Fic: Dust.
Title: Dust
Author: kaitmaree77
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst; season six “spoilers”
Summary: Chase contemplates calling her. Finding out where she is now, and begging her to stay.
Notes: This was written based on (and to the sound of) To Build A Home by The Cinematic Orchestra. It’s not imperative, but it would mean a lot if you listened to the song as you read this. It’s a beautiful piece of music, and much of the pacing of this story is inspired by the song. Thank you, and any thoughts are always appreciated.
-
By the cracks of his skin I climbed to the top
I climbed the tree to see the world
When the gusts came around to blow me down
Held on as tightly as you held onto me.
-
Now.
Chase has learnt firsthand that experience does not lessen the pain, merely bitters the core of you, preparing yourself for the inevitable sword thrust of loss. It doesn’t make it any more bearable.
Every turn is a memory. The leftward glance towards the bedroom reminds him of late nights spent intertwined; a cautious look back to the bookcase brings back remnants of a day spent curled up reciting lines of favoured books aloud. He’d burnt the book the day she left.
He stares around this tomb with a whiskey in one hand and an olive coloured garbage bag in the other. The bedroom still smells faintly of violets and the once familiar scent of her turns his stomach sick. He hates the parts of her that still resonate within these walls, the handwritten vows ingrained in the furniture once drunkenly he cannot quite erase.
The physical presences that remain of her are endless. He feels suddenly like an anachronism. This isn’t his time or his place. This cannot be his reality. Not again. The loss is jarring and surreal. He sweeps his hand over the desk in a desperate rush, forcing the papers of hers onto the floor.
A photo-frame shatters.
-
Then.
The last thing she had said to him had not been memorable or fitting, a cliché finality to resonate through the ages. It had not been goodbye, or I’m sorry, no words of promise for future happenings or predictions of days yet to come.
She had asked him not to take long. Suggested that his father might be home sometime in the evening.
He’d come home to find his mother sprawled on the couch, fallen into yet another drunken slumber. Except she wasn’t moving. Wasn’t breathing. A glass had shattered in the kitchen and Chase sliced his finger as he clambered for the phone and dialled the numbers etched in every person’s mind since they were a child.
Now, days later, he walks through the house that once occupied whatever semblance of a family he had left. It feels as if Chase is intruding, that this home was never really his despite the fact he grew up here from day one of his existence.
The piano is in the corner. It had been his father’s gift to his mother the day that they had found out she had fallen pregnant. They spoke of her learning to play, composing him lullabies, and eventually passing this talent onto her son. His mother had never learnt to play.
Instead Chase had taught himself. Throwing himself into his musical studies, his ministry, anything but the normality that his peers were so enthralled in. He stayed at home and played Beethoven, they kicked a football around the park every Thursday afternoon. Somehow he knew they were just as lonely, even surrounded by all of that laughter. He preferred the music.
He walks over to the piano, pushing back the lid and sits on the seat. For a very long moment he closes his eyes, swallowing before he starts to play. At first it is Brahms, but quickly he finds himself losing control. Hands clashing against the keys, lacking any form of rhythm. He thinks of the children he tutored in piano one semester, and how much happier they seemed to ignore the orchestral compositions of old men long dead.
And then he is crying. For the first time since it’s happened. Raw and all-consuming, as if every grief bursts out in guttural sobs all in one breath. He thinks he might be sick, the sensation overwhelming. Chase cannot remember the last time he felt this way, if at all.
He drowns out the sobs with music.
-
Now.
He sits.
Time passes, he is not sure if it has been minutes or hours before he finally opens his eyes to stare around at the mess he’s created in the rooms of a home he once called theirs.
Chase contemplates calling her. Finding out where she is now, and begging her to stay. The loneliness fills him quicker than ever before, and he is inexplicably breathless as he begins to ponder the fate of their relationship.
Chase does not call her this time, deciding within himself that if she wanted to be with him she would. But she isn’t. In his eyes, she’s a whole world away. So he packs.
Chase packs away every trace of Cameron that remains. The pieces she’d missed in her hurried rush to leave him, or perhaps the things she had intended to leave behind.
He finds a grocery list scrawled messily in her handwriting. It’s entirely insignificant, and yet he pauses to trace his fingertips over the indentation of her pen and the smudging of the ink. Chase laughs, remembering their endless arguments over grocery shopping one day, until they finally decided they’d take turns and just deal with whatever preference the other had for milk, bread, and whatever else had seemed so important the first attempt they made.
It had all been so trivial back then.
-
Then.
Chase walks outside, feeling suffocated by the death and despair of this house. He needs to breathe.
He sees the tree his father had once sworn he’d build a tree house for him in. One promise quickly broken, back in the days he had let himself believe. It hadn’t bothered him when he didn’t come home that Wednesday, or when a conference the next weekend he had shifted the ‘definite’ promise to came up. It didn’t bother him the next weekend, or even the next month.
In fact when it was a year later and Chase’s father went next door to help the neighbour construct a cubby house for his six year old’s birthday, he’d helped. It had been one of those thick summer nights where the heat threatens to suffocate you, and yet being out in the open with his father had been one of the best night’s of his life. His mother had watched from inside, and squeezed Chase’s hand as he came back home later on.
“He’s learning,” she had whispered. “I promise he’s learning.”
Chase had just forced a smile and made her tea, haunted by the wavering uncertainty in her tone. They couldn’t bear any more heartbreak in this house. The last time had been trouble enough.
He walks out to the tree and traces his hands over the rough bark. He swings himself up onto a thick branch and looks out over the yard. Somehow the view is more disappointing now. He hoists himself higher. He can see the church his parents married in, the same he was baptised in, and had taken up his path towards seminary school. The cross stands prominent as ever, and he thinks of stories of rebirth and sacrifice, wonders what this means for his own mother.
“I’m sorry.” He cries out, to no one in particular, as he shifts his way back onto flat ground.
-
Now.
Once Chase has started packing, he cannot make himself stop. Suddenly he sees Cameron’s shadows on the walls and sights her footstep imprinted, erasable, on the carpet. It haunts him.
He shoves every memory into a box, first, and then the insignificant things. Clothes. Books. And then everything. He’s finished before he’s sure he’s started, and stares around to a once-home bare with the exception of a littering of identical brown cardboard boxes.
It’s time to go.
He sells the condo the very next week.
And now, it's time to leave and turn to dust.
Author: kaitmaree77
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst; season six “spoilers”
Summary: Chase contemplates calling her. Finding out where she is now, and begging her to stay.
Notes: This was written based on (and to the sound of) To Build A Home by The Cinematic Orchestra. It’s not imperative, but it would mean a lot if you listened to the song as you read this. It’s a beautiful piece of music, and much of the pacing of this story is inspired by the song. Thank you, and any thoughts are always appreciated.
-
By the cracks of his skin I climbed to the top
I climbed the tree to see the world
When the gusts came around to blow me down
Held on as tightly as you held onto me.
-
Now.
Chase has learnt firsthand that experience does not lessen the pain, merely bitters the core of you, preparing yourself for the inevitable sword thrust of loss. It doesn’t make it any more bearable.
Every turn is a memory. The leftward glance towards the bedroom reminds him of late nights spent intertwined; a cautious look back to the bookcase brings back remnants of a day spent curled up reciting lines of favoured books aloud. He’d burnt the book the day she left.
He stares around this tomb with a whiskey in one hand and an olive coloured garbage bag in the other. The bedroom still smells faintly of violets and the once familiar scent of her turns his stomach sick. He hates the parts of her that still resonate within these walls, the handwritten vows ingrained in the furniture once drunkenly he cannot quite erase.
The physical presences that remain of her are endless. He feels suddenly like an anachronism. This isn’t his time or his place. This cannot be his reality. Not again. The loss is jarring and surreal. He sweeps his hand over the desk in a desperate rush, forcing the papers of hers onto the floor.
A photo-frame shatters.
-
Then.
The last thing she had said to him had not been memorable or fitting, a cliché finality to resonate through the ages. It had not been goodbye, or I’m sorry, no words of promise for future happenings or predictions of days yet to come.
She had asked him not to take long. Suggested that his father might be home sometime in the evening.
He’d come home to find his mother sprawled on the couch, fallen into yet another drunken slumber. Except she wasn’t moving. Wasn’t breathing. A glass had shattered in the kitchen and Chase sliced his finger as he clambered for the phone and dialled the numbers etched in every person’s mind since they were a child.
Now, days later, he walks through the house that once occupied whatever semblance of a family he had left. It feels as if Chase is intruding, that this home was never really his despite the fact he grew up here from day one of his existence.
The piano is in the corner. It had been his father’s gift to his mother the day that they had found out she had fallen pregnant. They spoke of her learning to play, composing him lullabies, and eventually passing this talent onto her son. His mother had never learnt to play.
Instead Chase had taught himself. Throwing himself into his musical studies, his ministry, anything but the normality that his peers were so enthralled in. He stayed at home and played Beethoven, they kicked a football around the park every Thursday afternoon. Somehow he knew they were just as lonely, even surrounded by all of that laughter. He preferred the music.
He walks over to the piano, pushing back the lid and sits on the seat. For a very long moment he closes his eyes, swallowing before he starts to play. At first it is Brahms, but quickly he finds himself losing control. Hands clashing against the keys, lacking any form of rhythm. He thinks of the children he tutored in piano one semester, and how much happier they seemed to ignore the orchestral compositions of old men long dead.
And then he is crying. For the first time since it’s happened. Raw and all-consuming, as if every grief bursts out in guttural sobs all in one breath. He thinks he might be sick, the sensation overwhelming. Chase cannot remember the last time he felt this way, if at all.
He drowns out the sobs with music.
-
Now.
He sits.
Time passes, he is not sure if it has been minutes or hours before he finally opens his eyes to stare around at the mess he’s created in the rooms of a home he once called theirs.
Chase contemplates calling her. Finding out where she is now, and begging her to stay. The loneliness fills him quicker than ever before, and he is inexplicably breathless as he begins to ponder the fate of their relationship.
Chase does not call her this time, deciding within himself that if she wanted to be with him she would. But she isn’t. In his eyes, she’s a whole world away. So he packs.
Chase packs away every trace of Cameron that remains. The pieces she’d missed in her hurried rush to leave him, or perhaps the things she had intended to leave behind.
He finds a grocery list scrawled messily in her handwriting. It’s entirely insignificant, and yet he pauses to trace his fingertips over the indentation of her pen and the smudging of the ink. Chase laughs, remembering their endless arguments over grocery shopping one day, until they finally decided they’d take turns and just deal with whatever preference the other had for milk, bread, and whatever else had seemed so important the first attempt they made.
It had all been so trivial back then.
-
Then.
Chase walks outside, feeling suffocated by the death and despair of this house. He needs to breathe.
He sees the tree his father had once sworn he’d build a tree house for him in. One promise quickly broken, back in the days he had let himself believe. It hadn’t bothered him when he didn’t come home that Wednesday, or when a conference the next weekend he had shifted the ‘definite’ promise to came up. It didn’t bother him the next weekend, or even the next month.
In fact when it was a year later and Chase’s father went next door to help the neighbour construct a cubby house for his six year old’s birthday, he’d helped. It had been one of those thick summer nights where the heat threatens to suffocate you, and yet being out in the open with his father had been one of the best night’s of his life. His mother had watched from inside, and squeezed Chase’s hand as he came back home later on.
“He’s learning,” she had whispered. “I promise he’s learning.”
Chase had just forced a smile and made her tea, haunted by the wavering uncertainty in her tone. They couldn’t bear any more heartbreak in this house. The last time had been trouble enough.
He walks out to the tree and traces his hands over the rough bark. He swings himself up onto a thick branch and looks out over the yard. Somehow the view is more disappointing now. He hoists himself higher. He can see the church his parents married in, the same he was baptised in, and had taken up his path towards seminary school. The cross stands prominent as ever, and he thinks of stories of rebirth and sacrifice, wonders what this means for his own mother.
“I’m sorry.” He cries out, to no one in particular, as he shifts his way back onto flat ground.
-
Now.
Once Chase has started packing, he cannot make himself stop. Suddenly he sees Cameron’s shadows on the walls and sights her footstep imprinted, erasable, on the carpet. It haunts him.
He shoves every memory into a box, first, and then the insignificant things. Clothes. Books. And then everything. He’s finished before he’s sure he’s started, and stares around to a once-home bare with the exception of a littering of identical brown cardboard boxes.
It’s time to go.
He sells the condo the very next week.
And now, it's time to leave and turn to dust.