♡ Heroes: Watchmaker (The Fairy Tale Gone Wrong Remix)
♡ [ Gabriel Gray, Virginia Gray | PG | 764 words ]
Greatest strengths and fatal flaws aren’t always so far apart.
Original story: Watchmaker by ibonekoen, 764 words.
Remix author: trascendenza
Author’s Notes: Thanks to sophinisba for the hand-holding! ♥
Watchmaker (The Fairy Tale Gone Wrong Remix)
Gabriel Gray was sixteen years old and he wanted nothing more than to be someone else (anyone else, anything else).
He had stacks of forms he’d snatched nervously from the counseling office in his backpack, half-crushed and smudged from his sweaty, guilty fingers.
Oh, college, his mother would say, fluttering her handkerchief and laughing like there was no air in her lungs, you know we don’t have the money for that, Gabriel. And she’d kiss him on the forehead, grip her fingers at the back of his neck, and say in the voice he knew she only used for him, but you’re too special for all that, anyway.
(He didn’t want to be too special for that. The nights when it was the worst, when she beat prayers into his chest until four a.m., he dreamed of a sea of people he’d be allowed to lose himself in, a classroom of six hundred where he’d be nothing but another face. Another cog in the machine.)
He sat on his bed, a clenching in his sinful chest, the backpack waiting tauntingly at the foot of his bed, daring him to open it, to show her. To say the words scholarship and student loan and dorms.
The clock at the head of his bed struck six-thirty a.m. and with it, a jolt ran through his spine. He leaned down, grabbed the straps of the backpack and walked purposefully, determinedly, into the living room.
She sat at the table, both hands around her cup of tea, curled in around it.
“Mother-” He started, the hum from the long-hand still propelling him; his fingers were already curling around the zipper, ready to launch his plans for escape.
Then the clock behind his mother struck six-thirty a.m.
Gabriel cringed, the backpack slipping from his hands. Each of his bones resonated with the discord: wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Yes, son?” His mother asked, a listless smile on her lips, oblivious to his torture. Each additional second the clock ticked sliced through Gabriel’s skull, sharp, white-hot, impossible to push aside.
Gabriel groaned, stumbling blindly to his father’s desk, groping at the kit he’d made it a point never to touch, tools fitting into his fingers like they’d been created just for his hands, like they’d been dormant, waiting for him to wake them.
Despite the relentless throbbing in his head, he took the piece off the wall gently, so gently that he couldn’t understand why his mother was shrieking, why her hands were slapping at his back, trying to distract him from his purpose. He laid it on the tabletop amidst her condemnations. (He was used to letting those fade into the background.)
He opened the back and let out a long, shaky breath as he stared inside.
With each turn of the screw, the pain abated, and something else replaced it: a cold, precise sense of satisfaction. (Untouchable.) His mother continued to talk, madly, disjointed shards of hysteria, but now when he listened, her words did not move him.
He was lost in the delicate dance of gears, the emotionless scratch of metal on metal.
(Perfection.)
“There,” he said when he was done, turning it over so it faced up.
The hands circled, meticulously accurate.
“Gabriel,” She breathed, awestruck. “Even your father couldn’t fix that.” Her hand trembled as she reached out to hover it above the face. “It’s been thirty seconds behind as long as we’ve been married.”
“The gears-they were trying to turn all wrong.” He said, staring at it intently, the lingering aftereffects of the rush still flowing through him. “They weren’t meant to go that way.”
“Blessed,” she said, gripping his shoulder and stroking his hair unsteadily. “You have been blessed, son.”
And though he couldn’t see her, he felt it when she closed her eyes, when she looked up and gave thanks to the Lord.
Gabriel Gray, who was the son of the watchmaker (who’d been the son of the watchmaker, who’d been the son of a watchmaker) closed his eyes and let his head fall back into his mother’s cradling hand.
Faraway promises faded from the back of his mind; the backpack was forgotten.
The clock ticked on.
“Blessed. Yes, mother,” he said, voice as geometrically precise as the tools still spread on the red cloth before him, utterly uninflected. “Of course, mother.”
Gabriel Gray was sixteen old (three months, two weeks, seven days, five-thousand eight-hundred and twenty-two seconds) and he wanted nothing more than to feel this powerful for the rest of his life.
Greatest strengths and fatal flaws aren’t always so far apart.
Original story: Watchmaker by ibonekoen, 764 words.
Remix author: trascendenza
Author’s Notes: Thanks to sophinisba for the hand-holding! ♥
Watchmaker (The Fairy Tale Gone Wrong Remix)
Gabriel Gray was sixteen years old and he wanted nothing more than to be someone else (anyone else, anything else).
He had stacks of forms he’d snatched nervously from the counseling office in his backpack, half-crushed and smudged from his sweaty, guilty fingers.
Oh, college, his mother would say, fluttering her handkerchief and laughing like there was no air in her lungs, you know we don’t have the money for that, Gabriel. And she’d kiss him on the forehead, grip her fingers at the back of his neck, and say in the voice he knew she only used for him, but you’re too special for all that, anyway.
(He didn’t want to be too special for that. The nights when it was the worst, when she beat prayers into his chest until four a.m., he dreamed of a sea of people he’d be allowed to lose himself in, a classroom of six hundred where he’d be nothing but another face. Another cog in the machine.)
He sat on his bed, a clenching in his sinful chest, the backpack waiting tauntingly at the foot of his bed, daring him to open it, to show her. To say the words scholarship and student loan and dorms.
The clock at the head of his bed struck six-thirty a.m. and with it, a jolt ran through his spine. He leaned down, grabbed the straps of the backpack and walked purposefully, determinedly, into the living room.
She sat at the table, both hands around her cup of tea, curled in around it.
“Mother-” He started, the hum from the long-hand still propelling him; his fingers were already curling around the zipper, ready to launch his plans for escape.
Then the clock behind his mother struck six-thirty a.m.
Gabriel cringed, the backpack slipping from his hands. Each of his bones resonated with the discord: wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Yes, son?” His mother asked, a listless smile on her lips, oblivious to his torture. Each additional second the clock ticked sliced through Gabriel’s skull, sharp, white-hot, impossible to push aside.
Gabriel groaned, stumbling blindly to his father’s desk, groping at the kit he’d made it a point never to touch, tools fitting into his fingers like they’d been created just for his hands, like they’d been dormant, waiting for him to wake them.
Despite the relentless throbbing in his head, he took the piece off the wall gently, so gently that he couldn’t understand why his mother was shrieking, why her hands were slapping at his back, trying to distract him from his purpose. He laid it on the tabletop amidst her condemnations. (He was used to letting those fade into the background.)
He opened the back and let out a long, shaky breath as he stared inside.
With each turn of the screw, the pain abated, and something else replaced it: a cold, precise sense of satisfaction. (Untouchable.) His mother continued to talk, madly, disjointed shards of hysteria, but now when he listened, her words did not move him.
He was lost in the delicate dance of gears, the emotionless scratch of metal on metal.
(Perfection.)
“There,” he said when he was done, turning it over so it faced up.
The hands circled, meticulously accurate.
“Gabriel,” She breathed, awestruck. “Even your father couldn’t fix that.” Her hand trembled as she reached out to hover it above the face. “It’s been thirty seconds behind as long as we’ve been married.”
“The gears-they were trying to turn all wrong.” He said, staring at it intently, the lingering aftereffects of the rush still flowing through him. “They weren’t meant to go that way.”
“Blessed,” she said, gripping his shoulder and stroking his hair unsteadily. “You have been blessed, son.”
And though he couldn’t see her, he felt it when she closed her eyes, when she looked up and gave thanks to the Lord.
Gabriel Gray, who was the son of the watchmaker (who’d been the son of the watchmaker, who’d been the son of a watchmaker) closed his eyes and let his head fall back into his mother’s cradling hand.
Faraway promises faded from the back of his mind; the backpack was forgotten.
The clock ticked on.
“Blessed. Yes, mother,” he said, voice as geometrically precise as the tools still spread on the red cloth before him, utterly uninflected. “Of course, mother.”
Gabriel Gray was sixteen old (three months, two weeks, seven days, five-thousand eight-hundred and twenty-two seconds) and he wanted nothing more than to feel this powerful for the rest of his life.