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damthosefandoms · 23 days ago

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This old house

(ao3 link) (based on this post)

Summary:

The house will always be theirs, and nobody can take it away from them.

———

There was something so incredibly enticing about the attic pull cord.

Maybe it was the proximity to Darry’s bedroom door; how every morning when he was younger, he’d get up and stand on the step-up to his room, and try to jump clear across the upstairs hallway, like the floor was made of lava, to the step-up to his parents’ room to wake them up. How he’d always manage to narrowly avoid that pull-cord smacking him in the face as he did so.

He still remembers his mother nagging him about it, about jumping around the tiny landing when it would be so easy to misstep and fall down the steep wooden staircase to his inevitable doom. He remembers his dad laughing and telling Mama to relax, because Dad did the same thing when he was a kid, growing up in Darry’s same bedroom, back when Grandpa Pat sacrificed a decade’s worth of paychecks to give each of his three boys their own bedroom, and built that addition onto the side of the house himself in between shifts at the factory and fighting in the first world war. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but it was home, and Grandpa made sure of that.

Grandpa used to tease Darry when he was real little, back before he passed; he’d hold him up and show him his best handiwork, which in hindsight was just an amateur addition to the side of an old two-story cottage, and Darry would wiggle around in his arms and try to grab at whatever he could, including that stupid pull cord. He’d laugh and untangle it from Darry’s pudgy baby hands and put him down for a nap, right there in that room that never belonged to anybody except Darrel Curtis.

Darry thinks about Grandpa Pat every time he sees it, these days. He can’t help himself when he goes up there, always reaching out to hit it, like he’s a middle school boy trying to show off and touch the top of a doorway in the hall—it’s instinct. He’s still there, in that bedroom—a room built by his grandfather, and now that he works in construction, Darry thinks about that a lot. About how his grandfather put his whole heart and soul into making this place a home, something that their family could use for generations, and how he’s unintentionally letting it go.

If you pulled the cord, a drop-down ladder would take you up into the attic, and it would take up the entire upstairs landing when it was down. You could barely maneuver around it, and that wasn’t Grandpa Pat’s fault, but when Darry was seven, he thought his Grandpa built the whole house (he didn’t—just the two side bedrooms, upstairs and down) and would blame him for everything that he felt like complaining about. Darry could grab the cord if he jumped, but his mother used to nag him about trying, saying “quit it, baby, I don’t want you takin’ a tumble!” as he’d stand up on his tip-toes at the edge of the staircase trying to reach it.

But one day, Mama’s distracted, stuck between trying to convince her most picky eater that carrots aren’t going to kill him and trying to get baby Pony to take medicine for his fever. This is his chance—Darry’s been eating his greens and finally, finally he is tall enough to pull down the attic ladder. He just wants to see what’s up there, maybe find out where that roof leak is that Dad mentioned the other night, and maybe he’s a little stir-crazy because this is the era of barefoot kids playing baseball in sandlots, but it’s a summer afternoon in 1954 and it’s raining cats and dogs out there in east Tulsa, so he can’t go play outside.

His five-year-old neighbor Keith is sitting on the step-up to Darry’s bedroom door, laughing, and his laugh only gets more infectious when the attic door opens and the ladder drops down. Darry dives out of the way, crashing into Keith as they fall back through the door onto Darry’s bedroom floor. Mama yells something up from downstairs, but Darry ignores her, telling Keith to grab the bucket so he can get it up there so Dad doesn’t have to worry about it later.

Fast forward and Darry’s twenty years old, reaching for that same pull cord so he can put away the holiday decorations. They don’t have to worry about leaks anymore, because Darry’s got a new job and has learned how to fix the roof, but that ladder still drops down like it has it out for him, and this time Two-Bit holds it steady for him. This time, Mama isn’t there to warn him to be careful.

---

The thing about living in what used to be a glorified summer cottage is that it’s nice, almost, in the summer. They don’t have one of those fancy central air conditioning units, but with all the windows and the front and back door open, a nice breeze will blow through every so often.

Darry remembers the summer of ‘57, when he was ten years old, and he was determined to send a paper airplane from the front door all the way out the back. Two-Bit told him it wasn’t possible, not with how their house was laid out (“Maybe if it was a straight shot, but there’s a wall in the way, Dar, it just ain’t gonna work,”) but Darry’s got two little brothers dead-set on helping prove him right.

Keith’s being going through a bit of a know-it-all phase lately, hence why they’ve started calling him Two-Bit—something about getting a little sister and “becoming the man of the house” as he puts it seems to have given him the idea he’s got to be the boss of everybody else, too. But Darry doesn’t care that the kid’s dad left right before Christmas right after his mom found out she was pregnant or that his best friend is no longer an only child or has to be involved in everything. Right now, all that matters is that he’s trying to steal Darry’s role as the coolest big kid in the neighborhood.

Darry’s the oldest. He’s the smartest and the best at football and he’s been organizing their Fourth of July baseball games (because Darry might think football is better but the Fourth of July is a baseball holiday) for three years now, since enough big kids like them moved in to play. Two-Bit Mathews will run their little corner of the East Side over his dead body.

He tells Sodapop and Ponyboy very carefully when they’ll need to turn on their little fans to make this work. He can only pray that his brothers are better listeners than Two-Bit’s five-year-old neighbor. The Cade kid doesn’t even talk! Pony can count to twenty and he hasn’t even seen his fourth birthday yet. Soda will make anything happen for a candy bar. Darry’s got the best throwing arm this side of the tracks; he’s got this in the bag.

Darry’s paper airplane takes a nosedive as soon as he throws it.

Ah, well. Bad luck. He’ll get his best buddy back at some point.

---

The downside to being the oldest in the neighborhood is that Darry gets stuck with the most boring jobs. At least mowing lawns makes money; walking his little brother to his friend’s house? Are you kidding? But Mama saw one too many missing kids’ faces posted on the milk cartons and now, in the fall of 1959, Darry’s stuck walking Sodapop down to his friend Steve’s house.

It’s a longer walk there than to any of their other friends’ houses, which isn’t saying much because Two-Bit lives basically across the street and Johnny’s two houses down from him. Steve’s the only one whose house isn’t on a road directly facing the lot, though; it’s in the next block over and Darry figures that’s why they hadn’t met him until Soda started school. Or maybe he’s one of those kids whose parents just don’t let him out for some reason.

It wouldn’t shock him if that was the case, not with how Steve’s mom had died. Darry remembers the day his mom told him about it, just a few years earlier. He had been sitting on the counter drying the dishes as usual, just opposite the oven in their tiny kitchen so he wouldn’t be in the way while his mom pulled out a piping-hot lasagna.

“It’s for Mr. Randle and his son,” she’d said to him, placing it on the stove to cool while Darry carefully dried Soda’s favorite plate. “Glory, that poor little boy. He’s about to lose his mother. No child should ever have to grow up without a mother.”

He wonders if Soda knows what happened, or if Darry had just been told because he was old enough to understand it. The boys hadn’t met until after Mrs. Randle’s cancer caught up to her, anyway. He wonders if Steve ever talks about it. If Darry’s mother died, he sure as hell wouldn’t. Just the thought of losing his mother sends chills running down his spine.

They’d walked this same way that day, cutting through the lot to deliver the food. Darry had skipped around the bases on the overgrown baseball field, just like Soda is now.

“Why’s this here anyway?” He muses, and Darry glances over at him.

“What?”

“The baseball field. Nobody ‘round here even likes baseball. I mean, Dally’s the only kid in town who really goes for that kinda thing, but he spends his summers in New York with his mom and prolly sees games all the time, but I don’t know nobody else who plays, so why we got a field here an’ all?”

“Grandpa Pat told me he asked the city to put up a backstop,” Darry says, kicking an old Pepsi can across the sandlot. “He got everyone in the neighborhood to go for it, hoping it would keep Dad an’ his buddies outta trouble. The socs on the other side of town got a real nice little league park and they thought maybe us greasers would be good like them if we got one. ‘Cept the city’s supposed to take care of our field too, but they don’t, so we got nothin’ to do and get into trouble anyway. If you ask me, I say they shoulda made it a football field, but I figure that was more expensive.”

Soda picks up a stick off the ground and swings it like a sword. “Everything’s expensive.”

“Nah,” Darry mutters, “we just don’t got no money.”

---

Sodapop’s favorite thing about their old house is the load-bearing crayon mark trailing from his bedroom door upstairs, all the way down and around the corner to the living room fireplace. Bright red crayon, scrawled for what felt like miles to the toddler behind the crime—probably his greatest feat to date. He doesn’t remember doing it, but Darry’s always reminding him who the culprit was.

Nowadays Ponyboy’s the artist of the family, and Soda’s crayons have been long since passed down. But the other piece of homemade artwork in the house that Soda treasures isn’t one of his brother’s. Ponyboy might’ve gotten his love of movies from their dad, but he got his artistic talent from their mother. Back before Soda was born, Mama was so deeply convinced she would be having a girl that she decorated the nursery for it, complete with pink, flowery wallpaper and little horses along the baseboard. She’d gotten a horse stuffed animal instead of a teddy bear for her baby girl and when a boy was born instead, she put her foot down and stood by it. Called him her little cowboy.

(His horsey is named Rascal, by the way. Pony’s the only one who knows he still sleeps with it stuffed under his pillow because every time he sees it, he zeroes in on the “surgery scars” from where his mother had sewed it back together after playing too rough as a kid and he’ll run a finger over the stitches and feel close to her again.)

Soda may not have been the best academically, and maybe he couldn’t even attempt to really start reading until he was seven, and maybe he’s not the best at math but—there are 167 little horses along the walls of his bedroom. He’s named and treasures every single one of them. Admittedly, the walls of what was originally Soda’s bedroom still are covered in the pink, flowery wallpaper. It proved too much of a project to take down.

---

Seeing Paul at the rumble, for Darry, was like seeing a teacher in public. A person that you’ve compartmentalized away into being in one specific part of your life and never expecting to see outside of that. Of course, that’s where the comparison ends, and now, with Ponyboy sleeping the day (and hopefully his fever) away and Soda working a triple shift at the DX because Darry’s gotta stay home with the kid, he’s left to his own devices.

That’s never a good thing, because free time always ends with him either stressing about money or thinking about Paul, and that’s what brings him upstairs to his old room, where now he’s trying to patch the hole Paul punched into the wall when they were seventeen.

He’d been angry with his parents that day. Darry doesn’t remember the exact reason why, but he’d watched as Paul slammed his fist into the wall, immediately cringing away afterwards in pain. It wasn’t the first time someone’s done that in their house, and it probably won’t be the last, but it left a hole there that Darry covered up with a football poster and forgot about until now.

Now, when he can still feel Paul’s fist on his jaw. Damn. He really should’ve iced it.

Darry thinks back to that night. He’d been lucky, really, that no one overheard the whole thing. Usually, the walls between their rooms upstairs were so thin that anyone sneaking in would wake Soda up immediately, but when he tore his ACL at the rodeo, their parents made Ponyboy switch rooms with him, and that kid—once he’s really asleep—doesn’t wake up for anything. Except the occasional nightmare, or if he’s sleepwalking, which is why his room was downstairs in the first place. But then Soda got thrown off that horse and his knee has been and probably always will be fucked because of that, and so he gets priority with the downstairs bedroom. Fair enough.

(Pony moved back into that room with Soda anyway after their parents died, so it’s not like it was ever that big a deal. Darry sure isn’t complaining about having the whole upstairs to himself these days. He gets some quiet.)

Paul would show up pretty often back in those days, and here’s the thing. Darry’s bedroom was upstairs, the one on the side of the house, and probably the second-nicest room behind Ponyboy’s, because they both had a window on three of their four walls. Sodapop used to bitch and moan for hours about how hot his room would get at night, having the tiniest room in the house, right above the kitchen. The only downside to Darry’s room upstairs was that Grandpa Pat apparently missed the class where they taught him how to build a level floor.

(Seriously, it’s a good thing Darry’s got two closets built in, because even his bed will slide down the floor if you don’t push it up against the outer wall, and he could swear it’s getting worse over time.)

That and the fact you’d have to scale the side of the house to get in, which probably didn’t help Paul’s attitude when he was already pissed off.

Well, he was probably more scared than anything, but Darry’s been sworn to secrecy on pretty much every conversation they ever had that involved Paul’s parents, so he’s not about to question it. He knows what goes on in that empty house on the West Side.

He punched the wall and Darry had snuck downstairs to get some ice and the first aid kit, praying Soda wouldn’t wake up and hear him.

They don’t really talk about it, but… but Darry gets it and he’s got a way he copes with getting angry, so he talks Paul into coming with him downtown to Tim’s once his hand is healed, to borrow his punching bag, the same one he was teaching Darry to box on.

There’s a million things Tim Shepard could say about Darry bringing a soc into the ring, but he keeps his mouth shut, ‘cause he knows better.

The thing is, Darry gets angry too, and he gets angry a lot. And it’s really hard to stop being angry once you start, sometimes. His parents have reminded him time and again about when he was eleven how he’d gotten so frustrated while playing with his brothers that he’d held Soda upside down from the monkey bars until he cried uncle, and then when Pony snitched and Mama came out to holler at him, he got so worked up yelling back that he dropped Soda.

And, you know, all those hours in the emergency room waiting for somebody to put a cast on his brother’s arm kinda knocked some sense into him. He doesn’t want anyone to get hurt just because he couldn’t control his anger ever again.

So boxing kind of helped. It gave Darry something to get his anger out on, and it was exercise, and maybe—just once or twice—he had made a few bucks off it. He never told his parents about it. They’d gotten real upset back when Soda was nine and spent a month practically begging Mama to sign him up for classes ‘cause he heard about it on tv and thought it was cool.

Dad used to tell them never to hit anything he could hurt. And Darry gets that, he does. But Grandpa Pat didn’t take the fall for nothing, and the money he’d posthumously made from it all paid off the house. Darry lost all interest in the sport after his parents died, and he pretends he doesn’t know that Soda still sneaks out to Tim’s backroom ring just like he used to, just to feel something.

Darry doesn’t hit people or things anymore, or he tries not to. Whether it runs in the family or not, it has fully lost its appeal.

Until a storm takes the chimney off the roof and Darry feels like punching another hole into the wall. It’s just one thing after another.

---

The post on the corner of the wall by the kitchen is cracking. Darry hasn’t cried in years—not in front of anybody, anyway, not like Soda does or Pony will under pressure, but.

But right now he feels like sitting on the floor and sobbing.

He knows how to fix it. He knows he should, and maybe there’s even enough in the budget this month to afford it. But at the end of the day it’s really just cosmetic, maybe, and the rest of the house has cracks in the walls and water damage and stains and that fucking crayon mark, and those—well they aren’t more pressing but he thinks about it a lot.

That’s not what’s killing him.

The crack in the wood, now big enough to really be noticeable, is about three feet above the ground, and it runs right through his dad’s name, written in Grandpa Pat’s shaky handwriting.

Darrel 6/7/30 — 3 y/o — shoes on.

Not the lowest point on the Curtis Wall of Fame’s height chart, but one of Darry’s favorites. It’s dumb. But he crouches down and runs his hand over the letters anyway. He looks a little above, searching for the same date.

In pencil:

Patrick Jr. 6/7/30 — 10 years — new boots!

Mikey 6/7/30 — 8 years — barefoot.

Darry’s the only one of his siblings who met their grandfather, but even he’s never met his uncles. They both died in the second world war.

Mama’s on there, too. Only once, and the date reads their wedding anniversary—the day she moved in. The same date is by dad’s name up at the top. Neither of them had much more growing to do, at that point.

Well, Dad didn’t. Mama was growing a baby at the time.

God, Darry misses them.

He looks down again.

Darrel Jr. 4/17/58 — 11y/o — shoes on.

Sodapop 8th birthday — no shoes.

Ponyboy Michael Curtis 11/14/1953 — 4mos. — sock feet.

Darry can’t help but grin at that one. It’s Pony’s first, measured younger than anybody else. Sock feet. It’s so Mama. Soda’s entries never seem to have shoes on, probably because he has never once willingly worn shoes (or socks) in his life. He hates the way it feels wearing them, and Darry swears he’s spent more of his life listening to Soda complain about his socks being itchy than he has playing football, and Darry has played a lot of football in his twenty years. Soda complains about shoes more than he complains about reading, and he used to cry over having to read six times a day.

Their family are not the only people they keep track of. The height chart is like a welcome to the family. He knows Pony’s always looking at this wall, like he’s memorizing just how long their friends have been part of their lives.

Keith Mathews — 16mos. 10/20/50 — no shoes.

No surprise there. You know someone's family when even Darry doesn’t remember a time without them around.

John Cade — 4/13/1957 — 6 y/o — shoes on.

Steven Randle — almost 7 — 4/13/57. No shoes.

There’s a mark with Soda’s name next to it listed with the same date. It’d been the first time Johnny and Steve slept over. Soda hadn’t stopped talking about it for a month after. Darry wonders if Soda had realized why their parents hadn’t wanted either boy to go home.

There’s a few marks with names scratched out. Darry knows the one pretty high up that looks like it was carved out with a knife used to say Paul’s name. He’s pretty sure Soda scratched out Sandy’s, too.

Somebody must’ve been embarrassed and started to scribble over the next one he reads, but they must’ve gotten stopped halfway through, because it’s still legible:

Dallas W. age 9 — cowboy boots — 12/21/58.

Darry’s still lost on how Mama pulled that off. Dally’s got only one other mark on the wall, pretty high up, actually:

Dally — 17th birthday (1966) — cowboy boots.

Soda’s also got one from that day, and it’s the only one where he is wearing shoes, actually. Cowboy boots, just like Dally. Soda had begged for them for years, and got them sixteenth birthday.

It had been an apology gift from their dad, for banning him from the rodeo. They couldn’t afford Soda risking his health like that, but they could find room in the budget for some nice boots, right? Soda hates shoes, so begging for them was a big deal.

That, and Soda just really likes matching with his friends. Hell, Darry’s half-convinced the reason he works at the DX with Steve is because they get to have matching uniform shirts and hats.

(Well, that, and Evie’s dad owns the greasy joint and has known them for years, so he hired Soda full-time on the spot when he dropped out of school. Apparently he used to be buddies with Uncle Patrick, and Mr. Mathews, actually, back before the war, but now he’s the only one left. Darry kind of understands the feeling.)

Darry hasn’t made the gang line up since his parents died. Most of them are done growing anyway, and even if he did have time to think about it, he can’t imagine seeing anybody’s handwriting up there for his friends, other than his Mama’s and Grandpa Pat’s and maybe a few other family members Darry never got to meet. He runs his hand over the most recent mark, his Mama’s last.

Johnny 12/25/66 — 15 — NEW yellow high tops!

Pony had spent months saving up to get him those. Now they sit up on the mantle collecting dust because he won’t let anyone touch them.

There’s a crack in the mantle, too, but this house is all they’ve really got, and it just wouldn’t be home if it wasn’t falling apart.

———

bonus inspo pics (because this fic was based on my grandma’s old house that she's since moved out of & it doesn't look like that anymore due to renovations over the years so i'm not doxxing anybody, and I miss it there so. fucking. bad.):