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rainbowfic2015-01-08 02:16 am
crossfortune) wrote in rainbowfic2015-01-08 02:16 am
one sweet moment set aside;
Name: Mischa
Story: fragments of stars falling
Colors: dove grey (memory becomes your partner), atomic tangerine (reconstruction), white opal (moonlight sonata), verdigris (dissolution),
Supplies and Styles: novelty beads, "who wants to live forever" (Queen)
Word Count: 1378
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Zorya's language, child/teenage soldiers, apocalypse aftermath.
Summary: There are a lot of things that Zorya misses from the old world, but she thinks that she misses music the most. Zorya, Lilia, the very shittiest of acoustic guitars, and some songs: Zorya remembers, and Lilia's never heard any of the music she remembers.
Notes: Super rough because I don't actually remember where I was going with it. Probably uneven on characterization since it's been at least a year since I've written these characters.
There are a lot of things that Zorya misses from the old world, but she thinks that she misses music the most. Real music, not the hesitant, faltering hymns offered to heaven and a goddess that doesn’t really exist, at least not the way they’ve defined her. Not like there’s really much time to compose anything with trying to survive, but if this is the best they can do, might as well not have bothered. Won’t inspire shit: she remembers the Orthodox hymns from her childhood, and while she hadn’t been religious for years before she helped kill God, they’d been beautiful.
Hah. So much shit that was lost with the end of the world, and she’s focusing on music. Fucking absurd, really, but if she gets started missing everything, then she’ll never, ever stop, and she doesn’t have time to feel fucking guilty over everything. Not like she isn’t already aware just how much her mistakes fucked everything up.
But here she is, in a moment that passes for peace, twisting pegs on a shitty acoustic guitar that she’s spent months trying to make and only vaguely resembles a guitar if she squints at it at the right angle: she was a physicist, not an instrument-maker and ain’t like she was much of a singer anyway, but she’s so desperate to hear some kind of music from before that isn’t those hymns, because memory ain’t enough. Not like actually hearing the music, whether from vinyl or cassette tape or CD or on that shitty IPod that she’d bought secondhand because she’d been too cheap to buy a new one and it hadn’t worked half the time, or being five years old and living in England and sitting on her father’s shoulder and listening to Freddie Mercury sing at Live Aid, because apparently her parents were stupid enough to bring a five-year old to a fucking rock concert.
(it’s the one piece of stupidity she’s ever forgiven, in all the long list of stupidity she never has - and she counts her own at the top of that list. It’s the last moment she’ll ever forget, after all her other memories are gone, and losing that will be the last of her humanity)
But she’ll never hear the music as it was again and her music collection’s centuries rotting at the bottom of the sea with Seattle and her apartment, assuming her mother didn’t box it up and throw it out or sell it before the apocalypse, she’ll certainly never know. Gone is fucking gone, and she doesn’t have time to cry about it. Not that she actually is human enough to weep anymore.
“What are you doing?” Lilia asks - she walks quietly, but Zorya’d still heard her coming-, and she just grunts at the girl, continuing to try to tune the monstrosity that she can’t even really call a guitar. She kind of misses the guitar she’d had, spent way too much money on it but it’s gone with everything else and this piece of crap is the best she’ll ever have again. “What is that?”
“It’s a guitar.” she grumbles, tightening the shitty pegs, and clarifies (the most reluctant grunt) at the polite confusion in Lilia’s eyes, “Musical instrument.”
“Ah,” the girl says, as if she understands, but her eyes say she doesn’t: she’s never heard the music that Zorya longs to hear again, even if only for a moment. Lilia’s frustrating to deal with, even on the best of days, earnest and with the kind of energy Zorya’s never had, but it’s flatly unfair (and all Zorya’s fault) that it turned out this way and she’ll never have any of the things Zorya remembers, gone along with everything else.
“Sit t’fuck down.” Zorya mutters, doesn’t expect the girl to do it - always moving, always burying herself in work, too many things to do. After a moment, Lilia does, much to her surprise - her curiosity about whatever the fuck this ‘guitar’ was was evidently too strong.
Well, fuck, then. There’s a whole lot of songs in her memory, not just Queen, but she can’t bring them out quite right: three hundred years and the slow wearing away of her memory, not to mention this piece of shit guitar and having to convert rock classics to the shittiest acoustic cover imaginable, and Zorya bends her head to focus on her fingering and the music, so she won’t have to look the girl in the eye. Won’t have to see her confusion at this unfamiliar style of music and lyrics she hasn’t any idea how to understand because English is years dead (and the modern Greek Zorya’d grown up speaking was now the language of the Lady’s church. Hah).
Zorya makes the mistake of looking up once, while her fingers fumble through what she remembers of Who Wants To Live Forever - Lilia doesn’t understand the lyrics, but quiet wonder shines in her blue eyes, and it hurts, sharp and angry at herself all over again, to know that this is all the girl will ever get, that she’ll never hear the song as it was intended to be rather than her terrible cover with something that only barely passes as an instrument, no one will ever hear Freddie Mercury’s voice ever again.
Gone. Gone forever, along with everything else, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Library of Alexandria. Queen and Beethoven and Kassia and - Great fucking job wiping out thousands of years of history, of musical and cultural achievement, along with humanity. Her fingers tremble on the strings, with guilt and rage, and she has absolutely no idea how she manages to finish the song without snapping any or all of the strings in half or lighting the guitar on fire.
But that’s it, and she throws the guitar aside in a tangle of discordant chords as it hits the ground. Fuck.
“That was...very educational.” Lilia says, very carefully, perhaps entirely too used to Zorya’s open fits of impatience and her careless streak, and smiles, and the fact that she’s content with that, has no idea what she’ll never hear (can’t miss what you don’t know), sets the anger alight in Zorya again. “Thank you.”
“Show’s over, girl. Get the fuck going.” Zorya cuts Lilia off before she can ask any of the questions she can see in her eyes - where did this music come from? where had she learned it? was there any more like it?- and turns back to her guitar, ignoring the fuck out of her, and the polite cough. Lilia can stand there all night - and she won’t, Zorya knows, too much and is proven right as the girl sighs and turns away.
“Zorya-” Lilia begins to ask, pausing the briefest of moments.
“No. And fuck no.” Zorya doesn’t look at her again, doesn’t even look in her direction, until the sound of Lilia’s footsteps fades away. Hah. When the fuck had she gotten so sentimental that she’d even try to share something carried from the old world, only half-remembered at best, with some slip of a girl who had no idea what it even meant?
Gone is fucking gone, it’ll never be again, and she’s all that’s left that remembers: that knowledge is bitter in her mouth, as she reaches into her pouch to roll a cigarette. But she’s never been good at letting anything go. Not her mistakes, not her memories, and (she misses everything so much) not even a single line of a song sung by a long-dead man who no one else alive will ever know a damn thing about.
Who waits forever, anyway?
“Me, apparently.” Zorya mutters - stupid, this is what trying to give humanity forever had gotten her and everyone else, less than nothing at all-, lights her cigarette and exhales, staring at the stars.
Story: fragments of stars falling
Colors: dove grey (memory becomes your partner), atomic tangerine (reconstruction), white opal (moonlight sonata), verdigris (dissolution),
Supplies and Styles: novelty beads, "who wants to live forever" (Queen)
Word Count: 1378
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Zorya's language, child/teenage soldiers, apocalypse aftermath.
Summary: There are a lot of things that Zorya misses from the old world, but she thinks that she misses music the most. Zorya, Lilia, the very shittiest of acoustic guitars, and some songs: Zorya remembers, and Lilia's never heard any of the music she remembers.
Notes: Super rough because I don't actually remember where I was going with it. Probably uneven on characterization since it's been at least a year since I've written these characters.
There are a lot of things that Zorya misses from the old world, but she thinks that she misses music the most. Real music, not the hesitant, faltering hymns offered to heaven and a goddess that doesn’t really exist, at least not the way they’ve defined her. Not like there’s really much time to compose anything with trying to survive, but if this is the best they can do, might as well not have bothered. Won’t inspire shit: she remembers the Orthodox hymns from her childhood, and while she hadn’t been religious for years before she helped kill God, they’d been beautiful.
Hah. So much shit that was lost with the end of the world, and she’s focusing on music. Fucking absurd, really, but if she gets started missing everything, then she’ll never, ever stop, and she doesn’t have time to feel fucking guilty over everything. Not like she isn’t already aware just how much her mistakes fucked everything up.
But here she is, in a moment that passes for peace, twisting pegs on a shitty acoustic guitar that she’s spent months trying to make and only vaguely resembles a guitar if she squints at it at the right angle: she was a physicist, not an instrument-maker and ain’t like she was much of a singer anyway, but she’s so desperate to hear some kind of music from before that isn’t those hymns, because memory ain’t enough. Not like actually hearing the music, whether from vinyl or cassette tape or CD or on that shitty IPod that she’d bought secondhand because she’d been too cheap to buy a new one and it hadn’t worked half the time, or being five years old and living in England and sitting on her father’s shoulder and listening to Freddie Mercury sing at Live Aid, because apparently her parents were stupid enough to bring a five-year old to a fucking rock concert.
(it’s the one piece of stupidity she’s ever forgiven, in all the long list of stupidity she never has - and she counts her own at the top of that list. It’s the last moment she’ll ever forget, after all her other memories are gone, and losing that will be the last of her humanity)
But she’ll never hear the music as it was again and her music collection’s centuries rotting at the bottom of the sea with Seattle and her apartment, assuming her mother didn’t box it up and throw it out or sell it before the apocalypse, she’ll certainly never know. Gone is fucking gone, and she doesn’t have time to cry about it. Not that she actually is human enough to weep anymore.
“What are you doing?” Lilia asks - she walks quietly, but Zorya’d still heard her coming-, and she just grunts at the girl, continuing to try to tune the monstrosity that she can’t even really call a guitar. She kind of misses the guitar she’d had, spent way too much money on it but it’s gone with everything else and this piece of crap is the best she’ll ever have again. “What is that?”
“It’s a guitar.” she grumbles, tightening the shitty pegs, and clarifies (the most reluctant grunt) at the polite confusion in Lilia’s eyes, “Musical instrument.”
“Ah,” the girl says, as if she understands, but her eyes say she doesn’t: she’s never heard the music that Zorya longs to hear again, even if only for a moment. Lilia’s frustrating to deal with, even on the best of days, earnest and with the kind of energy Zorya’s never had, but it’s flatly unfair (and all Zorya’s fault) that it turned out this way and she’ll never have any of the things Zorya remembers, gone along with everything else.
“Sit t’fuck down.” Zorya mutters, doesn’t expect the girl to do it - always moving, always burying herself in work, too many things to do. After a moment, Lilia does, much to her surprise - her curiosity about whatever the fuck this ‘guitar’ was was evidently too strong.
Well, fuck, then. There’s a whole lot of songs in her memory, not just Queen, but she can’t bring them out quite right: three hundred years and the slow wearing away of her memory, not to mention this piece of shit guitar and having to convert rock classics to the shittiest acoustic cover imaginable, and Zorya bends her head to focus on her fingering and the music, so she won’t have to look the girl in the eye. Won’t have to see her confusion at this unfamiliar style of music and lyrics she hasn’t any idea how to understand because English is years dead (and the modern Greek Zorya’d grown up speaking was now the language of the Lady’s church. Hah).
Zorya makes the mistake of looking up once, while her fingers fumble through what she remembers of Who Wants To Live Forever - Lilia doesn’t understand the lyrics, but quiet wonder shines in her blue eyes, and it hurts, sharp and angry at herself all over again, to know that this is all the girl will ever get, that she’ll never hear the song as it was intended to be rather than her terrible cover with something that only barely passes as an instrument, no one will ever hear Freddie Mercury’s voice ever again.
Gone. Gone forever, along with everything else, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Library of Alexandria. Queen and Beethoven and Kassia and - Great fucking job wiping out thousands of years of history, of musical and cultural achievement, along with humanity. Her fingers tremble on the strings, with guilt and rage, and she has absolutely no idea how she manages to finish the song without snapping any or all of the strings in half or lighting the guitar on fire.
But that’s it, and she throws the guitar aside in a tangle of discordant chords as it hits the ground. Fuck.
“That was...very educational.” Lilia says, very carefully, perhaps entirely too used to Zorya’s open fits of impatience and her careless streak, and smiles, and the fact that she’s content with that, has no idea what she’ll never hear (can’t miss what you don’t know), sets the anger alight in Zorya again. “Thank you.”
“Show’s over, girl. Get the fuck going.” Zorya cuts Lilia off before she can ask any of the questions she can see in her eyes - where did this music come from? where had she learned it? was there any more like it?- and turns back to her guitar, ignoring the fuck out of her, and the polite cough. Lilia can stand there all night - and she won’t, Zorya knows, too much and is proven right as the girl sighs and turns away.
“Zorya-” Lilia begins to ask, pausing the briefest of moments.
“No. And fuck no.” Zorya doesn’t look at her again, doesn’t even look in her direction, until the sound of Lilia’s footsteps fades away. Hah. When the fuck had she gotten so sentimental that she’d even try to share something carried from the old world, only half-remembered at best, with some slip of a girl who had no idea what it even meant?
Gone is fucking gone, it’ll never be again, and she’s all that’s left that remembers: that knowledge is bitter in her mouth, as she reaches into her pouch to roll a cigarette. But she’s never been good at letting anything go. Not her mistakes, not her memories, and (she misses everything so much) not even a single line of a song sung by a long-dead man who no one else alive will ever know a damn thing about.
Who waits forever, anyway?
“Me, apparently.” Zorya mutters - stupid, this is what trying to give humanity forever had gotten her and everyone else, less than nothing at all-, lights her cigarette and exhales, staring at the stars.
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And ouch. I can really feel Zorya's pain and anger at everything that was lost. It's just huge, everything being gone forever, and Zorya having to live with that.
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I'm glad that I managed to get it across so well - I was a bit worried since it had been so long since I'd written her.
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