#me? coping with my inability to go hiking by writing headcanons? its more likely than you think!

[writingpuddle]

“Don’t you ever get lonely?” Nicky asked, digging in his pack for a chocolate bar. To their left, the cliff dropped away precipitously, sheer granite cliffs like sentinels at the end of the world.

Neil stared at Nicky. “No,” he said.

“What, never?”

Neil looked out across the sweeping vista of mountains before them. A speck that could have been a hawk or a raven or a sparrow spun against the sky, too small and distant to judge. He’d stood in the middle of busy cities; he’d gone to school with hundreds; he’d even tried out for a track and field team once. He’d been surrounded by people, and he had been so ferociously lonely it had been like a knife in his chest.

“No,” he said, because he didn’t know how to explain—didn’t even want to, really. He’d felt more alone back in the so-called real world than he’d ever felt in the wilderness, miles from any other person. When there was no one around, there was no one to miss.

~~~The Long-Distance Hiker AU (A Bullet Point Fic)~~~

So after Neil’s mom died he kinda of ghosted around for a while and eventually ended up in a small hiking town in California

He met a bunch of thru hikers and figured, hey, my dad probably won’t find me if I’ve fucked off into the wilderness

So he starts hiking

And pretty soon he realizes it’s the best thing he could imagine

He spends all summer in the mountains and when winter rolls around he finds a temporary job in a skiing town working in a second hand gear shop

He’s an ultralighter in the most accidental sense possible

His gear is weird and cobbled together and his shoes are held together with dental floss

He sleeps under a tarp with a down blanket and a thin foam mat and he’ll eat the same shit day in day out without even registering it while he covers frankly obscene distances every single day

It basically gives Kevin an ulcer

Kevin’s an ultralighter, but in the stuck up, rich bitch way; his gear is probably worth thousands of dollars and he’ll lecture anyone who listens about ripstop nylon and is super snobby and elitist about who is a so-called “real” thru hiker (hint: anyone who doesn’t do it his way isn’t a real thru hiker)

(don’t worry he’ll get smacked around a little by people like Dan and stop being such a little bitch about it but he grew up rich so even though it might’ve been shit living with Riko he really doesn’t always take into consideration the context of how much fucking money gear costs when he’s preaching about ultralighting)

(yes I’m taking out my dislike for pretentious rich ultralighters on him, okay, but the difference is he’ll have character growth versus the people I met are probably still being preachy and self-important to this day)

Andrew’s like the exact opposite

His pack weighs like seventy pounds and he’ll pull a six-inch knife (a gross misuse of smart gear weight management) at anyone who comments

He has a completely contained single person tent that’s big enough to sit up in and a four-inch inflatable mattress

His sleeping bag is rated to like -20 even when he’s hiking in the summer

Nicky swears he once saw him pull a full-sized chocolate cake out of his backpack three days down the trail and everyone says that’s stupid and made up but secretly think its totally true

Andrew likes to hike alone but somehow he’s never more than a day away from Aaron and Nicky and when he keeps showing up near them it gets harder and harder to pretend like he doesn’t actually care about them

Nobody says anything, obviously, but Nicky gets a little teary when he starts to notice the pattern

It was Nicky’s idea; in this universe Erik got him into hiking when he was in Germany so he got the cousins into it as a bonding exercise and then it turned out it was the best family activity they had ever found

This is several years after they graduated and they’ve scrounged together enough time and money to hike the Pacific Crest Trail

Now the upperclassmen:

So Stephanie Walker is a trail angel: one of those people who lives near a long trail and provides snacks and rides and somewhere to stay and basically helps out anyone who comes by with whatever’s going on; she’s pulled a lot of people out of frankly dangerous situations and she’s not afraid of anything the trail has to offer

So Renee finds herself and her faith while living this life of meeting new hikers every day and it’s almost inevitable that she starts to hike and find solace in the wilderness

Allison is one of those Wild types: she’s done some hiking (much to her parents’ chagrin) but she’s never done a thru trail or even much overnighting before, but she’s ready to throw herself into it and doesn’t care how dirty she gets

She totally carries a tiny spa package though

The other women are very skeptical because they take pride in being free from societies expectations and make up and shaving but they come around after Allison pulls it out one time when they’re seven days into a ten day section and gives them face masks and they all have a little pedicure pampering session (so, so needed when your feet are being beaten and bruised by hard terrain all day)

She has a lot of new, expensive gear and is super touchy about people trying to help her (because a beautiful woman absolutely gets people trying to “help” all the time and it’s infuriating and condescending) but she learns to accept help from her closest friends

She was showing off near the beginning of the trail drinking with a bunch of guys and probably got too sloshed trying to act tough (alcohol hits you waaaay harder at high elevations dude, if you’re not expecting it you can get Fucked Up really fast)

It’s Seth who realizes things are getting out of control and pulls her out before the guys can do anything shitty which is how their friendship and eventually their relationship gets started

They piss everyone off with their constant breaking up and getting back together on the trail, sometimes hiking together for days and then splitting up and going to hike with other people but they find a lot of healing out there in the woods

Seth’s mom is totally dismissive and condescending of his hiking, she thinks it’s a stupid waste of time, but she thinks everything he does is a stupid waste of time so at least when he’s out there without cell service he has an excuse to not respond to her

Now Dan

Dan’s trailer trash, right

She’s got no fucking cash but she has this dream in her head to hike the PCT and she’s going to fucking well do it

Her gear is probably most similar to Neil’s except where his is a mess of weird priorities and held together by spit and twine

Hers is meticulously planned

It’s cheap, some of it’s over forty years old, but it’s hers

It’s probably the only stuff in the world that’s actually hers

She accumulated it over about four years, hitting all the second-hand gear events, saving up every penny, packing and repacking and writing everything out in great detail until David Wymack got wind of her plans at a gear event

He’s one of those guys who hiked the PCT thirty years ago back before anyone knew what it was except instead of feeling superior about that it means he knows exactly how much impact experiencing the wilderness can have for disenfranchised people

He approaches Dan and offers to sponsor her hike

She’s resistant at first; she planned this hike, she got all the stuff together, she was going to do it without anyone’s help

But he comes back and says he just wants her to write about her experiences and publish it on his website

He’ll pay her for the work, of course

And she wavers and finally caves because this will move her plans up by about two years if she can make money while she’s hiking instead of having to hoard up enough cash to take six whole months off

Her blog posts are a huge hit

She doesn’t preach about how the mountains saved her, or get too metaphorical about hiking or anything like that

She just talks about the real, raw experience of hiking

The friendships, the trials, the triumphs

The infuriating people whose mental image of the hiking community doesn’t include poor black girls who grew up in a trailer park, who say she’s an inspiration like they actually mean something else

She talks about the days that she flies up the mountains and the days that she can barely drag herself out of her tent and the day she realizes that Allison and Renee, these women she thought could not be more different from her, are the best friends she’s ever had in the world

And she’s takes fucking amazing pictures

She’s also very determined not to have a trail romance

That’s stupid and cliché

Look that guy Matt might be hot but she’s not interested

He’s clearly working through some stuff and she’s not here to be some guys savior or whatever

So Matt then

His mom helped him get sober a couple years ago and he’s been struggling with it ever since

She got him into hiking as an outlet and a healthy hobby and he took to it like a fish to water

He’s got legs for days and he doesn’t mind carrying a heavy pack, he can hike for hours without stopping

(The fact that he’s faster than her pisses Dan off a bit, but sometimes you gotta accept that you’ve got short legs and just hike your own hike, there aren’t any prizes for speed)

He relapsed again a couple months before his hike started and he and Randy weren’t even sure if he was going to be able to do it but he’s damned well going to try

So anyway

Pretty much everyone is trying to actually hike the PCT except Neil

He drives everyone bonkers

His motivation isn’t really about the trail so much as staying out in the wilderness where there are no gangsters to murder you

So he just does whatever he wants and keeps showing up at random points

He’s technically got one of the thru hiker permits but he frequently goes off on side trails not on the PCT and ends up hiding out in the woods so rangers won’t find him

He’ll just hitchhike straight through boring sections or anywhere that you pass through too many towns where he’d rather not be remembered

He keeps coming back to the PCT but it’s more like it’s a rough guideline of where to go than an actual route he’s taking

He’s got his natural colouring back because who’s dying their hair or wearing fucking contacts on the trail?

But also

Who would ever associate a runaway mafia kid with a guy with overgrown hair and a stained t-shirt who’s sitting serenely on a mountain pass in a photo on David Wymack’s website?

Nobody

That’s right kids, Nathan doesn’t have a role in this one because he doesn’t find Neil

Maybe he gets killed in a shoot out or something and some other gangster steps up and takes over, and in the shuffle Neil’s just kinda forgotten

Maybe he finds out months later and he just stares at the computer in shock because he should have known, shouldn’t he? He should have felt it when his father died

He should have realized that he was free

That happens later though

Who fucking cares what Riko’s doing honestly

Kevin has somehow attached himself to Andrew and is driving him up the wall with advice to improve his hiking/base weight/distance/etc and he sees this guy (Neil) who regularly covers like thirty or forty miles a day (obscene!) and is like YES this guy is my people!

Except when he starts talking to Neil he realizes he’s this total weirdo who doesn’t even have a cook set he just eats cold food (a common enough thing among ultralighters, but not like this. Oh god, not like this)

Neil’s just sitting there gnawing on a pack of uncooked ramen like a fucking animal

And he’s not! Even! Hiking! Properly!

You’ll never finish the trail if you hike like this!

Neil just gives him a blank look

He’s got no interest on getting on some “verified” list of people who hiked the PCT, he just likes hiking

Andrew likes him

I mean obviously he despises him what the hell is with that janky ass setup but also he’s so unconventional and unapologetic how could Andrew not be into that?

They’re the kind of people who give wilderness rescue personnel grey hair, but for completely opposite reasons

Neil keeps running into them because even though he covers so much ground every day, his meandering route means he doesn’t actually move down the trail very fast

They’ll be like wait weren’t you like a week ahead of us and he’s like oh yeah I heard about this cool waterfall and took a sixty mile side trail to visit it and nearly ran into a momma bear with two cubs, it was awesome

And they all start to grow on him, and each other, almost accidentally

Look none of them are out there romanticizing the trail as some kind of magical place where the problems of the real world disappear and the people are somehow more pure and true or whatever

People are people and they bring their issues wherever they go

But there is a paring down

When your daily concerns are just mileage and shoes and food and weather, a lot of other stuff fades into the background

And well the truth is a lot of people are on those trails to work through stuff

And they find each other

Gradually, without even really noticing

They team up in June, groups of three or four with crampons and ice axes to get over the Sierra’s.

Neil was planning to just do side hikes and wait for the snow to melt—he isn’t so reckless he wants to go over the ice alone, but Kevin insists he join them and for the first time he hikes in a group with Kevin and the cousins all together.

It’s weird

He’s not used to people talking to him when he’s hiking and he frequently doesn’t respond and it’s not because he’s being rude he’s just so focussed on what he’s doing and what’s around him that he literally doesn’t hear them

And then

Nicky slips

It’s not his fault, they did nearly everything right (Kevin may be a pretentious ass, but he does know his shit) but sometimes shit just happens for no reason

And they’re at the edge of the ice sheet so Nicky’s just untying himself from the rope that links them together, he’s not even moving, and the snow beneath him shifts and he doesn’t even have time to scream before he’s hurtling down the snow below the trail towards the cliff at the bottom of the ice sheet

Neil doesn’t even hesitate

He dives after him, ice axe in one hand like a fucking gladiator and gets his arm wrapped around Nicky’s waist

He slams the ice axe into the snow and it drags behind them, and it looks like it’s not going to catch, and the edge is getting closer and closer—

Until the axe catches something, and Nicky and Neil lurch to a halt, clinging to each other, hanging off of Neil’s one arm and the axe.

Neil looks up and sees Andrew, Aaron and Kevin in various places on the slope above them, their axes dug in and long gouge marks in the snow beneath their heels, strung together by a ropeline that’s still attached to Neil’s waist

That rope is probably the only thing that slowed them down enough that Neil could stop them without ripping his arm clean off

It’s hardly a by-the-book rescue, and in fact it was pretty stupid, but they’re okay, they’re okay, that’s all that matters

That night they light a fire down by a lake and Nicky cries on Aaron’s shoulder and Andrew keeps clenching his fists because he’s never felt so helpless in his life and it was Neil that jumped, not him

He knows that he was at the far end of the line and he would’ve made it worse if he had, but doing nothing while Neil risked his life to save Nicky

They don’t really talk about it

But you kind of can’t help being friends after that

And even after they’re out of the high mountains and back on solid trails Neil keeps tabs on them

And Nicky befriends the others and without even meaning to they start to develop a sort of loose trail family vibe

They’re not hiking together all the time like some of the groups they meet, but they check on each other all the time and wait up in resupply villages and bond over firepits and shitty hot chocolate mixes and swap tips on how to keep the butt-chafing at bay

Neil sticks to the outskirts, mostly, but he starts to open up a little, in fits and spurts, tiny non-specific things that wouldn’t even register to most people but that this particular group knows means more than that

He’s slowing down, too, sometimes hiking entire days with people and covering half his usual distance even when there’s no cliffs or glaciers threatening him

He likes hiking with Andrew the most, though

Because neither of them are big talkers when they’re hiking and Andrew’s pack might be absurdly heavy but he’s got legs the size of tree trunks and endurance to match, so he might not be fast but he can outwalk half the people on the trail by sheer relentlessness

They both like to camp up high, near treeline (so Neil can set up his tarp) and in the places that it’s legal they’ll start a small fire and Andrew will loan Neil his pot so he can actually cook his fucking ramen for once and sometimes they’ll watch the Milky Way rise and share secrets under the open sky, not looking at each other so they don’t break the illusion, and sometimes they won’t say anything at all but it’s okay, because they’re saying nothing together.

It’s nice

It’s maybe more than nice

The summer draws to a close and Neil is starting to realize that he doesn’t want it to

He never wants the hiking season to end but this time it’s different

This summer has been perfect

And he knows deep in his bones that once they leave the trail things will change

The others have lives to return to, and Neil…

The trail is all he has

And if he’s barely hiking alone at all these days, well, who’s going to call him out on it?

The others like having him around because he stops them from getting too fixated on the Trail to see the trail

He still takes side trips but now sometimes people will come along and he’ll stand at the base of a canyon staring up at the glossy white walls and Dan will snap a photo for her blog and smile, because the PCT is just a line on a map, but the hike is all of them; together

He’s hiking with Andrew in September when a storm hits, this time vicious

Neil huddles under his tarp in resignation

Storms suck, he always gets wet, no matter how much he lowers the tarp, but he’s used to it; he just waits it out

But it’s just getting worse

Hail lashing at the tarp and pummelling the ground and maybe for once he regrets camping so high up

And Andrew has to shout to be heard but finally Neil realizes he’s offering to let Neil come into his tent

You’re going fucking freeze, just get in here

Neil goes

It’s weird

It’s instantly weird

The tent is not built for two people, so they’re both sitting cross legged with their heads ducked to not press against the roof

The storms probably not going to let up soon, Andrew says

Yeah, Neil says.

Andrew sighs

Lie down, he says, and Neil does, and Andrew lies down next to him, shoulder to shoulder

It barely works, only because neither of them are very big people

Neil’s pack is outside wrapped in his tarp and all he has is his damp down blanket but he’s not cold anymore, not with Andrew bundled up in his ridiculous sleeping bag right next to him

The storm rages for nearly two days and what passes between them in that tent, nobody knows

If they’re barely ever seen apart after it, well. You only see people so often on the trail. It could easily be a coincidence

And if Neil doesn’t even set his tarp up on rainy nights anymore, well. They never camp near other people anyway, so who’s to know?

In early October the snow blows in, blocking the route to the finish.

They drift around a resupply village for almost two weeks, waiting for the trail to reopen, but finally even Kevin accepts that it isn’t going to

After all of that, none of them are going to finish the trail

It’s a disappointment—of course it is. For most of them, the end of their trip is now a nondescript exit into a village, no fanfare, no closure; they didn’t even know they were done for days

Still, it’s not so bad

They’re all together

Allison suggests Vegas, but they all laugh it down; they wouldn’t even know how right now, bearded and hairy and ravenous as they are

They go to South Carolina instead

It’s not really even discussed that they’ll stay together, they just all go; Allison hosts them at her resort and they laugh at the incongruous weirdness of seeing each other in real clothes, and it’s different, but it’s also okay

They stay for another two weeks, and they don’t hike another fucking inch

We should try the Continental Divide Trail sometime, Dan says

Her blog is so popular now that she’s got sponsorships from more than just Wymack waiting for her

She could make a career out of hiking and blogging and doing gear reviews and it’s a dream she’d never even realized she wanted until she had it

And if she accidentally fucked up and ended up with a hot trail boyfriend? Well, nobody’s perfect

And he has a great butt

(she has photos of it on her blog, from when they jumped into a glacier lake naked back in August)

Everyone is jealous

How about that trek in Iceland? Matt suggests

Or the whats-it-called in New Zealand, Allison says

Oh, I bet there’s some good ones in Europe! Nicky says. You guys can all meet Erik!

And it’s going to be different, but it’s not going away, and Neil feels calm in a way he never has at the end of a hiking season before

Eventually everyone has to start making plans to return to their lives, and jobs, and Neil sneaks out to the back of the house to sit in crisp fall air and watch leaves spiral down out of the trees

Andrew follows him

They sit together, watching the moon rise over the hills, and when Andrew asks Neil to come home, Neil says yes

#me? coping with my inability to go hiking by writing headcanons? its more likely than you think! #aftg headcanons #aftg au #andreil #bulletpoint fic #my writing #hiker au #gratuitous descriptions of hiker life #found family #this is like 3.5k idk man #this is very self indulgent lol