lirazel: An outdoor scene from the film Picnic at Hanging Rock ([m] not exactly superheroes)
lirazel ([personal profile] lirazel) wrote2011-01-07 11:21 am
Entry tags:

ficlet: sugar, we're going down swinging

Title: sugar, we're going down swinging
Fandom: Misfits
Characters/Pairings: Simon, Alisha, Nathan, Kelly and Curtis. Mentions of Simon/Alisha.
Rating: PG-13
Written for: comment fic-a-thon
Summary: You'll forgive them if they fancied themselves indestructible.

You’ll forgive them if they fancied themselves indestructible. It was to be expected, really—between immortality and the ability to turn back time, they hadn’t yet found any battle they couldn’t emerge from (relatively) unscathed (mental wounds, scar tissue building up on their souls—those are things they don’t talk about, and the silence is its own conversation, and Kelly never talks about what she hears—she’s surprisingly easy to trust, that one, once you get past her dirty mouth and ready fists). They haven’t lost anything too valuable, really (innocence was made to be shattered, otherwise why is it so damn fragile?), and the memories of bloodstains from production workers past and deals with the devil struck are voiced only in Nathan’s absurd speeches (he could play a magnificent Mercutio, don’t you think? Or maybe just Bottom). So if they had started to believe that they might actually be undefeatable, it had as much to do with necessity as anything else (Curtis carries a catalogue in his head of the various ways that he’s watched his friends die, and sometimes he pictures his mind like a filing cabinet full to bursting). After all, despite everything they’ve seen, they’re still so very young.

--

Simon’s always known this would come, though (one night right before slipping off to sleep, Alisha warm against him, he remembered that his mother had once told him that if he’d been a girl, she would have named him Cassandra, and the irony was so potent he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or scream), and he’s the only one who’s died and stayed dead (even if it was another version of him, one he still feels a bite of jealousy towards sometimes and whose existence he doesn’t quite understand, even with the help of all those years of Doctor Who and Back to the Future and Vonnegut) so maybe he’s the only one who can face the reality of it. He’s always kept the certainty tucked away, though, after he figured out that sometimes his knowledge of the inevitable only makes things worse (and if he’s too weak to bear the look he’d see on Alisha’s face if he told her everything he knows will happen, just because it has to happen, well, he can leave with that specific brand of cowardice).

So he’s not the least bit surprised that it’s come to this. Powers stripped away and up against a wall (it’s white and Alisha murmurs something about how pretty their blood will look splattered on it) and no way out this time. But Nathan’s shouting and laughing and Curtis’s fists are clenched and Kelly’s got that look in her eyes that says she means business and he can feel the brush of Alisha’s arm against his and…

And it was always going to end like this.

He finds that he doesn’t mind so much.

(At least this way he knows that he’s lived).

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