Fic: Ordeal by Light [Desmond(/Claire), Sayid(/Shannon), Juliet(/Jack)]
Title: Ordeal by Light
Characters: Desmond(/Claire), Sayid(/Shannon), Juliet(/Jack)
Rating: R
Summary: Three small pieces of character-driven angst (only sort of pairish), connected generally by theme, although they stand alone, too, so you can pick and choose and I won't be at all offended. First and last: 600 words. Middle: 850 words. I'm not sure where these are set in time, exactly (or even if it's at the same time), but there are spoilers for "Flashes" (3.08)
Note: If I knew where the hell this depressing stuff comes from, don't you think I'd shut off the valve? (Actually, I'm of a mind to think all the misery-filled, adjective-laden, and overwrought Faulkner I've been reading this semester is to blame, and I probably wouldn't stop that even if I wasn't required to be reading it for class.)
Also: tell me what you think. Yes, this is me telling you I don't mind concrit here, if you've got some.
Ordeal by Light
1.
Underwater, he can't hear. Was that how it was for her? His ears feel the pressure most of all. His eyes stay closed. He can't breathe. He doesn't want to. The sun hangs overhead, a desperately hot ball, blazing almost white, he thinks from under all this water. He can still feel it, and it feels ashen but yet consuming. Everything devours.
As if a person would ask for this thing he's got. His knees bend as his feet shoot him up sp his head's out of the water and he must gasp air into his lungs. The air out here is so different. The air where she is.
For a while, he'd dealt with artifice as his trade, making things look real enough for the stage but highly functional, too: humorless boxes of pressure-treated wood for chairs and tables and beds and walls; a glancing glow of footlight and they're real enough for what they're supposed to do. Not unlike this island, his own shelter, a bed that might as well be a box for all its disuse.
They staged The Tempest once, when he knew boats as things that carried him where he wanted to go. The boat wasn't a box, wasn't their usual minimalist staging. It was a façade: real on one side, all seams and no paint on the other. He feels like Prospero now, in so many ways; his hair's too long, and this beard makes him itch. It's good to hide behind, though. She will not notice the tremble in his facial muscles so much then. She will not notice anything at all is wrong.
She doesn't see everything. None of them do, not like he does. But what she sees she seems to understand. Maybe that's why he wants her-she understands it all, maybe even him. He sees things flash before him, but it's not real. He's real-he feels it now for the first time in months-but nothing else is. His brain's turned into some elaborate production of death and impulse and he can't make it stop. She looks at him like he's both holy and mad. He feels it sometimes.
His skin is too hot, so hot it suffocates him out here in this white-ball sunlight, shining off the water solidly though the water never ceases to move. The waves beat him back toward the shore, and he finds they've moved him farther than he meant. Everything that happens to him just carries him along now, like he doesn't own his own life anymore. His life is Charlie not dying. His life is her getting close enough to touch until she shrinks away and he would love to believe it's about Charlie or anything other than the way he radiates something painful.
Don't they know he would stop this thing if he could? But he doesn't know how to ask or to take, because he doesn't know how to manufacture that and make it work, look right. He only really wants to be the one actually transforming those sets into a life hot under the lights, but instead he lets himself fall under the surface of the water again until it roars with quiet. Just for a few seconds; cool, inexorable, sunlight muted like an impressionist painting, like the entire unreal world as he swam out to her and took hold of her limp body. Like the world before he came suddenly alive again when she did.
2.
He doesn't think of himself as an angry person. Anger requires emotional distances to be closed, not shut tight like the pages of a heavy, ponderous book but more like squeezed together, two bodies dancing, maybe, until their sweat mingles and they share one space on a crowded floor. This is what fuels anger, but he's always been good at finding himself in an empty place, no matter how many people are close enough to touch.
Yet he feels distinctly angry as he lifts the axe and shoves over his tight shoulders, burying steel which must be blunted by now, not from disuse but lack of the right tools to sharpen it, in the green wood. There's no reason to be angry, he thinks. There never was before either.
When he could think of those endless streams of quivering or stone-faced people as ideals, symbols of something hateful, he could do it. They were means, but they were ends, too. Ends of brutality and things so much more terrible than the things he would do to them. What he doesn't know, now, kicking the split wood into the disorderly pile beside his feet, is how many of them were telling him the truth when they said 'no.' The simple fact-and they were all simple, back then, of necessity-is he didn't even know them.
One would think he would prefer rules, things laid down in black and white, because they're easier. But rules are never fair and they're uninteresting. He hates them because they so often impede movement, even the most ordinary kind. Manipulating things with his hands serves to quiet his mind and keep the angry person-down inside, somewhere, he thinks-too occupied to get restless and come out; even occupied with guilt, but better employed sautéing or re-wiring than in this violent action of raising an axe to chop clean through what should've been a tree and is no longer, perhaps now never was.
People are not people here, he thinks. If they were, he would've chopped Ana's head clean off. Not for being angry-God knows she must've had reasons-and not because he believes she was even shooting at the Others when she killed her, much less at someone he lost his whole stomach to the missing of, vomiting bile when she died because he has always hated death, enough to consent to torture. He might've killed Ana because she wanted to die. But she wasn't real anymore, not after the cords bound his hands and he stopped feeling anything, even hate.
He thinks about her now in a way he didn't when she was alive, thinking how her hips were so narrow, yet she still didn't break him in two with her sharpness. He thinks he knows how many times she smoothed it over for so many different men, just to eat or sleep or not feel so alone. Hate, if he has it, is for that, the fucking and fucking and how he never got to fuck her except once, not enough, not even making love yet because neither one of them would've known how, really; and the one time he raised the axe and thought about cleaving her head from her body, he knew he was angry with her because she was dead and he wants her to not have died.
Simple as that, every day, black and white: he wants her to be alive. He chops her death into splintered pieces, but that only makes more of it. She is not a person anymore. Maybe no one's ever a person, he thinks. Certainly not him in these helpless weeks of numbness that only covers something he doesn't like to put a name to.
Unremittingly, the axe stings at the empty chopping block until it sticks. He leaves it there, just for a few minutes, because it's almost night now, sun's color draining from the sky as if leeched and concentrated into the bold strike of unreal copper light threading the trees; because he wishes it the most at night. Here. Now. Blonde. Soft. Angry. Wanting. A person he never understood who never understood him, but the wanting, the wanting and wanting and wanting-the knowing he's never in his life not been able to puzzle something out-makes him stop moving for fear he'll hurt something, hurt to make, illogically, the hurt stop. It was never right.
He puzzles things out all the time, even to the rational conclusion of no: no change or reverse or solace or end. He will never understand her better than the day she died. Leaning his forehead against a tree, he hates the sun just now. He hates his own body, too, how his dick does what it wants and he holds his hand tight over it, over his pants, thinking too much about her smooth skin and unwithholding eyes, the anger transmuted into something else that burns. At least he is not so hollowed and dulled anymore.
3.
It looks like a normal night sky, speckled with stars and giving over half its dominion to a bright moon, a shade off full. Down in his prison, there is no sky, and she wonders how he stands it. Would he do something crazy? Not since that first time, and that, she thinks, was more than enough.
It looks like a normal sky, but nothing about this is normal. She'd convinced herself it was until he had her by the throat. Now everything seems to pull tight around her throat, and she waits for something to rush in like water and shift the balance, let her curl her hands into fists before she even knows what she's doing. Impossible, that: she always knows precisely what she's doing.
The thing that wracks her with fear in the middle of the night (it's all too normal now to wake up in a cold sweat, even after these years) is how she went willingly. Better she might've let whatever it was happen upon her refusal than this protracted misery that suffocates her. But now, here, she's learned will and strength too late. Too stubborn to die now, so she lives with knowing she's here because she used to fail to act. Swept along-the story of her frail life.
But when the sweep comes now, she keeps both feet planted. She can remember fighting a tide of water that left only him in the wake. Can it clean? Perhaps. He-himself, the man, his eyes, his hands-makes her feel cleaner, healthier somehow, even if his very existence makes her sick. There are things bigger than the island, things righter than all the things her hands do. Somehow she'd almost forgotten it.
The sky looks normal, but she's not alone here, never alone except when she goes down there and he looks at her for all the world like she's not even there. It takes a powerful lot of determination to refuse to see things. Maybe that's what she feels when her fingers glance off his hands, or when she pulled him, unconscious, back to where she had to lock him inside. Certainly that explains the ache in the pit of her stomach.
She lies back on the cool grass. It even smells like home. Or maybe she's been here so long she can't remember. But she can remember a strong, kind, but often inscrutable boy lying on similar grass beside her, refusing to look at her, choosing the sky instead. But his hand would always find her. Then his lips. Then the rest of him, close and hot and all over her. They never wanted to want it, but that didn't mean they didn't.
She wishes there were a way to bring the grass to him or bring him to the grass, as though he would lie beside her and not say a word, let her alone. Given space, he wouldn't shut up inside himself, like a wound spring that he believes will rust before it can be used. No, if she could have him at all, if she's not crazy or even more desiccated than she never wants him to become, a touch would make him spring back to life, and she'd have to cling tightly to keep him from ranging too wild in the night. Or range with him.
She walks now, where he can't go. But it's she who does the walking, under a sky that was never normal.
Characters: Desmond(/Claire), Sayid(/Shannon), Juliet(/Jack)
Rating: R
Summary: Three small pieces of character-driven angst (only sort of pairish), connected generally by theme, although they stand alone, too, so you can pick and choose and I won't be at all offended. First and last: 600 words. Middle: 850 words. I'm not sure where these are set in time, exactly (or even if it's at the same time), but there are spoilers for "Flashes" (3.08)
Note: If I knew where the hell this depressing stuff comes from, don't you think I'd shut off the valve? (Actually, I'm of a mind to think all the misery-filled, adjective-laden, and overwrought Faulkner I've been reading this semester is to blame, and I probably wouldn't stop that even if I wasn't required to be reading it for class.)
Also: tell me what you think. Yes, this is me telling you I don't mind concrit here, if you've got some.
Ordeal by Light
1.
Underwater, he can't hear. Was that how it was for her? His ears feel the pressure most of all. His eyes stay closed. He can't breathe. He doesn't want to. The sun hangs overhead, a desperately hot ball, blazing almost white, he thinks from under all this water. He can still feel it, and it feels ashen but yet consuming. Everything devours.
As if a person would ask for this thing he's got. His knees bend as his feet shoot him up sp his head's out of the water and he must gasp air into his lungs. The air out here is so different. The air where she is.
For a while, he'd dealt with artifice as his trade, making things look real enough for the stage but highly functional, too: humorless boxes of pressure-treated wood for chairs and tables and beds and walls; a glancing glow of footlight and they're real enough for what they're supposed to do. Not unlike this island, his own shelter, a bed that might as well be a box for all its disuse.
They staged The Tempest once, when he knew boats as things that carried him where he wanted to go. The boat wasn't a box, wasn't their usual minimalist staging. It was a façade: real on one side, all seams and no paint on the other. He feels like Prospero now, in so many ways; his hair's too long, and this beard makes him itch. It's good to hide behind, though. She will not notice the tremble in his facial muscles so much then. She will not notice anything at all is wrong.
She doesn't see everything. None of them do, not like he does. But what she sees she seems to understand. Maybe that's why he wants her-she understands it all, maybe even him. He sees things flash before him, but it's not real. He's real-he feels it now for the first time in months-but nothing else is. His brain's turned into some elaborate production of death and impulse and he can't make it stop. She looks at him like he's both holy and mad. He feels it sometimes.
His skin is too hot, so hot it suffocates him out here in this white-ball sunlight, shining off the water solidly though the water never ceases to move. The waves beat him back toward the shore, and he finds they've moved him farther than he meant. Everything that happens to him just carries him along now, like he doesn't own his own life anymore. His life is Charlie not dying. His life is her getting close enough to touch until she shrinks away and he would love to believe it's about Charlie or anything other than the way he radiates something painful.
Don't they know he would stop this thing if he could? But he doesn't know how to ask or to take, because he doesn't know how to manufacture that and make it work, look right. He only really wants to be the one actually transforming those sets into a life hot under the lights, but instead he lets himself fall under the surface of the water again until it roars with quiet. Just for a few seconds; cool, inexorable, sunlight muted like an impressionist painting, like the entire unreal world as he swam out to her and took hold of her limp body. Like the world before he came suddenly alive again when she did.
2.
He doesn't think of himself as an angry person. Anger requires emotional distances to be closed, not shut tight like the pages of a heavy, ponderous book but more like squeezed together, two bodies dancing, maybe, until their sweat mingles and they share one space on a crowded floor. This is what fuels anger, but he's always been good at finding himself in an empty place, no matter how many people are close enough to touch.
Yet he feels distinctly angry as he lifts the axe and shoves over his tight shoulders, burying steel which must be blunted by now, not from disuse but lack of the right tools to sharpen it, in the green wood. There's no reason to be angry, he thinks. There never was before either.
When he could think of those endless streams of quivering or stone-faced people as ideals, symbols of something hateful, he could do it. They were means, but they were ends, too. Ends of brutality and things so much more terrible than the things he would do to them. What he doesn't know, now, kicking the split wood into the disorderly pile beside his feet, is how many of them were telling him the truth when they said 'no.' The simple fact-and they were all simple, back then, of necessity-is he didn't even know them.
One would think he would prefer rules, things laid down in black and white, because they're easier. But rules are never fair and they're uninteresting. He hates them because they so often impede movement, even the most ordinary kind. Manipulating things with his hands serves to quiet his mind and keep the angry person-down inside, somewhere, he thinks-too occupied to get restless and come out; even occupied with guilt, but better employed sautéing or re-wiring than in this violent action of raising an axe to chop clean through what should've been a tree and is no longer, perhaps now never was.
People are not people here, he thinks. If they were, he would've chopped Ana's head clean off. Not for being angry-God knows she must've had reasons-and not because he believes she was even shooting at the Others when she killed her, much less at someone he lost his whole stomach to the missing of, vomiting bile when she died because he has always hated death, enough to consent to torture. He might've killed Ana because she wanted to die. But she wasn't real anymore, not after the cords bound his hands and he stopped feeling anything, even hate.
He thinks about her now in a way he didn't when she was alive, thinking how her hips were so narrow, yet she still didn't break him in two with her sharpness. He thinks he knows how many times she smoothed it over for so many different men, just to eat or sleep or not feel so alone. Hate, if he has it, is for that, the fucking and fucking and how he never got to fuck her except once, not enough, not even making love yet because neither one of them would've known how, really; and the one time he raised the axe and thought about cleaving her head from her body, he knew he was angry with her because she was dead and he wants her to not have died.
Simple as that, every day, black and white: he wants her to be alive. He chops her death into splintered pieces, but that only makes more of it. She is not a person anymore. Maybe no one's ever a person, he thinks. Certainly not him in these helpless weeks of numbness that only covers something he doesn't like to put a name to.
Unremittingly, the axe stings at the empty chopping block until it sticks. He leaves it there, just for a few minutes, because it's almost night now, sun's color draining from the sky as if leeched and concentrated into the bold strike of unreal copper light threading the trees; because he wishes it the most at night. Here. Now. Blonde. Soft. Angry. Wanting. A person he never understood who never understood him, but the wanting, the wanting and wanting and wanting-the knowing he's never in his life not been able to puzzle something out-makes him stop moving for fear he'll hurt something, hurt to make, illogically, the hurt stop. It was never right.
He puzzles things out all the time, even to the rational conclusion of no: no change or reverse or solace or end. He will never understand her better than the day she died. Leaning his forehead against a tree, he hates the sun just now. He hates his own body, too, how his dick does what it wants and he holds his hand tight over it, over his pants, thinking too much about her smooth skin and unwithholding eyes, the anger transmuted into something else that burns. At least he is not so hollowed and dulled anymore.
3.
It looks like a normal night sky, speckled with stars and giving over half its dominion to a bright moon, a shade off full. Down in his prison, there is no sky, and she wonders how he stands it. Would he do something crazy? Not since that first time, and that, she thinks, was more than enough.
It looks like a normal sky, but nothing about this is normal. She'd convinced herself it was until he had her by the throat. Now everything seems to pull tight around her throat, and she waits for something to rush in like water and shift the balance, let her curl her hands into fists before she even knows what she's doing. Impossible, that: she always knows precisely what she's doing.
The thing that wracks her with fear in the middle of the night (it's all too normal now to wake up in a cold sweat, even after these years) is how she went willingly. Better she might've let whatever it was happen upon her refusal than this protracted misery that suffocates her. But now, here, she's learned will and strength too late. Too stubborn to die now, so she lives with knowing she's here because she used to fail to act. Swept along-the story of her frail life.
But when the sweep comes now, she keeps both feet planted. She can remember fighting a tide of water that left only him in the wake. Can it clean? Perhaps. He-himself, the man, his eyes, his hands-makes her feel cleaner, healthier somehow, even if his very existence makes her sick. There are things bigger than the island, things righter than all the things her hands do. Somehow she'd almost forgotten it.
The sky looks normal, but she's not alone here, never alone except when she goes down there and he looks at her for all the world like she's not even there. It takes a powerful lot of determination to refuse to see things. Maybe that's what she feels when her fingers glance off his hands, or when she pulled him, unconscious, back to where she had to lock him inside. Certainly that explains the ache in the pit of her stomach.
She lies back on the cool grass. It even smells like home. Or maybe she's been here so long she can't remember. But she can remember a strong, kind, but often inscrutable boy lying on similar grass beside her, refusing to look at her, choosing the sky instead. But his hand would always find her. Then his lips. Then the rest of him, close and hot and all over her. They never wanted to want it, but that didn't mean they didn't.
She wishes there were a way to bring the grass to him or bring him to the grass, as though he would lie beside her and not say a word, let her alone. Given space, he wouldn't shut up inside himself, like a wound spring that he believes will rust before it can be used. No, if she could have him at all, if she's not crazy or even more desiccated than she never wants him to become, a touch would make him spring back to life, and she'd have to cling tightly to keep him from ranging too wild in the night. Or range with him.
She walks now, where he can't go. But it's she who does the walking, under a sky that was never normal.