Title: Lace the Light across the Lines
Fandom: Doom Patrol (TV)
Rating: T
Length: 528
Relationships: Keeg Bovo | The Negative Spirit & Larry Trainor, Larry Trainor/John Bowers
Content Notes: -
Author notes: May expand on/edit this in the future.
Summary: The Negative Spirit, and metaphors.




At some point - somewhere, a lost island, mixed with lost time, minutes hours days weeks months melting into non-linear circles - you begin to think of the Negative Spirit as light. This is partially because it emits light from its body, its essence radiating through rooms to bring new life & vanquish darkness—-and partially due to its unpredictable nature.

What does light do? How can you tame light? How do you befriend light? Do you want to befriend the light, or do you want to become the light? O, to merge with light, to hold its hand in your hand and pass through the body of it. O, light, how you replenish the world God-like, in ways that Larry who is not light cannot grasp in his bandaged fingers. Would you grasp the light, if you could? Can you comprehend it? You have never respected light.

Scene one:

He finds his way to you in the darkness, placing his hands on every inch of your existence, placing two fingers directly into your soul & prying - fighting - melt your cowardice away like time in visions of white and blue, a different kind of light fixed in the halo resting permanent above John’s head. Touch the halo. You press two fingers against the brim of it & it burns, cementing you as the Essential Abomination, the Godless Monster, teeth against sweet pink lip skin, bone against skin & skin against torturous bodies & the absence of light, rebellious light, a light unlike the Negative Spirit, before the Negative Spirit, a light that no longer pulses in the present.

Scene two:

The lights are flashing electrical as they are pressed into your neck, and then, only then, sudden darkness, as if you have been launched into space once again, rendered unholy, disposed of. Like a switch. On, off. You know light very well; you know that when the sun rises, you have to leave John and enter the diseased, false life-kingdom that you built carefully & intricately & with your entire pried-open sewed-shut soul. It is necessary; they can never know. They can never know. You live shrouded in secrecy.

Scene three, and you know this scene well: the light shoots back, your mind switched on, Agent Charles Forsythe standing in front of you, above you, fluttering and flickering through every surface in the room demonic. He shows you the fourth scene, the sick twist in the fairy tale origin where the Negative Spirit emerges from your body.

You dream frequently of the Spirit. You hold its hand, you pass through it and it passes through your body. It calms the waters and waves of its unpredictability, and you embrace it. You no longer live shrouded in secrecy. You are Larry, and your friends care about you. Rita, Cliff, Vic, perhaps even Jane—-you no longer have to wrap your lies around you like the bandages that protect the world from the potent toxicity of Larry Trainor.

One day you will regard the Spirit as a friend, a new beginning to the tale, a rewritten ending. The relationship will transform from the ashes of the burned book, like a light switch alive in the paradise of Heaven. On, off.

Like light.