the androgynous keeper of plushfrogs (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
crossfortune) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowfic2013-02-16 03:41 pm
crossfortune) wrote in rainbowfic2013-02-16 03:41 pm
in this last of meeting places
Name: Mischa
Story: fragments of stars falling
Colors: atomic tangerine, "Before": white opal, "fool's paradise", dove gray, "farewell is said by the living, in life, every day."
Supplies and Styles: canvas
Word Count: 1748
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: mentioned sexism. the narrator swears enough to make a sailor blush.
Summary: The last time Alexia Laskaris ever speaks to her mother, it's raining. Maybe if she'd known what was coming, she would have tried to hang onto the moment, even if only for a heartbeat longer.
The last time Alexia Laskaris ever speaks to her mother, it’s raining. Last human conversation, truth be told, but she’s not thinking about any of that at the time or has any idea, lying on her windowseat with her phone pressed against her ear, trying to tune out her mother’s tirade in Greek while wishing vainly that her mother would someday, somehow, understand the concept of timezones. Not like her schedule was all that regular anymore, pulling three-day shifts, collapsing for a few hours sleep before getting up to do it all again, but still. Would be nice if mom didn’t call right when she got to sleep.
Only reason she’s home now is that they sent her home because she was talking again to the samples-and she’d swear up and down that they were better conversation than ninety percent of the people she had to deal with-, absolutely high on science and sleep deprivation, caffeine long past the point of helping, and Alexia doesn’t even remember how the fuck she got home. Or how she didn’t smash her phone into the wall when it started going off, much less remember how to answer it: lost three phones in a month that way, before she tried giving up sleep beyond catnaps.
There was work to be done, important work, and if they did it right, the need for sleep would be nothing more than a memory. Naps were nice, she had to admit though, especially nice when you had time to enjoy them and not the only form of sleep you were getting and had been getting for months.
“-Alexia, are you listening to me?” her mother’s voice hit that familiar timbre again, as if her eldest daughter was merely a child, still living at home, and not a grown woman living half a world away working on projects entirely beyond her interest or understanding.
“Yeah, what is it?” she isn’t thinking, and while she kind of tunes out a lot of what her mother is saying because her mom means well but she doesn’t understand, she’s usually not so obvious about it.
“You aren’t listening to me-”
“You woke me up.” Alexia grumbles into the phone. “What t’hell’s so important it couldn’t have waited?”
She can hear the intake of breath, the sigh that’s the prelude to one of her mother’s lectures, and inwardly groans. Thirty-five years old, two Ph.Ds, godslayer and co-discoverer of a force that would revolutionize science, and yet she still can’t figure out how to avoid being lectured at. Wasn’t that just fucking great.
“You haven’t called in months-”
“Been busy.”
“Busy? Busy?! All my letters to you were returned. The post office thought you were dead!”
How long has it been since she’s picked up her mail? Alexia can’t remember that well, though she stretches her memory back: auto-billpay was one of the best fucking inventions as far as she was concerned, and...yeah, she can’t really remember the last time she came up for air, did something other than work, shut out the world outside her lab. First time she’s even been home in who the fuck knows how long.
She lets her gaze wander to the window, where the rain fell against the window, drops against the glass: Seattle stretches out beneath her eyes, people and cars so small below, and for a moment, she thinks about holding the whole world in the palm of her hand and making it right. Fixing everything wrong with it. It’s so close, locked in the fragments of divinity still in her lab, glowing with a lambent light she can still see behind her closed eyes, along with the scrolling readouts of data. So very, very close.
“I just worry about you,” her mother adds, a moment later, softer. “I had a bad dream about you.”
It’s always been bad dreams, Alexia remembers, tilting her head back: her mother always had bad dreams about herself and her siblings, when they’d grown too big to be safely contained in the protective cradle of her arms, all worry and heartache. Take your medicine, I had a bad dream about you. Don’t drive so fast, I had a bad dream about you.
‘m fine, Mom.” she grumbles, entirely too used to this. “Work’s been busy.”
“Too busy to remember to get your mail?”
Alexia sighs irritably. “We’re on the verge of a breakthrough.” so close. “It’s going to be big, mom. Change the world.”
“What are you even doing?”
“Can’t talk about it yet.” she shrugs, though her mom can’t see her. Alexia curls her fingertips and feels the fire beneath her skin, wants a cigarette desperately but is too tired to get up. “Secret and all that bullshit.”
Her mother is silent for a moment, before speaking again. “Do you think you can come home? In a few months?”
“Few months?” her mind is already running through the calculations. “Yeah, maybe. Why?”
“Acacia is getting married,” oh, hell, her baby sister had finally found herself someone willing to put up with her until death do them part? amazing, though Alexia was smart enough at least even sleep-deprived to not comment on that. “You were sent an invitation, but the post office returned it.”
Hell, mom was never going to let her forget that, huh, and Alexia just grunted in acknowledgment. “Don’t do weddings.”
“Alexia,” her mother huffs. “Don’t be difficult. You haven’t come home in years.” pause. “...your father and I are getting old.”
Not that fucking old, Alexia is about to say, but she does the math without thinking about it, though she hasn’t thought about it in a very long time: she’s thirty-five, her mother is pushing sixty and her father...yeah. Yeah. And she stares out the window again, silent: She hasn’t been home in years, since she started work on her first doctoral thesis, gone to the United States for university as a teenager and just somehow forgot to look back somewhere along the way, scrubbing her eyes with her hand.
She’s by the ocean, here, in Seattle, but the gray-blue of Puget Sound beneath the overcast sky just wasn’t the same, and she misses the lush blue of the Mediterranean. Misses Greece, and fuck, she had to admit it to herself, even having her mother nag her in person sounds almost good right now. Maybe, in a few months, there’ll be time for a visit, shit will be calmer and she can get this homesick bullshit over with.
“...maybe.” Alexia grudgingly admits. “Can’t make promises. Best I can say.”
“If that’s the best, then we’ll just have to live with it.”
Alexia rolls her eyes: getting old or not, her mother just never changed. “...mom?” she asks, after a moment, considering. Your father and I are getting old... but yet, in her laboratory, she had the means to change it. If she could just crack the code. Break it right open: there was the secret there. To cure illness, old age, death, right there and she was so close to breaking it open. What if you didn’t have to grow old? “...never mind.” she mutters, a moment later: she’ll ask when she actually has the answers.
Her mother hmms to herself: Alexia’s learned to dread that sound. “What about that boyfriend you had the last time we talked? You’re thirty-five, long past time for you to be married. Maybe not with kids, I know how you dislike children, but I want to see you happy.”
Fuck. Alexia almost throws the phone across the room. Hadn’t been anything serious, anyway, least she hadn’t thought it so, but William had. Wasn’t like she wanted anything particularly serious, she didn’t have time, didn’t particularly want to be married, and science would always, always come first. Always. If she ever had to pick between a lover and science, it would always be science: that’d broken what few relationships she’d had in the past, women and men both. “It’s done, Mom.” she grumbles. “It’s been done for fucking months.”
“Language!”
Yeah, what the fuck ever. Wasn’t like that had stopped her before, even when she lived in the same house and got her mouth washed out with soap.
“I meant what I said, mom. We’ve been done for months, since before I signed onto this project. I broke it off.”
“...why?”
Alexia closes her eyes. “Never was that serious. He wanted to marry me. But science always comes first. Always. And he couldn’t take that answer.”
“...oh, Alexia.”
Irritably, she grumbles, not wanting to hear that note of pity: her mother had never understood, not really, and her dad was proud but they might have supported her better if she’d been a boy instead. With all her intelligence and relentless drive, all harsh angles against the grain of cultural expectation, both her own and the one she finds herself amidst now. Not wanting to settle. She would do something great, something impossible, change the world, she had vowed as a small girl.
“Don’t give me that, mom.”
“I just want to see you happy, Alexia.” her mother says, wistfully. “Whether with a man or even if it’s a woman, whatever you want. What will you do when you’re old, with no one beside you?”
“Hell if I know,” Alexia shrugs, and has a flash of blond hair, of determined eyes and a hopeful smile and a white blade. The fuck was that all about? Hell if she knew or really gave that much of a fuck. “Figure it out when I get there.” Yeah, yeah, she knows what her mother will do next.
Her mother sighs fondly. “Think about what I’ve said.”
Alexia snorts. Yeah, right. She had a whole bunch of other things to think about, rather than think about a nonexistent love life that mattered so very little in the grand scheme of things. In everything she had to do.
“I should let you go back to sleep, shouldn’t I?”
“Yeah, that’d be nice.”
And for a moment, she can almost hear her mother smile. “I love you, Alexia.”
Maybe if she’d known what was coming, she would have tried to hold onto the moment, even if only for a heartbeat longer. But instead, she yawns into her phone, and drawls, slowly, before hanging up and letting the phone fall forgotten to her bedroom floor, asleep again within moments.
“Yeah, mom.”
(So do I.)
Story: fragments of stars falling
Colors: atomic tangerine, "Before": white opal, "fool's paradise", dove gray, "farewell is said by the living, in life, every day."
Supplies and Styles: canvas
Word Count: 1748
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: mentioned sexism. the narrator swears enough to make a sailor blush.
Summary: The last time Alexia Laskaris ever speaks to her mother, it's raining. Maybe if she'd known what was coming, she would have tried to hang onto the moment, even if only for a heartbeat longer.
The last time Alexia Laskaris ever speaks to her mother, it’s raining. Last human conversation, truth be told, but she’s not thinking about any of that at the time or has any idea, lying on her windowseat with her phone pressed against her ear, trying to tune out her mother’s tirade in Greek while wishing vainly that her mother would someday, somehow, understand the concept of timezones. Not like her schedule was all that regular anymore, pulling three-day shifts, collapsing for a few hours sleep before getting up to do it all again, but still. Would be nice if mom didn’t call right when she got to sleep.
Only reason she’s home now is that they sent her home because she was talking again to the samples-and she’d swear up and down that they were better conversation than ninety percent of the people she had to deal with-, absolutely high on science and sleep deprivation, caffeine long past the point of helping, and Alexia doesn’t even remember how the fuck she got home. Or how she didn’t smash her phone into the wall when it started going off, much less remember how to answer it: lost three phones in a month that way, before she tried giving up sleep beyond catnaps.
There was work to be done, important work, and if they did it right, the need for sleep would be nothing more than a memory. Naps were nice, she had to admit though, especially nice when you had time to enjoy them and not the only form of sleep you were getting and had been getting for months.
“-Alexia, are you listening to me?” her mother’s voice hit that familiar timbre again, as if her eldest daughter was merely a child, still living at home, and not a grown woman living half a world away working on projects entirely beyond her interest or understanding.
“Yeah, what is it?” she isn’t thinking, and while she kind of tunes out a lot of what her mother is saying because her mom means well but she doesn’t understand, she’s usually not so obvious about it.
“You aren’t listening to me-”
“You woke me up.” Alexia grumbles into the phone. “What t’hell’s so important it couldn’t have waited?”
She can hear the intake of breath, the sigh that’s the prelude to one of her mother’s lectures, and inwardly groans. Thirty-five years old, two Ph.Ds, godslayer and co-discoverer of a force that would revolutionize science, and yet she still can’t figure out how to avoid being lectured at. Wasn’t that just fucking great.
“You haven’t called in months-”
“Been busy.”
“Busy? Busy?! All my letters to you were returned. The post office thought you were dead!”
How long has it been since she’s picked up her mail? Alexia can’t remember that well, though she stretches her memory back: auto-billpay was one of the best fucking inventions as far as she was concerned, and...yeah, she can’t really remember the last time she came up for air, did something other than work, shut out the world outside her lab. First time she’s even been home in who the fuck knows how long.
She lets her gaze wander to the window, where the rain fell against the window, drops against the glass: Seattle stretches out beneath her eyes, people and cars so small below, and for a moment, she thinks about holding the whole world in the palm of her hand and making it right. Fixing everything wrong with it. It’s so close, locked in the fragments of divinity still in her lab, glowing with a lambent light she can still see behind her closed eyes, along with the scrolling readouts of data. So very, very close.
“I just worry about you,” her mother adds, a moment later, softer. “I had a bad dream about you.”
It’s always been bad dreams, Alexia remembers, tilting her head back: her mother always had bad dreams about herself and her siblings, when they’d grown too big to be safely contained in the protective cradle of her arms, all worry and heartache. Take your medicine, I had a bad dream about you. Don’t drive so fast, I had a bad dream about you.
‘m fine, Mom.” she grumbles, entirely too used to this. “Work’s been busy.”
“Too busy to remember to get your mail?”
Alexia sighs irritably. “We’re on the verge of a breakthrough.” so close. “It’s going to be big, mom. Change the world.”
“What are you even doing?”
“Can’t talk about it yet.” she shrugs, though her mom can’t see her. Alexia curls her fingertips and feels the fire beneath her skin, wants a cigarette desperately but is too tired to get up. “Secret and all that bullshit.”
Her mother is silent for a moment, before speaking again. “Do you think you can come home? In a few months?”
“Few months?” her mind is already running through the calculations. “Yeah, maybe. Why?”
“Acacia is getting married,” oh, hell, her baby sister had finally found herself someone willing to put up with her until death do them part? amazing, though Alexia was smart enough at least even sleep-deprived to not comment on that. “You were sent an invitation, but the post office returned it.”
Hell, mom was never going to let her forget that, huh, and Alexia just grunted in acknowledgment. “Don’t do weddings.”
“Alexia,” her mother huffs. “Don’t be difficult. You haven’t come home in years.” pause. “...your father and I are getting old.”
Not that fucking old, Alexia is about to say, but she does the math without thinking about it, though she hasn’t thought about it in a very long time: she’s thirty-five, her mother is pushing sixty and her father...yeah. Yeah. And she stares out the window again, silent: She hasn’t been home in years, since she started work on her first doctoral thesis, gone to the United States for university as a teenager and just somehow forgot to look back somewhere along the way, scrubbing her eyes with her hand.
She’s by the ocean, here, in Seattle, but the gray-blue of Puget Sound beneath the overcast sky just wasn’t the same, and she misses the lush blue of the Mediterranean. Misses Greece, and fuck, she had to admit it to herself, even having her mother nag her in person sounds almost good right now. Maybe, in a few months, there’ll be time for a visit, shit will be calmer and she can get this homesick bullshit over with.
“...maybe.” Alexia grudgingly admits. “Can’t make promises. Best I can say.”
“If that’s the best, then we’ll just have to live with it.”
Alexia rolls her eyes: getting old or not, her mother just never changed. “...mom?” she asks, after a moment, considering. Your father and I are getting old... but yet, in her laboratory, she had the means to change it. If she could just crack the code. Break it right open: there was the secret there. To cure illness, old age, death, right there and she was so close to breaking it open. What if you didn’t have to grow old? “...never mind.” she mutters, a moment later: she’ll ask when she actually has the answers.
Her mother hmms to herself: Alexia’s learned to dread that sound. “What about that boyfriend you had the last time we talked? You’re thirty-five, long past time for you to be married. Maybe not with kids, I know how you dislike children, but I want to see you happy.”
Fuck. Alexia almost throws the phone across the room. Hadn’t been anything serious, anyway, least she hadn’t thought it so, but William had. Wasn’t like she wanted anything particularly serious, she didn’t have time, didn’t particularly want to be married, and science would always, always come first. Always. If she ever had to pick between a lover and science, it would always be science: that’d broken what few relationships she’d had in the past, women and men both. “It’s done, Mom.” she grumbles. “It’s been done for fucking months.”
“Language!”
Yeah, what the fuck ever. Wasn’t like that had stopped her before, even when she lived in the same house and got her mouth washed out with soap.
“I meant what I said, mom. We’ve been done for months, since before I signed onto this project. I broke it off.”
“...why?”
Alexia closes her eyes. “Never was that serious. He wanted to marry me. But science always comes first. Always. And he couldn’t take that answer.”
“...oh, Alexia.”
Irritably, she grumbles, not wanting to hear that note of pity: her mother had never understood, not really, and her dad was proud but they might have supported her better if she’d been a boy instead. With all her intelligence and relentless drive, all harsh angles against the grain of cultural expectation, both her own and the one she finds herself amidst now. Not wanting to settle. She would do something great, something impossible, change the world, she had vowed as a small girl.
“Don’t give me that, mom.”
“I just want to see you happy, Alexia.” her mother says, wistfully. “Whether with a man or even if it’s a woman, whatever you want. What will you do when you’re old, with no one beside you?”
“Hell if I know,” Alexia shrugs, and has a flash of blond hair, of determined eyes and a hopeful smile and a white blade. The fuck was that all about? Hell if she knew or really gave that much of a fuck. “Figure it out when I get there.” Yeah, yeah, she knows what her mother will do next.
Her mother sighs fondly. “Think about what I’ve said.”
Alexia snorts. Yeah, right. She had a whole bunch of other things to think about, rather than think about a nonexistent love life that mattered so very little in the grand scheme of things. In everything she had to do.
“I should let you go back to sleep, shouldn’t I?”
“Yeah, that’d be nice.”
And for a moment, she can almost hear her mother smile. “I love you, Alexia.”
Maybe if she’d known what was coming, she would have tried to hold onto the moment, even if only for a heartbeat longer. But instead, she yawns into her phone, and drawls, slowly, before hanging up and letting the phone fall forgotten to her bedroom floor, asleep again within moments.
“Yeah, mom.”
(So do I.)
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brb telling my parents I love them every time I hang up forever.
Great job.
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That line was easily the most heartbreaking part of writing the entire thing. (it was also the first line I wrote).