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Entry tags:
New Fic!
Ficlet: Humming
Fandom: Smallville
Rating: G
His father taught him many useful things and among them was the kind of patience that’s necessary in these situations. He’ll wait, as long as it’s necessary and then he’ll be done with waiting forever. The moment isn’t clouded with portents and intimations of a destiny muddled, found or usurped. Unlike all the moments that led to this one – it simply is. He simply is.
His elbows balance on his knees, his hands hang between his legs and the curve of his back is gentle – he is the picture of relaxed confidence. It is the absences that tension speaks heavily. The distance between his skin and the ends of his cell are unsubtle and the way only black cloth and leather touch the floor is telling. The wide stripe of pale skin revealed in the space between glove and shirtsleeve is hairless and smooth, not raised in goosebumps. Winding in swirls from his lips, hot air is caught in the fast, chill currents and is slowly dragged him – he should labour for breath, but his chest moves in a faint, strong rhythm. But for that he is still.
The guards watch him closely for some protest – he has not been a quiet or easy prisoner – but they are disappointed. The older one, shorter and thickly built, fingers his weapon lovingly and stares through the glittering barrier at the prisoner. The younger hums under her breath but does not break from her rigid posture. They do not consider music to be a breach of discipline.
They have a saying – as law, harmony – that the prisoner has run through his mind for weeks. Many times he understood it, but the recognition of a puzzle solved, was always followed quickly by confusion. The meaning flitted away, like water through cupped hands and eventually even the memory of having found the solution would fade.
The scars always heal fully and cleanly. Passing time brings faster and faster reconstruction and his body learns to cure everything that comes along. Viral and bacterial infections, rot, malnutrition, abrasions and breaks are smoothed away, his cells recycled at an alarming rate and his body draws nourishment from who knows where. Certainly they don’t know and he doesn’t. Perhaps some xenobiologist on a long dead world might have found in him something familiar and noted that two species were brought strangely close together by the radiation of her world’s native minerals and a distant yellow star.
They still can’t crossbreed, though. Star Trek had been wrong about that, and a lot of other things. He regrets that he’d never be able to rub that in, to all the Trekkies.
He regrets little else.
He’s not sure how to accomplish that emotion, in any large degree – he can only regret things like forgetting to turn off the television, though surely the maid would have fixed that for him by now, if she still even worked in his apartment. Perhaps his replacement favours a different breed of staff. Short Indian girls in French uniforms, or tall, chocolate men with gazelle-like legs. He has no way of knowing.
His parents often used to argue about such trivialities and he’s always suspected that his mother chose her servants by colour, to match her own red hair and pale eyes. He misses the way she could fixate on the silliest of things, driven by her compulsions to reorder the artwork hanging on the walls of her suite, to follow some obscure algorithm, or a favourite quadratic equation. He nourished his own quirks, his father said, in memory of her. While his father had said a great many intelligent and extremely accurate things in his life, in this he was wrong. The son is simply too much his parents’ child and both of them creep through his veins, bursting out here and there, in the contradictions of his personality.
His father had loved music with a pure and clean passion that had no rival. He used to hum random bars of favoured sonatas and waltzes, but stopped, when they spread like wildfire among his keepers. Human genius stripped and repackaged as one of their fads. The image of his father, playing his piano for them and directed by near-invisible strings that hooked into his skin, haunts him. It sometimes seems hysterically important that he remember standing beside his father, watching and listening to him play.
They might have got along, his father and his keepers. Lionel though, would never have thought to speak to them in the only language they really understood. No one had thought to really study the music as more than an anthropological curiosity – the trouble of having such military minds control first contact. So no, Lionel would not have made the connection and they would not have gotten along. Lex allows himself the arrogance to believe he’d done the best that any human could have done.
Before, he’d often thought that next time, he would pull out goddamn whale song, if he had to.
They hummed, in their fashion, but did not seem to appreciate the breathy exhalations of humans – screams particularly, annoyed them. He’d thought of a million ways to take advantage of that fact and all the others he’d learned during his interminable stay on the ship. Even through the haze that their atmosphere forced on him, he planned and schemed and made ready for any number of outcomes. He calculated his odds of survival finely, considering the world’s air forces and the chances that at least some of the costumed freaks had survived the early strikes. It is very likely that one in particular had managed to bumble through everything and still lived.
His recovery wouldn’t be a high priority.
He waits.
***
Fandom: Smallville
Rating: G
His father taught him many useful things and among them was the kind of patience that’s necessary in these situations. He’ll wait, as long as it’s necessary and then he’ll be done with waiting forever. The moment isn’t clouded with portents and intimations of a destiny muddled, found or usurped. Unlike all the moments that led to this one – it simply is. He simply is.
His elbows balance on his knees, his hands hang between his legs and the curve of his back is gentle – he is the picture of relaxed confidence. It is the absences that tension speaks heavily. The distance between his skin and the ends of his cell are unsubtle and the way only black cloth and leather touch the floor is telling. The wide stripe of pale skin revealed in the space between glove and shirtsleeve is hairless and smooth, not raised in goosebumps. Winding in swirls from his lips, hot air is caught in the fast, chill currents and is slowly dragged him – he should labour for breath, but his chest moves in a faint, strong rhythm. But for that he is still.
The guards watch him closely for some protest – he has not been a quiet or easy prisoner – but they are disappointed. The older one, shorter and thickly built, fingers his weapon lovingly and stares through the glittering barrier at the prisoner. The younger hums under her breath but does not break from her rigid posture. They do not consider music to be a breach of discipline.
They have a saying – as law, harmony – that the prisoner has run through his mind for weeks. Many times he understood it, but the recognition of a puzzle solved, was always followed quickly by confusion. The meaning flitted away, like water through cupped hands and eventually even the memory of having found the solution would fade.
The scars always heal fully and cleanly. Passing time brings faster and faster reconstruction and his body learns to cure everything that comes along. Viral and bacterial infections, rot, malnutrition, abrasions and breaks are smoothed away, his cells recycled at an alarming rate and his body draws nourishment from who knows where. Certainly they don’t know and he doesn’t. Perhaps some xenobiologist on a long dead world might have found in him something familiar and noted that two species were brought strangely close together by the radiation of her world’s native minerals and a distant yellow star.
They still can’t crossbreed, though. Star Trek had been wrong about that, and a lot of other things. He regrets that he’d never be able to rub that in, to all the Trekkies.
He regrets little else.
He’s not sure how to accomplish that emotion, in any large degree – he can only regret things like forgetting to turn off the television, though surely the maid would have fixed that for him by now, if she still even worked in his apartment. Perhaps his replacement favours a different breed of staff. Short Indian girls in French uniforms, or tall, chocolate men with gazelle-like legs. He has no way of knowing.
His parents often used to argue about such trivialities and he’s always suspected that his mother chose her servants by colour, to match her own red hair and pale eyes. He misses the way she could fixate on the silliest of things, driven by her compulsions to reorder the artwork hanging on the walls of her suite, to follow some obscure algorithm, or a favourite quadratic equation. He nourished his own quirks, his father said, in memory of her. While his father had said a great many intelligent and extremely accurate things in his life, in this he was wrong. The son is simply too much his parents’ child and both of them creep through his veins, bursting out here and there, in the contradictions of his personality.
His father had loved music with a pure and clean passion that had no rival. He used to hum random bars of favoured sonatas and waltzes, but stopped, when they spread like wildfire among his keepers. Human genius stripped and repackaged as one of their fads. The image of his father, playing his piano for them and directed by near-invisible strings that hooked into his skin, haunts him. It sometimes seems hysterically important that he remember standing beside his father, watching and listening to him play.
They might have got along, his father and his keepers. Lionel though, would never have thought to speak to them in the only language they really understood. No one had thought to really study the music as more than an anthropological curiosity – the trouble of having such military minds control first contact. So no, Lionel would not have made the connection and they would not have gotten along. Lex allows himself the arrogance to believe he’d done the best that any human could have done.
Before, he’d often thought that next time, he would pull out goddamn whale song, if he had to.
They hummed, in their fashion, but did not seem to appreciate the breathy exhalations of humans – screams particularly, annoyed them. He’d thought of a million ways to take advantage of that fact and all the others he’d learned during his interminable stay on the ship. Even through the haze that their atmosphere forced on him, he planned and schemed and made ready for any number of outcomes. He calculated his odds of survival finely, considering the world’s air forces and the chances that at least some of the costumed freaks had survived the early strikes. It is very likely that one in particular had managed to bumble through everything and still lived.
His recovery wouldn’t be a high priority.
He waits.
***
no subject
That's gonna live in the back of my head all day.
*cool.*
Re:
Glad you liked.
Am still reading the Buffy/Stargate crossover you reced - I was interupted by a crisis. It's quite good.
no subject
I'd love to see more in this universe.