A/N: Okay, I wrote this a long time ago and originally uploaded it to an account on a different site, but it probably makes more sense for it to be on this account, so here it is. It's a sequel to Superstar_II, and I like it kind of a lot.
Yes, there is some swearing in this.
1. Memento
She snapped that one of the tent as they were leaving, walking out of the gate in the chain link fence and into the endless wide world. Remember wind whipping at their hair as they stood and waited for a moment in time and she turned the camera over, trying to figure it out.
"I could do it," he volunteered, frustrated, itching to get a move on already, and she half-turned away, ignoring his half-reaching hands. "I want to learn how to use this thing."
"It's just a tent," he said. "You've never even seen it from outside before, have you?"
"Nope," she said. "That's why I want to take a picture. So I'll remember what it looked like."
2. Passing
"It's not like I'm doing something new here, you know," he said. "This is what I look like. I put my makeup on in the mornings, I don't know if you've ever noticed."
"Still," she said. "I want to record it. We're passing as a couple of normal humans for the first time ever."
"Speak for yourself," he told her, slicking his hair back again in the mirror as she put the camera away.
3. Metropolis
"That's a film camera," he told her, exasperated, snatching it out of her hands. "If you keep taking photos of every single building we pass, we won't have anything left to take pictures of things you want to remember."
"So get a digital one," she said.
"How the hell do you even know what a digital camera is?" he asked her, bemused.
4. Outset
"Hang on," she said, grinning. "Hold the ticket stubs up by your face again like that for a second."
If you examine the photo for long enough, you can just see, through the grimy window mostly just reflecting back the flourescent-lit interior of the bus, the brown and gray and green of the old city smearing past and away into the distance. They never stopped to ask exactly where it was. It didn't matter anyway.
5. Tourists
There are a whole pile of pictures of them in identical poses, heads together to fit into the frame and grinning, camera held out at arm's length, backdropped by one famous monument or another. The Eiffel Tower is one of the first, the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China and a pair of pyramids and the Leaning Tower of Pisa follow, among many others - the photo evidence of a pair of perfect world-travelling tourists, a travel itinerary out of a storybook, the kind everyone wants to have and nobody ever comes close to achieving. The date stamps show no particular method or logic to their travel, past that they seemed to have begun somewhere in Asia and then moved west to the rest of Europe. There are a few photos in this collection which show no recognizable landmark in the background, yet the two of them are still grinning widely, showing off their surroundings conspiratorially and with great pride. A one-story farmhouse, a nightclub with bare cement walls and pipes running everywhere, a rest stop with signs in Swedish... there would be no way to identify any of these places even if anyone wondered or cared.
6. Quiet
He sneaked this picture quietly, glad on some level that they had finally switched to a camera which didn't make so much noise. The composition was real and perfect, transferring to film from actuality - her asleep against the window of the train, her cheek pressed into the glass and her growing hair falling across her face, the tracks fading into the distance outside. He couldn't imagine not capturing it. Some moments deserve to go on forever and ever.
7. Neon
"I am only taking this photo," she told him above the blaring disco music, "so I can show it to you in the morning and inflict on you all the shame which you should rightly be feeling right now."
8. Finance
"Well, all right," she said, "if we've got to take them to the pawn shop, I want to take a picture of them first. Hand them over."
She arranged the wristwatches on the coverlet of the hotel-room bed in concentric patterns, silver and gold on red, and set about snapping macros. "These are going to look nice."
"What are you doing?" he groaned. "They're just watches, for God's sake. I can steal half as many again any time I go out on the street."
"Yeah, I know, but where else are you ever going to get twenty-seven businessmen's watches in the same place at the same time?"
9. Understudies
"If any more crazy men wearing plants assault us with stupid costumes in an alley under the pretense of needing replacement clowns for their show," she groaned, slumping against the suitcase and picking at the fluffy pink border on her dress, "let's just get the hell out of there and chance whatever bamboo rayguns they've got, okay?"
He shrugged. "At least it was a show. We make an okay pair of clowns, no?"
She sighed and rubbed her eyes. " No comment. I would have liked to watch that show from the audience."
10. Seasick
"I. Fucking. Hate. Boats. I. Fucking. Hate. Boats. I. Fucking. Hate. Boats..."
She grinned, and shifted her weight against the high metal railing of the ship. Around them, the crew worked, shifting crates of produce and merchandise and paying no attention to the pair of landlubbers. "Say cheese."
"Oh, for God's sake, why do you always have to take pictures of me at the worst possible moments?"
The camera clicked. She patted him on the shoulder. "This will be a memorable trip, I promise you, and you're not going to be seasick the whole time. We'll look at these photos and laugh later."
11. Hotel
They bounced around the suite, jumping on the enormous canopied bed, fluffing towels at each other, turning on the silver taps of the bowl-shaped marble tub and running the jets before it was really full enough to. Collapsed on the bed on top of each other when they were panting and grinning and completely exhausted. Sobered up quickly, the giddiness wearing off; she got up after a while, went to the bathroom and turned the bath taps off, came back and went out on the balcony and leaned on the fancily twisted railing and looked out over the city.
"I never imagined," she called to him, "that we would ever end up someplace like this."
"It's only for a night," he called back, lying back on the huge pillows at the head of the bed. "Back to real life after this."
"Shush," she said, not glancing back at him. "Didn't we agree to live for the moment?"
12. Alley
"Where are we going?" she hissed, flattening herself against the grimy wall. "And why all the secrecy?"
"Ssshh." He glanced back at her, smiled. "I want it to be a surprise."
"Is it going to be a good surprise?"
He grinned that grin like a shark. "No. But we will have fun."
13. Splint
There wouldn't have been a reputable doctor in the country who would have seen them, paperwork-less, in the state they were in, and neither of them even wanted to think of asking one of the back-alley doctors for their dubious assistance. She splinted his fingers herself, with pieces of wood and strips of cloth torn from one of her shirts, snapped the photos so she could, as she explained, keep track of what she was doing. He was incoherent, in shock. "I never get caught," he kept saying. "Never."
"It's okay," she told him. "Everyone screws up occasionally."
"Yeah, but it's not like spilling milk, is it? He broke my fingers! My damn fingers!" He sank down on their tiny folding cot, clamped his better hand - the left one, the one with only two fingers broken - over his mouth, moved it up to rub his eyes. "What are we going to do? We have nothing saved up, and it's going to take weeks... I can't do anything!"
She sat down next to him, the two of them and the cot and the suitcase nearly taking up all the room in this tiny, dirty ramshackle hut, pulled him closer and put her arm around his shoulders. "We'll manage just fine. Somehow. If worst comes to worst, I could always start working part-time as a hooker or something."
He stared at her.
"That last part was a joke," she said. "Just in case that wasn't clear."
"Good."
14. NYC
Two pictures here, stapled together back-to-back: The Statue of Liberty, seen over the ship's rail-
"Just like immigrants! Isn't this fantastic? We're arriving like on a boat and everything like they did!"
"We are immigrants, idiot."
"Oh, for God's sake. You know what I mean."
-and his hands, spread out splintless, only the right middle and ring finger healed a little crooked.
15. Idealized
"I liked Europe better," she said in disgust. "There are so many fat people here."
16. Disney
Someone else took this picture for them, though they couldn't have said ten minutes after the fact whether it had been an employee or another tourist who they had just shoved the camera onto. She's making the peace sign, or possibly the V sign, with the hand which isn't linked around Mickey Mouse's arm, and he's holding a watch up behind the costumed actor's head - it's probably the watch of whoever took the photo for them. You wouldn't notice it at first unless you were used to seeing the kind of photos they took, always.
17. La Nouba
"You're sure you want to do this," he said again.
She nodded, stone-faced, put the camera back in her purse - the snapshot of the white tent would turn out blurry, partially obscured by lamp-posts and trees, not at all a good photo. "I wanted to see another circus show from the audience, didn't I? We're here already, it would be stupid not to go."
"Dani," he said, and took her bare white arm, as if afraid she were going to run away. "I don't think it's a good idea."
She looked up at him, head cocked, eyes large and not-exactly-human, searched his face for a long moment, and smiled. "Look," she said. "I promise I won't jump up on the stage or anything. I won't even wave. I promise I won't even let him notice me. I ran away from the circus, and I'm not going to run back just because he's here. I swear I do want to see the whole thing, not just him. But I do want to know that he's happy. So let's go see the show."
There was silence. They stared at each other. They breathed.
"Okay," he said. "Let's go."
In a way, it was a shame that the photo came out badly, because it could have symbolized a landmark of sorts, a turning point, what everything up until then had been holding its breath for. But, on further reflection, perhaps the way it came out was exactly right.
18. Vegas
She blinked and rubbed her eyes and tried to eyebrow-raise the tiredness off her face as something about final descent came over the loudspeakers. Glanced over at the seat next to her - he was still asleep, snoring more than slightly. The sky outside was dark, but there was a glow of some kind from underneath the plane. She took a deep breath and looked out the window.
A moment later she was shaking him awake. "Get the camera!"
"Mmmh?" he groaned. Leaned over her and looked.
"Lights," they said simultaneously. "Lights and lights and lights."
"And lights," he added.
"And lights," she agreed.
19. Gigs
"What've we got today?" she yawned, pouring herself a glass of orange juice. He passed the paper over the breakfast table to her, and she inspected it while she crunched her toast down. "Oh look, it's me. In full color. On the first page. Wearing a minimum of clothes." She took a sip of juice, went on reading. "'Danielle Hall, cabaret and acrobatic dancer'. I've got a last name now. Kind of strange."
She met his eyes over the table. "We're normal now, aren't we," she said quietly.
He looked around their apartment, large and modern and neat, and then back at the newspaper in her hands. "For a given value of 'normal'."
20. Ennui
"I'm bored," she said. "Let's go to Africa."
"Okay," he said.