i said i had hope--i lied.
Let's save the debrief.
Flashfic! For the bordellinos 48-hour challenge. I was prompted by tangleofthorns:
"You burnt the house you built for us,
You left me in the cold,
Wearing all of your hand-me-down clothes."
- The Gentlemen Callers, "Hand-Me-Down Songs"
Uh. This is vaguely RPFish? Idk, Pete Wentz. 563 words. PG for stylistic quirks and overuse of adjectives.
*
i'll give you a match if you need it:
You wander a cavernous hotel suite for days afterwards, wearing one of his old shirts and touching your chest. You press your chilly fingers into your sternum and inhale against the pressure, an ache and sting to contrast the pain in your abraded throat, the struggling deflated tenderness in your lungs. The cracked, cheap plastic logo on his shirt is good and familiar when it catches on your fingernails. The cotton is dark green and as soft, maleable, tactile as skin. Not his skin, you don't know about that texture, because you never, you only stole his "Florida: where America goes to die" t-shirt when he was nineteen and drunk and it was brand new and he pulled it off and threw it at you so he didn't puke all over it. You only slept in it and thought of how he wasn't sleeping in it, and what that meant, and wore it until the state cracked like dried mud and the fabric became like skin over your skin instead of over his skin. If he ever noticed, he just smiled, because he was a good friend, or because he just liked smiling at you.
You stop in front of the suite's bedroom window, its curtains hanging like mosquito netting and milky like a shroud. You don't open the curtains. There are cameras waiting for your black-streaked, vacant face, but you are not done waiting for them. The cameras and the singular, shining eyes behind them, the static-cracking, smoke-filled voices below them hissing with unspoken comparisons to manic divas and stuffed animals and bathtubs, their ears deaf to all the answers you can give, all the answers you've been given, all the answers you're not giving. The story you're telling, the witness you're not bearing, the witness he's keeping on an eastbound plane. The silence he's going to carry like an overweight suitcase full of all the words you said, rattling with all the pills you took. The oil-slick shine of them still skins your blood with a sickly rainbow sheen.
Your fingers collapse against your chest, curling into your scarred palm until you are jamming your knuckles into the shirt and your own skin, fat, and bone. As if you could crack the bone and shred the skin and fat with the pieces, slice through connective tissue to your heart. A circular spray of blood and meat on the curtains, soaking through to the cold glass on the other side, a welcome wreath for the cameras outside. The compression of your fist hurts, because your pen was never the weapon--your hand is a weapon, and you know how to wield it against yourself better than anything else. Anyone else.
Your right hand on your heart, your left hand mummified in curtain-like bandages, the palm seemingly still stinging from the slap you laid across his face, the back a blazing, burned numbness. You still feel the blood dried between your nose and upper lip; his fist meeting your face like a wall, like a sidewalk, like a sudden stop at the end.
*
Flashfic! For the bordellinos 48-hour challenge. I was prompted by tangleofthorns:
"You burnt the house you built for us,
You left me in the cold,
Wearing all of your hand-me-down clothes."
- The Gentlemen Callers, "Hand-Me-Down Songs"
Uh. This is vaguely RPFish? Idk, Pete Wentz. 563 words. PG for stylistic quirks and overuse of adjectives.
*
i'll give you a match if you need it:
You wander a cavernous hotel suite for days afterwards, wearing one of his old shirts and touching your chest. You press your chilly fingers into your sternum and inhale against the pressure, an ache and sting to contrast the pain in your abraded throat, the struggling deflated tenderness in your lungs. The cracked, cheap plastic logo on his shirt is good and familiar when it catches on your fingernails. The cotton is dark green and as soft, maleable, tactile as skin. Not his skin, you don't know about that texture, because you never, you only stole his "Florida: where America goes to die" t-shirt when he was nineteen and drunk and it was brand new and he pulled it off and threw it at you so he didn't puke all over it. You only slept in it and thought of how he wasn't sleeping in it, and what that meant, and wore it until the state cracked like dried mud and the fabric became like skin over your skin instead of over his skin. If he ever noticed, he just smiled, because he was a good friend, or because he just liked smiling at you.
You stop in front of the suite's bedroom window, its curtains hanging like mosquito netting and milky like a shroud. You don't open the curtains. There are cameras waiting for your black-streaked, vacant face, but you are not done waiting for them. The cameras and the singular, shining eyes behind them, the static-cracking, smoke-filled voices below them hissing with unspoken comparisons to manic divas and stuffed animals and bathtubs, their ears deaf to all the answers you can give, all the answers you've been given, all the answers you're not giving. The story you're telling, the witness you're not bearing, the witness he's keeping on an eastbound plane. The silence he's going to carry like an overweight suitcase full of all the words you said, rattling with all the pills you took. The oil-slick shine of them still skins your blood with a sickly rainbow sheen.
Your fingers collapse against your chest, curling into your scarred palm until you are jamming your knuckles into the shirt and your own skin, fat, and bone. As if you could crack the bone and shred the skin and fat with the pieces, slice through connective tissue to your heart. A circular spray of blood and meat on the curtains, soaking through to the cold glass on the other side, a welcome wreath for the cameras outside. The compression of your fist hurts, because your pen was never the weapon--your hand is a weapon, and you know how to wield it against yourself better than anything else. Anyone else.
Your right hand on your heart, your left hand mummified in curtain-like bandages, the palm seemingly still stinging from the slap you laid across his face, the back a blazing, burned numbness. You still feel the blood dried between your nose and upper lip; his fist meeting your face like a wall, like a sidewalk, like a sudden stop at the end.
*