riko or manu | 22 | he/him
my main is @wormcoded. my talking tag is #riko.txt and when i complain my tag is #shut up riko

shark vs the universe

JVL
h
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

Love Begins

ellievsbear
almost home

pixel skylines
AnasAbdin
Show & Tell
ojovivo

Kaledo Art

roma★
Stranger Things

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Keni
noise dept.

Origami Around

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
seen from United States

seen from South Korea

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Ecuador

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Azerbaijan

seen from Germany

seen from Singapore

seen from United States
@anarchistcollie
riko or manu | 22 | he/him
my main is @wormcoded. my talking tag is #riko.txt and when i complain my tag is #shut up riko
— GENDERSWAP MOODBOARD . . .
antoinette baker
( 06 )
" wish i had some ice to put on it . . . "
I’m so sorry for being greedy but can we please just get more gavries kissing 😭
never apologize for wanting to see gavries kissing bro
i don't think i can be trusted with a tlw omegaverse au simply because i don't see them doing all that. every single one of those dudes are betas
hi guys
no to sound like a fic author but sorry it took so long my building caught on fire
Parker, Stebbins & Barko: here
Rewatched The Long Walk last week and realised I never did any art for it back when it came out in September 😫 so I locked in and over the last week got drawing ✌️😌
No one asked for this except me as I am still very fond of the film
HOAppreciationWeek Day 1: Rarin’ to Rip
Oh Hank Olson you deserved the world and so much more </3
You can see where I kinda slowed down with these, but I think I captured what I wanted to convey
special shoutout to my sister for help with the backgrounds !!!
wait okay. tlw food service au inspired by my old location's Horrors.
stebbins is the beleaguered agm who is simultaneously over- and under-qualified for the gm position that he suddenly has to fill because the last gm was transferred to another location across the state. he has not been promoted yet because he's technically still "in training," but that means he's doing twice the work for the same pay and his hours count directly towards the weekly scheduling so he can't give anyone the hours they need or hire anyone new while the major (regional manager) breathes down his neck about labor percentages.
art, collie, pete and ray are shift leaders and they're all still adjusting to the new system because corporate had them change over the software at the till and the kind of safe they use. they did not train them. none of them have food handling certifications, and if they do, it's at least a year out of date.
collie and ray threaten to walk at least once per shift. pete mostly just stands in the walk-in and stares into the middle distance for a few minutes at a time and then goes back out like nothing happened. art chainsmokes right next to the back door when he's mad at the back of house.
hank is a dishwasher who listens to his music with his airpods in but sings along out loud and vapes in the back.
barkovitch has been fired and re-hired like three times and is permanently relegated to back of house positions. control over the jbl must be wrestled from him and he plays bad music on purpose.
pearson has a panic attack in the walk-in about once a week, which he sometimes shares with harkness. he totaled his car two weeks ago and is barely being paid enough to cover his uber fees. harkness's bike got stolen.
curley's a minor so he works half-shifts and tries to weasel out of his breaks so he can eke a little more out of his paycheck, but nobody wants to violate labor laws personally so he's fresh out of luck
the a/c doesn't work in the summer months and part of the ceiling leaks. there's a teeny bit of a roach problem, but they're trying to handle it and what the guests don't know won't hurt them
nobody knows how to make a spreadsheet for inventory and sales. they've been reusing the same old one for years and they just clear it out at the end of every week/pay period
pearson and hank would be so good at being coworkers
Hair
ykw i'm never finishing the time loop fic i'm just gonna start throwing the teeny passages i had out there
Collie jerks awake on the bus. Across the aisle, a scrawny kid with a little stack of colored paper in his lap—swing and a miss, road burn, the stench of blood on hot asphalt—gives him a funny look.
Collie’s gut takes a nosedive into his boots.
Fuck.
He can feel his heart pounding, pulse hammering at his Adam’s apple and behind his eyes. He’s sitting—Christ almighty, that tricky bastard, sitting—for the first time in what must be forever. Or he’s been sitting forever, the way the mild ache in his lower back and his ass suddenly begins to make itself known. His whole body feels caught between sensations, relief in being able to take a full breath getting all mixed up with the sick cramping in his gut and how the whole right side of his face fuzzes in and out like a shitty radio signal.
When he was in eighth grade he got into a fight with Davie Walker (his name is just like yours, Collie, look, you’ll be thick as thieves in no time, won’t you?). Davie had fisted Collie’s hair in one sweaty hand and slammed his head into the bathroom wall. This feels like the half-second after, the breath between the impact and the pain, just before he started flailing back with limbs that were too long for him to know what to do with.
Nothing to flail against here. There’s his jacket, draped over his lap, and there’s the cracked vinyl seat below him and the half-chemical, half-human smell issuing from God knows where, same as the one he sat with for hours before they all piled out at the dropoff. There’s Rank, mama’s boy Rank, and he folds paper pretty damn good for a dead man. The driver hasn’t stopped. He doesn’t know if there even is a driver. Outside there’s nothing but conifers and early morning sun and the Road.
Purgatory is in Maine. Go figure.
Collie buries his face in his hands. Road to Hell, good intentions, whatever the fuck. His memories of the Lakota stories his mom told him are fuzzy, murmured over bedtime when his dad was working late at the plant and couldn’t come into his and his sister Cassie’s room to sing to them as they fell asleep. He thinks he remembers something about the Spirit Road being cold. There was a river in there somewhere, and once you crossed it, you were set. It definitely didn’t involve a Greyhound or skittish white boys throwing him side-eyes when they think he’s not looking.
He hadn’t given much thought to where he might end up. Not recently, anyway—he’d had his share of late nights with his best friend Lorraine when they were teenaged and dumb, heads cloudy with pot and watery beer as they argued whether the televangelists on the radio were full of shit. The only god in Maine was the Road.
Baker had kept faithful, though. Collie peeks out from behind his fingers to do a quick scan of the bus: plenty of boys, some of them even familiar, but no Baker. Off to a better place, maybe, not tangled up with Collie, who’d killed a man, and Rank, who’d slipped trying to fight one. He wonders what the rest of them did to land them here. Tripped each other, maybe. He thinks he remembers seeing a lot of that on the Hill. It’s blurry.
Baker was nice. Wherever he’s gone, Heaven or Louisiana, Collie thinks it probably has a lot of sunshine.
For a minute there, right before Collie had pulled the trigger on himself, he’d thought he might see his dad when he got to the other side. Heaven, Hell, the Spirit World, whichever would claim him, whatever was left over after the Change when the God-fearing State began to chase boys into the arms of the Road to die noble deaths pissing themselves and screaming for their mothers. Collie used to wish for his dad as a kid, the rest of his family crowded around the folding table in the kitchen whenever he had a birthday, one second of total silence before he blew out the candle: please let Daddy come back whole. Same as any other kid whose father had an accident one day and never came home. Never told anyone, mind you, that’d ruin the wish, but he thinks his mom probably knew. She’s always had her ways.
Jesus, she probably saw him die on live television. Or maybe she didn’t. Good chance they killed the broadcast once Collie went after the soldiers. Going against the State is a bad look, but getting one over on it is worse. The feed probably cut out, and when the country tuned back in, Collie would’ve been gone.
He doesn’t know if that’s any better.
Did they sing for him?
They’d sung for his dad at the wake. Collie had been eight and they’d done it twice, once in Algonquin, for Dad, and once in Lakota, for them. Mom led both times. She always had a good voice, and none of Dad’s family had followed him down from Canada, so she was the only one who knew any Algonquin, and only what he had taught her. She, Collie, and Cassie pooled what they could, tried to fill in the gaps Dad left behind to keep the memory and that part of them alive.
Collie swallows hard around the lump in his throat, against the ache there that isn’t a memory of the flash of gunpowder. However homesick he was before has nothing on the fucking abyss opening up in his chest right now.
He doesn’t move. His legs stay firmly rooted in place, breath rattling in his chest as he watches a knot of doomed boys, barely men, amble to their deaths, no limping, no desperate gasping, no carnage or broken bones or severed arteries. There will be. There’ll be the Hill and gut wounds and half-tracks rolling slowly over bleeding legs and any of those fucking morons who think they know what it feels like to be caged in and terrified will find out that they’re dead fucking wrong. Maine is a three hundred and twenty mile-long slaughterhouse.
A couple of them look over their shoulders to stare at him, half-curious, half-baffled.
“WARNING, NUMBER FORTY-EIGHT. FIRST WARNING.” That horrible fucking voice crackles out over the speakers, and something in Collie breaks because what if he’s been given a second chance and he fucks it?
The Major’s sunglasses gleam in the morning sun.
Collie moves his ass.
It doesn’t go any better. Curley is still the first one to get his ticket, and Collie starts peeling at the skin around his fingernails the second he sees the kid start limping. It’s a nervous habit his mom tried to make him break, but his hands are shaking so bad and nothing else stops them. Thinking about her makes it worse. Can she see him? Did she see him hesitate at the dropoff?
Cassie probably did. He’d called his mom last night (last week?) outside the bus depot and her voice shook when she told him Cassie was camped out in the living room even though the broadcast hadn’t even started yet. Came right home from work and sat her ass down in front of the TV.
A breeze kicks up that first night, a ways before the Hill, just past dusk. It sets Collie’s hair flying, blessedly cool on the back of his neck where the sweat’s been pooling.
The air doesn’t smell the same here. Probably all the farmland. Christ, he never got to hit the border, but maybe if he holds out ‘til New Hampshire this time he’ll see a real fuckin’ city.
He laughs to himself. Yeah, right. Who the fuck lives in New Hampshire?
Barkovitch looks at him sideways, all beady-eyed like a starving dog looking for scraps, and Collie snorts again. Barkovitch.
“You crackin’ already, Parker?” Barkovitch says, creeping closer on his skinny-ass legs. He even walks like a stray, somehow giving off the idea of circling even though he’s going in a straight line. “Figured you woulda been the one to beat, big boy. Didn’t expect to see you go this fast. Guess there really ain’t much goin’ on in that fat head of yours.”
“Bark bark, bitch,” Collie says, and just ahead of them, McVries chuckles.
It’s a nice sound. If he’d met McVries some other way, any other way, he’d be the exact type of guy Collie would buy a drink for. Or think about buying a drink for. Even if the answer ended up being no, he doesn’t think McVries would mind too much, the way he looks at Garraty.
Still. Collie’s got some self-preservation. Obviously not fucking enough, but some.
Barkovitch sneers. “Fuckin’ fags.”
“Don’t you got a sister to fuck?” Collie asks. “Or is it just you and your right hand?”
In the harsh light of the halftrack behind them, he can actually see a vein in Barkovitch’s head throb. “I’ll piss in your fuckin’ brains when they finally blow your goddam head off.”
“Yeah?” Collie goads. There’s something about Barkovitch’s fucking face that pisses him off. Could be that shitty bleach job he’s got for hair, could be the way all that rabid insecurity comes off him in waves. It smells like fruit cocktail. He wonders if Barkovitch will kill himself again this time. “Gonna walk me all the way down to Florida, you mouthy freak?”
“Fuckin’ watch me.”
ykw i'm never finishing the time loop fic i'm just gonna start throwing the teeny passages i had out there
Collie jerks awake on the bus. Across the aisle, a scrawny kid with a little stack of colored paper in his lap—swing and a miss, road burn, the stench of blood on hot asphalt—gives him a funny look.
Collie’s gut takes a nosedive into his boots.
Fuck.
He can feel his heart pounding, pulse hammering at his Adam’s apple and behind his eyes. He’s sitting—Christ almighty, that tricky bastard, sitting—for the first time in what must be forever. Or he’s been sitting forever, the way the mild ache in his lower back and his ass suddenly begins to make itself known. His whole body feels caught between sensations, relief in being able to take a full breath getting all mixed up with the sick cramping in his gut and how the whole right side of his face fuzzes in and out like a shitty radio signal.
When he was in eighth grade he got into a fight with Davie Walker (his name is just like yours, Collie, look, you’ll be thick as thieves in no time, won’t you?). Davie had fisted Collie’s hair in one sweaty hand and slammed his head into the bathroom wall. This feels like the half-second after, the breath between the impact and the pain, just before he started flailing back with limbs that were too long for him to know what to do with.
Nothing to flail against here. There’s his jacket, draped over his lap, and there’s the cracked vinyl seat below him and the half-chemical, half-human smell issuing from God knows where, same as the one he sat with for hours before they all piled out at the dropoff. There’s Rank, mama’s boy Rank, and he folds paper pretty damn good for a dead man. The driver hasn’t stopped. He doesn’t know if there even is a driver. Outside there’s nothing but conifers and early morning sun and the Road.
Purgatory is in Maine. Go figure.
Collie buries his face in his hands. Road to Hell, good intentions, whatever the fuck. His memories of the Lakota stories his mom told him are fuzzy, murmured over bedtime when his dad was working late at the plant and couldn’t come into his and his sister Cassie’s room to sing to them as they fell asleep. He thinks he remembers something about the Spirit Road being cold. There was a river in there somewhere, and once you crossed it, you were set. It definitely didn’t involve a Greyhound or skittish white boys throwing him side-eyes when they think he’s not looking.
He hadn’t given much thought to where he might end up. Not recently, anyway—he’d had his share of late nights with his best friend Lorraine when they were teenaged and dumb, heads cloudy with pot and watery beer as they argued whether the televangelists on the radio were full of shit. The only god in Maine was the Road.
Baker had kept faithful, though. Collie peeks out from behind his fingers to do a quick scan of the bus: plenty of boys, some of them even familiar, but no Baker. Off to a better place, maybe, not tangled up with Collie, who’d killed a man, and Rank, who’d slipped trying to fight one. He wonders what the rest of them did to land them here. Tripped each other, maybe. He thinks he remembers seeing a lot of that on the Hill. It’s blurry.
Baker was nice. Wherever he’s gone, Heaven or Louisiana, Collie thinks it probably has a lot of sunshine.
For a minute there, right before Collie had pulled the trigger on himself, he’d thought he might see his dad when he got to the other side. Heaven, Hell, the Spirit World, whichever would claim him, whatever was left over after the Change when the God-fearing State began to chase boys into the arms of the Road to die noble deaths pissing themselves and screaming for their mothers. Collie used to wish for his dad as a kid, the rest of his family crowded around the folding table in the kitchen whenever he had a birthday, one second of total silence before he blew out the candle: please let Daddy come back whole. Same as any other kid whose father had an accident one day and never came home. Never told anyone, mind you, that’d ruin the wish, but he thinks his mom probably knew. She’s always had her ways.
Jesus, she probably saw him die on live television. Or maybe she didn’t. Good chance they killed the broadcast once Collie went after the soldiers. Going against the State is a bad look, but getting one over on it is worse. The feed probably cut out, and when the country tuned back in, Collie would’ve been gone.
He doesn’t know if that’s any better.
Did they sing for him?
They’d sung for his dad at the wake. Collie had been eight and they’d done it twice, once in Algonquin, for Dad, and once in Lakota, for them. Mom led both times. She always had a good voice, and none of Dad’s family had followed him down from Canada, so she was the only one who knew any Algonquin, and only what he had taught her. She, Collie, and Cassie pooled what they could, tried to fill in the gaps Dad left behind to keep the memory and that part of them alive.
Collie swallows hard around the lump in his throat, against the ache there that isn’t a memory of the flash of gunpowder. However homesick he was before has nothing on the fucking abyss opening up in his chest right now.
He doesn’t move. His legs stay firmly rooted in place, breath rattling in his chest as he watches a knot of doomed boys, barely men, amble to their deaths, no limping, no desperate gasping, no carnage or broken bones or severed arteries. There will be. There’ll be the Hill and gut wounds and half-tracks rolling slowly over bleeding legs and any of those fucking morons who think they know what it feels like to be caged in and terrified will find out that they’re dead fucking wrong. Maine is a three hundred and twenty mile-long slaughterhouse.
A couple of them look over their shoulders to stare at him, half-curious, half-baffled.
“WARNING, NUMBER FORTY-EIGHT. FIRST WARNING.” That horrible fucking voice crackles out over the speakers, and something in Collie breaks because what if he’s been given a second chance and he fucks it?
The Major’s sunglasses gleam in the morning sun.
Collie moves his ass.
It doesn’t go any better. Curley is still the first one to get his ticket, and Collie starts peeling at the skin around his fingernails the second he sees the kid start limping. It’s a nervous habit his mom tried to make him break, but his hands are shaking so bad and nothing else stops them. Thinking about her makes it worse. Can she see him? Did she see him hesitate at the dropoff?
Cassie probably did. He’d called his mom last night (last week?) outside the bus depot and her voice shook when she told him Cassie was camped out in the living room even though the broadcast hadn’t even started yet. Came right home from work and sat her ass down in front of the TV.
ykw i'm never finishing the time loop fic i'm just gonna start throwing the teeny passages i had out there
Collie jerks awake on the bus. Across the aisle, a scrawny kid with a little stack of colored paper in his lap—swing and a miss, road burn, the stench of blood on hot asphalt—gives him a funny look.
Collie’s gut takes a nosedive into his boots.
Fuck.
He can feel his heart pounding, pulse hammering at his Adam’s apple and behind his eyes. He’s sitting—Christ almighty, that tricky bastard, sitting—for the first time in what must be forever. Or he’s been sitting forever, the way the mild ache in his lower back and his ass suddenly begins to make itself known. His whole body feels caught between sensations, relief in being able to take a full breath getting all mixed up with the sick cramping in his gut and how the whole right side of his face fuzzes in and out like a shitty radio signal.
When he was in eighth grade he got into a fight with Davie Walker (his name is just like yours, Collie, look, you’ll be thick as thieves in no time, won’t you?). Davie had fisted Collie’s hair in one sweaty hand and slammed his head into the bathroom wall. This feels like the half-second after, the breath between the impact and the pain, just before he started flailing back with limbs that were too long for him to know what to do with.
Nothing to flail against here. There’s his jacket, draped over his lap, and there’s the cracked vinyl seat below him and the half-chemical, half-human smell issuing from God knows where, same as the one he sat with for hours before they all piled out at the dropoff. There’s Rank, mama’s boy Rank, and he folds paper pretty damn good for a dead man. The driver hasn’t stopped. He doesn’t know if there even is a driver. Outside there’s nothing but conifers and early morning sun and the Road.
Purgatory is in Maine. Go figure.
Collie buries his face in his hands. Road to Hell, good intentions, whatever the fuck. His memories of the Lakota stories his mom told him are fuzzy, murmured over bedtime when his dad was working late at the plant and couldn’t come into his and his sister Cassie’s room to sing to them as they fell asleep. He thinks he remembers something about the Spirit Road being cold. There was a river in there somewhere, and once you crossed it, you were set. It definitely didn’t involve a Greyhound or skittish white boys throwing him side-eyes when they think he’s not looking.
He hadn’t given much thought to where he might end up. Not recently, anyway—he’d had his share of late nights with his best friend Lorraine when they were teenaged and dumb, heads cloudy with pot and watery beer as they argued whether the televangelists on the radio were full of shit. The only god in Maine was the Road.
Baker had kept faithful, though. Collie peeks out from behind his fingers to do a quick scan of the bus: plenty of boys, some of them even familiar, but no Baker. Off to a better place, maybe, not tangled up with Collie, who’d killed a man, and Rank, who’d slipped trying to fight one. He wonders what the rest of them did to land them here. Tripped each other, maybe. He thinks he remembers seeing a lot of that on the Hill. It’s blurry.
Baker was nice. Wherever he’s gone, Heaven or Louisiana, Collie thinks it probably has a lot of sunshine.
For a minute there, right before Collie had pulled the trigger on himself, he’d thought he might see his dad when he got to the other side. Heaven, Hell, the Spirit World, whichever would claim him, whatever was left over after the Change when the God-fearing State began to chase boys into the arms of the Road to die noble deaths pissing themselves and screaming for their mothers. Collie used to wish for his dad as a kid, the rest of his family crowded around the folding table in the kitchen whenever he had a birthday, one second of total silence before he blew out the candle: please let Daddy come back whole. Same as any other kid whose father had an accident one day and never came home. Never told anyone, mind you, that’d ruin the wish, but he thinks his mom probably knew. She’s always had her ways.
Jesus, she probably saw him die on live television. Or maybe she didn’t. Good chance they killed the broadcast once Collie went after the soldiers. Going against the State is a bad look, but getting one over on it is worse. The feed probably cut out, and when the country tuned back in, Collie would’ve been gone.
He doesn’t know if that’s any better.
Did they sing for him?
They’d sung for his dad at the wake. Collie had been eight and they’d done it twice, once in Algonquin, for Dad, and once in Lakota, for them. Mom led both times. She always had a good voice, and none of Dad’s family had followed him down from Canada, so she was the only one who knew any Algonquin, and only what he had taught her. She, Collie, and Cassie pooled what they could, tried to fill in the gaps Dad left behind to keep the memory and that part of them alive.
Collie swallows hard around the lump in his throat, against the ache there that isn’t a memory of the flash of gunpowder. However homesick he was before has nothing on the fucking abyss opening up in his chest right now.
He doesn’t move. His legs stay firmly rooted in place, breath rattling in his chest as he watches a knot of doomed boys, barely men, amble to their deaths, no limping, no desperate gasping, no carnage or broken bones or severed arteries. There will be. There’ll be the Hill and gut wounds and half-tracks rolling slowly over bleeding legs and any of those fucking morons who think they know what it feels like to be caged in and terrified will find out that they’re dead fucking wrong. Maine is a three hundred and twenty mile-long slaughterhouse.
A couple of them look over their shoulders to stare at him, half-curious, half-baffled.
“WARNING, NUMBER FORTY-EIGHT. FIRST WARNING.” That horrible fucking voice crackles out over the speakers, and something in Collie breaks because what if he’s been given a second chance and he fucks it?
The Major’s sunglasses gleam in the morning sun.
Collie moves his ass.
ykw i'm never finishing the time loop fic i'm just gonna start throwing the teeny passages i had out there
Collie jerks awake on the bus. Across the aisle, a scrawny kid with a little stack of colored paper in his lap—swing and a miss, road burn, the stench of blood on hot asphalt—gives him a funny look.
Collie’s gut takes a nosedive into his boots.
Fuck.
He can feel his heart pounding, pulse hammering at his Adam’s apple and behind his eyes. He’s sitting—Christ almighty, that tricky bastard, sitting—for the first time in what must be forever. Or he’s been sitting forever, the way the mild ache in his lower back and his ass suddenly begins to make itself known. His whole body feels caught between sensations, relief in being able to take a full breath getting all mixed up with the sick cramping in his gut and how the whole right side of his face fuzzes in and out like a shitty radio signal.
When he was in eighth grade he got into a fight with Davie Walker (his name is just like yours, Collie, look, you’ll be thick as thieves in no time, won’t you?). Davie had fisted Collie’s hair in one sweaty hand and slammed his head into the bathroom wall. This feels like the half-second after, the breath between the impact and the pain, just before he started flailing back with limbs that were too long for him to know what to do with.
Nothing to flail against here. There’s his jacket, draped over his lap, and there’s the cracked vinyl seat below him and the half-chemical, half-human smell issuing from God knows where, same as the one he sat with for hours before they all piled out at the dropoff. There’s Rank, mama’s boy Rank, and he folds paper pretty damn good for a dead man. The driver hasn’t stopped. He doesn’t know if there even is a driver. Outside there’s nothing but conifers and early morning sun and the Road.
Purgatory is in Maine. Go figure.
Collie buries his face in his hands. Road to Hell, good intentions, whatever the fuck. His memories of the Lakota stories his mom told him are fuzzy, murmured over bedtime when his dad was working late at the plant and couldn’t come into his and his sister Cassie’s room to sing to them as they fell asleep. He thinks he remembers something about the Spirit Road being cold. There was a river in there somewhere, and once you crossed it, you were set. It definitely didn’t involve a Greyhound or skittish white boys throwing him side-eyes when they think he’s not looking.
He hadn’t given much thought to where he might end up. Not recently, anyway—he’d had his share of late nights with his best friend Lorraine when they were teenaged and dumb, heads cloudy with pot and watery beer as they argued whether the televangelists on the radio were full of shit. The only god in Maine was the Road.
Baker had kept faithful, though. Collie peeks out from behind his fingers to do a quick scan of the bus: plenty of boys, some of them even familiar, but no Baker. Off to a better place, maybe, not tangled up with Collie, who’d killed a man, and Rank, who’d slipped trying to fight one. He wonders what the rest of them did to land them here. Tripped each other, maybe. He thinks he remembers seeing a lot of that on the Hill. It’s blurry.
Baker was nice. Wherever he’s gone, Heaven or Louisiana, Collie thinks it probably has a lot of sunshine.
For a minute there, right before Collie had pulled the trigger on himself, he’d thought he might see his dad when he got to the other side. Heaven, Hell, the Spirit World, whichever would claim him, whatever was left over after the Change when the God-fearing State began to chase boys into the arms of the Road to die noble deaths pissing themselves and screaming for their mothers. Collie used to wish for his dad as a kid, the rest of his family crowded around the folding table in the kitchen whenever he had a birthday, one second of total silence before he blew out the candle: please let Daddy come back whole. Same as any other kid whose father had an accident one day and never came home. Never told anyone, mind you, that’d ruin the wish, but he thinks his mom probably knew. She’s always had her ways.
Jesus, she probably saw him die on live television. Or maybe she didn’t. Good chance they killed the broadcast once Collie went after the soldiers. Going against the State is a bad look, but getting one over on it is worse. The feed probably cut out, and when the country tuned back in, Collie would’ve been gone.
He doesn’t know if that’s any better.
Did they sing for him?
They’d sung for his dad at the wake. Collie had been eight and they’d done it twice, once in Algonquin, for Dad, and once in Lakota, for them. Mom led both times. She always had a good voice, and none of Dad’s family had followed him down from Canada, so she was the only one who knew any Algonquin, and only what he had taught her. She, Collie, and Cassie pooled what they could, tried to fill in the gaps Dad left behind to keep the memory and that part of them alive.
Collie swallows hard around the lump in his throat, against the ache there that isn’t a memory of the flash of gunpowder. However homesick he was before has nothing on the fucking abyss opening up in his chest right now.