Chapter Text
Darry started keeping his grandfather’s Colt Python Six-Shot Revolver in the glovebox of the truck soon after Ponyboy was taken, and he still wasn’t quite sure why.
He didn’t check it. Didn’t reach for it when pulling up to trouble, didn’t consider using it even if something did go wrong. The revolver just sat there, dormant, taking up space in the glovebox and in the back of his head.
He didn’t want to use it. At least, he had no reason to use it anymore. And, in that moment where he had wanted it, wished it was in his hands, wished he would have done everything he could to stop that woman from putting Pony in her car– he knew his ass would have gone to prison for his trouble.
But that night, he’d fished it out from the closet, right next to where his father’s hunting rifle stood at the ready, and he tucked it into the glovebox.
Soda didn’t know, and Darry tried to pretend like it wasn’t a secret. Like he wouldn’t be at a loss for words if Soda kicked open the compartment one day and saw it sitting there wrapped up in cloth. Soda knew they had guns, and he knew where Darry kept them if, God forbid, their family was threatened.
The thing was, their family had been threatened. Not only that, the threat was made good, and it wasn’t at the hands of a robber or thug or soc stirring up malice in the wrong neighborhood: it was the State, and it was an uncle he’d never known existed.
How could that be fair? They hadn’t done anything wrong, at least, not since the fountain– not since Bob Sheldon met his fate at the end of Johnny’s switchblade, two of their best friends quick to follow in his departure only a week later. Darry had won the ensuing custody hearing, and the whole town knew that Judge Taylor had looked at the facts, heard his brother speak, and saw that Darry had been deemed the best guardian for his brothers even after his shortcomings were made public. He wasn’t perfect, but he was the best. No one could love his brothers more than he did.
Nothing was easy. Ponyboy was the shadow of a brother, clinging to life as hard as he clung to Johnny’s jacket, breathing only because Darry and Soda begged him to breathe, to eat, to remain. For months he teetered, unconvinced of continuation, the future something Darry promised to him and Ponyboy refused to acknowledge. They were just starting to heal.
Ponyboy had his bad days, days where he couldn’t leave the bed or, worse for Darry, days where he wandered in a daze around town and called Darry at the front office, telling him he didn’t know where he was and he needed a ride home. Darry bit his tongue to keep from yelling when he had to drive twenty, thirty minutes to find his kid brother in the middle of nowhere, Tulsa, because Ponyboy was already crying, and he forced himself to remember how his yelling had ruined him that night of Bob’s murder.
Months and months had passed in despair, and then bad days started to happen less in favor of okay days, and then by the end of the school year, good days were becoming a thing, too, and summer promised more of those between Ponyboy’s fifteenth birthday, grill days, beach days, wild nights– every member of the gang had offered to teach him how to properly drive, and he said he would take his time to decide who he wanted to be his instructor.
Darry really hoped it would be him.
Life was going to keep happening for the Curtis brothers, but that life was going to be good, if not a little bittersweet, and they would have each other and Ponyboy was going to go to college and Soda was going to open a garage with Steve and– and Uncle Ronny was knocking on their door, and he was going to get custody.
Darry still couldn’t quite understand how things had progressed. Maybe that was the kind of daze Ponyboy had been living in, Darry could process now, because it felt like every blink fast forwarded him to the next bad moment, and he was being dragged along, stripped of his power, left to clean up the pieces of something he hadn’t realized was broken until it cut up his feet. The State’s social worker said Uncle Ronny was his mom’s sister’s husband, which meant to Darry he was a nothing and a nobody who didn’t even share blood. They had never met their aunt, who passed away when Darry was little, and an uncle was never mentioned. To Darry, that meant he wasn’t worth mentioning, certainly not worth knowing, and entirely unfit to be a guardian.
They tried to explain he owned his own homestead a few miles outside the city limits, acres and acres of farmland, and he was “well-off”, so Ponyboy would be taken care, and all Darry heard was you’re gonna lose him, you’re gonna lose him, you’re gonna lose him.
Asking “ why” was futile. Ms. Gardner, who was decidedly not their usual social worker and far more disapproving of their situation, only had so many ways to say, isn't it obvious?
It wasn’t obvious. Darry worked hard, and the house reflected that, the fridge was stocked and the porch barely creaked, and Ponyboy had good grades despite his apathy. Sodapop was healthy and out of condemnable trouble, even if he did flirt the line between legal and illegal fun a little too close for Darry’s comfort. He was raising his brothers well, in his eyes.
Ms. Gardner would cut him off and draw attention to that word: brother. Brother was not father, was not parent, did not equate to guardian, was weak against uncle, against age, the stability promised by someone who had been working harder for longer and, she would add, Ponyboy would have his own room instead of sharing one with Soda. As if it wasn’t their choice to share, but a decision a woefully unfit Darry had forced upon them. Darry thought mentioning Pony’s nightmares wouldn’t help, so he could only grind his teeth to dust.
Ms. Robinson had been a middle class woman with sympathy for their situation, even if she could come across as condescending. Ms. Gardner was a soc all grown up, and it was obvious she saw herself as some kind of savior, a do-gooder who could change the lives of orphan boys down on their luck. Darry could tell with every flip of her flat-ironed hair and every squinty-eyed smile that she truly believed she was performing a heroic service.
When Darry felt the carpet start to tug out beneath his feet, he tried to ask for one thing. Just one: to meet the man who they were trying to give his brother to. He wouldn’t stop fighting the State’s decision, but until he could hold all the cards again, he needed to know that Ponyboy would be safe. Ms. Gardner seemed put-off by the resistance, but pursed her bubblegum lips together and agreed it wasn’t the most unreasonable ask.
Uncle Ronny had big ears. That was the first intelligible observation Darry could make. His ears stuck out from underneath the rim of his straw hat, and he looked as if he had stepped out of the screen of one of Ponyboy’s western films, the beaten up overalls and the fading flannel underneath screaming born a farmer, live a farmer, die a farmer. He hadn’t bothered to dress up, not like Darry had, wearing one of his father’s button downs, and jeans that hadn’t been with him up onto the Tulsa rooftops.
Big ears, and big hands, calloused worse than Darry’s, with dirt packed so tightly under his fingernails Darry knew they wouldn’t get clean even if the man had tried to scrub them. He had all his teeth, at least the front ones, and he was older than Darry thought he’d be. His parents had been young, and though he knew his aunt was older than his mom, he knew she wasn’t that much older. Uncle Ronny had at least twenty years over Darrel Curtis, Senior.
Darry didn’t trust him.
Beyond the fact his existence had been kept a secret by his folks, intentional or not, and beyond the fact that he hadn’t tried to come forward at any point past their death– not for the funeral, or the initial custody battle, or even the hearing after Bob Sheldon’s murder– Darry didn’t trust his gruff silence, his sunken-set green eyes.
Darry knew a lot of things about Ponyboy after reading the essay he turned into Mr. Symes’ English class that spring. Too much about what his kid brother used to think of him chief among the narrative, but he also learned that Pony hated people with green eyes. Maybe it was stupid, but even Darry hated Ronny’s green eyes. The weariness in them went deeper than age, and because he never took the hat off inside the house, they were always shaded, dark and lurking.
He spoke hoarsely, his voice a grave crackle, and if Darry wasn’t heartbroken he would have nudged Ponyboy and told him that’s what he can expect to sound like if he didn’t quit smoking. Instead, all three brothers had to sit there while Uncle Ronny shrugged his way through an inexplicable introduction of no more than a few sentences and then were told to help Ponyboy to the car.
Darry could tell Ponyboy was trying not to cry. Soda wasn’t doing much better. Darry kept blinking, and each blink took Pony further away so he tried to keep his eyes open, to witness every second he had with his family before it splintered another time.
He had to be the strong one, again. He held Pony’s shoulder and pressed his thumb into his collarbone, feeling his little brother’s pulse. Ponyboy surprised him by seeking out Darry’s eyes with his own, and Darry saw a storm of uncertainties and pleas and desires swirling around those unshed tears.
“We’ll get you back.”
Darry held Soda as the car drove off, catching him when his knees started to give out from sobbing.
“I promise.”
Darry kept the revolver in the glovebox, and he wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe he was afraid of Soda being taken next, and having to do the work of fighting for his family alone. But deep down, Darry knew: if anyone tried to stop him from getting his brother back, they were going to stare down the barrel of his grandfather’s gun and either kiss steel, or get the hell out of his way.