vanitashaze (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
vanitashaze) wrote2008-02-05 07:08 pm
vanitashaze) wrote2008-02-05 07:08 pm
Fic: kindness as a card game [Heroes, Adam/Various, R]
Take me down, six underground, the ground beneath your feet - laid out low, nowhere to go, nowhere or way to meet... You gotta love the Sneaker Pimps, especially with a name like theirs.
Second of the Adam-fics. In which things actually happen, for once. Title from Bright Eyes' "No One Would Riot for Less". Got lines in here from Jeanette Winterson and Jean Rhys.
Yeah. This is trippy. This is weeeeird. This is self-righteous literary crap and I will get stoned at the public library for plagiarizing something that was obviously written by an aging hippy hooked on anesthesia-gas. In any case read at own risk.
kindness as a card game
adam (kensei) / yaeko, adam (kensei) / hiro
heroes; r-whatever. spoilers up to 2.11 Powerless
The aquarium is flooding, water salty. As aquamarine splashes against his hips, Adam thinks of his father—of days on the docks waiting for sails like swan wings, a wooden bird with half of his DNA resting, restless, in its belly. Finding my fortune, isn't that what the man had said? As if it were a runaway horse, a child hiding in the safety of a chaotic marketplace. "Excuse me, sir, I'm looking for my son." And Adam hadn't known, really hadn't, wouldn't have spent those shillings if he had understood, honest. Cross his heart and hope to die, please let— Fortune-tellers, they're all just crooks anyway, not worth the money and the belt still stiff and smelling of the sea. "Never seem to make a mark on that boy. Goddamned devil child," and the eyes, the eyes are the worst of it all. Black like true space, his liver after he swallowed cyanide to see what it tasted like.
In the grave, he dreams. Time passes, or maybe time stands still; Adam isn't sure, has no way of knowing. Maybe the world just stopped one day like a broken watch, and him scraping his beak on the gears. Adam as a mocking bird—all the candlewax Icarus ever craved, and no wings to melt it on. In South America the dead ride night-mares into battle and are swallowed alive by parrots. In the feathers creeping creeping crawling with mites eclipse eyes distended gobbling bubbling throats lies No Return, take a number sweetheart you'll be waiting here forever. In South America birds are I Would Turn Back If I Were You.
*
True death is sunset-speckled wings, splattered jewels on the air; as the little fishies swim into his mouth and make nests in his windpipe, Adam reminds himself that drowning would only be a temporary one.
*
His lover is a mountain stream and he is godsend, godmade, a man made of clay with a tongue that drops apple seeds. The world takes on many forms and theirs is:
Her snowmelts surrounding him.
His body, numb with moisture.
(He is the lone casualty struck motionless before her straining ramparts, her swollen floodgates, the dam burst salty.)
Face curved like a blossom: moon-faced, tinged pink, he knows these curves. His mouth knows the shape of her; his mouth recognizes her in dreams. "Yaeko," running down her face are tears, fish—look—here a skeleton of a house; there a drowned man, bloated in moisture and heat. "Yaeko my love." In Japanese, lover and remnants of a flood, shingled tails slapping against the shore are the same thing.
"Kensei," here her voice tapers upwards like a flutist out of breath, a stairway with roof access. Her fingers push a ball of clay to her lips and she takes it between her petals, her two pink petals, and folds, flattens, smoothes. "Do you love me?"
"Yaeko," he says, "Yaeko my love." Her fingers drift to her petals, pink flushed things and from them she draws a clay figurine in the shape of a koi fish.
"Kensei," she asks, "do you love me," and drops it in his hands.
*
The aquarium is flooding, water like a salt-lick—clinging, sorrowful. A river dripping slow and sweet from her face. Hiro stands in a powerboat with a man whose glasses glint opaque in the neon light, saying something Adam doesn't understand. "I'm don't speak hero," he calls, and his words skitter, splash long-limbed and awkward across the aquamarine. From his pocket Hiro takes a broken test tube, uses the jagged edge to unscrew the motor screw by screw by screw—Hiro throws it at Adam, and the still-spinning blade that cuts through his jaw to gleaming teeth and bone & buries itself in his left eyeball is almost like a kiss.
Adam sinks and undersea is Yaeko, waiting for him, her hair alive in the water.
"No one wanted me," she says and it is horrible because this, this, he understands.
*
When he wakes, there is a splinter tickling his optic nerve. The coffin is rotting around him; it probably came dislodged from his thrashing and he rolled over on it without noticing. Adam shakes the blood back into his arms and pulls the splinter out. No screams, of course, his vocal cords are still healing from when he snapped them shouting for help, just one slow squelch like a body dragged out of quicksand. In his head, he hums Japanese lullabies. The pain is nothing, anyway, pain is just bright feathers brushing over his bones.
*
& Death? Death is dreaming.
*
He had been trying to get a fortune for his father, of course. A child's terrified squeal: "That's what you always say you're looking for", and look, only five pence, the woman with her ragged feathers piled high on her head will give you father's heart(s desire). Under her fingernails, claws twisted with age and devil-yellow, his palm is baby-smooth, unmarked save for dirt and bit of blood. This she tries to smear away; this she makes worse.
"No line," she squawks. "No line, no life. You aren't alive. You aren't dead." She yanks his hand up to see. Two lines flesh-scribbled across his palm, and Adam is suddenly afraid.
"You're an old crow," he accuses, and a laugh bubbles in her throat like a witch's cauldron.
"Say die and I will die," she says. "Say die and I will die."
"Die," he orders.
Her lips open for brown teeth, rotted all the way through.
"I am from South America," she says.
*
It's difficult, finding a way to see your own back, worse than difficult when you're almost too sore to move. Eventually Adam sneaks his mother's hand-mirror out of the oak wardrobe when she's gone—doing something else, he doesn't know what, doesn't really care. It takes a while to position it properly, get up and twist around, and it hurts, the bloodskinbone hurts, what with the belt-marks and bruises splayed like a bloody union jack.
"Goddamn devil child, never seem to make a mark on him," he hears his father through the walls and of course, there is nothing there. His back is smooth as his palm, smooth smooth empty—
*
(Sometimes, Adam wonders if it was all a dream.)
*
Of course it was this way, it never could have been any other. He never could have had a regular family with his father a kindly god-fearing merchant and his mother clean and warm and lovely, he used to hug her just to smell the lavender she hid in her dress folds and she would laugh and say, "why you beautiful child you" while Father smiled with a bible passage caught between his teeth. Their house had been roomy, comforting, with sunlight dripping off the tree outside his window, and on summer days Adam would lie cradled in the roots while his lungs filled with light and he drowned, again and again, and came back to life every single time.
Of course this never could have happened. These days it's ever so fashionable to blame it on the parents.
*
He is a skeleton and his bones are painted chintz, lounge-room red. He is a skeleton and his flesh, his perfect beautiful godly flesh, is buried deep underground, the maggots stripping his epidermis layer by layer but his bones are free. Adam's skeleton knows that soon his disciples will come. They will take his bones to the highest mountain and there they will build a temple. Everything will be wonderful and perfect, won't it? Hail the holiest who art highest in heaven. He will be their hiro, and lovehatebetray them all.
Humming lullabies to themselves, Adam's bones lie contented.
*
"You're not real," he says, and Hiro pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
*
Experimental procedure, hands that will stink of white powder and antibacterial soap and a patient that died twice on the table but for now, are gloved scentless. Empty walls. Faces as blank as the white coats: unbuttoned, crisp, well-fitting. "Careful now, steady," and Adam is reduced to a window set in the white wall of the surgical sheets. His curtains drawn back with sterilized metal clamps; faces peer through the window, into the foreign universe past its frame.
"Careful now, steady," clamps and cauterizer at the ready, don't bother with that dialysis machine Rogers, he doesn't need it. Jenny dear don't forget to cauterize the arteries as you go. "Remove the heart."
Experimental procedure. Gloved hands drop their prize into the metal bowl. A koi fish flops against the metal, shingled tail slapping as its tiny heart beats frantically and its gills gasp for water. In the cold, blank air, it drowns.
*
"Neither are you," Hiro says.
*
(He wakes, and it is no dream.)
fin.
Second of the Adam-fics. In which things actually happen, for once. Title from Bright Eyes' "No One Would Riot for Less". Got lines in here from Jeanette Winterson and Jean Rhys.
Yeah. This is trippy. This is weeeeird. This is self-righteous literary crap and I will get stoned at the public library for plagiarizing something that was obviously written by an aging hippy hooked on anesthesia-gas. In any case read at own risk.
kindness as a card game
adam (kensei) / yaeko, adam (kensei) / hiro
heroes; r-whatever. spoilers up to 2.11 Powerless
The aquarium is flooding, water salty. As aquamarine splashes against his hips, Adam thinks of his father—of days on the docks waiting for sails like swan wings, a wooden bird with half of his DNA resting, restless, in its belly. Finding my fortune, isn't that what the man had said? As if it were a runaway horse, a child hiding in the safety of a chaotic marketplace. "Excuse me, sir, I'm looking for my son." And Adam hadn't known, really hadn't, wouldn't have spent those shillings if he had understood, honest. Cross his heart and hope to die, please let— Fortune-tellers, they're all just crooks anyway, not worth the money and the belt still stiff and smelling of the sea. "Never seem to make a mark on that boy. Goddamned devil child," and the eyes, the eyes are the worst of it all. Black like true space, his liver after he swallowed cyanide to see what it tasted like.
In the grave, he dreams. Time passes, or maybe time stands still; Adam isn't sure, has no way of knowing. Maybe the world just stopped one day like a broken watch, and him scraping his beak on the gears. Adam as a mocking bird—all the candlewax Icarus ever craved, and no wings to melt it on. In South America the dead ride night-mares into battle and are swallowed alive by parrots. In the feathers creeping creeping crawling with mites eclipse eyes distended gobbling bubbling throats lies No Return, take a number sweetheart you'll be waiting here forever. In South America birds are I Would Turn Back If I Were You.
*
True death is sunset-speckled wings, splattered jewels on the air; as the little fishies swim into his mouth and make nests in his windpipe, Adam reminds himself that drowning would only be a temporary one.
*
His lover is a mountain stream and he is godsend, godmade, a man made of clay with a tongue that drops apple seeds. The world takes on many forms and theirs is:
Her snowmelts surrounding him.
His body, numb with moisture.
(He is the lone casualty struck motionless before her straining ramparts, her swollen floodgates, the dam burst salty.)
Face curved like a blossom: moon-faced, tinged pink, he knows these curves. His mouth knows the shape of her; his mouth recognizes her in dreams. "Yaeko," running down her face are tears, fish—look—here a skeleton of a house; there a drowned man, bloated in moisture and heat. "Yaeko my love." In Japanese, lover and remnants of a flood, shingled tails slapping against the shore are the same thing.
"Kensei," here her voice tapers upwards like a flutist out of breath, a stairway with roof access. Her fingers push a ball of clay to her lips and she takes it between her petals, her two pink petals, and folds, flattens, smoothes. "Do you love me?"
"Yaeko," he says, "Yaeko my love." Her fingers drift to her petals, pink flushed things and from them she draws a clay figurine in the shape of a koi fish.
"Kensei," she asks, "do you love me," and drops it in his hands.
*
The aquarium is flooding, water like a salt-lick—clinging, sorrowful. A river dripping slow and sweet from her face. Hiro stands in a powerboat with a man whose glasses glint opaque in the neon light, saying something Adam doesn't understand. "I'm don't speak hero," he calls, and his words skitter, splash long-limbed and awkward across the aquamarine. From his pocket Hiro takes a broken test tube, uses the jagged edge to unscrew the motor screw by screw by screw—Hiro throws it at Adam, and the still-spinning blade that cuts through his jaw to gleaming teeth and bone & buries itself in his left eyeball is almost like a kiss.
Adam sinks and undersea is Yaeko, waiting for him, her hair alive in the water.
"No one wanted me," she says and it is horrible because this, this, he understands.
*
When he wakes, there is a splinter tickling his optic nerve. The coffin is rotting around him; it probably came dislodged from his thrashing and he rolled over on it without noticing. Adam shakes the blood back into his arms and pulls the splinter out. No screams, of course, his vocal cords are still healing from when he snapped them shouting for help, just one slow squelch like a body dragged out of quicksand. In his head, he hums Japanese lullabies. The pain is nothing, anyway, pain is just bright feathers brushing over his bones.
*
& Death? Death is dreaming.
*
He had been trying to get a fortune for his father, of course. A child's terrified squeal: "That's what you always say you're looking for", and look, only five pence, the woman with her ragged feathers piled high on her head will give you father's heart(s desire). Under her fingernails, claws twisted with age and devil-yellow, his palm is baby-smooth, unmarked save for dirt and bit of blood. This she tries to smear away; this she makes worse.
"No line," she squawks. "No line, no life. You aren't alive. You aren't dead." She yanks his hand up to see. Two lines flesh-scribbled across his palm, and Adam is suddenly afraid.
"You're an old crow," he accuses, and a laugh bubbles in her throat like a witch's cauldron.
"Say die and I will die," she says. "Say die and I will die."
"Die," he orders.
Her lips open for brown teeth, rotted all the way through.
"I am from South America," she says.
*
It's difficult, finding a way to see your own back, worse than difficult when you're almost too sore to move. Eventually Adam sneaks his mother's hand-mirror out of the oak wardrobe when she's gone—doing something else, he doesn't know what, doesn't really care. It takes a while to position it properly, get up and twist around, and it hurts, the bloodskinbone hurts, what with the belt-marks and bruises splayed like a bloody union jack.
"Goddamn devil child, never seem to make a mark on him," he hears his father through the walls and of course, there is nothing there. His back is smooth as his palm, smooth smooth empty—
*
(Sometimes, Adam wonders if it was all a dream.)
*
Of course it was this way, it never could have been any other. He never could have had a regular family with his father a kindly god-fearing merchant and his mother clean and warm and lovely, he used to hug her just to smell the lavender she hid in her dress folds and she would laugh and say, "why you beautiful child you" while Father smiled with a bible passage caught between his teeth. Their house had been roomy, comforting, with sunlight dripping off the tree outside his window, and on summer days Adam would lie cradled in the roots while his lungs filled with light and he drowned, again and again, and came back to life every single time.
Of course this never could have happened. These days it's ever so fashionable to blame it on the parents.
*
He is a skeleton and his bones are painted chintz, lounge-room red. He is a skeleton and his flesh, his perfect beautiful godly flesh, is buried deep underground, the maggots stripping his epidermis layer by layer but his bones are free. Adam's skeleton knows that soon his disciples will come. They will take his bones to the highest mountain and there they will build a temple. Everything will be wonderful and perfect, won't it? Hail the holiest who art highest in heaven. He will be their hiro, and lovehatebetray them all.
Humming lullabies to themselves, Adam's bones lie contented.
*
"You're not real," he says, and Hiro pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
*
Experimental procedure, hands that will stink of white powder and antibacterial soap and a patient that died twice on the table but for now, are gloved scentless. Empty walls. Faces as blank as the white coats: unbuttoned, crisp, well-fitting. "Careful now, steady," and Adam is reduced to a window set in the white wall of the surgical sheets. His curtains drawn back with sterilized metal clamps; faces peer through the window, into the foreign universe past its frame.
"Careful now, steady," clamps and cauterizer at the ready, don't bother with that dialysis machine Rogers, he doesn't need it. Jenny dear don't forget to cauterize the arteries as you go. "Remove the heart."
Experimental procedure. Gloved hands drop their prize into the metal bowl. A koi fish flops against the metal, shingled tail slapping as its tiny heart beats frantically and its gills gasp for water. In the cold, blank air, it drowns.
*
"Neither are you," Hiro says.
*
(He wakes, and it is no dream.)
fin.