(no subject)
For the the marvellous jenish (my heroine), in the damnyouwentz Fic Exchange the First (in celebration of Wentzday); 1,818 words, replete with the abuse of footnotes, abstract references to broken chinaware, absurd talking books, and screencaps of actual MySpace comments.
...Yeah, I don't know either.
This is a re-post, it was originally over HERE, older comments can be found there as well.
(Oh, and to the uninitiated: Chris does have asthma, f'reals. That's not made up. Everything else, is. OR IS IT [?!])
all you can ever learn is what you already know (myspace is a place for liars)
THS. Darren/Chris: the important details of him, none of them on the internet.
i.
Nearly everything about Christopher Gregory Faller is tidy; his collar inconsequentially, unintentionally in place, hair parted neatly. It’s as if objects collectively decide to settle into place around him, or whisper hurriedly among themselves into a kind of planned arrangement as he enters a room. He is the kind of boy that words like spic and span are made for.
He hovers at the doorway of his bedroom with a misplaced kind of residual courtesy; leans his head on the doorframe and looks at the boy sitting at his desk, who is staring intently at his laptop, glasses reflecting a blue-white glow.
“…You’d better not be doing filthy things with my computer again, Darren Dastardly,” Chris says, making a soft approach, doing something in between lingering and walking in, hands in his pockets.
( -- move *over*, a kafka book wails, tightly pressed to the bookshelf wall, you’re hurting me, and the oxford thesaurus groans inaudibly in reply. the nearby lamp flickers on and off just the slightest, to warn the other objects of his return. shut *up*, we’re trying, the alarm clock on the nightstand rattles, in the silent speaking of Things. it’s impossible, say the set of jd salinger books on the far left, there’s too goddam many of us, and oh god, hurry, he’s come *back* -- )
“…Filthy things, of course there are always filthy things,” Darren replies over the clacking of keys, pure honeycomb defiance in his voice. “Wild and crazy shit like you wouldn’t believe. Whips, feathers, raspberry preserves and bunny ears…”
“And lions and tigers and bears, oh my --” Chris says, laying his hands on Darren’s shoulders, tightening his grip in mock surprise. Darren accepts the weight of him without protest, with more than enough familiarity, because Chris’ hands on his shoulders don’t mean anything in the same way that risqué conversations always happen when they are alone, or near surfaces soft enough to be pleasantly horizontal in. Really, it means very little, next to nothing at all.
Chris rests his chin on Darren’s head, reads over him at the monitor.
Why the hell does your hair smell like laundry soap, Chris means to ask, have you been sleeping near the washerdryer for warmth, or something, but he doesn’t get to, not in that second. See, it takes a moment to recognize what’s on-screen.
( -- a moment: a tiny volume of kafka’s the metamorphosis falls out of his bookshelf for no audible reason; perhaps just the pull of gravity. there is almost a little papery whimper as it hits the ground, but Chris doesn’t notice, instead he notices blue and white and tables&tables full of pictures and General Interests and Heroes, notices -- )
“…You’re on MySpace,” Chris cries incredulously, as if he wasn’t.
ii.
“There’s this weird thing, like,” Chris starts, and he sounds exactly like Patrick, Darren thinks. Because there is also this other weird thing, like, Patrick uses that expression every time a song reminds him of a story that reminds him of another song.
(This happens fairly regularly, now; lately there have been a lot of sunny afternoons spent indoors with large headphones on. The soft crinkle-crush sound of slipping old LP’s out of their paper sleeves and the murmuring undercurrent of a needle on vinyl. Patrick urging them both listen, listen, these are the sounds we need in the world.)
“…I read this book once,” Chris continues, “Where nothing happened in the story, and everything happened in the footnotes.”
“That might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard[1],” Darren says.
[1] This is not, in fact, the stupidest thing Darren has ever heard. The stupidest thing Darren has ever heard is a close contest between the reason he and his second girlfriend broke up, and something reported sometime last year by Fox News. However, at the time he makes this statement, he has not yet heard himself, two days later, asking a clerk at Borders about, uh, there’s this book that I’m looking for. What kind of book. Um. Well. It has footnotes?
iii.
The way every mug and cup Chris has ever owned is chipped in the exact same place each time. The way this has taken on its own ridiculously huge importance as Darren washes his hands at the kitchen sink.
iv.
While toying with piano arrangements (Darren’s in another corner, fussing over the surface of his hi-hat cymbal), Chris sometimes smokes as if they were staying after-hours at a tiny, smoky lounge, not after-hours in a recording-room with terrible air conditioning.
He takes maybe nine minutes to finish a cigarette, two minutes longer than the Statistical Average, due to the particular calibration of particles circulating in the air. Let us all take a solemn interest in this fact as we account for the 120 extra seconds (more or less).
.
.
.
0.2 seconds: Brief period of reflection as throat begins to tighten warningly. Chris wondering whether he should quit while he is ahead, “ahead” meaning ‘not choking for air in a spirit of sheer desperation.’
15.2 seconds: Reaching decision to breathe in breathe out breathe in, instead. Blue cloud of smoke tracing the outline of his jaw.
0.1 seconds: Acceptance of the inevitable.
67.0 seconds: Will feel like the longest sixty-seven seconds in the 21 years of his life. Inhaling expectantly but the oxygen not arriving. His collarbone dipping deeper into a valley. Ribcage almost collapsing in a heave. Looking more and more like a sparrow caught in a tornado, and all the danger that brings to bird-bones and wings.
0.4 seconds: Time it takes to travel from corner A to across the room.
2.9 seconds: Darren asking, “Will you ever learn what’s good for you?” Grasping Chris’ shoulders because it is as if he will shake himself apart.
7.9 seconds: Chris answering, “No, I, don’t, think, so,” in between inhalations, sharp like knife cuts. Heaving forwards and hitting a discordant set of high notes with his elbow. Smiling sort of crookedly.
0.53 seconds: Darren taking the cigarette from Chris’ fingers, crushing it underfoot. Chris frowning at the waste of perfectly good nicotine.
45.8 seconds: Chris’ breathing slowly returning to normal, interchanges of oxygen and carbon dioxide slowly lengthening, evening out. Darren rubbing his back, soft circles at first, then tracing the line of his spine down to his waist, over and over again, comfortingly.
v.
that several days could be passing by,
& maybe nothing else happens at all?
exactly.
vi.
Then, and then again --
Christopher Faller tastes a little like ashes, but more like the last dregs of milky coffee: bitter slightly standalone from the sweet, somewhat grainy, subtly rough.
Darren learns this fact easily and without pretense, leaning into him by a sunlit window. Golden knife-points of daylight slipping between the half-open blinds, catching themselves in his hair.
vii.
Sometimes Chris is stricken by random acts of declamation in supermarkets.
“ …‘You think I would be so bold as to serve you breakfast completely in the nude, Lord St. Bride of the London St. Brides?’ the buxom Yvette asked coyly. ‘Never! I always wear my tiny white lace slip, though it barely conceals the moist grotto of my womanhood…’ ”
He has perfected the syrupy hybrid of European accents used by every girl in every Danielle Steele book ever written, just for this purpose. Just like a natural storyteller perhaps should.
“It’s genius,” Chris says, putting the book back on the shelf with an affectionate pat, as if it had done something particularly pleasing for him. “Gorgeous in being pure and unfiltered shit. The publishers must be making millions.”
Darren tells him pointedly that this is because all romance novels come down to keywords like neck mouth skin fingers ocean heart, heart, in various happy arrangements.
“The bored housewives of the world seem to like it just fine,” he says. He turns over a paperback entitled Midnight Dreams of the Prisoner’s Bodice in his hands, the gaudy gold title glinting under the fluorescent lights, a laugh beginning to pool in his throat.
They buy it to pass back and forth on the walk home, oh, my passionate loins! echoing down the street, and her womanly delight! his turgid pleasure rod! They pause, maybe every block or so to catch their breaths, but resume quickly, every 14 steps ringing out with laughter and oh my god, stop it, this is killing me.
viii.
There are other things Chris would probably read much more quietly, with an indoors kind of voice -- slow and deliberate, because not all echoing is for mockery.
(Darren’s asleep on his couch, legs hooked over the armrest because furniture-makers do not normally think of him when they are designing their Fall line of sofas. Chris leans back onto Darren’s knees, taps out a beat idly on the floor with his fingers.)
But, he decides, the audience he means to read to is perhaps a boy of less words, more action.
ix.
page 248: You can't help it. They're just there, the beautiful wrong people… they have you believing in things you aren't suited to believe, and the worst of it is you aren't going to come to your senses someday, your senses are here[2].
[2] Here, under the curve of his hands cupped over Darren’s eyes; echoing in Darren’s ears when Chris asks him to blink just so he can feel the motion of his eyelashes. Here, on the imaginary borderlines between hip to hip, from knee to inner thigh. Here, in the wake of kisses he presses into Darren’s jaw, warmed by the heat of whispering you feel like sandpaper. Darren slides a hand underneath Chris’ shirt, damp with sweat -- the moisture making it difficult, like a book whose pages have all stuck together, the layers softened by time passing.
x.
neck mouth skin fingers ocean heart
, heart.
(Chris falls asleep in a way that is mostly atop Darren, legs kind of curled around Darren’s knees. Accounting for height difference, we must assume that their ankles do not quite meet. Chris would have to bend his feet just a little more, and perhaps drift just a little lower, for that to happen.)
xi.
When the time comes for leaving:
Darren looks back wordlessly, bemused. He is waiting for the speech centers of his brain to catch up with his heartbeat.
Chris stands in the doorway, book in his left hand, forefinger marking a page he may or may not get back to, later. He doesn’t say anything similar to a goodbye. Instead he holds out the book like a gun, one corner clasped in his hand as a trigger, arm outstretched in a threat. Bang, Chris whispers, book tilting back in mock-recoil, his mouth curving around the sound.
Darren staggers backwards, clutching at his heart, (as if it were a declaration of love) as if he were dying.
.
FIN ♥
Quote is from Chasing Shakespeares by Sarah Smith. It’s a boring novel with an awfully craptacular plot but good lines scattered around if you dig.
sonstoodstammer, my beta and beffy -- you are the cleverest this side of Everest and ily, please never leave me.
Feedback is always repaid in full. xo
...Yeah, I don't know either.
This is a re-post, it was originally over HERE, older comments can be found there as well.
(Oh, and to the uninitiated: Chris does have asthma, f'reals. That's not made up. Everything else, is. OR IS IT [?!])
all you can ever learn is what you already know (myspace is a place for liars)
THS. Darren/Chris: the important details of him, none of them on the internet.
i.
Nearly everything about Christopher Gregory Faller is tidy; his collar inconsequentially, unintentionally in place, hair parted neatly. It’s as if objects collectively decide to settle into place around him, or whisper hurriedly among themselves into a kind of planned arrangement as he enters a room. He is the kind of boy that words like spic and span are made for.
He hovers at the doorway of his bedroom with a misplaced kind of residual courtesy; leans his head on the doorframe and looks at the boy sitting at his desk, who is staring intently at his laptop, glasses reflecting a blue-white glow.
“…You’d better not be doing filthy things with my computer again, Darren Dastardly,” Chris says, making a soft approach, doing something in between lingering and walking in, hands in his pockets.
( -- move *over*, a kafka book wails, tightly pressed to the bookshelf wall, you’re hurting me, and the oxford thesaurus groans inaudibly in reply. the nearby lamp flickers on and off just the slightest, to warn the other objects of his return. shut *up*, we’re trying, the alarm clock on the nightstand rattles, in the silent speaking of Things. it’s impossible, say the set of jd salinger books on the far left, there’s too goddam many of us, and oh god, hurry, he’s come *back* -- )
“…Filthy things, of course there are always filthy things,” Darren replies over the clacking of keys, pure honeycomb defiance in his voice. “Wild and crazy shit like you wouldn’t believe. Whips, feathers, raspberry preserves and bunny ears…”
“And lions and tigers and bears, oh my --” Chris says, laying his hands on Darren’s shoulders, tightening his grip in mock surprise. Darren accepts the weight of him without protest, with more than enough familiarity, because Chris’ hands on his shoulders don’t mean anything in the same way that risqué conversations always happen when they are alone, or near surfaces soft enough to be pleasantly horizontal in. Really, it means very little, next to nothing at all.
Chris rests his chin on Darren’s head, reads over him at the monitor.
Why the hell does your hair smell like laundry soap, Chris means to ask, have you been sleeping near the washerdryer for warmth, or something, but he doesn’t get to, not in that second. See, it takes a moment to recognize what’s on-screen.
( -- a moment: a tiny volume of kafka’s the metamorphosis falls out of his bookshelf for no audible reason; perhaps just the pull of gravity. there is almost a little papery whimper as it hits the ground, but Chris doesn’t notice, instead he notices blue and white and tables&tables full of pictures and General Interests and Heroes, notices -- )
“…You’re on MySpace,” Chris cries incredulously, as if he wasn’t.
ii.
“There’s this weird thing, like,” Chris starts, and he sounds exactly like Patrick, Darren thinks. Because there is also this other weird thing, like, Patrick uses that expression every time a song reminds him of a story that reminds him of another song.
(This happens fairly regularly, now; lately there have been a lot of sunny afternoons spent indoors with large headphones on. The soft crinkle-crush sound of slipping old LP’s out of their paper sleeves and the murmuring undercurrent of a needle on vinyl. Patrick urging them both listen, listen, these are the sounds we need in the world.)
“…I read this book once,” Chris continues, “Where nothing happened in the story, and everything happened in the footnotes.”
“That might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard[1],” Darren says.
[1] This is not, in fact, the stupidest thing Darren has ever heard. The stupidest thing Darren has ever heard is a close contest between the reason he and his second girlfriend broke up, and something reported sometime last year by Fox News. However, at the time he makes this statement, he has not yet heard himself, two days later, asking a clerk at Borders about, uh, there’s this book that I’m looking for. What kind of book. Um. Well. It has footnotes?
iii.
The way every mug and cup Chris has ever owned is chipped in the exact same place each time. The way this has taken on its own ridiculously huge importance as Darren washes his hands at the kitchen sink.
iv.
While toying with piano arrangements (Darren’s in another corner, fussing over the surface of his hi-hat cymbal), Chris sometimes smokes as if they were staying after-hours at a tiny, smoky lounge, not after-hours in a recording-room with terrible air conditioning.
He takes maybe nine minutes to finish a cigarette, two minutes longer than the Statistical Average, due to the particular calibration of particles circulating in the air. Let us all take a solemn interest in this fact as we account for the 120 extra seconds (more or less).
.
.
.
0.2 seconds: Brief period of reflection as throat begins to tighten warningly. Chris wondering whether he should quit while he is ahead, “ahead” meaning ‘not choking for air in a spirit of sheer desperation.’
15.2 seconds: Reaching decision to breathe in breathe out breathe in, instead. Blue cloud of smoke tracing the outline of his jaw.
0.1 seconds: Acceptance of the inevitable.
67.0 seconds: Will feel like the longest sixty-seven seconds in the 21 years of his life. Inhaling expectantly but the oxygen not arriving. His collarbone dipping deeper into a valley. Ribcage almost collapsing in a heave. Looking more and more like a sparrow caught in a tornado, and all the danger that brings to bird-bones and wings.
0.4 seconds: Time it takes to travel from corner A to across the room.
2.9 seconds: Darren asking, “Will you ever learn what’s good for you?” Grasping Chris’ shoulders because it is as if he will shake himself apart.
7.9 seconds: Chris answering, “No, I, don’t, think, so,” in between inhalations, sharp like knife cuts. Heaving forwards and hitting a discordant set of high notes with his elbow. Smiling sort of crookedly.
0.53 seconds: Darren taking the cigarette from Chris’ fingers, crushing it underfoot. Chris frowning at the waste of perfectly good nicotine.
45.8 seconds: Chris’ breathing slowly returning to normal, interchanges of oxygen and carbon dioxide slowly lengthening, evening out. Darren rubbing his back, soft circles at first, then tracing the line of his spine down to his waist, over and over again, comfortingly.
v.
that several days could be passing by,
& maybe nothing else happens at all?
exactly.
vi.
Then, and then again --
Christopher Faller tastes a little like ashes, but more like the last dregs of milky coffee: bitter slightly standalone from the sweet, somewhat grainy, subtly rough.
Darren learns this fact easily and without pretense, leaning into him by a sunlit window. Golden knife-points of daylight slipping between the half-open blinds, catching themselves in his hair.
vii.
Sometimes Chris is stricken by random acts of declamation in supermarkets.
“ …‘You think I would be so bold as to serve you breakfast completely in the nude, Lord St. Bride of the London St. Brides?’ the buxom Yvette asked coyly. ‘Never! I always wear my tiny white lace slip, though it barely conceals the moist grotto of my womanhood…’ ”
He has perfected the syrupy hybrid of European accents used by every girl in every Danielle Steele book ever written, just for this purpose. Just like a natural storyteller perhaps should.
“It’s genius,” Chris says, putting the book back on the shelf with an affectionate pat, as if it had done something particularly pleasing for him. “Gorgeous in being pure and unfiltered shit. The publishers must be making millions.”
Darren tells him pointedly that this is because all romance novels come down to keywords like neck mouth skin fingers ocean heart, heart, in various happy arrangements.
“The bored housewives of the world seem to like it just fine,” he says. He turns over a paperback entitled Midnight Dreams of the Prisoner’s Bodice in his hands, the gaudy gold title glinting under the fluorescent lights, a laugh beginning to pool in his throat.
They buy it to pass back and forth on the walk home, oh, my passionate loins! echoing down the street, and her womanly delight! his turgid pleasure rod! They pause, maybe every block or so to catch their breaths, but resume quickly, every 14 steps ringing out with laughter and oh my god, stop it, this is killing me.
viii.
There are other things Chris would probably read much more quietly, with an indoors kind of voice -- slow and deliberate, because not all echoing is for mockery.
(Darren’s asleep on his couch, legs hooked over the armrest because furniture-makers do not normally think of him when they are designing their Fall line of sofas. Chris leans back onto Darren’s knees, taps out a beat idly on the floor with his fingers.)
But, he decides, the audience he means to read to is perhaps a boy of less words, more action.
ix.
page 248: You can't help it. They're just there, the beautiful wrong people… they have you believing in things you aren't suited to believe, and the worst of it is you aren't going to come to your senses someday, your senses are here[2].
[2] Here, under the curve of his hands cupped over Darren’s eyes; echoing in Darren’s ears when Chris asks him to blink just so he can feel the motion of his eyelashes. Here, on the imaginary borderlines between hip to hip, from knee to inner thigh. Here, in the wake of kisses he presses into Darren’s jaw, warmed by the heat of whispering you feel like sandpaper. Darren slides a hand underneath Chris’ shirt, damp with sweat -- the moisture making it difficult, like a book whose pages have all stuck together, the layers softened by time passing.
x.
neck mouth skin fingers ocean heart
, heart.
(Chris falls asleep in a way that is mostly atop Darren, legs kind of curled around Darren’s knees. Accounting for height difference, we must assume that their ankles do not quite meet. Chris would have to bend his feet just a little more, and perhaps drift just a little lower, for that to happen.)
xi.
When the time comes for leaving:
Darren looks back wordlessly, bemused. He is waiting for the speech centers of his brain to catch up with his heartbeat.
Chris stands in the doorway, book in his left hand, forefinger marking a page he may or may not get back to, later. He doesn’t say anything similar to a goodbye. Instead he holds out the book like a gun, one corner clasped in his hand as a trigger, arm outstretched in a threat. Bang, Chris whispers, book tilting back in mock-recoil, his mouth curving around the sound.
Darren staggers backwards, clutching at his heart, (as if it were a declaration of love) as if he were dying.
.
FIN ♥
Quote is from Chasing Shakespeares by Sarah Smith. It’s a boring novel with an awfully craptacular plot but good lines scattered around if you dig.
sonstoodstammer, my beta and beffy -- you are the cleverest this side of Everest and ily, please never leave me.
Feedback is always repaid in full. xo