WWJCD
You get a year. Don't fuck it up.
This, Ray thinks, should be first and foremost on the Magic Island Primer, along with warnings against ridiculous shit like falling for the first person you see after transcending time and space, because. Well, because while fairy tales and Harry Potter are apparently perfectly real, the whole first-sight thing doesn't have any more guarantees than high school sweethearts or fiances or that, that whatever it was about making a fucking baby that should have kept his dad there.
You get a year, someone should have told him, so don't waste it with learning to trust her, don't waste even more of it fighting or fucking with your friends, learn her like the parts of the rifle you traded away, a short gray dress he never got around to giving her. Learn her like the parts of his rifle and put her back together but when she's gone, like the rifle, don't you dare wonder what you're getting in return, because she's not really his to trade with the universe, and there's nothing he'd want that badly anyway.
Except to go home, maybe. Right now, dragging the last of his clothes to her hut, he doesn't want to fucking be here. He never really let it sink in, he never really let it back out: from the moment he got here, Marissa was like the fucking fairy princess that made him forget that he'd wandered off the path, and ever time he wanted to freak out about jumping five fucking years into the future and landing on an island no one's ever heard of, he'd shoved it down, decided it didn't matter, because poor mental health didn't actually get you to home plate with Marissa Cooper. Second base, maybe, if you were pitiable enough.
It does matter, though. It really fucking matters, because a year after he met her, she's gone, as easily as he fell out of that Humvee, into her line of sight.
The yellow boots are folded and wrinkled and hidden in the farthest corner of the room, under her bed and he's never hated a color so much in his fucking life.
You don't get a year, the primer will actually say: you don't get anything. You wake up in the wrong place and maybe a girl comes along, cleans you up and makes you coffee and drinks it with you, and she's fragile but somehow still nice, and you push down how crazy everything is because maybe, maybe you woke up on a magic island so you could meet her, maybe you woke up on a magic island so you could wake up and see her every day. But you fucking didn't, okay, everything is arbitrary and maybe you get a year, maybe you get a month, before one of you just as arbitrarily disappears.
Ray throws the box at the wall in a snit, forgets that he's stronger than he looks, even to himself, and it bursts open in a shower of wrinkled clothes, and a brown bottle tips off the narrow window sill and something clear soaks into a pair of his jeans, and, next to it, a textbook he isn't about to save. It's probably water. It really doesn't fucking matter anymore if it isn't.
"I don't know how to do this," he tells her hut, tells the smell of her girly shampoo that lingers in the humid air, because when he doesn't say things out loud they simmer in the bottom of his stomach until he wants to throw up or punch someone in the face, and that's just how it's always been, really. "Are you dead? Did you break up with me? This is really not a good What Would John Cusack Do scenario, okay."
John Cusack would probably get drunk, actually, and it's just ironic enough that Ray mutters a hoarse, "Fuck it," as he storms out of his new residence, past the cemetery and down the path, set on doing just that.
[I lied, I can't wait any longer to do this, so here it is: LT and ST more than welcome. Consider this the official Marissa Cooper is Gone post, anyone who needs to be informed is more than welcome to tag in or assume he's told them. Not a great time to meet him, but all tags are welcome. Timed to midday, find him outside Marissa's hut or on the paths.]
This, Ray thinks, should be first and foremost on the Magic Island Primer, along with warnings against ridiculous shit like falling for the first person you see after transcending time and space, because. Well, because while fairy tales and Harry Potter are apparently perfectly real, the whole first-sight thing doesn't have any more guarantees than high school sweethearts or fiances or that, that whatever it was about making a fucking baby that should have kept his dad there.
You get a year, someone should have told him, so don't waste it with learning to trust her, don't waste even more of it fighting or fucking with your friends, learn her like the parts of the rifle you traded away, a short gray dress he never got around to giving her. Learn her like the parts of his rifle and put her back together but when she's gone, like the rifle, don't you dare wonder what you're getting in return, because she's not really his to trade with the universe, and there's nothing he'd want that badly anyway.
Except to go home, maybe. Right now, dragging the last of his clothes to her hut, he doesn't want to fucking be here. He never really let it sink in, he never really let it back out: from the moment he got here, Marissa was like the fucking fairy princess that made him forget that he'd wandered off the path, and ever time he wanted to freak out about jumping five fucking years into the future and landing on an island no one's ever heard of, he'd shoved it down, decided it didn't matter, because poor mental health didn't actually get you to home plate with Marissa Cooper. Second base, maybe, if you were pitiable enough.
It does matter, though. It really fucking matters, because a year after he met her, she's gone, as easily as he fell out of that Humvee, into her line of sight.
The yellow boots are folded and wrinkled and hidden in the farthest corner of the room, under her bed and he's never hated a color so much in his fucking life.
You don't get a year, the primer will actually say: you don't get anything. You wake up in the wrong place and maybe a girl comes along, cleans you up and makes you coffee and drinks it with you, and she's fragile but somehow still nice, and you push down how crazy everything is because maybe, maybe you woke up on a magic island so you could meet her, maybe you woke up on a magic island so you could wake up and see her every day. But you fucking didn't, okay, everything is arbitrary and maybe you get a year, maybe you get a month, before one of you just as arbitrarily disappears.
Ray throws the box at the wall in a snit, forgets that he's stronger than he looks, even to himself, and it bursts open in a shower of wrinkled clothes, and a brown bottle tips off the narrow window sill and something clear soaks into a pair of his jeans, and, next to it, a textbook he isn't about to save. It's probably water. It really doesn't fucking matter anymore if it isn't.
"I don't know how to do this," he tells her hut, tells the smell of her girly shampoo that lingers in the humid air, because when he doesn't say things out loud they simmer in the bottom of his stomach until he wants to throw up or punch someone in the face, and that's just how it's always been, really. "Are you dead? Did you break up with me? This is really not a good What Would John Cusack Do scenario, okay."
John Cusack would probably get drunk, actually, and it's just ironic enough that Ray mutters a hoarse, "Fuck it," as he storms out of his new residence, past the cemetery and down the path, set on doing just that.
[I lied, I can't wait any longer to do this, so here it is: LT and ST more than welcome. Consider this the official Marissa Cooper is Gone post, anyone who needs to be informed is more than welcome to tag in or assume he's told them. Not a great time to meet him, but all tags are welcome. Timed to midday, find him outside Marissa's hut or on the paths.]