[Fic] Quondam
Summary: Take a word and bless it with a new meaning. [Ariel-centric, Ariel/Ada (AU)]
Rating: K+
Note/s: Written for iu_fanfiction's 40th challenge - prompt:: Redefinition. The (kind of awkward, to be honest) shifting from one verb tense to another here was intentional, because I am experimenting with a new writing style. Or something not-so-completely-new, but. Well.
Also yes I cannot wait for February 13 to come SO HUHU. Here, a small tribute to Ariel/Ada.
i. Then
Silence used to be just the absence of words, once, where a bout of fruitless conversations could’ve easily filled it.
Where silence burned his tongue into near-muteness, where silence was the best shield he could conjure up with to reinforce his defense against the onslaught of his mother’s double-edged words. Where silence accompanied him in his long, drawn-out hours he spent cooped up in their local library, as he bore in mind his distant fear of his mother’s ire every time he gets home later than usual, among other things. He picked it up and grew up with it even in the aftermath of his first murder, when he was driven to commit the murder of his mother, as though it’s all he’d ever need to anchor his sanity to.
He shared the wee hours of his mornings, in the suburbs of Detroit, with silence every time someone roused him from sleep so that he could loiter in the area assigned to him for pick-pocketing purposes. There’s little to be said about the gang, except it bore no semblance to a cult as much as any lackluster gang did in his day, except he never found it in him to put up with the ringleader. Except he knew he should be chasing the normative things back to his life, patching them up and nursing them back to appropriateness, but. Despite, there’s no denying that the digs were pretty much satisfactory, and he had nowhere else to go.
The gang left him, too. Not left him bare, there’s always silence to return to, but it robbed him of something he never owned.
It struck him that, he would’ve preferred silence over everything else if it solely meant the absence of words, but silence was a fiddly, fickle concept.
He never wanted to let go of it.
-
ii. Now
Silence is every cliché stories won’t tell you rolled into one idea laden with the most underrated of purposes, but it speaks much about his decisions, up until the day he fell.
They say that for every account there’s a turning point, where tensions mount to an apex, the critical juncture.
He has his fair share of it.
There’s France, an institute to go to, and a series of events indirectly testing his social skills.
And then there’s Ada.
There’s a bar confluence with her, too, and the late hours of the night found him wandering along Litheo street, a dagger in one hand and a blood red bandana accessorizing his arm. Silence was every judder his breath caught as he slid from a dark waylaying to another. It was what provoked his inner demons to resurface. It was what he hid against the corner of her lips- against the full of them, as he sealed the distance between them in one fluid motion. It was what escorted them as they cruised down the street on her motorcycle, sporting fresh bruises and cuts and all. It was what governed them as they dealt with their wounds, bandaging and patching shit up lest they wanted any fleshy organ to come popping out of their insides.
And then.
What could’ve quasi-easily led to a one night stand became something else entirely, and neither party was to be blamed for it.
For all its worth, though, he could’ve simply stepped up and volunteered to take it.
(He grinned something delicate but ultimately mischievous, "I love you." But it came through his teeth, "I love you." He let his hand drop back limply on his side, his eyes a little more open than just half-mast, "I love you. God, that's appalling.")
But he didn’t want to fall, as every clichéd story would have it.
He just wanted it fixed, but falling was not an option. Or if it were, he’d rather stray from it.
Still, too, there’s a first for everything, a first for every downfall.
For every bout of silence defined, for every second the clock tick away to, for every heartbeat.
He grows less and less complacent.
And yet, this is a battle he doesn’t want to win.
-
He doesn’t win, in the end.
But he has won more than what he could’ve benefitted from losing it.
-
Fast-forward in time and they find themselves residing in a rented flat in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a cat to accompany them, but for a purpose.
College, two undergraduate courses, plenty of research to go by, a shitload of math problem sets to solve, and a truckload of space sciences to study.
As a rule, people refer to it, given the tragic contexts of their past, as ‘living the dream’.
He prefers to call it ‘normal’.
And so, breaking silence is the easiest thing to do every time they review for their respective exams come tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or next week. It’s still there, though, in the very point of his pen as he scribbles a diagram for the problem, jots down equations and solutions, consults his notes. It’s there as they try to help each other out in solving the most challenging of the items provided. It’s there as Fen, the house cat, enters the scene by comfortably settling himself near Ada’s lap by the table.
Breaking silence, also, is the easiest with a mishmash of tongues and teeth and bilateral fervor ebbing away effortlessly into what little the consumed gap between them has to offer, as he lets their lips fit one rainy night. He laces silence with the thin handwriting of her hair as he rakes his fingers through it, abstractedly feeling silence swerving its way in and around them, in and around and even into the attenuated line his minor cut stung his forearm. He partners silence with the drizzle drenching their clothes, even to the flesh and bones of them, further infusing a sense of a more pronounced intimacy, more needed- feels it seeping easily into the very fiber of his being, if he’ll ever learn how to wax poetries at all.
Breaking silence is the easiest when he can settle with just this, lying flat on their backs with makeshift comforts in their backyard, on the grass, where they can view the clear expanse of the night sky and everything that decorates- glorifies- it. Their conversations scout from a brief history of astronomy, to a lesson on measuring degrees without the fancy gadgets, to a crash course on how to identify a constellation.
Planets.
Stars.
(She draws out a smile, then, and claims, as he points his laser pen to a random cluster of stars on one corner of their view there.
“Lepus.”)
-
A word engraved to the wedding rings, when he wraps a dissimilar kind of cordial silence between the two of them as he slips one into her finger:
Fixed.
-
He lets silence speak for him as he dips his head down to catch her lips with his.
-
END
Rating: K+
Note/s: Written for iu_fanfiction's 40th challenge - prompt:: Redefinition. The (kind of awkward, to be honest) shifting from one verb tense to another here was intentional, because I am experimenting with a new writing style. Or something not-so-completely-new, but. Well.
Also yes I cannot wait for February 13 to come SO HUHU. Here, a small tribute to Ariel/Ada.
i. Then
Silence used to be just the absence of words, once, where a bout of fruitless conversations could’ve easily filled it.
Where silence burned his tongue into near-muteness, where silence was the best shield he could conjure up with to reinforce his defense against the onslaught of his mother’s double-edged words. Where silence accompanied him in his long, drawn-out hours he spent cooped up in their local library, as he bore in mind his distant fear of his mother’s ire every time he gets home later than usual, among other things. He picked it up and grew up with it even in the aftermath of his first murder, when he was driven to commit the murder of his mother, as though it’s all he’d ever need to anchor his sanity to.
He shared the wee hours of his mornings, in the suburbs of Detroit, with silence every time someone roused him from sleep so that he could loiter in the area assigned to him for pick-pocketing purposes. There’s little to be said about the gang, except it bore no semblance to a cult as much as any lackluster gang did in his day, except he never found it in him to put up with the ringleader. Except he knew he should be chasing the normative things back to his life, patching them up and nursing them back to appropriateness, but. Despite, there’s no denying that the digs were pretty much satisfactory, and he had nowhere else to go.
The gang left him, too. Not left him bare, there’s always silence to return to, but it robbed him of something he never owned.
It struck him that, he would’ve preferred silence over everything else if it solely meant the absence of words, but silence was a fiddly, fickle concept.
He never wanted to let go of it.
-
ii. Now
Silence is every cliché stories won’t tell you rolled into one idea laden with the most underrated of purposes, but it speaks much about his decisions, up until the day he fell.
They say that for every account there’s a turning point, where tensions mount to an apex, the critical juncture.
He has his fair share of it.
There’s France, an institute to go to, and a series of events indirectly testing his social skills.
And then there’s Ada.
There’s a bar confluence with her, too, and the late hours of the night found him wandering along Litheo street, a dagger in one hand and a blood red bandana accessorizing his arm. Silence was every judder his breath caught as he slid from a dark waylaying to another. It was what provoked his inner demons to resurface. It was what he hid against the corner of her lips- against the full of them, as he sealed the distance between them in one fluid motion. It was what escorted them as they cruised down the street on her motorcycle, sporting fresh bruises and cuts and all. It was what governed them as they dealt with their wounds, bandaging and patching shit up lest they wanted any fleshy organ to come popping out of their insides.
And then.
What could’ve quasi-easily led to a one night stand became something else entirely, and neither party was to be blamed for it.
For all its worth, though, he could’ve simply stepped up and volunteered to take it.
(He grinned something delicate but ultimately mischievous, "I love you." But it came through his teeth, "I love you." He let his hand drop back limply on his side, his eyes a little more open than just half-mast, "I love you. God, that's appalling.")
But he didn’t want to fall, as every clichéd story would have it.
He just wanted it fixed, but falling was not an option. Or if it were, he’d rather stray from it.
Still, too, there’s a first for everything, a first for every downfall.
For every bout of silence defined, for every second the clock tick away to, for every heartbeat.
He grows less and less complacent.
And yet, this is a battle he doesn’t want to win.
-
He doesn’t win, in the end.
But he has won more than what he could’ve benefitted from losing it.
-
Fast-forward in time and they find themselves residing in a rented flat in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a cat to accompany them, but for a purpose.
College, two undergraduate courses, plenty of research to go by, a shitload of math problem sets to solve, and a truckload of space sciences to study.
As a rule, people refer to it, given the tragic contexts of their past, as ‘living the dream’.
He prefers to call it ‘normal’.
And so, breaking silence is the easiest thing to do every time they review for their respective exams come tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or next week. It’s still there, though, in the very point of his pen as he scribbles a diagram for the problem, jots down equations and solutions, consults his notes. It’s there as they try to help each other out in solving the most challenging of the items provided. It’s there as Fen, the house cat, enters the scene by comfortably settling himself near Ada’s lap by the table.
Breaking silence, also, is the easiest with a mishmash of tongues and teeth and bilateral fervor ebbing away effortlessly into what little the consumed gap between them has to offer, as he lets their lips fit one rainy night. He laces silence with the thin handwriting of her hair as he rakes his fingers through it, abstractedly feeling silence swerving its way in and around them, in and around and even into the attenuated line his minor cut stung his forearm. He partners silence with the drizzle drenching their clothes, even to the flesh and bones of them, further infusing a sense of a more pronounced intimacy, more needed- feels it seeping easily into the very fiber of his being, if he’ll ever learn how to wax poetries at all.
Breaking silence is the easiest when he can settle with just this, lying flat on their backs with makeshift comforts in their backyard, on the grass, where they can view the clear expanse of the night sky and everything that decorates- glorifies- it. Their conversations scout from a brief history of astronomy, to a lesson on measuring degrees without the fancy gadgets, to a crash course on how to identify a constellation.
Planets.
Stars.
(She draws out a smile, then, and claims, as he points his laser pen to a random cluster of stars on one corner of their view there.
“Lepus.”)
-
A word engraved to the wedding rings, when he wraps a dissimilar kind of cordial silence between the two of them as he slips one into her finger:
Fixed.
-
He lets silence speak for him as he dips his head down to catch her lips with his.
-
END