Songfic Meme
Directions: Open up iTunes (or turn on your iPod/mp3 player) and set the songs to shuffle. For the first ten songs that come up, write a short story for it. You only have the duration of the song to write - once it stops, the writing must also cease, unfinished or not. Pausing or rewinding the song is cheating (but if you do that, we don’t need to know ). The stories can share the same title as the song that’s playing (don’t forget to name the artist!)
1. Placebo - Running Up That Hill
A sense of dread lay thick in the air, clouding his senses and falling heavily on his ears. Illogical, he thinks; emotions should not have the ability to change the texture of the atmosphere… Wide eyes swiveled to find his; the blue in their irises were muted by fear and dilated pupils. He changed his mind: fear is tangible. Those wide eyes dropped to his torso, to the dark stain spreading along the blue of his shirt, and narrowed when he stumbled, barely catching himself on sharp red and gray rocks. A blast reverberated in the canyon, shattering a boulder several meters away. In front of him, Jim cursed, turned, and fired indiscriminately.
“Don’t shoot. Move…” His protest rose weakly. If his voice cracked in the middle, he would deny it until his dying day (not long from now, his mind whispered. He ignored the thought.)
“You’re coming with me.” His captain was foolishly stubborn. A familiar argument ensued:
“The statistical likelihood of the both of us surviving is less than-“
“Shut up. That’s an order - I don’t want to hear about the fucking statistics. You are not dying in this godforsaken place, and I am not leaving without you-“
“As the Captain, you are more valuable to the-“A cold look and a chilly hand at his jaw stopped him. The pulse there was sluggish to him, even if he knew the man’s heart was racing).
“You undervalue yourself.” Another blast sounded, closer this time. They looked back in unison. “Now, run.”
2. Sia - Breathe Me
Luke does not understand many things. He doesn’t understand how one boy could know so much and yet never say a word about it… He doesn’t know why he only feels like he’s breathing (living) when he’s running, or sitting next to the boy that feels. Cold wrapped its fingers around him, and he breathed, feeling small…
He saw red paint and a green eye; he fell into those colors and clung, hoping to save beauty from madness, a frozen pulse, a misplaced blade. He wanted to save an author from drowning within the captivating blackness of his own words. He wanted (so very badly) to meet the subject of that author’s passions.
This he does know: a silver grin can be interpreted many ways, but when aimed in his direction, it means love. And when he smiles back at that mouth, they’re both reliving the day they saved each other from the cold and dark.
3. The Cab - Bounce
Sharp eyes follow him in many directions, but one pair in particular attracts him. They are dark and shrewd. Many words fall from many pairs of lips, but only a few words stick to him. The minute his follower knows that, yes, I know you know that I know… They start.
It’s not right, it’s not fair (but neither are committed in any sense, so who’s cheating? One is deathly afraid of going anywhere near the word ‘fidelity’) but they keep going back, craving dark words and freezing hands and breaking ties with any sort of honesty. Below them, every week, the furnace flares and fails. Each day one sees the other, and they both take turns writing lies on the other’s lips.
It’s not right, but it’s what they need.
4. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Phenomena
The second he walks into a room, all eyes are on him. I look away (I’m not a conformist, and no, he does not possess any kind of magnetism that affects me). His body sways with his easy gait (he cants his hips just so), setting us at either tension or ease; his eyes rake over his domain in a sinuous (I refuse to use the word seductive) fashion. His lips shape themselves into the likeness of a smile, but right about now, I think it’s less of a smile and more of a smirk -
“Hello, gorgeous,” is one of his common greetings (he always has the stupid habit of greeting the pretty blondes like that. He doesn’t even like girls with blonde hair. What the hell…), and I can’t help but tighten a fist at the words. Not that I can really possess him - not that quicksilver nature. But then again… I felt like I was (owning him, wanting and having him) last night… Perhaps things change in daylight hours.
I’m rambling, aren’t I?
The tilt of his eyes and the angle of his shoulders are all platonic right now, I notice. Wait, I noticed? I’m not watching, I am not watching. The numbers in front of me are quite fascinating, yes…
“And how are we this morning?” smooth words ghost past my cheek. My first thought is, he said “we.” Then, I did not jump, no, I did not just jump in surprise. As I turn to face him, I see that his face is doing a fair approximation of one of my own expressions. But my raised eyebrow trumps his, I think with a strangled smugness. His smile is teasing.
“Just fine, thanks.” A supernova exploded in my chest and reflected in the phenomena of his eyes.
5. Keane - A Bad Dream
The clouds above are grey, like your eyes. The ice in them cannot rival the look on your face. Nor can they rival the words you drag so beautifully from yourself, tearing my heart and mind out upon string covered in broken glass.
The alarm screams my rise to awareness. I surrender to the morning.
I did not love you then, I cannot love you now.
I repeated that all day today, thinking of you. Thinking of how I fought, and how worthless the effort made me.
I hate you now. Are you happy? It was what you had intended.
The darkness blurs away.
I walked down the grey hallway (you were just as colorful in your lowest moments), feeling lost as the memory of you wrestled my poker face (freezing and empty) into a strange expression. I miss you, even when I cannot defend you now. I can’t wake up from this nightmare - I can’t fight my way out.
I’m tired. I sleep.
Was I ever your friend? Or were we just tools to one another, used for the simple purpose of escaping reality?
I wore your favorite color on a certain day in March, and I daydreamed of the two of us blurring the lines of sleep and waking.
I daydreamed about your favorite color and wore it to the funeral later that day. I never liked March, anyway.
I heard your laugh today, whispered somewhere on the wind as it wended its way through the black fingers of the trees. I almost wished that you were here…
Tomorrow, I won’t wake up.
6. Anberlin - Naïve Orleans
You’ve come and gone as you always have, never telling where, never saying who or why. You never answered my questions directly. Never in my whole life have you answered me in a way I could understand, and this circuitous infliction has made me an inept coward, plagued with alexithymia and never enough words.
I called you the other day and no one came to answer. I left you e-mails, composed letters in my mind, and wasted expensive long-distance dollars just to be met by a phone ringing off the hook. Have I told you that on that day, I had to call your sister just to find out where you were? I couldn’t find you. I thought you had died.
I am not afraid of anything that happens to me. I bear the scars and disassociation and post-traumatic stress as proof of that lack of fear.
But you are almost everything to me.
You were my world for nearly thirteen years, and even now the shackles of your strange ‘love’ keep me from expressing my own.
Three - no, four years later, after pain, too many tears and too many bonds of trust broken beyond repair (leaving me stranded in the cold with no one to run to, as you were never there when you should have been), I have realized one thing:
Life goes on without you, and the world still turns when you’re not around.
7. The Hush Sound - Love You Much Better
I could not believe he just kissed her. Kissed her, right there in the middle of the freaking transporter room, in front of tons of audiences everywhere, while the rest of us fans were sitting there, glaring at the screen, thinking as loud as we can: “Kirk is standing RIGHT THERE! Why the hell are you kissing Uhura?!” Well, for his credit, Chris-Pine-As-Kirk looked properly affronted. Which was good, seeing as Kirk freaking owns Spock’s soul. Yes, yes he does, and I am not going to refute that belief (no, it’s a fact).
US fangirls are also thinking, “Zachary Quinto: Why do you kiss everybody but me? I just sit back and watch…” Yes, ZQ, you had better beware, because we are after you. You too, Chris Pine. And next time we see the two of you on screen for a Star Trek movie (please? Pretty please?) We are going to make sure the two of you GET IT RIGHT; as in, PLEASE NO INTERRUPTIONS FROM ANYONE ELSE (especially not of the opposite sex). In your free time, to properly research you Star Trek Characters, I recommend that you read some slash.
Oh my God, this is nothing but complete and utter crack.
Hahahaha.
8. Seal - Rolling
He’d like to believe he was there for every moment. He’d also like to believe he was completely intact (enough to be sufficiently supportive) for the morning after. A sun that he couldn’t see rolled its way above the horizon and slipped slyly through the wooden slats of the blinds on the window. He mimicked the motion with his eyes closed. In the half -light of the winter morning, the colors of the room were leeched out into a grayish, unsaturated state. His eyes wandered, but his thoughts focused to one sharp point. Half a room away lay a splash of color sleeping the sleep of a corpse.
An almost-corpse, he corrected darkly, silently. Replaying the events of the past months (from one subtly poignant day in September, tracked all the way to the disaster of yesterday), he tried to see past the shades of gray and attempted to remember life through the eyes of the body across the room. With only twisted, inked words and vividly memorized works of art as his guides, his mind’s eye began to see. With each tick of the clock, he saturated himself with a different artist’s colors and outlined his thoughts with someone else’s passionate words. With each shared moment (whether through words or pictures or interactions brought back from memory), he was overwhelmed. He truly did not understand it, at all. Not then.
A set of words came across his musings, and he found them true in two cases: They say the trouble with me is that I'm one who knows/but I just don't understand/Rolling back my head I think I've learned that I do want to live… Now he understands. Half a room away, a pair of eyes opened.
9. Regina Spektor - Bartender
There’s a blizzard outside, flying with a stinging ferocity two feet away from his hiding place. He absolutely hates winter. Tipping his head back, he watches the stone around him sway and spin in a delightfully dizzying pattern. His hazy eyes tried to follow the pattern, but… Thinking was too hard at the moment. A tear dripped from his lips to his sleeve and he laughed a broken little laugh, trying not to remember.
He’d kill for the burn and trickle of alcohol, but he didn’t quite think before making his way up here. Not that it mattered; he could hardly feel the blizzard from the fuzziness in his limbs (what color were those pills again? Did he take the white ones or the blue ones?). With thoughts resembling circles, he figured that he didn’t need alcohol to land in this state.
Land, don’t think about landing… The ground was far, far below him, and he doubted the snow was soft enough to prevent a death by falling at his height.
Okay, so alcohol, maybe… (love will be the death of me/ love is so fickle/ it starts with a flood/ and it ends in a trickle…) He laughed again, and it hurt his throat. He should have never written those letters… If someone was smart enough, they’d find him and stop him and make him live through each shitty day… He got up and promptly stumbled into the wall (I’ve been too candid/ now I’m barely standing… Maybe if I sober up/ I’ll finally stop pretending/ love is forever…)
10. Rihanna - Russian Roulette
He has felt fear before, but never like this. At this moment - “Do you have the time?”
“Twenty-two hundred hours…” the ‘sir’ is almost forgotten, tacked on in haste (he doesn’t care, and a thought not his own flickers in his head: military time is weird/ why can’t we just use clocks…) At this moment, down to the seconds he’s counting unconsciously, he is absolutely terrified.
There’s red on the sterile white floors, and it is slick, slick and cold and the color should calm him, but… he knows its origin. He knows the components of it, its various bases and capabilities and where it comes from and no, it isn’t calming, not in the slightest…
Nineteen hundred hours:
The heartbeat under his hand is far too slow. Under normal circumstances, he can barely feel it, but now it’s almost as if it has disappeared completely (right along with the disappearance of blue eyes behind flesh lids). There is a tangible weight of terror consuming his mind, so he forces calm, but when he looks down at his hands (holding onto a face tinted red, tracing lips stained crimson), he notices that they are shaking, and that he cannot stop them.
He’s faced a murderer unflinchingly and watched genocide happen in slow motion. He has also been provoked into nearly committing homicide. He has been provoked into cracking the concrete veneer of his stoically built calm in order to face the terrifyingly tangible nature of his own emotions. All of that feeling paled when compared to the foreign color of blood on the floor.
“Oh, God, there’s so much of it…”
“Why are you just standing there? Dammit, you’re all idiots!. Someone get a gurney, alert Medical, and you! You’re needed elsewhere, go, and take some control of this place! Someone’s gotta do it, and that isn’t my job. I’m a doctor, for Christ’s sake…”
There’s a familiar hand on his arm, and long eyelashes consuming his peripheral vision. Her voice is coming through slowly (that is insensible, he muses; that is only his perception, he tells himself), as if through water. He can’t bring himself to look at her right now, and she knows this. She moves, as if to take his hands, and he moves away to conceal a flinch (her brow creases; she sees it for what it really is; she knows him too well).
“Go. Just… Go. No one’s going to stop you. Things are under control now.” He attempts to protest.
“I -“ Her glare is hard and brittle.
“Don’t you dare. Do not try to rationalize yourself out of your own feelings. Everything is as controlled as it can get up here and we are not infants in need of supervision. If we have to use force to take you out of here, we will, if you’re not going to move yourself.” He knows well enough when to surrender.
When he passes a certain dreaded room several floors below, someone is cleaning up the blood on the floor. As he passes the medical bay, he can see (the monitors are ever flashing reports) a sluggish heart beating precariously at the edge of survival.