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Fiction » Young Adult » Everything Looks Perfect From Far Away font: B s : A A A . width: full 3/4 1/2
Author: Conspiracy Unit
Fiction Rated: T - English - Romance/Supernatural - Reviews: 2 - Published: 02-19-08 - Updated: 02-19-08 - Complete - id:2477870

A/N: There are lyrics here from "Such Great Heights" by The Postal Service.


She’s waiting for him when he arrives at her bedroom window. She’s dressed and ready to go. It’s late, but she doesn’t care. She just wants to get out of the house, just wants to disappear for a few hours. The news said it might rain; she’s not worried. She’s wearing jeans, and a jacket, and a pink t-shirt featuring none other than a scowling smiley face. She’s warm, and mostly water-proofed.

And as soon as he arrives, she’s ready to leave. She throws open the window, and he’s there, smiling at her. Cargo pants and a hoody, and a big smile on his face. He reaches for her, and she clasps his hand.

“The night’s ours.” She says with barely hidden glee. “Where are we going?”

“I thought we might just fly away for a little while.”

She steps out of the window, and their feet rise together; out of the second storey window, upwards, upwards, rising on a cool night time breeze. In the distance, the thunderheads roll over the city, and the wind rises electric around them.

They are free of their bonds; free of school, of family, and now of gravity itself.

Together, they rise higher and higher; above her house, above the treetops of the shady avenue on which she lives. She wraps her arms around him, clasping her hands behind his shoulder blades, and he folds his hands arm her waist, keeping her steady as they climb upwards.

The night stretches away before them, the moon obscured by the rapidly descending storm clouds, the stars invisible in the gloom; their light comes from the city and the suburbs on a ground that is rapidly falling away below them, and from each other.

Night gathers around them as they climb higher and higher, and the temperature drops; he feels her warmth, and she his. They rise together faster and faster.

A bolt of lightning splits the air above the distant city, and they hover for a moment and watch the beauty of it.

Her perfume is the only scent that high up; he drinks it in. And he drinks her in. Everything about her. Her easy smile, her eyes' mischievous little glint. Her impish grin.

“The beach?” he asks.

He knows a nice little one. There’s never anybody there.

“The beach,” she repeats, captivated, mesmerised by the storm raging above the far-distant city.

He leans forward slightly, and they fly, faster than before, their arms still around each other. They fly above the suburbs. Above the park they go to on Friday afternoons. Above their school. Above the cricket pitch where he got hit in the face by a flying ball. Above his house. They pick up speed, aiming towards the coast.

And, in what seems like an instant, they’re there.

In the gloom, the water is grey; the surf is pounding, and he finds the beach, his beach. There’s a car park, on a rocky, grassy hillock overlooking the yellow crescent of sand that is the beach proper.

They land, her feet touching the asphalt first, and his touching down just a split second later. She looks around, and her heart swells. They’re alone, free.

At that moment, the first droplets of rain begin to fall.

It’s soft, barely worth noticing. She leads the way now, to the wooden rail that rings the hillock, stopping those that stand there from plunging into the ocean and the jagged rocks at the base of the hillock.

He gets there just a second after.

She places her hands on his shoulders, and looks him directly in the eye. There’s a moment, where they say nothing, but everything unsaid passes between them. He looks into her eyes, pools of liquid honey-brown. Intense. Piercing. Beautiful.

She looks into his; dark brown, intelligent. Distant. Like he’s thinking of places too far away for either to imagine.

The rain falls like a gossamer curtain around them, and droplets lie as a halo in her hair.

Water clings to his eyelashes.

They lean together.

It’s like electricity fills the air between them, and it seems as though bolts of blue lightening like that arcing above the far-flung city draw them together. It’s their lips that meet first; hers focused around his lower lip, and his around her upper.

The rain picks up, but it’s still light; getting wet is the farthest thing from their minds.

Even further than their other problems.

They’re happy, for now, to be together. He with her, and she with him.

They part, and now the rain is softening again. Their hearts beat in time, and souls tick in rhythm. They look over the railing, and she moves closer. He puts an arm around her shoulders, and they stand so close they are almost one; the rain almost bounces of them, and together they are the lightening that splits the heavens above, and the thunder that rumbles through the atmosphere, and the pounding, churning waves.

She turns to him, and he places his arms around her.

She leans in close, he comes closer. They stop, hair plastered to the sides of their faces, just centimetres from each other, water running in rivulets down the sides of the faces, along their jaws and dripping from the tips of their noses.

For him, it is her eyes.

Those bottomless, soulful, powerful ocular organs are what makes her, her.

For her, it is his hands.

Long, smooth, soft, powerful grasping appendages that seem to exist only to hold her.

“How does that song go?” he whispers.

And despite the rain, and the ocean, she hears. She smiles, and his world shines with all the light of the sun. “I don’t know. There are a lot of songs.”

So he sings it.

Off-key. Poorly. But it’s the words and their meaning that matter, not the quality, or lack thereof, of his voice.

“I,” he starts to sing, and she smiles as she recognises it. “Am thinking it’s a sign. That the freckles in our eyes are mirror images, and when we kiss they’re perfectly aligned.”

She joins him, as they move slowly, slowly, closer together. “And I have to speculate that God himself did make us into corresponding shapes, like puzzle pieces from the clay.”

They kiss, their lips meeting once again, and the rain disappears. The storm stops. Outside, it keeps raging, of course, but within them, everything is peaceful. Perfect. Their feet rise off the pavement.

He keeps singing, as she closes her eyes, and tilts her head upward, letting the rain fall down, down, down on her.

“They will see us waving from such great heights. Come down now, they’ll say.”

She opens her eyes, and looks back at him. “But everything looks perfect from far away. Come down now, but we’ll stay.”

Then she realises she is flying again, and she holds him tight.

“Let go,” he says. “I’ve got you.”

And she does.

They drift into the night, into the rain that gets heavier as they rise, and as he takes her home. This thing they have won’t last forever. But it’ll last for a while. As they soar through the night, they know that eternity could have taken place on that hillock, in the storm.

Together.



© Copyright 2008 Conspiracy Unit (FictionPress ID:595333).


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