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magistralucis · 4 years ago

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18 for soft gop bromance, please! The usual (^_^;) Thank you, love you!!

18: Drinks on the patio/deck of your fave place // Gopnik AU Bromance (Soft ver.)

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Louis was at his happiest in the evenings.

After sunset was when he worked at the restaurant. It was the last artifact of their previous life, now made safe through his efforts: he loved to cook, oversee the kitchen, weave gently through the conversations of the night. He had never felt more alive as when he was there, meeting and helping people. The restaurant healed him from the years he'd spent neglecting the goodness of human beings, and afterwards, healed his lover too. On summer evenings, when Mike was on break from university, they would step out the back and share drinks together. The nights were warm, and now and then a cat would come along, nudging insistently against his hand. Life was good.

Tonight, however, was special. Tonight they were awaiting not only customers, but precious guests. A table was prepared for them in the part of the patio usually sectioned off for reservations. The guests were coming straight from their travels, so presumably, they'd want to be - no, it was the polite thing to serve them right away. It was for that reason Mike and Louis were kept busy from early afternoon; Louis sank into a chair, and took a deep breath, as the hour of their arrival drew near.

It had been years since they'd last met.

Louis was elated this reunion was happening at last, though he was mildly nervous as to whether Vincent and Sebastian would be like he remembered. Whatever he felt, though, he knew Mike would be feeling in spades. Amidst table settings and special menus he refused to forget his lover, and the moment he caught sight of him, he called out: "A drink for you, Misha?"

Mike turned around. “A... pardon?”

He was dressed casually but handsomely, befitting his reputation as the best-looking man in Krasnodar (when he was around - as well as in Kaliningrad, of course, when he was around). Louis was enamoured. “Shall we have a drink before they get here? Just the two of us.”

Then, more softly: “It’s all right. You know no one can see us here.”

No one else was to be seated in this area that night. Only the two loving couples, if all went as intended. Mike smiled. His expression was still uncertain, but he took Louis’s offer and sat down opposite him. Two beers, chosen for their chill more than the flavour. They were silent for a while, sipping from tall glasses, ice clinking against the sides. Louis watched the foam subside in his glass for a moment before he spoke up again. “How are you feeling?”

Mike laughed slightly. “Nervous.”

He wouldn’t even have admitted to that, once upon a time. Louis was surprisingly relieved. In their old city, Mike had grown to see Sebastian and Vincent in a near paternal light, and he still felt that way most of the time: he was struggling with the impulse to seek their approval, to really show them he had improved as a human being. “Is that weird, Lyova?”

“Not at all. It’d be more unsettling if you weren’t nervous.” Louis shook his head. Condensation dripped down his hand and the summer breeze soon dried it away. “I feel the same, too. It’s the anticipation that kills, doesn’t it?”

“Indeed.” Then much to Louis’s surprise, Mike suddenly began speaking of the past. “I’ve been waiting for this moment since we settled in Krasnodar. Even when I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again, when all I had were my staff and my pigeons trailing behind me... I was always thinking of how I could thank them for all they’ve done. For being there for us before we left. We must have put them through so much, when we disappeared...”

He faltered, paused, then resumed again. His cool fingers laced between Louis’s own. “I feel I haven’t even paid back a hundredth of what they did for me. Letters and gifts only go so far from this distance. It feels as if I’ve been waiting for about fifty years to see them again - and now they actually are nearby, and I actually know how to show my gratitude - I’m, I’m so tense. I’m so excited I can hardly breathe. But I’m also equally worried I’m messing this up somehow.”

“Believe me, you’re doing incredible.” Louis was amazed: Mike very seldom talked about their past unless prompted, and even then, it was mostly in apologetic terms. This was the first time Louis had heard him actually analyze his feelings across a timeline, and admit to something that wasn’t guilt for once. “If you messed up at any point, which you didn’t, I did also. I mean, look at me: it’s not just you who’s got the tremors.”

He pointed below the table, where unnoticed by Mike, he’d been bouncing his leg restlessly throughout the entire conversation. A wry little smile returned to his lover’s face. “Besides, it’s not just the plan (whispered with a wink) that expresses our thanks. I think they’d be extremely proud of you if they heard what you said.”

“Do you think so?”

“Mm.” Louis clinked his glass against Mike’s own. It was already dark. Across the surface of their glasses darted pinprick reds and greens of the traffic across the road. “They helped give you back a life of excitement and you took it. Imagine returning to your garden after a long absence, and finding that a sprout you’d left behind had grown into a tree and was flowering.”

A quiet light entered Mike’s eyes. He did not comment more upon this, nor did he obviously take this as a sign of approval, but he didn’t need to. That look told Louis everything there was to know. A creak sounded several steps away. Someone was walking across the patio. Louis and Mike stood up in a hurry, just in time to see the figures of two men led by a cheerful young waiter. They turned the corner, entered the section - saw - and stopped.

One had vivid silver hair, star-bright beneath the restaurant’s lamps. The years had been kind to him; his brown eyes softened in laughter as soon as he saw the couple, and it was ever so familiar, the warmth in his expression. Beside him stood dark-haired Sebastian, his face exactly as piercing and pale as it had been when Mike had first met him. His first reaction was much like Mike’s own, disbelief followed by relentless joy - so relieved, and so overwhelming, that he literally didn’t know what to do with himself as they rushed to meet in the middle.

Louis felt his heart swell with warmth. That was pride, all right.

“Welcome, my friends!” He cried, laughing as Sebastian and Vincent nigh tackled the two of them into an embrace. “So many summers, so many winters! - Oh, I’ve missed you both so much!”

#absolut kurant #gopnik au (bromance)#summer prompts #drabble #fanfiction #сколько лет сколько зим :")#i developed a tiny plotline that deals with the sebinsky-bromance reunion recently #i'll crosspost this to aksug when the current hell.txt is complete because it's the start of that plotline #(also bromance tag hasn't been updated in so long)#at this point misha is still going to uni in kaliningrad / not done his phd yet #lyova is the primary contributor to the lucky cat restuarant #decor of this restaurant is not 100% decided nor are any expansions but they have cat visitors and established regulars #oh how enchanted must those young friends be to meet each other <3 #thank u for asking i hope you enjoyed it #💖💖💖

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magistralucis · 5 years ago

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1, 5, 16, 17, please

1: What book did you last finish? When was that?

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Kim Young-Ha, begun on 6AM Thursday morning and finished at 8:40AM. I had gotten this book out of the library about four weeks before and had completely forgotten to read it by its due date, hence the power read 😭 It was a fantastic book, though a little too short for my tastes. There’s an English translation but I read it in the original Korean. Kim Young-Ha is a very popular novelist in Korea, but he started becoming famous around the time I left the country for good... and for a long time I was too young to read his work, anyway. This is one of the only dozen books in Korean in the library, so it was my good fortune that it should be this one.

5: Which book did you last re-read?

C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. I hadn’t read it since I was doing my Masters. Recently I have been thinking about theology in a direction I’m less familiar with (Anglican, ironically, given my location) and wanted to revisit an idea or a few. Don’t think I have answers to anything I wanted to know, but as theology is what it is, I doubt I ever will. And that’s fine. It’s an incredible book, a lateral Divine Comedy set in dreadful suburbia.

16: If you could bring three books to a deserted island which would you bring and why?

Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, because it is a truly life-affirming text and I have never been the same as myself before I read that book. I keep the Latin copy with me at all times. It touches all the parts of my mind that are spiritual without leading me down a necessarily religious, or a purely faith-based path - and it does so very gently, without ever once shying away from all that is timeless or unfair about existence. There really aren’t many books like this, even in the modern day. This is the book that proves why humans need philosophy, imo.

A collection of Samuel Beckett’s works, novel and script alike, because I think it will help me cope with the absurdity of being on a desert island at all angles. In fact, Beckett wrote two plays that are basically about that exact scenario (Act Without Words I & Happy Days). The man knows me so well.

La Divina Commedia by Dante Alighieri, because it is one text guaranteed to keep me occupied for the rest of my life. Dantists and Dantistas around the world still haven’t managed to figure out everything in this work, and it’s been hundreds of years since it was written. I think my life will be spent on it just fine.

17: If you owned a bookshop what would you call it?

It'd be a cat cafe + bookshop combo and I would call it ‘Schrödinger’ 😍

#absolut kurant #book asks #long post #thank u for asking!!! <3 <3 <3

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magistralucis · 6 years ago

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1, 10, 16, please!

1: Describe the plot of your current WIPs in a single sentence each.

‘Liberte’ narrative of @akchotesuggestion: A story in multiple perspectives of a man traumatized by war who enters another war, and as a result, continually traumatizes everyone he loves.

Chronicles of a Fallen Love (Soft!Gopnik 1777, ‘Fidelite’ narrative of @akchotesuggestion): A young artist is taught a great deal about life by an older artist, but didn’t anticipate just how much else he didn’t know, couldn’t have, or couldn’t bring himself to face.

The Metaphysics of Sleep (Soft!Gopnik Sebinsky, ‘Fidelite’ narrative of @akchotesuggestion): Pathological insomniac finds a pair of loving arms to sleep comfortably in for the first and eternal time in his life.

The Colour of Honey (Soft!Gopnik Justice, ‘Fidelite’ narrative of @akchotesuggestion): You can either have the safe conventional life everyone prepared you to have, or become the sputnik sweetheart of a beautiful young traveler, but you can’t have both.

Angel AU: In the twenty-first century, angels are few, angels are dying, but angels still live among us.

Polar Night: After the events of A Cross the Universe, Gaspard and Xavier are extremely overdue for a talk.

Swansong: Dead lover returns to save his dying lover.

10: If you had to write a novel about one of the side characters in your current WIP, which character would you choose?

I’ll be speaking about ‘Liberte’ because this is the narrative where ‘spin-offs’ happen by default. The nature of this fic makes it inevitable that almost every character gets an expanded backstory at some point. But ‘side character’ here presumably means people whose stories don’t cross over with that of the main characters (Sebastian, Vincent, Franck, etc.) until well into the plot, or characters who have left the plot already. With that in mind, I’m really looking forward to what you guys make of the conclusion of Thibaut‘s narrative. He and his new significant other feature in a Season 4 subplot which I hope will tie up Thibaut’s old loves and agonies satisfyingly.

16: What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever done in the name of outlining/worldbuilding (timelines, research, maps, spreadsheets, etc.)?

I don’t fic very often in Korean, but I try to be convincing when I do. tl;dr I once spent like 3 days making a chart of which R+ members would use what level of formality towards each other in Korean, there being significant age differences and disparity in life experiences between the band members which are all contextually relevant.

And yet I have never ficced about R+ in Korean. fml

Also I have composed poems in Old English and Old Norse for Angel AU

#wip asks #this was very fun :DDDDDDD #thank u for asking #i hope some of them were enlightening teehee #long post #absolut kurant

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