#i laughed so much when david showed up as demetrius

[kristsune]

Well, after hearing David as the doctor appear in Cry Havoc last week, I just had to make a little compilation between Demetrius and Dr Edgware from Wooden Overcoats.

[magpiemorality]

Ok so this is a slightly disjointed idea but, 24 hour diner with Virgil or Dee as waiter/person who works there and one of the boys is a regular customer, but who shows up at the oddest of hours. they talk one day and our customer boy tells him about slightly unbelievable happenings, and Virge/Dee isn't sure if they are making fun of him, but this continues. They become each others constant, cause life's hectic. Any ship :] - xaime

This isn’t entirely what you requested because my mind half read it and went off on a wild tangent, but I hope you enjoy! 

Combined with:

This isn't a prompt as much as it's a challenge; how many different names can you give Deceit in one short story without it being incoherent? - @loveceit

"It was a dark and stormy knight" listen, it was a pun and a combo of purple prose+virgil nickname so i figured it could become a story therefore you get it *goes back into the night* - Anonymous

AO3

***

The diner was always an interesting place to work. From the peppy college students to the millennials seeking a quirky date; from the families with rowdy kids to the construction workers that were on a project nearby; it was a great place to be a people watcher.

Just a shame Virgil didn't much like people. He was only there to finance his freelance work and pay for his rent, which made him the perfect candidate for the night shifts.

When he'd accepted the graveyard hours he'd assumed he could just get some work done, hang out in silence until the morning guy, some peppy high-school grad waiting to get into the community college a few blocks away, showed up to take over.

No one told Virgil that the night shift often got the most... interesting customers.

Case in point; D- uh, Dee something. It might have been Damien? Virgil was sure he'd introduced himself as Damien once, but he couldn't quite remember and the guy was a regular by now so he couldn't ask, either. Damien- or maybe Darren?- was a fascinating individual that had managed to pique even Virgil's lack of interest, coming in as he did every time Virgil was on shift without fail. It wasn't always the same time, sometimes Darren, or Dalziel, arrived as the night started around eight or nine (if the sun had gone down), and sometimes he arrived as late as four or five am, only a few hours before Virgil got to go home.

No matter what though, he always stayed until Virgil's shift ended, disappearing in the few minutes when Virgil headed in the back to change out of his apron and grab his stuff. What a mystery. Virgil might not have liked people but he adored a good mystery.

They talked a little every so often, just exchanging pleasantries when Virgil brought D- Derek?- his coffee or a slice of pie (homemade by the chefs but not remotely fresh; this wasn't actually the 50s and demand was too high for authenticity like that). The man was often working diligently away on a clunky laptop with no discernible brand, tap tap tapping providing a nicely soothing rhythmic background to Virgil's own work over at the counter. It was always the same volume, even when there was dead silence, or rain outside, not that Virgil consciously noticed that.

Once he almost caught a glimpse of what D...rake? No definitely not a Drake, eesh. Maybe Declan? Still not right... What Dee was going. It looked like coding, but not coding that Virgil really recognised. More like if the Matrix had been an actual thing of sorts, flickering symbols moving up and down and somehow forwards and backwards, deep into the screen. It made his head hurt a little and Dee- no wait, it was... it was... nope, gone again. Maybe Devon? Ew no. 100% not right.

Anyhow, since then Virgil hadn't ever tried to look again, feeling faintly queasy at the thought of seeing that screen again, and the mysterious Dee just kept tapping reliably away.

The mystery deepened when Virgil had to take a day shift one week. It was busy, a little annoying because he had work to do he would have to stay up late to do instead, and his sleeping pattern was immediately off-kilter after the change of rhythm, but there was something else. His regular D- David? No, too plain. He was more of a Despereaux, or a December, something like that... His regular wasn't there, and the absence was more noticeable than Virgil could have predicted. Even worse, there was some creepy man with crazy intense eyes who came in part way through Virgil's shift and would not. stop. staring. When he got his things and headed to go home the man just smiled at him brightly and he hurried to grab the bus, giving in to the urge to keep looking over his shoulder as he made his way back to his apartment.

He told Drew, Dara, Dolion, whatever his goddamn name was, next time he was on the night shift. It was like slipping into bed at the end of the day; how right it felt to be back under cover of darkness. Dylan, D-ax? That was a name right? Not his mystery regular's though... Dee seemed curious about where Virgil had been, when he served the guy his drink that night, and insisted he sit down for a chat while the diner was otherwise empty. Virgil, despite the work he needed to get done, agreed, and they spent a while having a comfortable and easy conversation that had them both laughing in turn.

That night Virgil left work with a smile on his face for the first time in a very long time.

It only took another few shifts before Desmond or Dexter or Diaz admitted he'd been rather worried when Virgil had changed shifts. He was equally worried about the weird guy that had shown up on that shift. "There are some bad people out there," he'd murmured, looking out the window into the dark streets with a faraway expression as Virgil hung on his every word. "And there are some even worse things than them that prowl the streets." He'd shot Virgil a soft smile, a little apologetic, and had turned the subject neatly onto Virgil's word, leaving the words lingering in the air, almost solid enough to touch as they followed Virgil around for the rest of the week.

That conversation turned into a part of the routine, sitting together over cups of hot, strong coffee, grinning and laughing and sharing thoughts on the world. Rarely did their own lives get much discussion, the past just seemed... unimportant somehow, when compared to the now and the what could be. Draco or Dorian or Dominic or whatever his name was, was quickly becoming Virgil's best friend, and from the genuine delight on Douglas or Diego or Daniel's face he felt the same way.

And one night his friend was late.

It was near closing and Dee still hadn't shown up. Despite the massive coincidence Virgil had never bothered to wonder why he seemed to know the right nights to visit the diner, subconsciously writing it off as nothing strange, but now he forced his worries down with the logical answer that Dee simply had other things to do.

It wasn't weird that he had never once failed to show up for the past... had it been more than a year now? Close to two, even? It... that wasn't weird...

It was weird as hell. But it wasn't anything to worry about; no that pleasure belonged to his absence. Even when Virgil went and changed and got his bag, wondering if tonight of all nights Dean or Dustin or Donovan would have appeared in that moment instead of his usual disappearance, but it wasn't to be.

The journey home felt wrong and Virgil was restless when he forced himself to go to bed, full of turbulent thoughts and concerns. "There are some bad people out there," his thoughts whispered in the early dawn light. "And there are some even worse things than them that prowl the streets."

And yet, somehow, he was there again the next shift. He looked tired, Dalton or Deacon or Demetrius. His eyes were dark and his hair ruffled, and his laptop was nowhere to be seen. He smiled though, when Virgil spotted him, already hunched down in the booth in the corner, the shadow of bruises on his face.

Virgil waited for the other lonely customer to finish up and head off before turning the never-used sign to CLOSED and bringing the entire pot of coffee over for them both. He wrapped his friend in a hug when he stood from the booth as Virgil approached, only making sure to put the pot down first.

When they fell back into the red leather bench seats, eyes on the table in front of them and silence thick, Virgil knew something was changed forever.

He looked up as Dee cleared his throat, a rueful smile on his face. "I owe you an explanation, Virgil," he said, voice hoarse and gravelly.

"Do you?" Virgil asked, looking at him curiously. Somehow it felt like he was actually seeing Dee now, like he was clear where he'd been slightly blurred before. And Dee just smiled again.

"Let me tell you a story. About a man living in a world he wasn't meant to, and someone who saved him."

Virgil's eyebrows furrowed together and he leaned forwards, elbows on the table so he could rest his chin in his hands.

"It was a dark and stormy knight," the man called Dante began. "That saved him..."

-

Masterlist | Buymeacoffee

[junker-town]

2007: The inside story of the greatest season in college football history

Les Miles and 2007 were made for each other all along

Hello. This is a project all about the 2007 college football season, the wildest season ever. We've included dozens of interviews, stories, and other fun stuff in this package (take a look around!), but first, let's talk about Les Miles.

Maybe the problem with every other team in 2007 was this: they insisted that things make sense, while Les Miles and LSU never did. In a season of gambles and black swans, Miles was wearing a ghillie suit at the roulette table. It’s not that he had planned it that way, mind you. It’s just what he always wore, and one day, the perfect moment would come along for the outfit.

Consider that LSU might have had another unfair advantage from the start: being three teams at once.

One was the LSU that destroyed Mississippi State and Virginia Tech to start the season, a physically superior crew of crowbar-wielding sprinters and trench monsters so frightening, they scared poor Michael Henig of Mississippi State into throwing six interceptions in a single game.*

*Full disclosure: by the time he threw his fifth, everyone watching wanted him to throw six, because ... well, his public failure had come full circle to a kind of valiant achievement, hadn’t it?

Another LSU was a defense-averse scoring machine bent on playing deep into triple overtime. That team lost twice — twice! in a national title year! — to Arkansas and Kentucky and roared to victory in a shootout with Alabama.

The final LSU was the one everyone remembers best, the LSU that passed with one second left against Auburn or pulled off fourth down conversion after fourth down conversion against Florida in a comeback win or called a bizarre fake field goal for a TD against South Carolina or needed a pick six to win the SEC Championship Game.

It’s hard to beat three teams, but it’s also hard to be three teams. Fortunately, Miles mostly won with all three, though it was clear which one he preferred, even if that version was the one that forced LSU fans to drink even more after victories, simply to take the edge off what they’d just seen.

***

Take a chunk out of the cult of coach by pointing out how many of LSU’s biggest plays of 2007 happened because of perfectly timed individual contributions, usually in well-portioned turns. Craig Steltz popped up with pass breakups and interceptions exactly when required. Trindon Holliday, all five-foot-nothing of him, would snap a game open with a kick return. Cornerback Jonathan Zenon turned into Erik Ainge’s best receiver at the worst possible time for Tennessee, returning an INT for a conference-winning score.

LSU was a team of five-star talent and two-star heart, and the peak example was running back Jacob Hester. With a corps of fearsome locals, LSU’s leading rusher would be a fullback with male pattern baldness at the age of 22. Hester wasn’t supposed to end up where he did, but when you keep ending up across the first down line, it’s hard to take you out of the lineup.

It was hard to say exactly who would fall from the rafters at exactly the right moment and save LSU’s ass.

It was easy to say who was fine with that and would openly dare probability not to cough up a positive return on a gamble, even when the gamble was mathematically insane. Whether it was because he was a bullshit artist too scared to ever admit it or so ebulliently confident he infected his whole team, he thrived in it.

And for one year, Miles turned up exactly where he was supposed to, every time, with exactly the right answer.

He was perfectly on time when he called the fake field goal.

He did not just call a fake field goal. He called a flip toss by the starting QB over his shoulder to LSU’s kicker. The burn on trick play enthusiast Steve Spurrier, standing on the opposite sideline, was so precise, Miles made the noise "heheheheh" when watching a replay at Tiger Stadium.

heh

He could have made the same noise all five times he decided LSU was going for it on fourth down against Florida, a backbreaking series of gambles that completed LSU’s 28-24 comeback at home. Miles might have chuckled his way through that whole second half, for all we know. It was very loud in there, and I couldn’t hear my own heartbeat, much less a coach laughing several hundred yards away.

He was on time when LSU was tied with Auburn, with the clock burning down and everyone in the stadium assuming LSU would try to win 26-24 with a Colt David field goal.

When Demetrius Byrd brings down the TD, listen to the crowd’s screams and hear everything all at once: that LSU passed up the obvious answer, nearly blew the last second it could’ve used to kick if the pass had fallen incomplete, and scored despite risking an interception.

You can read some inspired defenses of this play, if you want to go deep enough into the archives. Don’t. It makes no sense, never will, was late, and ... was right. This is a horseshit play, and it worked. Later in his career, Miles and LSU would get in serious trouble with clock management, and this would all seem less than cute, but in 2007, LSU was unstoppably lucky.

They pressed that luck, even when they became phenomenally unlucky. The Tigers spit the bit at Kentucky and at home to Arkansas. The Kentucky game seemed like enough of an anomaly, the kind voters could forgive. True to bizarro form, LSU outgained Kentucky in yardage, had fewer turnovers, and still lost in triple OT.

Arkansas was worse. A sleepy, 7-6 game at halftime caught fire in the second half, and the three-headed backfield with three future NFL starters — Peyton Hillis, Felix Jones, and Heisman finalist Darren McFadden — ate up yardage until another triple OT loss* surely destroyed LSU’s hopes for a title run.

* There is another achievement LSU can claim, in addition to being the first two-loss AP champ since 1960: the only title team to ever lose two games in overtime, let alone triple overtime. Not that anyone would ever want to claim that, knowing what it’s like to chug rubbing alcohol at 11:45 p.m. while watching your team do this again.

***

Miles showed up when he was supposed to show up, even when he wasn’t supposed to.

2007 was my first year covering college football for money, and the 2007 SEC Championship was just my second game as credentialed media. I still did not know how anything worked, so during pregame, when LSU informed the collected media that "Coach Miles wishes to make a statement," I assumed this was normal.

The SEC

Have a great day

I was informed it was not.

Set this all in context. LSU had just lost a shot at the BCS Championship and would be starting its backup QB in a conference title game against a dangerous, 9-3 Tennessee. The SEC title seemed like a consolation prize, and reports of Miles, a Michigan alum who played and coached under Bo Schembechler, talking to the Wolverines about their coaching vacancy were everywhere.

Whether it was ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit reporting on TV that morning that Miles was as good as gone, or whether a fourth cup of coffee hit Miles sideways in the Georgia Dome locker rooms, or whether years of the accumulated WCW in the air possessed him, Miles felt the need to cut a wrestling promo live on the carpet in Atlanta.

When Miles was done with his speech to a room of baffled and bemused reporters, he appeared again exactly where and when he was supposed to appear. He had told ESPN to kiss his ass and made ESPN show it live on ESPN. He proclaimed in what was suddenly the thickest of Ohio accents that he had a "damn strong football team." He did it for himself, he said, and I believe it; his team, sequestered in the locker room, didn’t see the speech live and couldn’t have used it as some kind of motivational tool.

Miles punctuated his speech with the most truculent "have a great day" ever. Later, after the national championship and grown men from the Bayou running naked down Bourbon Street, the Tigers would put the phrase on the back of their equipment truck, so the whole world could kiss their gear’s ass as it rolled down the highway.

Starting the backup QB in a mop-up game, LSU let Ainge throw the winning TD to LSU’s Zenon. Everyone kept showing up in the right place at the right time, even people who were on other teams.

So when West Virginia lost to "the shittiest fucking team in the fucking world," Oklahoma couldn’t muster the votes to overcome losses to Texas Tech and Colorado, Georgia couldn’t make the case because it didn’t even get to the SEC Championship, an undefeated Kansas lost to rival Mizzou at the worst imaginable time, and Mizzou lost again to Oklahoma in the Big 12 Championship, it only made sense that LSU would suddenly face its third chance at a national title.

Getting to do it in New Orleans might have been a little heavy-handed, but the script was the script.

***

There are people who cannot thrive in normal circumstances, who struggle to make basic schedules work and whose only optimal working environment would madden a normal person to the point of tears.

Those people, 90 percent of the time, barely manage to fit into a lane. The really gifted and adaptive ones might become functional, with enough coaching. Others find themselves in much worse situations, often flagrantly so.

Miles is one of those people. After 2007, it became clear that quiet order would do Miles no favors. He’d recruit brilliantly but squander talent, particularly on offense. His carefree approach to clock management would become a running gag, his fake field goals would eventually only work on Florida, and LSU would wane as Nick Saban categorized, analyzed, and systematized the SEC into little more than Bama’s strip mine.

2007 was Miles at his best, but the flip side was 2011, when a phenomenally talented LSU showed up to the BCS Championship without anything resembling an offensive game plan. What Miles could profit from in chaos, he could waste in order. The decline began in earnest; by the time Miles was fired in 2016, quirks that were endearing had become intractable frustrations, even when his teams were still competitive.

If chaos-compatible people are lucky, sometimes they fall into exactly the right, irregularly shaped spot at exactly the right time and work where few others would. Miles fell into the right spot not once, but twice.

Getty

In 2005, after beating Auburn in OT

The first came after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, his first season as LSU’s head coach, when the chaos-compatible new guy helped steer an entire school through a natural disaster. Fats Domino was sleeping on QB JaMarcus Russell’s couch, Baton Rouge turned into a refugee camp overnight, and helicopters were flying over Tiger Stadium at all hours, but LSU managed not only to play a full season, but to thrive. In the year of Katrina, the Tigers somehow won 11 games. Almost everyone involved with that season agrees Miles was the person the program needed, when everything else fell apart.

There is a tendency to lionize coaches, overstate their importance, and diminish players in the name of using a single authority figure as a catch-all for a group of ever-changing faces.

That said, there was no one more suited to step into college football’s slipperiest, least predictable season. And once he and LSU stepped into it, they took everything, even well after reason said they were finished. In 2007, when throwing deep into the end zone with no time left made more sense than a field goal, Miles was the safest bet.

***

And at no point did that Ohio State team, or any Ohio State team coached by Jim Tressel, stand a chance in any universe’s 2007 title game, against any team.

2007 had already bit the Buckeyes once — losing to a Ron Zook-coached Illinois counts — but in a year of festive arson and freewheeling nonsense, Ohio State was doomed from the start. The Buckeyes didn’t understand the language on a spiritual level (and on a physical level, could not compete with LSU’s defense). Ohio State ran on a clock, and 2007 was too surreal for anything but melting pocket watches.

LSU won, but all I really remember was the aftermath, a French Quarter bursting at the seams with astronomically intoxicated LSU fans. Almost all of them were clothed.

Miles showed up at one point, too. I don’t remember exactly what time he appeared, but whatever time it was, I have to assume it was the right one.