petronia

Part I: You've gotta carry that weight

Lupin may look like Kitazawa Yuki but Sirius looks like Gren from Bebop. Luckily Azkaban doesn't bother with odd drugs in the food.

...You're welcome, now please point that somewhere else. XD

300 words. Writing a drabble/shortfic shouldn't be this hard, and in fact it wasn't the writing of it that was difficult; it was distancing myself from the subject at hand. I have to, you see, because Staniewski is for actors, and I'm the director of my fics, off in a corner with my sunglasses and my bullhorn and my funny hat. Someone has to be dispassionate. Drowning perspective doesn't make for good writing - at least not how I do it, because I can quite accept that other people handle it that way. It's the major reason I'm so bad at RP.

It was okay until "The Real Folk Blues" came on the 'amp. Then I was suddenly massive wibble.

Cowboy Bebop - The Real Folk Blues (Box-Set Live Version)

*

Remus was afraid to die, once.

What it means to grow up: children know they will never die. Remus has been an adult his entire life, except for certain nights of the full moon, running for the joy of sensing his packmates fleet as shadows at his side. A year, two years, and death came to take the children. But never him. He had to bear witness to the waste.

There are no more enchanted forests.

They cannot run, he and Sirius. Outside there is asphalt and concrete, the letter of the law, and the banal reality of evil. So they pretend they have a choice: they lie down together before the fire and close their eyes. Muzzles to the flagstone, nose to nose, tail to tail. The nocturnal cacaphony of Muggle London enfolds them, dampened only minutely to animal hearing by mortared layers of stone. The fire crackles. Grimmauld Place settles on its creaking timbers, weighted with age and secrets.

He listens to Padfoot breathe. But for the beast-longing in his blood, it is not much different from when he would wake in the Griffindor dormitory, limbs aching with monthly wear; it makes him think, safe, and not yet.

Not yet.

Death passes you by once too often, even hope looks like a steel-mawed trap.

But when he wakes there is a pillow under his head and a blanket over his legs, and the weight of Sirius’s arm slung carelessly across his heart. Sirius who draws him unknowingly close, breathing warm and slow against his collarbone. Enough, or nearly enough. The wolf is feral and unremembering; it is the human whose scars never healed clean.

Remus has much to do, and he would not give up this moment. But one lifetime, he now thinks, is all he can take.

*

Always one of my favorite anime OST songs, and frankly one day I'm going to do a free translation of the lyrics that scans, because if you don't speak Japanese you don't get the sucker-punch feeling that comes from hearing and understanding them along with the music. Of course it works perfectly for Remus. In some ways he's got the same character arc as Spike, hasn't he? And, the way I see it, the same streak of fatalistic strength.

Kingsley == Jet, Tonks == Faye. Hahahahahaha. Dare ya to write it.

(...to iu nara, Ed to Ein wa?)

Part II: Pretty with a pistol

Maybe it's just my usual circle - what am I saying, of course it's my usual circle - but I can't find PotC fic that doesn't have some sort of adult content, at the very least by implication. Feels odd to send that off to the sororial unit, regardless of literary merit (high, so far). But then I've always had that with the HPfic as well. It's not a novel reaction.

I want to get her a livejournal, but she's having trouble deciding on a username.

We discussed briefly yesterday the meta-ness of Johnny Depp going from playing a pirate to playing JM Barrie; the consensus was that - smartypants RPF aside - the only appropriately clever response would be to have him narrate the film version of Peter Pan that's coming out at nearly the same time. (Not that they're likely to have a voiceover narrator, but the novel itself very clearly has one.) The idea would induce much less alarmed hilarity if one could conjure up Depp doing Victorian English at the moment, as opposed to Depp doing Sloshed Fey Pirate. "Furrwell, Jamesh'Ook. Thou not, not entir'ly unheroic figure..."