Work Text:
Vision held the knowledge of the world in his mind.
He sifted through pages and pages of scientific evolution, human history, warfare, fiction, ammunition, aquatic life. He read through all of them. He saw them all. He could reiterate them all; word by word.
But he failed at describing his feelings to himself.
He could give you answers to objective questions, give you statistics and quantified data, give you the history of the whole wide world but one thing he couldn't do, was describe his feelings. Not to you; not to himself.
So he turned to poetry.
In the dead of the night, when the world slept, the android bore upon the romantic languages with a passion seldom seen in him.
He learnt how to define his feelings in the words of poets of the fall.
When he sees Wanda react to something and turn automatically to her side, her eyes searching for her brother, and then shutter in confusion and ache, Plath's words worm into his mind.
"I shut my eyes and all the words drop dead. I think I made you up inside my head."
When he sees her use her powers, her tendril gallivanting and piercing, and her, distancing herself from others; her power too big a burden to bear, Hawthorne flows through his veins.
"Where spells were wrought he sat alone,
The wizard touching minds of men"
When she smiles at him, and he feels his chest harden with a foreign feeling, the feeling of being the reason for her happiness, his synthetic heart beats faster and Dickinson seeps through into his blood.
"'Hope' is the thing with feathers.
That perches in the soul."
When she gives him herself, her aches, her insecurities, her doubts, her pain, her anger, her happiness, her joy, her love, he drinks in the cornucopia of emotions and Cummings inundates his heart.
"i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart)"
When his body hums with acute lust, just at the proximity of her frame or the hooding of her eyes, or the brush of innocent skin against skin, Angelou lines his lips.
"It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me."
When he pleasures her body, mind and soul, his lips skimming, nipping, biting her skin, his hands gripping her body roughly, his teeth marking her, his body moving in a tempo in conjunction with her cries, keens and moans, minutes and seconds counted in her ragged breaths. Roethke floods his bones.
"But who would count eternity in days?
I measure time by how a body sways"
When her ideals differ from his, when she chooses independence and freedom over peace and authority, his chest is on fire; yet he still feels the same way for her, irrespective of her choices, irrespective of her thoughts, and Neruda burns in his chest.
"the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly"
When she puts him into the ground, extending her powers to realms unknown to her before, from the bottom of the earth, he sees a haze of her face framed by her hair and he steels himself. He cannot break his ideals; and Henley ebbs through his leaden lungs.
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul."
When he stands to the side and lets them take her away, he sees her eyes burn with pain, her body yearn with ache and he stands still as a statue, watching as her body burns with a red hot fire and then becomes stark cold, her deadened eyes staring at him and Neruda clogs his throat in reverse.
"Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little."
Now, as he sits in the dead of the night, alone and half, he stares at the glass walls and sees reflections of brown hair, gentle smiles, hurt bodies and impassive eyes; and Hughes pervades his body.
"Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow."
----
Poems used:
Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath
Power against Power by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hope is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson
I carry your heart by EE Cummings
Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou
I knew a woman by Theodore Roethke
I do not love you except because I love you by Pablo Neruda
Invictus by William Ernest Henley
If you forget me by Pablo Neruda
Dreams by Langston Hughes