#oh we got popchyk baby!!!!!!!

[weltonreject]

In regards to the boris calling popchyk their baby post ... you Should !!!!

(x)

Theo isn’t sure why it’s weird to him. Maybe it’s funny and he just doesn’t want to laugh, want to encourage Boris or the nickname. Maybe--

“Popchyk! It is dinner time!” Boris says, clapping his hands and calling the dog from the next room over. His little round bed is close to the kitchen as possible in his old age. It still takes Popper until Boris is just about to put the bowl down for him to come bopping up to his ankles.

He barks shortly, almost like a yelp, before stepping back. He tells Boris where he wants the bowl.

Theo is standing at the sink, washing their own dinner dishes quietly, listening to Boris sing in Russian to the dog. He thinks this is the weirdest thing he'll ever have to explain to any house guests.

“Potter, the baby has such big appetite! Old age has done nothing to him!”

Theo is about to laugh and shrug the comment away when he hears it. “Yeah I guess he-- wait... The baby?”

“Baby! Our baby, Popchyk!”

“It’s a dog. We don’t have children, Boris.”

"Do not say that!” Boris stands up straight suddenly, accidentally teasing the dog with food nearly at eating level before sending it back up to the Heavens By The Counter. “Do not love our baby Popchyk?”

“I didn’t say that.” Theo says. “I said it’s the dog. Not a baby. Babies become toddlers, become children. They’re human.” Theo isn’t sure when he became such a stickler for nicknames. He really should have started with his own.

“No!” Boris shouts, jokingly getting out of hand. Theo shakes off his hands and leans against the sink, crossing his arms as he does. They’re not arguing but he is ready for if they do. “Baby something that needs care-- has two parents!” Boris motions between the two of them. “Three is family!”

“You’re calling us a family now?” Theo isn’t sure why it bothers him so much. Maybe it’s because he hadn’t been consulted. Or maybe because he hasn’t prepared at all. He doesn’t want to be a shitty father, even after knowing three awful ones.

“Do not think so?”

“I-- I don’t know. Family seems pretty formal for us.” Theo wants to scoff, but there’s a loose piece of hope that cracks his façade and his voice. “Don’t we have to be like... better people for that?”

“Better?” Boris shakes his head and whips his curls out of shape. “Family is whenever love binds you together! I have family with you, we have family with Popchyk-- our little baby! Crawls around and begs to be fed-- and we love him for it! And I--” Boris doesn’t say it. But what he means is he loves Theo too, the way families are supposed to.

“Yeah.” Theo nods. He looks down at their dog, a surviving and suspended moment of their childhood staring up at Boris with eagerness and intense patience. They’d been a family even when they thought they were standing alone in the rubble of their own private familial collapse. He smiles and reaches for the dog food bowl in Boris’s hand. “Don’t tease the baby like that, Boris. You better feed him now or he’ll start liking me better. Again.”

“Favorite-ism!” Boris gasps, pointing at Popchyk with a grin. His tail wags wildly, nearly shaking his entire body. “Always liked Potter-Father better. But I understand, yes. Is good father to have.”

[merrysithmas]

some POPPER-centric hcs:

I.

Boris and Theo celebrating Popper's birthday together for two years, waking up at two in the afternoon, blinds drawn tight - but not tight enough to banish the bright gleam of treasure chest gold that flares through the slits between them, 777 Vegas coin yellow, graffitiing malleable stripes of desert sun across the walls and crumpled sheets. Theo peeking a tired eye over the coverlet from under Boris' arm, little Popper’s big cookie-round ink eyes already awake and staring at him, tail wagging bashfully against the sheets in the silence.

Boris, who was snoring just a moment ago, starts up, suddenly, electrified, hollering a gasping realization that sounds something like, “Moy malchik!” The sound pops a breaker in Theo’s brain, letting loose a migraine from last night's bender, which is evidenced by the toppled pill bottles (Xandra's), the semi-collapsed beer cans and the vague memory of Boris' stoned over-confidence ("Potter! Look - against my head - watch - I bet I can - like the movies!"), and the ultimately ignorable ache of his hamstrings.

At Boris' startling exclamation Popper lets loose an exuberant tirade of ungodly shrieking, like set off by the crack of a gun at race he was raring for, immediately licking Boris' morning-slick skin, teenaged greasy and gross, and Boris is laughing so loud that the walls almost shake, as they are so regularly starved and thin of joy. And Theo sits up, wincing (that phantom ache again, inadmissible memories) and leans on his elbow, reaching out to pat the wild little thing who quickly turns on him, "Ok - Happy birthday! Happy birthday!"

II.

Boris and Theo washing Popper in the sink - he reeks. Sickly sweet rotten fruit-smell compounded with the wet mildewy stench of old laundry, distinctly intermixed with the odor of shit. Popper’s yelping echoes through the kitchen like an antique car horn, petrified, claws rigid on the edge of the sink, braced for continued frantic attempts to flee his sudsy prison and energized with bouts of fervor not entirely unlike a demonic possession. The one overhead light fixed accusatorily above the kitchen sink makes the whole set up look like an interrogation room - worlds away from the girly relaxing grooming videos they found on Youtube.

“Potter! Not this way!" Boris screeches - voice cracking like it has been lately - exacerbated in its rawness by the cheap, caustic brand of cigarettes he smokes. Lately they’ve been meeting the parched maw of his chapped lips like a consecutive line of ants, one after the other, his fingernails yellowing. Popper shakes violently, way before Theo is ready and can throw the ratty towel across his drenched body, whirling like a windmill, fur centripetal and spiralling, soaking their filthy t-shirts flat onto their bony bruised limbs.

“Oh, Popper," Boris outright coos, followed by a placating barrage of what is unmistakably a grandmotherly coddle of (likely) Polish. "You look just like Potter!" he declares, finally discarding his ciagrette, which dims in the puddle on the counter as it sucks up water. Theo grabs it as it does, revives it, takes a long, charring drag of nicotine and tar. His eyes narrow behind his glasses, observing the drowned-rat Maltese, frigid and shaking to its bones, and completely hates how Popper's forlorn appearance quite accurately recalls his own reflecton, just in from the pool, hair flat to his head, eyes big and, somehow always, helpless.

III.

Boris and Theo say goodbye to Popper when he is fifteen. Congestive heart failure - a diagnosis so deleterious and uncomfortably human Theo finds it hard to believe when the middle-aged vet ("Dr Janet", purple earrings, thick rectangular glasses - incense burning, loose leaf tea drinking, National Park lover) breaks it to him. She seems to understand the frozen bones in his shoulders and his unexpected quietness better than he does, leaving the room before he notices she’s gone.

Even in the darkest edges of his flayed existentialisms Theo never found room for dogs. Dogs, he supposes for the first time, in an achingly unfair realization, with their bright renewable resource of happiness (which they often give freely even to the undesevering, or unknowning, or unappreciative) are immune to such nihilistic musings. Popper stares at him from the table, ragged and old, too heavy in the middle and too thin on the edges, breathing all wrong. How did - all that time pass?

Boris, on video-chat in Kyyiv, up to no nefarious deed (he insists) is the one, for once, startled by Theo’s harsh red eyes, like he's been doping too much again, but there’s no dope - just a clinical setting and a hard shuddering breathing, from somewhere offscreen, quiet like it’s coming from a baby in crib.

Boris, like a knitted sweater, so often and inevitably pulled in many different directions until he disappears, seems to swat away half a dozen Non-English speaking acquaintances before the line goes quiet on his end and Theo can actually explain what is going on. The way he touches the screen on the video chat with his fingertips when Theo presents it to Popper (“Let me see him please,” Boris had asked, with no hidden heartbreak) makes Theo’s chest crush inward like the emotional equivalent of the impact of a car accident.

Boris says no at first, when Theo makes the suggestion, no let him go when he's supposed to, not yet, then: let me see him first, and makes it all the way to JFK before his phone rings. He doesn't answer, won't, but when he walks in the jingling door from the merciless city rain, the black tails of his coat dragging water, all sharp angles and dark shadows, he already knows.

“He couldn’t wait anymore,” Theo says. And when he meets Theo’s cherry red eyes, Boris doesn’t yell, or get angry - he cries. Right there in the lobby - he cries. Hands shielding his eyes, like a boy cowering beneath the shade of an umbrella.

IV.

Later they bump coke in the bathroom of Gramercy Tavern, shitfaced at the table, “Remember when he ate Xandra’s G-string?” Theo says so loudly it rings across the room like a papal blessing.

“Aha! Yes! So sneaky. Little pervert! Gets that from you! And the time he shit in the grocery store? Aisle 12?”

The memories pour out: “His fucking pink collar with the bell on it.” “How he howl like - ooo ooo oooo! So annoying! Always in the morning! Yes, Popchyk! I’m coming!” “Oh when we caught him fucking The Playa’s chihuahua?” “да, I told him he could do better! He was nice boy she was not so nice. Still, he got more ass than either one of us,” Boris says fondly, proudly, and clinks his shotglass to Theo for what seems like the hundreth time.

“Something deeply not right about catching a Maltese in the throes of passion,” Theo says, blinking long-disturbed eyes behind the dewy lenses of his glasses. Boris seems to agree, with a noncomittal grunt, and puts a heavy, vice-like grip onto Theo’s shoulder, shaking him until he looks up.

“Like a teddy bear getting a blowjob,” he says, and Theo laughs a half-choked laugh. They’re both crying. They’re both fucking crying.

“To Popchyk née Popper, G-string sniffer, pillow hat, accomplished singer,” Theo sniffs, sitting up straightly from his messy, hunched position over the table, head back against the booth. Boris meets his eyes, they’re both such a fucking mess. “And friend.”

“Vichnaya pamyat,” Boris says formally, in response. Theo smashes his glass, agreeing.

“Eternal memory.”

V.

“Open any one! Any one you want!” Boris crows happily, the tip of his nose red like he’s been outside in the cold but he hasn’t, not for hours, and the sloshing bottle of Christmas cheer which is sitting (carelessly, without a coaster, Theo notices with disdain) on the mahogany side table is nearly empty at only half past noon. “Oh! My big mistake!” Boris makes a big show of putting his hand to his chest in guilt, elevating the bottle and placing it on top of a book instead. “блядь,” he scoffs.

“I know what ‘bitch’ in Russian is,” Theo answers, wrapped warmly in a woolen Burberry pullover, burgundy, with the festive forest green cuffs of his starched button up curling around the ends of his sleeves. Snow is falling outside like white wafting butterflies, the stone Antwerp architecture nestled under frost, Tchaikovsky on the speakers hooked up to Boris’ sentimental iPhone.

“I know!” Boris says cheerily, gesturing towards the presents beneath the tree with a sweeping, encouraging hand. “Any one!”

Theo rolls his eyes, but as they land on the smattering of gifts wrapped festively on the dark hardwood floor his mood lifts. Picking up a small one, dark matte navy blue with a silver ribbon Boris exclaims offendedly -

“No! Any one!” he repeats, taking the blue one out of Theo’s hands and replacing it with a rather less elegant medium-sized red box, bundled together with a haphazard green string. “This one!”

The oddly-weighted box quivers in his grip, a strange feeling which sends an unexpected thrill of fear through Theo, “What is this.”

“Open!” Boris goads. “Just look!” he seems pleased with himself, taking another long hit off the joint that is smoking in the ash tray and then rubbing his palms together and leaning forward over his knees, eagerly like a kid.

The box is easy to open, just a cover over a base, which Theo lifts to reveal the small fuzzy face of a tiny, tiny round dog, so extremely gay, circular in the face like a teddy bear, pawing at the side of the box.

“You like her?” Boris asks with the trepidation of new fallen snow, peering over Theo’s shoulder.

The puppy stares at him, unblinking and cherubic, and softly licks Theo’s nose. It happily lets out the shrillest bark from its tiny lungs, a sound so high-pitched it makes the bells on the tree tingle in the vaguest memory of tinnitus.

“Ah, бубенчик Popchykova!” Boris laughs.

Theo hoists the little thing up, blinking tree lights ensconsing the ball of its fuzz, an ornament-shape itself - the puppy wriggles disorganized limbs in midair, pawing innocently for warmth and closeness. Somehow smaller, more effeminate, and more annoying than his last dog. He loves her already. Round cookie-shaped eyes and a bark that splits his skull. And the name?

It fits.

[medievalcat]

ok here are my bird movie thoughts spoilers under cut

-you already have seen me say this but: my biggest criticism is that the casting department should have cast native actors as Theo and Audrey.

also Audrey’s role being so reduced was. not good.

-I really liked the portrayal of Hobie and Pippa they really stood out. But there should have been more of them not just by themselves but together!! (if there had just been a miniseries ...) I think it was kind of an interesting choice that Hobie knows about the painting earlier but I didnt quite mind that? And Im glad that the movie..did not try and show her aunts decision in a good light

-Its lol that critics complained about Theo not having chemistry with Pippa when that ....lol...... AND the scenes we do have with Pippa are really effective looks at HER as a person in her own right even if we could have had more. one of the complaints I’ve seen about the book is that people feel she’s a non character but I don’t think so and I think the film medium having her acted out by a person was helpful to understanding

-I really liked Kitsey, she was very nuanced and interesting. and the same actress will be the coach in Dare Me....A Portfolio.

-I enjoyed it. but I will say the editing kind of...?? and if I didn’t read the book I would have been confused. I think non linear storytelling is fine and so is not laying everything out and revealing things gradually is too. but this story would  have worked better with a miniseries. a lot just felt for the film purpose underdeveloped and rushed and either left things out or almost understated them? I get that film is a different adaption but ... for example Theo’s addiction struggles definitely didnt have the same focus in the movie.

-Hobies earring, Xandra’s jacket, the kids’ shared cat shirt, thank you wardrobe department 

-Hobie telling little Theo that he and Popchyk can stay and then Popchyk sleeping on Theo...Cinema

-what got the big laugh in the theater was when Chance just straight up asked tiny Theo if he wants a drink

-XANDRA....I thought there would be more of her( and more stuff in Vegas)? but her laugh/crying when she tells Theo he’s just like Larry (which I think having that face-to-face instead of the phone worked well) was so much and I think she was effective in the scenes she was in

-when baby Theo was being interrogated and was like ITS A REMBRANDT. kdjhfbhdg. the actor was really adorable and good 

-the kids were good (BETTE...lol) and could maybe have been utilized more. I liked the scene that was like “when does it hit” and IMMEDIATELY cut to them lying down high out of their minds. and somehow them doing the kids-at-a-sleepover seriously telling secrets thing about their traumas right after that worked. it was mood whiplash but that fits with how it should be ig.

- “I’m not his ward” “whatever you are to him” I WAS LIKE OH NO HE FUCKING DIDNT......!!! HE FUCKING DIDNT !!!!!!

John Crowley: Theo isnt gay but I’m going to emphasize this textually explicitly gay man who threatens him about knowing his secrets, saying “ I KNOW WHO YOU ARE” like 3 times in a row. also Boris is straight but he can’t have a girlfriend or talk about spposedly having a wife or even work with a business associate who is a woman (Myriam being cut?? let her talk..) and he stares longingly at Theo and is cinematically positioned opposite Kitsey at the party like a homewrecker in an old movie

(I genuinely love the movie Brooklyn, but Crowley...??? )

-Boris Good

-adult Theo and his endless Cersei expressions/mannerisms legit was so fucking funny. EXPRESSIONS EXACTLY LIKE HER....”I socialize with people I despise” I know he and his mommy issues stan her! something that would happen in the book. he looked like he was gonna tell Everett “by the way there’s a 30 percent off sale on lawn furniture at Sears today.” which is maybe kind of different from book Theo who is ... not outwardly like that as much

-did you see how they made Nicole look like Laura Bush lol. not a criticism just saying. but she was really good in the movie and I liked the portrayal of Mrs B and I liked how the Barbour family was done. Andy was funny and enjoyable

-I liked the cinematography detail of Theo going back to his home and seeing front and center Audrey’s mug still with her lipstick mark on it, and then seeing her red sweater laid out (which looks like Boris’ sweater)

-another detail I thought was cool was kid Pippa’s ipod being an old model to show how it was in the 2000s

-little Boris had....the exact same mannerisms and clothing style as me when I was 15 but like as a boy hsbdfdsgh

-”Katy from civics....her mother’s bf” KOTKU??? IS THAT YOU??? IS THE BOYFRIEND THE HORRIBLE ABUSIVE ONE SHE RAN AWAY FROM OR IS THIS HOPEFULLY  A NICE NEW ONE? in seriousness I think having Kotku in the medium of the film  acted out by a person and not just filtered through Theos biased pov (she said she saw him as a little brother...) would have been cool

-I know this probably isnt what happened but I will Meme:  Crowley took one look at the “Popchyk is a gay dog” line and said we HAVE to cut half that dogs scenes