Avoiding

[itsallovernow]

It's grey here, calm, and I made myself look in the paper, and wished I hadn't. The LA Times put the pictures from Fallujah in the inside of the A section, but it didn't make them better, didn't make things less awful. Working on a new Power Point pres for the same client, and she has pictures from Rwanda and Bosnia that she wants to include and I had to tell her point blank that they were disturbing. Effective, and necessary, but disturbing. She's been working in this field for a long time, is completely committed to it, but was surprised I think to hear that.

In a purely selfish vein, I'm tired of being the technomoron. I hate being the girl who can't do things right. Who doesn't know how to make icons, or code anything without some sort of mistake. It's irksome and discomfiting. I'm the girl who does things well, and I hate having to ask why things don't work. But why, now that I've downloaded the latest version of Windows Media Player, installed it, followed through, all that, do I get vid, but not sound on the vids. This is the opposite of the problem I was having, i.e. sound but no picture. I've no idea what to do. Sigh.

suelac wrote porn (it's not really porn per se, merely an encounter within her larger Casablanca crossover, but it's very, very well done, and well, I don't get to harrass her over very much:), and searose talked about the writing of porn, and it makes me wonder why, aside from some cheek flushing embarrasment over posting Undertones, and really more embarrasment over parts of A Circle Just which still seems to me to be the kinkiest thing I've written, but back on track, why I'm relatively content to be known for writing porn.

I'm not sure I have an answer except for the fact that sex is a form of communication, and the writing of it allows a lot more visceral detail than writing conversations. People tend to do conversation badly. Our spoken language is awkward, full of pauses and missed words and unintential irony and poetics and malapropisms and smoothing that over into written conversation is rewarding, but I like my conversations to be sheltering, holding meaning hostage, and I guess I like the freedom of expression that happens in writing sex. I like the detail and I like the nuance and I like my own flushed cheeks, and the care I have to take to get it right, to straddle the line between soft-core porn and something with more depth, and the pleasure in achieving that, when in fact, I manage to.

And, lets face it, I write better sex than I write plot. And that's something I'm working on. I want to write good plot. I want to be a Searose, or a Kernezelda, or a Cofax or Maayan or Feldman or anyone of the fabulous writers in this fandom and others who effortlessly string movement and momentum and story together so the finished product reads like a whole and not a moment. And again, I'm working on it, but it's hard. And I'm not traditionally good at doing what's hard. What I'm also not doing is my Remix fic, which I'm avoiding like an avoidy thing.

So, since I'm all about avoiding today, and maybe that's because I'm writing about teenages abusing their parents, and am filled with images that I want to shake out of my head like a mongrel dog, here's Part One of something that I think is going to be four parts. (And I'm sorry to anyone waiting for Citrine. I will get back to it, I just have to be in a little sunnier frame of mind). Post Bad Timing. It's also the enactment of me as sponge, reading shaye and reading some of her WW reccs for crack_van, and you can see the influence on the writing style:) Think imitation and flattery, however unconscious.



He came back angry and she came back quiet and neither one of them are a hell of a lot of fun to live with right now.

He rails at fate, pissed off at the universe, at enemies everywhere, wanting her to be side by side in this and instead she tucks herself into his back at night, fists balled against his vertebrae, cheek on his scapula.

Moya hums for her, for them, for their loss and for their return, and he sees Aeryn one morning standing in Pilot’s den, fingertips gentle on the console, other hand flat on her belly. Her hair is so short, dark thick curls not even brushing her shoulders, but the line of her neck, the weapon on her thigh write her name large. She’s still here, still his. But so frelling quiet, sharing her pain with other people. Not with him.

She takes him inside herself at night, closing tight around him, throat taut, whimpering, hands straining for him, breasts pressed flat against his chest, soft nails digging in hard enough to leave welts but she doesn’t scream, doesn’t laugh or tease him or cry, just hangs on.

They haven’t talked of marriage, or of love since they came back. But he wants his ring on her finger, and decides that he needs to give her something new, something large and meaningful and he goes to D’Argo for help.

The two of them spend arns planning, and purchasing until finally he has wood under his hands, rough and scratchy and a color that doesn’t resonate in his mind, but the texture is right, and they start to carve. The arns get eaten away as he falls into the rhythm of wood and creation.

She eventually notice his absence, circles through Moya searching for whatever secret occupies his time, and when he comes to bed that night, she has a piece of purplish wood in her fingers.

“What are you making?” she asks, rubbing the wood with her thumb.

“A bed,” he says. “Something big enough for us to share.”

“Oh.”

He doesn’t know what he expected, but this isn’t it. She stands up and moves towards him, puts her hands flat to his chest, and lays her cheek over his heart. He wraps his arms around her.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says into her hair.

She doesn’t respond verbally, presses her lips to his heart and then takes his hand, leads him to their narrow bunk, strips him down, frells him senseless, sleeps draped over his body like a blanket.

She’s gone in the morning and when he fumbles for a cup on the nightstand, he knocks over a random part. It rolls under the bed and he fishes for it absently, too blurry to actually get up and fetch the piece. His fingers close over something dry and paper and he pulls out a small cardboard box. It’s an old Christmas box from a department store, well-used, recycled for years in family gift exchanges.

He eases off the top and his eyes smear with water. A tiny white blanket is folded up in the box, soft like fleece, satin edging and Aeryn is not the least bit sentimental. He’s having a hard time putting the various sides of this equation together, but he feels a sob hard like a fist in the center of his chest, wonders if they’re ever gonna get a break.

That night she tells him she’s leaving. Or at least, that’s what he hears.

“I just need some time,” she says, that low voice wrapping around his spine, breaking it into pieces.

He hears his words, doesn’t know if he stands behind them, but isn’t willing to take them back. “If you leave, you’re leaving me.”

Her lips are white, and she holds her fingertips to the grip of her pistol. “I’m not leaving you,” she says, raw and desperate. “I’m not running away. I just need some time. Three or four weekens.”

He refuses to hear any more, caught in a white haze of anger and hurt and resentment.

It takes a weeken to make arrangements and he manages not to spend the night with her during that time. He also manages not to say goodbye, until finally some part of his brain smacks him firmly upside the head, and he turns, running full throttle for the hangar bay, but she’s long gone.

Chiana sits by the door, eyes dark, luminous and angry. She lashes out, hitting him in the knee and he stumbles, off-balance, as pain lances up through his leg and his knees slam to the ground, knocking him flat.

“She waited, and waited,” she says. “But you didn’t come. So she left.”

He rolls to sit up and reaches for her, but she bats his hand away.

“ I love you Crichton,” she says, sounding young and alone. “But right now, I don’t like you very much.” She edges away from him, sinuous and fragile, and drops a vid chip onto his lap. “She left you that.”

He clutches the vid until it cuts into his palm, watching Chiana sidle away. Then he goes on a three day bender as they meander carefully into another system.

He wakes up one morning cold, damp, shivering with the vaguest memory of D’Argo holding his head under water, of gulping for air, of choking on stagnant fluid, of a soft white blanket ripped to shreds. He feels like the ass end of a really bad day, head throbbing, stomach churning, the smell of bile and rage on his skin, in his hair and on his clothes.

He drags himself out of bed, showers, changes and straps on Winona. He goes through his duty shift, fixes this, fixes that, argues half-heartedly with Rygel and even fiddles with his module just for the hell of it. The vid chip was lying next to the bed when he woke up, and he has no memory of watching it, but he tucked it into his pants so that it presses against the skin of his waist throughout the day, takes up the space where her hands should linger. He doesn’t watch it, but at the end of the day, still hungover, still wretched he goes back to the small workroom he and D’Argo have created. He takes the plane in hand and slowly works it over the wood, evening the plank to a steady symmetry.

Chiana’s forgiveness is never voiced, but there are fresh berries on his plate one morning two weekens past and melat tea the next day, which she drinks along with him, then strokes his thigh with careful fingers.

“Did you watch it yet?” she asks. He shakes his head, sips spiced tea.

“Do you miss her?” Chiana asks, open curiosity tilting her voice into something new. It’s like falling in love, the butterflies in his belly, the too fast heart beat, the spots of stars in his vision.

“Yes,” he says. “Like breathing. I miss her like breathing.”

“Pilot,” Chiana starts. “She left the coordinates, left the time when she thought we could come back for her…”

This catches his attention.

“I’ll go see Pilot,” he reassures her.

It doesn’t sound like a plan when he says it, doesn’t even feel like a plan when he watches the vid, sees her looking straight at him, generous mouth and grey eyes and seriousness, words soft, words like I love you, words like silence, words like anger, understanding. “If you don’t come back,” she says, “I’ll understand. I’ll love you and I’ll understand.” It doesn’t sound like Aeryn. “But, come back.” It isn't a request, and there she is, contained and distilled, a little broken, but still his girl.

None of it even feels like a plan, but it gets shot to hell within a solar day, and so it must have been a John Crichton special.