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ds_team_angstEven though I missed signing up for Team Angst (which, if there were ever a team I was made for, it would be an angst team...), I wrote a drabble for their drabble tree anyway. But I didn't post it there. I think you're only supposed to post there if you're on the team, which I am not, sadly.
In response to where lights only burn in the rooms of the dying, which was spawned by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nos4a2no9's "The Nightrunner" beginning riff I wrote what's below. Of course, it's not beta-ed, and there are grammatical problems. But, then, I guess that's the point of the drabble as writing exercise. So I exercised.
* * *
That overwhelming sense of failure had only increased upon finding himself flat on his back in a hospital bed, the antiseptic smell not only surrounding him, but becoming part of him and frightening him. Fraser's voyeuristic witnessing of Dr. Carter's romantic betrayal had sounded to its depths the deep well of his own sense of betrayal -- not Victoria's betrayal, but even more wrenchingly, his betrayal of himself.
Somehow, helping prevent a more murderous ending that would otherwise doubtless have occurred after witnessing Dr. Carter's unraveling did not ease his conscience. The first major obstacle to that was Ray's injury. But even witnessing Dr. Carter breaking down did not help Fraser forgive himself for his wretched ambivalence, his failure to draw a line within himself over which he would not step, no matter how badly he wanted to, because it was wrong. Even as he'd seen it in Dr. Carter, pointing a revolver at her young blackmailing lover, he had wanted to believe that he was somehow different from her, that that sort of reckless abandon, that sort of tidal emotionalism, wasn't also in himself.
At first, he'd imagined her rage like Victoria's: revenge, pure and simple, on the lover who betrayed her. But then Ray had reminded him: Benny, not every woman with long, dark hair tries to kill her lover. And then when he heard Dr. Carter speaking bitterly to her lover, describing the piecemeal tearing down of her heart -- it was as if that ache within himself, that down-to-the-bone pain, connected through the ethers to Dr. Carter's.
It was then that Fraser had understood Dr. Carter to be not like Victoria, but like himself. It was then that he had realized his furious pursuit of Victoria through the train station had not been motivated by the dictum "maintain the right" or any other sense of justice, ethics or morals. It was then that he realized he'd never thought far enough ahead as to what exactly he would do with Victoria when he caught her.
( Read more... )
In response to where lights only burn in the rooms of the dying, which was spawned by
nos4a2no9's "The Nightrunner" beginning riff I wrote what's below. Of course, it's not beta-ed, and there are grammatical problems. But, then, I guess that's the point of the drabble as writing exercise. So I exercised.* * *
That overwhelming sense of failure had only increased upon finding himself flat on his back in a hospital bed, the antiseptic smell not only surrounding him, but becoming part of him and frightening him. Fraser's voyeuristic witnessing of Dr. Carter's romantic betrayal had sounded to its depths the deep well of his own sense of betrayal -- not Victoria's betrayal, but even more wrenchingly, his betrayal of himself.
Somehow, helping prevent a more murderous ending that would otherwise doubtless have occurred after witnessing Dr. Carter's unraveling did not ease his conscience. The first major obstacle to that was Ray's injury. But even witnessing Dr. Carter breaking down did not help Fraser forgive himself for his wretched ambivalence, his failure to draw a line within himself over which he would not step, no matter how badly he wanted to, because it was wrong. Even as he'd seen it in Dr. Carter, pointing a revolver at her young blackmailing lover, he had wanted to believe that he was somehow different from her, that that sort of reckless abandon, that sort of tidal emotionalism, wasn't also in himself.
At first, he'd imagined her rage like Victoria's: revenge, pure and simple, on the lover who betrayed her. But then Ray had reminded him: Benny, not every woman with long, dark hair tries to kill her lover. And then when he heard Dr. Carter speaking bitterly to her lover, describing the piecemeal tearing down of her heart -- it was as if that ache within himself, that down-to-the-bone pain, connected through the ethers to Dr. Carter's.
It was then that Fraser had understood Dr. Carter to be not like Victoria, but like himself. It was then that he had realized his furious pursuit of Victoria through the train station had not been motivated by the dictum "maintain the right" or any other sense of justice, ethics or morals. It was then that he realized he'd never thought far enough ahead as to what exactly he would do with Victoria when he caught her.
( Read more... )
