ZOMG! I wrote fic!
Title: Pen and Paper
Fandom: Mag7!Modern AU
Characters/Pairing: Nathan/Rain
Rating: Gen
Notes: For
randi2204 and
mendax because they're both awesome and they seem to think this doesn't suck.
The very first thing Nathan can remember is writing. He remembers, with aching clarity, the slant of afternoon sunlight spilling across the empty backside of the rough, brown paper bag, the way the pen felt in his hand - not too heavy, but solid, present, an old fountain pen that had belonged to his granddaddy - and the way the lines wavered and wobbled across the makeshift page. They hadn’t had much, back in those days - barely enough money for food and decent clothing and the outrageous rent their slumlord charged them - but they’d always had paper and pens. It was amazing what toys, what landscapes of childish imagination, could be created from such simple objects - knights and princesses and dragons and heroes and castles and dark, deadly forests, colored garishly from broken half-sets of stolen crayons, or left light brown, like Mama’s skin.
After Mama died, Nathan found a different use for his pen. Then it became a weapon, a way of pouring out all the hatred and anger and despair and fear and confusion, of making sense of everything inside him, of turning the turmoil into manageable words that still didn’t quite capture everything he wanted to say. Sometimes there were no words at all to describe what he felt, and in those times the pen and paper became a map of his soul, full of dark creatures and dragons and burial mounds. He’d write, and write, and write, scribbling and drawing all of his thoughts, until Bobby Delancy saw him writing on the stoop and snatched away his home-made journal (a thing of string and ragged bits of paper held together more by a young boy’s love than by any real mechanism) and read the poem Nathan had written for Sarah Wallace (who was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, and who was white, and even though it weren’t the 60’s anymore, it still wasn’t considered right for a black boy to write poetry to a white girl) and it took seven days for Nathan’s black eyes to go away; of course it took two months for Bobby’s arm to come out of the cast, so Nathan figured those seven days were worth it.
Still, after that, he didn’t seek out pen and paper quite so often. He played sports, instead - ran track, played second base, got enough of a sports scholarship to get out of ‘Bama and head to North Carolina, to Duke for undergrad, where pen and paper were instruments that got in the way of his fun. The cheap pens wore a divot in his finger, and the notebooks got wet and messy and splattered with beer and pizza and soda and gunk; they weren’t the objects of reverence that they used to be. They were just tools, to be picked up and discarded and the doodles Nathan drew in the margins of his notes were just abstract patterns to keep himself awake while the Professor droned on about covalent bonds. Besides, computers were the thing, now - computers and word processing and email, and nobody really wrote anything using pen and paper anymore. Why bother scribbling down in a diary when a blog was so much easier? And in the vastness of the internet, it was probably more anonymous and protected than a real life journal ever could be.
And then he met Rain, and suddenly he was the little boy again, with no money to buy toys but enough imagination to not care. Suddenly he wanted Rain to know everything about him; he wanted to communicate in a way that let her see who he really was, let her know that he always wrote his ‘f’s with a little flourish, and that his ‘a’s and ‘c’s could be indistinguishable if he wrote too fast. He wanted to show her all the secret places he’d learned as a child - how a ‘d’ could become the toe of a dragon, and how an ‘m’ was the lowest foothill of a mountain. He wanted to write the world for her and change it with each stroke, and he couldn’t do that behind a computer.
So he found his granddaddy’s old pen, and paper that was smooth as linen and the color of old satin, and he wrote, with painstaking clarity, “you’re beautiful” upon the smooth expanse; wrote the words over and over, until they formed a rose made up of letters and longing.
He slipped the note into her purse as he walked past her lab station in Organic Chem, and waited, heart beating, for her to find it. It seemed to take ages until she had to open her bag, and Nathan ducked his head, suddenly shy in this moment; would she be pleased or creeped out by his little gift?
A small piece of paper - notebook paper, torn out and folded into a triangle and sent skimming through the air - bounced off his head and he looked up and over to where Rain sat hunched over her experiment. He took the paper and unfolded it, and smoothed it out, until he could read scrawled out in pencil and ugly enough to be a doctor’s hand: “you are too.”
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth where there are
comments
Fandom: Mag7!Modern AU
Characters/Pairing: Nathan/Rain
Rating: Gen
Notes: For
randi2204 and
mendax because they're both awesome and they seem to think this doesn't suck.
The very first thing Nathan can remember is writing. He remembers, with aching clarity, the slant of afternoon sunlight spilling across the empty backside of the rough, brown paper bag, the way the pen felt in his hand - not too heavy, but solid, present, an old fountain pen that had belonged to his granddaddy - and the way the lines wavered and wobbled across the makeshift page. They hadn’t had much, back in those days - barely enough money for food and decent clothing and the outrageous rent their slumlord charged them - but they’d always had paper and pens. It was amazing what toys, what landscapes of childish imagination, could be created from such simple objects - knights and princesses and dragons and heroes and castles and dark, deadly forests, colored garishly from broken half-sets of stolen crayons, or left light brown, like Mama’s skin.
After Mama died, Nathan found a different use for his pen. Then it became a weapon, a way of pouring out all the hatred and anger and despair and fear and confusion, of making sense of everything inside him, of turning the turmoil into manageable words that still didn’t quite capture everything he wanted to say. Sometimes there were no words at all to describe what he felt, and in those times the pen and paper became a map of his soul, full of dark creatures and dragons and burial mounds. He’d write, and write, and write, scribbling and drawing all of his thoughts, until Bobby Delancy saw him writing on the stoop and snatched away his home-made journal (a thing of string and ragged bits of paper held together more by a young boy’s love than by any real mechanism) and read the poem Nathan had written for Sarah Wallace (who was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, and who was white, and even though it weren’t the 60’s anymore, it still wasn’t considered right for a black boy to write poetry to a white girl) and it took seven days for Nathan’s black eyes to go away; of course it took two months for Bobby’s arm to come out of the cast, so Nathan figured those seven days were worth it.
Still, after that, he didn’t seek out pen and paper quite so often. He played sports, instead - ran track, played second base, got enough of a sports scholarship to get out of ‘Bama and head to North Carolina, to Duke for undergrad, where pen and paper were instruments that got in the way of his fun. The cheap pens wore a divot in his finger, and the notebooks got wet and messy and splattered with beer and pizza and soda and gunk; they weren’t the objects of reverence that they used to be. They were just tools, to be picked up and discarded and the doodles Nathan drew in the margins of his notes were just abstract patterns to keep himself awake while the Professor droned on about covalent bonds. Besides, computers were the thing, now - computers and word processing and email, and nobody really wrote anything using pen and paper anymore. Why bother scribbling down in a diary when a blog was so much easier? And in the vastness of the internet, it was probably more anonymous and protected than a real life journal ever could be.
And then he met Rain, and suddenly he was the little boy again, with no money to buy toys but enough imagination to not care. Suddenly he wanted Rain to know everything about him; he wanted to communicate in a way that let her see who he really was, let her know that he always wrote his ‘f’s with a little flourish, and that his ‘a’s and ‘c’s could be indistinguishable if he wrote too fast. He wanted to show her all the secret places he’d learned as a child - how a ‘d’ could become the toe of a dragon, and how an ‘m’ was the lowest foothill of a mountain. He wanted to write the world for her and change it with each stroke, and he couldn’t do that behind a computer.
So he found his granddaddy’s old pen, and paper that was smooth as linen and the color of old satin, and he wrote, with painstaking clarity, “you’re beautiful” upon the smooth expanse; wrote the words over and over, until they formed a rose made up of letters and longing.
He slipped the note into her purse as he walked past her lab station in Organic Chem, and waited, heart beating, for her to find it. It seemed to take ages until she had to open her bag, and Nathan ducked his head, suddenly shy in this moment; would she be pleased or creeped out by his little gift?
A small piece of paper - notebook paper, torn out and folded into a triangle and sent skimming through the air - bounced off his head and he looked up and over to where Rain sat hunched over her experiment. He took the paper and unfolded it, and smoothed it out, until he could read scrawled out in pencil and ugly enough to be a doctor’s hand: “you are too.”
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth where there are
comments