23. (misfits) you better be home soon; (original) (raw)
title: you better be home soon
fandom: misfits
characters/pairings: simon bellamy; simon/alisha
rating: r warning for canonical character death and graphic descriptions of it
words: 585
summary: every superhero needs a plan. or the one where simon actually stops, uses the clues he's given himself over the course of the timeline, and thinks for a second. post-finale, slight au.
notes: i can't sleep and i'm feeling sad so i figured i'd channel the latter into writing something for the saddest couple i love. written for the prompt remember all my past time, when the future is waiting for me / I am lying on this ground, among memories and to the song the title comes from. title from crowded house's better be home soon. ( also on AO3 and DREAMWIDTH. )
His hands feel cracked, coated in her blood. The skin stretches over the bones of his nimble fingers like it’s trying to escape. In his lifelines he can find her, bits of her he was unable to scrub away when he tried to rub his hands raw from a bar of soap.
When the pad of his thumb presses tightly to a photograph, it doesn’t leave a print. No blood, no shadow, no footprint. It angers him. His hands are dry and empty, but she lives on in every crack and crevice of him; the sheets still smell of her rich perfume, the small kitchenette bleeds of burnt toast, and his mouth feels slick with the blood he tried to kiss away from her unmoving lips.
Laid out before him are the photographs. They’re still strangers to him. He’s studied them in every possible light at every possible angle over the months, but, still, to this day, he feels like a stranger peering into an album that isn’t his.
He sits on the floor, back hunched, trying to not move a thing; her shoes by the bed, her scarf, her denim jacket gripping onto the back of a chair for dear life. He remains distant of the bed, not wanting to shuffle the sheets and lose her all over again. It confuses him as to how his hands can press and hold onto these photographs so tightly they don’t fall from his grip, but the moment he does it with her, she slips away like water.
The photographs have chicken scrawl on the back of them. He wonders if she ever noticed. The one in his lap is of her, a profile shot as she sits on a bench and watches something in the distance. Her hair is wild, uncontrollable, and he believes the wind’s pulling it into her face rather than away from it.
I wonder
, it says. The one thing he happens to have in common with Superhoodie is that one phrase. I wonder. It doesn’t help him with his mission to chronologically set out the photographs to tell him a story he continues to read wrong.
Anger still sets itself along his spine, twirling around the notches of the bone there like a vine, but he doesn’t push off from his seated position and tango with them during his fleeing to the past. All he sees is red, but at the end of this tunnel, he sees it coating Alisha’s neck and her hands, nudging its way beneath her fingernails and making home there. His back remains arched, his shoulders moaning in protest, as he bends his neck to look for something, a speck of movement, a speck of dust, another little note written on the wrong side of the photograph. Staying in the present physically hurts. Living a future without her is unbearable. Going to the past to live a few fleeting moments with her isn’t enough.
Simon believes in following paths, of fulfilling character arcs and destinies, but, most of all, after watching the life drain from her once animated face, he realises that sometimes going off script and ad-libbing saves the girl and gives her - and him - what she wants.
Every superhero needs a plan. Go back in time. Save the girl. Take some photographs for documentation purposes. Buy a photo album. Live happily ever after. Together.
Properly, this time.