Trailer Park Steve AU part 3
part 1 | part 2
(tw: guns, accidental death)
Robin’s already in full panic mode by the time Steve pulls up to her place, flinging the passenger door open and throwing herself into the car with so much force that the car bounces on its wheels a little. “Drive!!”
“Jesus Christ, good morning to you, too.”
“Steve!”
Steve starts to drive.
Beside him, Robin flips the visor down to look at her reflection; groans and scrubs her hands down her face in misery at whatever she sees. Steve doesn’t really get it. He thinks she looks beautiful, with her hair gently moving in the breeze from the open window, with her freckles lit up by the early morning sun.
“Ugh,” she says, turning to look at him, “I can’t believe I look like a zombie and you’re gonna make me late to the first day of school.”
“Wow.” Fuckin’ ingrate. And when he was just being so nice to her in his head. “How about a thank you, huh? ‘Thanks for picking me up, Steve. Thanks for bringing my backpack, Steve. Sorry you almost got shanked by your neighbor, Steve.’”
“You what???”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Um, yes it very much does matter, what the—”
“—I’m just saying, a little gratitude? Wouldn’t hurt you.”
He licks at the corner of his mouth, spritzes wiper fluid to clear the bugs off the windshield. Robin’s eyes are bulging out of her head, but he really doesn’t want to talk about how he still feels the ghost press of steel against his throat, so: “You’re not even right, by the way; I don’t know why you’re complaining.”
“Huh?”
“School started yesterday. I’m making you late for the second day of school.”
“Yesss,” she draws the word out like he’s stupid, rolling her wrist in a hurry up and get it motion, “but everyone knows that syllabus day doesn’t count. The first pep rally is the real first day of school.”
Ah, there it is.
Steve steals another peek at his best friend while they’re on a straightaway, notes the nervous twitch of her hands as she goes back to fussing at her reflection; the way she’s clumping her lashes together with seven coats too many of some drugstore brand mascara. She’s wearing lipstick. “This is about Vick—”
“—Don’t talk about—”
“—It’s about Vickie, isn’t it?”
“Ughhhhh.” Robin folds forward and thunks her head against the dash. “Fine, okay? Fine! Yes! This may have something to do with a distressingly cute fellow marching band member. Are you happy now?”
“Ecstatic.”
“Oooh, big word for you, Steven.” She swats him on the shoulder, face all twisted up in offense. “Stop laughing!”
“Stop hitting me,” he laughs. “I’ll dump your ass out on this highway.”
She gasps and narrows her eyes at him. “You wouldn’t.”
Steve eases his foot onto the brake.
“Okay, okay! Mercy! I’m being an asshole, alright? I’m sorry. I’m just— I’m stressed! Being gay is very stressful.”
The knife incident pops back into his mind. “Yeah,” he mutters, “I imagine it is.”
—
He catches himself slouching down into his seat a bit when they pull up to the school. Has to force himself to sit upright, hears his mother’s tutting in his ear about bad posture and the message it projects to the world.
It’s not that he’s embarrassed to be here; really, he isn’t. He’s just hoping to avoid being spotted by the nuggets now that they go here, too, lest he be accosted for evading his chauffeur duties.
God.
Dustin’s nerd shit is infecting his brain.
Robin grabs her bag out of the back seat, plants a parting peck on Steve’s cheek as she gets out of the car. “See you later?”
“Yeah, I’ll pick you up for work.”
“Love you, dingus.”
And then he’s alone again.
With Robin gone, Steve finds himself driving. Wandering and aimless, like a ghost who doesn’t know he’s gone. It’s not like he has nothing to do — he’s supposed to be out finding a second job, finding a way to support himself and his mom, because he’s the man of the house now. Because his life has turned into one of those shitty, overcomplicated word problems from math class.
If a recently widowed mother works no hours and her minimum-wage son works as many as Family Video will allow, how much mold-riddled dogshit housing can they afford?
Not much.
Inevitably, he finds himself circling the scorched bones of Starcourt, driving tired loops around the barbed wire perimeter. His ghost likes to guide him here; can’t shake the place where he shook off the mortal coil.
He didn’t know it at the time, but Steve Harrington died the day the mall burned down. Embarrassing, to not hear the death knell as his family name went up in smoke.
It was hard to hear much at all that night, between the concussion and the fireworks and the shrieking of a monster being torn apart, but the memory caresses his mind now in cruel whispers: the headrush of victory; the blood and the sweat; the relief that they’d won, they’d done it, it’s over, they won.
Steve tugs at his bad ear ‘til the ringing subsides.
Some fucking grand prize.
The thing is, you can’t go around exploding an eldritch horror without alerting the US government, and the US government can’t go around letting major investors in a hostile commie invasion keep their assets once they find out about their treasonous schemes. It happened fast: the arrest, the bail, the impending trial and the seizure of property. Richard Harrington was once a small town god on an invisible throne, making deals with devils in shadowy boardrooms, and suddenly he was looking at life in a cell.
Maybe it was a blessing he died before his reckoning was due. Maybe it was no accident at all.
The second, and perhaps more important, thing is: stray bullets don’t care about your looming court date.
Dad had a habit of cleaning his guns while he was drunk, nursing a whiskey in one hand while he polished the gleaming barrels with the other. Pointless, really, because the guns were always pristine to begin with. Dick Harrington didn’t hunt. Didn’t shoot. Claimed the pistol was for home defense, that he kept it loaded in case anyone ever tried to hurt his family, but Steve knew the truth.
His dad just liked to flirt with death. Liked to handle pretty, deadly things, stroke his fingers over ruthless metal and feel the rush of power when he walked away unscathed.
He didn’t walk away that night.
Didn’t even face death standing.
Sliced through his femoral artery and rolled right out of his chair.
They found him lying on the ground in a dark, sticky puddle, gasping like a fish as blood spurted from his thigh. Crazy how fast it happened. Steve had been in his room when the shot rang out, and he barely managed to reach the bottom of the stairs before the gurgling noises stopped. Just boom! whizz! bang! and Dick Harrington was gone.
Maybe it’s a good thing, too, that they lost the house.
The image of his mother in the hallway that night — shellshocked in the doorway, one pale hand shaking in front of her open mouth, features wide and wet with waking horror as she stared into the room — was enough to make him never want to step foot in the place again.
So now they live in a rundown piece of shit on the wrong side of town, with hideous burnt orange carpet and wood paneled walls, with cracks in the ceiling and cigarette burns in the walls, some parting gifts from whatever feral hick lived there before them, and it feels like another cruel, cosmic joke. Like the universe is delighting in the Harringtons’ comeuppance; like the blackened beams and brick rubble of Starcourt are all twisting to form one great, mocking mouth; the better to smile and laugh at their misfortune.
You bought your bed, now you have to lie in it.
He didn’t even know that the Harringtons owned Forest Hills until it was the only asset left to their name.
He’s pretty sure his dad bought it more as a joke than a genuine investment. Meant to teach Steve a lesson, like how he used to bring home Waffle House applications whenever Steve got a C on a report card. This is your future if you don’t straighten up, son.
Kill yourself, dad.
Oh, wait.
You already did.
—
part 4
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A few notes on trigger discipline, with examples from Spy x Family
One of the first things you learn when learning how to use a gun is that you absolutely do NOT put your finger on the trigger unless you're 100% ready and willing to shoot (and deal with whatever the consequences may be).
Accidental fire is extremely easy to occur. If your finger is touching the trigger, a simple spasm of the hand, a sudden sound or movement in the environment, or jostling from moving can cause the finger to pull the trigger. If you haven't aimed correctly at something that you want to shoot at, you'll very likely shoot something you don't want to shoot, including your own body parts. That's not even counting the fact that you may not properly control the recoil.
So normally, you need to train your discipline so that your first instinct when picking up a gun - especially during a stressful moment - will be for the finger to not go on the trigger until the gun is properly aimed at who/what you want to shoot.
I only trained with air guns some years ago, but discipline was still important; you wrap your hand around the handle with the index finger away from the trigger, make sure you have a good grip on it, raise the gun from the counter, aim, align the sights, and then you put the finger on the trigger and shoot. The one (1) time I accidentally put my finger on it before raising the gun, I shot at the wall while raising it and got a very angry look from my instructor. I was lucky that's all I got.
Since then, I've been noticing trigger discipline in media, and a lot of those get it very wrong.
To his big credit, Tatsuya Endo gets it right.
Twilight's finger is resting parallel to the barrel of the gun, away from the trigger. While this entire pose is more artistic than realistic, it was still important to Endo to portray correct discipline. You don't do that if you don't know about it.
Similarly with Nightfall in the cover of the sixth volume.
Again, artistic, not realistic pose. Still correct discipline.
More examples of artistic depictions with correct discipline:
And then! An action pose!
Twilight has a clear ready-to-shoot pose; he has a target, so finger goes on the trigger. (Normally the gun should be a little higher so he can properly align the sights but he's TwilightTM so I give it a pass)
Even Bondman has good discipline!
Seeing correct discipline in those pictures piques my interest a lot, because it shows that the artist is consciously choosing when he'll show a finger on a trigger, making such a moment more impactful.
Twilight aims his gun right on Edgar's head, his finger on the trigger. Again, you don't put your finger on the trigger unless you're about to shoot. If you're only threatening someone, it should still be off because one single unintentional fire can kill your target when you didn't mean to. Now, I can suspend my disbelief and say Twilight has super duper control over his body to the point of not being jostled or his hand not spasming suddenly because he's TwilightTM. So I instead focus on how serious Twilight was here about killing Edgar. Should Edgar do any movement, he's dead.
Again, it's about the knowledge of trigger discipline itself. When you portray a character not touching the trigger when they don't need to, showing the opposite hits harder.
The Handler prepares the gun ominously, her finger off the trigger.
But when she aims it at the student's head...
She's serious. She's made sure the students heard her prepare the gun, so when she threatens the student, he knows what he's facing despite wearing a blindfold.
Again, in a realistic scenario, in both cases their fingers would rest away from the trigger, because their intention is not to kill their targets unless absolutely necessary. But that might have confused the readers who don't know about trigger discipline, and might have made for less impactful moments. So I give that a pass, especially since Endo is shown to be aware of correct discipline.
The anime is also aware of this.
Twilight is assessing the situation; finger is off the trigger.
The Handler prepares the gun; finger off.
She threatens the student; finger on.
(Of course, there have been moments both in manga and anime with incorrect depictions. But I can let those pass cause I know there's a lot of people involved in creating the art and things can get complicated)
A few more examples, from the Imperial Scholars meeting:
Those are very short moments, but someone drew those stills and intentionally had the guards' index fingers extended and not around the trigger.
As I said above, those examples pique my interest because they are conscious, deliberate choices... and good use of that can make for an impactful scene... say, identity reveal happens, Twilight is aiming his gun at the Thorn Princess, but his finger is off the trigger. He urges himself to put the finger on it, but the damn thing won't move... she also cannot bring herself to stab him even though her dagger is right at his throat, and she notices his hesitation... Endo-sensei I am begging...
(don't spoil me if it happens in the manga, let me live in ignorance)
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