Pear 10
Author: C
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 626
Story / World: BTS/Untitled OHS/NaNo project
Challenge: Pear 10. doom & gloom
Toppings / Extras: Chopped Nuts
Notes: Aaron, Sandy, Seth and Peter stress out the night before they send Peter to the Library. Sandy is a geek, Seth is indecisive, Aaron is strange and Peter falls asleep, basically.
...why no, I did not post this to my personal journal by accident at all last night. Whyever do you ask? End of Pear, anyway.
Sandy rubbed her eyes, which hurt from staring too long at an impassive screen. She wasn’t sure how a computer screen would display sympathy short of *hugs* spontaneously appearing on it, which would be a strange combination of heartwarming and creepy, but she remained certain that hers, still, was more impersonal and uncaring than any other. Weren’t her eyes proof, dry and aching as they were? Discounting that this was mostly due to glasses-related negligence on her part, were her eyes not proof?
In the past two hours she had written and subsequently deleted, slowly, letter-by-letter, five phrases, which were as follows:
- To be honest I’m scared
- Really the part I don’t understand is why Peter
- What makes it worth it all are the applications, we could
- I had a dream about a blood-red worm tunneling out of my nose, I wonder if that means anything or I should not reread Dune before bed
- If we’re all dead it means Aaron got the wrong world and something with tentacles or other instruments of death and such
She stared a bit longer, until she could see ghost-words where already-written work would usually twist and blur, then typed:
I think what I’m afraid of is a specific type of failure. I am afraid of being forgotten. Not that there’s any way I know to make ourselves and our achievement known; I am not deluding myself. I don’t do that. I don’t. But to die with no one knowing what we tried to do...
I ended up being the one who converted everyone, really. Relentless, I am, and mad idealistic, so it makes sense. What no one but Aaron knows is that I’m not too sure exactly what it is I’m advocating.
I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow, won’t we?
- - -
Seth paced over the narrow rectangle of visible carpet in his room; there were footsteps ground into it from previous times he’d done this. He paced, and paced, and paced; occasionally he would stop and look thoughtfully at his desk. Sandy was probably still up, he’d think, talking would likely make it better, they could be apprehensive together...
Together. Better. Right. He’d bounce his sick nervousness off of her and it would stick, making both of them absolutely miserable.
Eventually he fell asleep, still fully clothed. He slept very badly and, unfortunately, forgot his dreams in the split-second after he awoke, but this was normal for him.
- - -
Aaron sat cross-legged, pricking his finger with a pin over and over, peppering the piece of scrap paper in front of him with blood. What he was doing was akin to guessing phone numbers with only an area code to work with, but including the added complication of that the right result would have barely anything - perhaps a thousandth of a percent, one part per million - in common with any other possible result. He had started with what he knew and was working away, as if every number he guessed he then called and asked for the farthest direction from there which could be known.
The advantage was that once he found it he could seal a pattern to it, the disadvantage that it was time-consuming and left him looking like he’d tried to shoot up his fingertips. Not that anyone was particularly likely to start inspecting his hands, though. It wasn’t a school night.
- - -
Peter was the only one of them who didn’t worry under the guise of preparation until the early morning. In this respect he was remarkably logical. It wasn’t that he was less nervous than anyone else; he simply chose to ignore these nerves by way of sleep. Admittedly, the anxiety was waiting for him when he woke up.
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 626
Story / World: BTS/Untitled OHS/NaNo project
Challenge: Pear 10. doom & gloom
Toppings / Extras: Chopped Nuts
Notes: Aaron, Sandy, Seth and Peter stress out the night before they send Peter to the Library. Sandy is a geek, Seth is indecisive, Aaron is strange and Peter falls asleep, basically.
...why no, I did not post this to my personal journal by accident at all last night. Whyever do you ask? End of Pear, anyway.
Sandy rubbed her eyes, which hurt from staring too long at an impassive screen. She wasn’t sure how a computer screen would display sympathy short of *hugs* spontaneously appearing on it, which would be a strange combination of heartwarming and creepy, but she remained certain that hers, still, was more impersonal and uncaring than any other. Weren’t her eyes proof, dry and aching as they were? Discounting that this was mostly due to glasses-related negligence on her part, were her eyes not proof?
In the past two hours she had written and subsequently deleted, slowly, letter-by-letter, five phrases, which were as follows:
- To be honest I’m scared
- Really the part I don’t understand is why Peter
- What makes it worth it all are the applications, we could
- I had a dream about a blood-red worm tunneling out of my nose, I wonder if that means anything or I should not reread Dune before bed
- If we’re all dead it means Aaron got the wrong world and something with tentacles or other instruments of death and such
She stared a bit longer, until she could see ghost-words where already-written work would usually twist and blur, then typed:
I think what I’m afraid of is a specific type of failure. I am afraid of being forgotten. Not that there’s any way I know to make ourselves and our achievement known; I am not deluding myself. I don’t do that. I don’t. But to die with no one knowing what we tried to do...
I ended up being the one who converted everyone, really. Relentless, I am, and mad idealistic, so it makes sense. What no one but Aaron knows is that I’m not too sure exactly what it is I’m advocating.
I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow, won’t we?
- - -
Seth paced over the narrow rectangle of visible carpet in his room; there were footsteps ground into it from previous times he’d done this. He paced, and paced, and paced; occasionally he would stop and look thoughtfully at his desk. Sandy was probably still up, he’d think, talking would likely make it better, they could be apprehensive together...
Together. Better. Right. He’d bounce his sick nervousness off of her and it would stick, making both of them absolutely miserable.
Eventually he fell asleep, still fully clothed. He slept very badly and, unfortunately, forgot his dreams in the split-second after he awoke, but this was normal for him.
- - -
Aaron sat cross-legged, pricking his finger with a pin over and over, peppering the piece of scrap paper in front of him with blood. What he was doing was akin to guessing phone numbers with only an area code to work with, but including the added complication of that the right result would have barely anything - perhaps a thousandth of a percent, one part per million - in common with any other possible result. He had started with what he knew and was working away, as if every number he guessed he then called and asked for the farthest direction from there which could be known.
The advantage was that once he found it he could seal a pattern to it, the disadvantage that it was time-consuming and left him looking like he’d tried to shoot up his fingertips. Not that anyone was particularly likely to start inspecting his hands, though. It wasn’t a school night.
- - -
Peter was the only one of them who didn’t worry under the guise of preparation until the early morning. In this respect he was remarkably logical. It wasn’t that he was less nervous than anyone else; he simply chose to ignore these nerves by way of sleep. Admittedly, the anxiety was waiting for him when he woke up.