Story: Saving Elliot

Type: Canon

Word Count: 2.5k

Pairing(s): Elliot Jensen/Elliot Fintry

Summary: In which fifty little paragraphs are used to try and explain Elliot Fintry.

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#23 - Fury

He looks at her, he thinks, fire and fury trapped in skin and bones.

#03 - Ill-fated

His father was born in Desdemona, South Carolina. A small town fit for sepia photographs and a small town, his father said once, made for leaving.

#10 - Remain

Subtract chaos and what remains?

#08 - Salt

He watches her bury the plate of fries in salt. Her need for self-destruction appear in the most casual moments.

#24 - Answer

"Say something."

The world is white noise, right now he can't comprehend the colour of the sky.

"I don't know what you want me to say."

"Anything. I - I just told you I love you, don't you have something to say?"

"I...I'm late to class."

#06 - Say

Violet tells him this: you're either not going to be enough or you're going to be too much. Don't ever apologise for it. Say, fuck it, fuck you and live.

#15 - Love

She breathes in, curls her hands into fists and glares. "You're such a fucking dick! I'd love to punch your lights out right now!"

"What do you know about love, munchkin?" he asks with a smirk.

"Certainly more than you!"

He considers her. He considers how anger sets her alight, makes her blue eyes burn, the way the winter air bites her cheeks red and how fierce and devastating she looks in the dying orange light. Somewhere - wherever he's hidden it- his heart gives a faint quiver. He leans a shoulder against the wall and shrugs, "Maybe."

#31 - Right

If his mother had turned right - if his mother had turned right, then what? Then nothing. Nothingness and the pleasure of unreality.

#22 - Belong

He didn't mean to say that. Yes, she is mine and I'm hers. Touch her again and you lose your hands. He knows she isn't. She's not a thing. People do not belong to people, it's a myth sold by Hollywood. He knows this, so why he can't let go of her wrist? Why is he tugging her to the dance floor? Why did she have to wear that dress? Why is his heart in his throat and worst of all, why does he feel so weak and unsure as he settles a hand on her waist?

#19 - Please

She shoves past West. "Please. Fuck off."

#21 - Ten

Elliot James Fintry: Strongest Man in the World, lifted and carried a thousand tonnes of emptiness for nine years.

#50 - Or

He scoops a chunk of lasagne onto his plate and eats. Eating makes him hungrier, not for food, for something else. He glances at her. Blonde curls pulled up in a careless bun, smiling and throwing sharp remarks at her older brother's questions. He thinks about the vodka bottle tucked in his jacket upstairs and the house party three streets over. Hungry for what? Love or destruction? He isn't sure. Maybe they're the same thing.

#27 - Apathetic

It's not that he doesn't feel. He does. He doesn't want to - but he does and he hates her for it.

#49 - Measure

Violet spreads her arms wide apart, she grins at him across toy train set on the carpet. Mom and Dad are arguing about dinner in the kitchen. "That's how much you annoy me."

#36 - Morrissey

The beer's gone flat. On the TV, a sullen man speaks of death and uprising in some fallen city. He's more interested in the moving banner below the man's tie, it tells him he has forty-three minutes until he has to get up for school. It tells him he can't miss another class when he's so far behind. It tells him he can't keep fucking up. He tells it to fuck off, sips his beer and changes the channel. Morrissey tells him about the honour of death by a double decker bus. He agrees.

#20 - Midnight

"Sleep," she rises from behind him on her side of the bed and wraps her arms around his neck. She pulls him close, nudges her face into his shoulder and places a warm kiss there, "Nothing good happens between midnight and five a.m."

#14 - Fool

The sky is black and pin-pricked with stars. They've been watching us for so long human must be synonymous with fool now.

#34 - Preach

The walk home is filled with her long, convoluted rant on Mr. Stanmore's teaching techniques. Terrible, she surmises, fucking terrible. The wind throws her wild curls into the air, a passing orange leaf is caught and it squirms for a moment before being ripped away by a stronger gust. Holy shit it's so cold, she wraps the scarf tighter around her neck and pulls it up over her mouth. Her blues eyes cut up to him. Are you even listening to me? But there's no one else he hears. She frowns and walks faster, I don't know why I bother.

#11 - Wrist

He pins her wrists together with one hand, presses them into the mattress above her head and kisses her dizzy, kisses her deep and slow and sweet like the honey she licked off her fingers this morning. She's shaking, or maybe he is. It's hard to tell. It's hard to think. She has a way of making his mind stutter and falter. She wraps her legs around his waist and groans into his mouth. His hold on her wrists tighten and his other hand slips under her shirt. The kiss grows dizzier; the world becomes a distant fairy-tale and distantly he wonders how this fairy-tale ends.

#46 - 2,300

Meet me at the back of the library. You need to see that history doesn't repeat itself. It rhymes. P.S. Bring my jacket, you've been hoarding it for 2,300 years now, munchkin.

#01 - Copper

The punch splits his lower lip in two, blood seeps into his mouth, spills down his chin. Crimson drops stain the stark snow and the taste of copper pushes a laugh past his red lips. He laughs again and again and again and - another punch sends him stumbling back, snow crunching under his boots. His laughter booms in the winter night.

He spits blood into a bush of brambles, it stains them black in the silver light of the moon. He grins, gory and feverish, he hasn't felt this - this anything in months. His opponent, some man he heckled into a fight, throws a hard punch into his stomach and he laughs once more.

He wipes his bloody mouth with the back of his hand. His grin has stretched so wide it brings a ringing, stinging ache. "Is that it?"

Pain, he thinks as the man lifts his fist, is enlightening.

#45 - Breathe

She calls him soft, gentle things that make him want to shatter. So, he carves his name into her heart as revenge. Forgetting him will be impossible, it will be like trying to breathe in deep space.

#09 - Cherry

Four consecutive shots of tequila sing through him. He opens his mouth and shows her the cherry knot sitting on his tongue. She laughs. He could study that laugh. Hold courses in college and teach generations upon generations on its every detail.

#35 - Dust

Things that go unsaid often eat at you. That's what his aunt used to say. He must be skeleton and dust now.

#07 - Elsewhere

His mouth is a centimetre, maybe less, from hers. She has a lovely mouth - a sweet, viscous mouth, soft and ribbon pink and his heart sits somewhere in his throat, time sits elsewhere. It sits outside this room and this room pulses with its absence. Her mouth parts, her voice is a siren song, "Fin -"

He kisses her. Her fingers slide into his hair. He knows.

#44 - Crack

Something changes or breaks or both but stars don't look like daggers anymore.

#12 - Never

He tries to imagine the other fork in the road, the one where he never met her. He can't - he can't bear it.

#05 - Wreck

A love to wreck the world - no, a love to wreck him.

#26 - Violet

"Know yourself, little brother."

#33 - Russia

At thirteen, shortly after the funeral, he mastered the art of hiding storms and earthquakes beneath his face. He can keep that mask on, he can be Russia, cold and unconquerable while his body burns and blackens from it all.

#25 - Honey

"What?" she says, blue eyes bright in the winter white light. Honey stains her fingers in an earlier attempt to spread it across the stack of toasted bread. She slides her thumb into her mouth, licks it clean and moves onto the next finger. He swallows. She frowns. "What?"

#41 - Sombre

Fintry: Memory hurts.

Nietzsche: It is possible to live without memory.

Faizullah: But is it possible to live with it?

#17 - Withering

She burns her thumb trying to pass the tube over the Bunsen burner.

"Fuck!" she hisses.

He rolls his eyes, gives her a withering look. "Is that the only word you know?"

"Piss off," she casts him a quick glance, "there - that's two more words I know. Impressed yet?"

#32 - Six

Stories make sense of the world, his father tells him one morning when he's six and a loose shard of glass carves a bleeding cut along his ankle, this will be a scar soon, remember the story behind it and remember who you were when it happened.

#28 - Tone

"This girl, Elliot," his mother says in that tone he hates so much, that tone that says you can't possibly think this will work out, happiness is for fairy tales. "Does she mean anything to you?"

"She means nothing," he says and hopes she doesn't catch the she means every fucking thing under his voice.

#43 - Apology

Sorry, it's three in the morning, hope I didn't wake you up. You're probably still asleep and I'll definitely regret this in the morning but...I'm so tired - the sun is rising behind me, a violent burst of violent and crimson and sorry, I think I love you too.

#02 - Explain

"- and it outputs a vector and the vector will depend on t, so the x component will be t times the cosine of t and the y component will be t times sine of t. Get it?"

Her hair, the colour of pale sunlight, cascades in unruly curls down her back and shoulders. She tries to tuck it behind her hair but the shorter strands escape and fall over her eyes.

"Fintry," she says, her eyebrows pinched together, "do you get it?"

Of course, he gets it. He could do parametric functions in his sleep but sleep has evaded him for so long he's forgotten its shape. He can't forget hers. Not the wild curls of her hair, the curve of her bottom lip, the sharpness of her writing. Watching Elliot Jensen work through multivariable functions brings the same trance as a dreamless sleep.

"No," he says, resting his chin the palm of his hand. "Tell me again."

#29 - Shiver

It's summer, the air is hot and thick with the smell of lavenders and lilies and when she leans in close to whisper something too sweet, he shivers.

#48 - Footprint

He's lying on a grassy hill somewhere in Manchester, a can of beer resting on his chest and a joint between his lips. The August morning is bright and white and the city below blinks awake. He tucks his free hand under his head and smiles. He could lie here forever, until the city falls and the stars dissolve away and the memory of man is a fading footprint in the sand.

#04 - Mark

She wiggles under him. "You're going to leave a mark."

"That's the point."

#37 - Underneath

If only loneliness wasn't such a damning thing. If only his blood didn't sing for a companion, for his hands in her hair, for her hands in his. If only he could be set free from needing her. If only he didn't have to worry about shedding his skin and exposing the heaving, slithering darkness underneath. If only.

#30 - Hell

"Quick life lesson in freedom," his sister says a week after returning from her first semester in college, "never piss quietly, the public toilet isn't an award-winning theatre full of critical snobs, do your business and do it however you like cause they sure as hell will and you sure as hell shouldn't care."

#13 - Dear

Dear Elliot,

I suppose this is goodbye. Do you think we'll meet again? Do you think we'll be better then? I hope so.

Love,
Elliot

#39 - Thousand

What did she mean? He can't remember. He's sifted through the conversation in his mind, peeled over her tone, collected samples of her pursed mouth, ran experiments on the small huff at the end but he still can't work it out. Today, tomorrow, a thousand days from now hinges on him remembering but he can't.

#42 - Unusual

We are unusual and alive and tragic, spray painted in large letters across the passing train.

#18 - Ruination

Nobody knows him. Not really. There are parts of him, palaces of ruination he shrouds in deep obsidian. Palaces with rooms and compartments in those rooms and corners in those compartments he hasn't visited in years, so old they've grown vines and spider webs and cracks that bleed black. Nobody needs to know him so perfectly. He has a right to keep some parts of him secret. She'll find them one day, hell, she'll find them tomorrow if he's not careful. He has to burn the palaces and all it's rooms and compartments and corners before she does.

#38 - Thaw

"Do you love her?" His sister smiles. The smile is a mid-winter night. Many fear it but many don't understand stars are best seen in the deep dark. "Has she finally thawed out your heart?"

He glances away, says nothing.

"If you had one."

He looks at her, meets that dark smile with his own, black like obsidian and razor sharp. "If I had one."

#40 - Print

Dialogues Concerning Nothingness, Professor E. Fintry. $15.99

The Dream of Acceptance, Elliot J. Fintry. $45

Nihilism in the 2000s: True Mortality and the Lack of It, Elliot Fintry. APA Philosophy Journal, issue 24, vol 3, pg. 212.

Tragedy, Language, and Death, Professor E. Fintry. $18.99

A Critique of Existence, Professor E. Fintry. $22.50

#47 - She

She thinks he doesn't pay any attention, not to her, not to anyone. She's right of course, he doesn't pay attention to anyone.

#16 - Abyss

Once upon a time a boy was buried in a wreckage, an abyss spiked with fallen stars, dead planets and black fumes spinning high. He built a world from this wreckage, a home.