i wish to god i could touch your hand
Some Things Last a Long Time. Twilight/Original. Collin/Diana, Collin/Loki. The colours are bright, bright as ever. The red is strong, the blue is true. Part of the mad 'verse etzyofi and I share, following Halo (the story, not the video game).
Written for 31_days , Sept. 02 ~ in ten years the world will have changed, with Daniel Johnston's 1990 and Songs of Pain plunking along in the background. Dedicated to that braintwin of mine, Angie bb - hope that big ole university is treating you right, dear heart. <3
12. They meet at twelve, Collin and Diana. She wears a crown of beaten metal and draws starships and pillars of light in the margins of all her notebooks. He is skinny for his age, likes to set off Roman Candles and jump off roofs, and he doesn't yet have calluses from playing guitar. That summer, they watch the entire run of Firefly, including Serenity and the originally unaired episodes. Her presence makes him sit still for longer than five minutes, and in his presence she actually says more than two words.
Then Embry comes home, and everything ends before it even gets the chance to begin.
13. She still gets skittery around the word "imprint". Embry moves around her gently, as if she's a wolf cub about to gnaw off his hand, and Collin revels in the fact that Embry or no Embry, he is still Diana's best friend. Somebody, a boy in the eighth grade, says something about Diana, about how she never talks, how she doesn't belong there, she isn't Quileute, just some freak. There's thunder in Collin's ears and his hand hurts and all of a sudden the boy is on the ground, bleeding from his mouth, and Diana is dragging him away, white-faced and tight-lipped, saying, Not here, you can't HERE, Sam will KILL you. Her voice is very calm but her hand shoves ruthlessly against his chest, and he can hear his growl vibrating all the way through her palm. He comes down from the anger and starts to fit back into his skin.
He's suspended for three days and when he asks Diana if anything happened, if anyone said anything to her during those days when he couldn't be there with her. And she says, in this cold voice that isn't like her at all, Just leave it alone, Collin. That night, dinner's at the Clearwaters and he thinks she sits a little closer to Embry than usual. His fist, even though it healed ages ago, begins to throb as if he just scraped it raw on that kid's face. And he leaves it alone.
14. They write a list of things they will do in the future. Collin plans to become the head of an aircraft empire, resurrecting the zeppelin as a form of safe, commercial transport (which it totally is, Hindenburg not withstanding, more people die in car accidents than planes, yadda yadda yadda). Diana plans to build a successful prototype of a bipedal robot because honestly, Big Dog freaks her out - she can't get rid of the feeling that there's some djinn or something stuck in that poor, headless, six-legged monstrosity with all of its mechanical screaming. She would like to fashion a less painful looking body within which the djinn can reside. Together, they will write a graphic novel - he will write it and she will illustrate it. They call themselves C&D, like Q&U but classier. He promises he will write all of his stories for her. He keeps this promise for a very long time.
15. She gets in trouble for mentioning extraterrestrial life forms in one of her English assignments for Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The grown ups at the school and her social worker and everyone are dying for her to go see some doctor in the city and call ink blots something other than ink blots and talk about her troubled childhood. Collin thinks, seriously, that if he cleared his schedule for the next six months, he might be able to punch out every adult asshole who's done her wrong. If Diana wants to make gigantic paintings of Viper fighter planes going up in flames instead of "releasing those negative emotions in a safe, nurturing environment", he's totally cool with it and he will defend her right (to the death) to tell everyone else to fuck off.
It's not like she really believes all that stuff about aliens and crop circles and the Nazca lines and Stonehenge and spontaneous combustion and rains of frogs and Nostradamus. It's just that when she talks about that stuff like she believes it, ordinary people back off, and the really cool people are left still hanging around. He was fine with the fact that sometimes she wanted to be alone in her head, without others - including himself - poking around in it. It wouldn't occur to him until maybe years later that she wasn't. Fine with it.
16. They sell fifty-seven copies of their first mini-comic. It's originally sixty, but Brady accidentally drools on one when he's phased, and Diana and Collin each keep a copy for themselves. They pay the copy costs out of his job at the garage where Seth works, and out of her job fixing temperamental toasters, un-jamming printers, and fixing computers by pressing the "on" button. Diana draws it on paper and they scan it onto the computer, and they gather an impressive collection of paper cuts the night they stay up til three folding, arranging, and stapling each issue by hand - and then un-stapling, unfolding, re-arranging, re-folding, and re-stapling each issue when they realise that one of the pages in the first quarter is upside down. They're too poor to pay for a colour printer, so Diana colours each individual cover by hand.
They don't really sell them, either - they make a run to Seattle in one of the old Junk Buckets (she fondly calls it Peggy, after Battlestar Pegasus - Aunt Penelope's massive purple minivan is officially Gally) and drop them off at any of the used book stores where there are shelves filled with other mini-comics waiting to be given away. Every weekend, they casually drop in and see how many copies are left. Sam sends out a discreet word, and a number of them are picked up by Pack members who choke (in Paul's case) at seeing alternate versions of themselves in hand-lettered, Copic-markered glory. Kim is mostly amused at the rendition of herself as a tough-talking, plum-sized, cigar-chomping angel.
Diana will keep on drawing for the rest of her life, and there will be other works of hers that sell better and run longer and garner more awards, that are less earnest, less awkward in their not-quite-correct bodily proportions, and a little better at hiding how they are rip offs of hers and Collin's favourite sci fi TV shows - but she'll remember that one the best.
17. Loki blows into town like a summer storm. Fire seems to snap in halos around her head, like some Hawaiian dancing goddess, all volcanoes and shimmer and lips curled up in a beautiful snarl. Things shatter and fall before her, Collin included. He wishes he could tear out his eyes, like he would rather weep blood for the rest of his life rather than look at this tiny, golden-skinned Asian girl - than know that his life isn't even his any more, it belongs to her. Loki. For the first time in her life, Diana slaps him full across the face and says, Don't you dare look away from her, Collin. Don't you dare pretend you don't see the way she's looking at you. He wants Loki to be this harbinger of destruction but she's just a teenage girl, confused and angry as hell, almost as confused and angry about all this as he is, and he's had five years to mentally prepare himself for this impossible possibility. He has a feeling that love isn't supposed to be like this - it's supposed to be something gentler, more gradual, something like sleepless blue nights and ink-stained hands tucked into ragged sleeves and listening to old tapes of Daniel Johnston and promises that last out a whole lifetime instead of a lousy few years. He tells himself, Well, this isn't love, after all. It's just imprinting.
18. Diana goes away for a little while, "to visit her mother" all the way out on the East Coast, and when she comes back from her cross-country bus trip she is strange and pale and withdrawn - well, stranger and paler and more withdrawn than usual. This time he pushes because he feels that if she doesn't come back this time then she isn't coming back ever. He pushes her too hard and she snaps and he's in her bedroom in June a week before Prom (a stupid tradition that they were going to spend watching the extended, re-mastered version of the original Star Wars Trilogy IV, V, and VI) and he kisses her because there's a girl like a red sun setting with rays that lance through every corner of his life, but there's a girl like the moon on the rise who shows her real face only to him. She doesn't slap him this time. She gives him a steady look, her eyes blank as metal, and she tells him to leave.
He leaves. He leaves her. He leaves town. He leaves behind every promise he ever broke, which is also every promise he ever made. He doesn't look back.
19. She doesn't hear from him for a long, long time.
20. She's two years into Engineering at Washington State, drawing graphic novels in her spare time for which she makes up the stories. She writes an awful lot of letters, preferring them to e-mails. Her script is as careful and nuanced as her drawings, and she still crams the margins with doodles. She writes to Collin's brother and sister, Jenny and Brady. She writes to Aunt Penelope, more of a fun exercise than anything else, because Aunt Penelope mostly ignores what she writes except to scold her to eat more, give her viciously gleeful updates about her reign as the queen of bridge in La Push and the surrounding area, and enclose hand-written recipes. She writes to Embry and stretches the boundaries of her imagination trying to find thirty-nine different ways of saying, I'm fine. Everything's fine. She writes to Loki and it takes a very long while, but eventually Loki writes back. Loki's voice in letters is still as sharp and cutting as ever, but it's softened by the ink and paper into something like dry humour, like grace. She studies the videos of Loki dancing that she insists Loki send her, studying the inexpressible beauty of bodies in motion, and she tries to find a way to capture that fire on paper without being burned alive.
21. She catches his name by accident. He's over in Iraq, some kind of correspondent. A soldier? A journalist? A mercenary? A bit of all three? The article doesn't say anything about him, it just says in no-nonsense black type, By Collin Sparrow. A guest piece in Harper's. Anger seeps through every word, but it's controlled, in a sense. Outrage turned into energy, like the explosion that fuels a rocket. She keeps the address of the magazine, thinks about contacting him. Thinks about writing him a letter that says nothing but two words, those two words being, You asshole. On other days, she thinks the two words should be, I'm sorry. And sometimes she thinks they should be, Come back.
22. She gets a packet of paper in the mail. Rough outlines, scripts, for half a dozen stories. There are sad, wise robots, and giant mutant wolves, and sarcastic aliens, and lumbering, ancient ships that sail through the mind swallowing darkness of deep space. It's good (of course it is), bleaker than their adolescent fantasies - sadder, wiser, sharper. Funnier, too. But she recognises the flavour all the same.
Over her desk, pinned on top of the clutter of papers, sketches, photographs, and clippings, is a sheet with the character specs of her latest MC: the daughter of a supernova, a woman with a halo of fire soaring lightly across worlds as if it they were her stage.
She looks at the scripts, and then at the specs, and dreams of a world where she is old enough to be selfish and smart enough to make it work; a world where she can still write her letters to Loki, and yet bring those scripts to life (the storyboards are already exploding in her mind) without breaking anybody's heart - including her own.
Aunt Penelope always hated that phrase, "You can't have your cake and eat it too." She always said, "Why didn't the ninny just bake two cakes?"
The note attached to the script says nothing but two words, those two words being, I promised.
And before it even ends, everything gets the chance to begin - but differently, this time.
Written for 31_days , Sept. 02 ~ in ten years the world will have changed, with Daniel Johnston's 1990 and Songs of Pain plunking along in the background. Dedicated to that braintwin of mine, Angie bb - hope that big ole university is treating you right, dear heart. <3
12. They meet at twelve, Collin and Diana. She wears a crown of beaten metal and draws starships and pillars of light in the margins of all her notebooks. He is skinny for his age, likes to set off Roman Candles and jump off roofs, and he doesn't yet have calluses from playing guitar. That summer, they watch the entire run of Firefly, including Serenity and the originally unaired episodes. Her presence makes him sit still for longer than five minutes, and in his presence she actually says more than two words.
Then Embry comes home, and everything ends before it even gets the chance to begin.
13. She still gets skittery around the word "imprint". Embry moves around her gently, as if she's a wolf cub about to gnaw off his hand, and Collin revels in the fact that Embry or no Embry, he is still Diana's best friend. Somebody, a boy in the eighth grade, says something about Diana, about how she never talks, how she doesn't belong there, she isn't Quileute, just some freak. There's thunder in Collin's ears and his hand hurts and all of a sudden the boy is on the ground, bleeding from his mouth, and Diana is dragging him away, white-faced and tight-lipped, saying, Not here, you can't HERE, Sam will KILL you. Her voice is very calm but her hand shoves ruthlessly against his chest, and he can hear his growl vibrating all the way through her palm. He comes down from the anger and starts to fit back into his skin.
He's suspended for three days and when he asks Diana if anything happened, if anyone said anything to her during those days when he couldn't be there with her. And she says, in this cold voice that isn't like her at all, Just leave it alone, Collin. That night, dinner's at the Clearwaters and he thinks she sits a little closer to Embry than usual. His fist, even though it healed ages ago, begins to throb as if he just scraped it raw on that kid's face. And he leaves it alone.
14. They write a list of things they will do in the future. Collin plans to become the head of an aircraft empire, resurrecting the zeppelin as a form of safe, commercial transport (which it totally is, Hindenburg not withstanding, more people die in car accidents than planes, yadda yadda yadda). Diana plans to build a successful prototype of a bipedal robot because honestly, Big Dog freaks her out - she can't get rid of the feeling that there's some djinn or something stuck in that poor, headless, six-legged monstrosity with all of its mechanical screaming. She would like to fashion a less painful looking body within which the djinn can reside. Together, they will write a graphic novel - he will write it and she will illustrate it. They call themselves C&D, like Q&U but classier. He promises he will write all of his stories for her. He keeps this promise for a very long time.
15. She gets in trouble for mentioning extraterrestrial life forms in one of her English assignments for Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The grown ups at the school and her social worker and everyone are dying for her to go see some doctor in the city and call ink blots something other than ink blots and talk about her troubled childhood. Collin thinks, seriously, that if he cleared his schedule for the next six months, he might be able to punch out every adult asshole who's done her wrong. If Diana wants to make gigantic paintings of Viper fighter planes going up in flames instead of "releasing those negative emotions in a safe, nurturing environment", he's totally cool with it and he will defend her right (to the death) to tell everyone else to fuck off.
It's not like she really believes all that stuff about aliens and crop circles and the Nazca lines and Stonehenge and spontaneous combustion and rains of frogs and Nostradamus. It's just that when she talks about that stuff like she believes it, ordinary people back off, and the really cool people are left still hanging around. He was fine with the fact that sometimes she wanted to be alone in her head, without others - including himself - poking around in it. It wouldn't occur to him until maybe years later that she wasn't. Fine with it.
16. They sell fifty-seven copies of their first mini-comic. It's originally sixty, but Brady accidentally drools on one when he's phased, and Diana and Collin each keep a copy for themselves. They pay the copy costs out of his job at the garage where Seth works, and out of her job fixing temperamental toasters, un-jamming printers, and fixing computers by pressing the "on" button. Diana draws it on paper and they scan it onto the computer, and they gather an impressive collection of paper cuts the night they stay up til three folding, arranging, and stapling each issue by hand - and then un-stapling, unfolding, re-arranging, re-folding, and re-stapling each issue when they realise that one of the pages in the first quarter is upside down. They're too poor to pay for a colour printer, so Diana colours each individual cover by hand.
They don't really sell them, either - they make a run to Seattle in one of the old Junk Buckets (she fondly calls it Peggy, after Battlestar Pegasus - Aunt Penelope's massive purple minivan is officially Gally) and drop them off at any of the used book stores where there are shelves filled with other mini-comics waiting to be given away. Every weekend, they casually drop in and see how many copies are left. Sam sends out a discreet word, and a number of them are picked up by Pack members who choke (in Paul's case) at seeing alternate versions of themselves in hand-lettered, Copic-markered glory. Kim is mostly amused at the rendition of herself as a tough-talking, plum-sized, cigar-chomping angel.
Diana will keep on drawing for the rest of her life, and there will be other works of hers that sell better and run longer and garner more awards, that are less earnest, less awkward in their not-quite-correct bodily proportions, and a little better at hiding how they are rip offs of hers and Collin's favourite sci fi TV shows - but she'll remember that one the best.
17. Loki blows into town like a summer storm. Fire seems to snap in halos around her head, like some Hawaiian dancing goddess, all volcanoes and shimmer and lips curled up in a beautiful snarl. Things shatter and fall before her, Collin included. He wishes he could tear out his eyes, like he would rather weep blood for the rest of his life rather than look at this tiny, golden-skinned Asian girl - than know that his life isn't even his any more, it belongs to her. Loki. For the first time in her life, Diana slaps him full across the face and says, Don't you dare look away from her, Collin. Don't you dare pretend you don't see the way she's looking at you. He wants Loki to be this harbinger of destruction but she's just a teenage girl, confused and angry as hell, almost as confused and angry about all this as he is, and he's had five years to mentally prepare himself for this impossible possibility. He has a feeling that love isn't supposed to be like this - it's supposed to be something gentler, more gradual, something like sleepless blue nights and ink-stained hands tucked into ragged sleeves and listening to old tapes of Daniel Johnston and promises that last out a whole lifetime instead of a lousy few years. He tells himself, Well, this isn't love, after all. It's just imprinting.
18. Diana goes away for a little while, "to visit her mother" all the way out on the East Coast, and when she comes back from her cross-country bus trip she is strange and pale and withdrawn - well, stranger and paler and more withdrawn than usual. This time he pushes because he feels that if she doesn't come back this time then she isn't coming back ever. He pushes her too hard and she snaps and he's in her bedroom in June a week before Prom (a stupid tradition that they were going to spend watching the extended, re-mastered version of the original Star Wars Trilogy IV, V, and VI) and he kisses her because there's a girl like a red sun setting with rays that lance through every corner of his life, but there's a girl like the moon on the rise who shows her real face only to him. She doesn't slap him this time. She gives him a steady look, her eyes blank as metal, and she tells him to leave.
He leaves. He leaves her. He leaves town. He leaves behind every promise he ever broke, which is also every promise he ever made. He doesn't look back.
19. She doesn't hear from him for a long, long time.
20. She's two years into Engineering at Washington State, drawing graphic novels in her spare time for which she makes up the stories. She writes an awful lot of letters, preferring them to e-mails. Her script is as careful and nuanced as her drawings, and she still crams the margins with doodles. She writes to Collin's brother and sister, Jenny and Brady. She writes to Aunt Penelope, more of a fun exercise than anything else, because Aunt Penelope mostly ignores what she writes except to scold her to eat more, give her viciously gleeful updates about her reign as the queen of bridge in La Push and the surrounding area, and enclose hand-written recipes. She writes to Embry and stretches the boundaries of her imagination trying to find thirty-nine different ways of saying, I'm fine. Everything's fine. She writes to Loki and it takes a very long while, but eventually Loki writes back. Loki's voice in letters is still as sharp and cutting as ever, but it's softened by the ink and paper into something like dry humour, like grace. She studies the videos of Loki dancing that she insists Loki send her, studying the inexpressible beauty of bodies in motion, and she tries to find a way to capture that fire on paper without being burned alive.
21. She catches his name by accident. He's over in Iraq, some kind of correspondent. A soldier? A journalist? A mercenary? A bit of all three? The article doesn't say anything about him, it just says in no-nonsense black type, By Collin Sparrow. A guest piece in Harper's. Anger seeps through every word, but it's controlled, in a sense. Outrage turned into energy, like the explosion that fuels a rocket. She keeps the address of the magazine, thinks about contacting him. Thinks about writing him a letter that says nothing but two words, those two words being, You asshole. On other days, she thinks the two words should be, I'm sorry. And sometimes she thinks they should be, Come back.
22. She gets a packet of paper in the mail. Rough outlines, scripts, for half a dozen stories. There are sad, wise robots, and giant mutant wolves, and sarcastic aliens, and lumbering, ancient ships that sail through the mind swallowing darkness of deep space. It's good (of course it is), bleaker than their adolescent fantasies - sadder, wiser, sharper. Funnier, too. But she recognises the flavour all the same.
Over her desk, pinned on top of the clutter of papers, sketches, photographs, and clippings, is a sheet with the character specs of her latest MC: the daughter of a supernova, a woman with a halo of fire soaring lightly across worlds as if it they were her stage.
She looks at the scripts, and then at the specs, and dreams of a world where she is old enough to be selfish and smart enough to make it work; a world where she can still write her letters to Loki, and yet bring those scripts to life (the storyboards are already exploding in her mind) without breaking anybody's heart - including her own.
Aunt Penelope always hated that phrase, "You can't have your cake and eat it too." She always said, "Why didn't the ninny just bake two cakes?"
The note attached to the script says nothing but two words, those two words being, I promised.
And before it even ends, everything gets the chance to begin - but differently, this time.