#them ending up having to perform the shakespeare play they were pretending to rehearse in that irish lady's apartment >:)

[my-timing-is-digital]

send  👫  for  a  reunion  starter

After the conclusion of Clemens' debacle, and his and Guinan's subsequent departures, the android repositioned the transreceiver in his supposed prototypical device for the horseless carriages and settled himself at the desk, monitoring the instrument's workings deliberately. Assiduously, he observed the rhythmic oscillations of the metal indicator, which functioned in a similar fashion as an analogue seismograph. Thus far, his device had not measured any time shifts, and would not for the next 39 minutes...

A long-awaited, arrhythmic scratching sound instantaneously tore his attention to the contraption. Excitedly, the pen attached to the end of the indicator recorded the occurrence — the device finally measured the time shift he had been anticipating —, and based off of the particulars printed on the sheet of paper, he could accurately determine the epicentre of the spatial distortion. Data consulted a map of the town to confirm the location, and without a moment's hesitation, he leapt to his feet and vacated his room. He navigated himself down a flight of stairs with mathematical precision and hurried outside where he supplied the bellboy, Jack, with sufficient 19th century currency to have him procure a carriage, preferably drawn by two equines — to multiply the carriage's power.

The ever-efficient hotel employee immediately scurried off to the stables and returned within several minutes, gesturing gleefully at the wagon he had snatched from an agitated colleague. Prior to mounting the box, Data expressed his gratitude for his services and pressed an additional sum of money in the boy's hand. He had never rode on horseback, let alone piloted a vehicle that was pulled by two of them, but he had judged it advantageous to observe others operate this form of transportation, in case he would relay on its services in the foreseeable future — he was glad he had pursued that particular endeavour.

Data armed himself with the reins and managed to set the equines into motion, gently instructing the animals to accelerate. The terminal words of farewell that emanated from the bellboy were left behind in a cloud of dust...

The carriage careened through the streets, teetering uncomfortably toward his destination: the local hospital. And it was not until he was in close proximity of the aforementioned facility that his positronic subprocessors sensed the familiar hum of 24th century technology, or rather, the wavelengths of a tricorder that was broadcasting signals on all frequencies. While he narrowly circumvented a collision with another horse-drawn carriage, he inferred that the others must have successfully ferried themselves across the frontiers of time and were here to assist him.

When the carriage swept around a corner, the tricorder transmission started to grow stronger and more prominent; his conjecture was confirmed when he sighted the others filing out of the hospital, and he promptly surmised that the occurrence of the time shift might have been a joint effort between them and the two individuals with the ophidian. Unfortunately, he could not initiate his interrogation, for his friends appeared to have antagonised the local police force.

'Data!' Commander Riker's loud, sonorous voice lacerated through the air, alerting him, unnecessarily, of their presence.

The android pulled on the reins to render the equines stationary adjacent to the pavement, allowing his friends to embark the vehicle.

'Doctor,' Data said, his own voice extraordinarily tranquil. He extended his hand for to grab and join him on the box seat while the others clambered into the carriage. 'It is good to see you again.'

'Go, Data! Hurry!' Captain Picard ordered, an urgent accentuation vibrated in the words he had enunciated.

'Aye, sir,' he replied compliantly, providing the horses with the objective to proceed down the street, with the intention to escape the police and take temporary refuge in the countryside until the coast was clear and they were certain no reinforcements would be ambushing them upon their return...

[fandomsilhouette]

they’ve got a bad reputation (they’ll get a standing ovation)

The spotlight clicks on, floods the stage until the shadows are sent scampering away, every flaw and every fear in sharp contrast for the audience to feast upon; but what horrors lurk where the darkness prowls, trapped at the edges of the script like handcuffs around the actor? May life mirror art at the best of times, the worst of times. 

Happy @felinettenovember, y’all! We’re back to terrible o’clock writing times with @musicfren, who is collaborating with me on this fic-turned-mechanism-through-which-to-preach-on-the-spot-Hamlet-analysis. He’ll be posting the second part on his account tomorrow, during which the bulk of my meta nonsense is going to come through. Are you following him yet? @emzurl spoiled this whole story with their art and @dumpsdoods simply spoils me with theirs. 

Part 1 below. Part 2 upcoming.

“Alright, take ten, my dudes! We’ll go from Act III, Scene 1 after you get some snacks and chill.” 

Marinette lets out an amused laugh as she thumbs through her copy of the script, ignoring the throng of hungry students pushing past her, desperate for this grueling 5 hour rehearsal to end. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but certainly not of this play. Nino makes a good director, she thinkst: loud, relentlessly positive, able to carry the sagging energy of an entire unwilling highschool production on his shoulders.

But alas, poor Nino is fighting a losing battle. Everyone knows that the point of this play is the obligatory report they will all have to write for their literature class at the end of the week. Almost no one here can act, and Marinette’s arms are beginning to grow tired from carrying up the entire play. With scarcely a week left it looks like most people are planning to coast the rest of the way to a clean C+. The part of Hamlet still has not been cast.

Akuma attacks have pushed back the discussions they were meant to have on the play, and Bustier couldn’t cancel the major assignment for the unit; instead, she had told them to analyze the play through the role of their choice after embodying it for the few weeks it took to rehearse and perform the production. Their in-class discussions have been condensed into a take-home paper on top of the already obligatory theatre performance and pretty much everyone knows that Bustier would be lenient on them just for that. And Nino knows they know, and Marinette is starting to suspect that he is itching to “chill” like he keeps telling them to. 

Marinette chews on the corner of her pencil, running a finger over the veritable bloodbath of neat pink notes she’s crammed into the margins of every page. She’s on in the next scene, and she wants to make sure she’s got all the nuances of the character, her character, exactly as she plans to bring her to life. Looking over the script, Marinette starts to regret not typing the notes to begin with: her entire essay is definitely already fully composed. Maybe Max will consider building her an application that can scan the document and transpose it to a word processor as editable text… 

“Give me your hand, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends.” 

Marinette looks up to see Felix quoting Shakespeare, trying very hard to look inconspicuous in his black stage-hand clothes, wheeling a stand of fake swords almost as tall as he was. She watches with some amusement as he struggles to set it upright, and makes absolutely no move to help him. 

“I wasn’t expecting to see you on stage any time this week,” she says, sticking her tongue out and being far cuter than it had any right to be. Felix, sweating, scrambles for a riposte. 

“I hadn’t expected you out of the home ec room at all. Shouldn’t you be half-drowned in fabric or something?” 

She sends him a quizzical look. He wonders if the akuma attacks have scrambled her memory. “Because...you’ve got costumes to work on? As the play’s costume designer?” 

“Oh, I’m not doing costumes this year, actually.” Marinette laughs awkwardly. “I’m not even sure what I would write about if I were.” 

Felix stares at her. The sword he was carrying slid out of his grasp with a dull clang.

“...what are you writing about as a stagehand?” 

Felix decides to pretend the last few moments were a fever dream and focus on answering this one very reasonable question. “I’m looking at the blocking and the prop placement and the lighting and how it impacts the effect of the character portrayal on the audience and what information manages to get conveyed to the audience.” 

Marinette offers a suitably impressed ooh at this. “How far have you gotten with it?” 

“Darling, we don’t even have a Hamlet. The titular character. I’ve done nothing.” Felix offers the most deadpan look he can muster and startles at her giggle. “What, how far have you gotten?!”

Marinette flashes her script at him, more notes than dialogue at this point. 

“You are possibly the only person in the class thinking anything even remotely deep about this play. What is all that for?!” 

“Hopefully for a handwritten notes to editable text conversion app.” 

Felix only narrowly avoids gaping. What?! “...is that what’s scrawled on every corner of that script you’re clutching?” He grins crookedly at her, and her traitorous heart skips a beat. 

“...oh! no, um, those are my notes. For… my essay? I’ve written out the character analyses into where the text supports my arguments and… um… yeah.” She flushes with the realization that 1) that was completely out of context for him because 2) he cannot, in fact, read her mind. 

“...Marinette, for what do you possibly need notes?” 

“...to play my character?” 

“Oh, wow, are you playing a guy? Impressive, tiny girl.” He rakes his gaze down her body and Marinette is flushed for a whole new reason now. She pushes to her feet and doesn’t bother to care about the swords she knocks over. 

“I’m not, actually.” 

“Why?! Who is there to play among the female characters? Marinette, I took you as someone who plays characters of worth.”

She looks up at him, eyes wide with dangerous innocence “Are female characters not valuable?” 

“I-- no, that’s not what I meant and you know it! Shakespeare is historical, and male-centric, and writes women who do little more than parrot the views of the men around them if they get any dialogue at all. There’s no substance there! Who are you possibly going to play, Gertrude? Ophelia?!?” Felix’s tone makes it very clear what he thinks of the only two options she has available to her. 

Marinette sweeps past him coolly, her hair whipping against his cheek. “I am playing Ophelia, actually.”

Stumbling, Felix turns and gives her a wry grin. “Oh darn, I’m sorry for your loss.” He makes a valiant effort at replicating her stuck out tongue, not that Marinette is looking. It’s for the best: it’s not nearly as cute on him. 

“Excuse you?” Marinette halts in her tracks, shadowed amongst the heavy curtains of stageside. Her voice echoes hauntingly around the empty theatre. 

“...c’mon. Ophelia does less than Gertrude. She even has fewer lines!”

With great restraint, Marinette manages to do nothing more than turn to face Felix, trembling with repressed rage. “Does less? Ophelia is the only person in this play who does anything at all that isn’t driven by a madman’s plot! Ophelia is the only person in this play who can pull Hamlet out of insanity, even if for little more than a moment.” 

Frustrated, Felix tosses the nearest item at her and growls when she catches it neatly. It’s a victory when she stalks off across the stage to the opposite wing, gathering her notes and settling herself neatly in a prim fury. She’s wrong, she’s wrong, she’s wrong. He whirls around and starts rearranging everything she knocked over, grumbling under his breath. 

“Ophelia is the only character in that play who makes zero choices of her own. Even her death was a result of her tripping into a lake.”

There’s a crashing sound, and Felix spins back around to see Marinette bolt upright, tempestuous in her temper. Felix may have gotten a bit too loud with that last statement.

“How can you say that? That’s the most significant choice she makes in the whole play!”

Felix can feel the irritation rising, hot and ugly in his chest. Why is she being so stubborn? Marinette makes a gesture at him, quick and angry from the other side of the room. Felix squints and tilts his head, struggling to what she was doing from across the stage. Then all at once it hits him.

“Do… do you bite your thumb at me?!” He splutters in indignant incoherency, his grip tightening on whatever he’s holding until the plastic grooves bite into his skin. 

“I do bite my thumb at thee, sir.” 

Felix steps onto stage, glaring. Marinette matches him step for step, glare for angry glare. Nino gasps, cowers, and then grabs his camera.

The class, milling around aimlessly as their ten minutes ticked to an end, comes to a collective halt. Nino sheppards them out of the way of the camera’s shot. They flock without protest to the edges of the theatre, terrified to watch this trainwreck unfold, terrified they’ll miss even a second of it. The die has been cast. Who now the price of his dear blood doth owe?

Nino can only hope that the set backgrounds manage to come out of this intact.

[skzsauce01]

In Fair Verona︱Chapter 4

Synopsis: Jisung knows he is the Romeo to your Juliet. He could wax poetry about you all throughout rehearsal and even a little after. Except Hwang Hyunjin is the one playing Romeo in the school play, not him. Jisung is just another tech crew member that you don’t know, but he’s determined to win your heart... by any means necessary.

Warning: none... yet

Word Count: 1.8k

Pairing: fem!reader x Jisung; fem!reader x Hyunjin

updates every Wednesday and Sunday @ 11 PM PST︱chapter list

Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble—

And I will do it without fear or doubt,

To live an unstained wife to my sweet love.

Jisung feels exactly as Juliet does in Act IV; he, too, would suffer in order for his love for you to remain pure. Venomous snakes, giant bears, and even being buried alive sound fairly doable. Seeing you with Hyunjin is a different story, however. He’s not even in Act IV, but he insists on watching you from backstage. Yugyeom and Ryujin seem to have taken a liking to him, and Jisung wants to shout that Hwang Hyunjin isn’t all that great.

He has no evidence of that, but he just feels it in his heart.

In the spare minute you’re not performing or playing a “dead” body on stage, you’re waiting in the wings with Hyunjin by your side, praising you for your acting. You beam at his compliments and say, “It’s all because we practiced in class today.”

Hyunjin shares a class with you, drama most likely. Fantastic. Absolutely amazing. Jisung only sees you at rehearsal, but you’re both always preoccupied with other things, so he doesn’t even get to be with you that long. He feels a twinge of envy, and it grows when you seemingly allow Hyunjin to playfully tug at the sash around your waist.

He abruptly turns to Changbin and asks, “When do you think dinner’s going to be?”

"I don't know. After this act?"

"How many scenes are there?"

He flips through his binder. "Five. And we’re on the second one. Are you hungry already?”

“Just asking. Thanks.”

“Sure.”

Only a short distance away, Hyunjin gently turns you around and ties the loose sash back into a neat bow. He’s slow and methodical, and Jisung knows he’s doing so on purpose. Anger flares throughout his body, and he stares daggers at the back of Hyunjin’s head. You don’t look bothered though. You play with your fingers while quietly thanking him. Ryujin is nearby; she could have done it, Jisung bitterly thinks.

You nearly miss your cue because of Hyunjin’s antics and are forced to run on stage. Jisung feels a smug grin forming from his vindication, so he quickly tucks his nose into the collar of his shirt, pretending to be cold from the air conditioning.

“Hey, Jisung, right?”

“Yes,” he replies, slowly drawing out the ‘e.’ What does Hyunjin want with him?

He sits down on the coffin beside Jisung. “Well, Y/N said you were a big Shakespeare fan, and I was wondering if you could give me some advice on how to portray Romeo. Ms. Park’s advice isn’t really helping me, so I thought maybe yours would. Since, you know, you like Shakespeare’s plays.”

“S-sure.”

Should he give him good advice? Bad? It’s probably going to be all bad since he doesn’t really like Romeo, let alone Romeo and Juliet.

“Thanks. I don’t really know how to play Romeo. It’s really hard to be him when I know that he’s just a dumb, horny teenager.”

Jisung thinks that’s exactly what Hyunjin is, but he digresses. “Just pretend to be maddeningly in love with Juliet. That’s, like, the entire plot.”

He sighs. “I can’t say those things to Y/N. I physically can’t. Every time I do, I get red and embarrassed. When she looks at me, it’s even worse. You know how Romeo says Juliet is the sun? That’s exactly what Y/N is.”

A strangled noise leaves Jisung’s mouth. To his horror, he knows exactly what Hyunjin is describing.

“You get me, right? There’s just something about her.”

He doesn’t say anything, just stares at you on stage. You’re worrying about the sleeping draught actually being poison, but even anguish looks pretty on you. His own anguish is the opposite. His head hurts, his heart is erratic, his foot repeatedly taps the floor. Hyunjin looks over at Jisung, waiting expectantly for an answer.

“Jisung?”

“I can’t help you,” he blurts out, not looking at him. “There’s— there’s nothing helpful I can tell you if you can’t say those lines.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” he sighs. “Thanks anyway.”

Hyunjin finally leaves him alone, but Jisung can’t bring himself to watch you as closely. He always had an inkling of a feeling that Hyunjin was interested in you, but he could never tell if he was flirting or just being Hyunjin. Now that he knows the truth, Hyunjin looks different, and you kind of do too. You’re less bright, while Hyunjin’s turning into a muddy gray color.

The rest of Act IV goes swimmingly, with only some redos. Just like Changbin predicted, dinner break starts when the act ends. Jisung chooses to walk to the convenience store with Chan and Jeongin even though he brought food from home. He doesn’t want to face Hyunjin or you after what he just learned. Jeongin asks about why he isn’t working lights like usual, and he makes up some excuse about wanting to work on homework during rehearsal.

You’re the real reason why.

“But you don’t even do homework. Ryujin says you just space out and stare off in the distance,” he protests.

“Things didn’t go as planned,” he shrugs. “Does anyone like doing homework?”

At the convenience store, Jisung hesitates in front of the chip aisle, thinking back to when Hyunjin gave you a bag. It only takes a few seconds for him to decide before he snatches two off the rack.

Jisung finishes his dinner of rice balls on the walk back, but he doesn’t start on his chips. Is it strange that he wants to share chips with you, just like how you did with Hyunjin? The activity was so mundane, but Jisung feels like that part is missing from his relationship with you. All you and him talk about is theater, but he’s never going to be more than your theater buddy if theater is the only thing you two have in common.

After dinner, the final act begins, and Jisung is unusually worried about the kiss scene, despite knowing that you are too shy to kiss for now. He rotates between sitting down on the prop bench and getting up for water he isn’t thirsty for. Hyunjin, instead, skips over it, and Jisung can breathe again. When Juliet wakes up from the sleeping draught, you’re supposed to kiss him before stabbing yourself with the dagger. As he expected and hoped, you skip over that step as well. His breathing slows and returns to a more reasonable pace.

The act ends with the Capulet and Montague families making peace with each other and deciding to erect golden statues of their dead children to memorialize the tragedy. There’s a few cries of disbelief and astonishment in the comms at such a stupid conclusion, and Jisung is one of them. He hates this play so much. You’re the only tolerable thing about it.

Ms. Park makes you and Hyunjin go over the death scenes again and reminds you that she expects real kisses before opening night. You and Hyunjin turn similar shades of red, while Jisung goes pale at the thought. Like nothing happened, she requests all the actors come in the auditorium to practice the curtain call. All of the tech crew gets a round of applause and cheering from the actors after, and the comms are filled with tech’s own cheers.

Because it’s Friday, rehearsal ends an hour earlier than normal. Tech notes are shorter than usual, especially when Mr. Gi reveals that he wants to go home to watch his favorite show. Jisung receives some praise for improving throughout the week, but the floor crew overall still need to tidy up some of the blackouts. Once he moves on to lights, Jisung tunes them out and discreetly scrolls through your Instagram throughout the rest of notes. You look very pretty in white.

“Good job, guys, and have a good weekend.”

That’s their cue to go home. The actors are already lining down the auditorium aisles to hand their mics to Chan. Jisung spots you behind Capulet, discussing alternative death scenes with Hyunjin. You’re standing right in front of him, so you have to tilt your head far back in order to look at him while talking. Hyunjin mimes stabbing you, and you double over, clutching your stomach in pretend pain. He fakes horror and drinks from an invisible vial. It’s like the two of you are in your own bubble, and Jisung’s watching through a window.

He gets up and decides to wait in the classroom. As he walks back up onto the stage, he can hear you and Hyunjin dying from laughter. He hits the main curtain particularly hard while making his way backstage. He still wants to give you the bag of chips, but Hyunjin seems to be keeping you from him. The classroom is mostly empty, and people occasionally come in to get their belongings and leave. You finally come in, and you’re back in your normal clothes. He wonders how you’re not freezing in shorts, but that’s not important right now. Hyunjin is nowhere in sight.

“Hey,” he calls.

You brush your bangs to the side before looking in his direction. “Hey.”

“Any chance you’re hungry? I bought an extra bag by accident,” he says, holding up a bag of chips.

You laugh, and his heart rate increases. “A lot of our conversations seem to be about food. I’m getting food after, but thanks anyway.” When Jisung visibly deflates, you ask, “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” he lies. He stacks the bag on top of the other bag and rests his hand on top. “I don’t wanna give it to Jeongin. He’s probably going to ask once he sees I have two.”

“You could just eat both bags.”

“Maybe. I might also end up in the hospital for sodium poisoning though.”

You laugh again, and he turns pink with pride. However, the universe must be against him because Hyunjin appears in the door frame. You greet him with significantly more enthusiasm. Hyunjin collects his belongings, and his right hand twirls a car key. Jisung’s mouth starts forming a frown, and it deepens when Hyunjin says to you, “You ready?”

“Yeah.” You sling your backpack over your shoulder and pick up your textbook from the table. “See you Monday, Jisung.”

He says, “See you,” too late once again. With a huff of annoyance, he grabs his things and follows you two to the parking lot while staying a safe distance behind. Your textbook is now in Hyunjin’s hand, and you’re scrolling through something on your phone. He realizes with a start that you are reading off frozen yogurt flavors. When Hyunjin asks which flavor you’re going to get, you select strawberry cheesecake.

When Jisung is finally in his car, he turns up the volume on the radio and peels out of the parking lot, his hands gripping the steering wheel for dear life. In the passenger seat sits two bags of chips, unopened.

~ ad.gray

[lumoshyperion]

thank you for the answer! I know what you mean about theatre being vulnerable, even as an audience member I think you get some of that too, and the way you all share the theatre space together and it's so fleeting! You said that Albus will likely never act again, why is that? :( 🎭

Yes, exactly! It's such a specific, special moment in time? And a play you see now will mean something different than it did years ago when you saw it for the first time. Whenever I see a performance, particularly one with a large audience, I'm always struck by how different everyone's experiences are? We all bring different baggage and biases to the theatre. Something that makes someone else feel nothing, may strip me down to the very core - and it doesn't mean that person didn't watch the play properly, it just means that it meant something different to them. There's no right or wrong way to view and enjoy theatre. And this is especially true for Shakespeare. His works have been adapted over and over and over again. Hamlet in particular will never grow old, its universal themes leading to productions like "Globe to Globe Hamlet", where their aim was to visit every country in the world. We all take something different from the melancholy Dane. Even the companies who adapt the play all have their own concerns and biases in mind when bringing it to the stage - and so will Astoria and Albus and the rest of the team.

Speaking of Albus - he's just not an actor. This is something he mentions, constantly, throughout the process of the play. He's also an introvert and being the centre of attention like he is when onstage, and especially in a leading role, just isn't something he copes with? And I think that - he could be an excellent actor, if he wanted to, but the key word here is "want". Because regardless of how good he is, regardless of how much depth and care he brings to Hamlet - he still doesn't want to be an actor. He doesn't handle the vulnerability well at all, and he's so empathetic that he just - gets lost in the character? And someone like Hamlet is incredibly difficult to inhabit. You constantly hear stories about actors who struggled with the role - Paul Gross said that he often zoned out during scenes, he hallucinated while onstage and sometimes even offstage. It was just too much? Especially for a person like Albus, who has this immense, unyielding sense of empathy and compassion. It stops being a performance, because Albus is out there living every part of Hamlet. He doesn't know how to approach it any other way, because he just... cares too much. He never does things by halves. And he loves Hamlet. He knows Hamlet. Anything less than his whole self just wouldn't be enough. Hamlet deserves more than that.

Here's an excerpt from later on in the fic, when things are starting to get heated. Albus found out that the company has been talking about him behind his back, and he didn't take it very well. He vanished from rehearsals and wouldn't answer anyone's calls. He shows up to the fight call, trying to pretend nothing happened. I've popped it under a "read more" because it's rather long.

Albus went through the stage door rather than the front entrance, not wanting to make a fuss when he arrived and hoping that he might just slip in quietly. But he heard the cast talking onstage as he walked through the wings, and he paused.

“Where else could he have gone?” Yann asked. “We’ve checked all over campus. We’ve checked his favourite cafes, we checked the library.”

“Maybe he went home?” Scorpius suggested, and was met with silence. “I mean, his parent’s home.”

“No, he wouldn’t have done that,” Yann replied, calmly. “He must be at his apartment, we just don’t know where that is.”

There was another silence, before Scorpius spoke, “And you’re sure you never walked home with him? He never mentioned where he was staying?”

“I’ve never been to his apartment. I never even saw the building,” Karl responded, a weight in his words that Albus couldn’t place.

They went quiet again, so Albus stepped out of the wings and put his bag down. Karl, Yann, and Scorpius were standing onstage, while Craig was at the lighting booth loudly talking to someone on the phone. They all stopped and looked at him and Craig said, “Uhh, he’s just arrived. Yeah, no, he literally just walked in… Rose! I’m not going to say that -”

“Where the hell have you been?” Karl snapped.

Albus flinched. Karl never raised his voice. “Is this everyone?”

Craig, who had come down from the lighting booth and joined them onstage, crossed his arms and said, “Rose canceled rehearsal. She’s out looking for you with Astoria.”

“We don’t need them to block the scene. Yann knows what they’re doing.”

Yann put their hands on their hips and frowned. “We should wait until they get back and then decide what to do.”

“We don’t have the time. We open in two weeks, your show opens next week,” He explained, already taking his coat off and eyeing the rapiers. “We should get this over with.”

Albus tossed his coat aside and stared at Yann, who stared back. He knew they wouldn’t be able to argue with his reasoning. Yann was spread thin. Between uni work and his job and choreographing two shows, it was almost impossible to find the time to work on Hamlet’s blocking. Yann raised an eyebrow and Albus inclined his head, trying to communicate that he was fine and that he just wanted to get this over with.

“Alright. We’ll do it,” they relented. But before Albus could say anything, Yann leaned in and added, “But we need to talk afterwards, okay?”

He nodded. He’d expected this. “Fine.”

With that, Yann cleared his throat and addressed everyone, “We’ll do 5.1 first and ease into 5.2. Hopefully by the time we’ve started 5.2, Astoria and Rose will be back.” He looked over at Craig, who glanced up from his phone and shrugged. “Or not. We’ll see.”

They hadn’t covered much of 5.1 yet in rehearsals. It was a handful of scenes that took place in the graveyard, as Hamlet returned from England and Ophelia was buried. Laertes, distraught with grief and anger at his sister’s lack of burial rights, leaped into her grave so that he might hold her one last time. And Hamlet, seeing this, made himself known and declared that his love was stronger than his. They fought over her body and Laertes had to be dragged off Hamlet before he murdered him on sight for his father’s death.

It was an intense scene that Albus had been dreading for a while. Yann had only come in once before to look at the blocking for it, hoping to cover it a lot more thoroughly at the fight call. Without Polly to stand in for Ophelia’s body, Craig offered to take her place, and Albus watched in silence as he climbed into the grave. He could feel everyone looking at him, but he still refused to make eye contact. He just wanted to focus on the play. I loved Ophelia, he recited, in his head. Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum...

“Hold off the earth a while,” he heard Karl speak, and finally glanced up at him, where he stood staring down into the grave. He hadn’t realised Yann had started the scene, he was so wrapped up in his thoughts. “Till I have caught her once more in mine arms.” He wiped a sleeve over his eyes and climbed into the grave, gathering Craig into his arms and holding him to his chest, before glaring up at Yann and Scorpius. His eyes were full of tears, but his mouth was set with determination.

“Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead, till of this flat a mountain you have made,” Karl continued, breathing ragged sobs into Craig’s green beanie. “To o’ertop old Pelion or the skyish head of blue Olympus!”

“What is he who’s grief bears such an emphasis?” Albus asked, approaching the grave just as Karl looked up at him with fury. “Whose phrase of sorrow conjures the wand’ring stars, and makes them stand like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I, Hamlet the Dane.”

Albus climbed into the grave and Karl was immediately upon him, his hand on his throat as the other clutched Craig ever closer. “The devil take thy soul!” He growled.

“Thou pray’st not well -” Albus struggled under his grasp, snatching at his arms and chest as he feigned an attempt to force him off. But Karl was vicious in his hold on Hamlet, glaring at him with a fire in his eyes that shocked Albus to his core. “I prithee take thy fingers from my throat! For, though I am not splenitive and - and rash, yet I -” He stumbled over the words, and Karl’s grasp weakened. Albus took advantage of the momentary lapse and tried to shove him away, but Karl was relentless. “I have in me something dangerous, which let thy wisdom fear! Hold off thy hand!”

“Pluck them asunder!” Yann read for the King, as he and Scorpius dragged Karl out of the grave. He kicked and howled as Albus glared up at him, holding Craig to his chest.

“Good, my lord, be quiet,” Scorpius hissed at him as Horatio.

“Why, I will fight with him upon this theme, until my eyelids no longer wag!” He gasped, shifting his hold on Craig, wrapping his arms around him and pressing his face into his shoulder with a barely suppressed sob. He waited for the Queen’s line, or for Yann to call the end of the scene, but they never did, so he continued, “I loved Ophelia! Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum!”

He glanced up and only saw Karl’s expression of growing concern, and it made him furious. So he set Craig down against the wall of the grave and stood up, wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his jumper. He was going off script, ignoring lines and the horrified looks of Yann and Scorpius, but he had to get it out. “What wilt thou do for her? Hmm?” Karl blinked and looked away, which only antagonized Hamlet even more. “‘Swounds, show me what thou’t do! Would weep? Would fight? Would fast? Would tear thyself? I’ll do it! Dost thou come to whine? To outface me by leaping in her grave? Be buried quick with her, and so will I!”

“Albus!” Yann shouted, and Albus flinched as he looked over at them. “That’s enough.”

“Sorry,” he said, taking a step back and looking down at his feet. His heart was pounding in his chest and he could feel sweat dripping down his neck. “I got carried away.”

Somewhere above him, Yann sighed and flicked back through their notes. “It’s fine. But our stopping point for tonight's rehearsal is Horatio’s line - ‘Good, my lord, be quiet.’ And Hamlet climbs out of the grave on the Queen’s line - ‘This is mere madness.’ We can do a full run through of the scene once Astoria and Rose get back, if you want.”

Albus nodded and sat down on the edge of the grave. Craig stood up and joined him and, if he saw the way that his hands were shaking and his bottom lip was trembling, he didn’t say anything about it.

Yann tapped his pen against his chin and stared down into the grave. “I’m just not sure about the way Hamlet is jumping in after Laertes. It doesn’t feel natural,” he mused.

Craig cleared his throat and raised a hand. “I know I’m supposed to be dead, but…” Albus chuckled at that, in spite of himself, although the sound was hollow. “Could Laertes pull Hamlet into the grave? Rather than jumping in after him?”

Yann considered, for a moment. But then their phone went off and they sighed. “Can we take five? Erin is calling me.”

As Yann took the call, Albus waited for a comment from Karl about Erin - the director of the musical Yann was working on, and the “villain who kept stealing their choreographer” - but it never came. He glanced over and watched as Scorpius and Karl spoke to each other in hushed tones, near the front of the stage. He knew they were talking about him, from the way they kept stealing glances at him. Something about the sight of it made his heart clench in his chest - made him want to get up and leave again.

But then Craig suddenly rested his head on Albus’s shoulder, distracting him from Karl and Scorpius’s secret conversation. “I don’t know how you actors do it,” he said, with a yawn. “It’s very exhausting, being dead.”

Albus gave him a weak smile. “I’m still not an actor,” he replied, aware of the irony considering his outburst just moments ago. “Say the word and I’ll come running back to the design department.”

“I wish you would. It’s lonely up in the rigs and the lighting desk without you.” He paused and rested his chin on Albus’s shoulder, staring up at him with those dark eyes. “Where did you go last night? We were worried about you.”

catch the irony of Craig's role in this scene :')

[sociallyawkward--fics]

52 and/or 61

Oh! And let’s do a Thomas Sanders Analogical. (I’m a sucker for analogical.)

———————–

[ao3 link]

Yup yup yup! Coming right up! The only idea for a while to occur to me was one VERY similar that I’d already written for Prinxiety so hopefully I managed to get far enough away from that one lol (I think I did at least)

(Also now I meet a conundrum because I want to title this the quote from 61, but I already have the Prinxiety fic titled that lol)

Also also, Punk Logan, except I don’t really know how to write Punk Logan but it’s whatever lol. And if this seems choppy it’s because I wrote it in segments at weird times lol

52. “Are you going to talk to me?”

61. “I told you not to fall in love with me.”

Word Count: 2779 (I was trying to keep it short but this is where we ended up lol)

——————————–

This was Virgil’s own personal hell. He was well and truly fucked. He should’ve never gone to school ever a day in his life just to avoid this moment.

He had to adapt a scene from a play, probably Shakespeare, he zoned out in terror before the teacher finished explaining, into modern-day language and then perform it in front of the entire class. And to top it all off, it was a partner project. He had to work with another person.

At least he wouldn’t have to perform alone.

But, just his luck, Virgil couldn’t just flock to Roman for the partner project like he always did. The teacher just had to assign partners. And Roman, with all his good luck, got that super nice new kid. Patton, Virgil thought his name was?

And Virgil got stuck with Logan Berry. The most intimidating kid in the class, maybe the school, notorious for getting into trouble on a regular basis.

“You have the rest of the class period to work with your partner,” Mrs. Mitchell said. “Pair up. And I better see working! No goofing around!”

Virgil hesitantly looked over at Logan, seeing him already packing his stuff up and and standing from his desk. Virgil took a deep breath and curled in on himself.

Roman clapped his shoulder as he left his desk next to Virgil, heading over to Patton. “Good luck, Virge. Tame the beast.”

“Yeah, right,” Virgil hissed back, glaring at Roman’s retreating back.

He jumped as Logan plopped down in Roman’s seat. Barely holding back another jump when Logan’s backpack was tossed to the ground between them.

“So we got some scene between Benedick and Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing,” Logan said, sounding bored.

Virgil nodded.

“So I guess we’ll have to adapt it so that Beatrice is a dude, unless one of us wants to dress in drag.”

Virgil nodded.

“And then I suppose we’ll do the hula and get chased down by hyenas.”

Virgil started to nod, then jerked slightly and shot Logan a weird look as best as he could without meeting his eyes.

Logan rolled his eyes, Virgil could tell by the head movement, and tugged at one of the studs in his ears. “Just checking if you were actually listening.”

Virgil nodded again.

Logan buried his head in his hands. He looked up, exasperation rolling off of him in waves. “Look, we need to do this project. Are you going to talk to me? Or not?”

Virgil opened and shut his mouth a few times.

Logan ran a hand through his hair, wincing when his fingers caught in a knot and carelessly dropping the blue strands that came loose to the floor. Virgil scowled a little. That was kind of gross.

“Look, I get it, I’m scary, whatever. Everyone’s freaked out by me. Can we just do the project?”

Virgil nodded and tried to take a deep breath. “Making Beatrice a guy would be okay,” Virgil got out in a choked whisper.

Logan raised his hands to the sky, as if in praise. “He speaks!”

Virgil looked back down at his desk and scowled.

By the time they got to actually discussing their plans for switching Beatrice’s gender, the period was almost over. Virgil winced apologetically when the bell rang in the middle of one of Logan’s comments.

“You won’t have any more class time for this,” the teacher called. “You have a month and a half to finish this project, make sure you get together with your partner to finish and rehearse!”

Virgil wanted to growl at their teacher’s words. Logan actually did.

“Of course she doesn’t give us any more class time for this, she can’t even fucking teach.”

Virgil’s eyes widened and snapped to Logan’s face.

Logan turned his glare on him. “What?”

Virgil averted his eyes again and raised his hand in surrender, speedily packing his stuff. Logan ripped his notebook out of his hands, scribbled something in the margins, and shoved it back at Virgil, standing to leave.

“Let me know when you’re free to work on the project,” he said as he left.

Virgil looked down at the notebook. Messily scrawled in blue ink was a phone number.

Ugh, Virgil hated texting first.

Roman had to talk him into at lunch, Patton joining them for the meal and providing his own support. 

Eventually, Virgil did text, right before the bell to signal the end of lunch rang. Logan texted back nearly immediately and they (unfortunately) made plan’s to walk to Logan’s after school (because Virgil absolutely refused to do this at his house, even if Logan also absolutely did not want to do it at his) to make more progress on their project.

Virgil worried about it throughout the rest of his classes. He’d worked himself well up by the time he was walking out the front doors with Roman and Patton.

“He can’t be that bad,” Patton chirped, bouncing next to Roman. “Lots of people can seem scary, even if they’re super nice.”

Roman laughed. “Not sure about that, but he definitely won’t murder you if he has to do a project with you. I’ve heard others who have worked with him say that he’s secretly a nerd. Could even be in the running for valedictorian.”

“Great,” Virgil muttered. “Now I have him insulting my poor intelligence on the list of things to dread.”

Roman rolled his eyes. “You’re plenty smart.”

Virgil turned when he heard a new set of footsteps speedily coming up on them. Logan speedwalked right past their group, brushing Virgil’s shoulder as he went.

“Let’s go, then,” Logan said.

Virgil shot a panicked look at Roman and Patton before rushing to catch up.

The two of them walked in silence for the full fifteen minutes it took to get to Logan’s house. Logan unlocked the door a much smoother motion than Virgil had ever accomplished in his life and slipped his shoes off in the entryway, motioning for Virgil to do the same.

“I’m home,” Logan called into the house. “I have a classmate with me.”

A frail looking woman poked her head out from what Virgil assumed to be the kitchen. “Blueberry, dear, just in time. Can you come help me with something?”

Logan slipped his backpack off, tossing it over onto the couch, and followed what Virgil assumed to be his grandmother into the kitchen. Uncertain of what to do, Virgil followed suit.

Logan reached up and handed his grandmother a dish from the cabinet before turning back to face Virgil, still standing awkwardly in the entrance to the kitchen.

“Nan, this is Virgil. We’re working on an English project together.”

Logan’s grandmother’s face lit up. “Oh, it’s so lovely to meet you! Logan never brings home friends!” She walked forward and pulled him into a hug.

Virgil shot Logan a panicked look over her shoulder, but Logan wasn’t paying attention. Instead he had his face buried in his hands in what seemed to be mortification, his ears pink.

“Nan, we really should get to work–”

Logan’s grandmother pulled back. “Oh, of course! Virgil, will you be staying for dinner?”

He shot a look at Logan, who shrugged. “I–I guess I can?”

“Wonderful! Alright, now you boys go on and get to work. I’ll come get you when it’s time to eat.”

“Thanks, Nan.”

Logan grabbed his backpack off the couch and led Virgil to his bedroom. Which was a lot more plan than Virgil had expected.

There was a bed with navy blue sheets. A desk with a laptop. A few astronomy posters. The walls were a typical beige. Nothing at all like Virgil expected. He glanced back over at Logan to find him wiping makeup off his face.

“Not what you expected?” Logan asked.

“Not really,” Virgil mumbled, finally setting his backpack down off to the side, where it wouldn’t get in the way.

Logan sighed. “There’s a reason I didn’t want to do this here. Get set up, I’m taking my contacts out, they’ve been bugging me since fifth period.”

Virgil furrowed his brow. This was not the same guy that told the (frankly, pretty shitty) principal to suck his dick. Maybe this wouldn’t be as terrible as he had feared?

Virgil got out his English stuff and waited for Logan to come back.

They made good progress on updating their characters that night. Virgil was able to relax and finally stop whispering and mumbling. Logan’s grandmother’s cooking was delicious.

By the time Roman had arrived to pick him up and take him home, Virgil had decided that Patton was right and that Logan was a pretty chill guy. Roman still didn’t believe him, but Virgil knew it wouldn’t be that easy to convince him.

The days and weeks that followed went similarly. Logan started joining Virgil and Roman (and now Patton, as well) at lunch. At least three days of the week after school, Virgil and Logan would go to Logan’s house to work on the project. Sometimes they would meet up on weekends, too.

There was one night when Virgil had accidentally stayed too late to leave and the two had an impromptu sleepover, deciding to work further on the project as long as they were awake. At least, they were pretending to work further on the project while goofing off.

“Mrs. Mitchell is absolutely going to kill us,” Virgil snickered.

Logan let out his own laugh. “Not our fault she thinks Shakespeare is the height of literature, “nothing” literally meant “dick” back then and she gave us Much Ado About Nothing.”

Virgil buried his face in the borrowed pillow to cackle without having to worry about waking Nan.

“Not to mention,” Virgil said as he lifted his face back up, “we’re turning it into two gay guys. She’s going to hate that, I don’t think she thinks her lesson plans through.”

Logan threw his head back, lost in snorting laughter and sending his glasses flying. “Just don’t fall in love with me and we’ll be golden.”

Virgil made some sound between a scoff and a snort. “No problem, I’m just here to piss of the student body, be gay, and do crime.”

They continued their routine after that. Roman and Patton started hanging out with them on weekends, and for some reason Roman kept sending him sly looks whenever the four of them were together. Every one was met with a confused look from Virgil, but Roman would simply shrug and not say anything.

It took another three weeks, to the point where Virgil and Logan were finally getting into the rehearsal stage, for Virgil to finally realize what those sly looks meant.

Virgil tripped over his unfinished costume and Logan darted forward to catch him before he could hit the ground. Virgil laughed it off and they reset, but his cheeks were warm and his heart was beating far too quickly.

But how did Roman realize it before he did? Had he been obvious before he’d even realized he liked Logan? Did Logan know?

This was Virgil’s own personal hell. He was well and truly fucked. He should’ve never gone to school ever a day in his life just to avoid this moment.

He could not be in love with Logan Berry. There was just no way he’d like him back! 

They were only hanging out together because they were working on a project together. Another week and a half and Logan would move on, probably not even give him the time of day.

No, he couldn’t act on these feelings, and he just had to pray that Logan hadn’t noticed. He would get through this project, they would stop talking, and Virgil would get over it.

Even if Roman nagged him from that day forward.

Even if Patton started giving him sad looks when he thought none of them were looking.

Even if Logan asked him why he started being so weird.

At least Logan questioning him he was able to play off as anxiety over having to perform. And Logan bought it, thankfully, not questioning him further.

They finished their project and performed it for the class (thought not without numerous anxiety attacks on Virgil’s end, as well as him nearly throwing up the moment they stood in front of the class in their costumes and all their makeup), but even so, Logan didn’t leave.

He ate lunch with them everyday. He invited Virgil over at least one day every week, if not more. At least every other weekend they would end up having a sleepover.

And Virgil’s feelings, unfortunately, only grew.

Luckily, it seemed he had gotten rather good at keeping a cap on them. Roman and Patton stopped nagging and teasing and giving him looks. If fact, they stopped bringing it up at all. Virgil would be suspicious if he wasn’t so relieved.

It was another Friday night that turned into an impromptu sleepover. Really, it was more Saturday morning by that point, but Virgil certainly wasn’t paying attention.

Somehow in their sleepy states, Virgil had let his guard down. The two of them laid on the floor of Logan’s room, laptop at an angle they could both see and playing Star Trek episodes in the background. Virgil’s head rested on Logan’s stomach as they laid perpendicular to each other, Logan’s hand combing absent-mindedly through his hair.

“You know,” Logan sleepily mumbled, scratching a bit more against Virgil’s scalp.

Virgil hummed, both in pleasure and to show that he was listening.

“I told you not to fall in love with me. Back when we were working on that English project, remember?”

Virgil tensed, eyes shooting wide open. He was suddenly very awake, but he didn’t dare move and startle Logan out of his sleepy state. There was a chance he could pass out any minute and forget all of this, Virgil just had to keep it cool.

“I was joking, of course. But I didn’t plan on one thing. You know what that was?”

Virgil hummed again, not trusting his voice. His hands had started shaking and he twisted them into the blanket that had been haphazardly thrown over him at some point.

“I didn’t plan on me falling in love with you. And yet, here we are, aren’t we?”

Virgil gasped, shooting up into a sitting position and twisting around to look down at Logan. Logan looked startled and sat up as well.

“I-I’m sorry. The late hour must be getting to me, just ignore me, I–”

Virgil shot forward, grabbing one of Logan’s hands and using his free hand to cup Logan’s jaw. He leaned forward until their noses were touching.

“Do you mean it,” he said lowly.

“I–Yes, I mean it.”

“Well thank fuck,” Virgil said.

He leaned forward to capture Logan’s lips, feeling Logan draw in a quick breath through his nose. For a moment, Logan didn’t kiss back, and Virgil panicked. 

Then Logan pushed forward to kiss back with so much force that Virgil fell toppled backwards onto his back, landing in a pile of pillows that they’d been smacking each other with earlier. Virgil laughed and Logan leaned over him, chuckling.

“Guess I got a little overexcited,” Logan said sheepishly.

“Hey,” Virgil said flirtatiously, “I’m not complaining.”

Logan rolled his eyes. “Roman teach you that?”

Virgil laughed. “Just shut up and kiss me, nerd.”

Logan complied, moving in and pinning Virgil down to the pillow pile with his body. They continued on like that for a few long minutes, completely lost in each other, the Star Trek marathon completely forgotten.

Then there was a loud knocking at the door and the two of them pulled their lips apart to look at it in a panic.

“You boys best be behaving in there,” Nan called through the door. “I don’t want to be hearing any suspicious sounds.”

Virgil threw his head back and cackled. Logan flushed from his collarbones to his hairline.

“Nan!” He yelled back. “It’s three in the morning, why are you up?!”

“I could ask the same of you boys,” she answered. “Keep it PG in there!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Virgil called through his snickers.

Logan shoved at his shoulder, which was rather ineffective considering the fact that he was the one laying down against a solid surface.

“You’re cute when you blush,” Virgil laughed.

Logan cocked his head, as if listening, then moved forward into Virgil’s space again. “Stop flirting and kiss me some more.”

Virgil grabbed Logan and rolled them over, pinning Logan down instead, grinning when his blush returned.

“Whatever you say,” he said.

Needless to say, they did not separate for some time after that.

[ikevampeventarchive]

[ERS] Tonight, Upon Love’s Stage - Dazai & Arthur

Route Preview:

Upon a brightly lit stage, a romantic drama suddenly begins… —

(Arthur and Dazai acting together…I can’t imagine it at all!)

Together with Arthur and Dazai, we act out “The Little Red Riding Hood” that Shakespeare entrusted with us.

[This is an unofficial work based on fan-translation. Copyright belongs to Cybird.]

Warning: Spoilers Underneath.

Route Summary:

Common Route

Shakespeare: Arthur and Dazai, huh… Unexpectedly, I think this will be quite interesting indeed. Though it’ll be difficult, won’t you grace my stage with the two of them? 

Arthur: …Huh?

Dazai: My, is that really okay?

Shakespeare told Arthur, Dazai, and MC that though the original cast he had in mind for the Little Red Riding Hood was Leo and Comte, he changed his mind and wants Arthur and Dazai to play it instead. 

On the day of the rehearsal, the trio, together with Shakespeare encountered a group of “Will-sensei’s fanclub” who looked forward to seeing Shakespeare’s new stage play. However, 4 different women also wanted to play the role of Red Riding Hood, and now there are 5 Red Riding Hood’s who would all appear in one scene each. 

Arthur: This isn't double casting or triple casting... What do we even call this now?

MC was given the role of Red Riding Hood #5 and is to appear in the very last scene at grandmother’s house. Dazai is the wolf, and Arthur is the hunter. However, during the rehearsal, Arthur entered the scene too early and ignored the script because he was jealous Dazai touching MC.

Shakespeare: Arthur. Please don't change my play.

The day of the performance finally comes, and everything has been proceeding smoothly without any unforeseen difficulties.

MC was beside the stage, nervously waiting to play her part as she watches Arthur and Dazai perform together. She notes how their performance is entrancing and focuses on the two of them. 

At the same time, one of the actresses who stood behind MC was relieved that she had finished performing her part. In her relaxed state, she accidentally collided into MC and pushed her onto the stage while Dazai and Arthur were still acting out their scene.

—

Dazai End:

The moment you touch his heart, a new love story begins...

“What a naughty Red Riding Hood you are. I suppose I'll have to teach you that men are truly wolves.”

—

Shock overwhelms MC when she finally registers the fact that she was now standing on the stage out of her cue. While she was trying to process what to do in this situation, Dazai suddenly spoke up.

Dazai: Why did you come out…. Red Riding Hood?

Dazai: My beloved, you could’ve ran away alone—

MC: !?

Dazai pulled MC toward him... and turned the scene into a love scene between the wolf and Red Riding Hood.

Arthur: Don't tell me… the Little Red Riding Hood is... actually a werewolf like you!? 

MC: (The Little Red Riding Hood is a werewolf?)

Finally catching on that Dazai is trying to ad lib the scene into one where the Red Riding Hood is actually a werewolf and the wolf's lover, MC proceed to continue the ad lib as well.

After a few sentences of ad lib later, Dazai, the wolf, eloped with MC, his Red Riding Hood werewolf lover, off the stage to escape from Arthur, the hunter.

The audience applauds and no one realized that whole ending act was made up on the spot.

Later that evening at the after party, MC and the actress who accidentally collided into her apologized to Shakespeare for the slip up and the change. Shakespeare told them it is normal for such happenings to occur during a stage performance.

Shakespeare: All's well that ends well.

Shakespeare proceeds to thank Dazai for the nice save with his ad lib and Arthur praised MC for the ad lib on her part as well. MC told Arthur she was able to say all that because her performing partners were him and Dazai.

That night back at the mansion… MC visited Dazai's room and knocked on his door.

Dazai: Oh? If it isn't Toshiko-san. What's the matter?

MC told Dazai she came to express her words of gratitude to him for all the help earlier today. Dazai took note of it and asked her if she would like to have Japanese tea with him inside his room since she's already here anyway.

MC: Is that alright? Then I'll have a glass.

After telling Dazai she accepts his offer, MC entered his room. Dazai poured MC a glass of tea and MC told him it's delicious. She thanks him for the tea and once again, for the help with the ad libbed scene.

Dazai: Actually… I've been thinking… If I write out Red Riding Hood, what kind of Red Riding Hood would she be? Perhaps an adorable werewolf…

Dazai told MC how when he acted out that scene he was imagining out what his Red Riding Hood would be so that was how it turned out.

Dazai: In any case— I feel like I actually became a werewolf.

MC: —!

Dazai suddenly pulled MC into a hug.

Dazai: To be entering a man's room this late in the night… what a naughty Red Riding Hood you are. I suppose I'll have to teach you that men are truly wolves.

MC: —...

Dazai: ………Oh? This time you're not ad libbing back?

MC: (That just now… was it an act?)

MC: P-please stop teasing me…

Dazai: Ahaha, sorry about that. By the way it seems you finished your tea. About time you head back, no? Good night, Mitsuko-san.

Dazai see MC out his room and closed the door.

Now in the hallway alone, MC thought back to what had happened just now in Dazai's room and how his eyes didn't seem like his usual joking self. MC wondered what would have happened if she had remained in the room, and hugged herself tightly.

—

Arthur End:

Something outside the norm  — his new expression sends your heart into disarray...

“Won’t you give the Huntsman that saved the Little Red Riding Hood a little reward…?”

—

As she stumbles onto the stage, MC flounders, her mind going blank at the abrupt accident. She looks over to Arthur, who suddenly has an epiphany and rushes over to MC, hugging her and exclaiming that he’s glad that Ms. Little Red Riding Hood is still alive. 

MC realizes that Arthur is covering her face by doing this, and Arthur follows up with an accusation to Dazai that he isn’t actually a wolf that devours people. Dazai plays along and wonders what Arthur might be talking about, while MC is confused as to what they’re planning by ad libbing. 

Arthur launches into full on deductive reasoning, stating that wherever the wolf has appeared, people have gone missing, but no corpses were left behind. In spreading the rumor that a werewolf has appeared, Dazai has been using the ensuing chaos as cover to kidnap young women and spirit them away. His cover blown, Dazai smiles, MC describing it as a sinister smile that raises goosebumps on her skin. 

Dazai: That’s right. However, it’s far too much of a waste to just eat them. All those girls — I’ve sold them all off as slaves by now. 

MC is surprised that Dazai managed to turn a werewolf into a human trafficker and still make the play work. Arthur tells Dazai that he can tell the rest of his tale in jail, to which Dazai flippantly replies that Arthur can do as he likes, and exits the stage as the lights go down. 

Then as the lights come back up again on Arthur and MC, MC thinks to herself that since everyone has tried their best up until now, she will also play along with the adlib and bring everything to a successful close. 

MC: I ran away from the Wolf with all my might. Mr. Hunter, all those children who have disappeared up until now are still alive. Perhaps your sister too…?  

She feels her voice going high from the nerves, but MC manages to deliver the lines. Arthur’s eyes widen with shock for a moment, before he then raises his hand with a gentle smile. 

Arthur: You’re right. Perhaps, like you said, my younger sister might still be out there, somewhere… Won’t you come search with me, Little Red Riding Hood? 

MC: Of course!

She places her hand in his and the audience gives the two of them a standing ovation. With such an atmosphere of hope, the curtain slowly descends upon the stage — .

— 

Following the performance, Shakespeare speaks to the two of them, saying that everyone thought the play was very well done, with the female cast members think that Arthur’s wonderful “Huntsman” was cool like Holmes.

MC notes that it seems like Shakespeare is prodding at Arthur a bit, but Arthur pays no mind, instead grinning in delight. He quotes Holmes, saying that those who learn to adapt and overcome are the ones who will succeed. He then proceeds to cheer on the rest of the cast members, saying that they can continue to try their best now that they’ve had this accident and the chance to learn from it. At his encouragement, the female cast members blush, and MC thinks to herself how Arthur both saved her and now cheered on the cast, much like everyone’s hero. 

A bitter feelings spreads in her chest at the thought of Arthur being everyone’s hero, but she pushes it away and pretends to be unaffected. 

Later once they return to the mansion and to Arthur’s room, they sit on Arthur’s bed and he flops over onto her knee, looking up at MC like he wants to be praised. 

Arthur: Ah — I’m tired. 

MC: Haha, you worked hard today. Seriously, thanks for all your hard work today. 

She smiles down at him, and Arthur lifts a hand to settle it against her cheek. 

Arthur: MC, the play is over now… You don’t have to pretend to smile anymore. 

He says that he noticed MC making a strange face earlier, and was concerned. MC is surprised that Arthur noticed such a thing, and thinks to herself that nothing ever escapes him. However, there was also a part of her that was surprisingly happy that he had taken notice. As his fingers gently caresses her cheek, MC starts to speak. 

MC: The play today… it went off without a hitch due to Arthur’s help, and everyone was so happy. I should’ve been happy as well, but… when I saw you being surrounded by girls, somehow…  The feeling that Arthur wasn’t mine alone… that you were everyone’s hero… well, I think I got a little lonely. 

MC: Sorry, Arthur, I got jealous at a strange time. 

Arthur: Jealous — you got jealous. Over me, of all things… 

Arthur quickly flips the two of them over, straddling MC as he promises to show her how much the Huntsman was concerned about Little Red Riding Hood. 

Arthur: So… won’t you give the Huntsman that saved you a little reward…? 

He begins to press bites all over her skin, and Arthur proves that his devotion to MC for the rest of the night. 

Note: This is where the paid Epilogue starts.

—

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[globefan]

Michelle Terry interview with The Stage

Michelle Terry: ‘This job has taught me that democracy is really hard’

by

Natasha Tripney

- May 29, 2019

Shakespeare’s Globe artistic director Michelle Terry tells Natasha Tripney about taking over from Emma Rice during a period of trauma for the organisation, why she chose the ‘mythic’ history plays for her latest season, and why Shakespeare will always be relevant

Less than half an hour before our interview, Michelle Terry was on stage playing Hotspur in Henry IV Part I, and when we meet she’s still sporting the character’s black nail varnish and tattoos.

The artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe is careful with her words, but there’s an undercurrent of exhilaration to her responses as she curls up in an armchair in a corner backstage. That’s no surprise given this is the first ‘trilogy day’ of the venue’s summer season (there will be six in all).

Over the course of the day, the ensemble company will perform Henry IV, parts I and II and Henry V. “It’s extraordinary going out in front of an audience who you know is going to be with you for the long game,” she says.

Explaining the thinking behind this year’s programme, Terry says: “At a time when our nation is in such a state, it made sense to do the state-of-the-nation plays.” The intention is to put on all of the history plays sequentially. The programme began earlier in the year with Richard II in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse with Adjoa Andoh playing the title role. Henry IV and Henry V are playing on the main stage and the cycle will return to the Sam Wanamaker for Henry IV and Richard III, to better explore “the domesticity of these plays, to view them through the prism of candlelight”.

Having referred to them as the history plays, Terry quickly corrects herself: “Calling them history plays reduces them. They’re mythic. We wanted to do all of the myths.”

As Hotspur, Terry is in her element, her performance vivid and playful, dashing, daring, funny. It’s the performance of someone who has total understanding of the space, its potential for intimacy and connection. Her strength of feeling for the building is similarly palpable.

Coming home to Shakespeare’s Globe

When we spoke in 2016, Terry talked with great affection about performing at the Globe, describing it “as a place unlike any other”. When she was appointed artistic director in July of the following year, the trajectory made sense. She took over the role from Emma Rice, who left after only two seasons in charge after disagreements with the board.

Although Terry knew the venue well as a performer, she was less familiar with its workings as an organisation and educational centre. So as well as taking over under difficult circumstances, there was a lot to learn. Looking back, she is able to recognise how tough this transition period was. “The big learning curve was understanding my place as artistic director in the organisation, at a point when it was bruised and people needed healing. It was traumatic.”

In the theatre industry, she adds, “the line between the personal and the professional can be wafer thin”. It was very personal for everyone, but she hopes good has come from it. When she announced her first season, she said: “Emma Rice was the best thing that ever happened to the Globe because it has forced an organisation to go through a healthy form of protest.” Throughout our conversation she returns more than once to the image of collapse and renewal. “We’re still in the renewal phase of figuring out who, how and why we are.”

One of the main features of her first season was the ensemble company with whom she staged Hamlet and As You Like It. She has spoken about a wish to dismantle hierarchies and create work collaboratively with the actors in the creative process.

This year she will revisit and expand the ensemble model. Whereas last year a company of 12 actors performed two plays, this year a company of 10 (11 if you count Terry, though she only performs in Henry IV Part I) will stage all the history, or rather myth, plays. As with last year, it’s a diverse company, with a 50/50 gender split. Part of the thinking behind the ensemble is that it gives the actors more time to work on the texts. “We live together with these plays for 15 weeks,” Terry says. There’s also a longer preview period, because, while a lot of dramaturgic work happens in the rehearsal room, “with Shakespeare you need to test it in front of an audience”.

One of her main intentions is to “release the plays from literal casting”. This is something she reiterates throughout our conversation – that Shakespeare’s plays are anti-literal and mythic. Anyone can play any role. “Shakespeare had an interest in human beings.” That’s a healthier way of looking at his work, she says, adding: “To think what type of human being is this, as opposed to whether they are male or female. The plays are much bigger and multitudinous than that.”

They’re more than fairytales, they’re ‘fated tales’ and “the minute we reduced them to literalism we reduce ourselves”, she adds. Last year, Jack Laskey played Rosalind in As You Like It, and Terry played Hamlet. In the current season, Sarah Amankwah plays Henry V opposite Colin Hurley’s Katharine. Helen Schlesinger plays Falstaff across the season.

She’s aware “our core audience has been through quite a ride with different artistic directors over a short space of time” and wants to reassure them that the work is still experimental. “It’s still radical. Theatre should be provocative but nothing we’re trying to do is antagonistic. I hope it’s liberating.”

One of the biggest successes of that first season was not a production of Shakespeare, but a new play about a writer inextricably linked with him: the English poet Emilia Lanier. Terry had long been fascinated with her. The name Emilia occurs often in Shakespeare’s plays: “I kept accumulating information about her.” She decided to shape the first season around her and stage all of the plays in which Emilia is mentioned. When she approached the playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm about the idea of writing a play about the poet, “she burst into tears and I thought: ‘Here we go – that’s your commission.’”

Emilia review at Vaudeville Theatre, London – ‘Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play roars into the West End’

Emilia, performed with an all-female cast, ran for just 11 performances at the Globe last summer, but during that time it struck a chord with audiences. The energy it generated, with its galvanising final speech and sense of reclaiming the stage, was incredible. A West End transfer followed. “It’s clearly chimed with many people, not necessarily just women. It’s about wanting to have a voice and be heard.”

The challenges of running the Globe

According to the Globe’s annual report, the 2018 programme, which consisted of 11 productions, attracted 364,422 theatregoers, which amounted to 89% of the Globe’s maximum capacity. School visits were down as was footfall, something attributed in the document to the terrorist incident at London Bridge and cuts to arts education. All of which means the Globe has been obliged to put its major Prospero Project – to create a new library and archive – on hold.

This also explains why, despite the success of Emilia, a decision has been taken not to programme any new writing in the main space this year, though there will be new writing in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in the winter. Terry cites the unpredictability of Brexit as another factor: “It means we had to be canny about the programming.” It takes time to invest in new writing, she says, especially as the remit of new work at the Globe is that it needs to be tailored to the architecture. “It made sense to give ourselves a year off to invest in writers for 2020.”

The Globe wants to stay reactive, she says, and that’s easier to do with new writing, but Shakespeare’s plays are timeless. “There’s always something in them that illuminates now.” There’s something comforting in knowing things have always been like this. “We’ve always been on the brink of civil war. We’ve always questioned leadership and power.”

What has her first year in the job taught her? “Democracy is really hard.” It’s hard for everyone involved, she stresses, be it assuming a position of power or giving power up. “How do you share responsibility, ownership, accountability? At a certain point the buck has to stop.” She believes theatre is a collaborative and collective art form and “if we’re not having collaborative conversations then it become a disingenuous transaction”.

She adds: “If theatre is to remain vital, then it’s vital we recognise that every individual comes with needs.” This includes parents – she spends a lot of time thinking about ways of improving things for parents in the industry – but it goes deeper than that. “It’s our responsibility to meet whatever those needs are in order for people to thrive, whether it’s an issue of childcare, carers, access. There’s not one size that fits all. Everything needs to be questioned.”

When Terry was six, her family moved from Nuneaton to Weston-super-Mare. In an effort to help her settle in and get to know people, her parents enrolled her and her brother in a local amateur dramatics group. “It’s hard being the new kid, but if you can pretend to be other people it’s easier.” She felt safest playing other people.

Though they’d sometimes go into Bristol to see plays, the Weston-super-Mare pantomime was one of her first introductions to theatre. The best pantomimes, she says, engage with the audience. “I had to sit in the middle of the row, the idea that someone might pick on me or talk to me was terrifying.”

Once she’d decided she wanted to work in theatre, she set about finding ways to make it happen. Following a degree in English at Cardiff University, she applied and got in to RADA. It’s important, she stresses, to have a period of time in your life when you “learn how to fail and how to pick yourself up”.

She made her stage debut in 2004 as Edith, the maid, in Peter Hall’s production of Blithe Spirit, alongside Penelope Keith, Joanna Riding and Amanda Drew. The production ended up in the Savoy Theatre in the West End. Barbara Kirby – who played Mrs Bradman – and Terry couldn’t believe their luck. “We’d always wanted to do theatre – and here we were doing it.”

Having worked on Blithe Spirit for a year, Terry ended up back in Weston-super-Mare working as a medical secretary. “That was awful,” she says. Having lived the life she’d dreamed of living, she was worried that was all she would get, that it wouldn’t happen again. Then in 2005, she was cast as Celia in As You Like It at the New Vic in Newcastle-under-Lyme and, as she puts it, “got lucky”.

A Royal Shakespeare Company casting director was travelling from Edinburgh when his train broke down and he ended up seeing her show. This led to her being cast in Dominic Cooke’s 2006 production of The Crucible. From that point on she’s worked steadily. “There never was a shooting star moment”. There have, however, been “painful periods of not working.” Then suddenly, she says, there are moments in which you realise: “Oh my God, I’m 40 and I’ve been doing it for 20 years. Only then can you finally allow yourself to say: ‘Okay, we’re doing all right.’”

Terry’s work at the Royal Shakespeare Company included Pericles and The Winter’s Tale. In 2007, she made her first appearance on the Globe stage in Love’s Labour’s Lost. In 2011, she won an Olivier award for best actress in a supporting role for Nina Raine’s Tribes, in which she played a woman gradually losing her hearing.

She acquired a reputation as an actor of nuance and insight. The Guardian’s Michael Billington referred to her as “a thinking actor,” meaning her approach to the roles she plays is as analytical as it is intuitive. Observer theatre critic Susannah Clapp called her “one of our most glorious actresses”.

Terry starred in Marianne Elliott’s All’s Well That Ends Well in 2009 and The Comedy of Errors, both at the National, returning to the Globe in 2013 to play Titania in Dominic Dromgoole’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Shakespeare is and will always be my first love,” she says.

Continues…

Q&A Michelle Terry

What was your first professional theatre job? Blithe Spirit for the Peter Hall company.

What’s your next job? No idea.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out? One in five people won’t like you and there is nothing you can do about it.

Who or what was your biggest influence? My old amateur dramatics teacher, my music teacher and Shakespeare.

What’s your best advice for auditions? Auditions are a separate skill – treat them like they’re meetings. It’s as important for you to know if you can work with who you’re meeting, as it is for them to know if they can work with you.

If you hadn’t been an actor, what would you have been? I never gave myself the option.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals? Tongue twisters: I have a sequence I have to do before every show, otherwise God knows what will happen.

The following year she was back at the RSC for Christopher Luscombe’s double-bill of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing, and reunited with McIntyre to play Rosalind in As You Like It at the Globe in 2015. One of her most flooring performances was in Katie Mitchell’s merciless production of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed at the National.

What drives her as a performer is “that feeling that you’re part of something that matters,” and she adds: “If you throw yourself into every role that you do, there will always be a moment where your life changes because of it.”

We talk about the cuts to arts in education. She grows even more impassioned, her frustration palpable. In order to develop an understanding, a love, of Shakespeare, she explains, it’s essential to have the opportunity to see it performed. “Theatre is so experiential. The plays are meant to be experienced. They are vibrant and vital and alive.”

Shakespeare is not just words on a page. We don’t appreciate the power of language to transform, she says, invoking Greta Thunberg, “this young kid standing with just words and everyone listening”. She mentions the Globe’s Playing Shakespeare education project for schools, in which 20,000 free tickets were given to students for Romeo and Juliet. “These London kids who experience knife crime every day are watching a play about knife crime – it’s so powerful. Theatre has the capacity to be miraculous,” she says.

One of the things she’s struggled with over the last year is “carving out time to be reflective, which is so important to staying creative”. Her daily life is “so atomic” and currently it’s hard to think past Hotspur, which lines landed, which didn’t. “It’s hard to find time.” Especially when running a major building.

Director Ian Rickson taught her a vital lesson about being an artistic director. He told her: “There are very few people who will understand how overwhelming it is – all I can say to you is: don’t miss the abundance.” With a job like this, she says: “We’re in the weeds all of the time. It’s important to take a moment to look up and realise how lucky we are.”

CV Michelle Terry

Born: 1979, Nuneaton Training: RADA Landmark productions: • Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare’s Globe, London (2007) • All’s Well That Ends Well, National Theatre, London (2009) • Tribes, Royal Court, London (2010) • A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s Globe (2013) • Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon (2014) • Cleansed, National Theatre (2016) • Henry V, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, London (2016) • Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Globe (2018) Awards: • Olivier award for best actress in a supporting role for Tribes (2011)

Shakespeare’s Henry plays run at the Globe until October 11

© Copyright The Stage Media Company Limited 2019^

[phanlight]

The Boy on the Blue Moon Dreams of Sun

prompt: dan is a theatre kid who hasn't had his first kiss but has to kiss someone for a show. he doesn't want his first kiss to be wasted so he tries to get it done properly beforehand & he meets phil and w/e you can take it from there!!!

““Tell you what,” Phil leans into him, and Dan can smell his cologne. “We’re gonna come back up here again, okay? And you’re gonna tell me about yourself. Properly, this time.

Dan frowns. “Isn’t that what we’ve spent the past ten minutes doing?”

“Yeah,” Phil says. “The only difference being next time we do this, I’m going to ban you from saying the word ‘acting’. So I can hear about you, the real you, and not whoever you pretend to be for a living.”

-

GUESS WHICH BITCH IS BACK AND WRITING AGAIN (spoiler: IT ME)

I thought it was about time I branched out a bit and tried my hand at a theatre au. This was so much fun to write (albeit kinda hard as despite being a literature student my Romeo and Juliet knowledge is a little subpar lmao lets hope I at least sort of did it justice tho) and deffo has more than ur daily dosage of angsty teenage actor!dan so look forward to that. thank u to the lovely anon who prompted me with this! (also yes i’m still relying on ptv lyrics for my song titles after 3 years sh)

Also I’m sorry if the writing in this is a lil inconsistent. I started this fic literally over a year ago and abandoned it for ages before finding and continuing it again. The first half was written in literally like mid 2016 (from which point my writing has obv improved a lot) and since then I’ve been working on it sporadically so if it feels like halfway through my writing style suddenly changes then that’s why OOPS soz

This was not supposed to be this long im so sorry wtf 13k ??? fuks sake

It’s the first time Dan’s ever been pissed off with being cast a lead role in a play.

He usually loves it – he loves the attention, loves having a ripped up script full of highlighted lines and more soliloquies to memorise than he can even keep count of. He shines under the warmth of the spotlight, lapping up the attention like a hungry cat, and when the applause ripples throughout the audience at the end, he can’t get enough of the sound.

It’s just- well, there’s one problem with his part.

It’s nothing he has against Romeo, not necessarily, and the piece itself is okay – Dan’s copy of the popular play in question is already crumpled with annotations; small post-it notes spilling fluorescent colours out of every crease (studying English literature alongside Drama always comes in handy as far as Shakespeare is concerned) and Romeo has a decent amount to say.

The problem is, he’s going to have to kiss someone.

Dan Howell, the one who snaps up almost every single role he auditions for, the one with a clay personality that can be moulded perfectly into whatever role he’s going for next, the one who lives the stage and breathes the lights, who was once described as ‘the heart and soul’ of the local theatre, is going to have to kiss someone.

And believe it or not, Dan Howell, the same seventeen-year-old who breezes through auditions leaving a flutter of girls at his feet, the same guy who was once rumoured to have made out with three people at the Les Miserables afterparty and the same guy who once had to reject two people in one night, has never actually kissed anyone before. Not properly, anyway.

Granted, he’s been extremely close to it a fair few times – having been in and out of auditions and callbacks since the age of about five, he’s come into contact with a considerable number of roles that involve love interests; only last month was his character Eddie supposed to kiss the love of his life, Alexandra, in the back of a car at a drive-in cinema. It was a play that one of the drama students had written; set in the fifties, all red-and-white ice cream parlours and hand jives and high school dances and Marilyn Monroe posters. Dan had enjoyed playing his part, and not just because it was the only opportunity he’d get to sport a black leather jacket (though he did decide leather looked really quite hot on him after that play. It’s almost a shame he’s vegetarian), but because the minor obstacle could, like every single other time, be solved with a stage kiss. Just a few seconds of his back to the audience, being agonisingly close to someone else’s lips, before pulling away and raking though his mind to try and remember the next line. It’s always worked for him, every time.

Except for this. Because the director, a Lucy Howcroft with a loud voice and a bossy personality, has only gone and booked them the Round at the Old Vic theatre. Which would be fine, of course it would; it’s one of the most popular theatres in the city and the theatre group is going to get a huge reputation for this afterwards, but it’s not so handy as far as stage-kissing is concerned. When you’re being stared at from every angle three-hundred-and-sixty degrees around, there’s no way you can get away with only partially leaning in to kiss.

“Are you sure there’s no way around this?” Dan had insisted when he’d stolen a moment after rehearsal to talk to Lucy. She’d been clearing her desk – a papery mountain range, and had looked a bit too busy to talk, but Dan would rather discuss this with her one-on-one instead of having to voice his feelings with twenty other pairs of eyes staring at him.

“For someone who just bagged yet another lead role, I would’ve thought you’d be a little more gracious than this,” Lucy had muttered, snapping a file shut. “I didn’t have to cast you, y’know.”

“It’s not- I am grateful, you know I am, it’s just-“

“Is there a problem with the casting of Juliet?” she’d offered, raising an eyebrow.

“No,” Dan had insisted. “She’s fine.”

“The costume, then?” she’d tried. “I’m not a bloody mind reader, Dan. Help me out a bit here.”

Dan had shut his eyes and taken a deep breath, trying to comb the tangle of words in his head into some kind of coherent sentence.

“I mean- I just- the venue,” he gulped. ��It’s- there’s a bit of a problem.”

“What about it?” Lucy sighed, irritation tracing the edges of her tone. “I fail to see what’s so problematic about getting a slot at the Old Vic of all places, but if you have any objections, then do enlighten me.”

“It’s not that, it’s just-“ Dan gulped, not really too sure how far he’s going to get with this. The bitterness already in her tone didn’t sound at all promising. “I don’t know. Do we have to perform in the round?”

“Christ, is performing in one of the most popular theatres in London that much of a chore?”

“No, no, I just-“ he gulped, trying to work out how the hell he’d word this without sounding like a twat. “I’ve never really… you know. Performed in an environment like that before.”

“You’ve been acting for twelve years,” she said bluntly. “I’m sure you have enough experience to be able to deal with a round stage instead of a rectangular one.”

“But- like, isn’t the round meant for- like… you know, Greek plays and shit?”

“It used to be,” she’d said, taking care to apply extra emphasis on the past tense. “Since when were you so hung up on the traditions of theatre, anyway?” she’d added after a pause. “Only last week were you totally in favour of the idea of having a rap battle in the middle of Othello.”

Dan had frowned, because that wasn’t really fair – sure, a rap battle isn’t exactly a common feature of Shakespeare’s plays, but no one could deny that Louis, playing Iago, was pretty good at freestyling whenever a mic was thrown in his direction. Despite not adhering to the conventions of traditional English theatre, it certainly made the play more entertaining.

“It’s just gonna be- you know. It’s gonna take some getting used to,” he’d mumbled instead.

“You have three months to get used to it,” she’d pointed out. “I’m sure you and the rest of the cast will have familiarised yourself with it by the time the production comes around.”

“But- the round is traditionally meant for-“

“Look, if you’re going to get so archaic about it, I can always build a time machine, book the open-air Globe for, like, sometime four-hundred years ago, and you can spend the next three days picking rotten tomatoes out of your hair,” she said. “Does that sound better?”

“They only did that to bad actors,” Dan had pointed out. Lucy rolled her eyes.

“And you know what makes a good actor, Dan?” she retorted. “Flexibility. The willingness to branch out of your comfort zone.”

Dan had sighed. He’s not going to get anywhere with this, is he?

“You know what?” he’d finally shaken his head, defeated. “Forget it.”

She watched him turn on his heel with a raised eyebrow. “See you Tuesday, then? First read-through of the script is at eleven in the morning.”

“See you then,” Dan muttered, not even bothering to turn around.

He let the door slam behind him.

It’s not that Dan doesn’t want to kiss anyone – (quite the contrary, really. He loves the idea of it, loves the thought of someone’s lips pressed up against his, the world slowing down around them and his heart feeling like fire. He’s always tried to incorporate that feeling into his acting, letting his passion leak into every character he’s cast, but when the stage lights are off and the curtain is down, his attraction to his colleagues ends there) – it’s just- well, he doesn’t really think he’s found the right person to share the real experience with, yet. His fellow actors and actresses aren’t unattractive by any means, but he doesn’t look at any of them and find himself struck by the desire to taste their lips and whisper incoherence into their ears like Eddie was supposed to do in the back of that car.

Seventeen, and still hasn’t had his first kiss. Still doesn’t want to waste it, at that.

Pathetic.

-

Technicians don’t get paid enough, Phil thinks.

He’s spent the day holed up in the trap room, devouring what was left in the back of the fridge (including a half-opened pack of Doritos that tasted like they expired about five years ago) and puzzling over this fucking broken light board that everyone had very kindly left him to take care of. It had already taken him over half an hour to get one of the chunky old Mac laptops up and running again (seriously, who in this day and age is still using an iBook?) and even then it only really half-functions – a handful of keys are missing, the trackpad only ever seems to work when it feels like it, and there’s a huge hairline crack right across the screen. Phil’s spent so long cursing through gritted teeth and smacking the table in frustration every time the damn thing freezes that it wouldn’t come as a surprise if he ended up contributing to those cracks by the end of the day. Maybe that’s how they ended up there in the first place.

“You alright?” the door suddenly opens and a voice – Nick, Phil presumes, breaks the aching silence that the room has been blanketed in for the past four hours. Finally, Phil sighs, feeling a pinch of anger melt away. Human company.

“Been better,” Phil mumbles, popping a couple of grapes into his mouth. Been better, he scoffs to himself. He’s pretty sure he hasn’t been worse.

“Chuck me a coke, will you?” he pulls up a chair and puts his feet on it, perching on the edge of the table. Phil heaves out a sigh – that involves getting up – but musters up enough energy to lean over and yank the fridge open. He tosses him a can, and Nick catches it expertly.

“Nice of you to show up,” Phil rolls his eyes. “Only four hours late this time. That’s an hour and a half off your personal best.”

“They said they didn’t need me here ‘till three,” he protests, popping the can open and taking a few gulps. “They said you had it all under control.”

His sentence is punctuated by a burp. Phil grimaces.

“Under control,” Phil snorts. That’ll be the fucking day.

“What did they leave you here to do?” he frowns.

“Only fix this entire fucking thing,” Phil nods over to the stupid light board. God, he’s sick of the sight of it. “Beats me what’s wrong with it. I’ve only just managed to get this dinosaur up and running,” he gestures to the corpse of a laptop in front of him, “let alone look at that.”

“Fuck me, man,” Nick sighs out a heavy breath. “If I knew, I could have come in earlier to help you out a bit. You should have texted me.”

“It’s fine,” Phil sighs even though- well, it’s not, really. There’s only so many hours of broken technology and out-of-date food one can take. “It’s not your fault,” he adds truthfully.

“They’re twats sometimes, aren’t they?” Nick lowers his voice, despite the fact they’re literally underground here, beneath the earshot of everyone.

“I’ll say,” Phil widens his eyes, trying to click something and- nope, it’s fucking frozen again. “For fuck’s sake. They’re all bloody loaded, too. You would have thought with the money they have, they could fork out a little for equipment that at least half-functions, right?”

“Yup,” Nick sighs. “Guess bookings for overpriced fancy-ass theatres are higher up on their agenda, though.”

Phil can’t argue with that. Apparently they’re going to have to wire up something in the Old Vic, of all places, next week. Phil dreads to think how much hiring that place out for even a few hours is going to cost, let alone booking it for three nights.

Probably more than enough to buy a better fucking laptop.

-

“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,

Who is already sick and pale with grief,

That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.

Be not her maid since she is envious.

Her vestal livery is but sick and green,

And none but-“

“No- no,” Lucy holds up her hand. “Come on, Dan. More emotion than that. You’re telling the love of your life that even the moon is envious of her beauty. At least pretend to put some passion into it.”

Dan rolls his eyes – only the fourth time he’s had to repeat this fucking soliloquy in the past fifteen minutes. He’s pretty sure he’s only one “no, no, it’s too (insert adjective here)” away from giving up with this whole thing altogether. He’d rather have played Benvolio anyway.

“Come on,” Lucy continues. “We’ll take it from Be not her maid…”

Dan shuts his eyes, scrapes up the remaining traces of his sanity, and takes another breath.

“Be not her maid since she is envious.

Her vestal livery is but sick and green,

And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off!

It is my lady. Oh, it is my love.

Oh, that she knew she were!

She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?

Her eye discourses. I will answer it.—

I am too bold. 'Tis not to me she speaks.

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,

Having some business, do entreat her eyes

To twinkle in their spheres till they retur-“

“No, no-“ she interrupts him again and for fuck’s sake, at this rate, Dan won’t even need to spend any time in his bedroom going over his lines. He’s pretty sure he’s memorised half of the monologues already just from recapping in rehearsals alone.

“Come on, really feel it,” she pleads. “You can’t say something as romantic as that with a face like yours – you’re literally saying that two stars in the sky have gone away and they’re asking Juliet’s eyes to shine in their place until they return.”

Dan balls his fists, ready to snap back that yes, he’s fully fucking aware of what’s going on in the play thank you very much, in case she hadn’t forgotten he did actually study it for three separate exams and subsequent exposure to the text in question has made him rather familiar with the occurrences currently taking place, but they’re all interrupted by a knock at the door.

“Come in,” Lucy huffs, mildly irritated.

The door knob jitters, then twists.

“Hiya,” a black-haired boy nods tiredly, pushing through the crack in the door. Dan immediately recognises him – one of the tech guys, he thinks, but he isn’t entirely certain. He’s never really spoken to any of the crew before; they tend to keep well out of the limelight (they’d rather control it instead).

“Everything okay?” Lucy asks, before turning to Dan and Alexandra (his Juliet). “You two, take five. Be ready to take it from the top.”

They both relax and take a seat on one of the upturned wooden boxes. It isn’t until Dan takes the weight off of his legs he realises how much they’ve been aching – fuck, he really needs to get back to that gym.

“Any luck?” she says to Mr. Black-Hair. He’s holding a laptop that looks as if it’s seen better years, never mind days, and a long cord of wire that snakes around his fist.

“Nothing at all,” he sighs, flicking a strand of his fringe out of his eyes. His hair looks as if it hasn’t seen a hairbrush for days, but there’s something about the way it sits shaggily on his head that kind-of suits him (Dan wishes he could pull off messy hair – he only attempted ditching the straighteners once and spent the rest of the day wondering if any birds had mistaken his head for a nest).

He doesn’t realise he’s been staring until he catches the tail end of Alexandra’s sentence and realises he hasn’t actually been listening for the past minute or so.

“What was that, sorry?”

“I asked you how you were finding Romeo so far,” she repeats.

“Hm? Oh yeah, yeah- he’s fine,” Dan says, not taking his eyes off of Mr. Black-Hair. He’s lost the thread of their conversation (he’s no lip reader) but by the looks of it, it seems as if there’s a problem with one of the laptops.

“Are you sure?” Alexandra frowns. Dan looks at her, but his glance is soon pulled back to the technician.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

She shrugs. “You don’t really- I don’t know, you just don’t seem to be… you know. That into it, y’know?”

“Wait-“ Dan shakes his head, trying to focus on their conversation instead of the one a few metres away from. “Hang on- what? What makes you say that?”

She raises her eyebrows, as if to say ‘really?’. Dan’s expression remains carefully blank.

“Come on, Dan. We wouldn’t have had to repeat this stupid scene like, five times if you were actually into it. I’ve seen you do way better than this.”

“Oh, not you as well,” Dan groans, deflating. He’s pretty sure that exact sentence had fallen from Lucy’s lips not so long ago. He’s sick of hearing it, sick of having to sit and listen to people tell him that he ‘can do way better’ and ask ‘is everything all right, Dan? Nothing bothering you, is there?’ because he’s just ‘not himself’ at the moment.

That’s the most ridiculous one, he thinks, because for Christ’s sake, he’s an actor. He’s never himself.

“No, I don’t mean it like that,” Alexandra says, backtracking. “You know I don’t. I just- I think I overheard Lucy say you had a problem with something or other last week?”

“Did you,” Dan mumbles, unable to keep the bitter sarcasm out of his town. Alexandra remains unfazed.

“What was that about, though?” she remains unfazed. “Nothing to do with the casting, is it?”

“You really think it’s to do with the casting?” Dan stares at her in disbelief, before scoffing. “Yeah, like, I’m gutted to have bagged the lead role alongside you at one of the best theatres in the country. How am I going to cope?”

Not entirely truthful, but not a complete lie either.

“Just making sure,” a grin tugs at her lips, and she flicks a curl of red hair behind her shoulders. “I don’t have much of a problem with it myself, to be honest.”

“That’s reassuring,” Dan smirks sarcastically, but his tone is fairly benign. There’s certainly no denying she’s fucking gorgeous and it’s really no wonder she’s Juliet – she has hair the colour of a sunset falling down her back in ruby curls, emerald eyes framed by a curl of long eyelashes and cherry red lips that stretch into a wide smile whenever Dan cracks a joke, giving way to a small dimple on the side of her cheek. Her skin is pale, the colour of moonlight, almost, and he idly thinks, just for a fleeting second, that the moon probably would be jealous of her. She’s beautiful.

“Certainly don’t have a problem with getting to snog you in front of a thousand people, I must be honest,” she adds, and Dan’s stomach drops and his grin vanishes. Shit.

He wrings out a laugh, internally wincing at how false it sounds. “Yeah, I- um-“

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” someone mutters a few footsteps away from them. He snaps his head up, and Lucy plus Mr. Black-Hair are hunched over the desk, clearly getting nowhere with the absolute disaster they call an iBook.

“Wait- what’s the problem?” Dan suddenly gets up. He feels a little bad for leaving Alexandra so abruptly so he throws her a little apologetic ‘be right back’ glance, but he can’t help it – he might actually be able to help, here.

He shoves down the other voice in the back of his mind, the ‘or rather you’re just grabbing at any opportunity to avoid any potential conversation about the kiss you fucking wimp’

“It’s okay, Dan, sit back down. I’ll be with you both in a second,” Lucy calls over her shoulder.

“No, really,” Dan insists. “I know a thing or two about Macs. I have one myself, and-“ he catches Lucy drawing in a breath, ready to protest, and he regrets the spill of words almost as soon as they come out – fuck, why can’t he just keep his mouth shut? – but Mr. Black-Hair turns around, an eyebrow quirked upwards.

“Really?” his stare is the colour of ice, the sky on a December morning, but it’s weirdly warm at the same time.

“I- uh, yeah,” Dan stutters when he remembers how to talk again. “I’ve always had Macs. They’re great when they decide to work, but they can be a bitch when they begin to act up, and-“ he cuts himself off with an awkward shrug, “yeah.”

“Tell me about it,” the technician smirks. “This bastard-” he nods to the chunky white rectangle in his arms, “took me like, half an hour to boot up alone. And now it’s been frozen for like- twice as long as that. I’ve only had chance to type in my password so far.”

Lucy’s still standing in the middle of them and it’s getting a bit difficult to ignore the stony glare burning into Dan’s peripheral vision right now and even harder to avoid eye contact with her, but it doesn’t stop him from offering some help, albeit rather inappropriately timed.

“I- um, have my MacBook with me if that helps?” Dan offers, trying not to feel the heat of his blush when Mr. Black-Hair looks straight at him. “I mean- if you don’t need it that’s fine, but like- it’ll function a bit better than that thing,” he shrugs. “I dunno. It would probably save you a lot of time.”

“Really?” he raises an eyebrow. “Like, with you right now?”

“Yeah,” Dan says. “I mean – I haven’t got my charger on me, but it’s on, like, eighty percent. Should be fine.”

“I mean-“ he throws a permission-seeking glance, towards Lucy, who Dan is pretty sure would be having steam coming out of her ears would it be humanly possible. She fixes Dan with a hard stare, a real ‘go on; be my guest’ look that’s always comes across as more of a dare than permission, a challenge for his conscience, but he can’t help an apologetic smile tugging at his lips.

“It’s cool with you, right?” his lips say before his mind catches up.

Lucy rolls her eyes in defeat. “If you absolutely must. But only- only because I could do with the extra time to independently go over one of Alexandra’s soliloquy.”

His face breaks out into a grin, and he’s not that sure why. “Thanks, Luce. I owe you one.”

“Don’t you make a habit of this, though. Remember; this is your own rehearsal time you’re sacrificing.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dan calls over his shoulder, trailing off. Mr. Black-Hair holds the door open behind him, and suddenly they’re out of the rehearsal studio and walking in a weird mutual silence sitting in a strange middle ground between comfortable and uncomfortable, across the car park and over to the actual theatre.

“Are you alright to do this, yeah?” Mr. Black-Hair (Dan seriously needs to come up with more imaginative mental nicknames for people) breaks the silence on their walk down to the trap room.

“It’s no problem at all,” he smirks as another wooden step groans under his foot. “Anything to get out of rehearsal.”

Dan’s never really been here before, never touched the underground territory where the technicians lurked, but there’s something about the atmosphere of this place that grips him.

-

Half an hour passes, and Dan couldn’t really tell you why he’s still sitting down here, still sitting on a revolving chair with a rip in the upholstery, under half-broken beams, tables that look like they’re seconds away from collapsing, and a lot of weird technology that he’d never even attempt to get his head around (seriously – do they even need this many buttons?). He’d given his laptop to Black Hair to receive a very emphatic ‘thank you, like seriously you’re a fucking lifesaver if I spent a second longer with that piece of shit I really don’t know what I would have done’ and the job had been done in seconds. Since then, a casual conversation had been struck up and Dan finds he doesn’t actually want to go back upstairs just yet.

“You two sounded really good in there,” Black Hair comments. They’d been talking about the play. “From what I heard, anyway.”

“Thanks,” Dan says, trying to ignore the quiet blush that warms his cheeks. There’s nothing quite like someone complimenting his acting. “Clearly not good enough for Lucy, though.”

“Few things are, Dan,” he sighs, and Dan only finds it half-weird that this guy knows his name, but Dan doesn’t actually know his. It’s unnerving, sure, but nothing he’s a stranger to. “She’s been on at you all morning.”

“Yeah,” Dan pauses, before adding an apologetic “sorry, I- um, I don’t think I caught your name?”

“It’s fine. I’m Phil,” he grins, and Dan thanks his lucky stars there’s finally a name to put to the face.

Dan studies him briefly, and frowns. “You do look familiar, actually.”

“Yeah – I do all the donkey work downstairs,” he grins. “You may have seen me emerge from the cave every now and then.”

Dan chuckles, deciding there and then that he likes Phil.

“Doesn’t it get lonely?” Dan asks, studying the square lights looming above them, one of which he notices is stuttering slightly, flickering on and off every now and then.

Phil shrugs, not taking his eyes off of the screen. “Kinda. But I mean – I have my little crew down here, y’know? There’s five of us. We just like- keep each other company. Help each other whenever we need to,” he glances at Dan. “Oh, and sneak up to the theatre and watch you guys every now and then.”

Dan giggles. “Brilliant. Must be a nice little community, though.”

“Yeah, it is,” Phil hesitates. “Or perhaps ‘support group’ might be a more appropriate term. For the poor sods who have to put up with shitty laptops and gross food.”

Dan laughs, and helps himself to another Dorito.

-

“Okay, right- Dan, sorry if this sounds a bit weird because- like, we’ve pretty much only just met, but like- um- I was wondering if you wanted to-“

“Phil,” Dan cuts him off. As an actor, there’s something about hearing people stutter and ramble without really saying anything that tends to grate on him. “I’d love to.”

“Really? Well, I-“ Phil stops and frowns. “Hang on a second. How did you know I was gonna ask you to hang out?”

Dan shrugs like he hasn’t spent the last thirteen years mastering the sciences of body language and speech and how they can be applied to the acting world. “Lucky guess, I suppose.”

Phil smiles. “I mean- would you? Like, really?”

“Of course,” Dan says.

“Well yeah, like- I don’t have to be home for a while yet, and I have a car so we could just like- drive around for a bit? Go to town if you want?”

Dan smiles, and repeats what he said before he even knew what Phil was going to say.

“Yeah. I’d love to.”

-                                          

It’s a bit of a weird result to come out of lending his laptop to a stranger for a while, but it’s how Dan finds himself spending the evening sat in the passenger seat on the top of a car park roof, blasting some weird indie song from the depth of Phil’s Spotify and watching the sun sink further behind the buildings, painting the sky warmer with every slow minute that passes on the dashboard clock.

They’d had a drive around the city together, sometimes talking, sometimes letting lulls in the conversation give way to thoughtful silences, both of them tapping away to Phil’s music taste, but Dan thinks it’s been about fifteen minutes since either of them last said anything.

“So,” Phil is the first to break the silence. He flicks the last of his cigarette out of the window (Dan had insisted on rolling down the windows before he did that – there’s no way he’s going home stinking of an ashtray). “Tell me about yourself.”

Dan looks up from his phone at that, his heart thudding.

“You what?”

“You know,” Phil’s gaze doesn’t move, his eyes fixed on the view in front of the windscreen. They’d picked a spot at the very top of a multi-storey car park overlooking everything, leaving the city a pool of lights and colours and life far beneath them. “I don’t really know you. So tell me about yourself.”

“I- um-“ Dan gulps. This wasn’t really a question he came prepared for. He shrugs. “I don’t really know what there is to tell, if I’m honest.”

“Oh, now come on,” Phil presses. “Just- anything. Your hobbies. Your life. Your dreams. What you want to be when you’re older.”

“I feel like I’m in a bloody job interview,” Dan chuckles. Phil’s lips quirk upwards in response.

“You are. I’m interviewing you to see if you’re fit for the job of being mates with me.”

“The ‘job’?” Dan frowns. “Like it’s a chore?”

“That’s for you to decide,” Phil grins. “Now, come on. I wanna hear about you.”

Dan gulps, silence falling for the first time in a while.

“I- um, well I think my hobby is probably pretty obvious, for a start,” Dan begins. Phil rolls his eyes. “And what I wanna be when I’m older, too. I’m gonna do a degree in Drama, I reckon.”

“What else are you into, then?”

Dan stops for a second. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, come on,” Phil presses, flicking his lighter and sparking up another cigarette. “You must have other interests besides acting. You got a girlfriend?”

Dan clams up. “Um- no.”

“Oh. Boyfriend, then?” he quirks his eyebrows, and Dan shakes his head miserably.

“Afraid not.”

“Glad we established that,” Phil smirks, but Dan doesn’t really smile back.

He chews on the inside of his lip, having a staring contest with a pair of headlights sliding across one of the roads beneath them.

“What music are you into, then?”

Dan swallows, trying to think. It’s like someone’s scraped over his mind with an eraser, rubbing out his interests and his life and his personality, all pencilled in with weak lines.

“Oh, you know,” he shrugs. “This and that. I like whatever this is,” he nods to the Spotify track on Phil’s phone. “Bit of Indie, it’s good. Oh, and I love- what are they called? Pink Floyd?”

“Floyd’s good,” Phil agrees. “And Nirvana.”

“Yeah,” Dan gulps, feeling another silence probe the conversation.

“You into the Smashing Pumpkins?”

Dan shakes his head.

“Oh, okay. Slaves?”

Dan shakes his head again.

“Genesis?”

“Never even heard of them.”

“Cobalt Night?”

Dan shakes his head again

Phil cackles. “Oh Christ. You do realise I made that last band up?”

“Oh god,” Dan can feel his cheeks burn peony. “I’m not doing myself any favours here, am I?”

“Don’t worry, I’m only messing with you,” Phil says. “I think it would be more embarrassing if you said yes, to be honest.”

“True,” Dan shrugs, feeling Phil’s stare burn into his side profile. He sits back further in his seat, keeping his stare.

“You’re not really into much, are you?

Dan shrugs.

“I’m more into Musical Theatre, really. Ever since we did a production of Hamilton I haven’t really been able to get that rap out of my head,” he chuckles.

“Right,” Phil sits up a little bit and clears his throat. “Well we’ve established your music taste and your hobby. Who are your favourite actors, then?”

It’s like someone’s flicked a switch inside Dan. His eyes light up.

“-and Leonardo DiCaprio, oh my God, don’t even get me started on him. I mean- who wouldn’t fuck young Leo? Have you even seen him in Titanic? And Romeo and Juliet too, Jesus Christ he’s gorgeous. He’s so fucking gorgeous. I’m not gonna do Romeo’s role any justice when he’s my competition, am I?”

Phil just nods and says the odd ‘hm’, listening to Dan’s stream of consciousness.

“-and Helena Bonham-Carter, what a fucking legend, man. She’s just- her character is just so versatile, you know? I mean- there’s a good reason she’s in literally everything, and that’s because she’s fucking amazing- have you seen Fight Club? You must have seen it, it’s incredible. She’s incredible. It’s a bit of a mind fuck if I’m honest, what with the split personality thing and everything, but- oh God, Brad Pitt is so good in it too. And he’s pretty hot, I’m not gonna lie. Well, until he grew out his hair and looked a bit like a farmer. But- where was I? Oh yeah, Helena Bonham Carter-”

“She was good in Sweeney Todd, too,” Phil comments, and he’s off again.

“-like, that was the first time I ever saw Johnny Depp act, and by Christ that film creeped me out. I mean- I was only like, seven when I watched it so of course it was gross, like, what seven year old watches people do- you know, that, to paying customers? I feel sorry for the poor sods who just went in there wanting to give their beards a trim. But- yeah, they were both really good in Sweeney Todd. I had a bit of a crush on Helena- and Johnny too, for that matter, I mean come on, who didn’t? But then I found out Johnny Depp is a bit of a dick in real life so I went off him after that. But Helena’s still cool, obviously.”

“She’s good, yeah,” Phil nibbles at a protruding hangnail on his thumb.

“And- oh god, who’s another good actor? Oh, don’t even get me started on Morgan Freeman. Absolute fucking legend. Like, oh my god. Him and that other one- god, what’s his name? The guy from Donnie Darko?”

Dan’s brain is moving far too quickly for Phil to keep up and he has no idea what the correlation between Morgan Freeman and Donnie Darko is, but he gives it a shot anyway.

“Jake Gyllenhaal?”

“Yes. Yes, oh my god, that’s the one,” Dan’s face breaks out into a grin. “Fuck, Donnie Darko. What a film, man. My friend has a tattoo of it, and-“

It continues like this, Dan chatting nineteen-to-the-dozen and Phil counting the glitters of passion in his eyes, before they’re both interrupted by a buzzing on Dan’s lap.

“Oh shit,” he grabs his phone. “It’s my mum.”

Phil doesn’t know what she’s saying on the other end of the line, but judging by Dan’s apologies it sounds like he’s stayed out here for a little too long.

“Sorry,” Dan mumbles, tugging on his seatbelt. “Lost track of time a bit, there.”

“Clearly,” Phil grins.

“This was good, though,” Dan says. “Like, really good. Thanks for, you know. Suggesting this.”

“Tell you what,” Phil leans into him, and Dan can smell his cologne. “We’re gonna come back up here again soon, okay? And you’re gonna tell me about yourself. Properly, this time.

Dan frowns. “Isn’t that what I’ve spent the past like- hour doing?” he glances at the clock and shit, has it really been that long? It’s pitch black outside, the only light coming from the glitter of the city beneath them (shit, it really is beautiful from up here) and he was supposed to be home forty-five minutes ago.

“Yeah,” Phil says, starting up the engine. “The only difference being next time we do this, I’m going to ban you from saying the word ‘acting’. So I can hear about you, the real you, and not whoever you pretend to be for a living.”

-

The next few days pass in a blur of line-learning, enduring Lucy’s lectures about how he just ‘isn’t putting enough ‘oomph’ into it, come on now, we’ll take it from the top one more time’ and Dan has to act like he actually gives more of a shit about what Romeo’s saying right now than what Phil had said in that car a few days ago. He has to act like it isn’t what he’d been reciting over and over in his mind, the words digging grooves into the back of his mind and making themselves at home.

He has to act like there’s more to his fucking life than acting.

-

The next time Dan sees Phil, they’re both cooped up in a control room eating lunch in a companionable silence; Dan going over his lines and Phil puzzling over these two wires that are, according to him, sly bastards that won’t fucking go in these holes Jesus Christ, to which Dan had shut his eyes and prayed to god no-one outside the room had caught that out of context. There’s a huge control panel, rows and rows of buttons and sound mixers and, as Dan had very accurately christened them, “slidey-things” in front of them. He has no idea what any of this stuff is, no idea what a “cross-fader” is or what the hell a “submaster” is supposed to do, but every now and then Phil will casually lean over and flick a switch or press a button and a stage light beneath them will change.

“What’s up?”

Dan looks up from his script. He’s been poring over his lines for so long he’s pretty sure stripes of yellow highlighter are now permanently inked into the back of his mind, now.

“What? Nothing.”

Phil swings his legs off of the bar they’d been resting against. They’re halfway through sharing a KitKat (Dan had taken a trip down to the Co-op at the beginning of the lunch break and returned with a bag so heavy with food it had left a dent in his hand, insisting Phil can’t be living on stale crisps his entire life) and watching a rehearsal, one Dan doesn’t have to be in for once, through a pane of glass.

“You’re going to have to do better if you want to convince me, Mr. Theatre Kid,” Phil reaches over to the bowl in front of them and plucks a grape from the stem. “I thought you were good at acting.”

“What do you want me to do; leap up and perform a jig?” Dan turns a page, the paper rustling a bit too loudly. “I’m fine, Phil. Stop reading into things too much.”

Phil stares at him. “You’re sat there with a face as long as my leg, and I’m reading into things?” he quirks an eyebrow. “Be careful. If you stare at that page any longer it’ll probably burst into flames.”

“Shut up,” Dan mutters, the edge in his voice a little too sharp for it to slip by as a joke.

Phil does.

Dan sighs. “Sorry, I just-“

“Rehearsals getting to you?” he suggests softly. Dan doesn’t plan on letting the real problem slip; Christ, he can only imagine the havoc that would ensue if it got around that as well as obsessing over acting he’s also never actually kissed anyone, so he quickly takes Phil up on that.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “I mean- Romeo’s a good character to play, I guess, but he does have an awful lot to say.”

“You’ll be okay,” Phil reassures him. “You still have months of time left to memorise your lines. When’s the play?”

“Seventh of February,” Dan says. Two months from now.

“There we go,” Phil says. “You have plenty of time yet.”

“I guess so,” Dan shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“You’ve done this millions of times before,” Phil says. “You’ll be fine; I know you will. You’re a natural.”

Dan wishes he knew the half, he really does, but there’s just something about Phil’s smile that makes him almost want to believe him.

-

Dan manages to tell Phil a little bit more about himself next time they’re on the roof together, and in return, he learns a bit about Phil too.

“Well, when I was acti-“

“Nuh-uh,” Phil interrupts him. “No acting talk, remember?”

Dan rolls his eyes. “It’s relevant to what I was gonna say. It’s an important part of the story.”

“Wherever the hell you can fit acting into a story about you and your friends getting drunk and stealing a supermarket trolley because you couldn’t afford a taxi, I’d be very impressed.”

“You’d be surprised,” Dan grins, and that was the only time acting came into conversation that night.

-

Dan learns Phil is eighteen, that he’d failed his driving test three times before passing because he was driving on the wrong side of the dual carriageway, and swears he’s going to give up smoking next year, he promises. He learns that his favourite colour is blue because he likes the way the colour skates across the ocean water in the summer, and that he used to be scared of dogs before his parents got him a puppy for Christmas, a bouncy Labrador called Daisy with a love for the sun and walks down to the beach.

“I fucking love dogs,” Dan beams.

“So do I, now. Took me long enough,” Phil agrees, taking a drag of his cigarette. “Daisy’s so cute, oh my god. You will love her.”

Dan doesn’t say anything, but there’s something about the definite use of ‘you will’ that he likes.

He, in turn, finds that he does have some thoughts and feelings and dreams hidden away in there, beneath the façade of scripts and stage lights and acting. He finds he does have stuff to say, stuff that isn’t always attached to a web stringing back to the theatre. He tells Phil all about his cat, Ozzy (a little shit who takes great pleasure in knocking all his belongings off of his desk and sleeping on his laptop, but he loves him anyway) his annoying next-door neighbours who don’t seem to see any problem with blasting ABBA at three in the morning, and they manage to find common bands they both like. Oasis is playing when the sun sinks, the sky darkens, and the city lights up beneath them.

“God, I love this one,” Phil mumbles, his speech obscured by the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “Don’t Look Back In Anger. It’s one of their best.”

“Oh god, yeah,” Dan agrees, tapping along to the chorus. “That and Stand By Me. Oh god, and Champagne Supernova, too.”

Phil grins at that, and leans forward, picking his phone up from the dashboard. Before Dan has a chance to question him, the chorus stops dead in its tracks, and an acoustic softness follows the sudden silence, a series of guitar chords that are just that bit too familiar. He grins.

“I always think the intro sounds a bit like Wonderwall,” Phil comments, putting his phone down and leaning back in the seat.

“Yeah,” Dan sighs, leaning back in his own seat and turning his gaze to the city beneath them, staring at lights and roads and buildings until they pool into a hazy amber blur in his vision.

How many special people change,

How many lives are living strange,

Where were you while we were getting high?

Slowly walking down the hall,

Faster than a cannonball

Where were you while we were getting high?

 Someday you will find me,

Caught beneath the landslide,

In a champagne supernova in the sky.

Someday you will find me,

Caught beneath the landslide,

In a champagne supernova;

A champagne supernova in the sky.

They don’t say anything, instead letting Liam Gallagher do the talking, but sly glances are exchanged from under brown fringes and black eyelashes.

-

“Nice up here, isn’t it?”

It’s only until Phil breaks the silence they’ve lapsed into that Dan realises the song has drawn to a close. He slides his gaze from the city and over to Phil, over to his thoughtful stare skating along the skyline, the ruffled sweep of black hair coating his fringe, and the orange glow of a cigarette tip poking out of the corner of his mouth. His eyes flicker over to Dan’s.

Dan looks back over to the city.

“Yeah.”

“I always come up here.”

“I can see why.”

“Yeah, well. Sometimes a little look over the city is just what you need to clear your head. It just puts everything in perspective, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Dan swallows. “It really does.”

There’s a litter of thoughts and worries in his mind, buried deep and multiplying with every day that drags past, every day that pulls him closer and closer to the production, to the hundreds of burning stares in the audience seats, to his colleague’s lips. He’s been longing for a break from it. Just a few hours of silence, a few quiet moments that don’t have to be spent combing over every single thought in his head, thinking and thinking until it inflates into anxiety, spilling into the pit of his stomach and clawing at the edges as it goes.

And the more he counts the city lights, the more he feels the cold night air stroke his cheeks and the engines reverberating around the car park levels beneath them, the more he reckons a more few nights up here. It’s the remedy he needs; just him, Phil and the lights.

Their eyes meet seconds after, and Dan can feel the question he’s vowed to ask Phil before the end of the night already beginning to rest on his lips, on the cusp of speech.

“When can we do this again?”

-

The late nights begin to pass more frequently in a spinning blur of city nights, passenger seats and conversations, all whispers and cold air and stolen glances. Dan can feel himself unravelling like a threadbare blanket, his carefully constructed personas and characters fraying at the edges with every hour spent up on the top of the city with a boy whose lips spill truths like water, and it isn’t long until Dan finds cracks in his paper personalities and begins to feel more and more honesty begin to seep through. He finds that no, he doesn’t have to spin false anecdotes like cotton and lie about his interests and find a way of linking everything back to acting, hooking every little quirk and element to his personality back to the stage. He doesn’t have to impress Phil with his knowledge of Hollywood throughout the years and he doesn’t have to act like he loves things he’s never actually heard of and he doesn’t have to lock his feelings away and throw away the key.

He doesn’t have to pretend.

-

It’s all okay until they fall onto the topic of previous relationships.

It’s been a good night. They’d visited the car park again, but this time without the car (it was warm enough to leave it in the driveway and make their own way up the concrete staircases, glass bottles in plastic bags clinking around their legs). They’d situated themselves in the very same parking space, the one second to the right and next to a beacon, but they’d traded car seats for a picnic blanket, headlights for phone torches and gear sticks for bottle openers.

“Yeah, like- fuck, she wasn’t a good kisser at all, was Mary. I mean- we were in year nine and she tried, bless her, and God knows so did I. But you know, with that as my first impression of kissing, when it was over I was like ‘what the fuck is all the fuss about?’” Phil chuckles, and Dan pretends to grin.

“Yeah, I mean-“ he shrugs, staring down at his lap. “I’ve had my fair share of bad kisses in my time.”

The ease with which the lie rolls off of his tongue almost takes him by surprise. It’s been a while since he’s lied about himself to Phil, and it feels strange.

“I can imagine,” Phil says, before frowning. “But you’re an actor. So you must be an excellent kisser, right? What with all the practice you guys have.”

Dan frowns, looking up from his bottle. “You what?”

“Oh come on. I saw what went on in the back of that car last term. Eddie and Alexandra. That play involved more lip-on-lip action than the fucking Notebook.”

Dan smiles at that, remembering the play adaptation they actually did of that when he was in year ten. He doesn’t quite know whether to laugh or cry over the sheer amount of starring roles he’s had that are heavily eloped in some kind of romantic storyline.

“Us actors have our techniques,” he says carefully.

Phil’s eyes widen at that. “You do? Like what?”

Dan shrugs, taking another sip of beer. “Oh, you know.”

“No, I don’t know,” Phil shuffles closer, a flicker of eagerness in his cerulean stare and shit, Dan’s beginning to regret opening his mouth now. “Come on. What techniques do you have? I could use a few tips myself.”

Dan raises an eyebrow, his eyes firmly locked onto the spread of amber lights in front of them.

“I doubt you’d ever want to use these kinds of techniques on anyone,” he says, a hint of humour drying his speech. “I imagine stage-kissing on a real date would be quite a deal-breaker.”

“Stage kissing, huh?” Phil widens his eyes. “How does that differentiate from a real kiss, then?”

“Well,” Dan takes another sip of his drink, his vision beginning to slow down. “First of all, it’s not really a kiss at all.”

“Huh?” Phil frowns.

“I mean- not usually. There are different kinds of stage-kisses, but most of them don’t involve, you know,” he smirks, reusing Phil’s rather vulgar term of “lip-on-lip action”.

“So you guys don’t actually kiss?” Phil asks.

Dan shakes his head. “Nope.”

“But-… how does that work?”

Alcoholic courage swims through Dan’s veins at that. He glances at Phil.

The words are a whisper, a dare almost, and it isn’t until Phil nods that Dan realises he’s actually said it out loud.

“Want me to show you?”

“Yeah, go on,” Phil’s tone is casual, soft almost, but his eyes are glittering.

“Okay, well- come over here,” he beckons.

Phil does as he’s told, shuffling up on his knees until he’s facing Dan.

“One of the actors needs to have their back to the audience,” Dan says. “So, let’s say the wall over there is the audience,” he nods over Phil’s shoulder to the stretch of concrete watching them.

“Alright. The wall’s the audience. Now what?”

“Now,” Dan gulps, feeling his heart begin to pick up the pace because shit, this is really happening now. “So, what you do is, like, just lean in normally for a kiss, but stop just as your lips are about to touch.”

Phil scoffs. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“Look, do you want me to show you or not?”

“Nah, nah, I’m kidding,” Phil says. “C’mon, then. Show me how it’s done in Hollywood.”

“You dick,” Dan mumbles, but he’s leaning in.

Phil gets closer, his face begins to crawl up to Dan’s until their noses are brushing and his fringe is a tickle on Dan’s cheek and his breath mixes with Dan’s own, warm and languid through parted lips and fuck, Dan’s heart is really thudding now. His legs feel like jelly and his lungs feel like fire and there’s something warm and fiery swirling in the pit of his stomach, something alien, something that he’s certainly never felt before with any other colleague he’s come this agonisingly close to kissing.

They stay there for what feels like minutes, lips hovering, warmth tingling and the city still thundering beneath them, and it’s Phil who pulls away first.

“Impressive,” he smiles, eyes glittering with nonchalance. “Frustrating, but impressive. Is that your go-to one, then?”

It takes three swigs of beer to calm Dan down before he can speak again.

“I mean- um, yeah. Though sometimes if you’re, like, sitting really far over to the side in the audience you might be able to tell that they’re not actually kissing, so,” he shrugs. “It just depends on the stage, I guess.”

“Right,” Phil nods, swigging from his own bottle. “You, er- you mentioned a few other types, right?”

The thought of coming that close to Phil’s lips again sends the strange flame of warmth flooding back into Dan’s stomach. He all but chokes on his mouthful of drink.

“Er- yeah,” he stutters. “There are a few others,” he gulps again and shit, what’s up with him?

Dan doesn’t really know what’s happening, doesn’t know why being within a metre radius of this guy is already making him feel far more than he’d ever felt with any colleague, kissing or not, but it doesn’t stop him from beckoning the older boy over and showing him kiss number two, their lips locked together with nothing except Dan’s thumb in between them. He can feel the warmth of Phil’s mouth against his skin, the hot movement of Phil’s breath through his nose and the tickle of his hair against his cheek again. When he parts his mouth, Dan feels the tiniest touch of lip against his. It’s only the very corner and can’t have lasted for longer than a millisecond, but the feeling comes back like a spark to a flame and he’s beginning to find it difficult to balance and oh, shit.

They break apart, eyes searching each other’s, and it’s the first time Dan’s feeling like this post-‘kiss’ without having to throw on a character like an old shirt. He doesn’t have to follow anything up with someone else’s speech, with a fake accent and a stupid costume and a mannerism that doesn’t quite fit.

For once, he doesn’t feel like he has to act.

Phil narrows his eyes after a few silent seconds, fighting back a smirk.

Dan frowns, the post-stage kiss high beginning to melt away.

“What?”

“Is that seriously it?” Phil says.

“Yeah,” Dan moves away, trying to ignore the surge of electricity he had felt upon edging within a few millimetres of the other boy’s lips, the city a roar beneath them.

“I don’t know why I feel so disappointed,” Phil smirks. “From where I sit, looking at you lot doing all your stuff down on the stage, it looks a whole sight more realistic than that.”

Dan looks back out to the city.

“Yeah, well,” he says, feeling his heart slow down. “Acting isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

-

“So. You and Alexandra, eh?”

Dan glares at him. Dawn is beginning to throw pastel colours into the blackness of the sky. It’s still dark enough to see the stars, fainter twinkles against the sweep of indigo above them, but it’s light enough for them to see each other, to make out feint outlines of faces in the low pre-sunrise light, eyes half-lidded and shadowed from the sleepless hours. It must be pushing four in the morning, and they’ve been here since eleven o’clock, leaving their parents with promises that they’re spending the night round each other’s houses to make a few preparations for the play.

(If reciting Romeo’s Balcony Scene soliloquy through giggles and slightly drunken slurs counts as preparation, then at least half of that promise is true).

“We’re not an item,” Dan mumbles, taking a drag from his cigarette. It tastes strange, kind-of like dirt and ash and tar and he’s not a smoker and probably never will be, but Phil had offered him one and- well, fuck it.

“I know,” Phil says. “But you guys are performing in the round, aren’t you?” Phil narrows his eyes, and Dan swears he leans an inch or two closer before whispering, “your stage kisses won’t work from that angle, I’m telling you.”

“Don’t remind me,” Dan shuts his eyes. So far he’d been doing quite a grand job of pushing that worry to the back of his mind, burying it deep into his consciousness. The whole reason he’s up here altogether is to escape it.

Phil hesitates.

“What?” he asks. “Don’t you want to kiss Alexandra?”

Dan gulps, the taste of alcohol souring on his tongue a little.

“It’s not that,” he says. “I mean- a kiss is a kiss, right? It’s all part of the job, and-“

“But you don’t fancy her,” Phil says.

Dan frowns. “Well- no, of course not. She’s a colleague.”

“I know,” Phil says. “It makes a difference though, doesn’t it?”

“What does?”

“Kissing someone you don’t fancy. It’s weird.”

“Tell me about it,” Dan mumbles. It’s getting harder and harder to maintain this lie. “I- er, yeah. I usually stick to stage-kissing on the job, to be honest,” he shrugs. “It’s just easier than kissing someone you don’t really have feelings for.”

“Have you never, you know, properly kissed anyone before, then?”

Dan takes a deep breath. Lies can flow like water when he wants them to; he’s a master at concealing the truth behind a blanket of fabrication and deception, but there’s something about talking to Phil that makes falsehood sour on his tongue.

He lets it out in a deep sigh, feeling his chest deflate and his heart thud. Fuck it.

“You know what?,” he begins. “No. I haven’t. I don’t know if you can tell, but- yeah. I dunno, I guess that’s why I’m so stressed about this shit with Alexandra. And like- I know that probably makes me a fucking loser for never having kissed anyone at the age I am now, and probably even more of a loser that I want my first one to be with someone special, but- fuck, I don’t know,” he swallows, feeling the knot of anxiety in his chest loosen a little. “No. I haven’t. Okay?”

Phil doesn’t say anything. He bites his lip and averts his eyes down to the neck of his bottle. He fiddles with the loose cap, letting it fall through the spaces between his fingers with a sharp clink.

Dan doesn’t like that, doesn’t like the silence. The knot returns.

“What?”

“I- er- that wasn’t really what I meant,” Phil finally says.

The knot tightens.

“What do you mean it’s not what you meant?”

“I meant have you properly kissed anyone on stage before,” Phil glances up. “Not in general.”

Dan’s stomach drops. Oh fuck.

He open his mouth, but no speech follows. No amount of words can haul himself out of his hole now. Shit.

“I mean-“ he finally speaks again after a silence, and there’s a tremor in his voice that he desperately tries to smooth over. “Oh, shit,” he deflates, feeling the pit of his stomach begin to churn due to the abundance of the night’s alcohol. There’s no point trying to clamber out of the hole he’s just dug himself. He’ll only deepen it.

“Have you really never kissed anyone?” Phil asks in a quieter voice, but he doesn’t sound surprised. Or humoured. Or any other emotion Dan had feared. Just… curious. “Like, at all?”

Dan gulps, the beer a sour swirl in the pit of his stomach. Maybe the sixth bottle was a mistake.

“Well there’s no point denying it now, is there?” Dan finally mumbles, his eyes fixed on a dent in the concrete not far from where they’re sitting. “No. I haven’t.”

The gentle thrum of city engines fills the silence between them, and the three seconds Phil doesn’t say anything for might as well have been days.

“Yep,” Dan breaks the quietness once it borders on unbearable. “There you go. You think I’m a fucking weirdo now, don’t you?”

“Not at all,” Phil replies, and his voice is unusually calm. Dan looks up, his eyes meeting a soft expression, and for some reason he really didn’t expect Phil to react like this.

“So-“ Dan shakes his head. “What? You’re not gonna take the piss? Laugh at me? Say I’m a fucking weirdo that only lied to you to try and look cool?”

The truth scratches his heart, but it needs to be said.

“Why the fuck would I laugh at you?” Phil frowns, and there’s something about the sincerity in his voice that, beneath the turmoil, Dan finds weirdly comforting.

“I mean,” Phil begins. “I’m surprised, don’t get me wrong. Only because you’re an actor and- well, let’s face it, you’re fucking gorgeous too, but-“ he shakes his head. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’m the first to say I’d much rather make sure my first kiss means something. If anything, I agree with you on that.”

“You’re not pissed off that I lied to you?” Dan gulps down another mouthful of lukewarm alcohol.

“Of course not, you twat,” Phil says. “I mean, I get why you did, but there was no need to. Really.”

“I know,” Dan sighs, picking at the label on his glass bottle until the paper frays at the edges.

“Wanna know something?” Phil says, his eyes not moving from the soft sweep of stars above them, dimmed by the early morning light.

Dan takes his eyes away from the sky. “What?”

“If you’re a liar, then so am I,” Phil tells the stars.

Dan frowns. “You what?”

Phil’s eyes flick back down to earth, meeting Dan’s gaze. “I lied too.”

Dan gulps, his heart thudding. “About what?”

Phil forces a chuckle, but it’s drained of humour. “Do I have to spell it out to you? I haven’t kissed anyone either.”

The words ring in Dan’s ears moments after, Phil’s voice an echo above the roar of the city below.

“Wait-…” is the only word that passes Dan’s lips in the next passing minute or so. “But-…”

“Yeah,” Phil shrugs. “Turns out you’re not the only one, are you?”

“But-…” Dan shakes his head. “Why did you lie about it too?”

Phil just shrugs and says, “same reasons you did.”

Dan tries, he really tries, to comb through the tangle of confusion in his mind right now, but the best response he can come up with after a moment or two of silence isn’t the most articulate.

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” Phil agrees, and they descend into quietness again.

“Shame, isn’t it?” Phil is the first to break the silence. “That we feel the need to lie about that.”

“It’s society’s fault for making us feel as if being over the age of about fifteen without having shoved a tongue down anyone’s throat is a failure.”

Phil grimaces. “I’ve never understood the attraction of that, you know. Like, I get making out and stuff, but why would you want to literally devour the person next to you? When I saw kissing scenes as a kid I thought they were actually trying to eat each other.”

“I know,” Dan takes a sip of beer, the alcohol slipping down with a little more ease now. “It sounds grim. I don’t know how people do it. At least with acting on stage you don’t have that problem.”

“True,” Phil mirrors his actions, pulling his drink away from his lips and tracing the rim of the bottle with the tip of his thumb, staring down the tube-shaped glass into the remains of the flat beer, swimming lukewarm and flat at the bottom of the bottle. Only when he glances up a few seconds later does Dan realise he’s been staring.

Dan smirks.

“What are you grinning at?”

“Just-…” he shakes his head and shit, he’s definitely had enough to drink tonight. He can feel the alcohol-induced honesty begin leaking through his parted lips and he knows he’ll probably end up saying something he’ll regret tomorrow morning but- oh, fuck it. “The thought of you having never kissed anyone. It just- doesn’t make sense to me like- look at you. How?”

He’s not really sure where the line between a compliment and a very sorry attempt at flirting is drawn but he’s pretty sure he’s fallen somewhere in the middle.

Phil’s gaze lingers a few seconds too long. “I could ask you the same thing. I mean- come on, look at you. A guy like you must have been drowned in opportunities.”

They’re both a bit too drunk, a bit too cold and there’s something about the atmosphere of an empty car park at fuck-knows-o’clock that warps reality just a little. Dan blinks and the city lights don’t unblur and he feels a bit like he’s in a dream.

“Yeah, I-…” he shrugs. “I’ve had my fair share of offers, I won’t lie.”

“I’ll bet,” Phil interjects, and Dan rolls his eyes.

“Oh, don’t act like you haven’t either,” Dan rolls his eyes, but he’s smirking. “I just-… yeah, I dunno. I didn’t really wanna waste it, but I never really found someone I liked enough.”

“That’s nice, that is,” Phil says, and though Dan scours his tone of voice for a trace of sarcasm or mockery, but Phil’s eyes glitter earnestly. “No, like, really. Most teenagers just, you know, dive straight into it. Slam their face against anything with a pulse that crosses their path. But the fact you care enough to wait,” he glances up, eyeing the boy beside him carefully. “That’s rare. Kinda admirable in a way.”

“Were you the same, then?”

Phil nods without any hesitation. “A hundred percent.”

Dan nods understandingly, taking another sip of beer, and the two of them watch the town sleep for a quiet moment before Phil speaks up again.

“Oh, come here,” he stretches out his arms. “You look like you’re seconds away from hypothermia, for Christ’s sake.”

Dan leans into his chest, closing his eyes and snuggling into the Topman denim of Phil’s jacket. “I don’t really think a car park roof is the most suitable drinking spot,” he mumbles, his speech slightly obscured by his rattling jaw.

“Not at five a.m. in December at least,” Phil says. “It’s a lot nicer in summer, I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Dan says, and the indirect promise that they’ll come out here and do this again makes Phil smile.

It’s quiet, serene and blue, and Dan loses count of the minutes that drip by until he hears Phil’s voice again, shattering his trance dancing on the fragile edge of drunken consciousness.

“Dan?” it’s only a half-whisper, but it still makes him jump.

The younger boy turns his head, his brown hair tousling against Phil’s denim chest until they’re eye-to-eye.

Phil lowers his gaze, but this time his eyes don’t flicker back up to Dan’s. Dan parts his mouth in response, but before he can say anything, there’s a surge forward and a soft pair of lips on his.

A jolt of adrenaline, shock, and a general ‘holy-fucking-shit-this-can’t-be-happening’ feeling shimmers through his body as he kisses back, and despite his embarrassing inexperience when it comes to anything remotely romantic, his lips move perfectly in time with Phil’s, their mouths melting together in flawless harmony.

Phil’s the one to break away, and Dan misses his lips the second the cold morning air touches his mouth. He frowns, studying Phil’s expression half-hidden by his mop of black hair, but the older boy refuses eye contact.

“Shit, I’m sorry, I don’t know what came ov-“

“Don’t apologise,” Dan cuts him off immediately, his hand hovering over Phil’s arm in quiet protest. “Just-…” he gulps. “Do it again,”

Phil’s head snaps up, his eyes boring into the brown stare in mild confusion.

“Please,” Dan mouths, and Phil doesn’t need to be told twice.

They kiss for longer, deeper, slightly parted lips and slow breathing and the teal glow of 5am light and shit, this was certainly worth a seventeen year wait. Phil’s lips feel like warmth and taste like tobacco and he feels a gentle comb of shy fingertips through his hair and yep, he can definitely see what all the fuss is about now.

When they break apart for the second time, all blushes and broken breaths, they’re both grinning. Phil drops his gaze with a bashful chuckle.

“Well,” Dan breathes. He’s still sitting close, their upper arms touching but neither of them really wanting to move away.

“Well,” Phil says, almost in agreement. They’re bathed in silence once again, but this time it’s comfortable.

“I’m not gonna lie,” Dan begins, looking out over the city. “That was definitely worth the wait.”

Phil tilts his head down, their noses almost touching. “Yeah?”

“For sure,” Dan cranes his neck up a little and pecks Phil’s lips again. The other boy grins, pulling his jacket further over Dan’s shoulders.

“We’ll have to do this again sometime then, won’t we?” Phil’s eyes glitter.

Dan grins, glancing at the view spread in front of them. The sun is beginning to awaken and there are fewer streetlights illuminating the land below and it’s cold and wow, they should really think about heading home soon. Dan hasn’t checked his phone in hours and he’s sure it can’t be running on anything much more than a measly four percent.

“Definitely,” he says, then hesitates. “Although, well.”

“Well what?”

Dan flicks his eyes up at the boy above him, tired brown against weary blue.

“Perhaps next time we should choose somewhere a little warmer than a car park,” he says in a soft voice, before adding, “I can barely feel my arse right now.”

Phil bursts out laughing, and then a pair of lips are on his for the third time.

-

The next couple of weeks rush by in a flurry of rehearsals, meetings, crumpled scripts and weird costumes that itch around the collar. Dan and Phil spend most of their time three storeys apart, meaning secret rendezvous up in the control room or down in the trap room are often necessary. The closer the big day creeps, the hotter the atmosphere becomes with stress, so it’s nice to leave the tension with the stage and the equally tense co-workers and escape for a bit.

“For fear of that, I still will stay with thee, and never from this palace of dim night depart aga- oh for fuck’s sake, you’re not even listening.”

Phil looks up from his phone, a giggling smirk still lingering on his face. “Huh?”

“Come on, Phil. You said you’d go through this with me and you’re sat there playing around with bloody Snapchat filters.”

“Sorry, sorry – I am listening, it’s just-“ his eyes flicker back down to the screen in front of him. “That’s hideous. Who even makes these filters? I look like a toe.”

“Can unflattering photos of you not wait five minutes until I’ve finished this? We’re literally nearly done anyway. We only have, like, one more paragraph to g-” Phil interrupts him by flipping the phone around to face the other boy. A bald, rather unsightly version of Phil with weird eyes stares back. Dan’s eyes widen in horror. “Fuck, that really is hideous.”

“I know,” Phil shudders. “I didn’t even know my face could do that,” he glances back at the screen and pulls a couple of experimental faces. “Would you still be with me if I looked like that?”

“Nope,” Dan replies semi-seriously, rolling his eyes when Phil pouts.

“What about if I looked like this?” Phil turns the phone around. He looks a lot better this time, but a little bit too much like an animal. Dan’s never really understood the national attraction towards ‘dog filters’.

“Probably. The ears might get in the way a bit, though,” he chuckles, before urging, “now come on. We haven’t got long left now.”

Phil agrees, albeit reluctantly. He swings his legs off the table, grabs Dan’s battered highlighted mess of a script sitting in front of him and they pick up from where they left off, something about ‘worms that are thy chamber maids’, ‘everlasting rest’ and ‘inauspicious stars’ (whatever the fuck that adjective means). They last a grand total of fifteen seconds before Dan’s voice is interrupted by a shriek of laughter.

“Oh, fucking hell that’s bad!” Phil cackles. Dan groans, wondering for a fleeting second where the best place to launch Phil’s phone might be.

“That’s it,” he loses it, suddenly leaping across the table and swiping the irritating rectangle of interest straight from Phil’s hand. His smile vanishes in seconds.

“Aw, what?!”

“You have five seconds to put this stupid fucking thing away, or else it’s going out there,” he points to the window behind them. Phil follows his gaze, his eyes widening. They can see the majority of the town from up here. That’s a long drop.

He turns his head back around. They’re nose-to-nose, eye-to-eye.

“Fine,” Phil smiles, the tips of their noses brushing together. “But just so you know, seeing you angry just makes me want to kiss you more.”

Dan rolls his eyes, but he can’t hide his smirk. “Are you still gonna want to kiss me when your phone ends up on the ground?”

“What do you mean ‘when’? I’ve put it away now,” he points to the bulge in his back pocket.

Dan fixes him with a glare.

“Come on,” Phil leans forward as Dan leans back. “Just one?” he pleads, his eyes big and blue.

He shakes his head and pulls away, a grin curling at his lips. His eyes flicker back to Phil, a brown gaze that lingers too long.

“Afterwards,” he says in a voice like velvet.

Phil rolls his eyes, flopping back onto the chair. “Fine. Bloody hell, it’s like being back at school.”

Dan pretends not to hear that last comment. “Come on, we’ll take it from “world-wearied flesh…”

Phil’s phone doesn’t move once from his pocket after that. The promise of Dan’s lips after rehearsal is more tempting than any filter some dumb app has to offer.

-

“How do I look?”

Phil eyes him up and down, a smirk playing at his lips. “Hot.”

The comment receives a soft punch to his upper arm.

“Behave,” Dan turns back to the mirror, twining a lock of perfectly sprayed hair that he was specifically instructed not to touch around his fingers. “Are you sure? I feel like I look like a-“

He’s interrupted by a pair of soft lips for a few seconds.

“That’s really not helping the nerves,” Dan breathes once they break away.

Phil grins. “You look fine. You know you do. Now quit playing with your hair before Alexa sees.”

Dan doesn’t think Alexa, the make-up artist, is capable of seeing anything that isn’t within a thirty-centimetre radius of her own face right now. She’s been hurrying around backstage all evening; powdering this, curling that, flitting from actor-to-actor so quickly it makes Dan out of breath to even watch her. She certainly hasn’t done a bad job though, he thinks, as he inspects his reflection. A slightly dishevelled, 15th-century version of himself stares back, all weird leather and burgundy velvet and wow, perhaps he should sport an Elizabethan tunic more often.

“Suits you,” Phil smiles as if he’d read his mind. Dan adjusts the collar accordingly.

“D’you reckon?”  

“Yeah,” Phil eyes him up and down again. “Most people here kinda look like twats in their costume, but you really actually pull that off.”

“Um- thanks? I think?” Dan smirks, frowning at his reflection. He doesn’t mention it has anything to do with his long-standing ability to morph into literally anyone he likes (he’d often been described by many make-up artists as having a “chameleon face” which he hopes is a reference to his adaptability to blend into multiple characters as opposed to resembling a lizard), and instead accepts the ever-so-slightly backhanded compliment.

“What are you doing down here?” someone with an updo the size of Jupiter asks Phil, sauntering past in something that really rather resembles a cupcake. Phil was right, Dan thinks. They do look a bit ridiculous. “They need you upstairs in five minutes.”

“Oh shit,” Phil glances at his watch. “Okay. Gotta go before Nick kills me.”

“Alright,” Dan smiles, pulling him in for a quick hug.

“Good luck,” he whispers into his shoulder. “You’ll fucking kill it.”

Dan tightens his grip around his arms. “Thank you.”

The word has multiple other meanings, and judging by the glitter in Phil’s eye when he pulls away, he thinks he understands every single one.

-

That night, Dan lavishes in warm spotlights and painted wooden sets resembling palaces and balconies, and he feels alive.

That night, the finest Elizabethan literature spills from his lips, flowing as easily as water, his voice shaping every monologue, soliloquy and duologue perfectly.

That night, there are another pair of lips on his; only this time painted red and totally professional. It feels strange, alien, and not a single trace of the spark in his heart that Phil’s lips ignite can be found, but it’s work. It’s courage.

And that night, someone up in the control booth watches through the pane of glass over all the light boards and buttons and wires, and smiles.

As if it’s been almost a year since my last oneshot??? Wtf this must CHANGE I’m getting back into writing (properly this time I swear) so there’s a lot more where this came from. Feedback is always appreciated whether it be good or bad so pls let me know how you found this! Feels so good to be doing this again u have nooo idea holy shit <3

[nationalsupersagency]

AU; School Play

Munciburg High School has a play every spring, mostly Shakespeare plays. This years is Romeo and Juliet.

Violet is not much of an actress, but she passed her Shakespeare class with flying colors. She understands the stuff.

Since she and Tony are an actual couple, he suggests they audition.

“Are you sure? We have to work though.”

“Hey, my parents won’t mind.”

So at the audition, they rehearse a scene together.

The director is convinced that the best way for two actors to play Romeo and Juliet and convince the audience they’re really in love is to cast an actual couple. So they pick Tony and Vi.

Violet is good at memorization but needs a little help with acting. A few people demonstrate to her how to act as Juliet and she follows their example.

Rehearsals happen every day after school.

“Where’s Invisigirl?”

“Rehearsing for the school play!”

Karen is super-excited for Violet and comes opening night.

The director is very picky and precise. She wants the cast members at the party scene to learn how to dance the Moreska, a dance that involves lots of wrist flicking. This makes Vi a little uneasy because flicking her wrists is one way she actives her powers.

Bob offers to help Violet rehearse scenes by putting a blanket over his head and pretend he’s the Nurse. Dash shouts, “A sail!” because that’s the only line he actually knows.

When it came time for costume fittings, all of Juliets gowns were too big for Violet. A mom of another cast member had to take them home and take them in so they’d fit.

Tony and Vi try rehearsing in her room but it always turns into makeout sessions so they have to stop.

The director wanted Violet to wear curlers for Juliet. Violet had to persuade them to settle on braids and buns for her instead because her hair doesn’t curl.

Dash won’t stop making up fake lines for the play during dinner.

“Shut it, Tybalt.” 

Violet cried real tears one night during the end of a performance before her character killed herself. She wasn’t sure why she got so emotional.

The costumes in the show are similar to those from the 1968 version with the actors that remind me of Tony and Vi.

I mean, seriously.

These two.

Make me think of Tony and Vi.

Look. Here’s Tony refusing to give Vi her camera back.

When Tony shows Violet his first costume, he goes, “Be honest; can I pull off tights?”

Violet and Tony’s families come opening night. Bob is holding a giant bouquet of flowers in his hand the entire performance. Helen brought tissues for safe measure. They attended the show closing night as well.

Winston attended the second night of the performance not just for Violet but Tony as well, who he is very fond of. He thinks Tony is an excellent boyfriend.

When the cast came out to greet the audience the first night, Karen lost all control and tackled Violet with a big hug. 

More headcanons to be added as they come along. The actors in the pictures above are Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey.

[adorkablephil]

Fic: The Roles We Play (2)

Title: The Roles We Play Summary: Dan Howell and Phil Lester work together as voice actors for BBC radio dramas in the late 1930s, but slowly begin to develop “inappropriate” feelings for each other Rating: G Word Count: 2,885 (this chapter) Tags: Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Historical AU, 1930s, BBC, Radio, Actors AU, Slow Burn, Eventual Romance, Love Letters, Period-Typical Homophobia, Closeted Gay Characters, Past Character Death, Grief, Angst Author’s Note: This fic was inspired by the @phanfichallenge 20k History Challenge. See note on first chapter regarding historical inaccuracies. See notes at end of this chapter for potentially helpful info about the plays mentioned. Many many many abject thanks to India for all her help with this chapter! (Not to mention all her previously unacknowledged help with "The Body Electric"!)

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[ All Chapters Masterlist ]

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28 October 1938

Philip Lester was everything Dan wished he could be, from head to toe. His hair, though, was what Dan envied most. It was black and smooth, slicked straight back with Brylcreem so that he resembled that American actor—what was his name? Clark Gable. His facial features didn't resemble Clark Gable, though, because Philip had a more aristocratic face, with his elegant forehead, narrow nose, high cheekbones, and delicate lips.

Dan’s hair never got that sleek Clark Gable look like Philip Lester’s, no matter how much Brylcreem he used. The best he could do was a sort of Danny Kaye set of waves. And, just in life in general, Dan would really prefer to be a suave Clark Gable than a slapstick Danny Kaye.

He’d seen photos of Philip Lester before, of course, but actually being in the same room with the famous radio actor was a little overwhelming. The whole BBC situation felt overwhelming, but being in the same room with a celebrity he’d listened to and admired for so long made it much more so.

So, ironically, he chose a chair close beside Philip’s, because he knew that it would give him the least opportunity to stare. If he sat immediately beside the man, he would have to turn his head sharply to look at that sleek black hair, that pale skin, those striking pale eyes behind the man’s trademark spectacles—but if he sat further away, he might possibly find himself staring without realizing it, which would be utterly humiliating.

He looked at the script in his hands: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He had read it in college, and had even performed it once in the West End, though he’d only gotten the role of one of the “Rude Mechanicals,” rather than Puck as he’d hoped. In this radio production, he would play Lysander, while Phil—with his comparatively lower voice and better established place in the repertory group—had the role of Oberon. He had fewer lines than Lysander, but more gravitas.

Dan pouted that he still didn’t get to play Puck.

“Hello,” Philip Lester said from beside him, making Dan jump. He turned to look at the other man, and maybe sitting beside him had been a mistake, because now he had to look at that handsome face from very close up. Philip was smiling and holding out his hand. “I’m Phil. You’re Daniel Howell, right? Playing Lysander?”

Dan nodded dumbly, unable to force out a single word. This was the voice Dan had heard through the radio in his living room for the past three years, but Philip—Phil—sounded different in person. He sounded less formal, more relaxed, which only made sense. Up until a few seconds ago, Dan had only ever heard that voice in professional radio broadcasts of dramatic productions.

Apparently unperturbed by Dan’s stunned silence, Phil shook Dan’s hand warmly, and Dan noticed how delicate and smooth Phil’s hand was. Dan’s own hands were soft—he’d never had to do any serious work—but Phil’s hand was pale and silky and … why was he obsessing over the texture of the man’s hand?

Dan shook his head to try to clear it and finally spoke. “Yes. Lysander. Right. Hello.” A staccato combination of words that were vaguely appropriate to the situation. Better than he would have expected of himself if asked for a prediction, if he was honest. Then he managed to add with a bit more composure, “Please, call me Dan.”

“Welcome to the BBC’s drama repertory company, Dan,” Phil said, squeezing Dan’s hand before letting it go. Or had Dan imagined that little squeeze at the end?

This hero worship was far, far out of control. He wouldn’t be able to tell Dora anything about the day’s events if all he was able to remember was the smoothness of Philip Lester’s hair and the silken skin of his hand.

Phil seemed to still be talking. Dan tried to listen and not just stare. “I assume we’ll be working quite a bit together. I hear they’re considering doing Oedipus next … just for a bit of light comedy after this weighty content, you know?”

A joke. Right, a joke! Dan laughed, maybe a bit more than was really deserved, but the famous Philip Lester was joking with him! And yes, they would most likely be working together quite a bit as long as they were both part of the repertory, so … Dan would need to get over this hero worship as soon as possible. It would make a working relationship nearly impossible if he was tripping over himself every time his co-worker smiled or made the slightest witticism.

Dan tried to think of something to say, but hadn’t come up with anything before the director called them all to order with a loud clearing of the throat. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we start with Theseus and Hippolyta, but you young lovers be ready to enter the scene.” That meant Dan, or rather, Lysander: one of the young lovers.

Dan sat a bit straighter in his chair. He had a fair amount of experience with stage acting, but this was his first actual radio acting job. They’d liked his audition enough to make him a conditional member of the repertory company, but he still needed to prove himself, and this was his first rehearsal.

Phil patted him on the shoulder and said in a low voice, “Don’t worry. You’ll do wonderfully. And, really, Lysander is just a sap, so if you don’t mind pretending to have a lower IQ than you have in actuality, you shouldn’t have any problems.”

Dan laughed again, this time with a bit less hysteria in it and a lot more blushing. Phil Lester had just called him intelligent. Or, at least, more intelligent than Lysander. Which, to be fair, didn’t set the bar all that high. But still … a compliment from Philip Lester. Phil.

Dan smiled at him and said, “Thanks. Oberon should be fun for you.”

Phil leaned close and confided in a hushed whisper, “Just between you and me, I’d rather be playing Puck.”

That surprised a genuine laugh out of Dan, since he’d felt the same way himself. “Me too!” he whispered back, but the director had lost patience.

“Mr. Howell, I understand that you are new to our proceedings, but we really do need a bit more peace and quiet to prepare to present the best auditory theatrical experience possible to our audience, as they rely upon us for edifying entertainment.” Dan wasn’t sure how edifying A Midsummer Night’s Dream was, but he supposed any Shakespeare was good Shakespeare. Then he remembered Titus Andronicus and grimaced. But he straightened his spine, gave the play’s director a serious nod and tried to keep his attention on his task instead of on the man sitting beside him.

“Sorry,” he heard Phil murmur. “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble. I’ll let you focus.” Dan gave him a quick smile and tried not to be dazzled by the swirling pale colors of Phil Lester’s eyes behind the spectacles. Okay, no, the colors weren’t actually swirling. His irises just contained so many colors at once that they seemed almost like the marbled endpapers of an expensive book, including that bit of gold leaf that would make it most expensive.

Dan looked away and stared fixedly at the script in his lap, paging forward to see where his first lines appeared, and they began their first read-through of the script. When Dan got to the point where he read, “You have her father's love, Demetrius; Let me have Hermia's: do you marry him,” he heard Phil snort beside him and felt proud that he’d made the other man laugh with his delivery of the comedic line. In fact, Dan had quite a few lines in the first scene of the play, whereas Phil’s character would not appear to commit his jealous mischief until the second act.

The group spent a few hours going through the first two acts of the play, with much commentary and many suggestions from the play’s director, Drury. Unfortunately, Drury seemed to have taken a bit of a dislike to Dan after his earlier joking with Phil, so Dan tried to stay as sober and solemn as possible for the rest of the proceedings.

******

When the rehearsal had finished, Phil immediately apologized with what appeared to be honest regret. “I’m sorry I distracted you so much! I didn’t mean to make your first day more difficult. I just wanted to make you feel welcome, but I fear our giggling antics may have annoyed Drury.”

Dan loved that Phil made it sound like they were schoolboys caught being naughty together.

Phil clapped Dan on the shoulder in a friendly manner and said, “If you’ll excuse me a moment, I need to speak to Drury before he leaves.” Phil smiled, then turned and walked to the director, who began conversing with him like an old friend. It was the first time Dan had ever seen Drury smile. Apparently he liked Phil. Who wouldn’t like Phil? It wasn’t merely Dan’s hero worship—Phil was just a likable guy.

Now that they’d been released from their duties for the day, the actors cleared the room pretty quickly, everyone bidding each other hasty goodbyes, but Dan found himself lingering conspicuously near the door while Phil spoke with Drury. Now that they were standing, Dan could see that Phil’s suit, though not particularly fashionable, was obviously expensive, very well-tailored and suited to his tall, slim frame. It made Dan aware of the comparative cheapness of his own suit. He followed current fashion trends avidly but, unfortunately, did not have the financial means to indulge his interest. It appeared that Phil Lester found himself in the opposite situation: financial means, but no taste. Dan quickly chided himself for the thought. It felt somehow disloyal, even though he’d only met the man a few hours ago.

Loitering near the door and watching surreptitiously, Dan saw Phil turn from his conversation with Drury, obvious intending to leave, but when Phil noticed Dan near the door, his expression showed first surprise, then pleasure. Dan startled, and his insides turned to jelly.

“You waited!” Phil exclaimed happily, walking to where Dan stood trying to look relaxed in his embarrassing cheap suit.

“Oh,” Dan replied, trying to sound casual, “I just … I wasn’t in a hurry, so I thought I’d wait, just to tell you what an honor it was to work with you today.”

Phil’s pale cheeks blushed, and Dan wondered how the man could still be humble enough to take such a simple compliment so much to heart. Surely he had encounters with admirers often enough, especially at BBC events. Why should Dan’s words carry so much weight?

“It was an honor to work with you, too, Dan,” Phil replied, holding out his hand to shake again.

Dan started to reach out, then shored up his confidence and suggested, “I thought perhaps we could take the lift down together.”

Phil let his hand fall and nodded with a smile. “We should be working together quite a lot in future, so it would be nice to know you as more than just the ridiculously besotted Lysander.” They began walking together toward the lift.

“You believe they’ll take me on as a permanent member of the repertory company?” Dan could hear the eagerness in his own voice, but he didn’t mind letting Phil know how high his hopes were.

Phil’s lips curved just slightly and he shook his head in disbelief. “You really don’t know how good you are, do you? I would assume after your work onstage in the West End, you would have more belief in your acting ability. Surely you appreciate your own talent?”

Dan pressed the button for the lift and avoided eye contact, hunching his shoulders slightly in embarrassment. “Well, radio differs from the stage, since we won’t have an audience’s immediate reaction to inspire and inform our performance. But also … I’m a bit of a perfectionist in my work. I study my lines obsessively, but I still never fully live up to how I want to embody a character. I perhaps set myself rather unrealistic standards, and so I just … it’s like I’m always failing myself.”

Phil put his hand on Dan’s shoulder and looked into his eyes, face serious. “You can’t go through life feeling like you’re always failing. You’ll never be happy.”

The lift arrived and they both got in, Dan regretting the need to pull away from Phil’s hand. Even through the fabric of his suit jacket, he’d been able to feel Phil’s warmth. But maybe that was just the man’s personality, and not his body temperature.

“I’m not a very cheerful or happy person, to be honest,” Dan admitted, wondering why he was opening up to Phil more than he had to anyone, even Dora.

The lift dinged when they reached the lobby, and they walked out into the evening’s sunset together. “You need to find a way to change that, Dan. You really do. You deserve to be happy.”

Dan tried to smile, but he could feel that the muscles of his face were too tense for it to possibly look natural. “I try.”

Phil looked around. “Hey, would you like to grab a drink before heading home? There’s a pub across the road.” Dan hesitated, but Phil cajoled, “Come on. Consider it part of the process of trying to be happier. Wouldn’t it cheer you to have a drink with the famous Mr. Philip Lester?” He grinned at Dan, who laughed.

“I can’t believe you just said that. Do you really think of yourself that way?” Okay, so yes, that’s the way Dan thought of him, but he’d been surprised to hear Phil say it.

Phil rolled his eyes. “Not for a second. But it’s how they parade me around at the BBC events, you know.” He shrugged dismissively. “But would you be interested in having a drink with just some guy named Phil?” He smiled and looked ridiculously charming. The sunset was glinting pink and orange off his glasses so that Dan couldn’t see his eyes. In the pub, the lighting would be better.

He knew he should go home to phone his parents and Dora to tell them how the first day’s rehearsal had gone, but instead Dan found himself nodding.

“Excellent!” Phil exclaimed, and lightly pressed a hand to Dan’s lower back to guide him across the street and into the pub.

******

“I’ll have a Pimm’s with ginger ale,” Phil told the bartender, “and my friend will have…” He glanced questioningly at Dan.

“Um,” Dan hesitated. He didn’t drink often, except tea and coffee. “I guess a gin and tonic?” The bartender nodded and got to work.

Dan and Phil seated themselves on adjoining barstools and their conversation lapsed for a moment.

“So…” Dan began, then realized with a sudden chill of panic that he had no idea what to talk about while relaxing in a pub with Philip Lester the rich, famous, well-dressed radio star. “Um … do you follow cricket?” Dan immediately wanted to bang his head against the bar.

Phil blinked in surprise. “Er, no. Not really. Are you an enthusiast of any particular team?”

“Not remotely,” Dan sighed in relief. “Thank the lord you said no, or I would have had to pretend I knew something about the sport.”

“Then why did you ask?” Phil looked at Dan with amused curiosity.

Dan shrugged and looked away, stirring the drink the bartender had just placed in front of him. “Just … trying to make conversation.” He took a sip, and found the drink bitter, which suited his personal style. He thought of himself as a rather bitter person, not easily prone to the lighter emotions. He eyed Phil’s sweet, fizzy drink and thought it appropriate, as well. “I wasn’t sure what you would want to talk about,” he admitted with chagrin.

“Well, definitely not sport!” Phil laughed. “Sport is the absolute worst! I hated it in school, so why would I want to watch other people do it now that I’m not forced to do it myself?”

“I know! Exactly!” Dan enthused. He’d never heard his own opinion stated so succinctly before.

“So what do you like to do, if you don’t enjoy watching grown men dressed in white play childhood games we both loathe?”

“I … er … I like music,” Dan offered hesitantly. “All kinds. And I play the piano a bit.”

“Really?” Phil looked suddenly very interested. “I would dearly like to play an instrument. My parents hired tutor after tutor, trying to teach me one instrument after another, but I had no talent at any of them.”

“Oh, I don’t have much talent, either,” Dan insisted. “I don’t play well at all. But I do enjoy it.”

Phil took a sip of his sweet drink and shook his head gently. “You have so little faith in yourself,” he chided Dan gently.

Dan gazed into those pale eyes and realized that Phil Lester had more faith in him than he had in himself. It was an odd feeling. But he liked it more than he should.

*******

Author’s Play Notes: In case you aren’t a literature/theater nerd, I thought I’d explain some of the references in this chapter. In particular, I thought I’d point out a few notes about A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Oberon is the powerful but jealous king of the fairies who asks his clever, mischievous fairy servant Puck to pull a prank which goes awry. As a result of this prank, four rather annoying young humans (Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, and Helena) get duped into all kinds of silly romantic hijinks in the woods. The “Rude Mechanicals” are just some low class workmen who provide some slapstick comedy. Oh, and about the other plays mentioned in the chapter: Oedipus Rex is a classic Greek tragedy (hence Phil ironically joking that it would be light fare after something like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is pure fluff); and Titus Andronicus was Shakespeare’s first play, which most people agree was bad (also gross), which is why Dan grimaces after thinking that all Shakespeare is good.

******

[ Continue to Chapter 3 ]

[ballerinascribbles]

“The Tate Modern? Ah, you can skip it.”

This is what a native British gentleman and engineer says to me, a starving artist visiting from the States. Having never met ballet’s ideal standards for beauty, age, weight, or race, I am defensively inclined to give the Tate Modern a chance. Plus, it sounds like a dare, so I go twice in two days.

The Tate is an institution boasting the United Kingdom’s collection of British art, international contemporary, and modern art. Its mission is to amplify the public’s accessibility to, enjoyment and understanding of art through its four magnificent galleries: The original Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives, and Tate Modern. Together, these sites house nearly 70,000 artworks of unimaginable variety.

The Tate Modern is my favorite. To get to the Tate Modern, I recommend taking the Tube and hopping off the Central Line at St Paul’s. You could, of course, get closer, faster, but hopping off here gives you a gorgeous fifteen minute walk past St Paul’s Cathedral, over the River Thames stretching under the Millennium Bridge, just brushing shoulders with Shakespeare’s Old Globe theater before embracing the monolith we know as the Tate Modern. This is the world’s favorite modern art museum, the fifth most visited museum, the youngest and most popular branch of the Tate group. Upon its opening in 2000, the Tate Modern attracted 5.25 million visitors - more than twice the amount of visitors from the other three Tate sites combined! When it became abundantly clear that this museum would remain among the world’s heavy-hitters in way of record high attendance, plans for expanding the Tate Modern were promptly announced. As it stands, the building is a dazzling, dizzying, thought-provoking piece in itself.

Now, let’s pretend you took my advice. You do stroll from beholding the classical beauty of St Paul’s Cathedral to confront the perhaps imposing but nonetheless iconic combination of steel, brick, and glass pictured above. If this is mildly shocking and slightly, secretly disappointing, don’t worry. This doesn’t make you a bad person.

Let’s take that stroll together from Old World beauty to contemporary reflection. Let’s slow over Millennium Bridge to look back, St Paul’s Cathedral framed in blue glass and sky.

Let’s pause outside the intimidating brick facade and wonder together if we’re shallow or simple-minded for not instantly appreciating the significance of the Tate Modern. Let’s allow for the possibility that our first impressions may be disproven, and let’s stride right inside.

We’ve stepped over the threshold to the First Floor River Entrance. We glance over the life-sized map on the wall to our right or we take to wandering, which I prefer. The Tate Modern may be thought of in terms of three separate pillars under one roof: The main Turbine Hall in the center, the Boiler House to the north, and the Blavatnik Building to the south. Let’s push past light, quiet crowds to peer over the first floor balcony or bridge stretching over the striped ground floor. We’ll see an immense pendulum swinging side to side along the seam of the Turbine Hall. We’ll watch children and adults alike chase the moving metal sphere, sprinting and craning up to see a glimpse of themselves in the orb above. We wonder together whether this was meant to illustrate the push and pull between childlike playfulness and existential profundity, or if our wild imaginations are working overtime. We keep walking.

Were we to scuttle downstairs to Level 0, we would stumble across three enormous underground oil tanks known un-mysteriously as The Tanks: One serves simply as a utility space while the other two showcase performance art and installations, earning the description as “the world’s first museum galleries permanently dedicated to live art.” Level 1 contains the Terrace Bookshop and gift shop. Levels 2, 3, and 4 provide the breathtaking public space packed with free displays because like all UK national galleries (and unlike many museums in the United States), the Tate Modern grants general admission free of charge. Only special exhibits require an additional fee, but we ought to feel very free exploring the ever-changing collections of Levels 2, 3, and 4. Each floor is separated into east and west wings, breaking tradition for organising the artworks not chronologically, but thematically: Artist and Society, In the Studio, Between Object and Architecture, Performer and Participant, Materials and Objects, Media Networks, and Living Cities. Let’s start at the Start Display, an introduction to basic ideas of modern art.

Level 5 buzzes with open-ended questions for being home to the Tate Exchange, a place devoted to engaging, communal conversation, collaboration, and discovery of new ideas and perspectives on life through art; the Tate Exchange is free and open to all. The Blavatnik Building runs a tall ten stories, each floor after Level 5 featuring places of varying exclusivity indelibly designed for contemplation. If we’re not buying Tate membership today, I recommend the top floor open viewing terrace, which is free and accessible to all (just be sure to use the dedicated elevator from Level 0). We can eat and drink at any one of the cafes and restaurants located on Levels 1, 3, 6, 9 or 10, but let’s be sure to end up on Level 10 to steal a spectacular 360-degree view of the London skyline.

That’s the long and short of the Tate Modern’s floor plan. Now let’s talk about its contents.

Maybe you’re enlightened enough to immediately understand every piece in the Tate Modern, all contemporary and modern art. But maybe you’re like me, and this doesn’t come naturally. The Tate Modern’s collection will be challenging. Bear in mind and rest assured: Reckoning with modern art is meant to be difficult.

I am a classical ballet dancer, through and through. Classical ballet is, like the architecture of St Paul’s Cathedral, classical for being built in a restrained Baroque style. This style of architecture and art was born of the Renaissance, the rejuvenation of classical antiquity and Greek thought within the then modern world, a style characterised by grandeur, exuberance, richness, and drama. My British gentleman from the beginning of this tale thought I might as well skip the Tate Modern because I more instinctively belong to the Baroque, to environments like the National Gallery with its sumptuous color schemes and ornate ceilings. I, of all people, am trained, programmed, and paid to adore and support classicism, idyllic lines and art and architecture. I am spoiled for clarity and a tad demanding for easy understanding. I encourage you to walk with me, past St Paul’s renowned and widely accepted beauty, over the hallmark of the Millennium Bridge to the edge of our comfort zone, onto the brink of the Southbank and into something new - the Tate Modern mindset.

Architects Herzog and de Meuron made light work of converting the old Bankside power station, rendering a truly contemporary public space which is deftly integrated with the existing historical structure. The lines are blurred between what is new and what is old within the Tate Modern, the minimalist, urban character of the building only enhanced by the non-obnoxious, thoughtful way. The effect is focused, undistracted, but still welcoming. Its halls feel unperformative, expansive and symbolic, but matter of fact. This is refreshing, when you open your mind and allow it to be.

There is a certain gilded fanfare to which I am accustomed. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever seen a theatre with red velvet curtains, plush seats, gold leafing, and satin pointe shoes. A theatre is akin to the National Gallery in the sense that both are stages for classical art delivered in a traditional way. The ballet audience receives and applauds only the beautiful finished product onstage. The audience is, however, never privy to the work poured into our pristine and polished presentation of ballet because we would never allow them to see the sweat put into our practice. That would break the illusion of grace and ease! It is the ballerina’s responsibility is to master her breath, mind, and body. There’s no room for quivering, faltering, or falling onstage. That is what rehearsal is for.

The Tate Modern is important to me because it wakes me up and makes me think. To me it feels like a ballet studio, a productive, experimental, progressive, rehearsal space with plain walls devoid of pretension, costumes, and dramatic lighting. It’s about the work. Our experience at the Tate Modern differs from our experience at places like the National Gallery because there’s more work to be done. The art here doesn’t play easy on you! You have to ponder, weigh out and decide what pieces mean to you, and in turn wonder what those conclusions mean about you. We become scientists and philosophers immersed in the museum rather than mere spectators separated from art, tasked with revealing meaning unique to our individual experiences as we wander along walls with Dali, Warhol, Picasso, Rothko, and more. The wooden floors of the Tate Modern are left unsealed so as to show the natural wear of life, the grit and lack of glamor left under our crisscrossing footsteps. You begin to feel at home. You begin to find the work rewarding. You begin to appreciate that you are never entitled to understand the world and the people wandering these halls with you, and you begin to work harder to earn the privilege of elevated understanding and tolerance.

And you begin to remember what you’ve always known: Our humanity is not just what we package up prettily, perfectly, and put onstage for the world to see. Our humanity requires work, activity, trying, failing, honesty, respect, and courage to listen to and uplift one another.

Let’s not skip the Tate Modern. Let’s go twice.

[seriestrash]

You Me Her

1 || 2 || 3 || 4 || 

Chapter Five: A Midsummer Nightmare

Word Count: 5306

↠ ♥ ↞

Abigail Adam’s production of Grease showed for three nights in early February of Riley’s freshman year. Riley and Kai played the quirky but loveable Jan and Putzie and during the rehearsal period Riley felt comfortable playing a ‘minor roll’ as she commonly referred to it. Kai kept stressing to Riley that being a Pink Lady was not minor by any means and she shouldn’t minimise her importance to the production. His encouraging words sent Riley into a nervous tailspin and she began worrying about messing the routines up for everyone with her clumsy habits. Kai happily put in countless hours with Riley after scheduled rehearsals. So much so that by opening night Riley could perform the entire play with her eyes closed. Even the parts that she wasn’t in. 

After a month of rehearsals and Riley’s involvement in the drama club her friendship with Kai had completely solidified at this point. Kai would eat dinner with the Matthews at least three times a week, which was three times a week more than Maya had been lately. 

It was the first time that Kai joined them for dinner that Riley learnt what a huge History buff Kai was. He wasn’t in Cory’s class but the two geeked out over world events for an hour. Riley found it strangely adorable how happy they both looked going on and on about some event Riley had never heard of. 

Topanga enjoyed seeing Riley make new friends but part of her was quietly concerned over the lack of Maya and everyone else for that matter. At first she may have been oblivious to Riley’s smiley routine but once Kai entered Riley’s life Topanga began to question everything, Riley’s full work load with shifts at the bakery, her studying and now her part in the drama club. Over the months that pass after Grease, Topanga keeps a close watch on her daughter. 

The rest of Riley’s freshman year is more of the same. Come Summer time Riley and Kai are practically inseparable. 

For the first few weeks of Summer vacation both Lucas and Zay have a baseball camp thing that Riley was fuzzy with the details but that saw Maya wanting to spend all her time with Riley which was a little awkward at first but quickly the two girls slip into their old habits with sleepovers and movie nights. Smackle joins the ‘girl hangs’ frequently, which thankfully broke up some of the awkward tension between Riley and Maya. 

Kai wasn’t too keen on hanging around Riley’s other friends, not that he’d ever say it aloud but he recognises her need for a life separate to the one revolving around her past crush dating her best friend. So on the days Riley was occupied with Maya he’d steer clear but afterwards he’d often come over and act as a means for Riley to vent to should she need him. 

Things with Farkle had been a little strained since their kind of fight outside the bakery right after Lucas and Maya became a thing. Since then Farkle has been acting like a wounded puppy around Riley and part of her felt guilty for straining another strong friendship in her life but a stronger part of her was just emotionally numb to it because she wasn’t up to dealing with it. So the two didn’t see much of each other over Summer unless it was orchestrated by Maya and Smackle or out of sheer coincidence that they wound up in the same place. 

Zay was a weird thing for Riley. Before Lucas chose, Riley always thought she’d lose Zay if he picked Maya. Not that she foresaw herself pulling away from the group but she always had the sense that Zay favoured Maya in the triangle and with Lucas being his best friend then he’d automatically be on his side. Surely enough Zay remains very involved with Lucas and Maya which quickly led to Riley not being involved with Zay at all. 

With Lucas and Zay at camp, that took the pressure off Riley but once they returned, Riley pretty much immediately pulled away again. Of course Kai is there to take her mind off things and he successfully makes sure her summer is filled with fun. Riley even tags along with Kai’s family to Disney World. The ‘story’ was that the trip was for Kai’s three younger sisters but everyone knew both Riley and Kai were the most exited. The Olson’s even invited Auggie along on the trip as a thank you to the Matthews for being so hospitable to Kai this past year as he’s practically eaten them out of house and home by now.  

Truth be known, even with Kai being quite possibly the most personable person to ever exist, with friends in all sorts of cliques at school, he never really found his person. Not until a sad Riley burst through the courtyard doors. So in reality Kai needed Riley and benefited from their friendship just as much as she did. 

So after three weeks of baseball camp and a little over a week in Orlando with the Olson’s Riley hadn’t seen nor spoken to Lucas in over a month. It would be a boldfaced lie if Riley claimed she hadn’t thought about him. She thought about him more over this summer away from him than she had the past months at school. Riley thought about Lucas being at camp with Zay and she remembers the time he told her about how they’d go away to summer camps together when they were little and she spirals into her black hole of fond memories, heartache and guilt. 

The rest of Riley’s summer is spent between work and Kai. Towards the end of vacation Riley spends a week in Philadelphia with Auggie and her grandparents. Ultimately Riley sees Lucas six times throughout the duration of summer where they’re both present in the state. Six times too many in Riley’s eyes as each time hurts just as much as the last. All meetings she was urged into Maya. 

Three days into Riley’s sophomore year, the first drama club meeting takes place. After four of the members graduated the previous year the club is down to seven until new recruits can join. So there was a lot riding on the first play of the year to entice people to join. Ms. Mitchell calls the meeting into order, the first thing on the agenda was ideas for which play to showcase. 

A few ideas bounce around, Riley sits quietly and watches as Kai loudly voices his opinion on each suggestion. It’s Kat, a junior who suggests ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Ms. Mitchell instantly takes to the idea and the play choice was settled. 

As Kai and Riley leave the meeting that afternoon they talk over everything that happened. 

“So, Shakespeare...” There’s an awkwardness to Kai as he broaches the subject, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Interesting choice...” 

“You mean a play where love is unrequited and manipulated by those around them?” Riley pricks up a brow, “ Now why on Earth would that be interesting?” 

“There are also fairies,” Kai says with an adorable smirk and Riley breaks her quizzical look with a grin of her own.

“It’s a bit... Ironic, don't you think?” Riley lets out a deflated laugh. 

“Anyone can relate to this basic plot line,” Kai swats the air dramatically. “Geez, Ri, stop being so self absorbed all the time!” 

Riley opens her mouth and chuckles through his joke like she’s surprised but definitely not offended. 

“Look, Ri, if it’s a little too close to home for you I understand if you don’t want to audition.” Kai wears a sweet smile.

Riley mulls it over in her head for a moment. Kai watches and waits eagerly for a ‘fine I’ll do it!’ Riley notices this and just doesn’t respond. 

“So?” Kai asks after a moment of silence. 

“So what?” Riley crinkles her brows, pretending to be confused. 

“Are you going to audition or not?” Kai questions, falling for her bit. 

“Oh,” Riley says as she gently taps her forehead. She finds amusement in Kai’s eagerness.

“Come on you love drama club!” Kai is almost pleading with her. “Oh my.” Kai gasps and crinkles his face up. “You do enjoy drama club don’t you? I’m not one of those parents that project their dreams onto their children am I?”

Riley let’s out a soft chuckle. “Don’t worry, dad, I do have fun doing the plays.” 

“Good.” Kai says with a small smile. Still with his previous thought on his mind Kai tries to assure Riley of one thing; his unconditional support. “I love doing the plays with you but if it’s not what you want then that’s fine. If you want to be a cheerleader then ‘Bring It On’. We will watch all the movies and practice till our arms fall off and your head cheerleader ready-” Kai abandons his ramble. “What I’m trying to say, Ri, is if you want to do something else - other than plays with me - I’m there for you, one hundred percent.”

Riley’s smile creeps wider. This is exactly why she’s so fond of Kai. This is why she loves him and why he’s so good for her. Riley has his support no matter what and he constantly reminds Riley of her value and worth. Kai has a spectacular knack for making the people in his life feel special, Riley included. Riley, especially. 

“The drama club may not be my passion in so many words but friendship is certainly my thing,” Riley says and although her smile doesn’t waver there is a slight pain in her chest remembering the estranged summer she’s had with her friends. “And you’re my friend and I love doing plays with you.”

“Yay.” Kai beams at her sweet statement. “So shall we work on the audition monologue?”

“Can we skip to the bakery?” Riley holds his stare. 

“It’s the safest way to travel!” Kai jokingly mocks Riley and they both giggle at the playfulness of it all and continue on to skip along to Topanga’s.

A week later the auditions are being held after school in the auditorium. There’s a nice turn out numbers wise and Riley takes a seat whilst she waits for Kai to arrive. Surprisingly it’s not her adorably cute but effervescent friend that sneaks up behind her but five other familiar faces. 

“Guys, what are you doing here?” Riley asks with surprise present in her tone.

“Well since you’re so busy lately we thought we could sign up for the play too and that way we’ll have more time with you.” Maya says in a really upbeat way. 

“You’re all auditioning?” Riley asks quickly, panic creeping into her.

“No, I thought I could paint sets or something.” Maya is taken back by Riley’s response. She thought about auditioning herself but didn’t want to ‘steal’ anything away from Riley that’s why she thought about working on sets so she could be there but also let Riley do her thing but from Riley’s reaction Maya wonders if it was all just a bad idea. 

“Farkle and I plan on offering our minds to the tech side of things.” Smackle grins. 

“Lights and stuff...” Farkle half smiles. There’s that wounded puppy in him coming out. 

“And since Zay and I aren’t good with painting or tech we thought we’d just audition.” Lucas smiles. “If that’s alright with you of course...” 

“Yeah, why wouldn’t it be?” Riley laughs it off. “The more the merrier right?” 

“First play I audition for and it doesn’t require my sweet moves,” Zay sighs. “Such a waste.”

Everyone chuckles at Zay, even Riley. For a moment, she thought that maybe this could work. Maybe the two separate worlds she’d been apart of the past year could come together as one. 

“Ri?” Kai calls from by the stage. Riley whips her head around and meets his quizzical gaze. Riley excuses herself for a moment and says she probably has to do something for the drama club and promises to return soon. 

Quickly Riley makes her way down towards Kai and he immediately bombards her with questions. 

“What are they doing here?” Kai asks. 

“Auditioning, or set painting- I don’t know,” Riley says in a huff, “They said they want to spend more time with me.” 

“Are you okay with this?” Kai studies face for answers. 

“I don’t know.” Riley says honestly. “It might be nice...” 

“Riley, Kai,” Ms. Mitchell projects her voice through the auditorium, “Students, will you all please take a seat.”

Kai sits up in the front row and tugs at Riley’s arm to join him. The brunette sends a small and apologetic smile back towards her old group of friends. Riley didn’t want to be rude so she made a note to move back towards them during an intermission but for now Ms. Mitchell was persistent on starting things. 

Due to everyone auditioning with the same set monologue it became repetitive quite quickly so Ms. Mitchell planned fifteen minute intervals. The first few students audition and Ms. Mitchell calls one more before the first break. Lucas. 

Riley catches herself holding her breath as she watches him climb the stairs at the side of the stage. Kai knew Riley would say she was fine about it all but still he gives her hand a tender squeeze before giving his attention to Lucas. Mostly out of curiosity. 

Lucas perfectly executes the monologue at no surprise to Riley but Kai’s left with his mouth slightly agape and he leans in towards his friend to whisper “Wow.”

Riley wears a weak smile. “Remember how I told you I played Juliet in middle school? Well, meet Romeo.”

The shocked expression on Kai’s face grows as this new piece of the puzzle comes to light. “You didn’t think that was something worth telling me?”

“The love story on and off screen ended in tragedy I didn’t want to relive it all over again.” Riley frowns. 

“But you told me a million other things about you and Lucas why didn’t you tell me about the play thing?” Kai whispers sternly. 

"I was hoping this play thing could be fun for me and I didn’t want to ruin the chances of that by hashing out the hurtful details of what didn’t happen between me and Lucas!” Riley whisper yells. Not loud enough for Lucas to hear specifics but it was enough for Ms. Mitchell to hush the pair. 

Riley and Kai sink into the seats and remain quiet for the rest of his audition. Once Lucas exits the stage, Ms. Mitchell calls the break and tells Riley she’ll be first one up when they reconvene.  

Riley stands knowing she’ll have to reconnect with her friends. The group, Lucas, Riley and Kai all meet off to the side. Everyone with the exception of Kai coo their praises at Lucas for his audition. Riley shifts her awkwardly on her feet.

“You’ll do great, Riley,” Lucas says with a smile, “You’ve got this. Shakespeare is like our thing.”

You could immediately feel the mood amongst the group shift into a tense awkwardness. Riley laughs nervously at his comment like it didn’t pain her to hear him refer to them as a pair. “At least no one dies in this play...” 

Ms. Mitchell starts to quieten down the students again and Kai whisks Riley away to the edge of the stage. Riley fidgets nervously with her hands and Kai holds them both steady. He forces her gaze. “Forget what Lucas just said. Shakespeare is your jam, Riley.” Kai says, “Don’t let them being here throw you off. You know this, you kill it with Shakespeare.” 

“Noah said a similar thing to me earlier today in English,” Riley wears a small smile. He said it in a softer way rather than ‘kill it’ but the notion was still there. His exact words were, “It’s a guaranteed touchdown, Sunshine.” Some football metaphor Riley gathered but she appreciated it all the same. The mention of Noah earns an eye roll from Kai but he pushes that aside to give Riley another quick rev up. 

Riley creeps onto stage and quickly gazes out at the students in the auditorium. She finds Kai first and then her other friends close by him, all wearing encouraging smiles. Riley takes a deep breath and delivers the lines, just as she and Kai had rehearsed them, better even. Riley makes it through her whole audition without a hitch. 

Two days later, the roles are posted on the bulletin board, Riley and Kai eagerly go to check them out.

"I can’t look,” Riley shakes her head and stands away from the board. “You do it.”

No further persisting was needed, Kai steps up to the notices and lets his eyes scan through the sheet absorbing all the names and corresponding rolls. Kai turns around with a slight grimace. 

“That’s your bad news smile...” Riley frowns and the internal panic begins.

“Well the good news is we both got quite good parts…” Kai tries to feed the negative with a positive first. 

“But?” Riley tries to brace herself. 

“No buts...” Kai shifts on his feet. 

“Give me my bad news first so we can celebrate your good news.” Riley lets out a deep breath. 

“Who said it’s bad for yo-” 

“Oh I can’t take it!” Riley groans and gives Kai a gentle shove out the way so she can look at the board herself. 

Kai stands back having anticipated the existential crisis this will bring upon Riley. He loves Riley’s dramatic flare, he indulges it but he doesn’t like her being dramatic when it’s used to cope with her pain. That, he doesn’t like to see.

"Helena?” Riley turns to Kia with wide eyes. “Helena?”

“That’s a lead role!” Kai says encouragingly.

“Yes, which so happens to be a desperate maiden that pines for the unrequited love of a boy who likes her friend.” Riley laughs at how unbelievable that was. “The only thing that could make things worse would be if Demetrius was...” Riley assesses Kai’s face as it scrunches up further with each word she speaks, “No!” Riley whines. The brunette turns back around to the list. She finds Demetrius and runs her finger along to, “Lucas.” 

“Ri-” 

Riley places her index finger to Kai’s lips to hush him. “I’ll sulk later. Did you get the part you wanted?” 

“Riley,” Kai coaxes his head. 

“Did you get the part?” Riley asks more firmly. 

“Yes.” Kai says quietly. 

“King of the fairies,” Riley says with a wide smile. “I’m really happy for you.” 

“This will be okay,” Kai gives her a sympathetic smile. Yes, he was happy to get his desired role but he didn’t like that Riley was reflecting on negative past times with her roll. “Just because Lucas and Zay are in the play and your other friends are helping doesn’t mean anything has to change. This can still be our thing. It can still be fun.” 

Riley wears a small smile and nods and for the first two weeks of rehearsal Riley believed his words to be true. Things were travelling well. Again Riley feels as though she might be able to balance her two worlds. Just as long as she doesn’t think about Lucas romantically. It had been almost a year now since the nature trip. The heartache wasnt constant like it had been for so many months after Lucas’ decision. It hurt to think about it, still to this day but as the time went on Riley found it easier to actually suppress those thoughts therefore she didnt have to deal with them. But now, she’s being forced to ‘act’ like she loves him. That definitely stirs things up. 

Riley thought that maybe the fact that Lucas plays a character thats quite nasty towards her would help a little but between scenes he’d go and be sweet and apologetic for pretend snapping at her. Each time making Riley’s heart flutter and it churns up the feelings she spent the summer really suppressing. As each day goes by Riley feels the doors pushing to open and tries her best to keep them closed. 

It’s two weeks into rehearsing that Riley comes to realise that as nice as it was to have Maya around, it was effecting her more negatively than positively as Riley feels her heart pick up pace when her and Lucas read lines together only a few feet away. The guilt constantly ate at Riley and there’s one moment in rehearsal that sees Riley realise just how wrong it was for her to be doing what she was. 

They were preparing to rehearse the scene of the play where Theseus and Hippolyta discover Helena, Hermia, Lysander and Demetrius sleeping outside the forrest. Each declaring their love for one another.

Lucas appeared to be anxious which, if he was anxious prior to today he was very good at hiding that from Riley. As they get into position Riley can’t help but wonder what’s wrong and even goes as far to whisper that to Lucas.

“Did you see the script change?” Lucas asks sheepishly and a wave of confusion takes hold of Riley. Ms. Mitchell is quick to quieten everyone down and ask Martin, the boy playing Theseus to start with his lines before Riley can clear anything up with Lucas.

Riley stands with Lucas, her arm wrapped around his back, her other hand brought up and resting against his chest while his arms pull her in closer by the waist. Riley was tense and awkward being in such close proximity to Lucas, her cheeks felt hot and she was making herself more nervous by worrying about looking flustered.

To make things worse Ms. Mitchell yells cut and calls Riley out for her stiffness and babbles on about how she - meaning Helena - is finally in the arms of the one she loves so she she should fall into place with him the same way they fell into love. Undeniably her words spoke a double meaning to Riley and it made things even more awkward for the teen. The tension wasn’t lost on Lucas either, this was odd for him too except he chooses not to hide it like Riley, instead he gives her an embarrassed and almost apologetic grin and they resume the scene.

“Now once Theseus waves the law and declares both couples will marry, Lysander and Demetrius will dip their respective lovers into a kiss where they will hold that position while the fairies return and ‘magically’ transform the set into the wedding scene.” Ms. Mitchell instructs. 

“What?” Riley squeaks. “A kiss?”

“Yes, did you not check the script changes?” Ms. Mitchell frowns. “I emailed them all through this morning.”

Riley finds Kai and gives him a look, he shrugs his shoulder and looks just as surprised as her.

“Do you think the kiss is a good idea?” Riley asks and Ms. Mitchell looks so offended that she’d even think to question her. “I just mean Demetrius doesn’t really love Helena, he is forced into it with a spell. If we seal it with a kiss isn’t that a bad message we are displaying for the audience?”

“Darling, that’s Shakespeare.” Ms Mitchell is clearly irritated, “Not to mention these changes make for easier set transitions and if you aren’t comfortable with a mere ten second peck on the lips then maybe you have no business playing one of the leads.”

Ms Mitchell’s words were harsh but Riley was more scared by the mention of a ten second kiss. That was at least nine seconds longer than her first and only kiss.

“Do we have a problem?” Ms. Mitchell asks sternly.

“Not with the roll, no..” Riley shakes her head. 

“Then what is it?” Ms. Mitchell questions. 

"It’s uh, it’s,” Riley takes a moment to stop her stammering, “It’s just that Lucas is Maya’s boyfriend I didn’t want to-”

“Riles, it’s cool.” Maya speaks up, she is off to the side painting a set and had stopped to listen. “It’s just pretend, right?”

“Yeah it’s not like it means anything.” Lucas says, he meant it to be encouraging or soothing at least but the moment the words left his mouth he regretted them.

“You’re right.” Riley says quietly. “Sorry, Ms. Mitchell shall we resume?”

“It’s getting late, why don’t we call it a day. Enjoy your weekend and we will reconvene Monday 3:30pm sharp.”

Everyone starts to wander off and Kai immediately pulls Riley behind the curtains and away from everyone. Before he could even ask if she was okay Riley’s eyes are heavy with tears threatening to spill and her bottom lip quivering. Kai engulfs Riley in a tight embrace. Once they separate, Riley wipes at the fallen tears. “Even if we remove the irony of the play completely, that’s still a mean thing to say to me isn’t it?”

“It’s not a nice thing to hear,” Kai shakes his head, “Even though I’m not sure he meant it to hurt you.” 

“I don’t want to kiss Lucas, I don’t want to be in the play.” Riley sheds more tears. “I want out, Kai, please.” 

“Maybe we can talk to Aleisha and See if she wants to play Helana and you can be my fairy queen?” Kai soothes his friend.

“I don’t want Lucas to think I’m switching because of him.” Riley blinks our more tears. 

“Ri, if you want out I’ll support you of course.” Kai rubs her back. “But you can’t let them ruin it for you. You were so excited about the play, it’s a lot of what we talked about this past summer.” 

“It’s not fun for me anymore.” Riley sniffles. 

“Lets take the weekend and work this out.” Kai says with a small smile. “We can tell Ms. Mitchell you thought about it and decided you can’t support the manipulation of love. We can see if someone wants to trade rolls for you...” 

“They’re still going to be here, I don’t think I can do this anymore,” Riley’s bottom lip still quivering. 

“What time do you finish work tonight?” Kai asks. 

“8:30,” Riley answers. 

“Well I’ll be there at 8 and we can walk back to yours and have a movie night.” Kai rubs Riley’s arm. “We can forget today and the whole play and work it out tomorrow. That sound good?” 

Riley nods and wipes away the rest of her tears. 

“You certainly put the drama in drama club,” Kai jokes and Riley chokes through the laughter. It’s very like Kai to make Riley laugh even in the most miserable of times. 

Kai hangs around for the last thirty minutes of Rileys shift at the bakery and sips on a chocolate milkshake. Once Riley finishes up they walk back to her apartment as planned. Kai parks himself on the sofa with Riley’s family while she retreats upstairs to shower off her day.

Riley exits the shower and strolls to her room in a towel. Riley lets out a shriek when she finds an unexpected guest sitting in her bay window. 

“I’m so sorry,” Lucas throws his hands out defensively and clenches his eyes shut. 

“What are you doing here?” Riley yells out of embarrassment as she reaches for her robe. 

“I’m sorry I should’ve texted first or used the door.” Lucas is still paniced with eyes closed tight. Truth is he spent ten minutes outside Riley’s building trying to decide if he should ring the bell or not. Ultimately he decided to use the window, he wasn’t prepared to admit that they weren't those kind of friends anymore. 

“I’m covered,” Riley says a little more softly but her heart is still beating fast, “Severely embarrassed but, covered.” 

“I’m sorry...” Lucas cautiously opens his eyes. 

Seconds later Riley’s entire family and Kai is at her bedroom door having heard the loud shriek.

“Lucas?” Cory is the first one to express his surprise. 

The Texan gives everyone a sheepish greeting. 

“I need to use the bathroom.” Topanga announces. 

“Uh, me too,” Cory chuckles nervously. 

“Me three.” Auggie holds out both hands and shakes his head before parting. 

Riley gives Kai a look. He’s still resting his weight against the frame of her door. A mild glare on his face pointed at Lucas. Riley’s silent look communicates quite clearly that she wants him to scram. Kai lets out a quiet groan. “Fine. Me four.” With that he parts. 

“I’m sorry for showing up unannounced,” Lucas apologises again. “I shouldn't have done that.” 

“It’s fine.” Riley shakes her head trying to get over the shock. “What are you doing here?” 

“I came to apologise for what I said during rehearsal,” Lucas holds Riley’s stare. 

“You have nothing to apologise for.” Riley drops her gaze to the floor and her anxiety towards the situation builds. 

“I know I upset you when I said that it didn’t mean anything.” Lucas states with a solemn expression. “I didn’t mean for it to sound dismissive of everything I just meant... If we’re just friends then why would it be weird?” 

Riley’s tries her best to keep a steady and unfazed tone. “Friends don’t kiss their friends boyfriends, even in plays it’s weird.” 

“Okay.” Lucas gives a single nod. “How about what you said to Kai after we wrapped up?” 

“What?” Riley’s heart picks up pace again. 

“I came to apologise to you for saying what I did and you were crying.” Lucas watches Riley’s face as he speaks. “Because of me...”

“Don’t sweat it,” Riley forces a laugh that sounds more awkward than anything else. “I have a full work load at the moment and it makes me tired which makes me overly emotional.” 

“You said the play isn’t fun for you anymore and that’s because we joined.” Lucas continues to prove he overheard her entire conversation with Kai. Thankfully he doesn’t suspect Riley’s emotions came out of feelings for him but he still hurts to think Riley’s finished with them as friends. 

“Lucas, you’re making a big deal over nothing.” Riley frowns. “I just didn’t want to kiss my friends boyfriend, you know how over the top I can be sometimes. It was just stressing me out and I snapped. Same old Riley!” 

“Don’t quit the play,” Lucas says softly, “If you don’t want to kiss me that’s fine, I understand. Just don’t give up something you like because I made things weird by injecting myself into them without thinking how that could affect us. I’ll ask to switch parts, just don’t worry about it, okay?” 

Riley can only manage a small nod. Lucas proceeds to climb out the window and hovers on the fire escape. 

“I’ll fix this, Riley,” He says by the open window. Once he notices the anguish on Riley’s face he pauses. “Is everything alright?” 

“Things are changing, Lucas,” Riley’s voice is weak. 

“But not between us, right?” Lucas wears a hopeful smile.

Riley’s smile fades. “I don't know anymore.” 

Lucas silently processes her words and expression before leaving without another word.

Come Monday Riley arrives at school early to see Ms. Mitchell. After some extra thought over the weekend Riley decided she didn’t want to face Lucas in rehearsal everyday so she wanted out. As Riley knocks on Ms. Mitchell’s office door she finds her drama teacher in a huffy state and asks what’s wrong. 

“I have to recast Demetrius for the play and we’re already halfway through rehearsals.” Ms. Mitchell sighs. 

“Lucas quit?” Riley knits her brows together. 

“He emailed me on Friday night saying he can’t juggle baseball and the play.” Ms. Mitchell is clearly irritated. “What is it you came to see me about, Riley?” 

“Nothing...” Riley shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter anymore...” 

End Note: Sorry if this is poorly edited, my boss caught me not working so I’m posting quickly!!!! 

For anyone that hasn't read the one shot this is based off, nor caught on by the ‘subtle’ hints left in the story but Kai is gay. I just don’t think some people have worked that out yet hahah and there was no need for a big coming out scene because he’s already openly out. Anyways! Moving on!!!! Next Chapter. Thanksgiving. Everything changes. STAY TUNED! 

Comments, reviews, etc, always SO appreciated!! :) 

Pepole who want to be tagged (sorry I’ve been forgetting to do this part in the last few chapters!!!!): @pamela-barron​ @siennese​ @nicolecolin​ @brassqueen​ @renait-courageux  (Sorry if I’ve forgotten anyone! Please just let me know if I did /if you want me to stop tagging you!!)   :)

[juggieheadcoopers-blog]

Can you write a bughead oneshot where they don't talk about the first kiss and dance around it for a while. Suddenly their schools Shakespeare company is doing a production of Romeo and Juliet (ironically) but the thing is Juggie doesn't get the role of Romeo (like Reggie or Archie does) and he interrupts the show midway through by reading the dialogue at the first meeting scene. Sorry it's super specific but I love your oneshots

This one was really fun to write, hope you enjoy it!

–

“I need everyone to quiet down!”

The theatre director stood backstage in the middle of chaos - costume pieces flying every which way, scripts fluttering across the hardwood floor, actors and actresses practicing their lines in their not-so-inside voices.

“Reggie, stop putting the props in Chuck’s ear, what did I say after the last time?” She hurried over to the boys standing by the props table, her long hair whipping over her shoulder as she frantically ripped the tiny object out of Reggie’s hand.

“I can’t believe we’re being forced to perform such an archaic piece of literary garbage. It’s so outdated,” Veronica whined, tossing her script onto a folding chair by the side of the stage. “I mean what teenager nowadays would climb up to someone’s window as a way of declaring one’s affections for them?”

Betty’s eyes went wide as she glanced at Jughead, her heart beating rapidly in her chest.

“No one,” Betty said almost too quickly, fiddling with a fraying piece of fabric on her costume and avoiding Veronica’s gaze.

“Exactly, B, glad to see you’re on my side on this one,” Veronica beamed at Betty before pulling on the arm of her dress and frowning. “Although, the fact that you’re our Juliet isn’t really helping the cause.”

Jughead gently pulled Betty away from Veronica, leaning in close to her ear so no one else could hear them.

“Bets, are we ever going to talk about it?” Jughead whispered. “It’s been weeks.”

“Talk about what?” Betty feigned confusion as she turned away from him to busily flip through her script. 

“You know what,” Jughead muttered, lowering his gaze to give her a knowing look.

“Alright, that’s enough!” The director’s voice rose above the chatter, signaling to to the group that it was time to meet with her in the center of the stage. “Gather around everyone, we don’t have a lot of time!”

“You said to pretend like nothing happened,” Betty reminded Jughead, looking back at him struggling to keep of with her as she hurried to join the rest of the group. “So that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“I didn’t mean-”

“Jughead, honestly, the faster you’re done wasting my time, the faster I can be done wasting yours,” the director sighed, turning to the students staring at her with bored expressions and taking an annoyed breath. “As you all know, our first performance of Romeo and Juliet is tomorrow. You all have put a lot of work into this and I expect that you will treat the performance with as much respect as it deserves. In other words, if you make a mockery of this program, I will see you in detention for an entire month - I’m looking at you Reggie. Okay, let’s get this over with!”

“Betty, I didn’t mean for us to skirt around each other like we were never even friends,” Jughead explained, taking her by the elbow and spinning her around slightly to meet his gaze. “I miss talking to you.”

“I miss you too, Juggie,” Betty admitted, her lips twitching into a faint smile as she allowed herself get lost in his eyes for a moment.

“Juliet, wherefore art thou Romeo? I know that’s not what that really means, but- oh never mind,” the director stammered, but stopped abruptly when she realized a dozen eyes were staring at her like she was crazy. “Seriously, Betty, where is he?”

“I’m here, Ms. Machin!”

As if on cue, Archie Andrews burst through the stage door to join the rest of his classmates on the stage.

“Sorry, I had music rehearsal with the pussycats and-” Archie struggled to catch his breath as he quickly tried to explain himself, but was cut off by an aggravated Ms. Machin shoving his costume in his face.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’ve put so much time and effort into other activities, Archie, but we have a performance tomorrow,” Ms. Machin reminded him. “So can we please run through this play before I start ripping my hair out of my head?”

“Yikes,” Veronica winced. “Sounds like someone needs a good long bath and a bottle of merlot after this horrid play is over and done with. And I don’t just mean me.”

“So are we okay?” Jughead asked, turning to Betty as she watched the group disperse in front of her. “You and me?”

“That depends,” Betty shrugged. “What did the kiss mean?”

“Bets, why do we have to decide that right now, I don’t-”

Rolling her eyes, Betty turned away from Jughead, already tired of hearing this answer, and made her way across the stage to look up at Archie putting one arm through the jacket that accompanied his costume.

“Arch, can we go over the blocking for our last scene together one more time?” Betty asked. “I just want to be sure I have it down perfectly.”

“Yeah, let’s do it,” Archie agreed, tugging on the hem of his jacket and smiling down at her as they headed off to a quieter location to practice.

“Okay, what is going on with you two?” Veronica emerged from somewhere behind Jughead, gesturing towards Betty with a raised eyebrow. “You’ve been dodging each other for weeks. Seriously I watched Betty dive into the girl’s bathroom just to avoid running into you last week. Something happened between you two didn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Jughead muttered, rubbing the back of his neck uncomfortably and staring at a spot in the hardwood floor. “Maybe.”

“Oh my god, I knew it!” Veronica exclaimed, her face brightening at the thought of an unexpected romance. “But wait, then what’s the problem?”

“A few weeks ago, we kind of had…” Jughead fidgeted in his spot, lowering his voice so he couldn’t be heard by any unsuspecting ears. “A moment.”

“Meaning?”

“We kissed,” Jughead admitted. “And afterwards I kind of… freaked out.”

“Like you ran screaming in the other direction like a five-year-old afraid of those people in the creepy character costumes at an amusement park?” Veronica asked, her brows drawing together as she tried to comprehend what he was saying.

“No,” Jughead sighed. “I just - I panicked and didn’t think she wanted it to happen. I mean, it was kind of out of the blue. But then again, it really wasn’t. Anyway, I told her just to pretend like it didn’t happen and now…”

“Now she’s treating you like you’re a piece of gum on the bottom of her shoe,” Veronica finished for him, nodding as if she understood exactly what he was talking about. “I mean you try to ignore it, but it keeps making itself known every time you walk and it sticks to the floor.”

“Kinda harsh,” Jughead scoffed. “But essentially - yes.”

“Well lucky for you, Ronnie knows how to fix even the direst dating woe,” Veronica assured him, her lips curling into a devilish smirk. “And believe it or not, this situation is not that dire. Here’s what you need to do - you need to show her that you really do want to be with her. Make some grand gesture, do whatever it takes to get her to believe you.”

“Well, how do I do that?”

“That part’s up to you my friend,” Veronica told him, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder as she turned to Archie and Betty at the other end of the stage. “But if I were you, I’d do it soon. Her Romeo is literally her dream Romeo, so I’d act fast.”

With that, Veronica crossed the stage to talk to a few of the girls in charge of the set decoration, leaving Jughead to watch as Betty laughed at something Archie was saying from across the stage.

“But he’s not,” Jughead muttered to himself, thinking back to the day he crawled into her room and kissed her like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Okay, let’s run through the balcony scene before we do a complete run-through!” Ms. Machin directed the group, gesturing for everyone to get into places with frantic hands. “Let’s go, people, the clock is ticking!”

“Okay, Juggie, it’s now or never,” Jughead whispered under his breath. “You might not be her Romeo in the play, but you were her Romeo when you climbed through her window the other day.”

“Alright, Act 2, Scene 2,” Ms. Machin clapped her hands together as the actors began to file into their positions. “Juliet appears on the balcony above, Romeo is below when he spots her and-”

Archie stepped onto the stage, glancing up at Betty with a look of longing as he began to deliver his lines.

“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the-”

Jughead couldn’t wait anymore. Before he could talk himself out of it, he hopped out from behind the lighting booth and made his way onto the stage.

“It is the east and Juliet is the sun,” Jughead finished the line for Archie, causing dozens of eyes to look to him with curious -yet intrigued- expressions.

“Jughead Jones, I will not have you make a mockery of-” Ms. Machin’s face was beet red from anger, but Veronica stepped behind her to place a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Let him finish!” Veronica insisted, nodding for Jughead to finish the line as he stood in front of the balcony, looking up at Betty.

“Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and pale with grief, that thou fair maid art far more fair than she,” Jughead continued, meeting Betty’s gaze with a look of regret and sorrow. “I messed up Bets. I should have told you how I felt about you a long time ago, but I was scared. I wasn’t sure if you felt the same way so I kind of - freaked out.”

“Juggie, all you had to do was talk to me,” Betty told him, taking a step closer to the edge of the balcony and leaning over it to smile down at him. “You can talk to me about anything.”

“I know,” Jughead met her smile before turning to everyone watching them and taking a deep breath. “So I’m asking you this now, in front of our entire class - will you go out with me?”

“Of course I will,” Betty answered, and a roar of cheers coming from the cast made an embarrassed giggle escape her lips.

Before anyone could protest, Jughead started climbing up the ladder meant to look like vines crawling up the side of the building and hoisted himself up and over the balcony to join Betty.

“Mr. Jones, that set it to be handled with care don’t you-” Ms. Machin yelled from the stage, but Jughead was already up and over before she could finish her sentence.

“Now, that’s the kind of play I would be excited about performing,” Veronica muttered to herself, clapping her hands together happily as she watched her friends smile at one another with goofy grins.

“Feel familiar?” Jughead asked as they stood in front of the hand-built window, his hands on her waist as she took a step closer to him.

“No yet,” Betty breathed before closing the space between them and placing her hands on his cheeks, their lips meeting with a kiss that was even better than their first.

[fredheads]

west of memphis - chapter 2, devil’s knot (it feels how it looks) (3157 words) on ao3

archie andrews/jughead jones additional characters: kevin keller, fred andrews tw homophobia, bullying, dark themes 

Wednesday morning Archie leads them downstairs and asks Fred to take them to the school-supply store. They get six new notebooks each. Jughead’s never been there when it’s not September - he wants it to be either exactly the same or a ghost town, and of course it’s neither. Laptop accessories have replaced the back-to-school displays, and they’ve rearranged the arts and crafts aisle. But otherwise, people come and go as they would anywhere, undisturbed, unaware that there’s a warrant out on his head (as they said in the old west), unaware that even under the fluorescents in the notebook aisle there’s a noose tightening under the collar of his hoodie.

He pretends as hard as he can. Pretends it’s September and that they’ve turned back time, that none of it has happened yet. Pretends it’s earlier than that, pretends it’s June. Lets Fred foot the bill and pretends he’s Archie’s brother.

He pretends with a fervour that he hasn’t felt since his mom left with Jellybean, a desperation that seeks to convince himself that maybe, just momentarily, he can be somewhere and someone else.

It works enough. It doesn’t work but it works enough, and that’s all he can ask.

Once in sixth grade, Kevin Keller had found him beaten to shit in the corner of their middle school’s locker room, lips gluey with blood, the solid imprint of a size-six sneaker standing out in dust on his t-shirt. Jughead was no stranger to the aggression of others, but this was his first time really getting pounded, and the feeling of that much blood draining out of his body was all new to his twelve-year-old senses. He’d lain there paralyzed on the tile, half with fear, half with embarrassment, and the quickest way out of the situation had seemed to be to die, which he had attempted to do by shutting his eyes ferociously tight against the floor and waiting for the inevitable moment his swollen lungs and bloody throat just collapsed.

It was during that period of wait that Kevin found him, and Jughead had had to squint through the blood in his eyes to know where to direct the plea that Kevin not get anyone, that Kevin just leave him there or stay with him, it made no difference, but not get an adult or even Archie for him, please, but just let him be. And Kevin had held him and rocked him while Jughead tried to stem the flow of blood from his nose, and Kevin had whispered furious and broken things in his ear, things like “they’re just jealous of you, it’s not you, it’s them, they want to be you and they’re just jealous because they aren’t” and while he hadn’t believed them for a moment he had been over-aware that these must be the words Kevin repeats to himself every morning, after every locker incident they’ve had assemblies to discuss and every football practice that disintegrated into jeers and taunting and every night the teachers pulled someone into detention for spray-painting Kevin’s name on the wall or carving it with a compass needle into the yellow bathroom partitions.

And yet it had been eerily comforting, that he wasn’t the only one who had to pretend. That he wasn’t the only one who fed himself lies like he was starving, who buried his terror at being alive in a stubborn dedication to what he only desperately hoped could be true. That other people, too, sometimes shut their eyes and ferociously pretended things were alright when they weren’t at all, and would probably never be.

Neither of them had spoken of that day since. But Jughead had remembered it vividly a year later, when their choir teacher had set her foot down and said no, Kevin could absolutely not play Gertrude in their middle school’s pared-down version of Hamlet, because there were too many girls who wanted the role and no parent wanted to see their daughter passed over for a nearly-leading role in favour of seeing Kevin strut around in a costume he had no business wearing.

She’d stuck to her guns even though Kevin had known all the lines, and even when Reggie, whose asshole years were still ahead of him, had piped up that, well, in Shakespeare’s day, men would have played all the female parts anyways. Kevin had lifted his chin without a wobble, and if it had been only a year or two later, Jughead was sure he would have told Mrs. Kraminski to shove her copy of Hamlet where the sun didn’t shine. But as it was, he had stalked proudly offstage with his head high, and even Chuck, whose size-seven Adidas had once decorated Kevin’s chest with the same kind of print Jughead had worn on the locker room floor, didn’t hiss a snide comment as he passed.

Kevin never came near the play again, despite being by far the best actor in the grade seven class. Betty had been a timid, trembling Gertrude in rehearsals, and Midge Klump had played Ophelia with all the sensitivity of a tire iron. Jughead sees the movie version much later, but in his mind Ophelia will always be Midge, spiky black hair newly-chopped, braces glinting in the broken spotlight, tossing flowers offstage in size-five combat boots. As fearless and as hard-headed as he’d always wanted to be.

He never told anyone about the things Kevin said on the locker room floor. He also never told anyone when Kevin winked at him a week after those disastrous auditions, when Jughead had caught him carrying the fabric of Gertrude’s dress down the hallway when everyone else was in assembly. They never found the costume. Betty went onstage in something Alice Cooper had whipped up that made her look - adorably -  like a creampuff. Mrs. Kraminski held a grudge against Kevin until she retired, but she never found a trace of that dress.

Jughead had never figured out why Kevin had trusted him not to tell. It had never crossed his mind that Kevin hadn’t stolen the dress, or that anyone involved in the ultimately disastrous production had doubted that he had. But Kevin had simply believed himself out of the consequences. Jughead for the first time had felt a stab of envy for Kevin’s life, for Kevin’s ability to live so firmly and so successfully in his own make-believe world. And yet he knew always in the back of his mind what he had known spitting blood in the locker room, that Kevin’s life depended horribly on a fishing wire tightrope of fantasy and pain, and that Jughead really wanted no part of it.

If Jughead had wanted anything it was to be normal. But it was too late now, far far too late, and if he was honest with himself it had been too late ever since he’d started calling himself Jughead at the age of three-and-a-half, because the name staining his birth certificate had been so blithely wrong to his ears. And now in the school supply store, watching Archie debate between royal blue and navy blue composition books, it feels far too impossibly late for him to be anywhere but here, with a potential murder charge ticking like a time bomb above his head and a frightening conviction in his heart that even at fifteen there was nothing he could do to convince them of his innocence.

Since they’re there, Fred asks if Jughead wants an external hard drive, maybe to backup the files on his laptop. Jughead says no. He wants the opposite of a hard drive. He wants less storage. He wants a brand new baby computer with nothing on it, nothing embarrassing, nothing incriminating, no folders hidden within folders where he used indecipherably labelled word documents to ponder exactly how similar he and Kevin Keller were and what precisely it was about Archie’s honey brown eyes that made him want to cry and laugh at the same time. He wants no evidence of his writing, he wants no memories of the summer, he wants to be anywhere but here and anyone - anyone at all - but himself.

But it’s hard to say this to Fred in aisle two, so he just shakes his head and says he’s fine.

Archie’s cheerful on the ride home, six glossy brand new spiral-bound notebooks balanced in a stack on his knees. He’d gone with royal blue, in the end, but had balanced the blue notebooks among red and purple and forest green. Jughead’s are all yellow, a more cheerful colour than black, less damning, less suspicious. A tear hits the front cover of one as they coast over a hill.

Fred has a kind of magnetic sixth sense for tears and turns around in the front seat, but Jughead squashes his wet cheek against the window and gives a winning performance of sleepy boredom until Fred looks back at the road. Archie’s talking about what he wants for lunch.

You make believe or you die. He’d always understood that about life, the necessity of lying to yourself when times got hard and the truth got too unpleasant to live with. But he doesn’t understand why it doesn’t get easier. Why he can’t convince himself he belongs here, or ease the weight pressing and pressing on his chest like years worth of size-six adidas sneakers.

If he ever found peace during the mornings he slept on the floor of the janitor’s closet, it was the tiny nucleus of time between his consciousness settling in from sleep and the awareness of the hard wooden floor pressed against his spine, where he could keep his eyes shut and it was easy to pretend he was sleeping anywhere in the world. Maybe he was at home, in his childhood bed, or on the floor of Archie’s den, during a sleepover. With his eyes shut it didn’t matter. And if he was really good, he could keep it going for minutes at a time, could pretend in the blackness that there was a bed under him, a breakfast waiting downstairs, a home.

He savoured one of these every night as well, in the space between closing his eyes and blacking out completely, letting the closet tilt and change in his mind’s eye as he stares at the inside of his eyelids. He could picture so perfectly how the room would look if he were in Archie’s bed right now, know exactly how the Dog Day Afternoon poster Archie had paid two bucks for when the Blockbuster closed would swim into focus just on his right if he opened his eyes. Sometimes he’d got so caught up in it he’d be surprised when he blinked and the stupid poster wasn’t there.

Jelly used to beg him to play with her whenever they got home from a movie. “Let’s be them,” she’d urge, her catchphrase in those days, and they’d take on whatever characters they’d seen at the drive-in and chase each other around the basement. Somehow, whatever the plot, it always culminated in some kind of tickle fight. He never minded. It was Jelly more than anyone who’d taught him to play pretend. The kid had a dress-up closet that would bring Hollywood costume designers to their knees.

He wonders how much of it fit in his mom’s car. Hates himself for not rescuing more of it for her.

He doesn’t have lunch with Fred or Archie. He carries the weight of Fred’s concerned gaze all the way up the stairs on his back, collapses under the Dog Day Afternoon poster, and pretends he’s still in that janitor’s closet.

Maybe that was all he deserved.

[newyorktheater]

There are moments in the “Measure for Measure” by experimental theater company Elevator Repair Service at the Public that offer the purest Shakespeare on any New York stage; this occurs when they project the Bard’s words on the backdrop as the performers are reciting them. But even here, it’s only when an entire verse is projected, and scrolls up slowly, that there’s clarity. Most of the time, the projected words are scattered, fragmented, overly large, scrolling up at great speed, all of which renders the text unreadable.

The scrolling word play feels like a metaphor for this avant-garde production of Shakespeare’s last comedy as a whole: It’s hard to read. There are watchable moments, occasional visual appeal in the design, even some touching scenes. But it’s difficult to figure out – or appreciate — what director John Collins is up to.

This is the first time in the 26 years since Collins founded Elevator Repair Service (reportedly named after the occupation he was told to pursue by a vocational counselor) that the ensemble is staging a play by William Shakespeare. In a program note, Collins claims that “Measure for Measure,” with its mix of “tragedy and comedy, heartbreak and absurdity creates exactly the sort of environment in which we love to play.” On the other hand, he adds, “Shakespeare’s densely layered metaphors and dizzying grammatical constructions can’t possibly be thoroughly understood and processed in real-time by any but the Elizabethan scholar. But maybe that doesn’t matter.” What makes the play “timeless,” Collins writes, is the “music” of the sentences — not, in other words, their meaning.

To me, this “Measure for Measure” counts as a missed opportunity, given the play’s startling relevance in the age of Mike Pence and Harvey Weinstein. Yes,

even Elizabethan scholars label “Measure for Measure” one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, though not because of the language. It has an odd, convoluted plot, an ambiguous mix of moods and a troublesome resolution; it’s generally one of the playwright’s least performed works. But what an ensemble attuned to contemporary parallels could make of this play. The Duke of Vienna puts his deputy Angelo in charge, while the Duke pretends to leave town, but instead disguises himself as a friar to observe what happens in his “absence.” What happens is a crackdown on what Angelo sees as moral laxness. Angelo arrests Claudio because his fiancé Juliet is pregnant, and sentences Claudio to death. Claudio’s sister Isabella, a virtuous novice nun, appeals to Angelo for mercy. Angelo responds that he’ll show mercy if Isabella will sleep with him.

The Duke, as the friar, hatches a very odd plan to thwart Angelo.   All eventually ends weirdly, with the most inappropriate pairings in all of Shakespeare.

How Collins and his ensemble handle “Measure for Measure” will be familiar to those who have seen previous ERS productions. The design gimmick of the vertiginous text projections, for example, is similar to the company’s 2013 play “Arguendo,” which used as its script the transcript of a Supreme Court case about nude dancing. The odd, fast-then-slow, recitation of the script – as if the cast is reading the script from a teleprompter (which, reportedly ,they are) – brings to mind their 2010 breakout hit, “Gatz.” “Gatz” was a seven-hour verbatim reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” — all 47,000 or so words – with the cast portraying dual roles, both as office workers whose colleague was reading the book aloud, and as characters from the novel speaking the dialogue. As in that play, the set for “Measure for Measure” has no correlation to the settings or action – the ensemble sit around old wooden tables in a conference room, often talking to one another using the old-fashioned candlestick telephones

And there is a downtown quirkiness to this “Measure for Measure” that is present in most of ERS productions, though it was perhaps most pronounced in the notorious Fondly, Collette Richland. The cast is given to abrupt awkward goofiness that would feel like an American version of Monty Python if it were funnier.

Amid the slapstick and vaudevillian non-sequiturs, Rinne Groff as Isabella and Greig Sargeant as her condemned brother Claudio offer serious, moving performances that would not be out of place in a more conventional and accessible production.

Isabella’s pleas for grace and mercy and justice come the closest to evoking both emotionally and intellectually the main theme of “Measure for Measure” as revealed in the origin of its title, which comes from the Christian Bible: “Judge not, that you be not judged. For … the measure you give will be the measure you get.”

But such moments of provocative drama must compete with the broad theatricality of the ERS brand, which can be fun, but persists in this production for more than two hours without intermission, and mostly without letup.

Click on any photograph by Richard Termine to see it enlarged.

Rinne Groff

Maggie Hoffman and Greig Sargeant

Scott Shepherd as the Duke/Friar ,

Search Calendar Shows and Events Ticketing Info Programs Joe’s Pub at The Public Free Shakespeare in the Park Support Us Visit About Contact Us Press Photo recent_actorsOedipus El Rey – Production Photos Oedipus El Rey – Production Photos recent_actorsTiny Beautiful Things Encore – Production Photos Tiny Beautiful Things Encore – Production Photos recent_actorsOffice Hour – Rehearsal Photos Office Hour – Rehearsal Photos Measure for Measure – Production PhotosDownload Gallery as Zip File close Placeholder Mike Iveson, Susie Sokol, Lindsay Hockaday, and Scott Shepherd

Greig Sargeant as condemned Claudio

Rinne Groff (center) as Isabella

Pete Simpson

Scott Shepherd and Maggie Hoffman

    Measure for Measure Written by William Shakespeare Created and Performed by Elevator Repair Service Directed by John Collins

Set design by Jim Findlay,   costume design by Kaye Voyce, , lighting design by Mark Barton and Ryan Seelig, projection deisgn by Eva von Schweinitz, sound design by Gavin Price

Cast: Rinne Groff, Lindsay Hockaday, Maggie Hoffman, Mike Iveson, Vin Knight, April Matthis, Gavin Price, Greig Sargeant, Scott Shepherd, Pete Simpson, and Susie Sokol

Running time: 2 hours and 10 minutes, no intermission.

Tickets: $75 to $150. $45 for members. $20 lottery.

“Measure for Measure” is on stage at the Public through November 12, 2017.

Measure for Measure Review: A Shakespeare for the Age of Mike Pence and Harvey Weinstein, via Elevator Repair Service There are moments in the “Measure for Measure” by experimental theater company Elevator Repair Service at the Public that offer the purest Shakespeare on any New York stage; this occurs when they project the Bard’s words on the backdrop as the performers are reciting them.

[vileart]

Babel Dramaturgy: Colby Quinn @ Edfringe 2017

LOUD // IN BABEL

 by COLBY QUINN

dir. Anastasia Bruce-Jones

12:55pm 14th - 19th August

TheSpace@NiddrySt (Upper), Niddry Street, EH1 1TH

It is 2057 and the world’s population has reached 10 billion. To prevent unsanctioned births, British law states that no male and female can be alone together in a private place. In an abandoned house, on the edge of town, Thomas and Isla break away from the rest of the party...

An abandoned house on the outskirts of Bristol. A group of young, would-be revolutionaries break in to start fires and drink liquid steel. The party quickly becomes raucous.

Upstairs, Thomas finds an old bedroom, dusty but with shafts of

evening light filtering in, and prepares a surprise for his girlfriend, Isla; their first proper date, alone. A heart-warming love story begins; two young people held apart by a law which unjustly assumes the sexuality of heterosexual relationships finally live out the most intimate and fragile of human interactions – they discover what is like to be alone with the person you love.

As they talk – about the city, about university, about their families and, seemingly constantly, about the way their lives have been affected by the new law – they are able to begin revealing the depth of their feelings for each other.

But romantic excitement turns to recklessness for Thomas as they steel themselves with alcohol. The political becomes entangled with the private once again, as Thomas’s frustration and revolutionary fury build, fuelled by the discovery of a box of photographs which tell a story of a similarly persecuted couple. Thomas’s idea of rebellion, sexual intercourse, in a world where even a father and daughter can’t be alone together, isn’t Isla’s.

WHAT WAS THE INSPIRATION FOR THIS PERFORMANCE?

I really like one night stands. There's something really exciting about being in such an intimate situation with someone you hardly know. But I don't like having sex on one night stands. It's just a line I draw. Some people have a real issue with that.It seems to me that every time I've found myself in a situation where a guy - and I say 'guy' because it always has been guys, girls in my experience haven't been this way - has pushed the boundaries of consent, and I've told them to stop and explained to them that they were beginning to do something that was non-consensual, it's always ended up being me who comforts them.  Me who comforts them? What the hell?

Because I guess it is upsetting, thinking that if the person you're on a one-night-stand with wasn't outspoken, or sober enough, or aware enough of exactly what it is she wants (or doesn't want), you could easily have ended up raping them. But I think we can agree that it's a hell of a lot more upsetting to have it the other way round.I had that image in my head for a few weeks - the victim comforting the person who has pushed their boundaries - and LOUD // in Babel emerged out of that.

IS PERFORMANCE STILL A GOOD SPACE FOR THE PUBLIC DISCUSSION OF IDEAS?

Well, in this case, I'm not really sure that's the question we need to be asking.I went through school with absolutely no discussion of consent at all - this is nothing against my school, it's a good place that really cares about it's students, but it's not in the curriculum and - worse - it's just not in people's minds.  There's no culture of talking about consent. The only formal education I've ever had about consent was a half-hearted two hour

workshop at the start of my time at University, run by students who had barely more experience than I did. Sure, I had a few afternoons in school when I was taught how to put a condom on a cucumber. Frankly, these days, that's worse than not good enough.The only place I ever see ideas of consent and - even more rarely - the difficult case of rape happening within a loving and consensual relationship being discussed is in performance and the very fringes of the media, in edgy, low-budget dramas and YouTube documentaries.As a writer and director, performance is the way I express my ideas. It's the medium through which I naturally filter and express my experiences. I guess that makes me lucky, because performance is one of the few places which *allows*, and more importantly, validates discussion of consent. Performance is absolutely necessary as a space for the public discussion of ideas.The question we need to be asking, though, is why is performance so necessary? Why is performance the only place I can be sure of being heard when I say that I have taught myself through experience how to prevent my own rape?

HOW DID YOU BECOME INTERESTED IN MAKING PERFORMANCE?

I think it was when I saw Trevor White play

Hotspur in Gregory Doran's 'Henry IV: Part I' and I realised that really great performances are about saying something totally new.In White's portrayal, Hostpur was an autistic man, wholly dedicated to his ideals, on fire with passion, leaping across the stage (I swear, four feet high sometimes) and compelling the audience with every ancient word he spoke. He never said a single thing that hasn't been said a hundred times before but it was electric and modern and totally fresh.

IS THERE ANY PARTICULAR APPROACH TO THE MAKING OF THE SHOW?

Not exactly a particular 'approach' - we're not going to rehearse everything in complete darkness or with our hands tied behind our backs or eating only rice and beans - I don't believe in directing gimmicks. But as with rehearsing any show, there are going to be unique challenges that require unique solutions.For example, Isla and Thomas (the characters in LOUD // in Babel) get drunk through the course of the show. Given that their particular level of drunkenness leads to both of them losing a degree of control and doing things that they probably wouldn't do if they were sober, it's important for Toby and Beth (our actors) to feel that particular level of drunkenness and how it affects their decisions as characters. 

So we're going to do a rehearsal where we run the show and they actually drink the amount of alcohol the characters are drinking - in real time. And I'll record that and then we'll watch it through the next day. But the recording is sort of secondary, it'll help with slight physical things, but no-one wants to watch actors pretending to be absolutely smashed, so it's not really about that. It's more to feel how that lack of control works on the characters; makes them quieter or bolder or gives them that little voice at the back of the head that whispers 'this is bad, this is really bad'.Instead of a particular approach, it'll be exercises like this. What I focus on is getting the actors' heads fully inside the psyche of their character, thinking and feeling as they do. After that, things come naturally.

DOES THE SHOW FIT WITH YOUR USUAL PRODUCTIONS?

Not exactly, but then it's been a pretty crazy range so far. I've directed 'Love's Labour's Lost' (a quirky Shakespeare comedy) set in modern-day Cambridge, 'The Duchess of Malfi' (a revenge tragedy) using physical theatre and 'set' (if you can call it setting) inside the subconscious dreaming mind of society itself, 'Birdsong' (Faulks' WW1 romance) in a pretty faithful way and I'm currently writing a short-film about two student film-makers who think they're Arthur Rimbaud. There's no real pattern here.What I think is important to me is that audiences feel a connection - some significance to what is happening on stage, whether that's because they've been through similar things themselves or conversely because they are being made to feel something totally new. It's that sense of connection that will keep people coming to the theatre, keep young people interested, and prevent the 'dying out' of theatre that the arts world at the moment is so afraid of.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE THAT THE AUDIENCE WILL EXPERIENCE?

Emotion. It's as simple as that.What I find interesting is that when you go to the theatre or the cinema, you know that what you're seeing is not real. And yet, you feel it more strongly than reality. I've had people tell me they love me for the first time and felt far less emotion than when Jack and Rose kiss on the prow of the Titanic. It's a sort of condensation of reality.People go because they want to feel something, and that's exactly what I plan to deliver.

WHAT STRATEGIES DID YOU CONSIDER TOWARDS SHAPING THIS AUDIENCE EXPERIENCE?

We've got a lot of cool ideas about this; we're planning to give some audience members t-shirts which, without revealing anything about the twists of the play, have quite an important role in a big reveal.We're also using people's voices within the play itself, so we need some volunteers to read some sections of writing for us. So, if you want to actually be in an Edinburgh show, come to us!

LOUD // in Babel, an original piece of dystopia from Colby Quinn, is a powerful insight into the dangers of a voice going unheard. Through the funny, touching and fast-paced dialogue of the two would-be lovers, the play challenges our perceptions of freedom of speech, consent and the implications of silencing a voice.

LOUD // in Babel is structured around a new and very different concept, which poses multiple problems for both the characters and the audience to grapple with. The unique concept of the play frames the issues of the present, focusing on a hypothetical future which amplifies the fears of today without parodying them or using already well-worn Orwellian tropes overtly. 

The play challenges the audience by placing them inside a space which is controlled by laws which have a fundamental impact on the way the characters have lived their lives and understand communication. 

Through the play, the audience realise their own comparative freedom, the delicate balance of the private and the political and the terrifying consequences of this balance being upset. The play itself strikes an unsettling and deeply affecting balance between romantic comedy and political drama, which drives the pace and creates a Nick Payne-esque emotional struggle. 

This rejection of standardised genre expectations holds the audience to account for their own problematic expectations of romantic relationships in theatre and western culture more broadly and reflects the darkly ambiguous position created by voicelessness within the play. The theme of voicelessness itself creates an intriguing crux in a form which is built around dialogue, asking questions about the existence and position of free speech, which are reminiscent of Sam Steiner. 

The production uses simple technical effects to create powerful images, building to an exciting technical reveal at the end. The play builds around difficult ambiguities, which come to their climax in the question of sexual consent in a loving, consensual relationship. It is a play which will spark conversations and debate among audience-members, something that lies at the heart of Fringe theatre.

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