence, law enforcement, arrest, injury, blood, murder, overdose.  

Noah looked worse for wear, which means the decision to come and harrass him had been a good one. Her night was only just winding down from loud music still ringing at a constant in her ears, eyes cursed for the last decade with possessing neon aura migraines until the end of time. His, it appears, was at a dead stand still.

And he reeks of hard liquor. Maybe if she wasn’t so stuck in her ways, Maeve would feel queasy that he’s chosen a path all too familiar to her.

Except she was a foot taller now, baby fat all but faded along with the hope she kept so close to her chest.

“You’re right. I think it’s probably the Little Dipper. Tail doesn’t go all the way across the fucking sky or whatever.” 

She shrugs a shoulder, leaning opposite of him on the door hinges. “What? We have a resident NASA guy in the Park, it’d be sacreligious not to get a freebie lesson on space.”

“You know I don’t work for NASA anymore.” Noah says calmly, but with an edge that always trickled in when he found himself stating the obvious. If he still did, there was no chance she would be there asking him any sort of questions. This conversation felt more like an excursion to rub salt in open wounds -- and the most irritating part of it was that it was working. 

“Sure as shit wouldn’t be here if I did.” 

The here was open to interpretation even to him -- Hadley Park? Hidehill itself? He doesn’t know where he wants to be, maybe nowhere. 

     “i’m just saying, for someone like me who loves a good party, should i still go to spain in the off-season time window. like, i don’t know about you but i deserve a holiday.”

“Sounds like you could bring the party wherever you go, so why not the off-season?” It seemed logical enough to him, which may not have been the best way to broach vacation plans, but he rarely went on any of his own so he’s far from an informative source on the matter. 

“Nope. If you haven’t heard me the first time, I just won’t repeat it,” he says playfully, clicking his tongue. “What’s gotten you so distracted anyway?”

“However will I go on with the unknown of whatever wisdom you were about to bestow on me,” Noah teases, pulled from the depths of his own thoughts by Bash’s words. He’s been a terrible conversationalist, he’s certain of that and he has no real excuse for it other than he was too up in his own head to truly be anywhere else. 

“i made a new friend, noah!” lennox gives noah an excited smile. cade had been visiting the record shop a lot as of late and the two just gets along so well over music. “h-he’s been coming to t-the shop a lot, we talk about music…he likes my…erm…music taste.”

“Oh, you did?” Noah practically braces for impact then. Lennox, in all the time he had known her, hadn’t been the world’s most adept judge of character and it showed time and time again when she told him of the new faces in her life who tended to sound like walking red flags to him. 

“you heard what i said.” nicolette said with a sigh, “i don’t think nash should’ve treat nancy’s house like a whorehouse.” it was easier for her to be honest with noah especially when she had a drink in her. “i’m going to fix it.” 

—

“You have met Nash, right?” He asks, the question redundant but then again, so was expecting anything other than that sort of behaviour from their brother. While it was true he was many things, at least consistent was one of them. 

Scout had her hand on his shoulder, though it was a very tall reach given her short stature, adding to the comedy of it all. Mix in the vodka cranberries she’d downed and the enthusiastic way she gestured towards the television screen. “I said, I just don’t get the name Gnash! Like I get he’s from Nash-ville but why the silent G? He’s not a gnat! He’s not even a bug!” The hockey players on the screen zoomed around the ice, sticks clashing as the mascot in question had long since left the screen.

—

Noah tried to keep his amusement at a minimum, given that it seemed she was very clearly beholden to some sort of true passion about the topic she had brought up. It hadn’t been something on his radar beforehand, but glancing from her face to the screen, he could see why it might cause  be causing her to be perturbed. 

“You know, that silent G would have went right over my head,” He confesses, for as smart as he had been told his whole life that he was, pronunciations got him at times. “I’d have been pronouncing that G like the dude was named ganache.” 

He gestures to her empty glass, his own beer having depleted to having only a mouthful left. 

…

“I asked…” Thomas glances over to the woman hysterically crying in the corner. “If we could eat somewhere else… It’s hard to enjoy my food with her wailing like that.”

--

Noah tries his best to be subtle about the way he leans slightly to look passed Thomas to the corner over his right shoulder, where an older woman was perched at a table intended for four by herself, seemingly trying and failing to contain a slew of emotions. 

The faint glow of a MacBook logo indicated that the machine open in front of her was indeed on, but it made him wonder if it shouldn’t be given the devastation that emanated from her space, where soft sniffles seemed to be veering more towards loud wails. 

He couldn’t make out what it was she was saying, other than one word that was said with care -- Bucket. 

Sasha: oh hush. i'm onto you, noah!

Sasha: as for the moms... i honestly don't know why they hate me!

Noah: what exactly are you onto? i'm all ears.

Maisie was having enough fun for two, and so she thought, why not ask Noah for a dance? “Oh, don’t look at me like that - come on, we’re going to dance before the tequila shots wear off on me! Remember when you used to let me dance one your toes? Come on, this will be fun, I won’t step on them or anything. I’ve gotten a lot more coordinated in my old age, you’ll see.” Maisie laughed, nodding. “You won’t even recognize that it’s the same girl.” 

“What’s got you in tequila shots on a Tuesday?” That’s his first question, his second was more along the lines of do I fucking look like I’m the dancing sort? but he knew before he said it that it was too harsh a disposition for a girl who had helped him out of a bind with his daughter more than once. 

The memory brings a laugh to him, it was far from wholehearted but it occurred nonetheless, and that was already more joy than he had been used to the last few weeks. 

Sasha: 🤭

Sasha: quitttt

Noah: can't. 😏

His excuse for lingering near the back door gives her pause, her mouth wrinkling to the side for a moment as she chews on her bottom lip. She hadn’t told him about the Bronco being keyed a couple nights previous – he obviously had bigger things going on that the moment. However, she had brought it into the shop so maybe he had heard about it – either way, the gesture wasn’t lost on her.

And while she is usually the first to assure that she can take care of herself, she gets the feeling that he needs it more than she does.

“Thanks for looking out, I appreciate it,” she tells him, “Saves me having to tip security to walk me out.”

She continues walking, hearing his steps behind her as she begins making her way towards the far end of the parking long. 

“Some guys are into it, you know,” Edie informs him – almost elaborating to say that some guys liked that their girlfriends were strippers. But she wasn’t his girlfriend – sometimes it absolutely felt like she had been, but she wasn’t – so she leaves it at that and swallows it down.

Arriving at her car, she drops down her tailgate to toss her duffle into the back, turning back to face Noah as she latches it back up.

Edie can’t remember a point of her life where she didn’t know Noah in one way or another. She knows him like the back of her hand, even through the moments where she’s tried to convince herself not to. It’s probably what’s always kept her coming back…

But she’s never seen him this broken – like if he would stand still long enough she’d be able to see it ripping at the seams of him.

“Well, Playpen and Pynk Potion, you’d be forgiven for the confusion,” she admits, walking around to her passenger side door and unlocking it before swinging it open and gesturing towards the interior.

“And as for the whiskey I’d say you have the mission accomplished. Get in the car.”

--

Her words offer him little comfort, he’s not concerned with what some guys are and aren’t into. There’s little doubt in his mind that three years stripping at Playpen meant she was some folks preference, their go to girl. It was a statistical anomaly if she wasn’t and for once, it made Noah wish he was bad at math. 

He has about as much right to feel some type of way about that as he did sympathy for the way his own life was turning out, yet he still managed to find a way to feel pretty fucking sorry for himself. That was harder to do when he was sober, when there was nothing to haze the edges of the truth which was plain and simply despite his efforts to complicate it -- it was his own decisions that led him there. 

( To Hadley Park, back to Hidehill, free falling backwards instead of moving forwards. ) 

“Don’t want to get in the fucking car.” He tells her, embodying more petulance in that moment than his own three-year old did when she didn’t get her own way. He wants to take a stand just for the sake of taking a stand, like if he stood in the parking lot all night just because she didn’t want him to then maybe he would have something to show for the evening. 

A couple of more whiskeys inside Playpen and he might have actually validated his own logic -- or lack thereof -- in that scenario, but even with whiskey warming his blood he still has some awareness that he’s being a dick just for the sake of it. 

That didn’t exactly jive with the vow he kept making himself every morning that today would be the day he did better. Most days, he’s forgotten that by noon. 

He abandons his post then, climbing into the passenger’s seat of her Bronco and closing the door behind him. Despite the amount of times he’s been in that very seat, the booze makes it’s presence in his system known with how it took him two tries to actually click the seatbelt into place. 

“Motherfucker.” 

He hadn’t meant to say that aloud, and he blinks when he realises he had vocalised it rather than just thought it, but he doesn’t elaborate further on it. That was the norm for them, half-truths and things left unsaid. 

Mason sighed, looking at Noah, “I asked if we’re starting to resemble our father?” It was something both had talked about never becoming, but they both became pieces of shit in their own right, “did we even have a choice?” He mumbled, looking into the bottom of his glass.

--

“Guess that ties back to how much credence do you put in nature versus nurture,” Noah says after a moment, the question Mason posed was far more daunting than he could address while still sober enough to be able to count backwards from ten. 

“I’d like to think that even though we’re fuck-ups in our own right that doesn’t mean there’s some sort of genetic disposition there that means our girls will be too. But who knows, maybe dad sat across from someone pondering this exact same thing about himself and us.”

starter for @noahvon​ at his home in the late afternoon

She knows she can’t hold off on bringing Amara to his home all day. Even if she’s spent all morning coming up with ridiculous excuses while she was in fact out eating, shopping and snoozing with her daughter. The love for her daughter and desire for her to have everything (and also the fear of her realizing malee may have withheld her father from her and hating her) is the reason she walks up the trailer park home and doesn’t run away. She isn’t superficial by any means and he could live in a cardboard box and she’d still think that he, Noah Von, was still the most run down thing around. But this isn’t about her. After she knocks, she lifts Amara in her arms and manages a smile when he opens the door. “Great you are home. Sorry we were running late. I had a flat.” Her car is behind her and in full view, cleaner than it was the day before because she managed to squeeze in a car wash in, but it’s her lack of caring to even come up with a plausible excuse. 

“I don’t think that she can stay over all night so I’ll pick her up before bedtime. I also made her food.” She pulls the backpack from her shoulder and places it on the ground. Her own jacket and shoes come off because she is still dragging her feet at leaving Amara behind. “Let me put it in your fridge.”

--

“Right where I said I’d be.” Noah says flatly, trying to keep the biting edge out of his tone. That was their norm these days, acidic words and sharp deliveries, but he he was on his best behaviour when their daughter was around. Her presence alone softens him, evidenced in how his demeanour changes when he reaches out to take her from her mother so he could hold her in his arms and greet her himself. 

“Hello beauty girl, daddy missed you, he did.” He tells their three year old, a series of exaggerated kisses to the side of her face  accompanying his words that elicited a series of giggles that made his heart feel full rather than heavy with grief and regret as it had been since he returned home full time. He straightens his hold on her as he looks passed Malee to the seemingly perfectly functioning vehicle parked outside that she had arrived in and swallowed down his instinct to call her out on that lie. 

( Took a liar to know a liar. ) 

“Why can’t she stay?” He asks, his tone getting away from him with the question, bearing that lilt it did when the conversation would be a fight if there wasn’t little ears listening. Holding his palm out flat for her, he lets Amara high five him like she insisted on doing every time he saw and left her, making a yay sound after their hands connected. 

Sasha: you click the clit.

Sasha: that's what you click.

Noah: can't do that virtually.