TM 193- Write a ficlet inspired by the picture
TM 193- Write a ficlet inspired by the picture.
One of the things that Gaeta has kept, in his rack where he can look at it, is a picture he took on a field trip in school. He was playing with photography at the time, fascinated by the separation a lens gave him, and the ability to make what he saw into his own vision and then capture it for all time. Other interests replaced photography, of course, like chemistry, history, astronomy, and girls.
He likes the picture, though, and he likes the memories that day calls back; the splashing through the creeklet and slipping on the rocks to get just the right angle to line up the two trees dead center. Even in nature, Gaeta likes symmetry and precision.
He held hands with a girl he really liked for the first time on that trip, too. Her name escapes him now, and it was both her hands, really, during a team building exercise which involved crossing a stretch of ground on beams. Somehow, she'd wound up blindfolded, and the object of the exercise was to get everyone across. If one foot touched the ground, everybody lost, and she'd been terrified. Unable to see, she'd refused to even try, until Gaeta took her hands and backed across all ten of the beams, he backwards and she forwards, her hands in his and her blindfolded face lifted to the soothing words he was speaking.
it was the first time his schoolmates had recognized him as something more than a brain, too, when Cal Pellan, the jock who was picked first for every team, slapped Gaeta on the back and admitted that he couldn't have done that, he just didn't have the balance. It had been a dizzying moment of acceptance, and Gaeta had revelled in it.
It lasted, too, the acclaim. Cal was genuinely impressed by the serious, studious boy's unexpected talent, and fair enough to praise him where others could and would be swayed by it. They'd stayed friends, too, all the way to high school when Cal was felled by an aneurysm in a single moment. Gaeta likes the picture for that, for letting him remember before, before Cylons, before bursting vessels, before adulthood. It's a perfect childhood moment trapped in time, when he was ten, and everything was still open to him.