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Makeshift Days
by Nicola
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: #1.01, Pilot
Warnings: incest (no, for real)
Note [August 2005]: I wrote this fic mid-season (pre-'Hearts and Minds') and canon has since washed it away. Apart from some subsequent canonical inconsistencies, I think it still works pretty well as an AU.
The erosion began after the first month. Those first weeks extinguished themselves in bright days of noise and confusion, darker nights of smoke and more uncertainty. They were days of stark emptiness, but remained concrete and tangible nonetheless. It was when she began to forget the days of the week that her sense of reality began to slip away.
It was the way she made it through the hours (tripping over the stepping stones, from minute to minute): she used to think about what she'd be doing in The World right at that moment. Saturday morning and she'd be at the salon, having a manicure. Saturday afternoon was shopping at the mall. Saturday evening was cocktails with the girls. But by the second month she began to forget whether her Yogilates class was on Tuesday or Wednesday. She didn't know whether green was still the colour of the season, because her Vogue subscription didn't deliver to purgatory islands like this.
"Is it Thursday today?" she asked Boone on one of the many anonymous days.
"I don't know," he said blankly, staring out at the ocean (today a torpid green-grey colour, hedged by a blanket of cloud cover).
"Thursdays you go to the gym, right?" she persisted.
He turned his glazed stare on her. ". . . Maybe. I don't remember." He frowned. Shannon remembered how much he had hated the gym; how he raged against the image-obsessed poseurs (Shannon included) who worshipped at its secular shrine. (He still worked out there, of course. Because he liked to look good, just like all the other image-obsessed poseurs.) Now he does press-ups and stomach crunches on the beach every day, because it kills the time (and there's so much time . . .)
Facts, figures; thoughts and feelings that had seemed so monumentally important before began to slip away from her. It was her boyfriend's birthday and she didn't know what to buy him. That bitch at work was being made supervisor over her. Her cell phone bill was astronomical and she'd have to ask mom and dad for the money to pay it. She sat on the beach, sifting sand through her fingers. (The sky was a dazzling clear shade of blue today, the colour reflected a shade darker in the calm ocean), Occasionally the breeze would spin the grains of sand away from her, leaving her hands dry and empty.
One day (was it Friday? Saturday?), she forgot her boyfriend's name. She spent all day, right through till sunset, trying to remember his name. Did it begin with R?
Radford. It came to her at daybreak the next day (was it Sunday? should she be going to church?), but the uneasiness did not subside. She'd thought that she maybe loved him — she'd played around with the idea a little; thought it might be nice. Now she could barely remember his name.
It is an unnaturally hot day (Thursday, it must be Thursday — unless it's Friday) when the idea enters her head; it circles, lazy as a mosquito, on the surface of her thoughts. It wouldn't matter. There would be no shocked friends; no disturbed parents. No repercussions; no one to answer to. In this void, it would barely even be real. Here they are what they say they are. The others' eyes will adjust as Boone holds her hand (not as a brother, but as a lover). Their perceptions will modify as she kisses him not on the cheek, but on the lips.
She can barely open her eyes, the sun is so intense. She feels his eyes on her, though — she has always been able to feel him watching her.
This evening it will rain, she knows.
She has stopped flinching when the heavens open. That response has been beaten down by constant, unexpected downpours. She has forgotten the way that freshly laundered cotton feels against her skin; a hundred times the material has been soaked, encrusted with salt and sand, rinsed through and dried brittle and faded by the sun. When the rain comes, at sunset, she welcomes the abrupt clamminess as the moisture soaks right through her. She runs out into the ocean while others, those who are still capable of flinching, scramble for shelter.
Boone follows her, incapable to the last of leaving her side. She ignores him, focused still on the distant horizon, burned through with a candy-coloured fire.
"You don't need to save me. I'm not drowning," she says. The sarcasm seeps out as naturally as the damp air fills her lungs. This is how she has always spoken to Boone. She has not yet adjusted from talking to him like the brattish sister who needs always to have the last word. Would his lover (girlfriend, fiancée, wife, goddess, destiny, one true love — the labels skid the surface of her mind) address him differently?
She read a crappy romance novel while she was on vacation. It's something she always does on vacation. Boone makes fun of her for the habit, but she can't sit on a beach without a bad airport paperback. On the pages of every one of them there is a beautiful blonde and her handsome suitor; there is a beach and a sunset. The book burned up in the wreckage; she saw a sheaf of scorched pages, charred lines of brown and gold obscuring every sentence, every sentiment.
In the rain, in the sunset fire of their beach, she wants to kiss him.
She turns suddenly, finding herself in the circle of his arms. Boone was standing behind her, with outstretched arms; he wants to placate, or if necessary, drag her back to shore. But he knows better than to touch her without permission (he learned the day he tugged on her pigtails and she rewarded him with three bright red scratches across his face; that she has not forgotten).
A pulse too late and with narrowed eyes, he reaches for her arms, grasping her wrists. "Come back to the tents. Stop being such a drama queen," he tells her.
The world is dimming. She can feel the clouds rolling across the sky; it's a sensation that seems to translate into a hum on her skin's surface. The rain is recoiling, beaten back by sudden heat. The weather is one of many things that doesn't make sense to her anymore. The moment has passed, and she's almost sure she won't kiss him. The blurred line will snap back into focus. Maybe she'll even remember what day of the week it is.
Night falls, elastic and unreliable. His lips are full and unresponsive as she kisses him hard (not gently, like all those insipid heroines in those ridiculous books). His grip on her wrists tightens unconsciously, and she is aware of a sharp twist of pain.
"You don't touch me," she says suddenly. The ambiguity jars them both, and Boone's hands release reflexively. "You never learn." Her eyes flash, and she is sure it is her victory.
On the beach, (afterwards, and maybe before) time ceases with sense. It speeds up with a faint whine as the others crowd in upon the two of them, with their crises and favours. (They are easily swatted away, like flies in the hot sun.) It slows as dusk approaches and Boone creeps nearer. It stops and starts with frightening inaccuracy as they make love every night. His hands catch and tangle in her hair. Her answering hiss is like steam in cold air. She leaves fingernail scratches across his back, bright and bloody in the moonlight.
November 2004
Muse music: 'More You Understand' by Howie Day; 'Wasted Early Sunday Morning' by the Sneaker Pimps
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