I don't :D But I took the text and wrote you Mirrormask, if that's okay?
~
It's not that juggling is an especially rare skill, but it means more if you've only got the one pair of arms. Valentine learns to compensate for the moment when the balls are in his blind spots, and out of his field of vision. The holes in his mask are not large, but he never noticed the gaps in his world until the balls flew into them.
And hey, that sounds deep, dunnit - the gaps in his world. He tries to talk about that, one night, but Jacko has no gaps that money cannot fill and the others would rather sing than talk philosophicks. What's got into you, Valentine? Do us a dance, shut your trap. The music stretches across their campfire, taut, a thin and apologetic sound in the night silence.
Valentine idly juggles with three silver coins and watches the way they catch the firelight, and agrees to himself that money can fill a great many gaps.
He doesn't think about it again for a long time.
Not until Helena pulls back from another of those empty dusted windows and says she's not me, she's fighting with my father, and she looks so torn apart that Valentine bites down on his response. As far as he is concerned, fighting with one's parents is the natural order of things.
The world gets darker, but it also begins to light him from unfamiliar angles, and he finds an unpleasant hollow at his centre that he cannot name. A gap.
He breaks away from this girl with her odd ideas and her rare sliver of a smile, her dark eyes, and scrambles desperately to fill the gap with money because that is the only path he knows well enough to tread blind. He blames it on the mask. (Those tiny holes.) He blames it on her stubbornness. He blames the Shadow.
When he finally crumbles and blames himself, he is watching the Queen's elegant and inhuman grace and finding a strange desperation in the way she beckons Helena closer. For a moment she is ugly with the cries of all the emotions she is killing inside herself, and Valentine draws back. The gap inside him shivers and says something, not quite loud enough to be heard.
Helena lifts her cup. Helens looks sidelong, and meets his eyes.
no subject
~
It's not that juggling is an especially rare skill, but it means more if you've only got the one pair of arms. Valentine learns to compensate for the moment when the balls are in his blind spots, and out of his field of vision. The holes in his mask are not large, but he never noticed the gaps in his world until the balls flew into them.
And hey, that sounds deep, dunnit - the gaps in his world. He tries to talk about that, one night, but Jacko has no gaps that money cannot fill and the others would rather sing than talk philosophicks. What's got into you, Valentine? Do us a dance, shut your trap. The music stretches across their campfire, taut, a thin and apologetic sound in the night silence.
Valentine idly juggles with three silver coins and watches the way they catch the firelight, and agrees to himself that money can fill a great many gaps.
He doesn't think about it again for a long time.
Not until Helena pulls back from another of those empty dusted windows and says she's not me, she's fighting with my father, and she looks so torn apart that Valentine bites down on his response. As far as he is concerned, fighting with one's parents is the natural order of things.
The world gets darker, but it also begins to light him from unfamiliar angles, and he finds an unpleasant hollow at his centre that he cannot name. A gap.
He breaks away from this girl with her odd ideas and her rare sliver of a smile, her dark eyes, and scrambles desperately to fill the gap with money because that is the only path he knows well enough to tread blind. He blames it on the mask. (Those tiny holes.) He blames it on her stubbornness. He blames the Shadow.
When he finally crumbles and blames himself, he is watching the Queen's elegant and inhuman grace and finding a strange desperation in the way she beckons Helena closer. For a moment she is ugly with the cries of all the emotions she is killing inside herself, and Valentine draws back. The gap inside him shivers and says something, not quite loud enough to be heard.
Helena lifts her cup. Helens looks sidelong, and meets his eyes.
This time he hears: family.