Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Idea Box


glitter-graphics.com

A/N: Dear writer friends, I come bearing gifts. Most of you know that I treat my fics like my progeny. Now, since I don't have time to flesh these out, I'm putting these babies up for adoption. I'm counting on the goodness of your hearts, so please don't let my children go to plot bunny cemetery.
Warnings: Tense inconsistencies, these prompts are unbetaed after all. Fluff and angst ahead (flangst?), recurring theme: relationship prism, prompts for other subjects to follow.
Disclaimer: I own everything, until the adoption papers are signed. Please credit if you decide to raise one of my plot bunnies. Thank you.

001
It was refreshing being with someone bereft of an emotional core. It suited her just fine, reveling in the worthlessness of peeling layer after layer of a personality that would prove absent. She considered this her reward. A fucking boon after all the years she wasted on morally gray people. This was peace, at least a version of peace she was comfortable with. She was—without meaning to—happy in the cocoon of her illusionary reality.

002
I was not expecting the when-did-you-know question. Not from you, whose confidence wouldn’t, no shouldn’t necessitate the need to ask. I wondered what triggered this fit of insecurity. Boredom? Weather pattern changes? Entropic forces? Perhaps I’d never know. And while the unexpectedness of the situation did unsettle me, it nevertheless gave me a chance to quibble.

003
Sorry isn’t enough. Not when it feels like a rock in his gut, shifting his balance. Sorry shouldn’t feel like a knife, mutilating his flesh, leaving scars. It is unacceptable, this apology tainted by crocodile tears. But what his all-consuming fury doesn’t allow him to see is how her apology—lacking in remorse as it is—betrays the plain sincerity of someone caught knee-deep in sin.

004
They get a chance. God help her, they get a chance. And if that means a lifetime of hurting each other or three minutes of ecstasy, she will still take it. Aware of how beautiful and bruising this opportunity is, she grabs onto it because it allows them to be together; takes it because the moment is perfect in itself, finds herself needing it because for once, it’s not him and her against the world.

005
What did me in were not his hands but the blades of his fingers. He got me good before I could violate him. And it was a shame really, when on principle, it was always me who did the violating. Even now, I could feel the ghost of his digits running over my spine; felt it over the rush of obscenities rattling in my head, tasted it in the shivers that racked his body, mindlessly entangled with mine.

006
You go to him and it doesn’t matter if all the time you’re fighting the urge to do so. Because you need to fix this and you need to fix him; can’t help it because managing the brokenness injects you with a sense of purpose. You go to him, armed with nothing but a sketchy idea of what’s right and wrong, knows that if things don’t repair themselves, you’d rather have him completely broken than half-fixed but alone.

007
Sometimes he wears too-tight pants and you’re worried he’s doing damage to his, well, his man business. You tell him this, and he acts offended, jokes that that’s all you want him for. You smile and tell him yes and after that you don’t say anything else. You don’t tell him how much you like his collection of plaid shirts, his fug hats, and even his scary neck beard. You keep it a secret that you’re fascinated by his left-handedness, his formidable vocabulary, and his nerd-centric humor. You stay silent because he’ll think you’re all sorts of weird, when in fact, all you really are, is that and maybe something more.

008
Their first fight, it was him who raised his voice and her who stormed off. She couldn’t even remember what the fight was about, just that it had set the precedent for the rows they were to have for months and months to come. There were times when she couldn’t even think of a day when they didn’t fight. She’d be so exhausted, barely remembering her role in this relationship, which was to accept verbal abuse and then storm the hell off. She would kill him someday, she had told him this too many times before. But she hadn’t counted on him leaving first.

009
She tells her friends the slow burn version while he boasts of the first time they met and had “relations.” Of course, he doesn’t call it that but she forces him to, threatening the withdrawal of all forms of “relations” until he sanitizes his story. In return, she tries to make him more macho, tries to convince her friends that he’s got muscles despite his lanky frame. Her friends make a show of agreeing with her, never letting on that his friends have already spilled the story of how they met and what they did that night.

010
She thought you were gay and you couldn’t decide if that was just funny or fifty shades of fucked-up. In the end you settled on funny, because it was easier than being all defensive and indignant. Besides, she was sleeping over and the last thing you wanted her to be that night was jittery or self-conscious. Later, when you were all huddled up, watching Chocolat— for crying out loud—you would tone the gay down (if that’s what it was) while you plied her with more wine. In the middle of her awwing and sighing over Roux’s guitar playing, you would lean over and kiss her.

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