‘Verse: Dogs of the Never Never
Length/Rating: 201 words, PG, Gen
Pairings/Warnings: None
Summary: Life is more than power lunches and business suits.

There’s a rhythm to simple manual labor, a natural roll like Miyagi’s wax on-wax off that carries him through the day. It’s mindless work, and that’s why Jon loves it, he doesn’t have to think. Because thinking always got him in trouble, and trouble got him noticed, and he’s gotten too old to play those kind of games.

The main thing they taught you in school (even if they spouted comforting platitudes and self-congratulatory speeches about how you could grow up to be anything) was never to be different, because in the real world being different got people killed.

It was easy to be unremarkable. Easy to fall into the roll of shoveling or sanding or painting or framing or whatever else Sullivan put in front of him. And when he was done, well, he had a house he could point at and say (with some degree of truth) ‘I made that’.

Of course he’d wasn’t that bright to start with, if you believed his teachers, or his sister, or his various bosses. But they were wrong; he’d never been stupid, just smart enough to figure out the game.

They kept telling him he’d lost, he was pretty sure he’d won.