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painispretty who wanted a ficlet inspired by this icon.
***** ***** *****
She felt them long before she saw them. She'd been feeling them since she was first a teenager, brushes of fingers on bare skin in the night, tangles in her hair in cold shadowed corners where the light didn't reach , bruises on her wrists and her new breasts that she couldn’t have explained if anyone had noticed.
They weren't threatening. Maybe they should have been, but they were familiar, and now that she was hiding, running, always moving and sneaking, familiarity was hard to come by. The station was so big, patches of dereliction breaking up the flares of life, keeping flickering neon amusement arcades barricaded away from the blazing tyre fires and the slick clean edges of the few working docking spots alike. So big, but haunted by the same ghosts.
They told stories, when the flames dulled and the ethanol roared in their veins, about Before, and about The End, and some said it was the explosions that did it, and some said it was the crush of vacuum afterwards, but whatever else, The End had been real. The plucking at her clothes and the pinching at her skin let her know that better than any story about the news-feeds and images of constructors caught and mangled in the airlock bays.
The only thing the stories did was make her wonder if she was seeing holos, which was almost worse than the idea of ghosts. Ghosts might be real, but seeing holos of 14 year old news feeds? That was oxygen sickness or something. Something bad. Ghosts are just people, right? And she knew what people wanted when they touched and grabbed and tangled fingers in her hair. And if you know what they want you can give it to them, and it's familiar and maybe you'll be safe for a while.
And there's a soundtrack for this one - the sample at the begining of it was buzzing around in the back of my brain as I wrote, and now I'm actually listening to it parts of the lyrics click as well, so Scott Deathboy - ToySeven
painispretty who wanted a ficlet inspired by this icon. ***** ***** *****
She felt them long before she saw them. She'd been feeling them since she was first a teenager, brushes of fingers on bare skin in the night, tangles in her hair in cold shadowed corners where the light didn't reach , bruises on her wrists and her new breasts that she couldn’t have explained if anyone had noticed.
They weren't threatening. Maybe they should have been, but they were familiar, and now that she was hiding, running, always moving and sneaking, familiarity was hard to come by. The station was so big, patches of dereliction breaking up the flares of life, keeping flickering neon amusement arcades barricaded away from the blazing tyre fires and the slick clean edges of the few working docking spots alike. So big, but haunted by the same ghosts.
They told stories, when the flames dulled and the ethanol roared in their veins, about Before, and about The End, and some said it was the explosions that did it, and some said it was the crush of vacuum afterwards, but whatever else, The End had been real. The plucking at her clothes and the pinching at her skin let her know that better than any story about the news-feeds and images of constructors caught and mangled in the airlock bays.
The only thing the stories did was make her wonder if she was seeing holos, which was almost worse than the idea of ghosts. Ghosts might be real, but seeing holos of 14 year old news feeds? That was oxygen sickness or something. Something bad. Ghosts are just people, right? And she knew what people wanted when they touched and grabbed and tangled fingers in her hair. And if you know what they want you can give it to them, and it's familiar and maybe you'll be safe for a while.
And there's a soundtrack for this one - the sample at the begining of it was buzzing around in the back of my brain as I wrote, and now I'm actually listening to it parts of the lyrics click as well, so Scott Deathboy - ToySeven
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