East from the Sun, West to the Moon (Jake English, Nannasprite, and a reflection)
Title: East from the Sun, West to the Moon
Fandom: MSPA (Homestuck)
Pairing(s): hints of Jane/Jake and Nanna/Hass
Rating: PG
Warnings: implied ectoincest?
Summary: On the night before his world changes, a young Jake English sleeps-- and meets an old friend.
~~~
I
One nice thing about living in the sticks, or really any isolated place, is that you can see the sky. You've never seen snow, or the city streets slick with rain-reflected neon rainbows, never heard the coyote cry lonely in the distance or the mournful wail of traincars clattering down their iron roads to the sweet song of the whistle. You've never played baseball in a sandlot or been in a high school musical or kissed a girl, but you can see the sky, see every star in perfect quality definition, pinpricks of blinding white that burn into your eyes. On cloudy nights there is no splashlight reflected from a thousand thousand streetlamps and skyscrapers, only the thick of darkness and the sound of the jungle alive around you, and on nights like this there is nothing but the gold-dust scatter of the milky way, from Alpha Centauri to Betelgeuse, with the bright disc of the moon cresting over the horizon.
On your back in the grass, there is nothing but the darkness and the sharp smell of gunpowder, the rifle in your hands and lain heavy across your chest. Tomorrow is a big day, you recall, thinking to the bunny left half-baked in a mound of gears and stuffing on your desk. Somewhere up above you, the stars move, winding through their glacial dance across the sky. A tale as old as time, the same as it's ever been. In the comparatively near distance, a red-gold firecracker trail blazes through the black, connecting different points to make a line, a road towards the heavens. You watch until the rocketship and its smoky jetstream trail has ripped through the atmosphere, punched apart the ozone like a fist to the face of god, spread out into nothing but a half-remembered oilslick smear over ink. Vaguely, you wonder where it was going.
The moon ticks gently across the sky, like its gilt and cardboard facsimile in the back of the old grandfather clock in the foyer, or the one in the den-- your humble home houses quite a lot of clocks, all ticking away in lockstep harmony, cogs and wires and bits of old spring. You wait, and the stars fall, one by one. You knew this was coming, deep in the dark pit of your stomach where the secret animal fear you'd never espouse lurks, in the back of your brain behind your eyes where the darkness gathers and clouds and whispers, the lingering hair-trigger wild reaction that makes your palms sweat and your heart beat an uneven tattoo as adrenaline winds into the water of your bones. You knew this was coming in flesh and blood and sinew, in the spark of your soul and all that you are; it was buried down deep below the placid surface of your mind, a tomb to be ransacked and desecrated and explored, the sinful, sparkling treasures pulled fast and free and held to the light, a crystal apple wrapped in snakeskin.
As this has happened once before, so it shall happen again.
You have slept, and you will sleep again, on this hill with the wind in your hair and hard dirt against your back smelling of lichen and loam, staring face-first into the wide bowl of the sky with eyes wide shut as you dreamed. You have slept, and skipped down golden hills whooping and hollering, ran through gleaming gilded streets as a prince for hours and never ran out of breath, exclaiming that you'd found the great lost city of El Dorado. You have slept, and looked to the sky again, and seen the sights that few men would see, and begun to think of it as something a little more than a game, a little less than a paradise.
You sleep.
II
"I want to tell you a story."
Jake English was somewhere else. Where, exactly, was yet to be determined, but there was a general and certain feeling of Elsewhere that could not quite be shaken. To go along with it, the thought: I must be dreaming, well used and cliched and hung like a blanket around his neck, like a comfortable noose. He relaxed, by inches. A dream was a dream was a dream, silk-spun as thought and woven through patterns easily torn and discarded, and in a dream he need not fear death, need not fear pain nor loneliness nor the crush of failure. In the confines of a dream, he was immortal.
"Go ahead, my dear lady."
This voice was his own, the second. From a distance he was high and reedy, ridiculously expectant with something inarticulately stuffy to his gait and the cut of his jib. The beginnings of a wispy, barely there mustache crouched like brushweed on his upper lip; the rest of him was gangly limbs like greenwood saplings and knees that knocked, and he knew he was painfully adolescent, though it was a thing that had never bothered him. He was also laced up and over with ropes and cords of stringy muscle, and he was growing into the shoes and body of a man, barreling headlong into adulthood rather than creeping forward on tenterhooks.
"It is not a story you may like very much."
Delivered with a warning tone that warbled, this voice, the other in the room, seemed as disembodied as his own, a warm but hollow ring like the gentle clang of a bell. A wind swept through the room with it, and through him, bringing into focus things that had faded to haze around the edges. A small stone room with two beds, one occupied, and a distended, empty hearth, fire burned down to malevolent amber embers and a snowdrift of ashes. Above it, two stone crows, mirror images, their broken wings lifted at the shoulder as though ready to take flight. Thought, a third voice still, his own but older, echoed softly in the dark back of his hidden skull, and memory.
A figure beside him raised a hand, blue glow emanating like a Christmas light that flickered and pulsed as though to the beat of a heart, the slow respiration of breath. He had paid her little mind, this ghost; the gals he favored tended to be younger, and more importantly alive. But it occurred to him as his eyes slid from the ruined statuary to her floating figure that it was she who had spoken first, who had invited him to partake in the telling of a tale.
Amiable and respectful of his elders to the greatest extent he ever could be, Jake half-turned and offered her a full smile, crooked teeth and naked enthusiasm. "Gracious madam, there is no sort of pleasant shenaniganry in all the world that I enjoy more than a good story."
She took his hand, and where it touched he tingled, a spark of ice that held fast and jittered up his humerus, rattled between radius and ulna and left his arm feeling like it had fallen pleasantly asleep, by the fireside, after a nice big glass of warm milk with cinnamon. Suddenly he felt as though he'd known this place, in another time. As though the bed with sheets thrown back and mattress cold was calling to him, the dip in the middle as familiar as his old woolen socks. At the speed of thought, the world twisted and warped and snapped back in on itself, and then they were Elsewhere again.
Now they were in a courtyard, and daylight spilled in. Alone, save for a fluffy white dog that slept with the occasional kick and snore in the shade of a gnarled beech, he turned to her and found her shadow washed out, spears of sun piercing through until she resembled nothing so much as a faded window cling, flat and nearly lifeless.
"So, then!" he exclaimed, jovial still, irrepressible as ever. "How about that story? It sounded like a good gobsmacking whollopper to me!"
She touched him once more, tender brush of gloved fingertip to rosy cheek, and smiled back at him, placid as the deep surface of a mountain lake, still and pristine and clear. "What I want to tell you is a story I hold dear to my heart," she told him, voice creaking. "It is a fairy tale about a young sister and brother who were raised by a wicked witch..."
Jake listened, ears open in a way they never had been before. Around him was warm summer that felt thin, stretched like textile cotton and wrapped around, smothering. Still, there was the distance-- between him, and her, and the whole of the world, miles contained in inches, millenia wrapped up in the sliver of a second. There were her words, and there was the meaning, and they stood compartmentalized, submitted for his appraisal, not found wanting. Jake loved stories, but less so stories he had already heard and lived and made; the adventures he crafted for himself always fell short in the eye of memory, dull and old hat after they had finished. A song that, once stopped, need nary be dwelt upon again.
And this was an old tune, wound out over summer days and places that felt as real to him as the golden moon of his dreams, as the vaulted arch of the sky and two islands all his own, two temples, two rooms full of guns. His grandmother had borne a deep fondness for the scientific arts, and he'd grown up nourishing his mind on anthropology and botony and nuclear physics, which served here to help him put name to the sensation he experienced: spiritual mitosis, a cell division of the soul. He hardly realized it, when she had finished, too busy looking out from four eyes, managing the beat of two hearts, standing solid on two different shores. He knew his body, back on Earth. He knew his mind, rooted here, floating on the iridescent skin of a soap bubble.
Suspicion began to overtake him as they stood in silence, with the curtain of the wind drawn around them. Exposed on the hill, he could only look into her eyes, obscured by thick glass and lines of cataract tissue in gentle cerulean hue, and feel as though he'd known them, in another time, in another place. The world spread on around them and between them, and he imagined that he could feel the machinations of the universe at work, great gears grinding ever on, always forward, always turning, always carrying them away from the things they loved and never back. All around him was the march of time, relentless, forever, and in her eye was the spark of a young girl, a flash of skirt and black bobbed hair, and he knew so much more then than ever he had, for a moment that stretched on into temporary eternity.
That bubble burst.
"Jane?" he asked, nearly a whisper. "Holy cats, girl, is that you under there?"
She chuckled, a gentle 'hoo hoo' reminiscent of nothing so much as an overly mirthful owl, the kind that might be present in children's stories about talking animals and lessons to be learned. "No, dear boy," she corrected, soft as down. "And neither are you my Hass." She smiled, and Jake English took her hand, palm to palm with ethereal fingers entwined. "But for now, isn't the thought of it good enough?"
III
One nice thing about suburbia is the stars. Specifically: the ability to view them, relatively fewer though they may be, from the comfortable second story of your centrally heated, middle class home, and the ability to accordingly stop looking at them at any time you liked, shut the window tight and tuck yourself in with a good detective novel and your favorite stuffed rabbits. There is a time and a place for stargazing, and you need not be rooted to this window until tomorrow morning-through-afternoon. Nor rain nor snow nor sleet or hail may stop a postman, but it is general knowledge that they have to sleep sometime.
Sighing deeply, content if restless, you lean out the perfectly painted sill of your window, chin propped against your folded hands, and think of the friends you know and love, the cherished companions that you are to take with you on your next (and first) great adventure. Somewhere beneath this same, darkening sky they sleep, held up in shadow and in light, sleeping away the dwindling hours 'till your triumph, and the triumph of your beloved empire. You hope they are excited, as you are. You hope they are safe, and sane, and happy.
You close the window, shutting out the dark and the wild and the things untamed.
Tomorrow is another day.
Fandom: MSPA (Homestuck)
Pairing(s): hints of Jane/Jake and Nanna/Hass
Rating: PG
Warnings: implied ectoincest?
Summary: On the night before his world changes, a young Jake English sleeps-- and meets an old friend.
~~~
I
One nice thing about living in the sticks, or really any isolated place, is that you can see the sky. You've never seen snow, or the city streets slick with rain-reflected neon rainbows, never heard the coyote cry lonely in the distance or the mournful wail of traincars clattering down their iron roads to the sweet song of the whistle. You've never played baseball in a sandlot or been in a high school musical or kissed a girl, but you can see the sky, see every star in perfect quality definition, pinpricks of blinding white that burn into your eyes. On cloudy nights there is no splashlight reflected from a thousand thousand streetlamps and skyscrapers, only the thick of darkness and the sound of the jungle alive around you, and on nights like this there is nothing but the gold-dust scatter of the milky way, from Alpha Centauri to Betelgeuse, with the bright disc of the moon cresting over the horizon.
On your back in the grass, there is nothing but the darkness and the sharp smell of gunpowder, the rifle in your hands and lain heavy across your chest. Tomorrow is a big day, you recall, thinking to the bunny left half-baked in a mound of gears and stuffing on your desk. Somewhere up above you, the stars move, winding through their glacial dance across the sky. A tale as old as time, the same as it's ever been. In the comparatively near distance, a red-gold firecracker trail blazes through the black, connecting different points to make a line, a road towards the heavens. You watch until the rocketship and its smoky jetstream trail has ripped through the atmosphere, punched apart the ozone like a fist to the face of god, spread out into nothing but a half-remembered oilslick smear over ink. Vaguely, you wonder where it was going.
The moon ticks gently across the sky, like its gilt and cardboard facsimile in the back of the old grandfather clock in the foyer, or the one in the den-- your humble home houses quite a lot of clocks, all ticking away in lockstep harmony, cogs and wires and bits of old spring. You wait, and the stars fall, one by one. You knew this was coming, deep in the dark pit of your stomach where the secret animal fear you'd never espouse lurks, in the back of your brain behind your eyes where the darkness gathers and clouds and whispers, the lingering hair-trigger wild reaction that makes your palms sweat and your heart beat an uneven tattoo as adrenaline winds into the water of your bones. You knew this was coming in flesh and blood and sinew, in the spark of your soul and all that you are; it was buried down deep below the placid surface of your mind, a tomb to be ransacked and desecrated and explored, the sinful, sparkling treasures pulled fast and free and held to the light, a crystal apple wrapped in snakeskin.
As this has happened once before, so it shall happen again.
You have slept, and you will sleep again, on this hill with the wind in your hair and hard dirt against your back smelling of lichen and loam, staring face-first into the wide bowl of the sky with eyes wide shut as you dreamed. You have slept, and skipped down golden hills whooping and hollering, ran through gleaming gilded streets as a prince for hours and never ran out of breath, exclaiming that you'd found the great lost city of El Dorado. You have slept, and looked to the sky again, and seen the sights that few men would see, and begun to think of it as something a little more than a game, a little less than a paradise.
You sleep.
II
"I want to tell you a story."
Jake English was somewhere else. Where, exactly, was yet to be determined, but there was a general and certain feeling of Elsewhere that could not quite be shaken. To go along with it, the thought: I must be dreaming, well used and cliched and hung like a blanket around his neck, like a comfortable noose. He relaxed, by inches. A dream was a dream was a dream, silk-spun as thought and woven through patterns easily torn and discarded, and in a dream he need not fear death, need not fear pain nor loneliness nor the crush of failure. In the confines of a dream, he was immortal.
"Go ahead, my dear lady."
This voice was his own, the second. From a distance he was high and reedy, ridiculously expectant with something inarticulately stuffy to his gait and the cut of his jib. The beginnings of a wispy, barely there mustache crouched like brushweed on his upper lip; the rest of him was gangly limbs like greenwood saplings and knees that knocked, and he knew he was painfully adolescent, though it was a thing that had never bothered him. He was also laced up and over with ropes and cords of stringy muscle, and he was growing into the shoes and body of a man, barreling headlong into adulthood rather than creeping forward on tenterhooks.
"It is not a story you may like very much."
Delivered with a warning tone that warbled, this voice, the other in the room, seemed as disembodied as his own, a warm but hollow ring like the gentle clang of a bell. A wind swept through the room with it, and through him, bringing into focus things that had faded to haze around the edges. A small stone room with two beds, one occupied, and a distended, empty hearth, fire burned down to malevolent amber embers and a snowdrift of ashes. Above it, two stone crows, mirror images, their broken wings lifted at the shoulder as though ready to take flight. Thought, a third voice still, his own but older, echoed softly in the dark back of his hidden skull, and memory.
A figure beside him raised a hand, blue glow emanating like a Christmas light that flickered and pulsed as though to the beat of a heart, the slow respiration of breath. He had paid her little mind, this ghost; the gals he favored tended to be younger, and more importantly alive. But it occurred to him as his eyes slid from the ruined statuary to her floating figure that it was she who had spoken first, who had invited him to partake in the telling of a tale.
Amiable and respectful of his elders to the greatest extent he ever could be, Jake half-turned and offered her a full smile, crooked teeth and naked enthusiasm. "Gracious madam, there is no sort of pleasant shenaniganry in all the world that I enjoy more than a good story."
She took his hand, and where it touched he tingled, a spark of ice that held fast and jittered up his humerus, rattled between radius and ulna and left his arm feeling like it had fallen pleasantly asleep, by the fireside, after a nice big glass of warm milk with cinnamon. Suddenly he felt as though he'd known this place, in another time. As though the bed with sheets thrown back and mattress cold was calling to him, the dip in the middle as familiar as his old woolen socks. At the speed of thought, the world twisted and warped and snapped back in on itself, and then they were Elsewhere again.
Now they were in a courtyard, and daylight spilled in. Alone, save for a fluffy white dog that slept with the occasional kick and snore in the shade of a gnarled beech, he turned to her and found her shadow washed out, spears of sun piercing through until she resembled nothing so much as a faded window cling, flat and nearly lifeless.
"So, then!" he exclaimed, jovial still, irrepressible as ever. "How about that story? It sounded like a good gobsmacking whollopper to me!"
She touched him once more, tender brush of gloved fingertip to rosy cheek, and smiled back at him, placid as the deep surface of a mountain lake, still and pristine and clear. "What I want to tell you is a story I hold dear to my heart," she told him, voice creaking. "It is a fairy tale about a young sister and brother who were raised by a wicked witch..."
Jake listened, ears open in a way they never had been before. Around him was warm summer that felt thin, stretched like textile cotton and wrapped around, smothering. Still, there was the distance-- between him, and her, and the whole of the world, miles contained in inches, millenia wrapped up in the sliver of a second. There were her words, and there was the meaning, and they stood compartmentalized, submitted for his appraisal, not found wanting. Jake loved stories, but less so stories he had already heard and lived and made; the adventures he crafted for himself always fell short in the eye of memory, dull and old hat after they had finished. A song that, once stopped, need nary be dwelt upon again.
And this was an old tune, wound out over summer days and places that felt as real to him as the golden moon of his dreams, as the vaulted arch of the sky and two islands all his own, two temples, two rooms full of guns. His grandmother had borne a deep fondness for the scientific arts, and he'd grown up nourishing his mind on anthropology and botony and nuclear physics, which served here to help him put name to the sensation he experienced: spiritual mitosis, a cell division of the soul. He hardly realized it, when she had finished, too busy looking out from four eyes, managing the beat of two hearts, standing solid on two different shores. He knew his body, back on Earth. He knew his mind, rooted here, floating on the iridescent skin of a soap bubble.
Suspicion began to overtake him as they stood in silence, with the curtain of the wind drawn around them. Exposed on the hill, he could only look into her eyes, obscured by thick glass and lines of cataract tissue in gentle cerulean hue, and feel as though he'd known them, in another time, in another place. The world spread on around them and between them, and he imagined that he could feel the machinations of the universe at work, great gears grinding ever on, always forward, always turning, always carrying them away from the things they loved and never back. All around him was the march of time, relentless, forever, and in her eye was the spark of a young girl, a flash of skirt and black bobbed hair, and he knew so much more then than ever he had, for a moment that stretched on into temporary eternity.
That bubble burst.
"Jane?" he asked, nearly a whisper. "Holy cats, girl, is that you under there?"
She chuckled, a gentle 'hoo hoo' reminiscent of nothing so much as an overly mirthful owl, the kind that might be present in children's stories about talking animals and lessons to be learned. "No, dear boy," she corrected, soft as down. "And neither are you my Hass." She smiled, and Jake English took her hand, palm to palm with ethereal fingers entwined. "But for now, isn't the thought of it good enough?"
III
One nice thing about suburbia is the stars. Specifically: the ability to view them, relatively fewer though they may be, from the comfortable second story of your centrally heated, middle class home, and the ability to accordingly stop looking at them at any time you liked, shut the window tight and tuck yourself in with a good detective novel and your favorite stuffed rabbits. There is a time and a place for stargazing, and you need not be rooted to this window until tomorrow morning-through-afternoon. Nor rain nor snow nor sleet or hail may stop a postman, but it is general knowledge that they have to sleep sometime.
Sighing deeply, content if restless, you lean out the perfectly painted sill of your window, chin propped against your folded hands, and think of the friends you know and love, the cherished companions that you are to take with you on your next (and first) great adventure. Somewhere beneath this same, darkening sky they sleep, held up in shadow and in light, sleeping away the dwindling hours 'till your triumph, and the triumph of your beloved empire. You hope they are excited, as you are. You hope they are safe, and sane, and happy.
You close the window, shutting out the dark and the wild and the things untamed.
Tomorrow is another day.