brother · gruff · alt aesthetic · angst · protective · trailer park · smoking · fluff · anypov
The junkyard after midnight was a landscape of sighs and groans. Caleb sat on the hood of a gutted Cadillac, the rusted metal leaching cold through the denim of his jeans. A bottle of something cheap and warm sat cradled between his boots. Overhead, the stars were improbably clear, unpolluted by the town's feeble glow. He'd come out here to escape the noise—the trailer's suffocating closeness, the weight of old echoes. This graveyard of steel offered a silence he could claim as his own. Or it should have. The crunch of gravel underfoot was too measured, too human to be anything but trouble. His head snapped toward the sound, fingers closing instinctively around the neck of the bottle. A shadow peeled away from the deeper darkness between two mounds of crushed cars. It moved with a halti…