Hey everyone, Paradigm of Writing here with a new piece of mine I like to call, Light a Candle in the Dark, for a new contest on the prowl, LunaticFromTheSun's Virtruso Contest, based around song fics. For clarity, we can still not write song lyrics in the public domain (you look at the rules, and you'll see it hasn't changed...) so I'm not breaking that rule and including lyrics. Personally, this is a very biased and hard contest because songs can be taken either very literally or extremely subjectively, and that is what I'm afraid this contest could turn into, but nonetheless. I struggled originally with what album I wanted to do, but then I narrowed it to two- Sara Bareilles's Blessed Unrest album or One Republic's Native album, the two albums that I find to be the best on the planet as I love every single song from both, but I have decided to go with One Republic's album, to make a varied range of motion. I've chosen the main characters of Roy and Robin (F), but they won't always be the only characters in the chapter depending on the song. I'm doing at least six songs, so we are starting with #1 in the list: Those Stars in the Sky, based off of Counting Stars. Enjoy!
Blurts of bright light disrupt Roy Nadar from sleeping, jolts of perception breaking through the soft cloud of tension underneath the closed lids, eyes quivering and shaking underneath blankets of insomnia. The redhead jolts in bed, shaking and sitting up with a feverish launch. His head is moist with beads of sweat as they trickle down his pale face, opal eyes from contacts wide, heart hammering in his chest. DRUM. DRUM. DRUM. He checks the digital analog clock by his bedside. In emerald blocked lines, the time read 2:40 AM. Damn. He hadn't even been asleep for more than an hour.
He sighs, looking over to the other side of the bed. Roy blinks hard, once or twice, he loses count of the number of times he does the bodily action; it is automatic, it is necessary. Blink. Why isn't she here? Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Shit. The redhead groans, realizing rather quickly the same fate occurring inside his brain is targeting the wife he so desperately loves. Stupid insomnia. Stupid inner demons. Next to him, instead of a soundlessly sleeping white haired maiden that is his wife Robin Nadar, there is a blank space vacated by his legs, no warm breath passing over his shoulder. She's probably out on the terrace again, more than likely. That's where Robin goes when she tries shutting down her inner suffering.
Roy shifts his legs over the bed, wondering if she came into the bedroom at all, perhaps, for the night. There are days when he finds her lying awake in the hallway, hugging herself tight. His suitcase lies open against the window, which is wide and gaping into their hotel bedroom. Pallid sheets of paper float aimlessly in the gentle breeze, dollar signs and decimal points and percentages running by in his eyes like streams of code that make zero sense beyond flimsy green slips of paper. He groans; groaning seemed to help him in the past few weeks.
The redhead steps out of bed, his feet close to touching the cold hardwood floor of the hotel bedroom, synapses tingling at the sensitive touch. Cold, laborious breaths rack his body, the gaping window giving the surrounding vicinity a depressing chill. If you were to be left anytime out there in the December cold of New York City, there is much to be desired, that you'd have negative ten-degree wind gusts blow into your home and screw everything up.
He squints, knowing there's only one reason why the window is open to cause hypothermia. Perhaps she is trying to kill him. Roy laughs quietly, although the laugh is more a snicker and has a darker intent than simple intuition of him dying by the hands of his wife unintentionally. Roy steps out to join her, the dear Robin Nadar in the sky full of stars, where they gaze up and wander aimlessly.
She knows he's there by his footsteps, a simple masculine presence giving off powerful energy. Robin looks at her hands, fingering with something, the bottom half of her lip being bitten by sharp teeth with the intent of drawing blood. "You can't sleep?" she whispers.
"Pretty much. You too?" Roy asks, scooting in closer to his wife.
"You know it…" One of them scoffs, though they don't know who did it. Doesn't matter anyways.
He grips her left hand, squeezing tightly and passionately. "I know today didn't work as well as it should have."
"Your promises are empty," Robin says hoarsely, continuously fingering whatever it is in her hands. "Stop trying to make them work."
"What are you holding?" Roy prods, nodding at her right hand currently enclosed in a fist.
She opens it and her item is revealed to be a ring. Their engagement ring. Neither one of them wore their wedding rings. They found the item to be out of date, that it's some stupid halcyon band that seemed too comfortable, that two words spoken out like wisps of a fire to the breeze that surrounds them could mean so much. Robin had her wedding ring, kept in a box, currently in a place that could count as her early grave.
He frowns. Roy is wearing his engagement ring too, his wedding ring currently by his bedside, because sometimes he swore that the ring had a mind of its own and would go on its own little damned adventures. No matter how much he dislikes the stupid golden piece of metal, he does not have the heart to throw it away. The redhead hates to admit it, he wishes he could be a ring that'd leap from old musty cluttered desks and go to the sewers, be with his own people. Filthy. Nasty. Deserves to die.
"I keep on thinking perhaps we're in the wrong field..." Robin speaks up, voice rising a level. "That what we're in will destroy us. Perhaps it already has and we just can't see it yet."
Her hands circle the ring slowly, Robin's pinkie smoothly rubbing over the gemstone. Roy asks what her favorite color is on a dinner date so many years ago it seemed like it belonged in the Roman numeral system. He expects, shamefully, something stereotypical: the good ole' periwinkle, maybe pink, purple, even black or red. She responds quietly with blue, radiating sapphire and aquamarine waves that resembled the sky so beautifully and sharply. So what he did, as the gentleman Roy used to once be, he bought her a ring. With a gemstone of that exact color. She loved him for it, more than most people would have.
Roy sighs, hugging his wife tight. "I have that thought run inside my head every day sweetheart, there's never a second I'm not thinking of it."
"They didn't deserve it you know. Getting cheated," she shudders, almost dropping the engagement ring. "We- we shouldn't have done that."
He looks up, noticing the bright starry sky, ignoring her entirely. "Look, can you somewhat make out Pisces."
Robin follows his gaze, smiling distantly at the constellation of the fish in the sky. It radiated her favorite hue of blue, when a subdued navy crossed with a brilliant turquoise, where light blended superbly with darkness. She fingers the ring. "You know... if we could have a currency of stars, wouldn't that make our lives much easier?"
The redhead grins, as if he almost didn't hear his wife correctly. "Pardon, Robin? You want hot balls of gas to act as our income?"
"Money never lasts," she shrugs, and then to herself, in her head, "And neither will our marriage."
"That is true," Roy nods.
Robin shifts closer so their hands intertwine, slender fingers rubbing bones gently, tickling skin with senses only known as comfort. "You're the most beautiful man on the planet." She does not know why she says what she just did. A coping mechanism perhaps, to change the subject.
Bile rises in his throat, and he chokes, close to vomiting over the railing of a hotel in the infamous New York City. He doesn't believe himself when he speaks. "I'm the worst, most horrendous man on the planet."
"Then I'd be the worst woman, wouldn't I?"
"And why's that?"
"Because I'm married to you," she says logically. "Like we say at work, terribleness finds terribleness."
"Thank all things we love that our kids didn't believe that," Roy chuckles.
Her eyes flash. "Didn't think you'd stoop so low." She hates when he mentions their children.
He takes a step back. "Did I already offend you this early in the month?"
Another harmless shrug, but Roy doesn't find it harmless. "I suppose..." A quirk at the mouth makes his blood boil.
Roy's eyebrows cross, his temper snaps. "Robin, I stay up every night because of you! That we're so dirty, that we're so vicarious and vicious in the world of money you'll get hurt. Doing wrong feels right, doing right feels wrong! We're young, not old, and I don't have to sit here at twenty-nine to feel terrible because my wife makes me feel that way!"
Robin narrows her eyes. She sniffs into the air disdainfully. "Perhaps," She shows him the ring, before hanging it over the balcony. "I hope you know that you burn hope..." she hesitates. The white haired girl is close to tears at this. "No... you don't. We both do. We're both vile, we both deserve to die. To be separated. Count those damn stars in the sky Roy, it might be all we have left when we run our life through its course."
The ring drops from her grasp, intentionally. He screams, pushing her out of the way as he watches the sapphire engagement ring plummet to its doom fifty stories up above the New York skyline. Had it been his way, the redhead would run from all the stairs in the building, would fly down the steps, and catch it in his hands. Not such the case, as a soft ding lets Roy know that the ring fell into a sewer grate.
Now his dream of becoming a ring to dive into a sewer takes even more fruition.
She steps into the bedroom from the terrace. "I'm going to wear my wedding ring now. Hopefully I don't accidently drop it too."
Roy looks emptily at the skyline, flashing lights and signs blinking together, blurring to one whorish mess of neon and sick sounds of partying, greed, lust, and more vicious things no one knows about. He looks down at his own hand, his engagement ring she gave him, the gemstone a dull diamond, where it shines grey than blue, sits cockishly. He removes it from his pointer finger, examining it with a plastered scowl.
"You disgust me too, ring." He drops it over the terrace as well.
He joins her in bed seconds later, and now the only thing the two can do is stare at the ceiling.
Robin coughs fiercely, clutching her chest. "I still can't sleep."
"Me either."
"If only we could move our bed out into the terrace, we could count those stars."
"You- you're just full of crazy ideas, aren't you?"
"We wouldn't be in this business if we weren't," she says.
He flips onto his right side to stare at her. Roy brushes a strand of hair out of her face. "You're beautiful. Counting stars in the sky has no comparison. I'd rather count the beautiful things I love about you. Robin, my wife, she shines brighter than any hot headed ball of gas out in space."
She frowns, not taking the compliment. "Darling, you continue to think like that, eventually you'll lose even more sleep. Thinking of something we aren't. Something we weren't. Something we will never be," Robin snarls harshly, before kissing him hard on the mouth.
For Robin and Roy Nadar, their eventful evening in a rundown luxury hotel in New York City, where'd they'd lose sleep over themselves, thinking of how to better each other, dropping rings from high places, taking solemn oaths, counting those damned stars in the sky... it was only the beginning.
There we are guys! That is our first chapter of Native, #1: Those Stars in the Sky. So... what did you guys think? How does Roy and Robin's relationship sound to you? Are they really in love? What job do they have that causes them to be so... self conscious, I could say? Did this reflect the meaning of Counting Stars to you okay? I hope it did. I don't know when I'll have the second chapter up, I'm thinking one or two every week, so there may be another update, but whenever I do, it'll be Chapter #2: Lost in Reality, based on the hit song If I Lose Myself. I cannot wait. *sigh* I'm only a chapter in and I love it dearly. Thank you so much for reading and please, oh please review, I'd love to hear from you. Have an amazing day! Love you all!
~ Paradigm
