the killing moon & lips like sugar (alisha, simon, misfits, pg)
disclaimer: I own nothing
pg: for language
author: ladygawain
characters: alisha and simon
summary: two one-shots. killing moon is set from the closing scenes of 204, a few moments from 205 that you'll recognize, and then veers off, for alisha. lips like sugar, simon's epic love of dough balls and strange affinity for spider-man, set some time between 206 and 207.
note: yeah, I started these suckers soon after 204 and never got around to finishing either of them. killing moon was really my attempt to play around in alisha's headspace as all this horrible, crazy stuff happens to her, around her and how she's making sense of things. lips like sugar was my attempt to play with simon and their first date and how hysterical it is that alisha's become a professional stalker. they sort of work together but not really. i hope you enjoy, my handle on these characters is shaky at best. feedback is sweet. thanks for reading. unbeta'd, oy, mistakes are mine as is the excessive use of semi colons.
credit: echo and the bunnymen. i've rediscovered my epic love for this band, thank you, simon. the lyrics to 'the killing moon' are freakishly relevant, i'm sure everyone knows this but it's kind of awesome.
the killing moon
in starlit nights I saw you
so cruelly you kissed me
your lips a magic world
your sky all hung with jewels
the killing moon
will come too soon…
I
She’s humming something under her breath while she rocks. She can’t remember for the life of her what the fuck it is.
He’d been shaking-before, or had he? She’d been trying to comfort him like something her mum used to do, like he was a child crying in the dark. He hadn’t made a sound even then, she thought maybe he fainted. But she could feel the way his muscles moved, like he was having a seizure or something; and then he went still and didn’t move again.
But she kept rocking.
-
How long has she been sitting here crying? Her thighs hurt, and there are spikes of pain in her lower back and she’s lost all feeling in her fingers from gripping at him so hard. He’s still and quiet. The blood on his chest, on her fingers, is cool and sticky like syrup left out too long in the air.
Fuck. She needs to get up.
The others will come-she’s sure they’ve figured out a way out already, maybe she should go check, but she can’t-and find her like this and then she’ll have to explain. And she can’t explain because he told her not because it’ll mess things up-and she’s not sure she even has the fucking words to explain this, any of this.
The match box is grainy and hard against her palm, solid.
Get up -get up -get up- get the fuck up, Alisha.
She doesn’t fucking want to. Maybe she can just stay here and sit with him. The soft scratch of his hair at her chin is like an illusion. She presses her mouth to it for a dream-like moment; and if she reaches down to touch his hands, maybe slip her fingers through his, he’ll turn around and smile a quiet smile and run his fingers across her knuckle. The forehead at her mouth is clammy though, like someone sick with the flu or something. And she can’t forget the dark red blood seeping thickly onto her hands or the smell of it that crowds her nostrils-or how still he is.
-
She pushes him away, and he slides onto the ground noiselessly, dead weight. It’s something she’s always noticed about Simon, always so quiet. It used to make the other Simon, the one not hers, invisible, unseen, weird but him-it drew her, pulled her eyes, everything.
He’s dead. Dead people don’t make any noise at all.
-
The petrol can is heavy, makes her stumble but she picks it up and walks back to him. She sloshes it, tries not to get any on her shoes because then she’ll burn right with him. That’s enough, she thinks. She hopes.
She lights the match. The tiny flame flickers and burns with a hiss, and she can feel quiet heat along her knuckles. She thinks about letting it burn, burn right down into her nails, into her skin. She holds it by the end, bare fingertips and nothing else and then she lets it fall. It’s easy really.
She’s afraid to look at his face, if she does; she thinks that maybe she won’t be able to do this at all. She imagines what it must feel like. Burning-the fire eating him up like that. Like the time she set fire to a plastic bag with her cousins one day because they thought it would be fun and the red-colored plastic melted and dripped in fat, oily droplets and the smell of it had scratched at her nose and eyes and wouldn’t go away for days.
-
It smells like scorched petrol, bitter as salt on her tongue and sweet like sickness, sweet like burnt sugar and blood, and it makes her eyes water.
-
Her eyes are dry, like chalk.
Her feet walk. One in front of the other. There’s a pebble digging into her left heel, she must have got it when she was running. She’s not sure where she’s going. Maybe her body will know when to stop when it gets there. She walks twenty-three steps, counts them exactly before she has to stop again. She leans against the wall, coughing hard, whole body heavy so she can barely hold herself up, and spit dribbling from her mouth.
He’s dead.
(She heads home. Doesn’t even bother to find the others, she’s not sure she could lie even if she tried. And, she doesn’t think it consciously but the truth of it is-she’s not sure she can face him. Even if it’s the him that isn’t him.)
II
She sits down on the ground, her fingers dig into the gravel by her feet before she wraps them around her knees, and tries not to cry.
The others think this is about Curtis. Curtis thinks it’s about Curtis. They look at her sometimes and she’s not sure who she wants to slap most, stupid twats. They’re her friends and everything-yeah; she can admit that now, killing a bunch of people together makes it so they’re a part of her, even Nathan. But it drives her up the wall. It’s bad enough trying not to let Kelly hear what she’s thinking half the time.
Strangely enough or maybe not so strange, the only one who doesn’t treat her funny is Nathan. So she finds herself near him more than the others-except for Simon that is (but that one was obvious.) Nathan makes jokes; Nathan runs off at the mouth until you’re ready to scream and tell him to shut the fuck up; with Nathan, it’s easy to fade into the background.
Simon, not so much. He notices everything or it feels like he does the way he watches things and people, quietly, still, thinking (some things never change.) She’s seen the way he looks at her sometimes when he catches her looking. Or that one time when she found herself sitting next to him, and he made one of his awkward jokes, and everyone laughed, and she’d reached out on instinct to touch the back of his arm where the dark downy fuzz, dusted his pale skin-felt this ridiculous urge to touch it, tiny bristles against her palm. Or that one time she’d leaned in to put her head on his shoulder for a second, pretend he was something to lean on, or maybe breathe in his smell-clean, simple, familiar. He’d caught her at the last second and reared back.
“What’re you doing?”
She’d laughed it off, said something about it being a joke or like she had balance problems or some shit.
He doesn’t understand (never will)-what a head-fuck it is to even see him. This him, just standing there-breathing, and know that the other him is nothing but black scorch marks and burnt-black bones on a shitty floor in some random estate. She knows this because she went to check. The police didn’t even bother to try figure it out, just some kids playing a prank or some homeless person fucking around with matches.
She wiped at her eyes roughly. Just - fuck! Just stop it - stop being so… such an emotional idiot.
She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and was scrambling to her feet before she could even think to stop herself.
-
He’s weirded out. She can tell and in the corner of her head she’s laughing her arse off because she’s become such a loser-stalker person.
He passes the earphones to her, makes a show of not touching her (the other version of him might have pressed them into her palm, wrapped his fingers around hers and lingered) and she laughs, and leans in a little to play at closeness he doesn’t feel (yet).
-
It’s different with him and yet the same. Sure, his shirts are crisper and perfectly ironed; she can’t imagine this Simon wearing a vest or whatever. His hair’s slicked down, he’s patted it down self-consciously twice already, and there’s the no-touching thing. But his eyes - it’s the same or it makes her feel the same.
-
She sits in the bunker sometimes-in the dark by herself. Or with the lights blaring bright, leaving everything exposed; the gray on the walls and floor cold like hospital room floors. The picture in her hand, she lets her fingers slide across his smile and hers (but not her at all).
It’s cold comfort is what it is. And she gets angry and has this urge to go off and tell Simon everything or break things or even tear the photo up into shreds, maybe burn it-she’s good at that apparently.
She even goes to the library, checks out a few books, a movie or two about time travel and all that shit. Only messes up her mind even more with all that loops and twin paradoxes and relativity stuff. And because what if it is all down to her. If she fucks up then what happens? She catches herself double-thinking everything, worried that if she turns left or right, or smiles too much at Simon, asks him out for pizza or a movie-she’s making the wrong move and not just ‘letting things play out’ like she's supposed to. She rolls her eyes at the ceiling at that and rolls over onto her stomach, buries her nose in the blankets and breathes.
She remembers that knowledge is power bullshit they used to feed to kids in high school to get them to do their homework and get their A-levels or something. Well, that was a lie because she knows and every other day she’s asking herself, what the fuck does she actually know? Nothing.
So maybe she could just throw in the towel because it’s hard-too hard.
-
But then she goes to pick up litter or wash down walls or clean up bird shit or whatever and there’s this Simon with his smile, and his hand smoothing down his too-neat hair, eating neat little sandwiches cut into little squares, slowly coming out of his shell so that there’s days when she has to do a double-take because he’s said or done something that sounds just like her Simon and the lines begin to blur. Days when he’ll turn his head a certain way or fold his arms across his chest or just stand there and she forgets.
He makes her laugh too; surprises her with that quiet sense of humor.
So she figures she’ll just wait-because there’s nothing else she can do, is there now? She has never had to be this fucking patient for a single thing in her life.
fin
lips like sugar
now
He sat at the table and folded the serviette into neat little squares. He unfolded it and ironed it straight with his hands, as straight as it could get and folded it again. This time a fan-like accordion that he pinched together between two fingers. He glanced at his watch, shuffled in his chair, and looked at the people seated on tables around him. There was a woman overflowing in her chair in the corner, lifting a slice above her head and letting the string of cheese float in the air above her mouth. To his left, a family of five-always an awkward number-the mother doling out slices on paper plates, slapping wrists when one of the kids gets to fussy, blowing hair out of her face in frustration at the husband who sits across from her with his eyes glued to the TV screen and the Champions League semi-final playing out there with an expression of blank boredom.
He looked at the napkin, creased in front of him, and folded it one more time into the shape of a paper airplane. It was crinkled and so the plane came out looking like a ruffled mess, shredded at the edges.
He wondered if maybe this was stupid-if he was stupid.
She wasn’t coming.
He knew it. He’d known it all along but he’d hoped-she’d even remembered the garlic dough balls. A silly part of him had gotten excited at the thought that she remembered. Because this was him-and there were lots of things in this world that made sense, and a lot more that didn’t, and the idea of her actually liking him seemed firmly set in the latter. Beautiful girls didn’t go for guys like him-not in real life that is. In comic books, maybe-guys like Peter Parker or something who, even though they were weedy and weird, always managed to get the prettiest girl to give them a second look. But this wasn’t The Amazing Spider-man. This was real life and he couldn’t help remembering the one time he’d even let it enter his mind, the idea of him and Alisha being anything, and the way her words had cut him to pieces.
But this time it hadn’t even been him that started it.
-
before
Simon is sifting through the comics section at the local library. The selection isn’t that great but he comes to check them out every few weeks. And now that he’s jobless and there’s no community service to occupy his days, and he’s still deciding whether to apply to school for something and, in a secret part of his mind, dabbling with the idea of using his power to do something-reading graphic novels at the library in between checking out his Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5 box sets is something to do before he goes off to meet up with the gang.
He smiles a little in between the covers of the ninth edition of Strychnine Lives-he’s part of a gang. Real friends who actually considered him their friend, it’s nice.
It’s when he’s placing a book back on the shelf that he stops short. “Alisha-what are you doing here?”
She’s on the other side of the aisle and if he didn’t know any better, he might’ve thought she was looking at him before-but there’s a book or two in her hands and he does know better. Alisha probably has 100 things to do with herself, peering at him through a bookstand wouldn’t even make the list. Still, he’s surprised-simply because a council library on a Saturday afternoon is the last place he’d expect to see her.
“Simon-hi there,” she says, slightly breathless. She props her book on the shelf and walks around to his side. He’s obviously wearing a shocked expression because she takes one look at him and says with a laugh, “Don’t look so surprised to see me in here - I do read you know… even if this place smells like shit all the time.”
He scrambles for words. “Oh-well, I know you read; I just never expected to see you here.”
“Oh, I love the library.” She waves her hand at the room. He notices that her voice is pitched a little higher; she’s looking at some spot beside his head when she says it; she’s bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet.
“Really? I’ve never seen you here before.”
Her gaze pivots back to him and he sees her bristling in irritation, she gives him a tight smile before looking down again.
“What are you reading?” He points at her book.
“Oh, this-it’s just-um just something about time and weird stuff.” She glances down at the cover as if to check the title. He leans in to take a look, and catches her familiar scent. A weird thing to remember: scent. But she smells like something sweet, and feminine. And even though he’s decidedly not the panty-sniffer Nathan accused him of being months ago, he thinks that he might like to sit in her room and spend hours figuring out each component of that smell. He’d never tell her that because she’d probably call him a freak and walk away-but he’s allowed to think it.
“So, I was wondering, Simon-would-do you like … food?”
He blinks at the question that came out of the blue. He has to stop himself from leaning back. Somewhere along the line when he was musing on her scent, she’d shifted closer to him, so that her arms, covered by the purple-and-black striped sweater brushed against his. He gulps. “Do I like food?”
She shrugs and smiles widely and he has to stop himself from gaping because Alisha’s beautiful. And they’re friends but he’s not sure he’s ever had all of that beauty; that smile, everything concentrated entirely on him, all by himself, without the group to diffuse it and make it bearable somehow. “Yeah, I was thinking we could-go for pizza and, you know, maybe some garlic dough balls.”
He stiffens at that. Is she joking? Is she making fun of him? He looks at her carefully, and behind the confident smile there’s a tremulousness to her lips and if he didn’t know better, he’d think she was nervous. She’s holding herself still as if everything is banked on the next few words he says. He’s not sure what this means and he doesn’t want to make presumptions. After all, this could just be her inviting him to eat (pizza and garlic dough balls) as part of the gang, or to be nice to him or something; or maybe she noticed how he was a little down with the whole Jessica thing, maybe-
“Well, yes-I mean, thanks-that would be fun?” Is it a question, a statement-he’s not even sure.
She exhales and laughs and says, “So-you and me, at the pub near Freddie’s, six o’clock-Friday?”
She’s been working at a bar at nights. They were all moving on with life-no more orange suits or community service. No fame either-Curtis made sure of that this time around.
He nods.
“Brilliant.” She lays her hand on his arm and the muscles under his shirt tense; he looks down at pink bubblegum-tipped fingernails startlingly bright against his gray shirt. He’s not sure he remembers a time when Alisha touched him so casually, as if she’d done that sort of thing every single day and it came naturally to her. “I’ll see you then-then. Don’t be late.”
He nods again and she leaves him, a bounce in her step, a wave of her fingers, and him sitting there wondering exactly what happened.
-
now
And now, looking at his watch and seeing it turn to a quarter past six, he knew she probably wasn’t coming.
“Hi Simon!”
His head snapped up so quickly that there was a little crack at the base of his neck and there she was.
“Alisha.” Her name came out stiffly, awkwardly, as if he’d forgotten how to wrap his tongue around the syllables. He gulped and tried to clear the mess he’d made on the table. She smiled and he noticed that her eyes had deep green flecks in them when she looked a certain way. “Were you expecting someone else then?”
He shook his head and let out a chuckle, breathless, frayed nerves smoothed over.
“I’m sorry I’m late-bad habit. Still not allowed to drive either so had to wait for my mum and it was a-” She shrugged with her left shoulder and he noticed her cheeks were a little pink.
She was rambling. “That’s okay; I was-a little late too.” He’d come fifteen minutes early. She snorted disbelievingly because maybe in the time they’d known each other, he’d only ever been late once or twice.
Their eyes met across the table; the table scratched with names of people who’d sat in this same spot in the corner; the cheap, red candle spitting wax in between them that was supposed to be romantic but only radiated a strange oily smell and dark, gray smoke; the shreds of white napkin he’d ripped up earlier; and a smile lifted one corner of his mouth. She smiled back warmly and for a second, he forgot to breathe.
-
It was when he was swallowing down his second dough ball that he remembered-garlic. Shit. She wouldn’t come near him with a stick with his breath all reeking of garlic-that’s if she’d even let him kiss her. And why would he even think she would want him to kiss her or that she’d kiss him, especially with her powers and-. His mind was leaping five hundred kilometers ahead; past overdrive and he had to take a deep breath. Remind himself to stop and stay in the moment especially when he noticed her watching him-with as much intent as he was watching her probably. She took a bite and looked down at his plate. “You all right, yeah?”
He nodded and picked up his slice, smiled a little. Some of the topping dribbled back on his plate. He didn’t even try to clean it up (pizza was probably the only thing he ate and didn't mind it being messy - mostly because he didn't like cheese).
Or maybe he just didn’t care right then.
Somewhere along the way he became convinced of an undeniable truth: this was a date. She knew it, and now he knew it. Fine, he might not get to kiss her upside down in the rain at the end of the night but he got this.
-
later
She did kiss him at the end of the night. He tasted like garlic, and so did she, and the tart sweetness of beer and her lip gloss. She ran her hands through his hair and he stood for moments in shock that it was actually happening and that he wasn’t dreaming. And then the words started bubbling up in his throat and he felt his jaw tighten, his hands grip her waist tight-too tight. She didn’t break off; she came closer and deepened the kiss; long, lazy strokes, her tongue against his. And something happened, like a wave rolling through him and he sank into it, into her and let the words sink like a heavy stone in his belly.
When she pulled away finally, hands and everything-without chaos breaking loose and him running off at the mouth and saying something mad, his head filled with blood as the taste of raspberries remained on his lips, he knew.
Still knowing that maybe this might be all there is and maybe even less than this-he smiled.
fin