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rainbowfic2015-08-18 09:50 pm
starphotographs) wrote in rainbowfic2015-08-18 09:50 pm
Alien Green 18
Name: starphotographs
Story: Corwin and Friends
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Summer Carnival, Lilith Fair Main Stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA8AfQaUnXM), Glitter (http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/defense-melancholy)
Characters: Spenser (POV), Maria
Colors: Alien Green 18 (I wouldn't want to disappoint you by not disappointing you.)
Word Count: 518
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: All he wants is to be useful and in good repair.
Note: I’d like to thank the Songmaven for picking this song, and Poem-A-Day for being late to change the poem, so I could use them at the same time. <3
Viscera
I don’t know why I keep driving myself over here. Lately, being with Maria is as brutal and lackluster as everything else. She pins me down, she grabs me by the hair. She’s intense and wonderful and I think I might finally be getting something important back, but when we’re finished, everything is back to normal. Not even normal. It’s back to whatever it’s been for the last month. Me battered, sleepless, coasting. Her having the nerve to keep living her regular life, because she thinks I am, too.
Hell, who’s to say I’m not?
She drives me back home (it isn’t really my home), and I sit shotgun, staring out the window. Like I do when the doctor drives us home after a night on the job. Sweaty, wrung-out, feeling like I’m the one who got eviscerated. We make conversation, and I know she’s using me for her own ends. Just like the doctor. It’s my body they want, whether it’s another pair of hands or something else. Maybe tomorrow, one of them will decide I’d be more useful as scrap than machinery. That I should be stripped down to base components and stacked in that walk-in fridge, where I’d wait to be zipped up into dozens of different skins and erased.
It’s not like they’d be wrong.
A long time ago, I was dedicated to order and power, the way less practical types might dedicate themselves to a god. I knelt at the feet of electromagnetism. I did my best to look past all my human softness and imperfection and see aspects of the machine in myself. It was all very bright and shining, full of promise, just like I was. And I was so wrapped up in the idea that I could be something better. That all I had to do was find the joints and rivets, and I’d be able to see myself as a grand work. But with room for improvement, and all the right sockets to connect me with those improvements. In short, something with a future.
That really was a nice idea.
This is what my life has been reduced to: riots of fluid and disjointed parts, buffered by hollow banter from people with ulterior motives. And that’s almost okay. I don’t mind being used. I want to be useful. But everything around me refutes this. I see what I really am, and it feels like an outright mockery of utility. Nothing is held together, and nothing quite fits into anything else. I’m soft and wet. You could take me apart with tools no more sophisticated than a rock or a metal spoon, if you tried hard enough. And I guess you could use a screwdriver, but I don’t see the point.
There isn’t even anything to connect all of this.
Maria drops me off in the driveway, says goodbye. I wave, like it matters. Not to be polite in spite of it all, but because that’s all I have left, and I hinge myself on it. Pretending things matter, I mean.
Pretending I matter.
Pretending I can be improved upon.
starphotographsStory: Corwin and Friends
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Summer Carnival, Lilith Fair Main Stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA8AfQaUnXM), Glitter (http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/defense-melancholy)
Characters: Spenser (POV), Maria
Colors: Alien Green 18 (I wouldn't want to disappoint you by not disappointing you.)
Word Count: 518
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: All he wants is to be useful and in good repair.
Note: I’d like to thank the Songmaven for picking this song, and Poem-A-Day for being late to change the poem, so I could use them at the same time. <3
I don’t know why I keep driving myself over here. Lately, being with Maria is as brutal and lackluster as everything else. She pins me down, she grabs me by the hair. She’s intense and wonderful and I think I might finally be getting something important back, but when we’re finished, everything is back to normal. Not even normal. It’s back to whatever it’s been for the last month. Me battered, sleepless, coasting. Her having the nerve to keep living her regular life, because she thinks I am, too.
Hell, who’s to say I’m not?
She drives me back home (it isn’t really my home), and I sit shotgun, staring out the window. Like I do when the doctor drives us home after a night on the job. Sweaty, wrung-out, feeling like I’m the one who got eviscerated. We make conversation, and I know she’s using me for her own ends. Just like the doctor. It’s my body they want, whether it’s another pair of hands or something else. Maybe tomorrow, one of them will decide I’d be more useful as scrap than machinery. That I should be stripped down to base components and stacked in that walk-in fridge, where I’d wait to be zipped up into dozens of different skins and erased.
It’s not like they’d be wrong.
A long time ago, I was dedicated to order and power, the way less practical types might dedicate themselves to a god. I knelt at the feet of electromagnetism. I did my best to look past all my human softness and imperfection and see aspects of the machine in myself. It was all very bright and shining, full of promise, just like I was. And I was so wrapped up in the idea that I could be something better. That all I had to do was find the joints and rivets, and I’d be able to see myself as a grand work. But with room for improvement, and all the right sockets to connect me with those improvements. In short, something with a future.
That really was a nice idea.
This is what my life has been reduced to: riots of fluid and disjointed parts, buffered by hollow banter from people with ulterior motives. And that’s almost okay. I don’t mind being used. I want to be useful. But everything around me refutes this. I see what I really am, and it feels like an outright mockery of utility. Nothing is held together, and nothing quite fits into anything else. I’m soft and wet. You could take me apart with tools no more sophisticated than a rock or a metal spoon, if you tried hard enough. And I guess you could use a screwdriver, but I don’t see the point.
There isn’t even anything to connect all of this.
Maria drops me off in the driveway, says goodbye. I wave, like it matters. Not to be polite in spite of it all, but because that’s all I have left, and I hinge myself on it. Pretending things matter, I mean.
Pretending I matter.
Pretending I can be improved upon.
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