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rainbowfic2015-08-14 10:26 pm
starphotographs) wrote in rainbowfic2015-08-14 10:26 pm
Baby Pink 10
Name: starphotographs
Story: Corwin and Friends
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Summer Carnival, Lilith Fair Second Stage: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/ingridmichaelson/porcelainfists.html), Glitter (http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/enough-0)
Characters: Spenser (POV), Martin
Colors: Baby Pink 10 (I can’t believe I’m still alive.)
Word Count: 1,963
Rating: PG-13 (?)
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: They have something in common.
Note: Another thing that takes place around “Rest in Pieces,” or a little after, but with the other side of the character dynamics. I wanted to do something from Spenser’s POV, because his interactions with Martin during this period are… Not quite the same as it is with Corwin. (Also, that poem planted the seed, and the verse about the bathroom in the song germinated it. Magic!)
Can’t We Just Endure?
Martin had just pulled his head out of the toilet, and I was helping him stand up straight enough to get to sink-level, so he could brush his teeth and wash his hands for what I swore must have been the tenth time today. He pushed up his sleeves, and I usually try to be polite about these things, because god knows I’m a gross motherfucker, but holy shit.
“Jesus, how the hell did you, like, fuck your arm up like that!?”
I wasn’t overreacting. Hell, I wasn’t even just-right-reacting. That’s just the way I fucking talk. Martin pulled his sleeve back down, hiding the grisly tear in his forearm, then sat down on the edge of the tub. Now, I’ve seen a lot of people cut open in my time, and let me tell you, that wasn’t normal. He was dark brown on the inside, and the blood smelled the way it always started to on my old shirts, when I’d go out on a hit and not shower or change my clothes for a couple days.
Martin seemed to think it was pretty normal, though. His tone didn’t even change.
“Lost balance getting out of bed. Smacked it on the endtable.”
It didn’t look like a smacking-related injury, but I wasn’t really sure what a smacking-related injury would look like on him. I mean, just an inch or two away from the open wound, he had bruises from leaning on the counter too hard. He’s been bruised and bleeding everywhere, lately. Like how I’m get when I’m having an excitable couple of months and stop paying attention. Except, there’s no red or purple on him. Everything is brown or bile-green. He’s not even sick to death of my zombie jokes anymore. It’s hard to get too annoyed at someone for pointing out the extremely fucking obvious.
“So, this was like… When?”
His sleeve looked blotchy and stiff, splattered with patches of darker black. He’d been bleeding for a while. And hadn’t been changing his shirt, which was probably part of why he hadn’t been smelling too great. Which I could ignore. I don’t smell that great a lot of the time. “Go sleep on the couch, you smell like freakin’ gasoline!” is something Piston actually had to say to me before. Twice. Martin, sulky, slowly decomposing, and exhausted (and smelly), shrugged.
“Like four days ago? I don’t fuckin’ know.”
So, that’s also about how long he’s been wearing the shirt. Huh.
“That… Is a long time for something to be, um, gaping open like that, dude.”
He pulled up his sleeve again.
“Yeah. I guess stuff doesn’t close up anymore.”
Martin looked… I don’t know. Disappointed. Like he was pissed at his stupid body for slacking off on the job. It made me want to work hard and fix its mistakes.
“I could, I dunno, close it for you.”
Now he just looked like he was about to hit me with a rolled-up newspaper.
“How the hell are you going to do that?”
He seemed skeptical. Then again, I probably would be, too. I’d also probably refuse the offer I was about to make. Especially if I was the one making it.
“I could, y’know, do some stitches or whatever. I’ve done it on myself, so.”
Martin kept looking down at the tiles.
“…Just go for it. It’s not like I have anything better to do.”
“Gotcha! I’ll be right back.”
I went downstairs to rifle through Hal’s coat pockets. He kept one of those shitty little plastic sewing kits in one of them.
*****
“…Okay, so like, I don’t know how to do doctor-style stitches. Just warnin’ you, this is gonna be pretty hard to take out when the time comes.”
Martin shrugged again.
“Corwin doesn’t know how to give injections.”
His voice was flat, but it sounded like a joke, so I laughed.
“…Good point.”
And then I threaded the needle and got to work. Got to fixing him.
The depressing thing about bodies is that you can’t fix them. They don’t have bolts or wires or interlocking parts. All you can do is squish them back together and pray it holds. But, Martin is full of circuits and batteries and titanium. He’s made, at least partly, of things I can understand. So maybe I really could fix him.
No one can fix him.
He was still staring at the floor. I kept looking down at his arm. The needled moved through the flesh easily. Almost too easily, really. He didn’t have any spring to him. I figured out that I couldn’t make holes too close to the opening, or the thread would rip them and I’d have to start again. This probably hurt like hell, but he didn’t seem to register it.
“…Somethin’ wrong, dude?”
He shook his head.
“This is just… Crap. It’s crap.”
I pinched the next section of the wound closed, tugging the dull grey skin over the glistening red-brown whatever-it-is underneath.
“What’s crap? The job I‘m doin‘ on your arm there?” I laughed again. “Like, whatever it is… Dude. I’m probably gonna agree.”
I think Martin might have laughed a little, too. He made some sarcastic little snorty noise, then coughed. The combined effect reminded me of unplugging a sink. Everything all sharp and wet.
“Just… All this shit. I mean… I didn’t think I’d be around long enough to see it get to this point. It would be pretty fascinating if I knew I’d live to tell the whole story later.”
Fuck. The skin tore, wrecking another hole. I moved a few millimeters down and tried again.
“…Y’know, I used to think that all the time.”
Martin tilted his head.
“You did?”
Some nights, when I remember I have the plans for the machine again, I still do.
“Yeah. I… Had a weird couple of years. I didn’t really plan to last this long, either. Like, I was pretty fuckin’ determined to make sure of that, y‘know?”
Neither of us said anything for a while. Martin coughed again.
“You always seem so… Well, I don’t know, I guess I can see you going down that road, yeah. But you seem like someone who could talk yourself out of it in like five minutes because you saw a funny commercial or some shit.”
I think he was calling me stupid, but I didn’t care. I’d call him stupid later, if I felt like it, and then we’d be even.
“But then there’s five minutes after that… And I‘m right back to where I fuckin‘ started, man.”
He was looking down again, and when he finally spoke, his voice sounded like a completely different voice. It shocked me, how much of the way he sounded was just him being harsh. With that blunted, he sounded a whole hell of a lot less punchable.
“Good point… I mean, I get that, too.”
Spenser, this is your cue to shut the fuck up. I’m pretty shit at not dominating conversations, but it seemed like he needed to talk, so I did my best to let him.
“…Yeah?”
But, Martin wasn’t talking. He was holding his head in his free hand.
“…You alright, dude?”
He shook his head.
“…You gonna throw up again?”
He nodded.
Shit…
“Just try to hang on a sec, okay? I’m almost done.”
I, rather hastily, and probably a bit too zealous in the jabbing department, finished closing the wound, then tied off the thread.
Martin pitched forward, practically nose-diving into the toilet bowl, exploding out one end and imploding in the middle. Under his shirt, I could see his entire ribcage contracting, which was actually mesmerizingly horrible. I sat on the tub patiently, bouncing my legs, waiting to see if I’d need to pull him out before he drowned.
I knew how much he wanted privacy, and god, I wish I could have given it to him.
Eventually, he went still, and I pulled him back again. The toilet looked the way Tyler’s toilet ended up looking that day he dared me to eat a bunch of cheap coffee grounds. Martin was limp and breathing shallowly. I slid down to the floor next to him, trying to keep him upright. Eventually, he regained enough control to start talking again, but not quite enough to stop leaning on me. And yeah, my arm was probably going to fall asleep, but that wasn’t exactly at the top of the list right now. He coughed a little, and mumbled something that I had to strain to hear.
“…See, this is what I mean.”
Martin tried to inhale, but it didn’t work so well. I shifted our positions so he was sitting up a little bit more.
“This is, like, five of the shitty minutes?”
He coughed a few more times, into his already-bloody sleeve.
“Exactly… I mean, I’ll be like this for… Shit, lately, it’s hours. And I’ll just be like… Fuck. Why aren’t I dead, you know? If I’m going to be dead, can’t I just be dead, and not have to fucking throw up anymore?”
God, we have a lot in common.
*****
I’m living in my dirty attic apartment, no kitchen, no shitter. I haven’t slept in days and I’m aching with exhaustion. “Can‘t I just be dead?” I’m getting too paranoid and thinking weird thoughts, and these are the only thoughts I’ve had in weeks. “Can‘t I just be dead?” There used to be friends I could see, but I have no idea where they are. “Can’t I just be dead?” I’m killing people and watching them get taken apart every night, working for a man I know is about to sell me down the river. “Can’t I just be dead?” My concentration is too shot to even work on designing the machine that’s supposed to fucking kill me.
“Can’t I just be dead?”
The world is so fucking mysterious and complicated and funny and beautiful.
Can’t it just stop doing this to me so I can appreciate it for once?
*****
Okay, so I can’t even pretend to know how he feels. I’ve been sick and run-down and busted more times than I can count, but never like this. Never so much that my body literally ground to a halt. But, I know what he’s talking about.
All too well.
“…But then you think about something awesome, right? And you’re just, like, fuck, more than being dead, I just want this shit back. That your deal?”
I put my arm around him and rattled him around a little, the way you do with your friend when you’re both drunk and commiserating. Only gentler, because I wasn’t sure how much it would take to just snap him clean in half, and I wasn’t taking any chances. Then I let my arm just kind of dangle off him for a while, urging the feeling back in to my hand.
“…Yeah. That’s my deal.”
God, he was still limp and deceptively heavy as a wet sock. I smiled.
“Martin… I get you. I mean, this is like… Well, a unique problem. But I get everything you just said, okay?”
He did the clogged-sink laughing-coughing thing again.
“You mean everything you just said.”
“Hey, you’re tired. I had to say some shit for you.”
He went in to a short coughing fit, and I had to wait for him to finish.
“…Thanks.”
“Hey, no prob-” I got the idea he wasn’t listening anymore. “…Martin?”
I nudged him a little.
The fucking jackass fell asleep right where he was sitting, still leaning against me. With my luck, I’d be propping him up all night.
I sighed, leaned back against the tub, and slid my phone out of my pocket.
Better get used to playing games left-handed.
starphotographsStory: Corwin and Friends
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Summer Carnival, Lilith Fair Second Stage: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/ingridmichaelson/porcelainfists.html), Glitter (http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/enough-0)
Characters: Spenser (POV), Martin
Colors: Baby Pink 10 (I can’t believe I’m still alive.)
Word Count: 1,963
Rating: PG-13 (?)
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: They have something in common.
Note: Another thing that takes place around “Rest in Pieces,” or a little after, but with the other side of the character dynamics. I wanted to do something from Spenser’s POV, because his interactions with Martin during this period are… Not quite the same as it is with Corwin. (Also, that poem planted the seed, and the verse about the bathroom in the song germinated it. Magic!)
Martin had just pulled his head out of the toilet, and I was helping him stand up straight enough to get to sink-level, so he could brush his teeth and wash his hands for what I swore must have been the tenth time today. He pushed up his sleeves, and I usually try to be polite about these things, because god knows I’m a gross motherfucker, but holy shit.
“Jesus, how the hell did you, like, fuck your arm up like that!?”
I wasn’t overreacting. Hell, I wasn’t even just-right-reacting. That’s just the way I fucking talk. Martin pulled his sleeve back down, hiding the grisly tear in his forearm, then sat down on the edge of the tub. Now, I’ve seen a lot of people cut open in my time, and let me tell you, that wasn’t normal. He was dark brown on the inside, and the blood smelled the way it always started to on my old shirts, when I’d go out on a hit and not shower or change my clothes for a couple days.
Martin seemed to think it was pretty normal, though. His tone didn’t even change.
“Lost balance getting out of bed. Smacked it on the endtable.”
It didn’t look like a smacking-related injury, but I wasn’t really sure what a smacking-related injury would look like on him. I mean, just an inch or two away from the open wound, he had bruises from leaning on the counter too hard. He’s been bruised and bleeding everywhere, lately. Like how I’m get when I’m having an excitable couple of months and stop paying attention. Except, there’s no red or purple on him. Everything is brown or bile-green. He’s not even sick to death of my zombie jokes anymore. It’s hard to get too annoyed at someone for pointing out the extremely fucking obvious.
“So, this was like… When?”
His sleeve looked blotchy and stiff, splattered with patches of darker black. He’d been bleeding for a while. And hadn’t been changing his shirt, which was probably part of why he hadn’t been smelling too great. Which I could ignore. I don’t smell that great a lot of the time. “Go sleep on the couch, you smell like freakin’ gasoline!” is something Piston actually had to say to me before. Twice. Martin, sulky, slowly decomposing, and exhausted (and smelly), shrugged.
“Like four days ago? I don’t fuckin’ know.”
So, that’s also about how long he’s been wearing the shirt. Huh.
“That… Is a long time for something to be, um, gaping open like that, dude.”
He pulled up his sleeve again.
“Yeah. I guess stuff doesn’t close up anymore.”
Martin looked… I don’t know. Disappointed. Like he was pissed at his stupid body for slacking off on the job. It made me want to work hard and fix its mistakes.
“I could, I dunno, close it for you.”
Now he just looked like he was about to hit me with a rolled-up newspaper.
“How the hell are you going to do that?”
He seemed skeptical. Then again, I probably would be, too. I’d also probably refuse the offer I was about to make. Especially if I was the one making it.
“I could, y’know, do some stitches or whatever. I’ve done it on myself, so.”
Martin kept looking down at the tiles.
“…Just go for it. It’s not like I have anything better to do.”
“Gotcha! I’ll be right back.”
I went downstairs to rifle through Hal’s coat pockets. He kept one of those shitty little plastic sewing kits in one of them.
“…Okay, so like, I don’t know how to do doctor-style stitches. Just warnin’ you, this is gonna be pretty hard to take out when the time comes.”
Martin shrugged again.
“Corwin doesn’t know how to give injections.”
His voice was flat, but it sounded like a joke, so I laughed.
“…Good point.”
And then I threaded the needle and got to work. Got to fixing him.
The depressing thing about bodies is that you can’t fix them. They don’t have bolts or wires or interlocking parts. All you can do is squish them back together and pray it holds. But, Martin is full of circuits and batteries and titanium. He’s made, at least partly, of things I can understand. So maybe I really could fix him.
No one can fix him.
He was still staring at the floor. I kept looking down at his arm. The needled moved through the flesh easily. Almost too easily, really. He didn’t have any spring to him. I figured out that I couldn’t make holes too close to the opening, or the thread would rip them and I’d have to start again. This probably hurt like hell, but he didn’t seem to register it.
“…Somethin’ wrong, dude?”
He shook his head.
“This is just… Crap. It’s crap.”
I pinched the next section of the wound closed, tugging the dull grey skin over the glistening red-brown whatever-it-is underneath.
“What’s crap? The job I‘m doin‘ on your arm there?” I laughed again. “Like, whatever it is… Dude. I’m probably gonna agree.”
I think Martin might have laughed a little, too. He made some sarcastic little snorty noise, then coughed. The combined effect reminded me of unplugging a sink. Everything all sharp and wet.
“Just… All this shit. I mean… I didn’t think I’d be around long enough to see it get to this point. It would be pretty fascinating if I knew I’d live to tell the whole story later.”
Fuck. The skin tore, wrecking another hole. I moved a few millimeters down and tried again.
“…Y’know, I used to think that all the time.”
Martin tilted his head.
“You did?”
Some nights, when I remember I have the plans for the machine again, I still do.
“Yeah. I… Had a weird couple of years. I didn’t really plan to last this long, either. Like, I was pretty fuckin’ determined to make sure of that, y‘know?”
Neither of us said anything for a while. Martin coughed again.
“You always seem so… Well, I don’t know, I guess I can see you going down that road, yeah. But you seem like someone who could talk yourself out of it in like five minutes because you saw a funny commercial or some shit.”
I think he was calling me stupid, but I didn’t care. I’d call him stupid later, if I felt like it, and then we’d be even.
“But then there’s five minutes after that… And I‘m right back to where I fuckin‘ started, man.”
He was looking down again, and when he finally spoke, his voice sounded like a completely different voice. It shocked me, how much of the way he sounded was just him being harsh. With that blunted, he sounded a whole hell of a lot less punchable.
“Good point… I mean, I get that, too.”
Spenser, this is your cue to shut the fuck up. I’m pretty shit at not dominating conversations, but it seemed like he needed to talk, so I did my best to let him.
“…Yeah?”
But, Martin wasn’t talking. He was holding his head in his free hand.
“…You alright, dude?”
He shook his head.
“…You gonna throw up again?”
He nodded.
Shit…
“Just try to hang on a sec, okay? I’m almost done.”
I, rather hastily, and probably a bit too zealous in the jabbing department, finished closing the wound, then tied off the thread.
Martin pitched forward, practically nose-diving into the toilet bowl, exploding out one end and imploding in the middle. Under his shirt, I could see his entire ribcage contracting, which was actually mesmerizingly horrible. I sat on the tub patiently, bouncing my legs, waiting to see if I’d need to pull him out before he drowned.
I knew how much he wanted privacy, and god, I wish I could have given it to him.
Eventually, he went still, and I pulled him back again. The toilet looked the way Tyler’s toilet ended up looking that day he dared me to eat a bunch of cheap coffee grounds. Martin was limp and breathing shallowly. I slid down to the floor next to him, trying to keep him upright. Eventually, he regained enough control to start talking again, but not quite enough to stop leaning on me. And yeah, my arm was probably going to fall asleep, but that wasn’t exactly at the top of the list right now. He coughed a little, and mumbled something that I had to strain to hear.
“…See, this is what I mean.”
Martin tried to inhale, but it didn’t work so well. I shifted our positions so he was sitting up a little bit more.
“This is, like, five of the shitty minutes?”
He coughed a few more times, into his already-bloody sleeve.
“Exactly… I mean, I’ll be like this for… Shit, lately, it’s hours. And I’ll just be like… Fuck. Why aren’t I dead, you know? If I’m going to be dead, can’t I just be dead, and not have to fucking throw up anymore?”
God, we have a lot in common.
I’m living in my dirty attic apartment, no kitchen, no shitter. I haven’t slept in days and I’m aching with exhaustion. “Can‘t I just be dead?” I’m getting too paranoid and thinking weird thoughts, and these are the only thoughts I’ve had in weeks. “Can‘t I just be dead?” There used to be friends I could see, but I have no idea where they are. “Can’t I just be dead?” I’m killing people and watching them get taken apart every night, working for a man I know is about to sell me down the river. “Can’t I just be dead?” My concentration is too shot to even work on designing the machine that’s supposed to fucking kill me.
“Can’t I just be dead?”
The world is so fucking mysterious and complicated and funny and beautiful.
Can’t it just stop doing this to me so I can appreciate it for once?
Okay, so I can’t even pretend to know how he feels. I’ve been sick and run-down and busted more times than I can count, but never like this. Never so much that my body literally ground to a halt. But, I know what he’s talking about.
All too well.
“…But then you think about something awesome, right? And you’re just, like, fuck, more than being dead, I just want this shit back. That your deal?”
I put my arm around him and rattled him around a little, the way you do with your friend when you’re both drunk and commiserating. Only gentler, because I wasn’t sure how much it would take to just snap him clean in half, and I wasn’t taking any chances. Then I let my arm just kind of dangle off him for a while, urging the feeling back in to my hand.
“…Yeah. That’s my deal.”
God, he was still limp and deceptively heavy as a wet sock. I smiled.
“Martin… I get you. I mean, this is like… Well, a unique problem. But I get everything you just said, okay?”
He did the clogged-sink laughing-coughing thing again.
“You mean everything you just said.”
“Hey, you’re tired. I had to say some shit for you.”
He went in to a short coughing fit, and I had to wait for him to finish.
“…Thanks.”
“Hey, no prob-” I got the idea he wasn’t listening anymore. “…Martin?”
I nudged him a little.
The fucking jackass fell asleep right where he was sitting, still leaning against me. With my luck, I’d be propping him up all night.
I sighed, leaned back against the tub, and slid my phone out of my pocket.
Better get used to playing games left-handed.
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