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Entry tags:
Fic: Observations
Title: Observations
Fandom: Exo
Focus: Tao-centric
Genre: General, Sci-fi
Rating: G
Length: Drabble, 434 words
Summary: Everything in Zitao's life is constant... Everything?
Cross-posted: Here.
Prompt: 30-minute challenge from EM: Spaceships.
Author's Note: I did the 30 minute challenge over at EM,but I didn't post over there because I have "coward" written all over me lol. But anyway, this actually took me 40 minutes instead because I took the time to google about the appearance of stars in a moving spaceship and to actually blow on the glass of my window to see how it would look. I don't think I will elaborate too much on what this all means, because it should actually be part of an AU that I used to write about. BTW, spoilers if anyone clicks on that -- you'll know the direction I'm planning on going with this (if I bother to continue) if you read through the first entry in that tag lol. A return to this verse after three years... some things do come back full circle, I suppose.
Last notes I suppose: I'm not sure if I even came close to capturing Tao's personality in this. My main point was to show his discontent, and a bit of his... not dreaminess, but thoughtfulness? Since there aren't any beaches to walk on alone, instead he sits alone on the observation deck and makes his own night sky against the glass. And the words he reads come from MAMA. How fitting, in the grand scheme of things.
ETA: I cross-posted, but far enough back that no one should notice other than back-trackers and flat-viewers. I'm still a coward, but I've missed posting on meme.
Fandom: Exo
Focus: Tao-centric
Genre: General, Sci-fi
Rating: G
Length: Drabble, 434 words
Summary: Everything in Zitao's life is constant... Everything?
Once during one of Zitao's lessons, he had read out the constant velocity of the Black Pearl from an electronic textbook in front of his whole class. It had been typed in tiny black pixels on an otherwise blank field of white almost as sterile as his bedroom walls and the ship's long, winding corridors, and the teacher's mechanical head had jerked at him once in both approval and dismissal as it continued on with the rest of the day's lesson in a smooth, synthesized voice.
Zitao had obediently sat down, and that had been the end of it.
Hurtling through space at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per second felt like something that should have been considered more thrilling than the rarely missed specks of dust that collected in the corners of the ship. Maybe it had been once upon a time, when Zitao's parents had first set foot on the Black Pearl with thousands of other passengers -- the survivors of a war that Zitao's electronic texts haven't covered yet no matter how far ahead he looks.
But there's no one else on the observation deck with him, not now anyway. Probably because there's nothing to observe that no one on the ship hasn't seen a thousand times before. Even Zitao is intimately familiar with the dark expanse of space just outside of the ship's windows, the little specks of twinkling lights in the distance that remain fixed in place as if someone had taken a white marker and merely dotted the glass. Sometimes he scratches at them with the blunt tip of his fingernail, but still they remain.
Constant like Zitao's short black hair.
Constant like Zitao's dull grey jumpsuit.
Constant like Zitao's empty white walls.
He breathes on the clean glass, disguising reality behind an uneven veil of faint white fog before pressing his fingertips against the window haphazardly. Peepholes into space stare back at him, a sky of his own making. It's pretty, Zitao thinks as he traces his own constellations.
It's while making thin paths with the tip of his fingernail that he notices them out of the corner of his eye: faint words that hadn't fogged over near the bottom of the observation window. The fog on the glass has already started to fade, making the characters harder to read, and so he takes a deep breath and blows again.
When the words reappear, thick black strokes against a fog of off-white, he reads them aloud as if they, too, were from one of his texts.
"Did those beautiful days I heard about really exist before?"
Zitao had obediently sat down, and that had been the end of it.
Hurtling through space at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per second felt like something that should have been considered more thrilling than the rarely missed specks of dust that collected in the corners of the ship. Maybe it had been once upon a time, when Zitao's parents had first set foot on the Black Pearl with thousands of other passengers -- the survivors of a war that Zitao's electronic texts haven't covered yet no matter how far ahead he looks.
But there's no one else on the observation deck with him, not now anyway. Probably because there's nothing to observe that no one on the ship hasn't seen a thousand times before. Even Zitao is intimately familiar with the dark expanse of space just outside of the ship's windows, the little specks of twinkling lights in the distance that remain fixed in place as if someone had taken a white marker and merely dotted the glass. Sometimes he scratches at them with the blunt tip of his fingernail, but still they remain.
Constant like Zitao's short black hair.
Constant like Zitao's dull grey jumpsuit.
Constant like Zitao's empty white walls.
He breathes on the clean glass, disguising reality behind an uneven veil of faint white fog before pressing his fingertips against the window haphazardly. Peepholes into space stare back at him, a sky of his own making. It's pretty, Zitao thinks as he traces his own constellations.
It's while making thin paths with the tip of his fingernail that he notices them out of the corner of his eye: faint words that hadn't fogged over near the bottom of the observation window. The fog on the glass has already started to fade, making the characters harder to read, and so he takes a deep breath and blows again.
When the words reappear, thick black strokes against a fog of off-white, he reads them aloud as if they, too, were from one of his texts.
"Did those beautiful days I heard about really exist before?"
Cross-posted: Here.
Prompt: 30-minute challenge from EM: Spaceships.
Author's Note: I did the 30 minute challenge over at EM,
Last notes I suppose: I'm not sure if I even came close to capturing Tao's personality in this. My main point was to show his discontent, and a bit of his... not dreaminess, but thoughtfulness? Since there aren't any beaches to walk on alone, instead he sits alone on the observation deck and makes his own night sky against the glass. And the words he reads come from MAMA. How fitting, in the grand scheme of things.
ETA: I cross-posted, but far enough back that no one should notice other than back-trackers and flat-viewers. I'm still a coward, but I've missed posting on meme.