i speak in smoke signals | the walking dead | rick/shane | pg

[thequakingaspen]

I Speak in Smoke Signals
The Walking Dead, Rick/Shane pre-slash. PG, 1400 words.
Coda to 2.03, "Save the Last One": You take a bottle of whiskey with you to the closed door.

You take a bottle of whiskey with you to the closed door. The liquor’s weight warms a pathway up your arm, makes the veins blue, green, purple scream against the white of your skin. Your arm is weak from giving too much and taking nothing back; it is a prescription written in the core of your bones: gather everything you have and send it away.

Surprisingly, the door does not creak when you open it; the hinges are rusted down with age and wear but they are sturdy and welcome you inside what they hold dear.

What you hold dear.

Shane is sitting on top of the toilet, lid closed, with his legs spread and his hands fallen in the valley between. He does not look at you when you shuffle into the cramped bathroom, but not because he does not acknowledge your presence – he does, always. You think maybe he sees second chances and missed choices somewhere in the grout lining a linoleum floor; or maybe he does not, and that is why he looks at it. Shane has always been the twelve-year-old boy lying in a field of dandelions and wishing he could pull down the stars.

“I come bearing Southern Comfort,” you rasp. The pun echoes along the walls.

Shane glances at your smile. “I’m not so sure I need it.”

You move towards the wall across from him: it is an awkward stumble, you on two legs that do not feel and him on leashed words cradled through feeling too much. “Humor me.” With support from the wall, you descend to the floor beside the sink, your legs stretching out awkwardly beside his bent ones. He has dirt in his toe nails, you think. He has scratches on his arms, you think. He has no water in his eyes, you think.

“You have a new look. It’s nice,” you offer. Shane nods. “It looks as bad as that time Shaylee Collins told you she’d let you take her out back on Route 151 if you shaved your head first.”

Shane laughs and the syllables part his lips, just for an instant. “In that beat up old shit o’bricks, yeah.”

“With the messed up clutch.”

“And the driver’s side window that didn’t roll down.” He is still smiling at memories. They look good on his face.

“Do you remember when the lever broke on the passenger side and we had to rig it up with-”

“-the screwdriver,” Shane crows, rubbing a palm over his mouth. “Yeah, shit. I hated that window, it was such a bitch to roll down.”

“We used to just leave it down and tell everybody that we broke it racing at the Strip.” You remember the drag strip, nestled in trees and dust clouds that brushed the sky; grass went on for miles in every direction and you and Shane used to lean over the plasterboards screening off the crowd and try to catch stars.

The whiskey bottle clinks, quietly, in the space between your legs and Shane’s knees. He rubs a chewed-down fingernail over the cork on the top. An olive branch.

You suck on your bottom lip and say, “You look like a man with the world on his shoulders.”

Shane uncorks the bottle; a loss. “Dustin Richards’ house, summer of sophomore year.”

You look at his eyes until they find yours.

The corner of his mouth tugs; a smile. “The first time you got drunk.”

It is one of those memories that is good in experience but bad in thought; you drank an entire bottle of tequila and puked for an hour, hunched over the toilet seat and rambling to Dustin’s girlfriend about your mom and dad and Shane and things too far away to reach.

“The first time you got puke on your shoes,” you reply with a tilt of your head. Shane smiles again; his lips are chapped and the skin shifts, splits just a fraction but not enough to bleed, only to hurt.

He grips the bottle by the neck and tips back a mouthful. Grimacing when he swallows, he offers you some. “Care to share?”

There are places you and Shane have been that cannot be retold; they exist in the same space as the last breath you took, and you said yes and yes and yesyes a hundred times over a thousand and only once did you say- “No. I’d be more whiskey than blood,” you shake the arm with the bandage around it, “and unfortunately today is not the right day for that.”

Shane looks at the white cloth dotted with your blood. He murmurs, “Yeah,” and licks the rim of the bottle before filling his teeth with sharp whiskey. “How’s Carl?”

“Good,” you exhale, “real good. Doc says he’s gonna do just fine, it’s all about waiting right now.” Shane’s spine meets the back of the toilet; it is a delicate maneuver, just enough tense and release of toned muscles to avoid unnecessary pain. Shane’s body is made up of reactions like that: a synchrony of joints and ligaments and tendons and flesh in harmony to roll forward and push everything else back. It is a thing he has been doing since the night he showed up in your bedroom window with a frown and nowhere to go except by your side.

Perhaps he has never left. Right now it feels like he has, with a thousand letters tangled on your tongue and unable to cross the divide between your caution and his reticence. This is not about voicing feelings or spilling emotions; this is about the cut on his knuckle and the tremor of his thigh, a phantom pain on the wrong leg, and the tears he will not cry, not for you or him or someone left behind.

“You know, I really miss Superbowl Sundays,” Shane laughs, kneading the thigh on the injured leg. A drink, a shiver, and then, “I miss the haystacks Lori would make. Goddamnit could I go for some beans and Fritos right now.”

A chuckle but it is your own. “Melted cheese, diced tomatoes, sour cream, some salsa- shit, that does sound pretty good, doesn’t it?”

Shane points a finger at you and says, “As long as you don’t try to make any more RO*TEL dip.”

“Hey, fuck you, man, those directions are not specific enough.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure you can buy it in a box, already made, or just let Lori make it. She looks better in an apron, too.”

You have not laughed with a smile on your face since before, in that land where McDonalds forgets to give you straws sometimes and traffic sucks and someone is always worse off than someone else. Here, you’re all damned the same.

Here, Shane Walsh has to leave Rick Grimes behind.

Shane looks around the sparsely decorated, cramped walls and fingers the whiskey bottle. There is a lull without words to speed up time; you do not have them and Shane does, but a bridge that used to be built has been torn down and you cannot cross over anymore. Maybe you can, but this is a world where Shane has to watch people die in place of someone else and this room is better off without the sounds of failure that has no one to blame.

He swallows and looks down at the wrinkled patterns in your pants. “Back there,” he says, tongue curling over his bottom lip and eyes here, there, everywhere else.

You say, “I know.”

Shane laughs but it is not enjoyment, it is derision. It is the sound of words no one needs to hear. Cradling your arm against your stomach, you push up from the tile and struggle to your knees. Shane keeps his head bowed; you can visualize the rough stutter of not-hair under your palms, could feel it if you were to touch his head.

You cup a hand around the side of Shane’s face, fingers fanning out where once soft hair would rush up to greet them. Nothing there now but an expanse of stubbled skin; a win. He exhales when you guide his face forward and you press your forehead to his, a moment of sincerity. Close your eyes and rub your hair along his bare head; take everything inside and give it away.

You kiss Shane’s temple and shape fingerprints along his jaw. “You’re okay,” you whisper to the words in his throat.

You leave the silence behind you with a closed door.

---

beta'd by alli. ♥
so i wrote this literally hours after episode three aired, and i'm really lazy and slow so it took me this long to post it. it might even be kind of redundant by now, idk.