Title: Parallax
Description: But in the end, they are just smudges. Accidental. Because humans need an explanation.
Pairing: Slight ROR/DAN
Rating: M
A/N: Drabble-fest. I have not seen the movie yet, but I have read most of the graphic novel. It's just pure love. Basically, I took some of the most common responses to ink blot tests and wrote little vignettes on them.
"Butterfly" is first. Hope you enjoy.
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Stomp on baby's breath
.Butterfly.
Walter had come to the realization that beauty was subjective at an early age. The ripe, bitter tang of five years in his soul had already begun to wither away. Grass tickled lovingly at his toes while his mother's hand left a scarlet stain upon his cheek – the sun averting its rays as the neighbors were hushed, mother's screams reverberating off graffiti-slain bricks. The forgotten bag of groceries whimpered forlornly while the woman huffed, exasperated from the bout of cruel energy spent, and laid a hand across her forehead.
Walter kneeled in the grass, the lonely patch that had sporadically sprouted two summers ago, and stared at earth's tendrils. He couldn't help but imagine the tips slick with red than a healthy, translucent dew. Early morning skirted away, clouds rolling with wind's hurried whispers. The travesty upon the patch of grass – barely a lawn; a few scant weeds, patches of muddled dirt and woodlice attempting to burrow deep into the shallow soil – glared and sputtered. Ruddy knees pressed hard into the ground and Walter refused to raise a hand to clamp onto his stinging cheek. The cool rush of clear liquid cascading his flesh provided him some nominal comfort.
Hush, my child..
Lipstick smudged, smearing unattractively from her lip to the far side of her jowls, Mrs. Kovacs closed her eyes – in either disgust or succumbing to the ravishing notion to forget – and scowled as she felt her heels sink into the dirt. Clutching her robe tight with gnarled fingers, she snatched the grocery bag. The final clicks of the dusty shoes echoed on the cracked sidewalk, leaving Walter in the throes of his mind, his escape, his grass.
Don't you cry..
He tried to forget about the condoms shaking in his hands as he was escorted to his mother, the clerk flabbergasted at the mere sight of a child seizing the rubbers close to his chest – as if everything intertwined with the latex. Walter stared at the grass instead, focusing intently on the slick caress of each strand that popped hardily from the earth. Still, he could not erase his mother's face, red and blotched with John Doe's greedy kisses. The humility failed to outweigh the ache in his chest, the weeping of his ribs, as Mrs. Kovacs tugged his arm roughly – the condoms spewing across the tiled floor.
"I can't take you anywhere! You ruin everything, everything!"
The monochrome packets gazed up bashfully from the floor while the clerk's mouth opened in late commissary for the child. He tried to avert his eyes from his mother's murky ones, so unlike his pale cerulean – the only feature upon his face to remain unscathed. Instead, Walter bit his lip hard, the peculiar taste of acerbity staining his teeth, and stared neutrally at the condoms lying lopsided and scattered. There were seven. He had counted. Twice. He would've had to count eighteen more times to outlast his mother's verbal slaughter and the clerk's pitying countenance.
The neighbors slowly returned to their thresholds, tongues bitten and swelling as front doors softly click shut. See no evil. Walter is silent, emerald stains rubbed against his kneecaps, legs slowly ebbing to a blissful numb. Despite the aloof way his eyes roved over each blade of grass, inside he felt turmoil bubble against the acidic lining of his stomach. Walter swallowed. The bile was creeping, nudging his esophagus as the jagged memory of his whimpering explanation to his mother surfaced, how he closed his eyes to the packets at their feet –
"I just wanted to help."
The throb of the yellow bruises gripping his left arm were starting to fade. The grass – patchy and forgotten – sighed beneath his fingers when Walter uprooted the innocent things. Two clumps of green in his fists. Russet locks burning in the afternoon sun, too big to hide precariously behind a passing cloud, and azure eyes darkening to navy, the child catches sight of an ivory smudge in his peripheral. He had disturbed a grave.
A moth, crumpled and heaving from a heel slicing right through its heart, lay idle. The powder of its wings still shimmered with the whisper of the noon breeze though its lungs were collapsed and shredded. He is afraid to touch it, the curiosity to prod the carcass with a finger halted. Instead, Walter watches as the wind creates the semblance of life, fluttering the frayed wings. The desperate attempt to fly.
Walter is five when he realizes the presence of subjectivity. Tears still whisking past the ugly red slathered on his cheek, lips parted with abated breath, Walter deems the dead creature beautiful.
- - -
A/N:
Soundtrack:
Marvelous Things -- Eisely
Butterfly represents hope, light, dreams. The dead moth translates to the fabrication of such things in Walter Kovacs' world.
Next: Fox