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rainbowfic2015-03-03 01:25 am
starphotographs) wrote in rainbowfic2015-03-03 01:25 am
Clean Again 5, Admin Yellow 20
Name: starphotographs
Story: Corwin and Friends
Characters: Martin
Colors: Clean Again 5 (Body Envy), Admin Yellow 20 (Change will happen whether you embrace it or not.)
Word Count: 1839
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: “I sing the body electric. I gasp the body organic. I miss the body remembered.” (WTNV, episode 42)
Martin knows that there are different ways of being dead.
Note: Questions, comments, concrit, whatever all fine!
The Bottom of My Rotten Heart
What I told him: I lost five pounds, my painkillers are giving me gastritis again, three out of five doctors acted like gigantic condescending dickheads.
What I didn’t: my lungs are rattling like a pachinko machine, there’s dead material in my spinal fluid, my bones are starting to go, and this time next year, I’ll be dead in the ground.
(As opposed to dead on it.)
What he knows anyway: I have no idea. Lying to Corwin is like fucking Russian Roulette. Five times out of six, he takes everything you tell him absolutely literally and goes back to thinking about whatever the heck he thinks about. The sixth time, he knows something’s up from the second the excuse slides out of your mouth, then stares at you, puzzled and accusing, for the next month. (But he never confronts you. His usual reaction keeps him from trusting himself enough to speak up.) It’s like he can’t read between the lines, but he doesn’t really read the lines themselves, either. Whatever he’s reading, it’s something I haven’t heard of, and thus cannot modulate. It’s kind of what made me want to be his friend in the first place. Talk to him for five minutes, and it’s obvious he’s navigating in some other space. Taking the stairs, coming in and out of emergency exits, going the long way round. Honestly, he makes me nervous. But then again, he also can’t pronounce most of the words he knows or walk straight half the time, so being uneasy around him makes one look pretty stupid. As does letting him catch you in a lie, for that matter. Nothing stings like being outsmarted by someone who seems so completely lost all the time that you forget the guy is six years your senior. Hell, I spent most of my college career shepherding him around (and, occasionally, messing with his head) like I was an older sibling. Which makes me feel like a real shit about not being straight with him. But it’s not like I don’t have my reasons.
Why I didn’t tell him:
1. It changes exactly nothing.
2. What goes on inside my putrid disintegrating roadkill fucking body is my own damn business.
The heart of the matter is: I half don’t believe it myself. I’ve never had an expiration date that didn’t get pushed back so far as to make even an educated guess impossible. Three years ago, I had six months. A little over two years ago, I had half that.
I still haven’t, to the best of my knowledge, expired.
The first time, I was put back together and eventually sent home, unable to walk, still strung up with tubes and wires, half dead in a room I‘d only just left. Or at least it felt that way. In reality, I hadn‘t lived there in over a quarter of year, between the night I spent in my new apartment, the two days on the space station on that dippy field trip, the night shoved in the fridge, all the time it took to get me alive enough to go home. For a certain value of alive, anyway. Inside and outside, machines were doing my organs’ work for them. Hell, I didn’t have an inside or an outside. A biological and metaphysical Klein Bottle. I was perforated with shunts and tubes and surgical drains, and my brain kept shutting down, flinging me back in to something remembered but inexpressible. Back in to the real world as only I, now, could know it. And when I managed to slip in through the back door of myself, out of the great yawning maw of everything and once again shut up in my own skull, I thought of that first and only night in my first apartment, lying in the dark and on the edge of something huge, but not like this. When I can feel anything but huge and empty, I mourn the loss of a self in possession of a present tense.
The second time, I’m fresh out of my second apartment. Well, not so much an apartment. More a dirty hotel room next to the meteor crater. But it was mine, and I was free. I was flying in the face of everyone’s expectations by taking care of my own fucking self. I had my mind to keep me company. I had my routine. I had all the towels and sheets hanging over the windows because I couldn’t regulate my temperature too well anymore and the sun made me sick. I slept in my coat because I couldn’t shiver anymore and the cold made me dizzy. I slept without dreaming. I slept entire days because I was too exhausted to move. I hardly ate because I usually didn’t even have the energy to ring the goddamn pizza guy. I spent more time watching television than I ever had before or since. I spent so much time asleep or passed-out or drifting in and out of reality that I was lucky if I got my meds every third day. My internal supports were going crazy. I’d wake up to a jolt from my pacemaker or the wires in my diaphragm, jerking like a cold salted frog leg. It wasn’t like I had the strength to clean, and like hell I was letting housekeeping come in and see me like that. Not until I was good and ready. Not until I was a sticky skeleton laid out under a cheap blanket, on a mattress they’d have to burn. A thick haze hung in the air after a while, a cloud of me and other rotten things. By the time I finally had to admit living alone might not have been going so well, I weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet, counting the mold in my lungs and the cords and circuits that kept me lurching along. I could hardly walk the distance to my bedroom door. Once again, I was reduced to living in a bedroom. A room on the second floor of what might have been called a boarding house. A woman who drives me to the doctor twice a week. And all the time in the world to wait.
And both times, I waited. For something that never came. The doctors declared their experiment a tentative success, and I eventually stuck my wheelchair in the closet, crawled out of bed, and went hitchhiking. I fought back an infection that my body was supposedly too deteriorated to handle. The wires jerking my sorry ass back to life until I could eventually stand up again. And I always do stand up again. Even the time I actually did die. And sure, that time, I pretty much stood up dead, but I got used to it. Dead, I lived to stand up again another day, and very well could stand up again next year. I’ve done it before.
Bullshit.
Even I know damn well that this won’t be like before. I think I even knew before they told me. I’m not even really sick, it’s just that little things are going wrong. And that, really, is how I know. I’m not sick, but I’m still getting worse. I’m dizzy too easily, even when I remember to put my head between my legs before I stand. Either I wake in the middle of the night, to those sharp jolts in my chest, or I wake after about fifteen hours, too stiff to move. More and more often, my stomach would rather throw back a meal than bother with processing it. My breath is even more vile than usual, no matter how much gum I chew or how hard I brush my teeth. Twice now, I’ve dislocated my right shoulder in my sleep. Last night, it was a rib, and I popped it back as best I could. My hands haven’t really been warm since the accident, but now they’re stiff and freezing even when I keep them jammed in my pockets. I’m breaking my own record for coughing up blood. Actually, I can’t really breathe in the morning, until I’ve coughed up quite a lot of blood, and as of last week, I’ve noticed that not everything solid really looks like a clot. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, anarchy is loosed upon my horrible fucking body, whatever. Good riddance.
Before I left the hospital, I was told to think about my options. And all I could think was, like hell I will. There’s nothing I want to think about less than my fucking options, which are as such:
1. Die comfortable in some facility where they supposedly treat me very well but actually treat me like a piece of meat, while visitors wander in and out and give me pitying looks while I’m too weak to punch them.
2. Die in horrible pain in my own bed, where no one prods at me, but everyone makes things weird because they can’t get out of their own heads long enough to consider how I might actually feel about my situation.
But those aren’t actually options at all. Just the same long road to the same underwhelming destination, me limping down one of the two parallel paths. I don’t have options. The last time I had options, I was twenty years old. I had just one undergrad class left, and then I had to decide what I wanted more, to be headed for tenure by my late twenties or to go through graduate school twice. Or something else entirely? How would I occupy my mind? Where will it take me? What could it do if I used it for real? What can I understand? That last question most weighed on my mind. There was so much that I really wanted to truly understand, down in my bones. Maybe to be the first to uncover or articulate something that no one had understood before, me all the way at the top, standing on the shoulders of all those who had understood before me, them lifting me into the sun. I could almost taste it then, but now I can barely recall the feeling. In another lifetime, I wanted to pull back some great curtain. I wanted to teach. I probably wanted a lot of things I wasn’t even aware of yet.
Today, from the bottom of my rotten heart, I want to stand without swaying. I want to get a deep breath. I want the knives of pain shooting up my back to stop. I want to read a book without holding it at arm’s length. I want to eat a decent meal and keep it down. I count my wants. And I can’t find anything that I want to do, or think, or understand. Nothing that isn’t overshadowed by some want to not-feel, at least. More than I want to test my mind, I want a body that isn’t falling apart.
And that, more than anything else, is how I know it’s almost time.
starphotographsStory: Corwin and Friends
Characters: Martin
Colors: Clean Again 5 (Body Envy), Admin Yellow 20 (Change will happen whether you embrace it or not.)
Word Count: 1839
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: “I sing the body electric. I gasp the body organic. I miss the body remembered.” (WTNV, episode 42)
Martin knows that there are different ways of being dead.
Note: Questions, comments, concrit, whatever all fine!
What I told him: I lost five pounds, my painkillers are giving me gastritis again, three out of five doctors acted like gigantic condescending dickheads.
What I didn’t: my lungs are rattling like a pachinko machine, there’s dead material in my spinal fluid, my bones are starting to go, and this time next year, I’ll be dead in the ground.
(As opposed to dead on it.)
What he knows anyway: I have no idea. Lying to Corwin is like fucking Russian Roulette. Five times out of six, he takes everything you tell him absolutely literally and goes back to thinking about whatever the heck he thinks about. The sixth time, he knows something’s up from the second the excuse slides out of your mouth, then stares at you, puzzled and accusing, for the next month. (But he never confronts you. His usual reaction keeps him from trusting himself enough to speak up.) It’s like he can’t read between the lines, but he doesn’t really read the lines themselves, either. Whatever he’s reading, it’s something I haven’t heard of, and thus cannot modulate. It’s kind of what made me want to be his friend in the first place. Talk to him for five minutes, and it’s obvious he’s navigating in some other space. Taking the stairs, coming in and out of emergency exits, going the long way round. Honestly, he makes me nervous. But then again, he also can’t pronounce most of the words he knows or walk straight half the time, so being uneasy around him makes one look pretty stupid. As does letting him catch you in a lie, for that matter. Nothing stings like being outsmarted by someone who seems so completely lost all the time that you forget the guy is six years your senior. Hell, I spent most of my college career shepherding him around (and, occasionally, messing with his head) like I was an older sibling. Which makes me feel like a real shit about not being straight with him. But it’s not like I don’t have my reasons.
Why I didn’t tell him:
1. It changes exactly nothing.
2. What goes on inside my putrid disintegrating roadkill fucking body is my own damn business.
The heart of the matter is: I half don’t believe it myself. I’ve never had an expiration date that didn’t get pushed back so far as to make even an educated guess impossible. Three years ago, I had six months. A little over two years ago, I had half that.
I still haven’t, to the best of my knowledge, expired.
The first time, I was put back together and eventually sent home, unable to walk, still strung up with tubes and wires, half dead in a room I‘d only just left. Or at least it felt that way. In reality, I hadn‘t lived there in over a quarter of year, between the night I spent in my new apartment, the two days on the space station on that dippy field trip, the night shoved in the fridge, all the time it took to get me alive enough to go home. For a certain value of alive, anyway. Inside and outside, machines were doing my organs’ work for them. Hell, I didn’t have an inside or an outside. A biological and metaphysical Klein Bottle. I was perforated with shunts and tubes and surgical drains, and my brain kept shutting down, flinging me back in to something remembered but inexpressible. Back in to the real world as only I, now, could know it. And when I managed to slip in through the back door of myself, out of the great yawning maw of everything and once again shut up in my own skull, I thought of that first and only night in my first apartment, lying in the dark and on the edge of something huge, but not like this. When I can feel anything but huge and empty, I mourn the loss of a self in possession of a present tense.
The second time, I’m fresh out of my second apartment. Well, not so much an apartment. More a dirty hotel room next to the meteor crater. But it was mine, and I was free. I was flying in the face of everyone’s expectations by taking care of my own fucking self. I had my mind to keep me company. I had my routine. I had all the towels and sheets hanging over the windows because I couldn’t regulate my temperature too well anymore and the sun made me sick. I slept in my coat because I couldn’t shiver anymore and the cold made me dizzy. I slept without dreaming. I slept entire days because I was too exhausted to move. I hardly ate because I usually didn’t even have the energy to ring the goddamn pizza guy. I spent more time watching television than I ever had before or since. I spent so much time asleep or passed-out or drifting in and out of reality that I was lucky if I got my meds every third day. My internal supports were going crazy. I’d wake up to a jolt from my pacemaker or the wires in my diaphragm, jerking like a cold salted frog leg. It wasn’t like I had the strength to clean, and like hell I was letting housekeeping come in and see me like that. Not until I was good and ready. Not until I was a sticky skeleton laid out under a cheap blanket, on a mattress they’d have to burn. A thick haze hung in the air after a while, a cloud of me and other rotten things. By the time I finally had to admit living alone might not have been going so well, I weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet, counting the mold in my lungs and the cords and circuits that kept me lurching along. I could hardly walk the distance to my bedroom door. Once again, I was reduced to living in a bedroom. A room on the second floor of what might have been called a boarding house. A woman who drives me to the doctor twice a week. And all the time in the world to wait.
And both times, I waited. For something that never came. The doctors declared their experiment a tentative success, and I eventually stuck my wheelchair in the closet, crawled out of bed, and went hitchhiking. I fought back an infection that my body was supposedly too deteriorated to handle. The wires jerking my sorry ass back to life until I could eventually stand up again. And I always do stand up again. Even the time I actually did die. And sure, that time, I pretty much stood up dead, but I got used to it. Dead, I lived to stand up again another day, and very well could stand up again next year. I’ve done it before.
Bullshit.
Even I know damn well that this won’t be like before. I think I even knew before they told me. I’m not even really sick, it’s just that little things are going wrong. And that, really, is how I know. I’m not sick, but I’m still getting worse. I’m dizzy too easily, even when I remember to put my head between my legs before I stand. Either I wake in the middle of the night, to those sharp jolts in my chest, or I wake after about fifteen hours, too stiff to move. More and more often, my stomach would rather throw back a meal than bother with processing it. My breath is even more vile than usual, no matter how much gum I chew or how hard I brush my teeth. Twice now, I’ve dislocated my right shoulder in my sleep. Last night, it was a rib, and I popped it back as best I could. My hands haven’t really been warm since the accident, but now they’re stiff and freezing even when I keep them jammed in my pockets. I’m breaking my own record for coughing up blood. Actually, I can’t really breathe in the morning, until I’ve coughed up quite a lot of blood, and as of last week, I’ve noticed that not everything solid really looks like a clot. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, anarchy is loosed upon my horrible fucking body, whatever. Good riddance.
Before I left the hospital, I was told to think about my options. And all I could think was, like hell I will. There’s nothing I want to think about less than my fucking options, which are as such:
1. Die comfortable in some facility where they supposedly treat me very well but actually treat me like a piece of meat, while visitors wander in and out and give me pitying looks while I’m too weak to punch them.
2. Die in horrible pain in my own bed, where no one prods at me, but everyone makes things weird because they can’t get out of their own heads long enough to consider how I might actually feel about my situation.
But those aren’t actually options at all. Just the same long road to the same underwhelming destination, me limping down one of the two parallel paths. I don’t have options. The last time I had options, I was twenty years old. I had just one undergrad class left, and then I had to decide what I wanted more, to be headed for tenure by my late twenties or to go through graduate school twice. Or something else entirely? How would I occupy my mind? Where will it take me? What could it do if I used it for real? What can I understand? That last question most weighed on my mind. There was so much that I really wanted to truly understand, down in my bones. Maybe to be the first to uncover or articulate something that no one had understood before, me all the way at the top, standing on the shoulders of all those who had understood before me, them lifting me into the sun. I could almost taste it then, but now I can barely recall the feeling. In another lifetime, I wanted to pull back some great curtain. I wanted to teach. I probably wanted a lot of things I wasn’t even aware of yet.
Today, from the bottom of my rotten heart, I want to stand without swaying. I want to get a deep breath. I want the knives of pain shooting up my back to stop. I want to read a book without holding it at arm’s length. I want to eat a decent meal and keep it down. I count my wants. And I can’t find anything that I want to do, or think, or understand. Nothing that isn’t overshadowed by some want to not-feel, at least. More than I want to test my mind, I want a body that isn’t falling apart.
And that, more than anything else, is how I know it’s almost time.
no subject
ME STANDING UP AND CHEERING BECAUSE YOU BROUGHT THIS WHOLE GLORIOUSLY SQUISHY THING AROUND WITH SUCH PANACHE.
There.
no subject
And thank you tons for reading, and I'm glad you liked it! :D
/incoherent gin-addled reply :P
no subject
:D
no subject
no subject
Being angry at stuff is a talent of his. XD And even if it isn't as obvious as this, it's usually at least kind of rightful if you squint a little and try to guess what he's thinking. If not, it's usually over something reeeealy dumb. :P
Thanks for reading! :D