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Mar. 10th, 2008 08:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meimichiWork is utterly dull. I spent today digging through random text files and finding some fic snippets I'd forgotten entirely about. So, fic dump.
Title: there are only the pursued and the pursuing
Series: Hana Yori Dango drama, post-Returns
Characters: Rui/Shigeru
She woke up to find the opposite side of the bed cold. It was not a surprise. He rarely slept through the night; rather he preferred to stay awake as long as possible and catnap during the day to make up for it. Sometimes she would wake in the dead of night and find him sitting across the room, motionless. Just reveling in the silence; drinking it in like music.
(When you're best friends with Tsukasa, she reasoned out loud once, you must learn early on to enjoy your precious few moments of quiet where you can get them. He bent his head at that, features disappearing under his hair, and with shoulders shaking just a little as the only telltale sign of his silent laughter, he said, just so.)
Tonight he was stretched out on the window-seat opposite the bed, just a silhouette against the window; the moonlight turning the outline of his hair silver-gold. He was still as a statue, and she held her breath, listening for the clues to give away whether he was awake or fallen asleep at the window. But then he did move, after all, and she heard the creak of a book spine that meant some well-loved page had been turned.
She weighed her options. It was always hard to tell when Rui was willing to be interrupted: his moods were so difficult to read. And she knew she could be as exhausting for him to deal with as Tsukasa was, in her own way.
Tsukushi had claimed this was why the match made sense: "He needs people to make noise and kick up a fuss and drag him places, or else he'd spend the rest of his life hiding under staircases with his nose in a book."
Yes, Shigeru agreed, but the trouble comes in knowing when he's willing enough to be dragged out into the sunlight, and when it's best to leave him be under the stairs. Tsukushi had made sympathetic noises at that and said simply that Hanazawa Rui was Hanazawa Rui. That was the problem and the solution at the same time, of course. There was nothing to be done but compromise as best one could.
She rolled out of bed and wrapped a sheet around her shoulders against the chill. The room wasn't as cold as it should be, but
it was too large to ever be considered warm. He didn't look up as she padded across the floor and up the steps to the window seat, standing just close enough to peer over his shoulder at the book he was holding.
"You'll ruin your eyes like that," she said sleepily. "If you're going to read, turn on a light."
"I didn't want to wake you." It was a ghost of a whisper, as if he were still afraid of waking her, even now. "The moon's full, anyway. It's enough."
He never glanced up from the page. She was trying to work out if this was indeed one of those moments she ought to leave him in peace, just when he shifted his weight on the window seat. Only an inch or two to the side, but with him, that was more than sufficient as an invitation.
She shivered as she settled against the window, the glass like a sheet of ice against her back. The seat was cold to the touch, too: she ran her fingers over the painted surface of the wood, the scent of fresh paint somehow never managing to fade. She'd stayed in hotel rooms that felt more lived-in than his bedroom. The sheets were always unwrinkled and crisp, the shelves uncluttered, the floor spotless and unblemished.
She really preferred sleeping in her own apartment. The mere act of sitting on Rui's bed gave her the sense of disturbing some meticulously-arranged museum display piece; kicking off her shoes haphazardly off the foot of the bed seemed a punishable offense. She wrapped the sheet a little closer around her shoulders, feeling it crackle, and felt as if she were getting away with murder just by removing it from the bed.
Her own Tokyo apartment had walls colored a deep wine-red, and there were flowers in every room; petals and leaves occasionally falling in a pool around each vase. She seemed to have a different bottle of nail polish hiding in every drawer in the house, with the end effect that she could never find the shade she wanted when she wanted it. She plastered her refrigerator door with postcards: left over from her own travels, from old school acquaintances on trips, miniature printed versions of paintings that she bought on a whim in museum gift shops.
Rui, when he was over, would sometimes pick out a postcard and comment on this painting's history, that artist's commonly-explored themes. She would listen, marveling at the sheer amount of knowledge he kept tucked away; she simply chose postcards of the pictures she liked, no more and no less. But Rui could turn paintings into poetry, with soft murmurs of this piece's influence on defining the Romantic movement, the tragic death of that artist's lover, the story of an art forger with such skill that even when he confessed to his crimes, critics still insisted his forgeries were real.
Talking with Rui in her kitchen, she felt a certain amount of assurance in her own space. She'd never imagined living on her own to such a degree of independence. Self-sufficience was a new thing to her: she was used to the easy comfort of New York and overreliance on the indulgences of her parents. When she'd first come to Tokyo, she'd tried to replace them with Tsukushi and the Makino family as a new crutch. But Rui was independent to a degree that she sometimes wondered if he even realized the rest of the world existed, save for the select few he had decided to make a concentrated effort to take notice of. She was used to being coddled; Rui merely took care of his own when they needed him, but otherwise couldn't be bothered in the absence of necessity or emergency.
She thought it was probably healthy for a certain degree of that attitude to rub off on her (though Tsukushi said it ought to work vice-versa). She could never be as reliant on others as she had been before. Her engagement to Tsukasa was not a past she planned to repeat. But she still found Rui's self-sufficience to be dizzying at times in its scope.
She knew, deep down, that she was on Rui's list of people deemed worthy of attention and care. But it was so difficult to really be sure. Even at times like this, sitting next to him in the moonlight, listening to him breathe and turn pages. Maybe even especially times like this.
She wanted to insist again that he turn on a light, but she glimpsed the dogeared cover of his book, and then decided not to bother. Even the act of turning the pages was probably only for ritual's sake at this point; he must know every word by heart.
She'd read the book in school however many years ago, but it was just a blur in her memory. The movie, she had seen more recently: Redford cutting a striking figure all in white, filling an empty mansion with the distracting noise of the jazz age. All in the interest of reliving a past long dead. Living in a memory, until it killed him.
It was passed off as romantic, but Shigeru just thought it sad.
Mimasaka-san said he thought Shigeru was the right choice now for Rui, because she was nothing like Shizuka. She had never met Shizuka, but managed to grasp her importance to Rui: the perfect woman, yet also perfectly untouchable, and even more independent than Rui in her way. Shigeru pictured her in her mind as a benevolent fairy queen, enchanting others unintentionally, leaving them feeling in equal parts inspired and abandoned. And as for Rui loving Tsukushi, it had been implied that it had been something infinitely more complex than a simple rebound. Yet somehow Tsukushi's similarities to Shizuka still made the relationship fall in the column of an attempt by Rui to recreate the past. The possibility of the match had provided no relief to anyone, it seemed.
Mimasaka-san said that now he feels like Rui is finally moving on. It was impossible to judge for herself, as she hadn't known him during the time before. She hoped, more than thought, that it was true. She wanted it to be, but she still couldn't shake the fear that she wasn't so much Rui's future as she was just so much more distracting, comforting noise in an empty house.
"I keep waiting for you to get sick of that book," she said. "Won't you ever?"
"Who knows. What do you think?" he asked, the question clearly rhetoric in its tone.
She chose to answer it anyway. After a lifetime spent with Tsukasa, Rui was used to his attempts at subtleties being wasted, anyway.
"I suppose it depends on why you're reading it," she answered. Fascination with the Roaring Twenties? Contrasting the idle chatter of the rich and famous in days of yore with their idle chatter today? Admiring the ideal of loving someone to the point of your own ruin?
She's guilty of that last one herself, a little.
He looked up from the book. "It answers to quite a few of my more common needs required from reading material, I suppose. Sometimes I pick it up when I'm feeling romantic. Sometimes when a fit of nostalgia overtakes me. Sometimes when I just want to read something familiar."
She let out a breath she hadn't realized she had been holding in. "And what is it to you tonight, hmm?" She tried to make it sound flippant, and failed miserably.
"A cautionary tale, perhaps," he suggested, shutting the book and leaning over to kiss her in one fluid movement.
She busied herself then with committing the texture of his eyelashes brushing against her cheek to memory. There were no more rhetorical questions to answer until after the sun came up.
Title: kill them with kindness
Series: Evangelion
Characters: Misato/Kaji, Shinji
She wishes that she could offer him kindness, because she knows he's seen too little of it in his lifetime. But they are too much alike. For her to be kind to him, she would need to believe that she is worthy of kindness herself.
She cannot. She never has been able to.
She can trace this realization back to that last lazy afternoon in bed with Kaji: not the last time they'd slept together when they were still young, but the last time both of them had dropped everything, skipped class, abandoned all obligations in the name of being too wrapped up in each other to sustain the appearance of interest in anything else. It had been almost perfect, and he had insisted on destroying it all with a few well-placed words. "Neither of us have the right to happiness," he'd murmured into her shoulder, breath warm against her skin. That was the moment she'd known she had to break it off with him. He had committed the crime of knowing her too well, and she would never be able to forgive it.
Unable even now to speak words of comfort, she instead can only say what is right. It is all she is capable of giving.
"You're cold, Misato-san," he says harshly.
She can't meet his eyes. Justice serves as a poor substitute for love.
Title: you remind me of home
Series: NANA
Characters: Nana, Hachi
"It's so hard to get guys to fit into my life," I said, wriggling to get comfortable on Nana's bed. "Since I got to Tokyo, it's like Shouji's and my schedules never match up. I didn't think just being together would be this hard. Everyday feels like an uphill battle!"
"Isn't it just that you're feeling the difficulties of being an independent woman for the first time?" she said dryly from her place on the floor, her back to me, crouched over the piles of CDs she was sorting through. "Going from being a coddled puppy to a stray must be tough."
"You're mean, Nana!" I wailed, rolling over to bury my face in her pillow -- it smelled nice, like Nana's shampoo. "Making light of my independent lifestyle, when it's such a strain on me to continue it!"
"So quit and go be lovey-dovey with your boyfriend."
I hurled the pillow at her next, missing by a mile. It didn't even get close enough for her hair to flutter. "You don't mean that. You'd miss me if I left you all alone in this apartment! I know it!"
She turned to grin at me, then. "I guess I'd just have to find another stray dog to take in and pay half the rent." She threw the pillow back over my shoulder. "Go fetch, Hachikou."
I thought, but didn't say: Nana's more of a stray than I am.
Title: not every saint is a fool
Series: Smallville, post-"Vessel" AU
Characters: Chloe/Lionel
I do not love you, she has stressed repeatedly over the course of their arrangement thus far, in these days and weeks since its beginning. She never says it out loud as such, because that would be too straightforward as to be worthy of their mutually acknowledged intelligence. She is a writer and communication is in her blood; she finds a million other, worthier ways to spell out her intended message.
My dear, as if I could care less, he replies in kind.
He sees her, almost imperceptibly, relax at this response, and he has to smile. She is delightfully unpredictable in all ways except one: when it comes to matters of the heart, Chloe Sullivan remains impossible to sway.
(This is invariably her greatest weakness, but she makes an effort at every turn to make a strength out of it as well.)
She presses a hand to his office window. She has well-concealed circles beneath her eyes (a symptom of all-nighters at the Planet these past weeks: Dark Thursday, on the heels of Lex Luthor being stabbed to death in his own library, makes for a busy month in either Metropolis or Smallville, and busier if you're splitting your time between the two). She's tense enough that her fingertips will leave streaks behind when she draws her hand away from the glass. The aftermath of Dark Thursday has taken its toll on the Metropolis skyline, still obvious even from this distance above, and the cleanup effort is going to be slow going.
It's not the long hours or the disaster as their cause that has a marked effect on her.
He notes aloud that the restoration of the city might be quicker going if a more able set of hands were present--
Don't, she says without turning her head. I didn't come here to think about Clark.
Of course, he acquiesces, and her shoulders sink down to form a more relaxed, even line, until he murmurs next to her ear: that was only half a lie, but the truth in its entirety suits you best.
She doesn't startle, or even move at all; only presses her lips together, forming a perfectly straight line, and says: I can't imagine why you even find me worth baiting any longer, if Clark is dead (and there her voice does not tremble at all).
Don't underestimate your own value, Miss Sullivan, he says with a smile in his voice.
He wonders briefly if he's tipped his hand too much in the admittance that her worth extends, however slight, beyond her status as another bargaining chip to be used for or against Clark Kent. But she exhales at his admission, tilting her head back to expose, irresistibly, the line of her neck.
She leans back against him (an action walking the line between encouragement and acceptance) as his lips lightly graze her throat, and she says (to him, or to herself, he isn't sure, but he likes that she can keep him guessing), Enough. It has to be enough.
Title: don't think of the places you should have been
Series: Animorphs, post-series
Characters: Marco, Eva
It is two years later, and he thinks things are starting to wind down. No more cleanup or war tribunals. They have memorials and anniversaries ahead, now, and when they reach the second-year milestone, he can (almost) start to breathe easily.
"Let's just go," he says impulsively when summer vacation starts. "Anywhere. The world is our oyster, or whatever. It's a waste not to go see it after we saved it."
He wants to see the Grand Canyon, to ride the five biggest roller coasters in the United States, to go see where Washington crossed the Delaware and see it as a history site instead of firsthand. He wants to stop by every lame tourist trap they find and visit the world's biggest ball of twine, just because they can. He buys road maps and his parents join in marking up the stops they want to make; highlighter pens scrawling lines across the highways from one end of America to the next. It's an impossible route: they'll get tired and sick of bad food and cramped quarters before they even cover a third of it. But it's okay, somehow, just knowing that when they set out.
Sometimes he stretches out across the backseat, his headphones blasting at an eardrum-damaging level. He'll throw an arm over his eyes to block out the glare of the sun, but whenever he spares a glance up front, he can see his parents holding hands across the armrest. Easy and comfortable grip; sometimes tracing secret patterns with a thumb against the other's palm, like some kind of lovers' morse code. He'll smother a grin in the safe anonymity of the backseat, and think that it was all worth it, after all.
Other times, his dad will nap in the back as Marco takes the wheel (time and drivers ed has made him a better driver than his mother, if only by a very slim margin). His mom fiddles with the radio, stations fading to static as the miles click away at the speedometer. They sing along to horrible pop songs and get ice cream at the McDonald's drive-thru, and it's a kind of normalcy that borders on ridiculous. They should not be able to have an easy family road trip. Dracon beam power levels, the finer points of enslaving a species, how much blood you can afford to lose before you're really in trouble: all these snippets of knowledge are kicking around their heads and more. It's a comforting kind of surrealism, though. He isn't sure if he deserves a happy ending in all of this, but he knows his mother does.
He yanks on the wheel in an attempt to get into the faster lane when they hit a traffic jam (cutting off the guy in the next lane, but whatever), though despite his efforts, they still end up at a dead stop on the highway. There's nothing to entertain them on the road save the bumper of the car in front of them, but he can't hide his grin when he catches sight of the New Hampshire license plates.
He steals a glance at his mom, and she's noticed it too. They share a smile, then: the smile of people who have fought a war and come through the other side, bruised but still breathing. The smile of two people who know the value of clichés as something you can laugh at, while still being aware that those same clichés usually speak the truth.
It's not really funny, he thinks. Just inevitable.
Title: there are only the pursued and the pursuing
Series: Hana Yori Dango drama, post-Returns
Characters: Rui/Shigeru
She woke up to find the opposite side of the bed cold. It was not a surprise. He rarely slept through the night; rather he preferred to stay awake as long as possible and catnap during the day to make up for it. Sometimes she would wake in the dead of night and find him sitting across the room, motionless. Just reveling in the silence; drinking it in like music.
(When you're best friends with Tsukasa, she reasoned out loud once, you must learn early on to enjoy your precious few moments of quiet where you can get them. He bent his head at that, features disappearing under his hair, and with shoulders shaking just a little as the only telltale sign of his silent laughter, he said, just so.)
Tonight he was stretched out on the window-seat opposite the bed, just a silhouette against the window; the moonlight turning the outline of his hair silver-gold. He was still as a statue, and she held her breath, listening for the clues to give away whether he was awake or fallen asleep at the window. But then he did move, after all, and she heard the creak of a book spine that meant some well-loved page had been turned.
She weighed her options. It was always hard to tell when Rui was willing to be interrupted: his moods were so difficult to read. And she knew she could be as exhausting for him to deal with as Tsukasa was, in her own way.
Tsukushi had claimed this was why the match made sense: "He needs people to make noise and kick up a fuss and drag him places, or else he'd spend the rest of his life hiding under staircases with his nose in a book."
Yes, Shigeru agreed, but the trouble comes in knowing when he's willing enough to be dragged out into the sunlight, and when it's best to leave him be under the stairs. Tsukushi had made sympathetic noises at that and said simply that Hanazawa Rui was Hanazawa Rui. That was the problem and the solution at the same time, of course. There was nothing to be done but compromise as best one could.
She rolled out of bed and wrapped a sheet around her shoulders against the chill. The room wasn't as cold as it should be, but
it was too large to ever be considered warm. He didn't look up as she padded across the floor and up the steps to the window seat, standing just close enough to peer over his shoulder at the book he was holding.
"You'll ruin your eyes like that," she said sleepily. "If you're going to read, turn on a light."
"I didn't want to wake you." It was a ghost of a whisper, as if he were still afraid of waking her, even now. "The moon's full, anyway. It's enough."
He never glanced up from the page. She was trying to work out if this was indeed one of those moments she ought to leave him in peace, just when he shifted his weight on the window seat. Only an inch or two to the side, but with him, that was more than sufficient as an invitation.
She shivered as she settled against the window, the glass like a sheet of ice against her back. The seat was cold to the touch, too: she ran her fingers over the painted surface of the wood, the scent of fresh paint somehow never managing to fade. She'd stayed in hotel rooms that felt more lived-in than his bedroom. The sheets were always unwrinkled and crisp, the shelves uncluttered, the floor spotless and unblemished.
She really preferred sleeping in her own apartment. The mere act of sitting on Rui's bed gave her the sense of disturbing some meticulously-arranged museum display piece; kicking off her shoes haphazardly off the foot of the bed seemed a punishable offense. She wrapped the sheet a little closer around her shoulders, feeling it crackle, and felt as if she were getting away with murder just by removing it from the bed.
Her own Tokyo apartment had walls colored a deep wine-red, and there were flowers in every room; petals and leaves occasionally falling in a pool around each vase. She seemed to have a different bottle of nail polish hiding in every drawer in the house, with the end effect that she could never find the shade she wanted when she wanted it. She plastered her refrigerator door with postcards: left over from her own travels, from old school acquaintances on trips, miniature printed versions of paintings that she bought on a whim in museum gift shops.
Rui, when he was over, would sometimes pick out a postcard and comment on this painting's history, that artist's commonly-explored themes. She would listen, marveling at the sheer amount of knowledge he kept tucked away; she simply chose postcards of the pictures she liked, no more and no less. But Rui could turn paintings into poetry, with soft murmurs of this piece's influence on defining the Romantic movement, the tragic death of that artist's lover, the story of an art forger with such skill that even when he confessed to his crimes, critics still insisted his forgeries were real.
Talking with Rui in her kitchen, she felt a certain amount of assurance in her own space. She'd never imagined living on her own to such a degree of independence. Self-sufficience was a new thing to her: she was used to the easy comfort of New York and overreliance on the indulgences of her parents. When she'd first come to Tokyo, she'd tried to replace them with Tsukushi and the Makino family as a new crutch. But Rui was independent to a degree that she sometimes wondered if he even realized the rest of the world existed, save for the select few he had decided to make a concentrated effort to take notice of. She was used to being coddled; Rui merely took care of his own when they needed him, but otherwise couldn't be bothered in the absence of necessity or emergency.
She thought it was probably healthy for a certain degree of that attitude to rub off on her (though Tsukushi said it ought to work vice-versa). She could never be as reliant on others as she had been before. Her engagement to Tsukasa was not a past she planned to repeat. But she still found Rui's self-sufficience to be dizzying at times in its scope.
She knew, deep down, that she was on Rui's list of people deemed worthy of attention and care. But it was so difficult to really be sure. Even at times like this, sitting next to him in the moonlight, listening to him breathe and turn pages. Maybe even especially times like this.
She wanted to insist again that he turn on a light, but she glimpsed the dogeared cover of his book, and then decided not to bother. Even the act of turning the pages was probably only for ritual's sake at this point; he must know every word by heart.
She'd read the book in school however many years ago, but it was just a blur in her memory. The movie, she had seen more recently: Redford cutting a striking figure all in white, filling an empty mansion with the distracting noise of the jazz age. All in the interest of reliving a past long dead. Living in a memory, until it killed him.
It was passed off as romantic, but Shigeru just thought it sad.
Mimasaka-san said he thought Shigeru was the right choice now for Rui, because she was nothing like Shizuka. She had never met Shizuka, but managed to grasp her importance to Rui: the perfect woman, yet also perfectly untouchable, and even more independent than Rui in her way. Shigeru pictured her in her mind as a benevolent fairy queen, enchanting others unintentionally, leaving them feeling in equal parts inspired and abandoned. And as for Rui loving Tsukushi, it had been implied that it had been something infinitely more complex than a simple rebound. Yet somehow Tsukushi's similarities to Shizuka still made the relationship fall in the column of an attempt by Rui to recreate the past. The possibility of the match had provided no relief to anyone, it seemed.
Mimasaka-san said that now he feels like Rui is finally moving on. It was impossible to judge for herself, as she hadn't known him during the time before. She hoped, more than thought, that it was true. She wanted it to be, but she still couldn't shake the fear that she wasn't so much Rui's future as she was just so much more distracting, comforting noise in an empty house.
"I keep waiting for you to get sick of that book," she said. "Won't you ever?"
"Who knows. What do you think?" he asked, the question clearly rhetoric in its tone.
She chose to answer it anyway. After a lifetime spent with Tsukasa, Rui was used to his attempts at subtleties being wasted, anyway.
"I suppose it depends on why you're reading it," she answered. Fascination with the Roaring Twenties? Contrasting the idle chatter of the rich and famous in days of yore with their idle chatter today? Admiring the ideal of loving someone to the point of your own ruin?
She's guilty of that last one herself, a little.
He looked up from the book. "It answers to quite a few of my more common needs required from reading material, I suppose. Sometimes I pick it up when I'm feeling romantic. Sometimes when a fit of nostalgia overtakes me. Sometimes when I just want to read something familiar."
She let out a breath she hadn't realized she had been holding in. "And what is it to you tonight, hmm?" She tried to make it sound flippant, and failed miserably.
"A cautionary tale, perhaps," he suggested, shutting the book and leaning over to kiss her in one fluid movement.
She busied herself then with committing the texture of his eyelashes brushing against her cheek to memory. There were no more rhetorical questions to answer until after the sun came up.
Title: kill them with kindness
Series: Evangelion
Characters: Misato/Kaji, Shinji
She wishes that she could offer him kindness, because she knows he's seen too little of it in his lifetime. But they are too much alike. For her to be kind to him, she would need to believe that she is worthy of kindness herself.
She cannot. She never has been able to.
She can trace this realization back to that last lazy afternoon in bed with Kaji: not the last time they'd slept together when they were still young, but the last time both of them had dropped everything, skipped class, abandoned all obligations in the name of being too wrapped up in each other to sustain the appearance of interest in anything else. It had been almost perfect, and he had insisted on destroying it all with a few well-placed words. "Neither of us have the right to happiness," he'd murmured into her shoulder, breath warm against her skin. That was the moment she'd known she had to break it off with him. He had committed the crime of knowing her too well, and she would never be able to forgive it.
Unable even now to speak words of comfort, she instead can only say what is right. It is all she is capable of giving.
"You're cold, Misato-san," he says harshly.
She can't meet his eyes. Justice serves as a poor substitute for love.
Title: you remind me of home
Series: NANA
Characters: Nana, Hachi
"It's so hard to get guys to fit into my life," I said, wriggling to get comfortable on Nana's bed. "Since I got to Tokyo, it's like Shouji's and my schedules never match up. I didn't think just being together would be this hard. Everyday feels like an uphill battle!"
"Isn't it just that you're feeling the difficulties of being an independent woman for the first time?" she said dryly from her place on the floor, her back to me, crouched over the piles of CDs she was sorting through. "Going from being a coddled puppy to a stray must be tough."
"You're mean, Nana!" I wailed, rolling over to bury my face in her pillow -- it smelled nice, like Nana's shampoo. "Making light of my independent lifestyle, when it's such a strain on me to continue it!"
"So quit and go be lovey-dovey with your boyfriend."
I hurled the pillow at her next, missing by a mile. It didn't even get close enough for her hair to flutter. "You don't mean that. You'd miss me if I left you all alone in this apartment! I know it!"
She turned to grin at me, then. "I guess I'd just have to find another stray dog to take in and pay half the rent." She threw the pillow back over my shoulder. "Go fetch, Hachikou."
I thought, but didn't say: Nana's more of a stray than I am.
Title: not every saint is a fool
Series: Smallville, post-"Vessel" AU
Characters: Chloe/Lionel
I do not love you, she has stressed repeatedly over the course of their arrangement thus far, in these days and weeks since its beginning. She never says it out loud as such, because that would be too straightforward as to be worthy of their mutually acknowledged intelligence. She is a writer and communication is in her blood; she finds a million other, worthier ways to spell out her intended message.
My dear, as if I could care less, he replies in kind.
He sees her, almost imperceptibly, relax at this response, and he has to smile. She is delightfully unpredictable in all ways except one: when it comes to matters of the heart, Chloe Sullivan remains impossible to sway.
(This is invariably her greatest weakness, but she makes an effort at every turn to make a strength out of it as well.)
She presses a hand to his office window. She has well-concealed circles beneath her eyes (a symptom of all-nighters at the Planet these past weeks: Dark Thursday, on the heels of Lex Luthor being stabbed to death in his own library, makes for a busy month in either Metropolis or Smallville, and busier if you're splitting your time between the two). She's tense enough that her fingertips will leave streaks behind when she draws her hand away from the glass. The aftermath of Dark Thursday has taken its toll on the Metropolis skyline, still obvious even from this distance above, and the cleanup effort is going to be slow going.
It's not the long hours or the disaster as their cause that has a marked effect on her.
He notes aloud that the restoration of the city might be quicker going if a more able set of hands were present--
Don't, she says without turning her head. I didn't come here to think about Clark.
Of course, he acquiesces, and her shoulders sink down to form a more relaxed, even line, until he murmurs next to her ear: that was only half a lie, but the truth in its entirety suits you best.
She doesn't startle, or even move at all; only presses her lips together, forming a perfectly straight line, and says: I can't imagine why you even find me worth baiting any longer, if Clark is dead (and there her voice does not tremble at all).
Don't underestimate your own value, Miss Sullivan, he says with a smile in his voice.
He wonders briefly if he's tipped his hand too much in the admittance that her worth extends, however slight, beyond her status as another bargaining chip to be used for or against Clark Kent. But she exhales at his admission, tilting her head back to expose, irresistibly, the line of her neck.
She leans back against him (an action walking the line between encouragement and acceptance) as his lips lightly graze her throat, and she says (to him, or to herself, he isn't sure, but he likes that she can keep him guessing), Enough. It has to be enough.
Title: don't think of the places you should have been
Series: Animorphs, post-series
Characters: Marco, Eva
It is two years later, and he thinks things are starting to wind down. No more cleanup or war tribunals. They have memorials and anniversaries ahead, now, and when they reach the second-year milestone, he can (almost) start to breathe easily.
"Let's just go," he says impulsively when summer vacation starts. "Anywhere. The world is our oyster, or whatever. It's a waste not to go see it after we saved it."
He wants to see the Grand Canyon, to ride the five biggest roller coasters in the United States, to go see where Washington crossed the Delaware and see it as a history site instead of firsthand. He wants to stop by every lame tourist trap they find and visit the world's biggest ball of twine, just because they can. He buys road maps and his parents join in marking up the stops they want to make; highlighter pens scrawling lines across the highways from one end of America to the next. It's an impossible route: they'll get tired and sick of bad food and cramped quarters before they even cover a third of it. But it's okay, somehow, just knowing that when they set out.
Sometimes he stretches out across the backseat, his headphones blasting at an eardrum-damaging level. He'll throw an arm over his eyes to block out the glare of the sun, but whenever he spares a glance up front, he can see his parents holding hands across the armrest. Easy and comfortable grip; sometimes tracing secret patterns with a thumb against the other's palm, like some kind of lovers' morse code. He'll smother a grin in the safe anonymity of the backseat, and think that it was all worth it, after all.
Other times, his dad will nap in the back as Marco takes the wheel (time and drivers ed has made him a better driver than his mother, if only by a very slim margin). His mom fiddles with the radio, stations fading to static as the miles click away at the speedometer. They sing along to horrible pop songs and get ice cream at the McDonald's drive-thru, and it's a kind of normalcy that borders on ridiculous. They should not be able to have an easy family road trip. Dracon beam power levels, the finer points of enslaving a species, how much blood you can afford to lose before you're really in trouble: all these snippets of knowledge are kicking around their heads and more. It's a comforting kind of surrealism, though. He isn't sure if he deserves a happy ending in all of this, but he knows his mother does.
He yanks on the wheel in an attempt to get into the faster lane when they hit a traffic jam (cutting off the guy in the next lane, but whatever), though despite his efforts, they still end up at a dead stop on the highway. There's nothing to entertain them on the road save the bumper of the car in front of them, but he can't hide his grin when he catches sight of the New Hampshire license plates.
He steals a glance at his mom, and she's noticed it too. They share a smile, then: the smile of people who have fought a war and come through the other side, bruised but still breathing. The smile of two people who know the value of clichés as something you can laugh at, while still being aware that those same clichés usually speak the truth.
It's not really funny, he thinks. Just inevitable.
