the hood of his car's up in the pharmacy parking lot , standing in the dull afternoon glare with the faintly embarrassed patience of a man accustomed to experts and currently surrounded by none.

the car is not broken , probably. it has only begun making a small , accusatory sound from somewhere inside the engine , the kind his father would have identified before angelo finished describing it. three seconds , maybe less , then a look over the hood that would have contained both instruction and exasperation — you hear that and kept drivin' boy ?!

he braces one hand on the frame and looks down into the machinery , willing competence out of stillness.

“ you any good with cars , or we both gon' look concerned at it ? ”

the store's rearranged itself from his last memory of it. ought to be expected , of course , things optimise , he can understand that , but what really makes his stomach cave into itself is that he can't actually remember the last time he shopped for himself. not outside of being somewhere and pointing to things that someone else would ring up on his behalf.

he moves slowly , re-orienting himself with the fact that the cereal is where the coffee used to be , the paper towels are where the cereal used to be. there's a cap on his head hopefully obscuring most of his face , but he knows he's still being watched , something he's been ignoring for the past five minutes. now he'll just have to admit he's a little out of his depth.

angelo carter | TASK  OO1  :  hey  wgn,  welcome  to  my  crib  !

disclaimer: angelo would never open his willow glen residence to media. he's done it in the past for AD , but his hometown, his sanctuary right now is off limits.

" i know i should have come to call on you sooner . " the words fight their way out of the widening warmth of his grin . a loose clutch bouquet of ivory garden roses , white hellebore , ivory spray roses , burgundy lilacs and white ranunculus obscures his hands , " mrs langford , " he offers her the respect first , extending the bouquet towards her .

it's been a long time since he'd picked out flowers by himself , he'd wanted this selection to matter . a piece of his choices , how he sees her . how he wants to think conrad would have . what they might have picked out together after she'd had a rough day and conrad would have outsourced all the actual choosing to him . angelo had never approved of the idea that flowers replaced a real apology and course correction , but that might have been his mother's sharp tongue coming through . conrad had always maintained it was a nice gesture regardless .

he'd swung the door open ready cuss a motherfucker out about a damn documentary they all but been blackmailing him to agree to — can't a man take a second to fuckin' breathe ?

what he sees though , is a time capsule in human form. his face splits into a wide white grin , like its careful countenance has been injected with warmth from the hearth. there's maybe some slyness to it too , the one that touches the features when you're about to show a kid a magic trick.

of all the empty booths at flo's, he'd picked the picnic table because it was outside, off to the side where patrons would pass him without a second glance , out of the natural line of sight.

his half - eaten pie sits in front of him , going soft in the heat ; phone face down beside the plate. it'd buzzed seven times in the last twelve godforsaken minutes.

so far , two strangers have waved , one's valiantly pretended not to stare , someone across the street has definitely taken a photo and then pretended they were checking google maps.

a shadow crosses the table , his phone buzzes again. he doesn't move to touch it and instead sets his fork down , slow and neat beside his plate , spine rolling as if he's about to stretch against his will.

he'd known it'd be a strange feeling being back here , empty hallways that feel so much smaller than in memory , but damn the panthers trophy case hasn't aged well.

the voluntary haunting might have been much more potent if not for the steam from the to - go coffee cup in his hand , looking at the faces of old teammates staring back at him, dawning realisation that he has no fuckin' clue what became of some of them. then he finds himself at seventeen , terrible haircut , all heart , no baggage , kneed he'd now kill to have again , staring back at him. the boy in that photo didn't know how good he had it.

the reflection on the glass flickers , he can feel movement behind him. he doesn't turn around , allowing the silence its moment before his voice echoes.