i see dead people
There's an image I have in my head of a murder scene, where the killer slowly, lovingly, fills the dead one's mouth with crushed flowers, forcing them down a constricted throat. I want to use it in a fic, or maybe I've already used it but I can't remember where. All I can see are the perfect oval nails on the killer's hands, and how long and elegant the fingers are, and they could be male or female, really, and I wouldn't notice. And there isn't really much colour in the image, other than the flowers, which are all shades of red, like surrogate blood in the dead one's mouth. The victim is not fixed in my head, but a mass of something that signals helplessness, or innocence. There's something vaguely sexual about the scene, apart from the overt sexual act of the flowers-in-the-mouth, and it's enough to make the viewer's bile rise. Because there is a viewer, you see. There's always a viewer, and they can do nothing but watch and try not to throw up, because that would get them noticed.
And I'm sitting here, trying to figure out what the hell I'm thinking and seeing - it's not a nice image, or one I want to keep - and all of a sudden I realise that it's not - it's not an image of the killer, or of the watcher, but of the watcher of the watcher, and that's when it clicks that the whole thing is about telepathy, and witnessing.
This is in lieu of saying that I'm writing a Centauri fic - a Vir fic, in fact - focused on the Centauri telepaths and their fate post TFoCP. I want to keep the fic neat and compact, but instead it wants to grow limbs and tentacles and things, and be about suffering and purges and the fall-out from Cartagia's sick little games. Because it's Cartagia who is the killer in my image, of course, who is very carefully arranging his victim as if s/he were a work of art, and everyone is just standing around, watching, and not doing anything. Initially, I was going to write about a man who tries to save some telepaths, but the more I fiddle with it, the more it comes to me that this story isn't about some sort of Centauri Schindler, complete with feel-good ending, but, rather, about the telepaths who see all of this unfold from a thousand different angles and a million different points of view. The reason the story wasn't working is because I've been trying to tell the wrong story, and it took flowers in a corpse's mouth to convince me of this. I don't care about the mechanics of hiding telepaths from a Drakh- or Shadow-ordered purge, or of how my protagonist managed to escape the Emperor's attentions. I do care about the society at large: a society where you can take the word of a telepath in court, and history can be built by witnesses as well as facts. I was looking at Anne Frank's Diary for inspiration; instead, I should have been looking at Rashomon.
Also, tomorrow I go to buy some clothes. And shoes. And possibly underwear. Which is always good. Yes.
P.S. monanotlisa! Email me your address to make sure I have the correct spelling etc of it so I can mail you some West Wing, girl!
And I'm sitting here, trying to figure out what the hell I'm thinking and seeing - it's not a nice image, or one I want to keep - and all of a sudden I realise that it's not - it's not an image of the killer, or of the watcher, but of the watcher of the watcher, and that's when it clicks that the whole thing is about telepathy, and witnessing.
This is in lieu of saying that I'm writing a Centauri fic - a Vir fic, in fact - focused on the Centauri telepaths and their fate post TFoCP. I want to keep the fic neat and compact, but instead it wants to grow limbs and tentacles and things, and be about suffering and purges and the fall-out from Cartagia's sick little games. Because it's Cartagia who is the killer in my image, of course, who is very carefully arranging his victim as if s/he were a work of art, and everyone is just standing around, watching, and not doing anything. Initially, I was going to write about a man who tries to save some telepaths, but the more I fiddle with it, the more it comes to me that this story isn't about some sort of Centauri Schindler, complete with feel-good ending, but, rather, about the telepaths who see all of this unfold from a thousand different angles and a million different points of view. The reason the story wasn't working is because I've been trying to tell the wrong story, and it took flowers in a corpse's mouth to convince me of this. I don't care about the mechanics of hiding telepaths from a Drakh- or Shadow-ordered purge, or of how my protagonist managed to escape the Emperor's attentions. I do care about the society at large: a society where you can take the word of a telepath in court, and history can be built by witnesses as well as facts. I was looking at Anne Frank's Diary for inspiration; instead, I should have been looking at Rashomon.
Also, tomorrow I go to buy some clothes. And shoes. And possibly underwear. Which is always good. Yes.
P.S. monanotlisa! Email me your address to make sure I have the correct spelling etc of it so I can mail you some West Wing, girl!