"Look out on a summer's day"
Life; Crews/Reese, pg - 13. No spoilers. Oneshot. Inspired by a song and Charlies hair. This is my first Life fic, and it was quite a challenge. Comments and suggestions are loved and appreciated!
Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and grey,
Look out on a summer's day,
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.
- Don McLean
When she was ten, she discovered an old, dusty book about art in the attic. It seemed like something that belonged to her mother – her father wasn't a sentimental type of man who would find anything in this book fascinating. At ten, Dani still could. The book was big and heavy, filled with reproductions of paintings. She remembers reading the names, trailing fingers along shapes and faces, watching colors.
Mona Lisa, The Birth of Venus, unsettling dreams of Salvador Dali, a world of colors and shapes (a shelter). Everything was there.
Sunflowers were always her favorite. Colorful and warm, like small suns captured on canvas, they seemed like they could come to life (just as Starry night or Olive trees. She loved those. At ten, she was still capable of loving them). She traced the flowers with her fingers, until she learned every trace of the brush, every streak of orange, as long as it took for the sounds of her parents fighting to fade from her mind. (Years and years later she will learn that there's a name for that kind of action, repetitive and purposeful, aiming to bring a mind to peace. She will not believe it, she will even think it's stupid and pointless until she slowly realizes it's not.)
She used to hide the book under the bed, until one day its loss was a punishment for her bad grades. At ten, she couldn't understand that.
(In years and years she will say, He only wants to make other people feel miserable.)
At ten, the colors started to fade.
She wakes up coughing, dust and smoke stuck in her throat. Dani opens her eyes in vain – there's only darkness surrounding her, and the pain in the back of her head the most solid proof that something beyond the darkness exists. She isn't certain, and she can't feel her head – she can't move her arms, because she is tied – but she thinks she's been struck hard on the back of her head, and that there's blood, or there was.
Her arms are tied above her head, not enough to make her hang above the cold floor. The alley, the suspect, the lobby where they followed him, the voice -
Crews, she thinks.
"Crews? Crews?" she calls. Her voice meets the hollow void, and the way it sounds makes her think of small rooms crumpling down on you, of narrow, pale walls and cold floor tiles and feeling your vomit up in your throat.
He doesn't answer. Her voice meets the silence thick and impenetrable like the darkness surrounding her. She coughs and pulls at her ties, calling him again. There's a bitter taste in the back of her throat.
"Reese?"
His voice comes to her clearly, somewhere in front of her, not too far away. She exhales, for a moment she thinks she imagined it, but she can hear shuffling. He calls her again. Tightness in her muscles loosens a tiny fraction, because he sounds almost like he always does, she just can't see him.
She pulls the cuffs, can't move to where he is, barely can move at all.
"You okay, Crews?" she asks.
"Yes, fine. Tied up, can't move," he says.
"Right. I think we've been caught," she says. She's aware that she's stating the obvious, but that's something they often do, because obvious sometimes isn't obvious at all.
"What do we do now?"
When she was ten she wanted to paint. Paint like Da Vinci and Rembrant and her friend Lisa, but mostly, she wanted to paint like Van Gogh. She didn't know much about perspective or composition but she knew about bright explosions of colors and paintings that looked like they could move, like they could come to life if she wished upon it hard enough. Her dad called them a silly waste of time.
Her memory is a blur, but they have probably walked into a trap. She's been unconscious, and so was Crews and she wonders where they are – and what's supposed to happen to them later.
"Reese?"
She looks up, wwants to look up, in the direction of his voice.
"Do you remember anything?" he asks. His voice sounds steady and clear, and even though she's not one to give into panic, she's wondering what he's thinking – if he's trying to count the time like she does, if anyone is aware that they're missing; if there's something that he's not telling her. She can't see him, and it's starting to bother her, although he's talking to her.
"No, nothing after walking into that lobby."
"I think I remember the hit on my head, though."
"Are you sure you remember something that sent you unconscious?" she asks. She wants him to keep going, because she can sense tension, reluctance she can't put her finger on. His answers come back a little slower than usual, and she wonders if he is injured.
"Well, my head hurts," he answers.
"But do you remember it, or do you just think you're remembering it?"
Then, after some silence she says,
"How can we be sure we're remembering anything right?"
Someone wanted to make it clear, where her place was. That was why she'd been partnered with Crews. They paired her with one of equal hurt; hoping, perhaps, that they'd drag each other down.
She doesn't know why she didn't give in to the pressure in the beginning, when he was doing wrong things and going wrong ways, getting them eventually to the right place. Perhaps he reminded her of herself. He seemed like someone who could fall all the way down and then sink even lower like someone she knew all too well, but he didn't; he didn't end up like that. Instead he walked a fine line between right and wrong, darkness and light. Chaos and zen.
Weeks, perhaps months later she had gotten used to zen and fruit, his odd remarks and nonsensical questions.
Perhaps he was something she wanted to be.
Darkness shouldn't feel bad, considering how often she was surrounded by it. Sometimes, darkness feels comforting. Sometimes it means there's nothing worse that can happen. She had forgotten about daffodils and brightness as hues had faded from her memory. It was a slow, soft fall, a loss that didn't feel like one.
There's a thing about Crews. The colors. The light. (She's sure there's something in his life philosophy about light, but she doesn't bring it up.). She takes a slow breath, almost feeling the thoughts taking shape in her head.
She can't stop thinking about it, though. You notice the loss of light only if someone abruptly shuts down the door, but not if it slowly fades away from in front of your eyes. You get used to it. Then you discover things that can give you short flashes, false hope. You come back for more, because of that hope, only to fall further. The more you reach the more you fall.
"Crews?"
Her voice is tentative against the darkness.
"Yes, Reese?"
"Are you shot?"
A heartbeat, two, a slow sigh. His voice is more quiet, feels like water in cold glass.
"No, Reese. I'm fine."
He doesn't sound fine.
"You sure you're fine, Crews?"
"Pretty damn sure," he says.
"Crews?" she calls again.
It takes a few moments for him to answer. He doesn't sound right.
"Yes, Reese?"
"Talk to me, Crews."
"What about, Reese?"
She swallows.
"Tell me how am I here," she says.
"You're not," he says. "I'm not. Nothing is really here. Everything is in motion."
"Then tell me, how can I talk to you if neither you nor I are here?" She pauses, wishing she could see him, because not being able to move for some reason isn't as unnerving as not being able to see him. She takes a breath, doing her best to push down the rising panic. "How can I be here, if I'm not really here? How can I be tied?"
"You sound like me, Reese," he says, and she can hear traces of a smile. It's not the first time he said that to her, but perhaps it's the first time that she doesn't mind.
It's not only the ties, that can keep you trapped, she thinks.
"Talk to me, Crews."
He is like those paintings, she realized. Paintings kept within a frame, looking like they could come alive any minute; paintings in motion, paintings in colors. So many colors.
Granted, Van Gogh was crazy. She felt like she was going crazy, most of the time. She kept Van Gogh somewhere in the back of her mind, along with drugs and booze and men. Crews just fit well in, with his own madness and darkness. For a man in search of enlightenment he had a terrifying side to him, yet she felt confident with his steps behind hers. He was betrayed before, and yet he seemed to trust her to stick with him.
Could madness balance out madness? She wasn't sure that it could work, she expected this unlikely partnership to fall apart, but it didn't, or perhaps wouldn't. Had she asked him, he could possibly tell her that the flip side of madness was sanity, or something similar, or that living was simply a perpetual passing from darkness to light and back again.
Moving could be done on pure automatism, or a conscious choice, and that was the hard part.
She felt like a black void was behind her back and shimmering light waited ahead, and she was unable to move from the spot.
"Sunflowers," she says.
"What?"
"Sunflowers. My favorite painting," she explains and when he doesn't pick up her prompt she continues, because she can't help with the darkness. "Although I like the Starry night as well. Almond blossoms. Irises. The potato eaters."
"Van Gogh?"
"Yes."
"Didn't know you liked art, Reese."
"Not art. I like Van Gogh," she says.
"Why Van Gogh?" he asks.
"Always liked him," she says and continues. "It's the colors. Have you seen the Sunflowers, Crews? They – they look kind of like you could touch them."
"It's his technique," he says. "The movements of brush and bold use of colors, trademark of impressionalism."
The quiet settles again. She tries to count the paintings – Caffee terrace at night, Starry night over the Rhone, Houses at Auvres. The red vineyard. Olive trees. She counts the works in her head instead of counting the minutes going by (the more time passes, the less likely it is they'll be found), when his voice interrupts her.
"Why Van Gogh, Reese?" he asked, like he did when he discovered new things, when he wanted to understand.
"He was mad," she says, hears him chuckle softly in the dark. "Nuts. Makes me think that someone mad isn't a waste of space."
Sometimes sudden light hurts more than darkness. She can't tell how much time exactly had passed when the door cracks open and there are colors and voices, and someone touches her face. Blurry lines sharpen and she recognizes Bobby's face hovering above her.
"You okay, Reese?" Bobby is trying to lift her awkwardly and she struggles along with his attempts, sees some kind of pipe her hands are tied to.
"Crews," she says. Her voice is raspy and her throat is dry. "He's -"
"That's allright, I see him," says Bobby and moved. Dani struggles. The light around her is pale, her eyes have adjusted and she can see him – Crews, his white shirt and blue necktie and fiery hair, she can see Bobby shaking his shoulder, she can see Crews moving.
She exhales. There is a rush, and shouts and other people. Someone calls for medics, someone uncuffs her, helps her up, and in the mass of people and swirl of motion that's too fast for her, she's trying to find Crews. She calls him, tries to move between the medics, and just before they start taking her out of the small room where they've been locked, she gets a clear view of him.
Bobby is helping him stand up. Their eyes lock, and he gives her a small smile, one that hides a much larger burden behind, and even though his eyes look pale and faded, he looks whole and unharmed by the darkness.
She takes the image of his smile, his hushed colors as the medics take her with them.
She often wondered if he was as equally fucked up as her. One couldn't come out of the prison innocent, even if that was the way they walked inside – perhaps especially then. He was a walking conundrum of opposites, ending up on the right side of his wrong attempts.
But she was far from innocent herself. She was lost on the best days and addicted at worst; she knows prisons can exist without bars to keep her in – she is the one keeping herself inside, and perhaps the only redeeming quality is that she still struggles. Sometimes she doesn't even know why, she just does.
She was too cynical to admire the light, too stubborn to give fruit a chance, but the thoughts she couldn't fight. It was a late afternoon, the setting sun was warm. She was discovering that mango and pineapple tasted better than she expected, and realizing that in the eyes of her partner the world looked like something beautiful and full of wonder; it looked like a painting.
It doesn't surprise her much, when he's at her door not twenty four hours later.
When she looks at him, whole and healthy and alive, she realizes that is the single most important thing in the world.
She watches him across the narrow expanse of her bed, lying on his side, watching her, and she knows that he doesn't want to close his eyes, just as she doesn't want to. She wants to see him and know he's there, see the sun on his face and warm glow in his hair, intense color of his eyes. She wants all his lines and colors to be there and never to fade away.
Crews told her once that staying still is impossible, that nobody exists in one place; that none of us are actually here. She realizes that there is no existing without moving, that not making decisions is an illusion. She knows she should decide, that she needs to.
When Dani was ten, she used to touch pictures of paintings, move her finger along the drawn lines, wishing she could capture the beauty of color, the vividness of the painting. Her hand stops a tiny bit before touching his face. He gives her a curious smile, keeps looking at her like he's seeing something new and precious. Part of her almost believes that he does. She wants to learn lines of his face, hoping that his colors can meld with her own. His cheek is warm under her palm. She realizes that she breathes in the air he breathes out.
He takes her hand, wrapping his fingers around hers and smiles in a knowing way, like there's a secret of the oneness in their intertwined fingers. There is something steady about it, something unwavering and light.
She falls asleep wrapped in the knowledge that he isn't going to fade away.