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cartoonfangirl1218 · 4 years ago

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Two to Tango

Note: Wow, it’s been like a year since I’ve written any EoA, and of course, of course, my inspiration was Estoma. I always thought tango as a dance for them and so... I made a fic. Thanks to @halloweennut for her advice in the dance and the ending. The dance was modeled on this one so if any of the description seems awkward, this was what I was trying to describe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_L-v8zQf14. As ever, hope y’all enjoy!

Esteban discreetly wiped his brow as he bowed down to what felt like his hundredth dance partner this night.

It had been thrilling to dance again, away from the cold eyes of the tyrannical sorceress. Feel his muscle memory flip to automatic as he spun around. The music lifts and moves him in a joyous way that he never thought he would have again. He needed to enjoy the night while he could. Before he went back to the “civilized silence,” the gloomy, culture-less Avalor and all the other miseries he brought upon himself there.

But even he had to admit he was exhausted after being on his feet all night yet he didn’t want to stop. King Lars had assured him the tango would play by now, as per Esteban’s request. The tango was one of the most complex dances in Avalor. Intense, passionate, por sabor! It reminded him of his childhood, watching his parents sweep around their ballroom on date night and wondering how two bodies could move that way. It reminded him of his youth- the way the guitar strummed and the music reached a tantalizing hilt as he dipped his voluptuous partner, feeling the heat feed off each other, feeling like a man. He remembered the feeling of being fully in control, his every muscle limber and engaged in the moment. Knowing that no one else could execute the tango like he could. It was like nothing in the world. Not that he would get to fully show off his skill. After all the tango was dependent on how well the partners moved together and since they were going in a circle, each guest taking the partner to their left, who knows what kind of person he’d get. The tricky intricate dance could be dangerous with the wrong partner. Not in the physical sense but to one’s ego, immensely. For an inexperienced partner’s awkward mistakes could make them both look like fools. King Lars rang the bell that signaled a partner change. He bowed to the dashing blonde who he shared the Marswickian waltz with. He rolled back his shoulders as he stood in the outer circle as the ladies tittered, swirling the skirts and moved to their right. And the gods must have thought, like so many times in Esteban's life, that he had too much of a good thing because they saw it fit to strike him with a migraine in the form of Avalor's magister of trade.

It was clear that she hadn't been expecting him to be her partner either by the way Doña's jaw unattractively dropped open and her nose started to scrunch up in disgust. He would almost have been insulted but he knew that he was probably making a similar face as the migraine began to assault him.

No, actually, Esteban thought to himself, he did feel insulted by how annoyed she looked. After all, she was the one who had been causing trouble all week. No matter the treaty, no matter the discussion. She contradicted each and every word he said. They were supposed to be a united front for Avalor's interests at these foreign meetings to ensure that Avalor, and more importantly Shuriki, would be satisfied and prosperous in the years to come. But instead she argued with him, that his strategies were unachievable. His ideas were too broad or too narrow. Everything he did was wrong or stupid or foolish in some way. He didn't know what it was. Most foreign trips, they'd sweep the other kingdoms aside and meet their goals efficiently. But this week, she seemed intent on refuting everything he said out of spite. He'd been hoping not to see her until the weekend. Their last argument had been particularly harrowing as it went from trade disagreements to more personal insults. He knew what she thought of him. Hell, she condescendingly held her chin up high and rolled her eyes at him as she went on about how little he knew of the real world because he was pompous, pampered, spoiled royal. That she was so much better than him, that she worked so much harder. It was infuriating to be with someone so arrogant and self-important. After two days he wanted to exile her to Nueva Vista to work as... as he didn't know what, but just far from him. But the worst thing was he couldn't do that. She was actually good at her job! This week aside, when they did work together, she had good ideas. Not as well thought out and great as Esteban's but they were effective. She had a silver tongue persuasiveness that sometimes left him speechless. She was dedicated, she knew how to get things done. Esteban was convinced that it was pure antagonism on her part that she thrived in her job. She was accomplished so he couldn't use the excuse of incompetence to put her out of office and out of his life! No, he was stuck with her. And he was stuck with her in this tango too apparently. His temple throb as he saw her lips part. A sure sign that she would add to his pounding headache. So he went for the first strike. “Let’s not talk that way, this will go faster for both of us,” Esteban cut her off, “Besides talking tends to make inexperienced dancers, like you, mess up.” Doña, blessedly, shut her mouth yet her eyes lit up with the competitive fire that was present at all their interactions. Then the music began. The guitars rumbled with feeling. The singer's voice rose from deep in his gut to mourn his lost love in the fires of the revolution. Esteban straightened up and held his arms out more stiff than what was expected for a dance but gods, this irritation always made him tense. She lightly took his hands, looking at him down her nose as if he should be so honored to be partnered with her. He couldn't stop his eye roll which she responded with a sardonic snort. Esteban thought to spare himself the further pain by training his eyes on some distant point. But her face caught his eyes first. Her green orbs weren't steadfastly ignoring him as he was planning to do with her, in fact she was seizing up his form. For a moment, Esteban thought she was watching him because she didn't know the moves. Unsurprising since she grew up during Shuriki's ban on music and dance. A fact amply demonstrated when he did see her dance. A scarecrow had more rhythm than her. However, she didn't have the look of a novice, nervously watching where to put her feet. No, she was watching him. Daring... no. Esteban could see the anticipatory look, she was waiting for him to slip. The nerve of her! He met her eye for eye, to partake in a staring contest that proved he had no need to watch his feet in a tango. He was the dance expert here. He lips curved into that taunting smirk and Esteban smirked as well, knowing for all her arrogance that he was the superior one on the floor tonight.

The tango is primarily a walking dance and so at the first 8 count, they curved and stepped. He stepped forward, keeping his weight on the balls of his feet, right foot passing over his left handily as she did the reverse, gliding across the room into the center of the circle. The spotlight that always suited Esteban best.

He swung her into a back corte, sliding his leg up hers for a gancho then she did the gancho and they repeated the arrastre. He began to move backwards so they could go to the right but she slid her leg up to his hips, forcing him to arch back into a lunge and then began to move backwards herself. Forcing Esteban to follow her to the left of the room.

Just like in a regular workday, Doña was always trying to counter him. Esteban gritted his teeth in an effort to keep his face stoic. He wasn't going to give her the satisfaction.

She'd pasada, "You're spoiled, egotistical, pretentious, pompous.." He'd agujas "You're disrespectful, self-centered, high and mighty.." He'd start a giro and she'd change it midway to a colgada. Insults going unspoken between them, but it was as if they were picking up the argument just from this afternoon. "Impossible, insufferable" "Deluded, ungrateful, repressed" Each doing what made the tango so difficult yet entrancing. Taking advantage of one move to add their personal flair, anticipating and following the other's moves in the push and pull that characterized the dance. And their personal rivalry for dominance. And just like their work life, they found each other underestimating the grace the other would pull off when faced with a surprise. The dedication and focus that was turned to this dance instead of their usual inventories. The fierce determination to do it right and not stop till it was done. He gently swung her right arm prompting a twirl so Esteban could get a break from their intense stare down and the feeling that he was going to go cross eyed. He took control and instead of returning to the regular forward facing position that the rest of the couples had taken, he turned her so her back was toward him. He pressed against her back, his cheek against her smooth hair, inhaling the flowery fragrance as they took a turn around the room. Esteban felt his body relax, his arms lost their stiffness and he let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

Yes, he was in his element now, and with some satisfaction he knew Doña wasn't. His hand held against hers on her stomach, and he could feel the all too purposeful in-out breathing that one used to hide nerves.

When he spun her around so they faced each other again, he didn't see a hint of uncertainty. Her eyes were narrowed in vexation at what he pulled but she still held her nose in the air like a goddamn queen. Gods, why was he cursed with her in his life? But if she wanted to act like she'd been tango-ing for years, well then he was certainly going to take this dance to the next level. Esteban cracked his neck and when the singer reached his chorus, he slid his hand to the small of her back, being careful that he was properly positioned and had a firm grip on her other hand, he lifted her up. She wobbled a bit at the surprise horizontal lift but he kept his grip on her, slowly turning around in a circle, drawing several gasps from onlookers.

Doña was too stiff and for the barest of moments her eyes widened in fear, probably suspecting that he was going to drop her on her head in revenge for many annoyances.

But he had a reputation on the dance floor to maintain and it wouldn't do if she made him look bad. He mouthed "Drop one leg down and relax." The fear vanished and was replaced with a haughty sniff as she dropped her head down for another turn around the room. He brought her back to the ground for a moment before lifting her up in a classic tango lift, settling her against his hip, arms outstretched. Another turn and she slowly, almost tantalizing if it had been any other person, slid down against his chest back to her feet. Back at first position, back in the stare down that started it all. The music sped up and they went into a triple arrastre, another corte and he spun her so they could take another promenade around the room. This time she was prepared for when he pressed against her back and she surprised him with a gancho between his legs. A gancho that was too sensually close for comfort that he decided it would be safer if they faced forward from then on. He could practically hear her self-satisfied drawl, "Repressed! I'll show you repressed!" Not that he didn't return the favor by pressing his lips against her neck for a moment, just long enough for her to gasp before he twirled her around, smoothing his face as if nothing had happened. The music hit another swell and their third back corte was when Esteban felt the moment he had been wanting. He felt free. His past, his mistakes, his flaws all meant nothing. His mind mumbling depressing days ahead we’re not in sight. He was happy. And he couldn’t stop the smile that spread across his face. The facial muscles that had gone unused so long. But it was a relief as well. That he was capable of feeling it again. That he had something to smile about. He wanted the moment to last forever. This was the moment where everything clicked, all his senses came to life, melded together in clear focus. Everything was heightened but he didn't notice his surroundings. He was aware only of the dance, the movement of their bodies, their music and the running heat.

He was also acutely aware of the dryness in his throat, the slight perspiration that formed a sheen across his forehead. He felt the smooth silk of Doña's dress, the way it slid under his palm as his left hand held the small of her back.

It suddenly hit him how close they were to each other. How he could feel the warmth of her body radiating through the slippery fabric. The softness of her hands in his. The firm yet determined grip on his shoulder. The way her curves rested against his chest. A fact that made his chest tighten and a flush rise up his neck, reminding himself not to break their staring contest and look down. There was nothing but air that could get past their proximity. His head was swimming with her jasmine perfume that permeated the air, filling his mind with its heady scent. He inhaled deeply, before swinging her arm, signalling that he was going to spin her into an arch turn again, giving him some space to breathe. She spun back toward him, her dress slit sliding up her long leg, another item he was determined not to notice, as he brought her into a low dip.

Esteban was focused on not looking down at the curves arching under him, staring resolutely on her face, eyes landing on the red of her bow shaped lips curved in a rare unguarded smile.

He hadn't noticed before but she was wearing red. A departure from her usual cool tones but it fitted her. It matched the lipstick that brought out her tan skin that glowed under the ballroom chandeliers, the dark raven locks that were slipping from her bun. The dark eyeshadow dusting her eyes that were closed for a moment before pinning him in her sights when he brought her back to standard position. Esteban, feeling drawn to the body warmth, stepped closer than before so their foreheads touched, giving him something to press against, to literally butt heads as they had been metaphorically doing all week. But it wasn't the same stubbornness that drove their fights. It was something altogether different. There was still tension in the air but it wasn't boiling anger. It felt like an undercurrent in his blood waiting to spring.

Doña was no longer smirking. Her mouth was set in a determined line, no longer concerned with showing him up but totally in the moment that they were sharing. Her glowing emerald eyes never left his as if she couldn't look away. And if Esteban was being honest with himself, he wasn't sure he could look away either.

Esteban didn't think, he just felt, taken away by the muscle memory and music. The connection and touch of their bodies against each other. His chest pounded and a coil grew tighter in his stomach. He was the music, rising and falling with the guitar, his tension ebbing and flowing with the notes. Arising with fire when he met Doña's eyes.

The music began to reach a crescendo and Esteban knew how to finish this masterful performance. It was a move he had done dozens of times with some of the most renowned dancers at Avalor's academy. One for the most advanced, and well, he had a feeling Doña was capable enough. Or at least, her pride wouldn't let her back out now.

He picked her up spinning and spinning, instinctively knowing the music was coming to its peak and setting her down. It was a dizzying move and Esteban could see from the corner of his eye that Doña was going to fall backwards.

And just like he'd done it a thousand times before, he turned and he gripped her arm into his. Locking gazes once more at the final note. The music ceased and there was a dull roar in Esteban’s ears. Not from the crowd clapping and shouting praise at their performance, he didn’t notice that. Esteban's view was consumed with their locked eyes, the only sound he heard was their breathless panting. Her breath tickled his cheeks from exertion, and heat and released tension. He felt exhausted yet light like he was floating on air. The whole effect was disconcerting and he knew he needed to leave now to get his bearings because if he looked any longer at her..... He broke the stare down first to slowly let go, noting how the crook of her arm fitted perfectly in his and forcing himself to shake that irrant thought away. Esteban backed away, surprised by how he suddenly felt weak-kneed, but he straightened, turned his back on her and left the floor. There was no need for talk, they left it all in their dance.

“You make an excellent couple on the dance floor. Eh, I see you don’t save the fierceness just for the bedroom.” King Juan Ramon nudged him. “Wha-what!” Esteban staggered back, nearly falling on the banquet floor after his flawless performance. “I said, I see you don’t save the fierceness just for the boardroom. You know, negotiations for treaties... Have you had too much wine?” King Ramon put a guiding hand on Esteban's shoulder, expertly leading him away from the crowd, and the sommeliers. “Ah yes, that must be it. Too much wine-I mishear things.” Yes, it was the wine Esteban assured himself. The wine was having an effect on his brain even though he knew that made no sense. He wouldn’t have been able to execute such an excellent tango intoxicated. But it was the only explanation he had for when Esteban heard “bedroom,” his mind immediately went to the image of her lips, remembering how she felt in his arms just moments ago and the desire to take her into his arms, feel the silk slide underneath his fingertips and close the imperceptible distance between them.

He had too much wine. It was the only reason he was thinking that way. He needed to rest. The tango took a lot out of him. He would have to remember for the next time to sit out during tangos. Doing it with the wrong person was dangerous. It made him notice too much. Think too much. Yet his thoughts lingered back to the tango that was more memorable than any he had done before.

#estoma #elena of avalor #esteban flores #doña paloma #my fanfic #my fanfiction #two to tango

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passionate-reply · 4 years ago

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This week on Great Albums: one of very few albums that I think is truly perfect. John Foxx’s second solo LP, The Garden, is a masterpiece of Medieval mysticism, romantic longing, and modern electronics. Transcript below the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! In this installment, I’ll be looking at a classic sophomore album, and one which epitomizes the principle of taking one’s sound in a different direction the second time around: The Garden by John Foxx, first released in 1981.

While The Garden was Foxx’s second release as a solo artist, it’s also his fifth LP overall, as he had spent the late 1970s fronting the original incarnation of Ultravox. Foxx’s Ultravox was an eclectic mix of influences from glam, punk, and, of course, electronic pioneers like Kraftwerk, but it would be the latter of these ideas that dominated Foxx’s solo career. His 1980 solo debut, Metamatic, is some of the purest, starkest, and harshest minimal synth around, and remains one of the most iconic early works of the subgenre.

Music: “Underpass”

If you want more like Metamatic from Foxx, you’ll want to skip ahead to the 1990s, because he turned his back on this thin and aggressively inorganic sound remarkably quickly. While he would produce several more LPs in the 1980s, the group of them seems to grow progressively lighter and softer, with less blistering analogue synth, and more radio-friendly love themes. But while Foxx’s third and fourth efforts are often panned, The Garden has actually won nearly as many fans over the years as Metamatic, proving itself to be powerful in its own ways, despite its radically different aesthetic. Where Metamatic dealt in brutalist city blocks and Ballardian psycho-sexuality, The Garden takes place in moldering cathedrals, embracing Gothic splendour and (imagined) Medieval emotionality.

Music: “Europe After the Rain”

“Europe After the Rain” opens the album, and also served as its lead single, becoming a relatively minor hit in the charts. As we hear it, we immediately become aware that Foxx has abandoned the instrumental palette of Metamatic, made almost exclusively with an ARP 2600 synthesiser, in favour of something more lush. On “Europe After the Rain,” traditional instruments like acoustic guitar and piano are impossible to ignore, though the constant bass synth ensures we never forget Foxx’s roots either. It also seems to be a major thematic leap away from Metamatic, with its tender and romantic feel. Still, that may not necessarily be all there is to it--the song is presumably named after a famous painting of the same title, by the Surrealist Max Ernst, executed in the early 1940s as World War II was first beginning. Ernst’s painting is a sort of apocalyptic vision, in which crumbling structures are overtaken by vegetation, and two figures wander through it, seemingly passing by one another. Perhaps Foxx’s “Europe After the Rain” is also a theme for a devastated landscape, its lovers meeting again the last survivors of some nuclear holocaust? Maybe it isn’t too far away from the themes of crushing modernity employed on Metamatic after all.

Note, as well, the emphasis on “Europe,” conceptually--The Garden is, at least partially, a sort of search for a new European cultural identity. The Garden fuses electronics, and hence Europe’s characteristic technological achievements, with a love of more traditional European cultural ideals, namely, the aesthetics of Medieval Christianity. For evidence of that idea, look no further than its most obvious apotheosis, the track “Pater Noster.”

Music: “Pater Noster”

“Pater Noster” is, of course, a setting of the Latin-language translation of the so-called “Our Father” or Lord’s Prayer, one of the most popular and well-known texts in Christianity. “Pater Noster” is the album’s most obvious love letter to the Middle Ages, but an informed listen will show that it has little to do with actual music from that era--I actually could forgive the synthesisers, which might be analogized to the role of church organs, but the percussion-propelled nature of the track is what really makes it feel ahistorical to me. Despite the religious themes of The Garden, Foxx always averred not being any sort of authentic believer in religion or God, and maintained that he was interested in the traditions of the Church purely on aesthetic grounds. Whether you think this sort of appropriation is appropriate and respectful or not, it’s certainly one of the album’s prominent themes, and part of what makes it feel as unique as it does. While I’ve emphasized the themes of romanticism and religiosity, it’s also worth noting that The Garden is not a complete break from Foxx’s earlier works, and in its return to a more guitar-driven sound, it often winds up riffing on something not unlike punk.

Music: “Systems of Romance”

Astute followers of Foxx will have already noticed that the track “Systems of Romance” shares its title with the third and final LP he released with Ultravox, in 1979. Apparently, it was written that much earlier, though it wouldn’t be seen to completion until several years later. Combining a hard-driving guitar, played by Foxx’s Ultravox bandmate Robin Simon, with the inscrutable, sensual, elemental lyricism Foxx employs throughout his mid-80s oeuvre, the track “Systems of Romance” really feels like a bridge between 70s art rock and 80s avant-synth-pop, moreso than anything else on the album. Much as “Systems of Romance” extracts a certain prettiness from punk, so does the aesthetically-oriented “Night Suit,” which plays with appearance, deception, and masculinity.

Music: “Night Suit”

“Night Suit” is the track on The Garden that I feel is the most exemplary of its own time period, a mysterious ode to a mystical garment that could almost feel at home on an album by Visage. The Garden is interested in “romantic” themes, but “Night Suit” truly feels at peace among the New Romantics. It’s got some of the most “believable” rock influences, with a prominent guitar riff from Simon, and yet its emphasis on the power of fashion and appearances, destructive, and perhaps even supernatural, is hard to imagine in a genuine punk context. As it implores us to “be someone” or “be no-one,” it’s easy to fit “Night Suit” into one of the major themes throughout Foxx’s career: the tranquility and liberation of personal anonymity. Why is the “Night Suit” a suit in the first place? The song wouldn’t make sense if it didn’t deal with a garment that is also a non-garment, something to wear that feels default, neutral, and unassuming--not to mention classically masculine.

On the cover of The Garden, the main thing we see is, well, a garden. Despite Foxx’s more obvious personal presence on the albums before and after The Garden, it’s easy to miss him here, dwarfed by the scale of nature that surrounds him. It’s almost like the album is more meant to be about this place, and the concept of “the garden,” than it is Foxx as a person, or any particular perspective of his.

While the actual capital-R Romantics were deeply interested in the “sublime,” and the scenes and moments in which mankind faces its vulnerability and insignificance when compared to the natural world, it’s also worth remembering that a “garden,” by definition, is really not a natural space at all, but rather one which is arranged by human hands. Even if this composition resembles those of Romantic painters, I think it’s worth looking earlier in the European past to interpret this one. Gardens were one of the most prominent symbols in Medieval literature, and scholars have suggested that they serve as symbols for sensuality, romance, and the yoni itself. Through the association with the Garden of Eden, gardens often represent a sort of lost, but longed-for paradise, and a return to innocence which is as tantalizing as it is impossible. In particular, “Europe After the Rain,” with its theme of lovers meeting again after the passage of some time, seems to connect with this idea.

In hindsight, The Garden really stands alone in Foxx’s career, a masterpiece whose precise style he would never attempt again. We might say it became that Garden of Eden, to which the artist could never return. While Foxx’s interest in Medieval spirituality would return on ambient works like Cathedral Oceans, and he would occasionally return to love songs with an electronic backing, the precise combination of lovelorn bardistry with a flair for the baroque that appears on The Garden remains totally singular. Foxx’s follow-up to this album, 1983’s The Golden Section, narrows its thematic focus towards poppy love songs, and its instrumental focus, likewise, is that of a fairly unremarkable mid-80s synth-pop record. But at the same time, I like to think that tracks like “The Hidden Man” manage to maintain a sense of the mystical.

Music: “The Hidden Man”

My favourite track on The Garden is “Walk Away.” While it lacks the severe and tragic grandeur of the album’s title track, which closes the album on a lofty note, “Walk Away” shares some of its delicate qualities, reviving the soft piano that we heard on “Europe After the Rain.” Thematically, “Walk Away” seems to deal with fragility and transience, and the grave significance that a brief, passing moment may have--which makes that “delicateness” feel all the more poignant in context. Its call-and-response outro, featuring one of Foxx’s most anguished vocal performances, really makes it a stand-out. That’s everything for today--as always, thanks for listening!

Music: “Walk Away”

#music #album review #album reviews #great albums #john foxx

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roseamongroses · 5 years ago

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W.A.L: “We Won’t Eat Our Words (they don’t taste so good),” (16)

s u m m a r y:

Eden was the lowest of the low, a monster, hardly human, and was set to be executed. Roman was on trial, perpetually stuck in time until it was time to atone for his families sins.

Neither cared much for staying trapped.

So when a Stranger offered freedom, offered peace, offered power, it was hard to say no.

Even if it put them on the wrong side of history.

v i b e s :

time is irrelevent, homophobia who?, magic and beasts, demigods

w a r n i n g s

Imprisonment, Mentions of execution, Blood/ injuries, Mentions of past Death, minor character death/suicide, repression, cursing,

c h a r a c t e r s

Deceit(Eden) Sanders, Remy Sanders, Logan Sanders, Virgil Sanders, Patton Sanders, Roman Sanders, Emile Picani

Ship: Roceit

1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

(6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11)

(12) (13) (14) (15)

It’s a closet.

A glorified closet, so Deceit honestly doesn’t know what to tell you about it other then it's dark, it's cramped, and that Logan is insistent that they absolutely cannot eavesdrop on Dr. Picani and Lazy Cow and instead must stew in this dark, did he mention cramp closet?

Deceit was reaching the point of boredom where he was tempted, ever so slightly to just leave and keep walking. He felt that impulse as well as the impulse to get nostalgic because Deceit had been shoved into a lot of closets for a lot of reasons. Some not good, some...more enjoyable, but most a tantalizing mixture of both.

Before he could indulge, the door abruptly opened, light streaking inside. Dr. Picani was a stark shadow looming above them. He seemed to have aged several years within the past few minutes, but his expression was the same pleasant, not quite a smile, not quite a frown so that anyone else wouldn’t have noticed a change if they were under the assumption that Dr. Emile Picani was a pleasant person. But Deceit didn’t think many people were pleasant, himself included, so he assumed the worst and didn’t question it further.

“Oh,” Dr. Picani said, but not to them, “You didn’t turn on the lights,” he said, snapping and like that, Deceit felt exposed, one by one candle on either side of a long aisle lit up, seemingly forever.

Dr. Picani didn’t step inside, “Take as long as you want, but know that I’ll be busy if anything arises,” He handed them a phone, “Use this if you have an emergency, but only if you have an emergency,” He handed the phone to Logan, not even waiting for protests or goodbyes, it felt familiar.

He was gone leaving the three of them in this long corridor, light flickering gently, beckoning them forward into the stretch of darkness.

---

“Back so soon?” The Stranger asked from the floor. Their dark hair spilled over his shoulders, long, much longer then it had been when he first came here. His clothes hung loosely from their now gaunt form, their blue eye focused on the unending white space above.

Emile clicked his pen, “I’m here for your evaluation,” he said.

“Sure you are, “ The Stranger batted his eyes, lips curled, predatory.

Emile ignored them, not even a glance up from their clipboard, “He died.”

The Stranger faltered, “He resigned?” he asked.

“Yes,” he said, “He found out about Dot and I guess he...I don’t know what he thought was going to happen. But I certainly didn’t stop him, it was his right.”

“It was his--” The Stranger scowled, “Why are you justifying this, the hell is wrong with you?" he hissed, standing all at once, “Did you even try to stop him? Did you even try to console him or did you just sit there like a fucking bitch on a leash again--”

“Oh, you’re trying to lord over me,” Emile sneered, “You use her, you’ve used him, every step of the way and you dare to say I don’t care,” He glanced down at his clipboard surprised, ink running as tears ran hot down his face, “She wouldn’t have been in the situation if you’d just… just,” he wiped his eyes, “Leave it be. Whatever you were planning, let’s just leave it behind.” he choked, running his hands in his hair, “Let’s --Let’s,” he stumbled forward and the Strange caught him, surprised.

“Emile?” The Stranger, wrapped his arms around their shoulders, feeling them shake, “Emile, you’re not making any sense, it’s too late for any of that...”

Emile looked up and The Stranger’s breath caught. His hair was messy, their face all blotchy and glasses askew, they were like a little kid, “I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I don’t want to fight anymore I don’t know what I, what I...”

“Darling, how exactly do you plan to get us out of this then,” The Stranger reasoned, smoothing their bangs back with soft touches, “It won’t last, we never do--”

Emile kissed the Stranger, hard, desperate like how the Stranger’s kissed him so many times before. And the Stranger kissed back. He ached, as Emile’s hands cupped his face, tugged his body as if trying to get him closer as if for the first time he was trying.

“Em, ” The Stranger felt his back hit some sort of wall, and he groaned feeling Emile press into him again, “Oh, that’s one way to say you're happy to see me,”

Emile laughed between his hiccups, hands gripping The Stranger’s hips as he rested his head in the crook of their neck, “Mm, “ he hummed, “Something like that.”

“Y’know, what you said about me…” The Stranger swallowed, “ About me being no better than you, about how I used them…”

The Stranger could feel them frown against his skin, “You know I didn’t mean it,” Emile promised, it was so strange to hear him be the one to promise such things. It’s been so long, too long.

“I know you didn’t mean it,” The Stranger reassured them, because after so many messy breakups, and messier arguments they said a lot of untruthful things about each other, “But I mean it when I say, I did use him,” he admitted, fingers tracing careful arcs in Emile’s chest, eyes bright, “The Old Man tried so hard to prove that I was worth something, but I did use him. And I would’ve done it again,”

“That’s not true…” Emile’s words were disconnected, his mouth like cotton as he looked up to meet the Stranger’s eyes, so desperate, so pleading, so...vulnerable.

“I mean it,” The Stranger said cooly, “I used Dot, but she knows that she’s fine with that--and,” he did not stutter, “I love you, you know that? I loved you for so long, but--”

“But? What are you--” Emile’s eyes grew wide as he tried to move away, to let go, but his body remained firmly in place, holding the Stranger so gentle as the Stranger’s soft touches grew cold.

“I love you, Emile,” The Stranger repeated as if it’d change it all, as if years from now they’ll laugh at this and it would be fine because he did love Emile and some time ago Emile may have loved him just as much, “But we we're never meant to last, I’m building something that will last.”

Emile’s eyes flickered with recognition, feeling the all-too-familiar probing of his mind sneak up on him all at once, “No-no-no, you can’t,” He pleaded, “why can’t we leave it--”

“Elliot.” The Stranger’s command was sharp.

And Emile, his team-mate, his jailer, his stubborn lover who was all too persistent and steadfast in all the wrong things, was out like a light.

---

It was a long trek into the darkness, the candles providing little light and even less warmth as they walked down the corridor. Virgil first, who navigated easily, his many eyes dilated, flickering at every shadow and noise. Then it was Deceit because it would be foolish not to keep an eye on him, and then Logan, the one keeping an eye on him.

“Does this go on forever,” Virgil complained.

“Are your legs bothering you?” Logan asked, and Deceit groaned. They were doing the thing where they talk through Deceit as if that makes their relationship any less awkward.

“No it's my-I didn’t say that,” Virgil sniffed, catching himself again, though Deceit could tell he was getting slower or at least he was more distracted. Still, whether that was attributed to fatigue was anybody's bet.

“If you didn’t want a response, you shouldn’t have said anything,” Logan replied.

Virgil spun around at that, now walking backwards, “How do you know I was talking to you, huh?” he said, face pinched, “I could’ve been talking to the snake-fucker for all you know.”

Logan sighed, “Were you, Virgil?”

Virgil snorted, “Of course not--Shit-” As he spun back around he slammed into a wall, Deceit slammed into him, and Logan slammed into Deceit.

“What was that…” Virgil groaned, staggering to their feet.

“A wall,” Deceit drawled, eyes flickering over the heavily carved wall.

“I think he means,” Logan stood up, readjusting their glasses, “What does it mean,” Deceit rolled his eyes, “It looks ancient, Alesener maybe.”

“Oh great, “ Virgil sighed, “It's not like they stopped teaching Alesener, years ago.”

“I’m sure there’s another way,” Logan said, inspecting the carvings, frown growing deeper, “Maybe I can pull up a translator,”

“On ancient Alesner?” Virgil's nose curled, hands tracing the markings, “Sure.”

“Well I don’t see you having any ideas--”

“It's a riddle.” Deceit cut in. Normally he’d just, let them figure it out and play dumb, but he didn’t want to stay here in a children’s maze with these two bickering.

“A riddle,” Virgil echoed lamely.

“A riddle.” Deceit confirmed glancing at the wall again, mostly for show.

Wall carvings were a common form of decoration in the Alesener village, but they were usually nonsense since the art was less in the meaning and more in the elegance the words form. Dot, however, seems to enjoy both. Her walls were littered with puns and riddles, all of which seemed profound at first, but after the extensive translation was more often than not children’s puns at best or dirty jokes at worst.

“How would you know that?” Logan asked, but in a tone that sounded more like a demand than anything.

“Yeah, you're not exactly a scholar,” Virgil said with a skeptical look.

“Like it's any of your business,” Deceit scoffed, before thoughtfully scanning the riddle again, “What I’m getting is that we need a map and the map is most likely…” Deceit frowned, “The truth?”

“Ah, it’s that type of maze,” Logan nodded as if that made perfect sense, “To enter each new part of the maze, someone in the group needs to admit a truth, the stronger the truth, the faster we get out of the maze.” he recited without faltering, “Usually it's harder then you realize to tell a perfect truth, so we have to be careful, these usually have some sort of...difficulty increase if someone lies.”

“Difficulty?” Deceit eyed the wall cautiously as if it’ll burn.

“Monster’s perhaps,” Logan shrugged, “Or it might make it harder to get out.”

“Fantastic,” Virgil sighed, “So how do we, y’ know, get goin’?”

“Easy,” Logan approached the wall, raising a hand and pressing it in the center of the deep markings, “I am an Apprentice,” he said and at first nothing happened.

Then there was the groaning, the stone wall scraping, inch by inch open, before revealing two pathways. Logan stepped forward, and the others followed.

If they had looked behind them, they would have seen the candles flicker behind them, getting taller, their golden flames unruly and leaving puddles in their wake. And once the wall shut again the dancing flames went out all at once.

#ts sides #sanders sides #roceit #ts deceit #ts roman #deceit sanders #sanders sides fanfiction #fanfiction #Winners Among the Losing

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doshmanziari · 5 years ago

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Castlevania: Curse of Darkness ~ It’s Just Like Symphony of the Night, Except Not At All! [Part IV]

When asked recently if Curse of Darkness is good, I answered: no; but, I’ve played through it about ten times. So, on a subjective level that can’t really be transmitted to other people by telling them what to focus on (although I’ll try to enumerate what I focus on), there is something here that, well, I just like. I’m not the sort of person to make the claim that, “[X] is a fine videogame, but a bad [series-name] videogame.” That’s not my conclusion -- to suggest that there is an inherent goodness to the series I like just because it generally excites my palate, and that anything below one’s standard is a “betrayal” of that inherence.

Even though difficulty isn’t what I go to videogames looking for, I think what makes Curse of Darkness work best for me is its hard mode, accessed by finishing the game once and then inputting “@CRAZY” for your file name on a new file (the same goes for Lament of Innocence). The norm for the Castlevania series and iterative challenge has been “loops” -- clearing the game once and then having it roll over automatically to a new game, whereupon enemies deal more damage and are perhaps more numerous and/or newly appearing. Although these adjustments have provided an extra challenge, the presence of new material, of differing enemies or enemy placements, has tended to be relatively minimal. The first Castlevania, for example, halts its modifications on stage four on subsequent loops. CoD’s hard mode is remarkable in that pretty much every area has been edited for enemy type and occurrence. It is also, at least on some hypothetical level, the toughest of any Castlevania hard mode. Hours in, you will still be easily slain in just a few hits, your curative capacity is strict, and money is tight. What all of this means, for me, anyway, is that Curse of Darkness becomes a sort of brutal dungeon crawler: the endurance which the level design, by default, asks of the player better matches what you need to do in order to survive until the next save point.

What it also means is that you might be compelled to more intentionally curate your familiars, here called Innocent Devils. Normally, these critters are absolutely peripheral, excepting a handful of spots where one’s ability is required for progress. On hard mode, having the right familiar in the right situation, using the right abilities, is an enormous help -- sometimes, the difference between your life and death. If I could retroactively magically redirect all of the labor poured into the Innocent Devils to the level design, of course I’d do it in a heartbeat; but the variety that effort produced -- the physical differences between a Devil’s evolutionary forms, their skills, and the descriptions for each (two of my favorites: “A star motif graces the rod of this mage. Its owner dreams of one day becoming one with the stars”, and “Pure rage in corporal form, it is chaos with wings. Many find its anguished form hard to look at”) -- has its place among the rest of the game’s marginalia. Without them, too, Curse of Darkness would perhaps be an overly lonely experience.

Curse of Darkness has something in common with KCET’s post-Game Boy Advance Castlevanias (most of all Order of Ecclesia), which is that its bosses are excellent -- fun to look at and fun to fight, especially on hard mode, where precise mechanical execution is mandatory. The downside is that they are, in fact, so good that returning to the game as usual after each can be especially deflating. Just as fun are the narrative interludes featuring some wonderfully on-point voice acting by, best of all, Liam O’Brien (as Isaac) and Adam D. Clark (as St. Germain), and, somehow, some of the subtlest facial expressions found on the console. To be sure, the characterizations are limited -- caricatures more than characters -- but what they lack in humanistic texture (something perhaps not to be sought in this series) they make up for in flair. People might pick on the Lords of Shadow titles for resembling “high fantasy” ersatz with doses of Castlevania jabbed in wherever, and while that is a fair criticism, just as awful was the games’ relentlessly grieving tone, as if a suffocating sense of self-seriousness were what the material needed for effect. Curse of Darkness’ tonal strain -- reverential, obscurantist, and funny -- could not be unlikelier. There is the rendering of Trevor Belmont, after we first fight him to no avail, as a near-saintly figure; the inscrutable, fanfiction-like logic guiding the major plot beats; the way Hector, as protagonist, slams between ridiculous shrieks of vengeance and introspective “Indeed”s. It is, all in all, maybe the best-relayed storyline Castlevania has ever gotten, and maybe will ever get.

If there’s one mechanical idea, separate from the Innocent Devils, to applaud, it’s the stealing mechanic, whereby Hector can snag various items from ghouls and ghosts if done at the proper time. This is indicated by the lock-on reticule momentarily switching from orange to purple, and often requires waiting for certain animations to begin or finish. It’s a neat micro-challenge to engage if you’re so inclined (bosses are where it shines; the Wyvern, for example, has an optional aerial sequence that’s tied to the steal-window), and a nice alternative to item drops being determined by randomized success/failure rates. To be clear, randomized drops do still exist -- they’re there in the bestiary as a delineated datum -- but they’re no longer the sole possibility. For some, this mechanic might also serve as an invitation to observe Dracula’s army with a heightened degree of purposefulness, to better appreciate the effort that went into giving its members life. However viewed, it’s kind of a shame that the idea remains unique to Curse of Darkness. I suppose pure statistical randomness pumps up the playtime for anyone who enjoys grinding; but the intentionality underpinning the stealing mechanic, the terms of its execution and our means of utilizing it, is a tantalizing window into an alternative, less number-crunchy shape for the action-RPG mold of Castlevania.

And, really, for as often as Curse of Darkness’ visuals compare unfavorably to Lament of Innocence’s, I couldn’t’ve taken as many photos of it as I did for another lo-fi-/CRT-dedicated project last year (a fraction of the results can be seen here and here) if the game’s world didn’t have an ambient luminescence of its own, albeit one thinned out by the aforementioned issues with the scope and camera, and several stale settings. In a fashion seemingly particular to PlayStation 2 releases, scores of exterior and interior spots are clothed with polychromatic, sourceless “lighting”, such that a wall’s surface might go from a deep blue to a brown-green to a purplish red. Taken as a sum, Curse of Darkness’ Wallachia is dim and gray-faced; taken constitutionally, it’s in fact abounding with colorful dispersions. Especially delightful for its brazenness is the pause menu/status screen, centralized by a pillar of neon-green stamps, headlined by a teal and an orange ochre banner, and itemized on the right by a stack of iconographic boxes. As coloration and organization go, compared to Lament of Innocence’s screen, it’s sloppy. But as a chunk of graphic design to linger in, it’s delicious, and happily recalls Harmony of Dissonance’s palettes (also directed by Takashi Takeda).

Well! That’s nearly all I have to say about Curse of Darkness right now. I’m curious if the animated Castlevania series’ second season, featuring Hector and Isaac (Isaac is physically recast and no longer queer-coded in the way media tends to do that coding; a gain and a loss, in my opinion), got some people to try this game out for the first time. If it did, I’m also curious if the show’s characterizations transferred over, maybe allowing those people to enjoy Curse of Darkness in a way foreign to myself (no, I still haven’t watched the show) and others. Could the imaginatively supplementary reach of fanfiction sustain such a playthrough? Surely it’s possible.

You can read the prior three essays on CoD here, here, and here.

#curse of darkness #Castlevania #brick by brick #akumajo dracula

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tabithacarlisle · 6 years ago

Photo

*OFF THE RECORD : Part 9

.......

by jo ( @tabithacarlisle ;)

*Catch up on OFF THE RECORD’s previous chapters Parts 1-8 at the OTR MASTERLIST

Word count: 5757

OTR Part 9 Notes & Disclaimers: Pixelberry Studios owns these characters, not me! I just have fun playing with them :)

Pairings: Liam x MC (Tabitha) (mentions: Maxwell x MC | Liam x Drake | discussions of Liam x Drake x MC x Maxwell)

*Author’s Note: any time you see text underlined, it’s a link to screenshots from Pixelberry’s Choices TRR scenes, or other chapters referenced from *OTR- click them!! :)

Warnings: 18+ NS*W, !, erotica, polyamory, marital angst, discussions of group sex, brief mention of recreational drug use, sex-play bondage If you click ‘Keep Reading’ you are acknowledging that you are 18+

…..

OTR Part 9

:::Security sweep, check.::::

::::North end, all clear, check.:::

::::Perimeter, secure. Check::::

...

The King & Queen of Cordonia sat waiting in their motorcade vehicle that had picked them up only a half an hour or so earlier from the jet tarmac on Sardinia. Tabitha rolled her window down to get a better look of the private costal beach view that they’d be enjoying for the next few days on their scheduled mini-break. The sun was setting, creating the most gorgeous purple and orange sky, and the only sounds they could hear apart from the shorebirds, and the waves crashing against the rocks were the faint sounds from inside the villa of Bastien & Mara’s security team communicating on their radios.

Tabitha sighed, enchanted at the sight. “It’s so beautiful.”

“Isn’t it?”

She looked back at Liam, who was looking straight at her, rather than at the sunset at the horizon. Groaning she rolled her eyes at him and slapped his shoulder, then laughed, “will you ever stop doing that?”

“What? Stop thinking you’re the most beautiful sight I’ve ever laid eyes upon? Doubtful.” He winked and laced his fingers through hers, bringing her hand up to his lips to kiss the back of it. She blushed, turning to rub his shoulder as she returned her gaze back out the window, both touched and embarrassed by his flattery.

Bastien opened the door the villa and Mara followed with the rest of the team, signaling for the Royal couple to make their way out of the vehicle.

“All clear. Enjoy yourselves tonight, your Majesties.” Bastien winked at Liam and the security team bowed towards the newlyweds before leaving to man their posts outside the building.

Liam moved to lock the door behind Bastien and Mara as they left. He spun Tabitha around an pinned her wrists together above her head against the door, almost too eagerly.

“Liam?!”

He groaned “I’ve been aching for you, my love. I can’t wait any longer.”

Liam pressed into her, his body urging her legs apart. She could feel his erection insistent against her, separated only by their thin layers of clothing.

“Liam...”

He dipped down his head to suck at the side of her neck, his free hand roving over her every curve. Liam pulled down her neckline to free her left breast, tweaking the nipple until it peaked before he took it in his mouth. Her breath caught in her throat and she bit her lip to suppress the pain.

*gRrrrrrrrrdddddNnnnn...*

“What was that?” Startled at the sound pulled away from each other, both panting with ragged breaths.

“Was that... you?”

“Omigod, so embarrassing. I guess I’m hungrier than I thought?”

Liam chuckled softly. Effortlessly switching modes, he helped Tabitha straighten her dress. With the doting care of a man who truly adored his wife, he smoothed down her hair and kissed her forehead, “well then we must feed you. Both of you.” His eyes twinkled and he let his hand rest on her stomach. For a second, it seemed as if a cloud passed over his gaze making his expression momentarily unreadable, but his face softened again quickly afterwards “Our dinner reservations aren’t until 7:30, but... I could pull some strings to make it earlier—“ He reached for the cellphone in his back pocket and started to dial.

“No, darling. I’m not really in the mood for dinner, but I could go for some gelato.”

“I know the perfect place. I’ll have them deliver to our room.”

“Liam, it’s ok. We can walk there. Like normal people.”

“But we aren’t normal people, Tabitha. I hate to be the one to remind you. We won’t be able to get the security clearances out there this late. Please, trust me on this one, my love. I do have ideas for how we can spend that time while we wait here to make it worth your while.” His hands moved down from her shoulders, slowly over her arms, and grazing over her hands before reaching behind to cup her ass.

“Oh? Like?”

“A foot rub? You asked for one awhile back and I do feel per my duties as your husband that one is long overdue.“ His eyebrows cocked suggestively as he pulled her flush against him again, toying further with the back hem of her skirt.

“That sounds heavenly” she purred, closing her eyes and inhaling the scent of his cologne and enjoying the pressure of his body against hers. “But what about you? Suppose we book some professionals for a couple’s massage in the room? Like we did for our honeymoon?”

“Perhaps, another time. Sometimes...”

He bent down to growl low at her ear, his hand cradled her throat

“Sometimes, I want to be the only one who gets to touch you.”

His lips kissed and softly sucked at the cartilage rimming her ear down to the lobe.

“Okay...mmm... you are very convincing.”

“I’ve learned from the best.” he murmured with his lips against her skin. “Go, sit down on the couch. I’ll be right there.” He hung up his blazer and unbuttoned his shirtsleeves, rolling up the cuffs before he dialed a number on his cell, where he could be heard speaking to the person at the other end of the line in fluent Italian.

“Now, where were we?”

Liam joined Tabitha on the couch and patted his lap.

“Up, feet, now.”

“Yes, your Majesty.” Tabitha obliged, giggling. He carefully removed her sling back pumps and placed them on the floor. Then lifting her heel, he began to knead the soles of her foot.

Tabitha closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the upholstered cushions.

“Ohhh... How do you know just what I need before I even know it?”

Liam tutted at her, a sideways smirk creeping across smile, “I’ve told you, it’s something I pride myself on; knowing you, what you need.”

His expert hands worked their way stroking up her toes.

“Omigod... that feels phenomenal...”

Her hips ground slowly from side to side as Liam increased the pressure. Tabitha moaned and arched her back off the couch

“mmmm... Liam How are you so good at this? Your hands are magic!”

He pressed in a tantalizing circular motion at the pressure point under her left arch, causing a jolt of electricity to pulse a current that shot straight up to her core. She inhaled sharply and bucked at the sensation, causing the hem of her dress to fall backwards revealing her thin lace underwear. He could see the physical results of his efforts by the small damp spot forming at the crotch. It made him ache for her.

“Tabitha...”

Liam let her foot down to dip his torso towards her and leaned down to kiss her lips. He groaned into the kiss as she deepened it, cupping his jaw as his lips moved feverishly against hers. His hand reached down, pushing her dress up more, skimming her bare, pregnant belly and traveling lower still to toy below the waistband of her panties.

“Oh, Liam—“

A sharp knock at the door interrupted their moment.

Liam sighed, smiling sheepishly, pulling her dress back down. “...That, would be the gelato.”

“Fuuuck.” Tabitha bit the back of her knuckles in an attempt to sober up for company, wincing. “Damn my stupid cravings.”

“Indeed.” He kissed her cheek softly and rubbed her shoulder, “we’ll pick this up later.” before gently patting her rear end and getting up to answer the door.

The handsome Italian Gelateria owner who came to their door had closed his shop and wheeled a refrigerated cart on foot to their vacation villa. They had a multitude of flavors to choose from. Tabitha’s mouth watered, overwhelmed at the prospect of having to make a decision out of so many options.

Liam, ever practical, knew exactly what he wanted.

“Vorrei un gelato stracciatella, per favore.”

Tabitha wrinkled her nose “Just chocolate chip? You’re only going to get one flavor? When there’s so many to choose from? That’s no fun.”

“Why not?” He shrugged. “I know what I want. It’s chocolate, it’s Vanilla, I get the best of both worlds in one flavor.”

“Liam, live a little! Let’s try something... *ahem* Vorrei un gelato con tre gusti, per favore.”

The Gelateria owner smiled at her, “Quali gusti vorrebbe?”

“cioccolato all ‘Azteca, stracciatella, y Nocciola, per favore.”

Liam smirked at her boldness, “That’s an awful lot of gelato.”

“Hush, you. Just trust me on this one.”

He chuckled, shaking his head

“Ok, you’re the boss.”

Liam thanked and generously tipped the gelato store owner, and dimmed the lights before rejoining Tabitha at the table.

“Now how, on earth, do you suppose we‘re going to eat all of this?”

“Patience, grasshopper. Watch & learn.”

“I’m listening.”

Tabitha spoke as she poked at the scoops of gelato in the bowl with the sharp end of her spoon.

“Liam, Stracciatella is a perfectly good flavor, by itself. But add some Noccicola, some Cioccolato all ‘Azteca, dip your spoon in all three, let their flavors meld and mix on your tongue, and it makes for a bite that becomes an experience, something you’ll never forget. Something you’ll find yourself craving to recreate that sensational combination, when one flavor just won’t do.”

He halfheartedly clapped, voice dripping with sarcasm “My Queen, I think you’ve missed your calling as a marketing executive. That was positively Don-Draperesque.”

“High praise, and a Mad Men reference on top of everything? I’m impressed!” she smiled. “But it means nothing if I can’t convince you that I’m right. So go on then, try it.”

Tabitha dipped her spoon again into each of the three flavors. She held it up to him, her eager anticipation awaiting his response making her eyes go wide and bright. Liam bent down tentatively, keeping his eyes locked on hers as he let her feed him. His eyelids closed once he took the full spoon in his mouth, and his hands drew up against his lips to hold it in as she pulled out, trying to keep it all in.

“Well...?”

“It’s....”

“‘It’s...’ what?”

Liam put his hand up to shield his mouthful of gelato as he spoke

“It’s bloody amazing.”

“Right? That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! Three is better than one.”

He dabbed a napkin at his mouth and finished swallowing his bite. “You’re not still talking about gelato... are you?”

“Please, Liam. I know you’re not that dense.”

Liam gathered his breath and drew a large sigh, taking another spoonful

“I signed off... on the plans.”

“What?”

“Drake’s plans. And yours, I gathered? Since you two seem to be tag teaming me to cave to your will.. For the cottage on your open estate lands in Valtoria.”

“Does that mean... you’re on board?”

Liam sighed.

“I, want to make you happy, Tabitha. More than anything. But I still can’t help but feel apprehensive about this idea. I know you and Drake are both bullish about it but, I...”

Liam looked down, trying to gather his thoughts. Tabitha could see the agony on his face, though he was trying to hide it.

Tabitha gave him a conspiratorial smirk

“That’s what the pot is for, darling. You boys are going to have so much fun, I’m actually quite jealous”

“Jealousy… interesting word choice. That’s another concern of mine...”

“Wait, you mean jealous of each other while we’re… Liam, if you’re worried about jealousy, you won’t find any from me. Max isn’t a jealous person at all, he’s done this before, and—"

Liam sighed

“Wait a minute. This isn’t just about the foursome is it? You’re still trying to work through the-“

She lowered her voice in a hushed tone,

“You, and Maxwell... the baby?”

Liam didn’t say anything, but looked down, his face couldn’t conceal his troubled feelings any longer with her.

Tabitha broke the silence again

“Are you still upset with me?”

“No. I was at first. Though, you didn’t deserve any of my ire. That was when I let my primal brain take over. Drake calmed me down, a lot. And I don’t blame you Tabitha, or Maxwell. I’ve made my peace with it. I am going to love this child and raise them as my own, regardless of whom the biological father turns out to be. But I can’t help but feel I should blame myself, for putting us all in this situation in the first place. I... wish I had been able to give you a simpler life.”

“Liam, what do you mean?”

“Part of me bears this unshakeable guilt...”

“Guilt? About what? Us?”

“No. Yes. No, it’s— it’s guilt that this, us, that we couldn’t just be simple. That we couldn’t just be enough for each other. I’ve told you before, Tabitha. You were the only one of my suitors who didn’t want to run away, or didn’t demand that I remove Drake from my life, when you found out about my complicated relationship with him. Drake even sensed that about you before you made it clear to me that you would accept me with all of the strings attached. It’s why he tried to suppress his own feelings for you, because we both knew what a gem you were, Tabitha...” Liam reached across the table and held her hands in his, with tears in his eyes, “you’re my ‘once in a lifetime.’ When I found you, I finally found the one I was searching for. I realized in you that I could fulfill my duties as King, to marry such a beautiful, marvelous woman. To have the heirs demanded of me, to have your love and also be able to keep the love of my best friend, it’s more than I ever dreamed possible. It’s why I’ve wanted to give you everything you could ever want, including that night with Maxwell....”

He swallowed back tears.

“When, you told me that the baby might be his, my biggest fear wasn’t that I might not be the father. I mostly feared that if he was, that you would leave me for Maxwell, and that I could never find another woman as remarkable or incredible as you, who’d let me be myself. I don’t want to lose you, Tabitha. I literally don’t know what I would do without you. I just worry that this experiment of yours will cause tensions that will end up with people I love getting hurt, and cause you think that you don’t need or want me, and-"

“Liam, stop. That would never happen. I married you. And you’re stuck with me now. For better, or for worse. And the parts with you, have all been ‘for better.’ I love you.”

“I still wish I could give you all of me.”

“You wouldn’t be the man you are today without Drake in your life. I see how he calms and grounds you. I know how much you need each other”

“But why do we have to all be together? Like... that? I honestly don’t understand the appeal. Sex has always been such an intimate act for me. I have never understood exhibitionism because for most of my life I always had to hide my feelings, until I met you...” he smiled with love in his eyes as he squeezed her hand across the table, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to— perform, with others around, and I don’t know how we’ll handle the fallout if it doesn’t go well. To be honest, I’ve always gotten a thrill out of being intimate away from prying eyes, the spontaneity of it—“

“Liam, is that why you get off so much on having sex outdoors, or anywhere else that’s not on a bed?”

“Well I’ve never analyzed my motivations so thoroughly before, Dr. Freud, but perhaps you might be on to something there.”

They both laughed, breaking the tension some, before Tabitha spoke again,

“Look Liam, I like a naughty fuck behind locked doors with a lover as much as the next person, it’s hot, sexy, dangerous, I get that. But sometimes, damnit, sometimes I just want to shout from the rooftops how much I love my three favorite men. And I want to be able to show you all that, physically! I get tired of all of this behind closed doors, off-the-record business all the time. I love you, I love Max, and I love Drake, I love what you and Drake share, and I don’t think any of us should be ashamed to admit it to ourselves! We should embrace it, celebrate it even. Don’t you think so too? You keep thinking of all of the possible ways this could go wrong, but what if, what if it goes right? What if making love to your wife and your best friend and her lover at the same time is the most amazing, earth shattering, mind blowing experience you’ve ever had, Liam? Just think of how good the sex could be if we put it all out on the line and can finally be fully honest with each other. Give it a shot. Give us a shot.”

“You make it all sound so goddamn reasonable. How on earth do you do that, Tabitha?”

“Because it is reasonable, and deep down, you know it too. Because we aren’t like other married couples. We never will be. Our many layers, our lovers, they’re what makes our love so extraordinary.”

Liam relaxed his shoulders with a stoic acceptance. “All right. You’ve convinced me. I’ll try it, for you.”

“You will? Oh Liam!”

She threw her arms around his neck as he tucked a finger underneath her chin to bring her lips to his and kiss her deeply. The passion in the kiss burst from Tabitha’s mouth hot like fire. Liam let a low moan escape from his throat, echoing at the back of hers. She pulled back from his lips just enough to rest her forehead against his, as his strong arms easily braced her frame pulled flush against him.

“God, I’d do anything to make you smile like that at me, my love.”

“I am so, so happy right now! Aren’t you?”

“It’s difficult to not catch that sentiment from you, my queen. Your energy is infectious. But honestly, I’m still-”

He let out a low exhale.

“- a bit, nervous. I’ve never...”

“Had group sex before?”

“No! Of course not. Have you?”

“No, I almost had a threesome once. There was this one time, in college...”

Liam chuckled. “I should have known. You and Drake had all of these ‘forbidden experiences’ that I missed out on 'in college.' What is it about Americans throwing caution to the wind when they attend University?”

“Yeah well, I kinda had a crush on my best friend Mark, and I think he felt the same about me, but we were always dating other people. Anyway, one time his girlfriend Amy, whom I couldn’t stand, said they wanted to have a threesome with me.”

“I gather, you turned them down then?”

“I couldn’t go through with it. I had feelings for Mark but I hated her so much. She could be a real monster. I knew it wouldn’t work out.”

“And... this tale of yours is supposed to make me feel better about our plans?”

“No! I mean, yes? That was different. I had no respect for Amy. But you, and me, and Max and Drake, we all know each other and genuinely care for one another. It’s a totally different situation.”

Liam scratched at the stubble on his chin deep in thought. “I see... so what ever happened to this ‘Mark’ - What was his last name again?”

Tabitha could see Liam’s brows furrowed with a tinge of mock jealousy as he started typing on his cellphone.

“LIAM! oh my god - Don’t!” Tabitha laughed as she swatted the phone away from him.

“No, I insist! I need to know about all of the many men in my wife’s past.”

“It’s a funny story, you know after we graduated, I hadn’t heard from him in years, until I got a FaceSpace Message from him, just a few months before I met you. He told me he found a job listing he thought would be perfect for me out in San Francisco, writing a dating advice column for a web publication.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, and he even found a place for me to live, some of his friends in the city who were looking for a new roommate.”

“I’m, guessing you turned it down?”

“I did. I told him I wasn’t quite ready to make that big of a move yet, Daniel and I were still locked into a couple more months on our apartment lease, there would have been huge fines if we broke it. And little did I know then how just a few months later that my life would change when a literal handsome prince and his two best friends would all come into my dive bar and sweep me off my feet, and turn my world upside down, in the best way possible.”

“Well, I feel like I should write this ‘Mark’ chap a thank you letter then, for not sweeping you off your feet.”

“You’re crazy, Liam.”

He winked at her. “I only kid. Did you ever hear back from him?”

“Not much after I turned him down, no. I did check out his FaceSpace profile several months ago, just out of curiosity. He’s in Seattle now. He made millions selling an app he developed to a big software company there. Crazy, right?”

“Do you ever think about, how much simpler your life might have been if you had taken him up on the offer?”

“What? For the threesome? Gross, not with him and Amy, never.”

“No, I mean moving to San Francisco. Rekindling an uncomplicated romance with an uncomplicated man with no obligations to ruling a sovereign nation, no strings attached...”

“No, Liam, no. Never. I thank my lucky stars every day that I turned him down. I don’t even want to think about what my life would be like if I hadn’t met you, and Maxwell, and Drake. Coming to Cordonia was the best thing that ever happened to me. And for all of the good and the bad, I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

He clasped her hands together and kissed her soundly.

“I’m so glad you feel that way. I love you, Tabitha. I feel like the luckiest man on earth that you chose to let us into your life. To love me, all of me. You are such a gift, and I could never properly put into words just how much you mean to me.”

“I love all of you Liam, every part.”

He pulled her into an embrace with his arms wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her in tight until their bodies melded together

She leaned back, beaming up at him, as he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear..

“Liam, I really appreciate you agreeing to get out of your comfort zone and agreeing to give this a go. I know how hard it is for you.”

“It’s hard for, selfish reasons, really... but it’s definitely not hard to agree to fulfill the desires of the two people I love most in the world.”

“And I feel so lucky to make it onto that exclusive list of yours.”

Tabitha took his hand and led him over towards the bedroom.

“I want to show you my appreciation. Tell me what your biggest sexual fantasy is that you’ve never done before.”

“You are my fantasy, my love. I don’t need anything else.”

“Ok, that’s romantic as hell, but. I call bullshit”

“What?! You would doubt me?”

“I know you, Liam. I know there’s some wild erotic fantasy knocking around inside that insanely beautiful brain of yours that you’ve been too timid to tell anyone about before. Tell me. I want to make it happen for you.”

“Well...”

“Yes! I knew it. Tell me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absofuckin’lutely.”

Liam chuckled, “You sound just like Drake.”

“He does rub off on you, but... I probably don’t need to tell you that.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him suggestively.

He blushed keenly with a knowing glint in his eye. “There you go again,”

They laughed until Liam’s shoulders eased and taking a long breath and a solid sip of wine, he dared himself to open up to her.

“Bondage. That I could do, to you. Light bondage anyway. Nothing that would hurt you, I could never forgive myself if anything happened to you, but the idea has, intrigued me...”

Tabitha’s mouth fell open with shock, her lips drawing up into a smile as she reacted to his suggestion.

“Wow, Liam, that’s so hot! I’m into it.”

Liam was taken aback by her eagerness,

“You’re... serious? Because if you’re not, don’t tease me, just forget I said anything and I’ll—“

As if to prove her point, Tabitha began undressing immediately.

“Totally serious. I’ve never been with someone before who’d be into it who I’ve trusted as much as I do you.”

Her hands went for his belt buckle and she smirked up at him,

“Let’s do it.”

“As you wish.”

Liam wrapped her in his arms, crushing his lips against hers with newfound ferocity. Their clothes were quickly discarded on the floor, leaving Tabitha naked, and Liam in nothing but his black briefs. He threw her down on the bed, and made moves to bring closer a small duffle bag with his belongings.

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes, with my whole life.”

“Put this on,”

She secured the familiar blue silk eye mask over her head, pulling out her hair from the ties in the back to make a tighter fit.

“Can you see?”

“Nope! Not a thing.”

“Good. Now, if you’ll humor me, lie down here on the bed, my love, and listen while I give you a short civics lesson in Cordonian crime and punishment.”

She giggled “Your Historian Nerd-foreplay is absolutely adorable, Liam. I—”

:::Rip::: :::Rip::: :::Rip:::

“Liam? Are you ripping the sheets?”

“The Cordonian Royal coffers paid good money for this villa. I intend to get our money’s worth. Will you allow me to continue?”

“...yes”

“Good.”

The sound of ripping fabric continued in the background of Liam’s monologue. Tabitha peeked beneath the blue silk blindfold, focusing intently at his biceps and pectoral muscles flexing and contracting beneath his taut skin as he methodically stripped the flat sheet into inch wide strips and continued to speak.

“Did you know that under Cordonia’s high treason laws, our Lord Chancellor barrister could legally try and execute upon conviction and my orders, anyone who binds the Queen?”

“Really?”

“Yes, it’s an ancient law that never became modernized, so it’s technically still in effect. One of those things we’ve been meaning to update, but it hardly ever comes up, so it gets pushed aside.”

He held her wrists together, kissing the inside of them before he began to wrap her arms further with the white strips of bedding.

“But because it’s still law, that means if either Maxwell, or Drake, or anyone else, Noble or not, decided to have a ‘romp’ with you and some rope or handcuffs in the bedroom, I could... legally, have them executed.

“...my god.”

“There’s only one person who is immune to this law.”

“...Who?”

Liam cocked an eyebrow at her, smirking at her as he tightened the binds at her wrists,

“The King.”

Tabitha moaned in her gasp of breath.

“Liam...”

“Now, just so you know, upon my honor, I would never do such a thing. That’s why Anton and his bastard cronies are going to spend the rest of their lives rotting away in prison cells, rather than lose their heads. Still, it would please me, greatly, in this... complicated arrangement of ours with our lovers, to have something, intimate, that only you and I could share, as husband & wife. Don’t you agree?”

“Liam...”

“Is that a yes?

“...Yes. That’s so hot.”

“And for now, since you’re carrying our child, I’ll remain extra delicate with my methods.”

“What about after the baby’s born?”

“... then all of my restraints, in regards to gentleness with you, are lifted.”

“I... anxiously await that day.”

Liam finished tightening the remainder of her restraints. He looked at her so vulnerable and at his mercy, feeling both aroused and overwrought with pangs of guilt at what he was planning to do to her

“Is this ok?”

“You don’t need to keep asking me if something’s ‘OK.’ I trust you completely Liam, and I just want you to have your way with me.”

“...Noted.”

“When I submit to you, it means everything is ok. If it makes you feel more comfortable letting loose, we can have a safe word in case anything ever goes too far.”

“A safe word? What should it be?”

“Your safe Gelato flavor would be the ideal word. ‘Stracciatella.’”

“I’ll remember that one.”

.......

He felt the excitement of a man about to experience something he had long craved but was just now about to taste.

Liam secured her wrists to her ankles with the strips of bedding. His mouth watered at the sight of her skin covered in goose pimples from the anticipation.

Tabitha’s hands strained against her restraints, her body’s automatic response and reflex to wanting to remove the blue silk blindfold.

“Are you sure you trust me, my love?” The deep cadence of his voice relaxed her struggling.

“Yes, my King” she purred. Of course she trusted him.

Liam’s cock twitched in his tight briefs at her words. He bit his lip and continued, hardly believing this was all happening.

She could hear him step away from the bed and the sound of a long metal zipper being pulled open. Sounds of rummaging around in a bag followed, before she heard and felt the sounds of his steps returning to her. Her pussy was spread open and aching to be filled

“Liam I need you.”

“Not... just... yet.” He playfully slapped her asscheek and she gasped, smiling. “You must be patient.”

She heard the sound of a switch flipping and a deep electronic vibrating pulse that seemed to be causing ripples in the air around them.

Tabitha bit back a laugh and shook her head He brought my ‘Magic Wand’ on holiday?? So presumptuous...

Just then she felt the pressure of it on her mound, pressing her lips open and vibrating against her clit. She tried to angle herself so the stimulation wasn’t so direct, but her restraints prevented her from achieving that goal. Tabitha’s insides seem to convulse in both protest and excitement. It felt so good it hurt. She mewled, reveling in her arousal, but in the back of her mind she worried if this much stimulation would be harmful for the baby. No matter, she was having too much fun to stop Liam now.

Liam watched her expressions fascinated, trying to interpret what was going through her mind. He kept the vibrator at her groin and leaned forward to suck and knead her breasts.

“Liam please!”

His hand roved downward, tracing her landing strip before he inserted a finger in her. She was soaking wet, so ready, but he wasn’t quite finished with tormenting her yet.

“You’re doing beautifully, my love. Stay focused.”

Though legs quaked with longing she nodded her head, committed to submission.

Liam liked being in control. He was born and bred for a life of public service to his kingdom, a Constitutional Monarchy but a monarchy no less, but there was something primeval and deeply engrained into the fiber of his muscles, this rush and natural high of being the one fully in control over her capacity to feel sensations of both pleasure and pain, that awoke his passions anew in him much like nothing else had in quite some time. The charge he got from discovering that she was as into it as he was both a surprising and thrilling discovery for him.

“Tell me when you’re about to come.”

Tabitha whimpered. She wanted him to ravage her right then. Biting her lip, she stayed focused on the smells of his cologne that wafted from him as he hovered over her, the sound of the vibrator pulsing electronic waves against her sex, the slight metallic taste of blood on her lips for biting back her screams. It suddenly became too much to hold in.

“Liam, I...”

The Magic Wand shut off. She cried out

“No Liam, please!”

"Are you ready for me to fuck you now?" He said untying her.

Once her hands were freed, she hungrily pushed up her blindfold, overly anxious to see him again.

The site that greeted her was his face in the candlelight, glistening with sweat and flushed with arousal. He was completely naked now, hovering above her, staring deep into her eyes.

“God, Liam, you are so gorgeous, take me now.”

“Tonight, I’m all yours.”

He moved over her gripping her wrists tighter, locking her into place, and crushed his mouth to hers. “God, Tabitha, I love the way you taste,” he moaned into her mouth whilst his knee nudged her thighs apart and his swollen cock hovered at her entrance. Ripping his mouth from hers, he gazed down at her flushed face. Her swollen, just bitten lips still beckoned, and the precum glistening at his tip gave away his eagerness to penetrate her and give in to that ultimate release, yet he resolved to stretched her patience just one more time. “Tell me, my love, tell me again.” With conviction and deep sincerity, she looked deep into the sapphire blue of his irises ringing the deep black pupils dilated with lust and she moaned. “Take me, please.”

He plunged his cock deep within her and their bodies moved together, finally, as one. Tabitha’s hands now freed, raked her nails up and down his back. He shivered and groaned as she lifted her head to softly bite at his neck. All the build up from the evening’s events came crashing down like lightning and Liam came long and hard inside her. Her walls pulsed around his shaft as she screamed his name.

They lay tangled up in each other for what seemed like an eternity, the night air cooling their sweat, their bodies strewn over the leftover scraps of fabric. They were both was almost asleep when Tabitha felt something, like a small hammer from inside her womb.

“Liam!”

“What’s wrong?”

She took his hand and placed it deliberately on her belly, holding it there, before she felt the flutter again

“That’s the baby?”

“I think so?”

“Our baby.”

“Yes! These are the first movements I’ve felt”

“Wow, that’s so incredible, it’s… you don’t think I hurt—”

“I think if we had, there’d be no kicking at all.”

Liam kissed her temples and held her, cradling her abdomen as the baby’s flutters continued. He fell asleep like that before she did, and she laid in his arms, feeling happy, though her heart ached suddenly when she found herself missing Maxwell.

---

Thanks so much for continuing to read and for all of the feedback, likes reblogs and support!! :)

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#off the record #otr part 9 #trr fanfic #choices fanfiction #king liam #liam x mc #liam x drake #liam x drake x mc x maxwell #choices fanfic #ns*w #lemon #maxwell beaumont #drake walker #the royal romance #the royal heir

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behind-the-hood · 6 years ago

Text

The Book

-Part four of The Bet-

A kiss is pressed to his neck, under his ear. His hair is brushed to the side and the kisses continue down, lower. Down his spine. A huff of breath, purposeful. Laurent does not move. His focus wholly on the text between his hands. Mostly.

A sharp bite on his cheek has him flinching, clenching. He tucks his lip between his teeth and makes no sound.

There's a deep chuckle, dark and tantalizing. Then a kiss to the smarting flesh. Tongue.

Laurent fights a shudder as he's spread apart and examined, his hole wanting and aching, holding tightly to the plug inside. Some get too excited to start; Laurent has learned his lesson.

A tug. A tease. Not meant to remove, but to provoke.

"Damianos," Laurent sighs, breathless.

Laurent wakes with a gasp. Hard in his pants and hot in his shirt.

Too many nights he wakes this way. He'd hoped sleeping with the man would settle the fire in his loins. It had only stoked the flames.

Damianos. All his mind seems to think about anymore, when given time to wander.

He'd gathered his allies, he'd explained the plan. All he needs now is perfect execution.

And Halvik is not a woman of halves.

Oh sure, Laurent has the Vaskian tribes of men as well, but he needed a leader, and she fit the bill. The men hadn't been overly happy, but a night of bonfires and hakesh can soothe any angry spirit.

Damen drank from his mug and avoided his father and brother. Nik had arrived the night before with several hundred men, awaiting Damen's orders. They were Damen's men after all, given to him by his father.

He'd sent Nik many letters of longing, all about Laurent. He did not get many replies.

Now they sit, with the soldiers at the front, ale in hand and fire heating their bodies.

It's colder this close to Vere in winter. Damen had went out of his way to avoid it during his trips. He'd prefer to be in Arles now if it meant this war had never come about.

Even with the beautiful blond slipping between Damen's fingers as he grasped those pale, slender hips.

"Auguste is worried," Damen says quietly, a secret between he and Nik. Not for the men around them.

Nik spares a glance, then his eyes are back on the fire. "You speak to him often?"

Damen gives a nod. "Every night."

Nik looks into the tree line then. Smart.

"He has a bad feeling about Laurent, but he won't say what."

Nik does not comment.

Laurent and his allies ride through the morning, Halvik at his side, his equal.

Her bird returns, with a new ribbon around the note tied to its leg. A reply.

"He has agreed."

The bird caws, and Laurent smiles. Two down, one more to go.

When they reach the clearing, a sole rider meets them.

"Hello Nicaise."

Damen is preparing for another long day of useless fighting, both with his father and on the field, when the flap to his tent opens. He needs more attentive guards.

A child, small and cherubic, a cloak over his shoulders and hood over his head. A scowl on his face.

He holds up a small, folded piece of paper between his fingers.

Damen takes it gingerly. He keeps his distance as well. No telling what the child is hiding under those layers.

"Take that to King Theomedes. Do not read it."

Then he leaves, and Damen cannot even ask who he is.

Damen looks at the paper between his fingers, sorely tempted to read it if only to spite the sprite who entered his tent. He does not.

He does sniff to check for poison. He may like Auguste and Laurent well enough, but most Veretians would sooner stab you in the back with a smile on their faces.

He is allowed entry to his father's tent, and slips him the note. Makedon and Kastor are already here and he does not wish to cause a scene.

A scene is had regardless.

Theomedes looks thunderous as he reads whatever is scrawled.

Then he turns his glare on Damen.

"That whore of yours is turning the tide against us boy," Theomedes seethes. Damen has never been so afraid of his father. Or anyone. "He's brought the Vaskian border tribes and now I'm to be informed that Prince Torveld is provided troops for Vere as well?!"

Vask and Patras. Damen would be impressed if he weren't busy regretting everything he has ever done in his life. Including being born.

Makedon looks impressed enough for the both of them at least.

Damen is sent out of the tent, his father's face burning red.

"They'll have us on our flank!" he hears shouted from inside.

Damen retreats with his tail between his legs.

Laurent feels rather pleased with himself as they crest the hills over Marlas. They can see the white canvas just on the horizon.

"You are proud," Halvik states, a smirk to her lips. She gives an approving nod. "You should be. It is a fine day to win a battle."

Laurent smiles. "You will likely see no fighting today. We have Akiekos cornered. You will see us treat, and then you will see nightfall and campfires and hakesh and many Akielon cocks."

Halvik laughs, more pleased with that outcome than the battle she'd orginally been talked into.

"I'd have taken you as my second the night I met you. How unfortunate for you to turn out with a penis."

Laurent can't help his chuckle. "I've found those who appreciate it."

She shakes her head, still smiling. "They appreciate what's behind it."

Damen is talking with Nik at the front when the cavalry arrives. Quite literally. And Laurent is at their helm. Hundreds of Vaskian tribesmen and women ride out behind him, each on their own horse.

Damen can see Auguste already riding out on his white stallion, racing to meet him.

Damen grabs the nearest horse and plans to do the same but Nik's firm hand and firmer head shake halt him.

Nik's right of course. His father is already more than displeased with him; to be seen riding out the meet with the enemy could have him hanged for treason. Damen waits. Impatient.

Theomedes' horse storms passed them, with the king atop. Kastor and Makedon follow.

Laurent sits steady on his horse as they all wait for his father to arrive. The last to make their impromptu meeting.

Laurent is resolute, and finally decided. He knows what he must do.

"Laurent! What is the meaning of this?" Aleron yells at him.

Theomedes looks mildly bewildered, as much as he is willing to show in front of the enemies at least. "You did not send him for reinforcements?"

Auguste looks worried and meets Laurent's eyes. But Laurent sees no betrayal within them. Good. Auguste still does not believe as their father does that Laurent is out for the crown. He is only worried for Laurent.

Laurent clears his throat to be heard over the bickering kings. "Gentlemen, I have come with my own allies to this fight and would like to propose my own terms."

He looks to Theomedes. "I believe an alliance of marriage between Damianos and myself is a splendid idea." When Theomedes opens his mouth to refuse, Laurent cuts him off first. "If you are so worried about heirs, I hear Kastor has a woman on his arm. Let them make the children."

Laurent turns to his own father. "I will not, however, be leaving court until I can be assured of my brother's safety. You may think me the threat, and I will no longer attempt to change your mind, but I will see this mess cleaned before my departure."

He offers Auguste a look, something private between only them even amongst the crowd, before continuing on. "King Theomedes, I am under the impression you recieved my note?"

Theomedes frowns and his anger is palpable. Warmonger.

Kastor has not spoken up, though his glare says enough, but the general with them looks amused from where his horse stands behind the main party. He sends a wink to Halvik.

"What is it you wish?" Theomedes asks, his voice grit. "The Akielon throne? So you can run us into the ground and prove Vere is superior?"

Laurent composes his face to nothingness. "I was more than happy to advise my brother during his rule and meet Damianos in the middle of the night for secret moonlit rendezvous. My father wouldn't allow me much else with any men I found to hold my interest.

"You and your ilk sought war and brought this upon yourselves. You saw that Vere was weak and you thought to take ground. Vere may be weak for now, but I am not. You'd do well to remember that."

Laurent will not be treated as a pawn any longer. He has played his hand to it's true height. He holds the power here.

He leans forward, threatening. "I have two future kings who would do anything I ask, a Patran prince in my debt, and the loyalty of the Vaskian border tribes. You are outmatched."

Loyalty is a strong word, but Theomedes backs down easily enough after that, though the vein on his forehead looks near to bursting. Auguste looks awe inspired. Aleron...shows nothing.

Aleron turns his horse without a word and walks away. But the fight is called off with the blow of a horn soon enough.

Halvik ticks her horse forward and she and her women split camps to ease all the soldiers of their burdens. For a night.

Some of the men follow, others return home. Laurent knew without himself on offer there was much left to be desired, so he's promised trade goods gifted and heading for meeting points of their encampments. He owes Charls a large sum of money.

Auguste pulls Laurent into a hug. Laurent allows it. "I dare say you are the most powerful man I have ever met."

"I may have also bluffed. Torveld only owes me at a max of maybe twenty men. But troops are troops."

Auguste laughs.

Two riders come out to meet them over the hill. One is clearly Damianos, the other Laurent has yet to meet.

Damen comes to a stop beside Laurent, and doesn't know what to say to him.

Auguste pulls his horse away with a roll of his eyes. Nik follows, a gagging sound escaping his lips. Dick. He did not have to follow Damen up here.

"Hello, lover."

Damen swallows. He does not know what has transpired between his father and Laurent, but Theomedes had calmed from his earlier rage by the time he made it back to camp. He almost looked surprised and not entirely displeased with the turn of events.

"Laurent."

Laurent curls his finger and beckons Damen closer. Soft lips press to his ear.

"You wish to know why I seek you out? I dream of you, of what we started but I cut short. I dream of how that night might have played out had I not grown nervous and banished you from my rooms.

"I thought of it last night Damianos. Of you."

Laurent licks his ear, playful, and Damen's fists tighten around his horse's reins.

Laurent's eyes are flirty, his tone sensual. "If you are so inclined, I'd be delighted to try again."

Damen is inclined. Damen is very inclined.

Auguste finds a note tucked into his chest plate fluttering to the ground as he's removing his armor. He picks it up and bids his servants to leave him. Laurent's usual style of hiding notes, so clearly from him, he thinks with a smile.

He doesn't like what he finds inside however.

'Uncle has returned.'

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disappearingground · 6 years ago

Text

The Jenny Lewis Experience

The New York Times July 24, 2014

A version of this article appears in print on July 27, 2014, Page 18 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Jenny Lewis Experience.

By Jeff Himmelman

“They’d put the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on,” Jenny Lewis said. We were sitting in a restaurant in Laurel Canyon, not far from her home, and she was describing her early childhood with parents who made their living performing as an itinerant Sonny-and-Cher-style lounge act called Love’s Way. “We lived in hotels,” she said. “My sister and I, they would just keep us in the hotel room, and they’d go down and play.” When Lewis was born in 1976, her parents were doing a stand at the Sands. They split up when she was 3, and her mother — herself the daughter of a dancer and a vaudeville performer — took Jenny and her sister to Van Nuys, in the San Fernando Valley, where she worked as a waitress and struggled to keep her family afloat. “We were on welfare,” Lewis said, before describing the day their fortunes changed, when an agent picked young Jenny out of a crowd at her preschool. “I think mostly because I was a redhead,” she said. “And I was a weird little kid, a weird little tomboy.”

She soon landed her first commercial, for Jell-O, and came under the wing of Iris Burton, an eminent children’s agent who represented River and Joaquin Phoenix and Fred Savage. Lewis started working steadily in commercials, television (“The Golden Girls,” “Growing Pains,” “Mr. Belvedere”) and film (“The Wizard,” “Troop Beverly Hills,” “Pleasantville”), living the surreal and somewhat communal life of a child star in the ‘80s. She spent her days being tutored on set and her evenings at places like Alphy’s Soda Pop Club in Hollywood, which catered exclusively to kids in the industry. At a party there when Lewis was 10, the actor Corey Haim handed her a cassette tape with Run-D.M.C. on one side and the Beastie Boys on the other. “There have been a couple of cassette tapes that have changed my life,” she said, “and that was the first one” — the tape that got her hooked on hip-hop, which eventually led her to songwriting.

I asked Lewis when she first fully realized the role she played in her family, the depth of their dependence on her. “Eight years old,” she said. “I remember the moment. That’s a pretty big thing for a kid to realize. And I remember the power in that.” By the time she was 14 or 15, with nobody to answer to, she could be as wild as she liked as long as she showed up to work and hit her marks. “I was up for it, honestly,” she said. “I loved the work and I loved the people, and it kind of prepped me for what I do now.”

What Lewis does now, the music she makes, is hard to characterize. She is often compared with Joni Mitchell and Emmylou Harris, and there is a kind of timelessness to the way she writes and sings. But the throwback stuff doesn’t quite capture her. Among some music fans — including many other well-known musicians — Lewis is considered a kind of indie goddess, a stylish performer who defies genre and salts her songs with a sly and off-kilter intelligence. Her first band, Rilo Kiley, signed a major-label deal with Warner Bros. Records in 2005; her first side project, the Postal Service, led by Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, sold more than a million copies of its debut; and she has released two well-received solo records since then. Next week, she will release a third, “The Voyager,” her first solo effort in six years. It has been a battle to get it out. Among other things, she has dealt with the death of her father, writer’s block and bouts of insomnia so severe and debilitating that she said they left her almost unable to function for nearly two years.

You’d never guess that from meeting her, though. She talks like a true child of L.A. — the “bro"s and “dude"s flow freely, without affectation — and her go-to traveling costume is a vintage Adidas track suit, Adidas shell-top sneakers and, on the day I first met her, hot-pink lipstick and oversize sunglasses. She lives with her longtime boyfriend and collaborator, the musician Johnathan Rice, up a long canyon road in the hills that separate the San Fernando Valley from downtown Los Angeles. Her house (called “Mint Chip” for its brown-and-light-green exterior) is set into the hillside, looking out over a ravine. There is a rehearsal space with a drum kit, a P.A. and some vintage gear, an old piano in the living room and a vinyl edition of James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James” propped up beside the fireplace. Beyond the small pool in the back yard there’s a windowed gazebo that Rice uses as his songwriting space. Whatever you are imagining of the California light and the laid-back lifestyle: yes.

Historically, nearby Laurel Canyon has been synonymous with a certain kind of lush ‘60s acoustic-and-multipart-harmony sound, but Lewis’s musical roots spring from the ‘90s and the smart indie rock of Elliott Smith and Pavement. When she was 20 or so, her acting career wasn’t where she wanted it to be, and she saw that she needed to make a change. “I was the best friend,” she said. “I was the friend, forever. I wanted the big, juicy roles, and they didn’t come to me.” (She read for the part of Bunny in the Coen brothers’ film “The Big Lebowski,” for one, but didn’t get it.) She had known Blake Sennett, another former child actor, since she was 17, and they began writing together and eventually formed Rilo Kiley.

She and Sennett dated and broke up and kept playing together. The relationship was always fraught (Gibbard remembers Lewis screaming at Sennett over the phone during the first Postal Service tour), but Lewis said it gave her the confidence she needed to become a real songwriter. “Through my partnership with Blake, I found a voice within myself that I didn’t know I had,” she said. “It sounds kind of cheesy, but I figured out who I was.” From the first lines of the first song on Rilo Kiley’s debut record, a track called “Go Ahead,” you can hear the DNA of the musician Lewis has become nearly 15 years later — a floating, distinct voice, an unpredictable melody, a wryly subverted rhyme.

The link between songwriting and autobiography is a tantalizing but tenuous one, and Lewis prefers to preserve as much mystery as she can. But she affirms that she has never written anything more personal than “Better Son/Daughter,” one of the strongest tracks off Rilo Kiley’s second record, “The Execution of All Things.” The song is about waking up in the morning and being unable to open your eyes or get out of bed: “And your mother’s still calling you, insane and high/Swearing it’s different this time.” Eventually it opens into an anthem of wounded fortitude, the kind you can imagine cars full of young women screaming along to. The actress Anne Hathaway, one of Lewis’s close friends, told me that she still turns to that song whenever she’s struggling. “It’s become almost like a prayer,” she said.

Outside whatever veiled references she makes in her music, Lewis doesn’t talk much about her mother. She acknowledged that it was a “difficult relationship” and that she didn’t have a “traditional upbringing,” but that was about it. At one point, I referred to a report in The Boston Globe in 1992, when Lewis was 16, noting that she owned a house in Sherman Oaks and a townhouse in North Hollywood. “We lost all of that,” she said, with a blankness I hadn’t seen from her before. I asked her why. “We just lost ‘em,” she said. “I achieved a lot as a child, I supported my family, but in the end we lost it all.”

In 2004, Rilo Kiley toured with Coldplay, but Lewis was still scraping by, living in a small apartment in Silver Lake with an Iranian rockabilly musician she found on Craigslist. In her bedroom, when she wasn’t on tour, she wrote the songs that would become “Rabbit Fur Coat,” her first solo record. The idea for it came from Conor Oberst, the songwriter (also known as the frontman of Bright Eyes) who helped form Saddle Creek Records, which had put out “The Execution of All Things.” “I encouraged her,” Oberst told me. “You know, why don’t you step away from this thing that is obviously causing you a lot of distress and make a record on your own?” Sennett had already made a solo record, which upset Lewis. “I was so jealous if someone else got Blake’s musical attention,” she told me. “I was shattered by it.” She made “Rabbit Fur Coat,” she said, in part to prove that “I can do it too on my own — I don’t need you.”

The songs on “Rabbit Fur Coat” are ethereal and haunted, rooted in deep Southern and gospel-inflected melodic traditions. On the record’s title track, Lewis’s lyrics again invite comparison with her family life:

Let’s move ahead 20 years, shall we? She was waitressing on welfare, we were living in the valley A lady says to my ma, “You treat your girl as your spouse You can live in a mansion house.”

And so we did, and I became a hundred-thousand-dollar kid . . . But I’m not bitter about it I’ve packed up my things and let them have at it And the fortune faded, as fortunes often do And so did that mansion house

Where my ma is now, I don’t know She was living in her car, I was living on the road And I hear she’s putting stuff up her nose . . .

After the record was done, Lewis went on tour with Rilo Kiley. When the band played the Showbox in Seattle in 2005, Gibbard picked her up after sound check. They’d become friends during the Postal Service tour a few years earlier. As they drove around in Gibbard’s car, Lewis played the new songs for him. “I just remember, all hyperbole aside, being completely blown away,” Gibbard said. “It was undoubtedly the best thing that she had done.” The press shared Gibbard’s reaction, and Lewis got more attention on her own than Rilo Kiley had ever gotten as a band. “Everything was so easy for the first time,” she said. “It just unfolded so naturally. And then going out on the road and touring was the most fun I’ve ever had on tour. There was no tension for the first time.” Rilo Kiley would put out one more record, but it soon became clear that it would be their last.

“I want to show you something,” Lewis said. We were talking in her kitchen about her second solo release, “Acid Tongue,” which she recorded over three weeks in 2008 at the legendary Sound City Studios in Van Nuys. The record had a bunch of special guests on it — Elvis Costello, Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes — but the most meaningful one was Lewis’s dad, who died in 2010. In the living room, she pointed out a glass vitrine on top of the piano that held one of her father’s chromatic bass harmonicas. Before the “Acid Tongue” sessions, she hadn’t spoken to her father in years, but she felt comfortable enough with the musical family she had created around her — Rilo Kiley’s drummer, Jason Boesel; Johnathan Rice; some other musicians from the Laurel Canyon set — that she thought she could handle having him around. He played on the track “Jack Killed Mom,” and the reunion helped Lewis forgive him for leaving the family all those years ago. “He was playing lounges in Alaska,” Lewis said of when she tracked him down and asked him to play on the album. “That’s why I never saw him. It was not a malicious thing. My dad was a savant. He never drove a car, he never had a bank account,” she said. “I don’t even know if he realized that he wasn’t around, you know? I think he was just playing his gigs, trying to make a living.”

“Acid Tongue” was also a step toward recording everything all at once, live, to an analog tape machine — instead of in pieces to a computer. It’s a process that Lewis has developed a devotion to, and one that the songwriter and producer Ryan Adams would push to an extreme on “The Voyager.” (After “Acid Tongue,” Lewis and Rice released “I’m Having Fun Now” in 2010, an underrated duo record that failed to get the kind of traction they hoped for.) For the last few years, Lewis had been sitting on many of the songs that would make up “The Voyager,” battling insomnia and struggling to get them down. She ran into Adams in Los Angeles and told him she had some songs she was working on, and he invited her to come by his studio, Pax-Am, on the Sunset Strip. She played a few of the tunes for him on her acoustic guitar.

‘My dad was a savant,’ Lewis said. ‘He never drove a car, he never had a bank account. I don’t even know if he realized that he wasn’t around, you know?’

“My initial impression was there were some really minimal but necessary things that had to happen,” Adams told me. “I could tell that she had sat with them a little too long.” (Lewis agrees: “I was like: ‘Dude, go for it. Help me.’ ”) On the first song that they worked on together, “She’s Not Me,” they changed the key to relax Lewis’s voice, and then Adams and his production partner, Mike Viola, strapped on electric guitars and rolled through the full song, three times, with Lewis playing and singing live with a backing band. Adams pronounced the track finished for the time being and said they would move on, without even listening back to what they’d done. “For Jenny, revisionism wouldn’t have worked,” Adams said. “The version she would play on the couch in the control room, we would just stand there, like, ‘Wow, this is classic songwriting.’ Every time. So that was sort of my mission. How do we get an ‘unmind’ vibe here and then go back later and look at these beautiful raw takes and just splash a little bit of watercolor on them.” Lewis ended up recording the bulk of the record with Adams over 10 days. (She worked on the single, “Just One of the Guys,” separately with Beck before she and Adams went into the studio together.)

“The Voyager” is an older and more direct record than her previous two. Her characters are still drinking and doing blow and cheating on each other, but there is a kind of weariness to it all. One line in particular has caught the early attention of some of her many female fans, during the bridge of “Just One of the Guys”: “There’s only one difference between you and me/When I look at myself all I can see/I’m just another lady without a baby.” She has been hesitant to acknowledge what that line specifically means to her. “I wanted to communicate some very basic things,” she told me, without saying what they were. She was already starting to regret having talked about some of her other struggles while making the record, including open discussion of the insomnia that plagued her. “Now everyone’s asking me about insomnia, which I’m terrified is going to happen to me again,” she said. “You can’t think about it too much, and everyone’s asking me about it, and I’m like, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’ But, [expletive], am I not going to get to sleep again?” You could hear the fear in her voice. “It’s my fault for putting it out there,” she said.

The video for “Just One of the Guys,” which got more than a million views in its first 24 hours online, was made with the actresses (and Lewis’s friends) Anne Hathaway, Brie Larson, Kristen Stewart and Tennessee Thomas. It’s an entertaining video, part Robert Palmer, part Beastie Boys, with the women spending half the time playing a sleek female backing band and then switching into male roles, clowning around in Lewis-inspired Adidas track suits and fake mustaches. Lewis, as herself, holds up a positive pregnancy test, to which Lewis-in-drag-and-fake-goatee responds, “It’s not [expletive] mine.” When she gets to the “just another lady without a baby” line, she smiles at the camera and then dances. It’s a house of mirrors, a romp through emotionally treacherous terrain.

When I visited Lewis in June, she and Rice (she calls him “Rico”) showed me an early cut of the video in the bedroom of their house, with Lewis calling out “bra shot” whenever we caught a glimpse of her cleavage. Driving down the hill toward dinner later, we got to talking, if somewhat obliquely, about the expectations of her female fans and the sexuality that is inseparable from who she is and the music she makes. She didn’t like to talk about feminism, she said, and in particular the trend of women criticizing one another for not being feminist enough: “What does it matter what I think of Lana Del Rey?” In the months before the release of “The Voyager,” Lewis has taken to wearing airbrushed suits for her live shows, rather than the sexier get-ups she used to wear onstage; she has said she feels “androgynous” these days and wants her costume to reflect that. But not always. As we made our way down the ravine, she told a story about the day President Obama came to visit a compound not far from Mint Chip. She wanted to go out for a run, but a Secret Service member stopped her and told her she needed an ID if she wanted to get back through the security cordon. “I was like, ‘Dude, I’m wearing short shorts,’ ” Lewis said. " ‘You’ll remember me.’ ”

After recording and touring mostly with men in the early days, Lewis now consistently seeks out women for her band and even tried to put together an all-female crew for the “Just One of the Guys” video, which she also directed. She said her desire to work largely with women was a response to the dissolution of her relationship with her mom. “The more I surround myself with women, the easier it is to reconcile my past in a way.” It seems to be serving a kind of psychic need, to replace the female relationship that once dominated her life with a kind of surrogate family of her choosing, a family that has stood behind her through the struggles of the last few years.

“I’m happy to see her making records,” Beck told me. “I just feel like music needs her. It needs someone doing what she’s doing. She’s got a special voice, as a writer, and then as a musician. She’s this great combination of so many things.” Conor Oberst shares that view, describing Lewis as one of the most important songwriters and performers in contemporary music. “Go see her play,” Oberst said. “Because we should all feel lucky to be around while she’s doing her magic.”

On a night in early June, at a sold-out show at the 9:30 Club in Washington, Lewis had her magic all lined up and ready to go. Backstage, she was relaxed, joking with her band and casually doing her makeup in the mirror on the wall. Just before show time, one band member disappeared, but Lewis was unperturbed. “It’s O.K.,” she said with a smile when he showed up, apologizing, just as they were about to go on. “You made it!” She took a sip of red wine out of a plastic cup and then walked up the steps to the stage.

‘I just feel like music needs her,’ Beck said. ‘It needs someone doing what she’s doing. She’s got a special voice, as a writer, and then as a musician.’

To watch Lewis perform live is to understand what Beck and Oberst and other musicians admire in her. “She turns into this other person on stage,” Gibbard said, “this unbelievably powerful performer” — and it’s true. Lewis is both a natural and a pro. Throughout the night, she had big middle-aged guys and teenage girls — “teeny little chickens,” as she called them later — singing along to every word. During the encore, Lewis sang the ballad “Acid Tongue” accompanied only by her acoustic guitar and the rest of her band grouped around a microphone behind her. “To be lonely is a habit,” Lewis sang, her voice ringing out in the near-silent room, “like smoking or taking drugs, and I’ve quit them both. . . . " The audience and her band belted along with her as she finished the line: “But man was it rough.”

It was one of those lovely moments you hope for in live music, when everything in the room connects. But it was also a kind of emblem of where Lewis has been and of where she is now. She has overcome all kinds of obstacles to get here, often with great style, but it hasn’t always been pretty. Whatever demons stole her sleep for these last few years, they’ve surely been with her forever, in one form or another. But they are also what gives such depth and soul to what she does. “I’m not looking for a cure,” Lewis sang, and as she stood in the spotlight at the 9:30 Club, nobody there would have thought she needed one.

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auntarctica · 6 years ago

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Can I ask what your writing process looks like? How do you find a story idea and nurture it into what you post eventually? Do you have any tips or tricks or recommendations?

Hey! Sorry it took me a moment to reply, but I had a weird and disjointed week full of asinine obligations and I didn’t want to phone in a response - I wanted to give this the attention it deserved.

This was such a rad question, because it actually caused me to sit back, have a French 75 and analyze the shape of what I tend to think of as an innate, inborn, organic process. Which is what invariably happens when a collection of personal discoveries become habitual over time - they’re so engrained and automatic, you begin to think they were always there.

But the truth is that, through a constant process of repetition and experimentation, every writer ultimately comes up with a set of practices that work for them.

With that in mind, and since you kindly asked, here are mine. My philosophy on writing comes down to these two guiding, driving principles:

I write what I would like to read.

I write to create what should exist, but doesn’t.

For fan-writing, I would also add, “I write to augment and unearth.”

There is an archaeological component to all writing, but never more so than in fanfiction, where you’re ultimately digging into existing narratives to find tantalizing clues and veins of possibility, in order to expand, enhance, reimagine and/or subvert those mother narratives. There may be an entire underground tomb full of gold waiting to be discovered beneath one sentence or throwaway part of a scene, but it will never be realized until someone excavates that avenue. Michaelangelo famously claimed that he did not sculpt—merely revealed what was already present in a block of marble.

If you have passionate feelings about anything in an artistic property, then you have ideas. You cannot help but have them.

And ultimately, this is where ideas come from: an exchange between two characters that suggests a history, and prompts you to wonder what transpired between them before, or inspires you to reference that moment in a story set in their future. A curiosity about the unspoken moments, those missing interludes and gaps in canon that are left unresolved, and are so ripe for fleshing out.

Or perhaps you like the general cut of a character’s jib, as presented, but find them under-developed, and want to give them more weight and presence and purpose. Or maybe you just think it just be would be hot if a couple of them hooked up. Or you want to fix something that bothers you, that you feel failed in the original work. Reconcile bitter enemies into passionate lovers. Redeem a villain and give him dimension. Re-mint a reputation, or tarnish a hero. Or anything, really. Anything that strikes you.

Once it strikes you, of course, the question is execution.

In my experience, there are two types of writers:

The first are like painters, who splash a lot of words down fast, dash off a full draft and then revise their overall vision in subsequent passes.

The second are more like sculptors. They edit as they go, carve sentences with care, craft the shape of the overall narrative, and search for the right word the first time.

Both are equally valid approaches, and I’m sure many people are a hybrid. Both have virtues, and drawbacks. The danger for the first one, of course, is if they never rewrite or revise. The danger for the second is that they get the dreaded “perfectionist paralysis”, and never finish.

I tend to be the second type. But regardless of what your natural approach and inclination is, I think certain things can be useful.

Once you have an idea about who and what you want to write about, your mind will start to work on those thoughts. It will begin with a sort of jumbled white noise that feels hopelessly inchoate. Be patient: things will start to emerge from the static. Scenes will start to coalesce, snippets and lines and exchanges of dialogue.

And when they come to you, it does not matter what point these need to occur in the narrative: write them. Strike while they’re hot and set them down. Even if it’s just a note to yourself about your eventual intentions, even if you fully intend to tweak them later, because you’re not sure about the context. Keep these snippets in a loose affiliation at the bottom of your doc, or in a separate snippets doc. (If you happen to use Scrivener, you can actually view any doc side by side with your main doc, which is incredibly helpful when harvesting those gems for inclusion).

The reason is this: if you write the scenes and sections and snippets you are fairly sure about wanting (even in a rudimentary form, or as a note), you automatically set up tentpoles, and a scaffold—a skeleton of thematic waypoints that your mind will use to fill in the lacunae and build a narrative arc. Your subconscious will work on this, even while you’re doing other things, and will be re-primed to work on them again every time you read them over.

Even if you’re hopelessly stuck, or have an unproductive day and don’t get any writing done, read over what you have before you shelve it for the day. Your mind will make connections, remove obstacles, and explore options, allowing you to sit down and compose words the next day.

Which leads me to this: most of the real work of writing happens off-page, and away from your computer. Once you set a piece in progress, your mind is always engaged and actively working on completing it. Writing anything – a story, a novel, a script, what-have-you—is like being in labor for days, or even years. Even when you’re not actively pushing, it’s happening. It’s a state you come to tolerate.

Pursuant to this, another tip: if words aren’t coming or you reach a difficult patch of prose or aren’t sure how to handle something, get up and do something mindlessly kinetic. Wash dishes, sweep, exercise, take a shower, cook some food. Engaging one part of your mind in something banal seems to free up the subconscious. It’s often shocking how quickly the answer will come to you, like a bolt from the blue.

In my experience, narratives want to be realized. Themes want to reveal themselves, and repeat meaningfully. What starts out nebulous and daunting will slowly winnow down and lick into shape. There’s a magnetism to words and ideas. It’s often a process of moving the pieces around until you feel a pull in some direction.I will sometimes begin a piece from the beginning, if I am struck with an undeniable opening sentence, but more often than not, I find myself writing out of order. This may not work for everyone, but by having these buoys and checkpoints in place, I feel like it gives a more comprehensive view of the overall shape of the developing narrative.

Full disclosure: I’m not sure if any of this is too rudimentary, or if I even addressed what you wanted to know, but if you have more specific questions, I’ll happily try to answer those too!

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arcaneranger · 6 years ago

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Premiere Impressions - Winter 2019

ZI still haven’t even finished 2018, but I knew that if I waited any longer I’d never get through any of this, so let’s dive right in!

Winter is usually a light season for me - I can’t spend all my time watching, and I’m much choosier about what I do watch than in other seasons. This is pretty much how I skipped a lot of deserving stuff last year - I was burnt out and totally skipped over Gakuen Babysitters, for example - and looking down the list...Only 29 full-length shows made their premiere this season, and of those, 8 are sequels, 9 if you include the Boogiepop remake. That’s pretty sparse these days, and it made it pretty easy to make a lot of early cuts, made up for by the fact that I’m gonna be spending a lot of it watching the shows from last season that are still going (of which there are a strangely high number).

Before I get too into this, though, I want to clarify my rules now that I’ve nailed them down and it’s a new year.

Lists will be divided into Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, Multi (any show lasting more than thirteen episodes and ending this year) and Netflix (any show picked up by Netflix, because they don’t simulcast and because they have enough original titles now that it’s easiest to rank them against each other). For the sake of these bigger posts, “Multi” impressions will be placed in the masterpost for the season they premiered with, but they’ll be sectioned off.

That means that, for example, Sword Art Online Alicization will be ranked for 2019 even though it started last year. This makes more sense to me than waiting a whole year to write the 2018 wrap-up just for the sake of one show, and Forest of Piano 2 and Kakeguruixx won’t be appearing on this list, they’ll go on the Netflix one at the end of the year.

With that, the numbers!

28 shows premiered for simulcasting that should end this season and last 13 episodes or less.

8 shows were skipped entirely, for the following reasons:

* Date A Live III, Kemono Friends 2, B Project: Zeccho Emotion, BanG Dream Season 2, and Real Girl Season 2 because I didn’t watch/finish the previous seasons. Techincally W’z should be here too, but I wound up making a post about it.

* Wataten! because I don’t give attention to that crap.

* VIRTUALSAN LOOKING because I don’t understand why Crunchyroll even picked up a show that relies entirely on virtual youtubers in Japan when Americans might be familiar with Kizuna Ai.

* Bermuda Triangle because I forgot it existed right up until the end and had no indication that it was worth my time anyway.

10 shows were dropped after the first episode. In no particular order:

* The Price of Smiles, Meiji Tokyo Renka and Pastel Memories because the ending twist wasn’t as compelling as the show thought it was.

* W’z for being a passion project from a director and producer whose only talent is wasting the potential of their staff on this story concept.

* Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka for not having enough original ideas to prop up incredibly lackluster execution.

* Grimms Notes the Animation for not having the execution to make its original ideas work in the show’s favor. (see what I did there, they’re parallel)

* Domestic Girlfriend for giving me a melodrama without an interesting lead. (This is the one I’m most likely to give another chance, should I drop too many of the shows I picked up.)

* Dimension High School but only because I don’t want anyone to think I’m recommending it because it’s good or anything. Would still be perfect for a good drunk weeb night.

* Saint Seiya: Saintia Sho for being the worst-looking show of the season and staining the name of a long-standing franchise.

* Kemurikusa for proving that its director didn’t learn much from the success of his previous work, including how to make his shows look better.

9 shows were picked up after the first episode, 2 of which I was unsure of:

* Kaguya-sama: Love is War because I love the direction and characters but can see myself growing annoyed with the concept.

* Girly Air Force because my judgment of its quality will be based heavily on the female cast, and we didn’t get to see much of them in the first episode.

And 7 of which I was more confident in:

* Mob Psycho 100 II and The Morose Mononokean II for obvious reasons (they’re sequels to shows I enjoyed).

* The Magnificent Kotobuki for being the only decent-looking CG show of the season and providing an excellent (and lengthy) action sequence in the first episode that totally sold me on watching dogfights.

* Endro! for being incredibly charming and creating a fun fantasy world that doesn’t get bogged down in RPG details.

* My Roommate is a Cat for giving me some much-needed accuracy in the field of cat-based anime.

* The Quintessential Quintuplets for being a harem show that looked like it might have an interesting plot and non-excessive fanservice.

* The Promised Neverland for having a ton of creative verve put behind a show that follows the current trend of kid-based horror.

3 shows premiered that are already confirmed to have more than 13 episodes, 1 of which I dropped:

* The Rising of the Shield Hero for just being okay right up to the point that it gave me blinding, seething fury.

And 2 of which I picked up, 1 of which I was cautious of:

* Boogiepop and Others, for being interesting but possibly a little too slow on the burn and very lazily made.

And 1 I was much, much more confident in:

* Dororo for being a very cool-looking interpretation of the work of Osamu Tezuka and having the coolest fight scene out of any of these premieres.

MOST IMPRESSIVE PREMIERE: The Promised Neverland

Maybe I’m predictable, but come on, when the first thing I can think to compare a show to is Made in Abyss, it’s doing something right. The Promised Neverland was probably the most-hyped show of Winter, and it gave us a premiere that demonstrated exactly why by tantalizing us with its mysterious setting before the big twist turned the atmosphere from “weirdly muted” to “complete horror”, and pulling off the only good bait and switch in a season that was fucking full of them.

Speaking of which...

WORST PREMIERE: The Rising of the Shield Hero

I’m not putting a GIF here because the first three pages of GIFs that Tumblr offered me for Shield Hero were all of Raphtalia, who appears to be the designated best girl of the season despite the show in question being easily the worst of the bunch and a strong contender for worst of the year already. My problem with this show is already known (and surprisingly, I only got one comment with the word “triggered” in it) and nothing besides Saintia Sho enraged me this much, but at least Saintia Sho just revealed itself to be poorly-made schlock instead of well-produced propaganda! Fuck this show.

And that’s it! The last lists for 2018 are coming soon, I promise, and I probably won’t be doing updated impressions this time around (because the season is already nearly over anyway), so stay tuned for my thoughts on the last few things I haven’t covered yet. Catch you guys soon.

#arcaneanime #winter 2019 #premiere impressions #rising of the shield hero #the promised neverland #dororo #mob psycho 100

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yobaba30 · 6 years ago

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trump’s reality TV gig

Expedition: Robinson,” a Swedish reality-television program, premièred in the summer of 1997, with a tantalizing premise: sixteen strangers are deposited on a small island off the coast of Malaysia and forced to fend for themselves. To survive, they must coöperate, but they are also competing: each week, a member of the ensemble is voted off the island, and the final contestant wins a grand prize. The show’s title alluded to both “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Swiss Family Robinson,” but a more apt literary reference might have been “Lord of the Flies.” The first contestant who was kicked off was a young man named Sinisa Savija. Upon returning to Sweden, he was morose, complaining to his wife that the show’s editors would “cut away the good things I did and make me look like a fool.” Nine weeks before the show aired, he stepped in front of a speeding train.

The producers dealt with this tragedy by suggesting that Savija’s turmoil was unrelated to the series—and by editing him virtually out of the show. Even so, there was a backlash, with one critic asserting that a program based on such merciless competition was “fascist television.” But everyone watched the show anyway, and Savija was soon forgotten. “We had never seen anything like it,” Svante Stockselius, the chief of the network that produced the program, told the Los Angeles Times, in 2000. “Expedition: Robinson” offered a potent cocktail of repulsion and attraction. You felt embarrassed watching it, Stockselius said, but “you couldn’t stop.”

In 1998, a thirty-eight-year-old former British paratrooper named Mark Burnett was living in Los Angeles, producing television. “Lord of the Flies” was one of his favorite books, and after he heard about “Expedition: Robinson” he secured the rights to make an American version. Burnett had previously worked in sales and had a knack for branding. He renamed the show “Survivor.”

The first season was set in Borneo, and from the moment it aired, on CBS, in 2000, “Survivor” was a ratings juggernaut: according to the network, a hundred and twenty-five million Americans—more than a third of the population—tuned in for some portion of the season finale. The catchphrase delivered by the host, Jeff Probst, at the end of each elimination ceremony, “The tribe has spoken,” entered the lexicon. Burnett had been a marginal figure in Hollywood, but after this triumph he, too, was rebranded, as an oracle of spectacle. Les Moonves, then the chairman of CBS, arranged for the delivery of a token of thanks—a champagne-colored Mercedes. To Burnett, the meaning of this gesture was unmistakable: “I had arrived.” The only question was what he might do next.

A few years later, Burnett was in Brazil, filming “Survivor: The Amazon.” His second marriage was falling apart, and he was staying in a corporate apartment with a girlfriend. One day, they were watching TV and happened across a BBC documentary series called “Trouble at the Top,” about the corporate rat race. The girlfriend found the show boring and suggested changing the station, but Burnett was transfixed. He called his business partner in L.A. and said, “I’ve got a new idea.” Burnett would not discuss the concept over the phone—one of his rules for success was to always pitch in person—but he was certain that the premise had the contours of a hit: “Survivor” in the city. Contestants competing for a corporate job. The urban jungle!

He needed someone to play the role of heavyweight tycoon. Burnett, who tends to narrate stories from his own life in the bravura language of a Hollywood pitch, once said of the show, “It’s got to have a hook to it, right? They’ve got to be working for someone big and special and important. Cut to: I’ve rented this skating rink.”

In 2002, Burnett rented Wollman Rink, in Central Park, for a live broadcast of the Season 4 finale of “Survivor.” The property was controlled by Donald Trump, who had obtained the lease to operate the rink in 1986, and had plastered his name on it. Before the segment started, Burnett addressed fifteen hundred spectators who had been corralled for the occasion, and noticed Trump sitting with Melania Knauss, then his girlfriend, in the front row. Burnett prides himself on his ability to “read the room”: to size up the personalities in his audience, suss out what they want, and then give it to them.

“I need to show respect to Mr. Trump,” Burnett recounted, in a 2013 speech in Vancouver. “I said, ‘Welcome, everybody, to Trump Wollman skating rink. The Trump Wollman skating rink is a fine facility, built by Mr. Donald Trump. Thank you, Mr. Trump. Because the Trump Wollman skating rink is the place we are tonight and we love being at the Trump Wollman skating rink, Mr. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.” As Burnett told the story, he had scarcely got offstage before Trump was shaking his hand, proclaiming, “You’re a genius!”

Cut to: June, 2015. After starring in fourteen seasons of “The Apprentice,” all executive-produced by Burnett, Trump appeared in the gilded atrium of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, to announce that he was running for President. Only someone “really rich,” Trump declared, could “take the brand of the United States and make it great again.” He also made racist remarks about Mexicans, prompting NBC, which had broadcast “The Apprentice,” to fire him. Burnett, however, did not sever his relationship with his star. He and Trump had been equal partners in “The Apprentice,” and the show had made each of them hundreds of millions of dollars. They were also close friends: Burnett liked to tell people that when Trump married Knauss, in 2005, Burnett’s son Cameron was the ring bearer.

Trump had been a celebrity since the eighties, his persona shaped by the best-selling book “The Art of the Deal.” But his business had foundered, and by 2003 he had become a garish figure of local interest—a punch line on Page Six. “The Apprentice” mythologized him anew, and on a much bigger scale, turning him into an icon of American success. Jay Bienstock, a longtime collaborator of Burnett’s, and the showrunner on “The Apprentice,” told me, “Mark always likes to compare his shows to great films or novels. All of Mark’s shows feel bigger than life, and this is by design.” Burnett has made many programs since “The Apprentice,” among them “Shark Tank,” a startup competition based on a Japanese show, and “The Voice,” a singing contest adapted from a Dutch program. In June, he became the chairman of M-G-M Television. But his chief legacy is to have cast a serially bankrupt carnival barker in the role of a man who might plausibly become the leader of the free world. “I don’t think any of us could have known what this would become,” Katherine Walker, a producer on the first five seasons of “The Apprentice,” told me. “But Donald would not be President had it not been for that show.”

Tony Schwartz, who wrote “The Art of the Deal,” which falsely presented Trump as its primary author, told me that he feels some responsibility for facilitating Trump’s imposture. But, he said, “Mark Burnett’s influence was vastly greater,” adding, “ ‘The Apprentice’ was the single biggest factor in putting Trump in the national spotlight.” Schwartz has publicly condemned Trump, describing him as “the monster I helped to create.” Burnett, by contrast, has refused to speak publicly about his relationship with the President or about his curious, but decisive, role in American history.

Burnett is lean and lanky, with the ageless, perpetually smiling face of Peter Pan and eyes that, in the words of one ex-wife, have “a Photoshop twinkle.” He has a high forehead and the fixed, gravity-defying hair of a nineteen-fifties film star. People often mistake Burnett for an Australian, because he has a deep tan and an outdoorsy disposition, and because his accent has been mongrelized by years of international travel. But he grew up in Dagenham, on the eastern outskirts of London, a milieu that he has recalled as “gray and grimy.” His father, Archie, was a tattooed Glaswegian who worked the night shift at a Ford automobile plant. His mother, Jean, worked there as well, pouring acid into batteries, but in Mark’s recollection she always dressed immaculately, “never letting her station in life interfere with how she presented herself.” Mark, an only child, grew up watching American television shows such as “Starsky & Hutch” and “The Rockford Files.”

At seventeen, he volunteered for the British Army’s Parachute Regiment; according to a friend who enlisted with him, he joined for “the glitz.” The Paras were an élite unit, and a soldier from his platoon, Paul Read, told me that Burnett was a particularly formidable special operator, both physically commanding and a natural leader: “He was always super keen. He always wanted to be the best, even among the best.” (Another soldier recalled that Burnett was nicknamed the Male Model, because he was reluctant to “get any dirt under his fingernails.”) Burnett served in Northern Ireland, and then in the Falklands, where he took part in the 1982 advance on Port Stanley. The experience, he later said, was “horrific, but on the other hand—in a sick way—exciting.”

When Burnett left the Army, after five years, his plan was to find work in Central America as a “weapons and tactics adviser”—not as a mercenary, he later insisted, though it is difficult to parse the distinction. Before he left, his mother told him that she’d had a premonition and implored him not to take another job that involved carrying a gun. Like Trump, Burnett trusts his impulses. “Your gut instinct is rarely wrong,” he likes to say. During a layover in Los Angeles, he decided to heed his mother’s admonition, and walked out of the airport. He later described himself as the quintessential immigrant: “I had no money, no green card, no nothing.” But the California sun was shining, and he was eager to try his luck.

Burnett is an avid raconteur, and his anecdotes about his life tend to have a three-act structure. In Act I, he is a fish out of water, guileless and naïve, with nothing but the shirt on his back and an outsized dream. Act II is the rude awakening: the world bets against him. It’s impossible! You’ll lose everything! No such thing has ever been tried! In Act III, Burnett always prevails. Not long after arriving in California, he landed his first job—as a nanny. Eyebrows were raised: a commando turned nanny? Yet Burnett thrived, working for a family in Beverly Hills, then one in Malibu. As he later observed, the experience taught him “how nice the life styles of wealthy people are.” Young, handsome, and solicitous, he discovered that successful people are often happy to talk about their path to success.

Burnett married a California woman, Kym Gold, who came from an affluent family. “Mark has always been very, very hungry,” Gold told me recently. “He’s always had a lot of drive.” For a time, he worked for Gold’s stepfather, who owned a casting agency, and for Gold, who owned an apparel business. She would buy slightly imperfect T-shirts wholesale, at two dollars apiece, and Burnett would resell them, on the Venice boardwalk, for eighteen. That was where he learned “the art of selling,” he has said. The marriage lasted only a year, by which point Burnett had obtained a green card. (Gold, who had also learned a thing or two about selling, went on to co-found the denim company True Religion, which was eventually sold for eight hundred million dollars.)

One day in the early nineties, Burnett read an article about a new kind of athletic event: a long-distance endurance race, known as the Raid Gauloises, in which teams of athletes competed in a multiday trek over harsh terrain. In 1992, Burnett organized a team and participated in a race in Oman. Noticing that he and his teammates were “walking, climbing advertisements” for gear, he signed up sponsors. He also realized that if you filmed such a race it would make for exotic and gripping viewing. Burnett launched his own race, the Eco-Challenge, which was set in such scenic locations as Utah and British Columbia, and was televised on various outlets, including the Discovery Channel. Bienstock, who first met Burnett when he worked on the “Eco-Challenge” show, in 1996, told me that Burnett was less interested in the ravishing backdrops or in the competition than he was in the intense emotional experiences of the racers: “Mark saw the drama in real people being the driving force in an unscripted show.”

By this time, Burnett had met an aspiring actress from Long Island named Dianne Minerva and married her. They became consumed with making the show a success. “When we went to bed at night, we talked about it, when we woke up in the morning, we talked about it,” Dianne Burnett told me recently. In the small world of adventure racing, Mark developed a reputation as a slick and ambitious operator. “He’s like a rattlesnake,” one of his business competitors told the New York Times in 2000. “If you’re close enough long enough, you’re going to get bit.” Mark and Dianne were doing far better than Mark’s parents ever had, but he was restless. One day, they attended a seminar by the motivational speaker Tony Robbins called “Unleash the Power Within.” A good technique for realizing your goals, Robbins counselled, was to write down what you wanted most on index cards, then deposit them around your house, as constant reminders. In a 2012 memoir, “The Road to Reality,” Dianne Burnett recalls that she wrote the word “FAMILY” on her index cards. Mark wrote “MORE MONEY.”

As a young man, Burnett occasionally found himself on a flight for business, looking at the other passengers and daydreaming: If this plane were to crash on a desert island, where would I fit into our new society? Who would lead and who would follow? “Nature strips away the veneer we show one another every day, at which point people become who they really are,” Burnett once wrote. He has long espoused a Hobbesian world view, and when he launched “Survivor” a zero-sum ethos was integral to the show. “It’s quite a mean game, just like life is kind of a mean game,” Burnett told CNN, in 2001. “Everyone’s out for themselves.”

On “Survivor,” the competitors were split into teams, or “tribes.” In this raw arena, Burnett suggested, viewers could glimpse the cruel essence of human nature. It was undeniably compelling to watch contestants of different ages, body types, and dispositions negotiate the primordial challenges of making fire, securing shelter, and foraging for food. At the same time, the scenario was extravagantly contrived: the castaways were shadowed by camera crews, and helicopters thundered around the island, gathering aerial shots.

Moreover, the contestants had been selected for their charisma and their combustibility. “It’s all about casting,” Burnett once observed. “As a producer, my job is to make the choices in who to work with and put on camera.” He was always searching for someone with the sort of personality that could “break through the clutter.” In casting sessions, Burnett sometimes goaded people, to see how they responded to conflict. Katherine Walker, the “Apprentice” producer, told me about an audition in which Burnett taunted a prospective cast member by insinuating that he was secretly gay. (The man, riled, threw the accusation back at Burnett, and was not cast that season.)

Richard Levak, a clinical psychologist who consulted for Burnett on “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” and worked on other reality-TV shows, told me that producers have often liked people he was uncomfortable with for psychological reasons. Emotional volatility makes for compelling television. But recruiting individuals for their instability and then subjecting them to the stress of a televised competition can be perilous. When Burnett was once asked about Sinisa Savija’s suicide, he contended that Savija had “previous psychological problems.” No “Survivor” or “Apprentice” contestants are known to have killed themselves, but in the past two decades several dozen reality-TV participants have. Levak eventually stopped consulting on such programs, in part because he feared that a contestant might harm himself. “I would think, Geez, if this should unravel, they’re going to look at the personality profile and there may have been a red flag,” he recalled.

Burnett excelled at the casting equation to the point where, on Season 2 of “Survivor,” which was shot in the Australian outback, his castaways spent so much time gossiping about the characters from the previous season that Burnett warned them, “The more time you spend talking about the first ‘Survivor,’ the less time you will have on television.” But Burnett’s real genius was in marketing. When he made the rounds in L.A. to pitch “Survivor,” he vowed that it would become a cultural phenomenon, and he presented executives with a mock issue of Newsweek featuring the show on the cover. (Later, “Survivor” did make the cover of the magazine.) Burnett devised a dizzying array of lucrative product-integration deals. In the first season, one of the teams won a care package that was attached to a parachute bearing the red-and-white logo of Target.

“I looked on ‘Survivor’ as much as a marketing vehicle as a television show,” Burnett once explained. He was creating an immersive, cinematic entertainment—and he was known for lush production values, and for paying handsomely to retain top producers and editors—but he was anything but precious about his art. Long before he met Trump, Burnett had developed a Panglossian confidence in the power of branding. “I believe we’re going to see something like the Microsoft Grand Canyon National Park,” he told the New York Times in 2001. “The government won’t take care of all that—companies will.”

Seven weeks before the 2016 election, Burnett, in a smart tux with a shawl collar, arrived with his third wife, the actress and producer Roma Downey, at the Microsoft Theatre, in Los Angeles, for the Emmy Awards. Both “Shark Tank” and “The Voice” won awards that night. But his triumphant evening was marred when the master of ceremonies, Jimmy Kimmel, took an unexpected turn during his opening monologue. “Television brings people together, but television can also tear us apart,” Kimmel mused. “I mean, if it wasn’t for television, would Donald Trump be running for President?” In the crowd, there was laughter. “Many have asked, ‘Who is to blame for Donald Trump?’ ” Kimmel continued. “I’ll tell you who, because he’s sitting right there. That guy.” Kimmel pointed into the audience, and the live feed cut to a closeup of Burnett, whose expression resolved itself into a rigid grin. “Thanks to Mark Burnett, we don’t have to watch reality shows anymore, because we’re living in one,” Kimmel said. Burnett was still smiling, but Kimmel wasn’t. He went on, “I’m going on the record right now. He’s responsible. If Donald Trump gets elected and he builds that wall, the first person we’re throwing over it is Mark Burnett. The tribe has spoken.”

Around this time, Burnett stopped giving interviews about Trump or “The Apprentice.” He continues to speak to the press to promote his shows, but he declined an interview with me. Before Trump’s Presidential run, however, Burnett told and retold the story of how the show originated. When he met Trump at Wollman Rink, Burnett told him an anecdote about how, as a young man selling T-shirts on the boardwalk on Venice Beach, he had been handed a copy of “The Art of the Deal,” by a passing rollerblader. Burnett said that he had read it, and that it had changed his life; he thought, What a legend this guy Trump is!

Anyone else hearing this tale might have found it a bit calculated, if not implausible. Kym Gold, Burnett’s first wife, told me that she has no recollection of him reading Trump’s book in this period. “He liked mystery books,” she said. But when Trump heard the story he was flattered.

Burnett has never liked the phrase “reality television.” For a time, he valiantly campaigned to rebrand his genre “dramality”—“a mixture of drama and reality.” The term never caught on, but it reflected Burnett’s forthright acknowledgment that what he creates is a highly structured, selective, and manipulated rendition of reality. Burnett has often boasted that, for each televised hour of “The Apprentice,” his crews shot as many as three hundred hours of footage. The real alchemy of reality television is the editing—sifting through a compost heap of clips and piecing together an absorbing story. Jonathon Braun, an editor who started working with Burnett on “Survivor” and then worked on the first six seasons of “The Apprentice,” told me, “You don’t make anything up. But you accentuate things that you see as themes.” He readily conceded how distorting this process can be. Much of reality TV consists of reaction shots: one participant says something outrageous, and the camera cuts away to another participant rolling her eyes. Often, Braun said, editors lift an eye roll from an entirely different part of the conversation.

“The Apprentice” was built around a weekly series of business challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be “fired.” But, as Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. During the making of “The Apprentice,” Burnett conceded that the stories were constructed in this way, saying, “We know each week who has been fired, and, therefore, you’re editing in reverse.” Braun noted that President Trump’s staff seems to have been similarly forced to learn the art of retroactive narrative construction, adding, “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.”

Such sleight of hand is the industry standard in reality television. But the entire premise of “The Apprentice” was also something of a con. When Trump and Burnett told the story of their partnership, both suggested that Trump was initially wary of committing to a TV show, because he was so busy running his flourishing real-estate empire. During a 2004 panel at the Museum of Television and Radio, in Los Angeles, Trump claimed that “every network” had tried to get him to do a reality show, but he wasn’t interested: “I don’t want to have cameras all over my office, dealing with contractors, politicians, mobsters, and everyone else I have to deal with in my business. You know, mobsters don’t like, as they’re talking to me, having cameras all over the room. It would play well on television, but it doesn’t play well with them.”

“The Apprentice” portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth—a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” Braun told me. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.” Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, “We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.”

Trump maximized his profits from the start. When producers were searching for office space in which to stage the show, he vetoed every suggestion, then mentioned that he had an empty floor available in Trump Tower, which he could lease at a reasonable price. (After becoming President, he offered a similar arrangement to the Secret Service.) When the production staff tried to furnish the space, they found that local venders, stiffed by Trump in the past, refused to do business with them.

More than two hundred thousand people applied for one of the sixteen spots on Season 1, and throughout the show’s early years the candidates were conspicuously credentialled and impressive. Officially, the grand prize was what the show described as “the dream job of a lifetime”—the unfathomable privilege of being mentored by Donald Trump while working as a junior executive at the Trump Organization. All the candidates paid lip service to the notion that Trump was a peerless businessman, but not all of them believed it. A standout contestant in Season 1 was Kwame Jackson, a young African-American man with an M.B.A. from Harvard, who had worked at Goldman Sachs. Jackson told me that he did the show not out of any desire for Trump’s tutelage but because he regarded the prospect of a nationally televised business competition as “a great platform” for career advancement. “At Goldman, I was in private-wealth management, so Trump was not, by any stretch, the most financially successful person I’d ever met or managed,” Jackson told me. He was quietly amused when other contestants swooned over Trump’s deal-making prowess or his elevated tastes—when they exclaimed, on tours of tacky Trump properties, “Oh, my God, this is so rich—this is, like, really rich!” Fran Lebowitz once remarked that Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person,” and Jackson was struck, when the show aired, by the extent to which Americans fell for the ruse. “Main Street America saw all those glittery things, the helicopter and the gold-plated sinks, and saw the most successful person in the universe,” he recalled. “The people I knew in the world of high finance understood that it was all a joke.”

This is an oddly common refrain among people who were involved in “The Apprentice”: that the show was camp, and that the image of Trump as an avatar of prosperity was delivered with a wink. Somehow, this interpretation eluded the audience. Jonathon Braun marvelled, “People started taking it seriously!”

When I watched several dozen episodes of the show recently, I saw no hint of deliberate irony. Admittedly, it is laughable to hear the candidates, at a fancy meal, talk about watching Trump for cues on which utensil they should use for each course, as if he were Emily Post. But the show’s reverence for its pugnacious host, however credulous it might seem now, comes across as sincere.

Did Burnett believe what he was selling? Or was Trump another two-dollar T-shirt that he pawned off for eighteen? It’s difficult to say. One person who has collaborated with Burnett likened him to Harold Hill, the travelling fraudster in “The Music Man,” saying, “There’s always an angle with Mark. He’s all about selling.” Burnett is fluent in the jargon of self-help, and he has published two memoirs, both written with Bill O’Reilly’s ghostwriter, which double as manuals on how to get rich. One of them, titled “Jump In!: Even if You Don’t Know How to Swim,” now reads like an inadvertent metaphor for the Trump Presidency. “Don’t waste time on overpreparation,” the book advises.

At the 2004 panel, Burnett made it clear that, with “The Apprentice,” he was selling an archetype. “Donald is the real current-day version of a tycoon,” he said. “Donald will say whatever Donald wants to say. He takes no prisoners. If you’re Donald’s friend, he’ll defend you all day long. If you’re not, he’s going to kill you. And that’s very American. It’s like the guys who built the West.” Like Trump, Burnett seemed to have both a jaundiced impression of the gullible essence of the American people and a brazen enthusiasm for how to exploit it. “The Apprentice” was about “what makes America great,” Burnett said. “Everybody wants one of a few things in this country. They’re willing to pay to lose weight. They’re willing to pay to grow hair. They’re willing to pay to have sex. And they’re willing to pay to learn how to get rich.”

At the start of “The Apprentice,” Burnett’s intention may have been to tell a more honest story, one that acknowledged Trump’s many stumbles. Burnett surely recognized that Trump was at a low point, but, according to Walker, “Mark sensed Trump’s potential for a comeback.” Indeed, in a voice-over introduction in the show’s pilot, Trump conceded a degree of weakness that feels shockingly self-aware when you listen to it today: “I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back, and I won, big league.”

The show was an instant hit, and Trump’s public image, and the man himself, began to change. Not long after the première, Trump suggested in an Esquire article that people now liked him, “whereas before, they viewed me as a bit of an ogre.” Jim Dowd, Trump’s former publicist, told Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, the authors of the 2016 book “Trump Revealed,” that after “The Apprentice” began airing “people on the street embraced him.” Dowd noted, “All of a sudden, there was none of the old mocking,” adding, “He was a hero.” Dowd, who died in 2016, pinpointed the public’s embrace of “The Apprentice” as “the bridge” to Trump’s Presidential run.

The show’s camera operators often shot Trump from low angles, as you would a basketball pro, or Mt. Rushmore. Trump loomed over the viewer, his face in a jowly glower, his hair darker than it is now, the metallic auburn of a new penny. (“Apprentice” employees were instructed not to fiddle with Trump’s hair, which he dyed and styled himself.) Trump’s entrances were choreographed for maximum impact, and often set to a moody accompaniment of synthesized drums and cymbals. The “boardroom”—a stage set where Trump determined which candidate should be fired—had the menacing gloom of a “Godfather” movie. In one scene, Trump ushered contestants through his rococo Trump Tower aerie, and said, “I show this apartment to very few people. Presidents. Kings.” In the tabloid ecosystem in which he had long languished, Trump was always Donald, or the Donald. On “The Apprentice,” he finally became Mr. Trump.

“We have to subscribe to our own myths,” the “Apprentice” producer Bill Pruitt told me. “Mark Burnett is a great mythmaker. He blew up that balloon and he believed in it.” Burnett, preferring to spend time pitching new ideas for shows, delegated most of the daily decisions about “The Apprentice” to his team, many of them veterans of “Survivor” and “Eco-Challenge.” But he furiously promoted the show, often with Trump at his side. According to many of Burnett’s collaborators, one of his greatest skills is his handling of talent—understanding their desires and anxieties, making them feel protected and secure. On interview tours with Trump, Burnett exhibited the studied instincts of a veteran producer: anytime the spotlight strayed in his direction, he subtly redirected it at Trump.

Burnett, who was forty-three when Season 1 aired, described the fifty-seven-year-old Trump as his “soul mate.” He expressed astonishment at Trump’s “laser-like focus and retention.” He delivered flattery in the ostentatiously obsequious register that Trump prefers. Burnett said he hoped that he might someday rise to Trump’s “level” of prestige and success, adding, “I don’t know if I’ll ever make it. But you know something? If you’re not shooting for the stars, you’re not shooting!” On one occasion, Trump invited Burnett to dinner at his Trump Tower apartment; Burnett had anticipated an elegant meal, and, according to an associate, concealed his surprise when Trump handed him a burger from McDonald’s.

Trump liked to suggest that he and Burnett had come up with the show “together”; Burnett never corrected him. When Carolyn Kepcher, a Trump Organization executive who appeared alongside Trump in early seasons of “The Apprentice,” seemed to be courting her own celebrity, Trump fired her and gave on-air roles to three of his children, Ivanka, Donald, Jr., and Eric. Burnett grasped that the best way to keep Trump satisfied was to insure that he never felt upstaged. “It’s Batman and Robin, and I’m clearly Robin,” he said.

Burnett sometimes went so far as to imply that Trump’s involvement in “The Apprentice” was a form of altruism. “This is Donald Trump giving back,” he told the Times in 2003, then offered a vague invocation of post-9/11 civic duty: “What makes the world a safe place right now? I think it’s American dollars, which come from taxes, which come because of Donald Trump.” Trump himself had been candid about his reasons for doing the show. “My jet’s going to be in every episode,” he told Jim Dowd, adding that the production would be “great for my brand.”

It was. Season 1 of “The Apprentice” flogged one Trump property after another. The contestants stayed at Trump Tower, did events at Trump National Golf Club, sold Trump Ice bottled water. “I’ve always felt that the Trump Taj Mahal should do even better,” Trump announced before sending the contestants off on a challenge to lure gamblers to his Atlantic City casino, which soon went bankrupt. The prize for the winning team was an opportunity to stay and gamble at the Taj, trailed by cameras.

“The Apprentice” was so successful that, by the time the second season launched, Trump’s lacklustre tie-in products were being edged out by blue-chip companies willing to pay handsomely to have their wares featured onscreen. In 2004, Kevin Harris, a producer who helped Burnett secure product-integration deals, sent an e-mail describing a teaser reel of Trump endorsements that would be used to attract clients: “Fast cutting of Donald—‘Crest is the biggest’ ‘I have worn Levis since I was 2’ ‘I love M&Ms’ ‘Unilever is the biggest company in the world’ all with the MONEY MONEY MONEY song over the top.”

Burnett and Trump negotiated with NBC to retain the rights to income derived from product integration, and split the fees. On set, Trump often gloated about this easy money. One producer remembered, “You’d say, ‘Hey, Donald, today we have Pepsi, and they’re paying three million to be in the show,’ and he’d say, ‘That’s great, I just made a million five!’ ”

Originally, Burnett had planned to cast a different mogul in the role of host each season. But Trump took to his part more nimbly than anyone might have predicted. He wouldn’t read a script—he stumbled over the words and got the enunciation all wrong. But off the cuff he delivered the kind of zesty banter that is the lifeblood of reality television. He barked at one contestant, “Sam, you’re sort of a disaster. Don’t take offense, but everyone hates you.” Katherine Walker told me that producers often struggled to make Trump seem coherent, editing out garbled syntax and malapropisms. “We cleaned it up so that he was his best self,” she said, adding, “I’m sure Donald thinks that he was never edited.” However, she acknowledged, he was a natural for the medium: whereas reality-TV producers generally must amp up personalities and events, to accentuate conflict and conjure intrigue, “we didn’t have to change him—he gave us stuff to work with.” Trump improvised the tagline for which “The Apprentice” became famous: “You’re fired.”

NBC executives were so enamored of their new star that they instructed Burnett and his producers to give Trump more screen time. This is when Trump’s obsession with television ratings took hold. “I didn’t know what demographics was four weeks ago,” he told Larry King. “All of a sudden, I heard we were No. 3 in demographics. Last night, we were No. 1 in demographics. And that’s the important rating.” The ratings kept rising, and the first season’s finale was the No. 1 show of the week. For Burnett, Trump’s rehabilitation was a satisfying confirmation of a populist aesthetic. “I like it when critics slam a movie and it does massive box office,” he once said. “I love it.” Whereas others had seen in Trump only a tattered celebrity of the eighties, Burnett had glimpsed a feral charisma.

On June 26, 2018, the day the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s travel ban targeting people from several predominantly Muslim countries, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sent out invitations to an event called a Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. If Pompeo registered any dissonance between such lofty rhetoric and Administration policies targeting certain religions, he didn’t mention it.

The event took place the next month, at the State Department, in Washington, D.C., and one of the featured speakers was Mark Burnett. In 2004, he had been getting his hair cut at a salon in Malibu when he noticed an attractive woman getting a pedicure. It was Roma Downey, the star of “Touched by an Angel,” a long-running inspirational drama on CBS. They fell in love, and married in 2007; together, they helped rear Burnett’s two sons from his second marriage and Downey’s daughter. Downey, who grew up in a Catholic family in Northern Ireland, is deeply religious, and eventually Burnett, too, reoriented his life around Christianity. “Faith is a major part of our marriage,” Downey said, in 2013, adding, “We pray together.”

For people who had long known Burnett, it was an unexpected turn. This was a man who had ended his second marriage during a live interview with Howard Stern. To promote “Survivor” in 2002, Burnett called in to Stern’s radio show, and Stern asked casually if he was married. When Burnett hesitated, Stern pounced. “You didn’t survive marriage?” he asked. “You don’t want your girlfriend to know you’re married?” As Burnett dissembled, Stern kept prying, and the exchange became excruciating. Finally, Stern asked if Burnett was “a single guy,” and Burnett replied, “You know? Yeah.” This was news to Dianne, Burnett’s wife of a decade. As she subsequently wrote in her memoir, “The 18-to-34 radio demographic knew where my marriage was headed before I did.”

In 2008, Burnett’s longtime business partner, a lawyer named Conrad Riggs, filed a lawsuit alleging that Burnett had stiffed him to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. According to the lawsuit, the two men had made an agreement before “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” that Riggs would own ten per cent of Burnett’s company. When Riggs got married, someone who attended the ceremony told me, Burnett was his best man, and gave a speech saying that his success would have been impossible without Riggs. Several years later, when Burnett’s company was worth half a billion dollars, he denied having made any agreement. The suit settled out of court. (Riggs declined to comment.)

Article from January 7, 2019 By Patrick Radden Keefe

Yobaba - New Yorker mag articles are LONG; I posted this mostly for my own reference so I will have a record of it; that said, I strongly urge everyone to read this. it explains a lot.

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Restaurants Fought for Covid Survival, With Some Tech Helpers The past year has crushed independent restaurants across the country and brought a reality to their doors: Many were unprepared for a digital world. Unlike other small retailers, restaurateurs could keep the tech low, with basic websites and maybe Instagram accounts with tantalizing, well-lit photos of their food. For the past decade, Krystle Mobayeni had been trying to convince them that they needed more. Ms. Mobayeni, a first-generation Iranian-American, started her company, BentoBox, in 2013 as a side job. She wanted to use her graphic design skills to help restaurants build more robust websites with e-commerce abilities. But it was a hard sell. For many, she said, her services were a “nice to have,” not a necessity. Until 2020. The pandemic sent chefs and owners flocking to BentoBox, as they suddenly needed to add to-go ordering, delivery scheduling, gift card sales and more to their websites. Before the pandemic the company, based in New York City, had about 4,800 clients, including the high-profile Manhattan restaurant Gramercy Tavern; today it has more than 7,000 restaurants onboard and recently received a $28.8 million investment led by Goldman Sachs. “I feel like our company was built for this moment,” Ms. Mobayeni said. The moment opened a well of opportunity for companies like BentoBox that are determined to help restaurants survive. Dozens of companies have either started or scaled up sharply as they found their services in urgent demand. Meanwhile, investors and venture capitalists have been sourcing deals in the “restaurant tech” sector — particularly seeking companies that bring the big chains’ advantages to independent restaurants. “A lot of what’s happening is reminiscent of what we’ve seen in the broader retail sector in the past decade,” said R.J. Hottovy, a restaurant industry analyst and an investor at Aaron Allen & Associates. “Covid accelerated the transformation quite a bit. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to redefine the experience.” Part of what Ms. Mobayeni offers restaurants is a one-stop shop and the ability to own their customer data. Many restaurants rely on third-party vendors, such as DoorDash or UberEats, to handle delivery. But those companies charge significant fees and retain customers’ data because the transactions go through their websites. That’s not such a big deal when delivery is 20 percent of a restaurant’s income stream, but it’s a game-changer when delivery becomes 100 percent of income — and you can’t contact any of your customers. “Restaurants realized they had to think of themselves as larger businesses and brands,” said Camilla Marcus, co-founder of TechTable, which connects the hospitality and tech industries. “You have to expand into other things: e-commerce, delivery, products. You have to think outside the four walls.” Helping restaurants deepen relationships with customers is where Sam Bernstein saw an opportunity. Before the pandemic he ran a tech start-up that connected students to housing, similar to Airbnb; when universities sent students home last spring, his revenue fell to zero. He went to his board of directors and offered to return what investment was left and close down. Instead the board suggested he regroup with a smaller team and new vision. “It was an existential crisis, as you can imagine,” he said. Mr. Bernstein laid off all but 10 employees and took them for a brainstorming retreat. They considered dozens of business models, looking for the right problem to solve. The more they discussed options, the more the members of the team realized they were all interested in food and hospitality and wanted to help restaurants. They hit upon the idea for a site that would allow customers to “subscribe” to their favorite restaurants. The new firm, Table22, would help chefs develop and market subscriptions for monthly meal kits and wine clubs, for example, and then manage the sales, recurring billing, scheduling, data analytics and more. In exchange, Table22 takes a percentage of each transaction. Table22, which is based in New York, went live with its first restaurant in May. Since then, it has grown to more than 150 restaurants in 50 cities. Late last year, the company received about $7 million from investors, who include David Barber, owner of Blue Hill farm and restaurants. Shelby Allison signed up her Chicago bar, Lost Lake, for the service on a cold email from Table22. She was hesitant at first, planning to listen just long enough to learn how to create a cocktail subscription service herself. “We get lots and lots of calls from these tech companies trying to help — or prey upon — us struggling businesses,” she said. Today in Business Updated April 16, 2021, 1:30 p.m. ET But she was impressed by the low service fee and the fact that Table22 shared customer data. She started the service in October, hoping for 30 sign-ups; 100 people joined. Ms. Allison now has 300 subscribers and five employees working on the make-at-home cocktail boxes. “This will 100 percent stay in the future,” she said. “I love this program. I thought it might cannibalize my to-go business, but it hasn’t at all.” Ping Ho considered signing up with Table22 to host the wine and meat clubs she offers at her Detroit restaurant and butcher shop, Marrow, and wine bar, the Royce. She decided against it, however, because her existing subscription platform, Zoho, gave her the essential tools. “It’s a bit more work, but there’s more agency,” she said. But because her website was mostly informational, she realized she did need help offering online ordering and a delivery system for the butcher shop. So Ms. Ho turned to Mercato, which enables e-commerce for independent grocers. In a bit of fortuitous timing, she had signed up a month before the pandemic struck. When stay-at-home orders were issued, she was able to quickly begin offering grocery items, such as milk and eggs, in addition to meats. Her sales jumped “tremendously” she said, although they have flattened out in recent months. Still, Ms. Ho intends to maintain the service. Mercato began in 2015, but 2020 was its year. In February 2020, the service had 400 stores across 20 states; it quickly ramped up to more than 1,000 stores in 45 states. It continues to grow and has added some big-name clients, including the Ferry Building Marketplace on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, with dozens of merchants. “We’re trying to give independent grocers a sustainable competitive advantage,” said Bobby Brannigan, founder and chief executive of the company, which is based in San Diego. It’s a mission that he has been training for all his life. Mr. Brannigan’s family owns a grocery store in the Dyker Heights area of Brooklyn, where he started working when he was 8, stocking shelves and delivering groceries. “It’s ironic that I’m back to doing what I was doing as a kid in Brooklyn,” he said. Last March and April, Mercato brought on hundreds of new grocers each week — clients that weren’t used to having online orders or weren’t used to the sudden volume of orders. Some stores that were accustomed to 10 orders in a day were flooded with hundreds, Mr. Brannigan said. Thankfully, his dad already had him build tools into the system that would allow grocers to limit the pace of orders and schedule them. Mr. Brannigan is also adding more data analytics to help his clients better understand what their customers want. They can now see what was bought and what customers searched for. “You’re amassing a valuable treasure chest of data that lets you sell the products they want today and that they want tomorrow,” he said. Of course, not all solutions are tech-centric; sometimes, it’s just a grass-roots community of chefs helping chefs. Alison Cayne, for example, has been giving free advice to chefs looking to create packaged goods, like her line of Haven’s Kitchen sauces. Having that extra revenue stream was critical when she shuttered her Manhattan restaurant and cooking school last spring, and she wants others to have the same options. “This is all very much from my perspective, not the supercapitalized, venture capital-backed, cool-kids business,” she said. “I just want to help them take a brick-and-mortar business and develop a product and build a brand that makes sense and is sustainable.” In Detroit, the grocer Raphael Wright and the chefs Ederique Goudia and Jermond Booze developed a “diabolical plan,” as Mr. Wright called it, to offer a weekly meal kit cooked by Black chefs during Black History Month. “Black food businesses are hurting in the city, so we thought, what if we created this meal box in a way that celebrates Black food and Black contributions to American cuisine?” Mr. Wright said. They named the project Taste the Diaspora Detroit and brought together Black chefs and farmers to create the weekly dishes — like gumbo z’herbes and black-eyed pea masala. The three organized all of the e-commerce and scheduling, which allowed chefs to participate even if they weren’t tech-savvy, and created the packaging and inserts that told the history of the meal. They topped it off with a paired Spotify playlist. “Being a part of this project woke everyone up and made them think they have a little hope they can push through,” Mr. Wright said. They hope to reprise the service for Juneteenth and are currently talking to funders to support the effort. Source link Orbem News #Covid #Fought #Helpers #Restaurants #Survival #Tech

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doctorwhonews · 7 years ago

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Twice Upon a Time (DVD)

Latest Review: Directed by: Rachel Talalay Written by: Steven Moffat Starring: Peter Capaldi (The Doctor), David Bradley (The Doctor),Pearl Mackie (Bill Potts),Mark Gatiss (The Captain) Format: DVD, Blu-Ray Duration (Feature): 58mins Duration (Extras): 100mins BBFC Classification: 12 Executive Producers: Steven Moffat, Brian Minchin Originally Released: January 2018 It’s an irony pointed out in last month’s Doctor Who Magazine that with 7.92m viewers more people tuned in to see David Bradley’s regeneration than William Hartnell’s back in 1966. Undoubtedly that’s partly down to the First Doctor’s original swansong being an event preceded by little fanfare. Good old Dr.Who simply has another of his adventures and then, once new foes the Cybermen have been dispatched with never to return, he has a bit of a funny turn and changes face. In fact, it feels less like the climax to The Tenth Planet than one of those cases where the beginning of the next serial is brought over to the end of the previous one in order to generate a cliffhanger. There’s certainly no sense of The Tenth Planet being about the Doctor’s decline and need to change. Of course, it’s all different these days and modern regeneration stories and long goodbyes to beloved actors and a chance to take stock and sum up what their Doctor stood for and where the show may go from here. This has probably never been more true than with Twice Upon a Time, a story which takes place entirely during the regeneration, with the Doctor having been mortally wounded two episodes previously and, from the very opening shot, locked in a dilemma about whether he wants to go on at all or to finally, finally, go gently into the night. While simultaneously retroactively giving the First Doctor the chance to consider the enormity of that first regeneration – surely the most traumatic as everything you’d ever known is stripped from you, and even your forehead will no longer be the one your mother kissed goodnight, your fingers not the ones you learned to tie your laces with, your eyes no longer the ones that looked into your father’s eyes. Ultimately a tale about self-sacrifice and duty, with both Doctors looking at the impact they’ve had, or will have, on the universe and deciding they have a moral obligation to march ever on, it’s appropriate that it intersects with World War I and Mark Gatiss’ Captain stoically prepared to die for his country as so many others had before him. The Twelfth Doctor has certainly had his issues with soldiers during his time in the TARDIS, so compassionate view of the Captain’s situation is an important component of the capstone on his era, while the “I’ve lost the idea of dying,” speech may be one of the lyrical things Doctor Who has had to say about the true nature of heroism. It might also be the crucial moment where the Doctor loses the idea of dying himself. Both Doctors do fantastic work here, with Bradley perhaps having the harder job – not because of the risk of comparison to William Hartnell (does anyone ever expect a note-perfect impersonation from this kind of thing?) but because of the balancing act being truthful to his own character’s drama while not stepping on what has to be, above all Peter Capaldi’s moment. As always, Capaldi dances wonderfully between gravitas, whimsy and the explosions of raw, tortured emotion that always bubbled under his Doctor’s stony exterior. It’s largely through his skill that the somewhat unlikely, and certainly disturbing, concept of the Doctor wanting to die somehow feels a natural development on the Twelfth Doctor’s journey. Even more impressively, he manages to make this conflict work for a Christmas Day teatime slot. It all adds up to one last chance to appreciate just how great a talent Peter Capaldi is, and how lucky we were to have him on Doctor Who for as long as we did. If his impassioned final speech may be seen as a mission statement for whom the Thirteenth Doctor will be, for whom the Doctor will always be, no matter his or her external appearance, then his successor’s first line could just as equally be seen as a summing up of the man she used to be. “Brilliant.” Extras If it’s disappointing that Twice Upon a Time feels doomed to fall between the cracks – not included on the Series 10 set and near certain to not be included as part of Jodie Whittaker’s premiere boxset either, then at least it’s accompanied by a relatively decent set of extras for a one episode release. Between them the two documentaries and panel interview presented here, the extras clock in at almost two hours – about twice the length of the episode itself. Doctor Who Extra: Twice Upon a Time covers the making of the Christmas itself, with contributions from Steven Moffat, Rachel Talalay, Pearl Mackie, Matt Lucas and Mark Gatiss. A highlight is the tantalizing glances of the partial remounting of The Tenth Planet that was ultimately cut from the episode itself (presumably because in aiming to be true to the 1960s original, it inadvertently creates the potential appearance of mocking the wobbly sets and wobblier acting). It’s a fascinating insight into the thinking behind the episode and full of anecdotes both fun and touching, from Mark Gatiss fulfilling a lifelong dream of having a Dalek mutant suck on his face to David Bradley and Peter Capaldi both almost corpsing with emotion the first time they found themselves amid the 1914 Christmas football match. The End of an Era covers, in fact, the end of two eras – the first half placing Twice Upon a Time in the context of Peter Capaldi’s time on the show and the journey the Twelfth Doctor has gone on from remote, amoral alien to twinklingly inspiring university lecturer, the second looking back at Steven Moffat’s epic marathon of being responsible for making more Doctor Who than perhaps anyone else ever. It’s particularly nice to get Moffat’s personal highlight and lowlights on his run (Day of the Doctor being “the most miserable experience to work on") in his own words. Rounding it all out is the full Doctor Who panel from San Diego Comic Con 2017. Watched from a point of time after the Christmas Special has been broadcast can make it a sometimes vague, fluffy experience as nobody can actually say much about the episode except in the most general terms. However, with Peter Capaldi, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, Michelle Gomez and Pearl Mackie in attendance there can rarely have been such a concentration of pure wittiness in one room before and they banter off each other and moderator Chris Chadwick delightfully. And it’s a proper lump in the throat moment to see thousands of people give Capaldi a standing ovation in thanks for his three seasons and for him, in turn, and in the manner of his typical kindness and lack of self-regard, turns into an opportunity to make a speech praising those he’s worked with and giving them full credit for what they’ve accomplished together. It’s an essential moment on a disc strangely missing the voice of the big man himself. The absence of a commentary really bites on this most important of stories, and he’s only a very sporadic presence in the other extras on the disc, mostly represented by old encounters with the team from earlier in his run. Perhaps on the cusp of his departure things were too raw and intense to dwell upon on camera, but it feels like there’s an important and revealing interview waiting out there in our future to be had. It’s not, unfortunately, on the Twice Upon a Time DVD. Packaging and Presentation For all fans’ efforts, from making their own covers to petitioning specials to be included in boxsets, the shelves on which our physical record of the show sits have always looked pretty chaotic, a mishmash of logos, shapes and formats. Twice Upon a Time, vanishingly unlikely to find a home on The Complete Series 11, doesn’t help matters and seems doomed to sit awkwardly between the two seasons, a thin streak of white. The cover too is pretty uninspiring, simply being the main publicity image for the episode. Despite the reasonably full listing of extras, it certainly looks pretty vanilla and rushed out when in your hand. http://reviews.doctorwhonews.net/2018/03/twice_upon_a_time_dvd.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

#Series 10 #Peter Capaldi #Pearl Mackie #Twelfth Doctor #{s{TwiceUponATime}}

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403secret · 8 years ago

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so this is... a seung gil fic i wrote back at the beginning of may. i dug it up and crammed out 800 more words to end it

anyways i’m stuck in rarepair hell but the dynamics btwn seung gil and phichit are great even though they’ve pretty much never met

He messes up his free skate.

And, god, it shouldn’t bother him as much as it does. As a professional skater, Lee Seung Gil is used to failure; he knows that not every opportunity is going to come to fruition, and it’s been something he’s learned to accept the hard way.

Except––except, this is different. This is Worlds, and it’s his first time here. He’s finally made it to somewhere big. And the fact that he screws up his free skate so badly–shaky limbs and awkward movements and badly executed jumps and all–that just isn’t representative of him. It’s just one bad performance, but it’s all the world gets to see of him. Nobody cares about his better days if he’s not standing on a stage.

And it hurts.

His coach takes the hint. She’s always been good at reading him after having to deal with him for so long. She gives him time to compose himself, under the pretense of giving him a few days off, but she knows it’s not out of kindness. It’s out of pity.

And he takes it. He doesn’t go to the rink after that. He can’t think of skating, can’t think of going back onto the ice when all he can ever do is fall, fall, fall–

It’s a day after the free skate when he runs into Phichit Chulanont in his hotel on the way to breakfast. Or, rather, when Phichit runs into him.

“Morning, Seung Gil,” Phichit chirps, wearing the same vivid, hundred-watt smile that he always has on.

And Seung Gil flinches. Phichit might as well be the most cheerful person who’s ever tried to talk to him–the boy has a personality equivalent to sunshine, and Seung Gil just doesn’t have the energy to deal with him right now. He pushes past, pretending not to have heard.

“Hey, hello?” Phichit asks, falling into step beside him. “What’s with the sad face?”

Does he really not know? Impossible. As a finalist, Phichit has to have watched the semi-finals, right? Seung Gil straightens up, sending him his most convincing glare. “I think you know.”

Phichit opens his mouth again, and all Seung Gil can think is, shut up, shut up, shut up. He isn’t ready to speak to anyone about it. Not now, and not ever. Maybe he should just spend the rest of the trip locked up in his hotel room, he contemplates.

“Hey,” Phichit begins, then clears his throat. “Is it the fr–”

“I’m not really in the mood.”

There’s a beat of silence, but it’s not nearly long enough. “I don’t get why you’re beating yourself up over this. Honestly, I think you were amazing.”

“I don’t need your pity, Chulanont.” He enunciates each word through gritted teeth, voice kept carefully low so Phichit can’t tell that it’s shaking.

“Wait, what are you talking about? I’m not pitying you!”

Seung Gil whips around, eyebrows drawn together and mouth creased in a frown. “I don’t want to talk about it. Just leave me alone.”

“Oh,” Phichit says, face falling. “Okay. I’m sorry for bothering you, then.”

He turns and leaves. And, damn it, Seung Gil hasn’t done anything wrong, but Phichit’s somehow managed to make him feel so damn guilty. He swallows, dumping his half-finished plate and grabbing his coat. Breakfast suddenly doesn’t seem so appealing anymore. He has a headache that’s been present ever since he’d performed his free skate, and come to think of it, it might have played a part in his lackluster performance.

It doesn’t matter now, anyways. He can’t change anything. He heads toward the elevators, not turning back once.

Dialing Park Min So.

Seung Gil leans back in his seat, holding a hand up to his throbbing temples. It may be something to do with skipping breakfast and lunch, or it might just be karma for having turned everyone away, but he feels like shit. Physically.

His coach picks up. “Seung Gil,” she says, voice warm and familiar, and he almost tears up at the sound. “I’ve been waiting for you to call. How are you?”

And now he’s going to disappoint her too, he realizes. The one person who knows he could’ve done better. Shifting, he leans so that the phone is held between his ear and his shoulder as he grabs the tissue box. “I’m fine.” He feels compelled to lie further, but his thought process is interrupted by a few harsh, jarring coughs that take him by surprise. He swallows, and his throat is sore. Weird.

“Are you feeling okay?” She’s asking, and he finds himself nodding. It’s a bad idea, considering that she can’t actually see him, and his phone nearly falls off his shoulder at the sudden movement.

“I don’t know,” he admits, then coughs again, muffling it into a handful of tissues. Had he had more hands, he would’ve brought the phone further from his ear. He knows it must be unpleasant for her to hear his symptoms up close. “I don’t…” he sniffles, feeling utterly pathetic. “...feel that great.”

“Sounds like it. I’m sorry,” she says sympathetically, and he curls an arm around himself, trying hard to conserve his body warmth. Briefly, he wonders if the air conditioning has started malfunctioning. It’s utterly freezing in here. “Just take it easy, okay? Take as many days off as you want.”

“Okay,” he says, and then repeats it, more for his own ears than for hers. “Okay.”

“Drink plenty of fluids, and make sure you get enough rest,” she says, sounding like his mother, but he knows she really just means, take care of yourself.

“Yeah,” he responds. “I will.”

He clicks the end call button, and the room is suddenly too silent.

When he next wakes up, he feels like shit. Physically and emotionally. It’s freezing and he’s shaking all over, but it’s the unpleasant type of coldness that extra layers can’t fix. His head still hurts like hell, but it’s worse now–a constant, throbbing ache–and he can’t breathe through his nose.

A hot shower should help. He hoists himself out of bed, trembling at the coldness of the wooden floorboards beneath his feet, and makes his way over to the bathroom. He’ll feel better after this, he tells himself.

When he steps inside the steady stream of water, he notices that he has to turn the knob a few degrees more than he usually does–he’s always been mathematical enough to notice things like this, and it’s not a good sign. It probably indicates that he has a fever. Great.

He doesn’t even have the energy to wash his hair, so he settles for just standing in place, letting the warm water flood over him. It’s nice and it loosens up his congestion a bit, but suddenly the hot water is running out and the coldness is starting to make him sneeze, and he’s getting congested all over again. It’s not a pleasant sensation.

He groans, turning the water off and hurriedly wrapping two towels around his shivering frame. The air feels mercilessly cold on his too-hot skin, and it’s concerning. He’s Korean; he’s supposed to be good with the cold, considering that he lives in one of the coldest areas in South Korea. The fact that he’s shivering right now isn’t characteristic of him at all.

Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. More than once, he gets dizzy and has to slump against the bathroom counter, waiting for his vision to clear. Maybe he’s worse off than he’d thought.

When he’s finally done, he exits the bathroom and falls back into bed, face-first, too exhausted to stay awake for any longer.

In his dreams, he’s skating his free skate over and over again, except every time, he messes up. It’s hard to breathe. Feels like he’s suffocating. The ice rink is too cold and his body is out of his own control and he wants to prove himself but he can’t, he can’t, he can’t. Or maybe he has nothing to prove in the first place.

When he wakes, he realizes that it’s dark outside, and he hasn’t left his room since breakfast. His throat is dry, and his whole body feels out of whack; each movement is uncontrolled, sluggish.

He needs to call Min So, he thinks to himself. He needs her to get him medicine to take for this.

Except he’s already bothered her enough. Except he’s already let her down. The least he can do is buy medicine for himself; there’s a convenience store on the street and he should be able to make it there and back, right?

It’s worth a shot.

He stands up, using the walls for balance, and makes his way to the door. He pulls on an extra jacket that’s too big for him and pries the door open, shivering as he steps into the hallway, which is somehow impossibly colder than his own hotel room. There’s only one thought on his mind, and it’s how much better he’ll feel after he takes something.

He doesn’t expect to end up standing at the cash register in the convenience store, his hands clammy and mouth suddenly gone dry.

In his wallet sit a few crumpled bills amidst a sea of coins. Blue, red, green, yellow. Korean currency. He can’t use this. He’d been planning on going to a bank sometime this week, but he hadn’t been taking into account that he’d spend the majority of his week locked up in his room, too out of it to even consider leaving the building.

“Would you be able to convert won to rubles?” He asks, and the woman at the cashier smiles apologetically.

“I’m sorry, we don’t offer that service here.” Of course. It’s a relatively small convenience store; he shouldn’t even have asked. Seung Gil looks at the medicine on the countertop, at the bottled water that sits tantalizing close to it, and swallows, a little painfully.

“I’ll have to pass on these, then,” he admits, shoving his wallet back into his pocket and scooping the items up into his arms. He coughs a few times into his shoulder. “Sorry, I’ll put them back. Thanks for your time, miss.” He turns to head back in the direction of the shop, energy sapped.

“It’s okay. I hope you feel better,” she calls after him.

He’s standing at the end of the medicine aisle, wondering if he can really make it back to the hotel without passing out, when he sees.

Standing a few rows away from him is Phichit Chulanont, gazing contemplatively at an assortment of ramen on the shelves. It’s kind of endearing, actually, how seriously he seems to be taking the decision process.

The relief hits Seung Gil all at once. Phichit can help him. They may not be friends, but they’re certainly acquaintances–surely Phichit will be willing to lend him just enough to cover the cost of the medicine pack, right? Seung Gil will even be willing to pay back in interest when he’s feeling well enough to stop by an actual bank. He takes a few steps over to Phichit’s aisle, relief completely overriding caution. He feels so unwell, but the idea of having medicine solve all his problems sounds just so damn appealing–

Only when Seung Gil opens his mouth to call out to Phichit does he realize what he’s doing. He’s the one who’d rudely pushed Phichit away just a couple days back. He doesn’t have the right to ask Phichit for a favor at all.

He’s so selfish. Blinking away the liquid in his vision, Seung Gil turns on his heels, mind set on getting out of this aisle as quickly as possible–

–and then his body has the audacity to make him sneeze.

The timing would be almost comical if he weren’t feeling so shitty. Phichit whips around, calling out a cheerful “Bless you!”, before his eyes widen in recognition. He sets three packs of ramen back onto the shelves, then takes a few steps in the Korean's direction, looking unsure of himself. “Seung Gil?”

This is the part where Seung Gil should make a run for it, except his legs won’t move, and his body feels stuck to the ground. “Hey,” he says, almost wincing at how his voice comes out. It’s dry and raspy and scraping, and, god, if he hasn’t made enough of a fool of himself already– “I didn’t think I’d see you here,” Phichit says, making no comment on the fact that Seung Gil’s voice sounds absolutely wrecked. “What’s up?

“Nothing’s up,” is the default response, and then he takes a step back, making a startled sound as he bumps into a shelf of cans. They rattle from behind him, and he feels his cheeks flush hot in dizzying embarrassment. “I was just… planning to get going.”

He takes a step out of the aisle, except then he’s coughing and he can’t stop–his frame shakes with every outburst, and his attempts to draw in a shaky breath are all interrupted by more coughing. It’s suddenly requiring way too much effort to stay upright. Wow, this is really bad timing. He can feel Phichit’s gaze on him, which isn’t a good sign. He probably looks like a complete jerk right now, coming to a convenience store when he’s sick and most likely contagious–

“That doesn’t sound good,” Phichit says, and Seung Gil almost flinches at the bluntness of the comment. “Are you not feeling well?”

“No, I’m not.” He swallows; he’s not even going to try to deny what’s blatantly obvious. “I was just stopping by for some medicine, but I think I’m going to head back now.”

“Without any medicine?”

“Yeah. I, uh… I didn’t know what to get. I couldn’t find the kind that I always use.” It’s a blatant lie, but he doubts Phichit knows him well enough to tell.

“In that case, I know some brands that work really well,” Phichit offers. “Wait just a second.” He darts off into the medicine aisle, and Seung Gil fumbles with his coat zipper so that it’s zipped all the way up to where his scarf begins. It’s too cold in the shop; his head hurts and he can’t breathe through his nose. He just really wants to get back.

Then Phichit’s there again, holding three different types of medicine, including the type that Seung Gil had brought up to the cash register before. “These should work.”

Seung Gil blinks, a little dazed. “Thanks.”

But Phichit isn’t leaving, and Seung Gil finds himself at a loss. He doesn’t want to turn down Phichit’s suggestions, but he can’t go back again and pretend he doesn’t know about the lack of Russian currency in his wallet.

“I appreciate it,” he stammers, “but I really can’t take these right now.”

“How come? Is it an ingredient allergy? Or something about the brands? Or–”

Seung Gil feels his face flush red. He should’ve just been straightforward with this in the first place. Now it’s practically too late to say something, and yet, what other choice does he have?

“I only have Korean currency with me.” He pulls his jacket a little closer in an attempt to suppress his shivering, wishing his body could at least attempt to cooperate. “I’d, uh, have to stop at a currency exchange store first.”

“That’s okay,” Phichit says, and Seung Gil almost gapes at how nonchalant he sounds. “I’ll pay. Don’t worry about it.” It’s as if he really, genuinely doesn’t mind. As if he isn’t practically offering money to a stranger.

“That’s too much,” Seung Gil says, “I can’t let you pay for this.”

“It’s not that expensive.”

“Yeah, and it won’t take me that long to find an exchange service.” He twists away to cough into the crook of his arm, making sure to put as much distance between himself and Phichit as possible. “I’ll buy them myself after I get the money converted.”

Phichit frowns. “When you’re well enough to go to an exchange service, you won’t really need the medicine anymore. Just let me do this, okay?”

“It’s really not necessary--”

“Think of it as a favor between friends.”

His eyebrows crease. “We’re not friends.” Are they?

“Then... a favor between fellow skaters?” There’s a steely determination in Phichit’s eyes--one that suggests that he’s not going to back down easily.

Seung Gil weighs his options. A part of him wants to keep arguing. After all, he’s an honorable person–it’s only natural to decline acts of kindness that he can’t repay. But the convenience store is somehow even colder than his hotel room is, and he’s shivering even under all the layers he’s wearing, and the walk here has drained all the energy from him and now he’s–well, he’s dizzy. Frustrated. Exhausted. And, more than anything, he wants to get his medicine and head back.

“Fine,” he caves, his voice cracking on the note. “But you really don’t need to do this.”

“I know.” Phichit turns on his heels, heading towards the first available cash register, and there’s nothing left for Seung Gil to do but follow him there. “I’m doing this because I want to.”

He pays for the medicine, then stuffs everything into a plastic bag and slings the handle over his wrist. “I’ll walk you back to the hotel?”

Seung Gil, previously preoccupied with attempting to stifle a sneeze as quietly as possible, glances up quickly. “Don’t you have more stuff to buy?”

“Not anymore. I was going to get ramen for dinner, but since my flight’s tomorrow, I think I’m going to eat out tonight instead. Get a taste of Russian food while I’m here, you feel?”

“Oh.” Seung Gil sniffles, blinking owlishly. “...Yeah.”

They cross the street and navigate the cluttered sidewalks to the hotel, side by side. Seung Gil tries to focus past the headache that’s taken root in his skull, but it’s next to impossible–everything around him is too cold and too bright, and his vision is slightly hazy around the edges, as if all of this is taking place within a dream.

It isn’t until they get to the hotel lobby that Phichit hands him the bag of groceries he’s been holding. “For the record, I meant what I said,” he asserts. “I think your free skate was really good.”

Seung Gil frowns, his fingers tightening around the bag handle. “I could’ve done better.” It’s a blatant understatement.

“That doesn’t change the facts. You were really cool out there.” Phichit grins, and his smile is just one degree from blinding--Seung Gil has to will himself to look away.

“Thanks for the medicine,” he says, changing the subject. “I’ll pay you back when I’m feeling better?”

“My flight’s tomorrow. If you’re that insistent on paying me back, I guess you’ll have to find me at the Grand Prix next year, huh?” Phichit quips, his tone light.

Seung Gil doesn’t say, I’m not participating next year. He doesn’t say, I’ve always skated for the fame; after a rough start like that, I’ve lost people’s respect for sure. He doesn’t say, I don’t have anything left to skate for. Because when he looks up at the person in front of him--acquaintance? Fellow skater? Friend?–that doesn’t feel quite true anymore.

Instead, he smiles, feeling something screwed tight in his chest loosen for the first time in years. “You’re right,” he says. “I’ll see you there.”

#i dont even remember what happened in this show LMAO it's been so long #my writing #yoi #apologies for the ending

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sholiofic · 8 years ago

Note

There was that one time they both got incredibly drunk and Peter forced Yondu to dance with him ;)

This is also posted on AO3: Come Dancing. Yep, it’s another fixit.

It wasn't a sound or any other clue that drew Peter to that corner of the ship; it was really just instinct that he followed down to the very back of the Quadrant's truncated cargo hold, and here he found Yondu, sitting with his back against the wall and a bottle of something high-proof and sharp-smelling, getting quietly and systematically drunk behind the ship's tangle of life support equipment.

Peter hesitated behind the oxygen tanks, wondering if he ought to just go away, but he might've known he'd already been spotted.

"Come in or scram, boy."

Peter came in. Yondu had a lightstick on the floor beside him, the kind that you snapped and then they burned for days with a cold blue-green glow. Otherwise it was dark back here, and cooler than the rest of the ship; it was all too easy to imagine the bitter cold vacuum of space on the other side of the walls.

There was a part of Peter that still expected to be menaced with the arrow when Yondu was in a mood like this. But of course the arrow was broken. Rocket had said he thought he could fix it, but in the meantime, there was something about Yondu that seemed smaller, somehow, without it.

"Missed you at the party," Peter said quietly, sitting down across from him with his back against the wall.

"Ain't that where you ought to be?"

Peter shrugged a little. He'd had a few drinks already, loosening up his inhibitions, which was probably what had made him go look for Yondu in the first place rather than just leaving him alone.

Music echoed down distantly from elsewhere in the ship: Earth music he hadn't heard before. There was a part of him that twitched desperately to go listen to it. But there would be time. Rocket had uploaded the contents of the Zune into the Quadrant's computers. The real thing was tucked safe in Peter's pocket.

He had all the time in the world to go through every single song.

Yondu took another long gulp from the bottle. It looked like it was still about half full, but then Peter noticed another, empty bottle next to him, half hidden in the shadow of his long coat.

"You gonna share, or keep it all to yourself?"

Yondu gave him a look, then handed the bottle over. His hand shook a little, from drunkenness or something else, Peter couldn't tell.

In the chill blue-green light, it was harder to see the gray, peeling patches on Yondu's fingertips and the exposed parts of his face (chin, nose, ears) -- healing frostbite, the only visible, lingering signs of those endlessly long moments in space before Kraglin and Rocket pulled them in.

The only signs on the outside, anyway.

Peter took a gulp from the bottle before he could change his mind, gagged, and handed it back. His eyes were watering. "Gah. I forgot how lousy your taste in booze is."

This got a slight grin, a flash of jagged teeth in the half-dark. "I'm the one what taught you to drink, boy."

Peter shuddered at the memory of hangovers past. "Don't remind me. Just want to make sure we don't end up dragging you to the medbay for alcohol poisoning."

Yondu's smile was brief and twisted before he tilted back the bottle again.

Intuition -- and long experience with Yondu -- told Peter not to ask why Yondu was down here instead of up at the "holy shit we're not dead" party currently going on elsewhere on the Quadrant. In a way, while he hadn't precisely been dealing with the urge to hide in a corner himself, he was finding the cool quiet of the cargo bay a relief. Finding out that your dad was a megalomaniac who'd murdered all your siblings and tried to kill you didn't exactly set you up for a party kind of mood.

And Kraglin had let him know just enough of what had gone down on the Eclector that he was also really, seriously trying not to think about that, either. He'd been slowly severing ties with the Ravagers since long before he actually walked away, hadn't even liked half those guys, but it had still been his home for more than half his life.

And it had been Yondu's whole world for longer than Peter had been alive.

From some things Rocket had said, Peter got the impression that there was even more to it than the mutiny and subsequent destruction of the Eclector, things that went all the way back into Yondu's past, and he just didn't know --

-- what you were thinking, you asshole, staying on an exploding planet, he wanted to say, and My life's not worth more than yours, you shithead, but that got all tangled up with a messy ball of twenty-five years of things he'd never said, never even realized had gone unsaid, and that got tangled up with the part of him that actually did understand, because there had been a moment when he'd been fully prepared to stay there on Ego's crumbling planet until he died, too, and it hadn't seemed like the worst of all possible options.

Yondu wordlessly held out the bottle. Peter took it for another eye-watering swig of rotgut and handed it back.

This was turning into the worst "we're not dead" party ever.

Peter sat up straighter and took the Zune out of his pocket. He also got out the little gadget Rocket had cobbled together in about five minutes from leftover pieces of tech dug out of his bag, because everybody had wanted to listen to it, before they got the bright idea of uploading it into the ship's memory banks.

Yondu glanced up. "Whaddya doin'?"

"Wondering if you ever listened to any of these songs," Peter said, flipping through the song list. Every one was a tantalizing mystery and an undiscovered secret. It was maybe the coolest present anyone had ever given him, and that blue asshole sitting across from him had just stuck it in his hand and then slunk off like it was nothing.

"Came with all the songs already on there," Yondu said dismissively. "Why would I?"

"So you didn't listen to any of these, at all."

A shrug, which was tacitly as good as a "well, maybe," but didn't answer his real question, which was "And did you like any of them, jerk?"

Well, if Yondu wasn't going to tell him, he'd just have to pick. Come Dancing, this one was called, by a band called The Kinks. That sounded promising. Peter stuck it into the little docking speaker Rocket had made, and when the first beats sounded, he grinned. Yeah, this was something you could dance to.

"What the hell you doin', boy," Yondu sighed with the long-suffering attitude of someone who'd been dealing with this shit for way too many years, as Peter got up and tried some experimental steps to the music.

"Showing you how Terrans dance," Peter said. "C'mon. You know you wanna try it."

"You ain't been on Terra since you was too short to see over my steering console, so how do you know how Terrans dance? Think I'll stay here an' watch you make a fool of yourself."

Peter got the rhythm of it, settling into the beat that made him want to twirl, so he did, and he caught Yondu grinning, just a little, before burying that quick, sly grin in another drink from the bottle.

"Nobody's watching," Peter said, doing a complicated little sidestep that a Krylorian girlfriend had taught him from one of the country dances of her homeworld. There wasn't much room in here, but he'd danced in tight spaces all over the Eclector and the Milano, so he was pretty good at it. "It's just us."

"That ain't better."

"Look, when I came down from upstairs, we'd managed to teach Mantis to dance, and she was teaching Drax, of all people, and if that's possible, then why the hell not?"

"You ain't dancin', you're just movin' around to music."

"What d'you think dancing is? Dance-off, man. You and me, let's go."

Yondu gave him a narrow-eyed look that was usually a precursor to the arrow coming out, and then heaved himself to his feet with a certain amount of effort, holding onto the wall. He really was drunk, a lot more than Peter had realized -- Yondu never gave anything away; he wasn't slurring in the slightest.

He was also perfectly graceful -- deliberate, slow, but not at all clumsy -- as he executed what Peter thought at first was a copy of his own little spin-sidestep, long coat sweeping out around him ... and then realized was something else, something that looked like a stylized piece of formal dancing (completely alien to Peter) that the music happened to fit the beat of. "That, huh?"

"Well, ideally you'd do it more than once," Peter said, trying not to grin like a lunatic, and not really succeeding. The Kinks song segued into another fast one -- thank the gods; he really didn't want to try to teach Yondu to slow-dance -- and he picked up the new beat with quick jump steps, twisting his arms, shoulders -- "You just let the music get into you. Let it move you."

"Earth ain't the only planet has dancin', you know," Yondu grumbled, swaying halfheartedly to the music. "I know what it is. An' you ever tell anyone about this, I'll --"

"Kill me, yes, I know. I've been hearing that from people a lot lately." Peter gestured at Yondu's feet. "What's that one you did before? Show me."

Two songs and another quarter of the bottle later, Peter had learned a few steps of what he guessed was some kind of half-remembered Centaurian dance, and he'd managed to teach Yondu to moonwalk, which Peter decided he was going to consider his greatest achievement in life. And Yondu was grinning, really grinning, and Peter couldn't stop laughing as he tried to remember the steps of the Krylorian dance that his old girlfriend had shown him, and got his feet tangled up instead.

And the planet that had been his father, and the ship that had been their home, were nothing more than smoking pieces of wreckage in the blackness of space, but ...

But he had a father, and they both had something like a home, and it was, just maybe, going to be okay.

#guardians of the galaxy #peter quill #yondu #yondu udonta #gotg2 #gotg2 spoilers #fixit #Anonymous

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