fandomtownies | Outside Luke's, Saturday afternoon

After spending much of the morning flinging himself full speed up and down the stairs around the island with Val leaping after him frantically to keep up/probably yelling at him to be more careful, Eliot decided it was time to spend some time relaxing.

So he picked an awning he rather liked, shoved a battered copy of ~~meta for~~ Treasure Island down the back of his pants, and climbed up on one of the outdoor tables to get into reach of one of the supports.

He loved reading. He especially liked to do so in extremely awkward and hard to get to places. They made it way harder for Gertie to come bug him and get him in trouble for not playing with her.

He lost his grip trying to swing his legs up around the support beam, and barely managed to break his fall by grabbing onto one of the closed umbrellas leaning against the wall. Momentum carried him and the umbrella down to the cobblestones with a thud, and he lay there for a moment staring up at the awning.

"Ow."

Then he grinned, jumped back up, and tried it again.

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"You don't like video games?" Alec asked. "Why not? They're superfun!"

And hard to play when the whole group home had to share one outdated system. Unrestricted access to one was unprecedented!

"Too much sitting," Eliot said. He was very bad at just sitting. "I like games where you move around."

Alec scrunched up his nose. "But then someone's always yellin' at you for runnin' where you ain't s'posed to be."

Alec's life thus far hadn't included a lot of safe places for horsing around outdoors. The streets were full of cars, the basketball courts with teens, the alleys with adults...

Eliot looked around. "Nobody's yelled at me yet, and I been runnin' around all morning."

"Must not seen a lotta adults then," Alec noted. So young. So cynical.

"Nope," Eliot said happily. "Not a single one."

"I wonder where they all went," Alec said, troubled. Not by the lack of adult supervision, but by the absence of what should be all around.

Eliot shrugged, not terribly concerned. "Maybe they're sleepin' in. Or at work."

"You ever seen a time an' place with no adults?" Alec asked. "I ain't." Frowning, he added, "But this island is pretty small..."

He'd never been in such a small town before!

Eliot shrugged. "Sure." He'd grown up in a very different environment than Alec had, after all. "You just gotta wander far enough away from home."

"How far is that?" Alec asked. "Cause even if you go 'way from home, there's still cops an' homeless folks, an' dealers, an' single moms with they kids, an'..."

Yep. Very different.

"Maybe you're going in the wrong direction," Eliot guessed. "Back home you go far enough and it's all fields and horses and cows and sometimes woods and things."

Alec just stared at him for a minute.

"Ain't nothin' like that in Chicago," he said eventually. "Even the parks closest to the home just got blacktop an' some grass."

"It's pretty much all like that in Oklahoma," Eliot said. "Even in the city, you at least got people's yards'n stuff."

The city. There was only one, as far as Eliot was concerned. He'd certainly only ever seen one. That's why it was just called "Oklahoma City".

"Nah, not in Chicago," Alec said. "You gotta be real rich to have a real lawn. Most folks ain't got nothin' like that. Just some chain fence an' maybe a driveway if they lucky."

You were from different worlds, kids.

"That sounds gross," Eliot said. "You should move to Oklahoma."

Well, no.

"You got foster homes there, too?" Alec asked.

Not that he really wanted to move to Oklahoma.

Not that Eliot knew of. He'd never heard of a foster home before today.

"There's lotsa farms," he said instead. "They always need more help. Plus you get to work with animals!"

Which was way better than helping out in a hardware store. Or doing whatever Alec did in Chicago.

The face Alec was making suggested that, no, working on a farm was not way better than doing what Alec normally did. "You mean dig in the dirt tryna get things to grow? An' get bit an' kicked by animals bigger'n me? That sounds terrible!"

He couldn't even drive a tractor with his eyes! No thank you!

"Animals only kick you if you give 'em reason to," Eliot said. "If you're nice to 'em and feed 'em and don't sneak up on them, they're nice to you."

"I dunno." Alec still looked very, very dubious about the whole prospect. "Ain't never dealt with animals much. Or farms. Maybe I should just stay in Chicago."

"There is NO WAY a farm is scarier than drug dealers or winos."

"You can avoid most of 'em," Alec said, shrugging. "Drug dealers ain't want little kids hangin' around drawin' attention an' winos just wanna sleep it off. Not like animals that are all big an' you don't know what they're thinkin'!"

Different. Worlds.

"Animals are easy to understand," Eliot said. "All they want is food and safety. It's people who are hard."

"People ain't much different," Alec said. "But at least people can talk."

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