fic: the abyss will gaze back into you (sunshine)
the abyss will gaze back into you
sunshine. in all times of vulnerability, you burrow in deeper; winter will be here soon. cassie; cassie/mace. rated pg-13. 2739 words.
notes: for vinylroad! and, oh, Kat, I had grand plans for this to be angsty and porny, but it somehow wound up just being angsty (with really vague porn, lol). FAILURE. i owe you doomed!porn. um, that said, pre-film and no real spoilers for anything? also: watch this movie if you haven't. just sayin'.
i will
lay me down
in a bunker
under the ground
(radiohead)
1.
The sinks here spurt black first and then gray before a trickle of clear water will spill into the metal basin. The first time Cassie had turned the spigot, the dirty splash had surprised her. And perhaps she had gasped, or maybe the reflection of her face in the mirror, her expression opened to the entire room at her back to see, betrayed by the glass before her, had been her tell. From behind her Mace had said, Surprised me the first time, too.
She started at that, her fingers pale yet still, no tremble to the bone, against the cold metal. She caught his eye in the mirror, her eyes meeting his reflection and he hers.
She blinked first.
2.
It started with the rationing of coal. The sky was already so dirty and the light was only getting dimmer.
It was around the start of one of the coldest summers on record, the Great Lakes still frozen, the fish in them dead or dying, that it was beginning to be understood: our sun is dying, they said, and they said it as though the sun was a living thing, a being meant to be worshipped first then mourned. Cassie had been four. Her mother would later chide her, tell her that surely she remembered the days that came before, the green leaves on the trees and the blades of grass underfoot, mashed down into the sticky mud when the rains came. There were pink petunias in the flower pot out back and red tomatoes on the vine, and there was color, there was color everywhere, not this starchy grayness, this stretch of parched earth, and the waters down on the coast, Cassie, her mother would say, oh my girl, I had never seen such a shade of blue.
When she first met Mace, she noticed his eyes. They were blue. Of course they were blue.
3.
Mace has the tattoos that show where he’s been. When she asks, he mentions something about a peacekeeping operation in the Sudan, fucking wasteland, he calls it, and she tries to stand a little taller after that.
They keep them alone. They keep their team off by itself. This is a part of their training, Searle told her as much. They sleep alone in a corner of the barracks, the hall long and lined with cracked and jagged rock, a row of lightbulbs hastily strung up, the entire passage reminiscent of an old mine shaft, the kind of imagery learned through film or fiction but never firsthand experience. Until now. The bulk of the base is under the earth, stairwells that wind farther and farther down, dim with a nauseatingly green flickering light, and slow-moving elevators that creak and whine, stutter as the doors part just a handful of inches before the floor is flush with the car.
They have their own bathroom - the water never warm, the soap hard.
Cassie’s skin is pale and bare, no marks on it save for those nature thought best to bestow on her. She spends most of her time with Mace, their tasks to be shared. He is quick to anger, loud with his mistakes and even louder with hers: you pull a fucking stunt like that up there, huh? you do it? you do it, you know what happens? we die, we fucking die - want that on your conscious? you want that? didn’t think so.
He makes her scowl, but he never makes her blush.
4.
Their first orbit of Earth, a practice run, he passed the pads of his fingers over the back of her hand.
Would you fucking look at that . . . he said, his eyes on the radar and her own on the window.
5.
If the cold bothers him, he hides it well, or perhaps he does not hide it at all. He’s an angry man, and Corazon goes so far as to call him a brute on more than one occasion, and he might deserve that. The first time Corazon called him a brute they were in the cafeteria and the near soothing din of white noise was broken by first a shout and then the crash as a tray of food met the linoleum floor. Mace, his hands free now, had punched the other man square in the jaw.
The strange thing, Cassie had thought, was that no one moved. They all just sat there, stood in line to receive their offering of food for the afternoon, lingered in the open doorway to bear witness to what feat of mundane violence might next occur. The dulled impact of flesh against flesh echoed strange in the underground room, and Cassie had shifted in her chair, watched as Mace bore down on the other man, his arm pumping easy, his bare fist making a rust-colored mess of gristle and pulp of the man’s face.
Cassie stood, her diminutive frame tall amidst the seated room, and Corazon had grabbed her wrist. At that same moment, there were two guards who entered, faces blank and resigned, as they hauled Mace off the man’s body. He put up a fight, the futility of it obvious in the lazy way he lashed out at the guards, and Cassie had not realized she was still standing until he had been taken from the room, his hands cuffed behind his back.
They kept him in the brig for the week. Cassie has never been there; no one really talks about it. It’s underground too, like most things at the base, and when Mace returned he wasn’t any more subdued than when he left. If anything, she had thought, he was angrier.
Corazon had clucked her tongue. She said, It takes a lot to break a brute like that.
6.
There are a great many nights when she wakes in the middle, and she will not know where she is anymore. The blackness of the room will feel corporeal to her, as human and real as herself, her body shaking under the thick, stiff blanket, whether out of fear or the cold she does not dare ask. She’ll close her eyes and then open them, a silent breathing exercise taught her by Searle, and she will fight against the fear clutching at her chest because the only difference between her eyes closed and her eyes open is the dim green glow the emergency lights provide, and even then, she thinks she might be dreaming.
The infirmary gives her the sleeping pills. Searle said, This goes against my better judgment, and when Cassie had not responded, had not told him how tired and how afraid she was, he took her silence for stoicism and scribbled the prescription in neat yet illegible script.
The first night, she finds, she does not wake, not once, or if she did, she does not remember it.
The same can be said of her dreams.
7.
She buried a bird as a child. It had been her brother who hit the thing - with a slingshot, a nervous cry of, I didn’t mean it! when it fell to the ground, the small brown body lost in a mess of debris and broken branches, dead leaves that had been trodden down long and rough enough by foot and time alike.
Of the two, he had been the older one, yet he was more afraid. Cassie had scooped the small bird into her hands and she stared at it, the miniature beak, the tiny legs.
Then she began to clear away the brush and dig. The earth was too frozen and hard for her fingers to scratch very far.
We don’t have to talk about the bird, Searle said.
8.
He breathes heavy beside her at night, his cot a buffer between her own and the wall. He is a noisy sleeper; Mace is noisy in all aspects of his life - he groans with the rise of the morning, no natural light down here but instead the piped in sound system and the fluorescent lights. Next to her at the control panel he mutters under his breath, a collection and arrangement of profanity under different circumstances might be enough to make her crack a smile. He sighs and he rolls in the night, he hums in the shower, a tuneless sound, more a buzzing between his lips, and he eats with his mouth open.
Cassie catalogs these things. She takes them, she notices him, and in her head she likes to think she has created a man, a partner in this task.
It doesn’t work that way. Man makes plans, God laughs. Her mother used to say that, or maybe her grandmother. Maybe it was a neighbor. She finds it hard some days, to remember. You think you have a man sorted, you think you have him figured -
They are three months into training when he grabs her hard by the wrist. His grip is too tight, she can feel the small bones protesting under his hand, the sweat from his skin shading over hers, and she freezes, her eyes wide, belying any guise of indifference.
You did good today, he says, not unkindly, but his grip is cruel, eyes lit with the same fire.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, she grumbles, the hall empty, empty except for those lightbulbs that hang, cold like belated party decorations, like vacant paper lanterns, and he looks at her mouth.
And then he lets her go.
9.
Their second ascent into space left her queasy, weightless.
He kissed her at the control deck, his open mouth covering her lips, and she pushed him away.
This isn’t real, he said, his eyebrows raised, the second part of that statement - time is running out - curiously unvocalized by him.
Her hair smelt of the shuttle after, after they returned to the base and the barracks. She could smell it everywhere: that stale recycled air, suffocating and dry.
Mace smelled like it, too. He leaned into her and looked at the list of calculations she transcribed; he smelled the same as her.
10.
What was in the Sudan? she asks him.
What you would expect, he says.
11.
Their final month on Earth is no different than all the time that has come before, save that it is marked.
The night is cold around them but the air they share inside the minuscule spit-slicked space between their mouths is hot, unbearably warm and humid. So she makes a tight fist of her fingers and the front of his shirt and she pulls, struggling to close the gap and lock her mouth to his. He likes that, or he seems to like it, because the pads of his fingers stumble a little against the bare swell of her hip - the original lazy caress against the jut of bone devolving into the rough, heavy grasp of his hand. Or maybe, she thinks (her front tooth finding his bottom lip before he can lay claim to hers), he likes this foreign show of aggression, so new to him, he doesn’t know what to do except push back.
She thinks she wants to know what his skin smells like under her nails, what he sounds like when he is as pathetic and desperate as she feels, each night, every night, buried deep under the earth, and during the day she can hear the jackhammers as they dig deeper, as they lay the foundation to build more bunkers, and that means they think we won’t succeed, she thinks, but doesn’t say it, she couldn’t say it -
They are preparing for a long winter here, one they will not be a part of, one that stretches with no end in sight, and those that remain will live under a mountain of rock. Cassie clings to him here, the tiled wall cold at her back, the sharp hint of antiseptic and lyme stinging her eyes, the bathroom empty, a lone showerhead drips.
His fingers stretch her, slide and smear between her legs and then push, an angry, punishing rhythm she doesn’t think she deserves, but she takes it, pulse hammering in her ears, her mouth at his jaw, and for the first time in a long time she finds herself wanting to beg, though for what, she isn’t sure.
Her hand joins his, and she pushes him away, his fingers sticky with her; it makes her gut clench, and in this light, harsh green and barely there, he is a shadow, an anonymous man in profile, the only distinguishing feature the silhouette he creates and the low rumble of his voice, the way he says, Cassie, the same impatience filling her name just as it does in the light.
And she is light, all air and bone, and a long time ago her father called her his little sparrow. Mace lifts her easily, the knobbed bend of her spine painful against the wall, but she curves in toward him all the same, legs bracketing his hips, body both restless and tired.
He thrusts into her hard, the burn of flesh on flesh, and the start of something like a sob catches at his teeth. He presses her into the wall, into the corner, his heavy weight against her as frightening as anything else buried here.
12.
The third time, the final time, they leave Earth there is the threat of snow. The snow that falls these days is more ash than the white powder Cassie has read about, suffocating the landscape under more gray and sticking in thick clumps along her body. As a child, there were picture books, stories about Christmas and about a Snow Queen, about blank stretches of white, trees coated thick as though dipped deep in sugar. She’s never seen anything like that. There has been little room for beauty in the world she knows. Mace could say the same, but his point of reference would be different.
Isn’t that always the case? Searle would argue.
And she would say yes, she would picture those books with the faded illustrations, stories of small, bright animals burrowing deep into the green trees, the glittering glint of ice and snow approaching. She would picture the sea, and someone once told her it used to stretch in blue, not the gray-brown sludge thick with dead fish and broken shells that encroaches on the cold packed sand.
The snow does not come before they leave. She is glad for that, but she tells no one this. The attendants who strap them into the shuttle wear bright orange suits, a pop of color against them, their monochromatic setting of metal and machinery, the sky flat and unseen from inside the cabin.
The meteorologists worry visibility will be poor. They all worry. They all sit there in silence, their fears clutched tight to their chests and buried well within their hearts, and what she has always wanted to say is that, yes, she is afraid, but perhaps that makes her the brave one.
Mace catches her eye only once before the deafening burst of the thrusters.
13.
Watch the Earth grow small. Watch it disappear.
Before it’s gone, do you see it? All that blue. You’ve never seen such a shade of blue.
14.
The night before they leave she dreams of the sun. The surface is orange hot, so bright, so incredibly bright, she cannot bring herself to look away. It pulls her as though strung up by a thread, a kite threatening to escape its lead. The heat on her face is real, the heat baking her body near uncomfortable, but she welcomes it.
She knows that when she wakes there will be a line of perspiration dotted down the stretch of bone between her breasts. She knows the room outside her bed will be chilled, the floor cold under bare feet, but she’ll sweat a little longer, eyes closed, cocooned and safe.
Cassie wakes, but she keeps her eyes closed. She’s not ready to look away, not just yet.
When she opens her eyes they are too far down in the dark for there to be anything to see.
The orange begins to fade.
fin.
sunshine. in all times of vulnerability, you burrow in deeper; winter will be here soon. cassie; cassie/mace. rated pg-13. 2739 words.
notes: for vinylroad! and, oh, Kat, I had grand plans for this to be angsty and porny, but it somehow wound up just being angsty (with really vague porn, lol). FAILURE. i owe you doomed!porn. um, that said, pre-film and no real spoilers for anything? also: watch this movie if you haven't. just sayin'.
i will
lay me down
in a bunker
under the ground
(radiohead)
1.
The sinks here spurt black first and then gray before a trickle of clear water will spill into the metal basin. The first time Cassie had turned the spigot, the dirty splash had surprised her. And perhaps she had gasped, or maybe the reflection of her face in the mirror, her expression opened to the entire room at her back to see, betrayed by the glass before her, had been her tell. From behind her Mace had said, Surprised me the first time, too.
She started at that, her fingers pale yet still, no tremble to the bone, against the cold metal. She caught his eye in the mirror, her eyes meeting his reflection and he hers.
She blinked first.
2.
It started with the rationing of coal. The sky was already so dirty and the light was only getting dimmer.
It was around the start of one of the coldest summers on record, the Great Lakes still frozen, the fish in them dead or dying, that it was beginning to be understood: our sun is dying, they said, and they said it as though the sun was a living thing, a being meant to be worshipped first then mourned. Cassie had been four. Her mother would later chide her, tell her that surely she remembered the days that came before, the green leaves on the trees and the blades of grass underfoot, mashed down into the sticky mud when the rains came. There were pink petunias in the flower pot out back and red tomatoes on the vine, and there was color, there was color everywhere, not this starchy grayness, this stretch of parched earth, and the waters down on the coast, Cassie, her mother would say, oh my girl, I had never seen such a shade of blue.
When she first met Mace, she noticed his eyes. They were blue. Of course they were blue.
3.
Mace has the tattoos that show where he’s been. When she asks, he mentions something about a peacekeeping operation in the Sudan, fucking wasteland, he calls it, and she tries to stand a little taller after that.
They keep them alone. They keep their team off by itself. This is a part of their training, Searle told her as much. They sleep alone in a corner of the barracks, the hall long and lined with cracked and jagged rock, a row of lightbulbs hastily strung up, the entire passage reminiscent of an old mine shaft, the kind of imagery learned through film or fiction but never firsthand experience. Until now. The bulk of the base is under the earth, stairwells that wind farther and farther down, dim with a nauseatingly green flickering light, and slow-moving elevators that creak and whine, stutter as the doors part just a handful of inches before the floor is flush with the car.
They have their own bathroom - the water never warm, the soap hard.
Cassie’s skin is pale and bare, no marks on it save for those nature thought best to bestow on her. She spends most of her time with Mace, their tasks to be shared. He is quick to anger, loud with his mistakes and even louder with hers: you pull a fucking stunt like that up there, huh? you do it? you do it, you know what happens? we die, we fucking die - want that on your conscious? you want that? didn’t think so.
He makes her scowl, but he never makes her blush.
4.
Their first orbit of Earth, a practice run, he passed the pads of his fingers over the back of her hand.
Would you fucking look at that . . . he said, his eyes on the radar and her own on the window.
5.
If the cold bothers him, he hides it well, or perhaps he does not hide it at all. He’s an angry man, and Corazon goes so far as to call him a brute on more than one occasion, and he might deserve that. The first time Corazon called him a brute they were in the cafeteria and the near soothing din of white noise was broken by first a shout and then the crash as a tray of food met the linoleum floor. Mace, his hands free now, had punched the other man square in the jaw.
The strange thing, Cassie had thought, was that no one moved. They all just sat there, stood in line to receive their offering of food for the afternoon, lingered in the open doorway to bear witness to what feat of mundane violence might next occur. The dulled impact of flesh against flesh echoed strange in the underground room, and Cassie had shifted in her chair, watched as Mace bore down on the other man, his arm pumping easy, his bare fist making a rust-colored mess of gristle and pulp of the man’s face.
Cassie stood, her diminutive frame tall amidst the seated room, and Corazon had grabbed her wrist. At that same moment, there were two guards who entered, faces blank and resigned, as they hauled Mace off the man’s body. He put up a fight, the futility of it obvious in the lazy way he lashed out at the guards, and Cassie had not realized she was still standing until he had been taken from the room, his hands cuffed behind his back.
They kept him in the brig for the week. Cassie has never been there; no one really talks about it. It’s underground too, like most things at the base, and when Mace returned he wasn’t any more subdued than when he left. If anything, she had thought, he was angrier.
Corazon had clucked her tongue. She said, It takes a lot to break a brute like that.
6.
There are a great many nights when she wakes in the middle, and she will not know where she is anymore. The blackness of the room will feel corporeal to her, as human and real as herself, her body shaking under the thick, stiff blanket, whether out of fear or the cold she does not dare ask. She’ll close her eyes and then open them, a silent breathing exercise taught her by Searle, and she will fight against the fear clutching at her chest because the only difference between her eyes closed and her eyes open is the dim green glow the emergency lights provide, and even then, she thinks she might be dreaming.
The infirmary gives her the sleeping pills. Searle said, This goes against my better judgment, and when Cassie had not responded, had not told him how tired and how afraid she was, he took her silence for stoicism and scribbled the prescription in neat yet illegible script.
The first night, she finds, she does not wake, not once, or if she did, she does not remember it.
The same can be said of her dreams.
7.
She buried a bird as a child. It had been her brother who hit the thing - with a slingshot, a nervous cry of, I didn’t mean it! when it fell to the ground, the small brown body lost in a mess of debris and broken branches, dead leaves that had been trodden down long and rough enough by foot and time alike.
Of the two, he had been the older one, yet he was more afraid. Cassie had scooped the small bird into her hands and she stared at it, the miniature beak, the tiny legs.
Then she began to clear away the brush and dig. The earth was too frozen and hard for her fingers to scratch very far.
We don’t have to talk about the bird, Searle said.
8.
He breathes heavy beside her at night, his cot a buffer between her own and the wall. He is a noisy sleeper; Mace is noisy in all aspects of his life - he groans with the rise of the morning, no natural light down here but instead the piped in sound system and the fluorescent lights. Next to her at the control panel he mutters under his breath, a collection and arrangement of profanity under different circumstances might be enough to make her crack a smile. He sighs and he rolls in the night, he hums in the shower, a tuneless sound, more a buzzing between his lips, and he eats with his mouth open.
Cassie catalogs these things. She takes them, she notices him, and in her head she likes to think she has created a man, a partner in this task.
It doesn’t work that way. Man makes plans, God laughs. Her mother used to say that, or maybe her grandmother. Maybe it was a neighbor. She finds it hard some days, to remember. You think you have a man sorted, you think you have him figured -
They are three months into training when he grabs her hard by the wrist. His grip is too tight, she can feel the small bones protesting under his hand, the sweat from his skin shading over hers, and she freezes, her eyes wide, belying any guise of indifference.
You did good today, he says, not unkindly, but his grip is cruel, eyes lit with the same fire.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, she grumbles, the hall empty, empty except for those lightbulbs that hang, cold like belated party decorations, like vacant paper lanterns, and he looks at her mouth.
And then he lets her go.
9.
Their second ascent into space left her queasy, weightless.
He kissed her at the control deck, his open mouth covering her lips, and she pushed him away.
This isn’t real, he said, his eyebrows raised, the second part of that statement - time is running out - curiously unvocalized by him.
Her hair smelt of the shuttle after, after they returned to the base and the barracks. She could smell it everywhere: that stale recycled air, suffocating and dry.
Mace smelled like it, too. He leaned into her and looked at the list of calculations she transcribed; he smelled the same as her.
10.
What was in the Sudan? she asks him.
What you would expect, he says.
11.
Their final month on Earth is no different than all the time that has come before, save that it is marked.
The night is cold around them but the air they share inside the minuscule spit-slicked space between their mouths is hot, unbearably warm and humid. So she makes a tight fist of her fingers and the front of his shirt and she pulls, struggling to close the gap and lock her mouth to his. He likes that, or he seems to like it, because the pads of his fingers stumble a little against the bare swell of her hip - the original lazy caress against the jut of bone devolving into the rough, heavy grasp of his hand. Or maybe, she thinks (her front tooth finding his bottom lip before he can lay claim to hers), he likes this foreign show of aggression, so new to him, he doesn’t know what to do except push back.
She thinks she wants to know what his skin smells like under her nails, what he sounds like when he is as pathetic and desperate as she feels, each night, every night, buried deep under the earth, and during the day she can hear the jackhammers as they dig deeper, as they lay the foundation to build more bunkers, and that means they think we won’t succeed, she thinks, but doesn’t say it, she couldn’t say it -
They are preparing for a long winter here, one they will not be a part of, one that stretches with no end in sight, and those that remain will live under a mountain of rock. Cassie clings to him here, the tiled wall cold at her back, the sharp hint of antiseptic and lyme stinging her eyes, the bathroom empty, a lone showerhead drips.
His fingers stretch her, slide and smear between her legs and then push, an angry, punishing rhythm she doesn’t think she deserves, but she takes it, pulse hammering in her ears, her mouth at his jaw, and for the first time in a long time she finds herself wanting to beg, though for what, she isn’t sure.
Her hand joins his, and she pushes him away, his fingers sticky with her; it makes her gut clench, and in this light, harsh green and barely there, he is a shadow, an anonymous man in profile, the only distinguishing feature the silhouette he creates and the low rumble of his voice, the way he says, Cassie, the same impatience filling her name just as it does in the light.
And she is light, all air and bone, and a long time ago her father called her his little sparrow. Mace lifts her easily, the knobbed bend of her spine painful against the wall, but she curves in toward him all the same, legs bracketing his hips, body both restless and tired.
He thrusts into her hard, the burn of flesh on flesh, and the start of something like a sob catches at his teeth. He presses her into the wall, into the corner, his heavy weight against her as frightening as anything else buried here.
12.
The third time, the final time, they leave Earth there is the threat of snow. The snow that falls these days is more ash than the white powder Cassie has read about, suffocating the landscape under more gray and sticking in thick clumps along her body. As a child, there were picture books, stories about Christmas and about a Snow Queen, about blank stretches of white, trees coated thick as though dipped deep in sugar. She’s never seen anything like that. There has been little room for beauty in the world she knows. Mace could say the same, but his point of reference would be different.
Isn’t that always the case? Searle would argue.
And she would say yes, she would picture those books with the faded illustrations, stories of small, bright animals burrowing deep into the green trees, the glittering glint of ice and snow approaching. She would picture the sea, and someone once told her it used to stretch in blue, not the gray-brown sludge thick with dead fish and broken shells that encroaches on the cold packed sand.
The snow does not come before they leave. She is glad for that, but she tells no one this. The attendants who strap them into the shuttle wear bright orange suits, a pop of color against them, their monochromatic setting of metal and machinery, the sky flat and unseen from inside the cabin.
The meteorologists worry visibility will be poor. They all worry. They all sit there in silence, their fears clutched tight to their chests and buried well within their hearts, and what she has always wanted to say is that, yes, she is afraid, but perhaps that makes her the brave one.
Mace catches her eye only once before the deafening burst of the thrusters.
13.
Watch the Earth grow small. Watch it disappear.
Before it’s gone, do you see it? All that blue. You’ve never seen such a shade of blue.
14.
The night before they leave she dreams of the sun. The surface is orange hot, so bright, so incredibly bright, she cannot bring herself to look away. It pulls her as though strung up by a thread, a kite threatening to escape its lead. The heat on her face is real, the heat baking her body near uncomfortable, but she welcomes it.
She knows that when she wakes there will be a line of perspiration dotted down the stretch of bone between her breasts. She knows the room outside her bed will be chilled, the floor cold under bare feet, but she’ll sweat a little longer, eyes closed, cocooned and safe.
Cassie wakes, but she keeps her eyes closed. She’s not ready to look away, not just yet.
When she opens her eyes they are too far down in the dark for there to be anything to see.
The orange begins to fade.
fin.