Reincarnation, as someone once said, is a tricky business. Dallas Winston learned that the hard way without even realizing it, but luckily, he had a particularly happy ending - or, he will. He's still alive, and he's still with his first and only love. And Johnny is, too. Their ending will be happy after all, and it should be, having paid their allotted prices for it: Johnny, pure as the sunrise of a new day, lived a happy life most of the way through. Dallas, having started out a hoodlum, had to deal with a few hardships before he could claim the prize of starting over and a reconciliation.

But what of the others?

The company Darry worked for went bankrupt, but not before he began to develop feelings for the woman that served him soup and coffee every morning before work, at the diner downtown. He started to watch his manners around her and came and spent forty bucks a day on meals even after money began to run tight. And, sometime after the company collapsed and their relationship began to bud into mutuality, she offered him a place to stay. When he asked about rent, Cherry just smiled. "You'll see," she said.

Keith partnered up in his late twenties with a wanderer called Mark, who had blown into town while he was working part-time at an auto shop, on the verge of losing that job due to merchandise that had "disappeared" mysteriously during his shifts. Mark shared with him ideas to ludicrous and clever that Keith found himself beguiled enough to quit his job before he got the chance to be fired. He never did learn the wanderer's full name, but together, they opened a chain of fast-food joints called Two Bits: one bite of Two Bit's, and your hunger will roar for more!

Too bad for Sodapop, the dice had not only managed to miss his mark, but they fell off the table completely.

Was God failing him? Could karma possibly have made a mistake? Whatever the cause, there was no helping him.

Perhaps, though, his story did not stray to the wrong side of the tracks without a reason. Perhaps history repeated itself to point him in the right direction the second time around, to guide him to the oasis at the end of the desert.

Whatever the case, Soda's story began around seventeen years before Dally and Johnny's in Chigaintown, New Jersey.

Chigaintown, short for Michigantown, was and still is a pretty little place set by the river. The close proximity to what was known as Philadelphia caused many colonial as well as modern style buildings to pop up, coloring the little city with diversity. It was brimming with cafes and pawnshops alike, with patches of road made out of cobblestone and tiles. It was a dreamy sort of place, set apart from everything else and belonging in its own little world.

Beautiful, Sodapop had always thought. Amazing, perfect, almost; at its very essence, a sanctuary. He had grown up here, in the comfy little building known as St. Olivia's House for Outcast Children: an orphanage.

Albeit, he hadn't grown up in luxury, but he refused to see it as poverty; "cozy" and "simple", the nuns had called it, spooning the typical "chilled" (as apposed to just cold) pea soup into their outstretched bowls for the twentieth time that week. They couldn't afford any better, but their regret of this was enough to make the kids make themselves choke down the awful-tasting stuff. That regret was all they needed to do so; it was enough to know that someone cared.

Soda was a gorgeous kid with sincerely good intentions, but the assumption that these things would get him adopted sooner rather than later did little to help it actually happen. He had never minded in the least, though, not even when the family to eventually take him into their home didn't show up until he was fifteen, and wasn't a family at all, but a single person.

He could never truly understand Russel James's motives for taking him in. The man had been in his mid-twenties at the time, but looked to be thirty or at least a prominent smoker or an alcoholic (though he turned out to be neither). Upon asking about the nature of his adoption, Soda was met with a vague comment about impulse, which satisfied him enough, but not really.

Affectionately, he called his new guardian Russ.

Russ was about as close to a father as any of the nuns had been - which, as one can tell, wasn't much. But he did love Soda in his own strange (and innocent) way. His hearing was bad at times and he was colorblind and forgetful, so Soda often ended up as the caretaker instead of the other way around. However, once again, this didn't phase him because he was, as always, inflexibly optimistic.

A year after his wayward adoption, when he dropped out of school, Russ looked at him sadly and said, "Soda, you're making a terrible mistake," but then lapsed into one of his uncommunicative fits and protested no more. Soda shrugged off his warning; neither of them were all that book-smart to begin with, even if they were nice to look at. And whether because he had forgotten or he just didn't want to, Russ never mentioned the boy's choice to quit school again.

It was while struggling to find a job available to largely inexperienced teenaged drop-outs that Soda met Sandy.

He had been applying for a job in a local hardware store, trying to use his background helping out with Russ's handyman job to his advantage, when he noticed a young, pretty thing walking alone past the shop. Business was slow in this area this time of day, but through the depot's large windows he could see a pack of shady-looking guys meandering behind her, slinking about so as not to catch her notice.

Things like that just didn't happen in Chigaintown, yet Soda found himself apologizing to the kind man running his interview and ran out after them.

It took a minute at most, and even outnumbered he won easily; growing up poor can do that for you.

She was blonde at the time, with the nicest china-blue eyes. Her movements were dainty and delicate as she stepped over one of the fallen men and offered him her hand.

Sandy Cade, she said, her voice full of gratitude, and it was a pleasure.

He smiled bashfully. "Sodapop James." He had taken Russ's surname for legality and lack of ever having one.

From the moment he took her milky white, smooth hand in his, it seemed to fit perfectly, and he knew at that precise moment that Sandy was the one. The way she imitated his shy smile and glanced to the side showed she liked him fine, too.

Best yet, she never said anything about his name.

Wow - I've been dreaming of SlowMo's release since just a little into HLWA(How Lucky We Are)'s beginning! Speaking of abbreviations, at least in my documents, I abbreviate all of my stories' names. Gang bangs and Cucumbers is Gb+C, and The Pursuit of an Artist is, naturally, TPoaA. However, for Slow Motion, I have decided on the abbreviation SlowMo, as there's something quite wrong about calling such a serious little story SM for short...

This chapter was pretty small, but then, so was HLWA's opening chapter. R&R? Be gentle, please. :)