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prospectus2011-01-02 07:14 pm
kisahawklin) wrote in prospectus2011-01-02 07:14 pm
Entry tags:
Cleaning out the WIP folder
Anyone care to join me, start the new year fresh?
Cambion: In medieval legend, a cambion is the half-human offspring of the union between a human male and a succubus, or of an incubus and a human female.
John was born in a home for wayward girls. His mother thought he was stillborn and was grateful for the mercy of God until he moved a hand, slowly, almost as if he was waving to her.
Her heart fell. She picked him up, wrapped him in her softest blanket and cradled him in her arms. He opened his eyes and stared at her intently. She fell in love.
When John is two, his mother marries Patrick Sheppard, and almost immediately gets pregnant. She delivers David with ease and Patrick dotes upon the boy. John spends most of his time with his mother, who goes into a deep depression and will not get out of bed for days at a time.
When John is four, he is found curled up in his dead mother's arms, napping.
When John is seven, the little next door neighbor girl is found dead in her bed. John never mentions that he's snuck in her window every night for the last three weeks to play house.
When John is eleven, his fifth grade teacher gets sick a few months into the school year. She lives alone. He and three girls volunteer to run errands for her; buy her groceries and read to her and clean up a little. She dies a few months later.
When John is sixteen, there is a rash of mono that seems to hit every girl John dates. They get sick for a couple of weeks, but by the time they feel better he's dating someone else. After a while, he dates girls at the high school across town, and then gives up on dating altogether and goes to college parties to pick up women he never sees again.
When John is seventeen, he leaves home, and it is several days before Patrick Sheppard notices. When he does, he counts his blessings and turns John's room into an office.
MIT is harder than John expects. The classes are fine, but people ask questions when the women respond to him like women always respond to him. These women are supposed to be different - and they are, except with him. He rotates his hookups among the thirty or so other colleges in Boston, sometimes every night; his appetite is nearly insatiable.
OTS isn't easy. By the time he graduates from MIT he can wait two whole weeks. In the winter, it's closer to six. He makes sure to start in the dead of winter, and he makes it through twelve weeks without a single incident, though he gets comments on how pale he looks at the end.
UPT is fifty-four weeks of hell. There aren't many women and the few that are there project nominal resistance, which is more than he's ever run across before. Two months in, he pushes the issue with a woman in his class, lays on the charm like he's never had to before, and a week later, he throws up when he finds out she's been kicked out of the program for missing her classes.
Afghanistan is easier than he thought it would be. Even with the heat, he can wait eight weeks in between feedings. He's resisted calling them feedings before, but since he found out he doesn't kill anymore, it's it easier.
Antarctica is almost perfect. The cold makes his appetite wane, and he only needs to find a woman every couple of months to assuage his hunger. There aren't very many women, so he has to recycle. If they blame him for their bouts of cabin fever, they never say.
Atlantis is ideal. He goes offworld almost every week. At least every two, and there's always someone throwing themselves at him. He takes care to choose people who are normal, who have no special status. He knows McKay watches him closely, but he's not doing anything any SG team hasn't done - that O'Neill himself hasn't done in a hundred mission reports. John knows how to read between the lines.
The first time they're stuck in Atlantis, really stuck in Atlantis, no getting offworld, John realizes how the regular feedings have decreased his hard-won self control. He gets hungry after a couple of weeks but grits his teeth and deals with it. Two weeks later, and he's scanning the personnel rosters, looking for someone with some time off, someone Rodney won't miss.
His pheremones go crazy when he hasn't fed in a while. Every woman in a room will look at him like they want to devour him - even Elizabeth and Teyla, which makes him really uncomfortable. He gets offers all day long, and women he barely knows show up at his door at all hours of the night.
Ford looks at him like he's some kind of sex god, which makes John laugh because it sure as hell feels like he's a sex demon. Rodney takes it all in stride, with a snarky comment or two, and does his level best to discourage anyone from approaching when they're together. His glower is usually sufficient, but sometimes it takes a nasty comment from Rodney's wickedly sharp tongue before the woman snaps out of it and storms off.
John starts hanging around Rodney more and more and he thinks he might be able to make it until they go offworld again - a couple more weeks, Elizabeth promises - when he gets back to his quarters one night and no matter how hard he tries, he can't get the lights to go on.
It's late, so he doesn't bother to worry about it, just strips down to his boxers and feels his way to the bed. He gropes for the mattress, just a hand to take his weight as he climbs in, but he touches skin instead.
"What the hell?" he shouts, standing back up. Someone's warm hands find their way to his belly and chest.
"John," a husky voice says, and even if he hadn't been starving, he probably couldn't have resisted that voice.
"How did you get in here?" He's drawing from her already, from her hands on him, but he keeps his wits about him, trying to force his eyes to adjust to the light so he can at least know who this is.
"I have a few skills," she says, and he finally recognizes her voice. Simpson.
"Shit!" he says, and jumps backwards, out of her reach. "No, Simpson, I can't." Rodney would kill me if you were out of commission for a week, he thinks.
"Come on, John. I know you've been lonely."
She stands up, all the way up on her tiptoes and kisses him. He puts his hands on her shoulders to push her away, but he's so hungry, and she tastes so good, and he can't help himself. He draws a little more, until her whimper snaps him back to the present. He breaks the kiss and fumbles for his comm on the nightstand, sticking it in his ear and clicking it on. "McKay," he barks, and Simpson stirs a little, though her head is resting on his chest, and he can feel the slight pull as he's still draining her, albeit slowly. "I have a minor emergency in my quarters."
"Major," Rodney whines, "I'm working here. What's the problem?"
"My lights won't turn on," John says, giving Simpson a little shove and letting her fall back onto his bed. He can see her eyes now, reflecting the ambient light. She blinks up at him.
"Do you need them to sleep?"
"I need them," John says.
Rodney takes a second to answer, and John holds his breath and hopes Rodney knows he doesn't ask for favors on a whim.
"All right," Rodney says finally. "I'm on my way."
until he's spending his days watching Rodney in the lab and his evenings in Rodney's quarters and it's not until he wonders if he can sleep on Rodney's floor that he thinks maybe he's taking it too far.
"I know you can't actually come out," Rodney says, and John looks up at him stupidly, "but I could spread a rumor and maybe they'd back off."
It starts with the Councilor's daughter from M3C-493, but it takes six more doe-eyed villagers before Rodney starts to really wonder about the irresistability of John Sheppard.
"Oh for crying out loud," Rodney says as Sheppard slips off with the barmaid that had brought them their dinner. "Is he really that undersexed?"
Ford laughs good-naturedly and keeps shoveling food in his mouth. Teyla says nothing but smiles a private little smile that makes Rodney want to throw things at her. Sure, Sheppard saved her life, but the way she tells the story, she saved his ass first. A couple of times. Surely a woman with as much going on as Teyla should be immune to Sheppard's charms.
Then again. Even Elizabeth looks a little hungrily at him when she thinks no one is looking.
Rodney is always looking.
There hasn't been a mission yet where John hasn't snuck off with some nubile young woman. They always look drunk afterwards, like Sheppard is the finest wine, and they can't help but indulge.
They rarely stay overnight offworld, something Rodney finds a little strange. Sam told him stories about staying for weeks on interesting planets, securing trade agreements or just learning about... whatever it was Jackson wanted to learn about.
Sure, Atlantis is in a dire situation, and they're looking for power sources, not knowledge - at least, none that Rodney cares about - but it's still strange. Rodney'd expected more hijinks and less waiting around for Sheppard to finish getting laid.
The first time they get grounded for a full week, Rodney's starting to wonder if something is wrong with Sheppard. He's always politely refused anyone in Atlantis who throws themselves at him, but now he looks like someone has kicked his puppy as he sends them away. He goes from his typical listlessness to near-coma levels of lazy, and he doesn't even show up to team movie night.
He considers calling Carson, but that seems a little like turning his team leader in, and while they haven't exactly cemented their friendship yet, it's precious enough in Rodney's experience to give Sheppard the benefit of the doubt.
At least until Simpson comes in to work looking drunk and completely unable to function, much less calibrate the sensors like she's supposed to.
"What's wrong with you?" Rodney asks, as he shuts down the klaxons for the second time. "Don't touch it anymore!"
Simpson pulls her hand away. She's still smiling, even though Rodney starts in on one of his official stupidity rants. Those tend that work best on Simpson; she's been proving her intelligence her whole life.
He snaps his fingers in front of her face. "Atlantis to Simpson!" She smiles at him, a beautiful but vacant smile, and that's the last straw. He sends her to the infirmary with Zilinky and goes to track down Sheppard.
Sheppard is training with Teyla when Rodney bursts in, getting his ass handed to him.
"Dr. McKay!" Teyla exclaims, and Rodney can see Sheppard calculating whether taking a shot while she's distracted is fair play. He decides against it and looks up at Rodney instead.
"Rodney."
Rodney glares at Sheppard. "I need to talk to you. Alone."
Teyla's expression doesn't change, but Rodney can almost feel her disapproval. She sets down her sticks and does the forehead thing with John before leaving the room.
"I don't know what the hell drugs you give your women, but I thought you'd have more sense than to use them on one of my scientists. I need every iota of limited intelligence available to me just to keep this city running!"
Sheppard's face gives nothing away.
"Can't you just pick one of your marines if you're going to drug them anyway? They can't get any more stupid!"
"Rodney," Sheppard says, his face still a mask of mild amusement, "I don't have to drug the women I sleep with."
Rodney wags his finger in Sheppard's face. "I've seen the results of your trysts, Major. They're drunk, or high, or something. Unless you're sucking their brains out through their mouths-"
That seems to hit home as Sheppard's eyes flash. "Their brains? That's... Oh for crying out loud." He palms the door to the gym closed. "An incubus? Really? How the hell did you survive in Antarctica?"
John shakes his head. "Not an incubus. That'd be my dad."
"Huh," Rodney says, thinking back over people's reactions to John Sheppard. "I thought you were supposed to kill your victims."
"Again, that'd be my dad." Sheppard looks guilty and sad, and that should work just fine for .
"So, you... what? Steal a little of their life essence?"
Sheppard nods. "It takes about a week for them to go back to normal."
Great. A week without Simpson. Zanky's going to have to put in some overtime.
"Fine," Rodney says. "Have sex with me instead."
"What? No!" Sheppard flushes pink, which is something Rodney has never seen in his limited Sheppard-watching experience. "It doesn't work with men, anyway."
Rodney smirks. At least he knows Sheppard's tried. "It'll work with me. My quarters, nineteen-hundred. Don't be late."
John's earliest memory is being plucked from his mother's arms when he was four, a rush of terror that still gives him nightmares, makes him wake up sweaty and shaking. She was dead; he knows this because his father told him so, and then never stopped telling him so until John left to get away from the accusations heavy in his father's eyes.
Death followed John closely in his youth. The next door neighbor girl he played house with, his third grade teacher who used to read stories to him when his father was late picking him up, the teacher's aide in seventh grade that he talked into letting him touch her breasts. They were soft. She gasped and fell down, and John stood there helplessly, watching as the ambulance came and left, with her wrapped in a plastic bag like she was an old suit.
She had a weak heart, they told him.
In high school it was mono that followed him around. He was called the kissing bandit because every girl he kissed came down with mono and was out of school for weeks. He stopped dating girls in his high school, preferring to chase the girls at the public school across town.
He was sixteen the first time he went to a college party. He got drunk and woke up next to a woman who was breathing very, very slowly. He watched her breathe for a little while before getting dressed and going home. He walked in the door at ten am on a Saturday and his father didn't even look up from his paper.
"Shh, John, lie still," Rodney's voice comes to him.
His eyes are clenched shut, like his body, curled tightly in on itself. A shiver goes through him and he clutches his own shoulders, wishing Rodney would keep talking, his voice a distraction against the black hole that's yawning in his belly, pulling John in so slowly he can feel every molecule of his being crushed by the gravitational pull.
He got into college at seventeen, without his father's knowledge or help, and he left home without a backward glance, his flight already booked, a Sheppard Industries AMEX tucked in his wallet.
Women practically threw themselves at him and it was fun for the first couple weeks, until he realized half the women in his dorm were walking around like zombies. Their vacant eyes freaked him out, and he switched dorms. He was celibate for a week after that, until he started sleeping later and later and napping in the afternoons, and then became completely unable to get out of bed.
His roommate dragged him into the shower after he missed his third Differential Equations class, and John felt a lot better afterward; his roommate had those creepy vacant eyes, though, and that shattered the last little bit of innocence John was using as a shield.
"Hush little baby, don't say a word, Pappa's gonna buy you a mockingbird."
The lilt of Rodney's voice singing brings him back enough to look up, to see Rodney's face and the worry and care that line it.
"And if that mockingbird don't sing - John?" Rodney asks, and John closes his eyes and curls up tighter.
A little bit of prudence went a long way, and if there was one thing John inherited from his father, it was a will of steel. He trained his body to resist the urge, for days, then weeks, then two months by the time he got out of college. That got him through boot camp, and he celebrated by going to a club and picking up the biggest guy he could find. He was six four and built like linebacker – the kind that have fifty pounds of fat on top of their two hundred pounds of muscle.
John read in the paper the next day that he died of a heart attack.
Rodney's humming, a strange Doppler-like effect as he paces next to John's bed. He smells so good, like sunshine and sea air, and John realizes that if he can't get Rodney to leave soon, he might do something he'd regret, more than anything else he's ever done.
The sky eases the longing sometimes, like he can soak up somethin
(Yep, stopped in the middle of a word.)
So, that's over 3000 words of a story that I know down to my bones but simply cannot get to work, no matter what I try. ARG. :(
Cambion: In medieval legend, a cambion is the half-human offspring of the union between a human male and a succubus, or of an incubus and a human female.
John was born in a home for wayward girls. His mother thought he was stillborn and was grateful for the mercy of God until he moved a hand, slowly, almost as if he was waving to her.
Her heart fell. She picked him up, wrapped him in her softest blanket and cradled him in her arms. He opened his eyes and stared at her intently. She fell in love.
When John is two, his mother marries Patrick Sheppard, and almost immediately gets pregnant. She delivers David with ease and Patrick dotes upon the boy. John spends most of his time with his mother, who goes into a deep depression and will not get out of bed for days at a time.
When John is four, he is found curled up in his dead mother's arms, napping.
When John is seven, the little next door neighbor girl is found dead in her bed. John never mentions that he's snuck in her window every night for the last three weeks to play house.
When John is eleven, his fifth grade teacher gets sick a few months into the school year. She lives alone. He and three girls volunteer to run errands for her; buy her groceries and read to her and clean up a little. She dies a few months later.
When John is sixteen, there is a rash of mono that seems to hit every girl John dates. They get sick for a couple of weeks, but by the time they feel better he's dating someone else. After a while, he dates girls at the high school across town, and then gives up on dating altogether and goes to college parties to pick up women he never sees again.
When John is seventeen, he leaves home, and it is several days before Patrick Sheppard notices. When he does, he counts his blessings and turns John's room into an office.
MIT is harder than John expects. The classes are fine, but people ask questions when the women respond to him like women always respond to him. These women are supposed to be different - and they are, except with him. He rotates his hookups among the thirty or so other colleges in Boston, sometimes every night; his appetite is nearly insatiable.
OTS isn't easy. By the time he graduates from MIT he can wait two whole weeks. In the winter, it's closer to six. He makes sure to start in the dead of winter, and he makes it through twelve weeks without a single incident, though he gets comments on how pale he looks at the end.
UPT is fifty-four weeks of hell. There aren't many women and the few that are there project nominal resistance, which is more than he's ever run across before. Two months in, he pushes the issue with a woman in his class, lays on the charm like he's never had to before, and a week later, he throws up when he finds out she's been kicked out of the program for missing her classes.
Afghanistan is easier than he thought it would be. Even with the heat, he can wait eight weeks in between feedings. He's resisted calling them feedings before, but since he found out he doesn't kill anymore, it's it easier.
Antarctica is almost perfect. The cold makes his appetite wane, and he only needs to find a woman every couple of months to assuage his hunger. There aren't very many women, so he has to recycle. If they blame him for their bouts of cabin fever, they never say.
Atlantis is ideal. He goes offworld almost every week. At least every two, and there's always someone throwing themselves at him. He takes care to choose people who are normal, who have no special status. He knows McKay watches him closely, but he's not doing anything any SG team hasn't done - that O'Neill himself hasn't done in a hundred mission reports. John knows how to read between the lines.
The first time they're stuck in Atlantis, really stuck in Atlantis, no getting offworld, John realizes how the regular feedings have decreased his hard-won self control. He gets hungry after a couple of weeks but grits his teeth and deals with it. Two weeks later, and he's scanning the personnel rosters, looking for someone with some time off, someone Rodney won't miss.
His pheremones go crazy when he hasn't fed in a while. Every woman in a room will look at him like they want to devour him - even Elizabeth and Teyla, which makes him really uncomfortable. He gets offers all day long, and women he barely knows show up at his door at all hours of the night.
Ford looks at him like he's some kind of sex god, which makes John laugh because it sure as hell feels like he's a sex demon. Rodney takes it all in stride, with a snarky comment or two, and does his level best to discourage anyone from approaching when they're together. His glower is usually sufficient, but sometimes it takes a nasty comment from Rodney's wickedly sharp tongue before the woman snaps out of it and storms off.
John starts hanging around Rodney more and more and he thinks he might be able to make it until they go offworld again - a couple more weeks, Elizabeth promises - when he gets back to his quarters one night and no matter how hard he tries, he can't get the lights to go on.
It's late, so he doesn't bother to worry about it, just strips down to his boxers and feels his way to the bed. He gropes for the mattress, just a hand to take his weight as he climbs in, but he touches skin instead.
"What the hell?" he shouts, standing back up. Someone's warm hands find their way to his belly and chest.
"John," a husky voice says, and even if he hadn't been starving, he probably couldn't have resisted that voice.
"How did you get in here?" He's drawing from her already, from her hands on him, but he keeps his wits about him, trying to force his eyes to adjust to the light so he can at least know who this is.
"I have a few skills," she says, and he finally recognizes her voice. Simpson.
"Shit!" he says, and jumps backwards, out of her reach. "No, Simpson, I can't." Rodney would kill me if you were out of commission for a week, he thinks.
"Come on, John. I know you've been lonely."
She stands up, all the way up on her tiptoes and kisses him. He puts his hands on her shoulders to push her away, but he's so hungry, and she tastes so good, and he can't help himself. He draws a little more, until her whimper snaps him back to the present. He breaks the kiss and fumbles for his comm on the nightstand, sticking it in his ear and clicking it on. "McKay," he barks, and Simpson stirs a little, though her head is resting on his chest, and he can feel the slight pull as he's still draining her, albeit slowly. "I have a minor emergency in my quarters."
"Major," Rodney whines, "I'm working here. What's the problem?"
"My lights won't turn on," John says, giving Simpson a little shove and letting her fall back onto his bed. He can see her eyes now, reflecting the ambient light. She blinks up at him.
"Do you need them to sleep?"
"I need them," John says.
Rodney takes a second to answer, and John holds his breath and hopes Rodney knows he doesn't ask for favors on a whim.
"All right," Rodney says finally. "I'm on my way."
until he's spending his days watching Rodney in the lab and his evenings in Rodney's quarters and it's not until he wonders if he can sleep on Rodney's floor that he thinks maybe he's taking it too far.
"I know you can't actually come out," Rodney says, and John looks up at him stupidly, "but I could spread a rumor and maybe they'd back off."
It starts with the Councilor's daughter from M3C-493, but it takes six more doe-eyed villagers before Rodney starts to really wonder about the irresistability of John Sheppard.
"Oh for crying out loud," Rodney says as Sheppard slips off with the barmaid that had brought them their dinner. "Is he really that undersexed?"
Ford laughs good-naturedly and keeps shoveling food in his mouth. Teyla says nothing but smiles a private little smile that makes Rodney want to throw things at her. Sure, Sheppard saved her life, but the way she tells the story, she saved his ass first. A couple of times. Surely a woman with as much going on as Teyla should be immune to Sheppard's charms.
Then again. Even Elizabeth looks a little hungrily at him when she thinks no one is looking.
Rodney is always looking.
There hasn't been a mission yet where John hasn't snuck off with some nubile young woman. They always look drunk afterwards, like Sheppard is the finest wine, and they can't help but indulge.
They rarely stay overnight offworld, something Rodney finds a little strange. Sam told him stories about staying for weeks on interesting planets, securing trade agreements or just learning about... whatever it was Jackson wanted to learn about.
Sure, Atlantis is in a dire situation, and they're looking for power sources, not knowledge - at least, none that Rodney cares about - but it's still strange. Rodney'd expected more hijinks and less waiting around for Sheppard to finish getting laid.
The first time they get grounded for a full week, Rodney's starting to wonder if something is wrong with Sheppard. He's always politely refused anyone in Atlantis who throws themselves at him, but now he looks like someone has kicked his puppy as he sends them away. He goes from his typical listlessness to near-coma levels of lazy, and he doesn't even show up to team movie night.
He considers calling Carson, but that seems a little like turning his team leader in, and while they haven't exactly cemented their friendship yet, it's precious enough in Rodney's experience to give Sheppard the benefit of the doubt.
At least until Simpson comes in to work looking drunk and completely unable to function, much less calibrate the sensors like she's supposed to.
"What's wrong with you?" Rodney asks, as he shuts down the klaxons for the second time. "Don't touch it anymore!"
Simpson pulls her hand away. She's still smiling, even though Rodney starts in on one of his official stupidity rants. Those tend that work best on Simpson; she's been proving her intelligence her whole life.
He snaps his fingers in front of her face. "Atlantis to Simpson!" She smiles at him, a beautiful but vacant smile, and that's the last straw. He sends her to the infirmary with Zilinky and goes to track down Sheppard.
Sheppard is training with Teyla when Rodney bursts in, getting his ass handed to him.
"Dr. McKay!" Teyla exclaims, and Rodney can see Sheppard calculating whether taking a shot while she's distracted is fair play. He decides against it and looks up at Rodney instead.
"Rodney."
Rodney glares at Sheppard. "I need to talk to you. Alone."
Teyla's expression doesn't change, but Rodney can almost feel her disapproval. She sets down her sticks and does the forehead thing with John before leaving the room.
"I don't know what the hell drugs you give your women, but I thought you'd have more sense than to use them on one of my scientists. I need every iota of limited intelligence available to me just to keep this city running!"
Sheppard's face gives nothing away.
"Can't you just pick one of your marines if you're going to drug them anyway? They can't get any more stupid!"
"Rodney," Sheppard says, his face still a mask of mild amusement, "I don't have to drug the women I sleep with."
Rodney wags his finger in Sheppard's face. "I've seen the results of your trysts, Major. They're drunk, or high, or something. Unless you're sucking their brains out through their mouths-"
That seems to hit home as Sheppard's eyes flash. "Their brains? That's... Oh for crying out loud." He palms the door to the gym closed. "An incubus? Really? How the hell did you survive in Antarctica?"
John shakes his head. "Not an incubus. That'd be my dad."
"Huh," Rodney says, thinking back over people's reactions to John Sheppard. "I thought you were supposed to kill your victims."
"Again, that'd be my dad." Sheppard looks guilty and sad, and that should work just fine for .
"So, you... what? Steal a little of their life essence?"
Sheppard nods. "It takes about a week for them to go back to normal."
Great. A week without Simpson. Zanky's going to have to put in some overtime.
"Fine," Rodney says. "Have sex with me instead."
"What? No!" Sheppard flushes pink, which is something Rodney has never seen in his limited Sheppard-watching experience. "It doesn't work with men, anyway."
Rodney smirks. At least he knows Sheppard's tried. "It'll work with me. My quarters, nineteen-hundred. Don't be late."
John's earliest memory is being plucked from his mother's arms when he was four, a rush of terror that still gives him nightmares, makes him wake up sweaty and shaking. She was dead; he knows this because his father told him so, and then never stopped telling him so until John left to get away from the accusations heavy in his father's eyes.
Death followed John closely in his youth. The next door neighbor girl he played house with, his third grade teacher who used to read stories to him when his father was late picking him up, the teacher's aide in seventh grade that he talked into letting him touch her breasts. They were soft. She gasped and fell down, and John stood there helplessly, watching as the ambulance came and left, with her wrapped in a plastic bag like she was an old suit.
She had a weak heart, they told him.
In high school it was mono that followed him around. He was called the kissing bandit because every girl he kissed came down with mono and was out of school for weeks. He stopped dating girls in his high school, preferring to chase the girls at the public school across town.
He was sixteen the first time he went to a college party. He got drunk and woke up next to a woman who was breathing very, very slowly. He watched her breathe for a little while before getting dressed and going home. He walked in the door at ten am on a Saturday and his father didn't even look up from his paper.
"Shh, John, lie still," Rodney's voice comes to him.
His eyes are clenched shut, like his body, curled tightly in on itself. A shiver goes through him and he clutches his own shoulders, wishing Rodney would keep talking, his voice a distraction against the black hole that's yawning in his belly, pulling John in so slowly he can feel every molecule of his being crushed by the gravitational pull.
He got into college at seventeen, without his father's knowledge or help, and he left home without a backward glance, his flight already booked, a Sheppard Industries AMEX tucked in his wallet.
Women practically threw themselves at him and it was fun for the first couple weeks, until he realized half the women in his dorm were walking around like zombies. Their vacant eyes freaked him out, and he switched dorms. He was celibate for a week after that, until he started sleeping later and later and napping in the afternoons, and then became completely unable to get out of bed.
His roommate dragged him into the shower after he missed his third Differential Equations class, and John felt a lot better afterward; his roommate had those creepy vacant eyes, though, and that shattered the last little bit of innocence John was using as a shield.
"Hush little baby, don't say a word, Pappa's gonna buy you a mockingbird."
The lilt of Rodney's voice singing brings him back enough to look up, to see Rodney's face and the worry and care that line it.
"And if that mockingbird don't sing - John?" Rodney asks, and John closes his eyes and curls up tighter.
A little bit of prudence went a long way, and if there was one thing John inherited from his father, it was a will of steel. He trained his body to resist the urge, for days, then weeks, then two months by the time he got out of college. That got him through boot camp, and he celebrated by going to a club and picking up the biggest guy he could find. He was six four and built like linebacker – the kind that have fifty pounds of fat on top of their two hundred pounds of muscle.
John read in the paper the next day that he died of a heart attack.
Rodney's humming, a strange Doppler-like effect as he paces next to John's bed. He smells so good, like sunshine and sea air, and John realizes that if he can't get Rodney to leave soon, he might do something he'd regret, more than anything else he's ever done.
The sky eases the longing sometimes, like he can soak up somethin
(Yep, stopped in the middle of a word.)
So, that's over 3000 words of a story that I know down to my bones but simply cannot get to work, no matter what I try. ARG. :(
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