my perfect verse is just a lie

let's watch the fantasies decay

2009-08-20T06:25:51Z

Title: let's watch the fantasies decay
Author: Aspen Snow
Summary: The story of a relationship always starts at the end. This one is no different. The tale of a love affair that never happened. In chapters.

PREFACE

—where the stage is set—

Her name isn’t important, his is even less so. Not because he doesn’t matter, but because she was the only one who could have changed all this.

He, well, he wanted her the first time he met her. You might call it love at first sight, except love isn’t really that easy.

She was always trying to decide if she really wanted him. And this is the truth my friends, this is where broken hearts come from—people don’t ever love equally.

And it’s a lie, you know, finding those moments where it all falls apart?

So easy.

CHAPTER 6

— where it can’t be saved—

He says, “I don’t know what to live for, anymore,” and he stares straight ahead, eyes, unblinking, fixed on the road. His fingers clench around the steering wheel and she’s sure she’s supposed to believe this was hard for him to admit. She watches the skin go white between his knuckles. It’s all so cinematic in its melodrama—a dash of stoic resolve, a pinch of vulnerability, and a hint of save me, please—this is what he wants her to see.

She’d sympathize, if she was that kind of girl. She’d put her hand on his thigh, pat it with warm fingers reassuringly, he’d like that, she knows.

Thing is, he’s more pathetic than he realizes and she won’t ever forgive him being so weak. That he fancies himself alone is the smallest of things.

They’re pulling into her driveway when she says “Grow up.”

She slams the car door shut behind her.

CHAPTER 5

—where he becomes less than the sum of his parts and she learns this could be a game—

They eat dinner together only because they are both hungry and that’s his fault.

Of course, had he actually looked her in the eye, had he actually taken her hand in his, established some kind of contact and said, “Let’s go on a date. Let’s change this thing between us,” she might have said no.

Across from her he swallows his mashed potatoes too loudly and his eyebrows tremble unnaturally when he laughs—these are the things that he’s become to her now. He drops his napkin, or his fork she isn’t really paying attention, and when he reaches under the table his knuckles brush across her knee.

The vanilla lotion she’d smoothed over her legs this morning makes her skin a cool kind of soft and she wonders if that’s what makes his fingers shake.

When he sits up again—pulling at his collar and clearing his throat—her skin can’t remember the sensation of his skin on hers and she thinks she always knew his fingers weren’t strong enough for that. She doesn’t imagine, anymore, what the inside of his knee would feel like, or what the edge of his jaw would taste like, or if his breath on her neck would be hot—she knows, anyway, that it would be damp and faintly nervous.

She pays the bill with her credit card and says to him, “You can pay me back later,” she thinks the waitress is smiling when she walks away. When she slides out of the booth she pulls at the hem of her skirt and smiles, laughs even, when he watches her fingers scrape along the inside of her thigh.

Because he wants her and, of course, she wants that.

She’s got her hands on the clear glass of the restaurant door before he can pull it open for her.

She’s stringing him along now.

CHAPTER 4

—where she is too lonely to let go and she doesn’t choose the high road—

She nearly tells him that she will never be his. She doesn’t, though, tell him because he wouldn’t understand the finality of her words— he still doesn’t get that she is a girl who knows exactly what she doesn’t want.

That he doesn’t, can’t, won’t ever understand is her fault, she knows.

There is so much between them that she could use. When they talk she remembers conversations they never had and he says do you remember this and she says do you remember that and they both forget that they haven’t known each other long enough to say yes. There are decades of history between them already and she could, maybe should, use that for something more than friendship.

She won’t ever.

She’ll dream about him tonight though, dream about his fingers in her hair, his breath on her cheek, his lips close so close. She is a little bit lonely and a little bit hungry and it has been so long, maybe never, since her skin has hummed and her heart has raced and she could have him. She doesn’t want him, but she is a girl and he is a boy and they spend so much time together (tables for two) that that the something more they are not is the subtext that loads their conversations.

She’ll keep him waiting forever because she has never quite believed that she is beautiful and he wants her so much that he has stopped looking for someone else. She is selfish and she will break his heart.

CHAPTER 3

—where he isn’t entirely the victim and he already knows how to play this game—

He calls her on her last day of finals like he has the right to crash into her life at any moment. He tells her his unit has been activated. He’s going to Iraq and she gets the feeling he couldn’t wait to tell her that.

She says, “Oh—,” like she has better things to do than react to this news. Because she’s known since he got out of boot camp that he’d be going somewhere else eventually and she isn’t sure what he wants her to say. Maybe I’m sorry, maybe he wants her to come over in that silk camisole she knows he likes—the straps always slide down her shoulders—run a hand over his shaved head and kiss him like goodbye is hard.

When he says “I might die for you,” she knows he won’t ever really get her.

She’d rather someone lived for her, anyway.

—before you think her callous you should know, he’s not a real Marine. Not really anyway. He’s in the Reserves and his unit wasn’t activated. One weekend a month, twenty miles down the road is as far as he’s going.

If he’d been a girl he would have feigned pregnancy, he just wants to trap her, somehow.

See—he was selfish first.

CHAPTER 2

—where she wants him for a second—

They are in a moment; you know the kind, where it could go either way.

They are at a party and she is wearing a red silk dress. Beneath the silk she’s wearing black lace. She’d imagined, when she bought it, them idling at an intersection waiting for the light to change, her knees locked against his hips, his hands gripping her thighs, pulling her too hard down onto his lap. Something like a scream heavy in the air.

She thinks if she told him this he might be the kind of guy who pushes her against a wall, puts his hands up her dress.

This is the moment where she nearly tells him what she really wants—because as strong as she is what she really wants is to be pushed around. She wants to feel like a damsel or a heroine or some helpless little thing, because what she really wants is to be saved.

But then he puts his hand on her shoulder to get her attention and his fingers tremble and his skin is clammy and far too soft and this becomes the moment when she says nothing at all.

This is the moment where expectations do what they do best—fail.

CHAPTER 1

—where it could have been a fairy tale—

Once upon a time there is a guy. And there is a girl.

The guy, he meets this girl right? Blonde hair, tan shoulders, strong thighs and she laughs with her entire face—dimples in the cheek, curled lips, light in the eyes.

He’s drunk this night, like, totally wasted—so there’s a glow, a haze, something soft all around her.

He talks her into playing pool. She protests, at first, that she doesn’t ever do things she isn’t good at.

But when she walks up to the pool table with strong smooth strides, he knows he didn’t talk her into anything.

(when he tells this story, much later, he will always forget to mention that she didn’t lose)

The girl, she meets this guy right? Shaved head, high cheekbones, sharp jaw and he walks over to her so swiftly that she loses her breath—just a little.

He gets her to play pool. She sucks at pool. She hates pool. But damn if his smile doesn’t make her want to be a part of whatever he’s doing.

She isn’t drunk this night but she’s tired, so incredibly tired—so there’s a strength in his voice, a command in his movement that compels her to do what she normally wouldn’t.

So she plays pool and lets him buy her a beer and push her hair behind her ear when she leans over the table and she has fun.

(when she begins this story, much later, she will always start, “I beat this guy at pool”)

CONCLUSION

—where it turns out this story could go without saying—

Everyone’s got it backwards, you know, it’s the small things that drive people apart. Things like politics, things like religion, people have been ignoring those for years.

When someone breaks your heart, these days, it isn’t ever for something grand. It’s for a million tiny stupid useless reasons that matter for no particular reason at all.

and if you would just say hello

2008-12-24T06:16:46Z

Title: and if you would just say hello
Author: Aspen Snow
Summary: Moments have to be made, really-- and this isn't a movie.

She locks her keys in her car at a gas station. That's how he meets her. She's already at the pump, got the hose in the tank when he pulls up behind her.

Before he gets out of the car he says, "She's cute," to his brother who responds only with a shake of his head. Because maybe him noticing her was inevitable-- he has a type you see. And she has this long brown hair, curled at the ends, that is so light it's nearly blonde. She's got stars on her shoes and musical notes on her jacket and the sun set hours ago but everything about her seems so bright. But it's not until he notices that she wears glasses-- square frames, maybe green or purple-- that he decides that she is probably, almost definitely more than a pretty face.

When she finishes, she puts the pump back in its cradle and walks around the car to the driver's side door, moves to pull it open. Except it doesn't open, not the first time, or the second and on the third time it doesn't open she bends down, moves her face close to the window, and laughs.

If he was a better man he'd recognize this as a moment. But he's never been lucky enough for his life to work in clichés so when she walks up to him, asks to use his cell phone, he just gives it to her. When she starts walking away, he goes into the Mini Mart, buys an energy drink for no reason at all (and maybe his fingers shake when he hands over the five dollar bill) and by the time he gets back his brother is holding his cell phone and she is sitting on the hood of her car.

She's got her back to him, those curled ends of her hair are brushing across her jacket and his brother is handing him his cell phone. He doesn't realize he's staring at her until his brother speaks.

"Dude, just go talk to her," he says.

"And say what?" he says. She's absently tracing patterns into the hood of her car now.

His brother turns to look at her, watches her fingers move in slow circles, maybe a little fascinated with her too, and says, "Fuck, I don't know, offer to stay with her until whoever she called gets here? That would be the, shit-- what's the word?"

"Chivalrous," he offers.

"Right," his brother says, "That would be the chivalrous thing to do. Girls love that stuff."

"Maybe," he says, and to be honest, he's thinking about it. Thinking about it seriously enough that he can see the way she'll turn her head when walks up, can see the way-- when he clears his throat with a heavy breath-- her lips will curl into one of those smiles from the movies, the ones that always hit you in slow motion.

He's almost convinced himself to take the first step when his brother starts waving a hand in his face, "You going to stand here all night?" he says.

He catches sight of a white car pulling into the gas station, watches her put her feet on the ground, push herself off the hood of the car. He turns around before the car pulls up to her, says "Let's go," to his brother.

He's put the car in reverse and turned onto the street before his brother can even buckle his seat belt. He stops at a red light a couple of blocks away and his brother says, "Should have said goodbye man. Got her name at least."

He shrugs. "That was probably her boyfriend in the car," he says, "Girls like that always have someone."

"Yeah, probably," his brother says, and then he's talking about tacos and burritos and guacamole.

He remembers, now, that when they'd left the apartment he'd been hungry. So he drives them over to a Mexican place, orders a California burrito (he likes the french fries) and tells himself he didn't actually walk away from her.

He takes a bite of his burrito and he can actually see her there, sitting across from him with her legs stretched out under the table, he can feel her shoe, the one with the stars, pressing into his thigh. Some guacamole falls out of the bottom of his burrito and hits his plate with an audible plop. he blinks at the noise and that image of her-- the glasses, the hair brushing the table, the eyes he just now remembers are blue-- it's gone and there's a ringing in his ears that sounds a lot like her laughter.

When he gets home that night he waits for his brother to go to sleep-- because yeah, he feels ridiculous-- and takes out his phone, scrolls through the recent call list until finds the only number he doesn't recognize.

He thinks if he can still remember her face in a week he'll call the number. And if a guy doesn't answer the phone, that boyfriend he had assumed was in the white car, maybe he'll even ask for her name.

*

The next morning she makes an appointment to get her hair cut.

It's been nearly a year since she'd had it cut last and with her hair reaching halfway down her back it takes twenty minutes to dry it every morning. As easily bored as she is the last thing she wants to do is stand in front of a mirror with a hair dryer for longer than five minutes. She inevitably ends up giving up after about ten minutes anyway, and the bottom half of her hair, which is left to air dry, is always slightly curly as a result.

She puts on a pair of shorts, a green v-neck shirt, and slips into a pair of flip flops, infinitely glad that the days are warm enough now that she doesn't have to wear regular shoes and pants and jackets. Of course, with spring in full bloom the weather makes her allergies flare up and her eyes always itch too much to wear contacts.

But she doesn't mind, she rather likes her glasses, actually.

She heads out to her car-- there is a taco place across the street from her hair place and with an hour to kill she decides to get lunch first.

She listens to Justin Timberlake while she drives because she's been wanting to dance for awhile but hasn't found the time, or the people, to go to a club downtown. She pulls into the parking lot of the taco place, parks in the back corner where all the spaces are empty-- she has this fear, irrational maybe, of hitting the car next to her every time she pulls into a space.

She walks up to the door, pulls it open and briefly wishes that places like these still had bells on their doors. She's thinking about getting a couple of tacos, maybe a bean burrito with extra cheese when the guy standing in line in front of her catches her eye.

He's rocking forward onto his toes and it’s that motion that makes her look down and when her eyes fall to the back of his leg, his calf muscle flexing, then relaxing, she sees that he has this bold, black tattoo of two letters, S and D, intertwined.

It’s the logo of the San Diego baseball team, the Padres (she's always loved its symmetry).

And she has never seriously believed in moments like this because that is the tattoo she had been planning on getting since she graduated from college last year. She'd been planning on getting it on the underside of her wrist, though, where it would be more of a declaration than an afterthought.

The fact that this guy is standing in front of her where the tattoo is all she can see makes her think he might be someone. So she takes a step back so she can look at him better.

He's wearing black basketball shorts, a black tank top, running shoes with ankle socks-- the kind real athletes wear-- and one of those 30's style hats, the fedoras or whatever. It’s got a red band around the base and she imagines all its missing is a feather. She thinks, with the hat and all, he must be one of those people who loves baseball for the way it makes you feel, for the way it sounds, for the effortless way it always, always breaks your heart.

But then she's always been fond of believing that the littlest of things are significant.

He steps forward to order and before she knows what she's doing she's reaching out to stop him. She wants to talk to him, feels like she should. She stops herself, though, from touching him. She's always been good at self control, and then he's finished ordering and is walking away, drink cup in hand.

She orders and pays rather quickly, asking for her order 'to go' as he did. It gives her an excuse, at least, to stand next to him by the counter. She thinks about saying something to him, as he fidgets with his car keys. She really wants to say 'Nice tattoo,' because she would mean it, but it is so obvious and as interesting as she finds him she is afraid of him finding her predictable.

If this was a movie she'd have something clever to say about his hat and the allure of contradictions. If this was a movie he would have stopped breathing for a moment when he saw her come through the door. If this was a movie he'd end up commenting on the flowers painted on her toe-nails and she can practically see the conversation from there, the facial expressions too, smiles even-- those half ones probably where the corners of the lips do all the work, those are the cute ones aren't they?

If this was a movie, though, she'd be watching it not starring in it and so when his number is called and he collects his food she doesn't say anything at all when he brushes past her and out the door. There is a scent, though, that lingers for a second before it follows him out the door. She doesn't know how to describe it, she's never been the poetic type but the sharpness makes her edgy. Then her number is called and when she gets her food she decides to eat it outside-- tells herself that when she pushes open the door quickly, a rush of air stirring her hair, she isn't looking for him (if this was a movie, though, he'd have a flat tire and no spare, no cell phone either and she wouldn't be the damsel in distress she'd be the damsel to the fucking rescue).

She is settling herself into one of the picnic-style tables in front of the restaurant, wondering how many moments like that a person gets, when her phone rings.

A quick glance at the caller ID and she knows it’s her brother.

"What," she says.

"We can't go hiking tomorrow," he says.

"Why?" she asks, as she turns around. Cowles Mountain is across the street, she always forgets how close it is to her hair place. She looks up, knows there's people standing at the top enjoying the breeze, she can't see them from here, though.

"Store meeting. Fucking Starbucks--" he says, "We'll have to go Friday."

"That's fine," she says, but really, she's been looking forward to the workout. She'd got a letter from the UCLA School of Law earlier in the week. One of those short, polite deals-- of the we regret to inform you variety. She hadn't really thought she would get in, UCLA is ranked, like, 13th in the country but still, she'd thought there was maybe a chance someone on the Admissions Council would read her personal statement and say 'We need someone like her here.'

Silly, maybe. She has five backup schools anyway, all her eggs aren't in one basket or however that goes.

"Hey," her brother says, "this guy called me today looking for a girl."

"Looking for what girl?" she asks, not all bothered by the sudden shift in conversation.

"No, I mean-- he said he was looking for a girl," he says.

"Right, ok, so-- did you tell him you weren't, unfortunately, a girl?" she asks.

"Funny. No. Just told him he had the wrong number. But seriously, the guy was like, nervous. Or, I don't know, sad?" he says.

"Sad? Really?" she says, "You picked up on all of this in the five seconds you were on the phone with him? Amazing."

"Shut up," he says, without any real anger, "I think maybe he was hoping I was someone else."

She laughs at that. "Well, that I can understand," she says, and really he makes it so easy.

"Whatever-- see you Friday," he says, "and try not to lock your keys in your car again, I hate driving out there."

She makes a comment about how at least she didn't get her car stolen by leaving a spare key in the glove box, he tells her to shut up, again, and she finally says goodbye. She puts her phone back in her purse after she hangs up and picks up a taco. The sun is warm today, makes her hair feel hot on the back of her neck and as she eats she thinks about that guy who called her brother looking for a girl and wonders who the guy is-- wonders more who the girl is.

*

The next afternoon he goes for a hike. He's been hiking Cowles Mountain for years. He likes the rocks and the dirt and the way his legs burn, already, a quarter of a mile in. The trail is a mile and half long and has a pretty decent incline all the way up. The people who come here regularly, like him, come with water bottles and iPods and hardly ever look too far beyond the path. They're here for the workout. The other people, the ones who stop by on a whim or because hiking sounds like a more wholesome way to spend their time, they stop and take pictures of Lake Murray or the brush which they mistake for wildlife. These people get in his way, these people don't understand to stay to the right of the trail to allow the faster moving hikers to pass. There's an etiquette and it bothers him when people don't follow it.

Sometimes, though, on the clear days the Coronado Bay Bridge is clearly visible in the near distance, arching over the ocean. A blue bridge hovering over blue water. Even he's tempted, to stop for that.

He fancies himself a poet, if you must know, though he rarely ever writes about things so lovely. He's never really been good at finding things or people to love-- can't seem to stop himself from trying, though, and yeah, he's tried. Inevitably he ends up writing about all the ways love just does not work.

He was forced to watch Casablanca as a child, and maybe this is where it all went wrong because he hated it. It was old and black and white and didn't say anything, at least not to him. Years later he thinks movies aren't brave enough, anymore, to give their hero and heroine an ending that breaks the heart rather than mends it. And this is the impression that really stays with him, the heartbreak.

These days he wears a fedora, like Humphrey Bogart, and when he's feeling particularly bold he'll bring it down low over one eye and mourn the loss of words like rakish and libertine and this is the part of the story where the girls always fall for him.

"You are so romantic," they always say with fluttering lashes and deep sighs and he resents them the cliché. He hasn't ever been looking for romance. He wants something heavy. He wants something with enough force, enough weight to pull him and he can't ever imagine settling for someone who can't move him.

So, he wears his hat when he hikes. Maybe because he's hoping a girl will recognize the gesture. Or maybe because he is every bit the hopeless romantic he pretends not to be (secretly he's waiting for a girl to catch his breath).

Jogging the last hundred yards of the trail the wind is cool on his skin and he has the sudden urge to close his eyes, for a moment, and savor. But he doesn't really understand the impulse, he's at the bottom of the mountain now and there is an old man with a fanny pack and knee high socks at the water fountain, a white, four door car pulling into the parking lot, and the sound of traffic, just barely louder than the music in his headphones.

This is nothing extraordinary, he thinks.

At the bottom of the mountain he's stretching, reaching down and touching his toes when a couple walks by him laughing. From his perspective all he can see is the girl's ponytail swinging back and forth-- brown hair curled at the ends-- and in her laugh he recognizes a sharpness he could describe, if he had the inclination. But it's just an idle observation, like the bridge, so he settles himself on the ground, keeps his back to them while he stretches his hamstrings.

He hears her laugh again as he walks to his car. The sound of it makes him turn around and look for her. She's already started the hike and with her hair swaying back and forth she turns to talk to the guy she's with and he can't help, all of sudden, but think that there is something about her profile that is familiar.

But it's just a stray thought that makes no real sense, so he gets in his car and pulls the door shut loudly. Driving home he can't help but think that if this was a movie she would have turned around when he'd shut the door and pined. If this was a movie the guy with her would have been her brother, not a boyfriend, and she'd be looking for the type of guy who could possibly, maybe break her heart.

If this was a movie they'd meet again and she would smile at him-- slow and lazy-- and he'd say something about fate or destiny and it would be a moment. But then, he's never really believed much in fate so he shakes his head to chase away the thoughts because really, girls like that don't exist except in the movies.

It doesn't stop him, though, from imagining running into her the next time he goes hiking. He can see her almost clearly, by herself this time, looking into the window of her car, a laugh on her lips. She's locked her keys inside, she needs his help.

He can taste their conversation on his tongue.

“Hello—“ is how it would start.

and what's wrong with another sin, really

2008-01-29T00:33:27Z

Title: and what's wrong with another sin, really
Author: Aspen Snow
Summary: She breaks hearts, to put it simply.

This is a story about expectations-- this is how it starts:

She's standing in a pink strapless dress, silver shoes, and she's got her hair curled down her back. She's wearing lip liner and eye liner and lip plumping gloss and all these things she doesn't ever use.

She's not herself, when she meets him.

Her brother is getting married. She stands through the ceremony with a smile on her face and she thinks too young. She could be jealous but everyone knows she doesn't believe in pink roses and high school sweethearts and champagne in heart shaped glasses and men who vow forever.

That she sometimes does believe this is a secret—- she's known for years that it's too late to share it.

He's sitting at the end of a pew when she walks down the aisle and he's watching her-- eyes on her face, the ends of her dress that brush her ankles. Later, when he's being chivalrous and wrapping her up in his jacket, he'll confess that he was charmed by her purple toe nails.

The reception is near the water-- yellow lights' reflecting in slow motion on black water and it's a little too perfect. She catches the bouquet, he catches the garter-- their live parallel for a moment.

The photographer has him kneel, tells her to put her foot on his knee. He pretends to slide the garter up her leg, his fingers hover near her calf.

She looks down, he looks up. He says, "Your eyes are green." She falls a little right then, with a laugh. The photographer snaps the picture.

The flash blinds them both.

*

Cut scene --

She’s done this before.

She’s 22 and she’s in class sitting at a desk with her left leg crossed over her right. There is a boy sitting next to her-— backwards baseball cap, faded jeans, beautiful hands—- and when he stretches his legs out he accidentally kicks her sandal off her foot.

He laughs, picks up her shoe and puts it back on her foot. His knuckles brush her toes and it’s like a fairy tale.

So—- she laughs with her eyes and thinks be still my heart, this could be something new.

-- end scene.

*

Their first date he takes her bowling and she's caught up in the whimsy.

In between frames he says, "Tell me something true."

She doesn't answer right away-- she walks up to the lane, bowls a strike, sways her hips side to side in an impromptu victory dance and says, "I'm going to make you love me for a long long time."

She's competitive, you see.

*

Thing about her is, she won't change anything for happy ever after.

See, guys always like her-- she's never had to like them back. So maybe her heart has been missing for years, but she hasn't been waiting for someone to find it.

She hasn't ever been so cliche, she hopes.

*

Their second date he takes her to a movie and she impresses him by quoting Chuck Norris.

When the lights dim he reaches over, twines his fingers through hers, and pulls her hand over to sit with his on the arm rest. His grip is a little tight, though, and not even halfway through the movie her fingers start to go numb.

When he grazes her knuckles with his thumb she doesn't feel a thing and when they're walking out of the theater, into the sunshine, she turns to him and says, "Those are some seriously smooth moves you've got there."

He nearly trips-- she laughs.

*

The next time she is with him she is really happy. The kind of happy where she's extra nice to the cashier at McDonald's. She orders a Big Mac and fries. He gives her a Big Mac and fries and a Fish Fillet, which she didn't even realize was still on the menu. He apologizes with these frantic hand gestures and stammers that it's his first day. She just smiles around a laugh and she thinks that might actually make him more nervous.

They order separately because she can't help but set up boundaries and when he actually orders a Fish Fillet she nearly giggles.

And back in his car after walking through the pouring rain her hair is wet, her mascara is running, she is shaking a little bit and it is still one of those days where smiling is just so easy. She remembers to notice that rain smells good.

She's stealing a french fry out of the bag when she decides that she likes the way he drives with one hand on the steering wheel. There's so much control there. When the palm of his other hand slides across the stick shift she thinks about kissing him, just to see what he tastes like.

But as easy as words are for her she's never really been that bold with her actions. So she digs her chap stick out of her purse, uses her finger to run some over her lips, slowly, like she likes the feel of it.

The rest of the time he's got one hand on the wheel and the other on his knee, pulling at the edge of his shorts.

At this point she's only playing at seduction.

*

Note:

She can't ever bring herself to say his name in front of him.

Instead she says, "Dude--" to get his attention and he forgets to notice what she isn't saying.

It makes him smile, she knows, the way she speaks as if she weren't always a girl.

But really, this is a problem. A red flag, if you must.

*

Amendment:

This is a story about subtleties. They breed hate don't you know?

*

When they go out again he takes her to a ball—he’s a Marine, you see.

They’re sitting at a table covered in cream linen and heavy folded napkins and he’s wearing his dress uniform-— navy blue(she calls it that to annoy him) and bold brass buttons.

She’s wearing a burgundy dress—bunched silk and gold high heels-— and he’s got his arm draped across her shoulders, his fingers brushing their way to her collar bone. It makes her skin itch the way he tries to pretend his hand isn’t shaking.

His fingers get tangled in her hair and when he moves to take a sip of his drink the tiniest bit spills over of the edge of his cup and down his chin. She’s staring and it takes awhile before he stares back. The silence is long, maybe uncomfortable, so he speaks.

“You look good tonight,” he says. She thinks she might have felt something if he had said something more precise. For now his skin in the candlelight doesn’t even shine and she wonders how long his blue blue eyes can keep her interested.

So, when his hand falls to her hip and he lets his fingers curl around her side to rest against her stomach she says, “Try, just a little, not to get hooked on me,” and when he laughs she knows she maybe shouldn’t have said anything at all.

She’s always doing that—- saying what she means.

*

He’s sort of a gentleman and sometimes when he takes her home he actually walks her to the door. He stands on her porch with his hands in his pockets. He swallows so loudly and he rocks back on his heels as if he can’t fully commit to forward motion.

The awkwardness irritates her and suddenly the way he smiles with just half of his mouth as if this is all so endearing makes her so angry. She’s strong and confident and she doesn’t have the time to waste on something so juvenile.

But at her door she says goodbye already half inside-— hand on the doorknob, foot on the entry way tile. He might see something like retreat, if he looked hard enough.

Except he’s got his eyes closed and he’s breathing too deeply. So when he leans in, puts a hand on the small of her back, she pulls back, says “No,” with a curl of her lips like this a game-— but really, she might be lying. She’s best at that.

Here’s the truth though—- she’s so fucking scared. Hard to get is what she knows best. She doesn’t know, really, how to be had.

*

He picks her up from work one day, takes her to lunch a couple of streets over. It’s a favorite place of hers, fantastic macaroni and cheese. It’s the pasta, she tells him, they’re spirals and it holds the cheese better.

His laugh is enchanted and this is all so easy.

When she gets in his car the blue plaid skirt she wore to work stretches back across her thighs and suddenly she’s got all the bare skin of her legs folded up in his peripheral vision.

Here’s the thing. She has a scar that runs along the side of her calf and she knows with all that skin showing he won’t be able to resist touching it.

They stop at a red light and she’s twisting her hair around her fist because the windows are rolled down and maybe he likes the way her hair curls around her face in the wind and it’s here that he puts a hand on her knee, slides it down the side of her leg, sweeps his thumb over her scar and says, “How did you get this?”

She’s disappointed by the predictability of it all and then the light turns green and they’re going and she knows it’s her fault anyway, for setting him up for the fall.

*

A snapshot of her life looks like this:

She’s in college and her mom buys her a plane ticket to come home for Thanksgiving. In the car driving away from the airport her dad calls—- she’s on the phone with him when her mom says, “If he wants to see you then he should fly you home.”

On the other end of the line her dad says, “Don’t ever be like your mother,” and hangs up.

Her parents fight so much—- this is an important fact.

*

They go to a park and she wonders, briefly, if they’ve regressed.

He’s playing catch with his dog and she watches him throw the tennis ball in an absent motion she knows is practiced. He played baseball after all. He was a pitcher with no claims to fame, but his arm is strong enough to give his dog a good chase.

He sits down next to her on the cement picnic table and hands her the ball. When she throws it—- she played softball for years, third base-— she makes sure to throw it further than him.

“I pray sometimes,” he confesses before the ball has a chance to hit the ground.

“Does it help?” she asks but she thinks it couldn’t possibly matter.

“Not yet,” he says and the dog comes up to the table with the ball in his mouth, tail wagging, and he pulls it out, throws it again.

The ball doesn’t arc in the air like it should.

“I’ll never believe in God,” she says, “I haven’t ever been so romantic,” and she thinks conversations like this never happen in so much sunshine.

“Doesn’t leave you with much to believe in, does it?” he says and she knows it isn’t a question-— but a judgment.

“More than you,” she says. The sun feels good on her legs.

*

They aren’t a couple, you see. They haven’t ever been. They’re just friends. But he wants more, obviously. She knows this. He knows that she knows this. But she pretends to not know this when he shows up on her doorstep late at night with a box of warm Krispy Kreme donuts and a baseball card (inside joke).

But the pretending makes it so much easier for the both of them when she doesn’t let him touch her as much as he wants.

He goes home thinking that tomorrow he will make her see.

She goes to bed thinking that tomorrow she won’t answer any of his calls. She’s getting tired of always keeping herself out of his reach.

It doesn’t occur to her that there might be an alternative.

*

Here’s a list of things she doesn’t know—-

-her eyes focus on things with snaps of movement—- it’s intimidating, the challenge it implies.

-when she lets him brush her hair out of her face, run his fingers along the edge of her jaw, he’s sure she doesn’t know that she’s far too beautiful for him.

-her skin is soft; she’s easier to touch than she realizes.

-she dreams with her hands folded over heart. Even she can’t help it—- sometimes.

*

This is how it ends—-

She stops speaking to him.

And then he gets a girlfriend and he stops speaking to her.

Except when he’s lonely—then he calls her, says “Let’s have lunch.” And when she’s taking a bite of her pasta—- he never orders anything—- he reaches over and pushes the loose strands of her hair behind her ear.

He always touches her—- when he’s lonely.

*

What happens next is she meets a guy.

It’s a blind date and she orders a soda just to be safe and she wins him over with her smile and her love of roller coasters.

When he walks her to her car—- she parked under a street lamp, but he’s a gentleman—- she leans against the driver side door, he brushes the hair out of her face, runs his hands down her arms, settles them on her hips, and kisses her.

She trembles and she’s sure he doesn’t know why.

He’ll walk away with the taste of her vanilla chap stick on his lips and this is how it all starts again.

Catch her in the right mood and she might love you for awhile.

(But really, this was never a story about love)

runaway like a prodigal

2008-01-03T07:06:22Z

Title: runaway like a prodigal
Author: Aspen Snow
Rating: R
Summary: Star crossed lovers, they definitely are not. This is the story of a slightly older girl who is perfect, except when she isn't, and the slightly younger boy who is stupid, but only in retrospect.

They work in an auto shop.

She’s the boss’s daughter. He’s a mechanic.

This is how these things always start, isn’t it?

*
She is the first person he meets with green eyes. He thinks that means something like luck.

She wants to shake his hand when they’re introduced. But he’s barely nineteen and high school is still the world he knows best and he thinks the adult gesture puts her years out of reach.

But then she presses her fingers into his palm and her skin feels more rough than smooth— less perfect than he would have imagined. She smiles and she means something to him already.

*

He hardly ever talks. Most people think his muteness must mean he isn’t very smart. They’re right, of course.

He didn’t graduate from high school, he doesn’t know the difference between Republican and Democrat, and he can’t read a book without coming across a hundred words he doesn’t understand. And although he is a mechanic he can’t spell things like ‘gasket’ or ‘remanufactured transmission’.

But she talks to him like of course he understands.

“You know,” she says while they’re eating lunch, “this girl in my history class thinks the Roman Empire collapsed because of lead poisoning,” her laugh that follows is almost a giggle, like that is the most ridiculous thing she has ever heard.

“Some people are just, stupid, don’t you think?” she asks and she’s got her head tilted slightly to one side, so that her hair slides across the bare skin of her shoulder that her shirt doesn’t cover. And really, he doesn’t think much beyond that.

But he smiles back and his next breath is almost a laugh and he goes back to eating. So does she.

She is the first too pretty girl—with her blond hair, green eyes, shiny lips—to rather think him smart than stupid.

When he gets home that night his hand trembles so badly when he’s pulling at his zipper that his fingers keep slipping. When he finally gets his pants undone he doesn’t bother with taking them off. He just wraps his hand around himself and in that first stroke he imagines her hair slipping and sliding against his skin.

He doesn’t even think to imagine her as anything but soft.

*

She always sings along to the radio. Never loud enough for him to hear, but he is forever catching her lips moving to the music— something to do with her lip gloss and the light.

She is the most watchable person he has ever met—she is always, always moving.

*

He feels a little bold one day and when he sees her sitting in the office—writing in a notebook, foot tapping to music—he asks her what she’s doing.

“Writing my personal statement. For law school,” she says, without looking up.

“What’s it about?” he asks.

She looks up at him then and he sees that she’s wearing green eye shadow. He likes it when she does that. He’d tell her but then she laughs and the force of it all, directed at him, makes his face burn.

“No one ever bothers to ask that question,” she says. He feels like he surprised her. He feels like the only thing in his world is the way she is looking at him. He feels a lot of things when she’s around.

“It’s about Montana and movies and baseball and changing the world,” she says and he feels like there is something important in the way she strings all those words together without hesitation.

But he doesn’t get it.

He wants to linger, in the moment, but then she goes back to writing and he really should go back to work. He thinks maybe he imagined the interest in her smile. If he knew how he’d draw it—curved lines smudged shadows—so he wouldn’t ever forget.

*

He accidentally hears her talking on the phone one day. He isn’t eavesdropping, but maybe with her he listens a little harder.

“Don’t—Mom,” she says and there’s something wet in her voice, in that break between words, something like tears.

“I can love you both you know. It’s just—he’s my Dad,” and it’s a whisper hushed with such force that her voice goes a little hoarse, at the end.

He learns later that her parents are divorced, have been for too many years, he thinks, because she smiles so often so easily.

This is all wrong, though. He’s pretty sure that in this scenario he’s supposed to be the troubled one, not her.

*

One day she’s feeling a little bold and plops herself on a stool next to him while he’s got his hands in the engine of a car.

“Ever have a girlfriend?” she asks. She laughs when he drops the wrench he was holding. The sound of it hitting the alternator is so loud and he thinks she must not be the girl he thought she was. Because he’s sure she already knew the answer to that question before she asked it.

He wonders if she’s maybe a little bit jagged, around the edges.

But then she puts a hand on his arm, only the second time she’s touched him, and it burns. “Don’t feel bad,” she says, “I’ve never had a boyfriend. Relationships are really fucking hard to figure out.”

The phone rings and she leaves to answer it. There is a slight indentation left on the plastic cover of the stool she was sitting on and he wonders, for the first time, if she’s lonely.

Because she is so much and she sees the way he can’t talk to her and she talks to him anyway.

*

When she kisses him for the first time it’s in the middle of the day, her dad’s on a road test and she walks right up to him, puts a hand around the back of his neck, pulls him down, and suddenly he’s got a mouthful of her breath.

He kisses her back when she bites his bottom lip—just barely too hard. Their kiss becomes a rough mess of lips and teeth and not quite steady heartbeats. His hands fall to her waist, his fingers press into her hips so hard he feels bone.

He doesn’t really want this to end. But then she’s pulling away and her hands are falling off his neck.

“You better be careful,” she says with her fingers on her lips, “or you’ll always taste like this place.”

A door slams shut, papers rustling in its wake—he remembers five o’clock this morning, doing push-ups with the TV on, something about a high wind advisory— and she’s running back to the office opening up doors and straightening papers.

The pressure of her skin is still on his fingertips and doesn’t know why he thought he would always be the gentle kind.

This is where it should end. But it doesn’t. He’s far better, you see, at being stupid.

*

The next time, her dad is out of town and he leaves her in charge. She wears a skirt to work, like she never does. He spends most of the day distracted by her thighs.

At lunch time she goes across the street and comes back with a hamburger and fries for him and an ice cream cone for her. She has a lot of work to do, she tells him, and she goes back into the office.

From his tool box he can just barely see her and she isn’t, at all, working. Rather he discovers something else.

She licks so, slowly.

It occurs to him that it’s not quite hot enough for ice cream cones.

*

Days go by and he’s almost certain he can smell her perfume—vanilla, or something warmer—even when she isn’t standing right next to him.

He’s at the sink in the corner of the shop washing his hands after pulling in the cars and closing the bay doors when he realizes she is, in fact, standing right next to him. She’s still wearing a skirt. Her dad is still out of town.

She licks her lips before speaking. She’s never done that before.

But then she doesn’t speak, just grabs his wrist and before he’s got a chance to figure out what’s going on she’s pulled them both into the bathroom and shut the door. And locked it. He can feel his heart beating in his skin—this might be something.

He wants to tell her that he has, before, imagined this moment but he can’t find enough air to say the words.

She grabs the front of his shirt, pulls him to her a little roughly so that the weight of him pushes her back against the door and whispers “its ok,” into his mouth.

Of course she would know that his silence was sort of an apology. Because he is less than what she deserves but with her forgiveness in his mouth his hands find the back of her knees, lift her up and her legs go around his waist, her heels into his back and his forearms against the door.

Her skirt has ridden up and she isn’t wearing any underwear because he can feel her wet against him, through the zipper and the cloth he can feel her and the friction is so hot.

Her hips crash into his or his into hers and he’s pushing and maybe she’s pulling because he keeps falling into her—her thighs spread wider and his mouth keeps sliding across her pulse, out of control and so fast against his lips.

And he’s trying to figure out what to do with his hands but she’s more interested in getting his pants off than letting him touch her. When she pushes them down over his hips and her hand closes around him inside his boxers he shudders so hard he swears his bones shake.

She pushes herself down onto him and she is so tight. Her breath stutters against his ear and it’s never like this when he’s in the shower using his hand and hot water and memories of her biting the cap of a pen.

Note:

This is where it actually ends. With her nails in his back and his heart splattered on the bathroom floor.

She doesn’t even say good bye, when she leaves.

*

She’s remarkably good at pretending that nothing happened.

Her fingers don’t even tremble when their hands accidentally brush—his do, of course.

The reason why she is good at this escapes him, though he feels like it shouldn’t.

*

She goes off to college then and her visits to the shop are few and far between. But he can understand that, really, because when she does visit her dad always approaches her with something like dread.

“Does your— ,” he starts.

“Mom doesn’t know I’m here, don’t worry,” she says and she stopped hugging her dad years ago so she just smiles at him.

There’s a world of hate there, though, that she keeps between herself and everyone else and he wonders how she was able to get through it all to him.

*

The end of the year finally rolls around and he feels like he’s lived an entire lifetime, already.

She gives him, for Christmas, a box of peppermint patties—dark chocolate. On the tag she writes you’ll love these, I do.

Later, he’ll look for something faintly bitter in the taste of all the girls who come after her.

*

Years after she stops coming by and her dad sells the business he gets his GED, starts taking night classes at the local college.

Words like ‘denial’ enter his vocabulary. Other words are quick to follow. Like ‘avoidance’ and ‘catharsis’.

He understands her more clearly, now that he has definitions.

‘Retrospect’ is another word he learns.

She was a mystery, before he knew better.

*

Theirs was a story that could have been epic.

She was the sad little girl. He was the stoic little boy. Their affair was forbidden and misunderstood and only half lived.

But really, the world moves too fast for love stories like that anymore.

Unaware That I'm Tearing You Asunder - (Kellerman, Sara)

2006-12-09T03:22:05Z

Title: Unaware That I'm Tearing You Asunder
Author: Aspen Snow
Pairing: Kellerman, Sara
Rating: PG-13
Summary: He can fix this, maybe.
Author's Note: Kellerman owns my soul.

He fakes a breakdown in a church. He lets out a strangled, jerky sound that starts out as a laugh because this is ironic— this is funny. He chokes it back, consciously keeps his eyes from blinking, and when they start to water he covers his face with his hands and lets his shoulders shake.

This is what grief looks like, he knows.

She is sitting two pews over, her hands wrapped around her knees, her hair tucked behind her ears. He imagines her rocking back and forth— remembering and forgetting.

He sits up a little straighter, runs the palms of his hands over his face roughly, pushes his fingers through his hair. The movement is frantic and desperate and some kind of denial.

She'll recognize the gesture.

When he opens his eyes she is watching him. She runs a finger across her bottom lip, slow, back and forth. He wonders what she feels there.

This is how it starts.

*

He yells at her loudly, too loudly like he is on the edge of something dangerous. She thinks something self destructive, she thinks hysteria. She thinks she recognizes the way his foot taps against the floor unsteady and fast— too fast.

She sits down next to him, puts a hand on his knee. Her fingers are firm, almost warm through his jeans, and they still his movement.

"I can help you," she says and she means it. He knows this because he is in her apartment, on her couch. And he brought pie and she made popcorn and they're watching a movie that was a hit at the box office.

He'd never seen it, she was surprised. He ends up liking it and when this is over he thinks maybe he will buy it— and a DVD player, and a TV.

She turns to look at him— the ends of her hair brush across his bare forearm and it's like there is something crawling on his skin.

*

She covers her mouth when she laughs, it strikes him as unnatural and without thinking he reaches out and wraps his fingers around her wrist.

"Stop," he says. His thumb is pressed against her pulse and his training was never meant to explain what that meant here, now.

He lets her go, or she pulls away.

*

"I need more time," he says and there is a crack in his voice and a hitch in his breath that sounds a little bit like a plea. He blames it on bad reception.

There's no response; just a dial tone and he wants to throw his phone against a wall or into the river or off the roof of a building so he can watch it shatter.

*

He hasn't walked somewhere in years and with his hands in his pockets and people rushing by, time stretches and slows and he remembers that he always liked the way city air smelled— like smoke and fire.

From across the street he watches her pull keys out of her purse. If he called out her name now she would hear him. She'd turn around, put a hand to her eyes to shield them from the sun— it's bright today. She'd smile, wave him across the street and invite him up.

He could fix this, maybe.

He's sweating in his suit and tie, it's making him itch. His fingers pull at the edges of his jacket, straightening and adjusting and none of this fits. Not the white clouds or the blue skies or the bright hot sun that makes her hair burn like something he can't look away from.

The door closes behind her and the moment is gone.

He breathes like he just remembered he was supposed to— fast and deep and greedy— and he tells himself it had to be this way.

*

When he sees her again he's wearing a t-shirt and jeans. He's got his hands on her knees, his fingers pressed into her and he can feel her trembling. He wants her to talk, he wants her to help him and it's like they've been here before.

But of course they haven't because she's tied to a chair, wrists red and raw and bleeding. And her hair sticks to her cheeks in dark clumps that are anything but the warm, soft kind of temptation he remembers.

"Go to hell," she says and it isn't a whisper, like he expects, it's loud and she looks right at him and he wonders where she gets the strength. He remembers her rocking back and forth, arms around her legs, eyes on her knees.

There's a deep red staining her too pale cheeks and her jaw is clenched and her breath shakes out of her and she is looking at him like he betrayed her.

She expected him to be good and that's new and different and just more. And he wants to smile when she fights her way out of the water, wants to smile because maybe he lets her.

But he doesn't, he isn't here for this.

*

He's on his back on the floor of a bathroom in a puddle of water— it's cold and it soaks his shirt. The skin on his chest is burning and numb and shrinking and ripping apart and doing a million other things that make him scream. He presses a hand to his chest, he can feel his fingers stick to flesh that is not quite burnt and he presses harder because he wants this to stop.

He has a gun, with a silencer. He could have shot her without anyone hearing, without anyone knowing. He could have shot her in the head, wrapped her up in a clear plastic tarp, stuffed her in the trunk when the sun went down and been done with it. He could have done that.

Instead he sits on a bed and changes channels and turns up the volume while she drowns in another room. This is what he does instead.

It's passive, maybe on purpose.

He watches her jump out of the window. He hears the impact— broken glass, bent metal, car alarm— and he thinks it's the pain that makes him pray that she isn't dead.

*

When he's got his gun pointed at them Michael looks at his brother like he is the last thing he wants to see. And he breathes like it hurts and clenches his fists and closes his eyes like this is all his fault.

He thinks he understands now how this man collects, demands loyalties.

"I can help you," he says and he lowers his gun and what he's really saying is you can help me. He thinks if he had said that to her that day on her couch, with the pie and the popcorn, she might have tried.

They believe him and they follow him maybe, probably because running is all they know how to do now.

"Have to find Sara," Michael says and he speaks in fragments, like the words are heavy, or a mantra.

He gets it.

It's funny, he thinks, the things men have in common.

Come With Me To Never Land - (Sara/Kellerman)

2006-10-26T10:19:55Z

Title: Come With Me To Never Land
Author: Aspen Snow
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sara/Kellerman
Summary: Never say never.
Author's Note: This is strictly a what-if.

She’s been here before. Needle on the table, bottle empty on the floor, fallen out of someone’s hand.

Not hers this time. Not hers.

“No,” she says, because she doesn’t want to die this time.

She picks up the needle, there’s blood on it. Looks around the apartment, tries to think, to react. She doesn’t know what to do.

She smells something warm in the air, homemade. Pie maybe, blueberry.

She smells blueberry pie.

She hears the door open behind her and all she can do is not move.

*

He hates the way she looks lying on the floor in a tangle of her own limbs, her hair spread messily around her.

She was graceful even when she was broken. She carried books to meetings with drug addicts and criminals, ran her fingers quietly along the edges of pages when she thought no one was looking.

She was soft and feminine even in her self deprecation. She was never this hard angled person lying so coldly on the floor.

He smoothes her hair with is fingers, skims the palm of his hand across her face to check if she is still breathing. Her eyelashes brush across his skin when he pulls his hand away.

The sensation is too intimate, scares him a little bit.

He’s not sure he has the stomach for this anymore.

*

She wakes up moving. There is a steady hum of vibration beneath her and she knows she is in a car. The cool leather beneath her cheek is unfamiliar and she doesn’t know how she got here.

Fear steals her breath. There is something important pounding in her head and self preservation keeps her from moving as her memory attempts to catch up with her.

“I know you’re awake,” and in his voice she remembers blueberry pie and she doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to breathe, doesn’t want to do anything that will make him see her there.

“I’m no doctor but there are some things about the human body that I am well versed in, you know, breathing patterns, eye movement, body language and the like,” and the words flow through the cramped space like they’re casual, like they’re nothing.

And that’s when she panics, jerks herself into frantic movement— pulling at door handles, looking for locks and buttons or anything that will get her out of this car. Because her father is dead and they want her dead too and maybe, maybe this is her dying.

But nothing opens, nothing rolls down and she pounds her fists against the window and she knows it’s useless. She’s seen this movie before, bulletproof glass, no locks on the inside. She wonders if there is some kind of biological airborne poison being piped in and she waits for a black partition to come up between her and the front, seal her in.

When he pulls over to the side of the road she thinks maybe this is it. She thought she had been prepared for this once but she remembers waking up in a hospital and thanking god that she wouldn’t be remembered for doing something so stupid.

He grabs her hands roughly, snaps her forward, makes her look at him, “I could have killed you so many times,” he says.

She believes him.

*

She insists on sitting in the front, he knows she wants to watch his hands, make sure they don’t reach for a gun. She doesn’t trust him. He doesn’t blame her. He would have killed her, nearly did.

The way he’s driving with nowhere to go he thinks maybe he still should. They’ll find him, they’ll kill him— her too. He isn’t naïve, he hasn’t saved her and he’s not the hero. He has prolonged her life, maybe, for awhile. But that isn’t much he thinks, when she has nothing left anyway.

He watches her out of the corner of his eye. She’s got her arms wrapped tightly around herself, for protection and warmth. She’s tired but she won’t fall asleep around him. Not yet at least.

She isn’t much to look at. Not with her hair tangled and knotted, not with her smeared mascara and pale pale skin. There is nothing there to motivate a conventional man to throw away the only life he has ever known.

But he doesn’t even exist to people like her. He is an unconventional man who wears suits and ties to put a professional face on the work he does, to justify the body count he leaves behind, to make it matter.

He believed it in all so easily, proudly. He believed they were bad, he was good. He believed in black and white.

She flinches when he pulls his hand from the steering wheel to turn on the heater.

She was the first person he couldn’t kill and he doesn’t know how to walk away from that.

*

She can’t bring herself to cut her hair. He wants her to.

“They are looking for you— for us,” he tells her when he hands her a pair of too small scissors and pushes her towards the bathroom. She doesn’t ask him who they is because it’s less terrifying when it’s abstract.

And she watches him at night when she pretends to be sleeping slouched against the passenger side door; she’s gotten good at faking— deep breaths, slow and steady. She watches how the speedometer jumps from eighty to ninety to hundred when he thinks she is sleeping, watches his hands clench around the steering wheel.

He is scared and that is enough for her to think that maybe they are on a suicide mission.

She puts the scissors on the edge of the sink, runs her fingers through her hair and tries to imagine what else she would do with restless fingers. He’s right she knows. Her hair, her face, her picture has been everywhere. She can’t look like this anymore.

She thinks about him out there on the other side of the door. Cleaning his gun, counting bullets, putting a knife under the pillow. It doesn’t scare her like it used to. She wants to learn how to use a gun, thinks about asking him sometimes. But she doesn’t. They both know she might shoot him one day.

She has a hard time reconciling who she was before and who she is now. Most days she doesn’t even think about it, but today, when he asks her to chop away who she used to be it is all she can think about. She’s afraid it won’t grow back.

She can’t bring herself to cut her hair. So she dyes it blonde instead.

*

Somewhere in Texas she laughs.

She’s got her feet on the dash and the window rolled down and the air is warm and sunny and it makes her hair brush across his arm. He remembers smiling when she came out of the bathroom with long blonde hair.

He doesn’t ask her why, doesn’t say anything at all. She needs this, this small easy thing.

Her father’s funeral, they saw it on TV last night in their motel room. He’d run across it when she was in the shower, and when she came out of the bathroom smelling like soap he had almost changed the channel.

She’d sat on the bed and didn’t move, didn’t cry. He had thought about saying something but he didn’t have the right so he had just switched it off when it was over and turned off the light when she said goodnight.

Their lives didn’t have room for much beyond what it took to survive from day to day.

And now with her laughing like she’s got more than just twenty four hours winding down, he looks at her pale purple nail polish— chipping at the edges— and can almost enjoy her laughter.

This is a moment he didn’t know he was going to have.

*

He traces her lip with his finger and the touch is so heavy it almost brings her to her knees. She wraps her hand around his wrist, warms her fingers on his fast, unsteady pulse, and tries to breathe.

She licks her lips and wonders if he tastes it too. His breath is on her cheek and the warmth of his body almost almost touching her seeps through her clothes. Nothing occurs to her except that he is just there.

Everything in him stops when she closes her eyes and his hand falls away from her face so fast that the callus on his thumb scrapes her jaw. He has calluses on his fingers for a reason, she knows. He turns away from her, all restless and tense, picks up a gun to steady his hand, and she watches him load it, strap it into his holster with an ease and precision that only comes from practice, from use.

There is violence in him, she remembers. It is hard and controlled and his body has memorized the muscles it takes to pull a trigger.

He was going to kill her once.

And suddenly all she tastes are the questions she should have been asking.

*

He wakes up one night with her on top of him, knees pressed tightly against his sides, a hand on his chest— warm and solid.

He’s slipping. There was a time when the first thing he would have noticed was the knife against his throat. Her hand is shaking and it’s making the knife move roughly against his skin. There is something wet there that feels cool in the air and he knows its blood.

He can’t see her face, it’s too dark. But he can feel her anger against his throat, her fear in her fingers clenched too tightly around the fabric of his shirt. She might kill him and he thinks they may have gotten the profile wrong on her. She wasn’t going to break.

“Did you,” and it’s a whisper that shakes, “my…father,” and she puts all the weight of her voice on that word. Father. And he knows what she’s asking.

“I didn’t kill him,” and she can’t see his eyes or his face or feel the way his heart is beating and he wonders how she is going to tell whether or not he is lying.

She doesn’t move, stops breathing maybe. Waiting or deciding he doesn’t know which. He wants to say something, wants to tell her he knows who did do it. He wants to give her a name, an answer, anything to confirm for sure that her father didn’t commit suicide. That it was murder. That she was right.

But he doesn’t say anything because he knows she would take that as a confession of guilt and he doesn’t want to die for one of the small things he didn’t do.

She lets go of the knife, lets it fall to the floor. The muted sound of metal hitting carpet breaks the tension in the room and she collapses on top of him. She’s a better person than him, she believes without reason.

When she doesn’t cry and doesn’t move he lets his arms go around her. Let his thumb find the bare skin of her shoulder and brush across it slowly.

He is innocent of this one thing.

It’s a start.

Precipice -

2006-10-22T00:44:38Z

Title: Precipice
Author: Aspen Snow
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Sucre, Bellick, Michael, Sara, Lincoln
Summary: They’re all standing at the edge.
Author's Note: I wrote this ages ago for the Prison Break Fic Exchange. Takes place before the second season.

For a moment he can’t move.

Can’t move, can’t think, can’t breathe, can’t can’t can’t do anything.

Michael has been moving since he met him. Walking, running, plotting, thinking, twisting and turning at night around details─ times, places, people, things─ always one step ahead of the firm stagnation that makes the prison air hot and sticky and heavy.

Michael is cool, Michael is fresh, Michael always has a plan. But now he is passed out on the floor not moving, breathing so slow like he could stop at any moment.

And Sucre can’t move. Michael not moving, not thinking, not speaking is a scary thing because now, suddenly, Sucre has the time to slow down, to bring everything down to his level. And he’s not smart, he’s not educated, he steals, it’s what he does, he makes his living off of other people.

He lets them do the work, let’s them sweat and labor and accomplish and the he comes in at an opportune moment, steals what he can, because he knows he won’t ever be able to do it on his own.

He’s been stealing bits of purpose from Michael. Michael is determined, Michael is focused, Michael forgets that he is in prison and when Sucre is crawling through tunnels, watching for guards, nearly nearly escaping he forgets too.

But now Michael’s breathing is a hollow rhythm too slow to fill the space in the cell and the days and days and days he has left in this place find room to pile up, stretching the air with inactivity until it is so thin he can hardly breathe.

He calls for help with a voice ragged, breathless, and tells the guard that Michael can’t can’t can’t die.

***

He remembers her when her hair was dull and limp, when her eyes were hollow and black, and when her skin was pale, so pale that he sometimes could see faint shadows of blue veins.

She was sick and her fingers trembled when she shook his hand. His had been firm, steady, sober already, for years. He had been better than her then.

But when she runs by with her clean hair pulled tight and her face scrubbed clean with concern, she looks at him like its all his fault, like he’s evil, a monster who lets bad things happen to Scofield, who wants them to happen.

She’s in that cell tracing the edges of burned away skin, running her fingers along the lines of the tattoo that’s still there in reverent, soft strokes. He hates that she thinks Scofield is something.

She doesn’t ask what happened, she accuses, curls her fingers tighter into Scofield’s shirt, she thinks she’s protecting him, she thinks she’s right, she thinks she’s better.

Bellick is an alcoholic. He isn’t worth much.

And when she walks out of the cell he steps aside, reminds her with a smirk and a tip of his hat that she isn’t worth much either.

***

Michael runs his finger along her wrist, the pulse is erratic, the skin is smooth. It’s a contrast he should remember, but won’t. This doesn’t matter that much to him.

When he kisses her he closes his fingers tighter and tighter around her wrist. She will remember the pressure, later, when she is trying to justify helping him escape from prison. She will think he didn’t want to let go.

He lets his free hand cup her face, lets his thumb sweep across her jaw line slowly, softly, over and over and over again. Like the feel of her skin is addicting, like he’s memorizing, imprinting something of her into his senses. He needs her to think she matters to him.

She breaks the kiss but doesn’t pull away. He leaves his fingers wrapped tight around her wrist, his thumb on her skin.

She whispers, “What do you want from me?”

He lets his fingers fall from her wrist, slowly, her skin is still smooth, her pulse is still erratic and he knows he won’t ever have to tell her what he wants.

She’ll do it anyway.

***

Sara pushes the needle into her vein because it is the familiar thing to do. The morphine makes her numb, replaces the guilt she should be feeling.

It was too easy to leave the door unlocked, too easy to recall the way he tasted like smoke, like sweat, like something she wasn’t ever supposed to have. She had a predilection for these things, secret, dark, mind altering things that seeped into your blood, that course through the veins with a violent sweet sort of fury until they became a craving.

Michael was just another drug and she hated how easy it was to become addicted to his charm and mystery.

Michael kissed her and she thought she mattered.

She pushes another dose of morphine into her arm, too much this time, because it would be so easy to do it again.

***

Everything is so loud. The sirens, the dogs, the helicopters, their footsteps, his breath, his heart.

Loud, so loud that Lincoln can’t think, can’t process, can’t slow down enough to breathe in some real air.

Michael still has metal around his wrists and he’s running and running and running in front of him with no plan, no direction in frenzied movements that jerk and twist in fear and exhaustion.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, it wasn’t supposed to be chaotic and desperate. It was supposed to be methodical, they were supposed to slip away quietly into freedom.

Spotlights chasing them, Michael breathing too hard, feet moving too slow, Lincoln thinks about giving up.

Death, and Hell Followed With Him (Lincoln)

2006-10-17T09:44:53Z

I died. Now I'm back because this really needed to be written. It's short, very very short.

Title: Death, and Hell Followed With Him
Author: Aspen Snow
Rating: PG-13
Summary: It was too easy. Lincoln goes after LJ.

“Too easy, too fucking easy,” and there’s a laugh— short, loud, disbelief.

He thinks they must be disappointed, maybe a little surprised that there was no elaborate scheme. No disguises, no calls from disposable cell phones, no codes to break, no smoke, no mirrors, no plan.

Just him in a stolen car, sunglasses and a gun, he made a neat little package.

“After all that he just drives up,” a man says, black suit, black tie. “Drives right up. That’s what— ironic?”

“Poetic, maybe,” this one has a gun with a silencer that he holds in his hand, casually, it almost dangles from his fingers.

They won’t kill him, he knows. They’re sending him back to prison, back to Fox River, back to the electric chair.

He is handcuffed and chained and broken, he isn’t going anywhere. But the man with the gun is tap tap tapping it against his thigh. The movement is too steady to be idle, too slow to be impatience.

He watches and watches and watches. The man smiles, touches the tip of his gun to his forehead, a salute, and walks away.

They never let him go. LJ. They never let him go.

How A Resurrection Really Feels - Michael, Lincoln

2006-05-22T02:08:08Z

Title: How A Resurrection Really Feels
Author: Aspen Snow
Character: Michael, Lincoln
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Freedom doesn't taste like it should. Michael and Lincoln in Mexico.

Michael loses his mind a little bit when they get to the border.

It’s dark and there is nothing but cool dust and moonlight for miles and miles. Mexico is just there, he knows, at the edge of what he can see. But he stops running.

“Michael let’s go,” and Lincoln’s voice is a little bit fierce, a little bit tired.

Lincoln has been running in front since they escaped. He’s been desperate since before he got sent to prison and Michael can hear the so close so close in the way Lincoln can’t stop moving.

But Michael doesn’t move, doesn’t go.

The moonlight is hot like a spotlight and he hears sirens and dogs and helicopter blades and the way the handcuffs hanging off his wrist slide against his skin is too familiar.

Michael thinks maybe his plan has been wrong this whole time.

What if they can’t ever run far enough?

*

The air in Mexico tastes like fast food and cheap beer and sweat that stains. The freedom here is stale at best.

The clerk at the motel doesn’t understand English, but he does understand exhaustion and American money. When Michael pulls a hundred out of the waistband of his prison issued gray sweatpants with shaky hands (it’s a dead man’s money after all) the man behind the counter doesn’t ask any questions. Just takes the bill in a sweaty hand and tosses them a key.

The room has no windows, just one bed and one door and even though the walls are brown and the carpet is brown and even though he is in another country, he sees grey, he sees metal, he sees bars.

He hadn’t expected to be so stifled when they finally got here. This hadn’t been the plan, standing in an open doorway holding his breath waiting for everything to change.

He’d planned on breathing.

*

The first morning they are in Mexico Michael buys them both clothes with pockets and shoes with laces.

When they get hungry Lincoln insists on going to a diner where they don’t have to stand in line with trays. When the waitress asks them what they want Lincoln orders a hamburger and fries without looking at the menu like he has planned this moment.

Michael holds onto the menu, his fingers pressed hard into the cool laminated paper and he tries to take comfort in the feel of something so common.

But he can’t. He doesn’t know what to order.

He never planned this moment.

*

Lincoln never asks Michael why they always stay in towns on the beach.

Michael watches the way Lincoln walks now, carelessly with hands in his pockets and slow. So slow that Michael has to stop every once in awhile and wait for Lincoln and his long lazy strides to catch up.

He watches how Lincoln doesn’t run anymore and Michael doesn’t know how to tell him that he needs to be able to see the wide open space of the ocean so that he doesn’t forget, again, that there are places beyond places.

The sand isn’t soft and it isn’t white, but it’s warm under his feet and the way it sinks and collapses with each step lulls him into an easier rhythm.

Forces him to slow down and pull his feet out of the sand.

The sand is warm and it is the first observation Michael has that is completely useless.

*

They stop at a mini mart to buy $6.32 worth of aspirin and candy bars. Michael pays with a twenty dollar bill and when the cashier gives him the change, Michael gives Lincoln the 68¢ of loose coins.

When they walk out of the store Michael bites into a Snickers bar and Lincoln swallows three aspirin dry, walks across the street to the payphone, puts in a couple of coins and puts his hand on the phone.

But he doesn’t pick it up, he never does.

There are some things that even Mexico can’t give back.

So wherever they go Michael carries the bills. Lincoln carries the change─ because Michael can only plan and Lincoln can only hope.

*

Michael gets drunk one night, drinks too much watered down vodka and everything becomes so heavy that he can’t move.

Lincoln is standing not far away with the same beer in his hand that he been casually sipping the whole night. It angers Michael that he can do that, stand and sip, stand and sip, that he can keep doing something so meaningless over and over again like its nothing.

Like all of this is nothing.

But it’s everything to Michael, fucking everything. It’s his life now, bars and motels and beaches with sand shades too dark to be paradise.

“I’m not supposed to be here you know,” he says mostly to himself. But he thinks Lincoln hears it because he finishes his beer in one long swallow, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and slams the empty beer bottle on the table.

“Let’s go,” he says and Michael remembers the last time Lincoln said those words to him he was desperate and running.

“It’s your fault,” and Michael can’t stop himself, “it’s your fault,” he says again and again and again until the world becomes too heavy and everything goes black.

When Michael wakes up in the morning he’s too nauseous to remember anything from the night before.

They pass a payphone when they walk into town and Michael stops, but Lincoln keeps walking.

Michael feels like he should apologize for something, but he doesn’t know what.

*

He sees her picture on the TV. He can’t make out much of the rapid fire Spanish, but he catches one word, muerto.

Dead.

He buys himself a twenty five cent beer because at least it wasn’t Lincoln.

He goes to the beach that night, buries his feet in the sand, listens to the water─ smooth and quiet, and tells himself it wasn’t his fault.

*

Michael breaks when there’s no more Mexican space to run through.

“I don’t have a plan,” he says and he thinks maybe he’ll just sit here on the edge until everything changes, until he finds something familiar he can hold onto.

“I know,” Lincoln says and he wraps his fingers around Michael’s wrist, firm and steady, and drags him along, back to the coast, back to the beach. Like he’s always known that Michael was breaking, like he has always known that Michael needed something constant and endless to hold him in place.

“What are we going to do?” and it’s the first question Michael has asked anyone, anyone, since he got himself sent to prison, since he decided that his brother’s life was worth more than his own.

“I’ll think of something,” Lincoln says and he believes him.

It has something to do with the way Lincoln’s fingers are wrapped around his pulse, Michael thinks, holding it steady.

Prison Break...And Stuff

2006-05-02T22:20:19Z

So, I've unearthed myself from the hell that is school and midterms and watched the new episode of Prison Break.

Totally did NOT expect Westmoreland to bust out a shovel and beat the shit out of Bellick. He came out of nowhere, he was like ninja!Westmoreland.

I find it hard to believe that our super detailed orientated genius Michael, who pretended to be crazy, could be so clueless as to not know that Tweener is ratting them out to Bellick. I mean seriously, Bellick finds the hole after Tweener joins P.I., and the dude just looks suspicious. Connect. The. Dots. Already. I mean, sure, I can understand Michael wanting to save Tweener since he failed Seth...but still, come on. But hey, for all I know Michael has developed a terribly long, complicated plan for using Tweener for...something.

The montage at the end set to House music? Seriously made me wonder if my roommate had stolen my DVDs of House and was secretly watching them.

I have obessive love for the way T-Bag says pronto. Also, that he choose brussel sprouts to cover his scent. Love.

"Whatever you may think of me, this is about Lincoln." Thank you thank you THANK YOU for saying that. Because the whole, 'yes I was using you before, but now I like you thing' was irritating.

Nick trying to point the gun at Veronica, made me laugh.

When Michael was in Lincoln's cell, and Linc was telling him to just leave him behind, I kept waiting for Michael to say 'I won't leave a man behind' because clearly Michael is like the General of his little break-out Army.

I knew that Michael somehow was the reason why the model fell apart and that he wanted to get back into Pope's office. But I seriously did not expect him to pull out the shank on Pope. Awesome. Michael loves Lincoln.

In news completely unrelated to Prison Break or School, I have become addicted to ljsecret and it has made me come to the conclusion that everyone in the world either 1. Is secretly in love with someone they aren't supposed to love, 2. Depressed, 3. Really really horny, 4. A little too fixated on their pets, or 5. Just flat out insane.

It's Like I Can't Breathe - Michael

2006-04-13T08:05:07Z

Title: It's Like I Can't Breathe
Author: Aspen Snow
Character: Michael
Rating: PG
Summary: Lincoln is arrested. Michael breaks.
Author's Note: Written for the psych_30 prompt Catharsis

Lincoln’s been arrested for murder, Veronica tells him. And he can’t believe it, doesn’t even know how to begin believing something like that, not when he just saw Lincoln yesterday clutching at the ends of a well worn jacket, freezing and pleading and too desperate to stand up straight like a man.

Everything in him liquefies, threatens to send him slipping, sliding softly to the floor and all he can do is breathe.

Veronica talks through his silence, fills the space of his office with words that describe what his brother did. But the words murder and dead and Lincoln are so big and heavy that he doesn’t have any room for what Veronica is saying now, so all there is for him in this moment after hearing what he can’t, doesn’t want to, understand, are her lips trembling.

And then more than shock, more than disbelief, more than the thin flash of grief, there’s guilt.

He shouldn’t have walked away. He should have answered the phone. He should have known that this time was different.

He should have he should have he should have.

But he’d been drunk and his own kind of desperate and Lincoln had been so strong, so in love with her that he thought he could find something there on her lips too, something that tasted like who his brother used to be.

Veronica’s crying now and he’s trying to stay standing and neither of them are saying that Lincoln is innocent, that he couldn’t have done this.

He hates himself for that, hates Lincoln more.

He wants to believe he wants to believe he wants to believe.

“Its not─” and his breath evaporates, it’s too much too much too much.

Veronica gets it though, turns on the TV and lets him see.

Lincoln in handcuffs is a jagged thing; a pain so hard it claws at him, rips the silence right out of him and leaves him gasping around pressure too choked to be defined.

He breaks more than he wants to. He didn’t know, didn’t have time to think that it would hurt like this.

He’d forgotten how much he loved him.

So much. He’d forgotten.

He’d forgotten so much.

Imaginary Elegies - Michael

2006-03-23T09:15:57Z

Title: Imaginary Elegies
Author: Aspen Snow
Character: Michael
Rating: PG
Summary: Prison isn't what he expected. He forgets. Hope can't be had.

Prison isn't what he expected it to be. There is no solitude, no quiet.

Even at night, locked in cells sleeping in the dark, he hears whispers and movement, feels the weight of the thoughts and dreams of thousands of men pressing down on him─ hot and sticky. His nightmares, sometimes, are hard and fast impressions of these thoughts that hang in the air like smoke.

But they only haunt when they brush by, when he breathes too deeply.

Most times, his nightmares are his. He dreams, then, of his brother dying because he is guilty. He dreams of being wrong.

He wonders if the weight of his nightmares sometimes fall into the dreams of his brother. Because every once in awhile he dreams of being in this place, and that is his brother's nightmare, he knows.

*

In church, he always sits in the pew behind his brother, he likes to watch him sitting there without him knowing, likes to let his eyes linger in leisure over his profile.

He forgets it everyday, loses its simplistic shape in the chaos of details he can't help but hold onto. He tries to make up for it now, by tracing and memorizing the curves and lines. But his brother abandoned him once, so he lets himself forget, a day at a time, how the shadows dull the strong edges of his face, make him nothing more than a lonely man about to break.

*

The men around him pray with heads bowed, they hope with whispered breaths.

But he knows better, it's why he watches, why he doesn't search for absolution in the dark with eyes closed.

Hope, he knows, is alive only in sight for a second before the eye blinks it away.

It is there only in the way his brother's fingers are folded neatly upon each other, still within their metal shackles, at peace, for a moment.

But then he blinks, and that second of glimpsed hope is gone, his brother's fingers move, searching for a bit of free air, restless, as limbs too long restrained are apt to be.

Hope can't be had. It can only be seen out of the corner of the eye, in moments too tiny to be believed in, in glimpses so temporary they tempt the senses to savor.

It's why he is here, this temporary hope that entices him so fleetingly to believe, it's why he has this plan. In those small small moments before he blinks his brother sits so still that he forgets that he is a man dying in minutes and hours and days.

Hope breathes in, breathes out.

It's there, and then it isn't.

In prison, he's learned to watch.

Hope is there only in the red, yellow, green, stained glass windows that bring in rays of light alive with color, so vibrant with breath and body amongst all the muted darkness.

Stasis - Michael

2006-03-20T05:21:02Z

Title: Stasis
Author: Aspen Snow
Character: Michael
Rating: PG-13
Summary: In the past and the present, Michael watches two people die.

stasis, noun : a slowing of the current of circulating blood

His fingers shake in the absence of movement; they dig into the flesh of his palm with the want to act.

They put him in handcuffs and it's all he can do not to scream and rage and beg and plead for them take them off just this once.

A shiver of need races down his spine, he trembles at its ferocity.

*

"I'm fine sweetie," she said, a palm pressed against her forehead, a hand braced against the counter.

He could feel the hot air from the oven on his face; he smelled cookies in the air. They were on the floor now, twelve of them, he counted.

"Just a little dizzy," she said, when he continued to stand there.

Her fingers were cold when they pressed against his cheek.

*

He doesn't realize he is crying until he tastes the salt on his lips.

It's a bitter taste that he can't bring himself to swallow.

He holds that small bit of moisture on his tongue, lets it mix with his saliva, and spits it out when he needs to breathe.

He keeps his mouth closed after that.

*

"And they lived happily ever after," she said, closing the book, "Now, time for you to go to bed."

"Are you going to live happily ever after too Mom? Like the princess in the book?" he asked.

"Of course, now come on, bed time Mister."

"When?" he asked, "When are you going to live happily ever after?"

She kissed his forehead, "Soon," she whispered.

He fell asleep with her fingers brushing through his hair.

*

The sound of feet shuffling and chains moving and people whispering is so loud that he can't see anything.

He hears a key turning in a lock once, twice.

More chains.

Solid footsteps.

A door closing.

When he hears wood creaking his fingers violently jerk across the palm of his hand, drawing blood that pools in the creases of his skin.

He can see everything now.

*

The phone made her sad. She cried every time she answered it.

So he hid it one day when she was at work. Stashed it at the bottom of his toy box, where she couldn't hear it ring.

When she came home that night she made spaghetti with meatballs and hummed while she stirred the sauce.

She found the phone the next day when she was cleaning his room.

The next time she answered the phone she didn't cry and when she hung up she went into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

He doesn't hear her cry anymore.

*

He watches them strap him in, wonders if he is counting down.

Wonders how he is filling up the last minutes of his life.

The guilt crashes over him in waves- steals his breath.

Everything is heavy, of a sudden, and he thinks, even without the handcuffs he wouldn't be able to move.

*

No one ever laughs in the hospital.

It's always cold and when he walks his footsteps echo down the long white hallways.

It scares him.

"Do people really live here Mom?" he asks.

She looks sad for a moment before she answers. "No honey, people don't live here."

He wonders, then, why people have to be here.

Why she has to be here.

*

On opposite sides of the glass they both sit in chairs- restrained and powerless.

The parallel scares him.

When they pull the switch and the lights flicker he braces himself for the jolt of somehting hot and hard and unnatural.

He is surprised when he feels nothing, forgets that he was never meant to.

When he sees smoke and smells the razor sharp edge of something burnt he hates himself for letting it end like this.

"I had a plan," he says.

*

He counted every time the machine next to her bed beeped. He got all the way to 4,652 one day before it stopped.

He repeated the number in his head over and over again so he wouldn't forget it while he watied for the machine to start again.

He didn't hear the nurses when they came in, he was saying the number out loud now, he could feel it trying to slip away.

"Four six five two, four six five two, four six five two..."

Loving You Was What I Was Trying To Do - Lincoln/Veronica

2006-03-14T23:42:05Z

Title: Loving You Was What I Was Trying To Do
Author: Aspen Snow
Pairing: Lincoln/Veronica
Summary: A collection of sentences delving into the relationshp of Lincoln/Veronica.
Author's Note: Written for the 1sentence challenge.
This list is going to be continually updated as more sentences are written, eventually, once all 50 sentences are done I will link them to my 1sentence table.

#01 - Motion
He fell asleep to the steady motion of her breathing─ in out in out in out─ and as her warm breath settled on his skin he wondered if it was possible to love the way a person slept.

#2 – Cool
The first time he kissed her it was like sipping a glass of cool cool water under the hot hot sun─ nothing had ever tasted so good.

#3 – Young
In the right light, sometimes, he can see her lips curling around a whimsical giggle, the kind she used to hide behind the back of her hand when useless things amused her for no reason and he wonders, now, if she remembers ever being that young.

#4 – Last
They were a cliché that was never meant to last; he was the bad boy, she was the good girl.

#5 – Wrong
He wonders if she ever thinks he was wrong, if he was lying when he said she would be better of without him.

#6 – Gentle
His calloused fingers always scraped across her skin and he often wished for them to be smooth enough to be gentle─ maybe then, he thinks, he would still remember how soft she was.

#7 – One
He never believed in soul mates and true love and big gestures, but the way she looked at him so long like it was all she wanted to do was one thing he could believe in.

#8 – Thousand
He knows her favorite color, her favorite movie, her favorite pair of jeans, her favorite smell and a thousand other things about her that he sometimes wants to forget and sometimes can’t believe he ever lived without.

#9 – King
She was his Guinevere to his King Arthur─ she was always destined to leave him.

#10 – Learn
He learned she was ticklish when he was taking her shirt off and his fingers brushed too lightly across her ribs, she laughed, swatted his hand away, “I guess you know my secret now,” she’d said, and then she picked up here he had left off, pulled her shirt over her head, dropped it on the floor, and waited.

#11 – Blur
He’d set a firm line between them, she was too young, he was too old─ he blurred that line the first chance he got.

#12 – Wait
He said wait; she left the next day for college and it took her years to come back.

#13 – Change
By the time she did come back everything had changed and she was smart enough to want more out life than him.

#14 – Command
He lost control of his life when his mother died and he got it back the first time Veronica said, “I love you.”

#15 – Hold
He held her hand and pulled her along as they rushed through the rain towards the bus stop and she didn’t stop holding his hand, even when there nothing to run from and nowhere to rush to.

#16 – Need
He’d thought about telling her that he wanted her to come back, but she was the one who left and she didn’t deserve to know that he needed her.

#17 – Vision
He had visions of her dying, of losing her forever, of his heart breaking, but he never thought he would mourn losing her because she lived and he died.

#18 – Attention
“Are you listening to me?” she would say, and he would nod, but his attention was distracted by other questions─ like why she was with him in the first place.

#19 – Soul
His soul is going to hell, he knows, he has done a lot of bad things in his life, but her, her soul is going to heaven if only because she tried to save a dying man.

#20 – Picture
A picture speaks a thousand words, he has heard this before, and so he stares at the picture of her in his cell for hours waiting for it to say something that will make all this easier.

#21 – Fool
He was a fool to love a woman like her, but he is glad, for once that he was stupid enough to make that mistake.

#22 – Mad
The only time he was ever truly mad at her was that first time, when she was at school, that she didn’t call him, he would rather she said she didn’t love him than for her to forget to care about him at all.

#23 - Child
As a child, he never thought much about love, but now, with her hand in his, cool and smooth, all he can think about is holding onto it.

#24 – Now
Now he thinks that she doesn’t deserve him.

#25 – Shadow
He thinks he is a lot like Peter Pan, if only because they are both always chasing something that can’t ever really be touched.

#26 – Goodbye
He never actually said goodbye to her until the night he almost killed a man with trembling fingers and a loaded gun.

#27 – Hide
“Hide and I’ll find you,” he said, and then he covered his eyes, counted to one hundred, and when he turned around again she was gone.

#28 – Fortune
He used to spend his time planning different ways to rob a bank, he wonders now if he could have stolen a different life with that fortune, one where he had enough to keep her.

#29 – Safe
He had never thought about keeping her safe, just keeping her, and when he hears about men with black suits and silencers hunting her he thinks that maybe he should have tried.

#30 – Ghost
He has been locked behind metal and cement for so long that the memory of her touch is nothing but ghosts on his skin.

#31 – Book
He doesn’t have a favorite book, when she comes back from college she has too many─ he still has none.

#32 – Eye
She didn’t have the most beautiful eyes, but they were a common shade of brown that he saw everywhere and in everything; that, he thought, was another kind of beautiful.

#33 - Never
When she kisses him he nearly forgets his name─ he never thought she would ever be his.

#34 – Sing
She always sang along to the radio when they were in the car and when he told her that she wasn’t a good singer she always sang louder─ he wonders if she ever has a reason to sing louder these days.

#35 – Sudden
Missing her was a sudden development, one day she was here, the next she was gone and he wanted her back.

#36 – Stop
“Stop,” she says, and he does and he lets her walk out of the prison without telling her that he is innocent, he is too used to her walking away.

#37 – Time
He has no time in prison, just this small space without her, just this small space until he dies.

#38 – Wash
He washed her scent out of his sheets with laundry soap and hot water, he can still smell her though, when he sleeps and he hates her for leaving him something so small.

#39 – Torn
She was always torn between what she wanted and what she needed and he never knew which category he fell into.

#40 – History
He invents a new history for them sometimes; one where he meets her when he is still in school and his mother is still alive, she would have liked Veronica, he thinks, they had the same smile.

#41 – Power
“The power’s out,” he says, and she laughs, starts lighting candles, “Romantic isn’t it?” she says─ he agrees.

#42 – Bother
In prison he doesn’t bother praying for her to come back, he is a helpless man chained and shackled, he doesn’t believe in God anyway.

#43 – God
He prays she thinks of him long enough to make a memory that won’t die.

#44 – Wall
There are marks on the wall next to his door, she points to one that reaches her stomach, “I bet you were cute when you were this small,” she says.

#45 – Naked
He had seen her half naked on accident once, walked in on her while she was changing, caught a glimpse of a pale blue cotton bra before she threw a pillow at his head, he still thinks it is the sexiest piece of lingerie she has ever owned.

#46 - Drive
She drives to the prison when she visits─ hands on the steering wheel, foot on the gas─ and he thinks about asking her if the roads are still black and long.

#47 - Harm
"You're not...I can't do this anymore," she says, and before she can walk out the door he's clamped a hand around her wrist, clenching, pulling, forcing her to stay with fingers too rough and hard for her delicate skin- there will be bruises in the morning, he knows.

#48 - Precious
Nothing had ever been precious to him until he had been locked up in a place too small for remembering and then, suddenly, the idle way she twisted her hair around her finger was a memory he wished he had never forgotten.

#49 - Hunger
Prison food is stagnant and bland, there is nothing about it than can be savored, which is why, when she kisses him again, he tastes only the peaches she had for lunch- he hungers now for things far more tangible than her.

#50 - Believe
"I don't believe you," she says, and she turns her back, walks away- he isn't surprised.

Lincoln/Veronica 1sentence Table

2006-03-14T22:07:00Z

So, since I seem to be unable to complete an actual fic, I have decided to take on the 1sentence challenge, and my claim for Lincoln/Veronica was accepted. So, here is my table, I hope to have the majority of these sentences done by the end of the day.

1sentence challenge table

#01 - Motion	#02 - Cool	#03 - Young	#04 - Last	#05 - Wrong
#06 - Gentle	#07 - One	#08 - Thousand	#09 - King	#10 - Learn
#11 - Blur	#12 - Wait	#13 - Change	#14 - Command	#15 - Hold
#16 - Need	#17 - Vision	#18 - Attention	#19 - Soul	#20 - Picture
#21 - Fool	#22 - Mad	#23 - Child	#24 - Now	#25 - Shadow
#26 - Goodbye	#27 - Hide	#28 - Fortune	#29 - Safe	#30 - Ghost
#31 - Book	#32 - Eye	#33 - Never	#34 - Sing	#35 - Sudden
#36 - Stop	#37 - Time	#38 - Wash	#39 - Torn	#40 - History
#41 - Power	#42 - Bother	#43 - God	#44 - Wall	#45 - Naked
#46 - Drive	#47 - Harm	#48 - Precious	#49 - Hunger	#50 - Believe

No Puedo Mas Si Tu No Estas

2006-02-27T08:24:03Z

So, I just got back from the IL Divo Concert in San Francisco. It was fantastic, breathtaking, and guh. Words fail me.

This picture I took at the concert, I think, makes words irrelevant and unecessary anyway.

Beautiful guys with beautiful voices, and roses.

(From Bottom Left: Sebastion, David, Urs, Carlos)

All This Spinning Is Making Me Dizzy

2006-02-24T22:20:50Z

So yeah, I feel like my life that lives on the internet died. I'm never on AIM, I'm never on LJ, and I haven't been writing, at all. Last night I got so excited because I wrote two sentences of an idea for a Prison Break fic I've had floating around in my mind. Seriously, I was like "Yay! I wrote something." So sad, really.

But this is what happens when real life intervenes and all of sudden you've got graduation deadlines to figure out, apartment leases to renew or decide not to, grad schools and possible transfer school for the remainder of undergrad to investigate, and advising appointments out the wahzoo. Suffice to say these past two and half weeks have been crazy hectic and not so much fun. But things are finally starting to slow down and I am hoping to finally start writing again, because yeah, I've got an entire notebook that is blank and it is driving me nuts.

In that vein, in an attempt to get past my current 'real life sucks' writer's block, I joined the anon writing meme that has been going around like mad. So, if any of you kind souls feel like leaving anon feedback, positive or negative, it would make me happy like nobody's business.

Tell me what you really think here

Somewhere A Clock Is Ticking - Lincoln/Veronica

2006-02-05T20:34:00Z

Title: Somewhere A Clock Is Ticking
Author: Aspen Snow
Pairing: Lincoln/Veronica
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Lincoln and Veronica before Fox River, before everything...
Author's Note: Written for the Too Much prompt over at fanfic100 and prisonbreak100

Before the escape there was her

Change - Prison Break Video

2006-01-26T05:10:22Z

So I was bored today, or really, I felt like doing some major procrastinating, so I finally decided to make use of my Windows Movie Maker program and I made a Prison Break Video. Soooo excited. It's my first though, so its not really that great, but I thought you guys might enjoy it anyway.

So here it is!

Song/Band: Change - Deftones
Created By: Aspen Snow
Summary: Lincoln has watched Michael change inside of Prison...

Change

I Am A Genius (Or Really, My Brain Works In Odd Odd Ways)

2006-01-22T06:05:37Z

Ok first, because all the cool writers are doing it...

1. Very little to no dialogue
2. Fairly short, generally less than a 1,000 words
3. Angsty, the characters are generally not in a happy situation
4. Introspective
5. Few physical descriptions of anything
6. Very few commas
7. Names are hardly ever used
8. Absolutely NO plot whatsoever
9. The characters never get what they want
10. The piece ends with a tragic sort of punchline

And secondly, I spent a little over an hour working on these, they are way too much fun in a frustrating oh-my-god-I-have-to-get-this sort of way....so, lets see if you all can figure these out...apparently, if you can get 19+ you are a genius =)

1. Example: 24 H in a D = 24 Hours in a Day
2. 26 L of the A
3. 7 D of the W
4. 12 S of the Z
5. 66 B of the B
6. 52 C in a P (W J)
7. 12 S in the U S F
8. 18 H on a G C
9. 39 B of the O T
10. 5 T on a F
11. 90 D in a R A
12. 3 B M (S H T R)
13. 15 P in a R T
15. 3 W on a T
16. 100 C in a D
17. 11 P in a F(S)T
18. 12 M in a Y
19. 13 is U F S
20. 8 T on an O
21. 29 D in F in a L Y
22. 27 B in the N T
23. 365 D in a Y
24. 13 L in a B D
25. 52 W in a Y
26. 9 L of a C
27. 60 M in an H
28. 23 P of C in the H B
29. 64 S on a C B
30. 9 P in the S S
31. 1001 A N
32. 1000 Y in a M
33. 15 M on a D M C
34. 12 D of C
35. 88 K on a P
36. 2 S to an A
37. 8 P in a G
38. 5 D in a Z C
39. 7 DS
40. 1 SS for M but a H L for M

And yes, I have all the answers, so feel free to ask if it starts annoying the shit out of you, as it did me =)

Sine Qua Non (Indispensable Thing)

2006-01-19T03:59:22Z

OMG I finally WROTE something...so yeah, my birthday present to myself is about two weeks delayed. But I finally finished this little fic, turned out longer than I expected and completely different than I originally planned, but hey, at least it is done. It's good to be back after being absent from the writing scene for over a month...

Title: Sine Qua Non (Indispensable Thing)
Author: Aspen Snow
Character: Lincoln, Veronica, Michael, LJ
Rating: PG-13
Author's Note: Written for the Ends prompt at fanfic100 and prisonbreak100
Summary: Ends aren’t supposed to be arbitrated and time stamped.

sine qua non, noun: an essential condition or element; an indispensable thing

prologue.

There is an arbitrary type of savagery in an execution. It is a controlled and cold and legally sanctioned variation of inhumanity. It is man killing man under the guise of justice.

An eye for an eye is a fundamentally flawed commandment to follow because it allows a person the freedom─ the justification─ to maim and murder.

And in the end their revenge leaves them blind to absolutes.

Like right.

Like wrong.

It’s the worst kind of death because it’s staged. Because it belongs to no one.

Ends aren’t supposed to be arbitrated and time stamped.

Whether or not a person believes in God─ or fate or destiny or heaven or hell─ no one is supposed to die like this. Not with clocks ticking away the moments that weren’t supposed to be the last. Not with an audience watching behind a panel of glass─ framed and rectangular like a movie screen─ bodies tensed in their stadium seats waiting for that climatic finale.

There is supposed to be more to life than knowing you are going to die.

There is supposed to be more to life than waiting for it.

i. innocent things (the beginning)

He touched her with hesitant brushes, with fingers that wanted so badly to tremble.

It was always brief, in the beginning.

A hand on the small of her back to steady her.

A couple of fingers on her shoulder to get her attention.

His knee against hers when they sat with folded legs in green green grass under too sunny skies.

A hand wrapped around her wrist to pull her along (she was young, he was old, he showed her things).

Never, though, his fingers slipping across her cheek to brush away loose strands of hair.

Never anything so intimate, in the beginning.

ii. expectations (wrong)

The movies have given him something to expect.

It’s this:

Guards strapping his arms and legs down to gurney with cloth chains that don’t chafe (an odd sort of luxury to give a man who is going to die soon).

A curtain being pulled back to reveal a row of all those lives he destroyed, trembling fingers gripping too tightly the chairs they sit in, wishing and praying and needing his death, searching for closure─ for absolution─ with their eyes closed.

A glance at the clock (midnight, he is going to die in that hollow time between days).

A nod from the Warden (go ahead).

Then a man with white latex gloves, white lab coat and a syringe in hand.

There’s a squirt of liquid, a tap on glass, a needle in his vein.

Then there’s a sob, or two, or three.

There’s poignant tears.

And silence.

iii. being a man (should have been more than this)

He’s got a whisk in a bowl of batter. He’s stirring and stirring and stirring, making the batter smooth and thick.

He’s never been a perfectionist until now (that was always his brother’s realm).

But his son is there, feet dangling over the edge of his chair, crayons spread across the table, drawing thick lined pictures with the colors he carries with him. His son smiles often.

He pours the batter onto the skillet. The hiss of homemade food warms the air of his too small apartment. He thinks about the worn down stub of blue crayon he picked up off the floor earlier. It is his son’s favorite color. His mother buys him boxes and boxes of blue crayons (he can’t, he doesn’t know where to find them) because he uses them so much.

He lets his hand slide into his pocket, where he put that discarded piece of crayon, lets his fingers close around that small bit of color.

His son will never miss it, he knows.

iv. strong (weak)

He wishes someone would tell the execs at the movie companies that they’ve got it all wrong. Men like him, men who didn’t go to college, who don’t read and research and learn need a way of knowing about things.

Men like him need common and accessible ways of learning information and history and facts that they can use and apply. He needs things like the movies where everything is dumbed down for audiences who are average; audiences who like everything important to be on the surface, easily identifiable and easily grasped.

Because he’d thought, in the too small, too cold, too hard confines of his cell he’d already known what it would be like.

He carried an image in his head of a man─ chiseled features─ stoic and unflinching even as he faced his death.

He had tried that.

“Why would I want anyone to watch me die?”

It hadn’t worked.

“I want you to be there the day before I die.”

v. grasping at threads (she’ll never be his)

There’s more to her face than he remembered.

When he sees her again that first time not behind bars or glass or choked spaces of betrayal he sees what he doesn’t remember, the sum of all her generic features─ the sense of familiarity that breathes along the curves of her face.

He touches her then, fingers on her face, stills them long enough to soak up flashes of impressions─ of warm, of soft, and then, her.

Her body stretches and leans into him, her lips sigh against his. It’s too much. He closes his eyes.

He’ll never see this again.

vi. brothers (die together)

Whispers of defeat shoot through the air too fast.

His brother promised too much.

He can almost see those men, criminals for no reason, circling his brother, a prison flavored sense of revenge twitching in their fingers.

He is going to be executed in twenty four hours. His brother won’t be far behind him.

The space between each footstep he can hear below him is heavy with malice. It’s weighing him down, he can’t move.

He wouldn’t be able to help anyway.

That’s nothing new.

vii. reality (right)

The movies are wrong.

He is going to die like this:

Two men in white lab coats, latex gloves. Each has three sets of syringes filled with different drugs. One set of syringes is filled with nothing but harmless saline solution; the other a combination of three lethal doses of drugs.

The first, he is told the day before, is an anesthetic, Pentothal, and will put him in a deep sleep. He won’t feel anything after this (this is where it will end, he has less time than he thought).

The second is a paralyzing agent, Pavulon, which will stop his breathing by paralyzing his diaphragm and lungs.

The third, and last, is a toxic agent, Potassium chloride. This will interrupt the electrical signaling essential to keep his heart beating and pumping blood and will induce cardiac arrest.

Neither of the men in starched white lab coats will know who has the real drugs, neither will know who actually killed him

He will be denied the truth, even then, of who has ended his life.

viii. his life before his eyes (countdown)

A man counts down the last moments before he dies.

This is what he sees:

3.
Eyes crying behind a panel of glass─ hot with anger, shaking with betrayal.

He prefers the distance there.

His brother’s sacrifice is too much.

2.
A picture of her eyes in his mind.

Nothing more.

He misses them.

1.
I
love
you

Words he only half deserves.

He didn’t kill a man, but he was going to.

epilogue.

Needles push into his veins.

He breathes.

It’s the only bit of freedom he has left.

I Was Born EXACTLY 22 Years Ago

2006-01-10T23:17:25Z

Today is my birthday, yes we have established this fact.

However, right now it is exactly my birthday, as I was born at 3:15pm on a Tuesday. So today is like my uber Birthday.

My mother sent me flowers, they are all spring-y like, which is nice since its all gloomy here.

Aren't they pretty???

My Tony Gwynn Bobblehead looks like he is guarding my flowers, which is quite amusing.

Anyway, have also decided, in the spirit of my Birthday, that I should not have to go to class today. So I'm not.

I'm feeling rebellious today.

Also, I am flying home this weekend to celebrate my birthday with my family. I'll be on a plane on Friday the 13th. Not sure how I feel about that.

It's My Birthday And I'll Cry If I Want To....Though I Really Wasn't Planning On It

2006-01-10T08:52:51Z

Ok, so seriously, it's been my birthday for about a half an hour and already everyone and their MOTHER has wished me Happy Birthday.

This means, of course, that I will wake up in the morning and have no one left to wish me Happy Birthday. Which is kind of sad, this is the curse of having college-friends who stay up all hours of the night and morning. My birthday has been reduced to the hours between Midnight and 4am. Which is fine, I think, since I sucked so much mileage out of my 21st birthday, its okay if my 22nd is somewhat anticlimatic. There is, however, tons of ice cream in my future, which makes all kinds of happy.

I share my birthday with Rod Stewart. I wonder if there is a place where I can request a different celebrity to share my birthday because I feel kind of cheated. Dude was popular largely before I was born, or you know, before I was actually cognizant of the world around me. I have decided Wentworth Miller would be a suitable replacement. Or Dominic Purcell. Or that guy who plays Mr. Sark on Alias, because I got Season 1-4 on DVD for Christmas and I have been watching them like crazy. And yeah, Mr. Sark is evil and bad and blah blah blah, but he's a very pretty bad guy.

I have decided that as a Birthday present to myself I am going to finish this Lincoln story that has been half written for weeks now. It's driving me crazy and finishing it would make me really happy. It isn't even that long, so frustrating.

So I am going to go to sleep hoping that when I wake up in the morning I won't have to walk to class in the pouring rain on my Birthday. Because that is not really my idea of a fun Birthday. Although, splashing in puddles is fun and walking around barefoot, in the rain, in your pajamas while the guy who lives below you looks at you like you have lost your freaking mind is also quite amusing.

Prison Break Fic: This Is How It Happens

2005-12-16T06:55:48Z

I need to learn to update my journal with my new stories at the same time I post them at prisonbreak_fic. So for those of you on my flist who have already read and commented on this story, I am sorry for spamming you. =)

Title: This Is How It Happens
Characters: Bellick, Sara
Rating: R
Summary: Bellick needs a change of scenery.

This Is How It Happens

Really though, I am only posting this right now because I am attempting to forestall studying for my International Relations of Western Europe Final.

On a side note though: The final is based almost exclusively on one book, which everyone in my class has been trying to get their hands on, and which I totally stole from the library tonight. I was really worried that the sensors would go off when I walked out of the library and that I would get yelled at by one of the security guards and he would take the book away and then I would fail the final.

But I escaped and WOO! I feel all sorts of criminal right now.

Clouds In This Romantic Sky - Michael/Sara

2005-12-12T05:27:51Z

Yes, I am taking a little bit of a break from the wonderfully chaotic and complex mind of Lincoln. Inspired, largely, by the fact that I am beyond annoyed with the direction the Michael/Sara relationship is going, I bring you my take on the ship everyone loves to hate.

Title: Clouds In This Romantic Sky
Pairing: Michael/Sara
Summary: She isn't his everything

He wishes the lies hurt to tell