count the headlights on the highway

killed them all 🥺

i'm sorry i've been gone for a while, i had a lot of grief and personal matters that kept me offline. in that time, i was, and still am quite depressed. i hadn't really drawn at all, so getting back into a creative mindset was quite difficult for me because i lost interest in everything. time passed so quickly and before i knew it, it was already 2025.

“Hey man,” said Hector, coming back from the huddle of organizers, “so, great news. Toretto’s gonna let you off the hook for the pink slip. He figures you’ve suffered enough.”

“Yeah,” Brian agreed dully. “Great.” His car was still upside-down. And on fire.

Hector clapped him on the back. “Chin up, white boy. At least you got out in time, you know what I’m saying? Could’ve been way worse. Hey – you need a ride to the hospital or something?”

Brian’s entire net worth was the $4 in his pocket and whatever he could maybe get for pawning his sneakers; he hadn’t had health insurance ever in his entire life. His broken bones were just going to have to work their own shit out. “Nah man, thanks.”

Hector raised his eyebrows and gave Brian an incredulous look up and down – his singed clothes, bloody face, palms still with little pieces of glass embedded – then said, “Cool, gringo, suit yourself,” and sauntered off.

Brian went back to watching the Eclipse burn.

It was his fault, probably, for working on her tired. Cars didn’t just explode by themselves, even if they had NOS in them, even if you flipped them seven times going 160 mph. He must’ve fucked something up the last time he was under the hood, didn’t tighten a connection enough or punched a hole in a fuel line without realizing – he could fucking kick himself. He could throw himself off a fucking cliff. Stupid. He was so fucking stupid, racing the car he also lived in. But he couldn’t afford LA rent prices with what Harry paid him, and he couldn’t get hired anywhere else without a diploma, so what the hell else was he supposed to do? There wasn’t exactly a wealth of opportunity available to eighteen-year-old dropouts.

Sirens started up in the distance and everyone split for their cars. Brian bummed a ride with some twitchy kid heading back towards his neck of the woods – Jesse, he said his name was – then hoofed it the last mile or so back to Harry’s garage. It was starting to cool off fast but his jacket and his hoodie had both been had been in the Eclipse when it went up. Hell, all his clotheshad been in the Eclipse when it went up.

It was a long shot, but he hammered his fist on the locked door of the garage – the light was still on in back, Brian knew he was here – until Harry came out to tell him to fuck off. Brian hadn’t expected anything less, but Jesus Harry was a stingy old fuck – Brian knew for a fact there was a cot in the back office that no one ever fucking used, he literally had nowhere else to go except a bench or a fucking sidewalk somewhere, and still the old man wouldn’t let him crash. It was complete bullshit. But if Brian lost this job he’d really be screwed, so instead of hanging around arguing he shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and started walking again.

Rome was just about the only friend Brian had in the world, and Rome was in prison. He couldn’t call his mom, because even if she did come, all she’d do was smack Brian around for a while and then leave, but anyway she wouldn’t bother driving all the way out here for that. Once she heard it was Brian she’d probably hang up the fucking phone.

There were a few homeless shelters Brian knew about, but it felt weird to even consider them – he wasn’t homeless, he was justtemporarily hard up for sleeping arrangements, and anyway he’d heard some truly vile shit went down in those places and he’d rather sleep rough on the freezing ground than wake up in the middle of the night to some old creep trying to feel him up. So he folded his arms and started walking toward the park. Maybe grass was secretly really warm to sleep in, or some shit. Maybe someone would’ve left a newspaper he could cozy up in.

His right knee was fucked, and he hadn’t managed to pick all the pieces of glass out of his palms yet – his fingers were too big and clumsy, he needed tweezers he didn’t have. It was gonna be a pretty miserable night, but Brian had suffered through plenty of miserable nights and survived just fine – he’d figure it out in the morning.

He did sort of wish Echo Park had less hills, though.

The roads weren’t empty – it was LA, the roads were never empty – but Brian could tell when one of the cars slowed up and idled that the driver was looking at him. He was just about to turn around and tell the asshole to get lost when they gunned it so they were right along next to him and rolled down the passenger window; Brian recognized the car before he recognized the driver – it was Toretto, the guy he’d been neck-in-neck with for five glorious miles before he clipped a median and flipped the car.

“Hey!” Toretto called. “You’re that dumb kid with the Eclipse – why the fuck aren’t you at the hospital?”

Brian made a face. “I’m not a kid!”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Toretto said. It would’ve helped Brian’s ego if he sounded angry or at least a little irritated – after all, Brian had put up a pink slip, nearly beat him, then lost and blown up a car that was technically Toretto’s. But the asshole just sounded bemused, like Brian was a puppy who kept digging up the same hole in the yard. “Why the hell aren’t you at the hospital?”

“Fuck off, man,” Brian muttered.

There were cars honking behind him so he pulled over to the curb and stopped. Brian could’ve kept walking but it wasn’t like he really had anywhere to go, so he stopped too. Toretto stared at him through the window, heavy, not saying anything. Brian squirmed.

“For someone who wants me to fuck off, you sure did stop to talk,” Toretto said.

Brian clenched his teeth together so they wouldn’t chatter and didn’t say anything. Pretty much anything he could’ve said would’ve made him lose face, and he still wanted to beat this asshole someday, which meant he had to be able to show up at a race without getting laughed halfway to Mexico. Not that he had a car right now to race, but that was an issue for another day. Tomorrow, maybe. Or the day after.

“You want a ride back home?” Toretto offered.

Even if Brian’d had somewhere to go his pride wouldn’t have fucking let him say yes. Too many people offering him rides tonight, like he was a fucking kid. He shook his head and didn’t say anything.

Toretto looked for a second like he might drive off, then swore under his breath – pissed at himself for what he was about to do – and said, “Get in.”

Brian would’ve liked to say he thought about it for a second, but he didn’t. He got in.

He was trying not to let on that he was cold – it was like 60 degrees outside, being cold was fucking pathetic – but he was shivering so bad that Toretto reached into the back seat and forked over a leather jacket. Brian pulled it on before he could remember he was supposed to be saving face; it was huge on him and smelled like sweat, but it was fucking warm. The burns on his neck and arms stung. Toretto pulled back out into the street and merged with traffic.

Brian sunk down into the seat and watched Toretto’s hands on the wheel, easy, not clenched, steady. “Where we going?” he asked.

“Noticed you had a bunch of junk in the back of the Eclipse,” Toretto said, instead of answering. “You were living in that car, weren’t you?”

Brian didn’t answer, but Toretto took one glance over at his face and knew. He swore under his breath again, then said, “We’re going home. My sister can patch you up. Then we’ll figure out what to do with you.”

“What, so I can pay off my pink slip?” Brian shot back, defensive – if Toretto thought he was going to just show up and decide Brian’s life for him because of some dumb bet –

Except “No, you idiot,” Toretto said. “I’m not an asshole. What are you, fucking sixteen? I’m not letting you sleep on a park bench. At least not while you’re covered in blood.”

“I’m twenty,” Brian lied.

Toretto snorted. “Sure you are. And I’m the Queen of England.” They turned off onto a residential street, rows of quiet houses in the dark, no streetlights. “Just say thank you and take the help, kid.”

“I’m not a kid,” Brian snapped again.

“Well then,” Toretto said, still with that mild fucking tone ilke Brian was a puppy, “why don’t you tell me your name, so I know what else to call you.”

He pulled into a driveway packed with other cars – Brian recognized Jesse’s, and a few more from the race, that girl Letty who everyone was always afraid was gonna cut their fucking balls off – then put the Skyline in park and turned off the engine. There were lights on in all the windows of the house; Brian could see people in the kitchen – a girl at the sink, laughing and rinsing dishes, some big guy pulling a beer out of the fridge behind her. Probably he should’ve been more worried about the fact that he'd just let some total stranger from a street race drive him home, but it wasn’t the dumbest thing he’d done in his life. It wasn’t even the dumbest thing he’d done today. Mostly he just wanted to go inside – maybe Toretto would feed him, maybe he’d let him crash – and this looked like the sort of house that Brian had never lived in, had never even really visited, where people sat around the kitchen table together and enjoyed coming home at the end of the day and laughed in a way that wasn’t mean and went to bed without locking their doors.

He wanted to go inside, so he told Toretto, “My name’s Brian. Brian O’Conner.”

Toretto watched him for a minute in the dark of the car, then said, “Nice to meet you, Brian,” in that deep rumbly voice that made Brian’s stomach flip for some reason. He held his hand out over the gearshift. “I’m Dom.”

Brian was wearing the man’s jacket – it was only polite, he figured. So he shook his hand.

###

Dom’s sister Mia turned out to be pre-med, plus she volunteered at a free clinic on the weekends – she insisted she wasn’t really qualified to be looking at second-degree burns, but since Brian wasn’t interested in going to the hospital and no one here was enough of a goody two-shoes to make him, she caved and did her best.

“Thanks,” he said, while she was disinfecting the tweezers, leaning over the sink with her hair tucked behind her ear, exposing the delicate line of her neck. “You know, you should let me buy you dinner sometime. As a thank you.”

Mia just raised her eyebrows, which – ouch. He wasn’t the smoothest guy in town, but he was pretty cute. Other girls had told him, not to mention a few guys. You look like one of those guys in porn who comes home too early from school and ends up fucking his step-mom, the last girl he’d talked into going out with him had said, which Brian chose to take as a compliment.

But Mia just asked, “Are you even old enough to be hitting on me?”

“I’m twenty!” Brian insisted, indignant.

Mia snorted the exact same way Dom had.

“Alright, fine, I’m eighteen,” Brian admitted, deflating. “But come on – it’s not like I’m in high school or anything. I know what I’m doing. I could show you a good time.”

Mia smiled, a little softer this time. “I’m sure you could,” she said, holding his hands palm-open in hers, which was nice – until she dumped like half the bottle of antiseptic on them, which took some of the niceness out of things. “But I don’t date strange boys my brother brings home. Sorry. Company policy.”

“Sounds like a dumb policy to me,” Brian muttered, but he didn’t push it – after all, she was picking glass out of his hands, and her brother was maybe hopefully going to let him crash in their house. Brian would’ve traded a roof over his head for not dying a virgin, but he was also really fucking tired.

Mia swaddled him in a bunch of bandages he wasn’t going to be able to pay to replace, then made him take off his jeans so she could look at his busted knee. Dom knocked on the door while she was kneeling in front of him, Brian sitting up on the closed toilet, and didn’t wait for an answer before pushing inside – Brian jolted about a foot in the air and said, “Hey man, it’s not what it looks like – ” but Dom only snorted and said, “Relax, I know it’s not, hotshot. I’m warming up a plate – you eat yet?”

The last thing Brian had eaten was a couple of protein bars for breakfast yesterday, scrounged out of the glovebox of an old Ford pickup somebody brought into Harry’s. You eat yet? implied there was a schedule to meals and that he was owed one at certain times, which in Brian’s experience had never really been true, but he was fucking hungry, so he said, “No, not yet. Thanks.”

Mia declared his knee not broken, made him put his pants back on and helped him hobble down the stairs into the kitchen, where Brian fell on his plate like a starving man and didn’t even really register what he was eating until he looked up halfway through to find Dom and Mia staring at him across the table with twin expressions of shock.

He put down his spoon in what was left of his mashed potatoes and said, “Uh, sorry. You guys normally say grace or something?”

Dom just kept staring at him, which was freaky, but Mia put on a very gentle voice and asked him, “Brian, when’s the last time you ate?”

Brian figured yesterday morning probably wasn’t a good answer, so he shrugged instead. Mia sort of looked like she was going to cry.

“It’s really good?” Brian tried, uncomfortable – no one had ever really taught him table manners, but he figured it couldn’t hurt to compliment the chef. “I usually just eat like, canned tuna or something. So this is – five stars. Gourmet.”

Mia looked cautiously amused now, which was better than whatever had been going on a second ago. “My cooking’s better than canned tuna,” she said flatly, “wow, thanks so much,” which made Dom laugh next to her – a low, rumbling sound – and eased the tension in the room, so Brian could at least go back to inhaling his food.

And then the back door opened and whole pack of people came in from outside – Jesse, pale as a ghost in his beanie, and Letty the alleged castrator and a couple of guys Brian recognized vaguely from around the races but didn’t actually know, one big and one slick like a seal.

They were laughing at something and shoving each other, and the big guy broke off with a slow whistle when he spotted Brian at the table. “Ohoho, what’s this, Dom?” he asked, in a dangerous, too-drunk voice. “You gonna make the poor kid pay off the pink slip on his knees?”

Brian and Dom were both up out of their chairs in a second.

Mia snapped, “Vince,” in a reproachful voice, and Brian shot back furiously, “Come over here and say that to my face, you dick,” but Dom was the one who slammed Vince up against the wall.

“You really think that about me, get out of my house,” he said dangerously, his mouth an inch from Vince’s ear, “otherwise, shut the hell up.”

Vince wasn’t exactly calm when Dom let him go – he was still red-faced, clearly spitting mad, but he didn’t say anything else, just glared at Brian and avoided Mia’s gaze while he went slamming out of the kitchen. Brian’s heart was slamming in his chest – he’d been ready for a fight, one of those scraping, biting fights he’d had in juvie – but the rest of them – Jesse, Letty, and the guy with the slicked-back hair – took it in stride, like this was something that happened all the time: Dom chucking people against walls and delivering ultimatums. Maybe it was.

Brian sunk down slowly into his chair. The other three joined them at the table, grabbing more beers out of the fridge, turning up the music from the radio on the window sill over the sink, and gradually, his pulse stopped racing. He finished his potatoes.

Mia jury-rigged a cover for his arm out of a plastic shopping bag and let him have a shower, and when he got out there was a folded pile of clothes on the counter – men’s clothes, too big for him. Brian didn’t really want to let his other clothes out of his sight, since they were the only ones he had, a ripped-up pair of jeans and a t-shirt for some band he’d never even heard of, $1 at Goodwill, but putting them back on when they were covered in blood and sweat and gravel would’ve been crazy person behavior, so he just dug his last $4 out of the jeans pocket instead, and his cheap Nokia cell phone, and the fake drivers license that said Brian Earl Spilner.

The house was quiet when he shuffled out, barefoot, hair damp. It sounded like everyone had gone home. Mia was humming to herself in the kitchen, and Dom was waiting for him at the top of the stairs, sitting against the wall.

“Hey,” Brian said, suddenly awkward. “So – thanks for, uh – ”

Dom stood up slowly, all 6 feet and 200 pounds of him, and took Brian’s dirty clothes, then herded him down the hall into a guest room – charming, homey clutter, a bed that Dom unearthed from under a few boxes, the beige comforter dusty but clean and full-length and, most importantly, not the back seat of Brian’s Eclipse. Brian stood in the doorway staring at it and trying not to look like he was having sexual thoughts about a twin-size bed; by the way Dom’s mouth quirked he probably didn’t succeed.

“You got work in the morning?” Dom asked. “Harry’s, right?”

Brian’s brain clicked back to the present. “Yeah,” he said. “Seven A.M.”

Dom nodded. “Mia gets up for school at six. She can wake you.”

“Thanks,” Brian said – and then, when Dom started to leave and close the door behind him, “Hey, wait a second.”

Dom waited. He was a shadow in the doorway, like one of those boogeymen kids told each other scary stories about, big and too silent for how big he was, his unwavering gaze more than a little unsettling, but for some reason looking at him Brian just felt quiet.

“Why are you doing this?” he made himself ask. “I mean, I’m grateful, don’t get me wrong. But you don’t even know me.”

Dom stared at him for another second. Then he shrugged and said, “You needed help,” like it was easy as that – like people helped other people all the time just because they needed it.

peter parker & tony stark | 2.1k | rated G | complete

captain america: civil war missing scene, character study

Tony was about to make some quip about Peter bringing homework with him on a superhero summons, but the words got stuck in his throat as it hit him that he’d brought a kid to what turned out to be a far more serious fight than he’d anticipated. Peter had a black eye to mirror Tony’s own, and all Tony could think was, This wasn’t supposed to happen.

my piece for the @iamironmanzine! a collab with @tinydance, check out their awesome art here!