Particles of Light, Chapter 17: People Are Like Suns
Title: Chapter 17 - People Are Like Suns
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own anything, and I mean no harm. I also don't own the title, which is a Neil Finn song.
Spoilers: As always, potential light spoilers from Season One
Chapter 17
People Are Like Suns
Sweet madness it must be wrong
What kind of fool imagines love
With all this going on
Stars burning in an empty sky
And the city is aflame with a million lights
And, they come and go in the blink of an eye
People are Like Suns
And I want to Fade into White
-Neil Finn, Crowded House
With a sweaty upper lip and racing heart, Dani Reese stumbled into the back door of an unnamed red vinyl nightmare she recognized as a bar somewhere near the 6th Street bridge. She’d been here before, quite literally, and also figuratively, if her dependency was to be considered official.
She felt every muscle in her body tense as she entered the bar. Haunted, hunted, immobilized, terrified, disconnected. Her brain was wracked with adjectives. But, the noun that kept coming back to her was BOTTLE.
Bottle. That’s where she’d be safe, be saved.
By the time she walked the long road from back door to actual sticky, smelly wood bar, her nerves were so shot her eyes weren’t tracking properly. She felt she was in some kind of foreign dubbed version of her body; a two second delay prevented her from speaking clearly and caused anxiety so acute she felt almost faint. She wished she would faint, that dark blanket of unconsciousness protecting her against herself. Last time she checked, she couldn’t order a drink while she was out cold. Although, there was that one night……This thought made the corner of her lips curve up in a brief smile, a joke at her own expense was secretly her favorite kind.
But, she was still conscious, clutching the beveled edge of the bar as she ordered the straight up version of every bitter disappointment in the world. The bartender either didn’t care that she already appeared drunk, even if it was just that she was in the throws of a panic attack. Part barkeep, part soulless zombie, he hardly cared what went on the other side of his own eyes.
Her drink came fast, with her still clutching onto the bar for balance. She used her delayed tracking to look around the bar. No real signs of life. Lots of people, though. Elbows propping up arms and shivering, shaking head and neck, she stared down into the abyss of the dirty glass, the liquid like a crystal ball. Her eyes shut tight with that thought. She already knew the future. She licked the dripping sweat off her upper lip and tried to ignore the imminent heart attack she was so sure of and placed her damp palms on either side of the glass.
Charlie.
Charlie’s tired body shone wet in the moonlight as his arms pulled his nearly weightless body through the water, each stroke enveloping him in a cool, self-made current. He looked at the lights of the canyon briefly before flipping on his back, inhaling deep and long to take in enough air to his lungs to float on his back, body half submerged in the water, eyes looking up at the stars.
His ears underwater, he heard every ping of settling concrete and tile in the pool, ever muffled far away beat of his heart. Chest still inflated, he put his arms out to his sides to continue his suspended float as he traced the stars in the sky, trying to remember which ones were stars, which were planets, which were constellations. There was brightness in the stars that wasn’t found on earth, that was for sure.
As he floated, Charlie felt a twinge in his gut when he remembered his humorless 11th grade Earth Science teacher dutifully reporting the biography of the star on a warm early June day. 17 year old Charlie, who sat tall and red and silently awkward at his small school desk, closed his eyes that afternoon and made his mind cut through the rigid lines of the periodic table. Of atomic space dust, of the dryness of empty fact. He formed his own conclusion:
Having already exploded, or in the process of burning up with nuclear fever, rotting from the inside with the brilliance of unimagined creation, or undefined occurrence. Either way, lost. Suspended in a floating vast empty space, both a void and a crushing weight.
At once older than time and gone before even being born.
Never. Her voice echoed in his ears in a water drenched, low frequency. Searing star heat turned up his insides, turning his stomach and making him roll over quickly, standing up to catch his breath. Water licking at his torso, dripping from his hair, his chin as he bent forward to look down into the illuminated pool water. He stared at strange, white hands turned green by pool light. Palms that had only just before held her face. Strange, wiggling fingers and skin that looked bone-dry even though submerged.
She was in my hands.
All helium, and hydrogen and dust. And, hotter than the sun.
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own anything, and I mean no harm. I also don't own the title, which is a Neil Finn song.
Spoilers: As always, potential light spoilers from Season One
Chapter 17
People Are Like Suns
Sweet madness it must be wrong
What kind of fool imagines love
With all this going on
Stars burning in an empty sky
And the city is aflame with a million lights
And, they come and go in the blink of an eye
People are Like Suns
And I want to Fade into White
-Neil Finn, Crowded House
With a sweaty upper lip and racing heart, Dani Reese stumbled into the back door of an unnamed red vinyl nightmare she recognized as a bar somewhere near the 6th Street bridge. She’d been here before, quite literally, and also figuratively, if her dependency was to be considered official.
She felt every muscle in her body tense as she entered the bar. Haunted, hunted, immobilized, terrified, disconnected. Her brain was wracked with adjectives. But, the noun that kept coming back to her was BOTTLE.
Bottle. That’s where she’d be safe, be saved.
By the time she walked the long road from back door to actual sticky, smelly wood bar, her nerves were so shot her eyes weren’t tracking properly. She felt she was in some kind of foreign dubbed version of her body; a two second delay prevented her from speaking clearly and caused anxiety so acute she felt almost faint. She wished she would faint, that dark blanket of unconsciousness protecting her against herself. Last time she checked, she couldn’t order a drink while she was out cold. Although, there was that one night……This thought made the corner of her lips curve up in a brief smile, a joke at her own expense was secretly her favorite kind.
But, she was still conscious, clutching the beveled edge of the bar as she ordered the straight up version of every bitter disappointment in the world. The bartender either didn’t care that she already appeared drunk, even if it was just that she was in the throws of a panic attack. Part barkeep, part soulless zombie, he hardly cared what went on the other side of his own eyes.
Her drink came fast, with her still clutching onto the bar for balance. She used her delayed tracking to look around the bar. No real signs of life. Lots of people, though. Elbows propping up arms and shivering, shaking head and neck, she stared down into the abyss of the dirty glass, the liquid like a crystal ball. Her eyes shut tight with that thought. She already knew the future. She licked the dripping sweat off her upper lip and tried to ignore the imminent heart attack she was so sure of and placed her damp palms on either side of the glass.
Charlie.
Charlie’s tired body shone wet in the moonlight as his arms pulled his nearly weightless body through the water, each stroke enveloping him in a cool, self-made current. He looked at the lights of the canyon briefly before flipping on his back, inhaling deep and long to take in enough air to his lungs to float on his back, body half submerged in the water, eyes looking up at the stars.
His ears underwater, he heard every ping of settling concrete and tile in the pool, ever muffled far away beat of his heart. Chest still inflated, he put his arms out to his sides to continue his suspended float as he traced the stars in the sky, trying to remember which ones were stars, which were planets, which were constellations. There was brightness in the stars that wasn’t found on earth, that was for sure.
As he floated, Charlie felt a twinge in his gut when he remembered his humorless 11th grade Earth Science teacher dutifully reporting the biography of the star on a warm early June day. 17 year old Charlie, who sat tall and red and silently awkward at his small school desk, closed his eyes that afternoon and made his mind cut through the rigid lines of the periodic table. Of atomic space dust, of the dryness of empty fact. He formed his own conclusion:
Having already exploded, or in the process of burning up with nuclear fever, rotting from the inside with the brilliance of unimagined creation, or undefined occurrence. Either way, lost. Suspended in a floating vast empty space, both a void and a crushing weight.
At once older than time and gone before even being born.
Never. Her voice echoed in his ears in a water drenched, low frequency. Searing star heat turned up his insides, turning his stomach and making him roll over quickly, standing up to catch his breath. Water licking at his torso, dripping from his hair, his chin as he bent forward to look down into the illuminated pool water. He stared at strange, white hands turned green by pool light. Palms that had only just before held her face. Strange, wiggling fingers and skin that looked bone-dry even though submerged.
She was in my hands.
All helium, and hydrogen and dust. And, hotter than the sun.