#it'll be here for me to integrate into teacher au

[grapenehifics]

Fic Rec Friday

Here's today's lesson in 'people can't actually read your mind, dumbass' (it's me, I'm the dumbass in this scenario). I was talking to @palfriendpatine66 and just, like, assumed that I'd already written a big long treatise about how much I love Center Stage? But, then, turns out, I guess I haven't. So, here one is now!

The flashbacks, and the way they're integrated into the plot. Maybe I'm just so impressed by this because it is so hard for me, personally, to do. But there's two stories going on here, and one of them isn't even told completely linearly, and they both feed off of each other and one gives you context for the other but instead of it just being 'plot info dump background information hope you remember this because it will be important later' (which is how I tend to do it), it's pieced out at the time that you need it and it leaves me hungry for MORE. I was just as, if not more, invested in the 'backstory' as I was in the present-day stuff.

Obi-Wan and Anakin feel like them. I mean, you know I love a good sports-as-Jedi metaphor, and the dancing works really well too. It's physical and mental at the same time, so you get those elements that you get from a good sparring scene: sexual tension, Anakin wanting to impress Obi-Wan (who is maybe less physically flashy but more experienced), determination to get it right, having to balance technical prowess with emotion...

It's a fun little peek into a world that I don't have a lot of experience in; one of my favorite things in the world is an AU where the person is clearly writing from personal experience and I get to learn stuff about dance competitions or coffee shops or someone's job or whatever

THE PINING

You know what the pining deserves a second bullet point because it's that good, there's just such LONGING and old hurts that they have to work through but the love is always there, they just have to let themselves be brave and take a chance

This is maybe just a more specific version of bullet point 2 but Obi-Wan is not only a performer but a teacher, too, and still in that transition period between the two so he's grappling with his feelings about aging and shifting to a different stage (ha) of his career, and as someone who is very much into the current Star Wars trend (on TV, anyway) of exploring middle age and what happens after these really monumental life events this speaks to me personally. Like, these are actual adults who are learning to grow into themselves and they're still who they are but they've let life change them, too.

Again I'm still stuck on the flashbacks but you get to watch Anakin's progression from needy, broke, angry teen to quitting the studio and leaving Obi-Wan behind for supposedly greener pastures all the way to coming home to him again and it feels exactly right and very Anakin

All in sub 14k words which just boggles my mind because I don't know if you've noticed but brevity is not my jam and I am deeply impressed anytime someone manages to pack so much emotion into a (to me) short wordcount

This quote: "He loved Anakin now and he had loved Anakin then. He had never known a time where he didn’t love Anakin, it had just grown and changed along with them" which sums up canon Obikin to me in, like, ten seconds

Also, it has a happy and romantic ending, so even when things get tough, never fear it'll work out

[emuchipmunk]

Booster Gold would love E.M. Forster’s Maurice and here’s why

This might get a little crazy but bear with me, if not for the actual content then for some of the best quotes you’ll ever read. Since DC doesn’t do shit with Booster Gold or Blue Beetle until it’s time for one of them to be evil or die (or both), that clearly means that I get to steal the characters and make them my own and that’s exactly what I plan on doing. I’ll put this all under a cut because golly gee I went off on this one. Also, like, this went from analysis to a little fic of sorts??? Have no clue what happened honestly.

Ok so even though Booster is from the future I’d imagine that he’d still have to read some old ass books in school, even if “old ass” to them means like,,,now for us. BUT for the sake of this, I’m just gonna mirror Booster’s education and discovery of Forster off of how I discovered Forster with little detail changes. 

So in this English class, everyone in the class has to choose an author that they’ve never heard of before and read a few books from them and make a project of any kind that they think represents the author and whatnot right. The teacher maybe hands out a list of authors put in different categories of what they write and since it’s the future I’d think that the list probably has a few more LGBT authors than mine did, but Booster sees it and says he’ll give mister E. M. Forster a try because it’s a goofy name so he reads this book called Maurice. Now Maurice isn’t one of his more popular books, it’s actually kind of hard to find in book stores and I’m pretty sure it got most of its fame because of the story surrounding the book rather than the actual book, but the point still stands. 

Booster starts reading Maurice and literally from the first page absolutely falls in love with it. The dedication page says nothing about Forster’s family, nothing about his friends, it only says: 

Begun 1913

Finished 1914

Dedicated to a Happier Year

Now Booster isn’t a pro at history (at least this point in history) but he’s pretty sure that the dedication in the book and the LGBT category Forster was in on the teacher’s list probably had something to do with each other and not in the good way. But still, he reads on, already convinced that he’s going to like the book just from seeing that. And he’s right. 

Like I said, the future is probably hopefully a lot more open to different genders and sexualities so it’s not like Booster is particularly closed off about the fact that he likes girls and boys, but it still kind of is a complicated thing to come to realizing, and instantly he’s drawn to Maurice as he tries to navigate his feelings once Clive is in his life, showing him all these ancient Greek texts that are about same sex love and Maurice and Clive end up spending a lot of their time together. Booster just keeps waiting for this thing to fall apart because he knows this isn’t how same sex love happened back then, he knows that something has to go wrong. Yet Clive and Maurice continue being happy together and being off in their own little world. 

That is, until Clive realizes the dangers of being a practicing homosexual at this point and what it could mean for his future. This is it, this is where the story changes and it’s only going to go downhill from here. Except...it doesn’t. Sure, there is a chunk of the novel where Maurice has to deal with the fact that Clive, his first love, left him after opening his eyes to his own sexuality, but it doesn’t end like that. And once Booster finishes the book, a little teary eyed and unable to let go of the story, he reads the author’s note and falls even more in love with it once he reads Forster saying, 

“A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.”

So after the project is finished, Booster has other things to focus on and kind of forgets about the book for a little while. He goes through all of the time travel, ends up with the JLI and all that stuff. And then as they’re hanging out, they start talking about school and all the dumb books they had to read for classes and someone asks Booster what kind of cool books they have in the future. He responds with “I wouldn’t know, I was reading old books too” and he remembers his favorite project he did in high school and starts getting really excited to tell them all about it. He keeps the story itself for himself, just tells them all about the cool poster he made that represented the Forster books he read. Eventually the conversation drifts off to something else but Booster’s still stuck on this book that he connected to a few years ago. 

He gets a new copy of the book and falls in love with it all over again and starts underlining the passages that he likes and making little comments on the edge of the pages. He comes back to read it every few months when he’s having a particularly hard time or even when he’s having a good time, whenever he just wants to look at it with a fresh perspective. He leaves different notes and likes different quotes every time. 

“There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.” He likes that one when he starts thinking he stands out too much and people won’t like him because of it. Finds comfort in the fact that it was like that back then too.

“He could die for such a friend, he would allow such a friend to die for him; they would make any sacrifice for each other, and count the world nothing, neither death nor distance nor crossness could part them, because ‘this is my friend.’” He liked that one before him and Ted had such a close bond and he didn’t have any true friends in this time yet, not knowing how close him and Ted would get and knowing that the quote would become a little too real in the coming years. 

“He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.” That one jumped out to him after Ted died and he was left on his own for the first time in years without realizing how much his best friend meant to him until it was too late. 

There was even one line that he remembered word for word from back before any of this hero business even started, when he was in his own time and didn’t know what he was going to do with his life. Maybe it’s what brought him here without him realizing. “The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.” He was a coward, he couldn’t manage to get anything right and he was terrified of what would happen when he grew up and lost his good looks that everyone kept him around for. So he ran away to the past and now he’s here. 

It was when Ted came back that Booster decided that he needed to share the book that meant so much to him with somebody and so who else to share it with than his best friend? So he brought out the book one night while it was kinda slow for the JLI and Ted was hanging out with Booster in his room. The book at this point was pretty beat up, had sticky notes and pencil and pen all over it. Ted was immediately curious, as Ted is all the time, and saw how nervous Booster was and immediately knew that this was something important to him. And they spent the rest of the night talking about Maurice, the quotes that Booster comes back to time after time and what it meant to him as a kid when he read it for the first time. They’d both be lying if they said there weren’t plenty of tears that night. 

After that night, Booster read it one more time and this time a new quote jumped out at him. “He had brought out the man in Alec, and now it was Alec’s turn to bring out the hero in him.” He realized that Ted was Alec all along and maybe it was possible to have a happy ending, maybe Forster wasn’t lying when he gave Maurice and Alec that happy ending so long ago. 

Years and years later, that quote from the authors note his first readthrough of the book stuck with him, and when Ted and Booster finally got married, the inside of the wedding bands reminded them that no matter what happens, “A happy ending was imperative.”