guess I should start using this thing
Oct. 8th, 2010 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
americanleaguerSo here are some random snippets of things.
Abandoned piece of previous occupant, before it switched from Granderson's PoV to Jackson's.
"So how's he working out?" he asks, real casual, like the answer doesn't mean anything much to him. Inge shrugs. "C'mon," Granderson says. "I know you, I know you have an opinion."
"He's fine," Inge says, rolling his eyes up. "He's, whatever. He makes some fancy catches, but half the time it's 'cause he's standing in the wrong place to start, so it's gotta be more dramatic than it shoulda been. He can hit pretty good. I mean, home runs, not so much, but he hits. He's just... he's fine."
"Ringing endorsement."
Inge shrugs again. He's not staring at the ceiling anymore, but he is still not looking at Granderson, which is, hmm. Interesting.
"How about in the clubhouse?" Granderson prompts.
"Well, jeez, Grandy, he ain't you. What else do you want me to say?"
"Nothing. That wasn't what I... I mean, obviously he's not me. I was just... we had a good clubhouse, yeah?" Inge nods, looking down to rub at the still-new-to-Granderson tattoos on his forearms. "I just sort of hated the idea of it getting all broken up. That clubhouse, how it was working. Seemed like that would be... just, a shame. That's all I was asking after."
"He ain't you," Inge repeats, softly. Granderson shakes his head, but secretly, in a tiny dark compartment of his self, locked deep down and away, he is a little bit pleased.
Completely abandoned Inge/Pedroia boarding school AU fic.
Brandon always waited at least an hour after Lights Out to make his move. That had been a rookie mistake, trying to sneak out as soon as the school went dark; the teachers were still patrolling then, looking for kids with flashlights under their sheets or whatever, and Brandon had nearly been caught a few times before he adjusted. He had adjusted, though, and he hadn't had a close brush in months; this was why he was considered the expert, the best man for the job.
The Kaline School was pretty isolated during the school year. Unsupervised off-campus travel was strictly prohibited, and they were way out in the middle of nowhere anyways, so even if you did manage to sneak out, if you didn't have a car, where would you go? The only other place worth visiting for miles around was their sister school, the Epstein Academy (the teachers always called it a 'sister school', but among the kids this was a joke, sisters, ha ha; it was all-boys just like them). The kids at Epstein were stuck under a similar set of rules, but they were isolated with a different set of food and books and things sent from home. The kids at Kaline would get bored with what they had, the kids at Epstein would get bored with what they had, and that was where Brandon stepped in.
Once every two weeks-- around that, anyways; he tried to keep his schedule irregular to reduce the odds of getting caught-- he would take whatever the Kaliners had managed to scrounge up. He'd sneak out of his bedroom, usually via the roof. He avoided detection by hopping roofs until he got to the wall around the campus property, which he could scale easily; it was old stone, slipped and cracked in many places, plenty of hand- and foot-holds for a nimble kid with a sure grip. Then he would sneak through the woods to the Epstein Academy, just about a mile, an easy run for anyone in good shape. He'd scale their wall, skulk around until he found a window with the usual signal of a red handkerchief dangling out of it, climb up to that, and initiate a series of trades. He would bring back the goods and the Kaliners paid him for the stuff with whatever they had: spare change, chewing gum, little plastic toys, magazines that weren't too out of date yet, baseball cards.
It was a pretty great system. Kids at both schools benefited, Brandon himself made a tidy profit, and the teachers were none the wiser. All he had to do was stay quick, stay sharp, and avoid stupid mistakes.
---
He shifted the straps of his backpack, trying to redistribute the weight. There were a lot of books this week, so it was pretty heavy. Books were the worst; even pies from home weighed less than books.
This was the trickiest part. The building closest to the outer wall and thus best-suited to his escapist purpose was Cobb Hall. A lot of the teachers had offices in Cobb Hall and some of them might still be awake, grading papers or doing whatever it was they did in their offices after hours. Brandon liked to take that roof as his final approach, but he had to do it really quietly: no stomping around, and God help him if he slipped and had to catch himself. No way to do that without making a racket.
It was important to pay attention to each footfall, lest he lose his footing on a wonky tile or step on a clump of wet leaves. He edged up to the library dormer window, shining a beacon of yellow light out at the wall. Feeling his way along its spine, he paused to look at the wall. Because he was next to the out-thrust dormer, not in front of it, nobody looking out the window could see him, not unless they had eyeballs on stalks, so it was ok to take a few seconds and give it the old once-over while he still had the chance and the vantage point.
The wall looked like it was in OK condition, no new broken spots that he could see. He checked the drainpipe down the side of Cobb Hall, the short patch of shadowed ground between that and the base of the wall where he planned to climb up. It all looked good. Situation normal.
Something twitched, a hint of a retinal afterimage, drawing his eyes back to the wall. He looked harder, and-- holy shit!-- there was something crawling over the wall, right there in the light. Something dark and lumpy, moving slow as it awkwardly hauled itself over the lip of the wall. What the hell? He crouched down next to the dormer, making himself as small as he could, hiding in the deepest shadows. Some kind of animal, maybe? Like, a big fucking raccoon? There was no way it could have smelled him up on the roof. Maybe it came in to raid the trash cans or something. That had to be it. He'd just wait until it had gone. And, shit, hope none of the teachers saw it; if they did, they'd be out on the grounds chasing it off, and there'd be no way for him to sneak out tonight.
The dark shape paused on top of the wall, all hunched over into a shapeless mound. It shifted and started to make its way down onto the Kaline School campus. There was one moment where it hung, splayed out against the wall, toes feeling for the ground, lit up like a convict in a prison spotlight. It quickly dropped out of sight and rolled into the shadow, but that moment had been long enough for Brandon to see that it was no big raccoon. That was a person. A kid, not much bigger than him.
He stood up, shifting his shoulders to keep the backpack's weight from overbalancing him. Another kid sneaking around at night? Hell no. Brandon did all the sneaking around here, thank you very much.
---
Once his eyes had readjusted to the dark, it was easy to see the kid, who had stayed right at the edge of the light, back pressed to the wall, looking around like he wasn't sure where to go next-- which he probably wasn't, because Brandon didn't recognize him, so he wasn't from Kaline. Process of elimination: he was either some kind of feral forest-dwelling wolf kid, or he was from Epstein. He wasn't, like, covered in dirt and bugs and shit, so Epstein was more probable.
Brandon looked him over carefully. He didn't see any big obvious gun-shaped lumps and the kid's hands seemed to be empty. He had a big chin and a funny, beaky nose. He didn't seem to be much younger than Brandon, although he was, like Brandon, small for his age. Brandon wasn't really sure what else to look for. He didn't know how to tell a psycho murderer from a normal grubby kid sneaking around at night. The kid didn't look dangerous, though.
Snap decision. "Psst! Hey!" Brandon hissed. The kid's head snapped around, his eyes shining briefly with reflected light. "Who're you and what're you doing here, huh?"
The kid sprinted through the patch of light to stand next to Brandon. So he obviously knew it was bad to hang out in the light-- how come he'd climbed over the wall right there, then, huh?
He stuck out a hand. "You must be Brandon Inge? Hi! I was looking for you, I dunno how I was gonna find you."
Brandon eyed the kid's hand dubiously. It was a little scratched up, probably from the wall. Had the kid let himself be seen on purpose, hoping Brandon would find him and somehow trusting that a teacher wouldn't? "Who're you?" he repeated.
"Dustin. Dustin Pedroia." The kid waggled his hand. Brandon frowned, but shook it. Pedroia had a strong grip for a little guy.
"You're looking for me?"
"You're the kid who does the trade runs," Pedroia said. "The older kids told me if I wanted to get on that, I should talk to you. And I thought, hey, I can do that on my own, easy, but if I'm headin' over there anyways, I may's well talk to the kid."
"Get on that?" This did not sound good. Brandon did the trades, he did the inter-school trafficking. He was that kid. He did not need some snotty little interloper horning in on his turf.
Pedroia shrugged. He had on an oversized t-shirt, which made him look a little bigger, but it was clear that under the fabric he was a skinny kid. "Soon's I heard about that system, I thought, well, how come it's Kaline with the runner? Shouldn't there be one from each school? To make sure it's fair and all that?"
"It's fair!" Brandon said, indignant. "It wouldn't work if nobody trusted me to carry stuff fair, and it does work, so it's, like, pretty obvious that everyone thinks it's fair." The nerve of this kid, jeez.
"Hey, man, no offense. I'm just saying." Pedroia shrugged, like he hadn't just been incredibly rude. "Everyone will know it's fair and stuff if there's two of us and we're working from different schools. Anyways, it'll be a lot better with two. We can do trades quicker, we can meet more often, which means getting paid more often, right? The more stuff we move, the harder it'll be for teachers to keep track of who has what, so they'll be less likely to notice if someone has a new magazine or whatever. It'll be great."
"You got it all figured out already or what? Cocky sonofabitch," Brandon said.
"Yeah, hi. Like I said, Dustin Pedroia. Nice to meet you." Pedroia grinned. Brandon wanted real, real bad to hate him, but he could already tell that it just wasn't going to happen.
---
He had to admit that the kid had style. Running a mile through the woods at night, to a school whose layout he didn't know at all, just to hope that a kid he'd never met would see him sneaking in so they could have a conversation? That was pretty ballsy stuff. But Pedroia had done it, and he'd pulled it off. Maybe Brandon could work with that.
Mr. McClendon cracked his wooden pointer down on Brandon's desk, making him jump. "You payin' attention?" he barked.
Well, jeez, now he was. Brandon straightened up in his seat and tried to look like the chalky scribbles of whatever on the blackboard meant something to him. He'd never seen Mr. McClendon actually break a pointer, but he was always smacking them on desks, bringing them right up to the point of shattering. There was probably some kind of art to it. Lessons in Terrifying Young Boys Via Sudden Thunderous Pointer Application. Or something.
His notes were a mess. The first few lines were filled with appropriate equations-- Mr. McClendon taught Physics-- but then they'd started copying down charts of cannons with arcing cannonball paths, and Brandon had lost his ability to focus. His cannons had quickly gained pirates, and then they were bombing a fortress, which turned into a vague approximation of the Epstein Academy. He drew in Mr. Epstein, the headmaster, as a stick figure surrendering to some more pirates. The Kaline School's headmaster was Mr. Leyland; the guy they were named after (Al Kaline, like the battery, ha ha, joke) was, like, older than dirt.
Since they were using cannon, there should be a big hole in the wall. He drew it in, scribbling to make it black, implied-deep, like all good holes should be. He drew himself in stick figure form coming out with a big bag over his shoulder. Looting the goods. That was what the victors did, so it had to go in.
After a moment's thought he drew another stick figure next to him, holding its own bag. He tried to give it a beaky nose, but he couldn't get it to look right. Well, whatever. He would know who it was supposed to be.
"Nice," Verlander said, leaning over. Brandon shielded his notes with one arm, giving Verlander a dirty look. Make sure Mr. McClendon knew exactly where to look for trouble; yeah, that was totally the best way to go about things. "Can I see?" Verlander asked.
"No," Brandon muttered, but he was already passing the page over. Verlander immediately snatched it away and bent over in the other direction to share it with Joel Zumaya, who was sitting on his other side. Zoom and Verlander were roommates, and they did everything together; it was almost disgusting.
Abandoned piece of previous occupant, before it switched from Granderson's PoV to Jackson's.
"So how's he working out?" he asks, real casual, like the answer doesn't mean anything much to him. Inge shrugs. "C'mon," Granderson says. "I know you, I know you have an opinion."
"He's fine," Inge says, rolling his eyes up. "He's, whatever. He makes some fancy catches, but half the time it's 'cause he's standing in the wrong place to start, so it's gotta be more dramatic than it shoulda been. He can hit pretty good. I mean, home runs, not so much, but he hits. He's just... he's fine."
"Ringing endorsement."
Inge shrugs again. He's not staring at the ceiling anymore, but he is still not looking at Granderson, which is, hmm. Interesting.
"How about in the clubhouse?" Granderson prompts.
"Well, jeez, Grandy, he ain't you. What else do you want me to say?"
"Nothing. That wasn't what I... I mean, obviously he's not me. I was just... we had a good clubhouse, yeah?" Inge nods, looking down to rub at the still-new-to-Granderson tattoos on his forearms. "I just sort of hated the idea of it getting all broken up. That clubhouse, how it was working. Seemed like that would be... just, a shame. That's all I was asking after."
"He ain't you," Inge repeats, softly. Granderson shakes his head, but secretly, in a tiny dark compartment of his self, locked deep down and away, he is a little bit pleased.
Completely abandoned Inge/Pedroia boarding school AU fic.
Brandon always waited at least an hour after Lights Out to make his move. That had been a rookie mistake, trying to sneak out as soon as the school went dark; the teachers were still patrolling then, looking for kids with flashlights under their sheets or whatever, and Brandon had nearly been caught a few times before he adjusted. He had adjusted, though, and he hadn't had a close brush in months; this was why he was considered the expert, the best man for the job.
The Kaline School was pretty isolated during the school year. Unsupervised off-campus travel was strictly prohibited, and they were way out in the middle of nowhere anyways, so even if you did manage to sneak out, if you didn't have a car, where would you go? The only other place worth visiting for miles around was their sister school, the Epstein Academy (the teachers always called it a 'sister school', but among the kids this was a joke, sisters, ha ha; it was all-boys just like them). The kids at Epstein were stuck under a similar set of rules, but they were isolated with a different set of food and books and things sent from home. The kids at Kaline would get bored with what they had, the kids at Epstein would get bored with what they had, and that was where Brandon stepped in.
Once every two weeks-- around that, anyways; he tried to keep his schedule irregular to reduce the odds of getting caught-- he would take whatever the Kaliners had managed to scrounge up. He'd sneak out of his bedroom, usually via the roof. He avoided detection by hopping roofs until he got to the wall around the campus property, which he could scale easily; it was old stone, slipped and cracked in many places, plenty of hand- and foot-holds for a nimble kid with a sure grip. Then he would sneak through the woods to the Epstein Academy, just about a mile, an easy run for anyone in good shape. He'd scale their wall, skulk around until he found a window with the usual signal of a red handkerchief dangling out of it, climb up to that, and initiate a series of trades. He would bring back the goods and the Kaliners paid him for the stuff with whatever they had: spare change, chewing gum, little plastic toys, magazines that weren't too out of date yet, baseball cards.
It was a pretty great system. Kids at both schools benefited, Brandon himself made a tidy profit, and the teachers were none the wiser. All he had to do was stay quick, stay sharp, and avoid stupid mistakes.
---
He shifted the straps of his backpack, trying to redistribute the weight. There were a lot of books this week, so it was pretty heavy. Books were the worst; even pies from home weighed less than books.
This was the trickiest part. The building closest to the outer wall and thus best-suited to his escapist purpose was Cobb Hall. A lot of the teachers had offices in Cobb Hall and some of them might still be awake, grading papers or doing whatever it was they did in their offices after hours. Brandon liked to take that roof as his final approach, but he had to do it really quietly: no stomping around, and God help him if he slipped and had to catch himself. No way to do that without making a racket.
It was important to pay attention to each footfall, lest he lose his footing on a wonky tile or step on a clump of wet leaves. He edged up to the library dormer window, shining a beacon of yellow light out at the wall. Feeling his way along its spine, he paused to look at the wall. Because he was next to the out-thrust dormer, not in front of it, nobody looking out the window could see him, not unless they had eyeballs on stalks, so it was ok to take a few seconds and give it the old once-over while he still had the chance and the vantage point.
The wall looked like it was in OK condition, no new broken spots that he could see. He checked the drainpipe down the side of Cobb Hall, the short patch of shadowed ground between that and the base of the wall where he planned to climb up. It all looked good. Situation normal.
Something twitched, a hint of a retinal afterimage, drawing his eyes back to the wall. He looked harder, and-- holy shit!-- there was something crawling over the wall, right there in the light. Something dark and lumpy, moving slow as it awkwardly hauled itself over the lip of the wall. What the hell? He crouched down next to the dormer, making himself as small as he could, hiding in the deepest shadows. Some kind of animal, maybe? Like, a big fucking raccoon? There was no way it could have smelled him up on the roof. Maybe it came in to raid the trash cans or something. That had to be it. He'd just wait until it had gone. And, shit, hope none of the teachers saw it; if they did, they'd be out on the grounds chasing it off, and there'd be no way for him to sneak out tonight.
The dark shape paused on top of the wall, all hunched over into a shapeless mound. It shifted and started to make its way down onto the Kaline School campus. There was one moment where it hung, splayed out against the wall, toes feeling for the ground, lit up like a convict in a prison spotlight. It quickly dropped out of sight and rolled into the shadow, but that moment had been long enough for Brandon to see that it was no big raccoon. That was a person. A kid, not much bigger than him.
He stood up, shifting his shoulders to keep the backpack's weight from overbalancing him. Another kid sneaking around at night? Hell no. Brandon did all the sneaking around here, thank you very much.
---
Once his eyes had readjusted to the dark, it was easy to see the kid, who had stayed right at the edge of the light, back pressed to the wall, looking around like he wasn't sure where to go next-- which he probably wasn't, because Brandon didn't recognize him, so he wasn't from Kaline. Process of elimination: he was either some kind of feral forest-dwelling wolf kid, or he was from Epstein. He wasn't, like, covered in dirt and bugs and shit, so Epstein was more probable.
Brandon looked him over carefully. He didn't see any big obvious gun-shaped lumps and the kid's hands seemed to be empty. He had a big chin and a funny, beaky nose. He didn't seem to be much younger than Brandon, although he was, like Brandon, small for his age. Brandon wasn't really sure what else to look for. He didn't know how to tell a psycho murderer from a normal grubby kid sneaking around at night. The kid didn't look dangerous, though.
Snap decision. "Psst! Hey!" Brandon hissed. The kid's head snapped around, his eyes shining briefly with reflected light. "Who're you and what're you doing here, huh?"
The kid sprinted through the patch of light to stand next to Brandon. So he obviously knew it was bad to hang out in the light-- how come he'd climbed over the wall right there, then, huh?
He stuck out a hand. "You must be Brandon Inge? Hi! I was looking for you, I dunno how I was gonna find you."
Brandon eyed the kid's hand dubiously. It was a little scratched up, probably from the wall. Had the kid let himself be seen on purpose, hoping Brandon would find him and somehow trusting that a teacher wouldn't? "Who're you?" he repeated.
"Dustin. Dustin Pedroia." The kid waggled his hand. Brandon frowned, but shook it. Pedroia had a strong grip for a little guy.
"You're looking for me?"
"You're the kid who does the trade runs," Pedroia said. "The older kids told me if I wanted to get on that, I should talk to you. And I thought, hey, I can do that on my own, easy, but if I'm headin' over there anyways, I may's well talk to the kid."
"Get on that?" This did not sound good. Brandon did the trades, he did the inter-school trafficking. He was that kid. He did not need some snotty little interloper horning in on his turf.
Pedroia shrugged. He had on an oversized t-shirt, which made him look a little bigger, but it was clear that under the fabric he was a skinny kid. "Soon's I heard about that system, I thought, well, how come it's Kaline with the runner? Shouldn't there be one from each school? To make sure it's fair and all that?"
"It's fair!" Brandon said, indignant. "It wouldn't work if nobody trusted me to carry stuff fair, and it does work, so it's, like, pretty obvious that everyone thinks it's fair." The nerve of this kid, jeez.
"Hey, man, no offense. I'm just saying." Pedroia shrugged, like he hadn't just been incredibly rude. "Everyone will know it's fair and stuff if there's two of us and we're working from different schools. Anyways, it'll be a lot better with two. We can do trades quicker, we can meet more often, which means getting paid more often, right? The more stuff we move, the harder it'll be for teachers to keep track of who has what, so they'll be less likely to notice if someone has a new magazine or whatever. It'll be great."
"You got it all figured out already or what? Cocky sonofabitch," Brandon said.
"Yeah, hi. Like I said, Dustin Pedroia. Nice to meet you." Pedroia grinned. Brandon wanted real, real bad to hate him, but he could already tell that it just wasn't going to happen.
---
He had to admit that the kid had style. Running a mile through the woods at night, to a school whose layout he didn't know at all, just to hope that a kid he'd never met would see him sneaking in so they could have a conversation? That was pretty ballsy stuff. But Pedroia had done it, and he'd pulled it off. Maybe Brandon could work with that.
Mr. McClendon cracked his wooden pointer down on Brandon's desk, making him jump. "You payin' attention?" he barked.
Well, jeez, now he was. Brandon straightened up in his seat and tried to look like the chalky scribbles of whatever on the blackboard meant something to him. He'd never seen Mr. McClendon actually break a pointer, but he was always smacking them on desks, bringing them right up to the point of shattering. There was probably some kind of art to it. Lessons in Terrifying Young Boys Via Sudden Thunderous Pointer Application. Or something.
His notes were a mess. The first few lines were filled with appropriate equations-- Mr. McClendon taught Physics-- but then they'd started copying down charts of cannons with arcing cannonball paths, and Brandon had lost his ability to focus. His cannons had quickly gained pirates, and then they were bombing a fortress, which turned into a vague approximation of the Epstein Academy. He drew in Mr. Epstein, the headmaster, as a stick figure surrendering to some more pirates. The Kaline School's headmaster was Mr. Leyland; the guy they were named after (Al Kaline, like the battery, ha ha, joke) was, like, older than dirt.
Since they were using cannon, there should be a big hole in the wall. He drew it in, scribbling to make it black, implied-deep, like all good holes should be. He drew himself in stick figure form coming out with a big bag over his shoulder. Looting the goods. That was what the victors did, so it had to go in.
After a moment's thought he drew another stick figure next to him, holding its own bag. He tried to give it a beaky nose, but he couldn't get it to look right. Well, whatever. He would know who it was supposed to be.
"Nice," Verlander said, leaning over. Brandon shielded his notes with one arm, giving Verlander a dirty look. Make sure Mr. McClendon knew exactly where to look for trouble; yeah, that was totally the best way to go about things. "Can I see?" Verlander asked.
"No," Brandon muttered, but he was already passing the page over. Verlander immediately snatched it away and bent over in the other direction to share it with Joel Zumaya, who was sitting on his other side. Zoom and Verlander were roommates, and they did everything together; it was almost disgusting.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-18 09:38 am (UTC)I'm kind of sad the boarding school AU thing never went anywhere. That was a cool idea.