from the not-so-distant-past
i remain baffled by the lack of gattaca slash in this world. seriously, have you seen the movie? it's kind of ridiculous. what with ethan hawke being hot, and then jude law being motherfucking hot (and in a wheelchair, no less!), and all this stuff about identity and turning yourself into someone else and potential and space travel. it's fuckin' tough, that movie.
anyway, this was my lil attempt. i think it struggles with eloquence at points, as in too much not too little, and the philosophy is a bit overblown, but i finally realized that's because jerome (the first person narrator) is completely hammered when all this is going on in his head. he's all rhapsing waxodical and pining lyrically for vincent--of course he's drunk. after i figured that out, i liked the whole thing a lot more. EXCEPT FOR ALL THE GODDAMN RUN-ON SENTENCES. mistakes of my youth, that's all.
it's been very well-received, because people subconsciously know that gattaca needs to be slashed. this one girl even translated it into japanese, which was weird for me.
Title: The Beauty of the Dark
Author: Candle Beck
Email: meansdynamite@yahoo.com
Fandom: Gattaca (movie)
Pairing: Jerome/Vincent (Jude Law/Ethan Hawke)
Rating: R
Archive: If there be one in which this fits, by all means.
Disclaimer: Characters herein depicted belong to Andrew McNicchol and the fine folks who produced the film. Feedback: Aye.
Summary: You don't belong here, and I wish you would stay.
The Beauty of the Dark
By Candle Beck
I gave him perfection.
He thinks that this means my bloodlines, my genes, the impeccable twists and turns of my DNA. I was the triumph of pre-birth science, I was the climax of decades of extracting the worse and inserting the best, I was where it all ended. From the first moments of my life, I was a promise. I was perfect.
And he was so terribly flawed, his vision blurry and uncertain, his arms skinny despite the muscle he tried to brace them with, his skin pale, his hands fragile and clever, his heart untrustworthy, always a beat away from stuttering to a stop, each breath whistling in and out struggling not to be his last, he has been dying continuously ever since he was born, and it fuels him with a desire to live like none I've ever known.
I always took it for granted, that I would succeed, that my life would be a wonderful, effortless thing. It didn't occur to me that for other people, people like him, life is a cruel trick, a rug pulled out from under you, a devastating rise of hope and expectation that crashes down on you. Everything has always come so easily to me, and it wasn't until I watched him going through the battering regime necessary to *become* me that I realized how very different we are.
I have spent my life being arrogant and charming. The two adjectives that trailed me ceaselessly. I have spent my life walking into rooms and feeling the attention of everyone shift so subtly, eyes widening slightly, shoulders pulled straight, restlessly tapping fingers stilling. I was Jerome Morrow, golden, brilliant, beloved, sharp with eye and word, bright with recklessly full laughter, the kind of man who could convince anyone of anything, the kind of man people throw away their lives for, just to get close enough to hear, to touch, to taste, to pretend. I was Jerome Morrow and I was what everyone wished they could be, what everyone wished they could have.
But he was the only one to whom I gave myself.
I tried to imagine that it wasn't really me, anymore, just someone that I had once been. Jerome Morrow sitting in a wheelchair, Jerome Morrow without movement and swiftness, this was not a man about whom I cared. This was not the Jerome Morrow that I had been all my life. So it didn't matter that I was giving it to him. My fingerprints, blood, hair, fragments of skin. I was selling him my body, which should have made me feel like a whore, but it wasn't my body, not really. My body wasn't supposed to break down, my body wasn't supposed to be a mess of pain and frustration, my body wasn't supposed to keep me chained in a chair, my body wasn't supposed to betray me. Whatever I was giving him, the samples, the evidence that he belonged at Gattaca, it wasn't really me.
I didn't really give him my true self, not then, not yet.
With all his years of working and trying, all his endless nights and helpless prayers thrown up into the night sky, all the time he spent outside the windows looking in, after everything he'd been through, the only thing he needed to get into Gattaca was a single drop of my blood, and I think that's when he realized how very different we are, too.
When he came home that night, after being allowed into the place he's been dreaming of since he was a child, when he came home I could see it in his face when he looked at me, hear it in his words when he spoke. He was grateful and terrified and angry, all at the same time, and his eyes shot with confusion sometimes, not quite understanding how this impossible dream of his could be so easily attained by me, not quite understanding why I had never done this for myself.
He doesn't know. I don't belong up there, in the sky, the forever night. On Earth I am remarkable, unparalleled, I am as close to a god as humans get. At least, I used to be. But who knows what I might have found up there? There's something in the beauty of the dark, the stark glow of the stars, the mysterious fall of the planets, there's something up there that's bigger than I am, there's something up there that I won't be better than, as I am better than everyone on this planet. Because how can a god among men ever face God? I prefer to stay down here, where I can rest secure in my own unchallenged superiority, able to believe that it will last.
The strange thing is, he *does* belong up there, for all his flaws, his weaknesses, for all the ways he has fallen short in this place. He belongs up there, and he will be able to look God in the eye, he will be able to demand his answers and ask for forgiveness, and forgiveness will be granted to him. He belongs up in the beauty of the dark, it fits him like nothing on this planet ever has.
He will see God up there, I am sure. He will find what he has been looking for.
Oddly enough, I have already found what I have been looking for. Something I didn't realize I needed before the accident, because back then I didn't think I needed anything. It wasn't until after my legs were shattered, my spine severed, after the months of ungodly pain and the dying echoes of my screams through the too-wide, too-pale walls of the hospital, it wasn't until I understood the enormity of it, the total annihilation of all that I might have been, it wasn't until after all this that I realized my blessed life had blinded me to the one thing I lacked, the one thing I needed as much as I needed air.
I spent all this time having everything, then I had nothing, and I understood that the one thing I needed wasn't anything I had lost, it was something I had never had, something that couldn't be programmed into my genes, couldn't be granted me under white laboratory lights, what I needed was far far away from science and intellect and the perfect design of a man.
What I needed was a miracle.
I needed to see something that would make me believe again.
Once they took the chances of birth out of the equation, they took away the wonder of life, the stunning crush of pain/desire/joy/hope/fear/despair/love/violence that used to race through us, keeping time with our heartbeats. Life became a problem to be solved, and we had solved it.
But human beings aren't supposed to be solved. We're not supposed to be perfect. We're supposed to be waiting for miracles and praying for things and crying in the night and laughing in the rain, we're supposed to live on the edge of something vast and incomprehensible, we're supposed to be shaking with the force of it and holding onto each other desperately, in terror, in amazement, in ecstasy. We're supposed to be more than we are, though we are told that we are everything.
What I was missing, that miracle, that embrace of destiny and the wickedly beautiful capriciousness of life, what I was missing I found.
In him.
Faith birth. Come into the world howling, come into the world dying. Come into the world beautiful and the way it should be.
He was like no one I'd ever known before, nervous and determined and scared and uncertain and so intensely, utterly human. I was supposed to be the ideal man, I was supposed to be the best possible example, but he is so much better than I am, he is a man with blood screaming in his veins, his heartbeat loud in his ears, he is a man with dreams that light him from the inside, he is a man wrenched with doubts and fear, he is a man who believed there was something better to be had, he is a man who had dedicated his life to achieving that something better, he is a man with complicated eyes and shaking hands, he is a man with expertly pale skin and soft hair, he is a man who should have died years ago, he is a man moving forward, he is a man with a fierce burning genius that tears him apart, he is a man who is stronger than I am, stronger than I could ever have hoped to be, he is a man. He is a man.
He is a miracle. By the time I knew him, he was already years past the date forecast for his death, he was living on borrowed time, and soon enough he was living on borrowed genes. A man who should have been dead, a man who should never have been able to get through Gattaca's harsh physical regimen, a man who should have been caught a thousand times, a man who should have only been able to look at the sky from glass roofs and imagine.
He has proven everyone wrong, the glorious science, the administrators at Gattaca, the establishment that had deemed him worthless. He has proven them all wrong, and he has achieved the only thing he'd ever dreamed of. He is rising, rising. It is where he belongs, it is where he has always belonged. I knew that from the first moment I saw him, the uncaged desperation in his eyes, the tightness to his mouth, the hard set to his jaw. He doesn't belong down here, he is better than that. If he hadn't been able to sneak through Gattaca, I believe he would have built his own shuttle, he would have clawed his way to the stars with his bare hands if he had to, he would have gotten there no matter what the cost.
And now he's gotten there, and the only cost he had to take is losing me.
I don't even know if he considers that a cost. I like to imagine he does, but who can say? It's not as if I expected him to finally have the chance to go up and then turn around and decide that he doesn't want to leave me. I didn't expect that.
This is what we've been working for, the months of impossible living, every day another day stolen, every day another that we'd slipped under the radar, every day another one for which we'd have to account. To Gattaca, to God. Every day we didn't get caught was one more day we shouldn't have had.
And now it's come true, this dream of his, and now I've truly got nothing.
He's left me alone and I never really knew what alone was until now. Even after the accident, the string of family and friends into my hospital room, the ill-disguised looks of horror and pity on their faces, and soon enough I was snapping and chasing them off, soon enough no one came to see me anymore, they let me sink away into my own dark solitude, but even that wasn't alone like this is alone.
Because I didn't know then all that I could have. Because I didn't know him.
He's done something worse to me than the accident; he's wrecked more of me than my legs.
I was living for him and he was living for me, and there was no one in the world who could understand either of us the way we understood each other.
It was the same goal, really. He wanted to become Jerome Morrow and I wanted to recreate Jerome Morrow, I wanted to rebuild the perfect man. We both wanted Jerome Morrow.
But his version of Jerome wasn't me. And by the end, I didn't want Jerome, I wanted Vincent.
Vincent.
What kind of a world is it that has no place for a man like him? What kind of a world is it that doesn't care about his magnificence, his astonishingly quick mind, his amazing bravery, his sweet grin, the light rising in his dark eyes?
One of the unexpected side effects of pre-birth science has been the slow disappearance of brown eyes. When parents have a choice, they choose green, they choose blue, they choose violet or gold. On the street you see these smears of color, watered down, nothing but a tint on the surface.
Vincent's eyes are dark, deep and capable of drowning a man. At some point I started being so glad that he was a faith birth, he was a real birth. I can't imagine him with pale cornflower-blue eyes, or with the few extra inches of height and layers of muscle that years of illness had worn away. I only want him like he is, imperfect, flawed, dying, beautiful.
I wanted him, because he was all that I wasn't, and he wanted me, because I was all that he was trying to be, and in the end we were too much for each other. Together we were the perfect man, both crippled and upright, both arrogant and uncertain, both strong and weak, both smart and reckless, both created by man and created by God, both dark and light, both dying and horribly, tragically still alive. Together we were whole, but I was tired of being perfect, tired of being whole, and he never believed he had anything I needed.
I never told him that he was the only thing I needed.
It was one night, a few days before he left, everything falling down around us, his brother beginning to unravel our mystery, the mission controllers at Gattaca studying him intensely, looking for the cracks and holes.
It was one night, the sky outside the windows black and unforgiving, the stars a promise for him that I could not touch.
I could touch him, as he lifted me into bed, feeling the strain of his muscles in his arms and back, the pull of his shirt outlining his form. I spread out my hand between his shoulder blades, felt the strength, and held him there when he tried to pull away.
"Hey," he whispered, his eyes stark in the dim light.
"You're going up," I said back, not moving my hand. He was half- leaned over, awkward, but he's been awkward all his life, it's nothing new.
His face flashed, a clutch of emotion. "I know," he replied, and I can feel his breath on my cheek, short and doubtful. I want to breathe him in, I want to steal his oxygen until he has to use my lungs, as he has used all the rest of me. He won't be able to breathe up there, and I want his last memory of the Earth's fresh air to taste like me.
I slid my hand up and curved my fingers around the back of his neck. My thumb got caught up in his collar, the button clicking against my nail.
"It's going to be beautiful up there," I told him, my voice low and rough. He only nodded, like his words had vanished.
I pulled him in and fit my mouth to his, seeking after something, his warmth, his touch, the slick of his hands and the sorrow in his eyes. I fit my mouth to his and he stiffened, briefly, his neck tight under my hand, but then I pushed up, because there is still enough arrogance and will in me to not let him shove me away.
He moaned, a small broken sound that collapsed against my lips, and then he was kissing me back, sweeping his tongue through my mouth and falling down against me, and I could taste his panic and his hope, the pinpoints of light that shone through him, I could taste salt like the sea and sweetness like the night sky, I could taste his corrupt blood and the apocalypse of his heart. I could taste death and redemption on his lips, and all the things that are so shattered and vulnerable and pure that they can only be human.
His hands were in my hair, and my hands were up under his shirt, scouring across his stomach and chest, and he gasped into my mouth, the muscles of his stomach shivering under my touch, and he let his head fall down against my shoulder, trying to breathe deep, trying to regain control.
I won't have any of that, though, the control here is mine, so I twisted his nipple between my fingers and bit the spot where his shoulder met his neck, his skin young and smooth, and I want to scar him, I want to brand him.
I dragged his head up and took his mouth again, fiercely, and ripped his shirt open, torn threads between my fingers, tangling. I licked my way down his neck, running my tongue along the racing line of his pulse, flickering in the cup of his collarbone, over the unexplored expanse of his body, his skin as pale as marble, heating in rushes, and when I dragged my tongue over his nipple, his whole body shuddered, his hands cradling my head, this strange gentleness in his hold, and I could hear the bursts of air and the jagged unfinished words that he let fall into the room.
I don't exactly have full range of motion, so, getting impatient, I pulled him down and rolled him onto his back beside me, levering up on my elbow to get a better angle. He looked up at me with something like amazement on his face, and I had to close my eyes and kiss him to chase the image from my mind.
At some point, my mouth hot on the jutting bone of his hip, my hand pressed hard to his stomach, at some point his voice pierced the fog of desire, his voice stripped clean, desperately honest, and he was saying my name, over and over again, "Jerome. Jerome. Jerome."
Something snapped inside me, and I pulled myself halfway up, as far as my arms could get me, my legs heavy and unfeeling, twisted around on the bed. I pulled myself halfway up and then my arms gave out and I fell, my face against his chest, my arms clinging to him, and I held him tightly, his hands running over my back and my hair, swift and tender, and when I could raise my head, my eyes burning, I caught his gaze in the night and said brokenly, "Vincent."
He closed his eyes, so strange to hear my voice saying his name after all this time, and his lips pressed together like he was trying to hold back tears. I gripped his shoulder and pulled myself a little farther up, and he was sturdier than the bedframe, he was strong and he was mine, and I got close enough to stroke his face, sliding my fingers down the stubble- rough of his cheek, his softly swollen mouth, and when he opened his eyes, I rested my fingertips against his pulse and said again, "Vincent."
He raised his hand, trembling, and cupped my face, smiling at me, and I watched his eyes as his heart broke, and then I kissed him, and moved my hand down his body, and caught the gasps and the moans with my mouth, and every time I shifted away to breathe, every time I dropped my head to his neck or ears, every time my mouth wasn't pressed to him, I was whispering, frantic, hopeless, "Vincent. Vincent. Vincent," the name muffled and choked, stuttering against his body, and every time I said it, he shook a little harder and held me a little tighter, but when he came, it was my name that splintered against the glass and echoed in the silence that followed.
He stayed there for awhile, tracing his palm across my chest, watching the movement of his hand with intense concentration, and I wanted to remind him that he wasn't going to be able to do for me what I'd done for him, but he surely already knew that. We lay there together, the rustle of the night creeping in through the cracks in the window glass, and I stared up at the ceiling and tried to memorize the feel of his body against mine, the hesitant pace of his hand over my skin, the brush of his sweat-damp hair against my chin, the smooth curve of his back, the fine drawn features of his face in profile.
He stilled his hand, just over my heart, and said clearly, quietly, "It's beautiful down here, too."
Then he got up and left, and the last I saw of him that night was his silhouette in the doorway, the cold light washing around him, and he looked hard and sure and perfect, and I wished he would look back at me, even just once, I wished to see his clean dark eyes again, but he was turned away from me, and his gaze was tilted up, rapt and flaring with power, and I knew that he was looking out the window at the end of the hall, he was looking up at the stars, and I knew that he'd forgotten about me.
And now he's gone, he's gone up, and I've been left alone.
This planet is no more a home to me now than it was to him, and the only reason I have stayed around this long is for him. I can say that now. There's no one to hear it, and I can say that to myself, if no one else.
I stayed until he left me behind, and I am so happy.
Because he is up there, and he has taken a part of me with him, he has taken the part of me that I never intended to give away. But he has it, and he is rising, rising, and I am rising with him. I can feel the rush, the stars streaking into endless lines of white with the speed, I can see the moon, full and solemn, growing pale in the window. I can feel the press of his body back into the seat, and the last breath he takes as he watches Earth fade to a small blue dot behind him, and he is leaving it all behind, and I am going with him.
I am so happy.
I will do one last thing for him, the only thing I can do. I will leave him with nothing to come back to, no more strands of my hair or flakes of dead skin. I will erase Jerome Morrow, and he will not have to use my body anymore, there will be no body left for him, for anyone. I am setting him free, because I know that Vincent is better than Jerome could ever have hoped to be, and he doesn't need me.
I take the medal and sling it around my neck, the reminder of the one time that I was not the best, the one time I finished something other than first. I want to feel the heavy circle against my chest, I want the metal to melt and fuse with my flesh, I want the ashes of the ribbon to mix with the ashes of my skin, I want my perfect body to burn with something imperfect, because imperfection is true.
It's not hard, climbing into the incinerator, hauling up my dead legs, folding my body into the small compartment. It's not hard, and I can feel the cool metal wall as I lean my head back, this sterile empty coffin.
It's not hard.
I wait for the flames, and I turn my mind to the sky, where he is flying, and I never thanked him for what he gave me, I let him thank me and never let him know that I got the better end of the deal by far.
We are rising, and as gravity lets us go, the drift feels like love, and we are rising.
I turn my mind to the sky, and I whisper as I begin to burn, "Keep going, Vincent. Keep going."
THE END