harborshore (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
harborshore) wrote2011-01-08 11:39 am
harborshore) wrote2011-01-08 11:39 am
Fic Post: To Dream Again
So! ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
bandomstuffsit had their fic reveal yesterday, and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
takkatakkatakka wrote my WONDERFUL Annie/Z story, which I ought to have guessed, because she's stellar at that sort of pacing and dialogue and I love it so much. Also, fuck, SUCH a good Z POV. *beams* Seriously, I've wanted a current-canon Annie/Z ever since that interview when Z said something about having no idea who Annie was when they were in high school, so this was perfect. Thank you SO MUCH, darling.
And, well. No one will be surprised by the following: I wrote To Dream Again forfictionalaspect. ALL of the love, dearheart. I had so much fun with this, and I'm so beyond thrilled you liked it.
Title: To Dream Again
Pairing(s): Pre-Brendon/Laena
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst. Well, initially.
Word count: 2382
Summary: AU. Brendon has to find another way to fit in.
A/N: Betaed byromanticalgirl and torakowalski, and many thanks to them. Any remaining mistakes are the fault of my own fool self. The title is Will Shakespeare's.
Brendon takes a deep breath and launches himself off the rock.
Ow.
He picks his head up off the ground and promptly puts it back down again. Everything hurts. He's pretty sure his knee is a little bit busted.
Rolling over onto his back, he lies there and stares up at the sky. It's a nice day. The clouds are wispy; the sky is blue. You could probably see forever up there. If you could actually get up there.
He closes his eyes because the glare of the sun is making them sting. His lip hurts. Actually, his whole face hurts. The ground must be getting harder; he doesn't remember the first time he fell hurting this much. Swallowing, he pushes himself into a sitting position. It's about time to go home.
It takes him an hour, because yeah, his knee is definitely busted. He keeps biting at his lip, which hardly makes anything better, but it's something to focus on, right? Right.
His mom takes one look at his face as he walks through the door and her shoulders go tense, but she walks around the kitchen table and hugs him, and if she hesitates before reaching out, neither of them mentions it.
"You'll figure this out, sweetheart," she says. He knows she means well, but all he can see is the ghostly outline of her wings, her non-substantial but so-very-fucking-there-and-functional wings and he hides his face in her shoulder for a second.
He manages a nod after a little bit, and she lets go.
"Help me work in the garden?" It's not really a request, but he doesn't mind, not right now. It's easier not to think when he has something to do with his hands. It makes his mind wander less, which is both good and bad.
If he wipes at his face at one point, neither of them say anything about that either.
--
The thing is, sometimes he does feel like he could do it. Like he's almost as light as he needs to be, like if he just got it right, threw himself off the balcony just right, he would fly, just like the others can. Just like everyone can. Brendon doesn't like being the only one who can't do something, and he wants this.
His mother tells him to be patient. His father ruffles his hair like before, but he doesn't really talk to Brendon as much. Not that it's a huge difference or anything, but Brendon notices. Kayla hugs him more. Brendon doesn't know how he feels about that.
The thing is, they're all worried. He knows they are. People who don't have wings, they're not--everyone can fly. Everyone. The people in the village are looking at him weirdly. He knows that if he doesn't get it soon, he'll have to--it can't go on, is all.
--
Brendon breaks his arm, the next time he tries. It hurts so much he yells as loudly as he can, and it echoes into the quiet of the canyon where he's been trying this, far away from where people usually go. Yelling helps for a second, but it doesn't keep him from passing out when he tries to move again.
When he wakes up, it's getting dark.
"Fuck," he says softly. It's the first time he says it out loud, a word like that. He doesn't regret saying that, but he's glad none of them are there to hear him. "Better get home," he tells himself. It's really dark now.
He walks home slowly, navigating by the stars. The moon is soft and subdued through the clouds; it's sort of like he can feel the light on his skin. Everything is quiet. It's not hard to focus now, because all he can feel is his arm throbbing. Every step jars it, making it worse so that even the moonlight seems to hurt, his mind swept clear with the pain.
The house is quiet, too. Brendon can hear his family breathing if he listens hard enough; he's always had good hearing. He stands there and loses himself in the sound of them, deep in sleep, far away. It's like he can tune out the pain a little bit when he has a beat to set his own breaths to. Holding his arm against his chest, he keeps listening. It takes him a long time to go to sleep that night.
--
He has to go to the doctor to get his wrist looked at. Walking down Main Street, he hunches his shoulders (his shoulders-that-carry-no-weight) against the stares, because the youngest Urie boy still hasn't figured it out, has he? Someone laughs sharply and when he turns to look, Mrs Quimber covers her mouth with her hand. Brendon grits his teeth and walks on.
Dr Douglas glances him over and his eyes go a bit distant. He touches Brendon's wrist and when Brendon bites off an exclamation of pain, he sends him off with a nurse for x-rays.
The machine is ancient and needs to be coaxed into working. It runs on solar power. Brendon's grandmother says there used to be many more machines, but most of them are gone now.
"We don't use this very much, you know," Jenny says. They wouldn't need to, Brendon thinks, because most of the time people who can fly manage to avoid accidents when they're on the ground.
Jenny's nice about it, careful with his wrist. He used to go to school with her, but she got her wings early, at sixteen, and went off to learn to become a nurse pretty much right away. Brendon tries not to think about what he will do for a living once he's too old to live at home. Wings are--you're supposed to have them. You just are. People don't like it if you don't have any; people don't hire you if you don't have any.
Dr Douglas doesn't say much besides "Hairline fracture". Brendon is sent off with his wrist in a plaster cast, some pills for the pain (they say the stockpiles from Before will last another three hundred years), and a pitying smile from Jenny. He walks home without looking at anybody.
Nodding at his mom as he walks through the door, he holds up his meds.
"Good," she says. Brendon shrugs.
Then he goes to his room and packs. His purple sweater, his favorite book, his knife. A few other things. He hefts his bag and decides it's too heavy, and puts it down again, taking out the book and one pair of pants.
It's stupid, really, to leave while he's still got a broken arm. He should be staying. He should be staying until he heals and then he could take off. But he's obviously never going to figure it out, and eventually everyone else will really know (though they mostly do already); staying will just make everything about his life hurt more than his arm ever could.
He has dinner with the others, smiling and laughing as best he can, and waits for night to fall. Then he goes.
--
It's not easy. People outside of his village aren't any more tolerant towards someone without wings. Less, actually, because they don't know him and so they make assumptions. Brendon gets used to being hungry, to not sleeping enough, and to never staying long in one place.
After a month or so, he finally lands a job cleaning at an inn. The owner, Mr Andersen, eyes him a little worriedly at first, but is eventually won over by Brendon's--well, he'd like to think it's his charm, but he suspects it's more the fact that he looks like he hasn't eaten or slept in weeks. Which, fair enough. Brendon's not going to argue with a job that gets him a place to sleep and free meals, no matter that it really doesn't pay any kind of a salary worth mentioning and is kind of gross sometimes.
He doesn't mind it so much, picking up in the hallways and cleaning the rooms. They're pretty dirty most of the time, but at least it's something to do. He gets so restless sometimes; it's a relief to have something to do, small things to focus on.
--
It's the third hallway of the morning, and Brendon stops to look at the painting he always stops to look at. He can't figure out if a guest did something to it or if it's actually supposed to look like red vomit.
Then he hears it. It's a strange noise, coming from the other side of the wall. It sounds like--there's a hum, almost, and it's--he doesn't know what it is, he's never heard anything like it. It sounds, he can't, it's taking all the jangling thoughts he has and smoothing them out into one single stream. It's hard to breathe.
He knocks before he can think twice about it.
The noise abruptly stops and he can hear someone walking towards the door. The girl who opens is shorter than him, and Brendon finds himself caught by her eyes when she looks up. But he has to ask. "What were you doing?" He knows he sounds breathless.
She blinks. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that sound, I've--I've never heard anything like... What... Tell me what it was. Please."
She swallows. "You could hear it? Really?"
He nods, willing her to not turn him away. He has to know.
"Come on in," she says, still looking at him wonderingly.
Closing the door behind him, he stops in the middle of the floor. She picks up something that looks like a stick and something else that is definitely wooden and has some sort of strings attached to it and puts the string-thing on her shoulders (her shoulders that don't have, she doesn't have any wings either, what) and--
Oh. Brendon can't, it's too much, it's, he's--
She stops, making the sound stop as well and her smile is so warm. "You can hear it," she says, shaking her head. "You can hear it too."
"What is that?" he manages, only just keeping from walking closer and reaching out to touch it. His hands are shaking.
"This?" she asks, indicating the thing she's holding. "This is a violin, but the sound it makes is called music." She keeps smiling, like it's impossible not to.
Brendon doesn't know what to say. "Why didn't I know?" He can't believe how long he's spent not knowing this existed.
"I've never met anyone else who could hear music before," she says. Her eyes are shining.
"But how did you know about it?" None of this makes much sense, and all Brendon can think is I want her to teach me.
"I grew up with my grandparents," she says. "They had--" she gestures at the instruments. "They were deaf, though, both of them, but they had these and they had some books, but it was like I always knew how. I just picked something up, and I wasn't very good, but it was like I just knew." She looks at him, considering, and picks up something small and thin, holding it out to him.
Brendon can barely breathe. He holds out a hand even though he's terrified he won't know how to do this either.
"Here," she says.
Brendon hesitates. It looks fragile. Like a fragile stick of silver with holes in it.
"No, really, here." He takes it from her, but she steps in close and puts his fingers over some of the holes. She's shorter than him, and her hair is as dark as his.
"Now close your lips and breathe out," she says.
He does, and there's a--there's a high, clear sound, and Brendon can hear where it wants to go, so he moves his fingers and keeps blowing, letting the sounds come together and float upwards and onwards and he thinks that maybe it's a little like flying.
When he stops, he looks back at her and she's smiling so brightly, it makes him feel warm.
"I'm Laena," she says, and hesitates. "Do you--do you want to try to play something together?"
Brendon almost says no, because he's never done this and he doesn't want to ruin anything she plays, but then he can't actually say no at all, because he would do anything to hear more music. "Of course I do," he says. "I might suck, but, you know."
"You won't." She sounds so sure. How is she so sure? "You didn't suck just now." Oh. "And you should tell me your name."
"Brendon," he says, and as Laena lifts her violin, he puts his fingers back on the flute, and she's right, it does like he knows how to do it. It's halting and a bit slow, and sometimes he almost clashes with her, as if the sounds don't match, but it's like nothing else, it's like nothing else.
When they finish, they're both breathless and grinning and Brendon wants to ask if they can keep doing that forever.
Laena swallows. "I'm leaving tomorrow," she says. Brendon tries to keep his face from showing how much that hurts to hear. "But. I know you have a job here, but do you want to come with me?"
He says yes almost before she's finished speaking (how could he not?) and she laughs, sounding relieved.
"Good," she says.
Brendon has no words at all, just, "Can't wait," he says, smiling helplessly.
Later, much later, weeks or maybe even months later, she will kiss his cheek when he finally figures out the cello solo for a piece she wrote, and he'll turn his face and accidentally catch her mouth. She'll smile into it, kissing him back, and he won't know what to say but he'll tell her how he feels anyway, all of it, all the stupid words and she'll say "Me too, me too" and he won't miss the wings, he'll never miss the wings now.
--
bandomstuffsit had their fic reveal yesterday, and takkatakkatakka wrote my WONDERFUL Annie/Z story, which I ought to have guessed, because she's stellar at that sort of pacing and dialogue and I love it so much. Also, fuck, SUCH a good Z POV. *beams* Seriously, I've wanted a current-canon Annie/Z ever since that interview when Z said something about having no idea who Annie was when they were in high school, so this was perfect. Thank you SO MUCH, darling.And, well. No one will be surprised by the following: I wrote To Dream Again for
fictionalaspect. ALL of the love, dearheart. I had so much fun with this, and I'm so beyond thrilled you liked it.Title: To Dream Again
Pairing(s): Pre-Brendon/Laena
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst. Well, initially.
Word count: 2382
Summary: AU. Brendon has to find another way to fit in.
A/N: Betaed by
romanticalgirl and torakowalski, and many thanks to them. Any remaining mistakes are the fault of my own fool self. The title is Will Shakespeare's.Brendon takes a deep breath and launches himself off the rock.
Ow.
He picks his head up off the ground and promptly puts it back down again. Everything hurts. He's pretty sure his knee is a little bit busted.
Rolling over onto his back, he lies there and stares up at the sky. It's a nice day. The clouds are wispy; the sky is blue. You could probably see forever up there. If you could actually get up there.
He closes his eyes because the glare of the sun is making them sting. His lip hurts. Actually, his whole face hurts. The ground must be getting harder; he doesn't remember the first time he fell hurting this much. Swallowing, he pushes himself into a sitting position. It's about time to go home.
It takes him an hour, because yeah, his knee is definitely busted. He keeps biting at his lip, which hardly makes anything better, but it's something to focus on, right? Right.
His mom takes one look at his face as he walks through the door and her shoulders go tense, but she walks around the kitchen table and hugs him, and if she hesitates before reaching out, neither of them mentions it.
"You'll figure this out, sweetheart," she says. He knows she means well, but all he can see is the ghostly outline of her wings, her non-substantial but so-very-fucking-there-and-functional wings and he hides his face in her shoulder for a second.
He manages a nod after a little bit, and she lets go.
"Help me work in the garden?" It's not really a request, but he doesn't mind, not right now. It's easier not to think when he has something to do with his hands. It makes his mind wander less, which is both good and bad.
If he wipes at his face at one point, neither of them say anything about that either.
--
The thing is, sometimes he does feel like he could do it. Like he's almost as light as he needs to be, like if he just got it right, threw himself off the balcony just right, he would fly, just like the others can. Just like everyone can. Brendon doesn't like being the only one who can't do something, and he wants this.
His mother tells him to be patient. His father ruffles his hair like before, but he doesn't really talk to Brendon as much. Not that it's a huge difference or anything, but Brendon notices. Kayla hugs him more. Brendon doesn't know how he feels about that.
The thing is, they're all worried. He knows they are. People who don't have wings, they're not--everyone can fly. Everyone. The people in the village are looking at him weirdly. He knows that if he doesn't get it soon, he'll have to--it can't go on, is all.
--
Brendon breaks his arm, the next time he tries. It hurts so much he yells as loudly as he can, and it echoes into the quiet of the canyon where he's been trying this, far away from where people usually go. Yelling helps for a second, but it doesn't keep him from passing out when he tries to move again.
When he wakes up, it's getting dark.
"Fuck," he says softly. It's the first time he says it out loud, a word like that. He doesn't regret saying that, but he's glad none of them are there to hear him. "Better get home," he tells himself. It's really dark now.
He walks home slowly, navigating by the stars. The moon is soft and subdued through the clouds; it's sort of like he can feel the light on his skin. Everything is quiet. It's not hard to focus now, because all he can feel is his arm throbbing. Every step jars it, making it worse so that even the moonlight seems to hurt, his mind swept clear with the pain.
The house is quiet, too. Brendon can hear his family breathing if he listens hard enough; he's always had good hearing. He stands there and loses himself in the sound of them, deep in sleep, far away. It's like he can tune out the pain a little bit when he has a beat to set his own breaths to. Holding his arm against his chest, he keeps listening. It takes him a long time to go to sleep that night.
--
He has to go to the doctor to get his wrist looked at. Walking down Main Street, he hunches his shoulders (his shoulders-that-carry-no-weight) against the stares, because the youngest Urie boy still hasn't figured it out, has he? Someone laughs sharply and when he turns to look, Mrs Quimber covers her mouth with her hand. Brendon grits his teeth and walks on.
Dr Douglas glances him over and his eyes go a bit distant. He touches Brendon's wrist and when Brendon bites off an exclamation of pain, he sends him off with a nurse for x-rays.
The machine is ancient and needs to be coaxed into working. It runs on solar power. Brendon's grandmother says there used to be many more machines, but most of them are gone now.
"We don't use this very much, you know," Jenny says. They wouldn't need to, Brendon thinks, because most of the time people who can fly manage to avoid accidents when they're on the ground.
Jenny's nice about it, careful with his wrist. He used to go to school with her, but she got her wings early, at sixteen, and went off to learn to become a nurse pretty much right away. Brendon tries not to think about what he will do for a living once he's too old to live at home. Wings are--you're supposed to have them. You just are. People don't like it if you don't have any; people don't hire you if you don't have any.
Dr Douglas doesn't say much besides "Hairline fracture". Brendon is sent off with his wrist in a plaster cast, some pills for the pain (they say the stockpiles from Before will last another three hundred years), and a pitying smile from Jenny. He walks home without looking at anybody.
Nodding at his mom as he walks through the door, he holds up his meds.
"Good," she says. Brendon shrugs.
Then he goes to his room and packs. His purple sweater, his favorite book, his knife. A few other things. He hefts his bag and decides it's too heavy, and puts it down again, taking out the book and one pair of pants.
It's stupid, really, to leave while he's still got a broken arm. He should be staying. He should be staying until he heals and then he could take off. But he's obviously never going to figure it out, and eventually everyone else will really know (though they mostly do already); staying will just make everything about his life hurt more than his arm ever could.
He has dinner with the others, smiling and laughing as best he can, and waits for night to fall. Then he goes.
--
It's not easy. People outside of his village aren't any more tolerant towards someone without wings. Less, actually, because they don't know him and so they make assumptions. Brendon gets used to being hungry, to not sleeping enough, and to never staying long in one place.
After a month or so, he finally lands a job cleaning at an inn. The owner, Mr Andersen, eyes him a little worriedly at first, but is eventually won over by Brendon's--well, he'd like to think it's his charm, but he suspects it's more the fact that he looks like he hasn't eaten or slept in weeks. Which, fair enough. Brendon's not going to argue with a job that gets him a place to sleep and free meals, no matter that it really doesn't pay any kind of a salary worth mentioning and is kind of gross sometimes.
He doesn't mind it so much, picking up in the hallways and cleaning the rooms. They're pretty dirty most of the time, but at least it's something to do. He gets so restless sometimes; it's a relief to have something to do, small things to focus on.
--
It's the third hallway of the morning, and Brendon stops to look at the painting he always stops to look at. He can't figure out if a guest did something to it or if it's actually supposed to look like red vomit.
Then he hears it. It's a strange noise, coming from the other side of the wall. It sounds like--there's a hum, almost, and it's--he doesn't know what it is, he's never heard anything like it. It sounds, he can't, it's taking all the jangling thoughts he has and smoothing them out into one single stream. It's hard to breathe.
He knocks before he can think twice about it.
The noise abruptly stops and he can hear someone walking towards the door. The girl who opens is shorter than him, and Brendon finds himself caught by her eyes when she looks up. But he has to ask. "What were you doing?" He knows he sounds breathless.
She blinks. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that sound, I've--I've never heard anything like... What... Tell me what it was. Please."
She swallows. "You could hear it? Really?"
He nods, willing her to not turn him away. He has to know.
"Come on in," she says, still looking at him wonderingly.
Closing the door behind him, he stops in the middle of the floor. She picks up something that looks like a stick and something else that is definitely wooden and has some sort of strings attached to it and puts the string-thing on her shoulders (her shoulders that don't have, she doesn't have any wings either, what) and--
Oh. Brendon can't, it's too much, it's, he's--
She stops, making the sound stop as well and her smile is so warm. "You can hear it," she says, shaking her head. "You can hear it too."
"What is that?" he manages, only just keeping from walking closer and reaching out to touch it. His hands are shaking.
"This?" she asks, indicating the thing she's holding. "This is a violin, but the sound it makes is called music." She keeps smiling, like it's impossible not to.
Brendon doesn't know what to say. "Why didn't I know?" He can't believe how long he's spent not knowing this existed.
"I've never met anyone else who could hear music before," she says. Her eyes are shining.
"But how did you know about it?" None of this makes much sense, and all Brendon can think is I want her to teach me.
"I grew up with my grandparents," she says. "They had--" she gestures at the instruments. "They were deaf, though, both of them, but they had these and they had some books, but it was like I always knew how. I just picked something up, and I wasn't very good, but it was like I just knew." She looks at him, considering, and picks up something small and thin, holding it out to him.
Brendon can barely breathe. He holds out a hand even though he's terrified he won't know how to do this either.
"Here," she says.
Brendon hesitates. It looks fragile. Like a fragile stick of silver with holes in it.
"No, really, here." He takes it from her, but she steps in close and puts his fingers over some of the holes. She's shorter than him, and her hair is as dark as his.
"Now close your lips and breathe out," she says.
He does, and there's a--there's a high, clear sound, and Brendon can hear where it wants to go, so he moves his fingers and keeps blowing, letting the sounds come together and float upwards and onwards and he thinks that maybe it's a little like flying.
When he stops, he looks back at her and she's smiling so brightly, it makes him feel warm.
"I'm Laena," she says, and hesitates. "Do you--do you want to try to play something together?"
Brendon almost says no, because he's never done this and he doesn't want to ruin anything she plays, but then he can't actually say no at all, because he would do anything to hear more music. "Of course I do," he says. "I might suck, but, you know."
"You won't." She sounds so sure. How is she so sure? "You didn't suck just now." Oh. "And you should tell me your name."
"Brendon," he says, and as Laena lifts her violin, he puts his fingers back on the flute, and she's right, it does like he knows how to do it. It's halting and a bit slow, and sometimes he almost clashes with her, as if the sounds don't match, but it's like nothing else, it's like nothing else.
When they finish, they're both breathless and grinning and Brendon wants to ask if they can keep doing that forever.
Laena swallows. "I'm leaving tomorrow," she says. Brendon tries to keep his face from showing how much that hurts to hear. "But. I know you have a job here, but do you want to come with me?"
He says yes almost before she's finished speaking (how could he not?) and she laughs, sounding relieved.
"Good," she says.
Brendon has no words at all, just, "Can't wait," he says, smiling helplessly.
Later, much later, weeks or maybe even months later, she will kiss his cheek when he finally figures out the cello solo for a piece she wrote, and he'll turn his face and accidentally catch her mouth. She'll smile into it, kissing him back, and he won't know what to say but he'll tell her how he feels anyway, all of it, all the stupid words and she'll say "Me too, me too" and he won't miss the wings, he'll never miss the wings now.
--