Fic: Fighting Memories NC-17
Jul. 16th, 2005 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltdTitle: Fighting Memories
Author: Angel
Fandom: Corvette Summer/Heroes crssover
Pairing: Kenny Dantley/Vanessa, Kenny Dantley/Ken
Boyd.
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Everyone has their memories to fight, whether in the jungles of Nam or the jungles of Sin City
Disclaimer: Not mine. They belong to the respective studios. No money is made on this
Warnings: adultry, some het, prostitution, drug use, unsafe sex (1985)
Fighting Memories
Kenny doesn't think much about that summer in Vegas anymore.
That's what he told Vanessa over the supper table, when she had suggested a second honeymoon for their fifth anniversary. She wanted to go back to the glitter and the greed. When he said no, she asked if it was bad memories. He told her he didn't think about it much.
His little bodyshop had grown very nicely. Vanessa turned out to be a terrific bookkeeper, and a good investor too. She handled the money side and left him free to do what he really loved, work on cars. His customers said he was the best mechanic in the West. he didn't believe it. He was just a kid who liked cars.
He flopped out on the bed in their little house--bought house, not a rented trailer like his mom's--and thought about how he wasn't really a kid anymore. Not at twenty-five and married. He listened to Vanessa rattle the dishes in the sink, singing in her squeaky voice. She'd changed a lot. He'd changed, but not as much. They were still a team against all life could throw at them.
He thought about the car in the garage, needing new straight pipes. It was a street-rod, owned by some guy from one of the corn states in the midwest: Iowa, Missouri or Kansas. He couldn't remember. Big guy. Good looking. Thirty-five or forty, which was too old to be street racing, but something was dead behind his eyes. Kenny had seen the look a lot in the faces of older brothers and uncles. He knew he had lucked out that the war had ended when he was still a freshman.
He pulled the car mag he'd been reading off the nightstand and turned on the lamp. He didn't like TV, it reminded him too much of his mother's, but Vanessa had a crush--one she'd never admit to--on A.J. Simon, and hated to miss a Thursday. He admitted it to himself, she liked blonds.
He couldn't concentrate, and walked out to the garage that sat on the back third of the property. The doors were padlocked, and the car was safe, but he was still uneasy. He went back inside and back to his magazine. He stared at an article, and turned the page. There was the rod, and its owner, also a Ken. They had been making the local circuits, and were just out of Modesto. They'd been winning a lot.
Winning. He shuddered at the memories that word brought up. He'd hated Vegas, and tried to forget it. Tried to forget sleeping in the U-haul, hustling on the Strip so he could get enough money to eat another day and keep looking, sneering at Vanessa for embracing the life.
He remembers instead, the one good memory: of Vanessa loving him. But even that is tainted by the demand for payment the next morning. His last two dollars, and wasn't that what had sent him out onto the Strip the next night, trying to get enough money to buy a burger?
"It's just body-work." Vanessa had told him that. He'd told her that. But neither had ever believed it quite enough.
Just body work. He'd sold his body on the street and his talent to the very thieves he was hunting. But he'd hated the first and loved the second, and not just for the money. The money wasn't real. The cars were. And he had worked on some of the most exciting ones he would ever handle in those weeks. Corvettes, El Caminos, Trans Ams, mustangs, a rare Tucker, even a Lambourghini
Silhouette.
He doesn't think much about that summer in Vegas. That's what he told Mr. McGrath when they talked earlier this evening. Old ties die hard, and not even knowing that his shop teacher had set up the car theft could totally destroy them.
He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. Now it was all Dodges, Buicks and Chevys for working men. Simple stuff, but satisfying. And he was his own man again, and no one's whore. It wasn't $600/week plus living expenses, but it came honestly, and he could look in the mirror again.
He hadn't been able to in Vegas, not ever. Not since the low-riders. Not at all after the beating. Never while he was hustling. Not even in the great mirrored walls of the hotel suite. There, he had made love to Vanessa, watching her body, and himself as a collection of parts: an arm, legs, a chest. Never his face, and never his eyes.
It was getting late. Vanessa slept soft beside him. Earlier she did that thing with her mouth that makes him crazy. He never asked where she learned it, doesn't want to know. She drifted off, and he was nearly asleep.
Half-dream, half-memory, he realized exactly where she learned it. From kissing him. And he'd learned it from the low-riders. Them and their macho initiation rituals, and playing the anglo boy for their amusement. He had thought the ride would be worth the embarrassment. It wasn't. He lay in the dark, remembering the taste that he suspected Vanessa was still tasting in her sleep.
It was going to be a night for memories. He wasn't going to get any sleep. He walked outside and looked at the stars. He had a whole skyful and was never tired of watching them. Unlike Vegas where the glitter from the casinos had made day and night a matter of differences in temperature and glare. He sat down on the patio chair and looked up, naming the three constellations he knew. He wondered idly about getting a book and learning more.
A shadow melted out of the other shadows near the garage. A big one. Kenny felt his body tense for flight. It wasn't a bad neighborhood, and no one had been robbed out here, but there was always a first.
"Nice night, ain't it?" asked the shape as it sat next to him in the other patio chair.
Kenny breathed a sigh. Just the racer who owned the car.
"Sorry to scare you, kiddo. I just don't sleep too good when the old gal is in the shop. Thought I'd wander down and check her over before I went to bed."
"It's OK. I wasn't sleeping too well either."
"I figured. Not too many people are out stargazing at midnight round here. Lotsa stars tonight."
"Do you know any of them? I can see the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, and Scorpio, but I don't know any of the others."
"See the teapot shape just under scorpio? Way down by the horizon? That's Sagittarius. And right up there is Corona." He grinned, a flash of white in the darkness. "Reminds me. Got any beer?"
"Just Coors. None of the Mexican stuff." He smiled back. "They're cold."
Kenny came back to find the guy had turned on his ghetto blaster. “Eye in the Sky” moaned from the speakers.
“I hate that New Wave shit.” The racer twisted the dial until he found a rock and roll station.
“All night, we’re feeling all right, with blasts from the past,” said the DJ, his voice tinny and far away. Buddy Holly started in with “Peggy Sue.”
“That’s better.” He sighed and took a drink of the beer. “Getting old. I did fine with the Stones and Jefferson Airplane, but this new stuff? It all just sounds like someone took a screwdriver to a piano to me.”
“The older stuff is ok,” Kenny conceded. He wasn’t too big on the new music either, but he sure liked watching Vanessa dance to it. He liked dancing with her.
They sat and talked, telling life stories. Ken’s was about what Kenny had figured: ordinary kid, shipped to Vietnam, couldn’t really settle down afterward. Kenny didn’t talk about Vegas.
“Sounds like you’re doing okay for yourself. She’s a real pretty little gal.” The racer’s voice was not envious, just matter-of-fact.
“I’ll bet you know all about that. Racers get their pick, don’t they?”
“Yeah, of drag-strip trash and cruiser chicks. And they all look alike after a while. I ain’t in it for the girls. Or the money,” he added, knowing the next question that was coming.
“So why do you do it?”
“Mechanics. Pretty blond mechanics like you.” He laughed the flirt off. “Nah, I do it because not doing it kills me. You shoulda seen me trying to settle down. Couldn’t hold a job. Too much beer, too many pills, too much weed and hash. I got on the pipe in ‘Nam, never quite got off it.”
“Driving makes you feel alive,” Kenny said. Before he knew it, he was spilling the abbreviated story of the ‘Vette and Vegas and Vanessa. He left out the hustling part, but was pretty sure Ken could fill in the blanks. He had heard the falseness of the laughter. And he hated being called pretty. He reminded himself again just how much he hated that.
“Sin City. Sure was fun for a while,” Ken added to his story. “But too damn expensive to live there long. Did some racing there a few months back.”
Kenny got them each another beer. Ken dug in his pocket and produced a small clay pipe. “It’s just weed. You want a hit?”
Kenny took one and another. It tasted different than it had in high school, stronger. He felt his head getting light, and his stomach rumbled, reminding him how long ago dinner had been. “I forgot how hungry this stuff makes me. Give me a sec.” He returned with a bag of chips and a second one of cookies. “Here.”
Ken helped himself to a cookie. “It just makes me mellow. A little detatched. Kinda like sex. Only three things really help, y’know, keep the memories away. Sex, drugs and racing.”
“I know.” Kenny was watching Sagittarius do its slow twinkle just above the horizon. “But sometimes sex just brings more up. Working is the only thing that really helps.”
“That’s why you’re the best mechanic in the Mojave, kid, and I’m just a burned-out headcase who shoulda never come back. Pal of mine is chasing his dream, a worm ranch. Me, I’m just chasing enough money for the next high, at least until I crack it up out there. I may’ve made forty, but I ain’t gonna see forty-five.”
“Just like that movie. The one about people who couldn’t live past thirty.”
“Yeah.” Ken launched another assault on the cookies. “Weed ain’t working too hot tonight, kid. And it’s gonna be a long bad night, I can already tell. I’d go for a drive, but she’s in the shop.”
Kenny knew he could offer. He wouldn’t mind. The guy was big, sure, but he was good looking. It wouldn’t be too bad. “So tell me about blond mechanics.”
“They got real big hands. Always. And that means real big dicks.” Another hit on the pipe and his tongue was loose enough he didn’t care if he scared the kid off. “And their hands are always real strong. “And most of them are pretty, like you. I’ve been through twenty states, and not one blond mechanic turned me down. You wanna help fight the memories, kid?”
Kenny took a last hit. “Sure.” He didn’t care right now. Not about anything. Not about Vanessa, asleep in the house, not about his own bad memories.
The kiss, when it came was hard and fast. Ken was rough and demanding. He made Kenny kiss him back, deep, and sucked on his tongue. “You got the biggest hands I seen yet. You want to show me the rest?”
Without a word, caught up in another whirlwind kiss, Kenny opened his jeans. Ken smiled.
“How does your woman take that monster, no bigger than she is?” Ken’s hand closed over him and stroked him erect. “I’m big enough to handle it.” He bent in and licked the head. “The memories are inside me. You have to be inside me, too, to fight them.”
Kenny nodded. It made perfect sense in a stoned sort of way.
Ken pulled a tube of vaseline, the kind that came in first-aid kits, out of one of his pockets and prepped him. “Grease a couple fingers and run them inside first. Makes it a little easier on me.” He dropped to his knees unfastened his jeans and bent over the low patio table.
Kenny, his first time on top for this, but remembering how the more considerate men had treated him, did as he was told. He put the head of his cock at the opening and added one more squirt of vaseline before pressing in.
“Oh. Wow.” Ken breathed against the invasion. “Hang on. I’m okay.”
Ken paused, half in, half out. This was great. He pushed the rest of the way in, and just stayed there, looking up at the stars. They all seemed to have names, and he knew them all. He thrust a couple times.
“Yeah.” The kid was amazing. Huge, and hitting him just right. Oh yeah, no memories tonight. Ken relaxed against the table and it only got better from there, until he was coming all over himself without even touching his dick.
Ken rocked in time to the twinkling stars, and felt like he could do this all night. But his mind and his body said two different things, until the stars were all inside his head as he came.
They stayed joined for a while, and then Kenny pulled out and stood up. He looked at his watch, tipping it so he could catch the moonlight on the hands. “It’s one in the morning. I have to open the shop tomorrow.”
“Yeah, get some sleep. See you in the morning.” Ken stood up, a real smile on his face instead of the wolfish grin that usually rested there. He fastened his jeans and buckled his belt.
Kenny walked into the house, threw the beer cans away and settled into bed. He lay in the dark beside Vanessa and slept.
Kenny doesn’t think much about that summer in Vegas anymore. That’s what he tells himself. And some nights, when Sagittarius is low on the horizon and Antares pulses just so in the heart of the Scorpion, he even believes it.
Author: Angel
Fandom: Corvette Summer/Heroes crssover
Pairing: Kenny Dantley/Vanessa, Kenny Dantley/Ken
Boyd.
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Everyone has their memories to fight, whether in the jungles of Nam or the jungles of Sin City
Disclaimer: Not mine. They belong to the respective studios. No money is made on this
Warnings: adultry, some het, prostitution, drug use, unsafe sex (1985)
Fighting Memories
Kenny doesn't think much about that summer in Vegas anymore.
That's what he told Vanessa over the supper table, when she had suggested a second honeymoon for their fifth anniversary. She wanted to go back to the glitter and the greed. When he said no, she asked if it was bad memories. He told her he didn't think about it much.
His little bodyshop had grown very nicely. Vanessa turned out to be a terrific bookkeeper, and a good investor too. She handled the money side and left him free to do what he really loved, work on cars. His customers said he was the best mechanic in the West. he didn't believe it. He was just a kid who liked cars.
He flopped out on the bed in their little house--bought house, not a rented trailer like his mom's--and thought about how he wasn't really a kid anymore. Not at twenty-five and married. He listened to Vanessa rattle the dishes in the sink, singing in her squeaky voice. She'd changed a lot. He'd changed, but not as much. They were still a team against all life could throw at them.
He thought about the car in the garage, needing new straight pipes. It was a street-rod, owned by some guy from one of the corn states in the midwest: Iowa, Missouri or Kansas. He couldn't remember. Big guy. Good looking. Thirty-five or forty, which was too old to be street racing, but something was dead behind his eyes. Kenny had seen the look a lot in the faces of older brothers and uncles. He knew he had lucked out that the war had ended when he was still a freshman.
He pulled the car mag he'd been reading off the nightstand and turned on the lamp. He didn't like TV, it reminded him too much of his mother's, but Vanessa had a crush--one she'd never admit to--on A.J. Simon, and hated to miss a Thursday. He admitted it to himself, she liked blonds.
He couldn't concentrate, and walked out to the garage that sat on the back third of the property. The doors were padlocked, and the car was safe, but he was still uneasy. He went back inside and back to his magazine. He stared at an article, and turned the page. There was the rod, and its owner, also a Ken. They had been making the local circuits, and were just out of Modesto. They'd been winning a lot.
Winning. He shuddered at the memories that word brought up. He'd hated Vegas, and tried to forget it. Tried to forget sleeping in the U-haul, hustling on the Strip so he could get enough money to eat another day and keep looking, sneering at Vanessa for embracing the life.
He remembers instead, the one good memory: of Vanessa loving him. But even that is tainted by the demand for payment the next morning. His last two dollars, and wasn't that what had sent him out onto the Strip the next night, trying to get enough money to buy a burger?
"It's just body-work." Vanessa had told him that. He'd told her that. But neither had ever believed it quite enough.
Just body work. He'd sold his body on the street and his talent to the very thieves he was hunting. But he'd hated the first and loved the second, and not just for the money. The money wasn't real. The cars were. And he had worked on some of the most exciting ones he would ever handle in those weeks. Corvettes, El Caminos, Trans Ams, mustangs, a rare Tucker, even a Lambourghini
Silhouette.
He doesn't think much about that summer in Vegas. That's what he told Mr. McGrath when they talked earlier this evening. Old ties die hard, and not even knowing that his shop teacher had set up the car theft could totally destroy them.
He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. Now it was all Dodges, Buicks and Chevys for working men. Simple stuff, but satisfying. And he was his own man again, and no one's whore. It wasn't $600/week plus living expenses, but it came honestly, and he could look in the mirror again.
He hadn't been able to in Vegas, not ever. Not since the low-riders. Not at all after the beating. Never while he was hustling. Not even in the great mirrored walls of the hotel suite. There, he had made love to Vanessa, watching her body, and himself as a collection of parts: an arm, legs, a chest. Never his face, and never his eyes.
It was getting late. Vanessa slept soft beside him. Earlier she did that thing with her mouth that makes him crazy. He never asked where she learned it, doesn't want to know. She drifted off, and he was nearly asleep.
Half-dream, half-memory, he realized exactly where she learned it. From kissing him. And he'd learned it from the low-riders. Them and their macho initiation rituals, and playing the anglo boy for their amusement. He had thought the ride would be worth the embarrassment. It wasn't. He lay in the dark, remembering the taste that he suspected Vanessa was still tasting in her sleep.
It was going to be a night for memories. He wasn't going to get any sleep. He walked outside and looked at the stars. He had a whole skyful and was never tired of watching them. Unlike Vegas where the glitter from the casinos had made day and night a matter of differences in temperature and glare. He sat down on the patio chair and looked up, naming the three constellations he knew. He wondered idly about getting a book and learning more.
A shadow melted out of the other shadows near the garage. A big one. Kenny felt his body tense for flight. It wasn't a bad neighborhood, and no one had been robbed out here, but there was always a first.
"Nice night, ain't it?" asked the shape as it sat next to him in the other patio chair.
Kenny breathed a sigh. Just the racer who owned the car.
"Sorry to scare you, kiddo. I just don't sleep too good when the old gal is in the shop. Thought I'd wander down and check her over before I went to bed."
"It's OK. I wasn't sleeping too well either."
"I figured. Not too many people are out stargazing at midnight round here. Lotsa stars tonight."
"Do you know any of them? I can see the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, and Scorpio, but I don't know any of the others."
"See the teapot shape just under scorpio? Way down by the horizon? That's Sagittarius. And right up there is Corona." He grinned, a flash of white in the darkness. "Reminds me. Got any beer?"
"Just Coors. None of the Mexican stuff." He smiled back. "They're cold."
Kenny came back to find the guy had turned on his ghetto blaster. “Eye in the Sky” moaned from the speakers.
“I hate that New Wave shit.” The racer twisted the dial until he found a rock and roll station.
“All night, we’re feeling all right, with blasts from the past,” said the DJ, his voice tinny and far away. Buddy Holly started in with “Peggy Sue.”
“That’s better.” He sighed and took a drink of the beer. “Getting old. I did fine with the Stones and Jefferson Airplane, but this new stuff? It all just sounds like someone took a screwdriver to a piano to me.”
“The older stuff is ok,” Kenny conceded. He wasn’t too big on the new music either, but he sure liked watching Vanessa dance to it. He liked dancing with her.
They sat and talked, telling life stories. Ken’s was about what Kenny had figured: ordinary kid, shipped to Vietnam, couldn’t really settle down afterward. Kenny didn’t talk about Vegas.
“Sounds like you’re doing okay for yourself. She’s a real pretty little gal.” The racer’s voice was not envious, just matter-of-fact.
“I’ll bet you know all about that. Racers get their pick, don’t they?”
“Yeah, of drag-strip trash and cruiser chicks. And they all look alike after a while. I ain’t in it for the girls. Or the money,” he added, knowing the next question that was coming.
“So why do you do it?”
“Mechanics. Pretty blond mechanics like you.” He laughed the flirt off. “Nah, I do it because not doing it kills me. You shoulda seen me trying to settle down. Couldn’t hold a job. Too much beer, too many pills, too much weed and hash. I got on the pipe in ‘Nam, never quite got off it.”
“Driving makes you feel alive,” Kenny said. Before he knew it, he was spilling the abbreviated story of the ‘Vette and Vegas and Vanessa. He left out the hustling part, but was pretty sure Ken could fill in the blanks. He had heard the falseness of the laughter. And he hated being called pretty. He reminded himself again just how much he hated that.
“Sin City. Sure was fun for a while,” Ken added to his story. “But too damn expensive to live there long. Did some racing there a few months back.”
Kenny got them each another beer. Ken dug in his pocket and produced a small clay pipe. “It’s just weed. You want a hit?”
Kenny took one and another. It tasted different than it had in high school, stronger. He felt his head getting light, and his stomach rumbled, reminding him how long ago dinner had been. “I forgot how hungry this stuff makes me. Give me a sec.” He returned with a bag of chips and a second one of cookies. “Here.”
Ken helped himself to a cookie. “It just makes me mellow. A little detatched. Kinda like sex. Only three things really help, y’know, keep the memories away. Sex, drugs and racing.”
“I know.” Kenny was watching Sagittarius do its slow twinkle just above the horizon. “But sometimes sex just brings more up. Working is the only thing that really helps.”
“That’s why you’re the best mechanic in the Mojave, kid, and I’m just a burned-out headcase who shoulda never come back. Pal of mine is chasing his dream, a worm ranch. Me, I’m just chasing enough money for the next high, at least until I crack it up out there. I may’ve made forty, but I ain’t gonna see forty-five.”
“Just like that movie. The one about people who couldn’t live past thirty.”
“Yeah.” Ken launched another assault on the cookies. “Weed ain’t working too hot tonight, kid. And it’s gonna be a long bad night, I can already tell. I’d go for a drive, but she’s in the shop.”
Kenny knew he could offer. He wouldn’t mind. The guy was big, sure, but he was good looking. It wouldn’t be too bad. “So tell me about blond mechanics.”
“They got real big hands. Always. And that means real big dicks.” Another hit on the pipe and his tongue was loose enough he didn’t care if he scared the kid off. “And their hands are always real strong. “And most of them are pretty, like you. I’ve been through twenty states, and not one blond mechanic turned me down. You wanna help fight the memories, kid?”
Kenny took a last hit. “Sure.” He didn’t care right now. Not about anything. Not about Vanessa, asleep in the house, not about his own bad memories.
The kiss, when it came was hard and fast. Ken was rough and demanding. He made Kenny kiss him back, deep, and sucked on his tongue. “You got the biggest hands I seen yet. You want to show me the rest?”
Without a word, caught up in another whirlwind kiss, Kenny opened his jeans. Ken smiled.
“How does your woman take that monster, no bigger than she is?” Ken’s hand closed over him and stroked him erect. “I’m big enough to handle it.” He bent in and licked the head. “The memories are inside me. You have to be inside me, too, to fight them.”
Kenny nodded. It made perfect sense in a stoned sort of way.
Ken pulled a tube of vaseline, the kind that came in first-aid kits, out of one of his pockets and prepped him. “Grease a couple fingers and run them inside first. Makes it a little easier on me.” He dropped to his knees unfastened his jeans and bent over the low patio table.
Kenny, his first time on top for this, but remembering how the more considerate men had treated him, did as he was told. He put the head of his cock at the opening and added one more squirt of vaseline before pressing in.
“Oh. Wow.” Ken breathed against the invasion. “Hang on. I’m okay.”
Ken paused, half in, half out. This was great. He pushed the rest of the way in, and just stayed there, looking up at the stars. They all seemed to have names, and he knew them all. He thrust a couple times.
“Yeah.” The kid was amazing. Huge, and hitting him just right. Oh yeah, no memories tonight. Ken relaxed against the table and it only got better from there, until he was coming all over himself without even touching his dick.
Ken rocked in time to the twinkling stars, and felt like he could do this all night. But his mind and his body said two different things, until the stars were all inside his head as he came.
They stayed joined for a while, and then Kenny pulled out and stood up. He looked at his watch, tipping it so he could catch the moonlight on the hands. “It’s one in the morning. I have to open the shop tomorrow.”
“Yeah, get some sleep. See you in the morning.” Ken stood up, a real smile on his face instead of the wolfish grin that usually rested there. He fastened his jeans and buckled his belt.
Kenny walked into the house, threw the beer cans away and settled into bed. He lay in the dark beside Vanessa and slept.
Kenny doesn’t think much about that summer in Vegas anymore. That’s what he tells himself. And some nights, when Sagittarius is low on the horizon and Antares pulses just so in the heart of the Scorpion, he even believes it.
