there will come soft rains
Title: there will come soft rains
Author:
tohereandnow
Characters: Erik/Charles, Raven
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1000
Disclaimer: Not real, not mine, not making money from this
Warning: implied RPF
Summary: Ten 100-word drabbles, beginning with (who can help it?) that field photo. Grief, memory, and the blurring of lines between acting and reality.
A/N: Title from this poem by Sara Teasdale
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
- Sara Teasdale
He is speaking animatedly and Michael dwells not about the topic they’re discussing but flirts with the accents and languages between them, words, words that hint at so much but mean nothing more, beyond the pale of Charles’ fingertips. And he corrects himself, James, not Charles, and the brightest of blues flickers up at him, burning like the sun only brighter, flickering with the surest hint of recognition, as if there really was a telepath in him who snagged that correction from the wind, laughing as he dismisses it, staring down at the spears of grass in his own hands.
****
There are many ways to miss a person. She stands before the mirror, reconstructs his image as her own. She imagines his nape where time has grown out his hair till it had begun to take on an almost imperceptible curl, as if reluctant to trespass on his shirt collar (wrinkled, unstarched), and she weeps, no, he weeps, because what other way could you love a man who thinks of you only as his sister than to become him and caress his brow, his arms, as you would if he were pressed against you, close-the door swings open and-
****
He stares at her, him, she can see the pronouns flickering across his face even if she can never read his mind. He steps in, folds his fingers over her legs. As the hands of the clock run anti-clockwise he recreates the memory of coruscation behind those eyes, action potentials reached and surpassed, electric signals surging way past threshold points so that all he sees is light, and is light something that can even be seen, he thinks, white, blinding, almost like pain, nameless and shapeless, searing itself from the base of his spine upwards, till there is nothing more.
****
The tricks he uses with the ladies are starting to wear thin, not because they’ve run out of steam but because they work too well, their model answers falling into place as he engages in his part of the dance, studied, predictable, boring. He wants to win someone over the old-fashioned way, (wine, tea, conversation, chess), a converging of minds unorchestrated by his meddling influences. A trophy, perhaps, of sorts. That somewhere down the road they will flip back through the pages of their lives, pointing there, there, happy as children, the markers of each other’s presence in the margins.
****
He’d slipped out of the mansion without anybody noticing. Wheeling himself uphill is an arduous task that is comforting in its occupation of his mind, which instructs him mechanically to push the wheels, watch out for uneven ground, breathe. The wheels feel sticky in his hands. Finally, he stops at a plateau, panting. There’s a hint of metal in the air. It can’t be an indulgence of his mind, nor the fabrication of his imagination; it really is there. For the first time he lets himself be convinced; it must be the iron in his blood that burns him so.
****
Sometimes he wonders if he bleached all memories of the suffering out of his being could his hatred be chained into submission and the entire tragedy averted. It is wishful thinking. The steel runs parallel to his bones and his broken spirit is its own splint; our trials and failings are melded so deeply into our beings that no fractional distillation can separate one from the other. There is a part of me that exults in your suffering for the sole reason that it is yours, dull nickel searing through my mind each time I relive everything you have endured.
****
It’s what they want. He hears the words taking on his native accent, lines jumping out of the narrative into the reality of movie-making as Michael realises that they’re nothing more than empty mouthpieces for a franchise far larger than themselves. If James caught on to his slip-up he has made no indication of it, no one does, and so the scene plays out, scripted and rehearsed. The wind whispers sand into their eyes and at every turn the cameras remind him that none of this is real, but for Charles’ tears that hush his face into a panicked softness.
****
He pulls a thin thread of metal from the last branch of the fork. It comes alive between his thumb and forefinger, reluctant at first but soon responding deftly to his touch, supple lines twisting themselves into the branches of a tree, lush, growing. He deliberates before adding more branches, forsaking leaves altogether in favour of a skeletal structure, finally giving in to embellishments unbecoming of him. The wind hisses and the slender spindles cave in on themselves without warning, flattening into a shimmery pool, which he stares into but sees nothing, not even the reflection of his own face.
****
It is not Erik’s mind he misses, he tells himself, the acrid hatred a bass line against which their conversations were conducted soundlessly from start to finish, the incessant death-wish. He misses none of it. What he misses is his own mind being read (what? you know you were thinking the same), not telepathically but emphatically, his thoughts left bare to another man. Night-time disarms him against his own mind and its corrugated interior, bedchambers opened for brief seconds now never to be slept in, infinite futures wider than he ever could have imagined crumpled beneath him on shifting sand.
****
The kids are goofing around with a football, and Charles’ wheelchair has just arrived from the props department and Hank is taking Raven on a ride in it, whooping. Something flies his way and Erik catches it, lobbing the ball back to Sean directly over Charles, sitting on the grass and tilting his head up as he follows the trajectory of the ball overhead, his white neck effortlessly beautiful, suddenly up and running towards him, laughing, palms wet from the morning dew on the grass greeting his grey sweater, because that damned patch of damp just had to be explained.