Fic: Vesuvius

Mar 06, 2010 20:12

Title: Vesuvius
Author: kaitmaree77
Rating: PG 13
Warnings: Angst; Spoilers post-Teamwork; Moar angst;
Summary: The way it used to hang, low. The way it framed her face, her smile - her drunken stupor, her lies, her sadness.
Note: Basically, this is a nonsensical mess of meaning probably only visible to myself. It’s unbetaed, it’s mostly raw. Dedicated to the Victorian Bushfires in 2009, whom were too easily forgotten for a tragedy so huge and to the victims of Pompeii and Herculaneum, lost so long ago, whose last agonies I have learned and felt such immense sadness for. Please review.

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He wants to hate her. Craves hating her. Aches for the moment he can remember her with a bitter laugh and stoic pose. She’s everything he should resent in a person. Or rather one thing: Gone.

Loneliness. Abandonment. It makes him ache. Anxiety filling the empty crevices of his mind, his heart, his being. The spaces she used to fill - the depths she used to consume being replaced by longing and loss, loss, loss.

Chase thinks of his mother and her long red hair. The way it used to hang, low. The way it framed her face, her smile - her drunken stupor, her lies, her sadness. He was certain she was pretty in another life; you could see the softness of her features the rare moments of bliss - evidence of memories wrapped in something other than pain.

He thinks of Australia, thick with desert and death. The sun searing in the sky, scolding him. Torturing him for unknown sin. Guilt, the original sin. He thinks of Biblical stories of struggling through the desert, of temptation, of trial.

Of fate.

Cameron says goodbye. Chase falls apart. Though his stitches remain closed the feelings slip out between the gaps. He ought to blame himself for falling in love, for trusting. Whoever once told him trust was a risk seldom worth taking was right.

He sleeps. Sleep unnatural for any healthy being, but what is health? What is normality? He resents society and their narrow definitions of Love and God and Meaning. He looked up Love the night she left, he ripped out the page and burned it until it fell upon his fingers in thick, black ash.

His country burns and he’s too far away. He thinks of the roads he’d driven upon so long (not so long) ago being consumed by the death. The cars filled with bodies slumped together, like Herculaneum casts of last agonies. He wants to go home. The death tolls rise and he wants to go home.

Cameron leaves and he watches her go. Her footsteps cemented in the floor, his mind. Her last words throbbing like a headache he can’t shake. The bed is still creased in the lines of her body, her skin. Familiarity stings, guilt, fills him with regret.

The world shakes and he feels himself standing still. As if he himself a statue of stone, unmovable. But the stone cracks and threatens to fall - but everyone trusts its stability and leaves it alone.

They leave him alone because they don’t know what to say. The Historical Tragedy, failure of speech. Of watching loved ones fall deep but being numbed by fear. Selfishness, he figures, but without her he doesn’t care.

He misses her so much sometimes talks to her. She’s not dead. He knows where she is. He could send her a letter if he wished - false impressions of survival, of moving on, of taking control.

But is she?

Chase finds a picture of them in a drawer he’d let become a tomb. Letters, gifts, memories. He grips the glass in his hands, flings it against the wall. Let it perish.

He wants to go home. But where is that? And what about Cameron?

He won’t give up, can’t give up. Love for her is ingrained in his being, as natural as the blood pumping through his veins, the blink of an eye, the sigh of a breath.

God, he’d have to give up all of that before he was willing to give her up.

fanfiction

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