Work Text:
It felt more like a blink than the five hours of sleep it apparently was, Paige mused, swatting at her phone. The horrible machine was droning on with the ringtone that she’d applied specifically to calls from the hospital.
“Hello?” she croaked, trying not to let her still closed throat impair her ability to do her job.
“Doctor Herrera?” Asked the voice of a receptionist Paige was pretty sure she knew.
“That’d be me,” she…tried her best not to grumble. She didn’t think she succeeded, though.
“Doctor Kolinsky will be out today; apparently it’s a last minute emergency. Doctor Tesler asked me to call you,” said the receptionist. Paige sighed. She wasn’t on call, she hadn’t been on call for a year. That had been the whole point of moving to Argon once her residency was over.
But, without Pavel fucking Kolinsky there, they would be too understaffed to keep everything running efficiently, which would lead to people not getting helped on time, and it wasn’t really Paige’s style to let that sort of thing happen.
She guessed she was going to work.
“I’ll be there in an hour,” she said, before amending, “-ish.”
After hanging up, Paige allowed herself two minutes to flop bonelessly back into bed, just to admire the first rays of sunlight drifting through her window and illuminating the motes of dust stirred up by the impact. Her eyes screamed that they wanted to close, but there was work to be done.
It cost more effort to drag herself to the too-small bathroom than it had been to splint the leg of that one particularly frustrating teenager. She resolutely ignored the streaks of grime running down the wall near the mirror as she brushed her teeth. Time to clean was a luxury she simply did not have.
She bustled herself out of the duplex, nearly tripping on the stairs like usual, and throwing herself gracelessly behind the wheel of her green 2006 Scion XB. She turned the key–only to experience the infinite whirring of a starter that wouldn’t catch.
Paige made a noise of pure, impotent rage before dropping her head onto the wheel heavily enough to honk the horn.
—--
Paige was perhaps the furthest thing from pleased, as the late afternoon air hung thick and sticky in that way it did in Southern California at the edge of autumn. No clouds, because of course there weren’t, and whatever gods existed hated Paige for…something. Probably something she’d snapped at one of her many idiot coworkers within earshot of a patient. She felt like her body was now 39% sweat and she just knew that her bestest friend in the world, Shower, was at least an hour away.
At least the tow truck guy was quiet.
The last time her dumpster fire of a car had broken down, the tow guy had been both obnoxious and a little creepy. Not that he actually did anything, but the unchanging, placid expression behind the scrawling face tattoos had been something else.
“Thanks Link!” One of the mechanics called, though the current tow guy’s soft reply was drowned out by his truck’s engine.
The truck hobbled its way out of the lot, looking and sounding like it was older than Paige was, as the senior mechanic/owner/manager/whatever he was, scratching idly at his gray, balding head trundled over, more secure on his feet than the truck had felt on all four wheels.
“Right this way, ma’am,” he said, gesturing towards what she guessed was the office. Casting one last glance at her shoebox on wheels, she hurried after him.
The owner’s name happened to be Able, just like on the rusted pylon sign that dominated the airspace about three feet higher than the roof of the squat, equally rusted buildings that made up the actual garage part of Able’s Garage, and the blue, yellow, and black logos over each employee’s left breast pocket. Paige found herself thankful for his gruff, quick-to-do attitude after the day’s seemingly endless frustrations. The actual paperwork process was quick and easy-ish, and she thanked every god she could think of that finally, finally , she could get underway to her rendezvous with a hot shower and whatever brainless slop Netflix would throw at her.
The door made a little tinkling bell noise as she and Able stepped back outside, Paige drawing her phone to order an Uber on the double. At the same moment, the heavy, creaking garage door for the one remaining open slot came down with a noise straight from the deepest pits of hell, sounding like nails on a chalkboard mixed with wailing infants and the wrenching sound her Scion made when she put on the E-brake.
Paige listened with half an ear as Able conversed with his employee, something about a Mara and a Zed and how they’d already left, leaving the last mechanic with the unfortunate job of locking everything up.
“Miss Herrera?” Able asked, causing her to send him a sharp glare from the corner of her eye. “We do offer a complimentary drive home, if you want. Beck here can take you.”
She looked past him, where the mechanic waved at her with a grease-coated hand. Trying her best not to allow her sigh to be audible, she considered the idea. It would be significantly quicker, free, and this Beck guy was no more or less likely to be a serial killer or whatever related breed of maniac than–she checked her phone–Galt the Uber driver.
“Fine,” she said, stuffing her phone back into her bag.
“Great,” Able replied in what Paige had now realized was his signature monotone. She glanced over at Beck again, who was wiping his hands on a faded red rag–his shirt. That was his uniform shirt. At some point after Paige and Able had gone inside to talk business, he’d peeled it off, leaving him in a…rather form fitting undershirt. And now he was wiping engine grease all over it.
Paige blinked at the cognitive dissonance. If she did that on her scrubs, Tesler would probably wring her neck. But then, that was a hospital, and this was an auto shop.
“Hi,” he said, taking a few hesitant steps towards her. “I’m Beck, but you knew that already.”
She raised an eyebrow at his cheek, though her hair probably obscured it from his view. After a second of nervous silence, he just mumbled something about going to get his car.
“Go easy on him, would you?” Able asked, his tone still flat but his eyes twinkling. Without another word, he loped off towards the little office, locking the door behind him.
Paige shooed a mosquito away from her bare forearm as a distant rumbling filled her ears. Around the corner came the most beat up car Paige had ever seen in her entire life.
It was an old muscle car, probably from the seventies, though she couldn’t tell at a glance what kind. The exterior was covered in all manner of pits and dents, and–was that house paint? It was white, mostly. Or it would be, if it was washed. The passenger side door had clearly been blue before being painted, with chips along the edges belying the original color, and there was a little ‘ENCOM’ sticker in the lower left corner of the rear window. Beck pulled the car up and parked a few feet in front of where she was standing.
Paige honestly hesitated to get in. It sounded fine, but it looked like it would fall apart halfway to her apartment.
Whatever. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Also, she really wanted to get back to her place already.
The interior was not nearly as bad as the outside, the black leather seats were just a little cracked, and the dash was thankfully without grime, though there was a suspicious gash in the driver’s side of the console. There was a little toy airplane suspended on a near-invisible length of fishing line from the mirror, swinging back and forth from the motion of the vehicle. A baseball cap had been thrown carelessly into the passenger seat at some point, which Beck was quick to toss into the back. Paige slumped into the freshly vacant seat, tucking her bag between her knees.
The car had a certain indescribable smell, like grease and hastily applied cologne, and a hint of sawdust, maybe. It was homely. Used, with old echoes of others sitting in the seat she now occupied wafting up through the cracks in the leather and the adhering to the windows with the fingerprints left on the glass, in a way that her own car and even her apartment failed to equal.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, unsure exactly how she intended it, “But your car is…interesting.”
Beck grinned, even as he put a hand on the back of her seat to more easily see out the back while reversing. His eyes barely met hers for a split second as he dragged his gaze back out the front of the car.
“I get that a lot. I’ll tell you about it once I know where I’m going,” he said, before hastily adding, “Y’know, if you want.”
“That’s fine,” she said. The least she could do is indulge the guy since she was about to make him drive her clear across town. During rush hour, no less. “1982 Lisberger Avenue.”
“Lisberger,” he said, considering. “Isn’t that out in Noble Hills?”
“Yep,” Paige said, popping the ‘P’ and looking firmly out the window instead of at her would-be chauffeur’s face. Beck whistled lowly.
“Take your bets now,” he said. “My guess is 45 minutes.”
Paige felt the corners of her mouth twitch up against her will.
“40,” she said. “Stakes?”
“I get to tell you all about my car,” he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “What do you want if you win?”
“Twenty dollars.”
Beck let out a real belly laugh when she said that. He probably hadn’t been expecting an answer so blunt.
“Besides,” she continued, “I figured you should be allowed to talk about your car, since I’m gonna be seeing it so much today.”
“Yeah,” he said, distracted by his navigational app. “Look at that! 44 minutes. Guess I win.”
“Guess so,” she said, aiming a smirk at him, which just made him smile a little wider. He pulled the car out into the road.
“It was my father’s,” he said, leaning over a little as he turned the wheel. It felt like he was admitting an open secret. “Apparently it was his father’s, too, but he found it rotting away under a pile of junk in their garage. He tried to fix it, but then he got hurt, and…”
Beck waved a hand as if swatting the thought away.
“We got it working.”
“That sounds nice,” Paige replied, a small, genuine smile on her face. She hazarded a glance at her driver, who wore an identical expression.
“Yeah?” he asked, barely a touch sarcastic. “My buddy Zed likes to say it’s a piece of junk.”
“I won’t argue that it looks that way from the outside,” she said. It took a minute to organize what she thought about it exactly. “...But it seems to have it where it counts.”
“Yeah,” Beck said, patting the steering wheel affectionately. “It’s a good one.”
“Does it have a name?” Paige asked. That was a thing some people did, right? Naming cars?
Beck hummed in thought.
“Sort of,” he said. “The numbers seven, eight, and six were spray painted across the trunk when we got it out of the garage.”
Paige listened in rapt attention as he merged onto the freeway and she put up a hand to guard against the sun, beginning its slow descent beyond the horizon. Up on the elevated junction, she could see the goliath skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles rising in the distance. The sun cast golden streaks across Beck’s face, causing him to squint as he continued.
“Tron used to work for ENCOM, so we put that sticker on the back window. And then the name ENCOM Seven-Eighty-Six just stuck. These days we just call it ‘the car’, though.”
Paige nodded a little, shifting to avoid the sun and regretting not bringing sunglasses. Or maybe a blindfold. And then–
“Tron?” she asked.
“Oh!” he said, laughing. “Tron’s my dad. It gets complicated.”
“I’ve got time,” Paige said. And she did. It wasn’t like she was going anywhere.
“Well–” he cut himself off, looking pensive despite also swiveling his head as he changed lanes.
“I never had any parents, really, and ended up as an emancipated minor when I was sixteen.”
He glanced over at Paige, likely to gauge her interest. She’d done her best to put her face in an expression of open attention. He continued even as his cheeks visibly darkened in the warm light of the sunset.
“I moved in with Tron around then,” he said. “He was already retired and wasn’t charging a whole lot for rent. He got me the job at Able’s too–” He jerked his head back in the vague direction of the garage. “-And the rest is history. He and Able go way back.”
“Classic found family trope,” Paige mused aloud, looking away from Beck again, sightlessly staring at the passing buildings and billboards. “Like a movie.”
“My friends from the shop say the same thing,” he replied. “Guess I’m a walking archetype.”
Beck apparently loved the people in his life openly and without restraint, and wore his heart on his grease-stained sleeve. Paige glanced at him again, taking barely a second to trace the evening glow spreading across his face. Unexpectedly, he met her gaze and gave her a crooked smile. She looked out the window, feeling her cheeks heat a little.
“What about you?” he asked, breaking the more-or-less companionable silence.
“What do you mean?”
“You got any family you’re dying to talk about?” he asked, audibly shifting in his seat. They came to a stop at the tail end of a traffic jam, sandwiched between a huge semi truck, which mercilessly cut off the sunlight, and a black panel van.
Paige chewed on her lip. She didn’t really talk to or about her family at all. She hadn’t been an emancipated minor like Beck was, but it sure felt like it sometimes.
“Well,” she said after a moment of consideration, “Doctor Tesler, my boss at the hospital, mentored me during the last years of med school.”
“Yeah?” he asked, and despite knowing him for all of ten minutes at most, she could practically see the quick side-glance that she was sure he was sending her.
“Yeah,” she said. “I owe him a lot.”
Beck was silent for a bit, and she didn’t look at him.
“He sounds…important,” he said, as they finally passed out of the semi’s shadow.
“I don’t know if I have that sort of relationship with him,” she said, rubbing her chin and pulling a knee up to her chest. It was nice, being in a roomy car for once. “Parental, I mean.”
The traffic jam cleared around them and Beck punched the gas pedal, sending the car and its occupants hurtling forwards. Paige’s head hit the headrest sharply and she choked out a “Whoa!” while laughing from deep in her chest.
“Nobody likes the car, but everyone likes going fast,” Beck said, grinning, in the way that he knew this from years of experience. She looked him in the eyes, just for a second, as he looked into hers.
His eyes were brown. She didn’t know why she was noticing this now, and hadn’t earlier, but she did. She stretched her legs out and sank a little further into the seat with a dull ‘squeak’ from the aged leather.
The quiet was, again, companionable, and the gentle vibrations of the car were only just barely not enough to rock her to sleep. The roar of the engine had long since faded into the background, mixing with the low tones of whatever medium, groovy thing the music was. She let out a contented sigh.
“When this car was just barely done,” Beck said, a soft and wistful tone to his voice, “Tron gave me my first driving lessons around the parking lot of the community college.”
Paige didn’t respond, though she suspected he knew she was paying attention.
“I always thought it’d be his car, but I think he only wanted to fix it at all so he and I would have something to do together.”
He licked his lips as he changed lanes, and Paige tried not to recognize the familiar architecture of Noble Hills. It would still be a while until her apartment was in sight. The drive was pleasant. She didn’t really want it to end.
“I’ve got a lot of memories in it,” he said. “And I’m always making more.”
This was followed by a rather pointed glance that Paige didn’t really have the energy to parse, but she met his brown eyes again.
“Eyes on the road,” she joked, and stifled a round of very undignified giggles when his face turned bright red. What was going on? She didn’t ever giggle .
“I wish I had some fun story about my car,” she said, shifting again in her seat so her knees were braced on the dash. She couldn’t resist the temptation to look at him again, at the barest hint of five o’clock shadow that had appeared on his jawline sometime between leaving the garage and now.
“It’s not as charming as yours,” she continued. She looked at him expectantly as they drove past a patch of conifers that swallowed the sunlight in a regular pattern.
“You’ve got cooler tattoos, though,” he said. “Any stories there?”
Oh boy, were there stories. Inspired by a mix of teenage angst and teenage rebellion, she’d started getting her sleeves far too young, and over the course of several years added more and more little details once every couple of months at least, until they filled the space from her wrists to the middle of her biceps. Most people continued them to the shoulder, but she liked them right where they were.
“Any that caught your eye?” she asked instead, too aware that explaining the entirety of the shapes on her skin would cost too much time.
“I noticed the birds,” he said, and she had to admit he had a good eye.
“Those were my first,” she said, twisting her arm a little so she could see them better. The birds, a healthy mix of blackbirds, songbirds, and raptors followed each other in a circle around her upper arm, right at the top of her left sleeve. “I got them when I was sixteen.”
“That’s… young.”
“You don’t approve?” she asked, dropping her smile entirely to shoot him a glare.
“No,” he backpedaled. “I got mine when I was already an adult, is all. Kind of surprised me.”
Paige decided to let it slide.
“You have a tattoo?” she asked.
He pulled down the neck of his tee just beyond his collarbone, to where a quartet of tiny squares sat arranged in a T shape, like a Tetris block. Somehow it reminded her of the sticker in the back window. She resolutely ignored all the colorful thoughts the back of her mind conjured at this situation.
“I take it there’s a story there,” she said, leaning back into the seat.
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” he replied.
She rolled her eyes, but the smile was coming back.
“I was a teenager,” she said. “It’s birds. Flying. Take a guess.”
“Freedom, then,” Beck said, something warm and amused in his tone.
“Got it in one.”
“Now who’s the archetype?” he teased, looking entirely too smug. Paige wanted, desperately, to wipe the smirk off his face.
“Your turn,” she said, peering at him out of the corner of her eye.
He rolled his shoulder like it was an old, reflexive tic. She wondered, briefly, where it had come from.
“Same deal as the car, really,” he said, gesturing to the warm and welcoming space inside. “Tron used to have that little symbol on all the planes he flew in the Air Force. I guess I just wanted to connect with him more.”
Paige reached out and flicked the toy plane suspended from the mirror. Its tiny propeller whirled around at the sudden motion, and Beck laughed out loud.
“Yeah, you get it!” he said, his face spread into a broad grin. His joy was infectious, spreading deep into Paige’s bones. Maybe that was why she pounced on the radio when an old Arctic Monkeys song came on, cranking the volume up as loud as was comfortable and trusting Beck to allow it. To her surprise and delight, he knew the song too, and they both wailed the lyrics as loud as they could. After that, the floodgates were open, and the pair talked on and on about everything and nothing as Paige guided Beck through the streets of Noble Hills.
She got to see how his brow scrunched up during a passionate harangue against certain American automotive manufacturers, and he let her rant for multiple minutes about her least favorite body part, the tailbone. The elation on his features as he turned to look straight at her at a stoplight right next to the aging ice cream shop they had both apparently frequented as children would stay in her memory for days to come; she was certain.
Paige was also certain of a thought that had made itself at home in her head near the start of the journey; she did not want this trip to end.
She liked it. She liked him .
And when he pulled up next to the duplex where she lived, she wanted to invite him in, more than anything she’d wanted in recent memory, including that shower. But she was still exhausted, and the apartment was still more grime than home, and she needed to wash her laundry and fall asleep watching vapid daytime TV or whatever the Netflix equivalent was.
Something in the back of her mind told her that he wouldn’t care.
She opened her mouth to say something, anything, but Beck beat her to the punch.
“That was fun,” he said, not meeting her eyes, choosing instead to stare at a leaf that had landed on his hood in the deepening early-autumn dusk.
“...Yeah,” Paige said.
She looked at him. He looked at her. His brown eyes were warm, set beneath slightly mismatched eyebrows and over five o’clock shadow and a small, crooked smile, and she blurted, “Can I give you my phone number?”
She refused to look away, though she didn’t forget to blink.
“Oh. Oh!” he stuttered, fumbling for his phone. “Here. You can just… yeah.”
When she was done, she handed it back, her hand lingering on his for just a second.
“Message me,” she said, feeling a little sheepish. “Maybe we can hang out. Or something.”
He glanced at his phone so quickly she wondered if she was just imagining it.
“I’d like that,” he said. “Paige.”
She didn’t choose to smile just like she didn’t choose to blush, but she decided she liked the sound of her name in his voice. And if she blew him a kiss from the bottom of the stairs, that was just between the two of them.