thuvia ptarth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thuviaptarth) wrote2007-08-02 10:29 pm
thuviaptarth) wrote2007-08-02 10:29 pm
WIP meme
If anyone wants to do a dvd commentary on one of my stories, I'd be flattered as hell.
I see the WIP meme is going around again, so:
Extrethuvia late Sweet Charity story - SPN
Dean's back to normal two days later, the way normal is now: like if he grins wide enough his teeth will outshine the darkness in his eyes. Comes back to the room after midnight, smelling of beer and girl, catfoot even drunk and in the dark. Sam stares up at the invisible ceiling and wonders if he really thinks Sam's asleep, or if it's not even thought; if Dean had come back in to his empty motel rooms that quietly even when Dad sent him off hunting alone.
Post-"What Is And What Never Should Be"
Sam was up two hours researching djinni and thirty-six hours searching for his idiot brother, and all he wants to do is sleep, but Dean says, "I been doing nothing but sleep for a day and a half," so they get in the car and go. First gas stop, Sam comes out of the minimart with a couple of packaged sandwiches, a half dozen bottles of Gatorade, and a sixpack of beer. He dumps the beer in the back seat and the Gatorade between them in the front. The girl they found is in the hospital still hooked up to an IV, but Dean, no surprise, wouldn't even let the doctors check him out.
The George Darrow story I probably won't finish (SPN)
This was going to be an attempt to reconcile the SPN version of the crossroads bargain with the African American one -- the bargain not with the devil, but with Legba -- but, um, at this point I've forgotten how I was planning to do it
Lately George Darrow has been painting masks: blasted metal masks with empty eyes, yellow-white masks the color of bone with mouths twisted in soundless moans. He paints them all on a background of crimson-tinted black, the color of the darkness you see when you press your thumbs against your closed eyes, before you let the pressure up. When he's done, he presses a bright red thumbprint into the lower right corner: maker's mark, evidence admitted to the case. He stopped signing his paintings ten years ago.
He stands in a semicircle of completed paintings in the dusk light that's just too dark to paint by and he looks at the masks and they look back at him and he knows, he knows with the same old bone-deep frustration that they are good, just good, not good enough. He thinks about it, the whole time away from that room, the whole time he can't paint; he thinks about what's wrong with them, why they don't work. Not on the surface of his mind—the surface is taken up by other things—but beneath, where he lives, he worries at it. He learned how to do that when he was hardly but a boy, sitting by his gran's bedside the two months it took her to die. On the surface you're there, on the surface you talk quiet or you plead or you cry, but down below you think, How can I use this?, down below you think, How does this fit in?, down below you don't hurt at all and at the same time you hurt so pure it's almost not a sensation at all, just a color, a shape, the movement described by a line.
Could be that talent never was yours, something whispers in the back of his head and maybe it's even him. Could be it was that demon's all along.
My paintings, my sins, my soul, my deal, George says right back, and he takes up his smelly turpentine rag and begins wiping the canvases down. I got enough on me I don't need to give up what little good I got done.
You really wanna claim this as the good you done, George Darrow? says that voice, sounding like his mama now, and that's even less convincing than sounding like him.
"Well, not this one," he says, wry, and it laughs. He's pretty sure that's a laugh, that dry sound like scale sliding over scale. Maybe it is all in his head; they got senses of humor down here, but all the jokes are mean ones.
All the masks are his own face, always were; they're not the kind of mask that hides anything. Next time he tries painting from snapshots instead of his reflection. It makes no difference, except to the colors. They're hurtful, pulsing colors: rusty reds, the brown of dried bloodstains, greenish-black grief, purple-black like bruises, red-black like pain.
Away again, and still thinking about it, when he can think, and then when he comes back, the paintings are still there. It's because they're wrong, he knows; when the paintings are better, when he's happy, that's when he'll come back to find the studio wrecked. He's careful to curse, those times, shout and threaten and plead. If they know it's not hurting, they'll find something that does.
When he figures it out, he starts laughing out loud.
Rusty twists of wire, roadkill bones boiled clean, smashed beer cans: it takes a while to collect the materials, but once he's done it everything goes fast, like his hands never forgot collage even if his head abandoned it years ago. Soon enough he's boiling up papier-mache, scrubbing dried glue off his hands with cotton balls and nail polish remover.
His masks are made of trash nobody wants and they're beautiful.
People start coming by to see them, soon enough.
The doctor, she has ravaged eyes and hair in dreadlocks and she trembles bad as any drunk (demon says, You should know and George says, Ain't no arguing with that). George doesn't figure apologies will do either of them any good here, so he doesn't offer any. She stares at the paintings for a while and says nothing, and then she goes away; whatever she wanted, she couldn't find it here. Next comes the architect. The other guy, the accountant, the one who never laughed at a man so drunk he stumbled over his own feet, and who never made faces like smelling something bad either, he hasn't showed up yet, and George can't say he's sorry about that.
A stranger stops him once, white guy, big shoulders, sad steady eyes. "I hear you met my boys," he says, all quiet-like, and it's something in the gravelly voice that brings the memory back, though now that he looks George can see the angry one in the shape of the older man's jaw and the set of his eyes, the other boy in the height and the slight shoulder stoop.
"They tried to help me out," George says, "yeah. Good boys you raised there." It don't hurt him none to say and it's probably even true.
"They okay?" the man says. "The boys?"
"I reckon," George says. "Both in one piece, anyhow."
The man swallows hard and nods and then keeps on nodding. He has to clear his throat before he can talk, and even then he has talk real soft so his voice won't break. "Both in one piece. That's good. That's good." The man clasps George's shoulder for a moment, a brief squeeze to say Thank you and they nod at each other and George pretends he doesn't see the shine in the other man's eyes before he goes.
The red-eyed girl smiles and smiles, but behind where she can't see her shadow is shaped like a big tall man. "I keep my bargains," she purrs, and behind her the black man tips his black hat at George and nods. He keeps his bargains, too.
Caterwaul (Dark Angel - Max)
It's not that bad, once she figures out she needs to be in charge, once she figures out she doesn't have to let them touch her.
Rememory (Dark Angel - Zack)
Six weeks' rehab, braces and exercises and Don't be too quick to get back on the horse, Adam and he wasn't. He wasn't. His bones healed quick and his muscles rebuilt quicker, but other things didn't come back at all. How to ride a horse. Wrangle cattle. Make a pot of coffee over an open fire, cook up a mess of beans. He picked them up fast enough, that wasn't the problem; the problem was he was picking them up, not remembering them.
(Six weeks felt like forever, and it was too fast. He'd scare shadows across the doctors' faces, stiffness in their posture, heaviness in their testing hands; they thought they hid it from him and he let them think so. In enemy territory, knowledge is a strategic advantage.)
The Kamui/Hisoka that probably won't get written (X/Yami no Matsuei)
The new boy is odd, although no one else seems to notice. The girls and some of the boys blush when he speaks to them; the other boys avoid him with the uneasy siddle of mice trying not to attract the attention of a preoccupied cat. The latter group includes Keichi, surprisingly, although when Kamui asks, all Keichi will say is that the other boy has always been perfectly polite, and Kamui has to admit he has never seen Kurosaki-kun be anything but. At [], Kamui had had to act like a thug to scare off the boys who thought he was prey; he can't figure out how Kurosaki has accomplished the same end with nothing more than courtesy and sarcasm.
But that's not what's odd. What's odd is that he *glows*.
Or--he doesn't, quite. It's not that Kamui can see him less clearly in the light, or more clearly in the dark; and it's not his coloring, either; it's just --
"He's very beautiful," Keichi says once, at lunch, wistfully. "Oh yes," Kamui agrees, frowning, still focused on the boy across the room, and Keichi's face brightens at his tone.
I see the WIP meme is going around again, so:
Extrethuvia late Sweet Charity story - SPN
Dean's back to normal two days later, the way normal is now: like if he grins wide enough his teeth will outshine the darkness in his eyes. Comes back to the room after midnight, smelling of beer and girl, catfoot even drunk and in the dark. Sam stares up at the invisible ceiling and wonders if he really thinks Sam's asleep, or if it's not even thought; if Dean had come back in to his empty motel rooms that quietly even when Dad sent him off hunting alone.
Post-"What Is And What Never Should Be"
Sam was up two hours researching djinni and thirty-six hours searching for his idiot brother, and all he wants to do is sleep, but Dean says, "I been doing nothing but sleep for a day and a half," so they get in the car and go. First gas stop, Sam comes out of the minimart with a couple of packaged sandwiches, a half dozen bottles of Gatorade, and a sixpack of beer. He dumps the beer in the back seat and the Gatorade between them in the front. The girl they found is in the hospital still hooked up to an IV, but Dean, no surprise, wouldn't even let the doctors check him out.
The George Darrow story I probably won't finish (SPN)
This was going to be an attempt to reconcile the SPN version of the crossroads bargain with the African American one -- the bargain not with the devil, but with Legba -- but, um, at this point I've forgotten how I was planning to do it
Lately George Darrow has been painting masks: blasted metal masks with empty eyes, yellow-white masks the color of bone with mouths twisted in soundless moans. He paints them all on a background of crimson-tinted black, the color of the darkness you see when you press your thumbs against your closed eyes, before you let the pressure up. When he's done, he presses a bright red thumbprint into the lower right corner: maker's mark, evidence admitted to the case. He stopped signing his paintings ten years ago.
He stands in a semicircle of completed paintings in the dusk light that's just too dark to paint by and he looks at the masks and they look back at him and he knows, he knows with the same old bone-deep frustration that they are good, just good, not good enough. He thinks about it, the whole time away from that room, the whole time he can't paint; he thinks about what's wrong with them, why they don't work. Not on the surface of his mind—the surface is taken up by other things—but beneath, where he lives, he worries at it. He learned how to do that when he was hardly but a boy, sitting by his gran's bedside the two months it took her to die. On the surface you're there, on the surface you talk quiet or you plead or you cry, but down below you think, How can I use this?, down below you think, How does this fit in?, down below you don't hurt at all and at the same time you hurt so pure it's almost not a sensation at all, just a color, a shape, the movement described by a line.
Could be that talent never was yours, something whispers in the back of his head and maybe it's even him. Could be it was that demon's all along.
My paintings, my sins, my soul, my deal, George says right back, and he takes up his smelly turpentine rag and begins wiping the canvases down. I got enough on me I don't need to give up what little good I got done.
You really wanna claim this as the good you done, George Darrow? says that voice, sounding like his mama now, and that's even less convincing than sounding like him.
"Well, not this one," he says, wry, and it laughs. He's pretty sure that's a laugh, that dry sound like scale sliding over scale. Maybe it is all in his head; they got senses of humor down here, but all the jokes are mean ones.
All the masks are his own face, always were; they're not the kind of mask that hides anything. Next time he tries painting from snapshots instead of his reflection. It makes no difference, except to the colors. They're hurtful, pulsing colors: rusty reds, the brown of dried bloodstains, greenish-black grief, purple-black like bruises, red-black like pain.
Away again, and still thinking about it, when he can think, and then when he comes back, the paintings are still there. It's because they're wrong, he knows; when the paintings are better, when he's happy, that's when he'll come back to find the studio wrecked. He's careful to curse, those times, shout and threaten and plead. If they know it's not hurting, they'll find something that does.
When he figures it out, he starts laughing out loud.
Rusty twists of wire, roadkill bones boiled clean, smashed beer cans: it takes a while to collect the materials, but once he's done it everything goes fast, like his hands never forgot collage even if his head abandoned it years ago. Soon enough he's boiling up papier-mache, scrubbing dried glue off his hands with cotton balls and nail polish remover.
His masks are made of trash nobody wants and they're beautiful.
People start coming by to see them, soon enough.
The doctor, she has ravaged eyes and hair in dreadlocks and she trembles bad as any drunk (demon says, You should know and George says, Ain't no arguing with that). George doesn't figure apologies will do either of them any good here, so he doesn't offer any. She stares at the paintings for a while and says nothing, and then she goes away; whatever she wanted, she couldn't find it here. Next comes the architect. The other guy, the accountant, the one who never laughed at a man so drunk he stumbled over his own feet, and who never made faces like smelling something bad either, he hasn't showed up yet, and George can't say he's sorry about that.
A stranger stops him once, white guy, big shoulders, sad steady eyes. "I hear you met my boys," he says, all quiet-like, and it's something in the gravelly voice that brings the memory back, though now that he looks George can see the angry one in the shape of the older man's jaw and the set of his eyes, the other boy in the height and the slight shoulder stoop.
"They tried to help me out," George says, "yeah. Good boys you raised there." It don't hurt him none to say and it's probably even true.
"They okay?" the man says. "The boys?"
"I reckon," George says. "Both in one piece, anyhow."
The man swallows hard and nods and then keeps on nodding. He has to clear his throat before he can talk, and even then he has talk real soft so his voice won't break. "Both in one piece. That's good. That's good." The man clasps George's shoulder for a moment, a brief squeeze to say Thank you and they nod at each other and George pretends he doesn't see the shine in the other man's eyes before he goes.
The red-eyed girl smiles and smiles, but behind where she can't see her shadow is shaped like a big tall man. "I keep my bargains," she purrs, and behind her the black man tips his black hat at George and nods. He keeps his bargains, too.
Caterwaul (Dark Angel - Max)
It's not that bad, once she figures out she needs to be in charge, once she figures out she doesn't have to let them touch her.
Rememory (Dark Angel - Zack)
Six weeks' rehab, braces and exercises and Don't be too quick to get back on the horse, Adam and he wasn't. He wasn't. His bones healed quick and his muscles rebuilt quicker, but other things didn't come back at all. How to ride a horse. Wrangle cattle. Make a pot of coffee over an open fire, cook up a mess of beans. He picked them up fast enough, that wasn't the problem; the problem was he was picking them up, not remembering them.
(Six weeks felt like forever, and it was too fast. He'd scare shadows across the doctors' faces, stiffness in their posture, heaviness in their testing hands; they thought they hid it from him and he let them think so. In enemy territory, knowledge is a strategic advantage.)
The Kamui/Hisoka that probably won't get written (X/Yami no Matsuei)
The new boy is odd, although no one else seems to notice. The girls and some of the boys blush when he speaks to them; the other boys avoid him with the uneasy siddle of mice trying not to attract the attention of a preoccupied cat. The latter group includes Keichi, surprisingly, although when Kamui asks, all Keichi will say is that the other boy has always been perfectly polite, and Kamui has to admit he has never seen Kurosaki-kun be anything but. At [], Kamui had had to act like a thug to scare off the boys who thought he was prey; he can't figure out how Kurosaki has accomplished the same end with nothing more than courtesy and sarcasm.
But that's not what's odd. What's odd is that he *glows*.
Or--he doesn't, quite. It's not that Kamui can see him less clearly in the light, or more clearly in the dark; and it's not his coloring, either; it's just --
"He's very beautiful," Keichi says once, at lunch, wistfully. "Oh yes," Kamui agrees, frowning, still focused on the boy across the room, and Keichi's face brightens at his tone.
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