Prompt #27, Author's Choice
Title: I've barely been gone
Rating: PG13
Word count: ~570
Spoilers: Pilot
Prompt: #27, Author's Choice
Notes: table // about my journal
Some things Michael Bluth will always remember: a compendium, of sorts (the common thread is inadvertent):
The first time he is called a bastard.
You bastard, Michael; her shirt is unbuttoned and her bra is a sickeningly garish orange (blouse: white), her hair is mussed and her feet are bare. The little chump had looked mortified and bolted. She just looks furious. Not his fault they hadn’t thought to use the lock, really, the lock that was right there and how was he supposed to know, not that he was the one who should even feel guilty when she was necking in the bathroom at their grandmother’s memorial service, honestly, with their cousin (“second cousin, Michael!”; the start of a pattern?), but she isn’t buying it and the self-righteous card isn’t going to work this time.
The first time Lindsay calls him a bastard: see above. (Footnote: it’s the tears, minuscule diamonds nestling in the crevices of her eyes, that he remembers.)
The first time a girl sucks him off (a girl in the most literal sense; they’re fifteen and she’s a friend of Lindsay’s, and there’s the awful nagging suspicion that some twisted kind of truth or dare is behind this which doesn’t stop him from smashing the back of his head into the edge of the toilet top and drawing blood from his own bottom lip roughly two minutes in.). She’s a blonde but later he remembers brown roots.
The accident involving a bottle of scotch and a knife and a thumb (his) and a minor transgression of the law (hers) in the form of a general disregard for speed limits.
Later, something like an apology in the form of ten kisses corresponding to his ten stitches. He could swear the boo-boo feels better.
The month he becomes both an uncle and a father, in that order. The stack of fat cardboard books full of cheerfully labeled pictures of farm animals and fruits which he compiles and sends off to Boston; the hot pink onesie he receives in a padded envelope printed with teddy bears holding balloons against a cloud-filled blue background, with an accompanying note in Lindsay’s slanting script that informs him Tobias picked it out and fails to elaborate further.
The funeral. The faces drawn into picture-perfect visages of sympathy and compassion, and the face that is missing because its daughter has pneumonia.
The faint click he hears as he’s speaking to the answering machine, causing him to punctuate his sentence with hello? hello?, and the lack of response making him think he imagined it. He’ll wonder, from time to time, when the call goes unreturned for a week, two weeks, six months, but stops himself before he’s fully figured out what he’s wondering, and then it’s years that number more than two and he hasn’t tried again.
The feeling of dismay: Lindsay’s been in town for a month? and his simultaneously bitter and affectionate unsurprise at her immediate instinct to lie about it. She’s been meaning to call him, she really has, and he replies sardonically but acceptingly while their eyes tell a whole different story that goes something like too many years and who’d have thought; regret: maybe, remorse: never.
And that day, for a different reason: somehow, it’s the end of snapshots and the beginning of video, and he didn’t know what continuity felt like until it was his.
Rating: PG13
Word count: ~570
Spoilers: Pilot
Prompt: #27, Author's Choice
Notes: table // about my journal
Some things Michael Bluth will always remember: a compendium, of sorts (the common thread is inadvertent):
The first time he is called a bastard.
You bastard, Michael; her shirt is unbuttoned and her bra is a sickeningly garish orange (blouse: white), her hair is mussed and her feet are bare. The little chump had looked mortified and bolted. She just looks furious. Not his fault they hadn’t thought to use the lock, really, the lock that was right there and how was he supposed to know, not that he was the one who should even feel guilty when she was necking in the bathroom at their grandmother’s memorial service, honestly, with their cousin (“second cousin, Michael!”; the start of a pattern?), but she isn’t buying it and the self-righteous card isn’t going to work this time.
The first time Lindsay calls him a bastard: see above. (Footnote: it’s the tears, minuscule diamonds nestling in the crevices of her eyes, that he remembers.)
The first time a girl sucks him off (a girl in the most literal sense; they’re fifteen and she’s a friend of Lindsay’s, and there’s the awful nagging suspicion that some twisted kind of truth or dare is behind this which doesn’t stop him from smashing the back of his head into the edge of the toilet top and drawing blood from his own bottom lip roughly two minutes in.). She’s a blonde but later he remembers brown roots.
The accident involving a bottle of scotch and a knife and a thumb (his) and a minor transgression of the law (hers) in the form of a general disregard for speed limits.
Later, something like an apology in the form of ten kisses corresponding to his ten stitches. He could swear the boo-boo feels better.
The month he becomes both an uncle and a father, in that order. The stack of fat cardboard books full of cheerfully labeled pictures of farm animals and fruits which he compiles and sends off to Boston; the hot pink onesie he receives in a padded envelope printed with teddy bears holding balloons against a cloud-filled blue background, with an accompanying note in Lindsay’s slanting script that informs him Tobias picked it out and fails to elaborate further.
The funeral. The faces drawn into picture-perfect visages of sympathy and compassion, and the face that is missing because its daughter has pneumonia.
The faint click he hears as he’s speaking to the answering machine, causing him to punctuate his sentence with hello? hello?, and the lack of response making him think he imagined it. He’ll wonder, from time to time, when the call goes unreturned for a week, two weeks, six months, but stops himself before he’s fully figured out what he’s wondering, and then it’s years that number more than two and he hasn’t tried again.
The feeling of dismay: Lindsay’s been in town for a month? and his simultaneously bitter and affectionate unsurprise at her immediate instinct to lie about it. She’s been meaning to call him, she really has, and he replies sardonically but acceptingly while their eyes tell a whole different story that goes something like too many years and who’d have thought; regret: maybe, remorse: never.
And that day, for a different reason: somehow, it’s the end of snapshots and the beginning of video, and he didn’t know what continuity felt like until it was his.