"Captured" - Mary-Kate/Ashley - R
Got lured over here by rubykate's latest twincest, and I figure I might as well throw in my hat. Hope you enjoy.
Title: "Captured"
Rating: R
Pairing: Mary-Kate/Ashley
Summary: "There were so many ways to be caught."
Notes: Right-o. Incest involved, proceed with caution. Thanks to beizy for the beta.
Captured
There were so many ways to be caught.
The dictionary in their office spelled it out simply. Caught. Noun, past tense of catch. To be discovered, to be made aware, to be grabbed, entangled, taken, held, captured. They even listed examples. One could catch your attention, catch your eye, be caught red-handed, be caught on film.
*
Mary-Kate had been caught on film more than once in her life. The cameras were ever-present. Their big black staring eyes had eaten up her first kiss, and her second, and many of the kisses after. The sideline of the Lakers game with David. The goodbye peck in his car. The hugs and the holding hands out on the street, paparazzi trailing her with those one-eyed monsters, staring and staring.
She had caught their eye. They were catching her life.
Nobody else really understood but Ashley. The other kids, they knew what it was like to be young and awkward. The other stars, they knew how it felt to be watched. But only Ashley had known their life, her life, bordered by flashes of light and microphone tips and the dark glass walls of lens after lens after lens.
The first time she had realized it, really painfully realized it, was when Star took pictures of their bare skin in Hawaii and everyone ran with the headline.
Olsen Twins: Caught on Film!
*
Mary-Kate talked like Ashley had been the one really bothered by it. "She cried hysterically," she told reporters later on. "It was awful." She never mentioned what she had done, never mentioned the ten minutes standing naked in front of the bathroom mirror and wondering whether her her hips were really as wide as they looked in the pictures, whether her breasts were really too small, her legs too skinny, herself too everything-not-perfect. She never mentioned those few days when she didn't eat from the nervousness and the need to shrink down, the baggy clothes and the sunglasses and the dark hair and all the ways she had found to hide herself when she didn't want them to see her. She never mentioned the frightening truth that sometimes cameras could see through her to her secrets. All she said was it was awful, "but Ashley got over it."
Ashley did get over it, and that was why Mary-Kate hid behind her now. She was always a step behind going down the street, down the red carpets. Ashley had always played the big sister, talking for the both of them and giving directions and getting good grades, like those extra two minutes gave her something Mary-Kate didn't have. And maybe there was something in those extra two minutes, because now without Ashley, Mary-Kate felt bare. She had no speech, no self-possession, no shine. She was just Mary-Kate--the tomboy, the little one, the left-handed kid whose attention span just never stretched as far as it needed to go, whose mind never wrapped around things quick and right the way Ashley's did.
What those two minutes had given Ashley was the power to overcome it all. When she stepped out on the red carpet, those extra two minutes, that extra inch, all of her big-sister things gave her the ability to rise up and see something beyond the lights and cameras and microphones all thrust toward them like hounds cornering prey. With the reporters barking for their attention, Mary-Kate shrank back that one step and let Ashley take the lead, let Ashley catch her hand and pull her where they needed to go. Ashley was the one who turned on their smiles and laughs for interviews, who spoke the first answers to every question, who showed Mary-Kate which flashbulb to turn and look for this time and next. And if Mary-Kate felt lost, she knew she could always step back and tangle her fingers with Ashley's so softly the baby-skin between their knuckles barely felt the brushing, and someone would be in control again.
That was why Mary-Kate only saw herself caught in the red-carpet pictures, herself all deer-in-the-headlights with big round eyes and the corners of her mouth tense and down-curving even when she smiled. Ashley's mouth never curved down. Ashley took on every lens with smirk, her chin lifted, her eyes heavy-lidded and sparkling, her shoulders back so the cream-pale skin of her chest showed every glimmer and shadow, her feet planted firmly, her hand around Mary-Kate's, her wonderful smart self looking classic and beautiful.
*
The People reporter had been hovering around her all day while she picked on salad and sipped her juice and sat endlessly in front of mirrors and lights and lenses. The woman wanted to know how it felt to be beautiful, one of the fifty most beautiful. Mary-Kate didn't think she would know, but she was pinned down by questions again on her lunch break.
Ashley had been able to give the right answers in six sentences flat, but Mary-Kate kept tripping over the thoughts. Did they think they were beautiful, the woman wanted to know, and Mary-Kate didn't know what to say. "Does anyone?" Ashley countered.
Then who, the women asked, turning her eyes directly to Mary-Kate, did they think was beautiful?
The words caught in Mary-Kate's throat. Truth, or not truth? While she hesitated, Ashley's voice rang out. "I think my sister is beautiful," she said. Mary-Kate, as the pink heat flushed over her cheeks, felt that it sounded less weird, more innocent-loving, than if she had said it first herself. And softly she voiced her agreement, the words flowing straight from her as smooth as Ashley's cream-pale chest, for the first time in her life.
*
No, that wasn't true. The words had come easy from Mary-Kate sometimes before, times when she had Ashley backing her up, times when they were just children and just themselves, no pressure to be anything other than sloppy and charming. Ashley had still been the smart and steady one, the one who knew their lines well enough for both of them and got all their chores done and could explain everything out so that Mary-Kate didn't get lost in it, but she wasn't tough. The thought of losing her had still made Mary-Kate feel so queasy and naked, but the fear had made her come out swinging because back then it was cute to be a fighter. Nobody got to Ashley except through her, not because she was so selflessly eager to protect her sister but because she was so selfishly eager to protect the one thing that protected herself.
It was just harder now because she was supposed to have grown up. She was supposed to be glamorous, a young woman, the thing every little girl wanted to be, the things Ashley was. That had been decided long ago for the both of them, by lawyers and managers and screenwriters who had plotted the course of their lives over boardroom tables and sent them the memos two days later.
Ashley was always the one to read the memos and pass the messages along to Mary-Kate over dinner. Maybe that was why she had grown into it all just fine, and why Mary-Kate felt so behind. Maybe it wasn't the extra two minutes at all. Maybe Ashley didn't need anyone to protect her at all and because they both finally knew it, Mary-Kate could just keep falling behind, trusting Ashley to hold her out of the way of the lenses.
*
That was the only way Mary-Kate knew how to escape it all, by getting behind it. When she couldn't get behind her own closed doors she'd get behind Ashley instead, and when she couldn't get behind Ashley she'd get behind a camera, turning the lens out and away from herself.
She always said now, she had been saying for a while, that she wanted to be a director. She liked photography. She liked being behind the scenes and behind the lenses more and more. And so for a while, since she had started saying it, they had been buying her cameras. Little digital things, big professional things with bulky changeable lenses, five different types of Polaroid from her other siblings. Ashley herself had been taping disposable Kodaks to Mary-Kate's birthday presents for years. Mary-Kate wasn't sure, but she had a feeling that Ashley had begun giving her cameras even before she said anything about wanting to be behind the lenses, and if it was true it would certainly make sense. Ashley knew everything about Mary-Kate first, without question, and Mary-Kate returned the favor by starting every roll of film with her sister.
So when they finally gave her a video camera, a decent one, it only seemed fair to christen it with Ashley.
Afternoon in their Cancun hotel room, the curtains all pulled straight and white across the wide windows, softening the Mexican light, and Mary-Kate felt it was time to break out the new camera. They had fifteen minutes until they needed to be on the set.
Ashley was wrapped in her big white hotel robe, and waved when she saw the pinprick red recording light come on. As always in front of a camera, she came a little more alive. "Welcome to our first video," Mary-Kate said from behind, and watching it later on her own VCR she would hear only her faceless familiar voice as if it were still swimming in her own head. "Do something, Ash."
Ashley was quiet Ashley, smiling the crooked smile that Mary-Kate did not have, laughing low and muffled, falling back onto the bed and among the freshly maid-fluffed pillows and swinging and kicking her legs so that the robe billowed out white and flowing over her light-tanned limbs. Mary-Kate followed every movement smoothly with the camera in her palms. "Look at this, I got this from falling on the beach," Ashley said while rolling her eyes at her own foolishness, and pulled up the robe to show the scrape down her shin. Mary-Kate zoomed in, panned over her leg, over the crisp beige of her skin against the bright white of the bedspread and hotel decor.
Onscreen the sun would make it look as if Ashley was glowing, as if she were hazy sun-caught golden with a halo of white room and curtains softening her borders and everything washed over with a kind of foggy glow, but Mary-Kate didn't need the filter of video to see it. Just looking through the lens she felt so blinded by the brightness that she had to squint, because she was discovering what she could do to Ashley with the camera, how she could turn her into just that leg or just that hand, just a flash of unfocused blonde. The familiar things, the fuller shape of her leg and the birthmark on her thigh, the things they had always used to tell each other apart, became just themselves and not a part of Ashley, became Mary-Kate as she took possession of them with the video she could keep for herself and no one else.
Someone knocked on the door--"five minutes, girls!"--and that too became part of the video, as well as she shake and darkening of the picture when Mary-Kate tilted the lens down toward the bed, thinking they were done. She flipped open the little screen to see what she had already.
Smooth and quick, Ashley ducked down into the frame, asked "Is that it?" and Mary-Kate could not resist following her face as she sat back up again. Ashley tilted her head and shrugged, looking over the camera at Mary-Kate, who was viewing it all now on that tiny screen, like a preview of what was to come, looking at her all washed out and pale in the low resolution, all bleached by the solid row of white-light windows that lit her as if this were a real movie. She put one hand up to the robe and leaned forward; in the screen her eyes were smudge-black rimmed and squinted in thought, the snub of her nose was just a haze of shadow, and her pink lips were parted and showing her inky black mouth and the tiny shine of front teeth. Mary-Kate made eye contact with her there, not in reality but in the little pale imitation onscreen. Ashley stared into the lens, maybe knowing she stared into Mary-Kate's eyes and maybe not, and asked, "Should I take it off now?"
It was a joke. As Mary-Kate flipped closed the screen and turned off the camera, Ashley smiled and slipped off the bed and whipped off her robe to reveal her costume safely protected underneath, and when Mary-Kate was ready she opened the door and led her downstairs to shoot the next scene, right on time.
But what happened after didn't really matter, because for Mary-Kate the video stopped right there, with Ashley's glowing face leaning into her, Ashley's dark-smudge eyes looking into her own, Ashley pale and indistinct like driftwood washed too long in the ocean, Ashley all her own and asking, "Should I take it off now?"
Sometimes she wondered if her sister was catching on.
*
Mary-Kate kept the videos in the back of her closet, along with her old school books and the shoes she never wore. She taped every vacation, every ski trip and day at the beach, her voice swimming around and narrating where and when they were, showing flashes of her parents and her siblings before demanding "Do something, Ash." And Ashley would step into the waves, or throw herself into the foaming snow to make angels, and Mary-Kate would capture her smile, her laugh, the flash of dark-blue eye and shining apple cheek.
People would lean in to her and say "You'll have such great memories of this trip," because they expected that she took these videos to remember it all by. But she could remember fine; she took the videos to live it, to hold it, to see something beyond lights and cameras. What Ashley got in those two extra minutes, Mary-Kate was making her own on videotape.
She would never watch the videos again, not for years. They went in the back of her closet alongside all the other things that had outlived their usefulness.
*
Except for one.
Some nights in the darkness she'd sit up in bed, nothing to herself except for the dim quivering glow of the television, and she'd watch Ashley against that white window row in Cancun, kicking to make her white robe swing, turning into just long smooth leg, just a curling hand clutching at blankets, just that washed face leaning in to ask with a parted petal mouth, "Should I take it off now?" And in the bottom of the frame, just under the time/date/rec stamp, Ashley's hand fluttered at the collar of her robe, beginning to push it and the straps of her tank top away.
Mary-Kate paused here every time, freezing that day before Ashley left the bed, and she'd lay herself sideways across her mattress and turn her head to watch Ashley unsteadily paused on the screen, and while telling herself that this had nothing to do with her sister she would let her thighs fall open and her fingers get to work. She would close her eyes and become just feeling, just a long smooth leg hitching up, just a curling flushed hand clutching at her waistband, just a washed face with a parted petal mouth, a good enough approximation of her sister that the world still confused them, and yes, she wanted it off now, she wanted to know what Ashley had been thinking, she wanted inside that robe and that body and she wanted off off off and oh God what if Ashley ever knew?
Caught. Red-handed. Captured. Enraptured. The words spilled into themselves till Mary-Kate had nothing to say, just Ashley's name over and over whispered into darkness, thinking no ears but her own caught the swimming sounds.
Title: "Captured"
Rating: R
Pairing: Mary-Kate/Ashley
Summary: "There were so many ways to be caught."
Notes: Right-o. Incest involved, proceed with caution. Thanks to beizy for the beta.
Captured
There were so many ways to be caught.
The dictionary in their office spelled it out simply. Caught. Noun, past tense of catch. To be discovered, to be made aware, to be grabbed, entangled, taken, held, captured. They even listed examples. One could catch your attention, catch your eye, be caught red-handed, be caught on film.
*
Mary-Kate had been caught on film more than once in her life. The cameras were ever-present. Their big black staring eyes had eaten up her first kiss, and her second, and many of the kisses after. The sideline of the Lakers game with David. The goodbye peck in his car. The hugs and the holding hands out on the street, paparazzi trailing her with those one-eyed monsters, staring and staring.
She had caught their eye. They were catching her life.
Nobody else really understood but Ashley. The other kids, they knew what it was like to be young and awkward. The other stars, they knew how it felt to be watched. But only Ashley had known their life, her life, bordered by flashes of light and microphone tips and the dark glass walls of lens after lens after lens.
The first time she had realized it, really painfully realized it, was when Star took pictures of their bare skin in Hawaii and everyone ran with the headline.
Olsen Twins: Caught on Film!
*
Mary-Kate talked like Ashley had been the one really bothered by it. "She cried hysterically," she told reporters later on. "It was awful." She never mentioned what she had done, never mentioned the ten minutes standing naked in front of the bathroom mirror and wondering whether her her hips were really as wide as they looked in the pictures, whether her breasts were really too small, her legs too skinny, herself too everything-not-perfect. She never mentioned those few days when she didn't eat from the nervousness and the need to shrink down, the baggy clothes and the sunglasses and the dark hair and all the ways she had found to hide herself when she didn't want them to see her. She never mentioned the frightening truth that sometimes cameras could see through her to her secrets. All she said was it was awful, "but Ashley got over it."
Ashley did get over it, and that was why Mary-Kate hid behind her now. She was always a step behind going down the street, down the red carpets. Ashley had always played the big sister, talking for the both of them and giving directions and getting good grades, like those extra two minutes gave her something Mary-Kate didn't have. And maybe there was something in those extra two minutes, because now without Ashley, Mary-Kate felt bare. She had no speech, no self-possession, no shine. She was just Mary-Kate--the tomboy, the little one, the left-handed kid whose attention span just never stretched as far as it needed to go, whose mind never wrapped around things quick and right the way Ashley's did.
What those two minutes had given Ashley was the power to overcome it all. When she stepped out on the red carpet, those extra two minutes, that extra inch, all of her big-sister things gave her the ability to rise up and see something beyond the lights and cameras and microphones all thrust toward them like hounds cornering prey. With the reporters barking for their attention, Mary-Kate shrank back that one step and let Ashley take the lead, let Ashley catch her hand and pull her where they needed to go. Ashley was the one who turned on their smiles and laughs for interviews, who spoke the first answers to every question, who showed Mary-Kate which flashbulb to turn and look for this time and next. And if Mary-Kate felt lost, she knew she could always step back and tangle her fingers with Ashley's so softly the baby-skin between their knuckles barely felt the brushing, and someone would be in control again.
That was why Mary-Kate only saw herself caught in the red-carpet pictures, herself all deer-in-the-headlights with big round eyes and the corners of her mouth tense and down-curving even when she smiled. Ashley's mouth never curved down. Ashley took on every lens with smirk, her chin lifted, her eyes heavy-lidded and sparkling, her shoulders back so the cream-pale skin of her chest showed every glimmer and shadow, her feet planted firmly, her hand around Mary-Kate's, her wonderful smart self looking classic and beautiful.
*
The People reporter had been hovering around her all day while she picked on salad and sipped her juice and sat endlessly in front of mirrors and lights and lenses. The woman wanted to know how it felt to be beautiful, one of the fifty most beautiful. Mary-Kate didn't think she would know, but she was pinned down by questions again on her lunch break.
Ashley had been able to give the right answers in six sentences flat, but Mary-Kate kept tripping over the thoughts. Did they think they were beautiful, the woman wanted to know, and Mary-Kate didn't know what to say. "Does anyone?" Ashley countered.
Then who, the women asked, turning her eyes directly to Mary-Kate, did they think was beautiful?
The words caught in Mary-Kate's throat. Truth, or not truth? While she hesitated, Ashley's voice rang out. "I think my sister is beautiful," she said. Mary-Kate, as the pink heat flushed over her cheeks, felt that it sounded less weird, more innocent-loving, than if she had said it first herself. And softly she voiced her agreement, the words flowing straight from her as smooth as Ashley's cream-pale chest, for the first time in her life.
*
No, that wasn't true. The words had come easy from Mary-Kate sometimes before, times when she had Ashley backing her up, times when they were just children and just themselves, no pressure to be anything other than sloppy and charming. Ashley had still been the smart and steady one, the one who knew their lines well enough for both of them and got all their chores done and could explain everything out so that Mary-Kate didn't get lost in it, but she wasn't tough. The thought of losing her had still made Mary-Kate feel so queasy and naked, but the fear had made her come out swinging because back then it was cute to be a fighter. Nobody got to Ashley except through her, not because she was so selflessly eager to protect her sister but because she was so selfishly eager to protect the one thing that protected herself.
It was just harder now because she was supposed to have grown up. She was supposed to be glamorous, a young woman, the thing every little girl wanted to be, the things Ashley was. That had been decided long ago for the both of them, by lawyers and managers and screenwriters who had plotted the course of their lives over boardroom tables and sent them the memos two days later.
Ashley was always the one to read the memos and pass the messages along to Mary-Kate over dinner. Maybe that was why she had grown into it all just fine, and why Mary-Kate felt so behind. Maybe it wasn't the extra two minutes at all. Maybe Ashley didn't need anyone to protect her at all and because they both finally knew it, Mary-Kate could just keep falling behind, trusting Ashley to hold her out of the way of the lenses.
*
That was the only way Mary-Kate knew how to escape it all, by getting behind it. When she couldn't get behind her own closed doors she'd get behind Ashley instead, and when she couldn't get behind Ashley she'd get behind a camera, turning the lens out and away from herself.
She always said now, she had been saying for a while, that she wanted to be a director. She liked photography. She liked being behind the scenes and behind the lenses more and more. And so for a while, since she had started saying it, they had been buying her cameras. Little digital things, big professional things with bulky changeable lenses, five different types of Polaroid from her other siblings. Ashley herself had been taping disposable Kodaks to Mary-Kate's birthday presents for years. Mary-Kate wasn't sure, but she had a feeling that Ashley had begun giving her cameras even before she said anything about wanting to be behind the lenses, and if it was true it would certainly make sense. Ashley knew everything about Mary-Kate first, without question, and Mary-Kate returned the favor by starting every roll of film with her sister.
So when they finally gave her a video camera, a decent one, it only seemed fair to christen it with Ashley.
Afternoon in their Cancun hotel room, the curtains all pulled straight and white across the wide windows, softening the Mexican light, and Mary-Kate felt it was time to break out the new camera. They had fifteen minutes until they needed to be on the set.
Ashley was wrapped in her big white hotel robe, and waved when she saw the pinprick red recording light come on. As always in front of a camera, she came a little more alive. "Welcome to our first video," Mary-Kate said from behind, and watching it later on her own VCR she would hear only her faceless familiar voice as if it were still swimming in her own head. "Do something, Ash."
Ashley was quiet Ashley, smiling the crooked smile that Mary-Kate did not have, laughing low and muffled, falling back onto the bed and among the freshly maid-fluffed pillows and swinging and kicking her legs so that the robe billowed out white and flowing over her light-tanned limbs. Mary-Kate followed every movement smoothly with the camera in her palms. "Look at this, I got this from falling on the beach," Ashley said while rolling her eyes at her own foolishness, and pulled up the robe to show the scrape down her shin. Mary-Kate zoomed in, panned over her leg, over the crisp beige of her skin against the bright white of the bedspread and hotel decor.
Onscreen the sun would make it look as if Ashley was glowing, as if she were hazy sun-caught golden with a halo of white room and curtains softening her borders and everything washed over with a kind of foggy glow, but Mary-Kate didn't need the filter of video to see it. Just looking through the lens she felt so blinded by the brightness that she had to squint, because she was discovering what she could do to Ashley with the camera, how she could turn her into just that leg or just that hand, just a flash of unfocused blonde. The familiar things, the fuller shape of her leg and the birthmark on her thigh, the things they had always used to tell each other apart, became just themselves and not a part of Ashley, became Mary-Kate as she took possession of them with the video she could keep for herself and no one else.
Someone knocked on the door--"five minutes, girls!"--and that too became part of the video, as well as she shake and darkening of the picture when Mary-Kate tilted the lens down toward the bed, thinking they were done. She flipped open the little screen to see what she had already.
Smooth and quick, Ashley ducked down into the frame, asked "Is that it?" and Mary-Kate could not resist following her face as she sat back up again. Ashley tilted her head and shrugged, looking over the camera at Mary-Kate, who was viewing it all now on that tiny screen, like a preview of what was to come, looking at her all washed out and pale in the low resolution, all bleached by the solid row of white-light windows that lit her as if this were a real movie. She put one hand up to the robe and leaned forward; in the screen her eyes were smudge-black rimmed and squinted in thought, the snub of her nose was just a haze of shadow, and her pink lips were parted and showing her inky black mouth and the tiny shine of front teeth. Mary-Kate made eye contact with her there, not in reality but in the little pale imitation onscreen. Ashley stared into the lens, maybe knowing she stared into Mary-Kate's eyes and maybe not, and asked, "Should I take it off now?"
It was a joke. As Mary-Kate flipped closed the screen and turned off the camera, Ashley smiled and slipped off the bed and whipped off her robe to reveal her costume safely protected underneath, and when Mary-Kate was ready she opened the door and led her downstairs to shoot the next scene, right on time.
But what happened after didn't really matter, because for Mary-Kate the video stopped right there, with Ashley's glowing face leaning into her, Ashley's dark-smudge eyes looking into her own, Ashley pale and indistinct like driftwood washed too long in the ocean, Ashley all her own and asking, "Should I take it off now?"
Sometimes she wondered if her sister was catching on.
*
Mary-Kate kept the videos in the back of her closet, along with her old school books and the shoes she never wore. She taped every vacation, every ski trip and day at the beach, her voice swimming around and narrating where and when they were, showing flashes of her parents and her siblings before demanding "Do something, Ash." And Ashley would step into the waves, or throw herself into the foaming snow to make angels, and Mary-Kate would capture her smile, her laugh, the flash of dark-blue eye and shining apple cheek.
People would lean in to her and say "You'll have such great memories of this trip," because they expected that she took these videos to remember it all by. But she could remember fine; she took the videos to live it, to hold it, to see something beyond lights and cameras. What Ashley got in those two extra minutes, Mary-Kate was making her own on videotape.
She would never watch the videos again, not for years. They went in the back of her closet alongside all the other things that had outlived their usefulness.
*
Except for one.
Some nights in the darkness she'd sit up in bed, nothing to herself except for the dim quivering glow of the television, and she'd watch Ashley against that white window row in Cancun, kicking to make her white robe swing, turning into just long smooth leg, just a curling hand clutching at blankets, just that washed face leaning in to ask with a parted petal mouth, "Should I take it off now?" And in the bottom of the frame, just under the time/date/rec stamp, Ashley's hand fluttered at the collar of her robe, beginning to push it and the straps of her tank top away.
Mary-Kate paused here every time, freezing that day before Ashley left the bed, and she'd lay herself sideways across her mattress and turn her head to watch Ashley unsteadily paused on the screen, and while telling herself that this had nothing to do with her sister she would let her thighs fall open and her fingers get to work. She would close her eyes and become just feeling, just a long smooth leg hitching up, just a curling flushed hand clutching at her waistband, just a washed face with a parted petal mouth, a good enough approximation of her sister that the world still confused them, and yes, she wanted it off now, she wanted to know what Ashley had been thinking, she wanted inside that robe and that body and she wanted off off off and oh God what if Ashley ever knew?
Caught. Red-handed. Captured. Enraptured. The words spilled into themselves till Mary-Kate had nothing to say, just Ashley's name over and over whispered into darkness, thinking no ears but her own caught the swimming sounds.