Somewhat belated Cheerupemo!Lytton fic!!
Hey dear lovelylytton, hope you're feeling better now, as this is a few days late (apologies!) but in any case, have some cheerupemo!fic!
Prompt: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3cns3LOPY1qzfya1o1_500.png
Characters/Ship: M/K implied, mostly about K though! Features glasses!K and chocolate. Couldn't get in K carrying M, but that will possibly come at a later date :)
Many thanks to the awesome cbrandtwright for all the assistance and patience in listening to me babble about this thing!
I.
The air is hot and smells sharply of salt and drying seaweed and carefully pitched wood. Five-year-old Kareem Al-Hassan can barely sit still, taking in all the sights and sounds and smells and feelings of being on Abee's boat for the first time. His father is humming, an old Moroccan folk song that is both cheerful and sad, and underneath a small fez and a cap of straight black hair, Kareem's face is all wide-eyed fascination as Abee pulls up the nets, dripping with water and bits of kelp, breaking the surface of the blue water and sending drops splashing sun-glossed gold as he pulls up the squirming, silver-skinned fish.
Something about the colour of the golden sun reflecting in the water draws his eye almost more than the struggling, flopping fishes that are his family's livelihood, and he doesn't know why.
II.
"Monsieur Pierre!" The ten-year-old boy smiles and dashes up to a boat being anchored at the dock. Kareem does not spend most of his days by the water any more as he did in his earlier childhood, but it is summer, and the crusty old French sailor chuckles gruffly as the boy approaches.
"Your père says that you are at the top of your class in both mathematics and languages," Pierre Benoit's skin is almost as dark as an Arab's from long days at sea, but his hair is a pale straw blond. Underneath his bushy moustache, his smile is even wider than Kareem's. "I don't suppose you told your classmates who your real French teacher is?"
"They don't understand," Kareem says with that mixture of levity and gravitas that characterizes young, particularly precocious children, then pulled something out of his pocket to show the old sea salt. "Look! Abee bought me glasses. They are to help me read."
The glasses are cheap, with plain plastic frames, but when Kareem puts them on, they just seem to magnify his inquisitive eyes. The sailor, one of many who have known the fisherman's son for years, chuckles again and digs through his knapsack. "I brought you something from Italy."
"Another picture?" Kareem perks up. All the men here, who have the opportunity to travel farther than his own father ever will, bring him back postcards from distant shores. Pierre usually has the best ones.
The boy falls silent when the glossy sheet of thin cardboard is placed in his hands, and feels a chill down his spine. It is a painting, likely a famous one, with girls throwing rose petals and dancing in a lush spring garden, but his gaze is immediately drawn to the figure right in the center, a carnelian cape cascading down her back, her blue eyes tranquil and all-too-knowing under a coronet of golden hair.
"This is a famous painting called Primavera, by an artist named Botticelli who lived hundreds of years ago. The cold wind of March pursues the nymph of the Spring even as Flora covers the land with flowers and the Graces dance in the sunlight. And watching over and rejoicing as the world wakes up from its winter slumber, Venus presides over the scene."
Venus. Something about the name echoes in his mind like a gunshot. Behind his brand-new glasses, if Pierre could see them, his eyes are suddenly haunted and too-old.
And yet, this postcard he looks at more often than any of the others.
III.
London is a completely different world than Morocco, and it takes him more than a month to get used to the fog and the chilly weather. But that is a small price to pay for the opportunity to study at the prestigious London School of Economics. For a young man whose family had lived by the sweat of their brow catching fish for the last five generations, whose parents had hoarded a week's earnings to travel to Casablanca to procure him a passport to travel to another country, it is a prospect more amazing than words can express.
Kareem is on scholarship, studying International Relations, and throws himself into his work with verve and single-minded sincerity. Aside from a twice-a-week sojourn to a local cafe for a hot chocolate (a pleasant surprise in the otherwise-bland world of English cuisine) and a weekly phone call to his mother, he does not socialize on a regular basis. The classes are interesting and challenging, the competition fierce, and a part of him that has only recently been given voice is coldly, almost viciously determined to finish first against all odds.
But he decides, about three months after his arrival, to accept the invitation of a few classmates to catch a film at the cinema. They agree on an arthouse film from France, in the original language with English subtitles, with deep philosophical subtexts and renowned actors, and locate good seats in the theatre.
Kareem's mind is still mostly on the paper for his Sociology class as the previews start playing, but he looks up in time to see a blonde girl with eyes like blue lightning behind a blood-red domino mask vault, catlike, from the top of a three-story building to tackle a brutish thug lurking in the alley. "Code Name: Sailor V!" the voiceover speaks over the gritty, pulsing beat of rock music. "Coming to theatres next July."
"What a bunch of mindless self-indulgence," One of his female classmates, a honey-blonde with sharp features and raggedly-bitten nails scoffs. "It's bound to be another insipid comic book adaptation with too many explosions and a plot as flimsy as a sheet of tissue paper. I am SO glad we are not watching THAT."
Kareem barely hears her through the roaring that fills his mind like a freight train, and doesn't remember any of the film they watch. For a moment, through time and space and wire-frame glasses and a red mask and a silver screen, his eyes meet the blue ones of the girl on the screen and something wondrous and terrible takes hold. The girl is beautiful, beguiling, but something about her unsettles and terrifies him as much as though the words "Run away" are etched over and over again on her skin.
From that day, he finds himself searching, without even thinking about it, for her if-only-he-knew-who in every blonde he sees.
From that night, the dreams begin.
IV.
He finishes his studies with honours several years later and is almost immediately offered a job as an interpreter in New York City, and he accepts the work, another new world, another country.
But even as the airplane flies across the ocean and he sleeps fitfully in a seat too small for his tall form, visions of blonde hair and blue eyes and golden chains follow and flare like a flashbomb through his subconscious.
Prompt: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3cns3LOPY1qzfya1o1_500.png
Characters/Ship: M/K implied, mostly about K though! Features glasses!K and chocolate. Couldn't get in K carrying M, but that will possibly come at a later date :)
Many thanks to the awesome cbrandtwright for all the assistance and patience in listening to me babble about this thing!
I.
The air is hot and smells sharply of salt and drying seaweed and carefully pitched wood. Five-year-old Kareem Al-Hassan can barely sit still, taking in all the sights and sounds and smells and feelings of being on Abee's boat for the first time. His father is humming, an old Moroccan folk song that is both cheerful and sad, and underneath a small fez and a cap of straight black hair, Kareem's face is all wide-eyed fascination as Abee pulls up the nets, dripping with water and bits of kelp, breaking the surface of the blue water and sending drops splashing sun-glossed gold as he pulls up the squirming, silver-skinned fish.
Something about the colour of the golden sun reflecting in the water draws his eye almost more than the struggling, flopping fishes that are his family's livelihood, and he doesn't know why.
II.
"Monsieur Pierre!" The ten-year-old boy smiles and dashes up to a boat being anchored at the dock. Kareem does not spend most of his days by the water any more as he did in his earlier childhood, but it is summer, and the crusty old French sailor chuckles gruffly as the boy approaches.
"Your père says that you are at the top of your class in both mathematics and languages," Pierre Benoit's skin is almost as dark as an Arab's from long days at sea, but his hair is a pale straw blond. Underneath his bushy moustache, his smile is even wider than Kareem's. "I don't suppose you told your classmates who your real French teacher is?"
"They don't understand," Kareem says with that mixture of levity and gravitas that characterizes young, particularly precocious children, then pulled something out of his pocket to show the old sea salt. "Look! Abee bought me glasses. They are to help me read."
The glasses are cheap, with plain plastic frames, but when Kareem puts them on, they just seem to magnify his inquisitive eyes. The sailor, one of many who have known the fisherman's son for years, chuckles again and digs through his knapsack. "I brought you something from Italy."
"Another picture?" Kareem perks up. All the men here, who have the opportunity to travel farther than his own father ever will, bring him back postcards from distant shores. Pierre usually has the best ones.
The boy falls silent when the glossy sheet of thin cardboard is placed in his hands, and feels a chill down his spine. It is a painting, likely a famous one, with girls throwing rose petals and dancing in a lush spring garden, but his gaze is immediately drawn to the figure right in the center, a carnelian cape cascading down her back, her blue eyes tranquil and all-too-knowing under a coronet of golden hair.
"This is a famous painting called Primavera, by an artist named Botticelli who lived hundreds of years ago. The cold wind of March pursues the nymph of the Spring even as Flora covers the land with flowers and the Graces dance in the sunlight. And watching over and rejoicing as the world wakes up from its winter slumber, Venus presides over the scene."
Venus. Something about the name echoes in his mind like a gunshot. Behind his brand-new glasses, if Pierre could see them, his eyes are suddenly haunted and too-old.
And yet, this postcard he looks at more often than any of the others.
III.
London is a completely different world than Morocco, and it takes him more than a month to get used to the fog and the chilly weather. But that is a small price to pay for the opportunity to study at the prestigious London School of Economics. For a young man whose family had lived by the sweat of their brow catching fish for the last five generations, whose parents had hoarded a week's earnings to travel to Casablanca to procure him a passport to travel to another country, it is a prospect more amazing than words can express.
Kareem is on scholarship, studying International Relations, and throws himself into his work with verve and single-minded sincerity. Aside from a twice-a-week sojourn to a local cafe for a hot chocolate (a pleasant surprise in the otherwise-bland world of English cuisine) and a weekly phone call to his mother, he does not socialize on a regular basis. The classes are interesting and challenging, the competition fierce, and a part of him that has only recently been given voice is coldly, almost viciously determined to finish first against all odds.
But he decides, about three months after his arrival, to accept the invitation of a few classmates to catch a film at the cinema. They agree on an arthouse film from France, in the original language with English subtitles, with deep philosophical subtexts and renowned actors, and locate good seats in the theatre.
Kareem's mind is still mostly on the paper for his Sociology class as the previews start playing, but he looks up in time to see a blonde girl with eyes like blue lightning behind a blood-red domino mask vault, catlike, from the top of a three-story building to tackle a brutish thug lurking in the alley. "Code Name: Sailor V!" the voiceover speaks over the gritty, pulsing beat of rock music. "Coming to theatres next July."
"What a bunch of mindless self-indulgence," One of his female classmates, a honey-blonde with sharp features and raggedly-bitten nails scoffs. "It's bound to be another insipid comic book adaptation with too many explosions and a plot as flimsy as a sheet of tissue paper. I am SO glad we are not watching THAT."
Kareem barely hears her through the roaring that fills his mind like a freight train, and doesn't remember any of the film they watch. For a moment, through time and space and wire-frame glasses and a red mask and a silver screen, his eyes meet the blue ones of the girl on the screen and something wondrous and terrible takes hold. The girl is beautiful, beguiling, but something about her unsettles and terrifies him as much as though the words "Run away" are etched over and over again on her skin.
From that day, he finds himself searching, without even thinking about it, for her if-only-he-knew-who in every blonde he sees.
From that night, the dreams begin.
IV.
He finishes his studies with honours several years later and is almost immediately offered a job as an interpreter in New York City, and he accepts the work, another new world, another country.
But even as the airplane flies across the ocean and he sleeps fitfully in a seat too small for his tall form, visions of blonde hair and blue eyes and golden chains follow and flare like a flashbomb through his subconscious.