fic: Patching Havoc
Title: Patching Havoc (Studied remix)
Length: 600
Warnings: Angst? Heaps.
Disclaimer: I'm under the irreversible impression that Pine is deeply in love with Sylvia Plath, so there's a lot in here and some of the lines are from her poems. It's a promised remix of blcwriter 's 'Studied', which I linked to in the title.
--
You drop into the lounge chair (the chair in the lounge, not one of those recliners that you’d smirk and be fed grapes on-those are Karl’s territory, everything lazy is Karl’s territory, but it’s lazy in the way sex takes hours in the middle of a humid summer night, steam blinding the window panes-) and pull the pen from behind your ear, its cap chewed and worn because you’ve got this thing, this ‘fixation’ that everyone comments on or blushes about but really, you don’t even notice. The crossword puzzle glares its blank, empty squares up at you from the coffee table and hey, why not? You’ve got time before the vultures are hungry for more of your words, to strip the flesh from them and suck the truth from the marrow.
Karl eases into a stuffed arm chair across from you and he’s sucking down some sugary mess in a labeled cup, cigarette already lit and between his fingers. You’re two letters in to a seven letter word for ‘relief’ and ‘spite’ finishes the clue and hurts in your gut, but you swallow over your silence and your exhaustion and smile.
Sorry, not the best company, you say, then put that pen cap back between your teeth because the next thing out of your mouth is but I could be.
And yeah, maybe your focus is mouths but it doesn’t help that his are wrapped around that straw and his eyes are wrapped around you, and since sooner or later something goes amiss, it might as well be sooner when he tosses out, S’alright. I chain smoke and drink coffee, you do crosswords, like he’s chewing nails, fingers jittery on his cup. You can’t help but flay open in a smile, because Karl is so Karl, trying to hide his nervousness, and you’re stupid in affection. The space behind your ribs shakes it off and you look back down at the crossword, nine squares waiting to be filled.
You ask because you’re too tired to think about it-yeah, that’s why, not at all because you’re dying to hear him speak, tongue soft around brick consonants with his weird voice training bleeding over into his natural lilt-because you’re tired. Yeah.
And maybe it’s because he answers so quickly, knows the word before you do but he says Perceived and you’re so pathetic. A gift, a love gift, utterly unasked for- your breath hitches and you don’t want it at all, what you want is to say everything in your head about the inconstant green gallop of his eyes and man, Sylvia was right; this is the most precarious you’ve ever felt.
You get lost in the seven seconds between ‘perceived’ and your muttered gratitude. For all the verbs you’ve penned into the flimsy gray newspaper (Pens, who does crosswords in pen, you remember him saying and you can’t help but wonder if that’s his thought every time you do a crossword around him), you can’t muster yourself to be as active as they are. Instead you remain in the passive, until the blurry unfocus of your eyes clears in the pattern of his shirt, the flick of flame at the end of his stupid blue lighter, a blue that doesn’t do anything for him at all and-
That striped shirt makes your eyes look both jade green and amber, you blurt, unblinking and so openly honest you startle yourself back into silence. You lap the dead air from your lips and breathe, just a little, look back down at the crossword and fill in ‘rapacious’.
Length: 600
Warnings: Angst? Heaps.
Disclaimer: I'm under the irreversible impression that Pine is deeply in love with Sylvia Plath, so there's a lot in here and some of the lines are from her poems. It's a promised remix of blcwriter 's 'Studied', which I linked to in the title.
--
You drop into the lounge chair (the chair in the lounge, not one of those recliners that you’d smirk and be fed grapes on-those are Karl’s territory, everything lazy is Karl’s territory, but it’s lazy in the way sex takes hours in the middle of a humid summer night, steam blinding the window panes-) and pull the pen from behind your ear, its cap chewed and worn because you’ve got this thing, this ‘fixation’ that everyone comments on or blushes about but really, you don’t even notice. The crossword puzzle glares its blank, empty squares up at you from the coffee table and hey, why not? You’ve got time before the vultures are hungry for more of your words, to strip the flesh from them and suck the truth from the marrow.
Karl eases into a stuffed arm chair across from you and he’s sucking down some sugary mess in a labeled cup, cigarette already lit and between his fingers. You’re two letters in to a seven letter word for ‘relief’ and ‘spite’ finishes the clue and hurts in your gut, but you swallow over your silence and your exhaustion and smile.
Sorry, not the best company, you say, then put that pen cap back between your teeth because the next thing out of your mouth is but I could be.
And yeah, maybe your focus is mouths but it doesn’t help that his are wrapped around that straw and his eyes are wrapped around you, and since sooner or later something goes amiss, it might as well be sooner when he tosses out, S’alright. I chain smoke and drink coffee, you do crosswords, like he’s chewing nails, fingers jittery on his cup. You can’t help but flay open in a smile, because Karl is so Karl, trying to hide his nervousness, and you’re stupid in affection. The space behind your ribs shakes it off and you look back down at the crossword, nine squares waiting to be filled.
You ask because you’re too tired to think about it-yeah, that’s why, not at all because you’re dying to hear him speak, tongue soft around brick consonants with his weird voice training bleeding over into his natural lilt-because you’re tired. Yeah.
And maybe it’s because he answers so quickly, knows the word before you do but he says Perceived and you’re so pathetic. A gift, a love gift, utterly unasked for- your breath hitches and you don’t want it at all, what you want is to say everything in your head about the inconstant green gallop of his eyes and man, Sylvia was right; this is the most precarious you’ve ever felt.
You get lost in the seven seconds between ‘perceived’ and your muttered gratitude. For all the verbs you’ve penned into the flimsy gray newspaper (Pens, who does crosswords in pen, you remember him saying and you can’t help but wonder if that’s his thought every time you do a crossword around him), you can’t muster yourself to be as active as they are. Instead you remain in the passive, until the blurry unfocus of your eyes clears in the pattern of his shirt, the flick of flame at the end of his stupid blue lighter, a blue that doesn’t do anything for him at all and-
That striped shirt makes your eyes look both jade green and amber, you blurt, unblinking and so openly honest you startle yourself back into silence. You lap the dead air from your lips and breathe, just a little, look back down at the crossword and fill in ‘rapacious’.