starphotographs (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
starphotographs) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowfic2015-07-04 12:33 am
starphotographs) wrote in rainbowfic2015-07-04 12:33 am
Dragon Scale Green 1, Admin Yellow 2
Name: starphotographs
Story: Corwin and Friends
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Dragon Scale Green, Summer Carnival), Glitter (http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-speak-dead)
Characters: Corwin (POV), Martin
Colors: Dragon Scale Green 1 "So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings." ― JRR Tolkien), Admin Yellow 2 (I hear dying makes you thirsty.)
Word Count: 2,982
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: Corwin and Martin have a talk
Note: I have finished Dragon Scale Green! All comments and questions great. (And thanks everyone for all the comments thus far! I have a bunch to answer right now and will get to them over the weekend!)
Unfinished Business
“…The heck are you doing down there?”
“The heck does it look like?”
From where I was standing, it looked like Martin was huddling under Hal’s kitchen table, drinking Hal’s vodka straight out of the bottle. I’d just crawled out of bed to get myself a glass of water, and I wasn’t quite awake yet, so I almost had a heart attack when I saw a shadowy humanoid crouching beneath the furniture, ready to grab my foot. Childhood nightmare.
“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”
He didn’t answer. Since, for some reason, it felt like the natural thing to do, I crawled under the table and sat next to him. Martin glared at me and scooted over about half a foot, taking the bottle with him.
“…Well, I’m thinking. Give me some fucking privacy.”
“Hey, I didn’t come down here to talk.”
“Why are you sitting under the table, then?”
Well, why are you sitting under the table, you fucking jackass?
“Because I wanted to drink some of Hal’s vodka. Pass that thing over here.”
He slammed the bottle down between us, then turned away from me. I could tell he was already drunk, and it didn’t take much to get him going. So figured I’d have it to myself for a while before he demanded it back. Unless Hal woke up and demanded it back, but I‘d cross that bridge when we got to it.
“…Are we going to get in trouble for drinking this?”
Martin shrugged, not bothering to turn around. With his face hidden and the lights off, it was hard to make him out. His black hair and black shirt melted into the shadows of the chairs.
“I don’t think Hal even knows about it. Probably isn’t really his. Probably belongs to his weird boss who ran off a couple months ago. I found it under the sink.”
“Sink Vodka, huh?”
I don’t know why I was trying to make conversation, since I’d already assured him I wasn’t there to talk. He assured me that, apparently, he wasn‘t there to respond. I took a sip and almost spat it out.
“…How old is this stuff? Is it like, bad? Does vodka go bad?”
Martin still wasn’t looking at me, but he’d at least moved into a neutral position, staring straight ahead, facing the window and lit by the distant glow of the junkyard’s halogen lights. Those things make everyone look as undead as he is, so they equalized us, made him look almost normal.
“I’m not sure how old it is, but I think it started out gross.”
Of course, I drank more of it anyway.
“Jesus, does Hal’s boss even have a tongue? Does he just use his mouth as a funnel and pour this shit down his gullet?”
That got a laugh out of him, at least.
“…I don’t know. Never seen him.”
“Do you even have a tongue?”
“So far, yeah. And you’re drinking it, too, so you don’t have room to talk.”
“Point taken.”
With that joke exhausted, we’d run clean out of things to say. I’d even run out of things to think. Then I got really wrapped up in the floor tiles. They were shining in the rectangle of grey light laid down by the window, and the design on them formed a very regular, symmetrical pattern. Except for one tile that was installed wrong, so the lines were about a half-turn away from where they should have been. I stared at the misaligned tile for a long time, imagining myself prying it loose and turning it in the right direction, over and over again. This was very satisfying. Eventually, Martin elbowed me sharply, then held out his hand.
“…Sharing is caring, asshole.”
“You sure? I mean…”
“I know, I know. My body’s fucked to hell and I could probably get blitzed off my ass measuring the stuff out in a pipette. That’s the point.”
Figuring that, if he threw up, he’d be the one who had to clean up after himself, I passed the bottle. Martin took a few disconcertingly intense gulps from it, then held it in front of his face and glared at it for a while.
“…Did this stuff go bad?”
“I’m not even sure if that can happen.”
“Well, you asked me first… Oh, who the fuck even cares.”
He put the bottle back down between us, then rested his head and arms on the seat of a chair. I took another swig. He didn’t do anything.
“…Martin?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Because you’re sitting under a table drunk at three in the morning.”
He looked at me in this particular way that always made me feel very stupid. Or more like I’d just wandered in from another dimension where things didn’t work quite right.
“That’s a… Thing. That people do.”
“It’s a thing Spenser does, but I wouldn’t call him ‘people.’”
“Well… Where do you think I got the idea?”
“…You’re taking cues from that wacko, and you expect me to believe nothing’s wrong with you? Come on.”
“Just… Stop, okay?”
I stopped. Since I’d never heard of anyone getting food poisoning from vodka, no matter how old it was, I took another sip. Actually, I was starting to get used to it. Either used to it or just drunk.
“…Aren’t you worried about this stuff, like, tearing up your stomach?”
“Not really. If I was worried about that, I’d have discontinued my pain meds a long time ago. I figure the damage is already done, you know?”
“I guess, but…”
“…But, I’m starting to straight-up disintegrate. At this point, I could do anything short of setting myself on fire, and it would still take longer to kill me than I’m probably going to last. So who the fuck cares?”
Martin crossed his arms in front of his chest, but left his head on the chair. It looked both incredibly awkward and weirdly comfortable. I started to try it myself, but I was too tall to make it work.
“How long do you think…”
“…I still have no idea. I was trying to figure it out before you came down here and started rambling about tongues.”
“Okay. Should I…?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. I let him talk anyway.
“I was trying to figure out how long I have, and if there‘s anything I need to get done.”
“So-”
I couldn’t tell if he was cutting me off, or if there were just two separate conversations going on. Whichever it was, it was easier to just let it happen. That’s one of the first things you learn trying to interact with Martin: Just Let it Happen.
“…I don’t have any loose ends, Corwin.”
He leaned back against the wall and stared at the floor. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say. It was the kind of thing that usually makes people feel at ease, but he said it in the wrong tone. I took a stab in the dark.
“I’m sure there’s something.”
Martin looked defeated, which wasn’t something I was used to. It scared me. I wanted to grab him and put him back the way he was.
“Believe me, there isn’t.”
“I’m… Sorry?”
“It’s just… I used to think I’d die in the middle of a bunch of shit. Even back when I assumed I’d be really really old. You remember how I used to be.”
I did. Before he died the first time, Martin was always involved with something. Usually so many things at once that I wondered how he didn’t wear out. I remember when I realized that he couldn‘t wear out that way, and how it was one of the final steps in the long process of learning that not everyone works like I do. That most people don’t. Martin was a pretty extreme example, but he was closer to normal than I was. Doing nothing made him feel bored and restless, not like he was recharging his batteries. Doing one thing for too long made him want to take a break. He saw the point in winning, but he never got around to telling me what it was. And he actually liked school. I’d met people like him before, but they always made me wonder what was wrong with me. Why I wasn’t them. The difference with Martin was that I actually got to know him. And, having become one myself, I’d mostly aged out of adults comparing me unfavorably to other kids I knew. By then, they’d figured out that I was a lost cause.
Then Martin, without even knowing it, helped me figure out that I wasn’t. I wasn’t lazy, or secretly stupid, or not trying hard enough, or not Living Up to My Potential. It turned out that I didn’t have the potential everyone thought I did, but I had my own. It turned out that we were just very different people. And before I met him, I never knew how different people could be.
“…Yeah, I remember. But it seems like you still do a lot of things. And I know you probably work harder to do them.”
“Sure, I do things. But everything I do has a beginning and an end but no middle.”
“I… Don’t think it works that way.”
“…Are two pieces of bread with no stuff between them a sandwich? No. They’re just two shitty pieces of bread. That’s how having no middle works. There’s technically stuff between the first and last layer of bread atoms, but it’s still just two shitty pieces of bread.”
Now I was really wondering if he was okay. “Bread atoms” didn’t seem like something he’d let slide if he heard it from someone else. But here he was, being the one to say it and not even correcting himself.
“You… Are very drunk. Nothing about that made any sense.”
Martin put his head in his hands and groaned. I was getting the idea that this was one of those things that you can’t really articulate to people outside your own brain. So you end up further complicating matters by speaking in bizarre sandwich metaphors.
“…I mean everything I do is done the same day I start it! I don’t have time for any long-term projects, because I’m my long-term project now. All I’ve done for the past few years is keep myself from falling apart, and when I’m finally done for the day, I don’t have time for anything else. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have energy to keep it running alongside all the other shit. And I guess I could be a fuckin’ Pollyanna about it and decide to try anyway, but I’m not going to be around to finish anything I start at this point. So all I’m left with is more shitty bread with no middles. And this is, like, it. All I have to work on is dragging this shit out.”
“If you need help with doing something, I-”
“You’d be a little out of your depth!”
He took another drink before I could argue with him, but I don’t know that I would have, anyway. Just thinking about it made me feel like I could use a drink myself. Sometimes, it’s kinder to just let people do the stupid thing, and hope they’d do the same for you.
“…Probably, yeah.”
“I don’t even know what the point of any of this was. I died when I was twenty, and that should have been the end of it. I don’t know what they were trying to accomplish by having me sit above ground a few extra years. It’s not like I finished anything I had going on back then, or even moved on to other things. I’m not getting anywhere. I’ve just been sitting around waiting to die because it didn’t take the first time. At least those people who lie around on life support for decades get to sleep through the whole thing, and don‘t have to spend the whole time watching themselves just-”
I couldn’t stand to listen to him anymore. I didn’t even know if he could stand listening to himself.
“Martin… I know it’s kind of a shitty situation, but that isn’t like, your whole life. I’ve seen you have fun… I mean, you were having fun just yesterday. And you were around long enough to meet Spenser, and I know you two have a blast together, so…”
Spenser, of course, was who he’d been having fun with yesterday. They were hiding behind furniture and flinging rubber bands at each other’s heads.
“…Hey, you’re not wrong. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have decided to stay dead, though. Have you ever decomposed? Shit hurts.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
We went a while without talking. I scanned the room, trying to re-find the misplaced tile. Martin pulled in his legs and sat with his arms resting across his knees, then finally muttered something.
“…Eighty-three days.”
“What?”
I thought that was going to be it, and I’d never know what he was talking about. But eventually, he took a deep breath and started again, from the beginning this time.
“Back around the turn of the century, there was an accident in a nuclear power plant, and this guy who worked there was caught right in the middle of it. Fuck, man, you’ve studied this stuff. I don’t need to tell you how screwed he was. He was up and talking at first, but at the cellular level, he didn’t even really count as a living thing anymore. I mean, his cells weren’t cells. The chromosomes were completely obliterated. Which means his body didn’t know how to rebuild itself, so he just… Fell apart, basically. They kept him alive like that for eighty-three days even though they knew damn well what was going to happen.”
He was speaking so quietly that it was almost hard to hear him, but I could tell by the way the words spooled out of him that this was something he’d been rolling around in his head for a good, long time.
“So, what…”
Martin reached for the bottle one more time, and, yet again, didn’t seem to hear me.
“…They’ve kept me alive for almost four years now, Corwin.”
“I don’t think it’s quite the same situation.”
That was supposed to make him feel better, but when I actually thought about it, I wasn’t surprised that it backfired horribly.
“Like fuck it isn’t! And shit, four years. I was supposed to be a professor by now.”
Martin had sort of caved in on himself, arms and legs tangled around his head.
“Wait, weren’t you planning to be in graduate school until sun swallowed the Earth or whatever?”
Then he sat up straight, as if nothing had happened, leaning against the wall and staring into space.
“…Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t get time to figure out what I wanted. I just know I didn’t want to die, but I don’t think I even thought of that. And you know what, I still don’t really want to. I mean, it’ll be a load off, but I can’t believe I’m going to be done. I didn’t even get started.”
Most of this was alien to me. But that feeling, I knew.
“Well, if it makes you feel better, I never got started, either.”
“…But you still could.”
“Hey, it’s too late in the game for you to start spouting that dippy life-is-fleeting seize-the-day bullshit. C‘mon, you‘re the only person I‘ve ever heard of who could stare death in the face without getting all corny and crap.”
Martin smirked. At least his face looked back to normal, if nothing else.
“Yeah, well, it helps that my problem doesn’t have, like, team colors and awareness days and all that bullshit… But anyway, I’m not saying that. I’m not saying you should do anything you don’t want to, okay? I’m just saying, you have a choice. I don’t get that anymore. I didn‘t even have it back then.”
“…If you didn’t have it back then, none of us do. We don’t know when shit’s gonna happen.”
This, too, backfired, but not all that destructively. He didn’t look quite so disgusted with me, at least. Just exhausted, and like he knew he could never really make me understand.
“Yeah, well, shit actually happened to me.”
I guess that was all either of us had to say. I flipped the tile over and over again in my mind, until something started bothering me. Something other than the tile, I mean.
“…Hey, Martin?”
“Yeah?”
“Okay… You said you’d have rather stayed dead, right?”
Martin rolled his eyes. I was glad he finally knew how it felt, going back and forth with someone who just won’t quit.
“…If you’re asking me if I still think that, I do.”
“Oh, I know, but I was just wondering… And remember that I’m not giving you permission or anything, but that year and a half we were out of contact…”
Every other year or so, I’d actually remember that tact was a thing and I should try using it. And Martin sabotaged me every single time.
“…You’re wondering why I didn’t just cap myself.”
Of course, there’s something to be said for being direct.
“Well… Yeah.”
He laughed. I thought about that tile. How I wanted to pry it up and set it right, watch the lines snap together and flow. To reorganize the universe. Grab it and put it back the way it was.
“Dammit, Corwin, you don’t understand anything.”
“Wha…?”
“Didn’t I just say I always need a project?”
“Yes, but…”
Finally, he turned to me and smiled.
“I’m a shitty project, but I’m the only project I have.”
I knew better by now than to say it out loud, but all I could think was:
Me, too.
starphotographsStory: Corwin and Friends
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Dragon Scale Green, Summer Carnival), Glitter (http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-speak-dead)
Characters: Corwin (POV), Martin
Colors: Dragon Scale Green 1 "So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings." ― JRR Tolkien), Admin Yellow 2 (I hear dying makes you thirsty.)
Word Count: 2,982
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: Corwin and Martin have a talk
Note: I have finished Dragon Scale Green! All comments and questions great. (And thanks everyone for all the comments thus far! I have a bunch to answer right now and will get to them over the weekend!)
“…The heck are you doing down there?”
“The heck does it look like?”
From where I was standing, it looked like Martin was huddling under Hal’s kitchen table, drinking Hal’s vodka straight out of the bottle. I’d just crawled out of bed to get myself a glass of water, and I wasn’t quite awake yet, so I almost had a heart attack when I saw a shadowy humanoid crouching beneath the furniture, ready to grab my foot. Childhood nightmare.
“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”
He didn’t answer. Since, for some reason, it felt like the natural thing to do, I crawled under the table and sat next to him. Martin glared at me and scooted over about half a foot, taking the bottle with him.
“…Well, I’m thinking. Give me some fucking privacy.”
“Hey, I didn’t come down here to talk.”
“Why are you sitting under the table, then?”
Well, why are you sitting under the table, you fucking jackass?
“Because I wanted to drink some of Hal’s vodka. Pass that thing over here.”
He slammed the bottle down between us, then turned away from me. I could tell he was already drunk, and it didn’t take much to get him going. So figured I’d have it to myself for a while before he demanded it back. Unless Hal woke up and demanded it back, but I‘d cross that bridge when we got to it.
“…Are we going to get in trouble for drinking this?”
Martin shrugged, not bothering to turn around. With his face hidden and the lights off, it was hard to make him out. His black hair and black shirt melted into the shadows of the chairs.
“I don’t think Hal even knows about it. Probably isn’t really his. Probably belongs to his weird boss who ran off a couple months ago. I found it under the sink.”
“Sink Vodka, huh?”
I don’t know why I was trying to make conversation, since I’d already assured him I wasn’t there to talk. He assured me that, apparently, he wasn‘t there to respond. I took a sip and almost spat it out.
“…How old is this stuff? Is it like, bad? Does vodka go bad?”
Martin still wasn’t looking at me, but he’d at least moved into a neutral position, staring straight ahead, facing the window and lit by the distant glow of the junkyard’s halogen lights. Those things make everyone look as undead as he is, so they equalized us, made him look almost normal.
“I’m not sure how old it is, but I think it started out gross.”
Of course, I drank more of it anyway.
“Jesus, does Hal’s boss even have a tongue? Does he just use his mouth as a funnel and pour this shit down his gullet?”
That got a laugh out of him, at least.
“…I don’t know. Never seen him.”
“Do you even have a tongue?”
“So far, yeah. And you’re drinking it, too, so you don’t have room to talk.”
“Point taken.”
With that joke exhausted, we’d run clean out of things to say. I’d even run out of things to think. Then I got really wrapped up in the floor tiles. They were shining in the rectangle of grey light laid down by the window, and the design on them formed a very regular, symmetrical pattern. Except for one tile that was installed wrong, so the lines were about a half-turn away from where they should have been. I stared at the misaligned tile for a long time, imagining myself prying it loose and turning it in the right direction, over and over again. This was very satisfying. Eventually, Martin elbowed me sharply, then held out his hand.
“…Sharing is caring, asshole.”
“You sure? I mean…”
“I know, I know. My body’s fucked to hell and I could probably get blitzed off my ass measuring the stuff out in a pipette. That’s the point.”
Figuring that, if he threw up, he’d be the one who had to clean up after himself, I passed the bottle. Martin took a few disconcertingly intense gulps from it, then held it in front of his face and glared at it for a while.
“…Did this stuff go bad?”
“I’m not even sure if that can happen.”
“Well, you asked me first… Oh, who the fuck even cares.”
He put the bottle back down between us, then rested his head and arms on the seat of a chair. I took another swig. He didn’t do anything.
“…Martin?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Because you’re sitting under a table drunk at three in the morning.”
He looked at me in this particular way that always made me feel very stupid. Or more like I’d just wandered in from another dimension where things didn’t work quite right.
“That’s a… Thing. That people do.”
“It’s a thing Spenser does, but I wouldn’t call him ‘people.’”
“Well… Where do you think I got the idea?”
“…You’re taking cues from that wacko, and you expect me to believe nothing’s wrong with you? Come on.”
“Just… Stop, okay?”
I stopped. Since I’d never heard of anyone getting food poisoning from vodka, no matter how old it was, I took another sip. Actually, I was starting to get used to it. Either used to it or just drunk.
“…Aren’t you worried about this stuff, like, tearing up your stomach?”
“Not really. If I was worried about that, I’d have discontinued my pain meds a long time ago. I figure the damage is already done, you know?”
“I guess, but…”
“…But, I’m starting to straight-up disintegrate. At this point, I could do anything short of setting myself on fire, and it would still take longer to kill me than I’m probably going to last. So who the fuck cares?”
Martin crossed his arms in front of his chest, but left his head on the chair. It looked both incredibly awkward and weirdly comfortable. I started to try it myself, but I was too tall to make it work.
“How long do you think…”
“…I still have no idea. I was trying to figure it out before you came down here and started rambling about tongues.”
“Okay. Should I…?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. I let him talk anyway.
“I was trying to figure out how long I have, and if there‘s anything I need to get done.”
“So-”
I couldn’t tell if he was cutting me off, or if there were just two separate conversations going on. Whichever it was, it was easier to just let it happen. That’s one of the first things you learn trying to interact with Martin: Just Let it Happen.
“…I don’t have any loose ends, Corwin.”
He leaned back against the wall and stared at the floor. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say. It was the kind of thing that usually makes people feel at ease, but he said it in the wrong tone. I took a stab in the dark.
“I’m sure there’s something.”
Martin looked defeated, which wasn’t something I was used to. It scared me. I wanted to grab him and put him back the way he was.
“Believe me, there isn’t.”
“I’m… Sorry?”
“It’s just… I used to think I’d die in the middle of a bunch of shit. Even back when I assumed I’d be really really old. You remember how I used to be.”
I did. Before he died the first time, Martin was always involved with something. Usually so many things at once that I wondered how he didn’t wear out. I remember when I realized that he couldn‘t wear out that way, and how it was one of the final steps in the long process of learning that not everyone works like I do. That most people don’t. Martin was a pretty extreme example, but he was closer to normal than I was. Doing nothing made him feel bored and restless, not like he was recharging his batteries. Doing one thing for too long made him want to take a break. He saw the point in winning, but he never got around to telling me what it was. And he actually liked school. I’d met people like him before, but they always made me wonder what was wrong with me. Why I wasn’t them. The difference with Martin was that I actually got to know him. And, having become one myself, I’d mostly aged out of adults comparing me unfavorably to other kids I knew. By then, they’d figured out that I was a lost cause.
Then Martin, without even knowing it, helped me figure out that I wasn’t. I wasn’t lazy, or secretly stupid, or not trying hard enough, or not Living Up to My Potential. It turned out that I didn’t have the potential everyone thought I did, but I had my own. It turned out that we were just very different people. And before I met him, I never knew how different people could be.
“…Yeah, I remember. But it seems like you still do a lot of things. And I know you probably work harder to do them.”
“Sure, I do things. But everything I do has a beginning and an end but no middle.”
“I… Don’t think it works that way.”
“…Are two pieces of bread with no stuff between them a sandwich? No. They’re just two shitty pieces of bread. That’s how having no middle works. There’s technically stuff between the first and last layer of bread atoms, but it’s still just two shitty pieces of bread.”
Now I was really wondering if he was okay. “Bread atoms” didn’t seem like something he’d let slide if he heard it from someone else. But here he was, being the one to say it and not even correcting himself.
“You… Are very drunk. Nothing about that made any sense.”
Martin put his head in his hands and groaned. I was getting the idea that this was one of those things that you can’t really articulate to people outside your own brain. So you end up further complicating matters by speaking in bizarre sandwich metaphors.
“…I mean everything I do is done the same day I start it! I don’t have time for any long-term projects, because I’m my long-term project now. All I’ve done for the past few years is keep myself from falling apart, and when I’m finally done for the day, I don’t have time for anything else. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have energy to keep it running alongside all the other shit. And I guess I could be a fuckin’ Pollyanna about it and decide to try anyway, but I’m not going to be around to finish anything I start at this point. So all I’m left with is more shitty bread with no middles. And this is, like, it. All I have to work on is dragging this shit out.”
“If you need help with doing something, I-”
“You’d be a little out of your depth!”
He took another drink before I could argue with him, but I don’t know that I would have, anyway. Just thinking about it made me feel like I could use a drink myself. Sometimes, it’s kinder to just let people do the stupid thing, and hope they’d do the same for you.
“…Probably, yeah.”
“I don’t even know what the point of any of this was. I died when I was twenty, and that should have been the end of it. I don’t know what they were trying to accomplish by having me sit above ground a few extra years. It’s not like I finished anything I had going on back then, or even moved on to other things. I’m not getting anywhere. I’ve just been sitting around waiting to die because it didn’t take the first time. At least those people who lie around on life support for decades get to sleep through the whole thing, and don‘t have to spend the whole time watching themselves just-”
I couldn’t stand to listen to him anymore. I didn’t even know if he could stand listening to himself.
“Martin… I know it’s kind of a shitty situation, but that isn’t like, your whole life. I’ve seen you have fun… I mean, you were having fun just yesterday. And you were around long enough to meet Spenser, and I know you two have a blast together, so…”
Spenser, of course, was who he’d been having fun with yesterday. They were hiding behind furniture and flinging rubber bands at each other’s heads.
“…Hey, you’re not wrong. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have decided to stay dead, though. Have you ever decomposed? Shit hurts.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
We went a while without talking. I scanned the room, trying to re-find the misplaced tile. Martin pulled in his legs and sat with his arms resting across his knees, then finally muttered something.
“…Eighty-three days.”
“What?”
I thought that was going to be it, and I’d never know what he was talking about. But eventually, he took a deep breath and started again, from the beginning this time.
“Back around the turn of the century, there was an accident in a nuclear power plant, and this guy who worked there was caught right in the middle of it. Fuck, man, you’ve studied this stuff. I don’t need to tell you how screwed he was. He was up and talking at first, but at the cellular level, he didn’t even really count as a living thing anymore. I mean, his cells weren’t cells. The chromosomes were completely obliterated. Which means his body didn’t know how to rebuild itself, so he just… Fell apart, basically. They kept him alive like that for eighty-three days even though they knew damn well what was going to happen.”
He was speaking so quietly that it was almost hard to hear him, but I could tell by the way the words spooled out of him that this was something he’d been rolling around in his head for a good, long time.
“So, what…”
Martin reached for the bottle one more time, and, yet again, didn’t seem to hear me.
“…They’ve kept me alive for almost four years now, Corwin.”
“I don’t think it’s quite the same situation.”
That was supposed to make him feel better, but when I actually thought about it, I wasn’t surprised that it backfired horribly.
“Like fuck it isn’t! And shit, four years. I was supposed to be a professor by now.”
Martin had sort of caved in on himself, arms and legs tangled around his head.
“Wait, weren’t you planning to be in graduate school until sun swallowed the Earth or whatever?”
Then he sat up straight, as if nothing had happened, leaning against the wall and staring into space.
“…Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t get time to figure out what I wanted. I just know I didn’t want to die, but I don’t think I even thought of that. And you know what, I still don’t really want to. I mean, it’ll be a load off, but I can’t believe I’m going to be done. I didn’t even get started.”
Most of this was alien to me. But that feeling, I knew.
“Well, if it makes you feel better, I never got started, either.”
“…But you still could.”
“Hey, it’s too late in the game for you to start spouting that dippy life-is-fleeting seize-the-day bullshit. C‘mon, you‘re the only person I‘ve ever heard of who could stare death in the face without getting all corny and crap.”
Martin smirked. At least his face looked back to normal, if nothing else.
“Yeah, well, it helps that my problem doesn’t have, like, team colors and awareness days and all that bullshit… But anyway, I’m not saying that. I’m not saying you should do anything you don’t want to, okay? I’m just saying, you have a choice. I don’t get that anymore. I didn‘t even have it back then.”
“…If you didn’t have it back then, none of us do. We don’t know when shit’s gonna happen.”
This, too, backfired, but not all that destructively. He didn’t look quite so disgusted with me, at least. Just exhausted, and like he knew he could never really make me understand.
“Yeah, well, shit actually happened to me.”
I guess that was all either of us had to say. I flipped the tile over and over again in my mind, until something started bothering me. Something other than the tile, I mean.
“…Hey, Martin?”
“Yeah?”
“Okay… You said you’d have rather stayed dead, right?”
Martin rolled his eyes. I was glad he finally knew how it felt, going back and forth with someone who just won’t quit.
“…If you’re asking me if I still think that, I do.”
“Oh, I know, but I was just wondering… And remember that I’m not giving you permission or anything, but that year and a half we were out of contact…”
Every other year or so, I’d actually remember that tact was a thing and I should try using it. And Martin sabotaged me every single time.
“…You’re wondering why I didn’t just cap myself.”
Of course, there’s something to be said for being direct.
“Well… Yeah.”
He laughed. I thought about that tile. How I wanted to pry it up and set it right, watch the lines snap together and flow. To reorganize the universe. Grab it and put it back the way it was.
“Dammit, Corwin, you don’t understand anything.”
“Wha…?”
“Didn’t I just say I always need a project?”
“Yes, but…”
Finally, he turned to me and smiled.
“I’m a shitty project, but I’m the only project I have.”
I knew better by now than to say it out loud, but all I could think was:
Me, too.
no subject
no subject
Thanks for reading! :D
no subject
no subject
Thanks for reading!
no subject
no subject
*hides sledgehammer*
...Thanks. XD