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thethistlegirlwrites · 2 months

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Lost and Found

John Stoker hasn’t set foot in the Amarillo hunter agency since he walked out of it twenty-four years ago with his brother’s death a fresh, bleeding wound in his heart.

He’s come home to Amarillo itself since, for Dia de los Muertos at the ranch and visiting extended family in town, but he’s never once gone back inside the agency. Too many memories haunt its halls. Ones he doesn’t care to relive.

The memories at the ranch are the good ones.

He wishes he’d never seen Gabe in these halls.

Halls that, despite nearly a quarter-century, have barely changed.

The track lighting has been replaced with something that buzzes less and is probably more energy-efficient, the godawful 70s pinky-beige paint is now a more natural desert tan, and the floor tiles are now a faux-slate instead of a Jackson Pollock freckling.

But the same awards cases line the walls, just with a few sections added on in a slightly paler wood framing. The names on the dark-burgundy-painted metal doors with their chicken-wire glass windows are still almost word for word the ones John recalls, although he’s pretty sure this is a new generation. He can only see a few where the white block letters of a different last name are visible under a layer of the burgundy.

And the wall of the fallen is still visible down the side hall. Unfortunately, that has changed. Plenty.

He walks past it, brushing his fingers against the plaque that has his brother’s name and date of death. A small replica of his Bowie knife is attached to the top of it, and his Saint Marcellus medal has been wound around it by its chain. A photo of him is set into the corner, probably his graduation because his hair is still just pushing the limits of regulation length. He’d grown it out as soon as he was allowed to on active duty. John rubs the worn medal between his fingers, then walks to the door at the end of the hall, that leads to the training room.

He thinks there was some logic in putting the wall of the fallen on the way there. Reminds new recruits exactly what they’ve signed on for, and why they need to be at their very best in training.

For decades, he’d thought the last piece of Gabe he was ever going to get was going to be that plaque.

And then Carmen called him from Amarillo’s holding station and informed him he has a niece he’d never met.

She’s done some sketchy things, apparently, and it was a while before he technically got permission to visit her, since she’d been in the middle of Amarillo’s takedown of the Morris Avengers, but the minute he was told it was possible, he’d packed a bag and hopped the first flight he could catch.

The gym is still very much the same. Battered bleachers with a few more layers of flaking paint, worn mats, and the smell of sweat that’s probably permanently soaked into the cinderblock walls. Chanted steps of basic moves from an incoming class. And then the sparring ring, blocked off by sagging ropes, where students get one-on-one experience with seasoned instructors.

Judging by the tagboard on the wall, with name badges hung up under time slots, the person he’s here for is in that ring right now.

John moves past a row of students practicing a curved under-the-arm stake strike, to get a better view of the practice ring. He’s just in time to see one of the people in it take the other down with a smooth leg sweep.

The smaller of the two women pushes herself up off the mat, short dark braid swinging, a few strands escaping and falling around her face. She raises her fists again and steps back into the circle outlined in peeling tape.

This time, the instructor takes advantage of her student’s newfound focus on her feet and lunges for her less-guarded face. The blow staggers her back, but the student doesn’t go down. She stumbles, then catches herself, still inside the lines, and comes back with a one-two punch to the arm and shoulder that even John is impressed with. The instructor takes a couple steps back, and apparently it’s the lead her student was waiting for. She moves in with a striking blow, headed for the ribs, but overshoots it. The instructor whirls her around, pinning the student’s back to her chest, and leans her head toward the student’s neck. A fake bite, reminding her of the price of failure.

And then the student's head snaps back, hard, slamming bone into bone. The instructor loses her grip and stumbles back, out of the circle, catching herself on the ropes. The student turns to her with a feral grin, more hair tumbling into her eyes, face flushed.

“Not bad, Aguirre.” The instructor rubs her forehead above her eye. “Mistakes are inevitable. How you recover from them is what matters.” She looks up at the clock on the wall. “Okay, you’re out. Masterson, you’re up. Show me what you got.”

Sierra Aguirre steps out of the ring, pulling her stretched-out Amarillo Academy t-shirt up over the back of her head and grabbing a blue water bottle off a stool next to the ropes. She pops the top open with her teeth and takes a long drink.

The move is so Gabe it hurts. Momma was always scolding him about using his teeth to open anything and everything.

“What are you looking at?” Sierra snaps suddenly. John hadn’t realized he was probably doing the creepy stare. “That was a fluke. I’ve been acing practicals when it matters.”

“I…uh…I wasn’t here to talk to you about your performance. I’m John Stoker. I’m your uncle.”

Her face changes, not to anything resembling open friendship, but at least to something that makes him feel a little less likely to be the next victim of her aggressive streak. “Carmen said to expect you at the house at breakfast. I got an off campus pass for the morning.”

“Didn’t want to wait.” John shrugs. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“You too.” There’s a formal detachment in her voice, but that’s to be expected. The only family member she’s had much contact with is Carmen, and that’s because Carmen has been brokering the deal that kept her out of an off the books black site for vigilantes.

“Well, I gotta get back to class. I’ll see you when they let us out.” Sierra turns toward the mat with the group practice session, and John backs out of the room.

He’s learned to be patient with people. Give them the time they need to open up to him. It would have been nice to have learned that before Maira dropped Robin on him, but better late than never.

He’s waiting with his car at the front gates when Sierra walks out, her hair now out of the braid, wet, and hanging down her back, and a loose academy sweatshirt having replaced the abused tee. She must have a nervous habit of twisting her hands into the front of her shirts.

“Sweet ride. 67 Fastback with the performance mod package and dual exhausts.” She slides a hand over the paint as she steps in. “Cherry metal flake was a good choice.”

“Nice to have someone in here who appreciates her finer qualities,” John says with a chuckle.

“Didn’t they tell you I was street racing before I was a vigilante?” Sierra asks. “I’ve been working on cars like this since I was old enough to hold wrenches. Learned from my mom.”

That would explain how Gabe met her. He’d worked a lot of contacts in the underground racing scene, gathering intel on vampire infiltration of it.

At least cars gives them something non-volatile to talk about on the way to the ranch. John’s still trying to gauge how Sierra feels about hunters. Kira was perfectly happy to fold into an existing structure when her actions put her on Chimera’s radar, but she’d become a vigilante before there was much information, if any, about hunters existing as an organized force. These days, and especially in hunter towns like Amarillo, becoming a vigilante is more likely to be a deliberate rejection of hunter values and ideals. Vigilantes used to be a more mixed bag. Some were just out to kill as many vamps as possible, but a lot were people who’d been hurt or had family members who had been impacted by vampires, and were looking for justice the only way they knew how.

But Sierra had Gabe’s journals. She had to have known there was a legal way to fight the things that killed him. And chose not to take it until she was backed into a corner with nowhere left to run.

It’s not like John can judge too harshly. He’d been so fixated on blaming the fae for what happened that night he almost got Robin killed. He’s made mistakes there’s no undoing too. But he can’t be sure if Sierra’s all in with this, or just going along with the training and recruitment because it’s better than the alternative.

Hopefully, getting to know her family will help with that.

John parks outside the ranch house. Carmen’s car is already here, the Barracuda’s blue paint gleaming in the first hints of morning light. She’s waiting on the porch with Momma and Dad, the three of them leaning on the railing.

Sierra steps out of the car without any apparent hesitation or nervousness. John is getting the feeling she’s not the sort to second-guess much, or to spend a lot of time on the what-ifs. He was always that person in their family, which is why he has the record for bones broken, but Gabe was always the people person. The kid who wandered off in supermarkets because he was saying hi to a total stranger.

Sierra walks up the steps and leans against a porch post herself. “So you guys are my grandparents, huh?”

Momma and Dad both look a little misty-eyed, but they’re also clearly reading the coolness in the situation that has nothing to do with the desert morning. “Yes. I’m Sonora Morgan-Stoker, and this is my husband Stephen,” Momma says, holding out a hand the way should would to any new cadet she was meeting. Technically, both she and Dad are retired, but Dad still works with the communications staff in an advisory role, and Momma speaks at graduations and teaches some of the advanced undercover classes.

“It’s nice to meet you both.” Sierra takes the offered hand. Dad clearly wants to hug her, but is holding back.

It’s odd, seeing her here, with their family. John used to think about what it would have been like if Gabe had had kids, but he’d always pictured some curly-headed big-eyed boy like his little brother, scooting around with toy cars in the sandbox, pounding herbs in Abuela Rosa’s pestle, sitting on Momma’s lap and watching with rapt attention while Dad read Dracula every October.

The truth was, he’d wished Gabe had a kid because he’d wanted to get a piece of his brother back. To make up for the mistakes he’d made the last time around.

Sierra isn’t his brother. Not even close.

But she is family.

“I’m starving, are we going to eat?” Carmen asks, breaking the awkward tension. She’s always been good at that. The diplomatic one.

“First things first,” Momma says, stepping off the porch. “Sierra, there’s something in the barn I think you need to see.”

John’s heart hits his shoes and then soars right back up.

The car.

The black-tarp-covered hulk that’s been in the back of the barn for almost twenty-five years.

No one has touched it since Gabe died.

He follows the rest of his family to the barn, helping Dad pull open the big doors, walking past the listing hayrake and the old corn sheller to the corner.

Momma pulls the light string hanging overhead, and a single bare bulb clicks on, picking out the dust-coated tarped outline.

“I’ve heard you’re a pretty good mechanic and driver,” Momma says. “I think your dad would have wanted you to have this.”

Carmen grabs a corner of the tarp with her good hand and pulls it down to the floor.

The car’s in rough shape. The barn cats have kept mice out of the wires, but all four tires are flat and dry-rotted, the paint is dusty despite the tarp cover, and one of the windows is cracked from where someone backing some equipment in forgot the auger was still sticking out.

Sierra freezes.

“How did a 1967 Yenko Camaro get all the way out here?”

Momma smiles, a genuine, unforced one this time. “Your dad found it in a wrecker’s lot. Someone from the east coast took his fancy new car for a Route 66 road trip and then got in a pileup. He junked the car rather than fix it, and Gabe got it for a song.”

“Holy shit. This is Tony Romano’s dream car but he said he’d need to win the lottery to even think about affording one.” She wipes dust off the headlights and runs a finger gently over the silver paint. “You hung onto it all this time?”

John remembers spending hours with Gabe out here, spraying body panels over the cardboard box their new refrigerator had come in that year. The car had come to them bright white, but Gabe had opted for something a little less, in his words, ‘totally boring’.

“Wasn’t ours to sell,” Carmen says.

Sierra looks up, and just for a moment, the warm light in her eyes is pure Gabe.

“You guys really are one close family, aren’t you?”

“Yes. And we want you to be part of it,” Stephen says. “I’m sorry we didn’t get to know you a lot sooner. But we’d all love to make up for lost time.”

“You know I’m not him, right? I’m never going to be him.” John wonders how often Sierra’s gotten hit with the whole family legacy thing at Amarillo. It’s kind of inevitable. She’s probably already tired of being expected to live up to her dad’s name, and assumed his family would have the same mindset. She wasn’t wrong about me at least. And it might take some time to separate the real her from what I always imagined Gabe’s kids would be. But we’ll get there.

“Oh honey, if any family knows what it means to be held to expectations based on who you’re related to, it’s us,” Momma says. “We’re not asking you to be.”

“I think I can live with that.” Sierra crouches down and inspects the lugnuts. “I do wish I could have met him. He had a hell of a taste in cars.”

Just for a second, John could swear there’s an electric crackle in the barn, like the air before a storm, and the ghost of a hand resting on his shoulder.

Maybe Gabe has never been so far away, after all.

(You can read this story and more from this universe on my WorldAnvil here!)

@catwingsathena @nade2308 @the-one-and-only-valkyrie @telltaleclerk @ettawritesnstudies @writeouswriter @whump-place

#febuwhump #febuwhump2024 #febuwhumpday11 #time loop #sort of #john stoker #sierra aguirre-stoker #this fic was basically an excuse for me to look up classic muscle car specs

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