[fic] Flash Back Bang
Feb. 27th, 2006 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeTitle: Flash Back Bang
Fandom: Spider-Man/Harry Potter/The Faculty
Characters: Peter Parker, Colin Creevey, Casey Connor
Word Count: 2000
Rating: PG
Summary: Three young men wander into a shop tucked away in a corner of the city one fine day.
Author's Notes: None of these characters are mine. Except the little shop of creepy and its owner. I do not own them, I am making no money off of this, please do not sue.
Here’s Peter, in between classes and with his bag slung over his shoulder in the precarious way that means he keeps checking it to make sure he doesn’t knock over anything. He’s never seen this shop before, but he has a few minutes and something in the window begs him to come in and have a look around.
Here’s Colin, on a holiday with his family in the city of wonders, the city of lost and poor and huddled masses yearning to be free. He broke away from his family a few hours ago and he’s been wandering the streets ever since. It’s easy to find your way around the subway system, but here’s a shop that seems to have the same kind of air as Diagon Alley.
Here’s Casey, out early before his afternoon classes and wandering around the big city. It’s different from the small town, but nothing’s been so different as what he experienced in high school. He still has their pictures in his wallet, all his old friends and that one heady summer when she was his girlfriend. He’s been looking for some black and white film to do a private project anyway.
The bell rings three times and by the time Casey walks in the dust has shaken itself from the top of the door.
“Hey, there.”
“Oh, sorry.”
Kid with backpack waves to kid with wallet-jeans and the camera bag that’s the size of some grandmother’s purses.
It’s the kind of shop that wouldn’t have looked out of place thirty, even fifty years ago, and it doesn’t look out of place now. Time has skipped over this store, leaving it unchanged except for the pictures on the walls and the windows and the level of dust on everything. Peter wonders how this store stays in business as he runs his fingers over the lip of the metal shelf holding camera cases that suggest the presence of real leather. He leans in and sniffs one, yes. Real leather.
The light comes through the windows and it seems as though that should be the only illumination of the store, but there has to be something else. Towards the back it’s as easy to see their way around as towards the front. He looks up and sees the tell-tale hollow gold circles of overhead lights.
Colin’s hand traces the curves of the kind with which he is most familiar. There’s nothing new in here, he notices, nothing digital like his Mum talks about sometimes with a wistful tone. And there are some pictures that he would have sworn winked at him when the other two boys weren’t looking. He wishes they’d leave, for a moment, so he can see if this is a Wizarding shop as well as an ordinary one.
But the other boy, one of the other boys looks up at the picture as the man in it scurries back into place and he doesn’t scream. His eyes widen a little and he knuckles them as though he’s overtired but he doesn’t even look as though it’s bothering him that pictures should move.
But if he were a Muggle, he would be staring in gape-mouthed astonishment. But if he were a Wizard student, he would know about moving pictures by his age.
Casey is neither but neither is he entirely unused to the out-of-the-ordinary. Moving pictures are more harmless than killer fish, or whatever those things were. Moving pictures won’t possess his friends (he thinks) or the people he called his friends and try and take over the world. They’re just images. An optical illusion, or maybe not, but they’re still just flat-panel images.
Anyway, he’s looking for film, and he’s finally reached the right shelf by the counter. There’s regular film, there’s black and white, there’s something else his eyes slide right by as though he’s not meant to see it.
Here’s the old man who says I have exactly what you need and his thorny old hands reach out for them. No boy wants to be touched by that.
Peter smiles and backs away and smiles that sickly grin that a person gets at the sight of someone they’ve only read about in Stranger Danger books.
He’s not looking for anything, honest. He’s just looking around and really, this place is fascinating. It has some of the latest equipment but most of the old stuff he’s been looking for, either to fit a part to an inherited Nikon or to try a spoofing technique he’s read about but never been able to get into the photography lab long enough to implement.
Something bangs. Everyone jumps.
It’s the lip of the fold-up barrier on the counter as the gentleman comes to take some cameras down for Colin to look at. He’s on holiday, and that means that his parents are willing to be more indulgent than they would back at home.
Colin turns each unit over in his hands and runs his fingers along the cold black surface, coming away dusty. Everything in this place is washed in gray, aged to sepia, the crinkle and musty smell of a room that hasn’t been aired out in years. It doesn’t bother Casey, whose lungs are usually sensitive. It doesn’t bother anyone.
By the end all of them have realized they have something they were looking for. So they let him take their hands and lead them through the aisles to the canister of film, or the musty old case, or the flash bulb. Or the developer fluid. Or the fixer. Or the gray plastic trays they could find at any old store. Maybe not Colin.
They step out onto the sidewalk, look both ways. Casey notices that Colin looks the opposite way first, but he doesn’t know what that means.
“Hey.” Times three.
Awkward silence. The lights come and go and the traffic flows around them. Still locked in that peculiar sense of still and timelessness, none of them notice.
“I’m.” Times three. All of them sticking out their hands at once and it turns into a grotesque and hilarious concert of introductions and handshaking. One triangle, three sweaty handclasps. They step away at the same time.
“Are you here on vacation?” Casey asks because he hasn’t yet learned how not to be so blunt. And strangers make him edgy, especially with what was going on in the shop. Even with the intervening, in-between years of quiet, you don’t really get over fighting for your life against strange beings in the middle of high school.
Colin nods. “With my parents,” he says, and then he stops because his voice sounds high pitched and very British compared to the two American men.
Not that Peter thinks of himself as a man. Leaping around the tops of buildings gives him a sense of freedom; it also gives him the suspicion that he hasn’t grown up yet. He doesn’t have a real job. He goes to school and plays at being a super-hero.
Or maybe that’s just Jameson’s influence. He still can’t sell any pictures.
“Where are you from?” he asks, for lack of anything more clever to say. He’s trying to remember what it was he had to do, but can’t.
“England,” Colin mutters to the ground, and something else the other boys don’t catch. Something with two syllables.
“Don’t worry,” Casey bursts in out of the blue, because the pressure and the lassitude and the uncertainty is getting to him and he can’t think of anything else to do. “I’m new here, too. Small town. Football town.”
He stutters to a stop when Colin starts to look animated and excited and then stops. In England they call it something else, don’t they? American Football. The differences slide between them like glass.
Peter intercedes for them, taking pity and some sense of responsibility for the boys. ‘Where were you going?” Then he wonders why they’re boys. Although it’s obvious in Colin’s case, young as he is.
“My parents are back at the Museums,” Colin shrugged. “I’ve already seen them and I didn’t want to listen to the lectures about gemology and fossils again. Besides, the people out on the street are much more interesting, they’re all …” And he stops what was clearly meant to be a torrent of babble in mid-sentence, blushing a shade of red that convinces Casey he’s been over on 42nd street and Peter that his parents shouldn’t have let him out on his lonesome.
“They just let you out on your own?” he asks, in a tone Uncle Ben would have been proud of.
Colin shrugs. “I’m at…”
There was something there, but neither Peter nor Casey have the first idea what it was.
“… boarding school. I suppose they …”
“Thought you could handle yourself,” Casey says, with the authority of experience. Colin throws him a grateful nod and shrinks into himself. The other two are both so old.
“Well, look…” Peter says, fishing out a battered notebook and a pen, shaking the granola dust from both. “I’ve lived here all my life, if you need a tour guide, or just someone to …”
Colin latches onto this idea with a vengeance that leaves Casey feeling left out, until Peter turns to him with a frowning question. “Hey, don’t I know you?”
“No.” Peter looks like an alien. Casey is frightened for no reason. “Um. Maybe?”
“Yeah…” Peter wonders why the boy’s so scared of him, and writes down his number twice. “Here. You’re in the Photography Club, right?” Colin perks up. “Here, in case you need a guide around campus or anything. I’ve been here a few years.” His smile is that wry sort of ease that makes a college student imagine his terms are like prison sentences.
Casey starts to relax when Peter doesn’t insist on taking him off anywhere or pull out a bottle of water and drink from it like he’s dying. Maybe he’s just a civic-minded older student. Maybe he’s just a friendly guy. Casey isn’t sure he believes in friendly guys anymore, seeing as one of them turned out to be an alien queen, but he’ll give this one a shot. If only not to scare off Colin.
Who’s fiddling around with his camera, and both Peter and Casey look at him. “Hold on…” Colin says with bubbling enthusiasm. “I want to get a picture…”
But he can’t, not without a tripod and a timer, not of all three of them, so finally it’s Peter who says they’ll just do the Thelma and Louise thing (“Who?” from Casey and Colin) and he holds the camera out at what he guesses is an appropriate distance and angle and clicks.
The picture starts to come through, and it’s moving.
Colin looks as though he’s stripped naked, painted himself blue, and run through the square. Peter and Casey look at each other with expressions of mutual amazement and the hint that they’re trying not to show that they’ve seen weird stuff before. Moving pictures, what is that to a former anti-alien fighter and a radioactive half-spider man?
“I shouldn’t…” Colin starts, and then hangs his head. “You’re Muggles. You’re not Wizarding folk, I shouldn’t have done that.”
Casey smiles a little. Cute kid.
“Don’t worry, Colin. It’ll be our secret.”
“I just thought,” Colin says, “Since you were in the wizarding shop that…”
“Wizarding shop?” Casey’s confused now, and they all turn.
The sun has come out of the clouds by now and the store front windows are blinding with the reflection. For a second all any of them can see is rainbows and light. Then they walk closer and the dust and shelves are lacking any form, a sign hung askew in the window that says ‘Come back tomorrow.’ It looks as though the place has been closed for years.
They stare at each other in lieu of holding hands. Real men don’t hold hands.
“But I thought…” Colin says, and then stops. Stranger things have happened.
Fandom: Spider-Man/Harry Potter/The Faculty
Characters: Peter Parker, Colin Creevey, Casey Connor
Word Count: 2000
Rating: PG
Summary: Three young men wander into a shop tucked away in a corner of the city one fine day.
Author's Notes: None of these characters are mine. Except the little shop of creepy and its owner. I do not own them, I am making no money off of this, please do not sue.
Here’s Peter, in between classes and with his bag slung over his shoulder in the precarious way that means he keeps checking it to make sure he doesn’t knock over anything. He’s never seen this shop before, but he has a few minutes and something in the window begs him to come in and have a look around.
Here’s Colin, on a holiday with his family in the city of wonders, the city of lost and poor and huddled masses yearning to be free. He broke away from his family a few hours ago and he’s been wandering the streets ever since. It’s easy to find your way around the subway system, but here’s a shop that seems to have the same kind of air as Diagon Alley.
Here’s Casey, out early before his afternoon classes and wandering around the big city. It’s different from the small town, but nothing’s been so different as what he experienced in high school. He still has their pictures in his wallet, all his old friends and that one heady summer when she was his girlfriend. He’s been looking for some black and white film to do a private project anyway.
The bell rings three times and by the time Casey walks in the dust has shaken itself from the top of the door.
“Hey, there.”
“Oh, sorry.”
Kid with backpack waves to kid with wallet-jeans and the camera bag that’s the size of some grandmother’s purses.
It’s the kind of shop that wouldn’t have looked out of place thirty, even fifty years ago, and it doesn’t look out of place now. Time has skipped over this store, leaving it unchanged except for the pictures on the walls and the windows and the level of dust on everything. Peter wonders how this store stays in business as he runs his fingers over the lip of the metal shelf holding camera cases that suggest the presence of real leather. He leans in and sniffs one, yes. Real leather.
The light comes through the windows and it seems as though that should be the only illumination of the store, but there has to be something else. Towards the back it’s as easy to see their way around as towards the front. He looks up and sees the tell-tale hollow gold circles of overhead lights.
Colin’s hand traces the curves of the kind with which he is most familiar. There’s nothing new in here, he notices, nothing digital like his Mum talks about sometimes with a wistful tone. And there are some pictures that he would have sworn winked at him when the other two boys weren’t looking. He wishes they’d leave, for a moment, so he can see if this is a Wizarding shop as well as an ordinary one.
But the other boy, one of the other boys looks up at the picture as the man in it scurries back into place and he doesn’t scream. His eyes widen a little and he knuckles them as though he’s overtired but he doesn’t even look as though it’s bothering him that pictures should move.
But if he were a Muggle, he would be staring in gape-mouthed astonishment. But if he were a Wizard student, he would know about moving pictures by his age.
Casey is neither but neither is he entirely unused to the out-of-the-ordinary. Moving pictures are more harmless than killer fish, or whatever those things were. Moving pictures won’t possess his friends (he thinks) or the people he called his friends and try and take over the world. They’re just images. An optical illusion, or maybe not, but they’re still just flat-panel images.
Anyway, he’s looking for film, and he’s finally reached the right shelf by the counter. There’s regular film, there’s black and white, there’s something else his eyes slide right by as though he’s not meant to see it.
Here’s the old man who says I have exactly what you need and his thorny old hands reach out for them. No boy wants to be touched by that.
Peter smiles and backs away and smiles that sickly grin that a person gets at the sight of someone they’ve only read about in Stranger Danger books.
He’s not looking for anything, honest. He’s just looking around and really, this place is fascinating. It has some of the latest equipment but most of the old stuff he’s been looking for, either to fit a part to an inherited Nikon or to try a spoofing technique he’s read about but never been able to get into the photography lab long enough to implement.
Something bangs. Everyone jumps.
It’s the lip of the fold-up barrier on the counter as the gentleman comes to take some cameras down for Colin to look at. He’s on holiday, and that means that his parents are willing to be more indulgent than they would back at home.
Colin turns each unit over in his hands and runs his fingers along the cold black surface, coming away dusty. Everything in this place is washed in gray, aged to sepia, the crinkle and musty smell of a room that hasn’t been aired out in years. It doesn’t bother Casey, whose lungs are usually sensitive. It doesn’t bother anyone.
By the end all of them have realized they have something they were looking for. So they let him take their hands and lead them through the aisles to the canister of film, or the musty old case, or the flash bulb. Or the developer fluid. Or the fixer. Or the gray plastic trays they could find at any old store. Maybe not Colin.
They step out onto the sidewalk, look both ways. Casey notices that Colin looks the opposite way first, but he doesn’t know what that means.
“Hey.” Times three.
Awkward silence. The lights come and go and the traffic flows around them. Still locked in that peculiar sense of still and timelessness, none of them notice.
“I’m.” Times three. All of them sticking out their hands at once and it turns into a grotesque and hilarious concert of introductions and handshaking. One triangle, three sweaty handclasps. They step away at the same time.
“Are you here on vacation?” Casey asks because he hasn’t yet learned how not to be so blunt. And strangers make him edgy, especially with what was going on in the shop. Even with the intervening, in-between years of quiet, you don’t really get over fighting for your life against strange beings in the middle of high school.
Colin nods. “With my parents,” he says, and then he stops because his voice sounds high pitched and very British compared to the two American men.
Not that Peter thinks of himself as a man. Leaping around the tops of buildings gives him a sense of freedom; it also gives him the suspicion that he hasn’t grown up yet. He doesn’t have a real job. He goes to school and plays at being a super-hero.
Or maybe that’s just Jameson’s influence. He still can’t sell any pictures.
“Where are you from?” he asks, for lack of anything more clever to say. He’s trying to remember what it was he had to do, but can’t.
“England,” Colin mutters to the ground, and something else the other boys don’t catch. Something with two syllables.
“Don’t worry,” Casey bursts in out of the blue, because the pressure and the lassitude and the uncertainty is getting to him and he can’t think of anything else to do. “I’m new here, too. Small town. Football town.”
He stutters to a stop when Colin starts to look animated and excited and then stops. In England they call it something else, don’t they? American Football. The differences slide between them like glass.
Peter intercedes for them, taking pity and some sense of responsibility for the boys. ‘Where were you going?” Then he wonders why they’re boys. Although it’s obvious in Colin’s case, young as he is.
“My parents are back at the Museums,” Colin shrugged. “I’ve already seen them and I didn’t want to listen to the lectures about gemology and fossils again. Besides, the people out on the street are much more interesting, they’re all …” And he stops what was clearly meant to be a torrent of babble in mid-sentence, blushing a shade of red that convinces Casey he’s been over on 42nd street and Peter that his parents shouldn’t have let him out on his lonesome.
“They just let you out on your own?” he asks, in a tone Uncle Ben would have been proud of.
Colin shrugs. “I’m at…”
There was something there, but neither Peter nor Casey have the first idea what it was.
“… boarding school. I suppose they …”
“Thought you could handle yourself,” Casey says, with the authority of experience. Colin throws him a grateful nod and shrinks into himself. The other two are both so old.
“Well, look…” Peter says, fishing out a battered notebook and a pen, shaking the granola dust from both. “I’ve lived here all my life, if you need a tour guide, or just someone to …”
Colin latches onto this idea with a vengeance that leaves Casey feeling left out, until Peter turns to him with a frowning question. “Hey, don’t I know you?”
“No.” Peter looks like an alien. Casey is frightened for no reason. “Um. Maybe?”
“Yeah…” Peter wonders why the boy’s so scared of him, and writes down his number twice. “Here. You’re in the Photography Club, right?” Colin perks up. “Here, in case you need a guide around campus or anything. I’ve been here a few years.” His smile is that wry sort of ease that makes a college student imagine his terms are like prison sentences.
Casey starts to relax when Peter doesn’t insist on taking him off anywhere or pull out a bottle of water and drink from it like he’s dying. Maybe he’s just a civic-minded older student. Maybe he’s just a friendly guy. Casey isn’t sure he believes in friendly guys anymore, seeing as one of them turned out to be an alien queen, but he’ll give this one a shot. If only not to scare off Colin.
Who’s fiddling around with his camera, and both Peter and Casey look at him. “Hold on…” Colin says with bubbling enthusiasm. “I want to get a picture…”
But he can’t, not without a tripod and a timer, not of all three of them, so finally it’s Peter who says they’ll just do the Thelma and Louise thing (“Who?” from Casey and Colin) and he holds the camera out at what he guesses is an appropriate distance and angle and clicks.
The picture starts to come through, and it’s moving.
Colin looks as though he’s stripped naked, painted himself blue, and run through the square. Peter and Casey look at each other with expressions of mutual amazement and the hint that they’re trying not to show that they’ve seen weird stuff before. Moving pictures, what is that to a former anti-alien fighter and a radioactive half-spider man?
“I shouldn’t…” Colin starts, and then hangs his head. “You’re Muggles. You’re not Wizarding folk, I shouldn’t have done that.”
Casey smiles a little. Cute kid.
“Don’t worry, Colin. It’ll be our secret.”
“I just thought,” Colin says, “Since you were in the wizarding shop that…”
“Wizarding shop?” Casey’s confused now, and they all turn.
The sun has come out of the clouds by now and the store front windows are blinding with the reflection. For a second all any of them can see is rainbows and light. Then they walk closer and the dust and shelves are lacking any form, a sign hung askew in the window that says ‘Come back tomorrow.’ It looks as though the place has been closed for years.
They stare at each other in lieu of holding hands. Real men don’t hold hands.
“But I thought…” Colin says, and then stops. Stranger things have happened.