Fic: Ten Summers
May. 3rd, 2009 10:33 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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graziepregoTitle: Ten Summers
Rating: Unreliable Narrator
Pairing: Spike/Angel or me or you or anyone we know
For Kita and Fod with my love
It's been a good year: it's been a good summer. It was late April the first time we planned to meet up, without your-my-his-their girlfriend and without your-my-her-his child and without the whole lot of them with their eyes too wide and their agendas on their sleeves. I knew you were sitting there, but I pretended not to see you at first so it didn't look like I was just standing around waiting for you to show up. Luck or angels sent me a friend, someone I knew from elsewhere, and I talked to her, animatedly, looking at her face -- looking everywhere but where you sat, a cape amethyst, a tektite, black jeans and white face on a bench.
I made you fall in love with me, stone heavy, white cotton and clouds in your head. I engineered it all, from sideways glance to note in your jacket pocket. There was someone else the whole time. You knew it, but you fell too hard -- you couldn't stop -- and I thought I could, but no ... I couldn't either. When I told myself I was done and it was time to end this, it knocked me over: the light filtering through the dust of that attic where we had to go, looking around for a file at four p.m., you like a cutout in the sun (I always thought of you in the dark) and our heads close together, quiet so the others couldn't hear our silent kiss.
From the outside, they knew, and then they made themselves forget it, and then they really knew. "But, you're not," she said to me, pouting like I had stepped on her teddy bear. I frowned absently; when had she become such a toddler, what grade is this anyway? What are these labels? All these lifetimes -- hadn't we stepped over enough lines? What limits could hold us back?
That's what we believed. May through August we were together in the sticky sweat of summer, invincible, loving out loud. One time in her room, her white curtains closed against oppressive heat, her ceiling fan like a jackhammer, and me straddling your lap, you said: Let's keep it this way. Let's never change.
You know you cursed it when you said that. Nothing examined can ever stay the same, the way it was before someone started thinking about it. You had to get me thinking about it -- you and her, her and me -- and then it all got complicated. The thinking curved in on itself and wormed its way through me, leaving doubt and uncertainty. Euphoria didn't hold me up off those burnt sidewalks anymore and neither did thoughts of you.
Of course you knew it faded. You fought it; you disguised yourself and your intentions to win me back, to have it back the way it used to be. The more you fought the more irritated I got and the more you fought to get closer. Your abandoned dignity disgusted me. They all saw it and they even felt bad for you, but I just had to get away. Nothing can ever be the same: that desecration creeps in, spills its rotting ennui.
Ten years later, I look at that notebook and the way you addressed your little notes to me -- Shazeb Andleeb, Nimrod's Son, Ten Percenter -- and the breathlessness from when I first saw you that spring afternoon comes back with a jolt: up in my throat, eyes watering. My heart or soul or whatever it is pounding out of my chest.
Nobody knew how it would end -- me, you, her, them. The pronouns whirl in my head like that unstable ceiling fan congealing our sweaty white T-shirts, one day in June. Here it is early spring again, ten years later. And I wish I could tell you I'm sorry.
Rating: Unreliable Narrator
Pairing: Spike/Angel or me or you or anyone we know
For Kita and Fod with my love
It's been a good year: it's been a good summer. It was late April the first time we planned to meet up, without your-my-his-their girlfriend and without your-my-her-his child and without the whole lot of them with their eyes too wide and their agendas on their sleeves. I knew you were sitting there, but I pretended not to see you at first so it didn't look like I was just standing around waiting for you to show up. Luck or angels sent me a friend, someone I knew from elsewhere, and I talked to her, animatedly, looking at her face -- looking everywhere but where you sat, a cape amethyst, a tektite, black jeans and white face on a bench.
I made you fall in love with me, stone heavy, white cotton and clouds in your head. I engineered it all, from sideways glance to note in your jacket pocket. There was someone else the whole time. You knew it, but you fell too hard -- you couldn't stop -- and I thought I could, but no ... I couldn't either. When I told myself I was done and it was time to end this, it knocked me over: the light filtering through the dust of that attic where we had to go, looking around for a file at four p.m., you like a cutout in the sun (I always thought of you in the dark) and our heads close together, quiet so the others couldn't hear our silent kiss.
From the outside, they knew, and then they made themselves forget it, and then they really knew. "But, you're not," she said to me, pouting like I had stepped on her teddy bear. I frowned absently; when had she become such a toddler, what grade is this anyway? What are these labels? All these lifetimes -- hadn't we stepped over enough lines? What limits could hold us back?
That's what we believed. May through August we were together in the sticky sweat of summer, invincible, loving out loud. One time in her room, her white curtains closed against oppressive heat, her ceiling fan like a jackhammer, and me straddling your lap, you said: Let's keep it this way. Let's never change.
You know you cursed it when you said that. Nothing examined can ever stay the same, the way it was before someone started thinking about it. You had to get me thinking about it -- you and her, her and me -- and then it all got complicated. The thinking curved in on itself and wormed its way through me, leaving doubt and uncertainty. Euphoria didn't hold me up off those burnt sidewalks anymore and neither did thoughts of you.
Of course you knew it faded. You fought it; you disguised yourself and your intentions to win me back, to have it back the way it used to be. The more you fought the more irritated I got and the more you fought to get closer. Your abandoned dignity disgusted me. They all saw it and they even felt bad for you, but I just had to get away. Nothing can ever be the same: that desecration creeps in, spills its rotting ennui.
Ten years later, I look at that notebook and the way you addressed your little notes to me -- Shazeb Andleeb, Nimrod's Son, Ten Percenter -- and the breathlessness from when I first saw you that spring afternoon comes back with a jolt: up in my throat, eyes watering. My heart or soul or whatever it is pounding out of my chest.
Nobody knew how it would end -- me, you, her, them. The pronouns whirl in my head like that unstable ceiling fan congealing our sweaty white T-shirts, one day in June. Here it is early spring again, ten years later. And I wish I could tell you I'm sorry.
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