Archive of Our Own ^beta

Savannah’s doctor tells her with a sad, resigned voice - and her parents have to tell her several more times, as he struggles to wrap his head around such a big concept - that her disease is going to gradually get worse, and that there’s no cure. Most of the changes seem to happen overnight.

She gets to school one day and she’s been replaced by a monster. Her classmates avoid her, and no amount of teachers patiently explaining that her condition isn’t contagious will help. Something about the way she moves, the way she walks, is just too freakish. They can’t tolerate it, can’t tolerate her, and nobody really expects them to.

Years pass from a corner of the school library where she’s relatively safe from bullying because anyone who raises their voice at her will get in trouble for being too loud. 

When Savannah Potts is twelve and concussed - a fall straight down onto a hard hallway floor, with nothing she could have possibly tripped on, the doctors keep telling her how lucky it is that she didn’t get even more badly hurt - she is officially told, for the first time, that she should not be walking unassisted. Her parents shift their weight from foot to foot, pace in the waiting room, because they’ve been told how this story goes. First a cane. Then crutches. Then a wheelchair and then a string of wheelchairs, each one more advanced than the last, to compensate more and more for her failing body. They seem to have some idea that they can delay or prevent the whole prophecy just by refusing the first step.

But the doctors really do know the future. And destiny is written in stone. Savannah picks out a color for her first cane.

When the bullying gets worse at school, which it always does, it also seems to lower the standard for how Savannah should be treated, which in turn lowers the standard for what counts as being nice to her, and nobody ever seems to notice or care that the standard of respect for her is so much lower than everyone else in the town. Ocean O’Connell Rosenberg is the smartest student in St. Cassian’s, and the most mature, and the kindest, and probably the best person in the whole town - all, of course, self-diagnosed traits. She crouches down to talk to her in an exaggerated sing-song voice, takes a personal responsibility to be her mentor because she is, obviously, so much more mature than Savannah. The gap between their birthdays is just about six months.

Richard Potts shows up to school halfway through the eighth grade with a he/him pronoun pin, and a name badge proudly displaying Ricky, and matching stickers all over his cane. Instead of getting a haircut - so much hassle, and if he doesn’t like it it will take so long to grow back - he ties it all into a bun that he can tuck behind a cap. He barely puts effort into passing because he knows that nobody at school is ever going to take anything he says seriously, let alone this.

Ocean notices his transition before his parents do.

And when she invites him to choir - which in itself is a weird gesture - she makes a big fuss about how it’s so hard to remember not to call him Sweet Little Savannah Potts, because she’s always seen him as her baby sister, ever since she first started occasionally talking to him maybe nine months ago.

Ricky grits his teeth and bears it. He’s not sure what else he can do.

On the first day of the ninth grade, Ocean limps into the choir rehearsal room.

She doesn’t offer an explanation. She doesn't acknowledge it at all, really, just puts her hand on a table on her way in so she has something to lean on as she goes to the front of the room, where she stands stiffly for the whole session with none of her usual pacing. Nobody asks what’s happened to her. Ricky wonders if maybe everyone else already knows and he is just, as always, perpetually out of the loop.

Ricky knows it’s wrong. But he feels a sort of perverse glee at the idea of Ocean being hurt. Serves her right, for all the condescending jabs at him. Maybe this will finally teach her a lesson.

Perverse glee starts to give way to sympathy when she shows up the next day, still limping, with no sign of improvement. A week straight and a grimace on Ocean’s face when she isn’t actively trying to cover it up, sympathy fades into concern.

“It’s honestly fine,” she insists, repeatedly, to anyone who will listen, which is most people, because when you’re not Ricky it’s easy for people to listen to you. “I just tripped and had a bad fall over the Summer. I’ll walk it off! I’m resilient.”

Ricky overhears, exactly once, Ocean smugly insisting that her parents don’t believe in modern medicine, and they have no interest in taking their daughter to get radiation pumped into her so they can “diagnose” the “problem” when surely their herbal concoction will work just as well.

There’s a pain in his chest that he doesn’t know what to do. Ocean would never listen to him if he tried to help her.

Constance keeps anxiously glancing at her in rehearsal, concern in her eyes. Ocean limps her way through the ninth grade with a stubborn fervor, laughing off anyone who asks if she’s okay, waiting until nobody can see her to show weakness. Ricky knows about this because when Ocean waits until nobody can see her, she doesn’t think to check if Ricky can see her, because she seems convinced that he can’t recognize distress in other people or understand what he’s seeing or pose any threat to her oh-so-perfect image. Ricky wants to be sympathetic but he’s not sure how to detangle that oh-so-perfect image from, specifically, a need to prove to everyone that she’s not like him.

Except, it turns out in the end, she is like him.

Because in the tenth grade, after about a year of avoiding doctors, with that leg probably irreparably damaged, she shows up to school with her own cane.

It’s wooden. Curved handle. Almost shepherd-esque. Ricky doesn’t have to wait until choir to see it. People stop and stare in the school hallways in the same way they used to stare at him. When she walks it’s like the parting of the red sea. 

She keeps walking. Unbothered. Like she just knows that she’s still going to be respected.

Ricky, somehow, finds himself staring with his classmates.

Ricky has, for many years, been described by teachers as a bright student who needs to apply herself more. He’s had no success in getting the staff to acknowledge his transition in any official documentation.

He does well on exams. He cobbles together great short-answer responses from the things he doesn’t realize he’s picking up during class, when he’s busy staring at the wall imagining another planet. He only does about half of what he’s told to do in class, perpetually zoned out and missing instructions and aware nobody will listen if he asks for help. He usually ignores homework.

His notes from his history teacher say as much. He squints over them in choir, while he waits for the rest of the choir to arrive.

And Ocean looks over his shoulder and tuts.

Ocean has been talking to him more and more, lately. Ricky’s not sure if it’s so much that she considers him a friend or just that she considers herself his friend.

“You should put some more effort in, sweetie,” she chides, and he’s not sure if sweetie is a friendly nickname or an infantilizing one. “You could get really good grades if you did your homework.”

Ricky shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “I’m too tired for homework.” School, walking from class to class, staying upright and kind of focused for six hours straight, that’s it - that’s all Ricky can do in a day, most of the limit of his energy. He tends to collapse into bed after school, for a few hours of YouTube before bed. He barely has time to shower. His bed goes unmade until the school holidays.

“My chronic pain makes me tired too,” Ocean admits, putting a hand on his shoulder sympathetically. “But you have to learn how to work around it! For example, just this last weekend, I was planning go for a walk for my mental health and then go to Constance’s house to study. But I realized how difficult it would be to do both of those things in one day… so I did my mental health walk on the way to Constance’s house!” She grins brightly. “We all have to make sacrifices! But the important thing is to work smarter, not harder!”

Ricky looks up at her, and blinks several times, and he’s not sure why he’s surprised. All of his interactions with Ocean seem to follow this general formula, now: Ricky is disabled, and Ocean is also disabled, and she’s much better at it. Ocean is some ridiculous caricature of the most annoying able-bodied person he can think of and, as a side thing to that, just so happens to have a disability. One of the good disabilities to have, one of the ones that never makes people think she’s a freak and never inconveniences anyone and never, well, disables her-

In his less charitable moments - such as after Ocean’s said something like that - it sometimes occurs to Ricky to question whether Ocean even counts as disabled. To wonder if maybe she’s so capable, and so respected, that she might as well be considered able-bodied. Maybe she’s successfully strong-armed her way out of having to acknowledge ableism, and turned right around to wield that power against Ricky, and in doing so she’s given up her seat at the table, so to speak.

But Ricky’s less charitable moments never last long. Because right as Ocean’s said something like that, Noel walks into the room and deadpans, “Really, Ocean? Two walks in a day is difficult?”

Ricky can think of a million half-justifications for that jab in an instant. He still cringes. It’s a fitting form of karma for the girl that has never in her life shut up about the benefits of exercise, and it’s clearly more out of Noel’s general hatred for Ocean than any actual ableism, and it’s a low blow.

But Ocean, without seeming hurt per se, takes several furious steps toward Noel. Breathing hard through gritted teeth with a grin on her face, she repeats, “We ALL have to make SACRIFICES, Noel!”

She never used to yell like that. At least not often. It started after the injury and only increased in frequency after she got the cane. There’s a constant defensiveness about her, now, and she’s quick to anger, a sort of comical positivity-filled anger where she keeps the smile on her face as she roars platitudes and the result comes across as just slightly unhinged. Her hand gestures are exaggerated, and her body contorts to hunch over whoever she’s yelling at. It’s like everything about her has to be dialled up to eleven just to be noticed at all.

Ricky sits there, and watches, and outwardly he appears calm and uncaring. But it’s hard not to be angry with the school, with the town, with the whole world - for the fact that Ocean has to yell like that just to be heard.

And, more selfishly, it’s hard not to be angry for the fact that she can yell like that just to be heard.

The school’s new bad boy comes in the eleventh grade and barely makes it six months before he gets put in choir as punishment. Ricky’s not even sure why choir is being used as a punishment, but to be fair, he was zoned out during most of what happened with Misha Bachynskyi, so he really wouldn’t expect to know. 

When he walks into choir, Ocean is engrossed in some conversation with Misha, clearly telling him half of her life story.

Ricky walks past them and goes to sit down in his usual spot at the back of the room, so the rehearsal can be his background music as he thinks about Zolar.

“Why do you have walking stick?” asks Misha, with a raised eyebrow and an emphasis on the you, like he’s half convinced this is some sort of weird trend or perhaps a requirement for the choir uniform.

Right, Ricky registers, Misha is blunt. He’s happy to return that energy. “None of your fucking business.”

“Ricky!” snaps Ocean, turning straight around to face him with that cheshire-like grin and that roaring voice. 

Ricky just rolls his eyes.

Ocean’s nails dig into his shoulder like talons. “Ricky,” she repeats, her voice lower now, but still with that same piercing quality, almost like a stage whisper. “I am trying very hard to educate Misha right now and you are trivializing all of that!”

Ricky blinks several times and then asks, “What?”

“I am trying,” Ocean repeats, briskly. “To educate Misha.” Ricky blinks again and she sighs. “Misha came in and asked why I was using a cane. I’ve been trying to explain it to him!”

“You have been explaining way too much,” complains Misha.

“I wanted to give him the full, nuanced understanding,” explains Ocean.

“Did you try explaining to him how that’s a rude question?”

Ocean glares. “It was a legitimate question which you are undermining.”

“I don’t have to tell anyone my medical information.”

“How is anyone supposed to learn if we lash out at anyone who asks a question?”

“You’re setting a precedent where anyone can just see me walking and expect me to stop and explain my whole-”

“I am trying to represent a community here!” snaps Ocean, drowning out the rest of his typed sentence.  

Misha stares at them both, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Seeming utterly oblivious to what, exactly, is going on here - probably not knowing whether he and Ocean are friends or enemies or what. Ricky isn’t sure himself, these days. He will never be Ocean’s best friend, that is firmly Constance’s title, but occasionally Ocean weaves her way into his life and seems to expect to be his best friend. And then, when she’s had her time to commiserate or whatever it is, she sneaks back out while Ricky is distracted thinking about Zolar, and it usually takes at least a week for him to notice that she hasn’t talked to him much lately.

Misha just has this judgemental look on his face like he thinks they’re both being fucking weird. Maybe they are, arguing about something so insane. Except Ricky didn’t want to argue, he was just sitting down for class.

What-fucking-ever, he tells himself. If he wanted to care about Misha’s opinion then he wouldn’t have said that first none of your fucking business.

But Ricky is a lover, not a fighter, and he doesn't have it in him to stay angry. Of course he and Ocean will be on speaking terms again by the end of the week.

Between the eleventh and the twelfth grades is the hottest Summer their part of Canada has seen in decades - thanks, global warming - and Ricky spends the hottest day stuck in an air-conditioned room, set colder than any reasonable person would tolerate.

School starts back up, and he sits alone, and Ocean plops herself down next to him in the cafeteria.

“Hello, Ricky!” she says, voice laced with sugar. “Can I talk to you?”

Ricky doesn’t have a chance to answer before she assumes yes.

“I’m thinking about our choir plans for this year,” Ocean explains. “And I wanted to do something to highlight disabled experiences.” Ricky blinks. What the hell does that even mean? “Do you have any ideas? Any experiences you’d like to share?”

Ricky blinks at her, unamused. Ocean blinks right back.

So, rolling his eyes, he starts typing. 

“I got drugged a few weeks ago. If that counts for anything.”

Ocean’s smile cracks and shatters in much the same way it does whenever Constance goes off-script in their improv sessions. “What?!”

“I had to go to hospital and the doctors got it in their head somehow that my disability was caused by anxiety so they made me take anxiety pills.” Ricky explains the story in the typical AAC monotone, unsurprised by it and not expecting Ocean to be surprised, resigned to the fact that this is just how you’re going to be treated if you go around looking like him. His hands shake as he types it.

“What?” asks Ocean, again.

Ricky, hesitant and uncertain, moves his hand to type more. Ocean cuts him off before he can.

“Are you sure you didn’t misinterpret something?” asks Ocean, brow furrowed. “Maybe they just wanted to help you calm down so they could treat you. Hospitals can be scary, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of!”

Ricky’s hand drifts down to his side. The fluorescent cafeteria lights above him bring to mind, suddenly, a much colder room. “It wasn’t like that,” he insists, with all his strength. “They just didn’t believe me.”

Ocean tuts. “Okay, Ricky, as a person with an invisible disability, I know that it means to not be believed. But… you have a diagnosis, don’t you?”

Ricky shrugs. “Some people don’t believe that’s real.”

“Some… conspiracy theorists! But we’re talking about actual doctors here, sweetie, why would they buy into conspiracy nonsense?”

“Some doctors are awful.” God does Ricky know that. He’s been pushed around and mismedicated and kept on display like a lab animal enough to know that.

Ocean frowns at him. “Okay!” she says, firmly. “I’m not going to argue with you on that!” She clears her throat, trying to shake off the undisguised rage that feels like far more of an argument than anything she could have actually said. “But that isn’t within the scope of things I want to raise awareness about. I’m talking about disabled experiences. This isn’t really… the right angle. How about we think of it more as an improv?” She grins, and Ricky rolls his eyes, and she seemingly doesn’t notice. “Like… just an example of an everyday situation where someone makes an untrue assumption about you. And you can correct them!” She beams with the enthusiasm of a girl who, perhaps by sheer willpower or perhaps by a miracle, is listened to when she corrects people. “Like, maybe someone is talking to you, really loudly to make sure you can hear them… and you can snap back, ‘just because I can’t talk doesn’t mean I’m deaf!’, and everyone can realize how stupid they are!”

Ricky blinks at her. “I wouldn’t say it like that,” he protests. “My mom’s Deaf.” He’s not close with her, never has been, barely talks to anyone in his family at this point. But he still has some standards.

“Okay, well,” Ocean continues, visibly frazzled. “It doesn’t have to be that. Just… something mundane that might happen to you on any given day. Something that happens to you because of you being disabled.”

“Like being mistreated by doctors?”

Ocean looks down at him like she’s not sure whether or not she’d like to compliment him on his great imagination. “Why are you singling them out? They know more about your condition than anyone.”

“They’re the ones with the drugs.”

“There are strict rules on when and how they’re allowed to distribute those drugs, they wouldn’t just use them to hurt you.”

And what the hell is Ricky supposed to do with that criticism? It happened. He can’t tweak the story to iron out the kinks, can’t replace it with a nicer story that makes more sense. It happened. It’s not his fault that he happened to get hurt in a way that was hard to believe. It’s not his fault that something like this seems to happen every time he needs to go to a doctor, to the point where he can barely fathom why Ocean would expect anything else to happen. 

Fury pounds through his veins as he types.

“If I could just run all my own tests and pick my own medications I would. I’d probably do a better job. Doctors don’t know shit about my health and they believe misinformation that can be corrected with one Google search and they hurt me just because they know they can. They don’t actually help, they’re just a bunch of useless gatekeepers.”

Ocean glares at him. She doesn’t slip into her usual animated rage, the one that comically hovers on the edge of stereotypical madness. She just glares.

And in a low voice - perhaps, genuinely, not mad but disappointed - she snaps, “It took so long to convince my parents to even let me go to a doctor. I had to fight so hard for that. I - I have an invisible disability, I know what it means to not be believed. I know how lifechanging it is to finally get a diagnosis, to talk to an expert, to have proof that something really is wrong and it’s not just all in your head.” She blinks at him, frowning deeply. “Are you really trying to act like that doesn’t mean anything?”

Ricky shrugs.

Ocean sighs haughtily. “I would love to know what goes on in your head, Ricky.”

Whenever Ocean storms off she does it like she’s taking something valuable away from Ricky. Namely, her presence. She stands up and storms off and looks over her shoulder on the way out to check if he’s disappointed. She never seems to realize that she bought herself into this conversation, because she wanted to talk to Ricky, and there’s really nothing to suggest he’d be particularly sad to see her go.

What goes on in Ricky’s head, honestly, is mostly Zolar.

And Ocean is never going to know that.

By the time the twelfth grade rolls around, Ricky is well and truly dragging himself around. Prone to collapsing every second he doesn’t have the cane in his hand, his school uniform always hiding some bruise or another. He really shouldn’t be continuing like this, should have already moved on to some other mobility aid that offers more security, but, well…

It’s not so much that his doctors won’t let him try another type of aid, as it’s that every time he means to bring it up someone says something utterly unhinged, like suggesting that maybe hypoxia is nothing to worry about or maybe he can defeat his illness through meditation, that shocks him into completely forgetting everything he intended to say in the appointment.

It turns out to not matter, in the end. All of it turns out not to matter, in the end.

Father Marcus, controversially, initially suggests that Noel be at the front of the choir for the Fall Fair performance. That he implicitly take on the role of the choir’s student leader, Ocean’s role, just for the sake of not having any canes front and centre when people watch them. Ocean’s composure, briefly, shatters at that. It’s odd to watch. Pristine, perfect Ocean, the straight-A student, being treated as exactly as unsightly and broken as perpetually sidelined Ricky Potts. For a moment, none of her efforts to be the most successful girl in town are worth anything; they are going before able-bodied judges and able-bodied judges don’t differentiate between a girl who constantly strives to be perfect and a boy who gave up on what people think about him long ago. They are both, equally, crippled.

The judges don’t differentiate, but apparently Father Marcus does. Ricky never knows exactly how Ocean talks her way out of experiencing ableism, considering that he accepted long ago that people were just going to treat him like this and there was nothing much he could do to help it. Maybe it’s because she’s cis, or maybe because people see her walk and decide that three good limbs can outweigh one bad leg as opposed to Ricky’s whole body being bad, or maybe because she can talk out loud and modulate her voice and that makes people listen.

Or maybe, Ricky tends to think bitterly from the back of the choir, she’s just better than him at being disabled.

Ocean fights for her place with a frenzy that sends her voice raw. Having dirt under your fingernails isn’t the same as actually clawing your way out of the hole. The judges look on at her with disapproval. Ricky has a feeling they’re going to come dead last against themselves again.

The Cyclone is their consolation prize.

Ocean gets the scepticism first, in line. Because, as always, she’s first in line. She argues like hell to say it’s perfectly safe for her to go on the ride with her cane, and the carnie listens to her for the same inscrutable reason people always seem to listen to Ocean, and then when Ricky approaches a precedent has already been set to allow him in without much fight.

Occasionally something like this happens and it reminds Ricky that there is a reason, beyond common decency, that he never just tells Ocean to fuck off and leave him alone. She carves a path thinking only of herself but sometimes Ricky can walk the same path. He’d feel bad about using her but he thinks it’s outweighed by how often the path really is only for her.

The Cyclone. 6:19PM. 

The warehouse. 

Ricky can talk now, which is… interesting. He’d like to test his theory that maybe that, specifically, is why people listen to Ocean and not to him. But Ocean, in her usual theatrics, just opens her mouth and talks and talks and talks, scarcely any room for even the omniscient robot to talk to her.

In the eighth grade, Ocean was untouchable and perfect. She was so, so far above Ricky. He watches her now, and oh, how the mighty have fallen. She’s dead, and she’s got a cane almost like his, and she’s gesturing wildly with it because a few years of being disabled have taught her that she has to be loud and animated and intrusive if she wants anybody to listen to her at all.

She grabs Ricky’s cane when she’s trying to make some big point about accessibility for all. 

Ricky’s not sure what the moral of this story is anymore. Every time he thinks about Ocean it’s a coin flip as to which conclusion he’ll come to. Ocean is stupid for throwing him under the bus so often, because able-bodied people don’t fucking care if you’re one of the good ones and she’ll have her face eaten by the same leopards she votes into power, except she wouldn’t be throwing him under the bus so much if not for the fact that it works. But it doesn’t work well enough. But surely, surely she should know better, she knows what it’s like, she’s been through this herself-

Ocean has always been one of the good ones. She wasn’t supposed to be like this. She isn’t a jaded, bitter cripple, and she can talk and she has strong arms and she can do everything able-bodied people can do, and she doesn’t deserve to be treated like this. Any idiot can say that. Any idiot can look at her and frown with pity-sympathy and say oh, how the mighty have fallen.

But when she takes Ricky’s cane, it scarcely occurs to anyone that he hits the ground just as hard. He has always been like this, and he has never been able to or tried to prove that he’s above other disabled people, and in the end it doesn’t matter. No pedestal, and oh, how he’s fallen. The ground doesn’t differentiate.

Constance takes his cane back off Ocean, hands it to him. Ricky waits oh-so-patiently for her to realize-

That he’s not the same as Ocean. That Ocean is exactly the same as him. That he’s worth listening to, too.

He’s not sure anymore. He’s been alone with his thoughts for so long that it’s all blended together in his head, all the types of human interaction that would be nice to experience before he dies. It’s too late now. He’s already dead. He’s never going to win this stupid rivalry with Ocean and Ocean is probably never going to listen to him enough to know or care that he considers her a rival. This is it, this is Ricky’s short life. This is what he has done to make it worth living and there is nothing more he can do.

He closes his eyes and thinks of Zolar.

That, he realizes, makes his life worth it far more than anything he could say or do to win Ocean’s approval.