Fic: My Dissolved Life
Title: My Dissolved Life
Pairing: JM/HL
Rating: PG-13 for some language.
Notes: I don't know where this came from, but here it is. We may have to beg to differ on certain things. Don't analyze the pictures too hard - they were just a general sort of starting-point for this fic, and I thought it might be nice to have multi-media, but they're not meant to be perfectly accurate to the story. Anyway, enjoy!
She has been distant for months, but it is when he sees the pictures that he knows. Something is wrong.
It is as if the sparkling, effervescent little girl she used to be in those photos has withered. She had always been all dark curls and dimples and the occasional freckle on a shoulderblade or collar-bone. Now she is movie-star blonde and too glamorous for her own good, blood-red lipstick like a wound against her mouth.
More startling are her eyes. She had always meant it when she smiled, and you could tell, from the flash of teeth and the playful tug at the corner of her mouth, but mainly from the spark in her eyes, that she was happy in a way he knew he never would be.
These days she smiles too hard, her teeth determined and clenched like weapons against who knows what danger and hurt she sees out there. The corners of her mouth sag and her eyes... her eyes are empty and stare through the camera-lense, beyond it, to something no one can name.
That night, he makes a decision. That night, he knows he has to try to make things right.
----------------
He is picking nervously at the glazed ham that craft service put out for lunch, and she is lounging irreverently across the couch, one leg over the arm-rest, puffing on a cigarette. Above her, the sign glares, THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING. She flicks the ash down to the carpet and watches it burn a plastic-y, black crater into the synthetic material.
So, he tries, How've you been?
Just peachy, she says, her very voice a warning. Don't come any closer.
You don't... you don't look happy these days, he tells her, his fork tearing bits from the meat. Suddenly, he doesn't feel so hungry anymore.
She is uncharacteristically indifferent as she takes another drag from her cigarette. So?
I've seen the pictures, he says. You look... he tries to chose his words carefully, but settles instead on the unpleasant truth. You look like something in you has died.
Maybe it has, she says, and in her bitterness, there is a hint, just a taste, of that same fragile sadness that he would never associate with anyone but her.
Well, what... is there anything - ? He is, as always, at a loss for words when it comes to her.
She sighs and her eyes slip closed, and when she speaks, it is the old Jennifer, the glitter-winds, big-dreams, swollen-heart-on-her-sleeves Jennifer. Just wait it out. A sigh escapes her lips, mingled with cigarette smoke like decay and regret. It will pass. In time.
As he leaves, he hears her murmur.
I won't always be this way.
----------------
Two months later, she is just the same, and he decides that it is time to resort to other measures.
He asks her to grab "a quick bite" after filming. She opens her mouth to decline, but somehow she must sense the desperation in him, the hidden conviction that this is necessary, because she closes her mouth and just nods. They take his motorcycle, "because it is more practical". Her grip is loose and indifferent. He pulls her arms tighter around him, and is reminded of a day more than two years ago, in the (fake) snow, on another bike, in another story of heartache. Had it really been that long since he had seen her smile?
She begins to catch on when he turns onto Highway 405, taking them out of Studio City and to she knows not where, and although she yells in his ear the entire way, he doesn't stop. They both know she's stuck with him, for better or worse. He has the vague thought that those words remind him of a pact he made long ago, but can't seem to remember.
It is nearly nightfall when they reach Santa Monica.
Her fists are hard against his back. He barely manages to catch the bike when she dismounts and knocks against it. Well, that's rather a gentle word. 'Throws herself from him' would be more appropriate.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Laurie?" She's never called him by his last name before. He was always Hugh, and she was always, always Jennifer. "Is this some kind of twisted joke? I don't appreciate whatever game you're trying to - "
He lifts her and carries her over his shoulder, and she screams loud and hard, pounding her hands into anything solid. The world is spinning, and up is down, and she can't tell what is Hugh and what is palm tree or lifeguard stand, but she lashes out against anything and everything. "Let me go!" she shrieks. "Fuck you, you bastard. Put me down!" She claws at him with her perfect French-tip manicure. She feels her nails break, and a satisfying dampness against her fingertips.
He walks down the long, deserted beach, his face a mask of concentration and willpower. He didn't think it would be this easy, but he never imagined it would be this hard. There is a steady dripping down his back, and he knows it is from Jennifer's ferocious resistance. "I hate you!" she screams at him. "Just go back to where you came from and leave me alone!" She bites into his side just as his feet reach the place where the water drows the sand, but he does not cry out.
One moment she is kicking and fighting against his hard, warm body, and the next she is suspended in air. She has just a single breath to be surprised before she falls into the dark, roiling waves.
She pushes, tangled in her clothes, with no idea of which way up is. Air, air. The surf buffetts her on all sides, and her lungs swell in protest. Sand and rocks scrape away at her soft skin, water pushes its way up her nose, burning as it does so, and a trail of bubbles escape her lips. And after a long, long time in the pulsing, raw violence, she let go.
The sound of water rushing against the shore is like a heartbeat, and Jennifer feels safer than she has in the last twenty-odd years, since she left her mother's womb. Once she stops fighting, the water cradles her carefully. Hush, the ocean whispers against the sand, against her skin. I know. It's okay. I've got you.
She opens her eyes for the first time. Gazing wide-eyed into the blurry darkness, she can see everything. Everything, and nothing at all, and somehow that nothing is everything, and she feels tiny and powerless and finally, finally, alive.
When her dark head slips silently above the surface, Hugh releases a sigh of relief because he can tell, although it's dark and her hair is plastered across her face, that something has changed. He had feared, for a moment... but no.
"He left," she says, everything about her completely still in the swirling ocean. "He left," as if only realizing what those words mean now. Two shining, silver tracks of tears fall from her eyes, though she is silent and does not sob. Hugh holds her to him, pushing thick locks of mermaid hair, dark and full of sand and kelp, back from her pale, stricken face, and he lets her cry all of her remorse and pain and longing into the ocean. Glimmering, her tears fall into the dark sea and mingle with those companion waters, and when he presses his lips to hers, it is all he can taste - salt and sea and tears.
The moon is just beginning to rise as he carries her across the sand, dripping and clinging to his neck like a child, like he is the last comfort in the world left to her. She shivers weakly against him, and even though it's dangerous and technically illegal, he climbs on behind her, keeping her in the circle of his arms.
By the time the stars are out, they are long gone.
That night, she bandages the deep rents she tore in him and kisses the bruises, and he trails his fingers over her every scrape. They fall asleep in each others' arms, too tired to wash the sand and sea from themselves (or at least, that's the excuse they'll make later).
Pairing: JM/HL
Rating: PG-13 for some language.
Notes: I don't know where this came from, but here it is. We may have to beg to differ on certain things. Don't analyze the pictures too hard - they were just a general sort of starting-point for this fic, and I thought it might be nice to have multi-media, but they're not meant to be perfectly accurate to the story. Anyway, enjoy!
She has been distant for months, but it is when he sees the pictures that he knows. Something is wrong.
It is as if the sparkling, effervescent little girl she used to be in those photos has withered. She had always been all dark curls and dimples and the occasional freckle on a shoulderblade or collar-bone. Now she is movie-star blonde and too glamorous for her own good, blood-red lipstick like a wound against her mouth.
More startling are her eyes. She had always meant it when she smiled, and you could tell, from the flash of teeth and the playful tug at the corner of her mouth, but mainly from the spark in her eyes, that she was happy in a way he knew he never would be.
These days she smiles too hard, her teeth determined and clenched like weapons against who knows what danger and hurt she sees out there. The corners of her mouth sag and her eyes... her eyes are empty and stare through the camera-lense, beyond it, to something no one can name.
That night, he makes a decision. That night, he knows he has to try to make things right.
----------------
He is picking nervously at the glazed ham that craft service put out for lunch, and she is lounging irreverently across the couch, one leg over the arm-rest, puffing on a cigarette. Above her, the sign glares, THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING. She flicks the ash down to the carpet and watches it burn a plastic-y, black crater into the synthetic material.
So, he tries, How've you been?
Just peachy, she says, her very voice a warning. Don't come any closer.
You don't... you don't look happy these days, he tells her, his fork tearing bits from the meat. Suddenly, he doesn't feel so hungry anymore.
She is uncharacteristically indifferent as she takes another drag from her cigarette. So?
I've seen the pictures, he says. You look... he tries to chose his words carefully, but settles instead on the unpleasant truth. You look like something in you has died.
Maybe it has, she says, and in her bitterness, there is a hint, just a taste, of that same fragile sadness that he would never associate with anyone but her.
Well, what... is there anything - ? He is, as always, at a loss for words when it comes to her.
She sighs and her eyes slip closed, and when she speaks, it is the old Jennifer, the glitter-winds, big-dreams, swollen-heart-on-her-sleeves Jennifer. Just wait it out. A sigh escapes her lips, mingled with cigarette smoke like decay and regret. It will pass. In time.
As he leaves, he hears her murmur.
I won't always be this way.
----------------
Two months later, she is just the same, and he decides that it is time to resort to other measures.
He asks her to grab "a quick bite" after filming. She opens her mouth to decline, but somehow she must sense the desperation in him, the hidden conviction that this is necessary, because she closes her mouth and just nods. They take his motorcycle, "because it is more practical". Her grip is loose and indifferent. He pulls her arms tighter around him, and is reminded of a day more than two years ago, in the (fake) snow, on another bike, in another story of heartache. Had it really been that long since he had seen her smile?
She begins to catch on when he turns onto Highway 405, taking them out of Studio City and to she knows not where, and although she yells in his ear the entire way, he doesn't stop. They both know she's stuck with him, for better or worse. He has the vague thought that those words remind him of a pact he made long ago, but can't seem to remember.
It is nearly nightfall when they reach Santa Monica.
Her fists are hard against his back. He barely manages to catch the bike when she dismounts and knocks against it. Well, that's rather a gentle word. 'Throws herself from him' would be more appropriate.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Laurie?" She's never called him by his last name before. He was always Hugh, and she was always, always Jennifer. "Is this some kind of twisted joke? I don't appreciate whatever game you're trying to - "
He lifts her and carries her over his shoulder, and she screams loud and hard, pounding her hands into anything solid. The world is spinning, and up is down, and she can't tell what is Hugh and what is palm tree or lifeguard stand, but she lashes out against anything and everything. "Let me go!" she shrieks. "Fuck you, you bastard. Put me down!" She claws at him with her perfect French-tip manicure. She feels her nails break, and a satisfying dampness against her fingertips.
He walks down the long, deserted beach, his face a mask of concentration and willpower. He didn't think it would be this easy, but he never imagined it would be this hard. There is a steady dripping down his back, and he knows it is from Jennifer's ferocious resistance. "I hate you!" she screams at him. "Just go back to where you came from and leave me alone!" She bites into his side just as his feet reach the place where the water drows the sand, but he does not cry out.
One moment she is kicking and fighting against his hard, warm body, and the next she is suspended in air. She has just a single breath to be surprised before she falls into the dark, roiling waves.
She pushes, tangled in her clothes, with no idea of which way up is. Air, air. The surf buffetts her on all sides, and her lungs swell in protest. Sand and rocks scrape away at her soft skin, water pushes its way up her nose, burning as it does so, and a trail of bubbles escape her lips. And after a long, long time in the pulsing, raw violence, she let go.
The sound of water rushing against the shore is like a heartbeat, and Jennifer feels safer than she has in the last twenty-odd years, since she left her mother's womb. Once she stops fighting, the water cradles her carefully. Hush, the ocean whispers against the sand, against her skin. I know. It's okay. I've got you.
She opens her eyes for the first time. Gazing wide-eyed into the blurry darkness, she can see everything. Everything, and nothing at all, and somehow that nothing is everything, and she feels tiny and powerless and finally, finally, alive.
When her dark head slips silently above the surface, Hugh releases a sigh of relief because he can tell, although it's dark and her hair is plastered across her face, that something has changed. He had feared, for a moment... but no.
"He left," she says, everything about her completely still in the swirling ocean. "He left," as if only realizing what those words mean now. Two shining, silver tracks of tears fall from her eyes, though she is silent and does not sob. Hugh holds her to him, pushing thick locks of mermaid hair, dark and full of sand and kelp, back from her pale, stricken face, and he lets her cry all of her remorse and pain and longing into the ocean. Glimmering, her tears fall into the dark sea and mingle with those companion waters, and when he presses his lips to hers, it is all he can taste - salt and sea and tears.
The moon is just beginning to rise as he carries her across the sand, dripping and clinging to his neck like a child, like he is the last comfort in the world left to her. She shivers weakly against him, and even though it's dangerous and technically illegal, he climbs on behind her, keeping her in the circle of his arms.
By the time the stars are out, they are long gone.
That night, she bandages the deep rents she tore in him and kisses the bruises, and he trails his fingers over her every scrape. They fall asleep in each others' arms, too tired to wash the sand and sea from themselves (or at least, that's the excuse they'll make later).