The Silent Kind

Chapter suming suming

Spring of 2007, Suburbs North of Chicago

The old van's suspension was near shot so she bounced and swayed like a ship on rough water just driving a straight line down the highway. The motion made it hard for Keith not to think of how this would be the perfect vehicle to kidnap someone in. At least according to what he'd learned from all those daytime crime dramas he'd been watching lately. There wasn't much else on basic cable in the middle of the day and he couldn't afford one of those new on demand packages. Keith couldn't afford much at all, really. His disability was in limbo until the VA made a decision on just how bad off he really was though it's not like he could get a job, he could hardly stand let alone walk and his left arm couldn't even hold a milk jug. There weren't many jobs Keith was qualified for that didn't require some of that and without the official disability ruling he didn't have the paperwork for accommodations. Until that came through there wasn't much for Keith to do but sit around and wait.

It was torture. Keith had been trained to withstand torture. But it was different when there wasn't a clear enemy causing the pain. He had no one to blame for this. No one to be angry at or fight against. At least not any sort of fight he could win. He couldn't escape this, couldn't even hope for rescue. All he could do was sit around and wait. Two things Keith had never been very good at. His friends tried to get him into college with them but he needed paperwork from the VA for that too. Not as if he'd be able to walk between classes anyway. So Keith was left with waiting. He'd run out of books to read and played all the video games he could stomach but his roommates still wouldn't let him off the couch. They were still worried from when he ripped his stitches going up the stairs though that had been over a month ago. The stitches had been taken out but they still treated him like he was made of glass.

At least he was off the couch now though he wasn't sure this was any better. Bouncing around the back of this old rust bucket seemed an easy way to pull a muscle and his friends still hadn't told him where they were going. Keith was trying to track their path like the detective in that one show but he'd lost count of their turns for all the swaying and that persistent rattle coming off the old, bent frame made it impossible for him to hear any sort of ambient noise that might help him guess their location. The waft of gas and exhaust fumes leaking into the cab not only kept him from smelling their surroundings but it was making him a little dizzy too. The perfect combination for disorienting a victim. Keith tried not to think what it did to the pastries Hunk used this old thing to deliver but at least that thought was a distraction from the gnawing paranoia of not being able to see.

"Nah-" Lance batted Keith's hand away from the blindfold around his eyes for the seventeenth time in less than an hour. "It's a surprise, babe. You gotta keep it on."

Keith could only wonder if Lance saw his glare through the blindfold. Probably not. And it wouldn't matter if he did. In the three years they'd been off and on sort of dating? roommates with benefits? fuckbuddies? It was complicated and Keith wasn't sure what to call the relationship anymore but he was still pretty sure that Lance had developed an immunity to his glares before they even got to the making out stage. Something about having hated each other's guts at first just took the power right out of most all Keith's threats. Lance knew he wasn't going to actually do anything about it. Not that he could if he wanted to. Not now.

"I don't like surprises," Keith muttered under his breath but it didn't matter. Lance knew, or at least he should know by now, that Keith was not fond of a lot of things Lance enjoyed but Lance liked them and Lance was doing this so. . . So Keith took it with a sigh as he picked at the edge of that awful brace he'd been forced to wear for half a year and had another six months to go on before the doctors would even consider taking it off. At least the surgeries were over and it was just his knee they were worried about now.