Fic: You push the button, we do the rest.
Title: You push the button, we do the rest.
Recipient: azn_jack_fiend
Author: lyryk
Rating: PG
Words: 541
Characters: Estelle
Spoilers: For ‘Small Worlds’
Summary: Four photographs Estelle takes with her Brownie, and one she doesn’t. Written for the prompt Estelle 1940s fairy-hunting expedition.
A/N: Title from Kodak advertisement for the Brownie. Written for tw_femficfest. alt_universe_me beta’d this, because she is fabulous.
*
Four photographs Estelle takes with her Brownie
1.
She wades carefully through the stream, pebbles cold and slippery beneath her bare feet, her shoes and stockings stuffed into her handbag. The water makes her movements noiseless. The sparkling, dancing stream seems to laugh with an abandon that she cannot share.
It’s the first time she’s seen them in daylight. She crouches low, adjusts the aperture and lowers her face to the camera.
In the developed photograph they look like splashes of light in the distance, illuminating a bush like ornaments at Christmas.
2.
She spends almost every evening in her improvised darkroom in the shed at the bottom of the garden. She moves methodically between the fixer and the developer, the smell of the chemicals familiar and embracing. It’ll cling to her clothes and earn her strange looks from the others at dinner.
There in the shed, surrounded by her warm cocoon of smells and red light, she sees what she was hoping for. The image forms tantalisingly slowly before her eyes, the fairy’s face shivering to life beneath the surface of the transparent liquid in its orange plastic tray.
3.
Later that week, she goes to a talk on ‘The Lives of Fairies’ at the Theosophical Society, her one successful photograph tucked carefully into a brown cardboard folder in her shoulder-bag. After the talk, she doesn’t have the nerve to go up to the speaker to show her the photograph.
She takes a photograph of the empty lecture room after the rest of the audience has left. The projector is still on, revealing the small imperfections on the white screen behind the speaker’s desk.
That night, she develops the photograph and clips it up to dry. She doesn’t remember the speaker’s name, but when she looks at the image, the paper almost wrinkling with wetness, she sees her future in it. It excites her like nothing else ever has, not even falling in love.
4.
The London blitz makes the night sky explode with colours, like fireworks. She slips out onto the balcony from the Astoria Ballroom and rests her camera on the plinth of a statue. She sets the shutter speed on manual and aims the lens at the sky, her fingertip keeping the button on the top depressed for two whole seconds.
Later that week, she sells the photograph to the Times, and considers for the first time that she may have a career other than the pursuit of bright, winged creatures.
And one she doesn’t.
It’s in her head: an image of the day she’ll die. She sees it the way she sees the rain-washed streets from the omnibus: the sounds muted and the fragrance of rain blocked by the large glass window.
She’s lying on the ground. She seems to be in a garden, but the rain trickling into her eyes is blurring her vision. She thinks and thinks and thinks about the image until it’s like a memory, strong and heavy inside her head. She returns to it on quiet, morose evenings and drinks from it the way others would from decanters of brandy. A garden’s not a bad place to die, she decides.
Recipient: azn_jack_fiend
Author: lyryk
Rating: PG
Words: 541
Characters: Estelle
Spoilers: For ‘Small Worlds’
Summary: Four photographs Estelle takes with her Brownie, and one she doesn’t. Written for the prompt Estelle 1940s fairy-hunting expedition.
A/N: Title from Kodak advertisement for the Brownie. Written for tw_femficfest. alt_universe_me beta’d this, because she is fabulous.
*
Four photographs Estelle takes with her Brownie
1.
She wades carefully through the stream, pebbles cold and slippery beneath her bare feet, her shoes and stockings stuffed into her handbag. The water makes her movements noiseless. The sparkling, dancing stream seems to laugh with an abandon that she cannot share.
It’s the first time she’s seen them in daylight. She crouches low, adjusts the aperture and lowers her face to the camera.
In the developed photograph they look like splashes of light in the distance, illuminating a bush like ornaments at Christmas.
2.
She spends almost every evening in her improvised darkroom in the shed at the bottom of the garden. She moves methodically between the fixer and the developer, the smell of the chemicals familiar and embracing. It’ll cling to her clothes and earn her strange looks from the others at dinner.
There in the shed, surrounded by her warm cocoon of smells and red light, she sees what she was hoping for. The image forms tantalisingly slowly before her eyes, the fairy’s face shivering to life beneath the surface of the transparent liquid in its orange plastic tray.
3.
Later that week, she goes to a talk on ‘The Lives of Fairies’ at the Theosophical Society, her one successful photograph tucked carefully into a brown cardboard folder in her shoulder-bag. After the talk, she doesn’t have the nerve to go up to the speaker to show her the photograph.
She takes a photograph of the empty lecture room after the rest of the audience has left. The projector is still on, revealing the small imperfections on the white screen behind the speaker’s desk.
That night, she develops the photograph and clips it up to dry. She doesn’t remember the speaker’s name, but when she looks at the image, the paper almost wrinkling with wetness, she sees her future in it. It excites her like nothing else ever has, not even falling in love.
4.
The London blitz makes the night sky explode with colours, like fireworks. She slips out onto the balcony from the Astoria Ballroom and rests her camera on the plinth of a statue. She sets the shutter speed on manual and aims the lens at the sky, her fingertip keeping the button on the top depressed for two whole seconds.
Later that week, she sells the photograph to the Times, and considers for the first time that she may have a career other than the pursuit of bright, winged creatures.
And one she doesn’t.
It’s in her head: an image of the day she’ll die. She sees it the way she sees the rain-washed streets from the omnibus: the sounds muted and the fragrance of rain blocked by the large glass window.
She’s lying on the ground. She seems to be in a garden, but the rain trickling into her eyes is blurring her vision. She thinks and thinks and thinks about the image until it’s like a memory, strong and heavy inside her head. She returns to it on quiet, morose evenings and drinks from it the way others would from decanters of brandy. A garden’s not a bad place to die, she decides.