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snowdarkred
Lost Boy (the stars breathe in the empty spaces)
Part One of Three
He pops open his laptop and begins to type, hardly paying attention as his thoughts arrange themselves on the blank page.
Three months later, he finishes. He doesn't know what to do with it, so he gives it to his agent, who looks at him with unreadable eyes for a few long moments after. She says, I'll look at it, and watches him leave. He can feel her eyes on his back.
---
He's nineteen and not very naïve, he knows it; the whole damn city knows it. He's in some club, a fake ID held loosely between two fingers as the alcohol works its languid way through his system. It's almost fucking surreal, the club lit by swirling smoke and fizzing blue lights. His wallet has become disappointingly thin, empty of cash again, and fuck, who does a guy got to do to get a goddamn beer around here?
He's drunk, and alone, and he shouldn't be so unsurprised to feel someone slide up to him. He'd spoken aloud, after all, but “sheltered” teens fresh out of high school aren't supposed to know about dark backrooms and aching jaws. He feels it, though, in the rapid heartbeat beside him and the steady breathes teasing his ear.
“Do me,” his new companion says, “and I'll buy you all the beers you want.”
He peers at the guy in the mindless darkness, squinting to make out his features in the grainy air. He can see the guy's eyes (are they green or hazel?) widen at the color of his irises. He smirks, since that's not an uncommon occurrence at the sight of his pretty blues, and takes in everything he can about him. Mystery man doesn't look too bad, so he nods and eases off of the bar stool.
“C'mon then,” he replies. “Let's go find some privacy.”
Of course, in this part of town, 'privacy' means a dirty alley with gritty mud on his knees as he sucks the guy off, but at least the man has the decency to tuck a fifty into his back pocket when he's done, right into the pocket where the condom had been.
He stays in the alley for a little while, feeling the vibrations from the club pulse straight to his bones. He leans his head back against the impersonal, grimy brick and stares at the smooth sky.
There are no stars in the sky above LA, only emptiness reflected back to the hollow city. He laughs, and the broken sound is swallowed by the desolate walls around him.
---
He's sixteen, and a lost boy, whatever the fuck that means. He grew up on the desolate edges of Hollywood, so he can eat drama for breakfast and still feel hungry for a granola bar later. The city lies dark and open beneath him, and he longs to enter her hidden depths.
He smirks at his own innuendo and lights a cigarette from a pack he'd stolen from his sister earlier. The smoke curls before him, and it hangs fey-like and whisping between him and the city. He rests back against the side of his car and sighs. He's a lost boy, an old soul in a young body, a fucked up mess with no real reason behind it. Useless teenaged angst, creeping up and leeching away his individuality just when he begins to think of himself as unique. A special and precious snowflake, doomed to melt with all of the other snowflakes in the warm California night.
Words twist sharply in his head, and he crouches down to scratch his finger in the dirt there.
I am alone, with no one but myself and my own emptiness.
Then he snorts and takes another drag from his cigarette. He stands again and looks at what he wrote, fragile and true in God's own flesh. He drops his cigarette and grinds it with his heel, obscuring his own words until they are barely a memory traced in soil.
He is alone with no one but himself and the soulless sky arching over his city.
---
“What is it?” the girl—woman, whatever—across from him asks suddenly. He looks up in surprise and stares at her a moment. The Doe Memorial Library is quiet and still around them, with just the barest of a scuffle when another student shifts in their seat. Thoreau is heavy on his mind, since he has a paper due in two days about the contrasting rhetoric styles of the eighteenth century, and he's going to be so fucked if he doesn't get something done soon.
“What?” he says, and the word is lost somewhere in the space between them. He gropes for a name but comes up empty. They've been studying together for a month, but he still can't even remember what to call her. Huzzah for college, right?
“What is it?” she repeats. Her eyes glitter under the florescent lights. “Where are you? What's got you so checked out? I've taken an interest, you see, done a study, even. And no one can decide if you're on some really awesome drugs or just slightly,” she pauses, “crazy.”
“That's a little dramatic, don't you think?” he says drily, and he turns away to finish writing his next sentence.
“Is it?” she whispers, but it's only a whisper, so he ignores it. The ghosting murmur of a pencil gliding across paper is the only thing he has a mind for at the moment, though he makes a mental note to find a new study partner. One who isn't so (possibly) overly dramatic.
---
It's the first real week of filming, and he's so nervous he's about to just say fuck it and retreat back into anonymity. The mantle of Kirk is draped squarely across his shoulders, and if he fucks this up, he will forever be known as the guy who ruined the most revered fictional captain ever.
Zoe is beside him, leaning on the bar with a cool expression on her face, owning the character like she owns everything. He feels envious that she can just curl up so much of herself and throw it into action, while he has to quest into the darkest reaches of his own mind to find the right emotion to use, to twist, to forge into something new, to match someone else's vision.
The stunt guys and him have gone over this scene a dozen times, again and again and again in the previous weeks, working to get just the right manufactured roughness and drunken anger. Of course, he knows drunken anger, he knows directionless rage and how easily it can burrow under your skin. His lines are coming a little too easily, a little too quick, and when the stunt guy swings at him, he doesn't think; he reacts.
There's a crunch and then silence, and then the air is full of swearing from all directions. He stares at the blood flecked on his fist, and he sees echos of something else. Shadows of ghosts he won't acknowledge. The darkness is settling down upon him, enveloping him, and he doesn't notice the world until JJ is standing in front of him.
“Are you okay?” JJ asks, and what he really means is, Are you going to freak out every time someone throws a punch at you? Well, no, that's not JJ. He feels like an asshole for thinking it. What JJ really means is, Are you okay?
He nods and avoids everyone's eyes. Someone gets a pair of spoons, and they fix the stunt guy's nose, and they start at the beginning. This time, he has a handle on his memories, and when the fist comes at him, he takes his panic and uses it to give Kirk the intensity he deserves.
No one brings that incident up again until the press junket, and then it's a joke between friends; he doesn't mention how he spent all of that night throwing up, again and again, at the memory of blood on his fist and the echos that won't go away.
---
Fourteen is a shit age, he finds. Probably the worst. It happens, and then he's spending too much time hiding it from his parents and his sister and everyone else around him to really enjoy any 'coming of age' moments that are supposedly laying in wait for him, ready to reach up and shove adulthood down his throat at the first opportunity. Whatever. He's just trying to survive, from one day to the next, until he hits fifteen and can leave it all behind in 1994.
Fifteen passes, and nothing really changes, and so he waits some more. By the time he hits sixteen, he has it all figured out—waiting's not going to work—but he no longer cares.
---
He's sitting on the steps to the dorms when a fluttering piece of paper is abruptly shoved in his face. He looks up, annoyed, to see that girl—woman, whatever—that he used to study with. She's standing over him with a purse and a backpack slung over one shoulder and one hand squarely on her hip. She flaps the paper gently at him, barely missing his nose. It's brightly colored and official looking.
“Here,” she says, and he still can't remember her name. “I think you should check this out. It's not like you're doing anything else, right?” He takes the paper to get her to leave, since he's not really in the mood at the moment to pretend to be human. She stares at him for a few more seconds before shaking her head and turning away.
He doesn't like whatever her calm dismissal stirs. Emotion is a rough blessing and curse; it scrapes against one's chest until all that's left is a hollow husk. He distracts himself by examining the paper in his hands.
It's a flier, actually, informing him that there were special opportunities in the United Kingdom for theater students. Never mind that he's an English major. Never mind that, even though he did the acting thing at Oakwood and was okay at it, he didn't feel the need to actually, y'know, act. He's parents, in a rare moment of pressure, had gotten him to do some work with A.C.T. earlier in the year. He did alright, if the applause was anything to go by, but he doesn't really....
He doesn't really have any plans for his life, since he is still taking things one at a time, but....
University of Leeds has a theater program (or should he call it a theatre programme?) and it's not like he's really doing much else at the moment. Leeds looks somewhat interesting, and maybe....
Maybe he'll be able to see the stars with his own eyes and trace the shapes they make make with his own fingers. Maybe he can lose himself on stage under the lights. Maybe he'll find himself.
---
Kirk is an interesting character, in the person sense and in the fictional sense. There's something about the starship Captain that he likes, and he thinks that this film thing might not be as much of a struggle as he thought it would be. He can already see the parts he's going to have trouble with, and he dutifully highlights them, color coding it for further exploration: Out There Somewhere (blue), What the Hell?(orange), and Too Close to Home (red) are the most used ones, followed closely by I Got This (green). He sips his coffee and reads the script over again, barely noticing Zach sitting down across from him.
“Your argument precludes the possibility of a no-win scenario,” Zach says stiffly and abruptly. He looks up from his scribbling another note in the margins—all but covering the previous notes he'd written, he needs some post-it notes or something—and immediately recognizes that he's not talking to Zachary Quinto in a coffee shop. His talking to Commander Spock, the pointy-eared bastard who's trying to get him booted out of the Academy.
“I don't believe in no-win scenarios,” he replies, putting down his script. He's no longer him; he's James Tiberius Kirk, and he's pissed about the assumptions this Vulcan is making about Humanity. Doesn't he know what the Humans' greatest strength is? But of course he doesn't, since he's just some snooty hobgoblin from outer space, casting judgment on the weak, illogical Humans.
“Then not only did you violate the rules, you also fail to understand the principal lesson.” Commander Spock's face is almost completely impassive, giving little away. But he can see the smugness in the half-Vulcan's eyes, the quirk of his lips in satisfaction. And they say Vulcans have no emotion.
“Please enlighten me,” he says, and the words are tense and sharp. Principle of the lesson? What principle? To be defeatable? To accept death with the façade of grace? To give up in your darkest hour? Darkest hour—
“You of all people should know, Cadet Kirk, a captain cannot cheat death.” Cold anger hits him, and he grips the table to keep himself from hitting the smug bastard. He of all people? The blackness of space, the intense silence that swallows you, the biting nothingness—
“I of all people...”
“Your father, Lieutenant George Kirk, assumed command of his vessel before being killed in action, did he not?” Action? It depends on what you consider 'action'. His mother, clutching him to her chest and screaming for hours on end, watching the documentaries on the holovid everyday for a year, reading Pike's dissertation and throwing up right after.... Action. Yeah, his father died in action, and everyone else was left to pick up the pieces. Because pieces were all that was left. Pieces....
(Chris knows that it's slipping from him, everything is slipping, but he can't stop it now; he's just along for the sickening ride.)
“I don't think you like the fact that I beat your test...” That was the root of it, wasn't it? Even those who throw away their emotions, who bundle them up and shove them into the darkest corners of their mind, even them—they can't stamp emotion out entirely; it's burning under their skin just waiting to be set loose to rage against an unmoved universe. This tribunal is nothing but a goddamn joke, a stage for this Spock asshole to vent his own frustrations over his perceived inadequacies.
“Furthermore, you have failed to define the purpose of the test.”
“Enlighten me again.” His new goal: Irritate Spock. Piss him off. Get him to drop that goddamn mask and face him, emotional being to emotional being. Pound your point into his brain until he looks past his logical cage and sees what it's worth in the real world.
“The purpose is to experience fear, fear in the face of certain death, to accept that fear, and maintain control of oneself and,” and he's no longer listening, because there are dark things flickering at the edge of his consciousness, things that he wants to ignore but can't, and he can feel himself loosing his grip on Kirk entirely, “one's crew. This is the quality expected,” expectations that eat you from the inside out, you mean, “in every Starfleet captain.”
Spock—Zach—waits for him to say the next line, but he doesn't because he's left the table and Kirk far behind, and he's already out the door by the time Zach turns around to follow.
No-win scenario. No escape. No way out.
Jesus, he thinks. Filming starts next week. I can't do this.
---
Moving sucks, especially when your sister ditches you even when she swore she wouldn't. So much for familial support. He watches the cars ramble past and smiles when he catches the drivers slowing down to check him out. He feels like he should be worried about potential burglars or something, but he's not, really. He's barely made it from job to job these past few years, so he doesn't have much of anything, much less anything worth stealing. He knows that it looks like it too, since he's last steady job was at some crappy restaurant who's name he's already forgotten. All he really remembers is the assholes who treat the waitstaff like shit and the fact that that was where he met that one talent agent who pissed him off so much.
His phone buzzes, and it's his actual agent, no doubt calling about another bit part. It pays the bills and lets him met the directors and casting people, but it's not very exciting. He lets it go to voicemail and returns to observing the neighborhood.
The Silverlake area looks nice, and he immediately feels out of place. Well, he always feels a little out of place these days, and it's not like he's not used to it. He figures that being out of place here is better than being out of place back at his old stomping grounds, and it's not like he's all that picky—as is proven by his old stomping grounds themselves.
He wonders if there's any good coffee around here, and if he'll have to pay through the nose to get it. LA sucks, he thinks, except when it doesn't. Even when it doesn't.
---
The press junket is grueling and horrible, and he comes out of his third interview of the day feeling like his skin has been turned into sandpaper. Ugh. Zach is there, of course, as smooth and cool by his side as a shadow as he all but staggers up to his hotel room.
“Well, that was exciting,” Zach says in his best Sylar voice. He wants to roll his eyes, since people think he's the bipolar one. Zach can't go five minutes without slipping into some character or another. “Didn't you think that was exciting, Christopher?”
Normally, he'd be up for this. He loves bantering with Zach, exchanging fast-paced dialogue at a break-neck speed. It's amusing to watch the people around them stutter and sputter in shock when he whips out his ten dollar words. He's not a moron, and he doesn't really understand why people assume he is one, except when he does. But, he's not up to it right now, and all he wants to do is collapse in bed and stare aimlessly at the ceiling, letting the repetitive questions drain out of his head-space like so much empty water.
He fumbles with his keycard and has to reverse it twice, since he apparently was holding it upside down and backwards. Stupid technology. He hates it. He's so old fashioned, he wouldn't even own a cellphone if everyone in the business didn't insist on it. Don't even get him started about the internet. He gets the door open and all but falls into his room, basking in the impersonality of it. Zach follows him in without further comment, and he loves how he doesn't even need to say anything for Zach to just get it.
He flops unto the bed, and Zach follows him, and they lay side by side as the day's stresses fade away.
---
Third grade is not as mind-altering as his second grade teacher had suggested. It's actually kind of boring. He's sitting in one of the small chairs in his third grade teacher's office, and his parents are there. He's not in trouble; they (supposedly) just want to talk about his “outstanding” abilities. The teacher is young, and he knows that she's been making mistakes; it's all right though, everyone has to start somewhere. He understands this.
“Mr. and Mrs. Pine,” Miss Terry says. He doesn't have to look up to know that she's smiling; you can hear it in her voice. “Your son is amazing.”
While his parents are exclaiming with the teacher over his test scores—they are not that awesome, honestly, geez—he's scuffing his shoes against the floor, trying to see if he can tally the number of times Bobby has threatened to take his lunch money this week.
“There was something else you wanted to discuss as well, wasn't there?” his daddy asks after the grown-ups decided that he needs to be enrolled in some special advanced classes to further nurture his educational journey. Or something. “You mentioned on the phone....?”
“Ah, yes, two things,” Miss Terry says. Her voice looses some of it's animation. “First, I believe it would be wise to take your son to your family physician or an eye specialist. He has trouble reading the board in class.”
“We already have an appointment scheduled with our doctor,” his mom says. “He trips so much, it's really for the best if he gets glasses. Something to keep him from getting all those bruises.” There's something edgy in his mother's voice, and he knows that shit's about to hit the fan, so to speak. (His parents would hate it if there ever found out how many swears he's learned from his big sis just this week.)
“Um, yes, about that....” Miss Terry trails off, and both of his parents sit bolt up right and look vaguely threatening and serious.
“And?” his dad demands when she doesn't immediately continue. “Are you telling us that something else is causing our son to have bouts of 'clumsiness'?”
“There are some bigger boys in his class, and he's shy,” Miss Terry says, and he knows that she's showing her inexperience as a teacher here. His parents will be mad, but not at him. He was never worried about that.
“Chris,” his mothers says, and she gets up from the big chair and comes over to him. She crouches in front of him, and the expression on her face is so caring and sympathetic that he has to look away. “Chris has anyone been...bothering you? We can take care of it, sweetie. You don't have to go through this alone. We're here for you.”
He doesn't say anything, but then, he doesn't need to. They take him to the doctor, and he gets glasses. He never goes back to that school, and he never steps foot in Miss Tracy's classroom again. He kind of wishes he could go back, if only to see if he could deal with it on his own. He pushes the thought away, and eventually he adjusts to a new school, with new teachers and new bullies.
---
He writes a story for class. University in the UK is different, but not that different, and he did sign up for the creative writing class, after all. Anyway, he's assignment is to write an original short story, and after stewing for a few hours on how anyone could think anything is original anymore—and narrowly avoiding spinning himself into a tangent on the complexities of universal archetypes—he sits down and scribbles it all by hand.
It's about a boy, who has a happy family and everything he could ask for. Except he's missing something, and he doesn't know what it is, so he searches the deserted streets night after night looking for it. One day, a girl—woman, whatever—comes up to him, takes him by the arm, and points up. That is what you're missing, she says. He looks, but there's nothing above them but blackness, and when he turns to her to ask, What should I see?, she's gone, and he's alone in the dark again.
He balls in up and throws it away.
He writes a different story, about two friends who go to a movie and make fun of it, and he's not surprised when he scrapes a B minus.
He takes the story out of the trash can soon afterward and smooths it out as best he can. He stuffs it into the back of a folder, and tosses the folder into the back of his suitcase. Then he goes one step further and puts the suitcase under his dorm bed, where he won't have to look at it or see it or think about it for weeks and weeks.
There once was a boy who lost something, but he didn't know what....
---
Master Post | Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Author's Note
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 04:17 pm (UTC)He stands again and looks at what he wrote, fragile and true in God's own flesh.
made me actually open another tab and stop reading for a few minutes because I just wanted to savour it.
Longer comments from me later, I'm absolutely certain ;)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 04:51 pm (UTC)I look forward to what else you have to say!