ifeelbetter (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ifeelbetter) wrote2011-02-14 06:58 pm
ifeelbetter) wrote2011-02-14 06:58 pm
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Comment fic? CHALLENGE: location
I have of late, the wherefore I know not prelims are evil incarnate lost the ability to write.
In honor of recently passing prelims (YAY!) andnearly dying of the plague the end of a particularly bad bout of flu, I want to do a few comment fics.
YOUR CHALLENGE: Pick a fandom/pairing and a location (the more specific the better). This is, of course,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deepsix's bril idea.
MY CHALLENGE: Write a comment fic using that location as the inspiration.
I love location-based fic writing--my Italian art!AU was entirely inspired by the visual of the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. So. You can pick a city, a building, a park, a tree, whatevs--I will write you a fic about/inspired by that place.
You Can't Blame Me For Feeling Amorous verse + Paris forjenna_marianne HERE
Arthur/Eames + the praying hall of the Great Mosque of Córdoba forosaraba HERE
Dom/Cat + a red couch and fluffy curtains at a real place, I'm sure fordancinbutterfly HERE
More to come!
In honor of recently passing prelims (YAY!) and
YOUR CHALLENGE: Pick a fandom/pairing and a location (the more specific the better). This is, of course,
deepsix's bril idea. MY CHALLENGE: Write a comment fic using that location as the inspiration.
I love location-based fic writing--my Italian art!AU was entirely inspired by the visual of the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. So. You can pick a city, a building, a park, a tree, whatevs--I will write you a fic about/inspired by that place.
You Can't Blame Me For Feeling Amorous verse + Paris for
jenna_marianne HEREArthur/Eames + the praying hall of the Great Mosque of Córdoba for
osaraba HEREDom/Cat + a red couch and fluffy curtains at a real place, I'm sure for
dancinbutterfly HEREMore to come!
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Feel like writing any more musicals AU or in the Singin' in the Rain fandom? Location, Paris?
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When Eames had insisted they stop for the painters--literally, he had tugged and said, "But, darling, for the painters" as if that was any kind of rhetorical strategy--Arthur had assumed they were stopping briefly. There was art everywhere and they weren't exactly in a profession that ever let them move all that far away from art in the first place--Paris, city of lights or love or giant iron structures looming over the cityscape, was a general busman's holiday to Arthur. More art, different setting.
But Eames. He was acting like Montmartre had been created specifically to tug at the strings of his heart and play him expertly.
"I'm tired, Eames," Arthur insisted (not whining, not quite). "It's just a bunch of trellises." The artist glowered at him and he added--unsure if the man had understood him or had just taken offense at the timbre of his voice-- "No offense. Obviously."
"Would it make you happy if I called this research? For the picture about the painter who has to choose between wealth and love...and tapdancing?" Eames asked, tilting his head absurdly at the painting of the pink trellis with the rosebush--as if it stood out against the green trellis with the pink magnolia blossoms or the blue door with the red shutters.
"All your pictures are about choosing between wealth and love," Arthur groused.
"You could go expel your wroth over there," Eames said, pointing to a tiny cafe, "and I could come find you when you've expended your vitriol."
"I'm going to go over there--but not to please you," Arthur said, with as much offended dignity as he could muster beyond the over-wrung exhaustion of a day of trekking across the whole damned city, "I'm going over there to sit down and have a coffee like a civilized man."
"Civilized man. That's you to a T," Eames agreed.
If Arthur expected--hoped--Eames to follow him, he wasn't about to admit his disappointment when he didn't, when he stayed hovering around the stupid trellis paintings. Even the cobblestones hurt Arthur's feet; standing around in his tow-pinching shoes did most definitely not appeal.
He ordered a coffee--the only French he knew--and tried to ignore the tinges of annoyance his exhaustion was prompting. His eyes closed on their own, letting the buzz of the polite crowd dim into a blur.
When his eyes opened, some semblance of calm re-instated, he noticed the upright piano in the corner. He walked over to it and let his finger travel down a scale. When nobody minded that--and he glanced around the cafe to check--he sat down on the stool and tried out a couple of chords.
It wasn't a conscious decision that they happened to be the first few chords of "The Way You Look Tonight." He wasn't really thinking at all and the song had been on his mind all day, even in the middle of his annoyance.
He hummed as he played, working his way into the melody. Then the words stumbled out of his lips and he was grinning quietly to himself. And Eames was lovely in Paris, that night and all the others too.
"Lovely, never, never change," he sang quietly, "Keep that breathless charm. Won't you please arrange it 'cuz I love you, just the way you look tonight."
He felt Eames suddenly, right at his back. He didn't have to turn to know the press of that body against his shoulder, and he found his grin expanded into silly proportions.
When he finished the last chord, repeating the last line a second time, he finally let his head turn upwards, up towards Eames's face.
He had a smudge of green paint across his nose.
Arthur really, truly did love him just the way he was that night.
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I'm not any sort of religious but it really struck me as a place of reverence and I've wanted to go there for 12 years now.
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The way things were supposed to go was this: (1) someone hires an extractor, (2) the extractor collects his team, sending them summonses to appear at some abandoned warehouse at an ungodly hour on some obscure date, and (3) they got the damn job done and disappeared. Arthur had known that was how things would go down on his first job, knew it just from the practical simplicity of it.
Of course Eames--who was supposed to be a simple (emphasis on the simple) Forger, no thinking required--would decide to flip the process on its head.
His text was direct at least: Córdoba. Noon. Two days.
No mirage of choice--there never was a choice, Arthur took all jobs and built, brick-by-brick, the mortar of the kind of reputation that would someday buy him Armani suits and the ability to sometimes say No, I think I'll stay in my tropical paradise, thankyouverymuch. And Eames knew it because that's what he was doing and he knew that Arthur knew that. So a location and a date meant a job.
Where in Córdoba? Arthur texted back.
Don't be simple, was Eames's obscure reply.
Which meant that Arthur had to buy a stupid guidebook, had to guess what was so central to this damn city that Eames assumed anyone would know, would walk straight there.
It had been almost too beautiful as Arthur approached the building. Sunlight shouldn't fall like that, tufts of green shouldn't appear in artistic dashes across the water, bridges shouldn't rise up so dramatically but charmingly from the riverbed and the edifices of stone below. It was an absurd place in that it seemed like nothing else could have stood in its spot and the ground itself must have waited for it for millennium.
But that was nothing to the slant of the light inside. The lines, the arcing curves over his head, seemed like buttresses of shadow, bending under and around the sunlight that poured between the pillars. They were like thousands of arced cats, furious or yawning or just holding themselves in curves when the beauty of the place wouldn't allow hard angles.
Arthur felt out of place and completely at home at the same time, in the moment down the sound of his shoes on the marble floor and completely outside of himself.
"I thought you'd like it," Eames said, in step beside Arthur before Arthur had registered his approach.
Arthur stuffed his hands into the pocket of denim jacket--holes in the shoulders, frayed at the cuffs, and everything he knew he'd buy himself out of. He thought about denying it, pretending beauty didn't move him out of his mind and transport the senses. He could mime a business facade if he couldn't feel it.
"I do," he admitted instead.
Eames's grin stretched wider--that was his real one, Arthur realized for the first time and then knew forever after--and he didn't shutter the surprise in his eyes.
He thought I'd lie, Arthur thought, glad he'd surprised them both.
"I thought to myself," Eames said, narrating suddenly, not speaking directly to Arthur, "I thought, 'who does this light remind me of?' You, that's who."
"The light...reminded you of me?" Arthur repeated. He had barely been able to afford the ticket, had used up the ends of the last of his legal backlog to get there.
"Yes," Eames agreed, still grinning. "And it does. Suit you, I mean."
"Ah," Arthur said because it was all he could think of to say.
"And I have a job," Eames added and Arthur felt solid ground beneath his feet again. "Mostly the light, though."
"Ah," Arthur repeated.
It would take him a year to understand the compliment as Eames had intended it.
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Dominic/Cat Deeley - This couch at the W Hotel. (http://la.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/6_6_10_w.jpg)
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There were lots of people around them--the sort of crowd that hummed at a pitch that made casual conversation impractical and no one ever had anything but casual conversation to offer. Dom had seen her when he came in; of course he did, she was seven feet tall and blonde like an British (not French, definitely not French) Amazon. You couldn't miss Cat in a crowd.
But she was over there and he was trying to pretend to be interested in the thread-count of curtains because otherwise he was going to do what he always ended up doing anyway, he was going to end up hovering somewhere nearby her.
He rubbed the corner of the curtain between his thumb and first finger again. It felt satin-y, right, but that didn't mean anything about the thread-count. (If you're going to feign interest in something as a cover, Dom had always said, you ought to actually take an interest in it. Safer that way.)
Cat was laughing at something someone--a dancer-looking-someone, judging by the stance and the breadth of the shoulders but, honest-to-god, Dom wasn't sure who was and wasn't on the show at any point anymore and that dude was seriously short--had said. It wasn't something Dom enjoyed knowing, but there you go.
He kicked at the corner of the sofa and flopped onto it. There was reported talking to Robert on the chaise right by him and he was aware that his behavior/body language was currently projecting It makes me sad when Cat doesn't talk to me in neon lights over his head. It wouldn't be long before Robert--good man that he was--shook off the reporter and comforted him. They'd been clowns together, after all. Some bonds don't break.
I just have to wait it out, he thought, grimacing as Cat laughed loudly again, throwing her head back this time and exposing a long arch of throat to the obvious villain monopolizing her time and laughter. The villain.
He swung his legs back and forth, kicking at the frame of the sofa. Robert gave him a look over the reporter's head--he was saying something about how much the "experience affected them all" and communal bonds but he managed to make his eyes say, "Stop it, you giant baby" very clearly without dropping a beat.
Dom knew, obviously, that giant babies are hardly (a)engaging conversationalists, (b)god publicity, or (c)at all attractive to women who are giant Amazon blondes. It wasn't like she was even looking anyway.
He pulled one of the plush red pillows onto his lap and started playing with the tassels.
A moment later he felt the sofa sag next to him. He didn't bother to look up because it would be Robert, clearly, or maybe Lauren and Lauren had a bad habit of slapping the back of his head when he got "emo" about Cat. He didn't want to risk a head-smack because of spooniness.
"You look utterly dejected, do you know that?" Cat said, leaning back into the cushions and letting one long, graceful arm rest on the back behind Dom's head. "And this sofa is ridiculous--I'm in danger of being swallowed by it utterly!"
"Maybe I am utterly dejected, did you consider that?" Dom asked but with a grin--she liked it that way. All game, nothing written down. Nothing but grins and jokes from now until eternity.
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"I was just telling Evan how you looked like you'd lost your budgie. Apparently you don't say 'budgie' in the States," she said conversationally.
"I will if you want me to," Dom said honestly. It sometimes amazed him how he could say these sentences and everyone would laugh like it was a joke--he always meant every word.
Cat's eyes crinkled at the corners. "Oh, Dom," she said, her tone all affection and--possibly--she already knew that he always meant every word.
"Or. I could. I don't know, I could do something else. Something heroic," Dom said, babbling. The air was better filled with babble than with the affectionate softness on her face that probably meant she was going to "set boundaries" again. He'd hated that conversation the first time through.
"Heroic? Are you offering to slay dragons for me, Dom?" Cat asked. Her hand--the one behind his head--ghosted over the hairs on the back of his neck.
"Yeah, sure. Slay dragons, climb mountains, do the Macarena in public. You name it, I'll give it my best."
"Dom, you really have to be careful what you promise me," she said. This time her fingers really were on his neck, he could feel them, surely.
"Why?" he asked because he liked being as honest as possible and she should be aware, right, that he'd walk ten thousand miles and then ten thousand more if she'd just say he should.
Her hand--it was the back of a finger, the nail scraped briefly against skin--twirled into the shorter hairs on the nape of his neck.
"One of these days, I'll call you on it," she said quietly, solemnly. "You can only joke so long."
He frowned. "I know that," he said, pushing out of the cushions so he could look at her directly, "but do you?"
Her gaze flickered to the reporter across from them, still interviewing Robert (who was not-quite-inconspicuously eavesdropping as he waxed poetic about the value of the show for young dancers).
"Alright, then," she said suddenly, as if a complex and thorough debate was concluding--one that Dom hadn't really been aware of having, not really. She stood and and nodded her head towards the balcony. "Alright, Dominic. Maybe it's time to stop making jokes."
She bumped his knees when she passed beyond him and he was still thinking, wait, seriously?, but his legs were working on their own. He was on his feet and following without finishing a thought, without making any sort of conscious decisions.
She turned, right beyond the curtain, just out of sight, just barely, and pulled him in by the collar of his shirt.
She could have told him to fight ogres or go on an epic quest for a golden fleece. If she was just asking for this, this thing he'd been hoping/dreaming/wanting/longing for anyway, well. This he could do.
And so what if she dipped him. And so what if it was his leg that popped. It was still a kiss that made him feel like he was dancing even though he was standing still.
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how about steve/danny and the nuuanu pali lookout?
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Specific? You asked, I give you: Mandarake bookstore on Otome Road in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, Japan. XD I recently went there during vacation to satisfy the yaoi fangirl within.
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As for your challenge: Arthur/Eames, Washington DC, The International Spy Museum (http://www.spymuseum.org/) :D
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