Fic Spam!

[masterofmidgets]

Finally got my writing notebook back from my professor, so it's random story fragment spam time again. :D

 

The scientists and the historians said - or they would say if anyone asked - that back in our primitive past people thought time was a straight line we all walked in the same direction all our lives.

The first time I met my girlfriend was in the bookstore, stretching up to reach the same book on Dali on an upper shelf, and when her hand brushed mine tears poured down her face. "You're beautiful," she said softly. "You're beautiful and I love you." I didn't know then that she was saying goodbye.

She is the only backwalker I will ever date, and my parents will never approve. Maybe they are right. Our love, for her, is a long forgetting - as I am learning what to cook and how to cheer her mood and what her hair smells like at night after we make love, she is losing the memory of our first apartment, our first argument, our first kiss. By the end she is the dearest thing in the world to me, and I am a stranger to her.

She tried to explain it to me once, sitting in the kitchen we had decorated together in sunflower yellow and cornflower blue, at the table we bought at a junk sale and hauled home tied to the roof of our car.

"Two years from now," she said, holding a mug of tea and blowing on it. "The pipes will go and we'll figure that, since it's already a mess, we might as well remodel. We stop talking for two weeks over the curtains."

"But you don't remember painting the walls when we moved in?" I asked her, around my own mug.

"I remember that you remember," she said.

I will never have the nerve to ask her how she leaves me. Maybe we quarrel, as we've done before, and this time we can't reconcile. Maybe she's unfaithful. Maybe she has no choice in it - she wakes up one morning in an unfamiliar bed to a woman whose face she doesn't recognize, whose name she's never heard, and so she leaves then knowing there is nothing left for her.

I will never ask her. The day has already come, and I cannot change it now.

 

Jake carries tension in his shoulders, always has, and the last few days have lain on him like a steel bar. But now, sitting next to Shane in the diner's narrow booth, he can feel himself relaxing for the first time in weeks.

They're all punch drunk from exhaustion and pain, but two days of end-of-the-earth adrenaline pumping through them and they can't sit still, let alone sleep. When Ethan suggested dinner at the all-night diner down the block they jumped at the chance. Even Mara, who is sitting on a barstool at the end of the booth, eating blueberry pie and looking baffled at the idea of being there at all.

Jake doesn't care about the pie, although the lemon meringue is the best he's ever had. Shane is pressed up against him, squeezed into the booth, and every contact point - shoulders, ribs, hips, knees - is making Jake more aware of his own skin than he's ever been before.

"There will be a press conference tomorrow," Shane says, while Jake's mashing the last of his crust with his fork, and Jake snorts.

 

"Like everybody on the goddamned planet doesn't know what happened," he says. "Or did they miss seeing the huge-ass alien spaceships?"

It gets a smile out of Shane - an honest, if weary, grin, not his professional I Care About You and Everything Will Be Okay smile and Jake's heart is pounding and his mouth is suddenly dry.

Ten hours ago Shane almost died - there's still a line of dried blood on his throat where the Orphidian's curved knife nicked the skin - and now he is sitting in a diner next to Jake eating a slice of pie and Jake can feel his heart beating in rhythm with his own.

Blake shakes his head at him. "This isn't a bump on the head, Cap," he says gently. "We're talking profound neurological damage - no cognitive function, no brain activity. There isn't anything wrong with his lungs. He's on the respirator because his brain doesn't remember how to breathe. I'm still not sure what he did to himself, but...there just isn't anything left."

Steve looks at Tony, so pale and still in the hospital bed. If he pretends there isn't a tube down his throat and a dozen more in his arms, that there aren't half-healed cuts and bruises yellowing and fading on his face and chest - if he can erase those out of the picture - Tony just looks like he's sleeping. He doesn't look brain dead. He doesn't look gone.

"I guess a kiss isn't going to do it, then," he says.