(no subject)
Fics I failed at finishing.
Canst thou not minister to a
mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a
rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles
of the brain,
And with some sweet
oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom
of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
- Macbeth
She had chopped off all her hair in the bathroom at the rest stop three towns ago, jagged shorn locks that brush against her cheeks. She’ll even it out when they stop, and with the new length- whatever it winds up being- and the new color, she’s barely recognizable. The length of her hair now brings out the feral glint of her eyes, the lean cut of her cheekbones, the arch of her neck. Several shades lighter, it’s a tawny caramel that only serves to enhance the overall animalistic aura she’s exuding, though whether she is the predator or the prey is uncertain.
She assumes he’ll drive, and he does, in no certain direction and with no set destination. Their map flew out the window five towns ago, after they crossed the line on the map, and she had held the hand with the map out the window and let the wind take it. He had hid his horror. Now he turns when it feels right, left and right and straight for hundreds of miles, nothing but desert and fields and hiccups along their drive, alone on the road, in a car where the air conditioner tells them when they’re down to half a tank and the radio sputters and dies every couple of hundred miles and her window is perpetually rolled down.
She tries to downplay herself- clothes from Walmart, laid in the backseat to fade them out, letting the latent freckles scatter across her face beneath the golden tan she gets when they drive west in the evening and east in the morning, chipped nail polish, boring normal names like Mary and Ellen and Catharine and Gracie, names no one bats an eye at. She’ll drive while he sleeps so they can keep going, or they stop for the night and leave before dawn, because neither can sleep well.
In the rare times they do speak, she says the reason she needs to move is because they can’t catch you if you keep moving.
She had told him, in the dim light of the warehouse early in the morning that she wanted out. She was sick of the life they were leading, sick of lies, sick of the truth, sick of everything. She was leaving this life, and that was all there was to it.
He had given her the standard lines: Don’t overreact; don’t be rash; don’t be silly; think of what you’re doing; think of why of you’re doing this; think of your country. Then, with an undercurrent of sincerity, he had tried specifics: think of why you started this. Think of the adrenaline rush you get every time you realize you’re this much closer to bringing them down. Think of how every step you make, you’re one step closer to whatever we might be able to have someday.
She brings up the last part. Draws it from his lips with inappropriate questions and her keen observation skills. She baits him with the one thing he can’t resist- her.
“Sydney,” he says, using all the willpower he can muster, “You can’t do this.”
The second stop they made she smelled rain, and she asked if it had rained during the night and then evaporated, leaving the scent, because there isn’t a cloud in the sky. The man behind the counter, with leather for skin and slits for eyes, tells her that it hasn’t rained for three weeks. She smiled a little, embarrassed, before wandering around the gas station store. She picked out some chips and candy bars and waters and sodas, not knowing what he liked but hoping for the best. She got goosebumps in the cold store, denim cutoffs and a tank top and hair shorter than she was used to making her shiver as she paid. She brushed past him on the way out as he’s coming in the pay for the gas. The feeling of him against her is becoming more familiar, but still electric, shaking the chill. He smiles at her, and she returns it, shyly.
The abrupt change of temperature made her shiver as she sat in the car, the sun beating down on a town where it hasn’t rained in three weeks and she hasn’t been sitting in the car for more than a minute than the heavens open up and it starts to rain, softly at first, then harder and heavier as she scrambles about to close the windows, noting that clouds have covered the sky. He runs out of the store and jumps into the car, letting in the scent of rain and carrying it on himself. He smiles apologetically, she returns it, dazzlingly.
There had been kisses before- meaningless, conciliatory, comforting pecks given out of love or like or friendship or solidarity- but it was nothing like this. This was rainwater and nature and inevitability and undertones of why did we wait so long and her face was febrile, but his was cool, and they tempered one another out, her heat becoming manageable, his chill rising to mild, pleasant warmth.
When the rain died down, and she withdrew to her seat, self-consciously touching her lips in a daze, the sun peeked out and threw its rays through the windshield. He started drive, and after a few minutes on the road, he smiles at her, and she returns it boldly.
The phone call had come late at night, long after he’d gone to sleep, his limbs heavy and his motions sluggish. He had slurred his last name into the phone with a question mark tacked to the end as he rubbed his eyes. Three-thirty-two.
The answer was his name whimpered back at him, and his brain shot to life with a frantic Oh my god it’s Sydney. Three-thirty-three in the morning and she was crying on the phone; he kept his panic at bay and asked her soothingly what was wrong. Her voice trembled and cracked as she spoke and he was struck with the sudden hideous awareness that she had reached her breaking point.
Where are you, he had asked in a voice suited to calming children, tell me where you are and I’ll find you.
She’d mumbled that she was outside a gas station, using a payphone, stumbling over the street numbers he needed.
“I’ll be right there,” he murmured comfortingly, “It’ll be okay.”
She had hung up then, knowing, even though he did not, that things were far from ever being okay.
She finds a tiny gold cross in Nevada, no bigger than the fingernail, on a delicate chain, and now she toys with it nervously as they drive. It had become a talisman of sorts for her, despite the fact that she had never quite believed in any true religion. The thin gold charm skims her collar bone, imprinting its shape onto her fingers as she clutches at it carefully.
See how worn it is, she asked him once, quietly, while they were entangled in the dark in some seedy dive or another, someone wore this always and loved it. He had nodded in agreement, kissing her hair, his fingers combing through the short locks, framing the face that studied him in such trusting sincerity. Someone wore this to remember their faith, or their luck, she whispered to him then, her eyes dark with something he couldn’t identify. He had pressed his lips to her forehead, her cheeks and her mouth, sweet with a tang of desperation.
You don’t need a cross to remind you, he said quietly. The person who wore it didn’t, either, or they wouldn’t have lost it.
Maybe she did, she replies, starting to drift off to sleep, settling her body beneath his, maybe she found something else to remind her.
He had laid his head beside hers on the pillow and mouthed, you have me to remind you. Why isn’t it enough?
He will always remember that the one thing determining in his life had been electricity.
It was a simple power surge that saved him- turning off in the middle of the night, making her clock flash 12:00 at her intermittently at ten in the morning, the morning that everything changed and made them who they are now.
He had gotten the story out of her piece by piece- her friends letting her sleep in, thinking that she must’ve turned off her alarm and called in sick, or gotten a day off, but not overslept- perfect creature that she was messing up? Impossible. She had groaned, loudly, wondering why no one had called, why no one had woken her, why fate was cruel.
(She hated being late.)
She called in, ready to make apologies and to offer some penance, but no one had answered, and when she had turned on the television, the news told her everything she needed to know.
“Downtown’s prestigious international bank, Credit Dauphine, collapsed at nine-fourteen this morning,” said Channel 5 anchorwoman Chrissy Amarosa.
And so, she fell against her couch and numbly dialed his number, an almost hysterical tinge to her words as she asked shakily what she was to do, where she was to go. She couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t breathe properly.
“Sydney,” he had said calmly, his voice steady. “Sydney.” And she obediently straightens up and wipes at her eyes, lets him tell her what to do. She blows her nose, drinks some water, washes her face.
Then she disappears.
He wakes up with his head pillowed on her stomach, her fingers threaded through his hair and his hand curved under her knees. She is awake and staring at the television, which is for some reason showing the end of an episode of Scooby Doo.
“And I would’ve gotten away with it,” says the adult villain of the episode, holding the head on his costume beneath his arm, “if it weren’t for those meddling kids.”
Lifting his head, he looks at her with sleep-heavy eyes. She pets his hair back and gives him a sweet smile. Too loud, she asks, and he wants to ask what’s keeping her up, but instead nods and lets her stroke at him some more. She frowns at him, concerned: You okay, sweetie? She asks, but only because she doesn’t want him upset.
Irina, in the darkness, pictures little girls.
There are hundreds of them, with different features and eyes and mouths and noses, some happy and some serious and some sad and some crying, but they're all beautiful and they're all hers.
She has Sydney's face in her mind, and sometimes, when she thinks she knows the date, she'll imagine where Sydney is- at ballet class, at school, opening Christmas presents, going to bed. She knows where Sydney's freckles are, and where the top of her head reached on her mother's body, and the size of her hands. Sydney, she knows, she could find in a sea of hundreds.
When her daughter had been born- exactly six months ago, Irina keeps track- her guards had growled that she would have one day with her before she was taken. Irina knew this was not some small mercy on their part, but more of an exercise in futility and torture for her. She had held on to the child, memorizing every inch of her as fast as she could, doing the small things she had done with Sydney as a baby, things that this baby would never remember, and no one would ever remind her.
Ava, she calls her, and she knows this child will be given another name and cast aside somewhere, if she's even allowed to live. She kisses her all over. Ava, Ava, she says, and the baby watches her solemnly, her eyes a dark blue that will turn to brown, eyes that will forget it.
The baby is six months now, sitting up and babbling, able to reach out and sleeping longer and curious, as Sydney had been.
Canst thou not minister to a
mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a
rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles
of the brain,
And with some sweet
oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom
of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
- Macbeth
She had chopped off all her hair in the bathroom at the rest stop three towns ago, jagged shorn locks that brush against her cheeks. She’ll even it out when they stop, and with the new length- whatever it winds up being- and the new color, she’s barely recognizable. The length of her hair now brings out the feral glint of her eyes, the lean cut of her cheekbones, the arch of her neck. Several shades lighter, it’s a tawny caramel that only serves to enhance the overall animalistic aura she’s exuding, though whether she is the predator or the prey is uncertain.
She assumes he’ll drive, and he does, in no certain direction and with no set destination. Their map flew out the window five towns ago, after they crossed the line on the map, and she had held the hand with the map out the window and let the wind take it. He had hid his horror. Now he turns when it feels right, left and right and straight for hundreds of miles, nothing but desert and fields and hiccups along their drive, alone on the road, in a car where the air conditioner tells them when they’re down to half a tank and the radio sputters and dies every couple of hundred miles and her window is perpetually rolled down.
She tries to downplay herself- clothes from Walmart, laid in the backseat to fade them out, letting the latent freckles scatter across her face beneath the golden tan she gets when they drive west in the evening and east in the morning, chipped nail polish, boring normal names like Mary and Ellen and Catharine and Gracie, names no one bats an eye at. She’ll drive while he sleeps so they can keep going, or they stop for the night and leave before dawn, because neither can sleep well.
In the rare times they do speak, she says the reason she needs to move is because they can’t catch you if you keep moving.
She had told him, in the dim light of the warehouse early in the morning that she wanted out. She was sick of the life they were leading, sick of lies, sick of the truth, sick of everything. She was leaving this life, and that was all there was to it.
He had given her the standard lines: Don’t overreact; don’t be rash; don’t be silly; think of what you’re doing; think of why of you’re doing this; think of your country. Then, with an undercurrent of sincerity, he had tried specifics: think of why you started this. Think of the adrenaline rush you get every time you realize you’re this much closer to bringing them down. Think of how every step you make, you’re one step closer to whatever we might be able to have someday.
She brings up the last part. Draws it from his lips with inappropriate questions and her keen observation skills. She baits him with the one thing he can’t resist- her.
“Sydney,” he says, using all the willpower he can muster, “You can’t do this.”
The second stop they made she smelled rain, and she asked if it had rained during the night and then evaporated, leaving the scent, because there isn’t a cloud in the sky. The man behind the counter, with leather for skin and slits for eyes, tells her that it hasn’t rained for three weeks. She smiled a little, embarrassed, before wandering around the gas station store. She picked out some chips and candy bars and waters and sodas, not knowing what he liked but hoping for the best. She got goosebumps in the cold store, denim cutoffs and a tank top and hair shorter than she was used to making her shiver as she paid. She brushed past him on the way out as he’s coming in the pay for the gas. The feeling of him against her is becoming more familiar, but still electric, shaking the chill. He smiles at her, and she returns it, shyly.
The abrupt change of temperature made her shiver as she sat in the car, the sun beating down on a town where it hasn’t rained in three weeks and she hasn’t been sitting in the car for more than a minute than the heavens open up and it starts to rain, softly at first, then harder and heavier as she scrambles about to close the windows, noting that clouds have covered the sky. He runs out of the store and jumps into the car, letting in the scent of rain and carrying it on himself. He smiles apologetically, she returns it, dazzlingly.
There had been kisses before- meaningless, conciliatory, comforting pecks given out of love or like or friendship or solidarity- but it was nothing like this. This was rainwater and nature and inevitability and undertones of why did we wait so long and her face was febrile, but his was cool, and they tempered one another out, her heat becoming manageable, his chill rising to mild, pleasant warmth.
When the rain died down, and she withdrew to her seat, self-consciously touching her lips in a daze, the sun peeked out and threw its rays through the windshield. He started drive, and after a few minutes on the road, he smiles at her, and she returns it boldly.
The phone call had come late at night, long after he’d gone to sleep, his limbs heavy and his motions sluggish. He had slurred his last name into the phone with a question mark tacked to the end as he rubbed his eyes. Three-thirty-two.
The answer was his name whimpered back at him, and his brain shot to life with a frantic Oh my god it’s Sydney. Three-thirty-three in the morning and she was crying on the phone; he kept his panic at bay and asked her soothingly what was wrong. Her voice trembled and cracked as she spoke and he was struck with the sudden hideous awareness that she had reached her breaking point.
Where are you, he had asked in a voice suited to calming children, tell me where you are and I’ll find you.
She’d mumbled that she was outside a gas station, using a payphone, stumbling over the street numbers he needed.
“I’ll be right there,” he murmured comfortingly, “It’ll be okay.”
She had hung up then, knowing, even though he did not, that things were far from ever being okay.
She finds a tiny gold cross in Nevada, no bigger than the fingernail, on a delicate chain, and now she toys with it nervously as they drive. It had become a talisman of sorts for her, despite the fact that she had never quite believed in any true religion. The thin gold charm skims her collar bone, imprinting its shape onto her fingers as she clutches at it carefully.
See how worn it is, she asked him once, quietly, while they were entangled in the dark in some seedy dive or another, someone wore this always and loved it. He had nodded in agreement, kissing her hair, his fingers combing through the short locks, framing the face that studied him in such trusting sincerity. Someone wore this to remember their faith, or their luck, she whispered to him then, her eyes dark with something he couldn’t identify. He had pressed his lips to her forehead, her cheeks and her mouth, sweet with a tang of desperation.
You don’t need a cross to remind you, he said quietly. The person who wore it didn’t, either, or they wouldn’t have lost it.
Maybe she did, she replies, starting to drift off to sleep, settling her body beneath his, maybe she found something else to remind her.
He had laid his head beside hers on the pillow and mouthed, you have me to remind you. Why isn’t it enough?
He will always remember that the one thing determining in his life had been electricity.
It was a simple power surge that saved him- turning off in the middle of the night, making her clock flash 12:00 at her intermittently at ten in the morning, the morning that everything changed and made them who they are now.
He had gotten the story out of her piece by piece- her friends letting her sleep in, thinking that she must’ve turned off her alarm and called in sick, or gotten a day off, but not overslept- perfect creature that she was messing up? Impossible. She had groaned, loudly, wondering why no one had called, why no one had woken her, why fate was cruel.
(She hated being late.)
She called in, ready to make apologies and to offer some penance, but no one had answered, and when she had turned on the television, the news told her everything she needed to know.
“Downtown’s prestigious international bank, Credit Dauphine, collapsed at nine-fourteen this morning,” said Channel 5 anchorwoman Chrissy Amarosa.
And so, she fell against her couch and numbly dialed his number, an almost hysterical tinge to her words as she asked shakily what she was to do, where she was to go. She couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t breathe properly.
“Sydney,” he had said calmly, his voice steady. “Sydney.” And she obediently straightens up and wipes at her eyes, lets him tell her what to do. She blows her nose, drinks some water, washes her face.
Then she disappears.
He wakes up with his head pillowed on her stomach, her fingers threaded through his hair and his hand curved under her knees. She is awake and staring at the television, which is for some reason showing the end of an episode of Scooby Doo.
“And I would’ve gotten away with it,” says the adult villain of the episode, holding the head on his costume beneath his arm, “if it weren’t for those meddling kids.”
Lifting his head, he looks at her with sleep-heavy eyes. She pets his hair back and gives him a sweet smile. Too loud, she asks, and he wants to ask what’s keeping her up, but instead nods and lets her stroke at him some more. She frowns at him, concerned: You okay, sweetie? She asks, but only because she doesn’t want him upset.
Irina, in the darkness, pictures little girls.
There are hundreds of them, with different features and eyes and mouths and noses, some happy and some serious and some sad and some crying, but they're all beautiful and they're all hers.
She has Sydney's face in her mind, and sometimes, when she thinks she knows the date, she'll imagine where Sydney is- at ballet class, at school, opening Christmas presents, going to bed. She knows where Sydney's freckles are, and where the top of her head reached on her mother's body, and the size of her hands. Sydney, she knows, she could find in a sea of hundreds.
When her daughter had been born- exactly six months ago, Irina keeps track- her guards had growled that she would have one day with her before she was taken. Irina knew this was not some small mercy on their part, but more of an exercise in futility and torture for her. She had held on to the child, memorizing every inch of her as fast as she could, doing the small things she had done with Sydney as a baby, things that this baby would never remember, and no one would ever remind her.
Ava, she calls her, and she knows this child will be given another name and cast aside somewhere, if she's even allowed to live. She kisses her all over. Ava, Ava, she says, and the baby watches her solemnly, her eyes a dark blue that will turn to brown, eyes that will forget it.
The baby is six months now, sitting up and babbling, able to reach out and sleeping longer and curious, as Sydney had been.