it's getting dangerous now (original) (raw)

To: beeblebabe
Title: Young Anastacio Plays It Safe
Fandom, Characters, Pairing(s): um
Wordcount: 1700
Spoilers: none!
Rating: G
Notes: Just a little original story.

Karen had volunteered to work the late shift ever since the separation, because it meant that by the time she got home, she was so exhausted that her brain didn't have the strength to dwell on how empty the apartment was, or how she still hadn't managed to clear all his things out, or what she was going to do with the place now that her salary was the only thing keeping her afloat. The only problem was, late nights at the Builder's Square were often so quiet that sometimes those thoughts crept up on her while she was still at work, and no amount of shelving could keep them at bay. Thus, she was locked deep in thought about the mechanics of getting rid of the cigarette-stained sofa she'd always hated (mostly whether or not someone would actually give her money for it, or if she'd have to pay them to get it taken away) when the boy came stumbling in with his letter jacket and handwritten page and told her, "I have a paint and opinion question."

That may have been a new one on her, but it wasn't the strangest request she'd ever had from a customer, so she put down the boxes of galvanized nails she'd only been half-counting and folded her arms across her chest. "Indoor or outdoor?"

"Outdoor," said the boy, who had the name Stacey embroidered in script over the left-hand side of his jacket and a Class of '95 patch on his sleeve. "Okay, so: You come home after a weekend away to find that your teenaged son has, out of the goodness of his heart, chosen a new shade of paint for the house and painted the whole thing himself, just because he felt like doing something nice for you. Do you buy it?"

Karen quite masterfully (she felt) kept a straight face through the entire hypothetical, and when he'd finished, shook her head. "Lord, no."

"Dangit." Stacey shuffled around in his pocket and pulled out a strip of wood that appeared charred at one end. "Then can you help me match this blue?"

She took it from his hands and examined the end without the scorch marks. Paint was not her specialty, but she had a good eye and a few painting classes under her belt, and it wasn't like it took a college degree to match a sample to a swatch. "Have you ever painted a house before?" she asked, cocking an eyebrow.

"When you say 'painted', you mean, like, with a brush, right?" he asked, and when she nodded her head, he shook his.

"Come on." She waved him along behind her, and together they crossed the nearly empty store, he following ever at her heels with the trusting nature of someone deeply afraid that inappropriate or insufficient action on his part might mean certain doom; he kept himself such her shadow that when she stopped suddenly in front of the paint display, he nearly plowed into her, recovering at the last moment by stumbling into a display of brushes. He was all legs and arms, yet he gave the impression of not having had either at such great length for very long, which was endearing. "Okay, how much paint do you need?"

He frowned for a moment, then checked his slightly crumpled piece of notebook paper. "Approximately ninety-three point eight square feet."

Karen felt her eyebrow creep toward her hairline; the kid was smart enough to calculate that kind of area, but dumb enough to create the mess that had damaged it in the first place. Whatever fiery destruction he'd caused, it must've been good. "And did you remove the old paint?" Stacey glanced over to the painting tools, looking a little lost, so Karen picked up a scraper and deposited it in his hand. "Is the surface smooth or rough?" she asked, holding the strip of wood up toward the little test cards she thought might be the closest blue.

"Before? Smooth." Stacey took a deep breath and let it out in a long-suffering sigh, scratching the back of his neck with his free hand. "Mostly I'm just hoping I can make up a good story about the grass."

"...Okay." Holding up the painted strip, she looked him in the eye. "I'm not helping you any more until you tell me what happened."

As young as he looked already, his face got even younger as it took on a sheepish expression, and he scratched at the base of his chin, from which sprouted something that looked half like the beginnings of a goatee and half like the same kind of scorch marks seen on what presumably had once belonged to the side of the house he was trying to fix. "It was just a small pipe bomb," he muttered.

"A pipe bomb?"

"A small one!" Stacey stuck his hands in his pockets and stared somewhere near the vicinity of her shoes. "It wasn't supposed to be a bomb, I swear. I was thinking, you know, Fourth of July! ...And instead wounded up recreating that bit from Apocalypse Now."

Karen rolled her eyes. "...So, was she impressed?"

She hadn't thought it possible for him to look any more shamefaced than he had before, but the bright red shade that took over his cheeks told her she'd got it in one. "Her ... bangs kind of caught on fire."

Though she knew it was probably a bit cruel, she couldn't help it: Karen burst out laughing at that one, holding her hand to her mouth to keep from making a complete idiot of herself. For a moment she was afraid she'd hurt his feelings, but then she saw the corner of his mouth twitch, and like a crack on the surface of an icy lake, once it started, there was no stopping the rest of the smile from making its bold debut across his face. "So," she said, taking a deep breath and trying to regain her composure, "I'm thinking a gallon will be plenty for the area you describe. ...Can't help you with the hair, though."

"I offered to trim it for her," he said, though the look on his face meant he didn't have to detail how well that had gone over. He was a handsome little thing, precisely the kind of guy she would've fallen ass over endtable for twenty years previous -- even if she'd found herself a casualty of his pyrotechnic intentions. But she also had never worn her hair with bangs.

The store loudspeaker chimed, telling all customers still on the premises that the store would be closing in ten minutes, and Karen swiped the appropriate sample card from the colour racks, taking note of the formula printed beneath the closest blue. "Let's mix you up some get-out-of-trouble paint," she winked conspiratorially, and he beamed.

While the machine shook the paint can to the right shade, she grabbed him a small can of primer, a good brush, and a few sheets of sandpaper, just in case the scraper alone wasn't equal to the force of his destruction. As she bustled around, he hopped up on the high counter by the mixing machine, high enough that even his long legs still had a good two feet of clearance over the store's bare cement floor; he didn't watch her, which she'd expected him to do, or stare at the mixer, which she'd seen countless hypnotized customers do, but looked off into a space she couldn't see, that little upward twist still resting on his lips, already planning his next great catastrophe.

Intellectually, Karen knew she probably should have been worried, or at least have taken down his contact information in order to alert some form of the authorities that they had a kid on their hands capable of accidentally constructing a pipe bomb, and she might have done exactly that if he'd shown even the slightest hint of malice or ill intent. But as potential mad bombers went, he was just so damn goofy that she couldn't think it of him. He wasn't a kid whose destructive impulses needed to be stopped; he was a kid who needed to figure out a way of making a living out of them. But that, like everything else, was the hell of it.

The final door-closing announcement came as she returned to him with the primer, and he hopped down, landing semi-gracefully. Handing him the equipment, she was struck with a sudden inspirational urge, and before she could think better of it, she asked: "Can I pay you twenty dollars to come destroy my couch?"

Standing there, arms full of painting supplies, he looked at her like she'd just offered him complimentary tickets to the Superbowl. "...Ma'am, I will destroy your couch for very free."

"How about...." She ushered him toward the exit, on past the last remaining open cashier, as she pulled out a notepad from her apron and jotted down her address and phone number. "I'm off mornings and all day Tuesdays, and we'll consider it an even exchange for making sure your parents don't ever find out."

"Sounds great," he said, and the next Tuesday evening, he and two of his friends showed up, loaded the couch into the back of his pickup, and drove away without specifying what, precisely, would become of that ugly old furniture. The best part was that Karen honestly didn't even care.

She saw him on TV nearly fifteen years later, and she knew it was him even before she heard his name -- though, really, how many Stacey Guerrazzis were there in the world anyway? -- the second she saw him him flash that big grin and press a button that turned an old refrigerator into fiery shrapnel. She laughed until she cried, and when her new husband asked her what was so funny, she couldn't explain any more than to tell him how sometimes, once in a great while, the world worked out just the way it was supposed to.

~*~

by safelybeds