stay with mike and any of the other losers?
i Think this is too long to be considered a drabble but …. here it is anyway lakjdfs
The air smelled warm, like Mike Hanlon’s father sitting on the front porch with a quiet, thoughtful look on his face as the sun sets before him, or his mother flipping pancakes for dinner while Charlie Pride kisses his wife good morning on the radio. Summer wind blew slowly but surely through one open window of the truck to the other, keeping it cool enough that the keys could sit long forgotten on the dashboard instead of their rightful place in the ignition. They’d driven as deep and far into a lonely, unfenced field off the highway as Bill’s beat up pickup would allow, watched the sun disappear behind the horizon and waited as night draped the sky like a warm blanket. The familiar sounds of crickets and cicadas and all other sorts of night-time creatures climbed into Mike’s heart and sat there, making it too full to stay contained safely in his chest. Mike turned in his seat to look at Bill, knowing it would do nothing to soften the heavy weight of love and home in his heart. Bill was obviously not as affected by it all as Mike was; country life and the small joys it provided (the sweet, gentle caress of summer wind, for example) were not a third parent to Bill like they were to Mike. Nevertheless, Bill had grown up in the outdoors right alongside the rest of the losers and he looked natural in it as he scribbled something on an old yellow legal pad. As Mike considered him, watched the way his pencil moved across the page, the way his mouth turned downwards whenever the pencil stopped, Mike could see that Bill was headed somewhere that was not Derry. No, Bill was already on his way somewhere that would take him light years from beat up pickups and nights so quiet you could hear the stars whispering secrets to each other.Â
It did not make him sad to know he only had so long before Bill gathered his words and love and bravery and threw them haphazardly into a suitcase and left for grander things. Bill was meant to speak and write and it was, Mike thought, as thought the world had been created to listen to him. And so it was right that he should leave. And though it did not make him sad, it scared him beyond belief. How would the world shape him, once he escaped from the suffocating, isolating hands of Derry? And though the rational part of his brain knew it was impossible, Mike worried that when, in twenty-three odd, inevitable years or so, they met again, Big Bill would not be the same sweet, stuttering boy he was now. Mike leaned over a brushed a mosquito off of Bill’s cheek. Bill looked up, and smiled a soft, boyish smile that sent Mike heart over the edge. It burst, sudden and painful, and Mike had to quicky lean over and kiss Bill’s cheek to keep it from running out his eyes. After, he quietly took the pencil out of Bill’s hand and gently straightened his fingers so his hand was flat against Mike’s. Bill watched him do so, eyes amused. And then Mike placed Bill’s hand against Bill’s chest, close to his heart. He held it there, and the car was silent for a moment as Bill waited for Mike to speak and Mike waited for the words to climb through the rubble of his broken heart and into his mouth.Â
“Promise me,” he began, voice firm and sure and afraid. It was the same voice he would use again two decades later, asking Bill to come home. “Promise me you will stay the Bill I grew up with, no matter where you go or what you do.”
Bill searched Mike’s eyes to see how serious he was being and found his entire future laid out clearly inside them; moving away, forgetting his childhood and the family he had made during it, writing his way to fame and fortune and losing himself along the way. He cupped Mike’s face with his free hand and wished he had the power to mold his future into something else, something that wouldn’t take him away from the boy who sat across from him now. “I promise,” he said anyway. Mike smiled at him sadly, as though he knew words alone could do nothing to alter the paths they had begun to walk the moment the seven of them had become one. He sat back in his seat and began to wait for his heart to repair itself and for twenty-three long, lonely years to pass.
send me a word and a pairing
