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rainbowfic2015-06-24 01:07 am
starphotographs) wrote in rainbowfic2015-06-24 01:07 am
Dragon Scale Green #6
Name: starphotographs
Story: Corwin and Friends
Characters: Martin (POV), Corwin for a little bit.
Colors: Dragon Scale Green 6 ("But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them." ― Ursula K. Le Guin)
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Dragon Scale Green), Nubs
Word Count: 2,141
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: Martin is half dead and all talk.
Note: A continuation and perspective switch for Rest in Pieces.
“Didn’t I just tell you to act normal!? Don’t fucking touch me, and don’t come back in here until you can get that through your head!”
I shouldn’t have said that.
And not because it was kind of an asshole thing to do or anything. “Asshole,” I can live with. “Asshole” is my M.O. It‘s actually more Corwin‘s problem than mine. There’s not a single wire in that man’s head that isn’t crossed. Making noise at him works more like shining a floodlight directly into his eyeballs, going by the way he freezes in place and just stands there blinking for a while. We were sitting together in class this one time, and he told me to stop shuffling through my notebook because it was making it hard for him to see the professor. I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how that would even work, but nothing ever came to me. That‘s a whole other story, though. What I‘m saying is, if you yell at him to get the fuck away from you, all it’ll do is make him hang around for another half-minute while he tries to wash the noise out of his eyes or whatever. And I guess that’s what he’s doing now, but something about the sound of his breathing and his sock-feet creaking on the floorboards makes it sound like he’s about to do something. While I face the wall, pretending to sleep, I will him to try and see what happens.
Go ahead and touch me again, you stupid motherfucker. You won’t be getting that arm back, but hey at least you’ll…
…Actually, I have no idea. I’m not really sure what he meant, or what he was trying to accomplish. He never touches anyone. If the three of us are sitting on the couch or something, Spenser and I will be kicking and smacking at each other the whole time, while Corwin sits against the far armrest, keeping at least three inches between him and everyone else. If you take a bunch of these irrelevant moments and lay them side-by side in your mind, all the times you’ve seen him mashing his arms to his sides on public transit, lowering his hand to try and make a cashier just drop the change in his palm, or sliding to the edge of a bench when someone else sits down, and you almost start to see a force-field around him. It only fails when he’s tired, or when there’s something really, really wrong. When he was resting after they finally replaced that decaying corneal graft with something a little more high-tech, I sat on the edge of his bed, and he let me clap him on the back when I told him, in a few more words than this, welcome to the club. When the house was under attack, and Spenser was getting ready to drive the two of us out to his friend’s shitty junkyard to lay low for a while, I sprawled bonelessly in the recliner, waiting for someone to help me up and get me into the car and watching as Sorrell threw her arms around him and kissed him full on the mouth. Watching as his arms wrapped around her from the front.
And I know what motivated him then, but that was her, and this is me, so it isn’t so clear. My best guesses are good old pity, or some futile attempt to grab onto me and trap me here, as if that would do us any good. It could be either of those, and I wouldn’t be any less disgusted with him. Still, he stands over me. I wait for him to leave, or to try and touch me again so I can make him pay for it. Neither of us say anything. My lungs rattle. The world spins on its axis, unfaltering. Eventually, the floor creaks again.
“Fine. Goodnight.”
His footsteps get a little farther away, and the door closes behind him.
At long last, I’m back where I’m needed: alone in my own head.
*****
The sappier narratives about situations vaguely similar to mine would say that I’m “pushing people away,” and need to find some mealy-mouthed social worker who could referee the screaming blowout that would shove us back together and get us all claustrophobically entangled again, just as God and the little dimwitted hay-eating Baby Jesus intended. But, there are some pretty obvious problems with that idea. For one thing, none of those situations are actually similar to mine at all, or even to each other, because they all concern multiple completely different people, none of whom are even me. Second of all, I’ve never met a social work major that didn’t want to push me off a cliff after talking to me for more than a minute, and I can’t imagine either I nor they have changed enough in the last four years to keep a full-fledged social worker from deciding to just euthanize me already and save everyone the trouble of trying to make me get along. Lastly, and this is the important thing, I don’t think there’s anything all that wrong with pushing people away. Especially now. I have even less time to deal with everyone’s bullshit, so why put up with it if I can just tell them to fuck off?
Hell, the way I see it, I should be pushing everyone away, getting a head start on extricating myself from the world.
As if that job wasn‘t being done for me already.
So, no, there’s nothing wrong with pushing people away. Anyone who says otherwise is either being paid, or was just born an idiot with no respect for personal autonomy.
But, there is something wrong with what I did tonight.
I didn’t push Corwin away. I grabbed hold of him and ground him into the pavement, unrelentingly, for the better part of an hour. I refused to smile and say I was fine, and from that moment on, it was open season. I told him how I’d be torn apart, and that I’d make sure he had to watch. I told him watching me die would be even worse. Then I yelled at him to say goodbye to me, now, and ordered him to suck it up, act normal, and get the hell out of my sight. It was almost cartoonishly vicious. Towards the end, I started to hope I could make him break down crying, just because I could see it coming and wanted him to get it over with. I was awful. Even more so than usual. And now, lying down alone, my throat still raspy from hacking and puking and snapping at my best friend, the room silent, I have no idea why it happened.
I mean, there were some reasons. Maybe not good ones, but it’s not like I’ve ever needed a good reason to act like a dick. Just reason enough is reason enough, is what I say. He kept stabbing me, and it hurt, and even if it was something that kind of needed to happen, it made me feel like getting a few in at him, if only metaphorically. I can’t handle how he’d been acting around me lately and wanted him to feel like shit, even if he didn‘t know why. I have genuine, but admittedly pretty half-assed plans that need to be discussed no matter how off-putting they might be. And I wanted to give myself the freedom to act as horrible as I feel. I’m frustrated and dying and high as a fucking kite, and I can’t breathe, and it feels like all my vertebrae are starting to snap apart. If I already want to scream, all the better to do it at someone, instead of losing my shit in front of them and letting on how bad things really are from the inside.
And yeah, he drives me crazy sometimes, so maybe I was trying to push him away. For all the good it did. All this time, and I haven’t heard him going down the stairs. He’s probably sitting right outside the door, playing the same five-second movie of me getting gutted by vultures over and over again in his head, and willing himself to go sit on a rusty car hood and smoke for three hours, freezing his ass off and still thinking about everything I said.
But really, I guess it was all just business as usual. The same old song, revised in minor key.
I’ve always talked a big game about being dead.
*****
Ever since I got most of my head back together, enough for there to be an “I,” as such, at all, “dead” has been my gimmick. It’s not something a lot of people are. None of the other gimmicks I’ve had can even compare. I’ve only heard of one other like me, and from what I’ve managed to dig up, I outlived them- or rather, out-died them, by more than a year. For someone who makes so many jokes about falling apart, I sure have managed to mostly avoid it for a startlingly long time. For someone so proud of the fact that they’re constantly decaying, the actual process has been pretty slow. I’ve blown through every expiration date I’ve ever been given, a whirlwind of stubbornness and strong cybernetics. And god, just existing hurts like hell, but, for a good, long time, it was almost physically impossible to take me down for long. Maybe even more than if I’d been the regular non-zombie kind of person. If I stop breathing in my sleep, I wake up to electrodes frying my diaphragm and forcing me to inhale, then drift back off, no deader than I already was. My fake heart pumps the fake blood through fake veins, and will get that gust of air where it needs to go. My pacemaker kicks my real heart in the ass so my real veins won’t stagnate and leave my five million pills stranded somewhere in back-roads of my body. That’s not all they have wired in to me, but it‘s always the same idea. My body, long-dead but standing. Picking itself up off the floor, again and again.
Until it couldn’t.
It only takes a few circuits to force you to breathe when your lungs have given up, but when said lungs are partially collapsed and overflowing with rotten blood and torn-up pieces of themselves, it won’t do you much good. And when everything you eat comes back up, nothing will do you much good. Not for very long, anyway. When your heart always wants to skid to a stop, it’s hard for a little battery and a some wires to pick up the slack. Lately, I’ve felt the devices acting on my organs and muscles more than I’ve felt the workings of my body proper. Soon, there won’t be anything left to act on. Just nerve fibers that don’t connect and muscles too decayed to move to move without snapping.
And a few hours after that, I’ll be dead.
I’ll be dead, and I won’t even be around to bullshit about it. And I have no idea how to even begin to handle that.
(Not that I’ll be there to handle it at all.)
*****
All things considered, I coped very well with my own death. Probably better than anyone else in history. And it’s for two simple reasons:
1.) I didn’t have time to think about it too hard. The airlock fucked up, and I was out for the better part of three months, then awoke as whatever the hell I am now.
2.) It didn’t really stick.
It’s different when you can feel it coming.
It’s different when you know you won’t be shaking it off.
I remember being dead so well that I never really stopped. So well that I’m not allowed to cross the street alone because I might cease to exist for a few minutes and get turned into a road pizza. And I guess knowing what it’s like could be comforting, but since I won’t be around to remember it, that’ll be different, too.
But hey, it’s not my call. And it still probably beats the hell out of coughing up your own lungs. It probably even beats the hell out of living a life where you have to do so much to just to avoid it.
I know damn well it beats the hell out of watching people watching you die.
Corwin has the needle. I have the will. My body has a good month or two before decompensation finally outpaces regeneration. The world has billions of things waiting to spring up in my place. The vultures are circling, wherever they are.
Now all I have to do is wait.
starphotographsStory: Corwin and Friends
Characters: Martin (POV), Corwin for a little bit.
Colors: Dragon Scale Green 6 ("But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them." ― Ursula K. Le Guin)
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Dragon Scale Green), Nubs
Word Count: 2,141
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: Martin is half dead and all talk.
Note: A continuation and perspective switch for Rest in Pieces.
“Didn’t I just tell you to act normal!? Don’t fucking touch me, and don’t come back in here until you can get that through your head!”
I shouldn’t have said that.
And not because it was kind of an asshole thing to do or anything. “Asshole,” I can live with. “Asshole” is my M.O. It‘s actually more Corwin‘s problem than mine. There’s not a single wire in that man’s head that isn’t crossed. Making noise at him works more like shining a floodlight directly into his eyeballs, going by the way he freezes in place and just stands there blinking for a while. We were sitting together in class this one time, and he told me to stop shuffling through my notebook because it was making it hard for him to see the professor. I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how that would even work, but nothing ever came to me. That‘s a whole other story, though. What I‘m saying is, if you yell at him to get the fuck away from you, all it’ll do is make him hang around for another half-minute while he tries to wash the noise out of his eyes or whatever. And I guess that’s what he’s doing now, but something about the sound of his breathing and his sock-feet creaking on the floorboards makes it sound like he’s about to do something. While I face the wall, pretending to sleep, I will him to try and see what happens.
Go ahead and touch me again, you stupid motherfucker. You won’t be getting that arm back, but hey at least you’ll…
…Actually, I have no idea. I’m not really sure what he meant, or what he was trying to accomplish. He never touches anyone. If the three of us are sitting on the couch or something, Spenser and I will be kicking and smacking at each other the whole time, while Corwin sits against the far armrest, keeping at least three inches between him and everyone else. If you take a bunch of these irrelevant moments and lay them side-by side in your mind, all the times you’ve seen him mashing his arms to his sides on public transit, lowering his hand to try and make a cashier just drop the change in his palm, or sliding to the edge of a bench when someone else sits down, and you almost start to see a force-field around him. It only fails when he’s tired, or when there’s something really, really wrong. When he was resting after they finally replaced that decaying corneal graft with something a little more high-tech, I sat on the edge of his bed, and he let me clap him on the back when I told him, in a few more words than this, welcome to the club. When the house was under attack, and Spenser was getting ready to drive the two of us out to his friend’s shitty junkyard to lay low for a while, I sprawled bonelessly in the recliner, waiting for someone to help me up and get me into the car and watching as Sorrell threw her arms around him and kissed him full on the mouth. Watching as his arms wrapped around her from the front.
And I know what motivated him then, but that was her, and this is me, so it isn’t so clear. My best guesses are good old pity, or some futile attempt to grab onto me and trap me here, as if that would do us any good. It could be either of those, and I wouldn’t be any less disgusted with him. Still, he stands over me. I wait for him to leave, or to try and touch me again so I can make him pay for it. Neither of us say anything. My lungs rattle. The world spins on its axis, unfaltering. Eventually, the floor creaks again.
“Fine. Goodnight.”
His footsteps get a little farther away, and the door closes behind him.
At long last, I’m back where I’m needed: alone in my own head.
The sappier narratives about situations vaguely similar to mine would say that I’m “pushing people away,” and need to find some mealy-mouthed social worker who could referee the screaming blowout that would shove us back together and get us all claustrophobically entangled again, just as God and the little dimwitted hay-eating Baby Jesus intended. But, there are some pretty obvious problems with that idea. For one thing, none of those situations are actually similar to mine at all, or even to each other, because they all concern multiple completely different people, none of whom are even me. Second of all, I’ve never met a social work major that didn’t want to push me off a cliff after talking to me for more than a minute, and I can’t imagine either I nor they have changed enough in the last four years to keep a full-fledged social worker from deciding to just euthanize me already and save everyone the trouble of trying to make me get along. Lastly, and this is the important thing, I don’t think there’s anything all that wrong with pushing people away. Especially now. I have even less time to deal with everyone’s bullshit, so why put up with it if I can just tell them to fuck off?
Hell, the way I see it, I should be pushing everyone away, getting a head start on extricating myself from the world.
As if that job wasn‘t being done for me already.
So, no, there’s nothing wrong with pushing people away. Anyone who says otherwise is either being paid, or was just born an idiot with no respect for personal autonomy.
But, there is something wrong with what I did tonight.
I didn’t push Corwin away. I grabbed hold of him and ground him into the pavement, unrelentingly, for the better part of an hour. I refused to smile and say I was fine, and from that moment on, it was open season. I told him how I’d be torn apart, and that I’d make sure he had to watch. I told him watching me die would be even worse. Then I yelled at him to say goodbye to me, now, and ordered him to suck it up, act normal, and get the hell out of my sight. It was almost cartoonishly vicious. Towards the end, I started to hope I could make him break down crying, just because I could see it coming and wanted him to get it over with. I was awful. Even more so than usual. And now, lying down alone, my throat still raspy from hacking and puking and snapping at my best friend, the room silent, I have no idea why it happened.
I mean, there were some reasons. Maybe not good ones, but it’s not like I’ve ever needed a good reason to act like a dick. Just reason enough is reason enough, is what I say. He kept stabbing me, and it hurt, and even if it was something that kind of needed to happen, it made me feel like getting a few in at him, if only metaphorically. I can’t handle how he’d been acting around me lately and wanted him to feel like shit, even if he didn‘t know why. I have genuine, but admittedly pretty half-assed plans that need to be discussed no matter how off-putting they might be. And I wanted to give myself the freedom to act as horrible as I feel. I’m frustrated and dying and high as a fucking kite, and I can’t breathe, and it feels like all my vertebrae are starting to snap apart. If I already want to scream, all the better to do it at someone, instead of losing my shit in front of them and letting on how bad things really are from the inside.
And yeah, he drives me crazy sometimes, so maybe I was trying to push him away. For all the good it did. All this time, and I haven’t heard him going down the stairs. He’s probably sitting right outside the door, playing the same five-second movie of me getting gutted by vultures over and over again in his head, and willing himself to go sit on a rusty car hood and smoke for three hours, freezing his ass off and still thinking about everything I said.
But really, I guess it was all just business as usual. The same old song, revised in minor key.
I’ve always talked a big game about being dead.
Ever since I got most of my head back together, enough for there to be an “I,” as such, at all, “dead” has been my gimmick. It’s not something a lot of people are. None of the other gimmicks I’ve had can even compare. I’ve only heard of one other like me, and from what I’ve managed to dig up, I outlived them- or rather, out-died them, by more than a year. For someone who makes so many jokes about falling apart, I sure have managed to mostly avoid it for a startlingly long time. For someone so proud of the fact that they’re constantly decaying, the actual process has been pretty slow. I’ve blown through every expiration date I’ve ever been given, a whirlwind of stubbornness and strong cybernetics. And god, just existing hurts like hell, but, for a good, long time, it was almost physically impossible to take me down for long. Maybe even more than if I’d been the regular non-zombie kind of person. If I stop breathing in my sleep, I wake up to electrodes frying my diaphragm and forcing me to inhale, then drift back off, no deader than I already was. My fake heart pumps the fake blood through fake veins, and will get that gust of air where it needs to go. My pacemaker kicks my real heart in the ass so my real veins won’t stagnate and leave my five million pills stranded somewhere in back-roads of my body. That’s not all they have wired in to me, but it‘s always the same idea. My body, long-dead but standing. Picking itself up off the floor, again and again.
Until it couldn’t.
It only takes a few circuits to force you to breathe when your lungs have given up, but when said lungs are partially collapsed and overflowing with rotten blood and torn-up pieces of themselves, it won’t do you much good. And when everything you eat comes back up, nothing will do you much good. Not for very long, anyway. When your heart always wants to skid to a stop, it’s hard for a little battery and a some wires to pick up the slack. Lately, I’ve felt the devices acting on my organs and muscles more than I’ve felt the workings of my body proper. Soon, there won’t be anything left to act on. Just nerve fibers that don’t connect and muscles too decayed to move to move without snapping.
And a few hours after that, I’ll be dead.
I’ll be dead, and I won’t even be around to bullshit about it. And I have no idea how to even begin to handle that.
(Not that I’ll be there to handle it at all.)
All things considered, I coped very well with my own death. Probably better than anyone else in history. And it’s for two simple reasons:
1.) I didn’t have time to think about it too hard. The airlock fucked up, and I was out for the better part of three months, then awoke as whatever the hell I am now.
2.) It didn’t really stick.
It’s different when you can feel it coming.
It’s different when you know you won’t be shaking it off.
I remember being dead so well that I never really stopped. So well that I’m not allowed to cross the street alone because I might cease to exist for a few minutes and get turned into a road pizza. And I guess knowing what it’s like could be comforting, but since I won’t be around to remember it, that’ll be different, too.
But hey, it’s not my call. And it still probably beats the hell out of coughing up your own lungs. It probably even beats the hell out of living a life where you have to do so much to just to avoid it.
I know damn well it beats the hell out of watching people watching you die.
Corwin has the needle. I have the will. My body has a good month or two before decompensation finally outpaces regeneration. The world has billions of things waiting to spring up in my place. The vultures are circling, wherever they are.
Now all I have to do is wait.
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Thank you! :D
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Thanks for reading!
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