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holdthosebees · 5 years

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La Belle Dame

Rating: T Pairing: John/Martin, pre-slashish. Background Melanie/Georgie. Summary: No powers, drag queen AU. In which John’s ex-girlfriend drags him to a charity show, and he has an awkward encounter with one of the queens.

A/N: A procrastination oneshot that I wrote while not working on any of my many, many WIPs. Shoutout to @jinxedlucky, who helped me workshop this idea and then told me not to work on it until I finish something else, and who was right. Also--Martin’s drag name, and the title, both come from the Keats poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

The drag queen on stage had glitter in her beard and the most impressive biceps John had ever seen. The red sequins on her skintight dress shimmered as she walked up and down the edge of the crowd, mic cord trailing behind her, as she reached out to regulars, all winks. Georgie tapped John’s shoulder; he had to lean in to hear her, her hair brushing against his ear.

“That’s Sasha’s friend,” she said. “Tim. The one I was telling you about.”

John nodded. He’d been struggling to keep track of all of people in Georgie’s new social circle, her girlfriend’s friends and their friends who were all supposed to be his friends by some sort of mathematical transference. The drag queen on stage tapped the mic, and grinned. Her lips were very red.

“Ladies, gentlemen, monsters, everyone else,” she said, pitching her voice low. “Welcome... to Eastbenders!”

There were a few half-hearted cheers.

“Oh, come on, you can do better than that. Anyway, for the virgins in the audience, all our queens are local and all our proceeds will go to providing shelter and services to trans youth.” Another pause for cheers, more enthusiastic this time. “If you have any questions, ask comrade Sasha over there in the booth. Wave to the people, Sasha!”

John had met Sasha a few times over drinks. She seemed a very sensible person, unlike Georgie’s new girlfriend Melanie, who hated him on sight. He resolved to go and find her after the event, and maybe donate a bit. That was why he was here, after all; the charity.

“And the rest of you old slags, go say hello anyway. I promise you she’s very friendly.” The queen punctuated her sentence with a slow roll of her hips and a leer. John scowled down at his ginger ale, and ignored Georgie’s knowing look. She wasn’t going to tell him to lighten up, because she knew that he’d just roll his eyes in response, and she didn’t need to, because he knews she was thinking it.

It was just that this, the lewd jokes for the sake of lewd jokes, the self-conscious decadence, it was very much not John’s scene. He didn’t have anything against it, exactly; he just found it childish, and strange, and there was something profoundly alienating about it besides. If it were up to him he’d be at home, reading, or putting a few more hours in on the project he was supposed to have in by Monday, somehow, although Elias clearly didn’t understand how long database work actually took.

But it was for charity, Georgie had said, and it had been ages since he’d been out and around, and he wasn’t going to meet anyone new if he just sat around moping. To which he had responded that he didn't feel the need to meet anyone new, and she’d looked at him with her eyes so knowingly sad, tinged with an insufferable pity. And so here he was, crammed into an uncomfortable booth in a dim bar, watching a man in a dress with a wig as tall as his head and heels you could punch through metal sheeting with croon into a cheap microphone.

“I am your host for the evening, Kinky Spice--” someone in the back booed. The queen sighed exaggeratedly. “Fine, you caught me. I’m your host, Kim Morningwoodburn--” More booing, and scattered laughter. “Tough crowd! I’ll deal with you later, you naughty audience members you. I am, cross my heart, your host, Diana Explosion, and I’m here to ask you to welcome in our first performer, the bizarre, the incomparable Honey Wilde!”

The lights dimmed, and turned blue. The crowd applauded as flog began to slip in from the corner of the stage, creeping across the floor. The music started, something slow and electronic. John was intrigued despite himself.

Honey Wilde slunk slowly out of the shadows. Her shoulders were hunched, and she moved with a slow lurch. Her straight black wig hung in front of her face, like a creature from a Japanese horror movie. The lights flickered out.

When they turned back on, she was standing at the edge of the stage, arms spread wide. She was tall, even without the heels; with them, she towered. Her hair was back, revealing a beautifully painted face; even John, who didn’t see the point of this sort of thing, had to admire the artistry. She was wearing a black gown of some sort of matte material, and black opera gloves. And on them, marching up her arms and around the curve of her bodice, curled around her throat--spiders. Huge, plastic spiders. And in her right hand, which she stretched out to the audience, slowly walking across her palm--

“Don’t worry,” she said, in a husky stage whisper. She stroked the back of the tarantula with one finger. “She won’t bite. Unless you ask nicely.” She snapped her teeth, and then smiled, looking suddenly self-conscious. Diana Explosion wolf-whistled. John shuddered. He looked around, plotting an escape route. When he looked back at the stage, Honey’s eyes were on him.

“If one of you could please do me a favor,” she said. “Tell the silver fox in the back row that I bite, too.”

John’s face burned. Georgie jostled him with her shoulder.

“He’s twenty-five,” she yelled back. The crowd laughed. Honey Wild ducked her head, and when she looked back, her smile was crooked.

“I suppose being with you has aged him prematurely, has it?” she said. Georgie laughed. John didn’t. The tarantula walked slowly along Honey Wilde’s palm.

“Only a joke,” she said. “Don’t let it... eat at you.”

Diana Explosion jeered. Honey shrugged. The gesture was strangely sheepish; it didn’t belong to the person in the gown and the dark red lipstick. Then the music shifted abruptly, pitched eerily up, and the performance began.

It seemed to be some sort of performance art, with slow techno interspersed with half-song stanzas of Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. What that had to do with spiders, John couldn’t say. He stopped paying attention. As the queen lurched and undulated across the stage, John stared down at his drink and thought angry, vague thoughts about pointless, fatuous entertainment and pretentious artists and men who thought that having a cock counted as a political statement. The next number featured a queen in a ridiculous harlequin costume and some kind of calliope remix, and John ignored Georgie’s worried glances and insistent nudges and pulled out his phone.

When the break came, he slid past her and went out the side for a cigarette. It was a cool night; he stood with his back to the brick wall and looked up a the sliver of orange-grey sky above the buildings. He breathed in, felt nicotine fill his lungs, allowed himself a moment to relax.

The door swung open. The man who emerged was tall and trying not to be. He had unruly brown hair that seemed pressed down on one side, and was wearing a jumper, ripped shorts, and fishnets. There was a grey smudge of hastily removed eyeliner around his eyes. “Oh,” he said. “Sorry. Hello. Mind if I share the alley for a bit?”

John shrugged. He offered the man his pack of cigarettes--might as well be polite--but was turned down.

“It’s just--need to get some air, you know? Decompress. I always get a bit jittery after a number. Can barely hold my hands straight, ha.”

“Hm,” John said.

“I don’t know how Tim does it. Of course, can’t hurt that he’s just like that all the time, I mean. It’s not really work for him, he just puts on a dress and goes out there, does his thing. Stuff really comes natural to him, you know?”

“I suppose,” John said.

“Sorry--you’re probably trying to relax, and here I am, talking your ear off.” The man ran his fingers through his hair, making it even more untidy, and looked down. There was a flush creeping up the side of his neck. “I, um. I’ll be out of your hair in a second, I promise. Just, while I’m here, I wanted to apologize.”

John raised an eyebrow.

“If I crossed some sort of line,” the man went on, as though that explained something. “I mean, it’s what most people are here for, to be honest, someone to flirt with and be mean to them, but you seemed sort of uncomfortable? So. Sorry about that. It’s just, I don’t really do this that often anymore, I’m only here because Tim made me, and for the charity. So I’m out of practice with the back and forth, is all.”

John squinted at him. The lighting was different; so was his posture, the shape of his face without makeup. But no, he recognized him now.

“You’re Honey Wilde,” he said. “The one with the tarantula.”

“Oh! Yes. Sorry. Not right now, I mean, right now I’m Martin. But yeah, that’s me.” Martin gave an awkward little wave. John took a deep drag on his cigarette and let the smoke out slowly.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Are you sure? You seem sort of...”

“It’s fine,” John said again, more firmly. Martin’s smile was pained. He had dimples, John noticed; they were slightly asymmetrical, the right one deeper than the left.

“Well that’s--good. I’m glad.” They stood in awkward silence for a moment. Martin kept looking at John, and then away; after a moment, John realized that he was being checked out.

He considered this. Martin wasn’t bad looking, as far as John could tell. He seemed nice enough. The apology had seemed genuine. And there was a part of John, a vicious, petty corner of his heart, that enjoyed the thought of leaving Georgie in the bar to go home with a virtual stranger.

“I’m sorry if it’s a step,” Martin said slowly, “but you don’t really seem to be enjoying yourself? Did your girlfriend drag you along, or something?”

“Ex girlfriend,” John said shortly. Martin’s eyes went wide.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, I’m--that makes it worse, doesn’t it. I’m sorry.”

Of course, there were the negatives. Sex with someone he knew well was just as likely to be uncomfortable and awkward as it was pleasurable; with a stranger, the risk was doubled. Martin seemed courteous, but he still might take it personally when John asked him not to touch him, or have weird kinks, or just expect John to be more into it than he could possibly be and come to his own conclusions when John inevitably wasn’t.

John watched Martin run a broad hand through his hair again, and decided that it wasn’t worth it.

“It’s--it’s fine,” he said, shrugging. “It was a long time ago. She has a girlfriend now, actually, who’s working behind the bar.”

“That’s--Oh, you mean Melanie? That’s Melanie’s Georgie?” Martin smiled, more genuinely this time. “Melanie won’t shut up about her. They seem sweet.”

“I don’t know if sweet is the word I would use to describe Melanie King,” John said. “But yes. They do seem to suit each other, don’t they.”

“Yeah.” There was something wistful in the way Martin said it, and a little sad. They looked at each other. John felt an unpleasant roll of anxiety; this was it, this was the moment when Martin would make a move, and John would say no, and they’d both go back inside feeling uncomfortable and awkward.

But Martin just pushed off from the wall and looked back at the door and said, strangely tentative, “Well, it was good to meet you. I should get back in. I’m not performing any more, thank god, but I don’t want to miss the second act. I’ll, uh, see you around, yeah?”

John blinked at him.

“Right,” he said. Martin flashed him a quick smile, and then opened the door. Through it, John could hear Diana Explosion, calling out, “--your seats, my lovely monsters, let’s get this show back on the road.” Then Martin was gone, the door closed behind him, and John was alone.

He took another deep drag on his cigarette. His phone buzzed, a text from Georgie, asking him where he was. He muted his phone and put it back in his pocket. Not yet. Soon, but not yet.

#the magnus archives #tma #my fic #jonmartin #jo(h)n sims #martin blackwood #JM

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baybelwax-blog · 7 years

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My mom still asks my dad to sing those songs, sometimes

My mom and I had dinner together several nights ago. I don’t see her much these days, despite us sharing a single-bathroom, two-bedroom house. She’s at work, or exhausted from work, a lot.

We sat down, and she asked me about school, about the thickly-accented Scottish history teacher I’ve been imitating all week, about Rhys, about the worrisome knocking noise my new-used car’s making, about this writing blog, about when I would be contacted by the University of California in regards to my recently-submitted application. She told me she didn’t like my tattoos. She ordered an oaky red wine from the two-page drink menu –

one of those restaurants in which impeccably-groomed, vampire-like waiters drop hot towels from silver tongs into your hands after you’ve finished your dinner, the entire menu contains dairy, a wide (and impressively eclectic) selection of French and Californian wines is offered, the selection of wines is wider than the selection of entrees, organic mints are delicately tucked into the bill.

To keep our conversation afloat, I asked my mom what she gathered of Trump’s recent immigration ban. She’s the foreign section editor at the Los Angeles Times; she’d lived, breathed, digested international airport protests and federal judges’ exhaustive assessments of the measure’s constitutionality the past couple of days.

My mom relishes in analyzing the inner politics and literary output of Times’ newsrooms, so work’s always a good thing to ask about.

She sipped her wine, and merely, briefly commented something about living in a country headed by a president with a diagnosable mental illness.

I waited for her to say something more.

She said the whole thing reminded her of my dad’s attempts to emigrate to Egypt from Sudan, after their engagement. My parents have always carried on an international sort of love – a strong marriage, despite the physical distance frequently inserted between them.

“That was a long time ago,” she said, when my dad looked strikingly like the young Mick Jagger, a handsome and blushing thing, wore his hair in a voluminous brunette bowl cut.

She hadn’t told me this story before.

My mom had seeped into her thirties, she estimated, and was living in Cairo, in an apartment whose balcony hung lavishly over the Nile River. A young and heavenly foreign correspondent, sharp-witted, with an ability to charm information from sealed bureaucratic lips, and a potent writer. She permed her hair faithfully every three months, and most frequently wore garments stitched with periwinkle threads and buttons. She crowded her bookshelves with yellowed editions of Keats and Hardy. Always kept a Siamese cat and a Persian rug. She’d met the pope, and had travelled to the majority of the continents.

In her early years of foreign correspondence work, she was assigned to write about, was engrossed in, and – despite professional journalist protocol – was emotionally-stirred by the blood and rubble of the Bosnian civil war.

My family visited Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the early-2000s. I was a little girl. That’s one of my earliest memories. I remember the trek to the Janković family graveyard, which perched between the damp, scraggly, but impressive brown hills that loomed behind the house my grandfather built, where my dad grew up. I slept in the bed that’d he’d slept in when he was my age. I most vividly recall the tattered Chernobyl-esque shopping malls and government buildings, which had been crippled in the war, that stood – hunched – as grim reminders of a city whose street gutters once, not too long ago, gurgled blood. My aunt and uncle, and my dad especially, tirelessly distracted my eyes from the ruins filling the car’s windows as we drove through the city. I can understand now that what they felt was shame.

My dad is Serbian, raised in present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina. A product of the formerly great Yugoslavia. If you ask his nationality, he’ll respond defiantly “Yugoslav” – only reluctantly, will he differentiate between the present-day states, and call himself a Serb, or sometimes a Bosnian-Serb.

I’ve always admired that small detail, that firmness, about him. I wonder what it’s like to have that strong, that ingrained, of a nationalistic sense.

My mom offered these contextual details, for the purpose of her story:

conflict touched my dad when it arrived in Sarajevo, in 1992. The city was a frictional mélange of Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats. Bosnia had recently declared independence, following Croatia and Slovenia, both of which had severed their allegiances with the Yugoslavian federation a year earlier.

The Bosnian-Serbs, supported by the Yugoslav’s People’s Army, injected defenses throughout Bosnia, fiercely seeking to secure Serbian territory.

The American newspapers, mom said, called it an “ethnic cleansing” – a “genocide” effectuated by Bosnian-Serbs – of the Muslim Bosniak and Catholic Croat peoples.

My dad fled his Bosnian homeland as conflict broke like an egg yolk, its sticky yellow permeating everything, suffocating, stinking. He evaded the draft, evaded the holy war that asked he point machine guns in the faces of his coworkers, neighbors, friends.

He found work on an oil rig ship, that was to port in Libya. When Libya was no longer safe for a Christian Serb, he uprooted again, and built a sort of life in Sudan.

It was there, in Sudan, that my parents met at a mutual friend’s St. Patrick’s day party. My dad arrived late – tardiness remains a habit he hasn’t managed to kick – as my mom was shouldering her purse, plotting her polite and apologetic exit.

“The Serb’s here!” someone called. Kim the writer was intrigued, having recently returned from reporting in Bosnia.

She said, Kim, the utterly biological and passionate human, too, was intrigued, by the broad-shouldered man who stood, commandingly, strikingly, in a brown leather jacket, which he wore with a simultaneous sharpness and ease.

They talked animatedly in a corner of the garden patio all evening, which glowed beneath stringy lights tangled in the palm fronds overhead. Mostly, they spoke about my dad’s roots in the bleeding country. About the politics, the divided peoples, the unique heartbreak of civil war.

“We made out all night and stuff, too,” she added insouciantly, poking her tongue at the crimson wine that stained the corners of her lips.

That night was shadowed by checkered-tablecloth dinners, by pensive and silent midnight strolls beneath date trees and crescent moons. Eventually, was shadowed by love. Then, by one failed marriage proposal. Then, by one successful marriage proposal, which occurred in an aluminum rowboat bumping against the Nile’s evening current. In the boat, my dad sang sweeping ballads about despairing Serbian women warning their husbands fighting away in Greece not to fall in love with the lovely Grecian women – to come home to the gorgeously Slavic, hardened wives that loved them.

My mom still asks my dad to sing those songs, sometimes.

My dad, still living in Sudan after their engagement, promised to join the young reporter he adored so feverishly, freshly, youthfully in Egypt. They envisioned a small, pretty life together, touched by the Nile’s fertile banks. He began the burdensome application work for a visa. Several weeks later, it was rejected.

He applied again, to be put before another wall. And several more times, over a period of months. All were rejected. On several occasions he was permitted to board his scheduled flight to Cairo – only to be held in Egyptian customs upon arrival – and to ultimately, despairingly, in a fit of yelling, board a flight back to Sudan. My mom flew to Sudan as often as was feasible to see him. My dad lived in an oil refinery dormitory, which was ostentatiously decorated with a twin-size bed and small window that cast a square of moonlight on the floor.

During this time, throughout the middle east and Europe, the dividing lines between Muslims and Orthodox-Christian Serbs were laced with barbwire – oozed blood, tumult, and fresh memories. As soon as my dad, in his visa applications, was discovered to be a Christian Serb, he was immediately, uncompromisingly barred from entering predominantly Muslim Egypt.

For my parents, one month apart became three, became six, became eight.

My mom navigated Egyptian political circles, being a newspaperwoman who reported predominantly on middle eastern politics. She’d frequented dinner parties given on occasion in the gold-trimmed dining room of Sudan’s Egypt-stationed ambassador. She’d spoken with him at length about Sudanese-Egyptian trade negotiations – and several times about the young man who permeated all of her thoughts, back in Sudan, who slept in an aluminum frame single bed, and subsisted off of farmers’ market date fruits and polaroid photographs.

The ambassador had sewn a sort of paternal, sympathetic affection for my mom over the course of their professional relationship. Admired her dignity, objectivity, and prose. Admired her ability to be on her own. I think he really wanted to help her.

Several more months passed. It was getting harder to see over the wall that had been erected between them.

My mother isn’t religious, although she considers herself a spiritual person; and she considers herself to have been in a state of desperation, at that point. It was several days before Christmas, not that Christmas is some large, commercial affair in Cairo – but which accentuated her solitude, thickened the barbwire between her and her fiancé, made the heaviness of her heart a meatier burden to lug around –

on this evening twenty-something years ago, the sun was unthreading in long, yellow strings to the Nile’s banks.

(In the small minutes between Egyptian day and night, when the line between the two is erased – when the sky spills into a citrusy pink cocktail that you’d be set back $16 for at a chic Manhattan rooftop bar – even I, who have been lucky enough to have watched in transfixion several of these sunsets, might be led to believe that something like God is pouring everybody’s drinks.)

To no one in particular, leaning against the white iron balcony fencing –

my mom said, “please.”

Deciding, then, to speak directly to God:

“bring llija to Egypt.”

Fluttering palm fronds, and the white noise of full-throttle traffic jams and street vendors. There wasn’t much else, much less anything remarkable. Not that she’d anticipated there would be. She’d waited a long time for God to come into her life, and here she still was, waiting.

Ilija is derived from the Hebrew “Elijah.” Saint Ilija, in the Macedonian Orthodox church, is revered as a ninth-century prophet who supposedly arrived at the gates of Heaven in a chariot of fire.

In the entryway to my childhood home, my parents hung an oil painting of St. Ilija, awaiting admission.

Ilija is also my dad’s name. It was also he who jingled the apartment doorbell perhaps ten minutes thereafter, wearing the handsome leather jacket my mom had met him in, skin smelling of sandalwood aftershave and cool night air, carrying a dozen fiery red roses in the nook of his elbow.

The ambassador, whose dining room was trimmed neatly with gold, had arranged that a visa be specially granted for the young man sleeping fitfully, dreamlessly, far away in an oil refinery dormitory.

My mom still isn’t religious, but claims that in a world colored by things like civil wars and lovers’ separation, miracles happen every now and then.

My mom ended her story abruptly. She does that, a lot. I think it’s because her sensibilities as a writer conduct the way she navigates life, in general:

“let things speak for themselves,” she said to me once, for example, editing one of my school essays, “overstatement only takes away from the effect.”

I said, “you never told me that story,”

She just shrugged, and flagged down the waitress to order another glass of wine.

My dad still finds all sorts of occasions to bring my mom flowers.

#I revised this and am much happier with it now #writing #spilled ink #thoughts #personal #writers on tumblr

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