Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Waiting. Monty should be really, really good at waiting by now. He waited day in, day out, to see if he would get his Orphan Annie story, when he was fresh into foster care. He waited for things to go wrong every time a new face or couple of faces came to meet him, cooing over his cherub face or adorable smile. He waited first for the various social workers to come up with a new way to say ‘sorry, it’s a no’ every time the visits ended. 

He waited for Esther to pick someone else when she first visited. He waited for her to stop talking to him, to stop smiling at him, to go away and leave and force the social worker into another sorry.

He waited to find out where he was going to be deposited when he aged out of the first home; he waited for what Mick would say when he ended up ushered into his new room; waited to be denied when Esther came to see him there too.

He waited for Esther to reveal it was all a trick, even as he begged Mick for permission to go on a day trip, to go to the zoo, or the mall, or just out for a drive.

He waited for Esther to stop coming back, time after time, until he started waiting for Esther to come get him again, time after time, until—

Until.

Monty waits, watching the clock on the wall, knee bouncing. He can’t fucking wait to get out of here, out of this stuffy classroom with its children and rules and useless information that drones around him but never quite makes it into either ear. He hides an earphone under his hair, tucked down by a slouchy, cosy beanie he’d swiped from the coatrack this morning without asking, because he was late and couldn’t afford to wait to find out whose it was.

Time seems slower when he’s waiting. It’s one of those unfortunate truths about the world that he’s learned, while the rest of the people that look his age but feel impossibly young have been sitting learning how to do long division and what the food pyramid is for.

Admittedly, some of the math he’s pretty quick at doing in his head. Percentages, for example, have been a constant of his life with Esther, since discount stickers and deals had been of particular interest for getting away with smaller scams. But using a calculator? Algebra?

He’s still waiting for someone to explain why any of it is necessary. And waiting for any bit of it to magically make sense.

The bell rings and he’s out of his seat, ignoring the annoyed shout to wait, the class is dismissed only when I say so!

It isn’t the end of the day yet but there’s no way in hell Monty is going to his English class. The last one had been such a fucking waste of time that he’d actually thumped his head on the desk, and been sent to the principal for disrespect.

He hadn’t gone of course, he’d just left the classroom and then sat in a stairwell for most of the day, so now he has an excuse to avoid the class entirely, since he doesn’t want to get into any extra trouble. And if they come for him he’ll just run, the way Esther taught him.

Port Townsend is nice enough in the late spring, but Monty doesn’t see it as he walks away from the high school at a good pace, wondering where to go to hide. All the public places in town are highly visible and will definitely notice that he should be in class still. He could hang out at the park, but his phone battery is low and there’s nothing to do there. Until he grows a little more, fills out, he can’t pass for much older than he is, which is a very uncomfortable fifteen. Not a baby anymore, and not a child either. But not yet old enough, physically, to do all the things he’s ready for.

God, this would be easier if he didn’t have to go to school.

He’ll just have to go back to the Shed and risk Mick seeing him sneaking in. He’s been waiting for their next argument about his education, after all.

The Shed is actually called the Shelter for the Estranged and Displaced of Northwest America. No one has ever called it that though, as far as Monty is aware, and even Mick—not Mr Mick, he always firmly points out—just calls it SEDNA, or occasionally, when he’s tired or trying to make one of the little ones laugh, ‘Shedna’. The inhabitants themselves have always just called it the Shed, though, and it’s stuck, lingering around them all like a shadow as they try and live their lives in Port Townsend. So-and-so from the Shed, labelled and assigned to a place, an othering and a gift all at once since most of them are left with gaps in the ‘surname’ section of every administrative paper, and no one to call in an emergency other than Mick.

Mick gets a lot of emergency calls.

It’s a decent house, really, on the end of a row in its own plot, slightly off to the edge of town. A bit run down, but Mick has a chore rota for all of the kids staying with him, and gardening is a big part of that. Monty had reluctantly trimmed the roses and cut his fingers to shreds two summers ago, which had led to a pretty spectacular tantrum—Mick had called it a meltdown but what the fuck did he know—about not being able to perfectly use his fingers if Esther needed him. Mick hadn’t said much while Monty ranted about that, but Esther hadn’t come, anyway. She hasn’t been back since a few weeks before that very incident, in fact.

And now it’s been just over a year.

A year of waiting for Esther to come back. A year of trying to remain ready to go on a whim. A year of blowing off classes Mick enrolled him into without asking, of not making any friends, and of not wanting to. Why would he hang out with anyone when he’ll only be leaving to go to work with Esther again soon? 

Monty is an accomplice. He’s a waiter. He’s in limbo. He’s got things to do and when he isn’t doing them he’s waiting waiting waiting waiting—

Mick is waiting on the porch when Monty walks through the front gate. He stops dead, looking at the man up the path, arms folded and expression as gruff and placid as always. 

“School called,” Mick says. Monty chews on nothing for a minute and then doubles down, walking up to the house and past Mick, who has a strict no grabbing rule for himself, and who therefore lets him go by, but pursues him through the house and up the stairs to take up residence in Monty’s bedroom doorway instead. 

Monty ignores him, throwing himself down on his bed and pulling the beanie down to cover his eyes. He knows Mick hasn’t gone anywhere, because he can hear the faint droning of a voice over his music. When the bed dips beside him and fingers pull the hem of the beanie up though, he knows this isn’t going to be one of those times Mick’ll just give up and leave him alone. 

Two hairy salt and pepper eyebrows lift expectantly. Monty waits a moment longer and then pulls one of his earphones out, fidgeting with it. “Thank you,” Mick says gently. “Monty. You have to go to school. It’s the law, and it’s a rule. I won’t call the cops on you guys, ever, you know that, but they might.”

“Then I’ll run away.”

“And live where?”

Monty sits up, throwing his arms around his knees. “I don’t fucking know, do I? That’s the point of running away.”

“Watch your language, young man. Monty, we talked about the counsellor. He’s a good guy, you can trust him. It might help with all this bullshit you’re going through.”

“Language,” Monty mutters. Mick chuckles, rubbing the beanie around. Monty squawks and glares at him, throwing it off and trying to sort out his hair. “I don’t want to talk. I just want—”

—I just want Esther to come back and take me away from here, to where the sun shines and the lights are warm and sparkly and bright and everything is beautiful.

“Esther ain’t comin’ back, Monty,” Mick tells him sternly. His expression is unusually serious, and tired, when Monty looks at him, ready to heatedly retort. The sight of it stops him momentarily, long enough for Mick to continue. “You gotta start livin’ for yourself now. You’re fifteen. That’s just three years left you can stay here ‘fore you have to think about work, and a place to live. That’s three years you can have fun and be dumb in a safe way, make some friends, go learn stuff.”

“She’ll come back.”

“No she won’t, Monty. Listen to me. Esther—she’s gone. She’s—” Mick stops and shakes his head. “Even if she came back, cops would get her in a heartbeat. She’s done too much, and she has no right to pull you into it too. I’m just sorry it lasted so long. She’s got your little heart all cooked up how she likes it.”

“What the fuck does that mean?! I’m not some brainwashed zombie! I know how things are!”

“Then you go see Mr K and you tell him how it is. Listen to me real good, young man, she is not takin’ you outta here again. One way or another, it won’t happen. So you have got to figure out some way of stickin’ around here, make some plans for the future, or I ‘spect I’ll be seein’ you on the streets in a few years beggin’ for coffee money.” 

Monty flinches back, struck by the reality of it. Mick isn’t usually gentle, or tender, but he is rarely so blunt, either. Or maybe it’s that he isn’t usually so cynical. 

He hangs his head, swallowing around a lump, not sure he could really say why it’s there. “I don’t want to go back to school,” he whispers. “Please. Are there other classes I could—I could take, or something? From home, or online, or at the community college? I can’t stand being in that school.”

Micky rests a large, warm hand over his spine, between his shoulder blades. “I reckon we could talk about that, as a compromise. ‘Specially if it stops you dropping out completely. I haven’t had a dropout round here for a while, not unless it was for a very good reason.”

He stands up, picking up the beanie and looking at it, snorting softly and pocketing it. Must be his then, Monty figures. He’ll be waiting a long time if he expects an apology. 

“Oh, by the way. New kid comin’ soon, she won’t be stayin’ long but if you’re gonna be stoppin’ school then you can help her out for a bit, yeah?”

“Sure, whatever. Do I have to go back tomorrow? When does she arrive?”

Mick looks at him. He hides his emotions well, does Mick. Monty never really has, although he’s learned how to use that to his advantage, being expressive for effect even when he lies. He can’t read Mick very well, but he does shift a little under that look. “She’ll be here tomorrow when I’ve cleared her a space. You go in tomorrow—”

“Wait but—”

“Ah! Wait for me to finish. You go in tomorrow and pick up any of your shit, apologise and make nice with whoever you need to, say your home situation is changin’ and you won’t be in a while. Get your files from the front office with that big old smile of yours and then you can come home and help out. ‘Til then, get your ass up and help me with the room.”

It’s more than he could have hoped for. He hadn’t been thinking about alternatives, but he has been waiting for something to give, something to change or break, and he hadn’t been waiting for that to be for the better. 

Monty is still waiting, for a thousand things, but in the space of one conversation he maybe shouldn’t have waited so long to have, suddenly he finds some nicer things to wait for. Like a new way to learn, and maybe a new person to meet. 

And in the depths of his heart, not that he’s realised yet, he’s stopped waiting for Esther Finch to come back and get him, too. 

Chapter Text

After all the emotional revelations of the afternoon, Monty doesn’t actually expect the new arrival to be of great interest to him. She’s a means to an end, a stepping stone to let him out of the systems he hates and into ones he can actually handle. The tool of his compromise. 

He never expects Niko Sasaki. 

She’s on the couch in the living room when he gets home the next morning, having raced through the various tasks Mick had given him to do at school. Freed from all of that particular bullshit, Monty is almost skipping on his way home, and trips over the door-jamb into the house with a snort of amusement at his own eagerness. 

“Are you okay?” he hears a voice call, and then the couch creaks as someone gets up. Monty blinks as an Asian-looking girl peers around the living room door, a beanie on her head. She has that typical long, straight brown hair, and it looks shiny and soft. He’s a little jealous actually. His is always sticking up weird these days, or too flat from wearing various hats. It’s been cut wrong but he’d had to keep it the right length so Esther wouldn’t— 

He stops himself there, rubbing his arm and offering the girl an easy smile.

“I’m fine. Are you the new girl?”

She nods. He nods and wanders past, eyeing her carefully on his way through to the kitchen. She follows him a minute or two later, as he’s filling a bowl with cereal and leaning on the counter to eat it dry. He shakes the box of cheerios at her while crunching on a mouthful, and pauses his illustrious brunch to pour her some too, pointing out the cupboards for the various cooking things and the food ones, with their labelled baskets for each occupant. “You aren’t staying long, right? So you can just use the stuff in any of the other cupboards but not these. This is our stuff.”

She nods again, smiling back at him gratefully. “Thanks. Mick said someone could help explain, but no one was around before.”

“When did you get here?” Monty asks, settling back into place against the kitchen cabinets with his bowl. The girl takes hers to the table nearby to sit down properly. She’d gone for milk and everything. 

They pass details back and forward like tentative gifts. Her name is Niko Sasaki, she’s a year older than he is, almost seventeen already, and she’d been going to the local boarding school while her dad worked all over the country for a while. Her mom is still in Japan, where they’re going to send her back to once things are figured out. She mentions her dad’s ‘accident’ and nothing more, and Monty doesn’t pry. 

In return he offers her his own name—sans surname of course—and explains he’s living here while he goes to school. He gets to boast about his impending move to community college, feeling a little bubbling burst of warmth in his chest, like a flower emerging from a bud, at the excitement he can share with her about it. He even shows her around the house, out into the garden where he’s surprised by her enthusiasm for… fucking everything actually. The sun is high and even though every now and then she gets quiet and sad, she’s pretty cool to hang around with. 

“Sorry,” she says, after she’s yawned again for the fifth time in under a minute. “I’m not sure why I’m tired.”

Monty shrugs. “We can go sit down if you want? Were you watching something?”

“Yeah, just let me get my laptop. I need to… I think it’s time I updated some of my friends about things.”

He waits by the door to her room for her to rummage through her things. She’s in the extension, a nice light room with two windows that only shares a wall with Mick. The opposite side of the house to his own room, as far away as she can get. He helps her find the wifi and they settle into the couches in the tv room, with some show playing. 

For a while there’s just silence, and the sounds of the show. Monty zones out to it, glancing over at Niko more than watching the screen, and every time he looks she’s either biting her lip and intently scanning her laptop screen; biting her fingernails and looking out the window; or carefully but quickly typing with a little frown. 

She sniffs, suddenly, and he turns quickly back to the TV. 

There isn’t a kid in the Shed that would want to be watched while they were crying. Tears aren’t weak, but they are embarrassing. They’re meant for private breakdowns, not for public consumption. They all have so little left to them that reputation and image are so sacrosanct that even inside the walls of the Shed the unspoken rule is to avert your eyes. To let people pretend. 

“Ugh, my friends are so nice…” she whispers, choked up. Monty figures that could be an invitation to say something, to look over, but that isn’t how it normally works, so he just darts his eyes over and away. “I wish they lived closer.”

“Where do they live?” Monty asks slowly. 

“London, actually,” Niko replies, and if it isn’t Monty’s imagination she sounds a bit relieved to talk about them. “I haven’t met them yet properly, but one day I will. We’re friends online. We met because we all liked that Sherlock show, remember it?”

Monty doesn’t, but he shrugs. 

“Well we all met talking about it on Tumblr and then—oh, do you have Tumblr?”

Monty doesn’t, and this time he shakes his head. Niko brightens, even with the damp visible under her eyes. “Oh I could set you one up! Then you can meet the others. They’re awesome, you’d really like them.”

“How does that work?”

“Do you have your phone?” Niko asks, instead of answering. At Monty’s nod she moves over to sit beside him, laptop displayed proudly. There’s some sort of program open that people his age probably know all about, messages pinging up from an ‘Edwin’, ‘Charlieboy’ and ‘xoxCrystalxox’. “Hey, they’re asking for a call. It's evening for them so now is the best time. Do you mind if I do that?”

Monty doesn’t, back to the shrugging. Niko clicks a button and her own face pops up, his just visible along the edge. He leans subtly away, pretending to watch the TV. His focus is entirely on the screen however, when three other faces pop up one by one. Two on camera and one just a smart headshot, probably a school picture, that lights up when a voice comes through. 

A very nice boy’s voice, with an accent that feels smooth as cool silk. Monty’s eyes flick over to the screen to eye the picture. Edwin. Old fashioned and British. Monty’s a little fascinated.

The other two, who Niko calls Crystal and Charles, are animated, waving and talking quickly. Charles is sniffling openly, wiping at his eyes every so often, with a different accent and a lower, warmer voice. Crystal is talking a mile a minute with a bizarre mix of US and UK pronunciation and slang, sharp and caustic even when she's trying to be caring, asking questions and recalling them, getting into sniping arguments with Edwin about what she can and can’t ask. Niko goes from smiling at them to hiding her face in her knees—but still on camera—to laughing wetly at some silliness Monty hadn’t caught.

Monty gets distracted listening to Edwin speak, thinking idly about how he could possibly sound so soft and so sharp at the same time, so precise and clipped and delicate, like a dancer placing each word perfectly and swiftly in sequence. 

When Niko shifts the laptop it catches Monty unexpectedly in frame, and instantly the voices are demanding to know more. 

“Oh, sorry. This is Monty, he’s my new friend. He lives here already, so he’s showing me around. He’s really nice!”

“Thanks for taking care of Niko mate, it’s good of you,” Charles tells him, blowing his nose and smiling. Monty glances at Niko and then shuffles into view, leaning into her shoulder so they can both be on frame. 

He smiles his best smile, and holds a thumbs up. “No problem. I’ve been here a while, so I can show her anything. You’ve got the best room, actually, Niko. For your art and stuff. And for reading after lights out.” 

Niko gasps. “That’s amazing! Monty is stopping school, so he can keep me company for a few days. Isn’t that perfect?”

“You’re stopping school?” Edwin asks, voice sharp. Monty blinks at the mona-lisa smile of Edwin’s profile picture, and shrugs. “To help with Niko, or for other reasons?”

“Uh, other reasons. I’m still going though, just to a different type of school. But until I get enrolled I’ll be around. Mick—that’s the guy that runs this place—he let me stop for now.”

“I simply can’t imagine stopping school, nor wanting to. Unless you were expelled?”

Charles sucks air through his teeth loudly as Monty hesitates and looks down at the keyboard. “Eds, remember what you said to Crystal yeah? Some things don’t need to be said out loud. People have feelings.”

“I know that, and I’m sorry, Monty, I just couldn’t possibly give up—”

“We aren’t all brainboxes like you are, Edwin, alright?” Crystal interjects with a roll of her eyes. Edwin splutters, and Monty’s small feeling disappears into a tiny kernel of affectionate amusement. 

Niko puts her arm around his shoulders and whispers, “Well I’m happy you don’t go to school right now,” and he has never felt so much like he belongs somewhere. 

They talk for a while longer, until Monty gets antsy sitting and listening to a thousand inside jokes and careful avoidances of The Elephant In The Room. He’s a people person, enough to know Niko desperately seems to want to talk about what’s happened to her, and her friends want to hear it. He gracefully—he hopes—retreats to his room to let her do it, and sure enough hears ragged breathing through the door when he’s only halfway up the stairs. 

He tells himself he isn’t hiding, when he ducks into his room and curls up on his bed to scroll through his new account on his phone. It’s just that she’s so different from what he’s used to, and it’s a lot. A good kind of a lot, but still… a lot. 

Mick arrives back from wherever he’d been not too much later after Monty’s retreat. He can hear their voices downstairs, and then Mick’s heavy boots clomping into the kitchen. He misses the same sound heading up the stairs towards his door, distracted by the appearance of three new notifications on his phone that he’s gained new followers. The knock on his door surprises him into almost dropping his phone, fumbling to quickly hit the follow back before calling for Mick to come in. 

Head appearing first, Mick steps past the door and tucks his thumbs into his pockets. “Heard you were helpin’ with Niko. Thanks for that.”

“Sure, I agreed to, right? It’s fine. She’s… nice.”

Mick nods slowly. “That she is. She’s got a good heart. Very complimentary of you, even with all the shit she’s got goin’ on.”

Monty shrugs, turning his phone round and round in his fingers. “What happened?”

“She can tell you if she wants, same as anyone here, Monty. You know the rules.”

He does. He just never wanted to know before, but with Niko he does. He wants to know, he wants her to tell him, and he wants… Well, he wants to be able to help, he thinks, but fuck if he knows how. So maybe it’s best it stays a mystery.

“Come down for lunch when you’re ready. I brought tortilla from Ms Asha. A special treat for our new guest. Best be quick about it though, Niko looked hungry.” 

Monty nods and watches him go. He rarely joins the others for meals, or for anything else for that matter. He barely knows them at all, and that’s because of him, not because the occupants change often. Far from it; the Shed has seven one-person rooms which tend to stay occupied for long years at a time, and it’s rare that all of them aren’t in use at the same time. Mick’s is a last resort for foster kids in the area who definitely won’t be finding a new family, but he’s also a dream placement to most of them. There’s no deadline for staying, no next stop, and he’s a decent guy. There’s no getting kicked out by Mick, not unless you’re literally on your way to jail. 

It’s only happened once, that Monty has vaguely heard about. He hadn’t asked any questions back then though, and even when Hope went apeshit and started breaking plant pots after a nightmare once, she had only been put on the couch in a bunch of blankets with a hot drink and instructions to cool down at her own pace. 

Sometimes, in his worst, latest night moments, Monty wonders what it would take. He’s a criminal, after all. He’s stolen, cheated, conned his way through some of the big cities in the area, and some of the smaller ones. If anyone caught Esther then it would only be a matter of time before there was a knock on Mick’s door asking about a pretty kid with sticky fingers who used to drive off in stolen cars and skip school to break the law. He’s an accomplice, not just an accessory. Juvie isn’t a million miles out of reach. 

But it hasn’t happened yet, and Mick doesn’t seem to be worried that it might, even though he does seem to have some awareness of what Esther had kept needing Monty for, for all those years. So until that day comes literally a-knocking, Monty will just… not think about it. 

The tortilla heating up downstairs makes his stomach growl, dragging him from his introspection. He looks down to see more notifications on his phone, messages and tags, and a link from Niko to the messaging site she’d been using to talk to her friends. His thumb hovers over it for a while. 

There’s another knock on his door, startling him. He pulls his thumb away and stands up to go open it, finding Niko there with a plate of tortilla and a hopeful smile. 

“Mick said you don’t eat downstairs much, so I thought it might help if I brought this to you here?”

Monty looks at the plate. He looks at Niko. He swallows, and pulls out his phone to hit the link. “Sorry, I just need to figure this out.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, I can show you how to set that up too if you want? If you have a laptop I can show you on that, it’s easier.”

“Yes, thanks. Actually, I was just coming down. Can you show me after lunch?”

Niko beams at him and nods, already turning to take his plate back downstairs. Monty closes the door behind him and follows her, ignoring Mick’s surprised look at seeing him walk into the kitchen with her. It’s much nicer to just focus on enjoying Asha’s cooking and the way Niko has so many nice and positive things to say about so many varied topics, from sport to school to books and shows and the world in general. 

It fills him up more than food ever could, in the end. 

Chapter Text

Niko stays at the Shed for almost a month in the end. There are complications with Visas and her mom wanting to travel over, organising transport for her dad’s… body. Monty doesn’t know all the details, but he knows a lot, from sitting on calls with the four friends or scrolling through the overnight chats he’s missed. Enough to guess when it’s a good time to knock on her door and offer a walk around outside, or bring her something sweet to eat, at least. 

With his new evening classes at the community college to tide him over until Fall, and Niko to hang out with during the days, his life falls into something of a reliable pattern for a while, for the first time he can ever remember. It’s kind of amazing, how reassuring it is, rather than stifling, not or restrictive like he would have imagined if anyone had asked him a year or more ago. There’s no waiting, no constant anticipation or uncertainty, when you know where you’re going and when. 

But all good things have to come to an end, and Niko is a great thing, so it has to end beautifully. 

It takes two days for Monty to decide he wants to be friends with the little group of online friends Niko has invited him into. Three days to start typing away in the chat whenever he’s free, thinking about asking Mick for a better phone package. One week to realise he has a blooming crush on Edwin. 

Actually Niko tells him that. She sees him tapping away on his bed, snuggled into his pillows as she reads beside him after dinner and raises an eyebrow at him. 

“What?”

“Nothing.” She grins, flicking her book, but darting back to look at him and blushing when she realises he’s still waiting. “Nothing! Apart from that smile—” 

Monty stares at her quizzically, confused by the weird sing-song intonation. When he glances down at a buzz from his phone—a reply from Edwin to Monty’s latest devil’s advocate theory—he feels his mouth lift, and then he looks up sharply at Niko’s ‘Hah!’

“Look at you!”

“I’m just smiling!” he protests, hunching further down and trying not to feel anxious. There’s nothing to feel anxious about. Niko is safe, and there’s nothing wrong with smiling. 

Niko wiggles her eyebrows at him from under her hat. She still hasn’t quite sorted out the bad bleach job they’d done two days before, in a moment of spontaneity while unsupervised in the afternoon, and so has adopted hats to help her feel more stylish until she can go to a salon. Monty’s fingers itch to steal the red beanie and see if it fits him too. 

He rolls his eyes at her and continues typing, trying to ignore her antics. She wriggles closer over the bedspread, and then closer again. He pulls his phone higher to block out the sight of her face but she just pushes up until her eyes are above it, still wiggling her eyebrows meaningfully. 

How could anyone not laugh?

“Stop, oh my god!” he whines, rolling over onto his stomach and burying his face in a pillow. 

Niko is undeterred, rolling over with him. She’s a warm and solid touch along his side, from shoulder to knee. It must be like this, for normal people. For kids that have sleepovers and friends and school and parents shouting at them to go to sleep. For kids that have homes and lives. Maybe that’s why Niko is so good at all this, at offering it out even while she’s going through something Monty can’t even imagine; she was a real kid all that time, until now. He was only ever shaped like one. 

“It’s okay if you have a crush, you know?” Niko tells him easily, because it’s easy for her. So many things are. “Crushes are totally cool. I have them all the time, actually, I think.”

Monty turns his cheek on the pillow so he can look at her. She smiles and turns onto her side to face him. “You really think it’s a crush?” he asks, for no reason other than to hear her talk about it, and soothe the scared, flighty bird in his chest that’s flapping around thinking about liking Edwin. 

“I don’t know for sure, for sure, but it looks like you do. Do you think it is?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe it is. I mean I like talking to him, and I like reading what he says and hearing him when he’s speaking, but I’ve never even met him. How can that be a crush?”

Niko blinks at him with big, soppy eyes. It’s a great tactic, and very effective on the right person. She’s unlucky that he’s too good to be manipulated that way. 

She smiles, widely, with all her heart, and he doesn’t even try not to smile back. “It’s okay, crushes are weird. But they’re so good, too! Maybe when you meet him eventually it’ll be even better, and you can get to know each other! And he’ll finally admit to everyone he’s into guys—”

“Sure. When?”

“When he sees you and—”

“No you said when I meet him. When am I gonna meet him, Niko? We live on the opposite side of the world from each other.”

“So?”

Monty pushes up, abruptly irritated. He isn’t sure what sparked the current under his skin but it’s zinging around angrily, and he doesn’t like that he’s so annoyed at Niko, of all people. He rubs his arm absently, plucking at his pants. “So? So I don’t have any money, Niko. Some people can’t just move across the world to go somewhere new. I don’t even have a passport.”

“Really?” Niko, for her part, looks genuinely surprised. “I thought everyone had a passport. Oh, that’s sad. But there must be a way to get one, so you can leave! And you can save up, or we could help—”

“No!” 

Niko flinches at the shout. Monty feels terrible. It’s just… “You don’t get it, okay? Can we just drop it? Sure, I have a crush on Edwin, because he sounds awesome and he’s funny and clever, but he’s far away and I’ve never even seen him on camera once, and it’s been like a week! That’s not long at all. I’m not gonna meet him, I’m never going to really meet any of them. Just you.” He can’t contain the bubbling energy twitching his fingers and bouncing his knee. He can’t keep sitting here. He can’t stay. He needs to stand or walk or go steal something—

That’s a bad impulse. A really bad one. 

“I’m going for a walk. Stay here if you want, I don’t care. I’ll see you later.”

It’s a retreat, but for both of their sakes. The last thing Monty wants to do is upset his only really true friend in his whole life, and drive her away. He couldn’t live with himself if he made Niko feel bad, or worse than she already does. She’s nice, and she’s friendly, and she cares, and he wants to treasure that. 

She’s so wonderful that she just lets him go. 

So out of the house he goes, walking fast. He leaves in such a rush that he doesn’t grab his earphones, and he forgets that his phone is already past half battery. 

It runs out twenty minutes after he arrives at the tiny playground, wriggling up into the top of the little plastic house, with its shiny orange slide. 

Monty sighs, scowling down at the black screen. Sure, scrolling mindlessly through tumblr and youtube hadn’t exactly been enthralling, but they’d made for good distractions from dealing with his hammering heart and sweating palms. 

He shoves it in his pocket and stretches his legs out until his feet dangle over the side. 

One loose shoelace loses the fight against gravity and slips down to sway in the breeze. Monty sniffs, rubbing the heel of his hand over his eyes and down to pinch his nose for a moment. It helps, a bit. Not enough. 

The jittery feeling still haunts his limbs. He can’t shake it, even in the warm evening air. May isn’t as beautiful this year as it could have been (as it has been in previous years, from the passenger seat of a top-down sports car), and the harbour always throws up humidity like no one’s business. There’s a rolling, stormy sort of sky covering the stars that threatens to break any minute and water the ground. The grass around the base of the playground equipment has grown thick and lush and green from it already this spring. Summer will either scorch the place to death or be perfectly mild. 

Monty reaches up for the bar that runs along the edge of the house-platform-thing he’s hiding out in, using it to swing himself off, jumping and landing neatly in a low crouch. He smiles at the brief uplifting feeling of it. It fades quickly. So does his smile. 

He needs to do something, and fast. Too much lingering makes his eyes sting and his throat close up and even if no one is out here, the idea of sitting and whining over not getting to meet a cute (probably?) boy from England is just pathetic. 

He walks aimlessly, wishing he’d remembered to grab a jacket over his hoodie. The light, fine rain is kept mostly at bay by the thick material but it also coats his face. 

Maybe that’s a good thing. By the time he’s walking through town back towards the Shed, he can wipe his face and no one looks at him weirdly if he’s sniffing at the same time. 

The rain picks up a little, wind sending shivers through him, so he ducks under the cover outside a bar. There’s someone standing there, lighting a cigarette while someone talks at him. Monty stands awkwardly close, the man glances over and then holds a hand up for the other guy to stop. 

“Can I help you? This is a private conversation.”

The smoke of the cigarette curls up between them. Monty’s smoked a cigarette before, coughing and spluttering to Esther’s great amusement before she took it back to finish, and now he wants whatever she’d got out of it. It hits the spot, Monty-baby. It soothes my soul. He’d like to have his soul soothed. 

“You got a cigarette?” he asks. The man stares at him and then laughs, and tells him to fuck off and go home. 

He fucks off, unwilling to push his luck. Fine, no soul-soothing cigarettes tonight. 

Just the rain and his own dead battery. 

“I’m glad you’re back,” Niko murmurs, hugging the shit out of him when he gets back. She’d popped out of the living room just like when they first met, waiting up for Monty to come back safely. “I knew you would be okay, but I’m still glad.”

“It’s honestly not a big deal, I just needed a walk.”

She holds him by the shoulders. “Yeah, but I still felt bad for making you need one. I saved some dessert for you. Mick got cherry cake from Asha’s again. It’s so good, so I protected a slice. I think we ran out of cream to put with it though, sorry.”

Monty looks at her and he has to smile. He just has to. “You’re really great Niko, I hope you know that.” 

“I try,” she beams, walking towards the kitchen. She stops to hold her hand backwards towards him and he takes it, and follows her to the kitchen. 

They end up watching videos on her laptop in her room until they fall asleep, crammed into the twin bed together comfortably close. 

Niko doesn’t mention the crush again, not out loud, but she does watch him when he’s frantically typing responses at light speed to the things Edwin says, and she squeezes his hand when he laughs at the other boy’s witty snark on a call. 

And then she has to leave. 

Mick is the one to tell him. He gets home from his community college orientation, meeting the supervisor of the summer school he’s been enrolled at, and Mick is waiting in the kitchen. There’s an untouched cup of coffee in front of him that Monty wonders if he’d be cool to steal and reheat. As he opens his mouth to ask, however, the atmosphere hits him. He looks at Mick again and sees the way the man is smiling faintly, but it’s sad. 

“What’s wrong?” Monty asks, boldly. Rip the bandaid off. “What happened?”

“It’s good news,” Mick replies, but he’s trying to convince them both. Monty knows what it sounds like when something good is happening to someone else, that’ll be bad for him. “Niko’s placement here is ending. Her family sorted out her travel back home. She’s going in a few days.”

“Oh.” When did the kitchen get so big? Mick is so far away. The table should be in reach but Monty thinks if he lifted his hand that it would be a chasm away. “That’s good. She’s probably happy to finally leave.”

Mick nods. “Yup. That she is. She’s a little sad too, though.”

That brings the kitchen back to normal size, as Monty blinks at Mick, frowning. “What? Why? She’s going home. Why would anyone be sad about that?”

He doesn’t expect Mick’s gaze to make him feel so self-conscious, or small. He hasn’t felt like an idiot in a long time, usually the first to pick up on the details of how someone is feeling, or what they’re thinking. What he can tell now is that Mick thinks he should already know why Niko might be sad, and he’s a little bit pitying that Monty hasn’t figured it out. “She might miss some things from her time here,” Mick tells him slowly. 

“Well she shouldn’t,” Monty snaps back. “She’s going home. She should be happy. She should—”

“We can’t choose how she feels. We just listen and learn and try to understand. She’s going to miss you.”

“Well she shouldn’t!” he shouts. “I wouldn’t! I wouldn’t look back, I wouldn’t miss anyone. I would be gone so fast!”

Mick stands up and Monty steps back sharply. Mick raises his hands. “Monty, take a minute. Go freak out upstairs, but don’t you think about being angry at that girl when you see her. You hear me? She does not need that right now.”

“So her feelings are more important than mine, yeah?”

“Monty!” 

He flinches back, hitting the wall by the doorway, instead of the empty space he can flee into, staring at Mick. Mick who pinches the bridge of his nose and shakes his head and leans on the island. “Go upstairs. Go to bed. Tomorrow, talk to Niko.”

“Fuck that.”

“I’ll make it a condition if you need me to. You promised to help her.”

“Yeah well now she’s leaving. She doesn’t need my help.”

“She’s going back home!”

“And I’m staying here. As fucking always. And I can’t—she’ll be gone.”

He’s crying. Mick sighs, roots around in his pocket, and holds out a pack of tissues. Monty ignores them, wiping over his face with the sleeve of his sweater instead. 

Mick takes another deep breath, sitting back down and leaving the tissues out on the table. “It’s not ideal, I agree. You two were good together. Maybe it was my fault, for lettin’ you get close when we knew it would have to end like this.”

Monty’s sleeve is getting saturated already. He tries to be quiet as he breathes, but his legs have started to shake. It’s only Mick here, and god knows Mick has seen the full range of human emotions in his time, so it’s easier than Monty expects, to slide down to curl up at the bottom of the wall, pulling one knee in to hug and rest his forehead on. Mick doesn’t speak for a while, or move, from what Monty can tell. 

Eventually there’s a rustle of movement and a presence nearby. Monty unfolds, drained, and stretches his other leg out beside the first, head falling back heavily against the wall. Mick bends, holding a hand out silently. Monty just shakes his head. He’s not actually sure his legs would carry him if he tried to stand up right now. 

Mick takes the response in stride, clasping Monty on the shoulder for a few long seconds instead, and then straightening up and turning to quietly clear away his coffee mug and some other bits of washing up. The sound is soothing, in a way Monty idly wonders if a cigarette ever could be. 

The clattering sound feels familiar too. He isn’t sure why, maybe old memories he can’t quite recall, but he really doesn’t want to go anywhere else just yet. There’s a little urge in his chest to get up and go over to the man at the sink and just get as close as possible and let him be comforting for a while. It’s a nice urge, but it scares Monty shitless, because it’s almost immediately followed by a cackling, clawing thought that sounds like someone teaching him not to be such a fucking baby, it was cute when you were small but you’re too old for all… that now. 

He feels it. 

The sleeve handles one last sniff and wipe, before Monty gathers enough strength to pull himself upright. He moves quietly, well-practised at creeping softly softly through any space he had to. The tissues go into his pocket and he ghosts his way down the hall without a goodbye, up to his bed. 

His too-big, too-empty bed. 

They throw a going-home party for Niko. Mick goes all out, inviting whoever he can, decorating with paper shapes and streamers, and gathering all the nice treats from Ms Asha that Niko has been steadily working her way through. 

Monty hovers on the edges, stealing down the stairs after the party has already started, watching from the top through the bannister at first until Niko sees him and waves. 

They’d talked, him and Niko, very tentatively. She’d cried, of course, and he hadn’t said very much but they had carefully brought up video calls and going back to school. It’s been strained, sure, not quite right, the past few days… But Monty had taken Mick’s plea-slash-threat seriously, and he keeps his grief and his anger and his jealousy to the privacy of his bedroom, where he stores it in the feathers of his pillows or the hems of various t-shirts and sweaters. 

The jealousy is the most productive of his emotions, he finds. It’s jealousy that has him googling flight prices, part-time jobs, and budgeting tips for saving money. His youtube is full of investment bros now, but some of it is interesting at least. 

He hasn’t mentioned it, of course, because he’s too scared that it’s a stupid thing to even think about, but he does feel privately vindicated when Niko accidentally brings up coming back to visit, sitting on the stairs with him after her party has started to wind down.

“It’s not so far from Japan, really, but then I had been talking to the others about maybe meeting in the middle in New York or something—oh, sorry Monty. I forgot. I’m sorry I brought it up again. Cake?” 

He opens his mouth and she feeds him another spoonful of rainbow cake, though he has to flex his tongue to stop it all falling right into his face. 

They both laugh for a while at that, long enough that Mick finds them there, Monty with his brow pressed into Niko’s shoulder and Niko trying to hold the plate still enough not to drop any more. He just nods at them both and disappears back down the hall, loudly corralling the other kids to help tidy up, and brooking no argument when the others complain immediately. Music starts in the kitchen, clearly Ritchie’s choice, quickly turning to something softer, mellow rock, either Hope or Mick stepping in to save the vibes. 

“I should go help,” Niko says, resting her cheek on the top of Monty’s head. She doesn’t move yet. 

Monty thinks about the car coming to collect her in the morning, and her packed bags, new goodbye gifts tucked into the suitcases—a kitschy statue from Mick and a stupid tourist trap souvenir Monty had convinced her to get in the first few days she’d been there. He shifts, gets his arms around her and squeezes tight. Niko returns the favour, holding him right back on the stairs. 

It’s just loud enough that his throat lets him whisper, “I’ll miss you.”

It’s just quiet enough that he can hear her say it back. 

Monty doesn’t want to get up to say goodbye to Niko in the morning. Mick thumps on his door but he refuses to respond, even when he hears the car idling outside, car doors clicking shut.

So Niko shows up in his bedroom, knocking quickly and then running inside to jump onto his bed and hug him tightly, pressing kisses over his hair and face until he’s hugging her back, and he’s laughing but he’s crying just like she is and then she holds his face between her hands, squishing his cheeks, and tells him “I can’t wait to see you again. You’re the best friend I ever had here. See you soon, online, right? Pinky promise me?”

He nods, following her downstairs when she pulls him, all the way to the door. Mick pulls him back with a hand on his shoulder when she’s inside, belt buckled, waving through the window. 

They watch until she’s completely out of sight, and then Mick lets out a very heavy sigh and turns to go back inside. 

Maybe it’s only because it’s Niko, and her special magic, or maybe Monty is just better, older now, changed by knowing her, but when Niko leaves it sucks, sure, but he doesn’t fall apart. He just feels sad, and determined, and he smiles when he gets to talk to her and tell her about his day and hear how she’s settling back into living in Japan. She’s on her own too, he realises, far away from him and their friends, and he resolves to be there and to get back to her one day, somehow. 

This time, Monty isn’t waiting for the world to happen to him. He’s got something to build now, to walk towards. A direction to go in, and see what can happen if he just keeps going. 

Chapter Text

The clock ticks on, endlessly patient, constricting like the even bars of a prison cell. Every so often the tap will drip, but it isn’t often enough to remember to get up and turn the handle a little further, to stop it before the next time. Creaks from upstairs occasionally add to the quiet soundscape of the kitchen, a harmony to the melody of tapping, sighing, shifting, scribbling and the squeak of shoes on the bars of the island barstools, rubber on metal. 

“Time’s up,” Mick tells them, his low, rumbling voice ending the symphony of slow madness. Monty drops his head onto the table and his pen goes clattering away. Hannah immediately turns to start excitedly chattering to her sister about her questions, as Hope grabs both their papers and takes them over to Mick. 

It’s supposed to be an informal quiz, to check in generally where they’re at. The sisters have been out of school almost more than Monty has, since they arrived last year, and now that summer vacation is in full swing they’re getting ready to head back again. He’s not sure why he had to do it, except that Mick had told him it would help… with something? Monty hadn’t been listening, because Niko had still been there and she’d been encouraging and enthusiastic as always and he’d just ended up agreeing. 

“I definitely failed that,” he tells the table, refusing to sit up. Mick ruffles his hair as he reaches by to grab his paper, poker face exceptional as always as he looks over Monty’s answers with a quick scan. “I did, didn’t I. I’m not even going to school and I failed it. I bet Hannah did better than I did.”

Hope shoots him a nasty look, dragging her sister out of the kitchen. Mick raps his knuckles on the table in warning. 

Okay fine, that was mean. But he just hates feeling stupid. All those times with Esther, half of the high was getting one over on adults who thought they were so fucking clever and so much better than him just because he was younger, and now he’s the one with the sinking feeling as the little girl skips off happily into the sunset with her doting big sister. 

“Hey. Go on, go outside for a bit or somethin’, it’s nice out,” Mick tells him, because he’s too good to pander to Monty’s grumpy wallowing, or even to indulge it enough to tell him to shut up. “Get some nice pictures to send to Niko and your boy.”

Monty chokes on air, whipping around to stare at Mick. “How the fuck—I—there’s no boy, what the hell?”

“Language,” Mick says calmly. “Niko wasn’t quiet, kid, and you’re as obvious as a... As an obvious thing. Half the things you actually say to me are about that Edwin of yours. If you wanted it to be a secret you should’a tried a bit harder.”

His heart is hammering so fast he has to sit back down. He folds his arms so he can stick his sweaty palms under his armpits and ignore them. “He isn’t my Edwin. And I just… he says cool stuff. About stuff. He’s interesting.”

Mick stacks the papers on the kitchen island and goes rooting around in the drawers for his old pair of reading glasses he rarely bothers to use. “Sure. It’s alright, you know that. But if you don’t want anyone else figurin’ it out, best start talkin’ a little more about the others too. Even Niko doesn’t feature so highly, and she’s your best friend.”

“I talk about her all the time,” Monty protests weakly. “I mean. I don’t because I don’t talk to you all the time, actually. Just because I’m talking about the others at others times, to other people… It…” He has no leg to stand on here, there’s no point trying to convince Mick. Monty gives up with a heavy sigh, leaning back bonelessly in his chair. He looks at the ceiling and chews the inside of his cheek and thinks about Edwin. 

“Nothin’ wrong with a crush, Monty,” is all Mick has left to say about it, before the glasses are on and he’s concentrating on the papers instead. 

Sure, nothing wrong with wanting something you can’t ever have, Monty thinks, silently allowing himself to enjoy the petty feeling of it all. He doesn’t love that he feels so strongly about Edwin, see. It sucks, if he ever really has to think about it. And sure, Niko had said crushes could be awesome, and sure, Mick says it’s fine even if it’s obvious, but Monty has had a lifetime of wanting things he can’t have and more than that; he doesn’t like that these feelings have just appeared. Without him asking for them. He doesn’t like that they can grip his heart and his mind and his mouth for fuck’s sake, and pilot him around like a silly, disney-channel tween twirling her hair and giggling over the rockstar in the corner. 

Even if Edwin is way cooler than any TV movie heartthrob. 

Monty gets up and heads up to his room to sulk a bit, leaving Mick to his moral superiority and marking. 

He skips dinner, as usual, because Niko is home from class and wants to talk. She’s back in school already, or tutoring or something, and seems tired a lot, but keeps talking about her newest stash of manga instead. Monty knows from reading the messages from last night that she’s trying to plan to go see Charles, Edwin and Crystal when she can make time for a holiday. She doesn’t mention that any more than she mentions being tired though, and he knows she’s only doing it to be nice. 

“It’s a good one, I think, but oh my god Monty like the third page was all these girls in bikinis and I shut it so fast—”

“How much does it cost?”

Niko blinks at him on the screen. “Really? That’s what convinced you?”

“No,” Monty laughs, shaking his head. “No, oh my god. I was thinking about…” For some reason he has the urge to go check the corridor, that no one is listening in. “About when you go to London. That’s a lot of money, right?”

“Oh!” She takes a minute to think about it, which he appreciates. It’s probably weird, and surprising, that after his initial freak out back in May he’s suddenly okay talking about it. “I mean, it definitely isn’t cheap. Especially to go during the summer. To be honest, I think my family is going to help because they know it’ll make me happy. They’ll probably give me some money for my birthday, and for Christmas.”

Right. “So you don’t have to buy them at all yourself? The tickets, or anything?”

Niko shrugs. She looks… sorry. “I don’t think so. But you know Crystal has loads of space to stay, so there’s no need to worry about hotels or anything, which helps? Are you…”

“No, I was just wondering. For you. I was wondering how you could do it, since flights are expensive and you’re way too busy for a job, so. I was just worried.” Nailed it. Wow Monty, weren’t you supposed to be good at lying?

They sit quietly on the call for a moment as Niko nods, and then someone shouts in the background. She calls back in japanese—which sounds pretty cool, Monty thinks—and then smiles at him. “I have to go, sorry. But thanks for… worrying about my plans?”

He snorts and nods, fidgeting with his hair. “Bye.”

“Bye, speak soon!”

The screen goes blank, leaving him with a few things.

Firstly, the nasty feeling in his stomach that he recognises as jealousy, and that he resolves to very much ignore. Niko doesn’t deserve it, after all. 

Secondly, the knowledge that Crystal has offered somewhere to stay, thanks to her crazy rich parents and their crazy rich house. She complains about how stupidly big it is all the time, and how her parents are barely home anyway and wouldn’t care if people came round, so… There’s that.

Thirdly, the understanding that he really, really wants to go too. He wants to be there with all of them, to see Niko again and meet Charles, Crystal, and yes, Edwin too. He wants to be in the selfies they sometimes share, and the videos, and the stories. Whether or not he accepts this annoying crush, he wants to be with his friends. 

Which leads to the fourth thing; a new determination to do it on his own. If he tells Niko or the others then someone—probably Crystal—is bound to try and offer to help, and he doesn’t want that. He wants to surprise them all, and prove that yeah, so his life isn’t like theirs. So what? They think they’re so grown up, but they couldn’t do what he has. What he will. 

Monty starts googling part-time jobs that night. 

It’s three am and he hates everything. All the local listings want you to be sixteen or over. He’ll have to wait until fucking February before he can do anything at all, and even then the pay is absolutely godawful. Sure he doesn’t pay rent but he wants to be saving up a little faster than under ten dollars an hour, five hours a week. You don’t have to be a math whizz to know that that’s bullshit. He snacks angrily on some cold chicken he’d scrounged from the dinner leftovers and wishes life was as easy as just driving to a new city and taking shit for free. Free flights would be amazing. 

Although… Legally he can only apply for jobs at sixteen. And legally they can only pay him a certain amount, or give him a limited schedule of work hours. But there are places and people that flaunt those laws all the time. Maybe… maybe there’s a way around this?

Monty kicks his shoes off and climbs into bed, moving the half-eaten plate to the side for the morning and settling in to really consider what to do. 

Option A is wait but be a good little legal boy about it. 

Option B is get rich fast. Okay, get more money quicker, but while taking the risk of doing something shady and getting caught. 

The real question, he realises, as his phone pings and the London trio start waking up, is whether or not he wants to do it properly, or take the easy route. Could he handle the questions, could he be proud about his achievement if he had to stand in front of Niko, or Charles, Crystal, or… fuck, Edwin, and admit that he was a filthy fucking criminal, actually, didn’t they know? 

No. There’s no way. He’ll hold out until the new year and he’ll figure something out in February. Maybe Mick will help, even if he’ll be unbearably smug about it…

Option A it is. It actually feels kinda good, taking the moral high road for once. 

He doesn’t make it to sixteen. 

It’s funny how things keep coming back to math, time after time. Because before the new year, his plan to wait and get a proper job seems like such an achievable idea. And yet, after the holiday, after he’s sat through Niko’s endless—lovely, but fucking annoyingly endless—pictures and messages and huge swathes of silence as she hangs out with her friends for the whole winter vacation, suddenly he can’t wait anymore. It isn’t fair, and they’re already making plans for the next meet up, and he hasn’t sent a single message for almost two weeks now because he’s so consumed with the absolute injustice of it all. 

Monty was trying, but the world was still laughing at his terrible luck. 

He’s been stuck on trying to figure out how to make enough money to buy an international flight, or even get a passport, and every time he looks, and tries—god, he really does try—to look at the job listings with an open mind and optimism, all Monty gets back is disappointment and a feeling of hopelessness. 

He’d really like to meet his friends before they’re at retirement age, actually. 

There are limited options, even when you know where to look and don’t mind asking a few quiet questions, for decent work under the counter. Monty doesn’t like asking questions, because that’s the sort of thing that gets noticed, and gets your name written down in places you might not want it written down, and it’s the exact way that stupid, harebrained schemes end up finding their way back to Mick. 

But there are some avenues that everyone knows about, that all the kids in the Shed do, because if you’re a little off the edge of normalcy you tend to run in particular circles. You might know more about the right kind of job, because the right kind of person will come talk to you, help you out, give you an opportunity. Something that isn’t flashy, but comes with some hazard pay for the risk. The sort of thing that’s a risk just to go and enquire politely about, in fact, and that Mick always tries to keep his kids from being exposed to. It’s actually thanks to Esther, and Monty’s absences, that he’s been sheltered from the watching eyes of the previous generation, oddly enough. 

Richie, however, down the hall from him at the Shed, has a cousin that works at the garage during the day and for some drug boss guy at night, which he boasts about all the time. Or, at least, all the little time Monty actually spends around him, which is minimal if he can help it. 

“I was going to dinner with my cousin, right, burgers at the bar—they let me in because I was with Danny, of course, because he’s got a rep now—” 

And normally Monty tunes him out. But this afternoon, on his way past the living room to the kitchen, scowling at yet another message from Crystal bugging Niko about something they did over break, Monty pauses by the doorway, out of sight, and listens to Richie talking someone’s ear off, and hopes he might say something useful for once.

“—so Danny says ‘fuck you, fuck off yourself, you wanna make a big deal out of it?’ And my burger is like, dripping out my fucking hands, swear to god, it was so tense, and this guy just swoops in out of nowhere—”

Get to the fucking point. 

“—and he introduces himself all politely, wearing like, I dunno, a dress or something and all this makeup, I figure he’s probably like, gay or something, I mean I don’t judge but whatever, dude looks gay I’m gonna say it, yeah? But, so Danny goes all quiet and so does the other guy and I swear to god Tommy King just smiles and puts his hand out and the dude runs. Well he walked away, but it was basically running, in that like fast way, yeah? And Tommy King, that’s the Coke King, remember? The fucking Coke King dude. Yeah he just gives Danny this pat on the shoulder and nods at me and then, dude it was so cool, he told me to enjoy my burger and he winked and he left.”

Tommy King. Now there’s a thought. Monty remembers his name, vaguely, not that he can quite remember where from. Maybe Esther had mentioned him, once upon a time. Maybe they’d even worked together, which could work in Monty’s favour… 

What he does remember, though, thanks to Richie so kindly—and concisely, fuck the guy can really ramble—jogging his memory, is that Tommy King has a particular reputation in Port Townsend, among the right people. He’s the Coke King, he deals all the best drugs and he has a tight grip over the coke market in particular, hence the name. He has a small but significant gang of assistants—or possibly just fans?—that help him network and keep an eye out on the other would-be drug barons of the area, and who all of the street kids either aspire to be, or are in some way related to, including Richie’s cousin Danny, apparently. He’s not quite got a heart of gold, but he’s fair and he has rules and he sticks to them. No one’s caught him because he’s too good, and no one wants to, or dares, stab him in the back. There’s not another guy brave enough in Port Townsend to wear anything approaching a dress that would be intervening in a situation like that and then being friendly to some associate’s random kid guest, even though Richie is definitely exaggerating most of the facts.

Monty doesn’t listen to the rest of the conversation. He turns around in the hall and heads straight back out again, because he knows the bar Richie means, so it just makes sense to try, to just walk right up to the man and ask him point blank. There’s still a risk that it’ll end poorly for him, but it’s a risk Monty calculates as being worth it. 

There’s a bounce in his step and determination in his shoulders as he heads into town. He's got a plan—maybe not a good plan, but something better than vaguely hoping, something a step further than just the foundations of wanting the future to look a certain way. And maybe it doesn't feel like doing 110 on the interstate with the top down in Esther's car. It doesn't even feel like when Edwin unexpectedly laughs at something he says on a video call. But it feels like progress, like hope, and that feels a lot like flying.

It's no moral high road, but it'll get him where he wants to be a whole lot faster.