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criminalmindzjunkie · 4 years

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I Carry Your Heart With Me (Part One)

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Summary: Spencer and the reader are reunited for the first time in fifteen years.

A/N: Very excited to get the ball rolling on this one. I hope you all enjoy it! Message me if you would like to be added to the taglist.

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader

Content Warnings: swearing

Word Count: 4.5k

“I cannot believe you talked me into this,” Damien mutters from the passenger seat, his icy blue eyes wide with fright. He pulls his gaze away just long enough to point at a lone cow grazing to the left of the road. “Look! That cow is just like… standing there. No fence around him or anything. What’s stopping him from stampeding into us the second we get out of this car?”

Damien sounds so genuinely horrified that you almost feel bad for laughing. Almost.

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem, Dee. Besides, that cow didn’t even look up when we drove past. We’re not even on its radar.”

“Oh, yeah? Ever heard of a little thing called mad cow disease?” Damien persists, in typical dramatic flair. You roll your eyes at him and he curses underneath his breath. “You know, when I agreed to go with you to this wedding, I pictured something more akin to a five-star resort with a minibar and a heated pool. Not rogue livestock and shitty cellphone reception.”

“You didn’t agree to anything – you practically begged me to take you with me.”

Damien waves his hand, dismissive, his eyes still roaming over the pasture. “Because I wanted an excuse to take a week off work. This is not the controlled environment I expected.”

“If you don’t quit complaining, I won’t hesitate to push you out of the car and leave you here with the cow,” you retort. In your periphery you’re able to make out Damien raising his middle finger to you. Rude.

You chuckle and fix your attention back on the dirt road. You’re driving almost painfully slowly, because the very idea of having to pay extra for damages to this already astronomically expensive rental car makes you feel nauseated. Despite your efforts, the car is covered entirely in dust. Its once pristine, white paint job has transformed into a muddy color.

There goes my deposit.

You shake your head at the thought. You had more pressing matters to concern yourself with; i.e., the fact that you were approximately five minutes away from coming face to face with the one person you swore you’d never speak to again. Two months seemed like ample time to prepare yourself in theory, but now that it is no longer some far-off thing, you know that your attempts at preparing yourself were in vain. With each day you crossed off the calendar leading to your departure date, your anxiety grew and grew until you worried your poor heart would give out under the stress. Getting onto the plane bound for Montana felt like the proverbial nail in the coffin, and a hefty dose of Dramamine was the only thing that kept you from spiraling as the plane ascended into the air. You slept through the entirety of the trip and, much to Damien’s chagrin, there is a sizeable puddle of drool on his left shoulder to prove it.

The lengthy nap helped. The tight band constricting your chest had loosened, and you pulled out onto the highway feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. You had Damien by your side and five vacation days to enjoy. Your best friend was getting married to the love of her life, and you were hellbent on standing by her side through it all. Spencer Reid can kiss your ass, as far as you are concerned. No way is he going to ruin this for you.

You are still very much clinging your take-no-shit mentality when you breach a hill and the ranch comes into view, effectively expelling every single positive thought from your head. Aforementioned anxiety reappears in full-force and you stomp down on the breaks.

“Fuck, I don’t think I can do this,” you squeak out, casting a look at Damien, whose eyes are trained on the sprawling expanse of the house ahead of you. “We can still turn around – no, we should turn around. There is no version of this that won’t end in me getting embarrassingly drunk and crying in front of everyone. I’m turning around.”

Damien’s hand on yours, strong and steady, is the only thing that keeps you from whipping the car around and retreating with your tail between your legs. His fingers pry your white knuckled grip off of the wheel slowly, his thumb rubbing reassuring circles across your skin. Its sweet and so overwhelmingly gentle that you’re a bit stunned. You glance at him in a silent question, as if to ask who are you, and what have you done with my friend?

He gets the message loud and clear, because of course he does. Damien fixes you with a smile, grip tightening on your hand.

“I’ve seen you hold your own against some of the biggest names in journalism on an almost daily basis – looking damn sexy while you do it, might I add,” Damien chuckles, and you can’t help but give a weak laugh of your own. Damien’s smile grows at this, and he continues, “If you can handle your business against those conniving pricks, I’ve no doubt that you can tough it out for this. You’re not the type of woman that lets some guy dictate what she does or doesn’t do. And you sure as hell aren’t the type of woman that would let some guy rob her of the opportunity to stand by her best friend on the most important day of her life. As the person who probably knows you better than anyone else on the planet, my opinion of you is pretty rock-solid, if I do say so myself. So, unless I’ve completely overestimated the extent of your badassery, I suggest you rethink that plan. What do you say?”

You avert your eyes and swallow against the lump in your throat.

“Spencer’s not just some guy. For a long time, I was convinced that he was the guy,” you whisper. The car is silent, save for the quiet crooning voice of George Michael flowing through the speakers. Damien squeezes your hand, prompting you to continue. You blink up at him with wet lashes, lips pulled into a sad smile. “Have you ever been in love?”

Damien shakes his head and rubs his thumb along the top of your hand. “I can’t say that I have, babe. Haven’t been that lucky.”

You let out a shaky breath and bring your other hand up to wipe at your eyes.

“Maybe you’re better off. I’ve only been in love once,” you gesture to your pitiful appearance and choke out a wet laugh. “Look where that got me. He fucking crushed me, and fifteen years later I’m still broken up about it. It’s pathetic.”

Damien frowns and shifts in his seat so that he’s fully facing you.

“I don’t want to hear you say that self-deprecating shit again. You were hurt by someone you gave your heart to, and I can only imagine how devastating that must feel. Being upset about seeing him again does not make you pathetic. The fact that you’re here, about to spend a week with the guy just so you can be there for Cassidy, is pretty damn admirable as far as I’m concerned.” Damien ends his monologue by pulling you into a tight hug, and you couldn’t be more thankful that he’d come with you. Not only was he a secret sweetheart, he also gave the very best hugs.

By the time he releases you, the tension in your chest has eased significantly. You nod once, and Damien’s rewards you with a smile.

“I am pretty cool, aren’t I?”

Damien snorts rather unattractively and rolls his eyes.

“I take back everything. You suck, and I don’t know why I bother with you, you narcissist.”

Now that the mood has lifted significantly, you reluctantly press your foot against the gas pedal.

“Too late. No takesies backsies,” you singsong. “You think I’m sexy and badass, and I’m never going to let you forget it.”

Damien mutters something undoubtably snarky underneath his breath, but it’s drowned out by the sound of gravel crunching underneath the tires. That, and the sound of your blood roaring in your ears as you inch further down the driveway.

The house, a beautiful log cabin with stone accents along the underside, is massive. Standing at two stories tall with a large wraparound porch and more than a dozen large windows, it’s a far cry from the modest little cabin in the mountains that Cassidy had made it out to be. Even Damien is slack jawed at the sight of it, sitting pretty against a back drop of rolling mountains, and you can’t help but feel a little smug.

“Still want to complain about that five-star resort?”

Damien shakes his head dazedly, “I retract my earlier complaint.”

All too soon, you roll to a stop and put the car in park. Several other cars are parked haphazardly in the grass around you, and that annoying voice inside your head wonders which one belongs to Spencer. It’s not that you care – you totally don’t – it’s just that you are kind of hoping that he hasn’t arrived yet. A few hours to acclimate to the environment before having to deal with him would be nice.

“You’ve got this, babe,” Damien murmurs. “And I’ll be with you the whole time, just in case you need a reminder.”

You flash Damien a nervous smile.

“You’re a really good friend, Dee. I’m really glad that you’re here,” you say, before narrowing your eyes at him. “If you tell anyone I said that, I’ll deny it.”

Damien snorts and pushes open the door.

“Get your sassy ass out of the car. I’m ready to mingle.”

As soon as you set foot on the porch, the front door flies open and a flash of curly red hair precedes a collision that nearly sends you flying back into the railing. Ecstatic squeals rip through the otherwise serene evening air and two boney arms envelop you into a tight hug.

“I cannot believe you’re actually here,” Cassidy laughs as she squeezes you tight. Her enthusiasm has you joining in, the two of you laughing happily and pulling back to examine one another. Cassidy places a sloppy kiss to both of your cheeks before throwing an arm over your shoulder. “I fully expected you to just blow off the whole thing, if I’m being honest.”

You cast at Damien, who’s watching on with an amused grin on his face.

“Believe me, she tried.”

Cassidy turns her attention to Damien and extends her free hand.

“I take it you’re the infamous Damien that I’ve been trading emails with?”

Your eyebrows scrunch together in confusion, “Wait, what? The two of you have been emailing?”

Damien accepts Cassidy’s hand and gives it a firm shake, all while smiling smugly.

“Yep. Me and Ms. Cassidy go way back.”

“I mean, that’s cool, I guess, but why?”

Cassidy and Damien share a look, both of them shrugging.

“Mainly to talk about you,” Cassidy admits, not even bothering to look apologetic. When you frown up at her she waves her hand dismissively at you. “All good things, I promise. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.” Cassidy punctuates her words with a patronizing pat on your shoulder.

“I knew letting you two meet was a bad idea,” you grumble.

Cassidy simply drops her arms from its place on your shoulder in favor of tugging on your hand.

“Come on, sour puss. I want you to meet my husband. He’s a real sweetie – you’re gonna love him.”

A flash of white-hot panic shoots down your spine and you dig your heels into the floor.

“Wait,” you squeak out, eyes wide. “Is… Is he here yet?”

Cassidy’s eyes shine mischievously, briefly flitting up to Damien before returning to you.

“He is. And you’ll be happy to know that pictures do not do the Good Doctor any justice.”

Salt, meet wound.

“Don’t know why you’re telling me that,” you mutter.

“Denial is not just a river in Egypt, my friend,” Cassidy singsongs as she begins tugging you forward. For someone so tiny, she makes easy work of forcing you through the threshold.

The foyer is just as impressive as you expect it to be – beautiful cedar walls and a grand staircase that leads to the second floor. If you weren’t horribly on edge at the current moment, you would definitely comment on the fact that the foyer alone is probably larger than your entire apartment, but you’re too busy scanning the immediate area for tall skinny white guys with stupidly curly brown hair to comment on the grandiosity.

Cassidy leads the two of you to double doors to the right, and just as she’s about to push them open, the shrill ring of your cellphone offers you an out.

You slip your hand from Cassidy’s grip and give her a faux apologetic look.

“I should probably take this – it might be work.”

Damien narrows his eyes at you. “I thought you left your work phone at home.”

You ignore him and begin taking a few steps backwards, “Is there somewhere private I can go?”

An indiscernible look flashes across Cassidy’s face and then her lips pull up into a sugary sweet smile. “Follow the hallway to the very end. Leads to the back porch,” she says. “No need to rush. Take all the time you need!”

Okay, weird, you think to yourself, but the idea of putting off the inevitable for a few extra moments is too tempting to pass up, so you continue your retreat. You make it to the back door in record time and let out a relieved breath as you bring the phone to your ear.

“Hi, mom.”

“Hi, baby. I was just calling to make sure the two of you got there safely.”

You push open the back door and the breathtaking view of the ranch prompts you to take pause; sprawling fields and rolling hills as far as the eye can see, grazing livestock congregating near a lazy stream at the far end of the property, and several horses running across the expanse of the left field. It was wonderfully serene and vastly different from the bustling rat-race that was New York.

You smile to yourself when a loud moo rips through the otherwise quiet ranch. I could get used to this.

“Yeah, we made it,” you murmur into the receiver. “You would love this place, Mom. It’s probably the prettiest place I’ve ever been. I’ll send you a picture when I hang up.”

“How’s Cassidy? Still a little spit-fire, I assume?”

You lean against the railing and let out a snort, “Oh, absolutely. Don’t think that’ll ever change.”

“I’d hope not,” your mother hums. “How does Damien like the ranch?”

“He’s not exactly a fan of the livestock,” you chuckle. “Damien’s never even seen a real cow before. City boy through and through, that one.”

You and your mother share a laugh that dissolves into a comfortable silence. Comfortable, until the telltale clearing of your mother’s throat warns you of the impending inquisition.

“So,” your mother begins. “Are you going to tell me how it went, or are you going to leave an old woman wondering? “

You sigh and run a hand through your hair. “Fortunately, I have yet to run into him. I may or may not be hiding out on the back porch as we speak in an attempt to avoid just that.”

“Y/N,” your mother chastises. “Prolonging the inevitable isn’t going to make this any easier.”

“I know, I know. I’ll go in there soon. It’s just a lot, you know? I needed to take a breather, first.” Just until my hands stop shaking. Or until Cassidy comes hunting for me. Whichever comes first.

“I know, baby,” your mother coos. “I’m proud of you for trying. Just don’t drag things out, okay? You’ll only make yourself sick with nerves.” Unfortunately, that ship has sailed. The rolling in your stomach can attest to that.

You laugh a humorless laugh, “I don’t know, Mom. You always like to remind me how stubborn I am. I’m sure if I put my mind to it, I can just avoid him for the entire week.”

A tiny movement at the very corner of your vision and a loud creak makes you whip your head around, and what you see has your heart falling to your ass.

Spencer Reid, looking absolutely stunning in a pair of khaki dress pants and a white cable-knit sweater, sits in a porch swing with wide eyes and a book clutched tightly in his hands. Soft, caramel-colored curls frame his face and a five o’clock shadow runs the length of his jaw, adding a bit of grown-up flare to his otherwise boyish features.

He looks every bit as beautiful as he did on the day he broke your heart.

Spencer knows that he should have spoken up as soon as you walked onto the porch. It was immediately obvious that you hadn’t seen him, and he swears he’s one second away from clearing his throat and launching into the introduction he’d been planning for the last sixty days. But the words die on his tongue as he drinks in the sight of you.

You’re so close to him for the first time in years and it’s more than a little bit dizzying. And yeah, he’s used his very limited knowledge of how the internet works to Google you on more than one occasion, but the version of you leaning against the porch railing is a far cry from the pixelized one. A light breeze rolling through the air lifts your hair away from your face, and Spencer’s breath catches in his throat as he surveys every perfect inch, from the curl of your lashes to the smattering of freckles on your nose. He indulges himself, eyes settling on your cherry red lips, fascinated by the way they move as you talk on the phone. Spencer is intimately familiar with those lips – can recall the way they felt pressed against his own. The years spent apart have done nothing to dull the memories. He’s not entirely sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

It amazes him how you’ve somehow managed to change a lot, but also not at all. You stand before him as an oxymoron personified, and it’s a lot for Spencer’s poor heart to take in. Your hair is a bit lighter than he remembers, as well as a little longer, but it still looks just as soft and he can recall with startling clarity how it felt when he used to run his fingers through it. You have a few more laugh lines than you did, as well as a scar on your left elbow that hadn’t been there before, but everything else about you is so painfully familiar that Spencer could almost pretend that no time had passed – that he still knows your body as well as he once did.

Spencer knows this isn’t true. Every seven years, the body resets; old cells destroyed and replaced with new ones. You’ve both spent enough time apart that your bodies have reset twice over. You’re as much of a stranger to him as he is to you.

Spencer positively abhors the thought.

The sound of your laughter pulls him from the depths of his mind, and while the laugh isn’t warm or inviting in the slightest, he relishes it. What was once one of his favorite sounds has existed in his head as only a memory for far too long. Hearing it in person is jarring in the best of ways.

The euphoria he feels dies a horrible death when you speak again.

“I don’t know, Mom. You always like to remind me how stubborn I am. I’m sure if I put my mind to it, I can just avoid him for the entire week.”

Fucking ouch.

Spencer cringes hard, too hard, because the porch swing screeches out an angry creak and you whip around and holy shit, have your eyes always been that entrancing?

He watches as your entire body goes rigid, tensed as if you’re about to bolt. You blink hard, eyebrows drawn together to form an adorably bewildered expression as you assess him. Spencer hopes he doesn’t look too disheveled. He hadn’t even thought to freshen up after his trip, an oversight that he’s regretting terribly as your eyes flit over him.

Spencer isn’t sure why, but he stands up. Maybe it has something to do with feeling vulnerable. Maybe he just wants to close the distance. The two steps he takes towards you support the latter. He’s thankful that you don’t move away, but the blank expression on your face worries him.

The two of you stand five feet apart, but you feel worlds away. Spencer refrains from speaking for as long as he can stand, which is only about thirty seconds.

“Hi.”

Your lips part, and Spencer holds his breath.

“Hi.”

More silence. Spencer gulps.

“It’s good to see you,” he says, cautious. The last thing he wants to do is fuck up within the first five minutes. Unfortunately, his brain and his mouth seem to have some sort of disconnect, and Spencer continues against his better judgment. “It’s been a while.”

It’s been a while? That’s seriously the best I can come up with?

Spencer contemplates drowning himself in the nearby stream.

“It certainly has.”

“Five-thousand, five-hundred and seventeen days.” And roughly thirty-six and a half hours, but who’s counting?

Muted noises flow out of your phone speaker and you pull your eyes away from Spencer. He’s both relieved and devastated.

“Yeah, Mom, I’m fine. I just ran into someone. I’ll call you back later, okay?”

Spencer agonizes over the fact that he’s been reduced to someone while you and your mother exchange goodbyes. You’re smiling when you look up at him again, but Spencer’s seen what a genuine smile of yours looks like, and this isn’t it.

“I didn’t see you sitting there. My apologies.” Your formality makes the situation all the more excruciating.

Spencer lets out a nervous laugh, “I suppose avoiding me is out of the question now, huh?”

It’s hard to tell who’s more horrified by the words that tumble from his mouth, you or Spencer. A fierce flush spreads across your cheeks. It’s the first crack in your otherwise calm and collected exterior thus far and Spencer relishes in it. Maybe you’re not as unaffected by him as you seem.

“I… I’m sorry you had to hear that,” you stammer, blinking up at him with guilty eyes. “That wasn’t very kind of me.”

“Don’t worry about it. I can’t say that I’m undeserving of your anger,” Spencer whispers so quietly that he worries you don’t hear him over the gentle flow of the stream. The hardness that returns to your eyes lets him know that you heard every word.

You clear your throat, signaling your unwillingness to discuss that particularly painful topic. “You’re still partial to Cummings, I see.” You gesture to the book clutched tightly against his chest.

Now, it’s Spencer’s turn to blush. The book in his hands, tattered and worn from years of use, is incriminating. The two of you both know what lies just beneath the binding. The fact that Spencer has it with him now makes him think that he might as well be wearing a t-shirt that reads, I’M STILL NOT OVER YOU.

Spencer raises a hand to scratch at the back of his neck. “Oh, yeah. Old habits die hard, I guess.” His eyes scour your face for a sign of anything that might clue him in to you feeling the same way. A flicker of something dances across your face, but it’s gone so quickly that he can’t be sure if he imagined it. He forces a nervous smile. “If I remember correctly, he was your favorite.” It’s a shitty attempt at a joke.

You exhale a shaky breath and to his absolute horror, your lower lip begins to wobble. He wishes he could reach up and pluck his words from where they hang heavy in the air.

“Not anymore,” you murmur, and fuck if that doesn’t absolutely wreck him.

Spencer shouldn’t ask, but he can’t help himself. “Oh. Why not?”

He holds his breath, anxiously anticipating your next words. You seem to be battling with yourself, mouth opening and closing several times. Spencer is content to wait as long as it takes for you to answer, but the universe is much more impatient than he.

The door leading onto the porch swings open and out walks an honest to God Abercrombie and Fitch model. Or at least, a man who meets the qualifications and then some. Long, flowing blonde hair and a crisp white dress shirt makes Spencer’s unruly brown mop and dumpy sweater look pitiful in comparison. Spencer frowns.

“Sweetheart, you’ve been out here for like ten minutes,” the man chastises as he closes the distance between you and him. Spencer watches him wrap his arm around your shoulders and pull you to him like someone might watch a car wreck happen; with equal parts horror and morbid curiosity. “You can’t hide out forever.”

All traces of rigidity leave your body and you melt into the man’s side. It happens in such a way that screams familiarity, as if the pet name hadn’t already driven that point home. The awful, gut-wrenching realization slams home and Spencer has to fight to keep his knees from buckling.

“Uh, sorry,” you mumble, before nodding your head in Spencer’s direction. “Damien, this is Spencer Reid.”

The man’s – Damien’s - eyes go almost comically wide as they settle on Spencer’s dejected frame, before schooling into a cool indifference. He offers him a polite smile that’s a little tight around the edges, but doesn’t outstretch his hand.

“Ah, Spencer. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Spencer swallows hard to keep himself from barking out a crazed laugh. He’s heard of me! That’s certainly something, considering the fact that no one thought it necessary to tell Spencer that you have a –

Spencer’s eyes dart down to your left hand. Thankfully, mercifully, your ring finger is bare.

“Uh, y-yeah. It’s nice to meet you.” The words burn as they roll off his tongue.

Damien nods at him before turning back to you. There’s an unmistakable fondness in the way he looks at you as he speaks. “Cassidy wants everyone back inside. They’re about to serve dinner.”

You smile up at him, not even casting a parting glance at Spencer before Damien leads you back inside. Spencer stands there long after the door closes behind the two of you.

The book feels heavy in his hands.

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shyficwriter · 3 years

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Shots

Guardians of the Galaxy fanfic | Yondu x Reader, guest starring Peter

Summary: Based on this prompt from anon: "Reader gets drunk for the first time - like REALLY drunk - and Yondu does nooot like it"

Author's note: Title sucks but I couldn't think of anything better. I was actually drunk when I wrote most of this (it's when inspiration finally struck to fulfill the prompt lol) but I obviously finished and edited it sober. That being said, I feel an obligation to say that the things Reader does in this story aren't necessarily written from experience, I was just trying to think what the most embarrassing things you could do while drunk would be lol. Enjoy!

Word Count: 2,470

One thing was certain, and it was that Yondu was going to shove his arrow up his ravagers' collective asses.

Yondu had long suspected you wouldn't be able to handle your liquor ever since you became old enough to drink. He noticed how you always got tipsy after just one beer, however luckily, you always stopped after around two, so it had never really been a problem.

Until tonight, that is. Because everyone was celebrating a big score gone well and Peter thought it'd be fun for you to take shots with him and the guys. Now Yondu had to deal with you being drunk off your ass.

He had pulled Peter aside and growled at him to knock it off earlier that night after he noticed you taking the first shot, saying, "The girl can't handle her liquor, boy! Don't be giving her any more, ya hear me?"

This was met with Peter calling Yondu overprotective, but he ultimately conceded and swore that he wouldn't give you anymore shots.

But Yondu hadn't said anything about Oblo, Tullk, or Horuz, had he?

The others thought it was real funny how giggly and expressive you'd get when drunk, so it didn't take much convincing from Peter for them sneak you shots when Yondu wasn't looking.

By the time Yondu noticed what had happened he was pissed.

He marched over to where you sat next to the guys. You were laughing your ass off at a dumb joke Tullk made, and you were surprised when you saw him and the other three jump up and high tail it out of the way without explanation.

Then Yondu sat in front of you.

"Heyyy!" you giggled, playfully shoving the captain in the shoulder. "Wassup?"

Yondu's eyes narrowed. "How much did you have?"

"What?"

"How much to drink, girl. I know they were giving ya shots, how many?"

You giggled and pretended to look yourself over. "I dunno what ya mean, I haven't been shot." You then preceded to laugh your ass off at what you thought was a hilarious joke.

"PETER!" Yondu snarled, looking around but unable to find the Terran. Kraglin happened to be walking by just then so he settled for pulling him in to see if he could answer the question. "Krags, did'ya happen to see how many she had?"

Kraglin was startled at having been suddenly jerked towards the two of you, but he answered as honestly as he could. "I'm not exactly sure, Cap, but I think I did notice her have at least four? Maybe five? Why?"

Yondu released the first mate's sleeve and sighed, massaging the bridge of his nose. "Dammit. I'm gonna kill Quill." he said, before standing and pulling you up from your seat. "Come on. Yer going to bed." he said gruffly.

"Aw! But I don't want to!" you whined as he dragged you from the bar, unable to even really walk straight.

"Tough." Yondu said. "I don't like ya getting drunk like this. It ain't good fer ya. You'll only get into trouble."

"But ya let the other guys!" you pouted as the doors swung shut behind you and Yondu.

"They can handle it. Ya can't." he said flatly. Almost as if on cue you stumbled and almost brought the two of you down. This caused you to giggle madly as Yondu lost his grip on you.

"Catch me if you can!" you squeal in delight as you take off down the corridor.

Yondu swore under his breath as he ran after you. He might've called his arrow to stop you in your tracks, but he was worried that your drunk ass would accidentally run into the flarkin thing if he stopped it in front of your face to halt you.

Luckily for him you weren't exactly fast in your drunken state and he caught you quickly, grabbing you about the waist and pulling you back.

You squeaked at the contact, batting him away. "That tickles! Don't!" you giggle, squirming away.

Yondu rolled his eyes and sighed, moving his hands to instead rest on your shoulders as he steadied you.

The next couple minutes were relatively quiet, you were just softly giggling and babbling about nonsense while Yondu kept guiding you down the corridor to your quarters.

You were about halfway there when you were hit with a sudden and bad urge to pee. "Wait a sec." you drunkenly slur to your guide and before Yondu could even react you had already pulled down your pants and had squatted to take a piss in the damn hallway.

Once Yondu realized what was happening he jerked back and looked away, both not wanting anything to splash back on him, and also obviously not interested in looking, grateful that your jacket had blocked anything he might have seen before he reacted and looked away. He pinched the bridge of his nose as his face flushed with embarrassment and irritation at the situation, but there wasn't exactly a whole lot he could do about it in the moment, it had just happened so quick. He waited until he heard you stand up before looking back.

"I can't believe ya just pissed on my floor." he grumbled, side-stepping the mess and calling up Kraglin to send someone down to clean the ... "spill..." in the corridor leading towards the crew quarters.

He finally got you to your quarters and ushered you inside so you could sleep it off. He started to nudge you towards your bed when you suddenly announced you were going to be sick.

Yondu's eyes went wide, and not wanting a similar incident like what had happened in the hallway he quickly ripped a nearby trashcan from the floor and shoved it towards you.

After you had finished vomiting you placed the trashcan back on the floor and stumbled back into a seated position on the bed. "I don't feel well..."

"Gee, I wonder why." Yondu said bitterly, arms crossed over his chest. "Ya need to go to bed."

Just then your eyes flew open and you dumped yourself onto the floor, pulling the trashcan back towards you as you began to vomit again.

Yondu sighed. If anyone were to ask him about what he did next he'd deny it. He knelt down next to you and gently pulled your hair back so that you wouldn't get sick into it, and there he stayed for a good bit while you emptied the contents of your stomach.

When you had finally finished you sat up and leaned your back against your bed. Then, almost as if noticing Yondu for the first time you leaned into him and hugged him tightly.

He was almost warmed by the gesture, but then to his chagrin, you started bawling.

He made a grimace but returned the hug tentatively, occasionally giving gentle pats to your back with a "There, there." not really knowing what else to do.

Well, except for one thing. He glanced up to see the door was still opened, and without disturbing you too much from your places on the floor, he kicked it closed. No way in hell was one of his crew going to walk in on this scene and see him being all soft and shit. No way.

Eventually you did start to quiet down and then Yondu attempted to gently prod you into standing up so you could get into bed. Unfortunately for him, you only mumbled nonsense and nuzzled in closer like he was a damn teddy bear or something. So, he gently pried your arms away from him so he could stand up before helping you to your feet.

He had gotten you halfway into bed when it happened. You got sick again. Only this time you didn't use the trashcan. You got sick on him.

Yondu's stomach churned but he kept it together, Taking a not-so-deep breath (because of the smell) to keep himself from angrily setting off. There'd be plenty of time to yell at you in the morning, he reasoned.

He quickly put you the rest of the way in bed and luckily you seemed to fall asleep the moment your head hit the pillow. However, not before mumbling out a, "Night, dad." Yondu raised an eyebrow in surprise, but didn't give himself time to dwell on it. He was eager to leave and get cleaned up.

He was about a quarter of the way to his quarters when he came across a laughing group a ravagers cutting up and being silly in the corridors. It was Peter, Oblo, and Kraglin, and they all stopped laughing when they noticed both the murderous look on their captain's face and the mess of sick on his clothes as he approached.

Yondu didn't stop to talk. Merely glared at them as he made his way past. "Not. A. Word." he growled at their surprised faces.

They obeyed, but it didn't stop their giggles once they thought he was out of earshot and they put two and two together. You were really gonna get it in the morning, they thought.

***

The next morning Yondu gave extra cleaning duties to Peter and the other ravagers who got you plastered the night before. He didn't say it was punishment for what happened, after all it wasn't like there was a rule against it, but they still knew he was mad. He had woken them up at 5am to tell them to get started while everyone else slept in, after all.

He called you into his quarters shortly after and you made your way over hungover and groggy, the previous night mostly a blur.

You lightly rapped on his door to announce your presence and flinched when you were met with a loud "Come in! It's open!"

You opened the door and groaned as you entered the room that Yondu had made uncharacteristically bright by seemingly turning on every freaking light he had. Through squinted eyes you made out the form of your captain and you cringed again when he called out in a booming voice, "Have fun last night?" making your temples throb.

Basically, Yondu was being a dick.

You grunted in response and he spoke up again. "So, ya remember anything from last night?" he asked, randomly speaking certain words louder than they needed to be, just to make you further regret your hangover.

You rubbed a hand over your eyes and made another grunt while shrugging your shoulders.

"What was that? Couldn't hear ya." he said, a slight smirk playing over his lips.

You groaned and spoke up, "I dunno. Had some drinks with Peter and the guys, went to bed?" You honestly didn't know why he had to call you in so damn early. Whatever mischief you got up to with the guys couldn't have been that bad that this couldn't wait until noon.

"Oh hoho, no!" Yondu laughed almost bitterly, clapping his hands together with a loud pop that made you flinch in pain from the loud noise. "Ya did a lot more than that, missy."

You just stared up at him weakly, half not giving a shit & wishing to go back to bed and half worried you had done something either dangerous or embarrassing.

"I s'pose ya don't remember getting sick all over me?" he asked.

Your eyes flew wide, your former grogginess forgotten. Oh no. Please let him be joking. "I'm- so sorry." you stammered, both in embarrassment and in concern for how he was going to deal with you for that. Surely you wouldn't get off scot-free for vomiting on your captain. "I- sorry- I-" you didn't really know what to say. You had apparently thrown up all over your captain the night before. What could you say?

"Oh that ain't all." Yondu said in a tone that was obvious it was about to get worse.

Your stomach fell. What could possibly be worse than having drunkenly vomited on your captain? You could feel your cheeks turning pink as you cringed and asked, "Do I wanna know?"

"Prob'ly not, but I'm gonna tell ya anyway." Yondu said, his hands on his hips. "Ya remember when ya pissed in the hallway?"

Your face turned scarlet. "What?! Please tell me you're joking."

"Nope. Ya ripped yer drawers down and popped a squat right in the corridor."

You covered your burning face with your hands. That. That was what could be worse than throwing up on your captain- literally pissing on his floor in front of him. This was so humiliating, and it only got worse once you realized you probably did it in front of the rest of the crew too. You lowered your hands and asked, "Oh god. How many people saw??"

Yondu wanted to scare you a bit and tell you that you did it in front of the whole crew, but he saw tears start to form in your eyes and just couldn't bring himself to do it. "Lucky fer you, no one but me. Ya did it when I was dragging yer ass to your quarters to sleep it off. Ya didn't get sick on me til after that."

Oddly enough, that didn't make you feel much better. You tried to wipe the tears from your eyes. "God, I'm never drinking again."

Yondu scoffed with a laugh. "Yeah, I've heard that one before. Ain't no one who's ever said that follows through though," he chuckled. He expected you to laugh too, but he made a grimace when he saw how miserable you looked. "Aw, come here." he said, pulling you into a hug. "Look, everyone's done embarrassin' shit when they're drunk. It's just part of life. It ain't the end of the world."

You sniffed. "Even you?"

Yondu rolled his eyes and begrudgingly answered. "Ya brat. Even me." He could tell you wanted to ask, but he moved the conversation along, moving to hold you out at arm's length. "Better?"

You sheepishly nod and say, "I guess..."

"Good. Ya can be off then."

You looked at him in confusion. "You mean I'm not in trouble?"

Yondu laughed. "Well, from the look on your face, I thought the humiliation was punishment enough, but since ya asked I guess I can assign ya extra kitchen duties this week. Ya can fill in tonight through Thursday for Gef."

You grimaced but accepted your fate. "Yes, sir," you say before turning to leave his quarters.

Yondu chuckled and shook his head after you closed the door behind you, flipping off some of the unnecessary lights. There may be some hiccups now and then, but his not-so-little girl wasn't turning out too bad.

And even though he knew you'd deny it sober, he was proud you called him dad.

But he'd be damned if he let you drink with Peter again.

#gotg #guardians of the galaxy #gotg fic #fanfic #yondu #yondu udonta #yondu x reader #drunk #drinking #peter quill #ravagers #reader is a ravager #fluff #embarrassing #fanfiction #dad!yondu #papa!yondu

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robininthelabyrinth · 4 years

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Delight in Misery (ao3) - part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4

A-Yuan

Jin Ling was pretty cool, in Lan Yuan’s opinion, and he didn’t even feel the need to caveat it with the statement that it was as far as young brothers went.

He didn’t really remember a time when Jin Ling wasn’t around – he’d had a bad fever that had eaten away much of his early memories, leaving only a few vague faces and a smile and something that sometimes gives him nightmares he doesn’t quite remember, but since he’s a few years older than baby Jin Ling, that meant there must have been a time when Jin Ling wasn’t there.

Back before, before Hanguang-jun adopted him and before Sect Leader Jiang managed to win the right to raise Jin Ling, who was only his sister’s son, at his home – they wouldn’t have been brothers back then.

Lan Yuan didn’t like to think too much about before. It gave him a headache.

(Except when he thought about someone smiling -)

Anyway, before was one of the secrets.

Lan Yuan knew all about secrets: he was extremely trustworthy, according to Hanguang-jun and even Sect Leader Jiang, a very mature and intelligent child who knew when and to whom to speak, and that meant he got to know all the cool secrets.

That meant it was his job to make sure Jin Ling kept the secrets, too.

“So, remember, what do we do when your grandmother comes to visit?” he asked encouragingly.

“Talk about her,” Jin Ling said obediently. He was a good kid, even if he had temper tantrums sometimes. “Don’t say anything about the Lotus Pier.”

“That’s right!” Lan Yuan cheered. “If you don’t talk about it, you can’t give any of the secrets away!”

Jin Ling nodded. “I’ll keep the secrets!” But then he frowned. “What are the secrets?”

“What do you mean? We know lots of secrets. Cool secrets!”

Well, some of the secrets were cool, anyway. The ones about how Zidian worked, and the hidden places in the walls, and some of the nasty stuff that Sect Leader Jiang said about the other sect leaders that no one was supposed to repeat and which made even the sailors look pretty impressed, and there was also the super-secret Yunmeng Jiang technique for getting fish to come up to you – it involved your toes and a lot of eye-rolling by Hanguang-jun.

According to Sect Leader Jiang, the eye-rolling was especially critical for it to work, but luckily they had Hanguang-jun for that; he was an expert.

(There was a secret, too, about Sect Leader Jiang’s shixiong and Hanguang-jun’s friend that they sometimes told stories about, the one called Wei Wuxian, and the secret was that that they both loved him even though he’d done bad things.)

Hanguang-jun was one of the secrets, too.

Lan Yuan wasn’t entirely sure why he was a secret, but it was very important that they not tell anyone that he was there. He’d gotten hurt really bad a few years back, really bad, bad enough that he hadn’t walked for a whole year and even after that couldn’t do much more than limp around with Sect Leader Jiang’s help. He ended up needing to learn the sword again the same way Lan Yuan did, except he got better at it a whole lot faster – it was because he was grown up, according to Sect Leader Jiang, and grown-ups had special cheating powers that let them do stuff like that super quick.

(Hanguang-jun said the only cheat was experience, but Lan Yuan preferred the cheating adult powers explanation.)

It was pretty cool to be trusted enough to know secrets, most of the time. The only time it wasn’t cool were times like this, when old Madame Jin came around and said mean things about Lan Yuan not being raised right and it being a pity that her beloved grandson was growing up with no father or mother to teach him.

It made Jin Ling cry whenever she said that, because it was the same thing the mean kids on the Pier used to say to him before Sect Leader Jiang had announced very loudly that he wasn’t so proud or dignified that he wouldn’t throw hands with small children if it made Jin Ling stop crying. It made Lan Yan so angry because she was Jin Ling’s grandmother, shouldn’t she care if he was crying?

She didn’t, not really; she just snapped at him for being weak. She was mostly just angry about everything: about the fact that he was being raised by Sect Leader Jiang instead of at Lanling where no one wanted to take care of him; about the fact that she wasn’t powerful enough to have stopped that decision from getting made no matter what she tried; about the fact that he wasn’t old enough to do anything useful, as she termed it; about his parents being dead, which wasn’t his fault at all –

It was wrong, too. Jin Ling might not have a mother or father to teach him, but that didn’t matter because he had Hanguang-jun and Sect Leader Jiang instead; who needed any more than that?

But he couldn’t say that, because Hanguang-jun was a secret.

Still, it didn’t mean that Lan Yuan was going to put up with it. Not this time!

He put on his best Hanguang-jun face – neutral but with his eyebrows a little arched like he was asking a question that he sincerely wanted to know the answer to – and asked her: “Are you a hag or a night-witch? They take different talismans to be banished, so I need to know which one to get.”

It wasn’t as deadpan or witty as Hanguang-jun was when he was trying nor as vicious and cutting as Sect Leader Jiang when he was on a tear, but it did the trick, given that the trick was to get her to yell at him instead of bullying Jin Ling any longer.

Lan Yuan was tough: she meant nothing to him, so he was fine with being called a worthless bastard (he knew he wasn’t worthless, so odds were good that he probably wasn’t a bastard either) or a whore’s son (whatever a whore was, he was moderately sure Hanguang-jun had never met one), a waste of space (how could space be wasted?) or a disrespectful brat (possibly true, even though he normally thought of himself as being quite nice).

He wasn’t expecting her to slap him.

“Gege!” Jin Ling shrieked, horrified out of his tears as he rushed across the room to Lan Yuan’s side; he was on the floor somehow, he must have fallen when she hit him. “You can’t hit gege!”

“Don’t address him like that,” Madam Jin snapped. “Pull yourself together – you’re the heir to Lanling Jin, you don’t need to address some bastard as – ”

She was interrupted a crackling sound, like wood popping in the fire, and Lan Yuan automatically smiled, even though it hurt his mouth to do so.

No one lasted long at the Lotus Pier without knowing what Zidian sounded like.

Sect Leader Jiang’s face was as black as Lan Yuan had ever seen it, and that was saying something, given that Sect Leader Jiang preferred scowling to just about any other expression out there.

“Madame Jin,” he said, and she tensed, clearly gearing up for a fight. “Thank you for coming to visit.”

She blinked, clearly surprised – wondering why he wasn’t making a fuss, most likely. Lan Yuan licked the blood from his split lip with a grin and held Jin Ling’s hand in his: he knew better.

“It’s such a pity that you have to leave so soon,” Sect Leader Jiang continued.

“What are you talking about, I’m not –”

Zidian lashed out, leaving a burnt mark less than a hands’ breadth away from her head.

“It is your choice whether you leave by your own free will or get carried out of by my guards,” Sect Leader Jiang snarled, his cold anger abruptly igniting. “How dare you strike A-Yuan? How dare you strike any child? If you’ve dared laid hands on Jin Ling –”

“I would never,” she snapped, but she was backing away: Sect Leader Jiang’s reputation preceded him. “A-Ling is –”

“If you did that, I’d put you in my dungeons,” Sect Leader Jiang continued as if he couldn’t hear her. His eyes were red and bloodshot with rage. “Surely no one could hurt their own grandchild, their own blood. Perhaps you’ve been possessed? I’ve heard rumors of demonic cultivation near your maternal family’s home…”

There was a bit more bluster after that, but Madame Jin retreated quickly, and then she was flying away from the Lotus Pier as quick as she could go.

After all, everyone knew how bad Sect Leader Jiang was when it came to demonic cultivators – and what he supposedly did to them in his dungeons.

It was a little funny, actually, since as far as Lan Yuan knew, the Lotus Pier didn’t actually have dungeons at the moment; the old ones had long ago been repurposed as storerooms and no one had ever quite bothered to replace them. And though Sect Leader Jiang did question demonic cultivators in the storerooms, right next to the rice and beans, it wasn’t – what people said it was.

Lan Yuan wouldn’t have believed such horrible things about Sect Leader Jiang anyway, but as it happened he’d heard Sect Leader Jiang screaming about it when he and Hanguang-jun were having one of their fights. They didn’t fight often, not real fighting, and they were very good at trying to make sure neither he nor Jin Ling were around for them when they did, but A-Yuan had gotten up especially late that night because of a nightmare he couldn’t quite remember and he’d overheard them by accident.

(“Is that really what you think of me? That I disregard all morality, all righteousness, that I’m blinded by hatred, that I wanted – that I wanted him to – to –”

“No. I know you loved him.”

“It wasn’t him, at the end. It couldn’t have been him, he couldn’t – jiejie’s dead. Everyone’s dead. All corpses, all, everyone around me just marking time until they’re dead, too –”

“Jiang Cheng, calm down; your mind is becoming unstable. I should not have asked –”

“But they’re not wrong! I do hurt them, even when I don’t mean to, even when I let them go later. I’m not righteous, I’m not; I find them, I stop them, I take them from where they’re hurting people – someone has to – and what if they’re him? What do I do if they’re him? I question every one of them. No one else can do it, I have to – it’s my fault, it’s my – he wouldn’t have started down that path but for me –”

“Jiang Cheng –”

“So many people hurt because of me, stupid selfish me, and still all I care about is making sure that I’m the one to find him first, just like I said I’d be back at the siege. I have to be the first one to find him so that no one else can hurt him, because if they find him they will – but now I’m the one, I’m the one who hurts them instead and all because I don’t know – I can’t judge – I get so angry –”

“Calm yourself. This is not irresolvable: I will help you question them, to see if any of them are him, and when that is done, we will decide their fate together. The guilty treated as guilty, the innocent as innocent. Or do you doubt my judgment?”

“…only in terms of romance.” A breath. “That would work. Thank you.”)

The second Madame Jin was gone, Sect Leader Jiang was kneeling in front of Lan Yuan, touching his split lip lightly with his fingers, a distressed expression on his face. “I shouldn’t have let her come,” he muttered. “Shouldn’t have let her see you. I knew she was sensitive about children, ever since Lianfeng-zun fully eclipsed her in influence…you need a doctor.”

“I’m fine,” Lan Yuan protested, even as he was swept up into Sect Leader Jiang’s arms. “Sect Leader Jiang…”

“No. Doctor, now.”

“I don’t need it! It’s just a little thing – Hanguang-jun could fix it!”

“Fine. Then we’re going to see him.”

“Take me, too!” Jin Ling demanded, tugging at Sect Leader Jiang’s leg. “Jiujiu, take me! I don’t want to see grandmother again! She’s a bad lady! She hurt gege, and all he did was say she was a hag!”

“She made Jin Ling cry!” Lan Yuan exclaimed, hideously embarrassed. “I had to get her attention away from –”

“You did the right thing, A-Yuan,” Sect Leader Jiang said, scooping up Jin Ling and heading towards the inner quarters where Hanguang-jun would be waiting. “Never let anyone attack your family. No matter what. You hear me? No matter what.”

Lan Yuan had had four panic attacks, seven nightmares, and at least twelve rather uncharacteristic temper tantrums (mostly just persistent pouting) over having to go visit the Cloud Recesses, and he was starting to think that he’d overreacted.

The Cloud Recesses was, despite all his fears…actually pretty cool.

Kind of like Hanguang-jun had said all along. And Sect Leader Jiang had even agreed, albeit with his usual caveats and complaining – mostly about the food, and something about quizzes.

It was still scary, though. Lan Yuan had gone on trips outside of the Lotus Pier with Sect Leader Jiang and the other Jiang disciples (he still thought of himself as halfway a Jiang disciple, even though his surname was Lan and he was apparently part of the Lan sect now?), but that was all in Yunmeng except for that one trip he’d taken with Sect Leader Jiang to some place in Qishan that he’d thought was a great deal of fun but which had made Hanguang-jun ask Sect Leader Jiang for a moment of his time in a way that meant Sect Leader Jiang was about to get a very stern talking to, and after that they hadn’t gone again.

This time, though, he wasn’t just going for a single visit, there and back again on Sandu; he was going for a whole month – maybe even a whole season if he liked the first month, but he’d already secretly decided he wouldn’t. Sect Leader Jiang would be there at the beginning, but he couldn’t stay for very long, and of course Hanguang-jun couldn’t go at all.

“For now,” Sect Leader Jiang had told him as they were flying, Lan Yuan held in his arms like he was Jin Ling even though he was old enough to stand on Sandu by himself as long as he was holding onto someone. Sect Leader Jiang had insisted, though, and Lan Yuan was shamefully grateful for it. “In the future, Hanguang-jun will be able to go with you and stay here while you’re here.”

“Really?” Lan Yuan had said, eyes wide. He’d never gone on a trip with Hanguang-jun before, first because he was injured and then because he was a secret, so that would be a brand-new experience – wait. “You didn’t say anything about future trips!”

Sect Leader Jiang had coughed, except it sounded a bit like laughter. “Nothing’s been decided,” he’d said. “We need to see if you’ll even like the place. If you don’t, well, there’s precedent for clan members joining other sects, and of course the Jiang sect would be happy to have you.”

That had been a relief.

Possibly it had been the relief of knowing he wasn’t going to get stuck there – sent away again – that had let him relax and start exploring the new place, which was nice and gentle and quiet in a way the Lotus Pier really wasn’t, except maybe for Hanguang-jun’s rooms…

Wait.

Lan Yuan turned and narrowed his eyes at Sect Leader Jiang. “Is this where the secret is from?” he demanded.

There was another cough-laugh, this time from Uncle Lan Xichen, who was apparently actually called Zewu-jun or else Sect Leader Lan; he’d come out with them to show them around. “The secret?” he asked Sect Leader Jiang, his eyebrows arched.

“He’s a child! They talk unless they’re told a reason not to, so we came up with a reason. I’m not sure what you were expecting us to do,” Sect Leader Jiang said, crossing his arms with a huff. “Put your brother in seclusion and deny him access to his son until he could walk again?”

Sect Leader Lan winced briefly. “I meant no offense, Sect Leader Jiang. It was only that I hadn’t realized how much effort went into keeping – into ensuring Wangji’s privacy.”

“A-Yuan was the easy one,” Sect Leader Jiang said, long-suffering. “When Jin Ling started talking…there’s no reasoning with a one-year-old. At least no one ever figured out who ‘ha-ju’ was.”

Sect Leader Lan abruptly stopped walking and raised a hand to his head, as if suffering from a sudden headache. “The Discussion Conference! When he kept reaching out to me, wanting me to hold him, and then crying when I did…!”

Sect Leader Jiang snickered. “He kicked Sect Leader Jin in the face trying to get to you,” he said in the tone of someone who enjoyed the memory very much. “A good kid.”

Lan Yuan nodded. Jin Ling was, in fact, a very good kid. Even his temper tantrums were getting more and more under control, which was inevitable under Hanguang-jun’s iron fist – if he could get Sect Leader Jiang to stop having so many temper tantrums, Jin Ling didn’t stand a chance.

No one did. Hanguang-jun could do anything.

Sect Leader Lan shook his head. “I can still scarcely believe it,” he murmured. “It seems – ah.”

“Ah?” Sect Leader Jiang echoed.

“It appears that Uncle has returned earlier than I had expected.”

“…you know what, I think I have some paperwork I need to get to,” Sect Leader Jiang said, which was probably both true and a sign that this ‘Uncle’ was either very scary or very annoying. “A-Yuan, act cute.”

Lan Yuan obediently arranged a pleasant smile on his face and widened his eyes.

“A very fine skill,” Sect Leader Lan praised, though his lips were twitching. “Come along, Sizhui; I’ll introduce you to Jingyi – I think you’ll get along.”

Lan Jingyi turned out to be a small scarecrow of a boy, too tall for his age and skinny to boot, and they sized each other up for a good while before Lan Jingyi broke out into a gap-toothed grin and said, “Wanna play?”

Lan Jingyi, Lan Yuan decided shortly thereafter, was awesome.

They ran around the Cloud Recesses (walked at speed, since running was forbidden), played with the rabbits and the birds, tumbled through the vegetable gardens as an obstacle course –

“And that’s just today!” Lan Jingyi crowed. “Wait until tomorrow when we have more time, Sizhui; I’ll show you the mountain, it’s really cool!”

Lan Jingyi, like Lan Yuan, didn’t have parents anymore, having misplaced them during the war like so many others had. He confirmed that sometimes the other children made comments about it – Lan Yuan wasn’t surprised – but also that most of them were too afraid of Teacher Lan to do much more than that, and that was moderately comforting.

Teacher Lan, apparently, was Lan Jingyi’s version of Hanguang-jun, and they sounded very similar in some ways, enough that Lan Yuan was giggling in sympathy and fellow-feeling.

He didn’t mean to slip up.

It was when they were dropping stones down a well. They’d just celebrated a particularly loud plop that had made Lan Yuan scold the rock for violating the rule against excess noise, much to Lan Jingyi’s laughter, and then Lan Jingyi said, pretty casually, “They don’t usually teach Lan sect rules outside of the Cloud Recesses, especially not with the clan-specific flourishes. So who taught you?”

Lan Yuan’s back went straight with fear. “I – no one.”

Lan Jingyi blinked at him. Probably because that was a terrible lie.

Probably because Lan Yuan didn’t like lying.

Lying is forbidden.

Hanguang-jun said so.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Lan Yuan said hurriedly. “It’s a secret. You have to promise not to tell!”

“But why is it a secret?” Lan Jingyi asked bemusedly. “You’re a Lan; it makes sense that you’d know the Lan rules.”

“Just promise,” Lan Yuan said. “Promise, and I’ll tell you.”

Lan Jingyi’s shout when he told him was loud enough to scare away all the rabbits.

Maybe it had been mean to make Lan Jingyi promise to keep something a secret from Teacher Lan, especially since he was his version of Hanguang-jun, because Lan Yuan wouldn’t be able to keep anything a secret from Hanguang-jun, not even if he promised.

Sect Leader Jiang, maybe, if it was something nice to surprise him with – but not Hanguang-jun.

That was probably why he wasn’t really that surprised when Lan Jingyi showed up to his door with a guilty expression and threw himself at his feet to beg forgiveness, or why when he ran back to the place where he was staying with Sect Leader Jiang he found all the adults shouting at each other.

“What do we do?” Lan Jingyi asked, his eyes wet with tears as he showed him a little hiding place that let them hear everything the adults were saying without getting caught. “I’ve never seen them this angry…you’re not supposed to yell inside the Cloud Recesses!”

“It’s okay,” Lan Yuan decided after watching for a little. He might not know Teacher Lan at all, and Sect Leader Lan not so great either no matter how much he looked like Hanguang-jun, but he knew Sect Leader Jiang very well and his face wasn’t nearly red enough to make him worry. If anything, he almost looked – pleased? Was he deliberately causing trouble? And after all those lectures about not starting anything…

Hmm, on second thought, most of those lectures had been from Hanguang-jun, and Hanguang-jun had been glaring over his head the entire time. Maybe they hadn’t been aimed at him at all.

“What do you mean that it’s okay? They’re fighting!”

“It’s a good type of fighting,” Lan Yuan explained wisely. “This is the sort of fighting that adults do when they have too many feelings and they can’t keep them all inside, so they have to throw them at each other instead.”

“…really?”

“Really. Sect Leader Jiang has a lot of those. They just need to wear themselves out.” At least, he thought so – that was what they did during Jin Ling’s tantrums. “Come on, let’s leave them to it; they’re not saying anything interesting, anyway.”

(“- have no right to refuse to tell us that he was hiding Wangji!”

“But Master Lan, how was I to know you were looking for him? After all, no one ever said – it was all just causal hellos and have-you-seen-any-Lan-sect-recently, never saying anything directly. And all the rumors said he was in seclusion.”

“Sophistry. You knew he wasn’t!”

“I did. I also knew that his sect didn’t seem to care enough about his well-being, after thirty-three strikes with the discipline whip, to actually bother to ask.”

“You -! I should think you of all people, Sect Leader Jiang, would understand our need to make sure he would never again be deceived by the likes of Wei Wuxian –”

“If you dare speak his name again in my presence, Master Lan, I will forget that you were once my teacher. Mark your words!”)

By the next morning, Teacher Lan had a stiff expression, Sect Leader Lan an exhausted one, and Sect Leader Jiang a distinct resemblance to a cat that has just left a corpse on the floor to show off its hunting prowess.

“Looks like I’m definitely staying here the full season,” Lan Yuan told Lan Jingyi, who looked so delighted by the idea that it almost made him feel okay about it. “Now it’s a principle.”

“A principle like our sect rules?”

“No, the type of principle where you want to show that you’re right and other people are wrong.”

Specifically, the type where Sect Leader Jiang got to stand up for Hanguang-jun’s honor, and honestly. If they’d only just told Lan Yuan that that was what they were doing, he would’ve agreed to come ages ago! He wants to defend Hanguang-jun, too!

“Oh. You mean gloating?”

Lan Yuan concealed a smile. It seemed like the Cloud Recesses really wasn’t a bad place after all.

Lan Yuan was not supposed to be here, but in his defense, it was totally an accident.

He’d been playing hide-and-seek with Lan Jingyi and some of the other juniors, and no one actually said the hanshi was off-limits. Sect Leader Jiang had always encouraged him to try to think beyond the rules (while Hanguang-jun just looked long-suffering), to not make assumptions about what was and wasn’t allowed, to press his limits until he figured out what he could and couldn’t do for himself.

And then, once he knew, to attempt the impossible.

He’d known that Sect Leader Lan was busy for most of the day with meetings – so why not hide in the hanshi? How was he supposed to know that Sect Leader Lan’s sworn brothers would come in to wait for him there?

Maybe if they’d come in slowly he would have just popped out of his hiding place, apologized, saluted, and scampered, but instead the doors had just burst open and Chifeng-zun strode in, closely followed by Lianfeng-zun, and they were already mid-conversation. It would have been rude to interrupt!

“- can’t decide if I want to thank him or wring his neck,” Chifeng-zun was saying. “But regardless of the conclusion, I’m not going to do either, and neither are you. It’s not our place.”

“I wasn’t suggesting any serious damage,” Lianfeng-zun said, starting to make tea. “A few minor irritations, at most; a trade dispute or two, possibly an inciting incident –”

“Meng Yao. We’ve talked about this.”

“I suppose we have. It’s only…” His voice trailed off.

Chifeng-zun sighed. “I know. Seeing Xichen break down like that was –” He waved his hand, looking for the word. “Horrific. I thought he was having a qi deviation.”

“It would have been easier if it had been something physical or to do with his cultivation,” Lianfeng-zun said. “Something a doctor could have helped, or the Song of Clarity – something, so that we wouldn’t be left doing nothing, nothing but waiting to see if he would die of grief. The way he clung to us both, what he said…well. Wounds of the heart and mind run deep, and the scars last long.”

“As we both know,” Chifeng-zun said, and his voice was a little dry.

Lianfeng-zun chuckled. “As we both know indeed. I must admit, I never expected to reconcile with you in this lifetime.”

“I’m still convinced in retrospect that you were planning on murdering me somehow,” Chifeng-zun said, not sounding as upset as he probably should have been about something like that. “I appreciate your restraint on Xichen’s behalf – and your lack of it when we joined together to search for Wangji.”

“Mm. That came as a surprise, to be honest. I thought da-ge would object to such…viciousness.”

“How was I to know you would have such strange assumptions? Being vicious, and even being petty, are not mutually exclusive with being righteous – and anyway, I like you much better now that I know what you’re like, and can formulate my expectations accordingly. It was always the hypocrisy and lies I despised the most; I’m surprised you didn’t figure that out on your own.”

“Da-ge has always been impossible for me to read,” Lianfeng-zun said, and his voice was strangely – scolding?

Chifeng-zun certainly seemed to take it as such. “I have hobbies! It was war; I just didn’t have time for them, that’s all. Anyway, having hobbies doesn’t necessarily entail having vices.”

“Unlike some other people of our mutual acquaintance,” and now it was Lianfeng-zun’s turn to be dry.

“I didn’t say it, you did. Anyway, returning to the subject of other sect leaders of our mutual acquaintance, I’m still shocked that Sect Leader Jiang kept up the lie as long as he did.”

“I know. I hate to speak badly about him, but he’s normally a terrible liar – his face goes red, he scowls more than usual, he averts his eyes…every single possible indication of untruthfulness. I would never think that he’d be able to keep a secret of this magnitude.”

“A lesson in underestimating people, I suppose.”

They sat in quiet silence for a little while longer, and then Lianfeng-zun poured the tea.

Lan Yuan contemplated escape, but really it was far too late to leave with dignity. They weren’t wrong about Sect Leader Jiang being a terrible liar, so Lan Yuan wasn’t angry or anything, but they’d probably be embarrassed that he overheard them talking about him at all.

“They’ll need a way to get out of it,” Lianfeng-zun said. “I’m not sure they realize that, yet.”

“Get out of it?” Chifeng-zun asked. “What do you mean?”

“As far as the majority of the cultivation world knows, Hanguang-jun has been in seclusion here, in the Cloud Recesses, for much of the past three years. During those same three years, Hanguang-jun’s adopted son has been living, quite publicly in the Lotus Pier – no one knows he’s Hanguang-jun’s now, of course, but if he reveals that he is, how does he explain the child having been there rather than here? Wouldn’t one or another of the sects have to admit the deception, and thereby lose face?”

Chifeng-zun considered the issue for a moment, then huffed. “You’re overthinking it. It’s not that hard problem to solve.”

Lan Yuan, who had started to enter full-fledged panic at the realization that they might have, in fact, messed everything up horribly and all because of him, calmed a little and tried to peer further around the edge of the screen he was hiding behind, eager to hear the solution.

Lianfeng-zun looked equally intrigued. “Well, then, da-ge – don’t leave we simple-minded persons in suspense.”

“As if you’ve ever been simple-minded.”

“Da-ge. Don’t play coy.”

Chifeng-zun chuckled and drank his tea, casually malicious, but then put it down on the table. “Easy enough. They just need to have a fight.”

“A fight?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t they fight? After all, with Hanguang-jun having finally emerged from seclusion, don’t you think he would be furious to discover that the son he gave his name to was being kept away from his family at the Lotus Pier?”

“I think I see your point,” Lianfeng-zun said, starting to smile. “When he retreated into seclusion, he undoubtedly understood that the boy would be delivered to the Cloud Recesses to be raised as a proper Lan, but instead he was kept back at the Lotus Pier –”

“Presumably Sect Leader Jiang made some sort of commitment to the mother that he didn’t feel he could break.”

“And naturally, since the father of the child was not present, there was no way for the Lan sect to claim him.”

“Of course. Especially when we are all in the midst of rebuilding – who would want to start trouble? But now that Wangji is out again…”

Lianfeng-zun laughed. “Doesn’t that result in the boy coming to the Cloud Recesses permanently? I was under the impression he didn’t want that.”

“Are you suggesting that they rob the boy of the only home he’s known?” Chifeng-zun pretended to scold. “Nonsense. Some calmer mind, likely belonging to a sect that is neither of the two in question - and not me -”

“Well, you did say calmer.”

“Someone will have to prevail with a compromise: a division of time between the two places.”

Lianfeng-zun smiled. “I think I see the direction in which you’re going – that’s the same sort of argument that could be used to allow Sect Leader Jiang to retain partial custody of A-Ling once he gets old enough that his return to Koi Tower is required, isn’t it?”

“Precisely.”

Lan Yuan somehow hadn’t thought about Jin Ling having to go back to Koi Tower – in Lanling, which was really far away – and it’s probably his distress at the idea that makes him lean forward a little too far and tip over the screen with a giant crash.

Both men turned to stare at him.

“Uh,” he said, and promptly dropped into a low bow, bringing his hands up in salute. “Sorry for the disturbance! Have a nice day!”

He ran.

(There was laughter behind him.)

“You – abandoner of responsibilities! Scum! Bad person!”

Hanguang-jun’s eye twitched. “Jiang Wanyin. I know you can do better than that.”

“Oooh, he’s pulled out the courtesy name,” Lan Yuan whispered to Sect Leader Lan, who was doing a very good job of not laughing out loud but it looked a little like it hurt. His shoulders were shaking and there were tears in his curved-smile eyes. “You know he’s serious now.”

Sect Leader Lan had to put his sleeve in his mouth to muffle the snickering. Jin Ling didn’t quite understand what was going on, but he was giggling quite openly, and that wasn’t helping either.

“I’m trying, okay,” Sect Leader Jiang complained. “It just feels weird, that’s all.”

“You fight all the time,” Jiang Meimei, one of the clan disciples that assisted Sect Leader Jiang with administration, said, rolling her eyes. “I’m not even exaggerating. How can this be hard?”

“We fight over reasonable things,” Sect Leader Jiang argued. “Like him being a snob, or persnickety, or having terrible taste in any number of things, up to and including seasonings –”

“Preferring to have intact taste buds is a reasonable preference.”

“Coward. Afraid of a little chili pepper.”

“That one can do something is not a reason to do it.”

“Is that a Lan sect rule? ‘Refrain from fun’ as the general rule, for everything else see the list of exceptions?”

“I believe the point Deputy Jiang was attempting to make was that this is more along the lines of what we were expecting,” Sect Leader Lan put in. “Perhaps a slightly more aggravated version…?”

“Oh, I can do aggravated,” Sect Leader Jiang said, which in Lan Yuan’s opinion was stating the obvious. “But even I have trouble working up a temper about Lan Wangji, of all people, abandoning some poor woman with a child he’d promised to take care of, which may or may not be his – it’s just not plausible.”

“What part,” Hanguang-jun said dryly, “the abandonment or the woman?”

“Both? Both.”

“While I don’t disagree with your assessment of Wangji’s character, that isn’t the point at the moment,” Sect Leader Lan said, his eyes sharp and interested – he’d looked up suddenly when Sect Leader Jiang had called Hanguang-jun by name, as if he were studying Hanguang-jun’s reaction. There wasn’t one, of course; Sect Leader Jiang had long ago fallen into the habit of calling Hanguang-jun by name, and Hanguang-jun returned the favor – albeit with Sect Leader Jiang’s given name, which everyone used instead of his courtesy name. Unless he was in front of other people, or else being especially sarcastic. “Perhaps you can think of some angle which would work for you?”

“Like what?”

“Well – A-Yao had a suggestion, but I don’t know if it would work.”

“Can’t be worse than this,” Jiang Meimei opined. “No one’ll believe Hanguang-jun for a scum no matter how loudly Sect Leader Jiang yells.”

Sect Leader Lan smiled and nodded, looking proud. He was Hanguang-jun’s big brother, so it made sense. “A-Yao suggested that Sect Leader Jiang consider it as Wangji having promised him something – to assist in caring for A-Yuan alongside him, perhaps – and having then defaulted in favor of something he preferred more, such as leaving to enter seclusion at the Cloud Recesses.”

Sect Leader Jiang’s shoulders abruptly went tense. “Not a bad suggestion,” he said, and his voice was strained as if he were forcing himself to be calm. “But Lan Wangji wouldn’t do that, either.”

“But if you pretend –”

“I would not,” Hanguang-jun said firmly. “I would not violate any vow I have taken, regardless of the recipient of that vow.”

Sect Leader Jiang’s shoulders relaxed a little.

“I do not believe that additional sincerity is helpful in this instance,” Hanguang-jun continued, folding his hands behind his back. “The goal is not to simulate a real argument, but to spread the understanding that there was an argument – wouldn’t a spar in public be sufficient, with explanations to be provided later?”

Sect Leader Jiang tilted his head to the side, looking intrigued. “So, what, you emerge from seclusion, talk to Sect Leader Lan for a bit to ‘find out’ about A-Yuan, then fly straight to the Lotus Pier and attack me without saying anything?”

Hanguang-jun nodded.

“That would be in character for a stone-face like you. And if you really put effort into it, I wouldn’t have time to be shouting out insults left and right.”

“It would confuse people,” Sect Leader Lan agreed, sounding thoughtful. “They would seek out anyone with knowledge, and we could plant some people to gossip appropriately…afterwards, once the information is widely known, we can have Mingjue-xiong or maybe A-Yao - they’re still fighting over who - well, one of them will announce that he was consulted as a neutral third party and that the matter is now resolved, with Wangji returning alongside A-Yuan to the Cloud Recesses for at least a season each year, and remaining at the Lotus Pier to supervise his education during the remaining months.”

“Acceptable,” Hanguang-jun said.

“Is it?” Sect Leader Jiang asked, looking at him. “Not to reverse course and go worry about the exact opposite thing I was worrying about just before, but, well. You know that it wouldn’t be hard to push for you to stay here all year, if you prefer, right? After all, I’m known for being unreasonable…”

Hanguang-jun shook his head. “A-Yuan should have the background to which he is entitled. A few months out of the year are an acceptable sacrifice.”

Sect Leader Lan bowed his head, looking a little sad, but nodded. “Moreover, if Wangji is truly unhappy in the Cloud Recesses, we can adjust the agreement going forward,” he said. “Attention will likely only be paid for the first year or two – thereafter, Wangji can reside wherever he prefers.”

“I will not remain at the Cloud Recesses,” Hanguang-jun said to Sect Leader Jiang, his eyes steady, and Sect Leader Jiang scowled in a way that was almost a smile. “It was my home once, but no longer – but it will be pleasant to visit it.”

“As long as you remember that it’s just a visit,” Sect Leader Jiang grumbled. “All right, I’m signed on. Let’s do it.”

#mdzs #lan sizhui #jiang cheng #jin ling #madame jin #lan xichen #lan qiren #lan jingyi #nie mingjue #jin guangyao #lan wangji #my fic #my fics #delight in misery #everyone gets a SUPER LONG CHAPTER

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fuckyeahzevranarainai · 3 years

Conversation

Zevran: Mmm... what? I... oh.

Zevran: I rather thought I would wake up dead. Or not wake up at all, as the case may be. But I see you haven't killed me yet.

Warden: That could be easily rectified.

Zevran: Of that I have no doubt. You are most skilled. If you haven't killed me, however, you must have kept me alive for some purpose, yes?

Warden: You seem awfully glib for a prisoner.

Zevran: (Chuckles) It is my way, or so I am told.

Zevran: Let's see, then. I assume you kept me alive to ask me some questions, yes? If so, let me save you time and get right to the point.

Zevran: My name is Zevran. Zev to my friends. I am a member of the Antivan Crows, brought here for the sole purpose of slaying any surviving Grey Wardens. Which I have failed at, sadly.

Warden: I'm rather happy you failed.

Zevran: So would I be, in your shoes. For me, however, it sets a rather poor precedent, doesn't it? Getting captured by a target seems a tad detrimental to one's budding assassin career.

Warden: Too bad for you, then.

Zevran: Yes, it's true. Too bad for me.

Warden: What are the Antivan Crows?

Zevran: An order of assassins, of course. Out of Antiva. I suppose you wouldn't hear much of them out here, but where I come from we're rather infamous.

Warden: Not for being good assassins, I see.

Zevran: Oh, fine. Is that what you Fereldans do? Mock your prisoners? Such cruelty.

Warden: So you came all the way from Antiva?

Zevran: Not precisely. I was in the neighborhood when the offer came. The Crows get around, you see.

Warden: Who hired you to kill us?

Zevran: A rather taciturn fellow in the capital. Loghain, I think his name was? Yes, that's it.

Warden: Does that mean you're loyal to Loghain?

Zevran: I have no idea what his issues are with you. The usual, I imagine. You threaten his power, yes?

Zevran: Beyond that, no, I'm not loyal to him. I was contracted to perform a service.

Warden: And now that you've failed that service?

Zevran: Well, that's between Loghain and the Crows. And between the Crows and myself.

Warden: And between you and me?

Zevran: Isn't that what we're establishing now?

Warden: When were you to see him next?

Zevran: I wasn't. If I had succeeded, I would have returned home and the Crows would have informed your Loghain of the results... if he didn't already know.

Zevran: If I had failed, I would be dead. Or I should be, at least as far as the Crows are concerned. No need to see Loghain then.

Warden: If you had failed?

Zevran: What can I say? I am an eternal optimist.

Zevran: Although the chances of succeeding at this point seen a bit slim, don't they? Ha, ha. No, I don't suppose you'd find that funny, would you?

Warden: How much were you paid?

Zevran: I wasn't paid anything. The Crows, however, were paid quite handsomely. Or so I understand.

Zevran: Which does make me about as poor as a chantry mouse, come to think of it. Being an Antivan Crow isn't for the ambitious, to be perfectly honest.

Warden: Then why are you one?

Zevran: Well, aside form a distinct lack of ambition I suppose it's because I wasn't given much of a choice. The Crows bought me young. I was a bargain, too, or so I'm led to believe.

Zevran: But don't let my sad story influence you. The Crows aren't so bad. They keep one well supplied: Wine, women, men. Whatever you happen to fancy.

Zevran: Though the whole severance package is garbage, let me tell you. If you were considering joining, I'd really think twice about it.

Warden: Thanks. I'll take that under advisement.

Zevran: You seem like a bright fellow. I'm sure you've other options.

Warden: Why are you telling me all this?

Zevran: Why not? I wasn't paid for silence. Not that I offered it for sale, precisely.

Warden: Aren't you at least loyal to your employers?

Zevran: Loyalty is an interesting concept. If you wish, and you're done interrogating me, we can discuss it further.

Warden: I'm listening. Make it quick.

Zevran: Well, here's the thing. I failed to kill you, so my life is forfeit. That's how it works. If you don't kill me, the Crows will.

Zevran: Thing is, I like living. And you obviously are the sort to give the Crows pause. So let me serve you, instead.

Warden: Can I expect the same amount of loyalty from you?

Zevran: I happen to be a very loyal person. Up until the point where someone expects me to die for failing.

Zevran: That's not a fault, really, is it? I mean, unless you're the sort who would do the same thing. In which case I... don't come very well recommended, I suppose.

Warden: And what's to stop you from finishing the job later?

Zevran: To be completely honest, I was never given much of a choice regarding joining the Crows. They bought me on the slave market when I was a child.

Zevran: I think I've paid my worth back to them, plus tenfold. The only way out, however, is to sign up with someone they can't touch.

Zevran: Even if I did kill you now, they might kill me just on principle for failing the first time. Honestly, I'd rather take my chances with you.

Warden: Won't they come after you?

Zevran: Possibly. I happen to know their wily ways, however. I can protect myself, as well as you. Not that you seem to need much help.

Zevran: And if not.... well, it's not as if I had many alternatives to start with, is it?

Warden: What do you want in return?

Zevran: Well... let's see. Being allowed to live would be nice, and would make me marginally more useful to you.

Zevran: And somewhere down the line if you should decide that you no longer have need of me, then I go on my way. Until then, I am yours. Is that fair?

Warden: Why would I want your service?

Zevran: Why? Because I am skilled at many things, from fighting to stealth and picking locks.

Zevran: I could also warn you should the Antivan Crows attempt something more... sophisticated... now that my attempts have failed.

Zevran: I also know a great many jokes. Twelve massage techniques, six different card games? I do wonderful at parties, no?

Zevran: I could also stand around and look pretty, if you prefer. Warm your bed? Fend off unwanted suitors? No?

Warden: You must think I'm royally stupid.

Zevran: I think you're royally tough to kill. And utterly gorgeous.

Zevran: Not that I think you'll respond to simple flattery. I'm only hoping that you're the sort of fellow that takes a chance every now and again. Ha, ha. Yes?

Warden: Very well. I accept your offer.

Alistair: What?! You're taking the assassin with us now? Does that really seem like a good idea?

Warden: Don't worry about it. We could use him.

Alistair: Hmmm. All right, all right. I see your point.

Alistair: Still. If there was a sign that we were desperate, I think it just knocked on the door and said hello.

Morrigan: A fine plan. But I would examine your food and drink far more closely from now on, were I you.

Zevran: That's excellent advice for anyone.

Zevran: I hereby pledge my oath of loyalty to you, until such a time as you choose to release me from it. I am your man, without reservation... this I swear.

#long post #zevran #zevran arainai #zevrans stories #this has been sitting in my drafts forever

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passionate-reply · 3 years

Video

youtube

In 1993, Billy Idol--yes, that Billy Idol--went completely mad and made an electronic album full of futuristic themes, samples, and techno beats. Many consider Cyberpunk one of the worst albums of all time, but on this week’s installment of Great Albums, we provide a somewhat more positive approach. Check out the video, or read the transcript below the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! In this installment, I’ll be taking a look at an artist one might not normally associate with the usual “pantheon” of synthesizer jockeys I usually talk about: Billy Idol. Initially known as the frontman of punk outfit Generation X, Idol found success as a solo artist in the early 1980s, fusing tough-as-nails punk aesthetics with a lavish, almost camp sense of glam, and his visually arresting pop-rock made him an MTV-friendly star of the “Second British Invasion.” While one couldn’t fairly argue that Idol was an “electronic musician,” his early work does contain moments of mild electro-curiosity, perhaps most notably the mercurial ballad, “Eyes Without a Face.”

Music: “Eyes Without a Face”

But despite the minor synth touches of the hit single “Eyes Without a Face,” few in the 1980s could have possibly expected the turn Idol’s career would eventually take by the time of his 5th studio LP: 1993’s Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is, of course, an album with a reputation that precedes it, and that reputation is not a particularly good one. Cyberpunk is a deeply fraught album, which commercially underperformed upon release, and did even worse in the eyes of critics, with the magazine Q dubbing it the 5th worst album of all time. In the nearly 30 years since the album’s release, opinions on it don’t seem to have softened that much, either. But as with everything I choose to talk about, I think Cyberpunk is worth listening to. I think it’s a daring and challenging work of art, and one that stands on its own terms when approached head-on. Whether you’re familiar with this album or not, I encourage you to give it a fresh listen, and a fair shake.

Music: “Wasteland”

Perhaps the most immediately apparent feature of Cyberpunk is its increasingly electronic soundscape, including a prominent sample-based hook on the track “Wasteland.” The album was created in less than a year, and chiefly through use of computers and digital audio software, which Idol evidently found easier to explore and use than earlier forms of music technology. I’m partial to the argument that sees the use of digital software as perfectly compatible with the famed DIY ethos of punk, and hence, not far from Idol’s wheelhouse at all. In the 1990s, computers were still something that far from everyone owned, but in our contemporary world of Soundcloud rappers on seemingly every street, it’s easier to accept the notion of computer music as a grassroots, egalitarian field where even the unskilled are welcome--perhaps even moreso than punk ever was, in the 20th Century. This is one sense in which I think Cyberpunk has aged better than anyone could have possibly imagined. Besides pushing the texture of Idol’s music into new territory, Cyberpunk is also a fairly risky album structurally, opening with a sort of manifesto being read, and peppered with brief interludes between its tracks proper.

Music: “Interlude 3”

It’s only fitting that an album so concerned with the bleeding edge of technology might also try to push the boundaries of the still-fresh CD age. Liberated from the confines of designing chiefly for vinyl, artists like Idol were empowered to create CDs that ostensibly had 20 “tracks,” with no need for empty grooves to separate these brief interludes from the album’s major compositions. This avant-garde touch adds significant amounts of texture to the album, and, dare I say, a sense of world-building. Undoubtedly, one main reason why this album was so poorly received at the time is that it is, quite simply, not what one expects a Billy Idol record to sound like--at least, with the possible exception of its second single, “Shock to the System.”

Music: “Shock to the System”

“Shock to the System” feels like something of an orphan in the tracklisting of Cyberpunk. While tracks like “Wasteland” certainly maintain a rough-edged rock mentality about them, and could never be confused for straightforward techno floor-fillers, “Shock to the System” feels more like it was tacked onto the album just so that it would have something that appealed to those who exclusively prefer Idol’s earlier style--and, given that most of Idol’s greatest hits compilations tend to include “Shock to the System” and nothing else from Cyberpunk, this may have worked. Cyberpunk, as a genre, is often concerned with political themes--its great literary progenitor, William Gibson, once said that “the future is already here, but it’s unevenly distributed,” epitomizing the extent to which the intersection between technology and class is a central issue in cyberpunk media. “Shock to the System” is the most overtly political track on Cyberpunk, inspired by the wave of riots that broke out in Los Angeles following the acquittal of police officers alleged to have used excessive force in the arrest of a Black man, Rodney King. While the role of computers in daily life has changed a great deal since the 1990s, police brutality and anti-Blackness have sadly remained quite similar.

Few have commented on the perhaps uncomfortable implications of Idol’s dramatization of the LA riots from outside, which seems to transmute the scene into one of high-tech fantasy while largely eliding over the racial implications of why people were rioting in the first place--something that seems particularly strange when one learns how upset members of the underground “cyberculture” were about the alleged co-opting and appropriation of their culture. Some have characterized Idol as an honest appreciator of cyberpunk who just wanted to make art that engaged with its ideas, and others more cynically consider him a profiteer who thought he could commercialize a more palatable version of the counter-culture. While the latter hypothesis may well be true, I’m not sure if it can rightfully be said that Idol had “no right” to mine cyberculture for inspiration, particularly since cyberculture has often encouraged amateur participation. Still, as a sometime fan of the literary genre myself, I’m tempted to agree with those who have questioned how deep Idol’s understanding of cyberpunk actually was, particularly when faced with tracks like “Neuromancer.”

Music: “Neuromancer”

In William Gibson’s novel of the same name, Neuromancer is a super-advanced AI with the ability to preserve people’s personalities in virtual reality...though you probably wouldn’t have guessed any of that from this track. Many who interviewed Idol seemed to think he had a weak grasp on the finer points of cyberculture, and even Gibson himself, upon meeting Idol, failed to take him seriously. Still, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to draw a line in the sand, as some have done, and say that Idol was particularly, individually, responsible for the dilution of cyberpunk ideals, as presented by authors like Gibson. While it may be easy to poke fun at the clownish, overwrought figure of Idol, as the embodiment of people who love books they don’t understand, it’s not like that many people owned this album. I think the success of popular films like Blade Runner and The Matrix has done much more to simplify and proliferate ideas cribbed from Gibson.

But however you feel about this, it’s clear that Cyberpunk was an album that ended up appealing to nearly no-one--it alienated Idol’s existing fans with its stylistic diversions, as well as feeling too commercial and inauthentic to cyberpunk enthusiasts. Something else that I haven’t seen mentioned in discussion of this album is the fact that Billy Idol really wasn’t the first to combine the ideas of cyberpunk and music. By the early 1990s, industrial acts like Front 242 and Front Line Assembly had already been making electronic music about cyber brain implants for years, albeit largely underground and often unnoticed by rock-focused critics. I can’t help but think that the prior existence of this stuff was yet another factor that caused Cyberpunk’s failure to thrive. Compared to the electronic body music scene, Cyberpunk comes across as less subtle, less insider, and much more surface-level.

The cover art of Cyberpunk has attracted nearly as much derision as the associated music. The image of Idol’s face bleeds and distorts “into” and “against” a gridlike field, perhaps the greenish terminal of an early computer screen, a representation of the hacker figure entering the virtual world of cyberspace, and identity blurring along those lines. With its wobbly image distortion and queasy complementary colour palette of yellow and purple, it instantly evokes not only cyberpunk aesthetics generally, but more particularly the fusion between cyberpunk and another popular aesthetic of the early 90s: psychedelia, which experienced a substantial resurgence around this time, related to rave culture and its embrace of hallucinogenic party drugs. So-called “cyberdelic” themes abound on the album as well, particularly on the hypnotic “Adam In Chains,” a track that sounds less like 80s New Wave, and more like 90s New Age.

Following the release and subsequent panning of Cyberpunk in the 1990s, Billy Idol went silent for over a decade. While he claimed that his disinterest in making new music was rooted moreso in mismanagement by Chrysalis Records than it was the album’s failure, it’s very tempting to look for a correlation here. Over the years, Idol was often asked if he ever planned to make more electronic music, and consistently claimed that he was chiefly interested in guitar-centric rock, while never completely trashing his vision for Cyberpunk. True to his word, when Idol finally did return to music with 2005’s Devil’s Playground, he delivered on his “classic” sound, and he’s continued to do so ever since.

Music: “Scream”

My favourite track on Cyberpunk is its lead single, the total showstopper “Heroin.” “Heroin” is actually a cover of a song by the seminal Velvet Underground, and it’s everything I think a cover ought to be: exciting, bizarre, and capable of taking something familiar and kicking it into a whole new territory. What’s the point of covering something without changing it and doing something a bit different? “Heroin” is naturally one of the most psychedelic-oriented tracks on the album, being a cover of a drug-themed 1960s classic, as well as one of the tracks with the most influence from dance genres like techno, boasting a very appealing extended outro that makes it feel like a 12” remix. While I think Cyberpunk is a fascinating album, “Heroin” is the one track I think really crosses the bridge from being interesting to being, quite simply, good, and it’s something I’m much more inclined to sit down and listen to recreationally. That’s everything for today--thanks for listening!

Music: “Heroin”

#music #great albums #album review #album reviews #billy idol #cyberpunk

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lizacstuff · 4 years

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So what do you think will finally be the tipping point for Serkan to start questioning what he has been told about Eda? I would prefer he admit to falling in love with her and kick Selin to the curb even before he gets his memories back but guess we will see. The emotions were super charged (of course) last episode for Eda & Serkan so hopefully they are both able to go into things a little calmer going forward. It sucks to say but I think with Eda backing off on the “we were in love and you need to remember” that he will slowly or maybe quickly start to pick up personality traits that we all know & love and start to remember her. But we all know that Selin will do her best to stop any of that before it starts. I just hope the show does a better job of not using Eda as an emotional punching bag to show us that she is such a kind & loving person. That ending was humiliating for her and even though I know she will pick herself up again, it was still tough to watch. Going to be even tougher for Serkan to forgive himself for doing once he has his memories back.

This right here: "I would prefer he admit to falling in love with her and kick Selin to the curb even before he gets his memories back."

Yes, that's what I need and what should happen. I can not get past the line, "If I were to live 100 lives, I would fall in love with you 100 times," said right before he went missing and got amnesia.

To me that line foreshadowed that the entire point of this storyline was for us to see that Serkan would fall in love with her no matter what. It did not foreshadow that Eda would always be able to break through and make him remember her. And if that's the story they wanted to do, that Serkan would always remember her, then the line should have been about that. It's not like there's not precedent for that in the show. There have been a couple of episodes with, "I want to remember this moment forever" type moments, so they could have done that again here, setting up that he would never be able to forget her.

THEY DIDN'T DO THAT.

They set up that he would fall in love with her if he was born again, starting from scratch, and that's what's happened with the amnesia. So if we don't see him fall in love, before he remembers everything, then what was even the point? As far as when things start to gel for him, I assume that's what the next episode is primarily about. My guess is Selin will be pushing forward as fast as she can. However, we know old Serkan was very commitment-adverse, so I think he's going to be internally freaking out about what he did. So I think we'll see him sort of become disengaged with her. Realizing he made a mistake by acting so rashly, but not admitting it.

At the same time, I assume we'll see him drawn to Eda, they'll probably have something that forces them to spend time together. Also we see it already in the first fragman. He knew about the lemons. I assume there will be things like that throwing his mind into a whirl and it will all climax with the mounting wedding pressure and he'll be feeling like something isn't right, and hopefully he'll start to recognize his feelings for Eda.

As for Eda being humiliated by Serkan's actions, I think it's more about being hurt. Every person in that room knows her rightful place in Serkan's life. They know how much Serkan loves her, no one but Selin is going to judge her for trying to get through to him with that kiss. It's much more likely that they're shocked at his actions and hopefully that will be the thing that jogs some of them out of their bizarre complacency about what Selin is doing.

As for your point about Eda being calmer and changing tactics, that's exactly what she needs to do. Imagine the scene at his house last episode, but instead of charging in at an 11 out of 10 and crying and throwing the pictures and breaking the glass, she instead very calmly said, "You went missing on our wedding day, I looked for you every day that you were missing, I dreamt about you every night, I took care of your business and your dog and your life, you at least owe it to me to hear our story from me. And then she proceeds to tell him their story using the photos. Imagine the results of that versus what happened.

He probably would have still been resistant, and nothing would happen in the moment, but think of the food for thought he would have had, instead of thinking she's crazy, scary and angry.

SPOILERS AHEAD (spoilers under the cut, enter at your own risk)

There are spoilers out there that Serkan gets his memories back by next episode and there's a big Edser moment with him kissing her after he remembers, while she's giving a speech. So are the spoilers wrong? Or does he fall in love with her before he gets his memories back at the end of the episode? Or is there no consistent storytelling at all and they're just going to forget Serkan falling in love with her 100 times in 100 lives and just go with "poof, problem fixed, his memories are back?"

Also if this storyline wasn't set up to reset things (with Serkan and Eda starting from scratch) and fuel a whole bunch of episodes, then I have no idea what the point was. At first, if this was only going to be a couple episodes of memory loss I wondered what the point of bringing Selin back even was. Plenty to fuel two episodes of story in Serkan losing his memories on his wedding day. Then after this episode I realized it might be so that even when Serkan jettisons Selin in the near future, what happened will be a stumbling block between Edser. Eda is going to be so hurt, I can imagine she'll need some time before jumping back into a relationship with him.

So to sum it up, I can't figure out what they're doing. It seemed to me they were trying to set up a do over so we could watch them fall in love a second time as a way to give the series new life, and to fuel a good 10 episodes, but if the spoilers are true, that doesn't seem like what they're doing, so I'm at a loss.

#Sen Çal Kapımı #sen cal kapimi #edser #sckask #sck speculations #sck episode discussion #asklizac #sck 1x29 #sck 1x30 #anonymous

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set-phasers-to-whump · 4 years

Text

they look so pretty when they bleed

Prompt: blood loss, trail of blood

Whumpee: Nick Burkhardt

Fandom: Grimm

hi what’s up!! i was originally gonna write this fic for a completely different fandom but then i got inspired to beat nick up some more!! sorry if i’m getting too repetitive lol, but i hope you enjoy!!

Nick’s list of things to do today had been pretty simple: wake up, go for a jog, take a shower, give Juliette a call and see how she was doing at her friend’s engagement party in Seattle, get to work. It had most definitely not included getting stabbed.

But there he was, standing on the sidewalk, not another pedestrian in sight, a hand clamped firmly across his torso and a bloody knife at his feet.

He knew what he should have done. He should have grabbed his phone and called 911, like any reasonable person would. But the knife hadn’t gone that deep - his attacker had plunged it maybe a third of the way into his body before they had apparently regretted their decision. They’d pulled the knife out, dropped it on the ground, and ran away. And Nick hadn’t chased them down, hadn’t even gotten a look at their face.

What he could do, then, to make up for his failing at that extremely basic task of observation that he was supposed to be so good at, was collect the evidence, fix himself up, and get into work to report a crime. That seemed like a perfectly reasonable plan.

It wasn’t, of course. The second he bent to pick up the knife, it felt as though all of the adrenaline in his body wore off at once. His torso exploded into a symphony of pain, and he collapsed to his knees, pressing his hand harder still into his skin, more in an attempt to stop the pain than to stop the bleeding. Then, he forced his other hand to grab the knife, and promptly dropped it when the hand started to shake.

He gritted his teeth and once again forced his hand to cooperate, this time gripping the knife so tightly that his knuckles turned white. He took a deep breath, then used that same hand to push himself back to his feet.

Somehow, he managed to remain standing, fighting through a wave of intense dizziness and willing his eyes to focus. He started to walk back towards his house.

It took him far longer than it should have, but eventually, Nick made it. He’d almost collapsed more times than he could remember, his wound had throbbed with every single step, his hand and shirt were slick with blood, and he could barely remember what it was he was supposed to be doing. He had managed to hold on to the knife, but he dropped it onto the doormat so he could let himself inside.

As soon as he closed the door, Nick leaned back against it. He knew he needed to be doing something, fixing this, but he was so tired, and a quick rest wouldn’t hurt, would it?

No, it wouldn’t, he decided, and slid to the floor.

Monroe had woken up earlier than normal that morning. He’d made a batch of muffins for himself and Rosalee, and they’d enjoyed them over coffee, discussing the new clock Monroe had just been commissioned to repair, and a shipment that the spice shop was expecting.

When Rosalee had left for work, Monroe had decided he ought to bring a few of the leftover muffins to Nick, seeing as he was home alone for a couple days and might have wanted some company over breakfast.

He parked his car across the street from Nick’s house and opened his door, the container of muffins in his hands.

The second he’d stepped onto the sidewalk, the container dropped to the ground, sending muffins flying. The smell of blood - Nick’s blood - was overwhelming, and Monroe looked around himself, hoping that he hadn’t somehow hit Nick with his car.

Which he hadn’t, of course. But something had hit Nick, a fact which was confirmed when he crossed the street, seeing splotches of blood along the sidewalk leading up to Nick’s front porch.

He hurried up the steps, grimly noting the trail of blood which preceded him. He stopped short at the doormat, seeing a bloody knife lying there. At least I know what happened, he thought, and tried the door.

It was unlocked, but didn’t want to move. As soon as Monroe realized why this must have been, he heard Nick groan from the other side. He’s alive, Monroe thought, that’s good.

He pushed the door open as gently as he could, certain that Nick was in no state to move himself. He stepped inside, cringing as the scent of blood enveloped him completely. This was so not good…

Nick opened his eyes as he felt his body move. He heard someone step inside and shut the door behind them.

“Who’s there,” he breathed, too tired to actually speak the words.

“Dude…” he heard Monroe say, somewhere out of sight. “What happened?”

Nick tried to respond, but his prior question had used up all the breath he seemed to have had, and he just made a sort of wheezing sound instead.

“No, no, I know what happened, you got stabbed, right? The knife on the doormat? I gotta do something...why are you even here? Shouldn’t you have, like, called 911 or something? Shouldn’t I call 911?”

He should have called 911. But...he hadn’t? “Why?” he managed to ask, and then he coughed, and his chest felt like it was tearing open and he tasted blood in his mouth.

“Why should I call 911? Because you were stabbed, Nick! I don’t....you’re a police officer! Why didn’t you call 911?”

Nick had been too out of it to actually process what Monroe had been saying to him, but he sounded irritated. Angry, maybe. He didn’t want Monroe to be angry at him, but he didn’t know how to fix it, since he didn’t know what Monroe had said.

“Sorry,” he whispered, figuring that was the best he could do. He felt something wet drip down his face and wondered if he was bleeding from his eyes, too. Why not? Every other part of himself seemed to be bloody. He could feel the blood drying on his hand, which had long since slipped to the floor, uncovering his wound. He felt it soaking into his clothes, and oozing from his torso, a horrible mix of cold and warm that was making him simultaneously sweaty and shivery.

“Hey, no, don’t be sorry, it’s okay,” Monroe said, and he crouched down, bringing his face into Nick’s field of vision for the first time. He was blurry and wobbly, but even through that Nick could sense how worried he was. Which was bad, worry was bad, bleeding like this was bad, oh, god, this was all really, really bad. Like, he was going to die bad.

He reached out his hand, looking for Monroe, but he was too far away, and talking, but not to him. Nick tried to remember what Monroe had said to him earlier, back when he’d been listening, but found he couldn’t. Maybe it’s Rosalee, he thought. Rosalee would know how to help…

And suddenly, Monroe was back in front of him, and then he was pushing something into Nick’s wound, and it hurt so, so badly, and brought a wave of dizziness with it, and Nick once again reached out a desperate hand, this time succeeding in touching Monroe, smearing blood across his face.

“M’roe…”

“Yeah?”

“Hurts.”

“I know,” Monroe said, and then he was doing something with his arms. It took Nick until he felt something being draped over him to realize he’d been taking off his jacket. “I know it hurts, but this is what they said to do.”

Nick hadn’t understood most of the words that Monroe had just said, but he had felt the warmth of his jacket, and could almost smell, above the overwhelming scent of his own blood, the familiar and comforting smell of Monroe. These two things distracted him enough from the pain that he managed to focus his eyes for a few seconds, latching them onto Monroe’s. He should tell him something, if he was dying, if…

But then the world started to darken around the edges, and he felt like he was falling through space, and he only had time to say, “‘M gonna-” before everything went black.

Not a minute later, two paramedics came hurrying inside, quickly moving Monroe out of the way and getting to work. Monroe, meanwhile, did his best to explain the details of the situation, which didn’t extend much beyond, “he was stabbed.”

He followed them to the ambulance, managing to convince them to let him ride along by insisting that Nick would be freaked out if he woke up in an unfamiliar setting with nobody he knew.

As the ambulance began driving, Monroe tried not to focus on the ever-present smell of Nick’s blood, of Nick bleeding out, so he distracted himself by placing hurried calls to Rosalee, Juliette, and Hank, all of whom promised they would get to the hospital as soon as they could.

They had nearly reached their destination when Nick woke up, very briefly, very panicked. Monroe gave the nearest paramedic a brief I told you so look, and then shifted himself to be sure that Nick could see him.

“Where...what’s…”

Monroe answered the unfinished questions. “We’re in an ambulance, on the way to the hospital. You passed out there for a little bit, but you’re awake now, so that’s good. Everyone’s going to meet us there - or meet me there, I guess, and you when you wake up from surgery, and…”

Monroe trailed off, realizing that Nick had passed out again. He’d be okay, though. He was tough, and, much as it pained Monroe to think it, had been through...well, maybe worse wasn’t the way to put it, but a hell of a lot of pain, anyway. He’d be fine.

And he was. Three hours later, Nick woke up, disoriented and confused but in a completely different way than he’d been before. He looked around, not sure what to expect.

And he definitely wouldn’t have expected the scene that waited for him: Monroe and Hank, sitting in identical plastic hospital chairs, talking about something Nick couldn’t quite hear, stealing glances at him every few seconds. Rosalee, in a slightly more comfortable looking chair, talking to Juliette on the phone and reassuring her that Nick was okay, and would probably be awake when she arrived back in Portland. The Captain, standing off by himself in front of a window, also talking on the phone about something that Nick was pretty sure had to do with him.

Monroe was the first to notice that he was awake, announcing it to the rest of the room a bit too loudly for Nick’s liking.

“Sorry, man, I’m just - it’s really nice to see you, not that we haven’t been seeing you, but see you awake, I mean. How do you feel? You want some water or anything?”

Nick chose to focus on the shortest part of Monroe’s brief monologue. “I’m okay, I think,” he said, reaching a hand out to experimentally poke at the bandages covering a large part of his torso.

“Don’t do that,” Monroe suggested, as Nick hissed in pain.

“Good idea,” Nick said, pulling his hand away and blinking tiredly. How am I tired? he briefly wondered. He didn’t remember much of his day since he’d woken up, but he was pretty sure he’d been unconscious for quite some time.

“You can go back to sleep, it’s okay,” Monroe said, noting his exhaustion. “You were stabbed, and all. You’re entitled to some rest.”

Nick took a final, somewhat worried, glance around the room, wondering how occupied it would be when he woke up. He almost asked, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Luckily, he didn’t have to - they all seemed to know what he was thinking, a fact which teetered on the line between freaky and touching.

Hank gave him a reassuring smile. Rosalee put a soft hand on his arm and told him that Juliette would be there in half an hour. Renard stayed in his position by the window, but offered up a nod. Monroe spoke the thought they were all trying to convey: “we’ll all still be here when you wake up. Promise.”

aaaaaaaaa thank you so much for reading this!!!!!! it was my first time writing monroe, so i hope that his voice wasn’t too bad! anyway i really really enjoyed writing this fic, and i hope you liked reading it!!!

#whumptober2020 #no.10 #blood loss #trail of blood #grimm #fic #nick burkhardt #stabbed #blood #my writing #i say things

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ourplaceinthecosmosphff · 4 years

Text

Chapter 4. Him

‘be gentle my little thunderstorm, the world is just not ready.’ a.j. lawless

The day we had tea with the Cambridges ended the same way many before: with Lourdes sending a video of her ice skating routine asking for my opinion; that time I didn’t even pretend to see it. I ignored the text and tried to sleep.

Louis barged into the room soon after.

“Will you stop ignoring our sister?”, he asked, rudely. “She notices, Maggie. And it’s really unfair.”

“Okay.” I said. “Goodnight.”

I heard him sigh, and nothing else. No steps out of the room, no creaky Clarence House door closing, no light down. Finally, I pushed away the cover and sat up.

“I can’t do this now, Louis. I have a headache.”

I’d come up with the headache excuse in order to skip dinner with the Prince of Wales and his wife, but my brother knew that excuse better than anyone.

After leaving the Cambridges, we had gone back to Clarence House, where we were hosted for the trip, and changed into black attire for a military ceremony in town where I managed to avoid my brother to try and focus on being less upset. He wasn’t about to make it easy for me, though.

At one point, Harry came to stay in line with us as my father and Prince Charles received the compliments from the officials. He gave me that look of his I was now coming to identify as a signature look, one with more intentions than verbalized; one with more feeling than was allowed.

“Nice dress.” He said. Leaning in close enough that only I could hear him, close enough that his lips brushed my hair and couldn’t be read by prying reporters, he added, “The person wearing it is prettier.”

It took all in me to contain an eyeroll, but the amused smile in my lips was impossible to hold back. Just as I felt my cheeks redden, Louis joined in.

“It’s probably our mother’s. The shoes definitely are.”

It wasn’t a dig for the untrained ears. My mother, in all ways, was more stylish and beautiful than a woman her age should be allowed to be. But knowing my brother for all the twenty-two years he’d been on this earth, I knew very well how to distinguish his honest compliments to his sarcastic ones.

Still, the moment passed, and I maintained the posture expected of me. Coming home, however, I had to tell my father I had a headache so I could come right upstairs before dinner, or else I might lose it in public.

I had a nice, warm shower, put on my softest fleece pajamas, and brushed my hair while talking to my friend Constance on the phone about our other friend Stella and her terrible taste in men, allowing it to distract me from my brother and wild, unruly thoughts of Harry.

After that, I got under the blankets and prepared to stare at funny pictures on pinterest - an app I had a fake, incognito account on - until sleep took over. I promptly ignored my sister’s text, as I was known to do, and not ten minutes later Louis barged into the room.

I finally heard the door close, and was overtaken by a familiar struggle against tears, but before I could decide if I should succumb to it, the mattress dipped as my brother climbed onto bed with me. A few seconds went by in silence before he finally broke it.

“Look. Maggie. I… I was talking to Will earlier.”

“Prince William?”

“Oui. I guess I just… I didn’t realize- of course I knew you were helping a lot back home. I just didn’t think it bothered you so much.”

I took it in; he was… almost apologizing.

“Well, now you know.”

“Yes, I do. And, I don’t know, I just…”

I pushed the blankets down and sat up, still not looking over at him, but allowing myself to be in the moment as well.

“I don’t want to be the reason you’re unhappy.”

I sighed, and finally looked over at him.

My brother didn’t look too young or old, he had that odd quality of looking precisely his age. He had a light stubble growing around his thin, pointy jaw; it was the same color as his hair, blonde, which was now growing almost to his ears. It waved about, framing his eyes, a nice, dark blue shade just like mine - Lourdes had them too, all three of us had inherited them from our mother. The blonde hair we got from dad’s side of the family, as well as an unwavering determination.

“I’m not unhappy, Lou. I just… I could be happier, I suppose.”

He nodded. “And I want you to be.”

Letting out a long breath, I attempted to also let go of the anger, and focus on what I knew for sure about Louis.

He had the biggest heart of anyone I knew. No matter the signs, or how often he was told of the contrary, Louis was always decided to give people the benefit of the doubt. It was a trait we got from our mother, too, and I wasn’t sure what had made me slightly more cynical than him in this aspect, but I suspected it happened somewhere in Law School.

Louis wanted people to be happy, to excel. He wanted laughter and adventure and success for every person that crossed his path. I knew for a fact there was no way he would ever really wish the contrary, on anyone. I knew something else, too, something much more important.

I knew exactly why he was afraid to come home.

“I know you’re trying to figure things out.” I told him. “I don’t blame you. I know it’s tough.”

He nodded, slowly, and took in a deep breath. When he spoke, his voice was wavering; barely a whisper.

“I’m not, though. Not anymore. I think you know that. I haven’t been figuring things out anymore. I’ve known, really known, for a while now.”

All thoughts of the fight forgotten, I felt my heart tighten on my chest. I looked at my little brother, shrunk down and resolute, sitting by my side in bed. He was staring off into the room, but I knew, somehow, he was perfectly aware of my every move.

“You’re sure?” My whisper matched his. I presumed my fear did too.

He sighed, gulped, and shut his eyes tight, before opening them again and smiling at me, scared.

“I’m in love with him.”

The words were new, but the sentiment wasn’t; Louis was fifteen the first time he told me he thought he might be gay. I remembered the day as if I had been replaying it in my mind at least once a month ever since, because it was accurate.

It was summer; I was almost eighteen, fresh out of my secondary school graduation, but still a few weeks before my adult future. We had been spending summer with our grandparents at the place they lived after my grandfather abdicated as king, Haydell Castle, in the east coast of Savoy. The Castle sat on a hill overlooking the Atlantic, and Louis, myself and Lourdes would go to the beach most afternoons to play volleyball and tan. One late afternoon, Lourdes was applying finishing touches to a sandcastle she’d spent hours working on. Louis had been helping, but left her to get some water from the cooler near where I was laying, struggling to read a book on the darkening light of the fast approaching sunset.

He sat down by my side with a thud, drank half a bottle of water as I complained about the sand he’d inadvertently thrown my way, and then, without looking at me, said, “I think I have a crush on a classmate.”

Louis went to an all-boys boarding school. The boy in question was a very handsome senior, with kind eyes and handsome dimples. My brother spent a while telling me about how he liked sports and theater and wanted to backpack through South America after school. Then we spent the rest of the summer brainstorming what this could mean.

Monarchies weren’t built on diversity. The core of the system our family was built on was genetics and catholicism, two elements that were famously not very lenient. The Royal Family of Savoy had branched out from the French Royal Family many generations ago. Though we prided ourselves, then and now, that we were different, we still inherited some very big elements from them. A few tiaras, a few titles, and Catholicism. Though Savoy had freedom of religion, the monarchy’s official creed was still Catholicism. It was involved in most of our protocols and traditions, a king couldn’t even be crowned if he hadn’t been baptised in the church.

The idea of a gay, catholic King of Savoy was ludicrous even to us, no matter how much we wished it wasn’t.

And then, there was the issue of the line of succession. Say the church and country allowed my brother to reign as an out gay man, say they allowed him to marry a man in the Catholic church, say they allowed him to be crowned as king with a prince consort… It would be his duty to secure the line of succession; a king’s job is to produce a child to be the next king whose child will be next after him, and so on. Though it was the 21st century, there was no precedent to a king’s heir being anything other than his own, biologic child. And even as we tried to consider the idea of my brother having one with an egg donor, using a surrogate, we immediately knew what that would mean: whoever this woman was, her privacy would never be respected. People would want to know everything about her.

As to adopting, what were his options? In what world would the press not hunt down every possible information about the child’s biological family? Interview every distant relative for money? Come up with every way to embarrass them for clicks on an article? How could that child possibly be raised to be king with that kind of scrutiny surrounding them?

I thought of it as we sat in silence. He loved Peter. Peter loved him. And yes, they were young and that might change, but Louis being gay wouldn’t. Louis wanting to be a father was unlikely to change. But there was no precedent for a king to have an adopted child as an heir, and having a biological child through surrogate would be too hard on a surrogate and her family, being harassed and forever linked to us. If he sacrificed his own wishes and decided not to have children in order to spare them, then me or my children would have to inherit, which to me was simply unthinkable.

“They’re not going to cut you out.” I told him. “You know mom and dad, they love you. They love us. It might be hard dealing with everyone else, but they’ll always support you.”

He gulped. “The thing is… they might love me, but that’s not enough to change centuries of tradition just so I can-”

“Be who you are!”

He was silent, pulling on a lose thread on the blanket.

“I suppose I could just do what they did back in the day.” He considered. “Marry some poor, naive girl, sleep with her just enough to produce an heir and make Peter my secretary so we can carry out a scandalous and secret affair.”

I gave him a sarcastic look, and he rolled his eyes.

“I’m kidding.” He started biting a nail. “I could just… not have children.”

“You want children.”

“...yeah.”

“We’ll think of something.” I told him, confidently. “It’ll be easier once mom and dad know. They’ll figure something out. They’re good at this. They’re not going to make you keep this a secret, they love you too much.”

He sighed. “It would be easier for me to abdicate.”

“That’s not happening!”

“Why?! Because you can’t fathom the idea of having to inherit?! You think it’s okay to put me or my children through hell so you can hold on to your comfort? Who’s being selfish now?!”

I stared at him, mouth agape.

“That’s not fair.” I wasn’t even sure the words had come out, so low was my volume and so loud my shock.

He reached out and held my hand in his, leaning over to lay his head on my shoulder.

“I know, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

I laid my cheek against his hair, holding his hand tightly.

The worst part was knowing he was right. As unfair as it was, the easiest path was for him to come out and simply not have kids. But I didn’t want the headache of figuring out how to raise children to inherit after him, or worse yet, to have to be the heir if he was made to abdicate. It was such a colossal thought I couldn’t even think of it too much without feeling a panic attack creeping in.

He was 22. My little brother shouldn’t even be concerned about children at this age. And yet, because of the backwards traditions we were embroiled in from birth, he had no choice, and all our lives depended on how accepting the world would be of who he was.

“Hey.” I called, and he raised his head to look at me. “We will figure it out. I promise.”

His smile was so small it broke my heart even more. He didn’t say anything, though. He just nodded, slowly, and stared at his hands.

“I love Peter.” I said, tentatively. I had said it before, but it carried a different weight now. Louis’ smile grew.

“I want to introduce him to Lou. She didn’t come that time you met him, I think they’ll get along.”

I bumped my shoulder to his. “Just tell him to compliment her skating, she’ll love him.”

He chuckled, then looked at me very seriously. “Speaking of our sister, you could be more patient with her, you know?”

I sighed. “I am.”

“No, you’re not. Patient would be watching her videos and offering useful advice.”

“You’re asking too much.”

“I can do it, so can you! You think I care about ice skating?”

“Kinda.”

“Well… okay, I do. But they wear really sparkly dresses. Honestly, Maggie, she just wants to make you proud.”

“I don’t…!” I sighed, “I don’t really know how to talk to her, sometimes. I only had a couple of years with her before going to boarding school, you at least got to see her more often.”

He fished into his pockets, found his phone and opened the messaging app. I watched him create a group, add both me and Lourdes to it, name it ‘Louis’ Girl Gang’, and send the message, ‘this way it’s easier to chat!’.

“This way you can just watch how I interact with her and mimic.” He said. “Just react like me and soon you’ll be able to do it yourself.”

I opened my phone and replied, ‘this chat name is ridiculous’.

“Ouch.” He said, emotionless.

I gave him a dirty look, and we laughed. Both our phones buzzed at the same time with Lourdes’ reply, the first of many.

‘yay i love this! miss u guys!’

I smiled. She was too sweet for her own good.

I had no idea what the future held for us, but I knew with one hundred percent certainty I loved every single atom of my siblings.

---- ---- ----

The drive to the polo club the following morning - our last one in Britain - wasn’t long, but we had to leave early enough that I had to do my makeup in the car. Did I need makeup to play polo? No. But would the press comment on how ‘tired’ I looked if I didn’t? Yes, so shaky hands on a tiny mirror it was.

Harry and William were already at the club when we got there; we were introduced to the horses we were using that morning, and the rest of the people who would be playing. There was a small breakfast laid out, with mimosas and champagne flutes, which we ate as we made some small talk and got to know everyone.

“So,” Harry started, finding me alone by the water jugs.

“So.” I replied.

“I’ve been doing some googling.”

“Yes?”

He sighed. “And I cannot, for the life of me, figure out when we may have met.”

“Oh.” I smiled.

I had started to think he’d forgotten it, or worse, simply didn’t care. But apparently he did. He cared enough to look it up.

The thought felt… oddly warm.

“I asked my people. And then I asked my people to ask your people, who weren’t able, or willing, to come up with an answer. So I do not know, for the life of me, when we may have met before two days ago.”

I nodded, smiling slightly. “Your efforts are noted.”

“Look, I feel like a jerk.” He sighed. “I’m sure I would remember you if we met before. You have a face a guy would remember.”

I swallowed the electric shock that line sent through me. “Apparently not.”

“Give me a hint. Was it here or in Savoy? Or another country? Day or night? Was it more than a year ago?”

I looked at him, brows raised. “It was in another country, during the day, more than a year ago.”

He nodded, attentive, scratching his beard. Then, he sighed dramatically. “God, I have no idea!”

“So you give up?”

He grinned. “Is that a challenge?”

“No. It’s a question.”

He stared into my eyes for a beat, as his smile grew.

“No, I don’t give up. I’ll figure it out.”

I nodded, silently, holding his stare.

I suddenly realized I didn’t have a plan. I hadn’t planned on making this a big deal, but now when I eventually had to tell him, we would both be faced with a story that wasn’t as interesting or sexy as we had made it sound.

“So, what are we thinking?!” My brother interrupted, joining us with William. “Heirs against spares?”

“What, and lose the chance to massacrate Harry on the field?” I challenged, as the ginger looked at me, mouth agape.

“Nice! I love the sentiment, Margueritte!” William cheered. “She’s on my team, dibs on Margueritte!”

“Excuse me, I believe I already have dibs on Mary.” Harry interjected, making his brother laugh.

The line was so unapologetically flirty I felt my jaw drop as I looked around. We were at a tent in the back, where the players were getting ready before being sorted into teams. There was no press around, but there was a lot of people who hadn’t signed NDAs or anything.

Louis was squinting at Harry with a mischievous grin on his lips. “Excuse me, are you flirting with my sister?”

I felt my stomach twirl in anxiety, and tried to give him a warning look, but before I could, Harry answered.

“I’ve been trying to, for the past three days.”

He was smiling at me now, again so unapologetically it felt as if I had lost all ability to function. William was watching the whole thing with an amused look on his eyes.

Louis’ grin grew into a smile, as he slowly moved his eyes from Harry to me, “Huh.”

“Is that a problem?”, Harry asked my brother.

“For me? No!” He assured him, “For you? Well…”

“She hasn’t exactly made it easy for me.”

“Sounds like her.”

“Louis-Adolphe!” I admonized, earning from him a roll of his eyes.

“Don’t use both my names as if you’re mom.”

William laughed.

“Any tips?” Harry asked Louis, very seriously, but looking at me as if studying an animal on the wild.

“Hm,” my brother considered him, “Patience. Her only relationship was with a family friend we’ve known all our lives, and that took forever.”

“Lou!” I warned, again.

“What?! It’s not like he can’t google you.” He shrugged.

“Okay.” I said, before turning on my heels to exit the tent.

I made myself busy elsewhere, but couldn’t keep my mind straight. My heart was racing and I couldn’t tell if the reason was Louis’ teasing or Harry’s unabashed flirting, or both. Before I knew it, though, we were stretching as a group, and getting our uniforms on; I did stay on William’s team, while Harry and Louis played together.

He found me as we made our way into the field, while I was busy trying to tie the upper half of my hair on a low ponytail.

“Have I told you you look fantastic today, Mary?”

“No, but I’m sure you’ll remedy that as soon as possible.”

“You look fantastic, Mary. White pants suit you.”

Harry’s eyes hovered down my body over my form-fitting white jeans under the black riding boots.

“Thank you.” I said, curt, and paced faster to my horse, starting to fasten the girth to adjust the saddle.

“...I’m sorry.”

I stopped, and looked back at him, only half surprised he was still there. A little more than half surprised by the genuine fear and sadness in his eyes.

“Oh. For?”

He grimaced. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable before, when I was talking to your brother. I was just… trying to lighten the mood. Be, you know, funny I guess.”

I gulped; funny?

“Right. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” I resumed my work on the horse’s saddle.

I even added a short smile to go with the lie, but it didn’t seem to convince him.

“Really, I didn’t want to upset you.”

“Why would I be upset?”

He took a quick step closer and wrapped my hand in his; I felt my breath caught in my throat as I noticed how big they were, his knuckles were protuberant, his veins popped against his pale skin. In a dark corner in my mind I wondered what hands like those might feel like on my body.

“Mary.” He whispered, softly; I gulped, not daring to meet his gaze.

“Marie.” I whispered back.

He sighed. “Marie. If you want me to stop, and just… be your friend, or even just a polite acquaintance…”

He allowed the end of his sentence to hang in the air, ominous; It felt horrifying, specially hearing him call me my actual name. It made me look back at him, meeting his eyes a lot closer than I thought they would be.

“...all you gotta do is say so.” He finished, finally.

The offer sounded awfully simple for a feat that sounded amazingly difficult, though I couldn’t understand why. He was being so annoying, so infuriating for the past three days. It would be so easy to tell him to back off, if only it weren’t for that little part of my heart that was trying to tell me he wasn’t that annoying. And really, wasn’t the only frustrating thing about it that we had had so little time together? After all, his hand was still on mine, and it did feel like my whole body was warmer than the British sun on that morning warranted.

“What’s this?” I asked.

As I looked back to his hands, I noticed once more that he had something written in them. He turned his palm towards me, while the back of his hand still rested in mine.

“This says ‘call Gil’, it’s the manager of my foundation in Lesotho. I have to get back to him about something. And this other line says ‘figure out trip’. It’s my mate’s birthday next month and the lads asked me to figure out how we can organize a hunting trip for him.”

As he explained his little reminder list on his palm, I traced it with the tips of my fingers lightly. After I ran out of the ink to trace, I started tracing the lines in his palm, very slowly.

“Bad memory?” I teased.

He sighed, “The worst. Well, not about important things. I remember important things. But names of people I met only a couple times, but should definitely know? Nope. And the deadline to things I have to do? Even worse. Hence the writing in hand.”

“Have you tried setting alarms on your phone?”

“I barely know how to make calls.” He rolled his eyes.

“Drama queen!”

“I’m serious! We’re not allowed to use social media, so really what’s there to do? I just don’t use it much.”

“God, it’s like you’re 80.”

He chuckled, and his hand closed on reflex over mine. Now it was almost as if we were holding hands. The thought, the warmth of his skin on mine, sent a shock wave through my body.

“Come on, Harry, no flirting with the competition!” Louis called out as he rode by.

We chuckled, timidly.

“Things seem better, with Louis.” He commented.

I smiled. “We talked.”

“Did he understand?”

I nodded. “Yes. He’s got a good heart. He’s young, but he’d never willingly do something to hurt anyone. It’s just…” I sighed, giving him a side glance. “He’s got… some stuff to figure out. And I wanna help as much as I can. I just… Can’t sacrifice myself for it. And I think he gets it.”

There was a pause, a more comfortable one this time, and next time he spoke, he had a whisper of a smile on his lips.

“You didn’t ask me to stop.” He whispered. I looked at him.

“I guess I didn’t.”

We exchanged a smile, and just as I felt my cheeks redden at the long pause, his brother rode by already on his horse.

“Stop flirting with my player, Harry, get to your horse!”

We jumped, startled, but chuckled timidly as he rode away.

“So, how confident are you that you’re going to beat me?”, he asked.

“Oh, only about 89%.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“Ninety-six, tops.”

He nodded, amused. “Care to make it interesting?”

“What are you thinking?”

“Loser buys dinner.”

I bit my inner lip to contain a smile. It almost sounded like he was asking me on a date. Was he asking me out on a date?

“I… I have to leave tomorrow morning.”

“Well, Savoy is, what? Four or five hours away by train?”

“Another one and a half to the city where I live.”

He nodded, then shrugged. “I can do that. What do you say?”

I placed a foot on the stirrup, and jumped up to take my seat on the saddle.

“Win first, Your Royal Highness. Then we’ll talk.”

“Game on, Mary.”

--- ---- ---

[A/N: THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING!!!! please let me know if you like it? I’m open to notes, suggestions, all of it =) just liking this chapter would really help me know!

I don’t know how to say this without spoiling a big plot point in the story, but to be fair it is sort of the main premise, so if you’d like not to be spoiled on plot points, maybe come back later? Cool. Let’s get to it.

When I first started writing this story, I hadn’t intended on Margueritte’s brother, Louis, to be such a big character. I expected his time with us would be… well, shorter, after all the main idea for this story starts with his - again, spoiler alert - death. But as I wrote a little of him, I I liked him so much, and I ended up writing more and more and soon it was really heartbreaking killing him. As you’ll soon find, Louis fits into a trope I didn’t intentionally set out to write: the kill your gays trope. I don’t want to go into details because that’s enough spoilers, but suffice to say mea culpa, and also I hope you’ll give me a chance to show I do have a bigger intention with this: one, monarchies are famously heteronormative. They essentially can’t survive otherwise, or so we are told. I have always wandered about this. We’ve all read the historical examples of homosexuality being swiftly repressed for the good of the succession line. As a modern royal, Margueritte will have to look this issue in the eyes, too. She’ll have to realize the role she plays in a system where for her family and its history to survive, some families cannot exist in their purest form, and she will struggle with not being able to tell the world the truth about her brother - since it is not her place - knowing this makes her an accomplice in rewriting history to fit her best purpose.

Which choices she makes and which path she decided to take in this issue are something I’m excited to explore, as I honestly believe monarchies will have to have a solution for this at one point or another.

TL/DR: though this story adds to the kill your gays trope, which I know it’s problematic, I want to write about the way monarchies perpetuate heteronormativity and how they will have to find a way for all their members, regardless of sexuality or gender identity, to feel at home in the institution, and I intend to add more non-straight characters so delve into this issue.]

#prince harry fanfic #prince harry fanfiction #princeharryfanfiction #princeharryfanfic #royalfanficcollection #brf #Prince Harry #princeharryff #chapters #OPITCphff #modern royalty au #modern royalty fanfic

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nauseateddrive · 4 years

Text

SUSPENDED by Alan Swyer

About to head off to conduct an interview, Pete Tarcher winced when a call came from his soon-to-be ex-. “How busy are you?” Suzanne asked before Tarcher even had a chance to say hello.

“Very. I've got a crew meeting me in Burbank.”

“Tell 'em you need to reschedule.”

“Because?”

“Jeremy's about to be suspended from school.”

“Let me call you from the car.”

Driving west toward Santa Monica, Tarcher listened uncomfortably via Bluetooth while Suzanne briefed him about their son's predicament. Then he asked an even more uncomfortable question. “Sure he wants me involved?”

“He thinks the world of you.”

“Sure has a funny way of showing it.”

“Kids take sides when their parents are going through divorce. Plus –”

“Yeah?”

“How'd you get on with your Dad when you were that age?”

“How well do he and I get on today?”

“I rest my case,” replied Suzanne.

After hanging up, Tarcher found himself contemplating the ways in which he and his son were different yet had much in common. Whereas Tarcher, proud of his New Jersey roots, was willfully outspoken and, when necessary, eager to get in someone's face, Jeremy was very much SoCal: soft-spoken with a winning kind of shyness, except when playing baseball, where he was a smiling assassin.

It was athletics that had long served as the primary bond between father and son, with Tarcher spending countless hours mentoring Jeremy in sport after sport. Though soccer, basketball, and football were part of his early years, it was always baseball that took precedence. Initially that meant Tarcher playing catch before school, pitching Wiffle balls to Jeremy in the backyard, and hitting ground balls to him at different parks. Once Jeremy turned nine, frequent trips to a local batting cage known as Slamo were added.

It was at Slamo where Jeremy, whose classmates, post-Little League, embraced computer games rather than team sports, formed friendships with kids who shared his zeal. That in turn opened the door to travel teams. The ensuing tournaments, first across Southern California, then farther away as well, often requited overnight stays, intensifying the ties between father and son.

Upon entering high school, Jeremy promptly had an experience that mirrored one from Tarcher's youth. While getting ready for fall baseball practice on a Tuesday afternoon, Jeremy was confronted by two vatos who were in the process of shaking him down when into the locker room stepped Junior Hernandez, co-captain of the team by day and reputed gang member.

“What the fuck you doin'?” screamed Junior when he saw what was happening.

“Be cool,” replied one of the toughs. “The motherfucker's white.”

“White or not, he's my teammate!” snarled Junior, ready to do some serious ass-kicking.

That, in a different sport was a reenactment of what happened to Tarcher, whose savior was Victor Washington, captain of the basketball team and heavyweight Golden Gloves boxing champ of New Jersey.

In another way as well, Jeremy followed in his father's path. To gain acceptance from his teammates and other in-groups, he assumed a double-life: a wild and crazy jock who, without calling much attention, happened to be in the school's Honors Program.

One person not fooled by Jeremy's protective coloration was his freshman English teacher, Ms. Vaughn, who was also the adviser to the school paper. Recognizing a talent that he himself might have otherwise not acknowledge, when Jeremy misbehaved in class one day, she issued an ultimatum: serve a week's detention, which would mean missing fall practice, or join the newspaper staff. Starting as second-string sportswriter, Jeremy rose to sports editor by his junior year, which yielded a peculiar series of omissions. Since reporters were not allowed to mention themselves in their stories, as Jeremy progressed from the youngest member of the varsity to its star, the sports pages carried more and more tales of game-winning hits, and shutouts thrown, with no mention of the player responsible for the heroics.

Little surprise that by his senior year, Jeremy requested, then demanded, a transition from sports to features, which inevitably led to the call from Suzanne that had Tarcher racing across town.

Pulling into a visitor's spot in the high school parking lot, Tarcher walked purposefully toward the administration building. He nodded to a security guard he knew from attending countless baseball games, then to a couple of students he recognized, before stepping into the principal's outer office. There he immediately received a frown from his son, who was seated unhappily on a wooden bench.

“You don't have to be here,” Jeremy grumbled.

“I don't do anything because I have to,” answered Tarcher. “I'm here because I want to be. And for the record, it was your Mom who called me.”

Without another word, Tarcher approached the reception desk. “Pete Tarcher for Anne Marceau,” he announced to the woman there.

“She's expecting you?”

“You bet.”

The receptionist picked up the phone and spoke softly for a moment, then faced Tarcher and pointed. “She's –”

“I know,” said Tarcher. As he headed toward the appropriate door, out stepped a well- dressed black woman who smiled.

“I just saw the film you made about the criminal justice system in San Diego,” Anne Marceau stated with a smile.

“If you're trying to butter me up,” replied Tarcher, “this is not the time.”

“Come in,” said the principal, ushering Tarcher into her office, then closing the door and motioning for him to take a seat. “How much about this situation do you know?”

“Let's assume I know nothing, so you can start at the beginning.”

Anne Marceau took a deep breath. “You're aware of your son's article?”

“Like I said, assume I know nothing.”

“Jeremy wrote an extended piece about a day in the life of a tagger here at school.”

“Was it informative? Well-written?”

“Not the point,” insisted Ms Marceau. “Aside from the fact that tagging is gang-related –”

“Not always –”

“Largely. This is something I know a lot about.”

“And I just fell off the turnip truck?” countered Tarcher. “Which one of us created the LA County Teen Court system?”

“Then you know what a scourge graffiti is.”

“I also know that street art is the most exciting form of artistic expression today.”

Anne Marceau took a deep breath. “You're not being sympathetic.”

“While you threaten to suspend my son? What exactly do you want?”

Anne Marceau stood and paced for a moment before again addressing Tarcher. “For Jeremy to divulge the name of the tagger who's anonymous in his article.”

“And if not, he's suspended?”

Anne Marceau nodded.

“So you're telling me that Jeremy will wind up with a black mark that could influence not merely the colleges that are recruiting him, but also the pro scouts who have been coming to see him play.”

“There are consequences in this world.”

“Want to talk about consequences?” Tarcher asked, rising to his feet. “Ever heard the word retribution?”

“I-I'm not sure I follow.”

“Didn't you say just a little while ago that tagging was gang-related?”

“What's that got to do with anything?”

“Let's suppose the guy Jeremy followed is a gang member. Think he's going to shrug if outed? Take it in stride? Turn the other cheek? You're talking about putting my son in harm's way!”

“No need to raise your voice,” said Ms Marceau warily.

“Oh, yeah? Tell me what point you're trying to make.”

“That there's a lesson to be learned.”

“And that lesson is that it's okay to be a rat?”

Anne Marceau cringed. “That's not the way I see it.”

“I don't care if you see it as red, green, purple, or blue. That's the message you're sending. So please listen to me carefully. There's no way in the world you're going to force my son to become a rat. Are we clear? I mean 100 percent clear?”

Anne Marceau took a moment to gather herself. “Okay,” she then said. “I'll consider your point. Are we done?”

“No such luck. How about something called freedom of the press? That doesn't figure into this?”

“I-I think you're making more of this than necessary.”

“Am I?” asked Tarcher. “How do you think the LA Times will respond if they hear about this? Or the local news stations? Or maybe it could even go national.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“I don't threaten. I take action. As you pointed out, I make documentaries. Know what? That gives me far better and far different access than if I were, say, an orthodontist, a car mechanic, or a lifeguard.”

“You're making me very uncomfortable.”

“Well guess what,” said Tarcher. “I'm just getting started. Here's the really awkward news. Much of what I do is muckraking. Get my drift?”

“I-I'm not sure.”

“Then let me explain. It might be really interesting to make a documentary about a school that prides itself on teaching kids about their rights, then punishes them when they use 'em.”

“Mr. Tarcher –”

“I'm not finished yet. Here's what's going to happen. If my son is suspended, the first thing I'm going to do is reward him with a trip. Maybe Catalina while he's missing school. Or even better, Hawaii. Understood?”

“Pete –”

“Then I'm going to use every resource at my disposal to make the world aware of what transpired, as well as who's behind it.”

“Please –”

“Next, I'm going to explore what other students have had their freedom of expression abridged. Why? Because the more I think about it, the more I can see a documentary like this appealing to Netflix, or HBO, or maybe PBS.”

Anne Marceau sighed. “What exactly do you want?”

“You're an intelligent women. What exactly do you think I want?”

Still seated on the wooden bench in the outer office, Jeremy looked up as his father emerged from Anne Marceau's office. “So?” he asked.

Tarcher eyed his son for a moment, then spoke. “Let's just say that Koufax is still the greatest lefty ever, Greg Maddox the best righty, and Tony Oliva the best natural hitter.”

“That's all?”

“And the sun will come up tomorrow morning.”

With that, Tarcher headed toward the door, only to have his son follow.

“Wait,” said Jeremy. “I-I don't know what to say.”

“Then maybe it's best to say nothing.”

Jeremy took a moment to reflect before speaking. “Thanks,” he then offered.

“For?”

“Coming. And helping. And being my dad.”

“I'm here when you need me.”

“I know,” stated Jeremy. “But that doesn't mean I'm not still upset at you.”

Tarcher studied his son for a moment, then smiled. “Likewise.”

Back on the freeway, Tarcher couldn't help by think about the contrast between his professional and personal experiences. Because he made documentaries – about the criminal justice system, Eastern spirituality in the Western world, breakthroughs in the treatment of diabetes, and even boxing – most people assumed that he was showing the world as it is. Yet Tarcher knew full well that with his films he could exercise significant control thanks to the people he chose to interview, the questions he asked them, and above all the choices he made during the editing process by sequencing and selecting the sound bytes used.

In real life, in contrast, control ranged from minimal to none.

That made real life – and especially his life – infinitely harder.

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white-collar-lawmen-and-conmen · 5 years

Text

The Execution

Summary: You execute your revenge plan and seize an unexpected opportunity. (Sequel to The Salted Coffee Hit List.)

Word Count: 2,769

Ryan went down fast once he had erroneously decided he could trust you, and after two more face-to-face operations plus a lot of in-character communications over the phone, he gave you some damning evidence which you relayed to Peter to build your case. While you couldn’t enter the broker’s office without thinking of the time you’d had Neal and Peter both interrupting every few minutes, you hadn’t had the time to get back at them for it because the case had to come first.

By the time you were back in your routine, that had been nine days ago and you weren’t even sure Peter would remember what had happened without some prompting. Hell, he could barely even remember to get his own clothes from the dry cleaner’s without a reminder. You caught yourself wondering if it was even worth it anymore.

Then you realized that you had the element of surprise over them both. After plotting – um, pondering on it for a while over a TV dinner, you decided you couldn’t let them get away with it. It would set a bad precedent.

Despite what most cop shows might have led you to expect, being a senior agent didn’t give Peter the excuse – or the guts – to order his agents to always bring him coffee. All members of his team alternated with who got all the coffees, and you bided your time until it was your turn.

“Y/N,” the barista called loudly, barely looking up from the coffee cups as he put several down in a cluster.

You grabbed a couple of white salt packets off of the utensils counter as well as two thin red stirrers, then started checking the names on the coffees as you were putting them into a cardboard drink carrier. You left yours, Diana’s, and Clinton’s free of tampering. Neal’s, with added cream, and Peter’s, straight, were left out of the carrier for just a moment. Trying not to look suspicious to the baristas or any other customers, you quickly but calmly opened both men’s drinks, dumped a salt packet in each, and stirred the salt into dissolving faster before trashing the stirrers and putting the tops back on.

No one suspected anything when you carried all the drinks back up to the twenty-first floor, across the bullpen, up the mezzanine, and into the preferred conference room. Keeping a straight face was a bit of a challenge, but you had been under higher stakes than this before, and you were not about to let your amusement ruin this for you.

“About time,” Neal commented, his dull eyes lighting up as soon as he realized there was coffee in the room. Peter looked like he had been halfway through chastising his informant when you came in, which probably explained said informant’s boredom.

You put the carrier down on the table while keeping your own cup in hand. Jones looked at his watch briefly before standing up to reach for his coffee. “I thought it would take longer. Lunch rush.”

“They’re starting to learn our order by heart,” you remarked, grimacing slightly. How much money did that branch make from tired FBI agents? Probably as astronomical amount.

Peter let everyone else get their drinks before he got his, but he was also the first to try drinking it while the steam was still rising from the slot in the lid. Sitting down normally, you kept an eye on him as he took a sip, made a face, forced himself to swallow, and then stuck his tongue out at either the heat, the saltiness, or both.

“Something wrong?” You asked, keeping your face even and tilting your head.

“I think I just tasted my tongue burning off,” your boss said, disgruntled. You were silently delighted. It was so hot that he couldn’t even pick up on the salt. He was going to drink the salted coffee again.

“The steam was supposed to clue you in,” Diana quipped.

“What have we got since I left?” At your question, the team got back on track. Diana and Peter filled you in with a quick review.

The five of you continued looking at your case for several minutes before the steam had quit venting out of the coffee lids. Neal took a taste of his while listening to Jones report on accounting figures and the face of disgust he made was worth every second of anticipation. As soon as he knew his coffee was tampered with, his eyes shot up to you.

“That was low,” he said, interrupting Jones.

“What did I do?” You asked earnestly, blinking. Neal didn’t buy it for a second. Diana looked at you suspiciously and drank some of her own coffee. Since she hadn’t been deserving of sabotaged beverages, she didn’t find anything wrong with hers and shrugged at Jones.

“It was almost two weeks ago.” Neal frowned.

“Congratulations, you can count.” You smiled sweetly at him.

Peter rolled his eyes and looked up to the ceiling. To brace himself for dealing with conflict, he drank some more coffee. It had cooled down enough by now for him to realize that the taste was god-awful and he turned around so quickly his tie flew, like he was going to spit it out in the trash can. He didn’t end up doing that, which disappointed you a little. It would’ve been more interesting if he had since you really hadn’t put in that much salt.

“For God’s sake,” he grumbled, turning back around after forcing it down. “What the hell was that for?”

“Huh,” you said thoughtfully, locking eyes. “I guess I must have accidentally mixed up the salt and sugar.” You kept up a polite smile.

Peter looked at Neal as if to say it was his fault. Neal made an innocent face at him and gestured to his own, almost untouched, coffee to emphasize that he was a victim, too. Peter just strengthened his glare and continued to blame Neal.

“I haven’t touched yours,” he objected, “I barely even touched mine!”

“Because there’s so much salt in it you could melt the ice off the road!”

Diana snorted and leaned back in her chair. “There’s free coffee in the kitchenette.”

Neal gave her an apprehensive look. “That’s not real coffee.”

“Ick.” Peter picked his cup up for a third time, but this time he dropped it into the trash bin. Neal pushed his along the table so that when the boss turned back around, he repeated the process with Neal’s cup.

“How long were you planning that?” The thief asked you, crossing his arms.

“I’ve had the idea since you wouldn’t shut up in the van.”

“It took you two weeks to do that?” He shook his head. “Wow, Y/N. Wow.”

So what if it was unsophisticated? It was unpleasant for them, and that was all you had wanted. “You weren’t expecting it and I ruined your afternoon because now you don’t have coffee.” Although you wanted to stick your tongue out at him, you decided against it. Instead, you sipped on your perfectly tasty latte with smug pride.

~~~ The Execution ~~~

Although you couldn’t accept coffee from Neal or Peter for a couple of weeks, the salted coffee hit list had been successfully carried out and was absolutely worth the inconvenience of having to get your own drinks for a while. The boys appeared to have taken it with some salt (pun intended), but there were no reprisals – they must have realized that they had it coming. Both of them had worked undercover before, and both knew how freaking aggravating it was when the utility of the earpiece was abused.

Work carried on as uneventfully as it ever did when your colleagues included a contemporarily-renowned con artist. When you joined the bureau, you had thought it would be exciting. It was, but you had confused the movies for real life. When you all caught wind of a case which involved a stolen identity, a missing persons profile, and long-term embezzlement, you all jumped to seize the investigative leads.

You almost forgot how boring it could be to sit in the van while someone else was doing the tough work. For a moment, you understood why Neal had been so insufferable. You worried about him, too, of course you did. This sympathy only lasted for a few minutes as Neal charmed it up with the receptionist inside while he waited for his appointment with the in-house accountant. If he could so freely wing it and expect you to stay quiet, then he should have been able to keep his mouth shut when you were watching your words and policing your body language.

“How did you do that?” The soprano voice asked with laughter. You rolled your eyes at the flirting while listening with a headset over your ears. Neal responded with the French word for sleight of hand, trying to appear cultured and suave.

“If this goes on for much longer, my lunch is going to make a reprise,” Peter shared, looking at you and pretending to have to settle his stomach.

You picked up your phone to check the time. “I thought the appointment was at one?”

“It’s supposed to be,” the senior agent grumbled. “This should be time theft.”

If Neal could hear you now, he would be offended. Your eyes darted to the recording equipment, just to see. The light was off on the equipment – the line was only open one-way. But that could change…

Peter wouldn’t go along with it because work was serious and had to be prioritized. You were glad he knew that, but Neal apparently didn’t, and sometimes that man only learned lessons when they were beaten into his skull. Though you’d been content with your petty revenge, this teaching opportunity was too good to pass on.

“Hey, boss, he’s just going to be hitting on that poor girl for a while,” you said craftily, giving a yawn into the crook of your elbow. “There was a Starbucks just a couple streets back, I’d love a pick-me-up.”

Peter yawned after you and blinked, apparently just then realizing how tired he actually was. “Me, too. I could use a stretch.” He got up and patted his pockets to check he had his wallet, phone, and badge. “Your usual?”

“Yes, please.”

You waited for him to shrug on his coat, jump out, and close the back of the van before you pressed the two-way communication button on the recorder. The light turned green and you smirked.

Neal kept flirting with the receptionist, and you kept yourself quiet. Though it was tempting to suddenly start chatting in his ear and distract him from the pretty woman’s attention, your point would have a lot more heft behind it if you waited until he was mentally invested in the task. He enjoyed flirting, but he himself said that it was more of a game than a serious endeavor.

Almost ten minutes after Peter left the van, the sound changed and someone faintly called Neal’s name on the other end. He quit talking with the receptionist and a few seconds later, he was introducing himself as Nick Halden and the other man’s voice was much closer than it had been before. The accountant introduced himself by his nickname, Walt, and Neal very subtly snuck in a comment on how the accountant’s office looked so that you and Peter would know where to go if things went sideways.

A couple of minutes into the meeting, a thumping on the doors had you stand up and open them for Peter with your headset still on. You took both coffees from your boss and let him climb back in and close the doors. He had graciously gotten your favorite latte. You smelled it first, and then took a tiny, slow sip.

“Don’t worry,” Peter said dryly as he sat down. “I thought about it, but exercised some self-control.”

“Ouch,” you remarked back at a normal volume, knowing Neal was hearing every word while he was also trying to concentrate. “That stings.”

“So does too much salt.”

Neal didn’t let on that he was hearing voices. You knew he wouldn’t or you wouldn’t have risked it. You had always admired his composure. Before long, he had become, for the most part, a behavioral mirror of Walt. Neal did it so skillfully that if you didn’t know exactly what he was doing, you wouldn’t have known he was manipulating his behavior at all.

A few minutes passed by, and Neal’s careful questions and inconspicuous prods started to show a little more about what the bad guy was thinking. It was time to interrupt again, you noted, and had a legitimate reason to do so. “What do you think?” You asked Peter, swiveling in your chair. “Is he the one pulling the strings?”

“I have a hard time believing someone else is doing it,” Peter said thoughtfully. “Accounting is very precise, and it’s not all about crunching numbers and filing taxes.”

“I know what this kind of job’s like,” Neal was saying, sounding earnest and a little… patronizing, maybe? It wasn’t a straightforward inflection – you would have had to see his expression to know for sure. “You spend all your time up here, crunching numbers, filing taxes, and no one even knows your name. Guys like us deserve a thank you once in a while, is that so much to ask?”

You thought quickly and acted to catch Peter’s attention before he realized that the uncanny repetition was Neal hinting that he could hear you. “He could just be the brains behind someone else’s greed,” you pointed out.

“He could, but I don’t think so. Not enough money’s gone missing to make up two cuts.”

“Maybe not yet,” you countered. “But if he thought this could go on long enough, they could rake in plenty for two people, or even three.”

Peter leaned forward, thinking about it carefully. You couldn’t wait for him to reply. Although Neal’s tone wasn’t cluing you in to any irritation or stress, you knew it had to be there. And in the meantime, the accountant was agreeing vehemently, getting braver because of Neal’s expressed sympathy.

“I suppose,” he said slowly, “But the way they’re talking, there’s not room for another person.”

“Let’s hope he’s the only one, then. Less paperwork.”

Neal kept continuing in the direction that his conversational partner was leading. It was becoming excessively clear that Walt felt the company owed him more than he was being given. There wasn’t anything concrete enough to use as evidence, but it was obvious that if you were persistent enough, you could get something out of him.

“I gotta spend my whole life cleaning up their messes and making their lives easier. And what do I get? Barely 80K.”

You rolled your eyes as the suspect whined at Neal. “Oh, is that all?” You sarcastically asked, then snapped, “Jackass.”

Peter was shaking his head. “The city’s not a cheap place to live, but that’s a lot more than most people get. I think he’s doing fine.”

“Greed like that should be illegal,” you commented. Thinking that a perfectly respectable salary was too low and feeling entitled to embezzle as a result was just inexcusable. No one was entitled to rip off other people. No one.

“In his case, it already is.” Peter mumbled, his low tone letting you know he was having similar thoughts.

The appointment continued on, but didn’t last very long. Most of that time you were respectfully quiet, not wanting to push too hard and actually jeopardize the case. Every few minutes, you would pipe up with something that sparked a short exchange between yourself and your boss. You had counted up to six interruptions before Neal was politely but firmly dismissed, and “Nick” gracefully made an exit while persuasively cajoling Walt to keep in touch.

There were a couple minutes of silence, and then the sounds of an elevator door closing and beeping with every floor as it descended. Presumably isolated, Neal let himself sound annoyed as he spoke again. “Seriously, Y/N?”

Peter was confused for a second before it dawned on him to check the equipment. The light on the box was still green. Peter slapped the button to turn it back into a one-way receiver and then turned an accusatory look on you. Now you understood how Neal felt right before one of those famed Burke lectures.

Putting your hand up quickly for a chance to speak first, you managed to hold him off long enough to say plainly, “Worth it.”

~~~

A/N: Woohoo! Thanks to @whizzer-fashion for my first commissioned story! Also, yay for my first posted series!

My requests are closed, but if you’d like to get around that little issue, please drop me a line or ask about my commission options or go straight to my Ko-Fi page. A oneshot of this length is $4 (pricing formula: cost = $1/500 words, + 500 words free). Imagines are $1 each, and you can also get a 2-for-$1 would include package.

#white collar #white collar x reader #neal caffrey #neal caffrey x reader #reader insert #peter burke #diana #jones #humor #commission #request #fic #sequel #the salted coffee hit list #the execution #series #revenge #lawmen-and-conmen #white-collar-lawmen-and-conmen

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reversemoon255 · 5 years

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Fifth Review: Kishiryu Sentai Ryusoulger

Controversial take: I think this is a good series. Not the best, but certainly not bad. And there are some people who read that and question what I'm talking about because they either love the series or think it's terrible. Well, for the first half of this series' run, most of the people I talked to did not like this series, to the point that I stopped talking to people about it. Now, I didn't stop because I thought their opinions were invalid, or because I was mad, but because hearing all that criticism was negatively impacting my opinions. I'd come off episodes feeling good, listen to what other people were saying, and suddenly my opinion would lessen. Ryusoulger does have some issues, but I feel like they were ballooned out of proportion to the point that the shadow they cast prevented people from seeing some very positive things this series had to offer.

The Good: This is a very trope heavy series, with both the goods and bads that come with that. And that does make sense, as this series was supposed to be a ratings grab season to bring in new fans. I know we all enjoy when Sentai breaks its standard tropes, but you have to establish what your tropes are before you can break them. And this checks all the boxes: having Red and the sixth getting the most focus, Red getting power-ups, big robot combinations, (Dino Sentai specific) having an important character die. It doesn't stray very far from the typical formula. But that's ok. Part of the reason we like Sentai is because we like the tropes, and to criticize the series for sticking to its foundation means you have an issue with Sentai as a whole, not Ryusoulger.

The series itself was also structured to help draw in new fans, which seemed to rub some people the wrong way. Episode one was extremely bombastic, with a few decent humorous and dramatic moments, and some over the top fighting. Following that, the first half plus of the show was very episodic, with not a lot of connecting elements. This was probably done to not alienate new viewers and make it feel like they could come in at any episode without missing much. The second half of the show had more connecting plots, like Gaisorg, Pricious, and Heras, to reward people who had stuck with the show and raise the stakes moving into the final acts. While I do prefer more threads and build-up, especially early on, I can appreciate what the writers were trying to do.

And Ryusoulger had a decent cast, if a little underdeveloped because of the aforementioned Red/Six trope. I'm not a big fan of Koh. He's fine when it comes to the goofier episodes, but he was hard to take seriously. Still like him more than Daigo. Melto felt like he might make a better Red, as he was a serious character whose nature easily lead him to being the butt of a joke. His relationship with Oto was actually cute and funny. I normally don't like the "legal loli" trope, but as everyone was far older than they appeared it helped to underplay that issue for me. Asuna had a lot of good moments throughout the season (being the first Pink since TimePink to defeat an enemy general) and had a great actress, but suffers from being the only female Ranger. In my opinion it's always better to write at least two female Rangers since it forces the writers to give them distinct personalities. When you only have one, like in Asuna's case, you normally end up with "girl in a boys show." Yes, she has quirks, like a bottomless stomach and super strength, but quirks a personality does not make. Towa is probably the least developed character, but felt like he had a lot more planned for him (like how he was able to summon Haya Soul's power without a RyuSoul in the final episode). Bamba is a darling, and I love him. The episode where we meet his ex-girlfriend says it all: a tough but kind man who has become better through his interactions with the other Ryusoulgers. I also don't like Canalo that much. His personality feels very responsive to the fact that Toei seems to be trying to subtly push having kids as a good thing to help with Japan's population crisis (which is much more evident in Precure if you pay attention to the fairy designs in recent years), and the fact that said higher-ups seemed to force retconned straight relationships on possibly gay characters over the last three season (which I think is more to do with the population agenda than anything else as Chocolate Macaroons is very much a canon thing). It just feels like he was written that way as a jab from the writers at the Toei big wigs (meaning he's purposefully annoying).

The design work in this series is also excellent. While I would have liked a little more armor on the main costumes, like shoulder pads, the armor given by the RyuSouls was nice, the villain and monster designs were great (as were their personalities, I just don't want to make this longer than need be), and the Megazords had much sleeker designs that allowed for a lot more movement (which seems to be carrying over to Kiramager). I also love the designs of the Kishiryu. Giving them a fossilized look helps set them apart from the dinosaurs that have preceded them, as well as helps with the ever shifting issues of how much feathering any particular species had. They also get huge credit from me as a toy guy for the amount of interplay and non-robot combining present within them. SpinoThunder, Pteramigo, CosmoRaptor, there were a lot of Kishiryu that could combine into other dinosaurs.

Episode to episode, as that's how most of the show was, was hit or miss. I typically loved anything that heavily features Tyramigo (as he was also a great character). Thankfully nothing was as bad as Pitch Cock from Lupin. As for ongoing plots, the Gaisorg plot had a few hiccups, but lead to a good death scene, a cool looking power-up, and some lasting impact on Koh. Pricious, after s/he showed up, easily demonstrated themself as a force to be reckoned with, and the pressure s/he put on the other generals lead to some great moments from the villain cast. The Heras plot had some neat twists to it, but I wish the ending resolved with Heras admitting that she was wrong before her death (since the current generation had overcome the long-standing feud between the two RyuSoul Tribes and had shown willingness to work with the Druidons, both things she criticized them for).

The last thing I'll go into is themes, as Life and Death were two very prevalent themes that were the focus of some of the best episodes. They went full ham on the downsides of the extended life of the RyuSoul Tribe, such as the episode where we meet Bamba's 60-70 year-old ex-girlfriend or the episode where another member of the Tribe wants to commit suicide because she's outlived too many people she's loved. The episodes with Shine and ShadowRaptor were probably my favorite, particularly the parts with Ui and her mom. It felt like a better version of what they tried to do with Kotaro in Kyuranger (which was, coincidentally, my favorite episode of that season).

The Bad: I already brought up a few issues. Focusing on Koh and Canalo isn't bad, but focusing on them too much negatively impacted everyone else's development until the last 10ish episodes of the show. Bamba got a decent amount because he had a backstory, but Towa got almost none and Asuna got little outside "team's girl." Going into power-ups, that is again not inherently a bad thing, but how you use them can be. This was a big issue I had with Lupinranger, as that series focused on two teams, but one of them stopped getting power-ups half-way through the show. Power-ups can be a physical representation of a character's growth, and if only Koh is getting them that means only he is growing. Bamba, Asuna, and Melto all eventually got to use one, but Towa wasn't seen using one until the second-to-last episode.

The Kishiryu are an offshoot of this problem. Koh essentially owns every Kishiryu outside the ones everyone started with. Furthermore, the Kishiryu were designed to be modular, but that was severely underutilized. There were no interesting combinations after they gained access to Five Knights outside of the final episode. Kishiryu-Oh's ability to move his parts around for specific attacks isn't seen outside the first few episodes. There was so much more they could do that they didn't. And I understand that part of that is costume design and budget, but you shouldn't bring forth that idea of modularity if you're not going to use it.

Then there's the aforementioned death scene, which, while I like it, highlights some of the issues with pushing all your plot threads to the end of the show. There were some writing hiccups involving Gaisorg and his relationship with the Druidons. In the death scene itself, it happens the episode immediately after they break the curse of the Gaisorg armor. There is no time to build up Nada's relationships, how grateful he is, how his dynamic might shake up Koh's with Melto or Bamba or Canalo; he's gone before any of that. And it's by a one-off villain. What should have happened, in my opinion, is Nada should have lived through that fight, proven his worth to the team, and then in the following episode died to Pricious. It would still be quick, but it would increased Pricious' threat level, given Nada more time with the team, and might have helped how they tried to nerf Max RyuSoul the episode after it premiered.

Overall, Ryusoulger is a popcorn series; one that is easy to pick up and watch, but isn't something that will blow your mind and you'll be talking about for years to come. It's a good show that is hampered by some sizable issues, but those issues serve as a benefit for the series as a whole and aim to keep it on the air for years to come. If we have to sit through a Ryusoulger every couple of years, I don't have a problem with that. It's not the best, but I still had fun.

#Super Sentai #Kishiryu Sentai Ryusoulger #Ryusoulger #review #dinosaur #Power Rangers

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upontheshelfreviews · 5 years

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Last year I talked about Fantasia, which is not just one of my favorite Disney movies, but one of my favorite movies in general. And if I may be self-indulgent for a moment, it’s also one of the reviews that I’m the proudest of. Fantasia is a visual, emotional masterpiece that marries music and art in a manner few cinematic ventures have come close to replicating. One question that remains is what my thoughts on the long-gestated sequel is –

…you might wanna get yourselves some snacks first.

As anyone who read my review on the previous film knows, Fantasia was a project ahead of its time. Critics and audiences turned their noses up at it for conflicting reasons, and the film didn’t even make it’s budget back until twenty-something years later when they began marketing it to a very different crowd.

“I don’t wanna alarm you dude, but I took in some Fantasia and these mushrooms started dancing, and then there were dinosaurs everywhere and then they all died, but then these demons were flying around my head and I was like WOOOOOAAAHHH!!”

“Yeah, Fantasia is one crazy movie, man.”

“Movie?”

Fantasia’s unfortunate box office failure put the kibosh on Walt Disney’s plans to make it a recurring series with new animated shorts made to play alongside handpicked favorites. The closest he came to following through on his vision was Make Mine Music and Melody Time, package features of shorts that drew from modern music more than classical pieces.

Fast-forward nearly fifty years later to the golden age known as the Disney Renaissance: Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney surveys the new crop of animators, storytellers, and artists who are creating hit after hit and have brought the studio back to his uncle’s glory days, and thinks to himself, “Maybe now we can make Uncle Walt’s dream come true.” He made a good case for it, but not everyone was on board. Jeffrey Katzenberg loathed the idea, partly because he felt the original Fantasia was a tough act to follow (not an entirely unreasonable doubt) but most likely due to the fact that the last time Disney made a sequel, The Rescuers Down Under, it drastically underperformed (even though the reasons for that are entirely Katzenberg’s fault. Seriously, watch Waking Sleeping Beauty and tell me you don’t want to punch him in the nose when Mike Gabriel recalls his opening weekend phone call).

Once Katzenberg was out of the picture, though, Fantasia 2000, then saddled with the less dated but duller moniker Fantasia Continued, got the go-ahead. Many of the sequences were made simultaneously as the animated features my generation most fondly remembers, others were created to be standalone shorts before they were brought into the fold. Since it was ready in time for the new millennium, it not only got a name change but a massive marketing campaign around the fact that it would be played on IMAX screens for a limited run, the very first Disney feature to do so. As a young Fantasia fan who had never been to one of those enormous theaters before, I begged and pleaded my parents to take me. Late that January, we traveled over to the IMAX theater at Lincoln Center, the only one nearest to us since they weren’t so widespread as they are now, and what an experience it was. I can still recall the feeling of awe at the climax of Pines of Rome, whispering eagerly with my mom at how the beginning of Rhapsody in Blue looked like a giant Etch-A-Sketch, and jumping twenty feet in the air when the Firebird’s massive eyes popped open. But did later viewings recapture that magic, or did that first time merely color my perception?

We open on snippets from the original Fantasia…IN SPAAAAAAAAACE!

It reminds me a little of the opening to Simply Mad About The Mouse, where bits of classic Disney nostalgia fly about to evoke the mood of this upcoming musical venture. In a clever conceit, snippets of Deems Taylor’s original opening narration explaining Fantasia’s intent and music types plays over the orchestra and animators materializing and gearing up for the first sequence, which jumps right into –

DUN DUN DUN DUUUUUUN – I mean, Symphony #5 – Ludwig Van Beethoven

Here, a bunch of butterflies flee and then fight off swarms of bats with the power of light – I can’t be the only one who saw these things and thought it was butterflies vs. bats, right?

It does look cool with its waterfalls and splashes of light and color bursting through the clouds, but this brings me to a bit of contention I have with the movie.

When I planned this review I was going to do a new version of “Things Fantasia Fans Are Sick of Hearing”, except there were only four major complaints I could think of that. On further introspection, I admit they are legitimate grievances worth addressing. I’m going to get them out of the way all at once in order to keep things rolling.

#1 – This Seems Familiar…

Certain sequences are noticeably derivative from the first movie. It’s as if they were afraid of trying too many new things that would alienate audiences so they borrowed from their predecessor in an effort to say “Hey, we can do this too!” Symphony #5 is clearly trying to be Tocatta and Fugue with its abstract geometric shapes swooping all over to kick things off. Though I love how much character the animators managed to give two pairs of triangles, Tocatta’s soaring subconscious flights of fancy leaves me more enthralled. Carnival of the Animals literally began as a sequel to Dance of the Hours until the ostriches became flamingoes. And Roy E. Disney openly stated he wanted the last sequence, The Firebird Suite to have the same death and rebirth theme as Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria, which they got, right down to a terrifying symbol of destruction emerging from a mountain to wreak chaos.

‘Sup, witches?

#2 – Too Short

Speaking of repeating the past, the original idea for Fantasia 2000 was to follow Walt’s vision in that three favorite segments would make a return amongst the newer ones – the Nutcracker Suite, which was eventually cut for time, Dance of the Hours, which I’ve already stated morphed into Carnival of the Animals, and finally, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the obvious choice to keep since that’s the most popular piece out of any of them. Cutting things for time doesn’t make that much sense, however, when you realize that Fantasia 2000’s runtime is only 75 minutes. A very short animated film by today’s standards that lasts barely half as long as its previous installment. I don’t see why they couldn’t keep at least one other sequence from the first Fantasia to make things last a little longer and keep in the original idea’s spirit.

#3 – All Story, No Experimentation

Unlike the first Fantasia, all of the sequences have a linear narrative structure that’s easy to follow. Not a bad thing and kudos to you if you’re among that group who prefers Fantasia 2000 for because of that, but again, I admire how the original film didn’t stick to a coherent story the whole time; how it was unafraid to let the music, atmosphere, and visuals speak for itself without sticking to a three-act plot and designated protagonist for every piece.

#4 – The One You’ve Been Waiting For, The Host Segments

One of the things that turned Fantasia off for its detractors was Deems Taylor’s seemingly dry narration. But maybe Fantasia 2000 can fix that with some folks who are hip and with it, perhaps a wild and crazy guy or two…

Eh, he’ll do.

Now, the idea of varying segment hosts isn’t an altogether bad idea. Most of them work well: Angela Lansbury gives the lead-in to the Firebird Suite plenty of gravitas befitting the finale, as do Ithzak Perlman, Quincy Jones, and James Earl Jones, who build plenty of intrigue for Pines of Rome, Rhapsody in Blue and Carnival of the Animals respectively; this seriousness makes James’ reaction to what the Carnival segment is really about a successful comic subversion. Even Penn and Teller for all their obnoxiousness kind of works with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice due to the linking magic theme.

I suppose what turns people off is the self-congratulatory tone and seemingly forced attempts at comedy you get from Martin, Penn, Teller, and Bette Midler. But you know what? They still make me laugh after all these years (well, you have to laugh at Bette Midler’s antics or she’ll come after you when the Black Flame Candle is lit). In fact, I have to hand it to Midler’s intro in particular. Fantasia 2000 came out right around the time I began taking a keen interest in what animation really was and how it was made. For me, her preceding The Steadfast Tin Soldier piece with tidbits about Fantasia segments that didn’t make it past the drawing board was like the first free hit that turned me into an animation junkie (plus this was before you could look up anything on the topic in extraneous detail on the internet, so it had that going for it). If I have to nitpick, though, The Divine Miss M referring to Salvador Dalí as “the melting watches guy” is a bit reductive. That’d be like calling Babe Ruth “the baseball guy” or Walt Disney “the mouse and castle guy”. Plus, Dalí and Disney were close compadres with a layered history. They planned on many collaborations, though the fruit of their labors, Destino, would not be completed in either of their lifetimes. Couldn’t show just a modicum of respect there, Bette?

Ahhh! I take it back! Don’t steal my soul!

So, I wouldn’t say I hate or even completely dislike the host segments. Sorry to disappoint everyone who was hoping for me to rip into them. They’re not awful, just uneven. And if you think they ruin the movie for me, you’ve got another think coming.

Pines of Rome – Ottorino Respighi

The idea for Pines of Rome’s visuals came about due to an unusual detail in some concept art. Someone noticed that a particular cloud in a painting of the night sky heavily resembled a flying whale. So why make a short about flying whales? The better question would be why NOT make a short about flying whales? A supernova in the night sky miraculously gives some whales the ability to swim through the air over the icy seas. Again, seeing this in IMAX was incredible. There’s just one minor issue I have with. This and another segment were developed well before Pixar made its silver screen debut, and unfortunately, it shows twenty years later; the worst cases are the close-ups.

Okay, who put googly eyes on the moldy beanbag?

There are ways of blending CGI and hand-drawn animation well, and this isn’t one of them. I understand the necessity of having expressive eyes but simply dropping one on top of a CGI creature gives it a bit of an uncanny valley feel. They should have either stuck with traditional all the way or made the whales entirely CG. The CG animation of the whales themselves isn’t too shabby, so they could have pulled it off.

Because simply giving whales flight apparently isn’t enough to hold an audience’s interest, we have an adorable baby whale earning his wings, so to speak. Once he gets his bearings above the surface, he swoops ahead of his family and bothers a flock of seagulls. They chase him into a collapsing iceberg, leaving him trapped, alone and unable to fly. The quiet dip in the music combined with the image of this lost little calf adds some genuine emotional weight to this piece. The baby navigates the iceberg’s claustrophobic caverns until he finds a crevice that elevates him back to his worried parents. From there a whole pod of whales rises out of the ocean to join them as they fly upwards to the supernova’s source.

“So long, and thanks for all the krill!”

As the music reaches its brilliant crescendo, the whales plow through storm clouds until they reach the top of the world and breach through the stars like water. It’s an awe-inspiring climax of a short that, flaws and all, reminds you of what Fantasia is all about.

Majestic.

Rhapsody in Blue – George Gershwin

The music of jazz composer George Gershwin? Timeless. The art of renowned caricaturist Al Hirschfeld? Perfection. All this brought to life with the best animation Disney has to offer? It’s a match made in heaven. Eric Goldberg, who animated the Genie among other comedic characters, idolized Hirschfeld and drew plenty of inspiration from drawings, so getting to work alongside him while making this was nothing short of a dream come true. That attention to detail in rendering Hirschfeld’s trademark curvy two-dimensional style goes beyond mere homage. It is a love letter to a great artist that encapsulates everything about him and his craft, and to a great city that we both had the honor of calling home. The story goes that Goldberg screened the final product for Hirschfeld shortly before his 96th birthday and his wife told him after that it was the best gift he could have ever received.

All this to say I am quite fond of this particular short, thank you very much.

The piece follows four characters navigating 1930’s Manhattan and crossing paths over the course of a single day:

Duke, a construction worker torn between his steady, monotonous job and following his dream of drumming in a jazz band,

Joe, a victim of the Great Depression desperately looking for work,

Rachel, a little girl who wants to spend time with her parents but is forced to attend lesson after lesson by her strict governess,

and “Flying” John, a henpecked husband longing to be free from his overbearing wife –

And her little dog too!

By the way, John is modeled in name and in looks after Disney animation historian John Culhane, who also was the inspiration for The Rescuers’ Mr. Snoops, hence why the two look so similar. He’s not the only name who appears in this sequence: Gershwin himself makes a surprise cameo as he takes over Rachel’s piano solo halfway through the story.

Speaking of, my family used to compare me to Rachel because at that point in my young life I was doing or already did the same mandatory activities as she – swimming, ballet, music, sports, all with the same amount of speed and varying degrees of success.

No one can argue that art is where we both excelled, however.

The physical timing of Rhapsody in Blue’s animation is hilarious, though it doesn’t rely wholly on slapstick for its humor. The sight gags and clever character dynamics all weaved into the music milk plenty of laughs, and envelop you in this living, breathing island that is Manhattan.

I speak from experience, this is the most accurate depiction of commuting on the 1 train that there ever was.

Even with such a premise and two masters of combining comedy and art, there is still enough pathos to keep the story rooted. Take when all four characters are at their lowest point. They look down on some skaters in Rockefeller Center and picture themselves in their place fulfilling their deepest desires. Seeing their dreams so close in their minds and yet so far away while paired with the most stirring part of the score is heartwrenching.

In the end, things pick up as the characters unwittingly solve each other’s problems. Duke quits the construction site, leaving an opening for Joe to fill. Joe accidentally snags John’s wife on a hook and hauls her screaming into the air, allowing him one night of uninhibited fun at the club where Duke performs.

“Anyone hear something? Nah, it’s probably just me.”

Rachel loses her ball while fighting with her nanny, which Duke bounces off the window of her parents’ office, which in turn gets them to notice their daughter about to run into traffic and they save her. Everyone gets their happy ending and it ends on a spectacularly glamorous shot of Time Square lit up in all its frenetic neon glory.

And not a single knockoff costumed character hitting up tourists for photos. Those were the days, my friend.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I adore Rhapsody in Blue. It’s easily my favorite part of the movie; a blissful ménage-a-trois of art style, music and storytelling, and it’s so New York that the only New York things I could think of that are missing are Central Park and amazing bagels. This sequence is gut-busting, energized, emotional, and mesmerizing in its form. I don’t often say I love a piece of animation so much that I’d marry it, but when I do, it’s often directed at Rhapsody in Blue.

Piano Concerto #2 – Dmitri Shostakovich (aka The One With The Steadfast Tin Soldier)

This piece has an interesting history attached to it. Disney wanted to do an animated film surrounding Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales – including The Little Mermaid and The Steadfast Tin Soldier – as far back as the 30’s, but the project fell by the wayside. During Fantasia 2000’s production, Roy E. Disney asked if they could do something with Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto #2 since he and his daughter were attached to that piece. He looked over sketches and storyboards made for the unrealized Tin Soldier sequence and discovered the music matched in perfect time with the story.

This is the second sequence that features CGI at the forefront. Unlike Pines of Rome, though, it works because the main characters are toys, and you can get away with your early CGI looking shiny and metallic and plastic-like when you’re animating toys.

Hell, it worked for Pixar.

The story centers on a tin soldier cast with only one leg who is shunned by his comrades for routinely throwing off their groove. He falls in love with a porcelain ballerina when he mistakes her standing en pointe as her also missing a limb. Despite his embarrassment when he learns the truth, the ballerina is enamored with him as well. This rouses the jealousy of an evil jack-in-the-box who I swear is a caricature of Jeffrey Katzenberg minus the glasses but with a goatee and Lord Farquaad wig.

“MUST. CHOP. EVERYTHING!!!”

The jack-in-the-box and the soldier duke it out for a bit before the former sends the latter flying out the window in a little wooden boat. The boat floats the soldier into the sewers and attracts a horde of angry rats who attack him, because animated rodents seem to have a natural hatred towards toy soldiers.

Case in point.

The soldier hurtles into the sea where he’s eaten by a fish – which is caught the following morning, packed up to be sold at market, bought by the cook who works at the very house he came from, and he falls out of the fish’s mouth on the floor where his owner finds him and places him back with the rest of the toys. Now the story this is based on hints that the jack-in-the-box is really a goblin who orchestrates the soldier’s misfortunes with his malicious magic. But based the extremely coincidental circumstances of his return home, I’d say the soldier’s the one who’s got some reality-warping tricks up his sleeve.

The soldier and jack-in-the-box duel again that evening, but this time the harlequin harasser falls into the fireplace and burns up. Our hero gets the girl and lives happily ever after. A nice conclusion, though a far cry from what happened in the original tale: the ballerina is knocked into the fire, the soldier jumps in after her, and all that remains of them by morning is some melted tin in the shape of a heart. I gotta say, for all my love of classic fairytales, Disney made the right call. Andersen’s life was far from magical and it reflected in his stories, making many of them depressing for no good reason. The triumphant note the music ends on also would have clashed horribly if they stuck with the original. Even the Queen of Denmark agreed with Disney’s decision to soften their adaptations of Andersen’s work. I don’t know if I’d call The Steadfast Tin Soldier one of my very favorite parts of Fantasia 2000, but in the end, s’all right.

Carnival of the Animals: Finale – Camille Sant-Saëns

This shortest of shorts (clocking in at less than two minutes) kicks off with James Earl Jones asking with as much seriousness as he can muster from the situation, what would happen if you gave a yo-yo to a flock of flamingos?

The answer –

Good answer!

Fie on those who dismiss this part as a silly one-off that doesn’t belong here. Fie, I say! It’s a pure delight full of fun expressions and fluid fast-paced action. Once again we have my man Eric Goldberg to thank for this, though this time he animated it entirely by himself. I’d call it a one-man show except for the fact that his wife Susan handpainted the entire thing with watercolor, making it look like it sprung to life straight from a paintbrush. It’s a simple diversion about a flamingo who wants to play with his yo-yo while the other snooty members of his flock try to force him to conform. As you can see from the still, they fail quite epically. Nothing beats the power of nonconformity and yo-yos (also every yo-yo move featured here is authentic; I love when animators go that extra mile).

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice plays next, but since I already touched on that in the first Fantasia review, I’m skipping over it. The segment ends with Mickey congratulating Leopold Stokowski (again), then crossing the barriers of time and space to inform the conductor, James Levine, that he needs to track down the star of the next segment, Donald Duck. Levine stalls by explaining a bit about what’s to come while Mickey frantically searches for his errant costar. The surround sound sells the notion of him moving around the back of the theater accidentally causing mischief all the while. Thankfully, Donald is found and the sequence commences.

Pomp and Circumstance – Edward Elgar

This famous piece of music was included at the insistence of Michael Eisner after he attended his son’s graduation ceremony. He wanted to feature a song that everyone was already familiar with. Of course, since this was after Frank Well’s untimely passing and no one was bold enough to temper Eisner’s worst instincts with common sense, his original pitch had every animated couple Disney created up to that point marching on to Noah’s Ark – and then marching out with their babies.

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Okay, A: Unless you’re doing a groin hit joke or are Ralph Bakshi or R. Crum, cartoon characters don’t have junk as a rule. And B, one of the unwritten rules of Disney animation is that barring kids that already exist like the titular 101 Dalmatians or Duchess’ kittens, the established canon couples do not in any official capacity have children.

To which Eisner laughed maniacally and vowed that they would.

But in order to placate Eisner’s desire to turn every branch of the Disney corporation into a commercial for itself, the animators compromised and agreed to do Pomp and Circumstance with the Noah’s Ark theme, BUT with only one couple – Donald and Daisy Duck. In this retelling of the biblical tale, Donald acts as Noah’s beleaguered assistant (I guess Shem, Ham, and Japheth were too busy rounding up the endangered species). Daisy provides emotional support while preparing to move on to the ark as well. It’s refreshing to see these two not losing their temper at each other for a change. I wish we got to see this side of their relationship more often. Donald returns Daisy’s easily lost plot device locket to her and as the rain rain rain comes down down down, he starts directing the animals on board; the lions, the tigers, the bears, the…ducks?

Anyway, all the animals and Donald get on board – well, most of them do.

The world’s first climate change deniers.

Donald realizes Daisy hasn’t arrived yet and runs out to look for her, unaware that she’s already boarded. Daisy sees Donald leaving but is too late to stop him before the first floodwaters hit their home. Donald made it back to the ark in time, however, though both of them believe that the other is forever lost to them. I find it astounding that they never run into each other not even once during the forty days and forty nights they’re cooped up on that boat. It’s the American Tail cliche all over again, and well, at least it’s happening in a short and not the entire movie.

Soon the ark lands atop Mount Ararat and the animals depart in greater numbers than when they embarked on their singles cruise. Daisy realizes halfway down the mountain that she’s lost her locket again, which Donald finds at that very moment while sweeping up, and the two are joyously reunited.

“I thought you were dead!” “I thought YOU were dead!”

I kid around, but I truly enjoy this short a lot. There’s so much warmth to Donald and Daisy’s relationship that makes their reunion at the end all the sweeter, and there’s plenty of great slapstick to offset the drama in the meantime. I will admit it’s nice to hear there’s more to Pomp And Circumstance than just the famous march, and the entire suite matches flawlessly with the visuals, though the main theme itself is so ingrained into the public consciousness that it’s difficult to extricate it from that what we’ve seen accompany it countless times.

Come on, you all know what I’m talking about.

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“What? Don’t tell me YOU don’t think of heads exploding like fireworks when you hear Pomp and Circumstance! Name one other life-changing moment could you possibly associate it with…you weirdo.”

The Firebird Suite – Igor Stravinsky

Fantasia 2000 comes to a close with a piece that has some emotional resonance if you know your history. You might remember from my first Fantasia review that Igor Stravinsky was disappointed with how Rite of Spring turned out, especially since he was a big admirer of Walt Disney and really wanted to do more projects with him beforehand. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they picked his premiere ballet to end the movie on decades later. After all these years, Disney worked hard to do right by Stravinsky – with a few twists, though. Instead of a balletic retelling of Russian folktales involving kidnapped princesses and immortal sorcerers, we have a fantastical allegory for the circle of life.

No, not that circle of life.

A lone elk who I’m fairly convinced is the Great Prince of the Forest walks through the forest in the dead of winter. With his breath, he awakens the spirit of the woods and one of the most beautiful characters Disney has ever created, the Spring Sprite.

I. Love. This character. Her design is gorgeous, shifting from a shimmery opalescent blue as she steps out of the water into an eternally flowing fount of live greenery spreading from her hair in her wake. Wherever she moves, grass, flowers, and trees blossom, fulfilling the idea of a springtime goddess more than Disney’s own Goddess of Spring ever did. The Sprite was a massive influence in developing my art style, particularly in her face and expressive eyes, and I used to draw her a lot. Visit any relative of mine and chances are you’ll find a picture of her by me hanging up on a wall somewhere in their house. Yet there’s far more to her character than just a pretty representation of nature; there’s plenty of curiosity, spunk, determination, and a drive for creativity. I love her frustrated expression when she’s dissatisfied with the tiny flower she sculpts out of the ground and how her face lights up when she morphs it into a buttercup as tall as she is.

The Sprite paints the forest with all the colors of the wind (mostly green) until she reaches a mountain that isn’t affected by her magic. Perplexed, she climbs it until she finds a large hunched over rock figure – or is it an egg? – standing inside. She reaches out to touch it and…

The Sprite has awakened her counterpart, the wrathful and deadly Firebird. Think giant evil phoenix made of smoke, flame and lava. And it goes without saying that seeing this on the biggest screen left quite the terrifying impact. One of the biggest inspirations for this sequence was the eruption of Mount St. Helens (though the shot of the Sprite surveying the breadth of the Firebird’s destruction reminds me far too much of the Australian bushfires going on) and the sheer horror of nature’s irrepressible chaos is fully captured here. But the Firebird refuses to settle for merely destroying the Sprite’s handiwork, oh no. It won’t rest until creation itself is consumed, and the Sprite is reduced to a powerless mite as she scrabbles to escape the Firebird’s relentless pursuit of her. Try as she might, however, the towering monster corners and devours her in one fell swoop.

The forest is reduced to gray ashes in the wake of the Firebird’s rampage, but the Great Prince has survived. Once again he brings the Sprite to life with his breath, only this time she is tiny and weak (the animation of her slowly developing from the ash into her huddled ragged form is breathtaking). Now, I didn’t think I’d get emotional revisiting a small part of a single movie I’ve rewatched countless times before but viewing this through a mature eye combined with the beauty of the Firebird Suite’s climax and its timely message has caused me to see it in a new light:

The Sprite is utterly broken by what she’s been through and the destruction she carelessly caused. She’s lost all faith in herself and in the idea of returning the forest to what it once was. Even so, the Prince gently insists on carrying her on his antlers to the remains of their favorite cherry blossom tree. Where her tears fall, grass shoots begin to sprout. This fills the Sprite with hope, and she soars into the air becoming one with the sky and rains life down on the forest. New trees burst from the earth. The air is filled with leaves and pollen and new life flowing from her essence. The Sprite’s joy and power grow so strong that she even encircles the Firebird’s mountain in all her verdant glory. Life and creation overcome death and destruction. It’s not Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria, but it’s close.

And unfortunately, that’s the biggest problem Fantasia 2000 has.

While working on the original Fantasia, a storyman made the mistake of referring to the work they were doing in “the cartoon medium” in Walt’s presence. Walt turned on him and snapped “This is NOT ‘the cartoon medium’. It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer.”

And conquer they did…just not the way Walt intended.

The point I’m trying to make is Walt was breaking new ground and experimenting with things nobody ever tried when it came to Fantasia. While those risks were initially deemed a failure, it eventually gained the recognition it deserved from the animation and filmmaking community. Any attempt to recreate the magic of Fantasia is no small feat. But rather than taking new risks that not even the first film dared, the studio opted to adhere to Fantasia’s formula with pieces that recall if not flat out copy from the original segments. I hesitate to call it a pale imitation or cash grab however because this was done for the art much more than the money (though Eisner was probably hoping it would bring in some bank). There’s even a little bit of depth to it: while the first Fantasia had themes of differing natures in conflict – light vs. dark, fire vs. water, etc. – Fantasia 2000’s theme is accidental but brilliantly meta: CGI vs. traditional animation, a conflict Disney would become very familiar with in the decade following the film’s release. In some ways, it reminds me of Epcot’s genesis. The driving force behind it was long gone, but the attempt to bring it to life as close to the original vision as possible is still much appreciated.

For all my gripes, I really do enjoy Fantasia 2000. Perhaps not on the same level as its predecessor, but it has its moments, oh yes. And believe me, as far as Disney sequels go, you could do far, far, far worse than this one. Fantasia 2000 is Fantasia’s kid sister mimicking its beloved older sibling in an attempt to show it can be cool like the big kids too. But hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this review, please consider supporting this misfit on Patreon. Patreon supporters receive great perks such as extra votes for movie reviews, movie requests, early sneak-peeks and more! If I can hit my goal of $100 a month, I can go back to weekly tv series reviews. As of now, I’m only $20 away! Special thanks to Amelia Jones, Gordhan Rajani and Sam Minden for their contributions! I’ll see you in a few weeks when I and review the 1959 Disney animated classic, Sleeping Beauty!

Artwork by Charles Moss.

Screencaps from animationscreencaps.com

Yes, I know The Lion King and Lady and the Tramp ended with the titular characters having babies, but was there anyone out there apart from Eisner who demanded there be sequels to those films that focused on their offspring?

January Review: Fantasia 2000 Last year I talked about Fantasia, which is not just one of my favorite Disney movies, but one of my favorite movies in general.

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kalluun-patangaroa · 5 years

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Afternoon Delight: Brett Anderson Interviewed

by Tariq Goddard

The Quietus, 3 October 2019

Tariq Goddard sits down with Suede frontman, Brett Anderson for a frank talk ahead of the publication of Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, the second volume of the singer's memoirs

Portrait by Paul Khera

Coal Black Mornings, the first volume of Brett Anderson’s memoir, was a haunting and unusual addition to the genre, eschewing the devices and gimmickry that are the principle selling points of a rock star confessional, for a harrowingly reflective and thoughtful overview of his early years. Anderson took the reader back to a time before the music, to the experiences that informed the songs, albums, and eventual career trajectory, and in doing so, circumnavigated the years of his triumph during which he rose to public prominence and critical acclaim.

His onus on the creatively formative period that preceded success, the tender portraits of his family, particularly his complicated relationship with his father, a man who may have wished he had the life his son had, and the recollections of an England that has vanished so completely as to no longer be a place, offered a more unique and heartfelt history than the celebrity tittle-tattle fans might have thought they wanted. To do anything comparable with the second volume, a story Anderson vowed not to tell, would at once be easier for him - his material would span the glory days of his career - yet harder, for how could the tenderness of the first book survive grubby contact with the reality of wild adulation and Britpop, a “movement" he admits to despising?

Perhaps to his own surprise Volume II, Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, strikes the same ruminative notes as the earlier volume, again subverting convention and expectation to avoid cliche and disappointment, written in the vulnerable and careful voice of its antecedent. Instead of dishing up insider gossip, Anderson mentions none of his rivals or contemporaries by name, assiduously sticking to the frequently scorned advice of “if have nothing nice to say, I say nothing”. Portraits of associates, friends and ex-friends are generous, forensic but fair, and there is no attempt to airbrush or underplay anyone else’s role in contributing to Suede’s imperial phase.

Knowing that the man he became in this second volume is not as sympathetic as the youth he was in the first, Anderson goes on to slay the most prominent elephant of all, himself, through pages of literary flagellation few writers could self-administer uncoerced.

Driven by the desire to work out what really happened to him, Anderson’s writing follows an unashamedly conceptual arc (“archetypes”, “convergence theory” and “postmodern play of mirrors” all appear on a single page), constituting a historical inquiry into the motives and processes that lay behind his best and worst work, by way of remorseless self-analysis, painful descriptions of how others must have seen him, and an attempt to grasp why we all think we are right at the time. The light shed and insight shared in these two volumes places them in the same covetable space as Springsteen’s Born To Run or Dylan’s Chronicles, and would be worth cherishing even if Brett Anderson was the reason why you never liked Suede in the first place.

Musicians often write books to sustain and propagate a persona that they have developed over a career, not deconstruct one in a spirit of enquiry. This book reads like it was written by that hidden aspect of yourself that wrote the songs in private, and not the public alter ego we saw perform them…

Brett Anderson: Absolutely, that is the main premise of the book, that it wasn’t going to be written by the Brett Anderson persona but whoever the real person behind it was. The reason why Coal Black Mornings ended where it did was because my public persona didn’t exist then, and I deliberately stopped the story before it had been formed. What I didn’t know was whether I could actually write another book in that same voice I had developed in the first, dealing with the next period of my life, and not drift into public persona I had created by then. It was a massive conundrum for me, as people might be familiar with the events and that version of me, and expect something consistent with that, while I knew I wanted a more personal and interesting story, told in the natural voice of the first book.

There is something I want to be clear about though, this thing with the persona we’re talking about is that it wasn’t necessarily false in the way people understand that to be. I wasn’t just the man behind the mask manipulating people’s view of me, because to inhabit a persona you have to believe in that persona too. Looking back it’s possible to wonder how much of it is really yourself, as it is you and not you at the same time, but all of it still comes from you. You are the one doing it. I mean, everyone manufactures personas all time. People in the public eye simply amplify the process, and the lens of the media then helps magnify and distort the original amplification. The “you” that sits down and watches TV with your family is very different from the “you” sitting here now, but that doesn’t mean that your public self is some Svengali like manipulation of reality. The persona you decide to project says as much about who you are as your private self does. And it was only through growing up, growing up and not giving up these past eleven years, and having kids who you can’t fob off with a persona, that I went through the slow and painful process of taking apart the nuts and bolts of what mine was made of.

The book does come up short on after dinner speaking anecdotage. Although it is often very funny, it doesn’t seem to see its function as to amuse, does it?

BA: No, not at all. The book is a search into what happened to me in those years of success and fame, and what effect that had on me as a person, not a parade of all my achievements, where I ask the reader to look at me and love me. Like the first book, I used my writing as a sounding board very like therapy, and used the questions I was asking of myself to work out my own shit.

Portrait by Pat Pope

Notes from therapy don’t normally make for very interesting reading though…

BA: They don’t, and I knew I was running a risk. In one of my favourite reviews of Coal Black Mornings the reviewer writes, having given it two or three stars out of five, I’m not sure which is the more dismissive number, ‘this book is very well written but the big problem I had with it in the end is it is all about him, him, him!’ Well of course it is, it’s a memoir! Memoir has to take the risk of being indulgent to work.

But for a memoir, I found you very impatient with your own perspective. There’s very little self justification or score settling, often it’s like you’re trying to establish something very close to historical objectivity? Even though you keep saying that it is impossible to do that.

BA: I realise I wanted to know everything that was going on around me at that time, that wasn’t just me or to merely repeat or excuse how I saw things then. And I really didn’t want to fall into one of the lazy tropes of the genre which is just to sit there and slag off other bands. There is a vitriol in there, but I apply it to movements and features of the period, not individuals, partly because I know how the media works now. As soon as you slag off a name, that’s all your book becomes, and you lose all control or ownership of context, and simply end up as a line in a feature in quotes of the year. A memoir is about context, a complex tapestry, not a motormouth series of quotes, and you don’t want to lose that by being petty or boring, or revisiting past rivalries. I mean, who cares who ticked me off? The crazy thing is that there are people who want you to name names and write that kind of book, but I wasn’t prepared to.

But readers are more used to engaging with a work of that kind, aren’t they, who blew coke up whose arsehole?

BA: Absolutely, but the books that do that are the same story with the names changed, you know, the amusing band shenanigans, all the japery, the dirt, all of it is essentially the same tale every time. But that is the expectation, and to be honest, critics can be just as predictable. I’ve had reviews saying that Coal Black Mornings was really good but who was it really for, as it doesn’t sit comfortably in the genre they think it is supposed to be in. But for me that’s a good thing. It’s meant to be more ambitious and about trying to get to the bottom of things and to understand life. Basically the opposite of a series of oft repeated anecdotes. The anecdotes that I have included are the things that are important to me that no one else could have ever known about, because they were purely personal or because sometimes there was simply no one else there to observe them. Whether it’s the beautiful girl who comes up to me just to tell me my band are shit, or the cheese and pickle sandwich I took with me on my first flight to America, these were the things I wanted to share so that I would know they had really happened. You know, the strange and quirky little things that give your life back to you, as they thread in and out of the story everyone else thinks they know…

You are hard on yourself in the book, but you are also very hard on your own music, which from a fan’s point of view might be tough to take. Reading that you have never rated your most successful singles, or that people’s favourite songs had working titles like 'Pisspot' and 'Sombre Bongoes' for example…

BA: Yeah, 'Stay Together', 'Electricity', the Head Music title track, and 'The Power', yeah, I take the sword to them all, but I had to be that self critical in order to be convincing. If I just sat there saying, “I’m a fucking genius and everything I have done is brilliant” anything else I would say would carry zero weight! Especially if I then want to go on and talk about the songs I really do still love, 'Heroine', 'Killing Of A Flash Boy', 'Sleeping Pills', the list goes on. It’s all part of subverting the myth of the god given seer, like the bit where I talk about myself honestly as a musician and admit that I am not a particularly talented one, but what I do have is that I just don’t fucking give up.That admission for me was a moment of truth, it just isn’t what most musicians say, and so another attack on the supposed elegance of my persona. But in the same way I view myself at points in my past as a different person, I see some of those songs as written by a different person, and that is why the flaws so easily reveal themselves to me. As for being hard on myself, again, I had to be. My mistakes were entirely my own and no one else’s fault, certainly not the fault of any childhood trauma or external stuff, and I needed to take responsibility for that. My descent into hell came from being romantically attached to the notion of the artist as a genius that accepts no limits or boundaries, it was that simple.

Do you think the experience of the relatively fallow and low periods in your career helped you develop the sensibility and humility with which you wrote this memoir? That continual and unbroken success may have robbed you of certain insights that disappointment helped provide?

BA: Yes, the end of the band meant I was able to jump off the bandwagon I had been on and develop a different perspective. Those were key years for me as an artist, that I had to have away from Suede, before we came back again. Experiencing struggle and failure, having had success, was crucial for me. I loved making solo records but it did start to feel like a bit of a vanity project as you do need an audience, and there is a certain point where if you drop below a particular level, you begin to wonder whether it is still worth doing. The work may still stand up, but if there’s just a select group you are appealing to, buttressed by family and friends, you can feel like the basic relationship you need with an audience, in order to create, is breaking down. And with having a family too, I thought I couldn’t afford to go on like that anymore. A performance, a book, a song, all these things require an audience, it’s a plea, you are projecting your voice out there and you require an echo in return. Otherwise you’d just stay in your own room and write for yourself, which is what some artists claim to do, but it’s an attitude I have never shared. Because half the point of creating anything is the reaction. I’ve never understood the cliche of the artist that only creates for themselves and never reads their own press.

You have to be Kafka to really not care what happens to your work. Most artists hope for perpetual immortality, on their more modest days.

BA: But did even Kafka really not care though?

He did leave his work with his best friend and literary executor to destroy.

BA: Exactly, his best friend and literary executor! Interesting that he chose a man who thought he was genius for that task! If he really felt that way he should have given everything to someone who really didn’t give a shit about him or his work.

Contingency and chance is one of the big themes of your book. One of the very few contemporaries you name, and then very affectionately, is Loz Hardy of Kingmaker whose fortunes you contrast with yours. You seem to be asking did you succeed, and he fail, because of the hidden hand of destiny, Darwinian necessity and artistic merit, or has the whole of your and his career been the most monstrous fluke?

BA: I thought long and hard about whether to involve Loz in any of this, and there is a part of me that felt bad about it, and so I tried to be sensitive in how I talked about him, as I have warmth for him and always really liked him. But I had to include him. We were thrown together by the Melody Maker’s “dog shit and diamonds” piece, a gladiatorial contest they set up where we were used as symbols for different musical and aesthetic tendencies, and there was no way for me to explore the questions I wanted to if I ignored that. The fact is Kingmaker did not go onto achieve success, but I hope I didn’t trample on them when I refer back to that point where we found ourselves in the same place. I genuinely wanted to work out whether things happened for us in the only way they could have, and if you can judge your own worth on the basis of success, as the ultimate criteria, or if it is all down to chance in the end.

You go on to say that the neglect of great art makes you wonder whether it is all chance, however much it might suit you not to think so…

BA: Exactly, look at Echo And The Bunnymen for fuck’s sake! They’ve made amazing music but why aren’t they then given the prestige they deserve, whereas so many of their less talented contemporaries fill up stadiums at the drop of hat? How can you resolve it? It’s unresolvable! But I think you need to believe in destiny wholeheartedly to make it at anything, and it is easy to when everything is going right, you know “my success is my destined birthright!’, but then how can you have any framework or belief system left if you embrace destiny and then fuck up? You’d be complicit in your own fall. Even then though, you can make failure work for you, and realise the fuck-ups were necessary too, and that you learn from them and they therefore feed your future successes, so you’re kind of led back into destiny again. The thing is if you are happy with where you have got to in life, and looking at things from a place of satisfaction, then you literally can’t really regret anything, as the fuck ups are part of the journey that led you to where you are, and are as easily as important as the successes.

Photograph courtesy of Phillip Williams

You make a number of complimentary references to the old music press in the book, even when they turned on you, which is rare for a musician…

BA: God yeah, we’re culturally less well off for their folding, don’t you think so? That whole Punch And Judy journalism and playground tribalism produced so many great bands and so much great discussion no matter how ugly it got. Those papers were like a music factory. A lot of modern music writing, with some very obvious exceptions that I love, is too dry and balanced. Growing up to a point where you can’t be violently partial means you lose something of the enthusiasm and passion that draws you to music. Music writing needs to be a little bit impetuous because music is impetuous. It’s easy to think it was all divisive and unnecessarily nasty, but it needed to be, that was its job, which encouraged it to issue challenges and be creative in its own right too. Which was great, providing they were saying nice things about us!

How has the creative process changed for you now that you are no longer committed to releasing album after album in quick succession, a process you say that led to the creation of some inferior work; does that easing of pressure and allowing of material to gestate compensate for what is lost, which is that in the old days you didn’t know what was going to happen next, and that every new record might yet change your lives with as yet unimagined success?

BA: There’s a trade off. The eventual realisation that you are not part of the mainstream anymore, as we clearly no longer are, does give you the freedom go to interesting places you could not always have gone to before. For me now the concept of a record has to be very strong to act on it, and I won’t start writing simply because it is time to release a record again. For example, the material and ideas I thought would be perfect for A New Morning, were actually followed through on and became The Blue Hour sixteen years later. Trying to carry them into the songs I was writing at the time, and make a record about the darkness of the countryside when you want your songs to be rotated on Radio One, was never going to happen. And that’s one of the beauties and consolations of being set adrift from the mainstream, which is that you really don’t need to worry anymore about a particular kind of career path anymore. We’re never going to latch back onto the mainstream again, I know that, because we could make the greatest record we’ve ever made, or has ever been made, and we would still never be on Radio One again. And I’m fine with that now. I am a 52-year-old man, do you know what I mean? Age has got to give you something, because otherwise there is a part of you that might never get over what it has to teach you.

You plot your changing relationship with your fans from a high of believing you were in it together, to the low of seeing graffiti left on your street with directions to your house and a request to kill your cat. The lesson that fans live for you when they should be living for themselves, and that you should be living for yourself and not them, seems hard earned on both sides, particularly as you write about how much you owe them for putting you where you wanted to be in the first place.

BA: It’s a fascinating process with fans, you were there in the early days, and you know that insane dynamic where the fans are still part of the experience. We used to hang out with you guys and it was like being with your mates where you share the same passions and interests, but then you get to that point in a band where the doors come down, and there is a separation where you find yourself either being mobbed by people or sitting on your own in an empty dressing room with no in-between. Life becomes polarised between these two extremes, and it is unavoidable because it is built into success, and so to some extent, is no more than what you wanted and signed up for, but there is that lovely point when you first start when the people who follow you aren’t an abstract, “the audience”, but friends, and there is something special about those days I wanted to capture in the book. Because those days were really important, one of those lovely periods you can never have back or go back to again.

After that you become public property, where you have an image you keep up to avoid disappointing people, and where everything you say is taken at face value. Like the story you mention in the book where I forget that I asked a couple of fans to come back to my house in two days time, only to be polite, then completely forgot about it, and ended up instigating a campaign of abuse against myself…

I understand the danger of taking rock stars at their word. In early 95 I bumped into you at the Severn Bridge Services and you told me that I should join you in Watford in a week, where you would meet me outside the venue and let me into a gig!

BA: Oh no, you’re joking…what an invitation! My God, and did I do it?

I would love to have said you did! I still got in, so no hard feelings.

BA: I’m so sorry! What you’ve got to understand is that in a band when you meet someone at the services you always want to leave the conversation on a high note, to contrast with the surroundings, hence the Watford Colosseum! I just hoped that you wouldn’t believe me and would realise that in the end it was all just…words!

Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn is out now via Little Brown

#suede #brett anderson #press #interview #the quietus #2019 #afternoons with the blinds drawn

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