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allsassnoclass · 4 years ago

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“Every day you wake up and make it my problem” Luke to Ashton

alrighty a theatre au for the only person in the theatre department who can handle me <3

Opening night brings a palpable excitement in the air, a nervous energy that can only naturally be produced at this point in the production process. The scenes have been blocked, the lines memorized, the sets built, the costumes sewn, and every piece of design meticulously brought together to create something ready for sharing. As Luke hangs up the laundered costume pieces and ensures that the dressing rooms are prepared for the night, he can already feel the excitement amongst the crew milling about. It will only be compounded once the actors arrive for the night.

Luke has his sewing kit, numerous pins, extra hairspray, and a bite light. There aren't many quick changes in Hamlet, and all of them have been easily doable in dress rehearsals. He's ready.

When he wanders out to backstage, Calum and Michael seem to be ready, too. Calum is sitting on the acting block Michael has commandeered as his seat since tech, scrolling through his phone while Michael goes through his pre-show duties on the other side of the stage.

"Ready for tonight?" Luke asks, making Calum jump.

"Yeah. Is the laundry up?"

"Costumes are all clean and accounted for," Luke says. "If you want an empty dressing room, now is your time."

He stands and stretches, wandering over to the dressing rooms. Luke takes his spot and watches Michael continue to double-check props on the other side of the stage. Once satisfied, he heads back over, stopping short when he sees Luke.

"You're not my boyfriend," Michael says.

"He went to go get ready before the rush," Luke says. "Ready for tonight?"

"Very," Michael says. "No one has broken anything yet, which is a bit worrying, but I'm fucking ready to open."

"No one's broken any props or sets, you mean. I've had to resew numerous buttons and seams. Ashton can barely keep his clothes on."

"I bet you like that," Michael says, waggling his eyebrows. Luke flips him off, too used to Michael's teasing to be truly bothered. Ever since he first saw their lead actor and tripped over his own feet he hasn't known peace.

In his defense, Ashton is very beautiful. It is not Luke's fault that he got flustered during their first interaction. At least he was only writing down measurements instead of having to take them, because being that close to him without time to mentally prepare would have been embarrassing for everyone. (If he still has to take a few breaths when helping Ashton get on his more intricate costumes, that's his business, especially because being under the stage lights only enhances all of Ashton's best features.)

"Ashton gets to make out with your boyfriend every night. Stop laughing," he says flatly.

"Yeah, and it's fucking hot," Michael says, nudging Luke out of his seat.

Luke rolls his eyes. Reducing the relationship between Hamlet and Horatio to a "fucking hot" make out scene is a disservice to all of the painstaking work that Ashton, Calum, and the director have done to seamlessly incorporate it into the story without alienating or reducing Ophelia, but Michael isn't exactly wrong.

Ashton seems like a good kisser. Luke wants to know what it'd be like to be on the receiving end of that when there's no acting involved.

Luke kills time with Michael until he has to go on headset, signaling that it's late enough that Luke should probably check on the actors. Gertrude's zipper on her dress keeps getting jammed to the point where Luke is really considering replacing it. It works most of the time, but Luke is getting sick of having to finagle it. He helps her get it up and makes a note to replace it before tomorrow, then he heads to men's dress, ready to camp out until someone else needs him

"Luke!" Ashton greets exuberantly as soon as he steps in the door. He has his makeup on, just simple things to ensure he doesn't get washed out under the stage lights, but he looks stunning. He isn't even in his main costume yet, an intricate black tunic with gold embroidery meant to blur the line between historical and contemporary like everything else in the show, but Luke wants to swoon.

"Hi."

"Thanks for fixing my buttons," he says. "Again."

"Try not to rip them off tonight," Luke says.

"I always try," Ashton says. Somehow, Luke still feels like he's going to be fixing a button. Ashton doesn't restrain himself onstage. It makes him captivating to watch, but it also means that unnecessary rips and button tears occur, sometimes in ways that Luke thinks should be impossible. Being wardrobe head for this production has taught him many new ways to break a costume.

He helps the actors here and there with things like hair or specialty makeup, distracting himself from Ashton changing in the background and passing the time until the actors go to warm ups. Rosencrantz has managed to misplace his socks because he hadn't zipped his laundry bag when he gave it to be washed and Gildenstern can't find one of her shoes, but otherwise there isn't much for Luke to do with this show. He wanders out by Michael, knowing by now where he can stand to watch from offstage and when he'll have to move so he's not in the way.

When the lights go down and the warnings about flash photography and food in the theater play over the loudspeaker, Luke's heart starts thumping harder in his chest. Michael turns on the fog machine for a bit of haze at the beginning, Bernardo and Francisco take their places onstage, and the play begins.

Even after having seen the show during the crew view and hearing it over the monitors backstage every night since, he manages to get lost in the story. Each performer is on top of things tonight, none more so than Ashton. From the moment he steps out on stage the charismatic actor is gone, replaced by a moody but no less magnetic Hamlet. His grief and anger is palpable in his introductory scene, and his relief at seeing Horatio for the first time perfectly sets up their dependency in the rest of the show. His scene with the ghost is heartbreaking, and Luke finds himself subconsciously biting his lip and leaning forward, wanting nothing more than to erase his pain. Hamlet is enamored by Ophelia and broken by her betrayal, and every soliloquy is captivating. No one can command a stage like Ashton Irwin.

Intermission sees Luke attending to his actual job as a dresser, helping with the laces on a few costumes and checking with all the actors to be sure there's no issues. Ashton grabs his shoulders and blurts an excited sentence about crowd reactions, then immediately goes backstage to get "back into the Hamlet zone." Calum watches this interaction with raised eyebrows. When he heads backstage, Luke hopes he's not going to gossip with Michael.

The second half of the show goes just as smoothly as the first. Michael has him take care of the actress playing Oscric when she feels a little bit faint, but once she gets more water in her she perks back up and Luke can return to watching Ashton's breakdown on stage. The ending duel scene is more polished and realistic than they've ever done it, but it's Horatio's final moments with Hamlet that leave Luke speechless. Something about Calum cradling Ashton in his arms while Ashton commands him to stay alive and tell his story has Luke tearing up.

He leaves during curtain call to grab the laundry bag and set himself up outside the dressing rooms, ready to take everything that needs to be washed. It feels anticlimactic to have the first night of the show done, but Luke typically doesn't feel the same sense of accomplishment as the actors do after each individual performance. It never truly hits him until strike, when he has to put everything away and reset the theatre and costume space to prepare for the next show. Luke congratulates every actor that passes and waits for them all to leave so he can go home. There's no one waiting for him in the audience tonight and he wasn't told about any after-parties, so he's looking forward to getting sleep before returning to the costume shop tomorrow to take care of the notes he has.

"Ashton's the last one in men's dress," Calum says when he hands in his own laundry. "He asked me to send you in."

Luke had been hoping that Ashton would be able to make it an entire show without a costume mishap. Apparently that hope had been misguided.

"It's Luke," he announces, knocking on the door.

"Come in!"

Ashton is pulling on a t-shirt, giving Luke an accidental glimpse at the dimples in his lower back. When he turns around he looks sheepish.

"I lost a button during the duel."

Luke sighs.

"I promise I'm not deliberately being destructive," Ashton says. "I'm not trying to make more work for you."

"Yet every day you wake up and make it my problem," Luke says. "Can I see which button?"

Ashton brings him his dueling vest, pointing out where a simple black button had fallen. Luke will walk by the stage to see if it's still there or Michael found it, but if not then it won't be difficult to replace.

"I'm really sorry," Ashton says, still standing close. "I swear I won't make you fix my costume tomorrow."

"Don't make promises you can't keep," Luke says. "You have the worst track record with costumes out of everyone I've ever worked with."

"Well, I need some excuse to keep talking to you."

Luke blinks at him.

"That was a joke. I mean, I do love having a reason to talk to you, but it'd be shitty of me to be deliberately making your job hard."

"Oh," Luke says. "You don't need a reason to talk to me. You can just do it."

"There's not a lot of time for it in the middle of a show," Ashton says. "Unless you'd want to see me outside of work sometime? Say, for a coffee or dinner? As a date?"

"Me?" Luke asks. Ashton makes a show of looking around the empty dressing room.

"I don't see any other tall, attractive blond men named Luke who keep putting my clothing back together."

Luke smiles, not trying to hide his excitement. He's a shit actor anyway, and Ashton would see right through him.

"I could do that, but only if you stop ruining your costumes every night. Make it through tomorrow with no mishaps and we'll go on a date."

"You drive a hard bargain, Hemmings, but I'll try my best. For you, I'd sew everything back together myself if I had to."

"Please don't," Luke says.

"You don't trust me?" Ashton pouts.

"No," Luke laughs. "You keep destroying your costumes. I'm not about to trust you to fix them correctly."

Ashton shrugs. "Yeah, okay. I'm not a good sewer, anyway."

"That's what you have me for," Luke says. Ashton smiles, just as dazzling under the dressing room lights as it is onstage. It takes Luke's breath away, just a little.

The dressing room door opens, bringing Luke back to Earth. Calum pokes his head in.

"Hey Ash, your siblings want to see you. Stop flirting with Luke and get out here." He doesn't wait for a response, thankfully leaving them alone again for another moment. Ashton ducks his head, scuffing his shoes against the floor.

"I shouldn't keep them waiting," he says.

"It's hard being a star," Luke replies. It makes Ashton smile again, which is an exhilarating experience in of itself.

"We'll check in about the date tomorrow," Ashton says. "No more costume mishaps, cross my heart."

"I'll believe it when I see it," Luke teases. Ashton snorts.

"Have a good night, Luke. Congrats on the show."

"You too," Luke says. "You're really amazing up there."

"Thank goodness," Ashton says. "It'd be a bit late to replace me otherwise."

Luke rolls his eyes with a smile. "Get out of here, superstar. Go see your family."

Ashton blows him a kiss and ducks into a bow with a flourish on the way out the door. Luke stands in the middle of the dressing room, running his finger over the spot on Ashton's vest where the button is missing. He should probably be annoyed, but he's not. He's going on a date with Ashton at some point, and that's worth all of the lost buttons and torn costumes in the entire production.

#my writing #lashton #drabble #I want to be involved in a production of hamlet SO BAD #SO BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!#also hello I miss traditional theatre #zoom theatre is great given the circumstances but I can't wait to actually Watch A Show In A Theater again #and be involved in one

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onewfantaesy · 4 years ago

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suggestion: an evil producer or something decides to out taemin's relationship while filming something/doing something live, and onew and minho come to the rescue (and since the fans already knew and didn't care, I bet they'd give the producer reasons to live in fear lol)

It was supposed to just be a documentary on various SM artists, and on the way the company runs in general. It was some sort of special anniversary thing, Taemin didn’t really know exactly. All he knew was that he had a small interview about his debut and his growth in the company and film a couple scenes learning some new choreography and recording songs and blah blah blah. Standard shit. Taemin wasn’t fazed.

Until months later when it was released and he was sitting at the premiere with so many labelmates and general employees and the press and even the damn CEO and there, on the big screen, is Kibum kissing his neck and tugging him close and Taemin himself giggling and trying to tug himself away, only to sneak a kiss on Kibum’s lips just moments later.

Apparently, secret relationships were a big part of this documentary. An unplanned addition. An unannounced plan that the director had as a way of exposing idol dating culture. Something that got no approval from those in charge of running this entire project, so pretty much everyone was shocked and confused and angry.

There were several other relationships outed as well, but Taemin felt frozen in his seat after his was finished playing out. So many people were looking at him, staring at him, whispering about him, and Kibum wasn’t even there that night and Taemin felt like he couldn’t breathe.

“Let’s go,” Jinki, his manager, whispers to him. And he pulls Taemin up and ushers him out of the theater, out of the building, and into a van all while shielding Taemin as best he can from various flashing cameras and nosy reporters who want to know why he (and several other idols) are leaving so soon.

Taemin is 24. He’s 24 and he’s been an idol for ten years and he’s been dating Kibum for five years but he has no idea what to do. This is his entire life that’s just been potentially ruined by a single director with an agenda of outing idol relationships. His whole life is about to be turned upside down, he could lose his job, his fans, everything because of one person.

“It will be okay,” Jinki tells him. “They’re already no doubt figuring out how to damage control. No one else will ever see that movie. Everything will be okay.”

“No it won’t,” he chokes, staring straight out the window and not moving. “Everyone’s gonna hate me.”

“No they won’t.”

“Yes they will!” Taemin screams, his head snapping abruptly to turn to Jinki. “I have to be perfect! And not being single makes me not perfect! Dating a dude makes me not perfect!”

“Life is not about obtaining perfection,” Jinki tells, his voice firm. “You work your body to the point of pure exhaustion, mentally and physically, trying to achieve something that’s impossible. Your fans love you because you’re you. Because they like your music and your personality and your dancing. Real fans won’t give a shit who you’re dating so long as they make you happy.”

Taemin doesn’t say anything for a while, instead going back to staring straight ahead. Jinki ends up walking Taemin up to his house, making even helping him over to the couch. Taemin is completely dazed, and it’s really worrying.

“I’ve worked so hard,” Taemin eventually says in a strangled voice. “For practically my whole life, I’ve worked so, so hard to be good at this. And it’s all ruined.”

He’s panicking and tears are spilling from his eyes and Jinki just sits next to him and holds him close. He’s been Taemin’s manager since he debuted, he knew exactly when Taemin started Kibum, he’s been there for everything Taemin’s ever had to go through. But this is by far hitting Taemin the hardest.

But of course it is. It’s a blatant invasion of privacy, and it really does have the potential to ruin Taemin’s career. Jinki won’t let it, of course, but that doesn’t mean the possibility can’t scare Taemin.

Jinki rarely sees Taemin cry, and this is by far the most he’s ever seen Taemin cry so desperately. Jinki sits with him for hours, consoling him, comforting him.

When Kibum comes home later that night from teaching a dance workshop, he freaks out over seeing a crying, distraught Taemin being held by his manager.

“What happened?” Kibum asks, rushing over. “Did someone get hurt? Are you hurt? What happened?”

Jinki has to tell him, because Taemin can’t quite form a coherent sentence.

Kibum is pissed. He’s angry and pissed off and he wants to do something about it, but he decides the best thing to do right now is just help Taemin calm down.

“I’m gonna go,” Jinki says after Taemin finally starts breathing normally again. “I’ll text you any updates on the situation. Just try to lay low for now.”

For the next three days, Taemin barely leaves the bed. He doesn’t answer calls, he doesn’t go online, he barely even looks at his phone. He just stays in bed either staring out the window, sleeping, or watching old kids movies.

Kibum stays with him as much as he can, tries to help him feel some sort of comfort. But they don’t really talk much. He’s never seen Taemin retreat into himself as much or as drastically as this.

“I’m gonna go get us something to eat,” Kibum says gently after a couple days. “Do you want anything specific.”

“Not hungry.”

He’s barely eaten anything if Kibum hasn’t practically forced him.

“I’ll be back in a little bit,” Kibum says. “Maybe try showering before I get back?”

“Kay.”

He probably won’t. Kibum knows he probably won’t.

While the incident has been in a few gossip columns, it’s been effectively buried by the company. It could have potentially ruined several of their most popular artists, it wasn’t something they were going to let get out there. Really, they said the documentary was highly fabricated by the director, that it was entirely unreliable and fictional, and that’s enough to appease the general public and fans alike.

Although many fans know the dating rumors are true. Most of them don’t care. Taemin’s fans in particular have known about Taemin and Kibum for years, but they’ve never been bothered by it. So long as Taemin is happy, that’s all they care about.

But Taemin is clearly unhappy during this time. The photos and videos of him leaving the original viewing very clearly show him upset and panicked. He’s been MIA for over a week since then, and even Kibum’s Instagram and online presence has severely declined in activity. He posted from the dance workshop that was held the same night, but nothing since then. It’s very worrying, especially since Kibum usually posts at least once a day, if not more.

It’s not until Minho, an actor and frequent variety show guest, finally speaks up about it that Taemin realizes maybe it won’t be the end of the world.

“We might be in the public eye, but we’re still people,” Minho says. “And to put these relationships on blast and just out all these relationships as what? A power move? Is just so reprehensible. It doesn’t matter if they’re true or not, you’re actively trying to ruin someone’s career because you think idols dating should be talked about more. But that just opens us up to more potential for hate by non-fans. And seeing so much hate does a lot more damage to a person’s health than you think it would.”

Minho, although not technically an idol, is an actor under SM. And his relationship with a stylist within the company was shown as well.

But seeing that Minho is okay, that he’s still out there doing his job and his life isn’t crumbling around him - that helps Taemin realize his career isn’t over because of one potential scandal.

Taemin is back to his usual self after a couple weeks. He’s still nervous and afraid of backlash, but he tries his best to just be happy in the moment. Plus, it helps that Kibum is so supportive.

After almost two weeks of complete silence from both of them, a fun video of Taemin learning new choreography is uploaded to Kibum’s Instagram. They’re in a company practice room, and Taemin comes out of a spin giggling, a little dizzy, and falling over to make funny faces at Kibum. Five minutes later, Taemin posts a mirror selfie in the same room with Kibum standing right next to him, an arm wrapped around his waist.

They’re so obviously together. They’ve never been super subtle about it. But they should be allowed to make the decision of when to officially announce it. And right now, neither of them are comfortable doing that. And that’s okay.

#taemin #shinee #key #onew #minho #taekey #little things au #hello anon #I hope this is okay!!!#I was still trying to figure out what roles they should play in this au #it I think manager and actor/friend work well for onho!!!

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just-my-sickly-pride · 5 years ago

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In the Wings || John Deacon x Reader

summary || your official job, as a queen roadie, was to help backstage during a concert. your unofficial job, as someone who the bassist john deacon had taken a shining to, was to help backstage during a concert in a very particular way.

rating || explicit (18+). do not read if you are under eighteen. oral sex (m receiving), slight degradation kink, pretty much public sex (although there’s no exhibition kink). i guess there would be an age gap, but it’s not really explored or explained.

word count || 4.1k

author’s notes || so i finally was able to watch rock montreal yesterday, for the first time, and i adored it, obviously. through our conversations in the discord, i learnt what actually went on backstage during concerts (would you believe i genuinely had no idea), and i was inspired. some of the details about the concert might be a bit iffy as i just had to go off memory as whatever research i could find. this one goes out to katie @anotheronebitesthedeaks, who works tirelessly to provide as much deacy content as she can. i hope this one does you proud, katie!

masterlist

The adrenaline was pumping. Really pumping. If the hammering heartbeats of everyone inside the arena – assistants, roadies, lighting and sound operators, pyrotechnics, performers (yes, especially the performers) – could be converted into power, you could have probably run an entire city.

Tonight’s concert was being filmed. You didn’t know much about cameras, but you knew it was apparently all very impressive. Really high quality.

Rehearsals hadn’t gone all that smoothly. It was the nearing the end of the tour, which meant that, fifty percent of the time, Queen were all at each other’s throats, and for the other fifty, they were inseparable. Well, maybe more like sixty-forty. Or seventy-thirty. Maybe seventy-five-twenty-five, considering that they were almost in the midst of putting together another album. Which, if the screaming matches you’d overhead last week were anything to go by, was proving to be a particularly gruelling one.

But if there was one thing that drew the band members back together in solidarity, it was having a common enemy – tonight’s director and producer, Saul Swimmer.

Your official job, as a roadie, was to help backstage with anything that the guys might need whenever they left the stage. Water, snacks, new picks or drumsticks, alcohol, a towel, backup guitars, outfit changes. So you heard everything during rehearsals, when they were interrupted time and time again by Swimmer, calling for camera positions to be changed or sound levels to be shifted. He even had the gall to try to tell Freddie where to stand, which Freddie promptly shut down with a swift, I’ll go wherever I fucking want, darling, I’ll sit on Roger’s drums if I feel like it.

Roger had tried to hide his laugh, but his mic had still been on from before, and it had echoed throughout the arena, which had made Freddie burst into a cackle. Brian had smiled. John had swung around to face away from the other three, his head tilted back, looking ready to murder.

John had seen you in the wings, and had gestured to you with an impatient hand.

You’d known what that meant. You’d grabbed the glass of whiskey and ginger ale you’d had ready-made to go, and had hurried out onto the stage to hand it to him.

It had felt awfully naked to be on stage. Even with no audience members, you’d never felt more exposed. You’d found it hard to breathe, like you hadn’t dare take in any more oxygen than you deserved.

You had no idea how they did it every night, perform on that stage in front of all those people, for weeks on end. You would’ve given up long ago.

But you’d waited dutifully while John had taken a few gulps of the drink, your hands nervously balled into fists at your side. He’d barely looked at you, which you’d expected.

“Oh, he’s getting a drink,” Freddie had said loudly from the front of the stage. “Come on, dear, we’re all waiting for you.”

John had scowled, shotted the remainder of the drink, grimacing, and then he’d shoved the glass back into your hands, and you’d rushed off stage again while he’d retaken his place.

You’d taken the glass backstage and had poured another whiskey ginger ale, in case it was needed.

You’d taken a moment to breathe slowly and deeply a few times, willing your heart rate to slow.

A fellow roadie had paused to ask, “You all right?”

You’d nodded. “I’m fine,” you’d said.

“Did John say something to you?”

You’d frowned. “What?”

The roadie had shrugged. Rick, you’d thought his name was. “Just saw you hand a drink out to him. I know he can be a bit of a dick sometimes. I’m sure he’s just pissed off or whatever, he wouldn’t have meant whatever he said.”

Rick had given you a firm pat on the shoulder, and had left.

But that hadn’t been the problem at all.

John Deacon could be a dick sometimes, sure. A complete asshole, if the mood struck him.

But, Jesus Christ, he was a hot one. And the fact that he clearly didn’t give a shit about you somehow made him even hotter.

You were watching him now, as he moved across the stage. During songs he was always switched on, focused, his eyes often closed as he hopped and bopped to the music. Between songs, his gait switched to almost a lope, his head hanging either forward or back, his chest heaving, his bass hanging loosely across his body.

He seemed extra fiery tonight, as did everyone else, which was undoubtedly influenced by the cameras. They were performers, after all, and you weren’t surprised that they all played a little harder, a little faster, a little sexier, when they knew that tonight they were being made immortal, eternalised on tape.

But there was something about John, specifically, more than the other three. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. The intensity of every note he played, his gaze on the crowd or on Freddie or on his bass, made your stomach flutter with butterflies. The lighting made his jawline look like it could cut glass, turned his profile into that of a marble statue of a Roman god. His hands looked huge on his guitar, his fingers moving with precision.

He radiated power. You hoped tonight was one of those nights where you fulfilled your less-than-official roadie job.

It was an open secret that bands like Queen used whatever spare time they had backstage to get off. John’s favourite time to do so was during Roger’s and Brian’s solos; you were his go-to. You couldn’t believe your ears the first time he’d propositioned you, but you had been more than happy to help.

It was never more than a backstage blowjob or handjob, though. There was never enough time for an actual fuck – although John had made it clear in the past that, for once, it pissed him off that Brian’s solos weren’t even longer – and he’d never returned the favour.

You weren’t all that fond of that part. You had to admit that it absolutely turned you on being used and then abandoned, left to catch your breath and clean yourself up while John snatched his bass from someone’s hands and re-entered the stage, but it would have been nice to receive something in return every once in a while. At least a real proper fucking after the show.

But that was the way of the world, you supposed. And your blowjob skills had grown exponentially since the tour had started. Which you weren’t sure you should have been proud of, but you were.

“Drum solo’s about to start,” you heard someone say, and your stomach flipped.

The song drew to a close, and then stage went dark. John and Freddie immediately turned on their heels and ducked into the wings as lights came up on Roger and his solo began.

Everyone worked quietly and efficiently. You handed a towel and bottle of water to Freddie while someone else took John’s bass at his request. “John,” you said, catching his attention. When his eyes met yours, everything you were about to say left your head completely, and you could have melted into a puddle right then and there.

But it didn’t matter – as soon as he realised it was you, he said, “There you are,” and grabbed your hand, towing you away from everyone else, heading towards the stairs.

It took a moment to register, but when it did, your whole body grew hot, as hot as John’s skin against yours. The leftover anger and frustration from earlier in the afternoon, the excitement and rush of performing for the cameras, the exhaustion and desperation that came with being so close to the end of a months-long tour – you could feel every part of it through the grip of John’s hand.

“Your shirt,” you blurted out, as John pulled to a stop. You were on the first landing of the stairs – far enough from everyone else that there was the semblance of privacy, but not far enough that John would be too far away from the stage.

It wasn’t really that private at all, though. There were people mere metres away from you, at the top of the stairs. But they knew what was happening, and politely began to shuffle away.

John was already yanking his jeans open, and he gave you a baffled – and slightly irritated – look. “What?”

“I was going to ask if you wanted to change your shirt,” you explained. “Before.”

“No,” John said bluntly, unzipping his fly and shoving his jeans down. “Obviously not.”

“Right, of course, sorry,” you stammered, and dropped to the floor, sitting on your heels, your hands fumbling against his as you both worked his tight jeans and underwear down just past his ass. He was already slightly hard, and you hastily took him in your hand and swallowed him down.

He breathed out sharply, his hand slipping into your hair, and you closed your eyes to focus on your job, your tongue sliding around the head of his cock, over the vein on the underside of the shaft, working quickly. You felt him beginning to swell in your mouth, and his body shifted in response. It was impossible to ignore how much it turned you on to feel it, to hear him react to everything you did.

It didn’t take long at all for him to be fully hard in your mouth – he must have been particularly worked up tonight – and you blew him fast and hard, as fast and hard as he’d been playing on stage. He was big, but you were used to that, and you used your hand to pump whatever your mouth couldn’t reach, every so often reaching down to fondle his balls in your hand, squeezing them a little. Your other hand gripped the back of his thigh, feeling the muscles tense, and it made you desperately want him to fuck you. Fuck you for real, feeling his cock stretch you out, feeling his hands all over your body, his mouth on your clit.

“Fuck,” he grunted, his hand tight in your hair. You felt his other hand rest on your cheek, and you adjusted to let the head of his cock press against the inside of your cheek whenever you took him in so he could feel it.

“Open,” he said. “Open your eyes, lemme…”

You did so, blinking up at him. The look on his face made you want to touch yourself, give yourself some relief from the throbbing arousal coursing through your body. You suckled at his head for a moment before sliding him down into your mouth again, and he moaned, low and deep. His hips bucked forward, making you gag, tears springing into your eyes.

You knew he liked the sound of you gagging, but you couldn’t do it too many times without starting to genuinely feel sick. You shifted your position, going up onto your knees to change the angle, and took a few steadying breaths before sliding your mouth down onto him, far enough that you gagged, and then drew back again. Saliva filled your mouth, collecting at the corners of your lips.

“Shit, yes, that’s it, take me all the way in,” John panted. “Gag on my cock, fuck.”

You moaned around him, and did it again, keeping as much eye contact as you could, and you felt his knees just about buckle.

You blinked the tears from your eyes, feeling them trickle down your cheeks, and continued sucking him off. You could feel yourself beginning to drool, but you let it happen, knowing that it made you look like a mess but not even caring. You could hear Roger’s solo drawing to a close. You didn’t have much time left, and John couldn’t exactly waltz onto stage with an erection. Especially not tonight.

You doubled your efforts, the scream of Brian’s guitar spurring you on. You knew John was getting close from how his back shifted against the wall, and he kept letting his head drop back to hit the bricks, his breathing growing heavier and heavier, his other hand gripping his own hair.

His hand began pushing the back of your head, and you concentrated on breathing through your nose, closing your eyes again, letting him fuck your mouth. Your hand still massaged his balls every now and again, and you gagged a couple more times, making him groan through gritted teeth.

You opened your eyes again to look at him, and he was watching you, his mouth hanging open. You wanted to kiss him, bite and nip at his lips, suck on them.

“God, I wanna f– fuck you,” he growled. “Bet your cunt’s just as wet and – ngh – tight as your mouth, shit.” His head fell back against the bricks again, and your stomach clenched.

Do it, you wanted to say. God, I need you to.

But instead you just took him in again and again, feeling him twitch in your mouth, and within no time at all he was groaning out, “I’m fucking coming, I’m coming,” and his hips jerked and he spilled into your mouth, his body shaking.

You swallowed, and drew him into your mouth a few more times, emptying him completely, cleaning him up, and then you were helping him to get stage-ready again with frantic hands, pulling up his underwear and jeans, tucking him in.

He did up his fly and the button on his jeans, and then he was throwing you a quick, “Cheers,” and bolting up the stairs, leaving you on the floor, your breathing ragged.

You heard Roger’s drums join Brian’s solo, and you knew John was going to make it on stage just in the nick of time.

Someone hurried past you, heading down the stairs, and you mumbled out, “Sorry,” shifted out of the way. You kept your head low as you tidied yourself up, wiping your eyes and cheeks dry and making sure there was no come or saliva on your mouth or chin, or on your clothes.

You were still aching with need, still soaking between your thighs. But that was part of the gig, and you were used to it.

You cleared your throat and wobbled to your feet. You could feel a couple of eyes on you as you made your way back to your spot in the wings, but most of the crew were used to seeing you looking dishevelled partway through a concert. The familiar coil of embarrassment still burned in your gut, but it was eased somewhat when someone surreptitiously passed you a bottle of water. You nodded in thanks and poured about half of it down your throat.

John did have a few more exits, but none of them any longer than a few seconds. He barely acknowledged you, apart from summoning a shot of whiskey or vodka. To an outsider, it would have been impossible to know that his dick had been in your mouth less than an hour before. It drove you crazy. Even just being near him muddled your brain.

Again, all part of the gig. By now, the other roadies expected you to be much less helpful after you had disappeared with John.

Then came the Bohemian Rhapsody break. The sound cue slid in perfectly, blasting the operatic section while all four band members scrambled off stage. Freddie dropped to the floor and yanked off his shoes, declaring that they were giving him blisters and he was done with the fucking things. You shared an uneasy glance with another roadie, but then John’s hand was wrapping around your elbow and he was towing you away.

You stumbled, and John let you go. You follow him without another word, hurrying along behind him, baffled. This break was almost exactly only one minute long – you were good, but you weren’t made of magic. Especially not after John had already come tonight.

“John, what’s going on?” you said. You were somewhere else now, somewhere dark, in a corner. “We don’t have time–”

John pulled up to a sudden stop, and whirled around, taking you by the shoulders, guiding you against the wall. He kissed you without warning, roughly.

You and John didn’t kiss much. It really only happened when you were pulling him off, and he preferred your mouth on his cock rather than your hand.

But you didn’t even hesitate in kissing him back. He kissed you with urgency, one hand tangling in your hair and the other on your hip, drawing a whimper from you. You clutched him around his back. His shirt was damp with sweat, his body running hot, but you didn’t care.

He drew back enough just to say, “Jeans.”

You immediately went to unbutton his jeans. But he stopped you with a hand.

“No,” he said. “Yours.”

“What?” you said, the word coming out in a squeak. This was completely new.

“We don’t have much time,” John said quickly, going for your jeans himself.

But you stopped his hands. “No, wait,” you said.

“What, don’t you want me to?” John said.

You stammered, shaking your head, and managed to get out, “Want you to what, John?”

“Finger you.”

“W–” You shook your head again. “Well, yes, but–”

Someone called John’s name, and he sighed in frustration. “Whatever,” he muttered, and went to leave.

But you grabbed his arm. “Hey.”

He turned back to you. “What?” he said. “I have to go.”

“You wanna do something new with me, you ask me first,” you said firmly. “You don’t just assume I want it and go for it. I might get you off every other night, but I’m not your fucktoy.”

He stared you, as if surprised you’d spoken up like that, but then he said, “You’re right. Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”

You nodded, and let your hand drop from his arm. “That’s all,” you said, crossing your arms. “Go, you’re gonna miss your cue.”

John took one more moment to drink you in, an unreadable expression on his face, and then he was gone.

Your hands shook. You couldn’t believe you’d just spoken to him like that. After he’d gone to finger you, which you’d wanted for weeks. What the fuck were you thinking, turning him down? Even just ten seconds would’ve been more than you could’ve hoped for. And you’d shot that gift horse right in the mouth.

You sighed, and pushed that aside. You were still on the clock.

God Save The Queen began to play, and you watched as Queen took their bows. Roger and Freddie were jumping around together – they’d had a lot of fun tonight, you’d noticed, giggling and pulling faces at each other the entire concert – and Brian and John bowed and waved.

John was off first, as he usually was, passing his bass over and grabbing a bottle of water. You expected him to head straight to the greenroom, as normal, but instead he just watched Freddie and Roger pass by, the two of them sweating and panting, but grinning, shoving at each other playfully. Brian was last, carefully handing over his Red Special. He was always quiet right after a concert, and he followed his two bandmates to the greenroom without a word.

As soon as all three of them had passed, John was beside you again. But instead of grabbing you, he said, “Can we go somewhere?”

You were so stunned you barely knew how to reply. “Uh, y– yeah, course.”

You followed him downstairs – but instead of heading to the greenroom, you went to his dressing room. You hovered in the centre of the room while he locked the door behind him.

“I, uh, wanted to apologise properly for earlier,” he said, stilted in his discomfort. He cleared his throat, and gestured towards you vaguely. “You were right. You’ve been, um, very… helpful, these past couple months, and I don’t think I’ve been treating you with the respect you deserve.”

“Oh, no, it’s fine,” you said with an awkward laugh. “Really, John, you don’t– You already apologised.”

“No, I…” John put a hand on his hip, his other hand rubbing his jaw. “I’ve been going through a fairly, er, rough time as of late, with the album, and a whole myriad of other things that I won’t go into, but that doesn’t excuse my behaviour. So I’m sorry. And I didn’t realise just how I was, um, behaving, until you stopped me tonight. Which you were absolutely correct to do, and I’m sorry that it had to come to that. Like I said, you were right, you’re a person, not a, um…”

“A fucktoy,” you supplied in a small voice.

“A, uh, fucktoy, yes,” John said, glancing away from you. “So. Er. Sorry. About that.” His eyes landed on you, and you watched as his face turned bright red. “I, uh…” He scratched the back of his neck. “This is… extremely embarrassing for me, but I– I can’t even remember…”

You blinked at him. “Can’t remember what?”

He gestured a little more, but you were still lost, so he squeezed out, “Your name.”

“Oh,” you said, your eyes going wide in realisation. “Oh. It’s [Y/N].”

“[Y/N]. Right. Of course.” John sighed, and nodded to himself. “Right. So. Did you… Was there anything you wanted to say?”

You hesitated. “Uh, I – don’t think so. I wasn’t really expecting this, so, um…”

“Right, yeah,” John said.

There were a few harrowingly painful moments of uncomfortable silence, so you blurted out the first thing that popped into your head.

“I like sucking you off.”

Wonderful.

John’s eyebrows rose. “Uh, good?”

“Ah, shit,” you sighed. “I– I mean I… I’ve liked all of it. You, um, using me, and ignoring me, and being kind of a dick to me. If I didn’t like it, I would have told you to find someone else ages ago.”

“You… like me being a dick?” John said.

You nodded. “It’s– I–”

“You, what, get off on it?”

You bit your lip, and nodded again. “I know that’s really weird,” you said in a rush.

“So would you mind if I…”

“Continued being a dick to me? Not at all. Actually, this whole conversation is very strange for me.” You shook your head. “I appreciate it, and I appreciate you apologising and all, and I meant what I said earlier about asking me before doing anything we haven’t done before, but please don’t think you have to be really nice to me or whatever from here on.”

John nodded. “Uh-huh.” You saw some of the tension leak from his shoulders. “Fuck, that actually makes my life a whole lot easier. I’m genuinely glad to hear that.” He laughed a little, relieved.

“So, um.” You shifted your feet. “You gonna actually finger me now, or what?”

He laughed again, a bigger laugh. You’d never seen that before. His smile changed his whole face – he looked like a completely different person. “No,” he said, shaking his head. He started backing towards the door. “Wish I could, but no.”

“No?” you repeated, bewildered. “Isn��t that why we’re in here?”

John rubbed his jaw again. “Thought about it,” he said. “But it really was just to apologise.”

“Then why’d you lock the door?”

“Like I said, I thought about it.”

“So why don’t you?”

“I have business to attend to,” he said. “We’re having drinks with someone important, I don’t know. Some kind of party, there’s always a bloody fucking party.” He added the last part in a mutter, rolling his eyes. “Not that it’s any of your business. See you tomorrow.”

He opened the door, and then he was gone, without so much as a glance back.

Your jaw hit the floor. “Fucking prick,” you whispered to yourself.

You heard his voice from outside the door, heading back towards you. “Er, actually,” he said, and he poked his head around the corner. “Come by my room later, yeah? In about two hours?”

You opened and closed your mouth once, then twice. “It– It’ll be after midnight by that time.”

“I didn’t realise there was a curfew for fucking,” John said. “Or are you happy to just get yourself off alone in your room again, woefully unfulfilled and unsatisfied but left with no other option?”

You just stared at him. You couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, and you had no idea what to say.

John gave you an exasperated look. “See you in two hours. Don’t bother making yourself look nice, I’m going to ruin you anyway.”

And he was gone again.

And then back one more time. He pointed a finger at you, squinting in thought, then said, “[Y/N]…?”

You nodded.

He nodded as well, looking chuffed with himself. “[Y/N]. Have to remember that. [Y/N].”

And he was gone once more.

He didn’t return.

You squeezed your thighs together. It was going to be a very long two hours to wait.

#mine #my writing #john deacon x reader #queen fanfiction #smut #rpf

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royallyprincesslilly · 5 years ago

Text

Title: Be Quiet For Me {One-Shot}***

Chris Evans x Reader

Words: 3.3K

Warning: Smut. NSFW. Cursing.

Summary: You’re in the mood for some fun. Chris has to work; he tells you to give him a few hours. You are impatient and decide to have your fun anyway.

Note: Song listened to, that you might want to listen to when indicated is; Madness By: Ruelle. I also apologize for any spacing issues.

**Slightly Edited/Proofread**

***Interactive***

Thank you guys for reading!!!! If you enjoyed this please LIKE, COMMENT, REBLOG. 😊 ❤️❤️❤

~~~~~~~~~~~

MSG: I miss you.😞

Sitting in your office, twirling in your chair you looked at your phone and waited for him to respond. You watched the sway of the beautiful weeping willow tree that was right outside your window. You’d chosen this room for your office because of that tree. Every time the wind blew you the hanging branches of the tree swayed and reminded you of a slow dance. You imaged classical music playing, and that made it even better. You didn’t have to imagine classical music because it was playing in your office as it usually was. The mellow sounds helped you work and kept your stress levels down.

MSG Chris: How? I’m less than fifty feet away.

You smirked. He was right. Right now, he was across the house in his office—working.

MSG: I know, but you’re so far. Come here.🙁🙁

You added a few sad faces to emphasis how much you really missed him. Almost a minute passed before his response came in.

MSG Chris: I can’t right now, sweetheart. I’m still in the middle of this deal.

You pouted and sent him the crying emoji.

MSG: 😭 You’ve been doing that for hours. Take a break. Please. I can make it worth your while.😈😈😈

Before sending it, you added three devil face emojis. You knew the devil face emoji would get your point across. Another minute passed without a response. You were getting annoyed. You hated when it took longer than a few seconds. When his message came in all he sent was the smirking face emoji. Sitting up, you crinkled your brow, wondering what the hell that meant. Another few seconds passed then another message.

MSG Chris: I have no doubt you can make it worth my while, but whenever you make it worth my while, I end up losing four hours at least. I need to finish this first. Give me a few hours. I’ll come find you. Promise.🤞🏼

It was not the response you wanted. He’d been busy the last week or two on this same deal. He was in town, but his days were filled with meetings, and when he was home, he was still in those meetings, and always on the phone. You knew this deal meant a lot to him; it would mean incredible things for his newly established production company. After ending his stint as Captain America and taking some time off he realized he loved acting, but he also loved behind the scenes work.

He’d always wanted to do something in production but always put off having a company because he felt he had no businesses doing that. Thanks to your pushing, he finally decided to do it, and the buzz was incredible. Turns out while many people were lining up to work with him as a costar, just as many were lining up to work with him as a producer and director. You were proud, prouder than any wife could be. You also knew this was your fault.

MSG: You’re neglecting your wife.

Two full minutes passed with no response, and it made you antsy. You stood from your chair and paced your office while scanning your email and checking updates to your own company. Maybe you should focus on work like him instead of trying to get into his pants. Every time you checked your texts for a response you may have missed, you got annoyed to see there was no. He’d left you on read. When you checked it didn’t even say he’d read it. You were left on received. You didn’t know which made you more annoyed. You tossed your phone to your desk and groaned. That was when your defiant, bratty side took over.

“If Goliath can’t come to the mountain, the mountain has to go to Goliath.”

Prancing out your office and down the hall toward your husband’s office, the smile on your face spoke volumes. You were about to put a major dent in his work schedule, and you gave zero fucks. When you rounded the corner you saw his office door open, but he was not behind his desk. After scanning the room and coming up empty-handed, you walked out and began searching for your elusive husband.

He wasn’t in your bedroom, or the kitchen, or the dining room. After almost ten minutes of searching, you were ready to give up, but then you spotted him in the media room. The closer you got, the more you could hear him talking to himself as he scrolled through his tablet. You leaned on the jamb and watched him. You loved looking over him from the back. His shoulders were broad, which contrasted with his taut waist and tight ass. Your teeth sank into your bottom lip, and your hands itched to touch. The navy blue pants he wore really fit him well and showed just what an amazing ass he had. He turned and gave you the view of the front. His white button-down was rolled up at the sleeves to his forearms and unbuttoned a few buttons, which gave you a nice glimpse of his tattoos. He was the perfect mix of country club heir, and down to earth hunk.

“Eh-em!”

Chris’s head snapped up. His eyebrows were knitted together as if he were thinking deeply about something and his jaw was clenched. Once he saw you his features softened.

“Hey, baby.” Two words, that was all it took to make you melt. You hated it. Shaking off the effect of his words you hardened your expression.

“Don’t baby me. I sent you a message over fifteen minutes ago, Evans,” you sternly chastised. Chris dug into his pocket and lifted his phone.

“Oops, I’m sorry honey, I didn’t see it.”

You crossed your arms and scowled. He smiled softly.

“Neglecting? That’s a bit much, don’t you think?

“Christopher Evans, it has been a week since you’ve given me the time of day,” you protested.

“A week? Babe, we had dinner last night right here, just the two of us. You had my full attention.”

“Okay, but after dinner, you were back in your stupid office. I went to bed—alone, alone.”

Once he got your meaning, he smirked and walked to the sectional and sat. “Oh you mean that kind of attention.”

“We said we’d never go longer than three days max. It has been seven.”

“You’re keeping track.” The narrowing of your eyes wiped his stupid grin off his face. He sighed and placed the tablet to the side.

“Come here, sweetheart.” You rolled your eyes and looked to the side while staying put. This would not be easy.

“Come on, kitten, come to daddy.” Reluctantly your smile emerged, and you walked to him. Once before him, he pulled you onto his lap, which allowed him to wrap his arms around your waist.

“I know it’s been pretty hectic the last few weeks. I know I’ve been busy. I’m sorry if you feel I’ve been neglecting you. It’s not my intention. Forgive me.”

His blue eyes hypnotized you and pulled you in. Then when he added the puppy dog pout you couldn’t stay mad.

“Fine.”

His lips met yours for a chaste kiss then turned soft and sensual in a matter of seconds. Heat spread through you, and just like that, you wanted him right here and right now. Chris must have tasted the need in your kiss because his hand dropped to your backside before he squeezed. You moaned on him and dug your fingers into his hair not caring if you messed up his perfectly coiffed locks.

Chris broke the kiss and dipped his lips to your neck, where he teased your skin and fanned the flames making them blaze even hotter. You could feel his arousal twitching against your thigh, and you made your move. Slinking down between his legs you quickly undid his belt and pants. He lifted slightly, allowing you to pull them down to settle at his ankles. You saw his manhood straining against the soft fabric of his underwear, and you wasted no time hooking your finger in the waistband and pulling them down to join his pants.

His length bobbed before you. You couldn’t believe it had been a week since you’d been this close to it. Just before you could bring your lips to his member his phone rang. You groaned and gave him the evil eye daring him to look at or even touch his phone. Chris gave you an apologetic look, and you could tell he was tempted to answer. He also knew you were probably very close to losing your shit. After the third ring the pressure was too much for him.

“I’m sorry, baby, give me two minutes.” Quickly he grabbed the phone and answered it to your disdain. You rolled your eyes exaggeratedly and dropped your head to his thigh trying to remain calm. You were so close to just taking what you wanted.

As he spoke, he grabbed the tablet beside him, and you knew this would not be a two-minute conversation. At that moment you decided fuck it. You stood before him, but he didn’t look at you, his face was buried in that damn tablet. You began untying the knot at the front of your wrap dress then opened it and allowed it to fall to the floor. Chris’ words stumbled then stalled as he stared at the pool of bright pink material at your feet. Slowly his eyes traveled up your body. They stopped at your white lacy panties then again at your matching bra. When his eyes met yours he sighed. While the clench in his jaw said “stop and behave,” the fire in his eyes said “please keep going.”

When spoke again, it took great effort to look away from you and back to his tablet. You looked to his lap and saw he was still hard. He must have liked what he saw. You smirked and walked to the sound system and took up one of the Bluetooth headphones and messed around with the music device on the wall, and found a song you loved. You began swaying to the spellbinding beat which made it impossible to not wind your hips to. You turned back to him but didn’t look at him. Instead, you slid your hands up the sides of your thighs to your hips over your stomach and across your breasts. Once there you softly cupped them. It was then you looked at him. You had his full attention and had his jaw clenched even tighter.

Fighting the smile that wanted freedom, you began to fully enjoy the music. It didn’t take long for you to get lost in it, and it also didn’t take long for Chris to have difficulty with remaining focused on his conversation and whatever he was looking at on his tablet. His eyes kept drifting back to you when he’d looked down. It was amusing. You turned your back to him and bent down to touch your toes. That made him gawk at your ass. When you peered at him through your open legs you winked, and you saw his length jerk. You stood and approached him standing between his legs and slithered your body like a snake in perfect Shakira belly dance form. His eyes were glued to your hips as you did it. When you saw his teeth sink into his bottom lip you knew you had him. Still he fought it though.

You turned your back to him and began winding your waist again, but you slowly dipped down to sit on his length. A strained groan escaped him then his hand was at your hips to give you a terse squeeze. You knew it was a warning. You didn’t care. You rotated your hips on his lap to the rhythm of the music. You bent forward and held onto your ankles and stood then dropped back to his lap and repeated the action a few times. Each time his hand squeezed the flesh where your pelvis and thigh met. You felt so much power knowing he was at your mercy. It was addictive, and you decided to forge ahead.

Turning to him again, you dropped to your knees before him and dipped down enough so his dick was right before you where your nose was. For him you knew the view would be torture because all he could see were your eyes. Again, Chris nudged his hips up sending his sack to tap on your chin. His skin was scorching. You tipped your tongue out and teased the skin at the base of his dick where his balls began. Not a sound passed his lips, but the fire in his eyes intensified. You traveled your tongue up his length to his tip and swirled it around before you sucked his head into your mouth while keeping perfect eye contact. His mouth was in an “o” but still he was silent. Slowly you inched your mouth lower sheathing him inside the warm, wet tunnel of your mouth before you squeezed him in the tight passage of your throat. It was then Chris growled.

“No, I’m sorry, got a little prick. Continue, please.”

You wanted to laugh; it definitely wasn’t a little prick. Chris cupped your jaw, forcing you to stop momentarily. He shook his head, but you took his hand from your jaw and put it back onto his tablet to join the other and continued. Deciding not to take it slow, you began bobbing up and down on his need --every time you brought him further into your mouth ensuring to keep your throat tight. As you did he lurched up, sending his hardness deeper and his nostrils flaring.

Before long, you’d found a stimulating pace that worked well with the beat in the headphones, and you’d lost yourself. You loved giving him head, he was always so responsive, and you loved the feel and taste of him. You picked up the pace when the crescendo of the song picked up and saw the tight clench of his fist beside him. You hadn’t even realized he was only holding the tablet with one lose hand. He wasn’t even looking at it. You had his undivided attention. It was time to assert dominance. You slinked him into your throat and kept him there as you tightened it around him. Chris began to shake, and you knew he was dangerously close. You didn’t want a mouthful of him though; you wanted to feel him fill you up.

Standing, you swayed again to the song and slowly spun around to grind your hips as you slowly lowered onto his lap. You didn’t take him in; you rotated on his lap giving him a short lapdance. Chris’ hand was at your back slowly trailing along your spine. You then felt him push your forward. You dropped your head between your legs and stood. His soft hands caressed your backside. You knew you were soaking wet, and you couldn’t wait another minute. You pulled your underwear to the side and lowered yourself onto him while looking back at him. His mouth dropped open as a pained expression took over. The lower you slide, the more his eyebrows knitted together. Once you’d taken all of him he dropped his head back to look into the ceiling. You ground on him, giving him a full three-sixty feel of your walls—walls he stretched like no other.

You tried to keep your moans inside as you began bouncing on him. You were close, that was how on edge you’d been this last week. By the way Chris was pulsating inside you; you knew he was close too. You leaned back onto his chest and dropped your head back over his shoulder and moved your body in a frenzied wave. You saw the bright rainbow of your release just ahead, and you began the chase. You felt Chris’ hand splay across your abdomen and then slip between your legs. His fingers expertly played with your clit sending you closer and closer to the rainbow. He must have known it; his hand clasped over your mouth then he stood holding you around the waist as well and shoved you onto the sectional. You hugged the back of the seat when you felt him slam into you with the strength of a mack truck. His hand across your mouth stifled the sound that slipped out. You felt his hot breath at your ear before you heard his low, predatorial like whisper.

“Not one sound, kitten.”

He didn’t give you time to adjust at all; he slammed into you, again and again, each thrust rougher and deeper than the last. His grip tightened around your hips, and your eyes saw his phone beside you on the couch, it was on speaker. Thanks to the music in your ears you didn’t hear the other party. Chris changed his pace and depth every so often to keep your body on high alert, and it made you want more and more. He knew it. Then he delivered the pounding you’d been craving for the entire week. His deepness was overwhelming, and you desperately wanted to scream his name, so you buried your mouth into the cushion and bit down on it. Chris grabbed your hair and pulled it then ground his hips into you. He’d lost his control. When you felt him jackhammer into you with deep stroke after deep stroke you knew he was chasing the same rainbow.

After one, two, three strokes, he administered a final knock you out for the count snap of his hips, and your damn broke. You could feel Chris shaking behind you as he emptied stream after stream of his hot come deep inside you. He bent over your back and rested his forehead on you as he tried to catch his breath. Chris placed soft kisses across your skin, leading to your neck before he kissed your ear. Then he pulled from your body and dropped back onto the couch. You could barely move; you felt amazing. When you looked at him he was staring at you with a look that said he wasn’t done with you. You peeled off the headphones just in time to hear the other party on the phone.

“Are you there, Chris? Did we lose you?”

“Not at all, I’m right here. Everything you guys are discussing sounds good.”

You could hear several other voices, and it dawned on you then he was in a group conference. Slowly you stood from the couch and looked over him. The sight of his still hard dick made you want him again. It jerked, and you knew he knew what you wanted. He dropped his head back onto the couch as he continued to speak. You languidly walked through your home in your bra and panties making your way to your office. Once inside you dropped into your swivel chair and smiled enjoying the pleasant hum in your body that no one else but your husband could give you.

Your phone chimed, and you took it up from the desk.

MSG: One hour, make sure you are on the bed just as you are now with your legs spread. I haven’t nearly had my fill.

You smiled wider because you hadn’t either. A week was a long time to make up for.

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#be quiet for me one shot #be quiet for me fic #Chris Evans #chris evans fanfiction #chris evans smut #Chris Evans X black reader #chris evans x you #chris evans x reader

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starrystarrybabe · 6 years ago

Text

Oh, How the Mighty Fall [In Love] CHAPTER FIVE (OC x Ben Hardy)

CHAPTER ONE, CHAPTER TWO, CHAPTER THREE, CHAPTER FOUR

Lily Anne Mercury is brought in to help with Bohemian Rhapsody at the request of her Uncle Bri and Uncle Rog, and along the way, she might meet someone to share her life with. The only problem with this is that while their friends and the world can see that they’re perfect for each other, they’re going to be fully blind to this for a while.

Hello, everyone! Sorry this took so long to write. I’ve been bombarded with work and I’m just sort of drowning rn and I’m not sure what I’m doing anymore. I sort of spiralled, but writing this helps me stay grounded. I’m glad that everyone likes the fic so far, and if anyone wants to message me about the story or the characters, that’s totally fine. I love talking with y’all! This is a fun chapter, so please, enjoy!

-- casey

TRIGGERS: hint at sexy times and scene in rehab

FACECLAIMS:

Kelly Gale as Lily Anne Mercury

Sira P. Kante as Ezichi Adebayo

Erika Linder as Bronwyn Ryan-Hughes

Bree Kish as Madigan Ryan-Hughes

October, 2018

Lily Anne drives to the filming studio after months away from her BoRhap boys, and the excitement she feels is threatening to bubble over. She’s missed them so much, and even though Joe would facetime her or send her pictures almost every day, it still hurt not to be with them in person.

She steps out of the G Wagon and walks across the parking lot to the set, smiling. The sounds of a bustling crew can be heard, and as she approaches the set, she smiles as she sees that it is a perfect recreation of the one from I Want to Break Free, which is one of her favorite music videos of all time. She can’t wait to see the boys dressed up in drag.

Roger and Brian walk in behind Lily Anne, and she almost jumps when she feels a hand clap onto her shoulder.

“How was the tour, love?” Roger asks, grinning at his goddaughter.

Lily Anne smiles and hugs her uncle, closing her eyes. “It was great. I could’ve done with something bigger than a twin bed, though. It was barely big enough for me.”

Roger lets her go after a moment, ruffling her hair. “You’d be surprised how many people can fit on a single bunk when you try hard enough.”

Lily Anne lets out a disgusted noise before hugging her Uncle Brian, smiling. He hugs her back tightly, smacking Roger’s shoulder.

“Ignore him. He’s just being himself,” Brian says, laughing. “We missed you, but you seemed to be having fun from what we could tell.”

Lily Anne smiles up at the man after they break apart, nodding. “It was fun, but I missed my boys and Lucy. How have they been?”

Brian nods after thinking for a moment, satisfied. “They’re doing great! They did miss you, though.”

Roger smirks, looking down to clean his sunglasses. “Especially Ben. You should’ve seen his face the first day you weren’t at set. The boy looked like a hurt puppy.”

Lily Anne scoffs and crosses her arms. “You’re being ridiculous. Quit it.”

Roger shrugs, looking smug. “I’m just saying. I don’t know what you did to that boy, but I’ve never seen anyone look so sad.”

Lily Anne rolls her eyes and looks up at Brian, waving one hand dismissively at Roger. “Whatever. Now, where are they? I need to see them before I do anything.”

Brian points to a red door and smiles. “Right through there, getting their makeup done.”

She smiles and kisses his cheek before turning to leave. “Thank you! I’ll see you both later.”

As she leaves, Brian looks over at Roger and sighs heavily. “What did I say about letting them figure it out for themselves?”

Roger puts on his sunglasses and shakes his head. “If we don’t make it clear to them, they’ll never figure it out.”

Brian looks down, rubbing his temples. “Just be patient, Rog. It’ll happen eventually.”

Roger shakes his head. “I want to see them produce a child and walk her down the aisle before we become senile or croak. If I need to speed up the process, I will.”

Brian shakes his head, and the pair walks off to check with the director what they would be doing that day.

All they want is for Lily Anne to be happy. Ben can make her happy, and he knows it. But it will happen at their own pace, and however long he has to wait, he will.

---

Lily knocks on the door of the large trailer, smiling. She can hear Joe inside, going on about something, and recognizes Rami’s laughter immediately.

The door is opened by Ben, with his makeup on and wig pinned back, and her jaw drops.

She always knew Roger looked pretty in this music video, but Ben is on a whole other level, and she’s just-- wow. He’s already pretty, but in this makeup, with the wig, and the skirt--

Holy fuck.

“Lily! I didn’t know you’d be back today!” Ben exclaims happily, bringing her inside and hugging her. She’s silent, and when he pulls back, she’s just looking over him in awe. “Words, Lil. I need to hear words. What’s going on?” He frowns, concerned.

She blinks and shakes her head furiously, backing up. “This--” she gestures wildly to Ben’s get up, “--should be fucking illegal. Who gave you the right to look this good as a girl, Hardy?”

Ben laughs, shaking his head and heating up. “It’s just the outfit, really.”

Lily Anne scoffs, looking up at Ben with an offended gleam in her eyes. “No, it isn’t. It is absolutely disgusting how fucking well you’re pulling this off and you know it, Ben. Don’t be fucking humble about it, that’s even worse!”

Joe has been recording this, and snorts, prompting Lily Anne to look towards him and his camera.

“That’s what I was saying!” he says, just as insistent as Lily Anne.

She nods, putting down her purse and pointing to Ben. “Look at this shit! Just take it all in, and tell me that this isn’t the prettiest woman you’ve ever seen.”

Rami and Gwil can’t form words, they’re laughing so hard.

Lily Anne puts her hands on her knees, slouching over, and catching her breath. She regains her composure before straightening up and doing a deep cleansing breath. She faces Ben again and smiles.

“I’m sorry. I needed to get that out of my system. You look good.” She smiles and hugs him, before moving to greet the rest of the cast.

She hugs Joe from the back and grins. “I missed you all so much on tour.”

“We missed you too,” Rami says, smiling and squeezing her hand as his makeup is touched up.

Lily walks over to Gwil and gives him a hug, smiling.

“How was the tour?” he asks, smiling up at her.

She stands up straight and smiles, moving out of the makeup artists’ way. “It was great! We sold out almost every stadium, and the fans were super receptive to the new music. I had a great time meeting some of them as well. The only downside was sleeping on a tour bus. It wasn’t exactly easy to sleep with the movement.”

Ben speaks as the hair person begins to finesse the blonde wig he’s wearing. “What was your favorite gig?”

Lily Anne purses her lips, tapping her chin. “That’s a good question. I think… probably Madison Square Garden. Especially since my Papa performed there as well. It meant a lot that I was carrying on his legacy and returning.”

Rami smiles and nods, turning around in the chair as the wig is adjusted. “I loved the song you wrote that you debuted on tour.”

Lily Anne looks down and laughs nervously. “Thanks, Rami.”

Joe looks over at Ben, who’s making it a point not to face Lily.

“It had some really beautiful lyrics,” Gwil says, keeping still as the makeup artist reapplies his eyeliner. “Your performance of it was amazing.”

Lily Anne smiles, rubbing the back of her neck. “I hated it while I was writing it, but I couldn’t sleep until I got it out of my head and onto paper. Thought it sounded bloody pathetic at first.”

Rami frowns. “I didn’t think it sounded weak. If anything, it was brave. You were just putting it all out there, and that’s incredible.”

Ben nods, and speaks quietly. “It takes a lot of balls to perform something like that.”

Lily turns to look at him, and smiles. “I guess it does.”

The trailer falls into a comfortable silence as the makeup artists and hair people finish up, and pretty soon, the boys are escorted to begin the shoot for the day. Lily Anne sits back and watches as they replicate the music video, smiling to herself as she thinks about how Freddie would always take her to his video shoots.

1991

The set of I’m Going Slightly Mad

Freddie bounces a two-year-old Lily Anne on his lap as he gets his makeup done for the video, trying not to smile as she lets out high-pitched giggles and waves her arms around. Eventually, he cracks, and the makeup artist huffs, shaking her head.

“Freddie, we don’t have time to waste! I can’t keep redoing this because you keep smiling!” she exclaims, putting down her supplies. “Let someone else take Lily Anne. She’s very cute, but right now we need to work.”

Freddie sighs, regaining his composure after cooing and hugging his daughter. “Alright. I’m sorry, darling. She’s just too much sometimes.” He kisses her cheek and looks over to see Deaky reading a book in his chair. “John, darling!”

Deaky looks over to his friend, closing the book. “What is it, Fred?”

“Could you take Lily? She’s making me laugh,” he asks, gesturing to the two-year-old with her hair in pigtails.

Deaky grins and walks over, plucking the baby from her father’s lap. “Of course! Hello, Lily Anne! We’re going to have plenty of fun, aren’t we, love?”

Lily Anne giggles, clapping her hands and cuddling into her uncle. “Unca John! Unca John!”

Deaky smiles, kissing the girl’s cheek. “Good girl! What’s that, darling?” He points to the penguins.

“Penguin!” Lily Anne exclaims, clapping.

“What about that thing on Uncle Roger’s head, love?” he points to Roger, who’s wearing his teapot hat.

When Roger sees Lily Anne, he sticks his tongue out at the girl, causing her to giggle.

“Kettle!” Lily Anne responds, sticking her tongue back out at her uncle.

“What’s the best instrument in the world, Lily?” Roger asks, smiling at the girl.

Lily Anne purses her lips before saying, “Guitar!”

Roger pretends to cry, sniffling and wiping away fake tears. “Not the drums?”

Lily Anne reaches for her Uncle Roger, and Deaky hands her over. She immediately begins patting Roger’s face with her tiny hands, pouting.

“No cry. Drums okay, guitar better,” she says, looking at Roger seriously.

He smiles and kisses her cheek, smiling. “I’m just joking, love. I’m not crying.”

Lily Anne huffs, hitting his chest with her little baby fist. “Not funny!”

“What do we call Uncle Rog when he’s being bad, darling?” Freddie calls out, smiling.

Lily Anne pokes Roger’s nose and grins. “Wanker!”

Roger cackles, leaning back and holding the little girl close.

To say that Lily Anne is confused by Gwil asking her to meet him in his trailer is beyond true. She has no fucking idea what he could possibly want from her alone, and he’s shown no attraction towards her, so she doesn’t quite know what all this is about.

Brian 2.0: Hi, Lily. I need to talk to you about something.

Lily Anne: sure thing. what is it, gwil?

Brian 2.0: Can you come to my trailer later? I need to tell you in person.

Lily Anne: of course. should i be concerned?

Brian 2.0: No, not at all! I think you’ll like what I have to say, but I don’t know for sure. Just come over later and everything will be cleared up.

Lily Anne: alright. will do!

Brian 2.0: Thank you so much. I really appreciate this.

After the shoot is over, she does as she’s been told to, and knocks on the door of Gwil’s trailer. He opens the door, looking nervous. She walks inside, frowning.

“Gwil, are you sure you’re alright? I’ve never seen you this nervous before,” Lily asks, looking up at the tall man.

Gwil takes a deep breath and fiddles with his fingers, trying to compose himself. “I’m alright, I swear. Just… sit down, please. On the couch.”

Lily does as she’s told, and when Gwil sits next to her, he turns to face her and clears his throat.

“I know I’ve made a rather… well, a strange request by asking you to come here alone, and it’s even stranger that I did it over text since you’ve been here all day,” Gwil says, fiddling with the cuffs of his sweater sleeves.

“Yes, that’s true. You’ve been off all day, really. I noticed that you were quieter than usual on set, less engaged than I’ve seen you be with the boys,” Lily says, looking back up at him.

Gwil nods, gulping. “I know, I know. I just… how do I say this?” He runs a hand through his hair. “While you were on tour, I couldn’t…” He moves his hands, trying to articulate. “I couldn’t stop thinking--” He huffs and drops his head. “I’m sorry, I’m usually so much better with words. You know that.”

Lily Anne nods, resting one hand on Gwil’s knee. “I know. Take your time.”

After a moment, Gwil lifts his head again, taking a deep breath. “I couldn’t stop thinking about Ezichi. I missed her so much, and even though we talked almost daily, it was still so hard to be away from her for that long. I never want to feel that way ever again, and I’ve most certainly never felt so strongly about someone as I feel about her.”

Lily Anne’s smile grows as he speaks, spreading across her entire face. “You love her.”

Gwil nods, smiling nervously. “I do. I love her more deeply than I’ve ever loved anyone. I don’t think this feeling will ever go away or fade, and I have to express it to her.”

Lily Anne laughs, leaning back. “Go ahead and do it, Gwil! This is great! Why did you want to tell me about it first?”

Gwil smiles and holds Lily’s hand. “I wanted your permission. She’s your best friend. You know her better than anyone, and if you didn’t think that I was the best person for her to be with, who could love her fully and make her happy for the rest of her life, I wouldn’t make a move.”

Lily puts her hand over her heart, touched by Gwil’s words. “Gwil, I… I don’t think anyone could love her more than you already do. You should go for it. She loves you just as much.”

Gwil’s face lights up, and he squeezes her hand. “Did she tell you that?”

Lily nods, smiling. “Yep. The entire tour, you were the only man on her mind. You had her listening to Stevie Nicks she missed you so much!”

Gwil pulls his hand away and smiles, nodding. He hugs Lily, and she hugs him right back.

“At the wrap party, I fully expect you to tell her everything you told me,” Lily says, rubbing his back.

“Don’t worry, I absolutely will,” Gwil responds, squeezing Lily.

---

Lucy and Lily are walking through London, enjoying their girl’s day. They had decided to go to brunch and shop, and as they walk by a boutique, Lily grabs Lucy’s arm and points to two outfits in the window.

One of them is a red velvet suit with an embroidered sheer collared top, and the other is a Twiggy-style dress with a scalloped collar and leather accents on the bell sleeves. They look perfect.

“Lucy, if you don’t try on that dress, I will literally kill you,” Lily says, looking over at her friend. “You’ve got legs for miles. They would look fucking fabulous in that dress.”

Lucy points to the suit, grinning. “Your skin against that color red? C’mon, we have to try it.”

The pair walk inside and are tended to by a store employee, who immediately starts changing rooms for them.

“What’s the event?” another employee asks, smiling.

Lily Anne smiles back at the employee. “A party. It’s going to be at the Ritz, and we intend to look just as classy as the ballroom we’re going to be in.”

Lucy smiles at her friend, nodding. “It’s going to be a lot of fun.”

The employee seems impressed, raising a brow. “The Ritz. Wow. Well, we can pull some more outfits worthy of the Ritz if you’d like. There are plenty here.”

Lily looks at Lucy, who smiles and nods. She turns back to the employee and nods. “Sounds great, darling. We’d love that.”

The employee walks off, and the girls go in to try on their outfits.

Lily Anne loves the fit of the suit, and walks out to see Lucy looking at herself in the mirror, checking out the different angles of the dress.

“Damn, Lucy! That looks amazing on you!” Lily exclaims, grinning.

Lucy turns to her, nodding. “I really like it. But I’m not sure if it gives off the right vibe.”

Lily frowns, crossing her arms. “The right vibe? What is that supposed to mean? You look hot, is that not what you want?”

Lucy blushes slightly. “Well ideally I would like Rami to ask me to be his girlfriend--”

Lily scoffs, rolling her eyes. “Don’t worry. He would date you no matter what dress you wear to this party. He’s been in love with you since you started filming!”

Lucy nods, looking back in the mirror. “I know I probably sound ridiculous, but it’s not screaming ‘I’m ready to be your girlfriend!’ to me.”

Lily Anne takes a moment to analyze the dress before nodding. “I get what you mean. Do you think this outfit would be good for the party?”

Lucy looks over Lily Anne and smiles, nodding. “I mean… you look stunning.”

The sales assistant from earlier comes back holding two dresses, and gasps when she sees Lily Anne. “Holy shit! Pardon my language, but that looks amazing on you!”

Lily Anne smiles at the sales assistant. “Thank you, darling.”

The assistant hands off the two dresses to another worker to put in Lucy’s changing room, examining the suit. “It looks very glam rock. I would wear the shirt with a nude lace bra, or just pasties if you’re brave enough. However, it’s a really good look either way.”

Lily Anne smiles as Lucy goes back to change, and examines herself in the mirror. She takes off the blazer, revealing the tattoos on her arms, and the worker gasps.

“Oh my god, you’re Lily Anne Mercury! I didn’t recognize you without all the glam when you walked in.” The worker turns red, shaking her head. “I’m so embarrassed! I listened to your music all the time in 2012, and I love the new album. I’m a huge fan, really.”

Lily Anne smiles, putting a hand over her heart. “Thank you, darling. It’s alright. I can be very lowkey when I want to be, and not many people recognize me on the streets unless I’m wearing something outrageous. I appreciate that you like my music.”

The worker’s smile is so wide and bright, and Lily Anne is touched that she could brighten this retail worker’s day with her presence. “It’s so cool to have such a powerful group of women to look up to. My niece loves you too. Her greatest wish is to go to a Room 301 concert and become a songwriter.”

Lily Anne nods, thinking for a moment. “What’s her name? I can get her a ticket to the next concert we do, and if she wants to go backstage afterward and meet the band, she can do that as well.”

The worker gasps, and covers her mouth. “That’s so sweet of you! Her name is Evelyn Kensie Wells, and I can give you her mom’s name and number.”

Lily Anne nods, and plugs the information into her phone. “What’s your name, darling?”

“Caroline Lewis, miss,” the worker responds, smiling.

Lily Anne grins. “I expect to see you there with Evelyn, alright?”

Caroline hugs her, and she smiles, hugging her back. She loves helping people and giving them nice things, and especially women and children. When Caroline pulls away, she’s slightly shaking.

“Can you ring up this suit, darling? I’m taking it.”

Caroline goes to ring up the suit and Lucy exits the changing room in a silky black gown with a turtleneck and a thigh-high slit. The sleeves hug her arms, and the backless detail just adds another layer of glamour to this look.

Lily Anne is speechless, and Lucy looks at herself in the mirror.

“What do you think, Lily?” Lucy asks, smiling.

“Rami is going to lose it and so will I,” Lily says excitedly. “You look like a goddess, Lucy. I love it. I’m getting it for you because you need this dress.”

Lucy frowns, shaking her head. “Lily, please--”

Lily shakes her head, cutting Lucy off. “Take that off and get into your casual clothes, because we’re getting shoes next.”

Lucy mumbles affirmatively, and the girls leave the store with their outfits for the party.

---

Lily sits back in an armchair, checking her phone as she waits for Lucy to finish getting her makeup done.

“Do you really think Rami will make a move, Lily?” Lucy asks, nervously playing with her rings.

Lucy looks over at the woman looking up at the ceiling as her bottom lashline is smoked out. “Look at yourself in the mirror, Lucy. You’re a five-course meal, darling! I’d marry you on the spot if you weren’t already emotionally involved with someone.”

Lucy smiles, letting the makeup artist do her other eye. “You say that as if you’re not also emotionally involved with a certain man.”

Lily rolls her eyes, and hears a knock on the door.

“Who is it?” she asks.

“Room service,” Bronwyn answers, causing Madi to laugh.

Lily opens the door, smiling. “I don’t remember ordering two raging lesbians.”

Bronwyn shrugs. “Sorry, love. We don’t come with a return policy.”

Lily grins. “Eh. I didn’t pay too much for you two, so I’ll keep you.”

Madigan smiles, and they walk inside, closing the door behind them. Bronwyn looks over at Lucy, raising a brow.

“Damn, Lucy. If I weren’t already married, I’d wife you the fuck up,” she says, smiling.

Madigan looks over and wolf whistles, joining her wife. “If it doesn’t work out with Rami, you can always come to us.”

Lucy blushes. “Thank you. You’re both very sweet.”

Lily smiles, and there is another knock at the door. “Hello?”

“My tit is about to pop out of this dress. Open up before I give someone a show,” Ezichi says, sounding panicked.

Lily Anne opens up the door and lets her friend, whistling at her ensemble. “We’re going easy access tonight, aren’t we?”

Ezichi examines Lily’s sheer top and raises a brow. “You’re basically flashing everyone. Don’t be a hypocrite.”

Lily Anne scoffs and looks in the mirror. “You can’t see that much with the embroidery, really. If it’s actually too much I can just wear the blazer over it.”

Ezichi rolls her eyes, picking up a piece of fashion tape from the box on the table and applying it to her dress. With Lily’s help, they manage to stick the fabric down, and Ezichi jumps for good measure, testing it out. The tape stays, and Ezichi smiles.

Lucy stands up from the chair and walks over to the mirror, and Ezichi’s jaw drops. “Holy crap, Lucy!”

Lucy’s eyes widen in panic and she immediately begins to look over herself for anything off. “What? Is there a stain on the dress?”

Ezichi shakes her head, laughing. “No! Not at all. You just look really good, that’s all. I’ve never seen you in a dress like this! I love it!”

Lucy smiles at Ezichi. “Thank you so much! I love yours too!”

Lily Anne frowns as her phone buzzes, and looks down at the device.

blind bitch: Help

She responds to Roger, sighing.

Lily Anne: what is it?

blind bitch: Can you sign tonite ?

Lily Anne: … sign?

blind bitch: Sing*

Lily Anne: what’s in it for me?

blind bitch: Are you kidding mr?

blind bitch: Me*

Lily Anne: nope.

The text bubble appears, disappears, and appears again over a span of ten minutes.

blind bitch: I’ll buy hte food for the after party.

blind bitch: The*

Lily Anne purses her lips, thinking for a moment before responding.

Lily Anne: sure. what songs are we doing?

blind bitch: Thank u !! Just we are the champions, dont stop me now, we will rock you, and borhap.

Lily Anne: got it. will warm up now.

blind bitch: Love ya, Lily !

Lily Anne: love you too, uncle rog.

Lily takes a sip of water and begins to do vocal exercises, causing Ezichi to frown.

“We’re not performing tonight, why are you warming up?” Madi asks, voicing what the band is thinking.

“Roger just texted me asking if I could perform with him and Brian tonight, and he’s buying us after party snacks if I do,” Lily explains, shrugging.

Bronwyn answers her phone as she gets a call, smiling. “Hello, Brian! What’s up?” She leans back against the bed she’s laying on as he speaks. “Alright. I’m down to perform if you have the bass. Which songs?” She nods as the songs are listed. “Got it. Easy enough. Bring up the bass so I can practice and we’ll be good to go! Thanks! Bye, Brian!” She hangs up and looks over at Lily Anne. “Sarina is bringing up the bass.”

Lily smiles, pausing her singing. “Sounds great.”

Ten minutes later there’s a knock on the door, and Ezichi opens it to reveal Sarina Taylor carrying a bass and wearing a low cut dress that fits her body like a glove.

“Hello, Ezichi! I love the outfit!” she says as she walks inside, kissing Ezichi’s cheek.

“Thanks, Sarina! I love yours as well,” Ezichi responds, smiling.

Bronwyn walks over and gets the bass from Sarina’s hands. “Thanks, mum,” she says jokingly.

“You’re welcome, love. You look dashing,” Sarina says, pinching Bron’s cheek.

Lily Anne smiles and hugs Sarina, grinning. “You look stunning, mum,” she says, smiling.

2013

Rehab

Lily Anne reclines in her bed, writing down the lyrics to one of her new songs when she hears a knock on the door. She looks up tiredly. “Who is it?”

A nurse responds to her. “You have a visitor, Miss Mercury.”

Lily Anne puts aside her paper, frowning. Nobody has come to visit her since she got here two months ago. “Who is it?”

“Sarina Taylor. She says that she’s your aunt. Do you want to meet her at the front desk?” the nurse asks.

Lily Anne blinks in confusion, biting her lip. Roger took it particularly harshly when she overdosed for the second time, but as a small gift, she received sequin slippers from the Taylor clan as a collective whole. She didn’t anticipate Sarina or any of the Taylors actually wanting to see her.

“Miss? Do you want to meet her? It’s up to you,” the nurse prompts.

“Y-yeah. Sure, just let me put on some shoes and a sweater,” she responds, clearing piles of paper off her bed.

“Take your time, Miss. I’ll tell the front desk that you’ll be down soon,” the nurse says before leaving.

When Lily Anne heads down to the front desk with a messy bun, gray sweats, and her slippers on, Sarina spots her and perks up, sitting up in her seat. Lily Anne walks over to her and the woman puts aside the bouquet she has in her lap to stand up and tightly hug Lily Anne.

There are no words that come out of Sarina’s mouth, but the love and relief she feels radiates from the warm hug Lily Anne recieves. When Sarina pulls away, she hands her the bouquet, smiling. “They’re from your garden. Mary helped me collect them.”

Lily Anne nods, smiling weakly at the flowers. “Thank you, Sarina. They’re gorgeous.”

Sarina picks up her purse and smiles at the girl. “Do you want to put them in your room and then go for lunch?”

Lily Anne raises a brow at the word lunch. “Lunch where? I can’t leave the facilities.”

Sarina nods. “I know. Jer and Kashmira made you some food, and I have it in my bag. We can eat it near the pond and have a little picnic of sorts.”

Lily Anne gulps back emotion and nods, smiling. “Sure thing. Let’s go to my room first.”

---

When Sarina sees the papers all over, she frowns. “Love? What’s all this?”

Lily Anne places the flowers in a plastic pitcher and puts them near her window. “The papers? They’re song lyrics.”

Sarina nods and leans down to pick some up off the floor. “Can I look at them, or are they not done yet?”

Lily Anne hesitates before nodding, helping her to pick up the papers. “I’m most likely gonna produce them, so I guess it really doesn’t make a difference, does it?”

Sarina smiles and nods, and as they leave the room and walk over to the elevator, she looks down at Lily’s feet. “I’m glad you like the slippers. Lola picked them out for you.”

Lily smiles, looking at her aunt. “Tell her that they’re a very good gift.”

Sarina nods, satisfied. “I will.”

---

Lily Anne smells the Indian food when Sarina pulls it out of her bag and nearly begins to cry. She can taste the love when it reaches her mouth and closes her eyes. A single tear falls because she can barely handle all this emotion she feels. Sarina squeezes her hand, and she squeezes it back, looking over to see the woman barely holding back tears.

“We all just want you to be okay, Lily. We’re here for you always, no matter what,” Sarina says.

Lily nods. “I know. I appreciate it.”

“They why don’t you take it?” Sarina asks.

Lily Anne takes a deep breath. “Sometimes I don’t think I deserve it. I’ve hurt so many--” She wipes away a tear. “So many people, so badly. I know that I’ve wounded Brian and Anita more times than I can count. My bandmates are so loyal, and I just don’t understand why. But the worst hurt has always fallen on Roger.”

Sarina nods, looking down. “He loves you so much. We all do.”

Lily takes another bite of her food. “I know that. He’s like a third father to me, which is why he can’t stand to see me destroy myself.”

Sarina takes a deep breath. “He’s hurting so badly. We all are. I offered for him to come, but--”

Lily Anne furiously shakes her head. “I don’t want to see the hurt in his eyes.”

“That’s why I’m here. He wants to know that you’re doing better.”

Lily passes Sarina a song she’s written. “Bring this to him.”

Sarina nods. “Can I read it?”

Lily looks over at her and nods. “Yeah. I want him to write this one with me.”

Sarina looks down and begins to read it, smiling. “Lily, you’ve never written anything this… this vulnerable.”

Lily takes another bite of her food and nods. “It’s my own form of therapy. I tried the group stuff, the meditation, the art therapy, but this is the only thing that really works for me.” Sarina nods, looking at the scrawled out lyrics. “Does it make you feel better?”

Lily nods, smiling. “Yeah. It helps me out a lot. I think I finally found a good coping mechanism.”

Sarina’s smile only grows as she reads further. “Oh, Lily… he’s going to love this. He’ll be so happy that you’ve found something that works for you!”

Lily smiles as her aunt kisses her forehead, closing her eyes.

Lily Anne leads the group of ladies downstairs, walking into the lavish ballroom and smiling as she sees the BoRhap boys together. As soon as she walks inside, Ben is the first to notice her, and smiles when he sees her, beginning to walk over. Gwil and Rami follow, and Joe tags along behind them.

Lily Anne looks over Ben’s suit, nodding in approval. “Black velvet with a red cufflink. I approve.”

Ben smiles at her and nods. “I see we both got the memo.”

She nods, laughing before looking over his cufflinks. “Are these real rubies?”

He nods, and Lily Anne’s jaw drops. “Wow. How boujee of you, Benjamin.”

He grins down at her. “What can I say? You’ve influenced my style.”

Her lips quirk up into a smile, and as he offers her his elbow to walk to their table, she takes it, walking away with him.

Joe looks like he wants to kill both of them. “How are they so blind? How? They even dressed the same fucking way without consulting each other!”

Gwil sighs, patting Joe’s back. “Just be patient, Joe. You’ll be his best man someday.”

Ezichi nods, agreeing with Gwil. “It will be a long time before she puts me in a bridesmaid’s dress.” She looks at Gwil, smiling. “I love the suit.”

Gwil smiles back at her, nodding. “I think that’s a gorgeous dress. You look amazing.”

She smiles as Gwil offers her his arm, and she takes it, walking off with him.

Bron looks over at Joe and sighs, offering her own arm. He takes it with a smile, and she grins.

---

Brian taps the microphone and the room quiets down, everyone turning to look at the man.

“Hello, everyone! Do I have your attention? Good.” Brian pulls out a piece of paper from his suit jacket. “First of all, I would like to say thank you to everyone who worked on this project, which is so important to Queen, to Lily, and to everyone who knew and loved Freddie.” He smiles at the audience fondly. “This project has been in development for so long, because we knew that it had to be absolutely perfect for Freddie. Everything, from the script, to the cast, to the set, to the timing. Everything just had to be perfect. I’m very pleased to say that Roger and I found that it was the best it could possibly be, and our goal of making sure the world knows Freddie and the band as more than just another rock band was met.” Brian wipes his eyes, smiling. “Queen is a family for me, and it has been since 1970, when we first got together. Just like a family, some people have decided to be less directly involved, but that doesn’t change that we love them unconditionally, and hold our arms open for them if they choose to return to the forefront. Also, just like a family, we take care of one another, no matter what.” Brian looks down at Lily, who blinks away a happy tear. “Everyone in this room is now part of the Queen family, and I’m so glad that we could extend our love to all of you talented, dedicated, wonderful people.”

The audience claps, and Brian nods, waiting for them to calm down.

“As a thank you, we’d like to perform a few songs for you all. On the bass, we’ll have the talented Bronwyn Ryan-Hughes, and in place of Adam and Freddie, the lovely Lily Anne Mercury.”

As the crowd roars, Lily Anne sheds her blazer, putting it on her chair before stepping on stage. She walks over to Brian and gives him a tight hug, smiling. He reciprocates, and when he pulls away, walks over to his Red Special. Roger gives Lily and Bron thumbs up, and the girls nod, heading over to their instruments.

Lily Anne takes her spot at the baby grand piano, angling down the microphone with a smile.

“I must admit, I was informed of this just thirty minutes ago, so I have no idea what the order of the set list is,” Lily Anne laughs, waving dismissively. “But I think it’s only right to start off with a song that truly encapsulates the legacy of this amazing band.” She begins playing We Are the Champions, and as the room claps, she lets the music take her, infusing all the heart and soul she can into the lyrics of the song.

She imagines that Jim and Freddie are watching her from the back of the room, smiling and holding hands as their baby girl sings, knowing that they raised a strong, independent, confident woman. In a way, she thinks they are watching her, and she could swear that she feels her Papa behind her, performing alongside her. As the song closes, she takes a bow before returning to the piano.

Don’t Stop Me Now gets her moving around the stage, at one point headbanging to Brian’s guitar solo. She owns the song, and as she begins the stomp stomp clap of We Will Rock You, she prompts everyone to stand up, causing the whole floor to shake. The power of the song causes the air around her to buzz with energy, and she sighs deeply, taking a sip of water and sitting down to catch her breath before the last song.

“You’re an amazing audience, truly.” She says, smiling at the people in the room. “I can’t help but feel like Freddie is watching this all from above. I’m sure he’s forcing Jim to sing along to all of it, and playing with the cats.” She lets out a laugh. “How about we close with a little Bohemian Rhapsody?”

The audience yells, and Lily Anne stands up to finish off the set. The song goes perfectly, and everyone screams once the song is over. Lily Anne feels a spark on her forehead and a hand on her shoulder, and knows that it’s Freddie, and he’s proud of her. She takes a bow with Bron, and hugs Brian and Roger, smiling.

---

Ezichi smiles and hugs Lily Anne as she sits down, grinning. “You were perfect, Lily! That was amazing.”

Lily Anne smiles at Ezichi and returns the hug, leaning against her friend. “Thank you, Ezichi. I appreciate it.”

Bron sits down and Madi kisses her cheek, grinning. “You looked so happy up there, B! I loved it!”

Bron wraps an arm around her wife, kissing her on the lips. “Thanks, Mads. I must admit, your dancing did encourage me to continue on. It was adorable.”

Madi blushes and shakes her head. “I dance like a chicken without a head, Bron. I’m so bad at it.”

Lily Anne frowns. “Madi, you’re a great dancer!”

Madi looks over and scoffs. “Not when it’s anything but Irish dance.”

Joe smiles, looking over at her. “You did Irish dance?”

Madi nods, smiling. “Yep. I’ve done it since I was five.”

Bron ruffles her wife’s hair. “She dances and I play Welsh fiddle.”

Gwil perks up. “How Welsh were your parents?”

Bron looks over and raises her brows. “My father had the flag tattooed across his back and my mother was a Welsh clog dancing champion. I grew up only speaking Welsh in the house.”

Gwil leans back, nodding. “I did clog dancing as well. I was pretty good at it, actually.”

Ezichi grins at Gwil. “No way. I have to see that.”

Gwil smiles at her. “I’m sure I can find my clogs somewhere in my closet.”

Just then, a slower acoustic cover of You’re My Best Friend begins playing, and people start to go to the dance floor in the center of the room as couples.

“Speaking of dancing,” Gwil begins, standing up and offering Ezichi his hand, “would you like to join me out there?”

Ezichi’s smile grows, and she stands, nodding. “Of course.”

Bron soon sweeps Madi to the floor, and Lily Anne, Ben, and Joe are left sitting there. The tension is thick, and Lily Anne sighs, sipping her virgin margarita. She clearly expects Ben to ask her to dance, but that’s not going to happen, so Joe steps in, standing up and offering her his hand.

“M’lady, could I have this dance?” he asks in a silly accent.

Lily snorts, putting down her drink. “I suppose so, my good sir. Please, sweep me away with your dance moves!”

Joe smiles and takes her hand, and as they walk to the dance floor and begin dancing, his hand on her back and hers on his shoulder, she sighs.

“Listen,” he says, becoming serious. “I know you were expecting Ben to ask you to dance. I get that I’m not him and this is a bit of a disappointment, but I will get that man to dance with you by the end of the night.”

Lily looks down, shaking her head. “It’s alright. I get it.” She looks up at Joe, concerned, and whispers. “Did I come on too strong with that song I wrote? I know it wasn’t subtle, but it wasn’t meant to scare him away.”

Joe sighs, looking down at her. “No, you didn’t. It was a good thing that you wrote that, because he called me up after he watched the video of it and asked me if you loved him.”

Her eyes go wide and she squeezes Joe’s hand. “What did you say?”

Joe smiles. “I asked him if he loved you.”

She squeezes his hand more tightly. “What did he say?”

Joe winces. “Lily, could you--”

She lightens her grip. “Sorry. I’m just really nervous.”

Joe shrugs, smiling. “It’s alright. To be honest, it’s pretty damn cute. Instead of saying yes or no, he said maybe, and before you say anything-- listen to me. I asked him to talk about you.”

Lily raises a brow and nods. “And?”

Joe smiles. “He praised you for almost ten minutes straight.”

Lily nods, pursing her lips. “Okay. But that’s not a yes or no answer.”

Joe nods, twirling her. “I then asked him that if you asked him to give you the world, would he do it?”

Lily looks up at Joe and presses her lips together nervously.

Joe leans in and whispers, “He said ‘Of course.’”

Lily smiles and sighs in relief, hugging Joe tightly. “Oh, thank God.”

Joe pulls away after a moment, looking down at her. “He’s scared. You’re scared. But I think if you asked him to dance, he would be less scared.”

Lily nods, smiling. “Alright. Thank you, Joe. You’ve been a great dance partner.”

Joe salutes her playfully. “Go get ‘im, tiger.”

Lily Anne walks off, going over to Ben, and the smile that lights up his face makes Joe want to squeal. Maybe, just maybe, he’s sped up this long and grueling waiting process.

---

Gwil is by far one of the best dance partners Ezichi has ever had. The height helps, but the firm hand on the small of her back and confident steps he takes are truly a wonderful combination. She lets Gwil guide her around the floor, smiling.

“You look really amazing, Zichi,” he says, looking into her eyes. “Truly gorgeous. I didn’t want the boys to tease me about it there, but I needed to get it off my chest.”

Ezichi smiles, letting out a little laugh. “I was going to say that your suit looks incredibly good on you, but I know Lily and Madi would have a field day going on about that. I’d never hear the end of it.”

Gwil smiles, but looks slightly confused. “I would think that Lily and Bron would be the ones making a big deal about it, not Madi.”

Ezichi nods, grinning. “I get that. Nowadays, Madi tries to contain her chaotic, nosy tendencies. She knows that Bron will immediately say something that gives away what she thinks, and she has to act like an adult to prevent that. But she’s a drummer. Drummers are inherently chaotic.”

Gwil lets out a laugh, and spins Ezichi. “All the chaotic energy is taken out on her drums?”

Ezichi nods, snorting. “Basically. She tries to be calm and collected and make sure Bron isn’t making a mess of things, but the one area where she’s still a teenager at heart is when it comes to gossip. She loves it.”

Gwil smiles and lets out a puff of laughter, shaking his head. “As a band, you all just work so well.”

Ezichi tilts her head to the side, shrugging with a fond smile on her face. “We have our fights, but we love each other. I couldn’t imagine life without them by my side. It would be so lonely.”

Gwil takes a deep breath, and looks down at Ezichi. “I understand the feeling. This project has been truly amazing, but I’m not sure how I’m going to get on once it’s all over. I’ll miss them all so much.”

Ezichi squeezes his hand, smiling. “Ben and Lucy will still be in London, and Rami and Joe both live in New York. It won’t be that hard to visit.”

Gwil shakes his head slightly. “I’ll also miss seeing you, Ezichi.”

Ezichi smiles fondly at Gwil, her stomach full of butterflies. “I’m in London. Lily’s in London. Bron and Madi are in London. We won’t be far at all.”

Gwil tilts her chin up so she’s looking in his eyes. “I know that, but I think I’ve become far too attached to you in particular, Ezichi.”

Ezichi’s eyes widen, and she begins to blush. “I-I… I’ve enjoyed your company as well, Gwil.”

Gwil smiles nervously. “If I’m being fully honest with myself, I’ve never felt so close to anyone before in my life. While you were on tour, I was so lonely. Every picture I saw of you just made me want to be with you, and I’ve never felt that kind of loneliness before, Ezichi. When you came back, I was just so indescribably happy. It was like a hole had been filled, but instead of making me simply content, it made me…”

Ezichi responds for him. “Happier than I’d ever been before.”

Gwil’s eyes light up. “Yes, that’s exactly it. Did you--” he turns red. “Did you feel the same way?”

His voice is so hopeful, and Ezichi is glad that she can make his hopes come true.

Ezichi nods, smiling. “I felt the same exact way, Gwil.”

Gwil nods, and as the song ends, he dips her, their faces mere inches apart. “I was so confused as to why it hurt so much, but I figured it out.” A new song starts up, and he lifts her out of the dip, his hand on her back beginning to shake. “I need you, Ezichi. You complete me in a way that nobody else can, and you make me want to be the best person I can be, because you’re my better half, and you deserve the best I can give you.”

Ezichi smiles widely as she’s twirled, and lets one hand rest on Gwil’s cheek, thumb stroking his stubble slowly. “I would’ve taken a simple ‘I love you,’ but I do love your monologues.”

Gwil smiles and kisses her gently, to which she reciprocates immediately. When they pull away Ezichi is flushed, and smiles as she move to wipe her lip gloss off of his face. After she does, he dips her again, holding her flush as his lips are at her ear.

He leans in to whisper in her ear as they keep dancing. “Now, as gentlemanly as I would like to be, and as much as I would like to treat you like the goddess you are, I am a mere man, and this dress is absolutely begging to be ripped off of your body.”

Ezichi smirks, leaning in to whisper in his ear. “Gwil, let’s get a few things cleared up.” She’s twirled again. “I appreciate the gentleman, but right now I want an animal.” They sweep across the floor, and she smiles as they turn. “I am your goddess. My body is your temple, and your temple only.” Finally, she’s pulled in again, and looks up at him with a wicked grin. “I want people to know that you worshipped me.”

Gwil looks down at her, pupils dilated. “Get your purse. We’re going to my room now.”

---

Roger watches as Ben and Lily dance, and Sarina sits down beside him, smiling and wrapping an arm around his shoulders. He turns to face her and smiles. “Hello, love. Enjoying the party?”

Sarina nods. “Very much. You sounded great up there, love. Everything was amazing.”

Roger smiles, sipping a glass of whiskey before kissing her hand and looking back at the dance floor.

Sarina watches with him, grinning into her glass of wine. “Lily and Ben aren’t going to admit their feelings for each other tonight, Rog.”

Roger looks over at Sarina, frowning. “Why not? They’re dancing. Lucy and Rami left earlier, and so did Ezichi and Gwil. How is it not going to happen?”

Sarina shrugs and holds his tattooed hand. “The timing isn’t right. They’re almost there, though. Be patient.”

Roger huffs and leans back, and Anita and Brian sit down next to them.

Brian smiles, sipping his water. “I know. I wanted it to happen too, but it won’t tonight.”

Roger shakes his head. “They’re so blind. It’s ridiculous that it’s taking this long for them to tell each other how they feel.”

Anita shakes her head. “They know how they feel for each other.”

Roger scoffs. “Then what’s taking so long?”

Brian smiles fondly. “They’re scared and cautious. They want it to work so badly that they’ll wait it out until it is fully clear that they won’t be rejected.”

Anita smiles and squeezes Roger’s hand. “When it happens, it will happen fast.”

Sarina nods, looking over at her husband. “Stop stewing, love. You’ll walk her down the aisle someday.”

Roger finishes his drink, sitting up. “I better.”

TAGLIST: @andtheytoldustotellyouhello @plethora-of-things @borhap-socials @everybodyplaythegame @i-the-fangirl @deakydeakydeaky @shisterfackisback @samanthadegaro @lv7867 @fatbottomedcurls @redspecialty @haisimsim @peterparkeroos @teenwolflover28 @ixchel-9275 @alessandra-elle @onexlittlespark @queenficarchive @leah-halliwell92 @rrrogah-tayluhh @maddistudiess @queen-fam @evrsncnewyork

#starry writes #ben hardy x reader #ben hardy #joe mazzello #gwilym lee #rami malek #lucy boynton #borhap cast #borhap imagines

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leverage-commentary · 6 years ago

Text

Leverage Season 1, Episode 9, The Stork Job, Audio Commentary Transcript

John: Hi, I'm John Rogers, Executive Producer of Leverage.

Chris: Chris Downey, Executive Producer.

Albert: Albert Kim, Writer.

Marc: Marc Roskin, Producer...and Director.

[Scattered Applause]

John: And director! Marc Roskin’s first directorial debut, ladies and gentlemen. You have directed for second unit for years for the company and do most of our...You’re shooting pretty much as much as we are on A camera on the show.

Marc: Yeah, there’s a lot.

John: Alfred. Albert, pardon me. Why don’t you tell us where the idea for the show came from?

Albert: Well, this is The Stork Job and it’s another cheery topic. Concerning European orphanages and the scams people perpetrate on desperate parents there-

John: We give you the ones that are more soul-wrenching ones because we know you have no soul.

[Laughter]

Marc: Yes, that’s true.

John: You’re able to withstand the emotional torment.

Marc: But, this was actually based on actual, real scams. Doing research for it, I found there were unscrupulous adoption agencies out there who were preying on parents here in America. And, uh, it started our really grim, but in the end I think the episode came out to be kind of fun.

Albert: Very fun.

John: It’s very fun. It shows how the grim premise can kind of ground you and then allows you to go off and have little bit of fun.

Chris: What’s great about this one, also if I may, is that normally what the teams going after is money, and as you’ll see in this scene here they’re going after a child. Which is really, like, something we’re constantly trying to challenge ourselves in the writers room, to try and make the scams not always about money.

John: We generally fail.

[Laughter]

Chris: It’s very hard. It really is very hard.

John: Also, this also started as a Nate/Sophie scene- a Nate/Sophie episode, talking about Nate about his issues about fatherhood and adopting. And because, as we broke this story, these kids didn’t show up until later, there was no way to fuel that, and so it became much more about Sophie’s issues with the acting, and really Parker’s and Hardison’s issues with their own upbringing.

Albert: Right, this is a great Parker episode. And I found that writing for Parker is actually the most fun for me. I mean, because on the surface she’s got all these emotional quirks and slightly Asperger's like aspects, which is fun to write for the comedic bits, but you also get the sense that deep down, she’s this- there’s this wellspring of darkness and blackness there which is really fun to play with.

Marc: And it was also fun shooting it, because as the story goes on, we take her to a place where I don’t think the audience is used to seeing her go.

John: I’m- no I saw the dalies of one of the later scenes, and I was like, that is probably one of the finer pieces of television acting I’ve seen in a long time.

Marc: Yes. I think there was a four letter word in the email you sent me.

John: We can swear on these by the way

Marc: Oh good!

John: Yeah, no problem. I’ve already done it quite a bit. The fact that i’m drinking in all of them doesn’t help.

Albert: This was Eliot’s face that was all damaged, that we had to write a quickie line for.

John: Ugh, yes. The lesbian bar’s a throwaway because SOMEBODY, in his weekly poker game with Tim Hutton and Saul Rubinek at 1 AM on a Saturday, went out to throw the football around and SOMEBODY was wearing his cowboy boots and went down on the sidewalk.

[All laugh]

John: Yeah, I actually laughed out loud when I walked in the trailer, it was great he was so worried. I walked in and I could not help but laugh, he went ‘it’s not funny man’ and I went ‘no no we’ll figure it out’. Amazingly by the way, the makeup managed to cover it. They built like a little mini prosthetic or something. It was only two scenes we had to really deal with it

Marc: Right.

Albert: We gave one of his scenes- some of his lines over to Sophie and other than that we covered it with his line here, which turned out to be a really funny line. And then his weird mutant healing power kicked in and he was ready to go.

John: Here’s when you realize shit-kicker has a genetic component. Because he is a country boy, and he really healed way faster than you should be able to.

Marc: And he was pulling things off of his face that normally your doctor wouldn’t suggest.

[All laugh]

John: ‘I’m just gonna get rid of this scab here guys and we’ll be ready to shoot’. By the way, I do need to give you a little bit of shit. Why is there a glamor photo of the orphan? Why is he doing the glamor photo pose with the little hand on the chest?

Marc: You know, I initially picked something a little…

Albert: Grittier?

Marc: Grittier and less posed. But Tim liked the black and white aspect with the dirt smudge on it, so...

John: The dirt smudge- tragic dirt smudge. Also our porniest writing run coming up.

[Laughter]

Chris: Yeah we did- we had great fun in the writers room for sure.

Albert: And I actually did Emmanuelle research and it was amazingly difficult to come up with a title for an Emmanuelle movie that hasn’t been taken. There’s like 50 of these things.

John: I want these views to realize that we have something called clearance, where we can’t duplicate things that already exist, so we can’t be sued for implying certain things about them. And so just fabricating goofy Emmanuelle titles took us, like, half a day because every time we had come up with something more ridiculous, it had been used.

Albert: ‘Emmanuelle Goes to Mars’? Oh that already exists. Made in 1984. Ohh, okay.

John: Right. It’s also interesting because the conversation about Emmanuelle basically ran the exact same way in the writers room as it does in this bit. With the guys like ‘oh those movies!’ and the girls are like ‘what? I have no idea.’ So Mark, you have a lovely transition coming up, so why don’t you- everyone, every director talks about the hell of shooting in the conference room, tell us how you tackled it. Tell us how you handled it.

Marc: Well I was- I was fortunate that I was able to not have too many green screens in our conference room. Actually the first thing we shot was all the surveillance footage from the park and we were able to get it into the conference room quick. But this, we did a push in and then a take over from a purchased shot.

Chris: Oh that’s great. Isn’t that terrific? I mean I think that- that’s gotta be a signature bit of this show.

John: Yeah. We should do that more often.

Marc: And this is the Masonic Lodge in beautiful downtown Pasadena.

[All laugh]

Albert: This is also a fun episode because I think it’s the first- maybe the only one we did in the first season, where we travel outside of the country and we have that sort of cosmopolitan feel where we’re going to Europe, and doing a little thing- little stuff outside of there. And the team’s-

John: A little Mission: Impossible.

All: Yeah.

Marc: And this is- Christian of course blocked this. He grabbed all of the prettiest extras and surrounds himself.

John: [laughs] He just grabs and brings them all over and- yeah. It’s a nice bit of- there’s a little bit of annoyance there. He’s developed a nice relationship between the two characters.

Chris: It’s great.

Albert: Originally this scene was written and it was a lot more elaborately choreographed, where Nate and Sophie were originally going to be dancing and in that ballroom with them. And it would’ve been fun to try, but it ultimately would’ve been crippling to do production-wise.

Chris: This is a fairly late add, but it was really great.

John: To explain why they were in the office.

Albert: To cover why they weren’t there.

John: And wound up being a really great joke. I love this joke. I love the ridiculousness of the tiara and that somebody would fall for it.

Marc: Still kept the tiara.

John: And- ‘I still got the tiara’ yeah. That’s a dirty little line. This is actually kind of the steamiest little exchange - one of them - that we have in the season. between the two of them where they argue over relationships and- Because it’s not about relationships, it’s about something else that happens to involve relationships.

Chris: Yeah.

John: That’s a good general writing rule. Is to never actually talk about the relationship, which we violated several times much to our regret. Also the Orange SQ the knockoff, the idea that Hardison is filled with rage he has to eat the knock off variants of his usual diet.

Chris: Lot of pitching on what a Eastern European beverage would be. Orange SQ.

John: And big props out to Derek, our computer graphics guy. This is an amazing episode for that.

Chris: He did a really good job.

John: Now where are we here? Are we in the hardest-working office in show business, but we’re on the soundstage?

Marc: Yes. We’re in the hardest-working office.

John: This is usually the villains office, we’re just shooting it from the other direction.

Marc: Yes. We just stripped out some stuff. Made it look like it was under construction.

John: Originally a van I believe.

Marc: Originally a van.

Albert: It looks like- was gonna be a van yeah.

John: Which we wound up stealing for the season finale. We ended up taking that idea and using it there.

Chris: Great little sequence of them coaching their- their counterparts at the party.

Albert: Now that was some fun research to do. About all the pickup artist techniques. Which is what Sophie ends up using to help coach Eliot. And so I got a lot of books on how to pick up women, and-

Chris: It’s always great when the wife gets- signs for those from Amazon.

John: ‘Oh hey, what’s from Amazon? Oh…’

Albert: ‘Yeah this is all for work, honey’.

Chris: Search and destroy the- the pickup artist.

John: By the way, that exterior shot - outside the balcony - we’re looking into a gymnasium there, I believe.

Marc: Yeah it’s like a big- a big auditorium.

John: It’s a beautiful green screen replacement. Yes, that was the entire idea, was that we ended up building a fake balcony on the end of an overlook that just looked into an auditorium.

Chris: There’s another- and again notice the Eastern European biscuits.

[All laugh]

John: Oh man that’s gorgeous, little bit of movement.

Chris: That’s a fantastic green screen.

Marc: Yeah we just added a bit of movement to a still shot to make it look like there’s cars or lights are moving.

John: The little laugh Parker does there, I love it’s one of the things that Ken Levine talks about this a M.A.S.H. writer who writes on a website. He says, you know, having characters laugh at things other character say is something that’s not done a lot, but it’s one of the ways you build that they have a relationship. You know they’re usually making jokes off each other, not together. It’s kind of a technique that’s not used a lot.

Marc: Kathleen was a great- great job playing this role.

John: Yeah. So great. So dismissive. Now all the things are techniques you found from your books, is that right?

Albert: That’s right. And no, I did not try them out, but I’m assured that they are all very effective techniques.

John: I swear you tried them out on me one time. I found myself really heavily entranced by you.

[Laughter]

Albert: Was that- was that not talking about it again?

Chris: Was it the- was it the anchoring? The backhanded compliment?

John: The anchoring. I totally took a bunch of these pictures I didn’t really like, but for some reason I couldn’t say no.

Marc: This is the- this is the first day of shooting without any facial damage on Christian.

[All laugh]

John: Really? Amazing that you managed to get around that, I have to say.

Chris: Now from a directing standpoint, was this the most difficult? With all the extras in? Or- I mean we had so many incredible breaking in this show.

John: This is a though show, it’s a bear.

Marc: I mean a lot of the shows are difficult, but I mean whenever you get into a comm sequence, you know you have to double the amount of time you spend shooting because you wanna cover it with their talking and their listening on all sides.

Chris: Yeah, right. So you have your options on what side of the conversation you want to cut to.

Marc: Yeah

John: So if you have a 5 page intercut comm sequence, it’s actually 10 pages of shooting.

Marc: Yeah, absolutely.

John: Which is interesting because that let us - again, welcome to television. Every show evolves over the course of the season; anyone who says otherwise is lying. Is the fact, if you notice that later episodes where we split the team up and don’t have them talk on the comms, they have very specific jobs that they can do, but don’t back chatter a lot. Because we realized we were killing the directors with the coverage.

Albert: Right. But I have to say in the end this sequence worked out great. The whole weaving back and forth, you just felt you know there’s a nice sense of urgency going on and a lot of fun banter.

John: Yeah.

Marc: Well that’s also because- there was so much coaching involved, that it was fun to cut back and forth to see the reactions. And also you know seeing Eliot playing the sophisticated and suave instead of just busting heads.

John: Yeah. That he has that in the toolbox and can you know... There’s actually- Yeah, we were saying, in Homecoming we have a reference where he says, ‘next time I’m wearing the suit…’ And we paid that off in the the Stork Job and in the finale. You know he does get to do the- he does get to wear the tux and be James Bond every now and then.

Albert: And later in this episode we have a sequence where Beth has a fight scene, and that’s another thing we haven’t seen Parker do before. And it was fun to be able to show that our team can take care of themselves, not- and that Eliot’s not the only one who’s...

John: And she has a very specific fighting style that takes advantage of the strength of her legs, and keeping people outside, and either staying outside their reach or stepping inside their- inside their reach. And Charlie Brewer again, it’s really great- I have a lot of fight guys who read my blog and I get a lot of emails from fight guys going ‘what the hell style is Christian Kane using? It’s such a mishmash’ and Charlie has this great vocabulary of fight styles for every situation. And this is- who is this actor?

Marc: David Lee.

Albert: David Hill- David Lee. yeah.

Chris and Marc: He was great.

John: And he really helped us on the language. And this is great - the intercutting, tell me about the intercutting flashbacks.

Chris: It was written this way.

Marc: it was written this way. The one thing I wanted to do was every time I shot the young Parker I said ‘let’s just do one’- I mean every time I shot the young boy, Luca, I said let’s just get one shot with Parker in it just in case it works. And it worked.

John: And it works. Very effective. And I love the idea that, you know, this is something we actually used as a joke in the finale- and right out onto the pad underneath the auditorium.

Chris: I just realized both your episodes she just leaps out of- leaps out of windows. It’s your motif.

Albert: That’s right I have her jumping a lot.

John: Do you have a macro? [laughs] Parker jumps out the window.

Albert: It’s on my keyboard - ‘Parker leaps out the window’. By the way that stunt even though it’s a fake balcony it was probably about a 10 foot drop down to the pads. And the stuntwoman just flew- threw herself out of the window. It was amazing. Afterwards we were all just stunned that she could do that.

John: I was gonna say the- the-

Albert: You’re mesmerized by Nate’s- Nate putting it all together.

John: I am. Nate’s had that moment where he realizes exactly what he needs to do there and moves us into the second con. It was about David Lee and it was gonna drive me crazy…

Chris: Just a little note about the con. People kinda talk about where do we come up with cons. And a lot of the times they are classic cons that we’re kind of adapting for our show. But this episode was interesting because we built our villain, Irena here, and the con kinda came out of the creative decisions we made about her character. So we decided she was a faded model and wannabe actress-

John: Because that would be the kind of place a grifter would come from.

Chris: Exactly. And we look at, when we’re looking at a con - is what’s our characters weakness? And when it’s money, it’s often greed. But in this case we thought her weakness was vanity and that’s what led to the movie - stealing the movie. Which really took the episode from a really dark Eastern European orphanages and brought a lightness to it that really elevated it.

John: There’s the blocking, there’s Mark Roscin blocking out that one side of Christian’s face.

Marc: Of Christians- one side of Christians face, that was fresh.

John: Yeah it was at this point actually that Apollo Robbins - our grifter consultant - he said you guys have become a fully functioning crime crew. You’re looking at the bad- your mark, and carving out around your mark rather than… Oh that’s it, the movie actually comes from, and again you do research, but a lot of the times everybody on the set, particularly the first AD, had worked on an Eastern European film. And we had heard so many horror stories by this point, that it really gave us the natural setting to do the con.

Chris: And Serbia is also, we found out, an emerging place where there’s a lot of film productions.

John: Right. I like the sleazy- sleazy producer and sleazy director, it’s the writers fantasy of how horrible they are. This is- is this shot by Jonathan Frakes or the other shot?

Chris and Albert: No the other one.

Marc: No the- the end shot of Kathleen. That was- we just put a fake ATM machine on the side of the stage.

John: Yeah it was parking- that was the stage and then the parking lot for the other one, yeah.

Chris: Oh here we go.

Albert: Here’s our set. I love this set.

Marc: You know what? So many people did because it reminded them of their early, like, coreman days where a lot of us started out.

Albert: Well the funny thing was is- well the way it was written, this movie that we’re showing - the set - was supposed to be kinda cheesy and cheap and a little bit B-movie production. And then when it came time to actually be creating it, I found out that our crew doesn’t really- can’t really do cheesy and cheap.

[All laugh]

Albert: They kept wanting to make it better and better and we were in these meetings where they were asking to put more flocking [transcriber clarification: fake snow] on the trees and we were like ‘we don’t need any more flocking on the trees’.

John: ‘I don’t even know what flocking is - what are you people doing?’ It was great because at one point watching this- the set looks so good, at one point watching it was like, you know we could just finish this movie. We could shoot this out and sell it to sci-fi and have it on Saturday nights.

Marc: This is one of my favorite transitions and I have to thank Dave Connell for it.

Chris: Oh, that’s great.

John: This is from the stunt man right?

Marc: Yeah.

Chris: But that was your- wasn’t that- that was your stunt man entrance? I think we were talking about that.

Marc: Yeah we wanted to have-

Albert: It was originally a cut right?

Marc: Yeah but unfortunately it- the crane could only go from that height so we had to figure out how we go from-

John: -from five feet to two feet, cinematically.

Marc: Yeah, exactly.

Albert: I have to say, of all the things of all the things I had to deal with working on this script, I think I spent the most time coming up with the title of the fake movie.

[Laughter]

Albert: I sat there for half an hour going like, ‘Wolf Wars?’

Chris: It’s absolutely perfect.

Albert: ‘Dog Fights? Dog Fighters?’

John: No seriously, we could sell this.

Albert: We should make Howl Force.

Marc: So many people want to see it.

John: The Howl Force chair backs have become quite the collectors item, actually. To show that you’ve bought the set for Howl Force.

Chris: Nate as a director…

John: This is one of our 360’s.

Marc: Yeah just steadicam-ing the whole time.

John: You didn’t lay track?

Marc: No, just steadicam. You know I was just trying to make the day, and- [laughs]

John: Well actually Mark give a brief- cause your career is kind of the prototypical Hollywood career in its length and oddity. How did you get into the business?

Marc: I actually- my first job I was a PA on Roland and Dean’s first movie- studio movie. Universal Soldier. So I was a PA and I went from AD-

Chris: PA like Parker right here!

Marc: Like Parker right here, yes.

Chris: Couldn’t be a better-

Marc: And I believe I wore that exact same, like, 80’s/90’s headset.

Chris: So kids out there, wondering whether you should take that PA job? Here we go.

Marc: Take it.

John: So PA to AD. Did you do AD?

Marc: PA to AD and then assistant for role and I just kept reading all their scripts. And that’s when I met you, and we brought you in for Carrier.

John: Oh that’s right, yeah.

Marc: And I just doing making notes and giving them to Roland and Dean and they basically said ‘well you’re already doing it, so why don’t you run Development for us?’ And then it was- being on set and saying you know we need an insert of a book. Now we need an insert of a book and a hand. All right now we need an insert of a person grabbing a book and walking. And then it just kept going.

John: Now we need an insert of a person grabbing the book and walking on a flaming train.

Marc: Yeah, yeah exactly. It just kept getting bigger, and you know I was always trying to just give him a little more. Cause the one thing I learned from Dean is, give your editor as many options as you can.

Albert: And this is one of my favorite shots coming up, and I think it was your idea.

Chris: Oh this is great.

Albert: When Sophie floats into view. It’s one of the highlights.

John: And it should be over the top and it’s not. It’s actually perfect. It’s-

Chris: Yeah well you- you put in the wheel sound. Got the ‘eee-eee-eee’

John: She’s being wheeled in.

Chris: We know she’s not actually floating.

John: This is, by the way, a beautiful distillation of how producers deal with scripts. The whole problem Eliot has with the script is that he’s acting like a producer here. ‘You have an effects sequence! You know what this’ll cost us!’

Marc: Even the way he grabs it out of her hands here.

[Laughter]

Marc: I just love it.

John: ‘Fine. Alright. I’ll go fine the first AD and we’ll block this out.’ This is one of my favorite scenes of the entire series.

Marc: Yeah, I really like this scene. It was- and we did it pretty simple.

John: This is our real craft service table.

Albert: I love how skimpy this craft service table is. A little orange there.

[Laughter]

John: Just for a bit. Just to give her something. Eating is always good, actors love to eat. Gives them something to do with their hands.

Chris: She likes to eat grapes.

Marc: I think this is one of my favorite lines in the movie. ‘This is- this is a movie about NATO soldiers being attacked by werewolves. There is no emotional payout’

[Laughter]

John: This is great- I don’t if we kept this, I think it got cut, but she does like a, ‘typical’. Just like the typical director bullshit.

Chris: ‘Typical.’ Yeah, I think that’s in there.

John: Yeah the genuine- the fact that it’s not all flirty, or not all sexual. That there’s a genuine friendship and he really cares about her feelings, it lands in a really nice way.

Chris: Yeah.

Marc: And it was great because the one note I had for Gina was like, this is your world - this is where you wanna be. You know as soon as you walked out of the van in the previous scene, she started looking around and so she really grabbed it.

John: And that’s also the big- the big eyes? The big girl eyes? Where she’s really excited? She doesn’t- we don’t give her that a lot. Cause she’s cunning. The thing is Sophie’s got so many emotional layers between herself and the rest of the team, that in a setting where she doesn’t have them, it’s great to see that that’s what’s underneath.

Marc: And their lines were so good you didn’t notice the snow I had going in front of that big light.

[All laugh]

Chris: Oh wow! That’s beautiful.

John: Wow, that’s beautiful! We’ll take a moment now, and-

Chris: Yeah, that looks great.

John: That is a director who is thinking about their background. I will say that right now man you- you put some depth into that shot.

Albert: This is- this is Sophie’s death scene, which is I think one of the first scenes we shot on the set. And it was one of those things where everyone came down to watch this. All the actors, even if they weren’t in the scene they came down to watch, all the writers, everyone came down and sat there

John: Most of the background photos from this episode, everyone is in it because it’s this scene, yeah.

Marc: Right.

Albert: But it was great because after Gina does this scene, and she does an amazing job with it, and after Mark called cut there was a round of applause. We all just sat there an applauded.

John: Are these the NATO guys or this- is this the flashback to the Nazis? I can never remember.

Albert: These are the NATO guys and no one ever stops to bother- wonder why NATO guys are chasing a nun.

Chris: Well I always thought that she- they thought that she had the infection of the werewolf?

Albert: That’s right - that is the backstory.

Chris: That’s how I always envisioned it.

John: That is a beautiful shot, by the way.

Marc: Yeah, thank you.

Albert: Shafts of light through the bullet holes.

John: Marc- I remember talking about how to pull that off. Like so do we-

Chris: How did you get the shafts of light through the bullet holes?

Marc: You know I don’t remember what movie, but there are so many movies that are done at night, bullets going through the door. And I even think we had some of that at the end, that originally in. Where like the garage was going to be shot up?

Albert: Yeah. we were going to try to do that.

Chris: Do you remember- how many takes was this? Do you remember?

John: Three. Two or three.

Marc: Yeah, no more than that.

John: Cause I was there that day and you got it- she banged it out first time. It was really a wonderful scene.

Marc: And we also had the XD camera pointed at her, so we can actually see what Nate is seeing on the monitor.

Albert: This- this was a really fun day. A really fun day

John: This is when you feel like you’re making a movie. This is when you feel like- when you’ve got people in costumes and dudes in soldier outfits, yeah. It really feels like you’re making a movie. ‘Oh this is great!’

Chris: [laughs] I love him going back to the character.

John: Yeah he goes back to the character after he explains.

Albert: And you got the sense that Tim was channeling, kind of, years of frustrating experiences with directors into this character and sort of paying them back somehow.

John: Yeah. There is some director out there right now who’s watching this and is like ‘son of a bitch!’

Chris: ‘Oh alright maybe I shot a gun to start a scene. It was one time!’

John: ‘One time!’

[All laugh]

John: So how did you do the door thing? I mean our actors are pretty fearless, did you just tell Gina to stand up against the door and blow up some squibs or what?

Marc: Well I said you know we’re gonna have squibs and we can do it with the stunt and then put you in. And she goes ‘well if they’re not gonna be that close I’d like to do it.’ You know, and I just checked with everybody saying, ‘is this cool, is this safe?’ and they said yeah so she went for it.

John: Where’s firearms? He’s off the set. Don’t worry about that it’s fine, she agreed to it.

Chris: Here’s another example, in typical con movies you show- kinda explain what the con is. And we really- I mean we talk a little bit about- in this one we kinda drop the audience in.

Albert: In the movie con?

Chris: Yeah. You know they steal the movie, you don’t know exactly how it’s gonna pay off.

Albert: Right, you don’t know what the goal is here, but part of the idea is kind of you’re having so much fun on the set, and you also, as we saw in the previous scene, Sophie is sort of outside of the con. She’s indulging her own personal weakness really - her desire to make a move. So she’s as much interested in making a movie as she is in pulling off the con. But then as it progresses and you figure out where this is headed, you figure out the team is trying to have Irena pull the kid into the movie.

John: It’s like the difference between an open mystery and a closed mystery. The old Columbo’s a closed mystery you know who did it and it’s just a matter of chasing them down. This is a closed episode. You’re kinda figuring it out as the bad guys would be figuring it out. And we make the choice depending on what works in each episode. Sometimes we’ll try it one way and we’ll flip it in the script in another. Because sometimes you want the audience to know exactly what’s going to happen because it’s about to get horribly complicated and you want to make sure-

Chris: This one’s pretty simple once you solve what’s going on.

John: End of day it’s to get the kid to the set. It’s not rocket science.

Albert: Exactly, right.

John: Where are we? We’re at Long Beach.

Marc: Yeah we’re in San Pedro.

John: We’re in chilly San Pedro, make sure you get the stocking caps because it’s frigid down there.

Albert: Yeah, we spent quite a bit of time at this warehouse.

Marc: Yes we did.

John: Well we shot two episodes in a row here.

Albert: Right, and then we shot Juror.

John: Yeah, the Juror Job is in the warehouse across the street, right?

Albert: Mm-hmm.

John: And this blow by the way, at the end of this episode was magnificent. It was so big. I was actually in the parking lot because they wouldn’t let us down because it was so big they closed it off.

Marc: Oh yeah?

John: I actually felt it in my car.

Marc: Yeah the heat. I couldn’t believe the heat. And you know, we’ll talk about it later, we even had our actor out in front.

Chris: This- this-

Marc: This is one of my favorite sequences because I was able to get enough coverage to really not cheat it and really feel what Parker was feeling.

Albert: I have to say when I saw that set in real life, it was so grim. The art department did such an amazing job. You walked in and got a wave of emotion.

John: Well they got photos of a Romanian orphanage, did you know that? They went online and got photos of a Romanian orphanage and recreated it on the set.

Chris: But it’s- so what was your approach here, Mark? In terms of making- cause we were having so much fun in this episode, so making sure this landed.

Marc: Yeah I just wanted- I didn’t want to make it too scary, but I just wanted to be in her shoes and use a lot of moving POV so we get the feeling. And just keep it quiet so we could really be with Parker in there.

John: Yeah.

Chris: And the lighting and the color really adds a lot of-

Marc: Yeah we just kept- most of this stuff in this episode, we graded it blue so it’s cold- so it really feels cold.

John: Well in one of the other commentaries, Dean talks about the fact that each episode is sort of color corrected on it’s own theme. And this very much feels like a European orphanage.

Marc: And even you know, our costume designer kept all the kids in gray, drab colors.

John: I suggested drugging them so they’d be more lethargic, but all of a sudden I’m the bad guy for drugging the kids and I wasn’t allowed on the set again.

[All laugh]

Albert: And we ended up dealing- about how many kids did we have again? Like 20?

Marc: 20. 20 kids.

Albert: That’s a lot.

Marc: I started with 8 but Dean said ‘you can’t have an orphanage with just 8 kids’. Okay.

John: That’s like a- a tee ball team.

Albert: That’s one of the great things about working with Dean. It’s like you sit there and think, most producers will come back to you and say ‘let’s make it a little more self contained, let’s make it a little more manageable, use less kids.’ Dean is always like ‘No, let’s blow it up; do a bigger explosion; let’s add more kids.’

John: That’s the great thing about having you know, the studio be effectively your creative partner, is that end of day, he’s going to put the quality of the show ahead of- if it’s a tie between fiduciary concerns and quality of show, quality of show is going to win. Which is not necessarily the situation a lot of other times.

Marc: Yeah and he knows where to spend it on. Which is great.

John: Yeah. Explosions are surprisingly cheap actually. They’re not that pricey. Orphans on the other hand, incredibly expensive. We wound up just going to a supermarket and just grabbing a lot of kids from the parking lot, and returning them at the end of the day before it hit the news.

[Laughter]

Marc: It’s amazing what a bag of gummy bears can do.

John: Yeah, you wanna be in a movie, here’s a bag of gummy bears, and boom. Yeah you know it’s four hours of a day, what are they doing? They’re not doing anything else. And this is also- storing the guns in hospitals and orphanages that’s true, based on a real thing that happened in the first war, during the air war.

Albert: That’s true. This is probably my favorite scene.

Chris: I think that’s something we made up, that turned out to be true.

John: No, no we knew that. We researched that. Albert was a journalist man, he brought the game on this one.

Chris: I feel like we…

Albert: This was probably my favorite scene this episode, it’s such- it was such a delicate dynamic between the two of them, and I remember talking to Beth before the scene saying that I was actually more nervous about this scene than about the explosion which we did earlier in the day, and she was the same. But the two of them together were just amazing.

John: Look at how just delicate she is there, how unraveled she is - how much she’s unraveling there.

Albert: And you never see that from Parker.

John: That kind of dead smile she does, it’s really just the performance- for her it’s the performance of the show, and really the entire season.

Chris: We watched this daily over and over again. We were working on other things and we were all gathered around it.

John: Oh yeah, we had this in the writers room and we must’ve watched it 10 times. Yup. And remember, we’re watching dailies on like a three inch screen on a computer, because we have digital dailies. We’re watching it uncut, only one direction, and we couldn’t stop watching it, it was really fantastic.

Albert: And this was late, this was late in the day.

John: Yeah, well it’s at night guys and you’re outside, duh. [Laughs]

Marc: It was a lot of work, yeah. It was tricky because there was so much noise going on, there were like party boats, and music, and the two of them really hung in there. And Dave did such a good job lighting it, I mean he-

Chris: There were party boats? Like during this incredibly emotional scene there was like ‘Whooo!!!’

John and Marc: Yeah!

John: Behind them, in one of the mixes you can hear [sings].

Albert: Yeah there was some booze cruise going by at one point.

John: That’s one of the things that makes a director really just wanna get a stinger missile and just clear the set.

Marc: Yeah.

John: Remember that chopper? When we shot the pilot? That chopper that just hovered over us that entire outside sequence.

Albert: Oh, in Chicago?

John: In Chicago we had a chopper that just hovered over us for 45 minutes. And it would go away, and we would call action, and it would come back and just circle back over us.

Albert: Was it a traffic copter or-?

John: Yeah. Oh she’s great. Look at her just dissolve when he says that, oh that’s a lovely bit of work. And then she shuts down again. Sorry, I know we have this rule where we’re not supposed to just watch the show, but damn she’s great. And he’s great too, he really grounds it there, you really find there’s a depth to him there and it’s not just a guy with a crush. You know, he’s really trying to help her there.

Chris: And we ride the line between the being flirtatious and brother/sister. There’s always a protection feeling.

John: Well it’s a distinct contrast in that, Nate and Sophie came into this with a sexual component in play. But they had not developed the emotional component, and so it goes wrong on them during the course of the season. Where the entire point was Hardison and Parker come into it from a totally business worker, coworker, and because they have to learn to trust during the course of the season, that’s how their relationship evolves.

Chris: They’re like step-siblings. [Laughs] Could go either way.

John: Step-siblings with a little bit of heat. They’re like Princess Leia and Luke.

Albert: Step-siblings with potential.

[All laugh]

John: Oh man, that’s a really horrible thing. This is great scene that should be incredibly dull, and instead is incredibly interesting

Chris: It’s really dramatically done, with the roundy round.

Marc: Yeah, we did a 360 on this.

John: And again, steadicam or track?

Marc: No, this was track.

Albert: Oh you used the circular track on this, right?

Marc: We used the circular track on this. Cause I think the actors when they first walked into it, they just saw chairs facing each other and were like ‘What? How?’-

Chris: It plays great. You have the equipment-

Marc: I said, trust me the movements gonna make it feel different and that sense of movement is gonna not make it look stale.

John: Now from a directors standpoint, you know how this is gonna cut together. So how do you decide what movement you wanted, how much coverage did you get on this?

Albert: Did you have two cameras going?

Marc: At one time we had two cameras, but they were getting in the way of each other. We had two dollies on the track and then we pulled one. Just because the one- A camera would always have to avoid the B. So you really gotta pay attention, make sure you have a good script supervisor to make sure you’re really nailing every line on camera. Getting two different sizes on everybody, and trying to keep the eyelines right.

John: Yeah. So you- did you wind up doing circular a couple times and then picking up your singles afterwards?

Marc: Yeah.

John: And then just letting Gary hunt, let Gary search for it?

Marc: Exactly. And after, Gary got a feel for the dialogue, he knew when to come off and pick to focus on the other actors.

John: Cause you pull focus a couple times too. And that’s something people don’t know, it’s that the camera operator has to know the script pretty much- better than anybody.

Marc: And god bless, Troy can just pull focus so well, he just nailed so many things.

John: Yeah, there’s a lot of ways that scene should’ve just laid there but instead it’s really dramatic and moving.

Albert: The other challenge we had in this episode was all the different languages we were playing with. We were playing with a set in Serbia, and we had Russians. We had Czechans.

Chris: Russian is sort of the default.

John: Language of crime?

Albert: Bad guys, yeah. We could’ve done that but you know someone out there would’ve complained that we weren’t being truthful.

John: Yeah, no, we got everybody. And the thing is a lot of people don’t know that there’s no central depository for language in film. We have to hunt up people every time and a lot of time-

Marc: Get translations.

John: A lot of actors pretend to be native speakers, but turn out not to be native speakers.

Marc: Well Kathleen speaks fluent Russian so that was helpful. So did David.

John: So did David. So that was great, we really got actors who knew how to speak the language.

Marc: And this is sorta different from Sophie’s, Sophie’s I wanted to be sorta inside the set during her chase, make it feel like it was part of a low budget movie. This we just stepped back and got behind the crew, cause it’s more about the con.

Chris: It’s more about the con. And we’ve sorta seen- we’ve been in the reality of the fake movie already.

Marc: And you’ll see when we track across, we’ll track behind the crew.

Chris: It’s a nice choice.

John: Well, when you’ve been doing it for 20 years.

Albert: The whole idea was that, you know, Irena’s death was supposed to be a counter balance to Sophie’s death. Which Sophie pulls it off nuanced and graceful, and she’s totally over the top and horrible.

[Laughter]

Chris: I love the helmet. Love the helmet.

Marc: Yeah, it was one of my hallmark requests. I had to have the clawed helmet.

John: We got a good 10, 17, 20 minutes of Howl Force, it needs- we really just need like 60 more.

Chris: Now is this- did we have to get a puppeteer?

John: Yes. we needed a puppeteer.

Marc: Yeah this was Pat [Bantor??], our stunt coordinator. We just show him, we don’t even have to hide him.

[Laughter]

Marc: Yeah it’s just like sock puppets and a hat.

John: Because if you have a guy with a sock puppet with a claw on it, that is free.

Chris: What vein did he get? Did he get the carotid artery? What vein did he get?

John: He got the carotid artery. If you have a wolf claw on a stick, that is a union gig, that is a puppeteer, that is an ungodly amount of money.

Albert: One of my favorite moments was when the prop people came over to you with a basket full of claws on sticks. ‘Which is the one we’re going to use here?’

[All laugh]

Marc: Yeah.

Albert: Let’s go with the long claws.

Chris: Takes you back- makes you think back to your days as a journalist, huh?. What a long strange ride it’s been that I’m looking at a basket full of claws.

Albert: Surprisingly I’ve been in news meetings that were very similar.

[Laughter]

John: This is also- I remember when this happened in the writers room cause we were trying to figure out how to end the goddamn show. We realized the trick was to basically end our regular episode in Act 4. And let Act 5 essentially be a free standing act rather than trying to combine the two. Cause remember we came in and took the card off and boom, just that one act all laid out. And then just backtracked for what we needed to set up.

Marc: I thought the woman who played the mom, Stacey Moseley, did a great job. And my buddy from college, David Castellani.

John: Oh, is that the dad? The dad that got his ass kicked?

Marc: The dad that got his ass kicked, yeah.

John: That’s lovely. You can believe that he’d want to go home with her. Everything’s going to be fine. People asked how they get him out of the country. Our guys forged the papers, plainly-

Chris: People have asked that?

John: Yeah, and it’s like do you think the Leverage team does things halfway? No. If they steal an orphan for you, you get all the providence. You get all the documents and yeah. They’re not gonna make you go buy a passport on the black market. That’s half service. And there’s them pretending to be cold in 98 degree weather.

Marc: Exactly.

Chris: Oh yeah, that’s right.

John: And yeah this is where we basically show Parker going off the reservation. And again this is one of the ones that should be seen in the second half of the show, maybe even right after Bank Shot, where you see that they’re gonna start going the extra mile for each other.

Chris: Yeah.

John: And then oh yeah, the choreography of figuring out how she got to the orphanage ahead of them and how far away it was and…

Chris: Yeah it was intricate, it was tricky

John: And that’s why the act break helps. The great thing about an act break in television structure is, it’s like the gutter in a comic book page. The audience- the brain automatically fills in details. That space, by the way, between panels is called a gutter.

Chris: Thank you, thank you very much, I appreciate that. You learn a lot from these commentaries

John: [Unintelligible] guide to understanding comics by the way, it’s a great book.

Chris: It’s the gutter; I didn’t know that. The jump, by the way, from the world of journalism, is the continued page.

John: Really? I didn’t know that.

Albert: Yeah when it says see page A18, that’s the jump.

John: So do you write around the jump?

Chris: You don’t pay any attention to where the jump is.

Albert: No [laughs]. You do pay attention to the fold, on broad sheets, whether it’s above or below the fold.

John: Oh my favorite bit. Bad translation is always amusing.

Chris: It’s always fun.

Marc: Looking in a dictionary,

John: ‘Make your tomato shiny’ and then just going out ‘okay let’s go!’ she plainly has no plan here. Parker is running utterly on instinct which is something she doesn’t do and it’s great to see her out of control. Completely working on emotion.

Chris: ‘Sadden you.’

John: ‘Men will sadden you’ yeah. There you go, ‘c’mon kids, let’s go’. The kids were great by the way, didn’t have a lame kid. One kid was kinda...

Marc: Yeah. One kid was a little problematic, but otherwise.

John: Nothing like firing a five year old.

Chris: This one you probably don’t want them to be too smiley, I’m guessing.

John: Well we told them, actually, that their parents had really died, and that really sold it.

[Laughter]

Chris: Here’s our fight.

John: ‘Oh shiny tomato’. And then there was the whole ‘we can’t do the fight scene in front of the kids’ so we had to move the fight scene outside, yeah. Beth worked hard for this, she did a great job.

Chris: She’s great.

John: That’s- again the actors really love doing this stuff. Because you know what you do in a lot of other TV shows? You carry a briefcase and talk about how the client isn’t guilty as you walk from one house to the other.

Marc: Right

John: And then the star goes and has a good scene.

Chris: And Albert great payoff to the wounding with the fork.

Albert: Yeah, the way she pushes into his shoulder.

John: Yeah a lot of people miss that, that’s actually how she gets the upper hand, is she pushes into the wound from earlier in the show.

Albert: Yeah.

John: Bang! She’s using her knees, using all the hard parts of her body. That’s actually an Israeli fighting style. ‘Okay!’ and then she comes back in and everything’s great.

Marc: ‘Let’s go! C’mon!’

Chris: Here we go, saving an orphanage.

John: No that’s actually the- god what’s it- is it Sabra? What’s the Israeli fighting style?

Chris: Krav Maga?

John: No, it’s a slightly different style, it’s a commando style. It uses all the unbreakable parts of the body that Charlie gave her. Cause that’s what she would use, she would use strike points rather than brute strength. Again, thorough- oh and what would you do with a staircase full of orphans, as the song goes.

Marc and Chris: Yeah.

Marc: We- we cast, as those three thugs, stunt guys, because later on they’re going to be quite close to an explosion. And I thought they did a pretty good job, they made it work.

John: They were appropriately thuggish. They’re men who live by violence, and hence they’re comfortable with it.

Marc: Yeah, exactly.

John: I love how- he doesn’t mention he got his ass kicked by a girl there, by the way.

Albert: The internal choreography of this was interesting too because it was one thing to write it in the script, and then you get to the location and you had to readjust it all to make use of the existing architecture there.

John: Yeah, that was you and I in that trailer outside the embassy, once we’d been to the location going ‘okay there’s no second level, there’s no staircases’, yeah.

Albert: Yeah. And then we just adjusted as it works.

Marc: Here we don’t even have to see Eliot kick somebody’s ass, you just know.

John: Yeah you just know he’s kicked an enormous number of orphan stealing, gun running asses. I wanted the door to come off the hinges but you wouldn’t do that for me. That was very selfish of you, just saying. You were too busy blowing up the place to really focus on the smaller details.

Marc: Yeah, exactly.

John: This bus is great, by the way.

Chris: Yeah, really made great use of this bus.

John: There’s the effects moment. And, by the way, she acts the hell out of that.

Chris and Marc: She does.

Chris: She reacts almost as if she’s been hit.

John: And it’s a lovely- I love the little ‘screw you’ read from Sophie, that’s very nice. With the X’s, it’s all set up.

Albert: And I don’t know if I ever noticed that the reason she throws herself against the opening is to protect the kids.

Chris and Marc: Yeah.

John: Yeah it’s one of the little, again, details of your creation. You build a character and even if you don’t consciously register it-

Marc: And you just get the little look from Nate in the rearview.

John: Boom, and that’s kind of a badass move there as Hardison walked in- walked by. That’s nice.

Albert: This thing- we were, what 100, 125 feet from this and the heatwave was unbelievable

Chris: Was it really?

Albert: Oh, it was just-

John: this is the second time we’ve set off a major explosion in the most important port in America with little or no permission.

Chris: Now what’s- this is cork? A lot of that’s-

Marc: Yeah, it’s a lot of cork,.

Albert: The debris was cork, right. But it was a gas explosion,

John and Marc: Yeah.

Marc: But we were initially gonna blow door- fake garage doors, but we just avoided them and just had the explosions go off. And here we make the villain suffer.

John: It’s like somebody does our gloat for us there. Cause usually we have a gloat moment, and it’s really the bad guy- and then we get the money come- by the way, how did you get the money to rain down from the sky? Cause in the pilot, remember when we tried to do that? It took us all day.

Marc: It’s took forever.

Chris: Did you have somebody on a ladder-?

Marc: He was a 12 step ladder, and it was, ‘more to the left, more to the right’.

John: Young directors, don’t have stuff rain out of the sky. It’s not worth the time or effort.

Marc: Yeah

John: You know, it’s one shot. Yes, this is how we explain-

Chris: That bus is perfect.

Marc: And notice that we didn’t have children so we just put curtains in the bus so you didn’t have to see them. The first line they say when they get there ‘they’re all asleep’.

Chris: Right.

John: As one would be after escaping from an orphanage and seeing an explosion, right?

[All laugh]

Chris: Sure.

John: You’d collapse in exhaustion from relief.

Chris: Strangers take you away from your orphanage, you’re going to sleep.

John: [laughs] Really? You’re going to sleep, you’re gonna take a nap. Cause you don’t know what’s coming up the next day.

Chris: Oh it works, it works.

John: It’s fine!

Albert: This was the second unit directed by Jonathan Frakes.

John: Jonathan Frakes, who was doing the next episode, was nice enough to pick this up. And that’s basically the shoe string budget that a lot of these movies are made on by the way. It is ATM based filmmaking.

Marc: This is a nice funny moment.

John: Yeah, she wants the footage. For her reel- I love the idea that Sophie’s got a reel.

Chris: Yeah

[Laughter]

John: Oh and so hurt, so betrayed. I think Tim drops it seriously here. We were saying how it started in one episode and it spread throughout all of them.

Marc: Yeah, right here. Here it is.

John: Yeah and Eliot trying to dodge responsibility. And again a nice- a second nice moment up here. It’s tricky you wanna, you know. We’re making pulp. We’re making pulp television, not even genre pulp. You want to do heart but without walking on it, and this is a great scene.

Marc: This is a really nice scene, she plays it well and so does he.

John: Pissed off is the right choice there, it’s actually kind of nice.

Marc: And how can you be mad at that?

John: Except when she misses her calls and then you want to kill her, but… and then the goofy- and that’s the thing he’s got in his acting vocabulary, he’s able to take the edge off the fact that he’s a very imposing, good looking guy.

Chris: Look and the nice ending shot that goes up, and the Haagen-Dazs.

John: Nice shot with the Haagen-Dazs.

Albert: And that’s the Stork Job.

Chris: And anything else?

John: This is where you get to say something- anything you want to say? Oh and ALbert! You- did you have a family member in this episode?

Albert: My daughter was one of the orphans, she was in the red overalls if you wanna go back and check.

John: And by the way we kept saying should we have a Korean orphan,

Albert: There are actually a very large number of Asian orphans in Serbia, they were- we didn’t get into the facts behind it, but it’s factually accurate.

Marc and Chris: Factually accurate.

John: Nothing like using your own daughter to further your career, nicely done. [Laughs]

#Leverage #Leverage TNT #Leverage Audio Commentary Transcripts #Audio Commentary #Transcripts #Parker #Alec Hardison #Elliot Spencer #Nate Ford #Sophie Deveraux #Season 1 #Episode 9 #Season 1 Episode 9 #The Stork Job

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cometeclipsewriting · 6 years ago

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Strowlers

Season 1: Episode 1

Chapter 2

AO3 Link

Summary: In a world where magic is both real and illegal, a librarian tries to help protect a young girl discovering her powers, while her girlfriend makes a device that helps to find unregistered magic users.

Full video episode can be found for free here!

“I was hoping that if they arrested me, they wouldn’t take Omar.” Whit shook her head. “I was wrong.” She lifted the cup she had been given, staring at the blue enameled metal. She huddled into her blanket, the air not cold enough to cause the frission that skittered down her back. But slow anger still burned in her core.

“At least I’m not part of the problem,” she looked around the ragtag huddle, her lips pressed into a flat line that only the most optimistic of souls would call a smile.

Night held them tightly, full dark. She had looked for them. Well, for people like them, for hours. And it was late, far later than she knew. But this was crucial. Across the jumping lights of the trashcan fire, a man slipped in, “You mean the Archanologists.” It wasn’t a question.

“Magic should be freed!” Whit pushed out. “Not collared and licensed.” She disagreed with Amanda on this subject on a fundamental level, and it had caused fights in the past; so they didn’t ever talk about it. Something she was bitterly regretting now. If she had known the research happening right under her nose, she would have searched for these people much sooner. Danger was coming to them. Coming to so many.

“What do you know,” a man asked, “about archanology?” His tone flowed, a poet speaking verse. Compelling, thoughtful, words full of meaning to discover.

Whit took a drink of her tea, shaking her head at the question, “Only what Amanda tells me... and what I read between the lines.”

***

“Thank you for seeing me on short notice.” Amanda spoke respectfully to the Preceptor, stepping up to stand beside him. She belonged among them. Her navy blue peacoat and professional slacks a clean symmetry to the two men’s A.R.C. suits. Like them, her hair was cut short and kept neat, the red-blonde parted and smoothed down. No spontaneity or ornamentation. The only true difference her lack of Focus scars gracing her temples.

“You circumnavigated four levels of bureaucracy in order to reach me directly, Professor.” He didn’t look at her once, keeping his concentration and magic trained on the man strapped to the chair in the adjoining room. Recruit 291’s eyes darted erratically around the vision his released magic still weaved. “You have my attention.”

Amanda took one small breath, trying to match his level of dispassion. Emotions would only hinder her here. “As you may know, um,” she glanced away from the proceedings in the other room, “my research to date has been focused on how and when children’s powers manifest.”

The technician slipped on a pair of heavy sunglasses, flashing her own scars, crossed to the large bank of buttons and dials, and started the process. A flat tone filled the air and surrounding area, and the machine started up.

The two spheres on either side of Recruit 291’s head immediately produced a bright white light, electric sparks traveling to each other, penetrating his temples. It coursed through him, sending his body to vibrate, jerking uncontrollably. Through the glass, Amanda could swear she felt the prickle on her own skin; to have it touch you directly… Despite his previous compliance, the young man tried to escape now. The restraints kept him in place as the electric crackle altered him forever.

“Unfocused talent can cause extraordinary damage.” Amanda couldn’t help but watch, her heart rate erratic, her palms starting to sweat. The Preceptor flexed his hand, testing what magic was still unrestrained but remained as cool as ever. As if he were just observing a lecture. “Especially when conducted through the unfocused and undeveloped mind of a child.” Her voice quavered, broke just a little, but she tried to keep her fear away. This horrible looking procedure was just a natural part of being a member of A.R.C.

“Your point, Professor.” He dropped his hand, but still watched carefully. Recruit 291’s eyes rolled back, the mouthguard preventing him from biting his tongue.

“What if we could detect talent in an individual before it manifests?” Amanda’s passion for her project collected her and the importance of her work beat over her fear. “I think my prototype solves that problem.”

In the other room, the machine powered down gradually, the electricity dying away. Recruit 291’s chest rose as he took deep, steady breaths, body easing into the chair. He blinked out at Amanda, his new scars raised white against an ashy black powder that had appeared on his skin. He waited patiently for the technician to come over and remove the mouthguard. He didn’t smack his lips or shift around in discomfort. He gave no indication of the stress his body had just been put through. He sat with an unnatural stillness, blinking, waiting.

“What do you feel.” The operator asked, but there was no inflection to the question. It was flat, monotone.

“I don’t feel.” He said, staring straight at Amanda. She swallowed. Hard. And the rhythmic blue flash of her collar reflected in the glass.

Director Rodrigo leaned over and hit the speaker, projecting his voice into the operating room. “Test him. If he retains his powers, he can apply for a job with A.R.C. If they have gone down too low… send him to corporate loan outs,” he instructed dismissively.

He turned around and looked at Amanda. “Does it work?”

The sudden shift back to her threw her for a moment. “My prototype?” She lifted her chin confidently. “Yes.”

“You know that makes it a level seven restricted technology.” He shifted his head just slightly, studying her closely. Was there a hint of sentiment in his voice? But his eyes showed absolutely none.

“Technically, yes.” One of the reasons she had kept it secret from everyone. Including Whit.

“And that your clearance level as an academic doesn’t begin to give you the authority-“

“But it works.” She interrupted, sure of her discovery and the sheer importance of the implications. She had to make them understand how it could revolutionize the process. How it could save so many lives. With a slight pause to bring her tone back down to the moderate tone A.R.C. members should always use, she continued, “And the regional council has the authority to grant a research waver.” And these two men were members of that council.

He looked at her, but Amanda couldn’t discern a hint of what he was thinking. The emotion she thought she had detected earlier gone entirely.

The low buzz of her phone filled the pregnant silence. Amanda looked away, just suppressing the grunt of aggravation from escaping. Why hadn’t she turned her phone off?

The Preceptor looked over his shoulder. “Take your call Professor, and we will discuss your request.”

She looked down, turning away and pulling her phone out of her pocket. Shit. This was not how she had hoped this meeting would go. She answered the call professionally, at least. “This is Amanda.”

***

“Amanda!” Whit cried with relief into the phone in one of the enclosed offices of the library. “I’ve been arrested! Or, I don’t know, I’m being detained.” In the desk across from her the cop watched her closely, as if she would burst into fire or start shooting magic bullets out of her mouth. A man with an at-ready rifle patrolled out in the main entrance of the library. And the creepy A.R.C. guy just watched her, too intent, his eyes still just a bit too wide. She really didn’t like him. He was like a predator, just waiting for her to run.

“No, something really crazy just happened at the library, and now these A.R.C. dudes think I’ve got The Power.” She made sure to add as much drama and sarcasm into her voice and had the pleasure in watching the cop role his eyes and explode out of his chair in a huff. “I know! I told them it’s ridiculous but- Hey!” He yanked the phone from her hand.

“Amanda Darrow?” He barked, pushing his authority.

“No, that’s impossible.” Amanda shook her head at what she was being told. Whit couldn’t have been responsible for the code 37. She had dreaded that the magical anomaly had been at Whit’s library, and it didn’t truly surprise her that Whit was somehow wrapped up in the fringes of it. But Whit couldn’t be the one who had caused a magical spike. “How- How did it happen?” How was she going to get her out of this?

The Archanologists had been speaking quietly behind her, but her tone must have pulled them from their official business. “Is there a problem?” Director Rodrigo asked.

Amanda took a little breath, turning to speak to him. You couldn’t just ignore a question asked to you by one of the head members of A.R.C. “Your agency is holding my… roommate for triggering an unlicensed manifestation.”

Love. She couldn’t tell them the truth of their relationship. Amanda loved Whit, a strong and powerful emotion. And emotions were anathema to Archanology. Emotions led to human mistakes and errors. The larger and stronger the emotions, the greater and more destructive the mistake. As she well knew. Not just from all the horror stories she heard in the news. Oh, no. She had her own personal well of horror to know that her love for Whit was not the wisest thing she had ever done.

“Did she?” Director Rodrigo prompted.

“Not a chance. She’s failed every test that we offer.” And more than a few of them several times. Whit really had hoped that they were just mistakes, and she had at least some small hidden talent that had not manifested for some reason. Amanda had explained many times that magic developed in childhood, but Whit still hoped.

“Give me the phone.” The Director held out his hand.

Really? Reluctantly, Amanda passed it to him, worried about what he would do. He had the authority to order just about anything.

“This is Field Director Lucas Rodrigo. Who am I speaking to?”

“A-agent Timothy Marks, sir.” Whit saw the swift shift from angry man-in-charge to the cowed underling taking orders from someone much more powerful than he was. She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back in her chair. She was confident her girlfriend would come through for her.

She glanced at the weird dude again. He was still staring, now tilting his head, Whit a specimen to study. She felt her face twist and she quickly turned away. He had shaved the sides of his head very short, proudly exposing his scars. A true fanatic who couldn’t feel anything, just like all the ones who had those marks of utter devotion to A.R.C. She shifted her shoulder; she swore she could still feel his eyes on her.

“A... Sir.” The cop sank down into the chair again, deflated. “Yes, sir. Understood. Sir.” Obviously reminded once again that while officially the police were supposedly above anyone’s authority, it was really A.R.C. who ran things. He put the phone down and sighed, unhappy. He rolled the words around in his mouth before reluctantly telling her. “You’re free to go.”

Whit smirked. Awesome. She took a moment, savoring this chance. “Where’s my book.” The two men looked at each other. “The one I was reading to the children? It’s mine.” She again made sure to interject some boldness into the words. Her sass might not do much, but you had to do something to fight against them.

The creepy Enforcer gave a quick little nod, and the cop pulled out her book, tossing it onto the desk. Whit slapped her hand down on it, a patently false smile just for him. And a very repulsed one raking up and down the A.R.C. man as she spun in her chair.

She left the office, quickly walking to her things. Pepper, who had been watching the whole charade, followed quickly. “Whit!” She called quietly, obviously just as aware of the armed men still patrolling the library. What did they want? Another little boy to collar and haul away?

“Are you alright, honey?” Pepper stopped outside the desk cubicle, not putting her back to any of the intruders to their library. The front door was shut and locked, although the man with a rifle and SWAT gear planted in front of the doors was a bigger hindrance than either of those things.

“Fine,” Whit said shortly, the little trembling of her fingers giving her away, but she hid it by getting her backpack out. Perhaps she was more shaken up than she wanted to be, then she even wanted to admit to herself, but she needed to keep it hidden. This was one of those things that no one else ever needed to know. A weakness that someone could use to hurt her. So she instead carefully slid her fairytales into relative safety of cloth and zippers. It wouldn’t do much, but it made her feel better and eased a little of her quivering.

Pepper gently slid Whit’s yellow beanie across the surface of the desk, “Here you go. I was able to pick it up after they left the upstairs.”

“Thank you,” Whit said quietly. Truthfully, she hadn’t even been aware that she was no longer wearing it. It must have fallen off when she had protested them picking up the unconscious Omar. Where had they taken him if most of their team was still here? “Did they let the other kids out safely?”

Pepper nodded solemnly, concern creating a furrow between her eyebrows, but she kept her eyes trained on the men still occupying the office. “Once they checked all the other children for magical talent, they hurried them out of the library.”

Whit sighed and sank into the chair. “And Omar’s family? Will they be told?”

Pepper’s frown deepened, and she shook her head slightly. “They will be told something, but I don’t know if it will be the truth.” She glanced back to Whit, a strange glint in her blue eyes. “I will make sure that they get the unaltered story, though.”

Whit blinked up at the small woman, confused. If Whit didn’t know any better, she would have thought the sweet librarian… dangerous. Something Whit had never even considered. But then Pepper looked solemn and concerned once more, and Whit dismissed the thought. The stress of the circumstance was getting to her imagination.

Abruptly, the Enforcer and the cop left the office, their goon squad falling into step around them. Whit slowly swiveled her chair, carefully watching them as they swept towards the door. The cop, obviously still pissed and holding a grudge, didn’t look their way as he passed. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said of the other one. Another studying stare from his fish eyes, and then they vanished out of the library. Forever, with any luck.

Both women let out deep sighs, relaxing. Pepper crossed to the doors and locked them once again, turning the cheery sign saying they were closed for the day. Maybe they should make one that was a little less happy, for days like this one. “Why don’t you take some time and head out for today, sugar.” Pepper said compassionately. “You have been through enough.”

Grateful, Whit snagged the strap of her bag. “Thanks, Pepper. You’re the best.” She asked before she made her way to the bathroom, “Are you sure you don’t need help with something?”

Pepper smiled slightly and shook her head, “No, I-“ She stopped abruptly, staring at something. Something that a shock.

Whit frowned and looked. The wall of magazines. With that look, she had expected another A.R.C. dude, or something, but no one was there. “Pepper?” Whit asked slowly.

The librarian slowly shook her head, “Sorry, sugar. Don’t worry about it.” She forced a smile. “I suppose I am more shook up by this than I thought. Go on,” she made little shooing motions with her hands, and so she went.

But why did Pepper look more scared just now than she had the entire time earlier?

#strowlers #fiction #fantasy #magic #modern day #seattle #f/f

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shitloadsofwrestling · 6 years ago

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Shitloads Of Wrestling Interview: Jamin Olivencia [May 30th, 2018]

For several years, someone who I’ve considered one of wrestling’s best kept secrets has been constantly improving over the last decade in the greater Louisville area. Jamin Olivencia is a 13 year pro whose matches are impossible to follow, with an unbridled intensity and next level commitment to his craft. I got a chance to slow Jamin down just for a moment for this quick but informal video about his career...

SOW: Jamin Olivencia, a wrestler I've known since before your first match at OVW! Through the years, you've had a lot of evolutions, from tag teams to having an entourage to being one of the most intense warriors anyone could take on. Through it all, would you say there's a point in your career that you were at your personal peak? Maybe a time where you thought you were at your absolute best?

JAMIN: I feel during my time as OVW Champion (my first run) was where I was at my best. I was training 6 days a week, wrestling 5 days a week and never stopped bettering myself. It was important to me that I was on my game.

SOW: In 2009, The Jamin Olivencia Show was probably my favorite thing in professional wrestling. You as the condescending show host doing something that I hadn't seen anybody doing prior, which was treating a talk show segment as if it were an actual talk show, complete with a producer, director, and cue cards for the audience. How did that idea come to fruition, and is it just me, or did Abraham Washington's version seem a little familiar?

JAMIN: This idea came as a joke between me and my good friend Paredyse. We would come up with ridiculous ways to make people laugh and The Jamin Olivencia Show was a joke that ran out of control. I sent my work to WWE thinking it would be a great concept for me. Later, a WWE employee later revealed to me that The Abraham Washington Show was stolen from me, even the same exact lines I used. I was told that they didn't see me as the "right" fit for that type of character. HA!

SOW: In 2011 when you returned to OVW, I think that time period had some of my favorite matches I've seen you do. You had a newfound intensity where I think the most popular version of Jamin Olivencia was smashing fools left and right. What was your favorite match from that time period?

JAMIN: Looking back it's hard to pin point exactly what was my favorite match, but I recall having memorable moments with guys like Rudy Switchblade, Ali [Vaez], and Doug Williams. They were the way showers of me seeing my own intensity and potential.

SOW: I've always been genuinely puzzled as to why you've had trouble breaking through that glass ceiling. You have a very unique look, your work in the ring is incomparable to others, and you've got an amazing charisma. Why is that with all of that going for you, no one has yet to pull the trigger?

JAMIN: I haven't broke through the glass ceiling mainly because of me. As my career progressed, I started to fall in love with other art forms outside of wrestling. I started to fall in love with my daughter more as she was starting to have conversations with me. There were an accumulation of things I experienced that turned me off from the business. To this day I always have an open door anywhere to perform and I am grateful for that. But I think my need to impact the world started to expand more than my ego in wrestling. It was tough to make those decisions at first. But now I am finding myself with even more opportunities. I still wrestle. It just has to be on my time. I recently even entertained the idea of possibly performing for the new OVW which is coming soon..

SOW: When you reflect on your career, what would you say was your proudest moment? Not necessarily your best match, but a moment in your career where you felt like you got the exact response you wanted, for example.

JAMIN: I think you were there. When I wrestled Bo Dallas in a dark match in Nashville. The audience got behind me, and when I walked through the curtain after the match, all these vets that worked backstage complimented me. JBL in particular told me he never saw anyone, in all of his years being there get the audience behind them in a comeback like I did. His fascination with me he said, was the fact that no one knew me and that I still created a true emotional connection with the audience that night. Hearing all the feedback, my peers telling me how good I did with my facials, movements, and the way I presented myself. That, made me feel great. I felt like I "made it" that night.

[Side note... I was there!]

SOW: Your recent path of positivity has been extremely interesting. You seem to be a man of many talents, but I'm curious to know what the ultimate goal for your current movement is.

JAMIN: Thanks for the compliment! During my wrestling career I found myself having other strong suits. Going to schools and holding deep discussions with kids. Not "motivational" speaking but actually holding and sharing deep conversations with kids that allow them to see their own bullshit. I have found that after going to several schools around the country, schools were calling me back and expressing how much the kids enjoyed having me. I never entertained the idea that I could be a positive force in the world on this type of platform but as the years moved along I am finding myself having a deeper purpose to help others change their perspective in a way that's beneficial to them. To not seek the answers outside of themselves and look at their own shit with more honesty. My poetry was something I did for fun and that has turned into more also. So now I am finding myself getting more attention outside of the wrestling world, which is fun and scary because all I ever known was wrestling. Now I can say I know myself. I want to give the world more of me. Not just in speaking, but in wrestling, in life.

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SOW: Do you have any upcoming events that fans should keep an eye out for?

JAMIN: Schools out for the summer and I have been training to get in the ring again, I am getting that itch.

#jamin olivencia #pro wrestling #ovw #wwe #2010s #2018 #sow interview

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cecilleeeee-blog · 6 years ago

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Should you leave work? Yes, says Alex Wadleton

By Alex Wadelton, originally published on http://www.campaignbrief.com/2016/09/alex-wadelton-why-you-should-l.html

In a lot of big agencies, there seems to be almost a competition to see who can stay the latest at work, who can work the most weekends, and who can be at their desk working earliest every morning. Some of it has to do with the fact that everyone is overworked, but a lot of it has to do with trying to give the appearance of being a hard worker. Does it make the quality of work better? I'd say no. Mostly it makes people resentful of the fact that they are just at work, stuck inside on a sunny weekend while all their non-advertising friends are out and about. So, let me tell you a story about why you should leave the office as often as professionally possible. A few years ago, I was wandering around an exhibition with my young son. The details are a bit hazy- it might have been Scienceworks, it may have been ACMI... but there is was one thing that is crystal clear in my mind's eye. Hidden, almost Zoltar-like in a dark corner of this exhibition, were a couple of grotesque photographs of a mental asylum patient being tested upon in the 1860s by a French scientist with the incredible handle of Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne (de Boulogne). What the bloody hell was he up to?

In short, he was applying electrodes to people's faces to try and recreate the six basic human emotions of anger, happiness, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise. Some of them worked, others were bizarrely contorted, but all were impossible to look away from. And it got me thinking. Why wasn't there more study on this area? What was it all about? And how quickly could I shoo my son away from looking at a lunatic electrocuting people in the name of science? I went home and read up about him, and it's fair to say if he'd tried to do it now, he'd be locked up in an insane asylum himself. Duchenne was intrigued to try and understand the physiology of the human face and how it works. From there it's only a hop, skip, and a jump in logic to progress straight to feeding electrical currents into the facial muscles of lunatic asylum inmates just to see what happens. Shits and giggles and all that. But in the 19th century, there were no laws to protect against such barbaric pseudo-scientific study. And that was that. Just another useless piece of information to be stored in my brain never to be thought about again, swimming around with all the pointless sport stats I know, the encyclopaedic knowledge of drum n bass that hardly anyone else apart from me cares about (big ups to Etherwood!), and all of the horrendous dad jokes that cause nothing but groans from all and sundry. Or so I thought. Because last year whilst I was working at McCann Melbourne a brief for the Melbourne International Film Festival from Danish Chan lobbed on the desk of my then art director partner Andy Jones and me. It was all about the emotions that you feel at the festival. How no matter what language you speak, we all share the same feelings. They wanted a cinema ad, and a poster. Sure, we could do that, no problem! Or we could go three and half million steps further and construct an archaic movie chair contraption that replicated what Duchenne was doing 150 years earlier by applying electrodes to people's faces to stimulate their facial muscles in order to re-enact the emotions you felt whilst watching all the films that were playing at the 65th anniversary of MIFF. No, really. Getting a client to agree to this frankly insane idea was no small feat, for which Caroline Macmillan deserves an inordinate amount of praise. Lauren Zoric at MIFF supported the idea from Day One, shepherding it through with élan. Idea, somehow miraculously approved, we then had to figure out the small task it if was, you know, even possible. That's where Australia's own SEO mad pseudo-scientist for the 21st century, Steven Nicholson from Airbag stepped in to frame. He and his team, supported by Robert Stock, Eliza D'Souza, and the inimitable Adrian Bosich were able to pull several hundred cats out of a bag along the way to make it happen. Back at Rancho McCann Victoria Conners, Patrick Jennings, and Afrim Mehmed produced the bejesus out of the idea with the support of Adrian Mills and Pat Baron. The best bit about working in this industry is getting to do crazy stuff that makes it sound like you are more interesting than you are when someone delivers your eulogy.

So, when at the Festival launch at Melbourne's iconic Forum, the person tasked with being the test subject for The Emotion Simulator freaked out at the size of the 800-person strong crowd (and the fact that they were going to have electrodes placed all over their face, whatevs) there was only one idiot willing to step into the breach. Being on stage as Steve manipulated my face for ten minutes is the most surreal experience of my life. Plus, I'm sure it was a bit of payback for Steve to inflict a modicum of pain on me for all the pain I'd caused him. And it just goes to prove, once again, that it's important to have a life outside of work. To be curious. To know a little bit about a lot of things. Because you never know what you'll see in life that you can bring back to work. So, go home on time. Don't work on the weekend. Turn your computer off. Put that phone away. Wander about with your mind open. You'll not only enjoy your life more; you just might get to electrocute people for fun.

The Melbourne International Film Festival Emotional Trailer just secured 1 Gold, 2 Silver, and 5 Bronze at Spikes, to go with Gold, Silver, and Bronze at Cannes, a Grand Prix, two Gold, two Silver, and four Bronze at AdFest, a WARC Prize for Innovation, and an Effie. You can watch it here.

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#alex #wadleton #leave work #work #work life balance #jfizzdabaddest

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peachybeancinema · 3 years ago

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Week 1

Exercise

1 film that’s stayed with me and remembered. The Secret Garden, 1993, dir. Agnieszka Holland.

Cinematography wide shots and beautiful establishing shots, opening shot is a lone girl that can’t clothe herself, left in dead centre with lots of space around her, the closeups of hands feels very innocent and intricate- they feel like a soft, innocent female gaze.

Lighting contrast between the stale dark inside and the light garden

Editing not noticed so much

The script, partly cheesy cause it’s about children trying/forced to grow up too fast, and a period like flick

Production design, old timey and frilly, but oh boy their green set designer went OFF 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Tone, lonely and hollow to a slow burn hope

Theme….

theme? Did it speak to me? Yes, the absence of parents- chosen to or not, running around finding wonder, kindness and strength in a garden

How did I feel? Loved and seen- a lost and lonely child that internally begs for love but has an inability to regulate her emotions- Collin too!

What kind of film would I like to be a part of HORROR or like something that can incite hope and make all types of children feel seen

EXERCISE 2

Director that inspires me: Gia Coppola

Resource on their process: ‘everything was trying to reach out to as many people as I could.’ Many of them stayed at Coppola’s mother’s house during filming. “I would drive them home after work and we’d all have dinner,” Coppola says, “It was like camp. I loved it.”

https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2014/05/09/gia-coppola-talks-directing-james-francos-palo-alto-and-the-pressures-of-her-last-name-qa/%3foutputType=amp

https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.vogue.com/article/gia-coppola-palo-alto-personal-style-and-james-franco/amp

Notes on script:

Does the camera show that she’s dead?

When do we learn that she’s dead- same time as him or before?

Rewrite in program with proper formatting

Week 3…

I was able to get together with a crew member and get the new draft of the script done. I have a bit of trouble understanding sometimes how to properly structure a script after coming from a book writing background, so I was really thankful that she was able to help me understand even better. The feedback from previous classes has centred around its general ‘look’ as a script and whether the viewer is in on knowing that Alexis is dead, and from the strat I’ve wanted the audience to know to further their distaste towards Ross, otherwise the audience could say ‘well hey I missed it, I get why he did’. Her choking will take place on camera, close up, so we can watch her leave us.

Week 4…

Getting ready for the pitch has been a huge mental struggle for me, but I keep holding onto the idea of actually making this film and that definitely gets me into our team meetings on the days it feels impossible. I’m already so happy with the crew and their thoughts and contributions, but it doesn’t kill my anxiety of presenting. I feel like the script is at a good point based on feedback, so when we presented and the main concern was finding a production designer, I felt immediate relief… okay we can tackle that. There is a pressure I’ve found quite uncomfortable so far in my journey in this class, and it’s even after filling the crew roles, a certain student not even in this class has become quite intense in getting involved as camera operator despite that role being VERY explicitly filled. I plan on keeping polite but firm, but god why should I have to?

Week 5…

So… despite the previous week's tiny rant of someone trying to vulture a filled role, our original DOP is now the 1st AD and someone else within our crew has taken on DOP, a choice we were actually all really content with. A search for a production designer continues, but we have to focus on scouting our potential Ross and Alexis. Unfortunately none from the team- including myself, could make it to crewing night, however, another student pitched on our behalf. The main goal is to obviously fill the production designer role, so fingers are crossed in the meantime. There was no class this week so I definitely spent the week taking care of myself and finishing off my slides for the pitch for next week, and I’m pretty happy with my slides and that most in the crew have stuck to the same aesthetic through the slides (minus points for memes).

Week 6…

Pitch week, so I’m ill with anxiety for it, but nonetheless, meds taken, train caught and standing before the panel. After the comments from the panel on how it very obviously pulls away from the serious nature of content, I was pretty bummed I didn’t just quickly delete people’s memes before the pitch. Overall I felt pretty good about how it went, but that’s only because that’s how my crew told me to feel about it. My anxiety was so bad while presenting, that I blacked out. In moments of intense anxiety I will disassociate entirely, I know I spoke, but I know nothing that I said or that was said to me. This is an incredibly frustrating process for me, especially because I have had to rely on my crews memories on the pitch, which definitely doesn’t feel fair. They assure me we are on the right path, and just that we should get a move on with casting. Still no production designer.

Week 7…

Mental health and substance abuse are taking a bad turn this week and it is affecting how easily it is for me to communicate effectively with my crew. I won’t be able to open messages or even show I’m online out of fear of disappointing and giving wrong/no answers. I feel entirely overwhelmed and I can feel myself falling behind. There’s still no production designer and at this point I’m willing to do it because I fear it’ll turn into a shit show anyway. I have been experiencing the worst internet from home and it’s been making getting anything done when I’m finally mentally available, impossible. I’m tired and as much as I love this script, I just want this trimester over.

Week 8…

This week for The Silent Treatment, we’ve been taking a look at Producer Sina’s Starnow casting calls for both roles, as well as looking at AirBnB’s for possible locations, which has lead to playful but extenuating bickering on the dop and producers part over ‘apartment or house’, which honestly, it’s quite easy reigning them in when they get a little too passionate. But I’ve actually found their bickering and passionate opinions on options for the film and helping restore my own fight for this film too. We have a few meetings coming up over our discord and we’ve been polishing up our previous presentation slowly.

Week 9…

We’re cutting down through our pickings for actors as well as getting excited over the possibility of taking James Lewis on as production designer. He actually appears to listen and understand quite well and he’s always writing notes in his book for props and decor. I’ve shared my ideas and I’m hoping he can fulfil my needs. This week was a really difficult one for me mentally (big shock and huge surprise) so I’ve actually been trying to make a plan to stay well and that’s by putting together a rehab stay, a huge and terrifying step I’m still not sure I’m going to actually take.

Week 10…

I’ve lost all of myself and my motivation this week. A rehab stay is officially scheduled and I’m afraid and trying so hard to reignite my passion for film and my own words and stories, but I don’t think it is worth it. I know I’ll look back in a week to a few weeks and struggle to understand why I hated my work so much, but I think when you hate you, everything you touch looks disgusting. I’ve been incredibly fortunate for my friends- some on my crew- and I’m INCREDIBLY fortunate for the crew members that don’t really know me from a bar of soap being exceptionally soft and kind with me during my low period. Knowing my team are such lovely people is actually a much better reason to get off my ass and do this- for them- not for me and my silly story…

Week 11…

We finally have short listed actors AND location and now we have those last auditions to wade through. Internally I definitely have decided on my location and actress, but for the male actor I’m not so sure yet. One guy auditioned and while he played it quite well, it was his in between chats that had me slightly off, as he kept feeling the need to drill in that he isn’t ‘this guy’, which of you arent, you don’t feel the need to tell everyone, which is why I’m keen to give another actor a whirl and see where to go from there. My fashion designer friend is still keen to make the scrubs and we’ve all worked out a decent pay for her services- I love bringing friends from other art disciplines into my films, eg placing crazy art from my painter friend, decorating the sets with my friends published books and even my nursing friend belinda wants to give me a bunch of medical supplies to set dress!

Week 12...

Big pitch next week and I’m terrified- how can I actually feel so prepared but terrified. The last male actor to audition BLEW me away and I felt a real chemistry when talking to him between the breaks which means I’m really looking forward to directions BOTH actors, as they’re super lovely and open and very relaxed to speak with! Location is LOCKED and I couldn’t be happier with the pick made! We just keep polishing away at the presentation, and yes, the memes are still coming out of the woodworks...

Week 13…

I'm not angry over the pitch, but I wouldn’t say I left happy… some of the ‘criticisms’ felt so empty and UTTERLY devoid of actual meaning. I mean, and I’m sorry, but this script was the same script written 1 year ago. No changes were made because I didn’t receive criticism through these weeks to do so- sure structure of the actual script itself changed but the scene where he imposes himself in her space was ALWAYS there, and I know the lecturers can have a lot to remember, but DO NOT ever say ‘this part wasn’t always here’ and ‘no I think we would’ve noticed’ had me boiling. It’s important to not talk with so much confidence in these kinds of times, as we all can forget things, but to stand and tell someone what they wrote and didn’t write in front of a crowd of people in higher positions than them, that’s insulting. I’m happy to take the criticisms about that ‘rape implication’ exert VERY easily, but it could have been addressed in week 1. I also do believe that younger lecturers NEED to be in these pitches, as it is a crowd of older people and senses of humour and film are changing and that should be fairly judged by a RANGE of ages.

APA REFERENCING

Gia Coppola talks directing James Franco’s “Palo Alto” and the pressures of her last name (Q&A). (n.d.). Washington Post. Retrieved June 25, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2014/05/09/gia-coppola-talks-directing-james-francos-palo-alto-and-the-pressures-of-her-last-name-qa/

Nast, C. (2014, April 4). Gia Coppola On Palo Alto, Personal Style, and James Franco. Vogue. https://www.vogue.com/article/gia-coppola-palo-alto-personal-style-and-james-franco--

#212

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dadvans · 8 years ago

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episode two :: Yuri realizes, suddenly and terribly, he might be a little bit in love.

Victor doesn’t even try to go to sleep. He just lays in bed with his laptop, watching the thirty-seven takes of Yuuri trying to get “hi, I’m Yuuri Katsuki, and I’m the Bachelor” out of his mouth.

“Don’t they know who I am?” Yuuri slurs on screen.

“Yuuri, you have to put the champagne bottle down, you have to pretend to be sober,” Phichit says off camera, all authority gone from his voice. He’s trying not to laugh.

“Phichit,” Yuuri says, and he takes a big swig from the bottle, bubbles pouring down both sides of his lips. “You can’t tell me what to do. I’m Yuuri Katsuki, and I’m the motherfucking Bachelor.”

Victor pushes past the canvas tarp of the production tent only to be greeted with quiet. A dozen or so of the production staff are mingling in hushed tones, all showing varying degrees of hangover. Mila is wearing sunglasses, despite the only light in the tent coming from several dimmed monitors, and Cao Bin is holding two greasy brown bags that smell a lot like McDonald’s breakfast, and not at all like the untouched table of fresh fruit laid outside by craft services. Everyone smells like stale alcohol and sweat, wearing layers on layers to mask two hours sleep with no shower despite the early morning summer heat of Los Angeles .

“Where’s Sara?” he asks, looking around.

“Puking,” Mila says. Her voice sounds like gravel, and she takes a long, long sip of iced water.

“Well, at least she’s here,” Victor says. He’s mildly impressed and a little proud that no one called in or was arrested after last night. “Could someone go get her? Emergency producers meeting.”

Mila salutes him and ambles off to go find Sara. Victor goes over to the production grid on the far side of the tent and starts pulling down all the cards--cards that indicate villain plots, tearful confessions, potential rivalries, coordinated confrontations, a projected final two--only to rip them up and throw them on the floor.

“Thanks to Mr. Chulanont’s carefully planned deceit of his best friend, we have been served a curveball for a Bachelor this season,” he says, letting the scraps of cardstock flutter down past his Prada wingtips.

Phichit tries to call out, his tone both miserable and apologetic. “Victor--”

“I’m not mad,” Victor says, cutting him off. “I’m excited. We need to take last night into account moving forward, because Yuuri Katsuki doesn’t fit into any standard formula. We need new characters. We need unpredictable stories and unpredictable villains. We need fresh chemistry. I’ve had today’s entire schedule pushed back three hours so Yuuri doesn’t come back to set still drunk and we have a solid plan moving forward.”

(Yuri Plisetsky, 21, Team USA Gymnast)

Phichit pins a card to the board’s Week One column that says “YURI P. - VILLAIN” in thick, purple marker, and Victor puts a pleased finger to his lips to hide his smile.

“No way,” Mila says. “No one is going to buy him as the villain.”

“If we’re thinking outside the box, then there doesn’t have to be just one villain,” Phichit replies. His is the only card on the board. “And also, I think it’ll be a lot easier than you think. Yuri’s PR team approached us to help with his image.”

“What?” Half the room sits up a little straighter, leans forward, drop their pens.

“That’s not public information,” Victor says, staring at Phichit curiously; he always plays his cards closer to his chest more than Victor would normally like, but it’s only because he’s working three steps ahead of everyone else. Phichit gets off on the element of surprise as much as Victor, and maybe that’s why Victor trusts him so much. “How did you know?”

Phichit digs his phone out of his pocket, tap tap taps a few times at the screen, and turns it around to show the rest of the room the still of a grainy film. “Anyone who knows where to look can figure it out. Yuri Plisetsky may be America’s Golden Boy after the medals he earned us in the last Olympics, but only because his team was working overtime to keep content like this off of mainstream news outlets and social media websites.”

He presses play.

The video is poor quality, probably taken on an older model of phone, and it features someone who looks and sounds exactly like Yuri Plisetsky screaming at a Burger King employee.

“How did he make it past the psych eval?” Cao Bin asks quietly after the video ends. “He tried to whip that kid in the face with a gold medal. Does he usually wear that everywhere?”

“There are dozens of videos like this, and they aren’t impossible to find,” Phichit says. “It’s not a matter of if they come to the public’s attention, but when. But let’s say he gets onto a reality program that is watched by a few million in prime time that shows him as sensitive, caring, deeply passionate-- his team gets to say in the wake of those videos going viral, ‘oh, that was when he was young. He’s grown up since then.’”

“So, you’re saying let’s exploit and manipulate his anger issues and possibly destroy his life?” Morooka asks, incredulous.

“Nobody here is a saint,” Phichit replies. “I’m certainly not.”

“God help us all if we get on your bad side, Phichit,” Mila says, and she writes something down in her notepad and takes another drink of what Victor is beginning to suspect is definitely not water. “Anyway, if we’re talking about people who are doing this for their image--”

(Jean-Jacques Leroy, 23, Aspiring Model)

“He has a girlfriend,” Mila says, and another gasp blows through the room. She looks up to Phichit, who is still standing coolly by the board. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

Phichit goes back to his phone and within seconds has an Instagram page pulled up. “If he adds you to his private Insta--which let’s be honest, he adds just about anyone who finds him, because he wants the endorsement money--he’s pretty honest about his relationship status.”

“How long were you planning on keeping this to yourself, Phichit?” Victor asks, looking at him curiously, then, “Mila?”

Phichit shrugs. Mila rolls her eyes. “You usually give out cash incentives for manufactured drama when you get bored during Week Three.”

“Shame,” Victor says. He hates being predictable. “What do you propose we do with this information?”

“It would be a pity if rumors started to spread on set,” Mila says, faux innocent, intent well apparent even behind her sunglasses.

“Or,” Sara says suddenly, grabbing her by the arm, excited. “Sorry, sorry, I just--I have an idea. We should pit him and Yuri against each other as rivals. Use their desperation for good publicity against them.”

“Holy shit,” Mila says gently.

“Beautiful,” Phichit agrees.

“Tell me more,” Victor says.

“We know their type. They want to make this about them, right? Conflicting personalities, both trying to prove something, the wrong thing--that they’re a good person--no, the best person-- and that they’re here for love. Let’s push them to their limits and see who is willing to take more risks for the sake of their image. We pit them against each other and let that drive the narrative.”

“You’re so evil, babe,” Mila says, and they cheers their plastic Starbucks cups that are definitely not full of iced water, Victor determines. “Love it.”

“Are we seeing them as endgame, then? Final two?” Cao Bin asks. He looks skeptical.

“Top four, at least,” Victor replies, writing his own “J.J. - VILLAIN - 4” card and pinning it to the board. “It would be nice to have someone in the top two who at least is pretending to be here for the rights reasons. Ideas, anyone?”

(Georgi Popovich, 27, former-Bachelorette contestant, single father)

“Oh, God no, can we please put him out of his misery?” Mila says, slumping back in her chair. “If we had a drinking game for every time he said ‘Anya’ or cried about his fucking kid, we’d all be dead of alcohol poisoning.”

“To be fair, after last night, I’m surprised some of us already aren’t,” Victor says. “But yes, agreed. The only person involved in this franchise that hasn’t unlocked his tragic backstory is the Bachelor, I’m assuming, which means that if he stays, it’s just going to be him rehashing what everyone already knows. Let’s try to get rid of him by Week Three, and go with someone else.”

(Michele Crispino, 22, Medieval Times Knight)

“Please, I’m begging you,” Sara says. “All of our lives would be easier if Mickey was getting laid on a regular basis.”

“I feel like that would be cruel to poor Yuuri,” Victor says. Everyone on set has had to deal with Sara’s Crazy Brother at least once. “I mean if Yuuri genuinely likes him, good for him. But your brother is a little… intense. I don’t want to take the chance manipulating him to the top.”

“You’re talking about him like he’s a serial killer,” Sara says.

Everyone meaningfully does not look at her. No one says anything.

“Anyway,” Victor says.

(Minami Kenjirou, 21, Disney On Ice Performer)

“So, my brother’s a serial killer, but Minami ‘I Bought Your Old Outfit And Show Up Wearing It To Meet You’ Kenjirou isn’t a stalker,” Sara says flatly.

“I feel like it comes from a genuine place,” Phichit says. Minami was one of his personal picks during casting. “Like, having known Yuuri for years, I’ve met a number of his fans. Minami’s a figure skater too, and he doesn’t have the ‘steal a lock of your hair when I’m hugging you’ vibe that a lot of Yuuri’s other fans do.”

“I’m worried he might be too innocent for Yuuri. I think he was actually crying when Yuuri gave the rigger a lap dance last night,” Mila says.

“Yuuri’s a lot different when he’s sober, though. He needs someone fun and sweet like Minami,” Phichit replies.

“I realize that you’re trying to have your friend’s best interests at heart, but no one watches the Bachelor for sweet, innocent fun,” Victor says. “Let’s table Minami and look at some other options.”

Moving on they also discuss Leo de la Iglesia (23, College Radio Director), Seung-gil Lee (24, Dance Instructor) and Guang Hong Ji (23, Preschool Teacher). Nothing sticks. The board still only has the two cards pinned to it.

“What about Otabek?” Cao Bin suggests.

“Otabek was good on paper, but I would rather watch paint dry,” Sara complains.

“The guy is honestly like a Terminator,” Phichit agrees. “What about Christophe? He seems fun.”

“Christophe’s just here to have a good time,” Victor says. “I don’t think he believes in monogamy.”

“For all we know, neither does Yuuri,” Mila says, leveling Phichit with a look, “since he didn’t even know this was a dating program. He looked pretty thrilled to be sandwiched between four different men all at once last night too.”

Victor sighs and puts his face in his hands, peeking at the empty board through his fingers. Eventually he sighs, straightens himself up and says, “let’s scratch the board. For now. I like the Yuri-J.J. rivalry, but everything else-- I think we have to let Yuuri Katsuki happen to us instead of us happening to him. Deeper into production we can see what narratives are naturally unfolding and pursue those.”

“You want us to do this blind?” Cao Bin asks, disbelieving.

“Yeah,” Victor says, and he realizes he’s smiling. “Yeah. It’ll be fun.”

The Bachelor contestants who survived the first rose ceremony arrive in a fleet of Escalades at the OC Fair, producers and crew pooling out behind them. Even in the dry heat, there’s always something about walking into fairgrounds that makes Victor feel uncomfortably sticky all over. As he meets up with the crew and cast who are gathering around Celestino at the fair gates, he can see the look of discomfort on nearly all of their faces save Celestino, who is ever the professional.

“Now, I know that all of you are not here to see me,” Celestino is saying, his smile and laughter so fake and boisterous you can’t help but love him for trying so hard. The rest of the men politely chuckle. “We’ve got quite the event planned out today. Your Bachelor is currently waiting for you in the giant ferris wheel, where each one of you will get to have a private one-on-one that lasts for a single rotation of the wheel; that’s ten minutes, so make your time count, because as soon as your turn is over, it’s going to be your fellow competitor’s turn to try and impress. After every one of you has had an opportunity to sit down with the Bachelor, he will pick the five men who have made the best impression for a group date, while the rest of you will be escorted back to the mansion. Understood?”

The men are prompted to cheer in an exaggerated way, fistpumping the air, letting whoop-whoops out with their hands cupped round their mouths, “like the Bachelor can hear you!”

There’s a production tent already set up next to the giant ferris wheel, and the crew sighs in relief stumbling inside to escape the sun and carnival smell. Monitors are already set up with five steady cams showing Yuuri sitting with his hands in his lap in a carriage near the top of the ride. He looks surprisingly put together, which Victor credits the emergency wardrobe and make up team he sent to Yuuri’s hotel this morning. Victor puts his headset on, mic to his mouth.

“Good afternoon, Yuuri!” he says, wincing slightly as Yuuri yelps with surprise into his own mic and jumps a foot into the air. “Sorry, sorry, you okay?”

“Victor?” Yuuri asks, looking up at the corner cam.

“Yes!” Victor says. He doesn’t know why it thrills him so much to have Yuuri remember his name after a night of drunken debauchery, where during the rose ceremony he had trouble remembering half of the men’s names (“Nipples,” Yuuri had called out to a shirtless Christophe, “c’mere, you get a rose”). “How are you feeling this morning?”

“I’ve thrown up twice since I’ve been on this ride,” Yuuri admits. “Don’t worry, it’s been cleaned up. This is a new shirt. I brushed my teeth. Someone brought me a vodka tonic.”

“Good,” Victor laughs, “good. Okay, we have the men coming down toward the ferris wheel on your right. When you get to the top of the ride we’re going to need you to stand up and wave to them. Think you can manage that?”

“Standing?” Yuuri says, like he can’t. It takes Victor a second to realize he’s joking. “I’ll try.”

The producers inside groan as Victor forces them outside the sanctuary of the tent to greet the contestants and shoot on the fly interviews as they wait for their turn to go up into the ferris wheel with Yuuri.

Victor mutes his mic so he can speak through his walkie without Yuuri hearing him. “Remember, we have two goals: find me two decent candidates for the final four, and give extra attention to Plisetsky and Leroy. We want them to feel the pressure. Whoever gets them to crack first gets the five thousand dollars burning a hole in my pocket.”

Phichit’s voice instantly comes on through his headset. “Define ‘crack.’”

“Something that we can use in a promo,” Victor replies. “I’ll know it when I see it. Surprise me.”

Guang Hong is the first contestant to get into the carriage with Yuuri. Victor’s first impression of Guang Hong was “too innocent, must be protected at all costs, who fucked up in casting to let this sweet, naive sunbeam onto the set of The Bachelor.” Victor is, as always, thrilled to find out he is wrong.

“How are you?” Yuuri says, standing up to greet him and help him in with one hand. Guang Hong doesn’t let go as they sit down across from each other.

“Afraid of heights, actually,” Guang Hong says, biting his lip and pinching his eyes shut as the ride jerks to a start.

“Oh!” Yuuri says, and he leans forward and brings his free hand to Guang Hong’s face, tilting it up. “Oh, hey, it’s okay. Just look at me and pretend, all right?”

Victor brings up Guang Hong’s casting application while camera five directly behind Yuuri’s shoulder gets a close up of Guang Hong’s big, dark eyes opening wide and staring sweetly at Yuuri like salvation. Guang Hong’s file has listed skydiving as one of his favorite past times.

“You smooth motherfucker,” Victor says to himself, impressed.

Georgi starts crying halfway through the ride. “My son just loves carnivals so much,” he says, snotting into his own shirtsleeve and wiping at his eyes. Yuuri looks uncomfortable with no escape.

“Take a drink everyone,” Victor says into his walkie.

Mila and Sara set up a corner for on the fly interviews next to a lemonade stand, which the men flock to in the midday heat. They manage to have Jean-Jacques (“call me J.J.,” he says with a wink) cornered, when Sara notices Minami directly behind him buying a pink lemonade, and nudges Mila in the side.

“So, J.J.,” Mila says, taking the hint, speaking a little bit louder for Minami to hear over the noise of carnival rides and the bustle of the surrounding crowd. “You’ve never dated a man before, have you?”

“What?” J.J asks, caught off guard. They had been talking about his modeling career.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Sara says, sweetly. She’s looking at Minami, who is staring at J.J.’s back with curious intent, mouth tight around the straw of his drink. “All of your high profile relationships have been with women! Is this a recent development in your sexuality?”

“Well, I,” J.J. sputters, fumbling for his sunglasses suddenly, even though they’re in the shade. “Not really, uh. No.”

“Are you concerned a lot of the men here might have more experience than you?” Mila asks. Her ability to feign genuine worry goes unparalleled among the production staff. “You know, experience with other men.”

Minami’s eyes narrow behind J.J., as J.J. stops, considers the both of them for a second, and then laughs airily.

“I don’t know what you ladies are implying,” J.J. says coolly. “I’m here for the same reason as everyone else: to find love. Gender has nothing to do with it.”

Minami stalks off, and Sara has to bite the corner of her mouth to contain her smile.

When Minami joins Yuuri in the carriage, he starts off apologetic. “I think I came across too strong last night,” he says. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it!” Yuuri says gently, almost amused. “Maybe we both need a do-over. I’m sure I didn’t leave the best impression last night either. I honestly--I can’t really remember much. You’re a figure skater too, right?”

“Yes!” Minami says, his knees knocking against Yuuri’s. He’s chosen to sit on the same side of the carriage as Yuuri instead of opposite him. “I skate with Disney on Ice! I was just the understudy for Olaf in the Worlds of Enchantment tour.”

“How was that?” Yuuri asks.

“Lonely,” Minami admits. “Touring, anyway. I always wanted to be a competitive skater like you-- I auditioned for the show before I even knew you were going to be the next Bachelor, but I was excited to find out when they announced it was you. It felt like fate, you know?”

“That’s sweet,” Yuuri says, carefully not agreeing.

“I just want you to know I’m here for the right reasons,” Minami says, and he takes Yuuri’s balled up fists into his own hands. “I’m here to find love. And I’m here for you. And also… well, I think there might be some people here for the wrong reasons.”

“Oh?” Yuuri says, looking up at him surprised.

“I just, well, maybe I shouldn’t say this,” Minami says, and he sounds so earnest, almost saccharine. “I overhead J.J. speaking to some of the producers. I get the feeling he’s here for his career. He was saying he’d never um. He’s only ever had high profile relationships with women.”

“Oh,” Yuuri says again softly. “Well, I appreciate you for letting me know.”

In the production tent, Victor says into his walkie, “it looks like we have a contender for that five k. I have Minami throwing Jean-Jacques under the bus, saying he’s not here for the right reasons. Anyone else going to play?”

“The money is as good as ours,” Mila replies, her and Sara’s laughter echoing in Victor’s earpiece.

“We’re not even halfway through the day,” Phichit chimes in almost instantly. He sounds cheerful, which is always promising. “And I have dibs on Plisetsky.”

“So, are you originally from Japan?” Christophe asks, stretched out languid and inviting across from Yuuri.

“Ah, yes,” Yuuri says. “I grew up in the south.”

“I’ve spent quite some time there myself on vacation,” Christophe says. “I love the food.”

“Oh?” Yuuri says, perking up. “What’s your favorite?”

“Hard to say. There’s ramen,” Christophe says, “which I love how you’re supposed to slurp up while the noodles are hot. Or takoyaki, maybe. There’s nothing quite like hot, salty-sweet balls in your mouth. I just love savoring them, holding the heat in and letting them melt on my tongue one by one.”

“Well, uh,” Yuuri says, shifting slightly. “That is how you’re supposed to eat them, I guess.”

The time the men get with Yuuri is approximately ten minutes, but it takes about twenty minutes altogether with mic and equipment checks. It’s been over three hours by the time Yuri is supposed to have his one-on-one with Yuuri. He’s been leaning against queue gate for at least thirty minutes with his jacket over his face doing some weird deep breathing exercises probably suggested by an anger management coach. Phichit makes it a point to walk past him with Morooka, commenting on how hungry Yuuri must be, having been cooped up the ride since noon, it would be so sweet if one of the remaining contestants brought him something sweet.

When he turns around, Yuri’s lifted up his jacket and is staring at the funnel cake stand across from the ferris wheel.

The ferris wheel jerks to a start again as Yuri sits down across from Yuuri. He’s got his jacket balled up in his arms, and unfolds it to reveal a steaming funnel cake with powdered sugar melting into the dough wrapped in checkered red and white paper.

“I figured being cooped up on this ride since noon, you might be getting hungry,” he says.

Yuuri hits the funnel cake out of his hand. It goes flying out of the carriage to the ground below.

“Sorry, I--” Yuuri starts, eyes wide. He looks surprised at himself. He says again, “sorry.”

“Uh,” Yuri replies. “Okay.”

“I don’t know what to say, I didn’t mean to, I just--” Yuuri is saying, until all of a sudden, Victor can’t hear him. He sees Yuuri’s mouth moving on the camera, but is getting no sound.

“Yuuri,” Victor says, turning his mic back on, “Yuuri, can you hear me? You cut out, Yuuri.”

Yuuri stops talking and looks back up to the corner camera. Victor can see him mouth ‘Victor?’ but can’t actually hear him.

“Shit,” he says. “Yuuri, you’re having mic trouble, we're going to have to bring you guys back around and start over.”

“Okay?” Yuuri mouths at the camera, and Victor sighs and stands up to leave the tent and see what the fuck is going on with the audio himself.

In the carriage, Yuuri turns back to Yuri. “It sounds like they’re bringing us back around. I don’t think my mic is working, so they’re going to start us over.”

“Oh,” Yuri says, looking away and cracking his knuckles in his lap uncomfortably. “You-- you’re not very good at this, are you?”

“Excuse me?” Yuuri says.

“This,” Yuri says, looking back at him and gesturing broadly with both arms. “You completely embarrass yourself on the first night getting wasted and shamelessly crawling over anyone on set who says two words to you. Your first reaction to someone offering you food is to literally slap it out of their hands. Sober You looks like he’d rather be anywhere else, or maybe you’re just constipated.”

Yuuri’s eyes widen, and for a second Yuri thinks he’s about to cry.

It’s a strange, shocking relief when he starts laughing instead.

“You’re right,” Yuuri admits. His smile is so sad, Yuri thinks. “I’m a complete mess. I didn’t even realize this was even a dating show when I signed up for it.”

“What?” Yuri doesn’t yell, but it’s an almost thing. “How the fuck do you sign up for The Bachelor without knowing it’s a dating show?”

“I’m not from here!” Yuuri says defensively, pained laughter bubbling out his mouth like the champagne he was pounding last night. “My friend’s a producer who suggested I do it to take a break from my career. I just--I don’t know what you know about me. My last competitive season just ended, and it was bad. It was so bad, Yuri. When my friend approached me about doing the show I was so in my own head trying to figure out if I just retire out of shame and become a hermit-- I was willing to do anything to escape that place. I didn’t even look at the contract when I signed it. I just wanted to get away.”

“Wow,” Yuri says. “Your friend’s an asshole.”

“I think he means well,” Yuuri says, but he doesn’t sound offended. Maybe he’s heard it before. “I’m not really known for being a people person. You were right just now, when you said I was bad at this. I’ve never been in a relationship before. And I really am sorry about the funnel cake-- I had gained so much weight by the time pre-production started, they’ve put me on this raw diet with the exception of clear alcohol, and--”

“Jesus Christ,” Yuri says. They’re at the top of the wheel now, and the the sun hits Yuuri’s face just right, the deep brown of his eyes looking like something worth sinking into and under. “And I thought I was bad.”

“What do you mean?” Yuuri asks, pushing his glasses up his nose, and Yuri is drowning, drowning, drowning.

“I, uh,” Yuri says, “I’m not really good at this either. Being here wasn’t my idea. My publicist thought it would be a good way to rehabilitate my image after I got in trouble earlier this year. No offense.”

“None taken,” Yuuri says. “It’s a relief, actually. I feel like there’s all this pressure on me to be this outgoing, sexy, mysterious figure, and I’m just not. Like you said, I probably look constipated half the time, I don’t even know what to say to half of these guys, or take what’s coming out of their mouth seriously.”

“Yeah?” Yuri says, curious. “Like what?”

“I think Christophe was trying to hit on me by talking about how much he likes eating fried octopus balls,” Yuuri says. “Another guy kept asking to see my feet.”

“Oh my God,” Yuri replies. “For fucking real?”

“For fucking real,” Yuuri confirms, and he smiles. It’s not his drunk smile, sloppy to one side and loose, but another kind of uninhibited that feels strangely private and wonderful for Yuri to witness. “This has actually been the best go-around so far.”

Yuri doesn’t choke on his own tongue. Weakly, he says, “yeah? You’re welcome.”

They’re almost nearing the gates. Yuri will probably have to get out, Yuuri too, and they’ll have their mic packs checked and get back in again and pretend it’s the first time. Yuuri grabs Yuri’s hand suddenly. “Hey,” he says. “I know… I know you don’t want to be here. For the reasons you’re supposed to be here anyway, but neither am I, and look-- I would like to keep you around. Just as a friend. It would be nice to have someone around that I didn’t have to try and pretend to impress all the time, you know?”

“Yeah,” Yuri says softly. “I know.”

They’re smiling at each other like they’re trying to hold their shared secret in their mouths as the carriage arrives at the gate.

The sky is starting to turn pink and orange by the time the one-on-one dates are ending, and the park is lighting up with spinning rainbows of colors becoming more and more defined as the sun continues to sink past the horizon. Yuuri stands with Celestino in front of the ferris wheel, and after some stage direction, draws out his selection of five men to take on a group date: Guang Hong, Leo, Otabek, Yuri, and some guy named Chad.

“That’s the foot guy,” Yuuri whispers to Yuri as they fumble through a house of mirrors. “I just invited him along to point him out to you.”

“What a creep,” Yuri says, absolutely not shivering when Yuuri puts two hands on his shoulder to slide past him to continue in the maze.

They go on a half dozen rides, each time another contestant getting the opportunity to sit next to Yuuri and hold his hand too tight in the thrill of the moment. Otabek displays terrifying proficiency at the ring toss game, and ends up winning Yuuri another stuffed bear.

“I’ll add it to my collection,” Yuuri says, vaguely remembering the one that Otabek thrust into his chest during the initial introductions.

The group is given front row access to the concert playing at the amphitheatre that night--it’s a band that none of them recognize, but they all pretend to be enthusiastic and thrilled to have the opportunity. Yuuri has three beers and starts dancing again, but manages to keep his shirt on this time. By the time they get back to the mansion, everyone’s shirt is cooling with sweat, stuck their skin.

“You smell rank,” Yuri tells Yuuri, helping him out of the Escalade. “Like, really horrible.”

“Thanks,” Yuuri says laughing. “You too.”

Yuri realizes, suddenly and terribly, he might be a little bit in love.

Chad gets eliminated that night. So do four other men who were brought on as filler cast. Georgi unfortunately remains, but Victor has faith the production crew will be able to fix that within the next few days. The biggest surprise is Yuri Plisetsky getting the first rose, despite what Victor has witnessed to be a stilted, uncomfortable dynamic between him and Yuuri.

He offers to drive Yuuri back to his hotel again, maybe going so far as to make it seem like this is something that always happens. Yuuri agrees, letting Victor hold the door open to the passenger seat of his Bugatti, only on the condition that Victor lets him pick the music.

“Is there something wrong with my music?” Victor asks. No one has ever commented on his music before.

“No, no, I love Soviet folk disco,” Yuuri says dryly, taking Victor’s phone in his hands and opening Spotify.

“You wound me, Yuuri,” Victor says, holding a hand over his heart. “And here, I was going to take you out for hot dogs.”

“You were not,” Yuuri says. “That would violate my apple and vodka diet.”

“I was going to treat you,” Victor sniffs. “You did so good today. But now, I don’t know. No one has ever criticized my music taste so cruelly before.”

“Probably because you would fire them,” Yuuri says, and it sinks in like a hundred pin pricks all at once, how right he is. The only people Victor has left in his life are the people he hasn’t let go.

“I feel like you’re saying such cruel, heartless things because you’re hangry, so I’m not going to hold it against you,” Victor says, but when he turns to get onto the Freeway, he maybe accelerates faster than usual and takes pleasure in the way Yuuri presses his hand firmly against the door as he merges four lanes over into the HOV lane at roughly eighty miles an hour.

When they pull up to Pink’s, Yuuri says, “I thought you were joking.”

“Why would I be joking?” Victor asks, putting the car into park and turning off the ignition.

“I’m still ten pounds off my goal weight,” Yuuri says. “I’m still not allowed to be around a pool or have my shirt off.”

“To be fair, you already broke both rules last night,” Victor says, getting out of the car.

Yuuri begrudgingly follows him. “Don’t remind me.”

They order hot dogs; Yuuri orders two, a bacon chili cheese dog, and a pastrami sauerkraut dog, and gives Victor a look as if to say try and stop me and I’ll eat yours too. They sit down between the newspaper stalls out front with their feet in the street and eat quietly while the cars pass them by. The summer air smells warm and sweet and dusty; it smells like city, and Victor closes his eyes and sinks into it like a hot bath.

“Oh, real food,” Yuuri moans around his chili cheese dog, leaning back and splaying himself wide on the sidewalk, each hand stretched out with a hot dog as if he were placed on some salacious hot dog crucifix. “Let me die like this, Victor.”

“Sorry,” Victor says, looking down on him fondly. Under the neon lights, with nacho cheese smeared down his cheek, Yuuri looks like all of Victor’s filthiest dreams come true. He tries not to choke, but lets himself reach down and swipe at the cheese with his thumb, before bringing it to his own mouth to lick it off. “Can’t.”

“Can’t?” Yuuri repeats. He’d been wearing a suit during the rose ceremony, but stripped off the button-down and jacket in the car, leaving just the white undershirt on. It’s skin tight and has ridden up just a little to show off a hairy patch of stomach, and Victor can see the delicate rise and fall of his chest when he breathes.

He looks away. Takes a shaky sip of soda. “Well,” Victor says, “you have nine more weeks of shooting to complete. Then you’re free to do whatever you like. But it’s my job to keep you alive until then.”

“Oh,” Yuuri says, sitting back up. He takes another big bite of hot dog, getting more cheese sauce on his face. This time, Victor hands him a napkin.

#yuri on ice #bachelor au #the bachelor au #victuuri #viktuuri #yuriyuu #victor nikiforov #yuuri katsuki #delaney writes

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1dffsummerexchange · 7 years ago

Text

It’s All in the Timing

Written For: @firaemsen

Written By: @earthshake

Pairing: Harry/OFC

Word Count: 5,000

Warnings: Language

Summary:

Harry and Nora were strangers, and sometimes Harry thinks it would have been better for everyone involved if they would have stayed that way.

A story about when two people are right, but the timing is wrong.

Micah is running late.

It isn’t that big of a deal, or at least it wouldn’t have been if Nora weren’t already running twenty minutes early. She bought herself a glass of wine to pass the time, but after forty-five minutes of sitting alone she’s finished two glasses and half an appetizer. She’s texted Micah twice, but he hasn’t replied.

The restaurant they’ve agreed to meet at was recently opened, one of those typical Los Angeles up-and-coming places with expensive dishes, organic produce, and twinkling lights. It had been practically impossible to get a reservation; Nora had put their names in three weeks ago, and this was the earliest slot they had open. She can’t believe Micah would bail on her tonight.

She is about to call him when somebody else slides into the booth across from her. He wears a confident smile, extending one of his long arms across the take to shake her hand.

“I’m Harry,” he says.

“Hi.” She blinks at him. “I’m Nora.”

“I like your headband. I noticed you instantly.” He nods at the green and gold scarf tied across her forehead. Nora sets her phone down on the table, feeling a little more comfortable in front of cute guy under the impression that he’s probably gay.

“Your date finally showed up,” the waitress says, pulling out her notebook and turning to Harry. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“I’ll have a glass of whatever she’s drinking, that you,” he says before she can find a way to explain that he’s not her date, they aren’t sitting together. Nora picks up her phone again, noting that Micah is now over a half hour late. From previous experience she can assume he’s not coming, and so she decides not to tell Harry that she’s meeting someone.

“So what brings you here tonight?” She asks.

Harry grins boastfully. “My sister is dating the owner. She pulled a couple strings.”

“Impressive. I was on the waiting list for what felt like forever. Do you want some Avocado Bruschetta?” Nora pushes the plate towards the center of the table, and Harry gratefully takes up her offer. Nora notices a few tattoos on his fingers and up his forearms. He’s wearing long sleeves with the cuffs unbuttoned, draping over his wrists. The first few buttons of his shirt are undone as well, revealing even more ink and reinforcing the notion that he is definitely, totally gay.

“So tell me about yourself. What do you like to do?” Harry asks after he’s finished chewing.

“I’m an aspiring actress in LA, the ultimate cliché,” Nora admits.

“Me too,” Harry says with a laugh. “But so far all I’ve been in is hair product commercials.”

“You do have lovely hair,” Nora compliments. He has dark curls that roll over his ears and down to his chin. He pushes them back with one hand, purposefully showing off.

“Thank you, it is quite literally my claim to fame.”

Nora laughs. “What’s your dream role?”

“War movie. Easy. I want to be the next Matt Damon.”

“Saving Private Ryan?”

Harry nods.

“I have to be honest, you don’t really look like you’ve been to war,” Nora says.

“That’s why they call it acting, Natalie.”

“Um, it’s Nora, actually.”

“Shit, sorry! ” Harry looks embarrassed, but Nora isn’t offended. She doesn’t actually remember giving him her name in the first place. “Okay Nora, what is your dream role?”

Nora has to think about her answer for a few moments. She’s been auditioning aimlessly for about a year now, trying to ignore Micah’s reminders about how unlikely it was she’d ever be successful, how she’d be better off going back to school. It came from a place of love and concern for her, it was always made Nora feel like a special kind of failure. At this point Nora would take any role she was given, at almost any cost.

“I guess I don’t really have a dream role as much as I do a couple directors I’d really like to work with. Ron Howard is at the top of the list. Frost/Nixon is my favorite movie.”

“Of all the movies to choose from, that one is your favorite?” Harry asks.

Nora shrugs. “I’m also a history buff.”

Harry and Nora enjoy an expensive, but exquisite dinner together, discussing their favorite movies and sharing audition horror stories. The food is delicious, living up to every review Nora had read. The company is even better, so much so that Nora doesn’t even bother to check her phone for Micah’s probably work-related excuse.

“I’m so full,” Harry complains when they finish, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his stomach. “How would you feel about taking a nice walk around the block to help the digestive process?”

Nora agrees, and it’s during this walk that Harry tries to kiss her.

“What are you doing? I thought you were gay!” Nora blurts.

“Excuse me?” Harry scowls. “If I were gay, why would I go on a blind date with a girl?”

“Huh? This isn’t—I’m not---“ Nora sighs. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I have a boyfriend.”

“Then why did Niall set me up with you?”

“Who is Niall?”

Harry steps back, face red with realization. He runs another hand through his curls, this time pushing them forehead to cover more of his face. He eyes a homeless person across the street warily before saying, “Niall is my roommate. He set me up with one of his co-workers. I told her to meet me at La Verne’s wearing something green and gold.”

“The Packers are my favorite football team,” Nora says lamely.

Harry scoffs. “Mine too. Figures. I finally meet a girl I like and she’s taken.”

Nora’s cheeks turn a soft pink.

“Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Harry says with a sigh. “And don’t worry, there are other fish in the sea.”

“I did think it was weird when you, a total stranger, just sat right across from me. I should have said something. You’ve probably ruined some poor girl’s night now by standing her up.” Nora has been there enough time to not wish the same fate on even her worst enemy.

“What about you? Were you just out to dinner by yourself?” Harry asks.

Nora hesitates. “I was waiting for someone, but…he didn’t show up.”

“Your boyfriend?”

Nora’s silence answers his question.

Despite her relationship status, Harry has trouble not thinking about Nora for the next few weeks. He grows more and more annoyed as the days go by, wondering how it’s possible that a girl who seemed so confident would put up with getting stood up by a guy. If Nora had been single, and agreed to go out with him again, he would’ve never pulled a stunt like that.

It turned out that Niall had forgotten to pass along the message to meet Harry to his co-worker, which at least meant she didn’t think he was an asshole. They make plans to meet up next Friday, this time after exchanging numbers to ensure no more mishaps were had. Before the date Harry does his best to push Nora out of his mind.

Niall’s co-worker is named Natalie, which Harry makes an effort to cement in his brain. He lets her pick the restaurant, having previously used his one impressive first date idea. Instead of dinner she suggests they go ice-skating, which Harry agrees to even when Niall warns him he’s going to make himself look like a fool. Harry hasn’t skated since grade school, and even then he wasn’t very good.

Natalie turns out to be an extremely talented skater; she laps Harry twice before slowing down to his speed. She takes the time to correct his form, holding his hand to keep him from falling as they start going faster. He makes it around at least a dozen times before getting too ambitious, spraining his ankle after attempting a jump.

“I’m so sorry, this is the worst first date ever,” Harry gushes in the emergency room, thinking he should have listened to Niall until Natalie laughs and kisses him hard on the mouth.

They go on one more date to Catalina Island before Harry asks her to be his girlfriend. They’ve been together four months when Harry lands his first lead role. It’s a romantic comedy, which is exactly the opposite direction he wanted to go in as an actor, but he’ll take what he can get. If Ryan Gosling can star in romantic comedies and action films, so can he.

Harry is cast before the female lead, and so he spends much of his next few weeks reading lines with potentials, testing their chemistry. Harry is excited it’s all he can talk about, and he thought Natalie was excited too until she tries to pick a fight with him in the middle of his living room, during the Super bowl.

“You didn’t tell me there was a sex scene,” she snaps after walking back from the bathroom and into a conversation about it. Harry had neglected to mention this piece of information on purpose, just until he could find the right way to say it, but then Niall had brought it up after enjoying a particularly raunchy commercial.

“It’s just one. It’s not a big deal,” Harry says.

“It is to me! How could you accept a role like that without discussing it with me first?” Natalie stands in front of the television, blocking the two of them from seeing what is undoubtedly an unbelievable touchdown.

“Get out of the way, Nat. Go fight somewhere else,” Niall says.

“How naked do you have to be in front of her?” Natalie demands.

Harry prefers to plead the fifth.

They’re up until three in the morning arguing, and the next day at work Harry is exhausted. He has another chemistry test first thing, and before it begins he locks himself in the bathroom for ten minutes, trying to get himself into character. He can’t seem to get the dead expression out of his eyes, and he keeps fumbling over his lines like there’s taffy stuck to the top of his mouth.

Harry picks up coffee from the cart on the way to set, burns his tongue on the first sip, and receives a scolding from the director about being late. He keeps his eyes glued to the floor or his script as he sits in his designated chair, waiting for the cue to begin.

“Wow, Stephen, I-“ The girl opposite him clears her throat and Harry looks up into Nora’s sea foam green eyes. “For a second there even I believed you were in love with me.”

Harry swallows, his head swimming with last night’s accusations. He waits a beat longer than he’s supposed to recite his next lines, his voice cracking over the words, “Me too.”

Nora glances at the front of the room, bites her lip, and then turns back to him. “Harmony looks really jealous,” she says.

“I don’t care,” Harry says. “I’m not pretending anymore.”

“But Stephen, that’s not fair! I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to, and now that you finally have what you want you can’t hold up your end of the deal?”

Harry gets off his chair, which is something he hasn’t done before during this scene, and walks over to Nora’s chair. He touches her lips with his thumb, and then brushes a strand of sandy hair over her ear.

“I can’t pretend to be with you anymore, Lyla, because it isn’t pretending for me anymore. It’s real, more real than anything I ever had with Harmony.” He leans down to kiss her lips that taste a mixture of vanilla and mint, his eyes falling shut until he hears the words Cut.

He pulls away, blinking.

“We’ll be in touch,” the one of the casting directors says to Nora.

“Bye Harry,” she says to him quiet enough so that he’s the only one to hear.

Her stomach is a field of butterflies as she sits in her car, trying to replay every second of the audition. It was her second one; her agent told her they were between her and a handful of other girls, and that she shouldn’t get her hopes up, but she couldn’t help herself. She’d been so shocked to see Harry wander in from the hall, but the shock had given way to joy. It was fate that they’d met that first night at La Verne, and it could only be fate that now they’d show up at the same audition. She hoped that even though she’d turned him down, he would at least speak highly of her with the casting agents. She’d told him how important her career was to her. He understood how big of a break this movie could be for her. For both of them.

Harry doesn’t let her down. She gets the call two days later that she’s gotten the part. She had more chemistry with Harry than any of the other girls they’d tested. Nora has a dance party in the living room with Michelle, her best friend. She wishes she had Harry’s number so she could text him thank you.

“I had nothing to do with it. They didn’t even ask for my opinion,” Harry confesses when she thanks him in person, after they’re first read-through of the full script. They’d both lingered in the conference room until everyone else had left, nervously approaching each other as if for the first time.

“Well, it’s really good to see you again,” Nora says, her skin warm.

“Do you want to go do something?” Harry asks despite himself.

Nora’s butterflies return.

Their first stop is the movie theatre, an activity they’d both discussed doing together back when Harry thought Nora was single and she thought he was gay. They share a large popcorn in the back of the theatre, gushing over particularly well-done scenes and impressive cinematography. It’s the first time Nora’s spent with a guy that wasn’t related to her since she and Micah broke up three weeks ago.

“He said he needed to focus on himself. He’s in med school, so he was always stressing about tests and his internship. He had to pick up an extra shift that night we met, that’s why he wasn’t there. I can’t really blame him for going after his dreams, can I?”

Nora shares this over ice cream on the beach. They’re walking barefoot in the sand, slowing inching towards the waves while the sun sets over the horizon. The sky is free of clouds, a true California sunset full of pinks, oranges, and reds. Filming hasn’t even started, and Nora already feels like she’s in a romance movie.

“How long had you been together?” Harry asks.

“Five and a half months,” Nora answers.

Harry kind of hates himself for thinking it, but no, she can’t blame him for going after his dreams. Harry is in the same situation with his own girlfriend, after all. She’s barely kissed him since she found out about the sex scene, and instead they spend all their time talking.

The weird thing is, Harry used to love spending all day talking to Natalie. He liked listening to her share stupid stories of stuff that happened at work (especially when it involved Niall). He liked that they could talk sports for hours, and that she made him laugh even when the serious stuff would come up.

Now they just bicker, and she nags, and Harry feels guilty every time he comes home from work, especially those times when he kisses Nora and likes it a little too much. He starts thinking maybe Nora’s ex did the right thing by breaking up with her, being honest instead of stringing her along. He doesn’t want to be too hasty, though, so first he asks Niall’s opinion.

“Aw, fuck man. You’re gonna make it awkward in the office again,” he says.

“Fucking hell, why’d you set me up with her then?” Harry asks.

“I thought you guys could at least last long enough for me to get promoted. Then I wouldn’t have to see her everyday. I hope she doesn’t cry at work.”

“Okay, but does that mean you think I should break up with her?”

“To be clear, you want to dump her for this Nora chick, right?”

Harry hesitates. “When you put it like that…”

“Dude, either Nora is the one or you’re getting caught up in the whole romance movie bullshit, in which case Natalie has a pretty good reason to be pissed at you all the time. I’d say either way you and Natalie are fucked.”

Harry goes to bed thinking it’s decided, and when he wakes up he sticks to his decision, texting Natalie to meet him for coffee after work. He arrives before she does at their favorite local place with the outdoor seating and mugs with quirky phrases on then. He orders her favorite, a vanilla latte, and sits in the same spot they always sit at, waiting.

Natalie shows up apologetically late, after her coffee has turned luke-warm. She kisses him before sitting down, looking flustered and stressed from her own workday (she’s the manager of an Urban Outfitters), and says, “God, this week has been terrible, I don’t know what it is about people…Anyway, I’ve missed you.”

And Harry can’t do it. He doesn’t know what he was thinking trying to break up with the best girl he’s ever had, for a girl he barely knows? He’s been with Natalie for almost half a year now, and this is the first they’ve fought. And it sort of made him freak out.

So Harry apologizes for not being honest about the sex scene, and Natalie for making it a big deal. He says he understands why she was upset (Niall had a point), and she says she understands why he can’t turn down the job. She says she’s really, really happy, and proud of him, and by the time he’s finishing reliving every detail of filming their coffees are cold.

“It sounds amazing, baby. When can I come visit?” Natalie asks, the wind blowing through her sun-kissed hair.

“Um. Yeah, maybe sometime after work next week. I’m sure everyone would love to meet you,” Harry says, but feels weird about doing so.

It’s just as weird when Natalie actually does show up, and he has to introduce her to Nora, who is hoping he doesn’t notice the expression on her face finding out Harry even has a girlfriend.

“I feel so pissed at myself. Harry and I, we really clicked, but I was so hung up over Micah and he treated me like shit…Harry is cute and nice and funny. Of course he has a girlfriend. Of course she’s also cute and nice and funny. I feel like an idiot,” Nora tells Michelle that night over Chinese take-out.

Michelle tugs at the ends of her dark hair, weaved together in a braid that falls at her shoulder. “The timing was off,” she says.

Nora nods. She resolves to forget there was anything more between them than friendship. It’s the truth, which she thinks should make it easier, but it doesn’t when they’re supposed to be pretending they’re in love all the time. Nora is starting to lose track of where she and Harry end and Lyla and Stephen begin.

After filming Harry still asks her on little dates, just the two of them, where they sit so close on a park bench that she can feel the heat off his body and he still smiles at her the same way he did the first night they met. He tells her all about his family-a mom who taught him everything he knows, two dads who don’t get along, and a sister he wishes he saw more. She tells him how being an only child always made her lonely, which is part of the reason she thinks she let her friends (and boyfriends) treat her badly.

“In high school I was asked to prom by a guy my best friend liked, and so she made hate accounts about me on Instragram and Twitter. She said all this stuff about me that wasn’t true, and got the rest of our friends to comment and say stuff too. I was so…” Nora shakes her head, averting her eyes. “And then when she took it I was so relieved to be her friend again. We just pretended it never happened and hated on the guy instead.”

“People are fucking assholes,” Harry says with a scowl.

They make a habit of never going to the same place twice, maybe to give off the impression that this is still a one-off, just two co-workers getting to know each other. Nora doesn’t mind at all, though. She’s from Colorado, born and raised in a town she knew like the back of her hand. Even after almost two years of living in LA she still feels like she’s exploring new territory, like the city is a giant playground.

The weather is warm, the beach is never more than a half an hour away, and Nora’s gained five pounds from all the specialty food, but it’s one of the best summers she can remember. She’s finally getting paid to do the thing she loves, and when she’s not doing that she exploring a city she loves, or spending time with people she loves—Harry included, maybe.

The last day of filming feels bittersweet, a mixture of accomplishment and disbelief. Nora walks outside into the sunlight, trying to wrap her head around maybe not ever going back in. She’s terrified of the movie flopping, of the bad reviews she’ll have to read if the critics think she’s a bad actress, or even worse if no critics have any opinions at all. What if no one sees it?

Harry doesn’t seem to care about any of this, of course. He’s excited about the cast party later that night, and for all the people he hopes to be interviewed by. Nora can’t bear to burden him with the anxiety.

They both have some time off before promo begins, which Nora uses to visit her mom. It too is a bittersweet experience, the joy of seeing each other clouded by the tension of her mother never wanting Nora to move away in the first place, and the guilt she feels for doing it anyway.

When Nora gets back to LA she and Harry have a meeting with Allie from marketing. We’re in one of the conference rooms without windows, seated at a round table with a phone in the middle. She goes over our schedules for the next couple of weeks, pointing out events of significance, of which there are few. The schedule is light, even for an indie romance with two completely fresh faces.

“I wanted to throw an idea out there,” Allie says in a voice that is misleadingly casual. “The promotional team thinks it would really benefit the film if the people could see you together in real life as much as possible.”

“When you say together…?” Harry says.

“Just let a photographer catch you holding hands every once in a while. If somebody asks you about it you don’t even have to say anything. It’s good to give the people a little mystery. We’ll go from there.”

The first thing Harry thinks is that Natalie is going to kill him.

Still, he doesn’t totally hate the idea.

He looks at Nora, a wary smile on his face. She hesitates before offering him a tiny nod. They agree to a date a few days after their first interview, during which they will be photographed for the tabloids.

Nora feels like she’s now fully transformed into a stereotype, but she doesn’t hate the idea either. Nor the execution.

Harry doesn’t make the same mistake twice, so he tells Natalie about the arrangement the day before the first photos will be released. She isn’t as mad as he expected.

“I kind of figured this would happen,” she admits.

“Am I that much of a cliché?” He asks.

Natalie laughs and Harry’s heart skips a beat.

But even though Natalie is totally cool with him pretending to date somebody else, Harry still feels guilty about being with Nora. He has a love-hate relationship with holding her hand, and when he’s not thinking about that he’s thinking about how easy it would be to kiss her. It’s not sustainable.

He’s got to pull himself together. It isn’t fair to Natalie. Maybe not to Nora either.

Harry swings in limo until opening night, the accumulation of all their hard work finally coming together in one two hour experience. Nora wears a simple, slinky little thing that matches the color of her eyes, her hair pulled up in an up do looks to Harry like a maze. Their fingers are laced together while they walk the red carpet, smiling blindly at the cameras.

Nora’s stomach is in butterflies, the way it has been for weeks now it seems. She’s let the pretending go to her head a bit, which she tells herself is fine for now, at least through tonight. She’s acutely aware of Harry’s actual girlfriend coming in somewhere behind them, under the premise of Niall’s date.

They sit in the best seats in the house, and Nora loves seeing them on camera together. The chemistry they had at that first audition is magnified on the big screen, and Nora feels herself fall for Harry all over again when she gets to really see the way he looks at her. It’s not just the lights or the background music; you can’t fake or fabricate a look like that. Nora knows because he’s giving her that same look in real life when the movie is over.

There is a lot of schmoozing to be done after the film finishes, and Nora momentary forgets about Harry in the mist of exchanging compliments with the other guests. Aside from what she’s developed with him, she’s also riding the high of starring in her first film. She tries her best to dazzle the critics and interviewers, reciting all the lines her agent had told her to say.

It isn’t until the middle of the after-party that Nora finally gets the chance to ask Harry for a moment alone. She makes sure Natalie is nowhere in sight, finds him chatting up one of the musicians, and steals him out the back door, where a couple of kitchen staff are taking their breaks. Thankfully they don’t seem too interested in eavesdropping.

“I just needed a moment, you know. It’s a little overwhelming,” Nora says, wiping the under of her eyes from the eyeliner that’s certainly smudged there.

“Very surreal,” Harry agrees, all dimples.

“I’m sort of sad it’s over, though.”

“It’s not over yet. We still have to read reviews and get the box office numbers. And I think there are a few more interviews too.” Harry pulls out his phone to check.

Nora swallows the lump in her throat. “Yeah, but it won’t be the same. I won’t get to see you everyday like we used to.”

Harry looks up, a strange expression coming over his face.

“Harry, I have to ask...if I don’t I’m afraid I’m going to regret it later. Filming this movie with you has been one of the best things to ever happen to me, and it’s not just because of the movie. It’s because of you, and I just wanted to know if there was any possibility-I know you have a girlfriend, but-“ Nora sighs, her words getting all tangled.

Harry steps back, unreadable “Nora.” It sounds like an apology.

“Oh,” Nora breathes. “Okay.”

“Wait—“ Harry panics, grabbing her hand. “I wasn’t ready to have this conversation tonight.”

It’s the moment of the truth, the decision he’s been putting off ever since Nora walked into the audition room. And even when she lays it all on the table for him, deciding still feels impossible.

“Nora, I’m sorry. We’re friends. And it’s not that I haven’t felt...things for you. But it’s not the same as what I feel for Natalie, and I can’t do this to her. I’m sorry. I like you, I do, but…the timing is off.”

“Okay,” Nora says. She doesn’t think she has a right to be mad.

“Let’s go back inside?” Harry suggests, and so they do. And in the moment, Nora feels like it’s one of the worst things to ever happen to her. It makes her feel sick inside the rest of the night, so much that she and Michelle leave the party early without telling anyone goodbye.

Three months later she and Harry officially break up, and it is apparently very messy. (It isn’t actually anything, just a string of unconfirmed rumors). It’s for the best that Harry and Nora lose tough as well after that, and eventually Nora breaks her phone and really does lose his number.

She starts dating around again, but none of them really stick, and so when Nora does meet Harry again she’s been happily single for about a year. They run into each other in the grocery store of all places, which feels like an even more specular meeting place than La Verne. He’s cut his hair since she’s seen him last, and so she almost doesn’t recognize him at first.

Nora doesn’t ask if he’s still with Natalie. Instead they talk about their recent projects and the weather, almost as if strangers again. They exchange numbers for the second time, but Nora doesn’t hear from him for another three weeks. He asks her to meet him at the Santa Monica pier.

And then, finally, with salt in their hair and sand in their toes, the timing is right.

#1dff #1dff summer fic exchange 2017 #harry styles #1dffupdates

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years ago

Text

Hackers Dissect ‘Mr. Robot’ Season 4 Episode 8: ‘Request Timeout’

Episode 8 of Mr. Robot’s final season was intense. We discussed zip ties, phone restoring, location trackers, mixers, Elliot’s sloppy Python script, and the final hack [SPOILERS, obvs]. (The chat transcript has been edited for brevity, clarity, and chronology.)

This week’s team of experts includes:

Jen Helsby: SecureDrop lead developer at Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Jason Hernandez: Solutions Architect for Bishop Fox, an offensive security firm. He also does research into surveillance technology and has presented work on aerial surveillance.

Harlo Holmes: Director of Digital Security at Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Trammell Hudson: a security researcher who likes to take things apart.

Micah Lee: a technologist with a focus on operational security, source protection, privacy and cryptography, as well as Director of Information Security at The Intercept.

Yael Grauer (moderator): an investigative tech reporter covering online privacy and security, digital freedom, mass surveillance and hacking.

***

Yael: I want to start out by saying that I agree Momofuku is good.

Micah: In the very first scene, in 1995, when young Elliot is playing hide-and-seek and hiding something in the Queens Museum, I thought it was cool that he was running past all this retro computer equipment from 1995.

Trammell: Getting to the Queens Museum from 2nd avenue is a long haul on the F to the 7. And isn't Krista's place somewhere in upper Manhattan?

Yael: During the cab ride, I couldn't believe they were still showing videos of Tyrell after he's dead. But I guess I can't say I'm surprised if they put a lot of money into producing it. I mean, it IS Evil Corp. Also, shoutout to Krista. She got KIDNAPPED and KILLED someone and was still counseling Elliot after all that. Talk about emotional labor. (Or don't, lol, Twitter is a mess.)

Micah: Yeah, Krista is quite the badass. I also liked that when they got to the police station and Elliot was like, "I can't go in there with you," she was totally fine with it.

Dom and Darlene’s Kidnapping

Yael: So the Darlene/Dom kidnapping scene reminded me of a conversation we had in a previous chat about duress, and how you can program stuff to lock you out, but if someone's gonna start offing people, maybe you don't want to. Also, how do you get out of zip ties?

Harlo: About a week ago, I did this kidnapping simulation, which was actually pretty harrowing. Before you go into the scenario, they try to prepare you by teaching you how to get out of zip ties, handcuffs, and duct tape. Brief detour: zip ties are fun. While you can definitely just bust them by bringing them down with enough force onto your hip bone, more substantial ones require a long enough shoelace, which you loop through the cuffs, tether to your feet, then flop over and pedal like you're on a recumbent bike to slice through the plastic. Super fun. Great parlor trick. But when I did the sim, it was tricky to feel confident and safe enough—and unsurveilled enough—to attempt the escape, even if you knew how to do it.

Yael: Timing is really important. I think Dom had the sustained training and probably experience to really use it to her advantage, in a way civilians probably don't.

Harlo: Also, kidnapping sims that you do after one day of training DO NOT ever bring in the "cuntstick" with a baggie full of different torture knives. That would absolutely dampen your spirit as far as escape is concerned.

Micah: I just wanna say that Dom is a fucking badass.

Harlo: Yeah, she fucking nailed it.

Micah: Pulling the knife out of your chest and stabbing someone else with it, then shooting your captors.

Yael: That was awesome. It was cool that Dom had a plan, too. I was pretty disappointed that she didn't before. And now the license plate thing makes sense whereas before I was like, of course Dark Army is surveilling you; they own you.

Harlo: I have a nitpick. In the scene where Janice calls her bang-bang-bois over Signal. Didn't Signal at the time NOT play the regular phone ringing tone? Instead, it was this kinda cool radar sound? It used to have this amazing submarine radar sound. Also, Dom and Irish bastard are not using Signal. They were using regular-ass phone. But whatevs. I feel like a fucking walking ad for Signal nowadays. I must be absolutely insufferable.

Yael: I heard something recently about how Signal wasn't secure for people in China who use an Android keyboard.

Harlo: It's because sometimes your keyboard is a snitch. It's not a Signal problem per se, but by default, you might find yourself typing secrets into Signal that are captured by your keyboard, and then, anything goes.

Yael: Well, maybe Signal shouldn't allow external keyboards, or not have them on by default, hmm…

Harlo: In settings: there is "incognito keyboard," and if that's in your threat model, turn it on.

Yael: Do you think Darlene giving up her brother's location was the right call? Or his phone's location? She's basically trading his life for (maybe) saving Dom's family members' lives.

Micah: I don't know… it's kind of impossible to decide between who should get murdered and who shouldn't.

Jen: Mr. Robot's version of the trolley problem. I mean, a bunch of kids were gonna get killed. Sad, but a reasonable call.

Yael: Janice could just kill them anyway, though. It was hard to tell whether Dom thought Janice was gonna kill her family or knew they'd have escaped. But I can see why Darlene did it. I was surprised she didn't do it after Dom got stabbed. I want to know whether it's advisable to tell your armed kidnapper to eat shit, then die.

Micah: She gets my respect for it.

Yael: I've had a crush on Darlene since Season 1. Even if she is a murderer.

Jason: I think it's hard to consider Janice a credible person to negotiate with. She seems unreliable… why would Darlene expect to survive, even if she does everything Janice wants?

Yael: Yeah, that's why I wasn't sure it was a good call.

Micah: Yeah, she's terrifying because she's an unreliable psychopath.

Harlo: There are different classifications of kidnappings. What we saw on Mr. Robot was NOT the most prevalent one, which is just about squeezing money out of someone whose family/loved ones might have it.

Phone Restore

Micah: I think when Darlene wiped her phone, she actually wiped it for good and didn't have a way to recover the data again.

Trammel: The secure element or TrustZone stores a key that is inaccessible to the user. If it gets cleared, then the Flash memory is as good as erased. How did she recover it?

Micah: I don't think she could have restored it, not without taking a backup of the phone first. But when you take an Android backup, the Signal app doesn't back anything up, so she would have lost Elliot's location even if she did restore a backup. I think instead she just installed her hacked Signal client again, and got pinged from Elliot's phone again. That's the only way I can see that working.

Harlo: I don't even think that Darlene would need her Signal mod; Elliot's was modded only to ping with his latitude/longitude periodically. So all Darlene needs is Signal.

Micah: True. Her hacked Signal client must not care about safety numbers—something we talked about last week. Elliot's Signal client could decide to not trust Darlene's number again if her safety numbers changed, but it looks like that wasn't the case.

Harlo: Yeah, I guess there was no safety measure like, "do not ping if safety number has changed" baked in; too bad!

Yael: Darlene got sloppy! Or maybe it was intentional, in case she had to ditch her phone.

Micah: It takes a lot of trust to put an app that tracks your location on your phone.

Yael: She grabbed Elliot's phone from his hand and put it on for him.

Harlo: Signal wasn't available as a plain old APK then… unless you built it from the source code. But it didn't look like Darlene had a computer with her.

Micah: She had a shortened URL to download her modified APK. Also, it's possible she just logged into a Google account and downloaded from the Play store.

Harlo: Ah, then that would be most expeditious. What I'm curious about is how she restored it. Like, if you need to use the Play store, you need a Gmail account. Or F-droid.

Location Tracking

Yael: I thought Janice had a good point when she said, "You didn't give me your brother's location; you gave me his phone's location." A lot of drone operators should learn the difference.

They seemed like they were outside of Krista’s house. How good is this geolocation tracking? Is it just a general location based on the device’s proximity to cell phone towers, or can it locate the exact floor in the exact apartment?

Jason: Geolocation on phones is flaky, especially if you're in an "urban canyon" like NYC where you don't have good line of sight to satellites. Phones also use Wi-Fi data and cell tower data to identify where they are, but it's not perfect.

Yael: Companies like Skyhook Wireless can provide very specific location data based on hotspot IP addresses. They have these huge databases that correlate hotspot locations with the IP addresses. They use a combination of direct hotspot scanning and the cooperation of app “partners” who pass along hotspot IP data from users as they connect. But I dunno if Darlene would subscribe to Skyhook; it's hella expensive.

Jason: Those location databases aren't super reliable. They'll give you a latitude and longitude that is precise but not necessarily accurate.

Micah: Android has two location permissions, "coarse" and "fine." I believe "coarse" location works without GPS and instead relies on Wi-Fi access points the phone can see, combined with Google's massive database of Wi-Fi access points it knows about, and "fine" uses GPS. I think she would use the phone's built-in location services.

Yael: How fine is fine?

Micah: I guess it depends on where you are, but if you take out your phone, open your maps app, and click the button to zoom in to where you are—that's how fine.

Jen: Kashmir Hill has done some nice reporting on some of the unfortunate situations that arise due to errors in those geo-IP location databases.

Yael: I was thinking about this recently with Protonmail. It has this new privacy feature that's supposed to remind your phone to wipe local data if you enter a certain area. But it looks like it would only work if you were right in the center of the country, and it seems like it’s hard to change the radius precisely.

Elliot’s Hack

Harlo: Elliot's stressed. Print twice?

` “print out

Jen: Yeah, he had some syntax errors in that script. SyntaxError on line 16 (first line in the coinCoins() function).

Trammell: The main call is cleanCoins(), but his cleaning function that passes them through the tumbler is named coinsCoins. And since Python doesn't check that when it compiles code, it might cause a runtime error. Hopefully Elliot doesn’t lose all his coins, like when Sonic hits an enemy.

Harlo: I was totes gonna drag him for that, but I gotta check the tape again; perhaps cleanCoins is above the fold and we don't see it.

Trammell: Sonic collects rings, not coins. Please disregard my attempt at a nerd reference and deduct one from my score.

Image: USA

Micah: One of the print commands was Python 2. The other was Python 3.

Harlo: In 2016, he was probably not using Python 3?

Yael: Elliot has been through a lot. Or maybe there were different personalities typing.

Jen: Mr. Robot is Python 2, Elliot is Python 3.

Yael: What is little Elliot?

Jen: He's that programming language for kids.

Yael: I learned the little Python I do know from the Python for Kids book, by the way. "A resource for the rest of us"?

Micah: Also, why is he using both os.system() and subprocess.check_output()… to call curl? You can make HTTP requests directly from Python.

Jason: Yeah, he should be using requests.

Jen: TFW your TV show doesn’t get permission to use requests, so you gotta subprocess out to curl.

Harlo: lol, they can't afford the rights to show requests. Also!

Did y’all notice the autofill? _main_ (one underscore). Somebody's been writing some non-working code that they're hoping to deploy under duress… Also no pep 8, but hey, what are ya gonna do?

Micah: To be fair, he was in the middle of writing that script, and super stressed out, and clearly hasn't tried running it yet. So maybe we're not being fair. I have typos and broken stuff in my unfinished code all the time.

Jen: Yeah, we're just being annoying. It looks hackery enough for the show. We're just giving the readers of this article what they want: line by line code feedback. If I know anything about normal humans, they love Python programming.

Yael: I don’t think he’s slept in many episodes, either.

Jason: If he was doing real development, he'd have Stack Overflow up, and he'd be copy/pasting from it.

Harlo: Anyhoos, okay, we've got some curl with a cookie; and what are those other flags? Don't worry about SSL if it's not available? I forget…

[Python Image]

Yael: I just want Darlene to finish the hack because she "happens to be smart and good at things," as she said several seasons back. If this episode was Request Timeout, does that mean the next one is Conflict?

Oh, dumb question, but does Darlene actually need to find Elliot to finish his hack?

Micah: I'm not sure… I'm actually a little unclear on the details of the hack they're in the middle of doing, and how it works.

Trammell: Looks like the plan is to steal cryptocurrency and pass it through a tumbler to launder it.

Yael: Can we do an ELI5 about tumblers and mixers?

Jen: A coin mixer is a service you can move your coins through such that you can hopefully disassociate the coins with where they came from (which one would do if coins were illegally acquired). Like money laundering.

Trammell: The base64 doesn't decode to ASCII, unfortunately.

Image: USA

Harlo: What does it decode toooooooo? Shall I get out the CyberChef?

Yael: I don't understand how any of this works, tbh. Like, I know he's trying to steal crypto. CryptoCURRENCY.

Micah: This Python script that Elliot's writing isn't actually the full hack. It's not even exploiting anything. It appears to be laundering cryptocurrency. I think once they steal the money, this is how they're going to retrieve it without getting caught. But this script isn't actually stealing the money.

Jen: The other comment is valid. It looks like at some point he renamed a function during development and when the main() function runs, it'll crash with a NameError.

Micah: It looks like the final output of the script is a list of new wallet addresses that the money was ultimately sent to.

Jen: Presumably, he'd run this in test before moving millions of USD worth of coins through a mixer.

Hackers Dissect ‘Mr. Robot’ Season 4 Episode 8: ‘Request Timeout’ syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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starrystarrybabe · 6 years ago

Text

Oh, How the Mighty Fall [In Love] CHAPTER THREE (Ben Hardy x OC)

CHAPTER ONE, CHAPTER TWO

DISCLAIMER: I’m fully aware that it would’ve been physically impossible for Jim and Freddie to have a child even with this method during the time they were alive, but the idea of Freddie as a dad and the idea of how his child would turn out to be was just too sweet for me to not write. I’m also aware that I have 2 more fics in progress and I must make a masterlist, but as I’ve previously stated in other fic disclaimers, I am technologically challenged and quite overwhelmed at the moment. I apologize for this, because you all deserve the best from me, and it may take me a while to get to a place where I feel comfortable enough with the quality of everything to produce it. I do have a problem with being a perfectionist when it comes to my work, but I’m working on making that better.

TW: discussion of body issues? this chapter is pretty tame to me so idk if i should even mention it but oh well.

The next day, it’s time to shoot Live Aid. Lily Anne drives back to set in her more practical G Wagon, smiling as she pulls into the parking lot and spots Roger exiting his blue T-Bird. She shakes her head as she exits the car, walking over to the man.

“Remember what you said to me when I drove here in my Rolls Royce, Uncle Rog?” she asks, crossing her arms.

He nods, shrugging. “It was completely impractical. I said that I should take that car for myself if you didn’t treat it better.”

She nods, and points at his Thunderbird. “I could say the same for your T-Bird, Roger. You probably shouldn’t be on the road anyways, you’re so blind and deaf!”

Roger scoffs and shakes his head. “I’m fine, Lily. Don’t be a wanker.”

She shakes her head, becoming more animated. “No! No, you’re not! That T-Bird isn’t safe in your hands, and not to mention it would compliment my orange one quite nicely.”

He raises a brow and crosses his arms. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you, Lily?”

She nods, raising her chin. “Fully.”

Roger thinks for a moment before nodding. “Alright, I’ll make you a deal. If you can perfectly recreate my drum solo from Rock Montreal 1981, you’re allowed to take the car. If not, I get your precious Rolls Royce.”

Lily Anne nods, thinking over his terms. “Deal. How long do I have to learn the drum solo?”

Roger grins. “You have to do it at your concert tonight.”

She bites her lip and shakes her head, holding out her hand for a shake. “You’re a bloody wanker, Rog.”

Roger shakes her hand, grinning. “Say goodbye to your favorite car, Lily Anne.”

“Don’t be so confident, Roger!” Lily shoots back as he walks away, sighing and running a hand through her hair.

Joe comes up next to her, raising a brow. “What just happened?”

She looks at him and sighs, “I’ve just bet my favorite car on my ability to play the drums well enough.”

Ben walks up with Gwil and his interest peaks. “What drum solo do you need to do?”

She looks at Ben with fear in her eyes. “Rock Montreal. 1981.”

Ben’s eyes widen and his jaw drops. “Dear god, Lil. You’re going to lose that fucking car.”

As Lily Anne begins to freak out, Gwil rests a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t listen to him, Lily. You can do this.” He crouches slightly to be more level with the short woman. “Look at me, alright?”

Lily Anne looks up, visibly freaking out now.

“Take a few deep breaths, and just… there. That’s good. Breathe.” Gwil coaches Lily Anne until she’s calmed down. “Who taught you how to play the drums?”

“...Roger,” she says, looking down. “He was a shit teacher. Kept all the best secrets to himself before I pried them out of him…” Her eyes widen. “I know his best kept drumming secrets. I can identify them when he plays.”

Ben looks at her and smiles. “Then you have a chance!”

She grins back at the blonde and nods. “Yes. I have a chance! I’m going to study the fuck out of that footage if you don’t mind. Have fun getting into hair and makeup!”

Lily Anne begins running to the trailers, but stops when Lucy comes running after her.

“Lily, wait! I don’t need to film today. Let’s work on it together, alright? Then, we can take a ride in your new car once you get it,” she says, catching her breath.

Lily Anne grins. “Of course! We can do that tonight, if all goes well.”

Lucy’s eyes go wide. “What’s going on tonight?”

Lily Anne shrugs. “A small concert with my band. It’s going to happen in a small pub that we first started at on campus.”

Lucy is speechless for a moment. “Can… can I come?”

Lily Anne bites her lip, looking down. “I mean… I see no reason why you can’t, I just… I feel like by taking you all to a concert right after inviting you to my house is sort of narcissistic, and I don’t want to give the wrong first impression.”

Lucy shakes her head, holding Lily’s hand. “No, not at all! Are you kidding me? We had so much fun at your house, Lily! We’d love to see your show as well.”

Lily looks up at Lucy with a light in her eyes. “Really?”

Lucy nods, grinning. “Of course!”

Lily grins, nodding. “Then everyone is invited! I’ll make sure there are enough seats booked for everyone.”

Lucy nods, squeezing Lily’s hand. “Never feel self-conscious about what you have, alright? We care so much about you, and as your friends, we want to see what you’re proud of and celebrate your achievements with you, alright?”

Lily nods, giving Lucy a hug. “Alright. Thank you, Lucy.”

A few hours later, Lucy and Lily Anne have figured out the way to play the drum solo, and they’re called in to watch the Live Aid filming. The girls smile and wave as their boys get into character, and Lily Anne puts a hand over her heart when Rami blows her a kiss as Freddie. It’s truly touching to see such a good portrayal of her father.

When they film Live Aid… wow. It’s so good, and the boys are so in character that it feels like Lily Anne is actually in Wembley Stadium watching her father and his band perform. They do the whole 20 minute set, and when the director calls for them to cut, Roger and Brian shower the boys in praise, grinning at them.

“Great job, boys! That was fabulous. Very accurate. Great energy, everything was just perfect!” Brian exclaims, looking at the men as if they were his own sons.

“The music sounded great, the choreography was spot on… I think that’s as good as it can get, boys,” Roger adds, on, high fiving Ben.

Brian turns to Lily Anne, and frowns. “Lily, why are you crying? Is something wrong?”

Lucy wraps an arm around Lily Anne’s shoulders and the whole cast immediately turns their attention to the silently crying woman, who shakes her head.

“N-No, nothing’s wrong. It’s just…” She wipes her eyes with the sleeves of her leather jacket. “Ignore me, please. I’ll get it together.”

Roger helps Lily onto the stage, where Ben immediately shakes his head and walks towards her.

“It’s alright that you’re emotional. Could you just tell us why?” he asks gently.

Lily Anne smiles tearily. “I know it sounds stupid, but I just realized--” She sniffles again. “That’s the closest I’ll ever get to experiencing Live Aid, and out of all the concerts I wish I could’ve seen my dad in, that’s got to be number one on my list. It was lovely, guys. Really, truly, it was absolutely perfect. I loved every minute of it, and I know Freddie and Jim did too.”

Brian and Roger smile as Joe hugs Lily Anne, and the whole cast goes in for a group hug. The Bohemian Rhapsody family is truly coming together, and everyone is crying now, because this is such a unique and moving experience.

“You’re all so good,” Lily Anne croaks out. “This is going to be an amazing movie.”

When the group breaks apart, Lily Anne sniffles and wipes her eyes.

Lucy smiles at her, finishing wiping away the tears from her own eyes. “When is your concert tonight?”

Lily looks up at her. “Ten. It’s a really late concert, but I’ve secured tickets for all of us, and I plan on doing the drum solo for Roger’s Thunderbird, so if you’d all like to see that go down, I’d like if you could all come.”

The cast smiles and nods at Lily Anne’s offer.

“Of course!” Gwil says. “That sounds like a very fun concert.”

“You’ve got to have moral support for when you attempt that drum solo, don’t you?” Joe adds, grinning.

Roger scoffs and laughs, and the cast turns to him. “You’ll never get the drum solo right, Lily. Never. You might be good--”

“Of course I’m good, you taught me!”

“--but that was a struggle even for me. Good luck, Lily!” Roger says before leaving, revving his engine so they can hear the car.

Brian smiles and shakes his head. “I’m going to get some rest before the concert. Keep practicing, Lily. You can do it,” he says, winking at Lily Anne.

She grins. “Take a video of his reaction when I bang the gong.”

Brian nods and leaves, waving goodbye to the cast.

Lily Anne looks back at the cast. “I’m winning this goddamn car. That smug wanker won’t know what hit him.

“B, what should I wear? The leather skirt or the acid-wash denim skirt?” Madigan asks, holding up the options to her wife, who’s taking pictures of their cat. “Bronwyn! This is more important than updating Lillian Weiss’s Instagram story!”

The androgynous looking woman turns to see her wife and grins. “Well, if I had my way you’d be in that lovely latex skirt that really shows off your ass--”

Bronwyn dodges a Doc Marten tossed at her face and raises her hands in surrender. “Alright! I’ll stop. I like the denim with that top.”

Madigan smiles innocently and blows a kiss to her loving wife. “Thanks, babe! I’ll wear the lace underwear you like so much underneath it.”

Bronwyn grins and runs a hand through her short blonde hair, sitting on their bed. She loves her wife more than anything.

“Babe, what did I do to deserve you?” she asks, closing her eyes.

“You ate me out really well!” Madi calls back from the closet.

“I know that, but why did you stay, even after we were kicked out of our parents’ houses?” she continues, turning the conversation more serious. “I mean… I’ve put you through hell and back, babe.”

Madigan exits the closet (hehe) and sighs, sitting beside her wife and holding her hand. “B, look at me.”

The Welsh girl looks up at her lovely wife, raising one hand to play with her long, ginger locks.

“I got you kicked out of your house as well, baby. We both put each other through hell. But we had to walk through the fire to get to where we are today.” She waggles her ring finger, which has a sparkling diamond on it. “Happily married, and about to be together for… Jesus, for 12 years.”

Bronwyn smiles and kisses her wife’s hand. “It’s been a good long time, hasn’t it?”

Madigan kisses her wife’s forehead. “It sure has, love. Now c’mon, we need to get to rehearsal.”

Bronwyn adjusts her button-down before leaving with her wife, heading over to the pub.

Lily Anne is pounding away at the drums, already sweating as her bandmates enter.

“Oi! Hands off my drum kit, Mercury,” Madigan demands, heading towards the stage. She frowns in confusion when she sees a gong. “We don’t use a gong in any of the songs we’re doing tonight. Why is it here?”

Lily Anne looks up and puts down the drum sticks. “Sorry, Madi. I just… I made a bet with Roger.”

Madi nods, still confused. “Alright. What’s the bet, and how is this relevant to you destroying my drumkit?”

Lily Anne stands up and adjusts the gong. “If I can do his drum solo from Rock Montreal in ‘81, I get his blue Thunderbird. If I can’t… I give Christine to the blind old bat.”

Bronwyn goes on stage and raises a brow. “That’s a ballsy bet, Lily. I certainly hope you can follow through. You love Christine!”

Madi sighs. “You’re going to lose her, Lily. That’s one of the hardest drum solos in rock history! Just because he taught you doesn’t mean that you can do it.”

Lily Anne raises a sheet of paper her and Lucy have written on, smiling. “Here’s all the combinations Roger uses in it. He never said I couldn’t have a reference.”

Bronwyn and Madigan smile at their friend’s antics, and shake their heads.

Ezichi walks in wearing a very revealing outfit, and Bronwyn lets out a cat call to the lady as she begins tuning her bass.

“Damn, Zich! Whose pants are you trying to get into tonight?” the bassist calls out, grinning.

Madi and Lily Anne’s jaws are practically on the floor, because this is a thirst trap of an outfit.

“Well, the BoRhap cast is coming, and there was this one man who I found to be fine as hell, so hopefully his,” Ezichi explains, uncasing her guitar.

Lily Anne sighs heavily and shakes her head. “Ezichi, Gwil has a girlfriend. Also, don’t take advantage of me getting some new friends just so you can shag one of them.”

Ezichi raises a brow. “Is he in a stable relationship with her, or can that be changed by long distance and busy schedules?”

The couple of the band cackles and Lily Anne lets out an annoyed screech of Ezichi’s name.

“Ezichi, no! Don’t be a homewrecker! Especially not with Gwil! He’s so sweet, he doesn’t deserve that!” she exclaims, wringing her hands in frustration.

Ezichi shakes her head. “I don’t want him just because he’s pretty! I spent some time with him, and I can’t remember the last time I met someone so genuinely kind. He’s amazing, Lily.”

Ezichi has never talked about anyone this way before, and Lily considers the situation. They’re both gorgeous, kind, and talented. Their children would be supermodels. Ezichi is loyal to the end, and Gwil deserves someone like that in his life. They would be a good match.

Lily nods, smiling. “You know what? I think you two could make a great couple.”

Ezichi grins brighter than the sun. “Really?”

Lily nods again and turns to Bronwyn and Madigan. “Once you meet him, you’ll see what I mean.”

Bronwyn and Madigan shrug, taking Lily’s word. They’ll make up their minds on their own, but they trust her judgment. Despite Lily’s many mishaps and personal errors, she’s always been fairly correct when it comes to other peoples’ relationships and her readings on potential love interests.

Lily Anne takes the microphone in her hands and begins moving across stage, examining how much space she has. She sits on a speaker and leans against the wall.

“Ladies, what Queen song are we feeling for tonight?” Madi asks, twirling her drumsticks.

“Something from Queen or Queen II, definitely,” Ezichi comments, gleaning nods of approval from Lily Anne and Bronwyn.

“Doing Alright is a good option. That or Liar would be fantastic, I think,” Bronwyn adds, smiling.

The band turns to Lily Anne for the final say. She smiles at her friends and sits up.

“Doing Alright. This is a good night, we should play a happy song to accompany that,” she explains.

Everyone gets ready to practice, and music rings out throughout the pub.

The BoRhap cast files into the front of the bar, where there’s a table reserved for them. Brian, Roger, Anita, and Sarina get their own table in a less crowded area of the bar. The cast orders pints of lager and Joe hastily adjusts his Yankees cap to hide his hair.

Ben smiles at the sight of Joe adjusting his hat. “What’s wrong, Joe? You weren’t uncomfortable with us seeing your perm.”

Joe frowns and presses his lips together in a thin line. “It wouldn’t be bad if it could just wash out.”

Lucy snorts and shakes her head. “I can’t believe you didn’t know that perm stands for--”

“--permanent. Yes, I know now, Lucy. Thank you for the reminder,” Joe snaps, huffing.

Gwil bites back laughter, shaking at the effort. Rami is doing the same, shaking his head.

“You’re all awful,” Joe says as he gets his lager and takes a swig.

The lights dim and the stage lights turn on, and the curtain on the stage rises to reveal Lily Anne and the rest of Room 301. The cast begins cheering as the band waves and receives the love from the audience.

“Hello, lovies!” Lily Anne shouts, gleaning a rowdy applause from the audience. “How is everyone? Ready to bring back rock and roll, my darlings?”

The applause is even louder, and she grins, spotting the cast and waving.

The girl raises her arms and hushes the audience, smiling. “Thank you all for your ears. I just want to say that it means so much to Room 301 that everyone is here tonight where this band had its first performance, because we really did start from nothing, and everyone should pay homage to their roots. That’s what our latest album is about, and it was well-received, so we figured we’d do well with this concert. Actually, I forgot how much I missed the smaller crowds.”

“I love you, Lily Anne!” a fan shouts, and Lily Anne blows them a kiss before laughing.

“Enough talking. Let’s start the show, yeah?” The crowds are screaming. “Madi, take it away!”

The show begins with a very aggressive drum solo, accompanied by a guitar duet before Lily Anne begins singing, draping herself over equipment, the floor, and her bandmates. The whole stage is utilized in different ways, and it all accommodates the woman’s writhing body.

The next song begins with a beautiful piano melody, which Lily knocks out of the park before the lights flash and she’s leaning against the instrument and watching Ezichi pour her heart and soul into her guitar solo.

Gwilym is watching this with an amazed smile, and Ezichi notices this, which seems to help her performance. Lily raises a brow at her guitarist and continues singing, twirling around stage and grinning at the audience below her.

Ben is entranced by Lily’s performance. It’s so interesting to see the character she plays on stage. If he hadn’t heard her story, or saw a moment of vulnerability from her, he could see how people believe that Lily Anne Mercury is simply a diva who consistently puts on a show and doesn’t have problems. This version of her is enchanting, but he personally prefers the one who lets people in, and lets herself be vulnerable.

She’s pouring every ounce of her energy into keeping up this facade of playfulness and flirting, but he knows that she must be exhausted. It takes a lot to keep up such a high level of energy. He understands why she turned to drugs in order to keep it up outside of the stage. If this is her usual energy level on stage, it’s no wonder she began to burn the candle from both ends to sustain it.

Before they know it, Lily Anne is pausing the performance, smiling into a microphone.

“Okay, okay… this wasn’t planned, but this morning, on my way into work, I made a bet with my uncle. If you didn’t already know, he’s a right wanker, and his name is Roger Taylor.”

The crowd goes crazy, cheering along as the spotlight moves to Roger, who waves at everyone.

“He was riding in this lovely blue Thunderbird, and when I did the same in my Rolls-Royce, he said he should take it away from me for mistreating it. However, when I called him out, he decided to give me a bet. I had about eight hours to learn his drum solo from Rock Montreal, which is one of the hardest in rock n’ roll history, and I lose my baby Christine if I don’t do it perfectly tonight. However, if I do it correctly, I acquire his Thunderbird. So now, I will attempt this drum solo, and I would appreciate everyone’s positive energy.”

With a cheer, Lily Anne goes back to the drumkit and takes a moment to compose herself before beginning the drum solo as Roger listens back to it and compares the two. The room stays silent as she continues, sweating buckets. Rami grips Lucy’s hand because he’s just so stressed watching this all go down. She grips it right back, and Joe holds onto Ben. Everyone is just incredibly stressed out.

Then, it happens. Lily Anne bangs that fucking gong, and the room erupts into applause. The whole cast fucking yells at the top of their lungs, Roger’s face deflates, Brian gives Lily a standing ovation, and the woman flings her arms into the air, embraced by her band.

“I can barely feel my fucking arms, but I don’t give a shit!” Lily Anne cries out, laughing. “I get that beautiful blue Thunderbird!”

Ben grins, watching as Lily Anne continues the show with a smile that isn’t holding anything back. She’s just fully engulfed in her music, and expresses her joy in a way so pure and raw, and she’s letting herself be vulnerable in the music, which, as far as Ben can tell, is where she finds hardship once she’s off the stage. She doesn’t just open up to anyone.

If that’s true, and Ben has a feeling that it is, why did she open up to him? What makes him so special that she felt comfortable telling him about her overdoses and time in rehab? That’s so deeply personal, and even though they haven’t known each other for long, she feels comfortable telling him all these things.

He’s pulled out of his gaze by Joe nudging him as Lily Anne smiles at the audience, waving at her friends.

She sits at a piano and clears her throat, smiling. “Now, I think it’s only appropriate that we end tonight with a Queen song. We started this tradition during our first concert when my father requested that we do it in memory of Freddie. We performed Love of My Life, which is the only song I will not do nowadays because I don’t like to end Room 301 concerts in tears.” She smiles at her now hushed audience. “You’ve all been a great audience, darlings. I love you all, and appreciate your support so very much, sticking with us despite all the time we’ve made you wait for new music. Now, we’d like to end the night with All Dead, All Dead.”

Lily Anne begins playing the piano, and Ben can’t tear his eyes away from her. Even while sitting down at an instrument, she commands the attention of the entire room. Her emotions are amplified, and everyone can feel her pain and hope as she crones out the lyrics to the song, which are about longing, but also knowing that despite their physical presence being gone, the ones we’ve lost never really leave us.

He feels a tear beginning to form, and sees that the entire table is blinking and wiping their eyes. Lily Anne’s dedication to her craft shows, and it makes itself clear in the tears of the people all around the bar.

Someone raises their phone light and begins to sway, as a homage to Freddie, and the rest of the crowd joins in. Lily Anne looks out and blinks, a black tear streaming down her face as she smiles. She is truly touched by the energy of the audience. Once the song is over, she sniffles and wipes her eyes.

“What did I say about crying?”

The audience laughs, applauding.

Lily Anne shakes her head. “No. We need something to pick us up before we go. How about…” She turns to her band. “Don’t Stop Me Now?”

The audience cheers and the band gets ready to play, and Lily Anne grins, performing the hell out of the upbeat number. She bows with her band as it ends, and leans into the microphone one last time.

“Take the correct Uber home, and assist any drunk people back to their cars! Nobody in this audience is becoming a damn statistic, do you hear me?” She smiles as she hears applause. “Goodnight, London! Room 301 loves you!”

The curtains close, and Lily Anne goes back to change with the rest of the band in their changing room.

Bronwyn is already reaching for her sweatpants and hoodie, and Madigan takes out a makeup wipe, scrubbing the dark smoky eye and maroon lip color off of her face.

Lily Anne immediately takes off her platform boots, tossing them to the side and rubbing her eyes. “Great show, ladies! I love you all, and the audience seemed to as well.”

Ezichi is wrapping her hair in a bonnet and leaning back in the chair. “You did great, Lily. It was an amazing show.”

Lily smiles, wiping away her eye makeup. “You know what, guys?”

Everyone in the room turns to face her, and she smiles tearily.

“I feel like Jim was watching us from his table.”

November, 2008

Lily Anne, Ezichi, Bronwyn and Madigan take the stage for their first concert. They’re nervous as hell, and don’t know how the crowd will react to their set. They’ve performed for their friends, and for Jim, and for Brian and Roger, but those are all people who like them. They’re biased and don’t want to hurt them. What will an audience of drunken college students with no filters think? They’ve heard they can be brutal.

The girls crowd together behind the curtain, holding each others’ hands.

“Alright. We’re about to perform for the first time,” Lily Anne begins, taking a deep breath. “We can kill it. We just need to let the music do the talking for us, okay?”

The girls nod, and Ezichi speaks up. “We have amazing stuff. We know that. If we perform well, people will know that we’re a serious group, and not just some teenagers with instruments. We know what we’re doing.”

Madi smiles. “We managed to please rock legends with our music. There’s no reason why we can’t please drunk uni students.”

Bronwyn grins. “Let’s kick ass.”

The girls huddle together, squeezing each other before heading out on stage.

Lily Anne looks out at the bar, half empty since it’s too early to warrant people coming in yet. She sighs and frowns slightly, her hands shaking. This all stops when she spots her father sticking out like a sore thumb in his wool sweater, sitting at a table with a pint of lager and a warm smile. She waves to him, grinning.

Jim gives her a thumbs up and mouths ‘you can do it.’ The girls sigh in relief, and Lily maneuvers the microphone, which squeaks.

“S-sorry about that, everyone. My name is Lily Anne, this is Ezichi, this is Madigan, and this is Bronwyn. We’re a band called Room 301, and this is our first performance, so please be kind,” she says with a nervous laugh.

The bar-goers look unimpressed, and she carries on.

“Alright, we’re going to start with something we wrote, and we’re very proud of it.”

The band begins playing a song that starts like a ballad, but grows to be something so much more. Lily Anne’s voice cracks, but she quickly regains her composure and begins to sink into the song, letting herself go.

Slowly but surely, the bar-goers have gravitated to the stage, and Lily Anne is controlling the crowd, moving in ways that feel natural and prompted by the music, and swaying to the beat. When she hits a high note, the people cheer, and the adrenaline that runs through her body is the best feeling she’s ever experienced.

She looks into the audience, and Jim is sitting there, looking up at his girls with so much pride and love, and it invigorates them.

“This next one is a faster number, and from the way you’re all behaving now, I’m guessing that you’ll like it!” Lily Anne exclaims, prompting the audience to scream.

The show goes by quickly, and at the end, she smiles and sits at the piano.

“Now, we have one more song left, but we didn’t write this one,” she says, and the audience quiets down. “Don’t be discouraged, people! It’s a good song by a band called Queen.”

The audience cheers again, raising their arms up. Lily Anne grins, and begins to play Love of My Life. It’s dedicated to Freddie, and as she begins to cry singing it, she looks out to see Jim wiping away tears from his eyes. She sniffles and continues, letting the tears flow down her face and neck.

At the end, she smiles and closes the piano, wiping her eyes.

“That seems like a good way to end the night, yeah?” she asks, looking around at the crying audience members. “This was Room 301, I’m Lily Anne, and I hope you all have a great rest of your nights!”

The crowd screams as the band goes backstage, and they collapse into one another, hugging each other tightly and sobbing. That was an amazing first performance, and they’re so overwhelmed by the positive response they got.

“I love you all so much,” Lily Anne sobs, hugging her friends.

That night, they go back to Garden Lodge and curl up on the couch watching shitty movies, and Jim gives them tea and biscuits to reward them for their stellar performance.

Lily Anne is almost asleep on the couch when she stirs due to Jim turning off the TV. She lets out a little noise of confusion and her father shushes her, tucking her back into her blankets.

“Dad?” she whispers, looking up at Jim.

He looks down at her and smiles. “Yes, love?”

“Did you like the performance?” she asks, smiling.

He nods, grinning down at her. “It was lovely, Lily. I loved it. Your Papa would be so proud to see you work the stage like that.”

Lily Anne smiles and closes her eyes. “Good.”

Jim kisses her forehead lightly. “Goodnight, love.”

Lily Anne falls asleep smiling, curled up with her friends on her couch.

Lily Anne smiles as the blue Thunderbird pulls into her driveway, watching as her uncle exits the car and looks sadly at it. She walks forward and grins, looking up at her uncle.

“You’re the one who offered this bet, Roger,” Lily says, shrugging. “This is all your own doing.”

The man sighs and looks down at the young woman. “I know, Lily. I’m sad to give it up, but I’ve got to admit, you did very well. I’m proud.”

She smiles at her uncle, squeezing his hand. “Thank you, Uncle Rog. I learned from the best, after all.”

Roger ruffles her hair before beginning to walk away, dejected. Lily feels a pit of guilt in her chest and sighs, running a hand through her hair.

“Roger, stop!” she exclaims, catching the man’s arm.

He turns to face her and raises a brow.

Her head slumps forward and she shakes it. “I… listen. I feel bad. You look so sad… you know what? We can share. It stays in my garage but if you want to take it for a ride…” she shrugs. “Go ahead.”

Roger grins, hugging the girl. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to follow through, Lily.”

She huffs, hugging him back. “Wanker.”

Inside the house, the band is lounging around, talking with their new friends, and clicking well. The band likes the cast. Bron and Madi have a close eye on Ezichi and Gwil, watching how they interact. They like the dynamic, and like most times, Lily appears to be correct about the match.

All they have to do now is sit back and wait for it to happen.

Lily walks inside, checks on her guests, and then pops back outside, lighting a cigarette. Ben soon follows, sitting next to her on the bench next to the koi pond like before.

Lily smiles at him, leaning back against a pillow on the bench. “Just so you know, I don’t intend to spend another four hours out here. I got bitten up by a bunch of bugs last time.”

Ben laughs, lighting his cigarette and shaking his head. “Nah. Maybe just thirty minutes this time around.”

Lily looks back at the pond, taking a puff of her cigarette. “Any grievances you want to air out? This is apparently a very good place to do it.”

Ben shrugs, breathing out smoke. “Nothing comes to mind at the moment. Give it some time, I’m sure something will come up.”

Just in that moment, Lily Anne’s phone buzzes and she picks it up, seeing a notification from twitter about Room 301’s concert.

SINGER LILY ANNE MERCURY SPOTTED WITH EASTENDERS HEARTTHROB BEN HARDY

Lily lets out a groan and shakes her head. “Ugh. Disgusting.”

Ben turns to look at her. “What is it?”

She hands him her phone, and he rolls his eyes at the headline. “That’s bollocks. I hate twitter.”

She takes her phone when he hands it back to her, looking up at him. “Why do you hate twitter in particular? It’s not the only site that thrives off of bullshit rumors.”

Ben sighs, looking down and rubbing his temples. At this, Lily Anne lets out a breath and begins to freak out.

“If that’s the grievance and you don’t want to air it out, I won’t force you, Ben.”

Ben shakes his head and looks over at her, taking a drag of his cigarette. “No, no. Don’t worry. I should talk about it. Talking made you feel better, didn’t it?”

She nods, looking at the pond. “It was very therapeutic. But don’t feel forced to let it out.”

Ben waves a hand dismissively. “I want to let it out, just give me a moment to collect my thoughts.”

Lily Anne nods, waiting patiently for Ben to collect his thoughts.

When he sits up and takes a deep breath, putting aside the butt of his cigarette, she hands him another one from her pack, which he takes and lights.

“Well, earlier on in my career, I was instructed to make social media accounts to stay relevant, gain fans, get more high profile roles, you know how it works,” Ben begins, looking forward.

“I was told the same thing. I’m assuming you made a twitter?” Lily Anne adds, looking over at him.

He nods, taking a deep breath. “I made a twitter, and I made a horrible mistake by checking the hashtag with my name.”

Lily Anne lets out a groan. She has a feeling she knows where this is going.

“The tweets I saw… the majority of them were just talking about my outer appearance, praising my body, but not acknowledging that I’m a damn good actor as well. My body isn’t all that I have to support my career.” Ben is becoming agitated, and Lily Anne rests a hand on his arm. “It became overwhelming, and the tweets got to my head. I began to think that maybe I was just a piece of meat for people to stare at, like they had said online. I began to absolutely loathe myself, and I could barely look in a mirror without feeling horrid.”

Lily moves closer to Ben, frowning. “Did you delete the app soon after?”

He nods, looking over at her. “Yes. My manager was incredibly mad at me, and didn’t listen when I tried to tell him why I was so uncomfortable. Then, he booked me a photoshoot that he said would really put me on the radar: a nude photoshoot.” Ben blinks back tears. “I’d never felt so objectified and worthless in my entire life.”

Lily Anne moves closer, holding one of his shaking hands. “Is this movie bringing back those fears, Ben?”

He nods, wiping his eyes. “Sometimes I think-- and I know it’s horseshit, but it still bothers me-- that I was only casted because I’m pretty. People won’t look at this movie and think about my acting, but my appearance. Apocalypse didn’t help with that either. My character ended up being an underdeveloped rebel with wings,” he continues, his voice cracking. “What if my career just ends up being me looking pretty on a screen for people to objectify?”

Lily Anne wraps an arm around his shoulder, trying to calm him down. “Hey, hey… it’s alright, Ben. I can assure you that for this role, you were chosen for your acting abilities. I helped Roger make the final choice.”

Ben sniffles and looks at Lily, green eyes damp. “You did?”

She smiles kindly at him. “I did, and in my opinion, this movie will help you get closer to being the kind of actor you want to be.”

He smiles, wiping his eyes. “I-I’m sorry about the tears, I just… I worry about this stuff. A lot.”

Lily Anne shakes her head, handing him a tissue. “It’s alright. Your worries show that you’re not willing to settle for anything, and that kind of determination will bring you where you want to go in your career. People who settle are temporary. The ones with ambition are the ones who stand the test of time.”

He nods, leaning back and taking a drag of his cigarette. “It doesn’t always seem like that.”

Lily Anne nods. “I know. I thought my competitors in the early 2000’s would be around forever, and Room 301 is one of the last rock bands standing. All you have to do is wait. Father Time will do the job for you.”

Ben looks over at her, brows raised. “How can you be so calm about this kind of thing? Aren’t you scared of fading into the background?”

She scoffs and looks over at him. “Of course I am! I can’t support this lifestyle with inheritance alone. I need to make money to keep this level of luxury going. But if I could go to rehab twice and take a hiatus and despite all that my band is still a household name, I’m fairly certain that I’m going to be fine. We’ll all be fine in the end.”

Ben nods, taking in what she said. “Sometimes I forget that you’ve been through so much,” he says, shaking his head. “Tonight, on stage… I’ve never seen anyone sustain that much energy for so long. It was like watching a different person.”

Lily frowns. “Is that a bad thing?”

Ben shakes his head vigorously. “Dear God, no! Not at all. It’s great. Your stage presence is amazing. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. But if I didn’t know you, I would never guess that anything bad has ever happened to that girl in her life.”

Lily shrugs and smiles down at the koi. “I guess I’m a good actress, then.”

Ben smiles down at her. “You could make some good money on the screen if this whole rock star thing doesn’t work out.”

She grins up at him. “Coming from a talented actor like you, that means a lot to me.”

Ben smiles, and the pair sit in silence, finishing their cigarettes.

Joe looks out the window at the pair, frowning. “They baffle me, they really do.”

Ezichi looks up from the card game she’s playing with Gwil and Rami and raises a brow. “What baffles you about them?”

Joe turns back to his friends, wringing his hands. “They’re so clearly into one another, and so good for one another, and they’re so clueless about it all!”

Gwil rolls his eyes, putting down a card. “They just met, Joe. Give them time before calling them clueless.”

“But they’re soulmates, Gwil! Soulmates! How do you not see it?” The man bounces onto the couch next to Gwil, insistently nudging his way into the man’s personal space.

Ezichi shakes her head. “I’ll know if she likes him before she knows it herself.”

Rami frowns, slapping down a card. “How would you know that?”

Ezichi smiles, putting down her last card and winning the game. “She gets this look in her eyes, this really sappy, disgustingly vulnerable look. You’ll know it when you see it.”

They smile and look outside the window before going back to their usual business before Ben and Lily notice.

It’s only a matter of time before they see that look.

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