[fic] : lwd + bmw + lost + tvd
ETA: OKAY, GUYS, A LITTLE HELP PLZ. Do you think these work or it far too much a random concept to...not be far too much of a random concept? D:
ALSO:
hello, welcome to me archiving things. don't mind me. i write things when i absolutely should not be writing things. mostly for siken prompts. and when you give me siken prompts, you inevitably end up with things like this. these are various comment fics (much edited now) that you may or may not have read and a combination of fandoms you may have thought you'd never see together but you were wrong. because i am always happy to oblige with new experiences. i love you. bye.
makes a cathedral
life with derek | emily davis; emily/derek; casey/derek | pg-13 | season 4
You do the math, you expect the trouble. This is how you make meaning; you take two things and try to define the space between them.
Somehow, you know this: when you started, it was a story about a girl writing a story about a boy.
You knew the boy, because you sat next to him in English, and he made paper planes out of thin air, with his name scrawled slightly to the left in bold letters, and landed them all on her desk like a metaphor that just stopped short of being one. He claimed territory with sketch-pen marks and fingerprints because that was all he could touch that belonged to her. Or at least, that's how you phrased it in your head. In poetry. The meter almost ghosting through your head like his fingerprints on paper that she picked up and then it was his name and fingerprints on her skin, and that was the final destination, thrice removed from reality.
She turned around sometimes. Only sometimes. But sometimes. And her glance was fire and, even though she wasn't looking at you, you shifted your desk back a little, because the heat singed and your desk was wood and you'd rather not take the chance. The boy leaned back in his chair, satisfied, and the girl leaned forward, outraged, and there should have been symmetry if your seventh grade math teacher was right about chapter nine, but there isn't.
But then again, if there's anything you know that overrules geometry, it's them.
::
When she puts her pen to paper to write, the shape that forms has a smirk like his.
The hair is darker, just a slight emphasis on the shade of red that defines each strand, when he tilts his head to drink after a hockey match, and the sun catches it in a particular way. You know this, because you have a book on this; color-coded and categorized according to the shades of brown and all the interpretation that Wikipedia affords.
Things, they mean something, you've always known. Colors mean something. Pieces of paper declaring your parents as man and wife mean something. But his hair on her paper is a little more red because she's catching the sunlight through her words and the way it lights up the sky, and the red is the closest she gets.
She lets you read, when you ask, but she never asks you what you thought because her sunlight clashes with his hair and you've been footnoting him for as long as she has, so she doesn't ask and you don't tell.
::
There's a touch of madness to her consonants you think sometimes.
They're hard and harsh and every time, one falls from the tip of her pen, it creates a pool of ink masquerading as his hands. The words repeat themselves endlessly till the meaning is lost between the distance from his door to hers and you think the story is sort of sad in the way that doesn't mean much outside a montage of Technicolor and desire and the darkened room and a giant screen and the roomful of people all alone.
Sometimes though, her punctuation is the vent in his room through which the air slips through the wall that stands in between, and she breathes too loud and he falls asleep to the sound. You've already read the story a thousand times over in his eyes and on her paper, it's repetitive and drowned in words that add up to mean less than she thinks, and more than she wants.
You still stay the night sometimes, his hands on you and in you and all over and his harsh breathing softer than the silence through the vent.
It's always left open, you know.
::
This one time the scene she describes is green and it's darker than his favorite sweater and she smiles, as you watch, because it's not the exact same color, and if you were to pick up the dictionary and read her head, she's thinking of something sensible and false; words like progress and falling out of something she'll never say she fell in.
She doesn't use the word love, though; her dictionary ends before the alphabets that make any of his syllables and stops short of her tongue breaking his name in half. And love, love comes after. But it doesn't help that there is blue glitter on the page and she only wears eye-shadow to impress.
::
He stops by your desk sometimes, when she's creating him in her notebook through high-flown words of an assignment she'll submit much before time and then worry about the boy who didn't call, even though he doesn't enter the letters she forms in perfect cursive on the blank paper that is full of literary analysis with proper citations from the handbook that you lost on the second day of school and he never bothered to pick up from the store at all.
But when he laughs a little louder at something that wasn't funny and doesn't look sideways and she doesn't look sideways, even though her hand stills, you kiss the boy because you've loved him for a time longer than she's known him, even though he's loved her harder in the time that you've almost known her. And when she gathers her books and walks away and trips, he will leave your hand and trip her again next to her locker and then slam the door shut far too hard because the sound isn't as loud to him over the hammering in his chest.
And you will drill a combination over a color-coded notebook filled with them because this is what you know, even through all the missed glances: he reads her almost as much as she writes him.
it's too cold outside, to lay this fire to rest
boy meets world | cory matthews; implied cory/angela | pg-13 | season 6
He’s Cory Matthews, rationalizing things is practically his unique selling proposition.
I mean, have you ever thought of me in a way other than just a friend?.
Never.
Tell the truth.
One time.
::
He can rationalize the first time it happens. And anyway, he’s Cory Matthews, rationalizing things is practically his unique selling proposition.
So, she’s in a towel. And he’s pretty sure the statistics will tell you that when a man hugs a woman in a towel, it isn’t exactly because he wants to establish the poster children of a whole new era of How To Do Platonic Right. He’s read the literature. Or, at least he’s observed Shawn, which amounts to the same thing; because anyone who knows anything knows that Shawn’s practically the Bible in these affairs.
He keeps his hand on her back though. Doesn’t allow them to slip lower. And for anyone keeping count, that totally counts okay.
He doesn’t hug her because she’s in a towel. He hugs her because she’s a friend. See, in that ‘man hugs a woman in a towel scenario’, it’s obvious that substituting her name and his name makes the exception that proves the rule.
(And Toganga’s name somewhere in between, because this equation doesn’t exist without her. She’s the factorial. Or the binomial. Or some complicated mathematical system that makes sense of the whole thing without the addition of Angela’s shower-wet hair and taut skin. He's occasionally glanced at the math book through the years, he knows what he's talking about, okay.)
::
(That night is not the first time he dreams about her.
It's the first time she’s in a towel in his dream though. )
::
The thing about college is; it’s college. So while he’s reading up on Freud and the unconscious or the subconscious or whatever the hell it is that the guy’s always on about, it’s like an epiphany.
It’s about sex.
Topanga wants to wait, and he’s frustrated, so he’s fixating. That’s an appropriately Freudian and nicely psychoanalytical term right there. It probably has something to do with not being appropriately gratified during his psychosexual development. Or maybe his mother just didn’t love him enough. (If he’s going Freud, he’s going Freud.)
Angela’s is the most skin he’s seen from a girl who wasn’t directly related to him (there was that time when he had sex on his mind and his mother in the bathroom during the Prom Night From Hell, but that just strengthens the fixation theory. Really, he’s being a model student here), so it isn’t exactly odd that he’d think more about it. Or think about it all the time, because, like he said, college.
Cor, you’re turning into a real boy, is what Shawn would say, because in between the poetry that he can't understand, still exists the boy who used to watch cartoons under the same blanket. And Shawn would probably slap him on the back. If this fixation wasn’t with his ex whom he’s still completely in love with, that is.
Which means there are more layers to his own subconscious than even Freud would be able to unravel.
Or maybe he’s just a really terrible person all round.
::
(The second time, the towel is the same shade of blue.
Except when it falls and absorbs the water on the bathroom floor. Then it’s darker.)
::
Angela jumps into bed with him easily now, when he’s reading or when she’s missing Shawn and he isn’t around and she can lie next to his roommate and pretend she’s actually in the bed across the room. And he’s pretty sure he should be pretending something too, involving an engagement ring and his beautiful fiancée, but his entire nervous system is concentrated on her thumb running slow, forgetful circles on his skin.
Which is ironic and something else that he doesn’t quite have a word for right now, but Feeny will probably give him one tomorrow in the Literature seminar, while describing some seminal work of middle-English poetry.
(That’s his life now; made up of words from seminal works from middle-English poetry where each time this scenario replays, the white noise gets harder to translate into a language that makes sense.)
She rests her head against his shoulder, slipping comfortably down the pillow. “What are you thinking?”
(You don’t even know me. she’d said once, with a semi-exasperated look on her face like she couldn’t understand this need to be something definable, when they’d never been anything in particular except the lovers of their best friends.
I’ve dreamt about you. he hadn’t said. I dream about you, he hadn’t said.)
He flips a page, “nothing.”
::
I mean, have you ever thought of me in a way other than just a friend?.
Never.
Tell the truth.
One time.
See, here’s the thing: he lied.
before you trade in your summer skin
lost | jack shephard; jack/claire | pg-13 |
There are times he loves her like a sister.
There are times he loves her like a sister.
Most times he doesn’t love her at all. Most times he doesn’t even know her, even after all these years, because she isn’t Kate and he isn’t Charlie, and they just never bothered. Even back there, when there was no blood lost between them. When the days melted into each other and she was that girl he felt like he had to take special care of because he was a doctor. Because he believed in the Hippocratic Oath. Because he believed.
He doesn’t know her favorite color or her first heartbreak or if she likes cinnamon in her coffee or if she ever cried during Titanic or all those things that it feels like every brother should know about his little sister. But sometimes she tilts her head, and his blood maps out the blue veins under her skin and he thinks something stupid like home.
He thinks the feeling may just be residual. An ache left over from the times when he could still pretend to fix things and she was lost and alone and needed all the fixing in the world.
But Jack, I don’t think it’s normal that he hasn’t kicked in-
What would you name your child, if you-
Dammit, the tent won’t stay fixed, could you please-
He moved. Oh my god, put your hand here, can you feel-
But she doesn’t need fixing anymore, not here. Not in his house in the real world where they are real people. And anyway, he has an extraordinary ability to turn everything he touches to ashes. So these days he just settles for looking.
Doesn’t touch.
::
There are times he had wanted to kiss her.
Not times he remembers. Not earth-shattering moments of revelation that tore the sky apart and made the stars fall from the heavens. But just a few seconds, in between loving Kate and wanting Juliet just that little bit, he thinks he may have wanted to kiss her.
Only when she laughed. Only sometimes when she laughed. Only maybe sometimes when she laughed.
“What are you thinking?” she asks sometimes when she catches him staring, sprawled across his couch with a book. Those times when he’s staring and she calls him out on it, because most times she looks the other way and pretends she doesn’t see.
Maybe it’s something their father left them.
“Nothing,” he says, doesn’t touch, that’s important, doesn’t touch, “nothing.”
::
There are times he hates her.
Moments when he wants her to get out and stay the hell away because who the fuck is she to come in and turn his world the wrong side round, and shift his center of gravity with every fall of her step.
He is not that guy in the mirror. Not the guy her existence makes him. Not that guy whose head tilts the same way as hers, whose skin maps over the same blood and still spends all his time wanting her.
“We should go out,” she says, because she has a tendency to wander around bare-feet and occasionally rock her son’s cradle, and this is the fantasy family he wanted.
Except this is that other fantasy, not the one where he pats her head and beams down at his nephew, but the one in which he fucks her against the table. So obviously something got screwed somewhere. Possibly his sanity.
“Where?” he asks.
She turns around from the glass door, the wind blowing her hair against her face, and she reminds him of the Island like this. He wants to go back. He wants to go back. There’s no history there. There’s no blood. Her skin was built for the summer, not glass doors and cold streets that line the way outside the house.
“Vegas,” she says, “let’s go to Vegas.”
“Claire,” he says, turns back to the medical report, soaks a little in his stereotype, “you don’t mean that. I’m busy.”
She turns back, rests her head against the glass cage, “if I could mean that, I would.”
He doesn’t look up.
::
“I want to go back,” she says one night, her hand trailing across the crib, as she bends down and smiles at Aaron and he thinks he maybe sometimes wants to kiss her when she smiles, “let’s go back.”
He feels the white-hot rage making inroad in his veins, “don’t say that.”
“I want to go back,” she says, looks at him and tilts her head just so, challenges him.
He has her against the door before he’s thought it out, “ do. not. fucking. say. that.”
She runs her tongue across her lips, and he’s hard, because this is all it takes. Sometimes it doesn’t take this much, “I want to go back.”
“Shut up,” he says, “shut up.”
Why, she whispers. What are you so afraid of, she whispers.
Or maybe it’s that voice inside his head that sounds like her these days. That makes sounds and forms words he’s never heard from her mouth.
He’s afraid he’ll never come back again. He’s afraid he’ll never want to. He’s afraid he’ll touch her and it wouldn’t matter, because things don’t matter there. The forest doesn’t care. And it should matter. For some stupid fucking reason, it should matter.
I want to go back.
For now, he’ll live out an hour of madness in a second of her body against his.
::
There are some things he knows now.
He knows she likes the television volume on even numbers and always cuts the size of her sandwiches. He knows she thinks Brad Pitt is overrated and that she watches soccer for some Brazilian player rather than the game itself. He knows she orders pineapples on her pizza and takes them off one by one because she doesn’t want them, she only wants the flavor. He knows the song she sings to Aaron.
He doesn’t know her favorite color, but he knows that.
He knows she sometimes stands by the glass door and waits and doesn’t know what she’s waiting for.
She doesn’t sit still and he doesn’t move because he might touch her if he does. Turn her summer skin winter cold with this sickness. This disease.
Still, there are times he loves her (like a sister.)
you could be my original sin
the vampire diaries | klaus/caroline | pg-13
This is not the story you think you know.
So, once upon a time-
(This is not the story you think you know.)
::
There is a girl-
See, you know this girl because there's nobody in school who doesn't know this girl. She's that blonde, beautiful head cheerleader from your high school who was dating that blond, beautiful quarterback from your high school. They would have blonde, beautiful children, obviously, because that's a mandatory clause for Happily Ever After.
Everyone knows that.
But one day, the Evil Witch wore her best friend's face and stole the air right out of her lungs and then her eyes turned red and oh, Grandmother, what big teeth you have.
And what do you know? Red Riding Hood is the wolf in disguise.
All the better to eat you up with, my dear.
::
Rewind, repeat, flip tape.
This is the other story, the High School Teen movie about the girl on the sidelines.
(This is not the story you think you know.)
::
There is a girl-
You don't know this girl very well, but you know her best friend, Elena.
Everyone knows her best friend Elena. Even that new guy in school, who took one look at her and fell in love with the same face over. That blonde quarterback was her lover once and if you ask him, those children at the back of his mind still have dark hair like this one girl he knows.
The Big Bad Wolf finds his way into Red Riding Hood's room and nobody else finds her because nobody else is looking. But that is a different story.
In this part of the movie, the villain of the piece is an artist in his spare time and he paints her in coal on paper and thinks of leaving black marks all over her skin.
You're beautiful, you're strong, you're full of light.
So basically, the ditzy blonde friend whom you vaguely knew ends up with the super-villain. It's so ridiculous; it probably never made it past the editing table.
::
Turn to page 147, start from the middle of the second paragraph.
This is the story of the girl who got lost in the woods.
(This is not the story you think you know.)
::
There is a girl-
She sat behind you in History and once in eighth grade you thought you would ask her out maybe, but Tyler Lockwood would have laughed at you, so you didn't.
Then Tyler Lockwood kisses her behind closed doors and it is more desperate than she remembers. But he's not dead. He died and he's not dead and the only thing that matters is holding on and bruising his naked skin with her grip and never letting go.
He speaks in different words these days and looks at her with ancient eyes, but she is beautiful and strong and full of light, and also stupid, and shallow and useless, and she doesn't see.
The Wolf's disguises are better now, and her father isn't alive to tell Red Riding Hood to stay away from the woods. But that story ended many pages ago.
This is the girl on the sidelines, so starved for affection that she doesn't ask how. How he clawed through the shallow grave and found his way back to her. But you paused that tape in the middle.
No, this is the other story; the one where the girl discovers the monster behind her lover's mask and thinks;
Nobody has ever loved me like that before.
This is what happened: she didn't leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind, and the woods swallowed her up with the monster's first kiss.
::
Listen closely to the choir singing the hymn on Sundays.
This is the story of the girl who eats the apple.
(This is not the story you think you know.)
::
There is a girl-
You passed her car by on the interstate and adjusted your rear-view mirror a little because she reminded you of someone you used to know.
There is a man beside her who can't keep his eyes off her and she can't seem to look at him. They drive off into the sunset, even though it kills their kind.
I don't love you, she says, looking straight ahead at the road, I might never love you.
He shrugs, and the misleading gesture makes the wolf in him seem domesticated (don't fall into that trap, press control-alt-delete and quit the game);
Never say never when you have forever to change your mind, sweetheart.
Here is what he learns over the next few days: she sleeps on the right side of the bed and breathes when she doesn't need to and finishes all the hot water in the mornings.
She looks up at night, hesitant.
I want you, you know, even though I don't love you.
He watches Red Riding Hood take off her cape, as the girl on the sidelines takes center-stage in page after page under his hands. He follows the scent of the girl who got lost through the woods and ravishes her against the silence of the river.
She turns off the light each night, as if she can't do this while looking at him. He'll wait for the day she leaves the lights on. He has all the time in the world to wait after all.
Here is what you don't know: theirs is the original sin.
::
Move straight to the series finale, skip the title sequence of the last episode.
This is the show about the Ever After.
(This is not the story you think you know).
::
There is a girl-
You've never seen her because when you're giving your final English exam, she's in Tokyo. And when you die, she's in Paris in a pair of those huge sunglasses that make people stop and turn and try to figure out if she's a star from the movies in disguise.
Or maybe this was the spin-off that they didn't tell her about, the one where she stopped being a supporting character in her own life.
The man beside her shoves his hands in his pockets and he's a shade warmer than the sun. She's always cold, but every night, and most days, he covers his body with hers, and then she burns. She still uses up all the hot water in the mornings.
This is the girl who doesn't need, but wants anyway.
Have you been in love long, another girl in their hotel asks, wide-eyed with the romance of it.
Red Riding Hood followed the Wolf through the woods. But that wasn't in the fairytale book your grandmother read to you. The girl on the sidelines realized in the middle of the movie that life didn't end with the ringing of the school bell and ran to Rome with the bad guy. But that scene never made it beyond the notes the scriptwriter scribbled on the margins. The girl who was lost was found by the monster. But that was in a story you never heard. The girl who ate the apple built another paradise. But the bible never mentioned that.
Yeah, she says, casually, forever, it seems.
The smile the man beside her gives her is nothing short of wolfish.
::
Flip to the center page of the newspaper and complete the phrase in three down of the crossword without cheating.
This is not the story of knights and dragons and true love's kiss.
(This story you know; it's the one you just read.)
::
And they lived-