Fic: In Camera
Title: In Camera
Author: speak_me_fair
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Kate/Hotspur (Douglas)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: This second tetralogy AU is set primarily during WWI and just before it. Terrible liberties are taken with real history in both directions :-) and probably horrible things to the characters as well...
Summary: Kate tries to take pictures.
Notes: With love to the usual AU suspects, and my darling Quo. Fits just after Thick-Eyed Musing, and hints as to what injuries Douglas sustained to land him in the hospital.
This AU is very much in progress, and I have no idea where it will end up. But if anyone has any ideas as to what other characters might be up to during this time, feel free to discuss it with me!
In Camera
She wants to use the camera to capture all the things she is trying to learn (like turning the heel on a sock, which still evades her). Put moments into the film, take them out and look at them, and think 'This is when it means busy. This is when it means talking. This is friendship.'
This is who we were. Then. Now. Always.
So far, she has managed 'This is a plant. This is the cat (maybe, it's running away). This is Harry about to break my camera, and then I told him how much it cost, so he didn't.'
It is not of any assistance at all. They change, when they see her with the little box in her hands, freeze and stop, turn towards her and lose whatever expression she was trying to imprint onto film and paper, and she is left once more with only the blurred, uncertain definitions of her mind, trying to pinpoint it within sections of time.
The dead leaves float in the sighing air,
The darkness moves like a curtain drawn...
They do not understand what she wants. Douglas is unfailingly polite, standing still, a bland, practised smile on his scarred face that means nothing except that he is waiting for her to finish. She cannot hold him in a frame, for it is as though the view finder imposes a layer of extra glass over him, hard and untouchable. She thought this would not be possible, with this best of new-fangled cameras, the one that should even allow her to take pictures of ever-restless Harry.
It is not much consolation that Harry hates it. All she gets when she tries to snatch at something concrete, something real, is a mocking look. Her photographs are a pathetic little collection of moments gone, of impatience, of kindness, of a hiatus in their lives while they wait for her to finish.
A veil which the morning sun will tear
From the face of death.
She cannot explain that she does not want them to stop for her, that she is not intending to intrude; not really to capture, at least not in that sense of the word. It's time she's trying to grasp, hold onto, transmute from sand into glass. She simply wants to have something she can hold, and understand, look at without it changing and flowing like water into something else.
They never stay still. Their faces shift, minutely, all the time, small flickers of variations on a single emotion that can change what she sees in her viewfinder with every passing second.
She thinks, sometimes, that she is worse than the camera, at picking up on that precise moment of change-flick-now-this, or otherwise she would not need to try a way that is not dependent on her own eyes, her own observations.
But there are too many layers, too many interpretations, there is too much depth and distance between what she is looking for and what they allow her to see, and she is still as lost as she was when she started to try this new idea.
A little battle souvenir for one across the foam
That's if the French authorities will let me take it home.
There is one photograph she likes. Not because of what it shows, but because of what she remembers, the before and after. The point when Doug was not wearing his smoothly twisted, scar-pulling smile, and Harry was not on the verge of telling her to go away. The point just before she lifted her camera in their direction, when they were simply talking, drinking wine, the electric lights in the upstairs drawing room finally working, cutting through the darkening air and out onto the balcony where they stood talking.
Enough light so that she needed no placed lighting.
They never thought that particular photo would come out, but it did, and Kate touches it for a moment, and for once, she knows that she has accomplished something in one of her attempts.
It reminds her of the point afterwards, when she put the camera down, and joined them. The point when she was no longer an observer, but part of something.
O soldier, soldier, won't you marry me....
Kate, once more alone in the great house, with a child in her belly that resents her every movement, and a longing for Harry that cannot be assuaged by anything so ephemeral as remembrance, looks at the dim little sepia photograph, and tastes wine on her lips; lets past and once contentment seep into her bones along with that phantom liquor.
It is not in the picture, what she was trying to hold will never be in a picture. It is in her.
She knows that she is learning still, as she began to on the train to Oxford. Perhaps to know that she always will be is another step towards the understanding -- the innate understanding, the kind that does not rely on any man's words -- that she craves.
The road is straight as the bullet flies,
And we go marching into the dawn.
Author: speak_me_fair
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Kate/Hotspur (Douglas)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: This second tetralogy AU is set primarily during WWI and just before it. Terrible liberties are taken with real history in both directions :-) and probably horrible things to the characters as well...
Summary: Kate tries to take pictures.
Notes: With love to the usual AU suspects, and my darling Quo. Fits just after Thick-Eyed Musing, and hints as to what injuries Douglas sustained to land him in the hospital.
This AU is very much in progress, and I have no idea where it will end up. But if anyone has any ideas as to what other characters might be up to during this time, feel free to discuss it with me!
In Camera
She wants to use the camera to capture all the things she is trying to learn (like turning the heel on a sock, which still evades her). Put moments into the film, take them out and look at them, and think 'This is when it means busy. This is when it means talking. This is friendship.'
This is who we were. Then. Now. Always.
So far, she has managed 'This is a plant. This is the cat (maybe, it's running away). This is Harry about to break my camera, and then I told him how much it cost, so he didn't.'
It is not of any assistance at all. They change, when they see her with the little box in her hands, freeze and stop, turn towards her and lose whatever expression she was trying to imprint onto film and paper, and she is left once more with only the blurred, uncertain definitions of her mind, trying to pinpoint it within sections of time.
The dead leaves float in the sighing air,
The darkness moves like a curtain drawn...
They do not understand what she wants. Douglas is unfailingly polite, standing still, a bland, practised smile on his scarred face that means nothing except that he is waiting for her to finish. She cannot hold him in a frame, for it is as though the view finder imposes a layer of extra glass over him, hard and untouchable. She thought this would not be possible, with this best of new-fangled cameras, the one that should even allow her to take pictures of ever-restless Harry.
It is not much consolation that Harry hates it. All she gets when she tries to snatch at something concrete, something real, is a mocking look. Her photographs are a pathetic little collection of moments gone, of impatience, of kindness, of a hiatus in their lives while they wait for her to finish.
A veil which the morning sun will tear
From the face of death.
She cannot explain that she does not want them to stop for her, that she is not intending to intrude; not really to capture, at least not in that sense of the word. It's time she's trying to grasp, hold onto, transmute from sand into glass. She simply wants to have something she can hold, and understand, look at without it changing and flowing like water into something else.
They never stay still. Their faces shift, minutely, all the time, small flickers of variations on a single emotion that can change what she sees in her viewfinder with every passing second.
She thinks, sometimes, that she is worse than the camera, at picking up on that precise moment of change-flick-now-this, or otherwise she would not need to try a way that is not dependent on her own eyes, her own observations.
But there are too many layers, too many interpretations, there is too much depth and distance between what she is looking for and what they allow her to see, and she is still as lost as she was when she started to try this new idea.
A little battle souvenir for one across the foam
That's if the French authorities will let me take it home.
There is one photograph she likes. Not because of what it shows, but because of what she remembers, the before and after. The point when Doug was not wearing his smoothly twisted, scar-pulling smile, and Harry was not on the verge of telling her to go away. The point just before she lifted her camera in their direction, when they were simply talking, drinking wine, the electric lights in the upstairs drawing room finally working, cutting through the darkening air and out onto the balcony where they stood talking.
Enough light so that she needed no placed lighting.
They never thought that particular photo would come out, but it did, and Kate touches it for a moment, and for once, she knows that she has accomplished something in one of her attempts.
It reminds her of the point afterwards, when she put the camera down, and joined them. The point when she was no longer an observer, but part of something.
O soldier, soldier, won't you marry me....
Kate, once more alone in the great house, with a child in her belly that resents her every movement, and a longing for Harry that cannot be assuaged by anything so ephemeral as remembrance, looks at the dim little sepia photograph, and tastes wine on her lips; lets past and once contentment seep into her bones along with that phantom liquor.
It is not in the picture, what she was trying to hold will never be in a picture. It is in her.
She knows that she is learning still, as she began to on the train to Oxford. Perhaps to know that she always will be is another step towards the understanding -- the innate understanding, the kind that does not rely on any man's words -- that she craves.
The road is straight as the bullet flies,
And we go marching into the dawn.