#if there’s one thing about me it’s I’m gonna imply dally and mark are brothers lmao

[damthosefandoms]

There's death at my door and I swear that it's following me

(ao3 link)

Summary:

“I’m going to finish it,” he says out loud to anyone who might be listening in his empty house. “I swear. I have to for school, anyway. I’m not handing in an unfinished paper.”

There is no response but the sound of Ponyboy’s own breathing.

“It’s not easy to write, Johnny!” he yells. “This is the part where I get you killed, you know!”

Nothing.

Figures he’d be quiet dead, too.

---

Neither of the greasers who died that cold, September night in 1967 had a funeral—Dally had nobody to set one up, except his friends who couldn’t afford it, and they never found out where the cops took him after they killed him anyway. But a month or so after everything ends, they find out Johnny’s mother had him cremated and that she and his father kept his ashes.

Ponyboy is particularly pissed off. Something about Johnny being trapped in that house his whole life, and even now, after death, being kept in a place he hated more than anything else…

“It ain’t right. I…we loved him more than they could ever dream of.”

As the remnants of the gang sit around the Curtises’ kitchen table, defeated, Two-Bit half-heartedly jokes they should steal his ashes. Darry rolls his eyes. Sodapop says that’s horrible. A heartbroken Ponyboy says, “Dally would’ve done it in a heartbeat.”

A week later Darry and Soda wake up to Pony making eggs for breakfast, with a new centerpiece on the table.

“Tell me that is not what I think it is,” Darry mutters, gesturing to the cheap urn.

Pony’s face goes red. “So, uh… this kid Mark at school taught me how to pick locks, and��”

“Ponyboy Michael Curtis!”

“C’mon, Darry, I had to! It was eating me alive. They don’t deserve him! I’ll bet they won’t even notice he’s gone!”

His brothers look at him like he’s finally lost it. Maybe he has, because Mark’s advice had gotten him nowhere, and Pony swears the Cades’ door unlocked on its own last night.

“All Johnny wanted was to get out of Tulsa. The happiest he ever was, was watchin’ the sunset back there on Jay Mountain. I needed to go get him so we could take him there.”

“Ponyboy…”

“I had to. I just had to. If not for Johnny, then for Dally, okay? ‘Cause god knows we couldn’t do anythin’ else for him.”

He’s got a lot of reasons to believe this is what Johnny wanted.

That weekend, the whole gang drives up to the remains of the church, so they all can say goodbye. Ponyboy pours Johnny’s ashes out over the cliffside where they watched the sunset, and if a little bit of dust gets on his hands, well. He stares for a minute before he goes to wash it off at the old water pump.

“You gotta go, Johnny,” he mumbles. “Don’t stick around me. Don’t do that to yourself. Move on.”

He’s always had a weird relationship with death. 

---

Ever since Ponyboy was little, he’d been told he had a strong imagination. His brothers call him a dreamer. His dad used to laugh and say he had his head in the clouds; his Mom said he was just the creative type. He learned pretty fast that no one else saw the things he could see, and he learned even faster not to talk about it. He thinks his brothers never believed him, but they also never forgot.

It’s one of those things where Ponyboy doesn’t see things unless he needs to. He got real good at tuning out the supernatural at a very young age, and it’s not something that comes up in his life very often anyway; death may follow him wherever he goes, it may show up at his door but he does not let it in. He doesn’t know why he’s like this. It’s like there is just something special about him, something he figures he won’t understand until he is much, much older. Or maybe he never will, and he’s just crazy.

The first time death comes to visit, Ponyboy is not feeling well. It’s been a month, it’s almost Halloween, and it is the first time since Johnny and Dally died that he’s sick again. Pony’s got just a low-grade fever, but Darry lets him stay home because that’s for the best. He promises to work on his English assignment.

Darry and Soda head out to work with promises to check up on him during their lunch breaks. He picks up his notebook and flips through it, but he is at the part where he runs into the church to save those kids and he can’t bring himself to pick up the pencil and admit that it was his cigarette. His fault.

His pencil rolls over the edge of the desk. It clatters to the floor and Ponyboy reaches down to get it. When he sits up, Johnny’s ghost is staring at him, pointing at the blank page. 

He blinks and he is alone again, but he can still feel the presence and knows deep down he isn’t. He sits back and groans. He can’t be normal for ten minutes?

“I’m going to finish it,” he says out loud to anyone who might be listening in his empty house. “I swear. I have to for school, anyway. I’m not handing in an unfinished paper.”

There is no response but the sound of Ponyboy’s own breathing. 

“It’s not easy to write, Johnny!” he yells. “This is the part where I get you killed, you know!”

Nothing. 

Figures he’d be quiet dead, too.

But writer’s block grabs him by the throat and doesn’t let go, so Ponyboy picks up his pencil again and begins to doodle on that blank page a picture of his current situation.

He falls asleep at his desk, and when his brothers come home, they find him there, snoring over a picture of himself at his desk, writing in his notebook while Johnny Cade stands watching over his shoulder like some kind of guardian angel.

---

Time passes and school starts up again, and around a year or so after the Windrixville nightmare, Ponyboy announces to his brothers that he’s going to some school dance with a couple of friends. He’s really non-committal about the whole thing, but Soda thinks it’s a good idea, and maybe Pony doesn’t really like the group of guys he’s going with but he knows he has to get out of his comfort zone and this is one way to do that. He promises to be back before curfew, so it’s not like he’ll have time to get into any trouble.

Apparently, his first mistake was one he’d made literal months ago, back in the spring—saying no to going out with Angela Shepard.

He knows it was shitty of him, the way he'd barely even acknowledged her presence after she waltzed up to him that day, but he also he knows it was never about him. It was her, expecting Pony to have her back whether or not he actually was interested in her, because that's just what Curtises and Shepards do.

But the day she approached him was—would've been—Johnny's seventeenth birthday. So, you know. There are a lot of reasons he'd turned her down. 

And now here they are, in October of 1968, at this stupid school dance. Mark’s brother Bryon brought a date and Bryon never liked Ponyboy anyway, so he and Mark walked off together to let those two hang out, and then Mark wanted to go out to Terry’s car because he brought alcohol or something—Pony was not interested in drinking the slightest, but he followed anyway—and then his second mistake must’ve been simply being at the dance or something, he doesn’t actually know. He doesn’t think he spoke to Angela the whole time.

(Later Ponyboy finds out she was trying to piss off Bryon, who he later finds out is her ex. She was mad he'd brought a date, or something like that. He still doesn't really get the whole thing, and probably never will. If you ask him, Angela should've known better than to have taken it all personally when she'd known exactly what she was doing.)

They’re sitting on the hood of Mark’s friend Terry’s car and some guy walks up that Ponyboy has never seen before. 

And the guy just swings at him! Of course he swung back!

Pony knows that he does not have a tough reputation, but he is one hell of a fighter—he may have gotten his ass kicked in the rumble but he also helped kick ass, and he’s been working out a bit with Darry so he can keep up with the track team, and he was briefly considered an accessory to murder, so clearly he can handle himself. Just ignore the fact he'd been drowning in the fountain for that whole thing. He figures Mark didn’t get the memo, because when the guy smashes a beer bottle to swing at Ponyboy’s head, his idiot friend decides to pick that moment to tell the other guy to relax.

Next thing Pony knows Mark’s on the ground bleeding and the school-sanctioned cop appointed to keep kids from killing each other at the dance grabs him to haul him away. Some job he’s doing.

He goes to get Mark’s brother, and he explains that the guy meant to hit him and not Mark, and Bryon says something about Angela Shepard but he doesn’t really explain. Pony decides he doesn't care. Mark groans and his eyes open, but it’s like he can’t see anything and Pony winces, because he knows all too well what is happening.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Shock,” Ponyboy says, and he takes Dally’s old leather jacket off and throws it over the guy until the ambulance arrives and the EMTs take over. He’s careful not to let any blood get on it, though. It’s already been through enough.

Ponyboy thinks maybe he has, too.

The brothers get into the ambulance and Cathy Carlson, the girl that Bryon took to the dance, walks up to him and asks what happened, so he tells her. She mentions that Bryon borrowed a friend’s car to drive them there—Two-Bit drove Ponyboy to the dance and then ditched him for the first girl he saw at the party, and must be long gone by now—and she points it out to him in the parking lot. She heads off to see if she can get a ride to the hospital from someone. 

Ponyboy wants to thank Mark for stopping the fight, if he can. He’s not as bad as everyone thinks he is; Pony’s got no clue why Dally used to be so insistent he stay away from the kid. He also kind of figured Bryon would need a way home too, so…

He hotwires the car. He hopes he didn’t break anything in the process, and he makes sure to have Cathy drive, because she has a license and Darry won’t let anyone but himself teach Pony—and he won’t do it until Pony’s sixteen. Probably for the best considering Soda and Steve have a million speeding tickets each and Two-Bit is chronically under the influence.

When they leave, Ponyboy and Bryon have to help Mark walk out because he can’t on his own just yet. Pony’s in the middle of saying he gets it, “I had this killer concussion last year after some soc kicked me in the head during the big rumble, and I remember bein’ out of my mind loopy after, laughin’ at how I couldn’t run… straight…”

He trails off.

He realizes he recognizes this hallway. The door across from him is slightly open and it is the room Johnny died in.

Mark half-falls ‘cause Bryon kept walking and Pony didn’t, and it takes Cathy asking if he is okay to snap him out of it. He says yes but his chest is starting to feel tight and his eyes burn.

He blinks a few times and shakes his head and mumbles a “sorry,” which just gets him an odd look, but no one really asks after that. They get Mark in the car and the only thing he says for the entire ride home are the directions to his house.

Except they don’t get all the way to his house, because they are driving down the street Dallas Winston died on and the pain in Pony’s chest gets worse and he looks out the window toward the street lamp and yells “STOP!” because he sees someone standing there and is convinced they are about to hit them.

Everyone stares at Ponyboy like he is insane but he does not care because Dally is crumpling to the ground just like he did that night, calling out Pony’s name and dropping dead. Then he is standing up, and the bullets are hitting him, and it repeats and repeats like some horrible loop. Pony feels like all his hair is standing on end. He can’t breathe.

Don’t think about how you heard Dally and Johnny’s last words, how they called for you, but you’ll never know Mom and Dad’s. If they screamed for help. If they held each other as they died. If they watched the train coming and knew they couldn't run.

“Uh, I forgot to tell y’all a turn, I… I’ll get out here. Thanks for the ride.”

He doesn’t wait for a response before he gets out of the car and shuts the door. Cathy’s got the window down and she asks if he’s okay and Pony is normally a good liar but he isn’t tonight.

“I’ll be fine. See you later.”

They drive off and Ponyboy sits down on the curb and stares at his hands. He’s never hanging out with any of them ever again.

He thinks about his dreams, the horrible ones that wake him up screaming and shaking, the ones he can’t ever remember, and he wonders why he had to be the one cursed with this stupid ability. To know something horrible is going to happen before it does. To see what happened to his friends after death. Why he has to be the one to know Dallas Winston will never move on. He has this feeling in his gut and he knows he needs to walk down this road to get home but he cannot bring himself to go anywhere near that street lamp. He already has Johnny’s spirit attached to him. He can’t deal with the idea of Dally being there too. He is too angry, and even from this distance, it’s starting to affect Pony, too.

He takes the long way home, because maybe he has a jacket tonight but he figures that if he’s going to get jumped tonight for walking home alone, what’s the worst that could happen after last time? He’s already lost two friends. He lost his parents. Who even cares anymore?

When Ponyboy gets back to his house it is well after curfew and he can see the light on inside and it is like deja vu. He has a black eye and his lip is cut, he knows it’s swelling up because he never put ice on it, and his chest feels tight and he knows he’s shed a few tears and he just. He can’t even bring himself to care as he walks inside.

“You’re late again,” Darry says. Soda is nowhere to be seen. 

“Yeah, whatever, Darrel,” Pony mutters.

“Where were you? I told you to be home by midnight. What happened to your face?”

“Some guy swung at me. Don’t worry about it.”

“You really think I won’t, Pony? We’ve talked about this.”

That is a lie. They didn’t talk. They just promised Soda not to fight anymore.

But Pony is tired and Dally and his heart hurts and he feels like he is going to explode, so he does.

“I was at the hospital, Darry, is that what you want? My friend got hurt trying to help me out because some guy I ain’t never seen in my life decided to swing at me at the dance even though I didn’t even do anything and I went to the hospital to check on Mark. And you know what? I had it all under control and then I hadda walk past that stupid room Johnny died in and now I know my brain is broken ‘cause I can’t stop thinking about it and about Dally and— and I don’t want to talk about it!” Ponyboy can’t even finish. He just storms past his brother and down the hall to his room.

He opens the door, grabs Sodapop out of the bed and shoves him out, and then slams the door shut behind him. The doorknob clicks locked and they hear a noise that sounds an awful lot like a heartbroken sob.

Soda looks at Darry.

“I told you waiting up for him would just piss him off.”

“Shut up.”