| |
Mascara
by Sharkbait
AUTHOR: Sharkbait and her disturbed / disturbing brain
E-MAIL: epec@skamania.net
RATING: R for language, adult content, dark themes, and twisted-ness
in general
GENRE: Angst (whee!)
CHARACTER(S): Jonathan
CONTINUITY: Season 6, "Dead Things"
SUMMARY: "Here in this dingy bathroom, putting on a dead woman's
makeup, pretty much everything seems trivial."
ARCHIVE: Ask and ye shall receive. I'm-- er, I mean, it's just that easy.
FEEDBACK: Well, I guess so, but only because you asked nicely.
SUGGESTED LISTENING: "Mascara" - Deftones
DISCLAIMER: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, much like every character
contained herein, belongs to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, 20th Century Fox,
and lots of other interesting people, I'm sure. Bummer, man.
NOTES: I'm a bad, bad person, and I just can't seem to help myself. Ah well.
He twists the cap counterclockwise, twirls it loose between his fingers, and
pumps the wand in and out a few times to coat it. He slides the brush out
carefully, drags it over the rim to wipe off any excess, then opens his eyes
wide.
He's using her mascara, the one from her purse.
He's finding out it's not easy to put on mascara without looking yourself
in the eye. If you keep your mind blank and stare hard enough at nothing
outside your lashes, it's possible. But all it takes is one little slip, and there's
a very long fall into deep, shock-glassy brown so much like hers it bites and
it bleeds.
How strange, that they would share the same fair skin, with hair and eyes
dark as espresso, and long, coal-black lashes. Whatever this means (he can't
bring himself to call it fortunate), he knows her makeup suits him as well as it
did her, and that's all he's trying to think about, for this second standing in
this bathroom in front of this mirror.
Four minutes ago, he squeezed her ivory foundation onto his fingertips, and
smoothed it in circles onto his face. Two and a half minutes ago, he lined his
eyes with kohl. Forty seconds ago, he blew fairy pink motes from the camel
hair brush and dusted just barely so over cheeks, nose, and forehead.
It's more than he needs for the glamour to take, but that isn't really the point,
is it? Glamour has never been the point.
Glamour had been his mother's. She who wore pearls to the post office, glitter
and lace on her jeans, floating in open toe shoes with five-inch stilettos and
glossy, black vinyl straps draped elegantly over ankle and perfect size seven
foot. She didn't look glamorous-- She WAS glamour, breathing, laughing,
sparkling glamour.
His mother, she used to let him sit on the end of her bed, while she sat at her
grandmother's vanity and proceeded through the Ritual. Foundation, eyeshadow,
eyeliner, blush, mascara, lipstick. Always in that order, never wavering, no
exceptions. It was so much like the magic he's practicing right now. Maybe
it was magic, maybe that's how you could explain her and her glitter-sequin
brilliance.
His best memories were of the Ritual, especially the way all through it she
would talk to him in her smooth honey alto. She'd tell him stories, jokes,
and poems, ask his opinion (mauve lipstick today or the frosted peach?), and
teach him love songs that she'd known by heart since age sixteen. He would
watch her reflection, warm and shimmering in the glow of white Christmas
lights strung around the mirror's frame, and know that nothing had ever been
more beautiful than she was right then.
Sometimes he had wished he could be beautiful like, as she carefully chose her
most precious atomizer --crystal with a cream silk tassel-- from the congregation
of bottles set on the table, to mist herself with lily-scented amber. And
sometimes his eyes would sting from more than just the fragrance, thick and
sweet, enveloping the bedroom.
She kissed the mirror to end the Ritual, and each time after she had gone, he
would press his lips to the cooling imprint, as part of his own ritual. In those
moments he could almost, ALMOST, forget that she never actually touched him.
There are moments he thinks he can still smell her perfume.
Outside of the Ritual, he and his mother had never really been close. Funny,
how it was always 'my mother' for him, never Mother or Mom or Mama or even
Mommy. But he'd always known nothing so constricting and personalized as a
name could ever hope to hold her, as long as he can remember.
In the end, he and his father couldn't hold her either.
She slipped away from them on a Wednesday in April. All she left behind (aside
from her husband and son) was a note sprayed with her scent, and a frosted
peach lipstick kiss on the vanity mirror. He stood there and stared at that kiss
for at least ten minutes, then quietly wiped it off with a tissue. The lack of lily
perfume and love songs ached so fiercely, he fell to his knees and sobbed.
The peach had always been his favorite.
Later on, he offered to box up her remaining possessions. His gentle, fragile
father would not have the heart to do it. Lying on the couch in the living room,
a nearly empty bottle of vodka clutched in hand, he was in no state to disagree
even if it'd been in his nature.
"It's not right," his father had sighed, face gleaming with tear tracks. "You
shouldn't have to do this, Jonny." Tiny wrinkles had transformed into craters,
vaguest distinguishing silver changed to gray hair; in one day, he had aged
fifteen years.
Like father, like son-- In that respect and so many others. "It's okay, Dad,"
he'd mumbled, a pallid, hollow specter tired down to the marrow in his bones,
and his father did not have a reply.
Feeling like broken glass on the inside, he'd gone into the bedroom with every
intention of doing just as he'd said. Instead, he was inexplicably drawn back
to his mother's vanity.
He was fourteen, the first time he performed the Ritual himself. Sitting where
she'd sat, he told himself that he would only touch her makeup, and then he
would pack it away. After fondling and caressing every tube and bottle 'til the
pads of his fingers tingled with hypersensitivity, he told himself it would only
be a little, a whisper of rouge or powder. But the second he cracked open her
gold monogrammed compact, he knew he was lost to Its mysteries.
Foundation, eyeshadow, eyeliner, blush, mascara, lipstick. Kiss the mirror,
right in the center where she had always left her mark.
When It was done, he looked at his own reflection in her mirror, and though
he did not shimmer as golden as she, though her makeup meant for tanned,
hazel-eyed almost-blonde goddesses didn't match his coffee-and-vanilla
coloring...in that moment he was beautiful. He FELT it.
Afterwards, he scrubbed his face pink and raw, and filled his pockets with her
things, to later be hidden in a shoebox at the back of his closet.
This is how it begins.
The year passed, counting days with Cover Girl, Revlon, and Max Factor, and he
told himself that once the makeup was gone, that would be it. No more. He
would get on with his life, and eventually forget stolen beauty in the bathroom
or behind his locked door.
Then he met Cordelia, and forgetting was not even a pretense any longer.
Freshmen year, peer tutoring program, and yes we know it's unusual for
someone as young as you to be a tutor but you're so advanced for your
age Jonathan surely you don't mind? And he didn't. Not much, anyway,
especially in shimmering peach.
It wasn't as painful as it he'd thought it would be, not at first. She wasn't
stupid, and she actually knew most of the material to start with; it was
studying and organization she had trouble with, he was relieved to discover.
That was all just a matter of technique and habit.
He showed her all about outlines, note cards, highlighters, color tabs, and
memorization tricks. And Cordelia listened to what he said, and caught on
so quickly it was a surprising joy to work with her, like unexpectedly finding
sequins and beads stitched inside your old denim backpack.
Like finding out that, away from that vicious little pack of hers, she could
actually be a...a decent human being.
One night while studying in his living room (only them in the house; Dad
was staying later and later at the pharmacy these days), he happened to look
up from his textbook and catch her staring at him. Before he could ask any
of a hundred stupid questions cartwheeling through his brain, she blurted
out, "I wish I had your eyelashes."
"Huh?" Stupid question #37 on his list.
She'd averted her eyes, looking embarrassed, and-- Wait, was Cordelia Chase
actually blushing? "I mean, they're so thick and dark, and most girls I know
would, like, rip out their fingernails to have lashes that long," she babbled,
darting a glance back at him. "I just...think they're pretty. I mean, nice."
And then she most definitely blushed, which seemed very, very odd to him.
Probably because it was very, very odd.
Soon after that she "remembered" the extremely important, terribly urgent
reason she had to go be anywhere else, and did so, post-haste. But he stayed
sitting on the couch for a long while after she'd gone; wondering if that had
actually just happened, what it meant if it had, and if she really thought he
was pretty.
This is how he gained a new reason to enjoy their sessions.
When they were together, he was smarter, funnier, and...cooler than he'd ever
been before. For the first time in his life, he said and did all the right things,
and for a little while, he was the boy that might be Cordelia Chase's real, live
friend. And she really thought he was pretty.
But he screwed it up, like he screwed up everything in the end. He slipped,
forgot his place, and dared to approach her at school, in the hall in front of
her clique. She'd stopped him in the middle of whatever doubtlessly wonderful
thing he was saying with a stare that froze him dead, a stone-faced, ice-eyed
Queen C kind of stare, and that's when he had realized his mistake.
It was too late now. All the Cordettes were watching, grinning, scenting blood
in the water, and why'd he have to put her in this position didn't he know she
had no choice but to destroy him now?
"Don't you have somewhere to be?" She'd snapped, and he knew she'd pulled
the punch, hadn't driven the knife as far as she could have, but God, it still hurt
so badly.
Every smart, funny, cool word melted on his tongue like cotton candy. All he'd
been able to do was stutter, and flush bright red, stare at the pattern on his
shoelaces to hide the welling tears.
She left him standing there with his heart hanging out of his chest, with the
whispers and the snickers, left him wanting to crawl into a hole and just die.
Everything was ruined between them now, and it was all his fault for being
so goddamn STUPID.
The bell rang, sparing him any further public humiliation. Everyone else was
too busy rushing off to their classes to notice him anymore; none of them saw
him bend down, and pick up the black tube with gold lettering and cap,
dropped while brushing past him.
Cordy's mascara. All he had left of her now.
This is how he gained his new fetish.
It was a wonderful addition to his collection. Deep, India ink black looked
so much better on him than any of his mother's shades of berry and brown.
There was a time that he hated Cordelia. He would coat his lashes (pretty
pretty) with her mascara, and kneel on his bed wearing nothing else,
touching himself to visions of what he would do to her given the chance.
Degradation. Torture. Murder. Pull out her fingernails (see, Cordy, you're
not the only one who listens), stake her out in the woods and leave her
there, parade her naked down the halls of Sunnydale High. Make her scream.
Make her bleed. Make her his whore.
He would shudder in release, grit her name out between clenched teeth, and
the mascara would flow down his cheeks in oceans of sweat and tears and hatred.
Oh, how he'd hated her then-- More than any of the others, even more than
Aura or, God, even Harmony, who'd first started the rumors that he was gay
back in seventh grade. He could have dealt with the hatred, even used it to his
advantage, but he couldn't even hate her the right way, because he loved her,
too. Love that equaled the passion of his rage, his torment. If she'd given him
the tiniest indication she wanted it, he would have come running back to worship
her again, no questions asked, and there had been occasions, sick as it made him
to admit it. He was her sick-love puppy.
Time passed, and like the pain of his mother's abandonment, his obsession with
Cordelia faded to a shadow (though he has to confess a twinge of guilty
vindication, at her later disgrace). He'd long ago run out of makeup, and hadn't
worn it since.
Until now, tonight, that is.
The light in here is bad, but it's okay, or as okay as it will ever be, ever. He's
almost done now. All that's left is the final Ritual step.
He knows that when he leaves the safety of this room, Warren and Andrew
won't ask how he knew about the art of applying mascara, because they just
don't want to know. They'll think on it later, and wonder, but he doesn't have
the energy to care. He's not sure he would care anyway.
It's funny, because he used to care so much what they thought about him,
what everybody did. But next to thoughts of murder and cowardice and
knowing you're dirt, you're nothing, you're a sick fucking gutless would-be
rapist, there's not much room for trivialities.
Here in this dingy bathroom, putting on a dead woman's makeup, pretty
much everything seems trivial.
He hunts through her purse, and exhales, a little shaky, as his fingers close
around the cool, sleek black plastic cylinder. Deep breath now, still shaky
but not as much. He doesn't know if this is a good or bad thing.
He pulls the cap off, twists the base counterclockwise, and prepares to anoint
his mouth with its sacred oils. A steady hand (steady hand, trembling body)
follows the contour of lips with neat, practiced efficiency, painting them perfect,
icy peach that shimmers even in this dim light. Somehow, he keeps himself
from vomiting.
The peach, after all, is his favorite.
When it is finished, he is blinded by a halo of phantom white Christmas lights,
and forgets where he is, why he's doing this. He leans in to kiss the mirror,
to end the Ritual.
There is another apparition and it stops him, that of a shivering, ashen-faced
boy peering feverishly out at him with eyes like mineshafts. Bloodshot eyes
that desperate, but dry, because this mascara probably isn't waterproof, and
there will be plenty of time later to make it run like thick, blackened rivers.
His throat constricts, bile and tears seething, churning in the back, all acid
burning hatred loathing.
It is in this moment, staring into his own reflection...he knows.
He will not do what is right, or noble.
He will not defy Warren, and go to the police or to the Slayer (her name is Buffy,
he makes himself acknowledge that she has a name and it is Buffy, poor Buffy
with a dead mom and a little sister to raise by herself, Buffy who's saved his
worthless life so many times and this is her reward?).
He will not redeem himself in the eleventh hour.
And he has really never looked so pretty.
|
|
|