beauty

[lux_mariko]

Story: beauty
Year: Various
Word Count: 1500
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Lux, Mariko, Lobell, Evan, Tsuna, Shane, Dimana, Gabriel, Imi, David, Rubika, Simon, Ruth, Michaela
Warnings: References to war/violence

1. April showers

lux understands the beauty in desolation.

lux feels the blood dripping down her back, like rain, and breathes in the scents around her, twining dying daffodils around her hands, making a crown.

lux knows there is beauty in dying, and beauty in pain.

lux doesn't want that to be the only beauty she can see, but there it is.

lux has been in prison far too long.

lux is not ready to be free.

lux is not ready to find beauty in feather-light hair, and feather-light kisses, and slowly reviving flowers dancing in human eyes.

lux thinks that this is the most painful beauty of all.

2. first of May

mariko has always loved the beginning of spring, when grass and daffodils and crocuses are just starting to peek up past newly-departed frost.

mariko has always loved the beginnings of things.

mariko, each time she falls in love, if the timing is right, coaxes her girlfriends out to watch the sunrise on the equinox--new dawn, new flowers, new beauty to cherish.

mariko loves to braid flowers in her lovers' hair on those mornings, picking the perfect colors to complement them--reds and whites and yellows and blues and everything in between.

mariko, even after she is burned, loves the early spring.

3. spring forward

kevin lobell has almost forgotten beauty.

kevin lobell spends too much of his time taking apart what he should simply appreciate, shredding petals of daffodils into tiny slides, shredding fragments of thoughts into blips of data.

kevin lobell is willing to pay any price he must, even if someone else is the one making the actual sacrifice, for what he calls progress.

kevin lobell calls progress beautiful, and thinks that justification enough for what he does.

kevin lobell looks only at the deepest layers, focuses on too narrow a sample.

kevin lobell shatters what he sees, and calls it right.

4. planting

evan finds beauty in the foundation of things.

evan finds the foundation of things in his wife, in his daughter; in neat lines of numbers crawling across the page; in the everyday mundane tasks that make up a family.

evan pulls up daffodils by the roots, so he can replant them in pots them instead of cutting them and putting them in vases and watching them slowly fade away.

evan knows that beauty grows beyond its roots, but, growing up rootless, he decided that he didn't want only the blossom-end of the story.

evan clings to the beauty of foundations.

5. flowers

tsuna doesn't put much stock in flowers.

tsuna likes receiving them after a performance, as a gift--especially from her beloved--but they're at once too transient and not transient enough.

tsuna thinks that beauty is best found in that one breathless moment of perfection onstage, on the street, in her bedroom, in her studio, in her daughter's playroom, that moment that captures all the senses at once.

tsuna knows that flowers only exist in two dimensions.

tsuna still gets daffodils for her house, because they're bright and cheerful and feel like renewal.

tsuna knows that imperfect, limited beauty is still true.

6. new growth

shane has lived quite a long life, for a human.

shane has learned that nothing is new for long.

shane finds a secret delight, however, in the new things that do come, as she watches them grow, and change, and age.

shane likes the maturity of the world, the ever-renewing maturity of it.

shane hungers for the cycle of novel-known-passe.

shane picks her daffodils just before they begin to droop, starving and preserving them in notebook after notebook.

shane understands that beauty can be new, and it can age and change and become commonplace, but it never really fades.

7. colors everywhere

dimana lives and breathes for the exotic.

dimana collects flowers from all over the universe--the rarer the better; no mere daffodils for her half-stolen hotel rooms.

dimana grasps life by the throat and takes whatever she can, measuring her life only by her own standards.

dimana is a conquering heroine, the victor in every conflict, even the ones she loses on the surface, because she always has a deeper game at play.

dimana surrounds herself by what is beautiful, and rare, and valuable--and the best.

dimana, after all, thinks nothing is worth doing unless you go farther than everyone else.

8. young love

gabriel has somehow managed to never lose his optimism.

gabriel isn't sure if it's because, alone of all his siblings, he has never had to become violent, or if it's because he had a child, or if it's just some quirk of his creation.

gabriel even has hope that his sister will be reconciled to them, that somehow they'll find a way to make it right again.

gabriel almost starts to doubt, when he sees the pain they all have caused--but then he sees a daffodil, and smiles, and his faith in the future beauty of the world is restored.

9. baby animals

imi knows what it means to be teetering on the edge of breaking.

imi's life has been thrown into chaos more times than she'll ever tell her new family.

imi doesn't want to lose them, too.

imi knows what it means to be weak, and helpless, like a daffodil just sprouting after the crocuses have had their say, waiting to be stepped on and crushed by an unwary traveler.

imi watches her breath crystallize, beautiful, and fragile.

imi keeps to the dark and quiet places, and is the least surprised of all to learn the role she is to play.

10. fresh grass

david has always been more of an indoor type of guy.

david is bookish and not particularly athletic, smart and snarky and maybe a little bit lonely

david doesn't really understand the appeal of running around outside, when he can curl up with the dog and his laptop.

david does, however, sometimes go out to sprawl on freshly-mowed grass, tangling it in his hair and staining his clothes (to his mother's eternal despair), looking for daffodils in the clouds and wondering what his father was like.

david doesn't do it often, but he will acknowledge that sometimes, outside is nice.

11. go exploring

rubika hasn't seen a fraction of what the world has to offer.

rubika knows it better than anyone.

rubika treats every day as an adventure, watches sunsets from high above the atmosphere, and impatiently waits her new orders to see what there is to see in some new place.

rubika is impatient with the small things, and she doesn't decorate her ship with flowers.

rubika thinks daffodils, and dewdrops, and anything smaller than a planet, a star, a person, too small to be truly beautiful.

rubika chases light from one side of human space to the other.

rubika chases life.

12. build a fort

simon eventually realizes that his memories are just hidden out of sight, not gone.

simon wants to find them, but he isn't sure how.

simon decides that they're like flowers, seen through thick plate glass--daffodils blooming in a locked greenhouse, and he's lost the key.

(simon knows the metaphor is backwards--he's in the greenhouse, the flowers are outside--but he's just trying to organize his thoughts.)

simon breaks through the back door, or maybe the windows eventually, and learns the flowers aren't so beautiful when they're real.

simon touches the flowers, when the walls come down, and discovers that they're poison.

13. warm breezes

ruth sometimes imagines she hears her name on the wind

ruth goes out, afterwards, to find the brightest, sunniest, yellowest daffodils she can--yellow was his favorite--to try and summon his voice again, but it never comes when she wants it.

ruth almost wishes for the simplified beauty of her husband's eternal present, when her memories refuse to cooperate.

ruth usually manages to banish that feeling quickly--what he was missing was not worth what he gained, not by a long shot--but she still feels it.

ruth puts the vases in her baby's nursery, and refuses to let him see her cry.

14. spring break

michaela is not, and never has been, heartless.

michaela has existed since beyond the human scope of time, and therefore michaela does not always understand what humans do or why they seem so tied up in everything that matters.

michaela is a warrior, is a soldier, is a killer.

michaela is, nevertheless, not heartless.

michaela cradles a broken daffodil, a fragment of a fragment of the beauty in this world, a way to see the pieces that make the whole.

michaela knows it isn't enough--it is only a fragment, after all--but michaela plans on making a gift of it anyway.

15. new beginnings

beauty comes in many shapes and sizes.

beauty is in life, in death, in pain, in joy, in small things, in large things, in simple things, in complex things, in love, in hate, in hope, in despair, in betrayal, in redemption.

beauty is a bouquet of daffodils--dried, broken, new-sprouted, near-dead, ripe, raw, faded, fresh.

beauty is, after all, a placeholder for all the things they value.

beauty is what they see on the horizon, what they hold in their hands, what they seek, what they know, what they fight for.

beauty is how the lost ones return to the light.