[Ghosts] The Color of Silence
Title: The Color of Silence
Story/Character: Ghosts / Alaric
Rating: PG
word count: 1672
Note: Essentially, Alaric's side of the story in a 1600 word nutshell.
His name is Alaric Ulrich. He knows this because it is written on the bottom of his shoes, in neatly formed loops of ink black letters. He can read them when he sits down, tugging one foot across the opposite thigh with the sole tilted up to reveal its secret message of ownership.
The shoes themselves are brown leather, a little mud and water stained, with a knot in one of the laces. They are worn around the toes and heels; second hand, because he is a younger child and all of his clothes are second hand, passed down from his older brother, but Alaric doesn't mind. His brother is careful with his things, mindful to take good care of them, and mostly they come to Alaric perfectly good enough to last a year before he grows out of them in his own turn.
He has trouble, sometimes, remembering things his brother has said; the exact order of the words that were used. He tries not to let this bother him; people have always told him that it isn't normal to remember words so precisely and Alaric thinks, on some days, that he might like to try this 'normal' thing sometime.
He doesn't care much for other 'normal' things - children's games and school lessons and sugary sweets. (His brother adores sweets, particularly the dark richness of cocoa. On the rare times they have any Alaric always gives his own portion to his brother.) He likes letters, though, and numbers, and the neat, ordered way they march across a page. (His own handwriting was not so neat - the pens are always cumbersomely slower than the thoughts that form in his head. In consolation, however, his brother's letterforms are worse, no matter how the teachers berate him.)
The library is huge, a multi-leveled utopia of leather bindings and musty pages stacked on tall wood shelves that tower over him. It is quiet the way libraries are supposed to be quiet and the purposeful lack of sound is soothing. Alaric likes to wander through the forest of shelves, where the leaves are all dusky wine and deep moss green with gold gilt edgings all year long. The carpet is tan and red and black, vine patterns that stretch between the trunks of the shelves, so thick and soft that it muffles everyone's steps, not just his own.
The books are thick and thin and small and large. He isn't to touch them but he likes to find someone who is reading something at the long tables and lean up to look over their shoulder. Sometimes it is history, sometimes science, sometimes just a storybook of modern fiction, but he has sampled them all. No one ever turns the pages right - they are too slow, or too fast - but he leans over the backs of their chairs and reads with them all the same, because the words are neat and orderly and reassuring, crisp black on white pages, and he has always liked to read.
He likes it least of all when the library closes every evening. He doesn't like the quiet of the night time at all and he likes the blackness of the long hours between days even less. It lurks at the corners of his eyes and in-between each blink he can feel it, stalking him.
He tries not to blink.
* * * * *
His name is Alaric Ulrich. He knows this because it is written on the bottoms of his shoes, and when he sits and turns his foot over he can still trace a finger over the fading smudge of an ink dark line. He can't read it any more, not unless he squints just right, but he remembers that it was there.
The shoes are, he thinks, a little worn, but he doesn't really notice it. He has always had them, so he supposes it's fitting if they show a little bit of wear. They are a gift from his brother and he likes them for that alone, even if they weren't marked indelibly as his own.
He has trouble, sometimes, remembering what his brother's voice sounds like and he hates it. He spends hours, sometimes, taking out every memory and carefully refreshing it until it gleams, bright and fresh, in his mind; his brother's laughter, his voice, the sound of his brother's heartbeat and every word he can recall. People say that time moves on, that years pass and things fade, as though it were a perfectly normal thing to be expected. Alaric loathes the thing called "normalcy" with a fierce anger that leaves him shaking in its wake.
He watches children in the park run and jump and slide, sticky fingers and sticky faces covered in the glaze of honey buns and hard candies. He doesn't remember what sugar tastes like, but he doesn't think he ever liked it overly much.
Frequently the world feels strange around him, too slow, too fast, too much and not enough all at once, and when it boils over the library is his haven. The silence is a soothing balm, hushed and heavy between the high rows of shelves, just the way it should be. He walks the aisles, trailing fingers a tiny breath above the leather bound spines of books. It's as close as he comes to touching them, but their very presence is comforting. The colors are faded, dusky gray tinged red and green and brown, but even that is soothing.
Sometimes he finds someone who is reading, researchers and students with their stacks of reference books at the broad, heavy tables, or someone with a volume of fiction cradled between their hands, tucked into one of the wing-backed chairs that cluster near the windows, pages held up to the light seeping through the panes. It's hard to read. The words leap and drip across the page, in and out of focus no matter how he squints, and it makes something inside of him hard and cold and uncomfortably tight in his stomach. He screws up his eyes and concentrates, but mostly the words slip through his grasp, there and gone like the flutter of butterfly wings. He wishes, with a childish petulance, that someone would read the books to him. Someone did, once, long ago, but he can't remember the sound of the voice, only a deep, steady cadence that was somehow comforting.
He walks the aisles and in between the tall, tall shelves, and sometimes, just sometimes, its easy to forget that the spines of the books are hazy and dim and that he isn't allowed to touch.
When the library closes and nighttime comes with its dark, formless shadows, he keeps his eyes open and stares back into it. Courage, his brother once said, isn't the absence of fear. It's standing fast in spite of it. He spits his spite into the darkness and watches it, guards against it, tense and defiant all the night long. He blinks only when he has to and the dizzy rush of it only makes him bare his teeth and push back the darkness all the more.
* * * * *
His name is (was) Alaric Ulrich. (Once, long ago and far away.) He keeps it close (holds it tight) because it is his (his own, core and center, and anything that isn't held tight can be stolen away.) He repeats it to himself when the silence is too heavy, the whole world nothing but black and white (white on white) and flat and silent. It is one of the only things he can keep with sharp clarity.
There were voices once, voices and a face, something special, something that was also his. He holds that too (memories, slipping, fading, the silence steals them and he holds them fierce and tight) and that has a name too - Brother, and it beats inside the empty hollows that fill him, his and his and his.
There are no voices now (only whispers, mocking him.) Not his own, not others. The silence is white and black and white again; he blinks (sliding, the world turns, spins through the blackness, cast adrift) and when he opens his eyes (the world caught in amber, solid once more) he is elsewhere, drawn back by familiarity to a place that is repetitive but nothing to him (lies that he tells himself.) He returns to it because it is somewhere to go (truth, but he tells himself he doesn't care.)
He drifts through the aisles (tall and meaningless) and there are things there (books) but they mean nothing (truth and lies all at once). He remembers books, or thinks he does (knowledge which is the core which is the only heart he has and there are hearts scattered carelessly in this place waiting to be taken but he can not touch them.) The silence is deeper here and there is nothing, nothing at all. (He blinks and watches blank pages turn, chairs move, the rotating blades of a fan stutter and shift in perfect silence, things slipping and moving when his eyes are closed and motionless once more when he opens them.)
There is nothing there. Nothing. (He hungers for it, aches for it, and there is nothing, the thirst and hunger eating him away from the inside for the sake of the silence.) He hates it (lies.) He needs it (truth.) He doesn't care (more true than not.)
There is nothing for him there (deeper truth) but he returns all the same (habit, paths retraced, endless, looping) and drifts there until the silence would drive him mad.
The world is dark and light and dark again (night, he remember. day.) It's all the same to him. He closes his eyes (white to black) and the world shifts (the blackness whispers, echo of half remembered voices, of sound and life and colors) and when he opens them he is somewhere else. It doesn't matter. It's all the same to him. When he tires of it, wherever he is, he only has to blink.
Story/Character: Ghosts / Alaric
Rating: PG
word count: 1672
Note: Essentially, Alaric's side of the story in a 1600 word nutshell.
His name is Alaric Ulrich. He knows this because it is written on the bottom of his shoes, in neatly formed loops of ink black letters. He can read them when he sits down, tugging one foot across the opposite thigh with the sole tilted up to reveal its secret message of ownership.
The shoes themselves are brown leather, a little mud and water stained, with a knot in one of the laces. They are worn around the toes and heels; second hand, because he is a younger child and all of his clothes are second hand, passed down from his older brother, but Alaric doesn't mind. His brother is careful with his things, mindful to take good care of them, and mostly they come to Alaric perfectly good enough to last a year before he grows out of them in his own turn.
He has trouble, sometimes, remembering things his brother has said; the exact order of the words that were used. He tries not to let this bother him; people have always told him that it isn't normal to remember words so precisely and Alaric thinks, on some days, that he might like to try this 'normal' thing sometime.
He doesn't care much for other 'normal' things - children's games and school lessons and sugary sweets. (His brother adores sweets, particularly the dark richness of cocoa. On the rare times they have any Alaric always gives his own portion to his brother.) He likes letters, though, and numbers, and the neat, ordered way they march across a page. (His own handwriting was not so neat - the pens are always cumbersomely slower than the thoughts that form in his head. In consolation, however, his brother's letterforms are worse, no matter how the teachers berate him.)
The library is huge, a multi-leveled utopia of leather bindings and musty pages stacked on tall wood shelves that tower over him. It is quiet the way libraries are supposed to be quiet and the purposeful lack of sound is soothing. Alaric likes to wander through the forest of shelves, where the leaves are all dusky wine and deep moss green with gold gilt edgings all year long. The carpet is tan and red and black, vine patterns that stretch between the trunks of the shelves, so thick and soft that it muffles everyone's steps, not just his own.
The books are thick and thin and small and large. He isn't to touch them but he likes to find someone who is reading something at the long tables and lean up to look over their shoulder. Sometimes it is history, sometimes science, sometimes just a storybook of modern fiction, but he has sampled them all. No one ever turns the pages right - they are too slow, or too fast - but he leans over the backs of their chairs and reads with them all the same, because the words are neat and orderly and reassuring, crisp black on white pages, and he has always liked to read.
He likes it least of all when the library closes every evening. He doesn't like the quiet of the night time at all and he likes the blackness of the long hours between days even less. It lurks at the corners of his eyes and in-between each blink he can feel it, stalking him.
He tries not to blink.
* * * * *
His name is Alaric Ulrich. He knows this because it is written on the bottoms of his shoes, and when he sits and turns his foot over he can still trace a finger over the fading smudge of an ink dark line. He can't read it any more, not unless he squints just right, but he remembers that it was there.
The shoes are, he thinks, a little worn, but he doesn't really notice it. He has always had them, so he supposes it's fitting if they show a little bit of wear. They are a gift from his brother and he likes them for that alone, even if they weren't marked indelibly as his own.
He has trouble, sometimes, remembering what his brother's voice sounds like and he hates it. He spends hours, sometimes, taking out every memory and carefully refreshing it until it gleams, bright and fresh, in his mind; his brother's laughter, his voice, the sound of his brother's heartbeat and every word he can recall. People say that time moves on, that years pass and things fade, as though it were a perfectly normal thing to be expected. Alaric loathes the thing called "normalcy" with a fierce anger that leaves him shaking in its wake.
He watches children in the park run and jump and slide, sticky fingers and sticky faces covered in the glaze of honey buns and hard candies. He doesn't remember what sugar tastes like, but he doesn't think he ever liked it overly much.
Frequently the world feels strange around him, too slow, too fast, too much and not enough all at once, and when it boils over the library is his haven. The silence is a soothing balm, hushed and heavy between the high rows of shelves, just the way it should be. He walks the aisles, trailing fingers a tiny breath above the leather bound spines of books. It's as close as he comes to touching them, but their very presence is comforting. The colors are faded, dusky gray tinged red and green and brown, but even that is soothing.
Sometimes he finds someone who is reading, researchers and students with their stacks of reference books at the broad, heavy tables, or someone with a volume of fiction cradled between their hands, tucked into one of the wing-backed chairs that cluster near the windows, pages held up to the light seeping through the panes. It's hard to read. The words leap and drip across the page, in and out of focus no matter how he squints, and it makes something inside of him hard and cold and uncomfortably tight in his stomach. He screws up his eyes and concentrates, but mostly the words slip through his grasp, there and gone like the flutter of butterfly wings. He wishes, with a childish petulance, that someone would read the books to him. Someone did, once, long ago, but he can't remember the sound of the voice, only a deep, steady cadence that was somehow comforting.
He walks the aisles and in between the tall, tall shelves, and sometimes, just sometimes, its easy to forget that the spines of the books are hazy and dim and that he isn't allowed to touch.
When the library closes and nighttime comes with its dark, formless shadows, he keeps his eyes open and stares back into it. Courage, his brother once said, isn't the absence of fear. It's standing fast in spite of it. He spits his spite into the darkness and watches it, guards against it, tense and defiant all the night long. He blinks only when he has to and the dizzy rush of it only makes him bare his teeth and push back the darkness all the more.
* * * * *
His name is (was) Alaric Ulrich. (Once, long ago and far away.) He keeps it close (holds it tight) because it is his (his own, core and center, and anything that isn't held tight can be stolen away.) He repeats it to himself when the silence is too heavy, the whole world nothing but black and white (white on white) and flat and silent. It is one of the only things he can keep with sharp clarity.
There were voices once, voices and a face, something special, something that was also his. He holds that too (memories, slipping, fading, the silence steals them and he holds them fierce and tight) and that has a name too - Brother, and it beats inside the empty hollows that fill him, his and his and his.
There are no voices now (only whispers, mocking him.) Not his own, not others. The silence is white and black and white again; he blinks (sliding, the world turns, spins through the blackness, cast adrift) and when he opens his eyes (the world caught in amber, solid once more) he is elsewhere, drawn back by familiarity to a place that is repetitive but nothing to him (lies that he tells himself.) He returns to it because it is somewhere to go (truth, but he tells himself he doesn't care.)
He drifts through the aisles (tall and meaningless) and there are things there (books) but they mean nothing (truth and lies all at once). He remembers books, or thinks he does (knowledge which is the core which is the only heart he has and there are hearts scattered carelessly in this place waiting to be taken but he can not touch them.) The silence is deeper here and there is nothing, nothing at all. (He blinks and watches blank pages turn, chairs move, the rotating blades of a fan stutter and shift in perfect silence, things slipping and moving when his eyes are closed and motionless once more when he opens them.)
There is nothing there. Nothing. (He hungers for it, aches for it, and there is nothing, the thirst and hunger eating him away from the inside for the sake of the silence.) He hates it (lies.) He needs it (truth.) He doesn't care (more true than not.)
There is nothing for him there (deeper truth) but he returns all the same (habit, paths retraced, endless, looping) and drifts there until the silence would drive him mad.
The world is dark and light and dark again (night, he remember. day.) It's all the same to him. He closes his eyes (white to black) and the world shifts (the blackness whispers, echo of half remembered voices, of sound and life and colors) and when he opens them he is somewhere else. It doesn't matter. It's all the same to him. When he tires of it, wherever he is, he only has to blink.