[March 4] [Original Fiction]: The Collision of Objects

[sassafras28.livejournal.com]

Title: The Collision of Objects
Day/Theme: March 4: however you live, there's a part of you always standing by, mapping out the sky
Series: Original Fiction
Character/Pairing: Original
Rating: G


“It is not quite like a bird, is it?” Danelle wondered quietly when he showed to her in the dimming afternoon light. “The wings, they are like a bat’s somewhat.” Lamir did not say anything for a long minute after this, and she wondered immediately if he had been insulted. Taken her comment for a criticism, instead of merely as an observation, which she had thought might be a bit clever.

“You’re right,” he said mildly, and she could see from the faint, interested lines in his face as he watched the thing that he was not annoyed by her words. The little creature made a swooping pass around them, and he reached to clumsily catch it in his hands, careful not to damage the slender metal of its tiny body. “Real birds,” he said, turning his palm flat and revealing the animal like the denouement of a magic trick, “coast on the air, with their wings outstretched,” he eased the wings out to their full span with his smallest finger. “But see, this one is so heavy, he has to flap to stay aloft.”

“It’s the eyes,” he said fondly, winding up the golden key in the bird’s back, “they’re ball bearings.” And indeed they were, perfectly round and a lusterless gray color. “Here,” he said, and launched the bird from his palm towards her. She caught it easily with her superior reflexes, and understood that it was to be hers from now on.

She had a small room just off the kitchen, and there was shelf with her mirror and a washbasin on it. She set the bird next to the pitcher, in the shadow of the basin. It seemed rather at home in the blue porcelain jungle of coiled flowers and creeping vines. It was, for a long time, the only thing of ornament she displayed. Until the star chart.

He unrolled it for her against the wall above his head. He was much taller than her, and she had to crane to look at it. It was, he said, the night sky, as visible from the top of the highest tower. The stars shone white and silver on black paper, he drew between them with his long fingers, showing her where the constellations went. She knew the great worm, of course, the queen enthroned and the little prince with his mother leading him. Lamir showed her others, though, telling her half-remembered stories as he traced the lines between them. She wondered absent-mindedly if those stories his father had told him when he was still in diapers, leaning over his crib with his soft and music voice.

“What is this one?” pointing to a single yellow-red eye in the highest corner.

“That? That is a planet,” he said, as if he had been surprised by the question, “a world, like our own.”

A worry line appeared immediately in the small place between her lower lip and her chin. “Just like ours?”

“Well, no, not exactly. I mean, I suppose it could be…but we don’t know, it’s so far away.” His eyes glowed with the possibilities that this opened up inside his head. “I mean, it could look like our world, but be totally uninhabited. Or it could be full of people who are not like us, or perhaps animals. Or something like both. Could be anything really, with so much distance.”

Danelle reached up to touch it, to cover it with the tip of her finger. “In the sky.” She said.

“It’s gravity,” Lamir he said, watching her trace the lines of constellations, their curve and delineations. “Gravity is this…powerful force that pulls objects in the sky together.”

“Don’t you need it still?” she asked, when he rolled up the chart efficiently and handed it to her. He shrugged his shoulders.

“No, I’ve got what I came for.”

And she knew he had, there were still ruins of half-finished clockwork animals all over his workshop, three nameless mice lounging uselessly around their cages, huge books of a long-dead language left unfinished and bristling with torn paper bookmarks. “I know enough to order in a restaurant,” he had told her once.

“Ah,” she had answered, “so if we ever find ourselves six thousand years in the past, you can get us a bite to eat.” He had laughed, and touched her hair like an affectionate older brother.

She put the star chart on the wall opposite her bed and burned down a dozen candles on a dozen nights, tracing the lines and bursts of light with her eyes. When she slept they moved and danced in front of her eyes, pulled together, pushed apart by invisible forces.

A thing she loved about Lamir was his spectacles. Or rather, a small thing he did with his spectacles. He took them off, sometimes, ironically to get a closer look at something small and delicate and occasionally, he would forget he had already removed them and touch a hand to outside edge of where they were supposed to be. Finding warm skin instead of thin metal, he would drop his hand and smile faintly at himself, just a half-quirk upwards of his mouth.

He smiled that way the first time they kissed, which was an accident. Pressed into the little passage between the kitchen and the lower rooms. He tilted, shifted and bent to let her pass, she half-twisted and righted herself with one hand rested on his shoulder, on his neck. It was in awkward way that their mouths came to bump together, Danelle facing backwards and Lamir with his hands pressed flush to the stone of the wall.

He looked down and said, “There’s going to be a fall of meteors this Friday night,” as if this meant anything to anyone. Danelle rested her forehead on the stone wall and did not look at him as she backed slowly into the kitchen.

That night she laid awake and did not expect a knock at door, but instead only stared at the far wall. At those ersatz stars. She wound up the little bird in her lap, watched it’s perfectly round eyes as it flew. And she thought about what seemed to be the terrible inevitability, the horrible gravity of the collision of objects.

The bird landed on the floor with a heavy thunk, and it was just clockwork again.