![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A very dark little ficlet, set pre-movie. For a prompt on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
comment_fic.
Title: Wishes Were Fishes
Rating: R
Fandom: Dark City (1998)
Characters/Pairings: Dr Daniel Screber, gen
Summary: In one sense, Daniel has never had a kiss, first or otherwise
Wordcount: 492
Warnings/Notes: Dark City did horrible, horrible things to the concept of free will (via mindwipe, mostly, the odd bit of torture), so there's consent issues all over the place with this
Disclaimer: Not mine
comment_fic.Title: Wishes Were Fishes
Rating: R
Fandom: Dark City (1998)
Characters/Pairings: Dr Daniel Screber, gen
Summary: In one sense, Daniel has never had a kiss, first or otherwise
Wordcount: 492
Warnings/Notes: Dark City did horrible, horrible things to the concept of free will (via mindwipe, mostly, the odd bit of torture), so there's consent issues all over the place with this
Disclaimer: Not mine
Wishes Were Fishes
In one sense, Daniel has never had a kiss, first or otherwise.
Or at least, none that he remembers. Maybe once, in whatever existed before the City, before the Strangers, before the gaping wounds in his memory that he himself is responsible for. Maybe, somewhere beyond that, there was some lost intimacy he no longer remembers.
But not here. Not since then. He has always been remote, removed, at the bidding of other masters. The only touches he has known have been theirs, violent, impersonal, and never once were those touches kisses.
There was, at least, that much mercy.
He could, he supposes, have written one for himself. He could have made the shape of himself in someone's memory, tasted kisses at one remove. Not here, not for himself, but in the phantoms of someone's manufactured memories, so that they might have smiled had they passed him on the street.
He never had. He had never been able ... never been able to bring himself to. Every violation he had enacted on the people trapped above him, the people walking in endless circles of the rat maze of this city, every wound he had carved into them with them all unknowing. He hadn't been able to bring himself to enact another, for purely selfish reasons, for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold demands of his captors, but only his own foolish loneliness. It would have been past excuse, a using just for him. He ... had not been able to bear the thought.
But in a way ... in another sense entirely, perhaps he had them anyway. Perhaps he has had a hundred kisses. A thousand. Drawn from his imagination and theirs in the shaping of a memory, orchestrated in flesh and blood by the insidious whisper of his prompting. A young woman, kissing a different man each night for a month, each time thinking it her first and only. Two old men who had never known each other, who had traded kisses for forty years only in false memory, lying down together at his remote prompting.
Perhaps, in that sense, every first kiss this city has allowed has been his. Perhaps, in that way, he has had a thousand kisses.
It's a thought that drives him straight to the poolhouse, to the water and the drowning and the silence beneath the surface, some respite, some refuge. Not enough. Wiping hands and soap across his mouth, not ever enough. Perhaps it can't be. Perhaps it shouldn't be.
But sometimes ... sometimes, he wishes it could. Foolish wishes, like the touch of lips on his that are not painted in false memory. Desires that are nothing, inconsequential, against the things he knows he must do, the things he knows he must endure, for something so much more valuable again. Something so dear, so dangerously bought, that none of this can matter against it. He knows that.
Even knowing, even understanding ... sometimes he wishes regardless.
In one sense, Daniel has never had a kiss, first or otherwise.
Or at least, none that he remembers. Maybe once, in whatever existed before the City, before the Strangers, before the gaping wounds in his memory that he himself is responsible for. Maybe, somewhere beyond that, there was some lost intimacy he no longer remembers.
But not here. Not since then. He has always been remote, removed, at the bidding of other masters. The only touches he has known have been theirs, violent, impersonal, and never once were those touches kisses.
There was, at least, that much mercy.
He could, he supposes, have written one for himself. He could have made the shape of himself in someone's memory, tasted kisses at one remove. Not here, not for himself, but in the phantoms of someone's manufactured memories, so that they might have smiled had they passed him on the street.
He never had. He had never been able ... never been able to bring himself to. Every violation he had enacted on the people trapped above him, the people walking in endless circles of the rat maze of this city, every wound he had carved into them with them all unknowing. He hadn't been able to bring himself to enact another, for purely selfish reasons, for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold demands of his captors, but only his own foolish loneliness. It would have been past excuse, a using just for him. He ... had not been able to bear the thought.
But in a way ... in another sense entirely, perhaps he had them anyway. Perhaps he has had a hundred kisses. A thousand. Drawn from his imagination and theirs in the shaping of a memory, orchestrated in flesh and blood by the insidious whisper of his prompting. A young woman, kissing a different man each night for a month, each time thinking it her first and only. Two old men who had never known each other, who had traded kisses for forty years only in false memory, lying down together at his remote prompting.
Perhaps, in that sense, every first kiss this city has allowed has been his. Perhaps, in that way, he has had a thousand kisses.
It's a thought that drives him straight to the poolhouse, to the water and the drowning and the silence beneath the surface, some respite, some refuge. Not enough. Wiping hands and soap across his mouth, not ever enough. Perhaps it can't be. Perhaps it shouldn't be.
But sometimes ... sometimes, he wishes it could. Foolish wishes, like the touch of lips on his that are not painted in false memory. Desires that are nothing, inconsequential, against the things he knows he must do, the things he knows he must endure, for something so much more valuable again. Something so dear, so dangerously bought, that none of this can matter against it. He knows that.
Even knowing, even understanding ... sometimes he wishes regardless.
Tags: