Chapter Text
Your name is Jake Harley, and you are wildly nervous.
It all started, of course, in year 10.
Your younger sibling, Jade, had just gotten old enough to finally join your school’s robotics team, and they encouraged you to join with them. In their words, you were ‘a sad, lonely loser who just watches movies after school and doesn’t have any friends!!!’. You corrected them, because you’re super charismatic and of course you have friends (hell, you’d spent your morning pestering Aradia about that shiny new skull she’d found!), but when Jade gets their mind set on something, which they had, they’re a persistent little bugger.
So you joined.
You actually found it quite fun, even if you’d joined a year late! You’d figured it’d all be nerd jargon and nonsense words that you wouldn’t get, but you really took a shining to it. You never really made any close friends, though. People tended to look at you strangely once you started talking about movies you liked, or you would blunder and say something that made someone upset in a way you didn’t even know a person could be upset. You had acquaintances, though, and you got on fantastically with the power tools!
You’re in year 11 now, which really isn’t that long of a commitment to the whole robot thing. At the start of the year you and Jade both decided to apply for your team’s drive team– Jade wanted to drive the robot (or really just be more involved with the team!) and you wanted to spend more time actually doing things, instead of wasting away in your room. You both got on, Jade as a technician and yourself as a human player. Jade was absolutely electrified.
Now, you’re standing at the human player station, waiting for the match to start, and you feel like you could just vomit. Out of nerves, mostly, but the pizza your coach got was also pretty terrible and that might be adding to it. You’ve honestly never actually really liked pizza. Good God, what if you're lactose intolerant?
…Back on track, though. You’ve got the heebie-jeebies because this match may decide your fate. If you win this match, you go to Championships. In Houston.
You look over to Jade, who’s sitting on the robot cart, and they grin at you, giving you a double thumbs up. You give them a shaky smile, double pistols, and a wink, and then you hear the match start.
You zero in on your alliance’s robots, and stay on the ball with getting game pieces to them on time. The whole match zooms by, filled with a desperate hope that your team is doing well, that the score that you don’t dare check weighs in your favour. You only allow yourself to look up once you get to endgame, and by gum it is close.
You wait, all in a dither, eyes stuck to the large projector screen up above the field.
The whole room is dead quiet.
The red alliance (that’s you, that’s you and you’re going to go to championships) wins and you nearly sob, or fall over, or maybe that pizza from earlier will finally make good on its promise and resurface. You don’t do any of that. Instead, you hug Jade as tight as you possibly can– they’re actually crying, and they hug you back just as tight– and then you and the rest of the drive team skedaddle back to the pit so you can get your stuff the hell out of here, go back to the hotel, and frigging sleep.
Dinner goes by in a flurry of excitement and you skip out on team bonding in favour of being on your lonesome, since today has been overwhelming, to put it gently. You conk out immediately after you get to your hotel room, and wake around four in the morning. Jade’s snoring in the bed next to yours.
You sit up, taking a breath. It’s dead quiet. You’d tried to watch a movie, but you fell asleep not even half an hour in. Jade must’ve set aside your laptop for you, the angel. Across from you is a floor to ceiling window overlooking the city.
You migrate to the floor, sitting with your knees to your chest. The city is… it’s bright. It makes you feel entirely small, and you don’t know if it's a good or a bad or a neutral feeling. It’s a feeling though, definitely, and it swells up in your chest.
It’s so quiet.
You wonder who else is awake in the hotel. You wonder who else is awake in the city. You wonder what your grandma is up to, or what your sister Jane or your brother June or your dad all the way in Washington are up to. Aradia’s probably asleep, but Tavros may be up.
You don’t particularly feel like talking to any of them.
Houston’s probably just as city-like, which is a profoundly stupid sentence, you think, even if it’s true and there’s something there in the parallels of places across the globe.
The city makes you feel like less of a person. You’re just… Jake. You’re a boy on a hotel room floor, curled up, lonely. Most of your friends are your siblings, and the two other people you know live thousands of kilometres away. You’re lucky they speak English and even put up with you, the bumbling fool that you are.
Maybe Houston will present you an opportunity to break out of being alone.