#also i know this is way late sorry y'all my schedule's gonna be wack for the last week or two of this

[waveridden]

FIC: cast my name to the wind

A tale from America’s golden age in which an heiress renounces her riches and becomes a vagrant in a quest to deserve her one true love, the Hobo Princess, in her home the fabled vagrant’s paradise Moonshine Holler. What woman cannot relate to that? Only a woman who has never loved. Sami Jo/Autumn, Sami Jo & Steve, 1.8k.

AUcember || title lyric

#

“So let me get this straight,” Steven says. “You threw a party last night.”

“Mhm,” Sami Jo says. “You were there.”

“I was there,” Steven agrees. “And at some point, when I lost track of you at this party, you met a woman who told you she was the hobo princess.”

“Yes.”

“As in, the princess of all hobos.”

“That’s right.”

“And the hobo princess gave you… a glove.”

Sami Jo holds up the glove. “She said it’s like the hobo equivalent of proposing.”

“That’s great,” Steve says, but that vein in his forehead is doing that pop-out thing that it does when he’s actually about to go apoplectic on her. “You’re engaged to the hobo princess.”

“She’s great,” Sami Jo sighs dreamily. The woman was beautiful, a little indelicate, unlike anyone Sami Jo has ever met. She’s smitten and she doesn’t even care.

“You’re already engaged!”

“Uh, I don’t want to be engaged to Parker, and I’m also pretty sure he doesn’t want to be engaged to me.”

Steve claps his hands together in front of his chest. “You can’t run away.”

“Why not? I’m an adult, I can do what I feel like.”

“Because people are going to notice if you go missing!”

Sami Jo is an heiress to a canned good empire. It’s the shittiest, worst sentence that defines her life, next to: Sami Jo is engaged to the heir of a different canned good empire. Like somehow, marrying off two canned good moguls is going to make some huge canned good conglomerate. She hates it. Steven knows she hates it. She’s pretty sure Parker knows she hates it, too, which she’d feel bad about if he didn’t also hate it.

“Barely anybody will really care, though,” she argues. “And I want to find her again.”

“Can’t you write her a letter?”

“Oh, sure, I’ll just leave it at a street corner. Dear hobo princess Autumn, please marry me, I’ll see you next Tuesday.” She glares at him. “Steve, come on, that’s crazy.”

“And the rest of this isn’t crazy?”

“I’m going to find her,” Sami Jo says stoutly.

“You’re not even in love with her!” Steven practically shouts. “You met her last night! You can’t run away from your responsibilities and go searching for a hobo by yourself because you think you might want to marry her!”

“Good point.” Sami Jo taps her chin thoughtfully. She doesn’t know enough - or anything - about the hobo lifestyle, certainly not enough to do this. “Come with me.”

“What?”

“Come with me. So I’m not alone.”

“I don’t-”

“You don’t want to be rich either,” Sami Jo says, as cajolingly as she can. Steve is her best rich friend, which means that they both agree that having money sucks. Financial security is one thing, but the isolation, the separation, the expectation is all too much. They’ve joked about running away before. Hopefully he can tell she’s not joking anymore.

Steven sighs. “But I don’t know how to be a hobo either.”

“We can figure it out together.”

“I can’t run away,” Steven says, but Sami Jo can feel him coming around. “I can’t - can I call it a business trip?”

“Call it what you want,” Sami Jo says. “But I’m going to call it what it is.”

“And what is it?”

“A jailbreak,” Sami Jo says, and just like she knew he would, Steve cracks a smile at that.

#

They’ve been on the run for a sum total of seven minutes when a guy quite literally pops out of a dumpster and says “Whuzzit?”

Steven shrieks and wheels back a few steps, dropping his bindle in the process. Sami Jo just tips her cap to the guy. “Uh, whuzzit to you too.”

“Whuzzit’s a dumb way to say hello,” the guy says reproachfully, adjusting his headband. “It’s an American hobo thing, but I am a Canadian hobo, and I am a hobo of distinguished taste.”

“You are literally in a dumpster,” Steven says. “You, right now, are in a dumpster.”

“Distinguished,” he repeats. And then he spits a glob of saliva and… well, hopefully just saliva into his hand and holds it out. “Name’s Cib.”

“No,” Steven whispers. “No, no, no-”

Sami Jo spits in her hand and smacks it against Cib’s. “They call me Sami Jo.”

Cib nods approvingly and wipes their joined spit off on his shirt. Steven, still standing decidedly behind Sami Jo, gags. Cib ignores him. “Haven’t seen you around these parts before.”

“We’re a bit new at this whole hobo thing.”

“Also, you’re Canadian,” Steven says, kind of unhelpfully. “So, you know, that might be why you don’t know us.”

Cib peers around Sami Jo to glare at him. “Or maybe I emigrated a few years ago and you came poking around my dumpster. Ever think about that, you bean-can string-bean string-along fuck?”

“What did you just say to me?”

“Bean-can string-bean string-along fuck, aren’t you listening?”

“I don’t think he’s being literal,” Sami Jo says. “He probably actually didn’t understand you.”

“His loss,” Cib says. “You said you’re new?”

Sami Jo wipes her own hand on the side of her jeans. “Yeah, maybe you can help me, actually. I got a glove from a hobo a while ago, I’m trying to track her down.”

Cib whistles. “Got gloved, huh? Next thing you know the wedding pies’ll be baking. Who’s it from?”

“Her name’s Autumn.”

Cib’s eyes nearly pop out of his head, and in one smooth motion he vaults the side of the dumpster and lands next to Sami Jo. “You got gloved by the hobo princess?”

“Is there only one hobo named Autumn?” Steven demands.

“Yeah, she got first name dibs on Autumn.” Cib shakes his head and leans over to Sami Jo. “Do we have to take him with us?”

“Take him with us?” Sami Jo repeats. “Where are we going?”

“To find the hobo princess, of course.”

“And how do we do that?”

“You ever been on a train before, Sami Jo?”

“I have.”

Cib grins. “Not like this, you haven’t.”

#

“When you want to get on a train, you need a running start.” He cranes his neck, looking down the eastbound tracks. “Makes it easier when you jump.”

“I’m going home,” Steven says. “I’m not going to jump on a moving train, what the fuck is-”

“How do you pick a car?” Sami Jo asks, curious though her heart’s pounding.

“You normally shoot for one of the last ones. And you can tell a cargo car from the outside.”

“And when do you start running?”

The engine of the train pases them “Now,” Cib says, and takes off.

Sami Jo sprints after him without hesitation. She can hear Steven shriek “Samantha!”, the way he only does when he’s actually pissed at her, but she knows that he’s running after her. Or at least, he hopes that she is. It’s hard to hear anything over the train.

“Okay,” Cib shouts. “The last car is coming up, so you’re going to need to jump and grab on. If you have strong arms, this will not be as hard for you as it will be for me!”

“We’re going to die,” Steve screams back, which is about what she expected from him.

“Ready?”

“Ready,” Sami Jo yells back.

Cib changes angles so he’s running towards the train. Sami Jo follows him, and he jumps on the back of the last train car, clinging to the back. “Go,” he shouts.

Sami Jo takes a second to cast a prayer up to whatever’s listening, and then jumps, grabbing onto a handle on the far back. She barely manages to shimmy over before Steven flings himself upward next to her, gasping for air.

“Oh my god,” Sami Jo says, exhilarated. “Oh, my god, we got on the train.”

“Please tell me we can also get in the train,” Steven says, although it’s still hard to hear him. “Why are we doing this?”

“Because you love me?”

“Why are you doing this?”

Sami Jo grins at him. “Glove!”

“I’m going home!”

“Got it,” Cib shouts, and the door to the train compartment goes flying open. “Everyone in, quick quick quick, gotta go!” And with that he swings himself into the train compartment.

Steven stares. “Uh, do you want-”

“After you,” Sami Jo says. Steven glares at her, but he shimmies to the side and, with a loud yelp, more or less throws himself into the train compartment. She doesn’t allow herself to think twice before following suit, stumbling but landing on her feet. Which seems to be more than Steven can say, from where he’s sprawled out on the floor.

“Nice,” Cib says approvingly. “You have mastered the second most important lesson of hoboism. I’m proud of you already.”

“What’s the first?” Steven groans, pushing himself up to a sitting position.

“Getting off the train,” Cib says cheerfully, and goes to shut the compartment door. The last thing Sami Jo sees before the compartment goes dark is Steven’s face going pale.

#

Cib snores. They find this out about two hours into the train ride, by Sami Jo’s estimate.

“Hey,” she says quietly, looking at where she’s pretty sure Steven is. It’s hard to see. “You good?”

“Yeah,” Steven answers. “Hold on.” She can hear shuffling, like he’s getting to his feet, and then he plops down next to her in the dark. “You good?”

“I’m good.” Sami Jo tips her head back to look at the ceiling. “I think.”

“I think I lied.”

“I might be lying too.”

“We’re both rich and we’re in a cargo car of a train, heading somewhere unspecified east of here, with a homeless man we met in a dumpster.”

“Looking for a hobo princess in a mythical city.”

“Mythical city?”

“Oh, I forgot that part.” She grins despite herself. “There’s apparently a hobo paradise called Moonshine Holler. It’s like their version of… I dunno, New York or Los Angeles.”

“Where is it?”

“She wouldn’t say.”

“Oh, she wouldn’t say,” Steven mumbles. “Fantastic. What are we doing here?”

“Looking for the hobo princess.”

“The hobo princess,” he repeats, a little higher pitched than before. “The hobo princess who you met, last night, at a party. Was she worth throwing everything away for?”

Sami Jo shrugs and lets her head fall onto Steven’s shoulder. “I think I was ready to throw everything away,” she admits. “This is just an excuse. But she’s a pretty excuse.”

Steven claps a hand on her knee. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Thanks for coming on an impossible quest with me.”

“Thanks for getting me out of that shitty, stuffy life.”

Sami Jo smiles in the dark. Somewhere out there, her parents are searching for their daughter, and her fiance is probably worried about her. And somewhere out there, there’s a woman with a bright smile and one glove, waiting for her. She knows which one she’d rather run towards.

#

bonus info about this au