Shakespeare Drabbles, Round 1
Feb. 26th, 2007 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
itsallovernowFor those of you who haven't yet received drabbles, they're coming, but I thought I'd post Fridays drabbles here as well.
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rydra_wong gave "Glory is like a circle in the water,/Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself/Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught." for SG-1
Season 10.
She's the last person that Mitchell would have expected to question a celebration. Vala's always the first to order, the first to put forth thoughts of revelry, of mirth. But when he raises his beer to clink with hers, to toast to a victory, she pulls away her pink martini and looks at him with wide, startled eyes.
"You'll jinx it," she says, voice soft so as not to carry. The others are standing closer to the bar, but she'd convinced Cam briefly to dance with her and when the song ended, they'd settled closer to a table with an eye towards the room.
"I'm not toasting the war," he says, gently as he can. He's found, somewhere along the way, the patience to be gentle with her. She's more than Jackson's shadow, more than a liar, more than the sum of her parts, and he's discovered more than a few of his own virtues in her presence.
Still, Vala shakes her head and Cam nods. He can respect a superstition. He's a pilot, he's flown every combat mission wearing the same pair of socks. But, still, this is her fight as much as anyone's, and it's not a victory if she's not part of it.
"I don't think I'm tempting fate," he says slowly. "None of that win the battle lose the war crap." He pauses as she tilts her head, plays with the plastic monkey clinging to the edge of her glass. Sam has a tiny plastic elephant but the monkey suits Vala and her pigtails and her pink drink and her worldly eyes. He looks and looks, and finally knows what to say.
"I don't think much about us losing," he says, and God, he so does not want to be the leader of this fight, but he is. And she's a lieutenant, and god that thought makes him laugh and laugh. Wonders if he can reinstate the merit badge, reward them all their strengths and weaknesses, sum them all up in a circle of cloth the same way his wings do, the same way the SG-1 badge does, pressed against their arm like a smallpox shot.
"Go on," she says, tilting her head forward, taking a sip of her drink. The monkey slides around along the outer edge and Cam thinks of the Wizard of Oz. Kansas is a distant memory.
"I don't think about losing," he says again, "but if we do, I want to remember the things we did right. The people we were with. The victories we had. I want that to hold onto."
It sounds ridiculous, both trite and sentimental and disingenuous, but Vala smiles her wide, wide smile, and clinks her glass against his bottle.
"Alright, darling," she says. "That I can drink to."
***
pdxscaper gave Gilmore Girls:
Assume a virtue, if you have it not. [Hamlet, Act 3. Scene IV]
Season 6.
"You're the bravest person I know," Chris says to her, when they're 15 and drunk on Amaretto.
Lorelai scoffs. "I can't kill spiders and I fall asleep to Barry Gibb. That's not all that brave."
"You stand up," Chris thinks, and kisses her cheek, which turns into a sloppy session of making out on her mothers sitting room couch. "When everyone else sits down, you stand up."
That's not when she gets pregnant. He puts his hand high up on her thigh, underneath her skirt and it's innocent and feels so dirty that she blushes. She knows then that she'll sleep with him some day and that she won't have any regrets.
*
"I still don't kill spiders," she says to Chris in a bar in New York City. Rory is eight and staying overnight with Lorelai's parents, which is a concession she didn't want to make but Emily is persuasive. Lorelai didn't have plans, but she just couldn't stay in the same state where her daughter, her small perfect daughter slept alone in her parents' house.
Chris is home on vacation, looks sheepish and young, barely old enough to drink and he buys them beers and dances with her to Lou Reed and the Sex Pistols and kisses her goodnight.
She goes home at 2:00 a.m. and calls Emily to see if her daughter is sleeping. Emily's furious, and Lorelai doesn't care, buzzed up on cheap beer and good music and the idea that she's never leaving her kid behind again.
*
He traps a daddy long legs with the glass from the bathroom, covers it up with a piece of paper and takes it outside while she pulls the covers up to her chin.
"My hero," she says, and he brings her coffee and kisses her. "But don't touch me until you wash off the spider."
"Lor," he says, like he wants to laugh at her, but she's just seen him naked, again, and it never gets less funny and sweet and good. He goes to wash his hands.
When he leaves her later that day, leaves her for Sherry and a kid that he's going to raise from the start, she thinks of him with that spider in the glass and she doesn't cry until much, much later.
*
"You're a coward," she says to Chris a million times in a million different ways, and means them all but forgives him anyway.
He means well. But he's still a coward, even when he's doing the right thing and she forgives him all his trespasses against her and never forgives him for the harms he does to Rory.
He's ready to give up on them, thwarted at the first sign of a challenge, of trouble. And that's Chris, knight in shining armor turning tail fast as he can when things get hard.
Later, it's the way that she figures out why she has to leave. Chris sits down on the couch like he's ready to strip away armor and fight with his fists. Like he's ready to kill spiders for her, and follow maps for her, and stay whenever and wherever she needs him to. And when she sees him like that, all stripped down and brave, she knows it's not going to be enough.
She knows that she's not brave. Has never been brave for herself, but she's been brave for her kid. It's always been easy to be strong for someone else.
When she sits next to Christopher on the couch, and tells him the truth, that she loves him, that it's not right, not ever going to be right, she thinks of Rory, and thinks that sometimes, it's better to be a coward. Easier. Safer. She understands Chris in that moment like she hasn't in the decades that they've been friends, lovers, parents. How appealing it is – safety. How you can hide behind doing the right thing. And how awful, and lonely, it's going to be to be brave.
***
She also gave:Farscape:
Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ ignorant More learned than the ears.[Coriolanus, Act 3. Scene II]
(Season 1)
"You're smarter than that," he says to Aeryn, finds that he means it. "Following blindly. Doing what you're told." It's an old argument, but they'd been talking battles.
Normally she'd take offense, take that offense out on him, fists against his body, but she's got him covered in an alley, her gun out like an extension of breath and hope. She's beautiful in her violence, and he watches her instead of watching the way that pulse blasts dance sand around their feet.
"And I suppose that your earth soldiers are so ill-trained that they disobey direct orders," she says, but she sounds amused, barely out of breath as she ducks back behind the pillar, raises her eyebrow at him where he's crouched behind a barrel.
"No," he says and scowls and she grins, makes him feel… inevitable. And safe. A pulse blast hits the barrel and he scratches safe, but keeps the frantic edge of giddy.
It's easy to be fearless with Aeryn. It's when he's alone that the fear comes rushing back, twisting in his guts and his bowels. The rusty, ragged bilish fear that reminds him, "You almost died today."
"Shoot with your left hand," she says as she turns back to the fight, instead of commenting further on his accusation, his insinuation that he wants her to take as encouragement.
"Not ambidextrous," he mutters.
"Shouldn't have hit him, then," she says, and finally ends the gun play, nailing the last person with a hard on for their asses with a clean shot between the eyes.
When they get back to Moya, ragged and cranky and tired, she insists that they train. All John wants is his shower and his bed. He tells her to frell off, and when she grabs his arm, there in the hallway of this ship that lives and breathes and freaks the fuck out, she's gentler than he has any right to expect.
"You fight with your fists," she says, and takes hold of his forearm, balls up his hand, wraps cool fingers against the damaged muscles. His hand feels like the whole of the bones are now lodge permanently into his wrist. He tries to shrug out of her grasp, but she holds him tight.
"Yeah, well," he says, looking at her like of course I do? What should I be using, my dick? My charm? My very fine ass? He doesn't say any of that. 6 months out here has taught him that brain rarely wins to brawn.
"Hit me," she says, but he's trapped in her hands.
"No." He hates when she gets like this, bullish, brutish, determined.
She squeezes his damaged fingers and he sees red – pain, rage, doesn't matter. All he sees is how much it hurts. He takes a wild swing at her with his other hand, a round house that should have knocked her down, but she ducks, shoulders him in the stomach.
"Fuck, Aeryn," he says. "I'm tired, I don't wanna do this right now."
"So you can accuse me of ignorance, and do nothing to remedy it in yourself?"
Her voice is edged. Sharp as the knife in her boot.
"Yeah," he says, "I can do exactly that."
"You're hurt because you used your fist, didn't follow through with your body," she says quietly and lets him go. "You can't separate the weapon from the bearer of arms."
He thinks about it, the way her gun is an extension of her arm, the way the prowler is an extension of her body. The way he can be fearless when he's next to her.
"Okay," he says, "you win. But I don't want to fight in the hallway. When you kick my ass, I want something soft to land on."
***
monanotlisa gave:
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" SG-1
Season 10.
He frankly cannot remember a time when he hasn't walked with a weapon, whether it be his knowledge or his skill or a rifle in his hand. Cam doesn't think of himself as a violent man. Impulsive yes, that's sure been said. Impatient. A thrill seeker. Lots of adjectives, lots of verbiage addressed to adrenaline and the shadings of control.
But no one who knows him talks of his violence. He has killed men, he knows this. Combat pilot. It's a given, and if it's impersonal, it's never… cold, thoughtless. He's always encouraged his squads to remember that they control fate with the speed of their flight and the press of a button. He used to think of it as saving lives, not ending them.
Nowadays, he walks into other worlds with a gun in his hand. Protection, for himself, his world and his team. It's a cold necessity. The Gou'ald weren't squeamish about their violent impulses, and the Ori use weapons that can't even be seen. Cam's rifle is as much security blanket as act of security.
But sometimes, when he watches Jackson, with his hands on books, his gaze deep into words and history, he wonders what it would be like to go through the gate unarmed. He looks at Vala and her comfort with weaponry is personal, not professional. On the other side are warriors – Sam is carrier military, and Teal'c is… Teal'c. It makes him think.
Cam's a man who wanted to see the stars, who wanted flight, dreamed of it in classrooms and bedrooms and in soft, fragrant arms. He wanted that wonder, once upon a time. Now he's all wonder – when does it stop and are we enough? The first time he realized that there was more to the universe than stars, he felt frayed all around the edges, like all of his hems had suddenly unraveled.
The others tease him about counting his trips through the gate, and he pretends embarrassment, pretends bravado but he always, always counts. He is stepping onto the soil of a different world, and that has to be worth something. He carries the gun as a promise now: that he's keeping his home safe, that he's part of doing what he can. They walked through a wormhole and started a war.
But still, sometimes, he thinks of putting on regular clothes, old boots and a leather jacket and walking through that gate unarmed, wonders what difference it would make. He isn't that man, but he still wonders.
***
haphazardmethod gave:
"For they are yet ear-kissing arguments." (King Lear) Slings & Arrows
Season 3, but spoilers only for Ep. 1 (mostly).
There are times when Geoffrey looks at his life, and sees only the perfect metaphor that surrounds him.
Jack Crew on one end – youth and love and success, and Charles on the other, dying in his dreams. Geoffrey in the middle, his current madness a smash hit in New York.
"We're the riddle of the Sphinx," he says to Oliver with a smile on his face, but Oliver just crosses his legs and waves his hand.
"I hate Aeschylus," he says. "Bloody damned Greeks with their incest and their tragedy."
"Sophocles," Geoffrey mutters, but it's a moot point.
"Do you think I'm a man full of sound and fury," he asks Oliver later, feeling whimsical.
Oliver snorts, indelicate even in death. "Isn't that a questions best left for therapy?" he says. "It's a lot to ask of Shakespeare to define you."
Geoffrey thinks why else do Shakespeare, but he knows better too.
When he goes home to Ellen, he wonders if she traces her own trajectory through her roles. If she mourned when she was too old to play Ophelia, Cordelia, Beatrice. He thinks Lady Macbeth and Reagan would be more satisfying, but then what does he know, he's not a woman.
He doesn't regret that he'll never again play Hamlet. He's starting to believe that he'll never want to play Lear.
"Next season, we should do one of the histories," he says to Ellen. She's sleeping on her side, just buries her face deeper into the pillow.
"Mrrmmy the mpph," she says, and he nods.
"True. They'll only come for Henry and for Caesar. And you're too old for Katherine…" she kicks him in the shin, but it's just because. No one really wants to be Katherine.
Ellen rolls her head until her mouth is unmuffled. "Titus Andronicus," she says. "It's meaty."
Great, Geoffrey thinks. I'm not sure I can survive meaty.
"Well," he says outloud. "Perhaps we'll look at one of the moderns. The Cherry Orchard. Or maybe some Ibsen."
"They're doing an Ibsen entirely with midgets in the States," Ellen says, and rolls towards him, her body warm and lithe and comfortable against him. "Oh, sorry. I think they prefer to be called little people."
Geoffrey rubs his forehead with the heel of his hand. " A comedy then," he murmurs, and has fevered Midsummer dreams. Ellen will make a beautiful Titania.
***
More to come either later today or tomorrow.
rydra_wong gave "Glory is like a circle in the water,/Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself/Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught." for SG-1Season 10.
She's the last person that Mitchell would have expected to question a celebration. Vala's always the first to order, the first to put forth thoughts of revelry, of mirth. But when he raises his beer to clink with hers, to toast to a victory, she pulls away her pink martini and looks at him with wide, startled eyes.
"You'll jinx it," she says, voice soft so as not to carry. The others are standing closer to the bar, but she'd convinced Cam briefly to dance with her and when the song ended, they'd settled closer to a table with an eye towards the room.
"I'm not toasting the war," he says, gently as he can. He's found, somewhere along the way, the patience to be gentle with her. She's more than Jackson's shadow, more than a liar, more than the sum of her parts, and he's discovered more than a few of his own virtues in her presence.
Still, Vala shakes her head and Cam nods. He can respect a superstition. He's a pilot, he's flown every combat mission wearing the same pair of socks. But, still, this is her fight as much as anyone's, and it's not a victory if she's not part of it.
"I don't think I'm tempting fate," he says slowly. "None of that win the battle lose the war crap." He pauses as she tilts her head, plays with the plastic monkey clinging to the edge of her glass. Sam has a tiny plastic elephant but the monkey suits Vala and her pigtails and her pink drink and her worldly eyes. He looks and looks, and finally knows what to say.
"I don't think much about us losing," he says, and God, he so does not want to be the leader of this fight, but he is. And she's a lieutenant, and god that thought makes him laugh and laugh. Wonders if he can reinstate the merit badge, reward them all their strengths and weaknesses, sum them all up in a circle of cloth the same way his wings do, the same way the SG-1 badge does, pressed against their arm like a smallpox shot.
"Go on," she says, tilting her head forward, taking a sip of her drink. The monkey slides around along the outer edge and Cam thinks of the Wizard of Oz. Kansas is a distant memory.
"I don't think about losing," he says again, "but if we do, I want to remember the things we did right. The people we were with. The victories we had. I want that to hold onto."
It sounds ridiculous, both trite and sentimental and disingenuous, but Vala smiles her wide, wide smile, and clinks her glass against his bottle.
"Alright, darling," she says. "That I can drink to."
***
pdxscaper gave Gilmore Girls:Assume a virtue, if you have it not. [Hamlet, Act 3. Scene IV]
Season 6.
"You're the bravest person I know," Chris says to her, when they're 15 and drunk on Amaretto.
Lorelai scoffs. "I can't kill spiders and I fall asleep to Barry Gibb. That's not all that brave."
"You stand up," Chris thinks, and kisses her cheek, which turns into a sloppy session of making out on her mothers sitting room couch. "When everyone else sits down, you stand up."
That's not when she gets pregnant. He puts his hand high up on her thigh, underneath her skirt and it's innocent and feels so dirty that she blushes. She knows then that she'll sleep with him some day and that she won't have any regrets.
*
"I still don't kill spiders," she says to Chris in a bar in New York City. Rory is eight and staying overnight with Lorelai's parents, which is a concession she didn't want to make but Emily is persuasive. Lorelai didn't have plans, but she just couldn't stay in the same state where her daughter, her small perfect daughter slept alone in her parents' house.
Chris is home on vacation, looks sheepish and young, barely old enough to drink and he buys them beers and dances with her to Lou Reed and the Sex Pistols and kisses her goodnight.
She goes home at 2:00 a.m. and calls Emily to see if her daughter is sleeping. Emily's furious, and Lorelai doesn't care, buzzed up on cheap beer and good music and the idea that she's never leaving her kid behind again.
*
He traps a daddy long legs with the glass from the bathroom, covers it up with a piece of paper and takes it outside while she pulls the covers up to her chin.
"My hero," she says, and he brings her coffee and kisses her. "But don't touch me until you wash off the spider."
"Lor," he says, like he wants to laugh at her, but she's just seen him naked, again, and it never gets less funny and sweet and good. He goes to wash his hands.
When he leaves her later that day, leaves her for Sherry and a kid that he's going to raise from the start, she thinks of him with that spider in the glass and she doesn't cry until much, much later.
*
"You're a coward," she says to Chris a million times in a million different ways, and means them all but forgives him anyway.
He means well. But he's still a coward, even when he's doing the right thing and she forgives him all his trespasses against her and never forgives him for the harms he does to Rory.
He's ready to give up on them, thwarted at the first sign of a challenge, of trouble. And that's Chris, knight in shining armor turning tail fast as he can when things get hard.
Later, it's the way that she figures out why she has to leave. Chris sits down on the couch like he's ready to strip away armor and fight with his fists. Like he's ready to kill spiders for her, and follow maps for her, and stay whenever and wherever she needs him to. And when she sees him like that, all stripped down and brave, she knows it's not going to be enough.
She knows that she's not brave. Has never been brave for herself, but she's been brave for her kid. It's always been easy to be strong for someone else.
When she sits next to Christopher on the couch, and tells him the truth, that she loves him, that it's not right, not ever going to be right, she thinks of Rory, and thinks that sometimes, it's better to be a coward. Easier. Safer. She understands Chris in that moment like she hasn't in the decades that they've been friends, lovers, parents. How appealing it is – safety. How you can hide behind doing the right thing. And how awful, and lonely, it's going to be to be brave.
***
She also gave:Farscape:
Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ ignorant More learned than the ears.[Coriolanus, Act 3. Scene II]
(Season 1)
"You're smarter than that," he says to Aeryn, finds that he means it. "Following blindly. Doing what you're told." It's an old argument, but they'd been talking battles.
Normally she'd take offense, take that offense out on him, fists against his body, but she's got him covered in an alley, her gun out like an extension of breath and hope. She's beautiful in her violence, and he watches her instead of watching the way that pulse blasts dance sand around their feet.
"And I suppose that your earth soldiers are so ill-trained that they disobey direct orders," she says, but she sounds amused, barely out of breath as she ducks back behind the pillar, raises her eyebrow at him where he's crouched behind a barrel.
"No," he says and scowls and she grins, makes him feel… inevitable. And safe. A pulse blast hits the barrel and he scratches safe, but keeps the frantic edge of giddy.
It's easy to be fearless with Aeryn. It's when he's alone that the fear comes rushing back, twisting in his guts and his bowels. The rusty, ragged bilish fear that reminds him, "You almost died today."
"Shoot with your left hand," she says as she turns back to the fight, instead of commenting further on his accusation, his insinuation that he wants her to take as encouragement.
"Not ambidextrous," he mutters.
"Shouldn't have hit him, then," she says, and finally ends the gun play, nailing the last person with a hard on for their asses with a clean shot between the eyes.
When they get back to Moya, ragged and cranky and tired, she insists that they train. All John wants is his shower and his bed. He tells her to frell off, and when she grabs his arm, there in the hallway of this ship that lives and breathes and freaks the fuck out, she's gentler than he has any right to expect.
"You fight with your fists," she says, and takes hold of his forearm, balls up his hand, wraps cool fingers against the damaged muscles. His hand feels like the whole of the bones are now lodge permanently into his wrist. He tries to shrug out of her grasp, but she holds him tight.
"Yeah, well," he says, looking at her like of course I do? What should I be using, my dick? My charm? My very fine ass? He doesn't say any of that. 6 months out here has taught him that brain rarely wins to brawn.
"Hit me," she says, but he's trapped in her hands.
"No." He hates when she gets like this, bullish, brutish, determined.
She squeezes his damaged fingers and he sees red – pain, rage, doesn't matter. All he sees is how much it hurts. He takes a wild swing at her with his other hand, a round house that should have knocked her down, but she ducks, shoulders him in the stomach.
"Fuck, Aeryn," he says. "I'm tired, I don't wanna do this right now."
"So you can accuse me of ignorance, and do nothing to remedy it in yourself?"
Her voice is edged. Sharp as the knife in her boot.
"Yeah," he says, "I can do exactly that."
"You're hurt because you used your fist, didn't follow through with your body," she says quietly and lets him go. "You can't separate the weapon from the bearer of arms."
He thinks about it, the way her gun is an extension of her arm, the way the prowler is an extension of her body. The way he can be fearless when he's next to her.
"Okay," he says, "you win. But I don't want to fight in the hallway. When you kick my ass, I want something soft to land on."
***
monanotlisa gave:"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" SG-1
Season 10.
He frankly cannot remember a time when he hasn't walked with a weapon, whether it be his knowledge or his skill or a rifle in his hand. Cam doesn't think of himself as a violent man. Impulsive yes, that's sure been said. Impatient. A thrill seeker. Lots of adjectives, lots of verbiage addressed to adrenaline and the shadings of control.
But no one who knows him talks of his violence. He has killed men, he knows this. Combat pilot. It's a given, and if it's impersonal, it's never… cold, thoughtless. He's always encouraged his squads to remember that they control fate with the speed of their flight and the press of a button. He used to think of it as saving lives, not ending them.
Nowadays, he walks into other worlds with a gun in his hand. Protection, for himself, his world and his team. It's a cold necessity. The Gou'ald weren't squeamish about their violent impulses, and the Ori use weapons that can't even be seen. Cam's rifle is as much security blanket as act of security.
But sometimes, when he watches Jackson, with his hands on books, his gaze deep into words and history, he wonders what it would be like to go through the gate unarmed. He looks at Vala and her comfort with weaponry is personal, not professional. On the other side are warriors – Sam is carrier military, and Teal'c is… Teal'c. It makes him think.
Cam's a man who wanted to see the stars, who wanted flight, dreamed of it in classrooms and bedrooms and in soft, fragrant arms. He wanted that wonder, once upon a time. Now he's all wonder – when does it stop and are we enough? The first time he realized that there was more to the universe than stars, he felt frayed all around the edges, like all of his hems had suddenly unraveled.
The others tease him about counting his trips through the gate, and he pretends embarrassment, pretends bravado but he always, always counts. He is stepping onto the soil of a different world, and that has to be worth something. He carries the gun as a promise now: that he's keeping his home safe, that he's part of doing what he can. They walked through a wormhole and started a war.
But still, sometimes, he thinks of putting on regular clothes, old boots and a leather jacket and walking through that gate unarmed, wonders what difference it would make. He isn't that man, but he still wonders.
***
haphazardmethod gave: "For they are yet ear-kissing arguments." (King Lear) Slings & Arrows
Season 3, but spoilers only for Ep. 1 (mostly).
There are times when Geoffrey looks at his life, and sees only the perfect metaphor that surrounds him.
Jack Crew on one end – youth and love and success, and Charles on the other, dying in his dreams. Geoffrey in the middle, his current madness a smash hit in New York.
"We're the riddle of the Sphinx," he says to Oliver with a smile on his face, but Oliver just crosses his legs and waves his hand.
"I hate Aeschylus," he says. "Bloody damned Greeks with their incest and their tragedy."
"Sophocles," Geoffrey mutters, but it's a moot point.
"Do you think I'm a man full of sound and fury," he asks Oliver later, feeling whimsical.
Oliver snorts, indelicate even in death. "Isn't that a questions best left for therapy?" he says. "It's a lot to ask of Shakespeare to define you."
Geoffrey thinks why else do Shakespeare, but he knows better too.
When he goes home to Ellen, he wonders if she traces her own trajectory through her roles. If she mourned when she was too old to play Ophelia, Cordelia, Beatrice. He thinks Lady Macbeth and Reagan would be more satisfying, but then what does he know, he's not a woman.
He doesn't regret that he'll never again play Hamlet. He's starting to believe that he'll never want to play Lear.
"Next season, we should do one of the histories," he says to Ellen. She's sleeping on her side, just buries her face deeper into the pillow.
"Mrrmmy the mpph," she says, and he nods.
"True. They'll only come for Henry and for Caesar. And you're too old for Katherine…" she kicks him in the shin, but it's just because. No one really wants to be Katherine.
Ellen rolls her head until her mouth is unmuffled. "Titus Andronicus," she says. "It's meaty."
Great, Geoffrey thinks. I'm not sure I can survive meaty.
"Well," he says outloud. "Perhaps we'll look at one of the moderns. The Cherry Orchard. Or maybe some Ibsen."
"They're doing an Ibsen entirely with midgets in the States," Ellen says, and rolls towards him, her body warm and lithe and comfortable against him. "Oh, sorry. I think they prefer to be called little people."
Geoffrey rubs his forehead with the heel of his hand. " A comedy then," he murmurs, and has fevered Midsummer dreams. Ellen will make a beautiful Titania.
***
More to come either later today or tomorrow.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-02-26 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-26 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-26 11:42 pm (UTC)there's a pathos there...a wondering what if by me wearing a uniform and carrying a weapon I bring upon myself the violence I see and have aimed at me and the team I try to protect
*debates exploring this when I'm awake*
no subject
Date: 2007-02-26 11:51 pm (UTC)Most of the time, I try not to think about my issues of cultural exploration while armed, and just enjoy the pretty, pretty people. But once in awhile, I want to think about it, and exploring it with Cam - who is so very pretty, and so very military, and yet still so very new to all this, kind of delights me.
(And it's also the part of my brain that'll always be reserved for Farscape, the idea of bringing violence upon you when you approach the situation from the stance of bearing arms:)
no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 01:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 09:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 09:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 05:33 am (UTC)I love the Cam ones -- this:
But still, sometimes, he thinks of putting on regular clothes, old boots and a leather jacket and walking through that gate unarmed, wonders what difference it would make. He isn't that man, but he still wonders.
is such an interesting idea.
And the Slings and Arrows snippet is a marvel -- I love the idea of Geoffrey thinking he wouldn't survive Titus Andronicus (he really, really wouldn't -- meep) and his decision to do Misdummer Night's Dream, because really, Ellen *would* make a wonderful Titania.
Brava!
no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 06:03 am (UTC)And Geoffrey would block it properly, so her back wouldn't be to the audience, and I would bet pints that there would be neither sheep nor *bleating*. :D
::wanders off to re-watch season 1 obsessively...again...::
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Date: 2007-02-27 09:17 am (UTC)But he would block it perfectly, because despite his flair for tragedy, Geoffrey is an absurdist, and a practical romantic, and he would make Ellen into a wonderful Titania full of fury and whimsy and pixie scheming and seductive rage:)
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Date: 2007-02-27 09:21 am (UTC)And yeah!! So, so glad you liked the S&A snippet:) Titus really would kill him. It's too bloody, too ambiguous and ruthless. There's no pathos there.
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Date: 2007-02-27 06:46 am (UTC)Oh, Aeryn and John... the beginning. I especially loved this bit:
It's easy to be fearless with Aeryn. It's when he's alone that the fear comes rushing back, twisting in his guts and his bowels. The rusty, ragged bilish fear that reminds him, "You almost died today."
One minor grammar quibble, bilious (http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/bilious) may be the better word to use.
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Date: 2007-02-27 09:15 am (UTC)Oh, Aeryn and John... the beginning.
They will always, always be my favorites:)
And hee - thank you for the grammar suggestion, but the word I wanted was the word I used (which, you know, isn't always the case, and in this case probably isn't a really word, but bilious isn't quite right either:) Still, the effort and offer is much appreciated.
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Date: 2007-02-27 10:10 am (UTC)I just twitched at the not-word. I think I've been reading too many un-beta'd stories recently. (SGA brain eating virus) I want to shoot all the incorrect word choices in the head.
I forgot that sometimes words can be brought into existence and live long improbably robust lives.
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Date: 2007-02-27 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 06:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 09:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 07:09 am (UTC)Oh, that's a beautiful, beautiful twist on "wonder."
Geoffrey thinks why else do Shakespeare, but he knows better too.
Ah, Geoffrey, able to see characters with visionary, deeply human keeness, and most elusive to himself.
Most EXcellent!
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Date: 2007-02-27 09:11 am (UTC)I'd say, more than anything, more than most of the time I write drabbles, these have ended up being weird sort of tributes to all these beautifully fucked (or fucked up) men:) All these men seeing ghosts and visions, seeing things in their futures, seeing possibilities in moments.
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Date: 2007-03-27 12:18 pm (UTC)It's just perfect!
GG & Farscape also very, very good!
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Date: 2007-03-27 05:55 pm (UTC)you even make me like Daniel That's quite the compliment because half the time, I think I'm trying to get myself to like him:)