Then, why can't you just stop breathing?

[ayascythe]

As a child, Connor's vague impressions of The Desert had been those sweeping, sprawling dunes in exotic travelogues: perfect golden oceans of sand stretching toward infinite sapphire skies, shimmering, pristine, crossed by saints and seekers on the secret roads to myth. It turns out Nevada's dry, hazy, scrub-ridden expanse of cracking mud is nothing at all like those photographs, but Connor has spent the past sixteen hours unlearning his geographic ideals one by one, until all the world could be one dead yellow horizon between the fat splatter of insects. There is nothing beautiful or illuminating about it. (Negative Space, by eris)

I love descriptions of the desert. Not because I think it's beautful. It's not. It's hot, raw, dusty and excruciating. And that's exactly what intrigues me ... the heat beating down on you until you're numb in body and mind, when everything's just a blurry haze, an almost meditative state of mind that resembles a daydream. When everything's so fucked up around you, when there's nothing but dust and burning heat.
It's that kind of image I get in my mind that made me love Jarhead - both the movie and the book -, that makes the Black Hawk Down OST still one of my most favourite soundtracks ever and that makes me feel enchanted by fics that play in the desert.[/rambling]

Besides, this fic is one of the most brilliant things I have read in a while.