chase, character study
Title: Lucky Lipstick
Author: cerieblue819
Characters: Chase, his mother, Rowan
Words: 966
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own them.
Summary: It was the lipstick he remembered.
It was the lipstick he remembered. After ten years of getting over it, the flash of red across a beautiful woman’s mouth was the one thing that could send Robert Chase back into the dizzying spiral of memory. She wore Lancome in a dark, striking red that outlined the perfect cupid’s bow of her mouth and somehow made a rather-girlish face look like it belonged on a woman.
She had freckles and wide blue eyes, a toothy grin and awkward limbs, but somehow the simple touch of red to her mouth transformed the freckles into delicate beauty marks, the awkward limbs into something borne of grace and agility. She’d danced once in the Australian Ballet, back in the 1970s, and Chase imagined that’s where his father had met her.
Of course, he was still on the arm of his first wife, but he could imagine that his dad was struck by the beauty of the waif dancing the lead in Swan Lake…struck enough that he left his wife with their friends and snuck backstage for a glass of champagne and a hastily-written address smudged by that same Lancome lipstick, albeit less frequently applied in those days.
He bet they were something of a scandal: the high-profile doctor and the waifish ballet dancer in her oversized sunglasses and wildly-printed scarf in some modern interpretation of Grace Kelly in To Catch A Thief. Yeah, Chase imagined that his mother probably could have been a Hitchcock blonde: her screams when things had went downhill were testament to that.
The marriage was probably out of necessity. She was a devout Catholic, for all her drinking and carousing, and the pregnancy wouldn’t be looked upon well by her middle-class family back in Melbourne. The pregnancy also wouldn’t have been well-received by her employers at the ballet, who preferred that their dancers stay lithe and trim and not misshapen by illegitimate children.
The first few years were probably good, Anna getting her trim figure back and, as a rich man’s wife, spent her days chasing after her son and gardening in the palatial mansion by the sea that Rowan had built for his first wife. She was easily replaced, the harshness of Mary and her blueblood English ways giving way to cheery flowers and messy paintings that Chase remembered touching as a child. His mother always let him touch, no matter what. Nothing was too delicate.
Soon, however, another woman probably caught Rowan’s eye. Maybe she was a cute nurse at the hospital, bright smile and thick accent. She might have been the babysitter he had sometimes when his mother went off with her old ballet friends, dark curls and curvy figure. It didn’t matter. Chase knew, in the back of his mind, that it probably happened.
It probably happened and Anna probably found out, big doe eyes clouded with hurt and decanter of brandy finding a reasonable connection with Rowan’s head. Chase didn’t remember, but it probably happened that way and ended with Rowan taking him off to a hotel for the night while his mother drank herself sick, coming back the next day to find her pale and her eyes ringed with black.
No matter the catalysts and the actual telling of events, Chase knows that she turned mean. He knows that she stopped caring about her appearance and the easy, free-flowing skirts and bright patterned shirts gave way to dingy nightgowns and a tattered robe. She stopped caring about the house, the beautiful palace that she tried to make cheery turning into a dungeon that she no longer cleaned or paid anyone else to clean.
She stopped caring about Rowan, burning his photographs in an alcohol-fueled rage, cursing the day she ever drank champagne with him and gave him her number. But, the thing that hurt most of all, she stopped caring about him.
No hugs, no help with homework, no “what did you do at school today?” nothing. He was a ghost in her eyes, just another body that occupied her space that she sorely wished to get rid of so she could drink without the guilt. He stopped asking his friends over. How could he explain that his fun-loving ballerina mum had turned into a dingy, drinking monster? She was some sort of Ms. Hyde to her Lady Jekyll, an awful doppelganger that Chase wished he could get rid of.
However, nothing could excise her demons but death and she did die, bottle in one hand and lipstick in the other. Her mouth was clumsily painted with the lipstick as if she were going to go find Rowan and remind him what he’d lost and done a piss-poor job of it. There she was, lying on the floor at the age of 35, cold and stiff and no longer the mother of a gangly sixteen year old.
The funeral came and went, Chase going through the motions of the prayers and thinking, ironically, that his mother’s mouth was painted with the wrong shade of lipstick. The mortician had picked a soft pink, thinking no doubt that this would lend an air of youth to her fairy-like face, but to Chase it was all wrong. His mother’s lips should be red, blood red, and he felt like it needed to be told to the people in charge. He didn’t, though, not wanting to complain and instead she was buried with a half-used tube that Chase had found on her dressing table and brought to the funeral home.
And even now, it was the lipstick that did it. Not the gin, not the artful pas de deux at a ballet, not a messy piece of modern art: the simple tube of color that she used to mask herself away from the world. It did it to him every time.
Author: cerieblue819
Characters: Chase, his mother, Rowan
Words: 966
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own them.
Summary: It was the lipstick he remembered.
It was the lipstick he remembered. After ten years of getting over it, the flash of red across a beautiful woman’s mouth was the one thing that could send Robert Chase back into the dizzying spiral of memory. She wore Lancome in a dark, striking red that outlined the perfect cupid’s bow of her mouth and somehow made a rather-girlish face look like it belonged on a woman.
She had freckles and wide blue eyes, a toothy grin and awkward limbs, but somehow the simple touch of red to her mouth transformed the freckles into delicate beauty marks, the awkward limbs into something borne of grace and agility. She’d danced once in the Australian Ballet, back in the 1970s, and Chase imagined that’s where his father had met her.
Of course, he was still on the arm of his first wife, but he could imagine that his dad was struck by the beauty of the waif dancing the lead in Swan Lake…struck enough that he left his wife with their friends and snuck backstage for a glass of champagne and a hastily-written address smudged by that same Lancome lipstick, albeit less frequently applied in those days.
He bet they were something of a scandal: the high-profile doctor and the waifish ballet dancer in her oversized sunglasses and wildly-printed scarf in some modern interpretation of Grace Kelly in To Catch A Thief. Yeah, Chase imagined that his mother probably could have been a Hitchcock blonde: her screams when things had went downhill were testament to that.
The marriage was probably out of necessity. She was a devout Catholic, for all her drinking and carousing, and the pregnancy wouldn’t be looked upon well by her middle-class family back in Melbourne. The pregnancy also wouldn’t have been well-received by her employers at the ballet, who preferred that their dancers stay lithe and trim and not misshapen by illegitimate children.
The first few years were probably good, Anna getting her trim figure back and, as a rich man’s wife, spent her days chasing after her son and gardening in the palatial mansion by the sea that Rowan had built for his first wife. She was easily replaced, the harshness of Mary and her blueblood English ways giving way to cheery flowers and messy paintings that Chase remembered touching as a child. His mother always let him touch, no matter what. Nothing was too delicate.
Soon, however, another woman probably caught Rowan’s eye. Maybe she was a cute nurse at the hospital, bright smile and thick accent. She might have been the babysitter he had sometimes when his mother went off with her old ballet friends, dark curls and curvy figure. It didn’t matter. Chase knew, in the back of his mind, that it probably happened.
It probably happened and Anna probably found out, big doe eyes clouded with hurt and decanter of brandy finding a reasonable connection with Rowan’s head. Chase didn’t remember, but it probably happened that way and ended with Rowan taking him off to a hotel for the night while his mother drank herself sick, coming back the next day to find her pale and her eyes ringed with black.
No matter the catalysts and the actual telling of events, Chase knows that she turned mean. He knows that she stopped caring about her appearance and the easy, free-flowing skirts and bright patterned shirts gave way to dingy nightgowns and a tattered robe. She stopped caring about the house, the beautiful palace that she tried to make cheery turning into a dungeon that she no longer cleaned or paid anyone else to clean.
She stopped caring about Rowan, burning his photographs in an alcohol-fueled rage, cursing the day she ever drank champagne with him and gave him her number. But, the thing that hurt most of all, she stopped caring about him.
No hugs, no help with homework, no “what did you do at school today?” nothing. He was a ghost in her eyes, just another body that occupied her space that she sorely wished to get rid of so she could drink without the guilt. He stopped asking his friends over. How could he explain that his fun-loving ballerina mum had turned into a dingy, drinking monster? She was some sort of Ms. Hyde to her Lady Jekyll, an awful doppelganger that Chase wished he could get rid of.
However, nothing could excise her demons but death and she did die, bottle in one hand and lipstick in the other. Her mouth was clumsily painted with the lipstick as if she were going to go find Rowan and remind him what he’d lost and done a piss-poor job of it. There she was, lying on the floor at the age of 35, cold and stiff and no longer the mother of a gangly sixteen year old.
The funeral came and went, Chase going through the motions of the prayers and thinking, ironically, that his mother’s mouth was painted with the wrong shade of lipstick. The mortician had picked a soft pink, thinking no doubt that this would lend an air of youth to her fairy-like face, but to Chase it was all wrong. His mother’s lips should be red, blood red, and he felt like it needed to be told to the people in charge. He didn’t, though, not wanting to complain and instead she was buried with a half-used tube that Chase had found on her dressing table and brought to the funeral home.
And even now, it was the lipstick that did it. Not the gin, not the artful pas de deux at a ballet, not a messy piece of modern art: the simple tube of color that she used to mask herself away from the world. It did it to him every time.