this is my favorite elvis song

YULETIDE 2017

falseeeyelashes — Sat, 30 Sep 2017 16:43:39 GMT

Dear Yuletide Writer!,

I say it every year, but I can't believe it's that time again! I want to thank you for writing for me this year and I want you to know: everything in this (lengthy and unwieldy) post is merely a suggestion. I am thrilled to read anything you write for me with these characters and these fandoms.

As a blanket FYI, I ship all the below characters in some (overly explained) capacity or another, but I am absolutely fine with gen fic if that's what you prefer to write.

GENERAL LIKES: unreliable narrators; nonlinear story-telling; moral complexity and/or ambiguity; backstory; missing scenes; outsider POV; blurring the lines between professional and personal relationships; epistolary fic; power-play; codependency (both healthy and unhealthy); loyalty; unexpected intimacy and physical intimacy; case fic; dark fic; super messy, complicated, and difficult to categorize relationships between characters (made all the better if/when they share a history and maybe probably repressed feelings); repression, generally; sexual tension; slow burn; infidelity; hurt/comfort; fake dating; AUs, both of the canon divergence variety and the whole new setting variety (though I am not the hugest fan of mundane AUs, i.e., coffeehouse AUs, high school/university AUs, etc.).

As I already mentioned, I totally invite ship fic or porn if you wish to write it. I do prefer when sex in a story is character-driven and rooted in emotional stakes for the characters involved rather than straight-up PWP. Which brings us to KINKS: friends to lovers; enemies to lovers; first time; workplace sex; rough sex; hate sex; drunk sex; dub-con of the sex pollen/fuck or die/villains made us do it variety (a caveat: this is me saying feel free to throw everything else in this post out and just write this trope if you feel so moved – it's an all-time favorite of mine); biting; breathplay; choking; orgasm denial; frottage; dirty talk; comeplay; voyeurism/exhibitionism; under-negotiated kink; threesomes (especially this year; four out of the five fandoms below definitely apply here!); sex as ill-advised coping mechanism; sex as ill-advised attempt at communication between characters.

And last, GENERAL DISLIKES/DNWs: rape or non-con; A/B/O or omegaverse; scat or watersports; formal BDSM; issue fic; kid!fic (unless the characters canonically have children); and character bashing.

Spoilers apply for all the fandoms below, but in particular for Free Fire and the first season of Ozark.

FREE FIRE (2016)
Justine (Free Fire); Chris (Free Fire); Ord (Free Fire)

REQUEST: Fix-it fic, where everyone (or at least these three characters) lives to continue life as violent, vengeful fugitives. Details in letter.

This movie was an absolute blast. I loved the vibe of these three characters and how each played off the other in their own way: Ord's nonchalant pot-smoking irreverence and smack talk in the face of danger; Chris's cool-headed attempt at chivalry and keeping shit under control; and Justine masterminding the entire disaster while hiding her involvement behind long-suffering sighs and well-earned eyerolls. This is me saying, I want more.

I'm basically into any sort of fix-it fic that allows the three of them to limp away from that warehouse bloodbath (hey, what is Ord's John Denver story anyway?) in some capacity for whatever future you deign to give them. One possibility could be the AU where Justine misses (both) her shot(s), and Ord and Chris, though wounded, live. And get arrested. Cue their eventual jailbreak and their prickly, begrudging partnership as they decide to seek out a disappeared and briefcase-toting Justine. And revenge turns out to be a threesome, or you know, whatever. Or, another alternative "everybody lives!" story could be one where the three of them hit the road together as fugitives, running south to the border with the cash and the guns. Or, I'd totally love to read the fix-it fic where Justine and Chris get to go on that dinner date after all!

In addition to those options, I'd also love any and all backstory you might want to write for these characters – Justine, particularly. How did Justine and Ord come to know each other and to work together? How did Justine meet Chris and get in with the Irish? How did Justine wind up in this line of work at all? If you wanted to write a whole big crime backstory for Justine, I'd be all in. Or, if you wanted to write a canon divergent AU that isn't fix-it fic: what if these three had met before the events of the film? What if all three of them were in on Justine's plan?

Last, the set-up of the movie lends itself well to just about any and all AUs and fusions if you ask me. A western shoot-'em up? A western shoot-'em up that's really Westworld? A The Man From U.N.C.L.E. pastiche? Space bandits? Actual 1970s monster hunters that's essentially Scooby Doo gone grimdark? YES, to all of the above, and anything else you might imagine. I guarantee I'd love it.

I am into pretty much any combination of the pairings possible here, with a real soft-spot for Justine/Chris/Ord and Justine/Chris, though I would not say no to Ord/Chris – so long as Justine still played a role – or Justine/Ord.

And, finally, an additional kink not listed in the general section above: gun kink. If ever a canon was made for gun kink, this is the canon. If that's your thing, go ahead and TAKE YOUR SHOT /real bad gun puns.

HALT AND CATCH FIRE
Cameron Howe; Gordon Clark

REQUEST: Cameron and Gordon's changing relationship charted over the years. Details in letter.

This quote from Mackenzie Davis (who plays Cameron) last season about the change in Cameron and Gordon's relationship basically sums up everything I find so interesting about these two and the element I'd love to see explored more fic-wise: "... It deepens with them each confiding in the other and exposing themselves to each other. It's a seminal moment of finding out that you don't hate this person and it's an active exchange of privacy and trust." What I am mainly interested in here is the evolution of Cameron and Gordon's relationship over the years, and how they have become even closer in Season 4.

I am cool with everything from friendship fic to full-on (emotionally fraught and complicated, but that's kinda a given with these two) porn. I am incredibly fascinated by how Cameron and Gordon have grown together and how they play off each other, and how this genuine mutually caring relationship has emerged between them over the course of the series. If there's ever a type of pairing or relationship I love explored fic-wise, ship-wise (porn-wise) it's their dynamic: heated antipathy giving way to genuine, if complicated, respect, understanding and affection that's never outright stated but rather evidenced through action. These are two people who have come to know each other in a way that is unique to how they relate to everyone else in their lives. These are also two people who are well-known for their destructive tendencies, whether via self-immolation, like Cameron, or inadvertent self-sabotage, like Gordon. This is the long-winded way of me saying, I would love to read the fic where the two of them unintentionally take a hammer to this relationship built over the years and then come out the other side, either for the better or the worse.

Another possible prompt, that could be written platonically or as ship fic, would be to chart their evolving relationship over the course of all the video games they have played together. The scenes of the two of them playing and trash-talking are some of my favorite from the series, and I am always here for more of that. Feel free to write even just an individual scene of them hanging out and I guarantee I will love it. Or, communication has served as a big theme of the show, but I have particularly liked how that theme has been explored with Cameron and Gordon – such as their connection via ham radio in Season 3, and how it was through that method of communication that Cameron finally told someone she had gotten married. Exploring the changing methods of long-distance communication between these two characters who never had any intention of ever connecting would make for an awesome fic (and is a great opportunity for epistolary fic, should you wish to write that). And I am definitely curious about the time skipped between seasons 3 and 4 (or the time skipped at any point in the narrative; this show loves its time jumps!) and how the two of them might have communicated long-distance during that period of time Cameron was in Japan.

AU-wise, I'd love to read the AU where in Season 3 Cameron never moved out of the Clarks' house (and, I guess, never got married). The what-if narrative that spirals out from that intrigues me: the ongoing and deepening conflict with Donna over Mutiny contrasted with the ongoing and deepening connection with Gordon. Another canon divergent AU possibility I'd love to read is what if in Season 4 Cameron kept crashing at Gordon's place, as she did after his fortieth birthday party. And, last, if you're feeling in the mood for writing both AU and historical fiction, feel free to plop these characters down in the age of telegraph or the early days of the telephone or whatever Ye Olde Communication Tools era you wish, becuase that sounds super fun to me (conversely, feel free to send them to the future instead and do as you wish!).

As a side note, both Donna and Joe play such integral parts in these characters' lives and in the relationship between Cameron and Gordon, so I am all for including them in the story if you wish. And ship fic-wise, other than Cameron/Gordon, I'd also be very into Cameron/Gordon/Donna or Cameron/Gordon/Joe, if you wanted to go that route. I'm also fine if you want to include Katie or Tom in whatever capacity – I leave that up to you!

And as a final note, as of writing this letter, there are still some episodes left in the final season. Feel free to diverge from the remaining canon if inspiration strikes before the series ends.

EDIT post-4x07:

WELL, FIGURES, HUH? So when I wrote "feel free to diverge from remaining canon" in this letter earlier today, I didn't think I'd essentially be saying: FEEL FREE TO WRITE FIX-IT FIC. If you want to include Gordon's death in your fic, I trust you, writer! (as a coda, or as a multi-timeline sort of OTHER POTENTIAL OUTCOMES story exploring alternate lives they could've led, or a time loop AU, or ghost!Gordon lol), but I'd prefer his death not be the focus of the fic or for it to be grief!fic. I'm all for darker fic, but this is just too sad for me! I'm in mourning!

OZARK (TV)
Ruth Langmore; Martin "Marty" Byrde

REQUEST: Any and everything Ruth: her complicated loyalty to Marty and what that means for her future; her backstory; or, how she arrived at her decision to save Marty at the expense of her own family. Details in letter.

From "Why do I have this feeling we both know you'd be better off dead?" to "I couldn't have them kill you." Well, damn. This is my jam.

In general, I would really love for the story to be Ruth-focused. I like Marty a lot, but I am particularly interested in how he relates to Ruth and the function he plays in her life, and she in his. That said, there's something hugely performative about Marty I'd love to see explored fic-wise: he's always wearing that mask that hides everything and anything human about him. He's the guy furiously working his legs to tread water while maintaining an air of complete control above the surface. He spends the entire season scrambling, and even when he is fucked and in too deep (which is basically all the time), there's a cold level of detachment to him. Which makes me curious: what does he actually care about? Is everything he does just part of his play for manipulation and control and to stay alive? What does he actually feel for Ruth? Does he care?

Because Ruth cares. I am so fascinated by Ruth and that complicated loyalty she has for Marty. There's potential for a great cat and mouse game here where they both have the ability to destroy the other (at their own possible peril: Ruth knows about Marty's "business" and Marty has not only made Ruth an accomplice but he knows she killed her uncles). They're that close to mutually-assured destruction, and I love it. If you want to go dark with the fic, I'd love if you explored that: two people, working together, but could just as easily work against each other.

As I said before, I love Ruth SO MUCH. She was easily my favorite part of the series. I will happily read anything you want to write about her. In addition to what I've said above, I'd totally read Ruth backstory. The first season left me wanting to know everything about her. World-weary and crafty Ruth, her father in prison leaving her to run the family, butting heads with her uncles, too smart for any of them and maybe for her own good. Feel free to fill in any of the gaps of her backstory. Or, I'd love to read about her future. What happens after that first season? How does she deal with all the conflicts that have brightly emerged in her life: her father in prison and the consequences for not doing what he wanted her to do on the outside; her cousins and the guilt she feels; and Marty. Or provide some missing scenes fic from the first season. I'd love to see more of Ruth reaching the conclusion that even though she started the season scheming and plotting to jack Marty's cash (at his fatal expense), she decided she cared more about keeping Marty alive. That's a bulletproof narrative kink for me right there and I would love to get a deeper glimpse inside her head as to how she arrived at this point. In addition to that, if you wanted to extend the scene where Ruth confessed to Marty why she killed her uncles, I would gobble that right up.

Another possible prompt: MORE HEISTS! I loved the episode when Marty and Ruth worked together to pull off a heist of the strip club that she winds up running. If you wanted to write about Ruth and Marty tearing a blue streak through the Ozarks, ripping off strip club after strip club, I am right there with you. Or maybe their heists graduate in scope and take and they start getting ballsy with who they rip off, and a Midwest May-December Bonnie and Clyde duo is born. Or, hell, if you wanted to write a Breaking Bad fusion where Ruth is the Jesse Pinkman to Marty's Walter White meth cook, I'M IN.

Or, if you wanted to just write 1000 words or more of Ruth smarting off to Marty in her strip club office, I am all for it, too.

Last, I am cool with fic that preserves their relationship as depicted in canon, but I'd also be totally down for the dirtybadwrong avenue should you care to travel that. Julia Garner, who plays Ruth, had this to say about Ruth and Marty: "She definitely has daddy issues. I think that's why she is drawn towards Marty." DO WITH THAT WHAT YOU MAY, DEAR WRITER.

PEAKY BLINDERS (TV)
Lizzie Stark; Tommy Shelby

REQUEST: Everything about Lizzie Stark (and her relationship to Tommy): pre-series, post-Season 3, missing scenes, you name it. Details in letter.

Lizzie Stark! Honestly, I want anything and everything about her. I loved her when she was introduced in the first season and then loved her even more when she showed up at the start of Season 2 and wound up employed as Tommy's secretary. Her relationship, for lack of a better term, with Tommy is the ultimate in unhealthy and toxic, which is probably why I'm fascinated by it. I'd love to see more of that explored, and if you're willing, I'd be more than happy to receive dark!fic for this fandom and these characters (though that's certainly not required).

A quick sidebar regarding these characters and this fandom: I know I listed rape and non-con as DNWs above, but the topic is slightly unavoidable when it comes to Lizzie Stark, both because of her background as a prostitute and because she was raped at the end of Season 2. If you choose to write backstory about Lizzie, I am totally fine with you including her work as a prostitute (especially since canonically that sounds like how she met the Shelby brothers). I am also fine with you including reference to her rape – it definitely colors and, in my opinion, fuels the toxicity between Lizzie and Tommy – but I'd prefer that not be the focus of the fic you write.

As for prompts, I would absolutely love to read pre-series fic about Lizzie and how she came to know the Shelby brothers and her initial arrangement with Tommy. What was the first time he came to her like? Or, if you wanted to write something less heavy and more fun, I'd love to read about those early days when Lizzie worked as Tommy's secretary, her serving as His Girl Friday (until it all went to hell at the end of the season). What few glimpses we got of them working together during that season were great, and I'd absolutely love to see more of that. I also love her relationship with Polly, and if you wanted to write about the both of them (championing women's rights!) I am here for that. Or, if you wanted to look to the future, I'd love fic that extrapolated on the events of the end of Season 3. You could write about the immediate future, or further down the line. I love the idea of Lizzie rising up in the crime world and ascending the ranks of the Blinders.

And, of course, as mentioned earlier: Lizzie/Tommy. There's so much to unpack when it comes to this pairing, and I'd love to see what you could do with it if you're willing to write it! It's such a one-sided relationship where Tommy takes and takes and takes, and as the Season 3 finale showed, the only thing he thinks he has to give in return is money: "Lizzie, I want it known that money was for you because some nights it was you who stopped my heart from breaking. No one else." That's so fucked up! Tell me all about those nights! Tell me everything! What Lizzie feels in this moments, what she wants, her willingness to let Tommy take from her what he needs but her refusal to take his money. Money plays an obvious role between them and fuels a power dynamic I'd love to see you flip on its head. If you wanted to write porn, using sex as an escalating power-play between them would be so fascinating to me, changing the script from something transactional to something assertive on Lizzie's part.

I'm not particularly interested in Tommy/Grace (or any of Tommy's canonical love interests), but I can totally see how it's canonically unavoidable and would give short shrift to his character not to include it (his grief, especially). I'm fine with you including Tommy/Grace, but I would prefer that Lizzie be the focus of the story (and Tommy/Lizzie should you elect to go the ship fic route). I would also be more than cool if you wanted to go the extra messy mile and wrote Tommy/Lizzie/John. Because, man, I live for Lizzie first snarling at Tommy that he's ten times less the man than John is, and then later, after her awful experience at the track (courtesy of Tommy), when she mournfully tells John to get out, that he's not like Tommy. Play with all of that if you wish, because I would love to read it.

And last, I have no idea (no one does?) when the fourth season is slated to air. Should it start some time this fall as apparently planned, feel free to include anything from it if you wish, but I don't expect it! (Though here's the trailer for the new season, if you want to get as stoked as I am right now).

DUBLIN MURDER SQUAD SERIES – TANA FRENCH
Antoinette Conway; Stephen Moran; Frank Mackey

Mackey thought her over. Glint in his eye, raking her, would've had me twitching. Conway didn't notice or didn't care. Just waited for him to finish up and answer her.

"Seems to me," he said, and stood up, "that you and I both need a moment to clear our heads. I'm going out for a smoke. I think you should join me."

REQUEST: Case fic that builds off the events of The Trespasser that requires Conway, Stephen, and Mackey to work together. Details in letter.

I think this has become my perennial request. My kingdom for more of the emotionally fraught and complex tightrope walk that was the three of them sharing an interrogation room (or, you know, the art classroom at Mackey's daughter's school).

I am totally cutting and pasting some of the stuff I wrote in last year's letter, but my favorite part of The Secret Place was easily when these three characters came together and played off each other: how effortlessly Mackey intimidated Stephen, how unflappable Conway was and able to read the both of them, and how Stephen knew better than to trust Mackey and was smart enough to fear him. I was particularly fascinated by Conway as seen through Stephen's eyes: so flinty and harsh with these little glimmers of empathetic humanity and kinship beneath. Conversely, I also loved Stephen as illustrated by Conway in The Trespasser, and then, how the pressures of Murder and her fellow coworkers were enough to make her question Stephen's loyalties (to her!!!). I loved it. I want more of it. And adding Frank Mackey in to the mix again would only make it that much better.

What I really like about the series in general is how French writes these characters through different lens, each viewed differently by her rotating stable of narrators. I think the unreliable narrator trope could play beautifully with these characters in a Rashomon-style story where each of the three tells their own take on the same event (maybe each is being interviewed by Internal Affairs? trying to hide Something Terrible that happened?), remembering things and each other in varying and conflicting ways. I think that would be a really fun way to approach case fic.

This is me segueing to say: I would love case fic for this fandom. Case fic that sees the three of them forced to work together, each interaction weighed down by a shared history that makes the trio of them unbalanced, stained by mutual distrust, and how Conway's presence influences how Stephen and Mackey relate to each other and how Mackey's presence influences Conway and Stephen.

And piggybacking off my love of case fic, I also loved that we learned in The Trespasser that Conway had worked undercover before. I would love to read fic that explored the fall-out from the events of The Trespasser that for whatever arbitrary or plot-based reason results in Conway and Stephen have to go undercover – with Mackey running the op. The undercover element would play deeply into the trust necessary for the job, and the trust necessary to be someone's partner, and the trust required of each for the other, and I LOVE THAT. I'm totally all about all the tropes that go along with case fic (or undercover case fic): stakeouts! Beat the clock scenarios! Fake dating! All the tropes!

Generally speaking though, I would love to read fic of any kind that deals with the aftermath of The Trespasser. Is there any blowback on Conway and/or Stephen? Does their partnership/relationship change after everything they went through together? What sort of wrench would Mackey throw in that partnership if he was forced to work with them in whatever capacity? I'm cool if you want to write these relationships platonically, but I also am totally down for ship fic with these characters in whatever combination you want: Conway/Stephen, Stephen/Mackey, Conway/Stephen/Mackey – I love it all and want it all!

This letter is a thousand years long, but I guess I'm just that passionate and excited about all of these characters and fandoms lol. I am so excited to read whatever it is you write for me, and I hope you enjoy and have fun!

I can be found elsewhere as arbitrarily over on AO3 and widespindriftgaze on tumblr.

THANK YOU AGAIN and with much love,
falseeeyelashes

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falseeeyelashes — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 01:52:44 GMT

CHOCOLATE BOX 2017

falseeeyelashes — Sat, 07 Jan 2017 02:48:19 GMT

This is my first time doing Chocolate Box and I’m excited! I’m requesting fic for all the fandoms below, and thank you for writing for me. I cannot wait to read what you come up with! Before we get to the fandoms I’ve requested, some generalities. I’m cool with any rating, from G to Explicit, and all the below are just suggestions and ideas.

Some other general likes: unreliable narrators; nonlinear storytelling; dialogue; moral complexity; super messy and complicated relationships between characters (made all the better if they have a shared history and maybe some repressed feelings); sex as power play; power play in general; outsider POVs; infidelity; slow burn; codependency (both healthy and unhealthy); unexpected intimacy; case fic; darkfic; psychological horror, AUs (both of the canon divergence variety and of the “hey, now they’re in the outer space!” variety); hurt/comfort, fake dating.

If you decide to write ship fic or porn, I prefer when sex in a story is character-driven and rooted in emotional stakes for the characters involved rather than PWP. Other things I like: sexual tension, friends to lovers, enemies to friends to lovers (or just straight-up enemies to lovers; feelings can come later, if at all); first time; orgasm denial, workplace sex, rough sex, hate sex, drunk sex, dub-con of the hate sex/sex pollen/fuck or die/villians made us do it variety; breathplay; voyeurism/exhibitionism; sex as ill-advised coping mechanism; sex as ill-advised attempt at communication between characters.

And some general DNW’s: non-con; A/B/O; scat or watersports; kid!fic (unless canonically they have kids); non-canonical major character death; on the other end of the scale, fluff (I like happy stories! but fluff, not so much) (most of these lend themselves to some dark material, and I am more than fine with that (and in fact encourage it!)).

Spoilers for all the canons below!

REQUESTS:

BLACK SAILS
Billy Bones/Captain Flint

Man, these two, all unforgiving and weighed down by their shared history. I like Billy and Flint together best when there’s that knife’s edge of antipathy between them. Feel free to go all-in on hate sex or a fight/argument that leads to sex, as violent as you see befitting them. I find especially fascinating Billy’s complicated, often un-self-examined feelings where Flint is concerned: he’s tired of his rule, he believes he stands by his side only because he and the men need him, yet when Flint is presented with the possibility of death during his duel with Teach, Billy is clearly conflicted. More of that conflict would be great to read – either Billy as an unreliable narrator still up to his eyeballs in his own self-denial or Billy working his way through it, via whatever conduit or catalyst. Other ideas: trope-wise, “patching up each other’s wounds” is totally a soft-spot for me and I’d gobble it up. Similarly, any sort of plot or setting that traps the two of them in close confines (are they captured? jailed for the night and sharing the same cell?). Or, maybe the two of them having an increasingly drunken discussion late one night? All for it. Feel free to set the fic after Season 3 (what happens when Flint encounters Billy when he returns to Nassau?) or as a missing scene from the preceding seasons (I’d totally love fic set right after Billy returns from the dead). Barring that, I'm all for backstory, in particular, when Billy was first brought aboard the Walrus.

LA LA LAND (2016)
Mia Dolan/Sebastian Wilder

I loved this movie so, so much, and I am hungry to read just about anything. In particular, I'd love to see missing scenes from the movie filled in, all the bits of their relationship we missed along the way. The early awkward “courtship” days when they’re still just learning each other (and if you want to go smutty, learning each other in bed)! We saw a lot of Sebastian teaching Mia to love jazz, but I'd to see her have a similar effect on him where it comes to film. Something I loved about the movie was how clearly influenced it was by Old Hollywood, and if you found a way to include similar influences or references, that’d be awesome too (though not expected!).

And a total left field prompt here, the end of this movie reminded me so much of the end of Roman Holiday, in particular the look on Gregory Peck’s face as he walked away from Audrey Hepburn, so if you wanted to do some sort of Roman Holiday!AU or just an ~Old Hollywood era AU, by all means, go right ahead!

If you wanted to go for a darker, sadder strain of fic, I’d also totally be down with post-film fic. Do they have an affair? Does Mia return alone to his club? What if they were to meet again?

UTOPIA (TV 2013)
Milner/The Assistant

I miss this show so much! All I ever truly want is more of these two plotting to take over the world in the 1970s! Or, what’s their backstory? When and how did they meet? Were they both spies beforehand? I’m deeply, deeply fascinated by the relationship between the two of them – in particular, his fierce and unending loyalty to the point of voluntary scarification of his own body to protect her. I will greedily gobble up ANYTHING you give me about the two of them. The history of them! How did they come to be a team! Write about their early MI-5 days, as spies! Missions they went on! Or go beyond that and beyond what is shown of them in the Season 2 ep – what do they do after Carvel’s disappearance? I'd love to read about the immediate events after the Three Mile Island disaster, as the two of them hunt for Carvel together. Or about the weird curious domesticity that develops between them as they themselves become part of British bureaucracy. What becomes of them, how do they get to the point where we meet them again in S1, in the present-day? Or you could even do a sort of “missing scene” story from their 1970s-set episode – I’d love it. As I mentioned, I love the one-sided loyalty kink here, where there is nothing The Assistant would not do for Milner. And if you wanted to complicate that, I'd love to read that. What if The Assistant meets this limit and a confrontation occurs between him and Milner about how much she has expected from him while giving nothing back.

And if you want to go the bonkers AU route with these two, I present to you, a Westworld!AU – what if Milner had been the architect (Carvel had been her partner), and The Assistant is a host who has quietly been developing his own sentience. How does his loyalty to her change as a result. Does it?

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN (MOVIES)
James Norrington/Elizabeth Swann

I feel like I'm indulging young teenage me by requesting these two, and I love it. These two set up the possibility of canon-divergent AUs galore, and I say, go to town! What if she had married him, but then eventually left him for the sea (because it’s Elizabeth Swann and piracy was always going to be her endgame)? Or what if their marriage quietly evolved from what initially felt like an obligation into something more? I'd be all about for that wedding night fic (or in general Elizabeth and her sexuality, how that's another form of power she learns to wield). Or, instead, what if a wounded Norrington is rescued by Elizabeth’s crew and he more or less winds up joining her piracy on the high seas. And/or they get stranded on a deserted island! Cue all the tropes galore! Or Norrington stays the straight and narrow while Elizabeth becomes a captain pirate and they’re sworn enemies, with him chasing after her fleet, but there’s also something more going on? Or if you want to stick within the confines of canon, I will take any and all missing scene fic that comes to mind. (Practice sword-fighting! Sparring that gets out of hand! Drunk in a tavern! Lizzie as a corrupting influence on Norrington! Norrington being a surprisingly corrupting influence on Lizzie!).

MR. ROBOT (TV)
Dominique DiPierro/Angela Moss

My big takeaway from this past season of Mr. Robot was how much more I wanted I absolutely loved both the scene when Dom cornered Angela at her desk at E Corp and even more when she showed up at Angela’s apartment – that dark, intimidating (vaguely sexual???) vibe between the two of them as Dom both warned and threatened Angela. An interrogation scene between the two of them would be amazing. An unofficial interrogation scene that ends in sex? PLEASE. A wild game of cat and mouse that ensues between Dom and Angela following the events of Season 2, the two of them meeting up occasionally for tense conversations in public settings, maybe meeting up in less public settings for way less conversation? ABSOLUTELY. Beyond the porn potential, I also think there’s a shared thread of loneliness between both of these characters – whether it’s Angela singing karaoke in a crowded bar or Dom’s late-night chats with Alexa, they have that in common, and I would love to read that explored in some, or any, capacity.

CROSSOVER SHIPS
Nina Sayers(Black Swan)/Claire Robbins (Flesh and Bone)

The second I saw this in the tagset, my brain immediately began spiraling out over how desperately I want to read this, haha. Dark, ambitious, complex and self-tortured ballerinas! Go as dark as you want with this one, bend both canons to your will. I'd love to see fic of them where they are rivals, engaged in a campaign of mutually-assured destruction and self-promoting sabotage. I think juxtaposing their differing presentations of steely fragility and those hidden ugly depths would be absolutely fascinating. I will legit read anything you invent with these two. (And if you really want to go bonkers, NINA AS A GHOST, haunting Claire after she joins the company; go nuts!).

Thank you again for writing for me, mystery author! I'm arbitrarily at AO3 and widespindriftgaze at tumblr.

YULETIDE 2016

falseeeyelashes — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 15:58:57 GMT

Yuletide Writer!,

It's hard to believe it's that Yuletide time again, but here we are! First off, I want to thank you for writing for me! This post got crazy long and out of control, but in all honesty and all seriousness I will be thrilled to receive anything with any of these characters and these fandoms. Please consider all of the following as options and simply that. Feel free to run with your own ideas; I am sure I will love whatever it is you write.

General Likes: character-driven stories; unreliable narrators; nonlinear storytelling; dialogue (banter!); super messy and complicated relationships between characters (made all the better if they have a shared history and maybe some repressed feelings); sex as power play; power play in general; outsider POVs; infidelity; slow burn; codependency (both healthy and unhealthy); unexpected intimacy; case fic; darkfic; psychological horror, AUs (both of the canon divergence variety and of the “hey, now they’re in the outer space!” variety).

If you decide to write ship fic or porn, I prefer when sex in a story is character-driven and rooted in emotional stakes for the characters involved rather than PWP. Other things I like: sexual tension, friends to lovers, enemies to friends to lovers (or just straight-up enemies to lovers; feelings can come later, if at all); orgasm denial, workplace sex, rough sex, hate sex, drunk sex, dub-con of the hate sex/sex pollen/fuck or die/villians made us do it variety; breathplay; voyeurism/exhibitionism; sex as ill-advised coping mechanism; sex as ill-advised attempt at communication between characters.

General Dislikes/DNWs: rape or non-con; non-canonical major character deaths; A/B/O; BDSM; scat or watersports; kid!fic; character bashing.

Spoilers for the fandoms below! Especially for Season 2 of Mr. Robot and episode 3.07 of Halt and Catch Fire.

MR. ROBOT (TV)
Dominique DiPierro, Angela Moss

"Alexa, are you alone?"
"I wasn't able to understand the question I heard."

REQUEST: Feel free to focus on solely Angela or solely on Dom or go ahead and put them in a fic together (platonically or ship-wise). What if Angela had stayed working for E Corp? What's Dom's backstory with the FBI? What if you stuck both of these characters in an interrogation room post-Season Two? Details in letter.

You can either write fic with the both of them in it, or if you’d rather focus on one rather than the other, I am totally cool with that, too – treat this as an “or” rather than an “and” prompt character-wise. Basically, I want anything and everything about these two characters.

Let's start with Angela. I liked how Sam Esmail described the character of Angela as a cypher – I think that’s very true. So much of her actions can be seen from multiple angles and multiple motivations and I love that. She’s evolved so much as a character from where we first met her in the series to where Season 2 ended. For the fic, feel free to diverge from canon: what if Angela kept climbing the corporate ladder at E Corp? What if she abandoned her whistleblower mission and instead allowed herself to be seduced by the illusion of power? What does that look like? Or if you want to stay within canon, I’d totally love fic that sketches out more of the details we weren’t privy to over the one month gap unseen between Season 1 and Season 2. Or even more of the details of Angela working for E Corp – give me all the corporate intrigue! All of Angela trying to refashion herself into the cold and icy woman she tries to present herself as. One of the my favorite parts of this past season was when Angela was taken to meet Whiterose and she was interrogated by what looked like the child version of herself. Everything about the scene felt dark and wrong and surreal, a David Lynch nightmare, and I would love to read fic in either that style or that told a similar story as that episode. I’d definitely love to read a take on what happened between that episode and the finale – how did Angela get to where we left her? Her voice was so chilling and calm as she spoke to Tyrell over the phone – which, speaking of, how does she know Tyrell? What happened to her after that scene with Whiterose? I'm going to talk below about Angela/Dom, but I'd also totally and definitely read Angela/Elliot/Tyrell, too, if that was a post-Season 2 direction you wanted to run to.

And as for Dom – like I said about Angela, the same applies here: I would read anything about her. Write about her past! How she became an FBI agent! Her work at the bureau! Go full Clarice Starling, Silence of the Lambs-style, and give me some past casefic involving her. The scenes where Dom was talking to Alexa were some of my favorites from the season, and I’d be so into reading some sort of Her-like AU that’s just all the conversations Dom has with Alexa, her deepest connection with someone, something, not even human. And as I’m going to go into below, I’m all about Dom/Angela, but I’d absolutely read Dom/Darlene (the two of them in the finale, man, I'd read anything and everything). Does Darlene team up with Dom and turn on f society? And speaking of f society, oh man, I'd totally read the fic that details Dom and the team putting together Elliot's and every other character's role in the attack. Santiago mentions that they've spent months crafting this case, so seeing the story that we know but from the angle of Dom and the FBI piecing the puzzle together would be really cool. I enjoyed watching her butt heads with the rest of the FBI, especially Santiago, so if you wanted to include that angle, I'd be more than game to read that.

If you want to go the ship fic angle, I am ALL ABOUT Dom/Angela. I absolutely loved both the scene when Dom cornered Angela at her desk at E Corp and even more when she showed up at Angela’s apartment, that dark, intimidating (vaguely sexual???) vibe between the two of them as Dom both warned and threatened Angela. An interrogation scene between the two of them would be amazing. An unofficial interrogation scene that ends in sex? PLEASE. A wild game of cat and mouse that ensues between Dom and Angela following the events of Season 2, the two of them meeting up occasionally for tense conversations in public settings, maybe meeting up in less public settings for way less conversation? ABSOLUTELY. Beyond the porn potential, I also think there’s a shared thread of loneliness between both of these characters – whether it’s Angela singing karaoke in a crowded bar or Dom’s late-night chats with Alexa, they have that in common, and I would love to read that explored in some capacity.

HALT AND CATCH FIRE
Cameron Howe, Gordon Clark, Donna Clark

"But Cameron's been great for the most part ... I mean, she makes you better, right?"
"I really don't want to talk about work."
"I wasn't talking about work."

REQUEST: The messy triangle of loyalty, allegiances, and intimacy the three of them create. Focus on Cameron's time spent living with the Clarks. Or, explore what happens following episode 3.07. Details in letter.

Oh boy, Season Three has been a dream to me. Cameron was living with the Clarks! Cameron and Donna and their crazy complex temporarily destroyed partnership and friendship! Cameron and Gordon’s (now somewhat ruined) newfound trust and friendship! There’s so much to work with here! Basically what I want is a polyamorous tech mess! I want everything, from domestic hijinks while Cameron is living with the Clarks to straight-up debauched porn (of either the Cameron/Gordon/Donna variety, or Cameron/Gordon, or Donna/Cameron). I like the idea of an uneven triangle shared amongst the three of them, where each of them means something distinctly different to the other – platonically, romantically, sexually, whichever it is you wish to write. Season 3 saw these three living (increasingly less contentiously) under the same roof. Gordon and Donna’s marriage, that manages to be both struggling and intimately lived-in. Cameron and Donna navigating their partnership as their success grows only for that to be torpedoed by betrayal, distrust, and divergent ambitions. And then there’s Cameron and Gordon with their complicated history they both are able to move away from as they earn a natural intimacy. It is everything I have ever loved with these three characters! So much potential messiness! So much potential for a messy (either emotionally or literally and physically) threesome! Or, threesome dynamics playing out amidst the three different legs of the triangle and how all three of these relationships are wildly different while Cameron is living under the Clarks’ roof: Donna and Gordon relate to each other dramatically differently than Donna and Cameron do and how Cameron and Gordon do. So one idea for fic I would totally read is: what if Cameron never moved out? What if she didn't get married? (SIDENOTE: I like Tom and I like Joe, so feel free to include either or both, though I'd prefer the focus wasn't exclusively on them over any of these three characters).

As already mentioned in the general section above, infidelity is a trope I enjoy. I think the dirtybadwrong feelings coupled with guilt, shame, fear (and that’s just the cheating party not to mention the cheated-on half) can be fascinatingly played out and I can’t imagine a trio I’d want to read more about than these three in that regard lol. What if this starts as infidelity and then moves to a realm of consensual infidelity/all three of them in on in it in varying configurations lol. I'm very into the idea of Donna as voyeur, unsure what it is that she likes about watching (do they know she's watching? does she want them to know?), and I especially like how that scenario highlights how Cameron and Gordon are now so far from her. Or I could see threesome-wise, Donna directing their every move, essentially managing the encounter, maybe not even necessarily physically involved in it, but she likes telling Gordon and Cameron what to do and she likes when they obey.

I'm writing this letter as of episode 3.07, and OH MAN. This sets everything up for the perfectly angst-ridden fucked-upness that I always desire; look no further than this episode still! Donna and Cameron’s betrayed trust! Gordon warning Cameron of EXACTLY WHAT WAS GOING TO GO DOWN. That terrible cry Cameron made after the vote! THERE ARE SO MANY AWFUL FEELINGS HAPPENING HERE, so of course, I want all of that sublimated in the worst sort of sex-ways. Angry, hurt, not-quite hate-sex between Donna and Cameron? SURE. The same between Cameron and Gordon, but at a quieter pitch and a different level, a different sort of betrayal overlaid by a different sort of earned intimacy? ABSOLUTELY. All three of them in some fashion? OF COURSE. This is the long-winded way of me saying: feel free to write something that canon might ruin in the next couple episode that takes the ending of that episode into all sorts of messy places.

Instead of the threesome dynamic I (way-too-wordily) described above, I'd also absolutely be super down with Cameron/Gordon or Cameron and Gordon fic detailing their friendship/relationship. I think Mackenzie Davis, who plays Cameron, captured perfectly what it is I find so appealing about Gordon and Cameron: “I think the whole relationship is special because it’s a surprise. It’s not one that either of them actively pursued or expected. They were both just happy to be cordial with each other for the first time in their history, and then it blossoms to them both feeling alienated by Donna. It deepens with them each confiding in the other and exposing themselves to each other. It’s a seminal moment of finding out that you don’t hate this person and it’s an active exchange of privacy and trust.” So, what if their Mario marathon ended differently; take that weekend they spent alone playing video games to a darker place. I'd love reading fic that was essentially transcripts of their ham radio sessions. Or what if those radio conversations lead to an emotional affair of sorts. Or give them a physical affair. Have Gordon making some brain damage-based fucked up decisions, or maybe he thinks the bad decisions he’s making are brain-damaged based. I definitely would want Donna present in some capacity (consensual infidelity?!?! some fucked-up devil’s bargain amongst the three of them that they all think is incredibly bizarre but for whatever reason mostly works for them?) because I can't imagine these two characters without her. Or run with the plot post-3.07 and have Cameron somehow join Gordon and Joe in their new joint venture (I imagine convincing her participation alone could be half the story lol).

And the third option – Donna and Cameron or Donna/Cameron. Post-3.07 fic is what I would love. Donna on drugs and imagining Cameron there with her on the grass was one of my favorite scenes. I'd love fic that explored how their relationship could be salvaged in the wake of the IPO vote. Is forgiveness a possibility in their future? Can they ever work together again? If their partnership is irreparable in the presence, I'd love fic that jumped forward in time when maybe they meet again, poignant and sad. Beyond that, feel free to fill in any missing scenes from canon, like late nights with the two of them at Mutiny. . I love the two of these together and am not exaggerating when I say I'd read anything you'd write involving them with delight.

NOTE: Feel free to include events from future episodes for the rest of season three, since there's a couple left as of now. Also, feel free not to and to diverge from canon after 3.07, aka the time of writing this letter and these prompts. Honestly, feel free to do whatever timeline-wise, haha. I trust you, Yuletide writer!

DUBLIN MURDER SQUAD SERIES – Tana French
Antoinette Conway, Stephen Moran, Frank Mackey

Mackey thought her over. Glint in his eye, raking her, would've had me twitching. Conway didn't notice or didn't care. Just waited for him to finish up and answer her.

"Seems to me," he said, and stood up, "that you and I both need a moment to clear our heads. I'm going out for a smoke. I think you should join me."

REQUEST: A case requires all three characters to work together – perhaps undercover – and requires each to trust the other. Details in letter.

The Trespasser comes out this coming Tuesday here in the US, so it’s totally okay if you decide against using any of that canon in this – there is more than enough to work with in The Secret Place when it comes to these three for me! I loved The Secret Place, and my favorite part of it was easily when these three characters came together and played off of each other: how effortlessly Frank intimidates Stephen, how unflappable Conway is and able to read the both of them, how Stephen knows better than to trust Frank and is smart enough to fear him. I was particularly fascinated by Conway as seen through Stephen’s eyes: so flinty and harsh with these little glimmers of empathetic humanity and kinship beneath. I am so excited to read The Trespasser and read all about Conway and her role in Murder, but feel free to run with that in your own way too if you want! What I actually really like about the series in general is how French writes these characters through different lens, seen differently through her rotating stable of narrators. I think the unreliable narrator trope could play beautifully with the three of these in a Rashomon-style story where each of the three tells their own take on the same event (maybe each is interviewed by Internal Affairs? trying to hide Something Terrible that happened?), remembering things and each other in varying and conflicting ways. I think that'd be a really fun way to approach case fic.

Because, oh boy, I would absolutely love case fic. Case fic that sees the three of them forced to work together, with that weighted-down-by-the-past distrust-laden not-quite mentor/protege relationship between Frank and Stephen mutated by Conway's presence! Make them work undercover! The undercover element would play deeply into the trust necessary for the job, and the trust necessary to be someone's partner, and the trust required of each for the other, and I love that. I'm also all about all the tropes that go with case fic/undercover work: stakeouts! Beat-the-clock rescues! Hey, fake dating if it fits! Someone gets shot! All of the above!

I’d also love to see the fallout for Stephen back at the precinct with Frank after everything that went down at St. Kilda’s. And Conway! They’re partners in The Trespasser, so I’d be so into you playing with ALL OF THAT. Keep it platonic if you want, but I’d be more than down with reading any permutation of this trio, with a particular fondness for Conway/Stephen, Conway/Stephen/Frank, and Frank/Stephen.

If none of this is what you have in mind, I’d honestly love to read anything involving the three of them – their voices are all so distinct and so fun, just having the three of them shooting the shit at the holidays in a pub after hours drinking their working sorrows away would be more than fine by me.

EDIT:

I just finished reading The Trespasser and oh boy, MILD SPOILERS HEREIN,

but if you wanted to run with the fact that Conway worked an undercover case? And fold Frank into that and her current partner Stephen and write undercover fic? This is me encouraging that a second go-round. Addiitonally, if you wanted to spin-out that scene when she calls Stephen to come by her house because she knows someone has been casing her place? And you wanted that scene to end a little differently (does he stay? what happens if he stays? what happens if they keep drinking? what happens when they realize seated there on her couch that it's the two of them against if not the world than the Murder squad?) I'd be ALL FOR THAT. I'd also be all in for any and all fallout from the end of the book: is there any blowback on Conway and Stephen? Does their partnership/relationship change following everything they went through, and if so, how? This book was SO GOOD, and it only made me that much hungrier for more about these characters!

THE DIVINERS SERIES – Libba Bray
Evangeline "Evie" O'Neill, Sam Lloyd

Sam stole a glance at the flappers watching them. They were cute, and probably one of them might jumpt to date him. So why was he entering into a devil's bargain with Evie? Why did the prospect of a fake romance with her give him the same thrill as thievery?

REQUEST: All the tropes! The fake dating plot between Sam and Evie was so much fun in the book, I'd love to see that expanded and basically the entire kitchen sink of tropes thrown in with them. Details in letter.

I love Evie so much! I love the voice that Bray gives her and I absolutely love how off the rails party girl wild and drunk she goes in the second book. I’d read all about her bonkers partying in the 20s, while in denial of all the nightmarish shit she’s been through. As for her and Sam, go nuts with the tropes! Fake dating! Flesh out all their fake dating and string it out even longer than it occurred in canon! That is a trope I will always want more of. Give them more investigative adventures while fake dating in the public eye, and I will gobble that up. Or, what if they got married? Would they be able to go through with that farce just so Evie could maintain her fame (and so Sam could achieve fame of his own?)

Trope-wise, go ahead and play around! Enemies to friends to lovers is a stalwart fave of mine, fake dating, any sort of forced intimacy/huddling for warmth/etc, loyalty kink (hey! what if they get captured by those shady dudes that have been following them and have his mother held in captivity!) (oh hey! what if you drop these two in a similar captivity cabin situation! WHAT DO THEY DO). Or get extra wild with the tropes: time travel! some sort of groundhog day/time loop thing related to the diviners! Get into the terrifying dreams she’s having! Maybe she eventually confides in Sam about it. Or play around with their diviner powers! Go into some Project Buffalo business! I think the equivalent of casefic for them, 1920s paranormal-style, could be really cool if that's something you'd want to do.

Or go super dark with it! What if all these vision come to fruition and the end of days do arrive? What do they do? I’d be more than cool with 1920s post-apocalyptic fic. I’ll be honest, the setting is so much of what I love about these books that I’d prefer you not go the AU route (feel free to diverge from canon if you want and alter some of the plot points of the series; all I ask is you keep the setting. That is, unless you decide you want to write a time travel plot, then BY ALL MEANS, do you).

Ship-wise, I am clearly very into Sam/Evie, haha. Most of these prompts read pretty shippy, but even if you wrote the two of these platonic but a close intimacy and understanding develops between them as they work together, I would love that too. I’m not particularly into Jericho/Evie, but I would be into Sam/Evie/Jericho if that was something you wanted to write. I think that would be fascinating to watch unfold, especially considering how annoyed both Sam and Jericho get with each other.

I am so excited to read whatever it is you wind up writing for me. Thank you again and HAVE FUN!

For any other additional information you might want or need, my AO3 is here and my tumblr is here.

With love,
falseeeyelashes

HAPPY NEW YEAR! HAVE A FICATHON!

falseeeyelashes — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 19:25:12 GMT

©

Hey! It's a ficathon! To close out 2015! We all remember how this works probably?!?!

1. PROMPT! Whatever you want I don't care I have no shame or morals.
2. FILL THE PROMPTS! Get weird! Get wild!
3. PROFIT?!?!?!

Have a happy new year, my friends!

YULETIDE 2015

falseeeyelashes — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 18:56:47 GMT

It's that time of year again!

Thank you so much for writing for me, mystery yuletide writer! I love these fandom and have been jonesing for fic for all of them, so believe me when I say I will be pumped to read whatever you write. Everything suggested below is merely that: suggestions. Write what you want to write, and if you manage to include anything I’ve (um, excessively?) detailed here, that’s awesome, too.

I'm not kidding when I say I am honestly game for just about anything. This year especially I feel like I’d be wide open for everything from happy and warm to the other side of the spectrum of dark and weird (or maybe, somehow, a mix of both!). I love emotional co-dependency between characters (which can definitely feed into kinks, should you elect to go the porny route, but we’ll get there!) and a lot of these fandoms include characters who work together and I LOVE that slow build where people go from strangers to working together to something more (whether it be the found family variety or coworkers who sleep together or coworkers in love or something more toxic, or, you know, a complicated melange of all of the above!)

Some ADDITIONAL LIKES: character-driven stories; super messy relationships between characters weighed down with shared history (and maybe repressed feelings?); team work! ensemble stories!; sex as power play; power play in general; outsider POVs, especially when they recount details the main characters are oblivious to; dialogue (especially banter!); fake dating; sharing a bed because of Reasons™; and, if all else fails AU IN SPACE ( ... though I guess that doesn't apply to The Martian, lol). I’m totally okay with AUs, be it the canon divergence/fix-it types or the HEY THEY’RE NOW 1970s DISCO COPS! whole new world sort of AU. If a certain AU ‘verse speaks to you, by all means: run with it. I'm sure I will love it.

I'm cool with fic of any rating, be it of the ship variety or gen. I love me some ship fic (I definitely ship all the characters here) and I LOVE ME SOME PORN, but that said, I also am fascinated by these characters individually and how they relate to one another and would love to read anything about them you might cook-up. I don’t want you to feel obligated one way or the other! A lot of these are single-serving film or book canons (or a tragically canceled television series) which left me wanting as much more material about the characters as I could get.

Should you elect to go the sex route, I'm not averse to PWP, but I do prefer when the sex in a story is character-driven and rooted in emotional stakes for the characters involved. (On that same note, I am totally into emotional co-dependency between characters explored, whether it be portrayed as healthy or, you know, not-so-healthy). Other kinks/tropes I’m into: friends to lovers/fuck buddies, breathplay, orgasm denial, workplace sex, rough sex, hate sex, drunk sex, infidelity, dub-con (especially of the sex pollen/drugs/do-or-die variety). NONE OF THIS IS EXPECTED OR REQUIRED, but I figured I'd throw it out into the universe!

As for DISLIKES: rape or non-con, non-canonical character deaths, A/B/O, BDSM, scat or watersports, kid!fic, and character bashing. That's really it. The majority of the fandoms and characters I’ve requested this year lend themselves to some pretty dark material. I’m comfortable with dark themes and violence, especially if it's in step with the canon's tone.

This feels like a boatload of information, but in all seriousness: I am not difficult to please. I am truly stoked to read anything you will be writing for any of these fandoms!

(ONE LAST NOTE: Spoilers abound for all the fandoms below, but in particular for Sicario, The Martian, and Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine.)

SICARIO (2015)
Kate Macer, Matt Graver, Alejandro (Sicario)

REQUEST: Kate moves forward after the events of the film. Maybe eventually she re-teams with both Matt and Alejandro, or maybe she takes a different path, decides to stay true to her morals, and becomes a whistleblower – needless to say, Matt and Alejandro try to stop her. Details in letter.

What I really loved about this film was how each of these three characters were presented as believing they were doing what is right, or in Alejandro’s case, what is just. Both Alejandro and Matt operate by an “any means necessary” method that clashes with Kate’s “by the book” approach, but the effects of their opposing system goes beyond procedure: there’s the emotional effect it has on Kate, as she sees everything she believed in stripped away; the more macro effect it has, via the single line from the drug lord Alejandro confronts at the end: “Where do you think we learned it from?” regarding the cartel’s violent tactics; and the never-ending feedback loop that results, as Matt tells Kate early on, “This is what happens when they dig in,” justifying the chaotic – and illegal – measures he invokes. Basically, it provides the perfect setting for all sorts of conflicting and fucked-up character work I’d love to read.

For the fic, I’d really love the emphasis to be on Kate. That said, I was super into her interactions and murky relationships with both Alejandro and Matt. I would love to see that explored in further detail. Feel free to flesh out her three days from hell portrayed in the film! In particular, I’d especially love to see the aftermath of her emotional and physical confrontation with Matt after the tunnel op (“I’m going to tell everyone what you did.” / “That would be a big mistake.” I’m paraphrasing!). Or, go beyond the film! What becomes of Kate after the film? Where does she go from here? Is she enlisted for another mission by Matt? Does she leave her job with the FBI? Does she reclaim her sense of morality and dismiss the tactics employed by men like Alejandro and Matt? I think that could be a really cool route to take, especially if Kate tries to take the high road as a whistleblower – do Matt and/or Alejandro reenter her life to try and stop her? Or! Does she swing in the opposite direction and travel further down the road these men have already walked? I would love to read any of these, or anything else you might come up with.

I’m curious about both Kate/Matt (I have a real soft spot for the smug, knowing boss/disobedient, insubordinate protege potential of these two) and Kate/Alejandro, and would totally be game for some messed-up Matt/Kate/Alejandro (just putting that one on the table!).

THE MARTIAN (2015)
Melissa Lewis (The Martian (2015)), Mark Watney (The Martian (2015))

REQUEST: Everything about Commander Melissa Lewis! Also, everything about her relationship with Mark Watney. Pre-film (NASA training adventures! or further back than that and her Navy days spent on a sub!) or post-film (the long journey back to Earth on the Hermes as Mark recovers) or during the film (her POV on events and also the guilt and responsibility she feels for leaving him behind). Details in letter.

I want to know everything about Commander Melissa Lewis! There are all sorts of possible routes I'd love to read here. Her Navy backstory! Her time spent on the sub! Her NASA background! In addition to that, I'd love to know more about her relationship with Mark. How long has she known him? What was her POV during the events of the film and Mark’s time stranded on Mars?

There's the pre-film option! The long flight from Earth to Mars, the first 18 sols spent on Mars together as a team. The NASA training before the mission! Or, post-film! Their reunion! The journey back home to Earth! Or when they get back to Earth – as both try to adjust to being back home again, and to what level of success they manage. I came away from the movie shipping these two hard; I would love post-film fic about the two of them continuously drawn together after they’ve landed, after they’ve tried to resume their lives. I know she’s married, but as I’ve said, I’m totally ok with infidelity (in fact, for whatever reason that makes it that much hotter to me lol).

In lieu of ship!fic about the two of them, I would love to read anything about her (or their) time aboard the Hermes. Hey, feel free to get festive and write about the holidays on the Hermes en route to Earth!

On a completely different potential prompt path – SPACE MADNESS. While I really, really loved that this film was hopeful and optimistic, there’s a terrible part of me that yearns for something so much darker and so much more messed-up. Go full-tilt crazy here! Mark Watney comes back from Mars, but he comes back … wrong. Cue the nightmarish trip back to Earth as Lewis and the rest of the Ares 3 team start to realize this isn’t the Mark Watney they remember. (Double points if you appeal to my dark-sided heart with some truly messed-up, murky Watney/Lewis!)

LAST POTENTIAL PROMPT!: AU it! What if she didn’t make it back to the MAV in time and she made Martinez take off without her? What if both her and Mark were stranded on Mars? It totally changes the story of course, but man, I’m pretty sure that premise alone hits every button I possess haha. You could keep it in line with the tone of canon or go dark and creepy with it.

Oh wait, last AU thought for real: I love heists, sooooooooo what if the Ares 3 team turns into … A SPACE HEIST TEAM. I have no idea what they are heisting, but hey! Heists!

MECHANIQUE: A TALE OF THE CIRCUS TRESAULTI – GENEVIEVE VALENTINE
Bird (Mechanique), Stenos, Elena (Mechanique)

"It terrifies him to know her.

He sees no way out of this, until one of them has the wings. Stenos knows he's the better choice – he would make a better picture walking at the front of the parade than poor Bird with her one eye. He would know how to make the crowd love him. (He misses applause.)

Looking at Bird, though, he worries; he wonders if she would hesitate to dig the wings out of his shoulders as he slept.

Inside the wagon she has slid into her bed, has turned to face the wall.

She cuts through him just by breathing."

REQUEST: Honestly, anything. Further details of the circus days shared amongst these three, backstories for Bird and Stenos, fic set after the book ends, really messy and emotionally exhausting Bird/Stenos/Elena – ANYTHING. Details in letter.

Steampunk! Dystopian! Circus!

The setting of this book was such a wild dream, and the characters themselves were so gorgeously twisted and broken, truth be told I’d read anything and everything. But, oh, boy: Stenos and Bird. They both come to the circus and they both are vying for the wings that once belonged to the circus troupe’s own felled Icarus, Alec. Oh, and the wings are made of bones. Oh, and some of the bones belong to Elena, a caustic aerialist Stenos starts sleeping with after Elena “lets” Bird fall and shatter from the trapeze. And yup, so long as they stay close to the circus and close to Boss, the ones who swapped their bones out for metal cannot die. So, Stenos hates Bird even though he tries and fights to save her at every turn, and Elena hates everyone, and Bird (given that name after her bloody plummet to the ground) only wants to fly.

I LOVE THIS BOOK.

And I would love to read anything you might write. It can be set pre-novel and offer some insight into both Bird and Stenos and the lives they led before they came to the circus. Or, since a lot of the novel is from Little George’s POV, I’d love more about the events of the novel from Bird or Stenos’s POV (or Elena's!). Or! Post-novel! Does Bird ever come back? What becomes of Elena? I would totally would be down for exploration of some sort of twisty, dark Elena/Stenos/Bird.

A slice of life sort of fic could work awesomely here, set maybe mid-novel, after Bird has fallen but before the entire circus goes to shit that shows how the three of them go about their daily routines, but how each of them is wholly wrapped up in the other – in particular Bird and Stenos; their antagonistic symbiosis FASCINATES ME. I would really love the violent physicality of Bird and Stenos explored: the two alone and isolated as they practice and train, as they learn each other’s bodies, how in the book the two of them are always together – basically what I am saying is, I’d gobble up the fic equivalent of a TRAINING MONTAGE of these two, and if you want to get porny with it, BY ALL MEANS. I like the idea of a resentful Elena on the outside of whatever warped and weird bond Bird and Stenos share, but I also love that she is tied to both of them – Stenos because she is sleeping with him and Bird because she let her fall.

Or! If none of this speaks to you! Canon divergence!AU: Bird doesn’t leave at the end. What happens if Bird stays?

UTOPIA (TV 2013)
Milner | Letan, The Assistant (Utopia), Jessica Hyde

REQUEST: Either, Milner and The Assistant in the 1970s (or, through the ages as they try to Save The World) or just about anything about Jessica Hyde: pre-series, post-series, slice-of-life when she was living with Dugdale, the list goes on! Details in letter.

The 1970s! Milner and The Assistant and their quest to save the world! I’m deeply, deeply fascinated by the relationship between the two of them – in particular, his fierce and unending loyalty to the point of voluntary scarification of his own body to protect her. I will greedily gobble up ANYTHING you give me about the two of them. The history of them! How did they come to be a team! Write about their early MI-5 days, as spies! Missions they went on! Or go beyond that and beyond what is shown of them in the Season 2 ep – what do they do after Carvel’s disappearance? What becomes of them, how do they get to the point where we meet them again in S1, in the present-day? Or you could even do a sort of “missing scene” story from their 1970s-set episode – I’d love it.

I'd be all about backstory on Milner not shown or mentioned – I'm forever haunted by her line to Carvel, "Have you ever been in a genocide? I have." – and the same goes for The Assistant: who is he? Where did he come from?

Or,

Jessica Hyde! What was her life before we met her in the first season? Her backstory has been filled in gradually throughout the series, but I’d love more. More of the specifics of her upbringing, more of the effect being on the run her entire life has had on her, and so forth. Or! Jessica Hyde and Michael Dugdale as roommates! It could be a missing scene, slice-of-life kind of deal from when she was crashing at his place in the second season or you could go full-tilt AU and write about their adventures as the worst-matched roommates in the history of roommates and the world. It can be platonic or romantic, whichever you choose – I’m just really into their dynamic. Or, write about her and Arby/Pietre. Or post-S2! What happens to Jessica Hyde? Invent what you believe happened to her! I AM OPEN TO ALL IDEAS!

Oh, and one last potential AU: Jessica Hyde as raised by Milner and The Assistant. The best weapon against Philip Carvel is his own daughter. It’d be especially interesting to see how Jessica is raised versus Arby/Pietre. Also, I know I listed kid!fic as a DNW above, but this is the exception to the rule, namely because I think it’d be terrifyingly fascinating to see both Milner and The Assistant as faux-parental units, especially if Jessica Hyde is the child in question.

BIRDMAN (2014)
Sam Thomson, Mike Shiner

REQUEST: What becomes of Sam Thomson? Where does her life go after the events of the film? Details in letter.

Ho-boy, their chemistry in this movie honestly made the movie for me. A part of me really, really wished that the movie would have chosen to focus on her character and the weird, very natural-feeling, relationship that evolved with him. ENTER FIC!

I'd love to read fic set post-film! Or, the events of the end of the movie since both characters took a backseat to Birdman himself. Mainly, I want everything in the world about Sam. What does she do with her life after the movie ends? What was she like before the film? Does she ever see Mike again? Was he just a convenient port in the storm during the movie or is there something more at play there?

Or, I would love to read a fic set a few years after the events of the film, Sam and Mike run into each other in New York. It can be the holidays! New York at Christmas! What has become of them? What happens when they meet again?

Or, playing off that idea, do they collide at random for the rest of their lives, somehow impossibly running into one another at unexpected and unprecedentedly dramatic points of their lives? (If need be for inspiration, I can totally see a FIVE TIMES sort of fic working that way. FIVE PLAYS they ran into each other at, or something like that!).

I could also see an outsider POV working really well: a journalist writing an article about Mike or about the Thomsons/Thomson legacy via Sam. Or if you would rather focus on Mike – you could still run with the FIVE THINGS sort of fic format: five famed Mike Shiner performances, five famous actresses courted by Mike Shiner, five bad reviews, whatever strikes your fancy!

This letter is crazy long! Thank you again and I hope you have fun! I cannot wait to read what you write.

For any additional info you might want/need, my AO3 is here and my tumblr is here. HAPPY YULETIDE!

With love,
falseeeyelashes

falseeeyelashes — Sat, 27 Jun 2015 02:48:47 GMT

OBVS WE SHOULD HAVE A FICATHON

Guys! Is LJ dead?!?! I hope not! It's almost my birthday and I'm almost pretty drunk and IT'S HIGH TIME WE HAVE ONE OF THESE AGAIN!!!!

YOU REMEMBER THE RULES! Prompt weird shit! Write weird shit! Let's all be best friends! God, I miss LJ so much my heart hurts!!!!!

The end!

A FICATHON?!?!?!!!!!!!

falseeeyelashes — Sat, 10 Jan 2015 21:40:06 GMT

The official I CAN'T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME WE HAD ONE OF THESE
comment ficathon

It's cold! It's snowy! I have more gin than a person knows what to do with (you drink it, that phrase doesn't work here; you drink the gin, Michelle). It's the Golden Globes this weekend (aka the greatest excuse for rpf in the galaxy!) AND I MISS YOU ALL GOOD FRIENDS AND ALL THE GOOD FUN WE HAVE WRITING RANDOM FIC LOL.

We all know the rules! ONE PROMPT PER COMMENT, be cool, write some weird shit, have fun, profit, drink gin w/me, etc., etc.!!!

YULETIDE 2014

falseeeyelashes — Sun, 19 Oct 2014 05:25:41 GMT

Hello dear Yuletide Writer! It's hard to believe it's that time of year again!

First off, I want to thank you for writing whatever it is you are going to write for me! All the below are things I love and would be thrilled to read in any permutation, and to say I'm excited is putting it mildly.

Some general stuff: I love gen fic and I love ensemble fic and I love shippy fic. I love character studies and I love character-driven stories. I love the "friends to lovers" trope, found families (or people forced to work together and over time come to depend on each other), casual intimacy between characters, and banter and snappy dialogue.

If you want to write porn, I am all about it, haha. I love, love, LOVE sexual tension in a story, and if you wish to write that and also consummate it? If you feel the itch to go to there with any of these prompts? By all means, PLEASE DO. That said, I'm cool with most things, but I'd prefer no non-con or dub-con or extreme kink or humiliation. I'm okay with PWP, but I do like there to be an emotional, character-based element in play, too. Also, since it could come into play with some of these fandoms, I am more than okay with infidelity.

The only DO NOT WANTS I truly have are non-con and character bashing. A couple of the fandoms requested below (Utopia and the Dublin Murder Squad Series) trade in some pretty heavy, violent, dark material, and I'm cool with that for those fandoms, but would prefer the others not to tread too far into the dark.

I am truly not hard to please, and I am so appreciative you're willing to write for these fandoms and characters I love. Which, speaking of ...

THE GOOD WIFE (TV)
Robyn Burdine, Finn Polmar

KALINDA: You need to make yourself hard. You need to make yourself indispensable. That's why people keep you on.
ROBYN: But I'm not you.
KALINDA: You don't need to be me.

REQUEST: Either, The Adventures of Robyn Burdine! Or, The Adventures of Finn Polmar! Or, if you're game: The Adventures of Both of These Secondary Characters! Details in letter.

Two options here:

The first, The Adventures of Robyn Burdine! Ever since Robyn was introduced, I was into her, and as time and her role has gone on I am THAT MUCH MORE into her, and I would love more of her. I find her blend of plucky optimism paired with her career as a determined investigator so great, and I love the role she plays at Florrick, Agos & Lockhart. Fic-wise, it can be a case fic (the way the show does the whole case-of-the week business), but it doesn't have to be. She can be arranging another Christmas party! You can go back in time and talk about the early days of the new firm and her catchall role there! Hell, she can get arrested! I'm into it all. What I am really interested in is seeing more of her character (her home life! more investigating!) as well as exploring more of her relationships both with Cary and Kalinda (and Alicia, for that matter! and Carey Zepps!). And as a sidenote: I would totally definitely absolutely not be adverse to you going in a Cary/Robyn direction, but you don't have to do that if you're not into it!

Or, we have a second option:

Finn Polmar! I want all the dirt on Finn Polmar! I am so into whatever is happening with him and Alicia, and I'm also just really super into him as a character. We know so little about him, and I'd adore fic that explored more of him and bulked him up as a person. You can go the case-of-the-week route with this too if you want or just throw him and Alicia in a bar together or go back to when he was shot or hell, have Robyn investigating him for whatever reason (the two options here bridged! option three!), whatever you want! I'm not kidding when I'd say I'd literally be into anything you'd write on these two request option fronts.

Aaaaaaaand, one last thing: THIS IS TOTALLY RANDOM AND TOTALLY, TOTALLY OPTIONAL (and I wasn't even going to be mention it considering it's so random and bonkers but hey - tis the season!), BUT I'm a real sucker for both AUs and crossovers, and I'm forever quietly gnawing on how cool it would be to crossover The Good Wife with Damages. We know Finn came to Chicago from New York, and Damages is set in New York, so a crossover tying him to Patty Hewes and Ellen Parsons (...... since we're already talking total bananas business, this is me being a monster saying I would devour Ellen/Finn fic) would be super cool. This is a tall kooky order, so do not feel obliged AT ALL to write this, unless, like me, your heart desires this nonsense too. And if your heart desires this too, we clearly should probably be best friends.

UTOPIA (TV 2013)
The Assistant, Milner, Philip Carvel

Your loyalty breaks my heart.

REQUEST: Milner, The Assistant, and Philip Carvel plot to save the world in the 1970s. Details in letter.

I'm still super bummed this show was canceled, but at least we got S2, which gave us the wonderful 1970s flashback episode. But I gotta say: one episode wasn't nearly enough for me on the 1970s plot of this show. I am OBSESSED with the relationship presented between Milner and The Assistant, as well as Milner's relationship with Carvel.

I would love a story about Milner in the 1970s, as The Network begins to grow into the frightening weapon it would become in the present day, her reliance on The Assistant (the scar! him masquerading as Mr. Rabbit!), and her worship of Philip Carvel. In addition, I'd be all about backstory on Milner not shown or mentioned – I'm forever haunted by her saying to Carvel, "Have you ever been in a genocide? I have." – and the same goes for both The Assistant and Carvel. I found these three characters equal parts horrifying and fascinating, and I was equally fascinated by the role the three of them played against one another: Carvel as the brains behind Janus, Milner as the heart believing fiercely in what they were doing, and The Assistant as the body man who ensured the path was clear to proceed.

I'd prefer the fic is set in either the 1970s timeline of the show, or even the early 80s after Carvel and Jessica disappear, but if you want to string the story from there to present-day I am more than okay with that. I'd also be more than okay with (thrilled?) if you wanted to go the shipping or the porn route with any (or all three) of these characters. I have a soft-spot for The Assistant/Milner, but I am also all about Milner/Carvel and wildly intrigued by the premise of The Assistant/Milner/Carvel.

DUBLIN MURDER SQUAD SERIES – TANA FRENCH
Antoinette Conway, Stephen Moran, Cassie Maddox, Frank Mackey

I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack.
THE LIKENESS

REQUEST: A case brings this foursome together and Frank Mackey is the knot at the center of them all. Details in letter.

I recently finished reading the newest installment in this series, and man, I loved it so much. I took to Stephen Moran immediately as the narrator of the story, and equally loved how both Antoinette Conway and Frank Mackey were shown from his view. The scenes involving the three of them together and all the sticky tension and stubbornness that resulted was easily one of my favorite parts of the book. Frank Mackey seems to be a running constant in terms of favorite things for me about this series. The Likeness might be my favorite installment so far, and amidst everything happening, what I couldn't get out of my head was the relationship between Cassie and Frank and all the alluded history shared between them. Which brings me to my request:

CASE FIC! Some sort of case that involves all four of these characters would be AMAZING. As I've said, I'm utterly fascinated by everyone's relationship with Frank Mackey – the weight of history with Stephen, the mentor/protege conceit with Cassie, and the lack of fear from Conway. I'd love to read a story where all four of these detectives are forced to work together, butting heads, maybe there's an undercover angle involved, maybe there are suspicions amongst them – I'm game for it all.

If case fic isn't what you have in mind (which I totally get), I'd be more than happy to read about any combination of these characters (be it shared drinks at a pub or out on a surveillance sting or a slow Tuesday in the bullpen or hell, full on porn – I'm down). I'm especially intrigued by Frank and Cassie's relationship, Frank and Stephen's, and Conway and Stephen, though to be honest, I like these characters so much I am sure I would enjoy reading any combination of them interacting.

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE RPF
Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader

REQUEST: Literally anything. I am not kidding when I say I would read literally anything about these two – be it backstage early days on SNL or filming movies together or having a secret affair in New York or any and all AUs. Details in letter.

LITERALLY ANYTHING feels like an entirely unhelpful thing to say, but this is me saying LITERALLY ANYTHING. I've always shamelessly loved their rapport, and I feel like the past few months of them doing promo for The Skeleton Twins and then her popping up on SNL when he hosted (or when they both popped up when Andy Samberg hosted) has me basically drowning in feelings and a desire to read fic about them.

I'd love to read about them starting out at Saturday Night Live together or both of them leaving SNL or those years in between when they have settled into a groove and routine and a partnership. I'd love to read about all the movies they've filmed together, all the traveling and promoting these movies, the roles they play in each other's lives. I am all about a secret affair, or a long-building love, or whatever between them. I'D LOVE IT ALL. Go the funny route and talk about all the antics they get up to! Go the poignant, sadder route – they return to SNL for a Christmas episode and the city is colder and they're older and they have too much history shared between them! LITERALLY ANYTHING!

And AUs are more than welcome here! I feel like these two could so easily be slotted into any and all universes, so needless to say, I'd be all about reading that. SUGGESTIONS INCLUDE!: rockstar AU (with Hader as the sort of nebbish bassist in a garage band and Kristen as a bad-ass frontwoman), struggling stand-up comics AU, a Veep-style beleaguered government staffers AU, squabbling bartenders AU, roommates AU, et cetera et cetera so on and so forth, ALL THE AUs EVER.

THE GIRLS AT THE KINGFISHER CLUB – GENEVIEVE VALENTINE
Jo Hamilton, Lou Hamilton

Lou misses the old waltz, when the leader's fingers just touched her waist, the way Jo taught her back when they were the only two.

(Lou sometimes hates that Jo taught her first. It's tied them together some way she can't shake.)

REQUEST: With twelve sisters there will be favorites: Jo is Lou's and Lou is Jo's. Details in letter.

SISTERS, MAN! SISTERS! I loved this book so much (how could I not? The Twelve Dancing Sisters adapted to fit 1920s New York speakeasies? SOLD) and I wanted it to go on forever. One of my favorite parts of the book was definitely Jo and Lou's close-knit relationship, and how Jo was willing to sacrifice everything she wanted to save her sister.

What I would love to read is basically MORE. There are so many details I would love filled in from the novel: more about their early dancing days, more about their start at the Kingfisher, but particularly – I'd love more of the story from Lou's point of view. I'd especially love Lou's perspective about the last part of the novel – leaving Jo and leaving her sisters, marrying Tom (her opinions on Tom in general!!!!), stuff about Jake if you want, their return to New York. I'd also love a story set after the book, now that Lou and Jo are reunited in New York. We see so much of Lou through Jo's eyes, and I'd love to see Jo through Lou's as well as Lou herself.

(As an aside, for this fandom I would prefer no incest where Lou and Jo are concerned.)

This letter got long! I'm so excited to read whatever you come up with, and thank you in advance for writing for me. If you need some additional info, my AO3 account is here and my tumblr here. HAPPY YULETIDE!

Much love,
falseeeyelashes

SPRING SPRANG SPRUNG

falseeeyelashes — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 02:48:08 GMT

A SPRING FEVER COMMENT FICATHON.
Because honestly why not.

It's been many moons since a) I've posted here, and b) we've done one of these ficathons! So many moons that it's the end of April and almost May! Which by my estimation means we are long overdue for a comment ficathon post.

WE KNOW THE RULES AT THIS POINT? We know the rules. One prompt per post, ANYTHING GOES prompt-wise, be nice and be friends and write some weird business and get all that creativity flowing! AMEN AND HAVE FUN.

ficathon???

falseeeyelashes — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 04:49:50 GMT

A DUMB COMMENT FICATHON BC I'M BORED

There's no excuse for this and there are about a million other things I should be doing, but, hey, it's Oscar weekend and there's a blizzard on its way here and Don Draper likes puppies, SO.

LET'S DO THIS.

1. PROMPT!
2. WRITE!
3. PROFIT!!!

And be friends and have fun, good night.

FICATHON » START THE NEW YEAR WITH A BANG!

falseeeyelashes — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 08:02:29 GMT

NEW YEAR, NEW EXCUSE FOR SOME WEIRD FIC!
... not the greatest slogan.
(I'm sleepy).

Can you believe it's 2014? Can you believe it's been over a month since I've posted one of these things? I know New Year's is a time for making resolutions to be better people or not procrastinate or idk, but hey, I'm always game for the wonderful distraction that is cracky comment fic! SO HERE WE ARE!

RULES:

1. Consider it a free-for-all and prompt at will! Any fandom, RPF, any pairing. Whatever your bizarro heart desires.
2. One prompt per comment.
3. FILL THE PROMPTS! Write, write, write! And thank your writers!
4. HAVE FUN AND HAVE A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

FICATHON » RPF AU BONANZA

falseeeyelashes — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 05:36:50 GMT

RPF AU RECAST COMMENT FICATHON
for all those roles you wanted other faces playing.

This is bred completely from all the weird twitter conversations Farah and I have been having. Remember that movie you saw one time and you were mad because a) THERE WERE ZERO MAKEOUTS, and b) you wanted hotter faces doing the making out that didn't happen??? Then this is the ficathon for you! Obviously we should take these movies and turn them all into RPF AU plot engines!

There are roughly a million other things I should be working on right now, but whatever! Who doesn't like distractions?! Go prompt and write and be weird to you heart's content. AND HAVE FUN.

GLAD TIDINGS! » Yuletide Letter 2013

falseeeyelashes — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 20:48:19 GMT

Hello dear Yuletide Author! Before we even begin, I just want to say a) this is my first time doing Yuletide (HI!), and b) how extremely grateful and bonkers excited I am to read whatever it is you choose to write.

Before we get into the actual requests, I figured I'd cover the more general things I like and dislike when it comes to fic.

Things I love: Dialogue! I love snappy, in-character dialogue. The more banter, the better. And beyond that, all those characterization-building quiet moments. Nine times out of ten, I’m more interested in characterization than I am in complicated plot structure. I just really love character dynamics, and I especially love reading/witnessing the bonds built between characters and the relationships developed from there (be they platonic or romantic).

In the romance column (should you go that route), I LOVE SEXUAL TENSION BETWEEN CHARACTERS. That warranted all-caps, man. The build-up is almost always my favorite part where romance is concerned. Also, tied to the romance department of “Things I Love,” I honestly love when a writer runs with a commonly used trope – fake dating! sharing a bed! friends with benefits! all the clichéd things! – yet finds a way to put a fresh and fun spin on them. Smut/porn is more than okay by me, but not necessary. If you decide to go to there, I definitely prefer realistic, even awkward sex over anything else. But mainly, I just really love characters who are obviously – even if it’s to everyone else and not themselves – into each other and appreciate each other.

AUs! I love AUs! I’m not sure how well that’d vibe with the fandoms I’ve listed below, but if your heart desires an AU, believe me when I say, mine will as well. (In conjunction, I love crossovers too! I just really love characters I love interacting. At the bottom of this post will be a link to my tumblr in case you want to peruse what other fandoms I’m into should a crossover be something you’d want to write!). It can be a whole big overhaul AU where the characters and their story are now set in a Wild West ghost town, on a space station, in gangland 1920s Chicago etc., etc., or an AU that diverts from the original canon but is still set in the same universe: I am into both.

Also, I will never say no to a zombie apocalypse AU.

I like angst to a believable degree (sometimes the world sucks!) but I also really enjoy happy, or at least hopeful, endings (though I’m not much of a fan of gratuitous fluff). I think what I am trying to say is, I don’t want to be depressed on Christmas, and I like a good balance between happy and sad. (And as a postscript to the word Christmas, I’d be more than okay and in fact most likely thrilled if the story you choose to write is set during the holidays; that’s a plus not a minus for me).

A catch-all list of other things I love: nonlinear storytelling, road trips, characters hanging out at bars, characters getting drunk (sometimes at bars), stories set in hotels, first times, makeouts, friendships, found families.

And, the things I don’t like: Babies or kid!fic (we’ll throw mpreg under this umbrella, too). Non-con or extreme kink. Major character deaths. Character bashing, slut-shaming, all of that business.

Despite all that text, I’m not that difficult to please. Honestly. You offered to write characters I love, and to say I am appreciative is a real understatement.

+

Rubicon
Tanya MacGaffin, Will Travers

I got into this show three years too late. I suppose though regardless of when I watched it, thirteen episodes would still seem like too short of a run to me. I wanted more to everyone’s stories! What I would really love to read is more about Tanya. It can be pre-series, it can be post-series, it can be smack-dab-in-the-middle-of-the-series. You can flesh out her addiction narrative if you want to, or talk about her stint in rehab, or how she got the job at API, or whether she really does quit in the finale. Or something else altogether! I’d love if Will (and if you want, Miles and Grant) played a role in whatever story you choose to tell, as I always really enjoyed her interactions with him (as well as with Miles and Grant, should you desire to include them as well!). One of my favorite scenes from the show was the scene between Will and Tanya in the stairwell leading to the roof and she was mad at him because he didn’t have her back during the team meeting which led Will to talk about good versus bad fear and how good fear serves their job well but the bad fear doesn’t. I just found that interaction between the both of them so fascinating, and would have loved to have seen more of it on the show, and would certainly love to read fic that featured the both of them in some capacity.

I also think I’d love a story that picked up a couple years later from where the finale left off. It wouldn’t need to be Tanya-centric, but I’d love to check in with her and with Will and see what’s become of them and what has happened to them in the intervening years.

A lot of options here! And, hey, if you’re game I’m totally game for more espionage and paranoia and intrigue, haha, whether that means more on the Fishers Island gang or a whole new conspiracy for Will et al to uncover (or abet, I suppose! plot twist!).

Hart of Dixie
Wade Kinsella, Lemon Breeland

Lemon is easily my favorite character on Hart of Dixie, and I was so happy with last season’s plot development where both her and Wade went into business as co-bar owners. Their dynamic is so much fun to me! There’s so much history there and so much mutual antagonism that has given way to this really awesome, begrudging friendship. I’d love more of that, and for that friendship to dovetail into a wacky romance while they struggle to run a successful bar and restaurant.

I really don’t have a specific request here. As I mentioned above, I am game for all the romantic comedy tropes, haha. They embark on another, more disastrous road trip! Bad weather strikes Bluebell and they’re stuck at the Rammer Jammer! Or, running with what was set up during the third season premiere: fake dating! I am all in for whatever crazy shenanigans you might cook up for them to endeavor upon, whether it’s any of those trope-y suggestions or something else altogether.

The Bridge (TV 2013)
Sonya Cross, Marco Ruiz

I really enjoyed the first season of this show, and I think my favorite part about it was the evolution of Sonya and Marco’s relationship. I’d love to see more of that explored – more unexpected visits by Sonya at Marco’s house, more shared drinks and conversation, more of Sonya opening up.

I’d definitely be open to casefic for these two, whether you invent an entire new crime for them to investigate or you continue the girls of Juarez plot that really started to take off towards the end of the season, but it’s not a necessity. I’m not particularly invested or interested in the “revenge” portion of Marco’s plot established at the end of the season finale, but if you felt you could mine something interesting and something involving Sonya from that, I’d be happy to read that. What I am really interested in is just furthering the relationship between Sonya and Marco, platonically or otherwise. (And by otherwise, I mean bad decision-making on both their parts resulting in a drunken one-night stand – or a succession of one-night stands – rather than a full-fledged romance).

I really loved all the characters on the show, so feel free to include Hank or Fausto or anyone else.

Mad Men
Peggy Olson, Stan Rizzo

You know how I mentioned I loved AUs above? This is definitely where I can see that love playing out, haha. Not that I don’t enjoy them in their actual canon setting (and I’d be more than jazzed to read that! so no worries!), but for me the sky’s the limit where AUs are concerned with the two of them. They are such distinct and awesome characters that I think they can be plunked down into any universe and it would work, haha. Modern-day advertisers? Sure! Presidential campaign workers in the 1960s, 1970s, or present-day? ABSOLUTELY. College!AU where Peggy’s all about the dean’s list and Stan’s an obnoxious frat boy? Definitely. Hollywood screenwriters, beleaguered journalists, disaffected graphic designers in Portland, squabbling bar workers Cheers-esque AU – yes to all the above!

In all seriousness though, one of my favorite things about Mad Men is how quietly and along-the-sidelines Peggy and Stan’s relationship has progressed. Stan obviously respects and admires Peggy so much and I loved loved loved how after Peggy left SCDP in Season Five, Season Six showed the two of them and their seemingly regular nighttime phone chats and that they hadn’t fallen out of touch. Honestly, if this fic was just a whole random catalog of phone conversations the both of them have had over the course of their shared existences, I’d be over the moon to read that.

Rectify
Amantha Holden

Rectify was one of my favorite TV shows I watched this past year and for a good while after the finale I couldn’t get the show out of my head. I just really loved the atmosphere and the slow approach to the entire show and how much focus was given to all these great character moments.

I think I loved Amantha the most, and what I would love to read more than anything is just more about her. What was her life like when her brother Daniel was first arrested and then sentenced to death? Does she ever have doubts, even if they are just to herself, of his innocence? What has happened for her in the 19 years Daniel’s been in prison? What was she doing in Atlanta? What is she going to do now that she’s moved back home? I just have so many curiosities and questions about her and the life that exists for her outside those few days depicted in the first season of the show. I’d love to read a fic that explored any of these questions or presented new ones.

Once again, I can't thank you enough, stranger! If you still need other references for what I'm into, there is my tumblr, and my LJ fic tag is here and my AO3 account is here. YOU ARE THE BEST.

Much love,
falseeeyelashes

FREE-FOR-ALL COMMENT FICATHON: THE SEQUEL

falseeeyelashes — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 02:19:38 GMT

FREE-FOR-ALL COMMENT FICATHON: THE SEQUEL
Based on the tweet "Hollywood: Hot People Making Bad Movies" ~~from the novel Push by Sapphire~~.

It's been what? Two months since I threw one of these things up so I think that means we are definitely overdue for this business. I also have the house to myself and way too much wine (which I originally typed as "whine," and that might be apt too). In other news, it's September! This coming week so many shows are coming back! And if that's not a loose interpretation of the word "reasons," then idk what is.

RULES:

1. It's a free-for-all! Prompt whatever you want! Film, TV, books, AUs, RPF, have at it!
2. PROMPT AT WILL! All I ask is one prompt per comment.
3. FILL ALL THE PROMPTS! Warn if any warnings apply, be cool, etc.
4. HAVE FUN AND ENJOY I NEED TO GET MORE WINE!

fic: in event of moon disaster (mad men) (3/3)

falseeeyelashes — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 20:25:11 GMT

STAN.

Stan has fucked four women in the past month. One was Peggy.

First, there was the Nico lookalike who smoked those skinny feminine cigarettes and wanted to talk only about Jim Morrison or Scientology or the perks of a vegetarian diet. She told him she wasn’t eating meat anymore before looking pointedly below his belt and told him from behind her cigarette and behind her long dirty blonde bangs that she’d be willing to make an exception. She said it smug and not flirtatious and it was easily one of the worst pick-up lines he had ever heard. But he liked the shape of her mouth, wanted to know what it felt like around him, so he accepted.

The second claimed the moon landing was faked. She was a writer, or she said she was, but the only thing she seemed to have to show for it was an ink-stained left hand. Her name was Angela and she had a Queens accent that became thicker the more she drank, at its most pronounced when he fucked her. When she introduced herself, she claimed she knew his friend Tom, but Stan didn’t have a friend named Tom, or at least he didn’t think he did. He found that didn’t matter. She told him about the moon and she told him about film, the properties of filmmaking, gravity, Neil Armstrong, none of it sounding like fact but rather a biased desire to uncover a conspiracy. He went back with her to her place, and she had short cropped hair (made him think of Jean Seberg before he thought Mia Farrow, neither entirely on the mark: Angela was skinny as opposed to gamine) and he was distracted by the pale curve of her throat, the spasm of it while that Queens accent spilled from her, while he fucked her on faded floral sheets.

The third said she was from Los Angeles. Stan had believed her. She had freckles across her tanned nose, and oddly it was her teeth -- large and white, encased beneath thin pale pink lips -- that convinced him that it was California she belonged to, not New York. She didn’t say what she had done in Los Angeles, which led him to believe she was a failed actress with too much pride to admit it. She was a bottle blonde; he learned this later. He fucked her in the bathroom at a small bar where a band who thought they were The Moody Blues was playing.

And Peggy. He fucked her on the floor of his apartment, and it’s the single strangest sensation in the world: getting what you’ve wanted only to find there was no way you could have possibly imagined it in rich enough detail. Peggy fucks greedy -- her hands, her mouth, the tight grip of her cunt before she comes. She left her ripped pantyhose coiled like snakeskin on the floor the next day. He thought about her returning home, bare legs, blue underwear under her skirt, and he already wanted to fuck her again. What else is new, he might have asked; he’s spent the last five years wanting to be inside of her.

KEN.

In his head, but never out loud, Ken has taken to considering this their own moon landing. Madison Avenue without the safety net of older men’s names as their own foreign moonscape -- waiting, he thinks, for them to stake their claim.

Space age conquistadors. That had been what Stan had called Neil and Buzz, throwing down the newspaper on Peggy’s desk (and it’s only now that Ken considers that perhaps Stan hadn’t meant the name favorably but rather as an indictment), and Ken’s mouth had cracked open in a wide hopeful grin.

Apollo 11. Ken hadn’t slept the night they landed on the moon. He sat up with the baby, the volume of the TV turned down low (even though the coverage was over, even though it was an episode of The Twilight Zone he had already seen, but he had hoped new coverage would materialize, that they would broadcast at them, down from the moon again, secret missives only Ken would be awake to receive, and if this was to happen, he feared to miss it, feared to lose whatever terrifying cocktail of awe and hope had been stirred up within him).

It was the thrill of discovery. Everyone kept using that word: discovery. It was the proof that there was more out there than they could ever know or imagine. It galvanized him, in a way, made him brave, made him want more than he would ever find in that single office.

So at the end of July he said yes to Peggy and while Stan and her talked excitedly over each other, speaking more to themselves than to Ken, Ken didn’t mind: he was imagining they were bound for the moon.

Now he sits in Peggy’s apartment, their temporary place of business, each arriving with a list of potential old (or at the very least, dissatisfied) clients.

“Peggy, you either need to marry a woman or hire a maid,” Joan says as she surveys the place.

Peggy doesn’t answer. She’s mid-argument with Ginsberg about God only knows what while Stan smokes between the two of them, rifling through past designs they had shelved over the years.

The phone rings and they all freeze. Joan is the first to move.

“Holloway Cosgrove Olson & Rizzo,” she says.

27.

An afternoon in late August, Peggy runs into Megan. It’s been a hot summer, and the end of August is no different.

The city feels like the heat is trapped in the maze created by the buildings, no calming breeze to be found, nothing to break through the dense and oppressive heat. No respite to be found except behind closed doors -- polished lobbies, the dark bars belonging to hotels, the floor of her bedroom directly in front of the air-conditioning unit perched in her window. It’s an old building, drafty, and the cool air does not spread. It gets swallowed greedily by the heat, and them.

New York manages to feel too small a city at times. In this heat it tips over the border into claustrophobia.

It’s in this environment that Peggy finds Megan. They are both over by Grand Central Station wearing twin expressions of embarrassed surprise several paces away from each other.

“It’s funny,” Peggy says when they sit down at a table at the first bar they pass, “Running into old friends in this city.”

Megan frowns and smiles at the same time, the end result marking her as confused. “Were we ever friends?”

“Yeah!” Peggy says a little too forcefully. “We were friends. Colleagues.”

“Friends of Don,” Megan jokes.

“Now there is a man with too many friends,” Peggy jokes, pointing a finger at Megan. Megan only smiles a little, and it’s sad, makes Peggy sad and she doesn’t even know why. So she asks, “How is he?”

“You don’t see him?” 

Peggy shakes her head. “Do you?” She tries to ask it as another ill-conceived joke, but it falls flat.

“Well, sure. He’s still my husband. It’s just -- it’s complicated. I live there and he lives here, and.” She stops abruptly there, not even trailing off. Megan is not that great of an actress, Peggy thinks, not at all charitable. She doesn’t ask Megan what Don has been doing. Their conversation goes at fits and starts, too revealing and too much giving way to unsure and stumbling.

“We’re both following our dreams,” Peggy says, and even to her it sounds unbearably cheesy.

Megan smiles at her politely, like she knows firsthand how lonely and steep the road to follow a dream can be. “Shall we order?” she asks.

Their conversation inevitably circles back to Don, even if obliquely at first. They talk about work (Megan’s acting, Peggy’s new agency) which becomes advertising which becomes Don which becomes marriage.

“I thought,” Megan pauses, shaking her head with a silly smile, like she might start laughing or crying at herself. She does neither, just shrugs self-consciously. “I thought that was going to be me and Don, you know? Partners. Equals.”

Peggy doesn’t have anything to say to that.

“That’s what you want,” Megan is saying. “There’s the romance of it all and the excitement, that passion. It’s the partnership you want to come home to.”

“Sure,” Peggy says too casually, and when Megan smiles again, Peggy thinks it’s at her own expense.

“I have missed you,” Peggy says as they leave the restaurant. “And hey, you ever consider a return to advertising -- my door’s open.”

They both know it’s an offer Megan will never take her up on, they both that by Monday Megan will have returned to Los Angeles and the life she has there, but they both smile at each other as though to say, wouldn’t that be nice.

“Thank you, Peggy.”

“Break a leg,” Peggy says, feeling a cliché, walking out into the sweltering heat alone.

28.

There are random stacks of Life magazine open all over her apartment, separate stacks designated to the ads they love and the ads that make them mourn their chosen profession.

Peggy finds she likes living where she works, working where she lives, chicken or the egg, whichever comes first. So far they have been working with small fish, local nibbles, but, as Ken pointed out, their version of local is New York, and as though he had been about to burst into Broadway song and dance, he had said, “the greatest city in the world.”

“Cool it, Sinatra,” Stan had said, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

Stan and Peggy sit on the couch, exhausted. Lately, it’s become his custom to be the first at her place and the last to leave. That night, he stayed late, helping to finish the work they had done for some city council candidate’s campaign. Hardly the work they had imagined doing when they stepped out of SC&P, but, like Ken said (and Stan mocked after their third beer): greatest city in the world.

The work never seems to be over now. She likes that though; she thinks he likes that too, that he wouldn’t be here otherwise.

Stan’s hand rests between their bodies, and with idle curiosity, she touches the knot of his wrist, her fingers circling it loosely, passing up over the bumped ridges his veins make along the back of his hand, on to his knuckles. He rolls his hand over, palm up, and she presses her palm to his, their fingers interlocking easily.

They’re sitting on her couch holding hands like they’re on their way to prom. She gulps down the dregs from a cheap can of beer.

“We’re doing well, right?” she asks him suddenly. “This thing? We haven’t failed?”

“Yet,” he says, but he squeezes her hand, bumps his knee against hers.

She pokes him. “You’re supposed to be my optimist.”

“And I am. I also just so happen to be your pragmatist, too.”

“Optimist, pragmatist. Hedonist. One-man show, Stan Rizzo.”

“Only where you’re concerned,” he says lightly, but their hands are still entwined, and she knows what he means. She thinks she agrees.

JOAN.

That morning Joan came in to find Peggy, Stan, and Ginsberg passed out on the couch, all one heap of wrinkled clothes, two-thirds hungover, all in need of a shower.

 “I missed the slumber party?”

Peggy had yawned wide, pushing Stan’s head off her shoulder. “Shit,” was all she said. And then, “Ken told us about your meeting with Yellow Taxicab. We got to work . . . ”

“And then you fell asleep?”

She had left not long after, bound for a meeting with a Manhattan-based wig company (“We’re a parody at this point, you know this, right,” Ginsberg had said).

She couldn’t do what Peggy is doing, no sense of balance, merging it all under one roof: her home where she works and where she works, her home. That’s too messy and impossible an integration for Joan to even entertain. A lot of things Peggy attempts are too messy and impossible for Joan to consider. But then, Joan has made a career out of balance.

Take, for example, the men in her life.

It’s a Tuesday and Bob calls from Detroit on Tuesday nights. He’ll ask about Kevin and he’ll ask about the new job and she knows that if she were to tell him about anything, anything at all, unasked and unsolicited, he’d listen with that same polite attention. “It’s nice,” she had told her mother, “to have a friend.”

She had said the same thing to Roger and his reply had been predictable: his arms spread open in selfish supplication, his face a mock frown. “Hey? Who’s saying I’m not a friend?”

The wig company, for what it’s worth, said yes.

29.

The fall of 1969 is the season when Stan lives with Peggy. They don’t call it that or consider it that way, never speaking of the routine develops, the routine where Stan is always there, domesticity borne out of the pretext of work. But he’s there, he accumulates within her apartment, a toothbrush left in her bathroom, his shoes kicked under her bed, his shirts brushing up against her dresses in her closet. His body in her bed.

But that comes later.

People like to speak of falling in love. This, whatever this arrangement is, is what they fall into.

Peggy pads out of her bedroom in an old ratty pair of pajamas only to find Stan asleep on her couch. He’s sprawled out along the length of it and the blanket her mother gave her is pulled up over him, his legs hanging off the edge and the cat is stretched along the back of the couch just behind his shoulder. He’s snoring lightly, mouth parted open.

She reaches over and shakes his shoulder, his snoring cutting off sharply and in question. He blinks up at her. “What to my wondering eyes,” he grumbles, a dumb smile spreading his mouth. “And here I had thought you were just a dream,” he teases.

She rolls her eyes and folds her arms over her chest. “It’s not even six and you’re charging straight out of the gate.”

He yawns widely, his arms stretched overhead, nearly cuffing the cat in the head. “Credit morning wood.”

Peggy rolls her eyes again and pushes his legs over a little too roughly and sits down, his legs dropping back down into her lap near instantly. Her hands rest on his legs, just below his knee and she can feel the muscle in his calf twitch slightly when she runs her fingers over it.

“I think I had an idea last night, a really, just, genius idea, but fell asleep in the middle of it,” he says, his words bleeding into a second yawn.

“An idea about what?” she asks. The cat paws its way over to Peggy trying to get her attention but she ignores it.

“I don’t remember,” he frowns. “Nothing. Everything.” He laughs.

Peggy considers his leg under her hand and his body stretched out next to her.

“Please tell me you’re wearing pants under there.”

Stan waggles his eyebrows at her. “Wanna get under here and check?”

“Get up,” Peggy says as she stands, unceremoniously dumping his legs off her lap.

“Oh, I am up,” he says. She means to glare at him, but maybe it’s because it’s so early, maybe it’s a lot of things, but instead she winds up offering a coy, lopsided smile before bracing her hands on her hips and shaking her head.

“I’m going to make breakfast,” she announces a little too loudly.

“Thanks, honey,” he mocks, the cat now spread over his chest, purring loudly. “I like my eggs over-easy,” he calls after her.

“Make them yourself!” She can hear him mumbling, and she’s pretty sure he’s talking to the cat.

Another morning, Peggy wakes fully clothed besides Stan on her bed. There are still notes and production boards at the foot of the bed, and an uncapped pen has leaked blue ink all over her sheets.

“Oh shit,” she mutters into his back. “Wake up, we fell asleep.”

Waking Stan up is like waking a slumbering bear.

“This is not how I envisioned waking up in bed with you,” he mumbles.

“Stop imagining me naked and get out of bed.”

“Your mattress,” he says into the pillow, “is really firm.”

“Get up.” She shoves at him.

“Like sleeping on a cement block covered in a fancy sheet.”

“Then roll over and get up.”

He sighs when he stands, his knees popping, stretches his arms out and yawns dramatically.

“I’m gonna take a piss. And then I’m gonna make some coffee.”

“Buy some coffee,” Peggy shouts after him. She pulls the collar of her shirt up to her nose, sniffs, decides she definitely should change.

“What?” he shouts back.

“Buy coffee. We ran out yesterday.”

She can hear him mutter goddamnit and then the toilet flushes, the pipes whining in protest. He’s humming, she can hear it over the running faucet and his side of the bed is still warm and it’s all so painfully domestic she doesn’t know what to do with it or herself. The intimacy between them isn’t new. Hell, the domesticity isn’t either. It’s been there for a long time, whether in the office or on the phone calls that came after, that easy lived-in feeling has always marked their every interaction.

Nothing changes them. No, that’s not true. Plenty of things have changed them -- the hotel room at the Waldorf, all those pitches and all those campaigns, Ginsberg’s hiring, her departure -- but for the better. Better sounds like too much. Closer. Closer is the word. Even, and especially, all the things that should have pulled them apart -- they brought them closer.

Pushed closer and closer until here they are, alone together every night in her apartment.

Partners, she thinks, remembering Megan, remembering her own comment to Stan back at that bar in Midtown. They’re partners now.

“I’m gonna get the coffee!” she yells, semi-panicked. She tugs a (semi) clean shirt on and grabs her purse.

“What?” he swings the door open, his face wet. “I said I’d do it.”

“No, you didn’t,” she says. “I’ll be five minutes, don’t destroy the place.”

He raises his eyebrows and looks around. “As if that’s possible,” she can hear him say as she unlocks the front door.

“Get some danishes!” he shouts after her.

30.

So it makes sense they start sleeping together -- platonically, sexually, every potential meaning of the phrase -- a lot.

They start sleeping together. Again. A lot.

The first time, that’s actually the second time, but the first in a pattern that emerges:

Peggy initiates it and he goes for it immediately, like he’d been waiting for her to reopen the door to this. The Carol Burnett Show is on the television and the first draft of work for Gordon’s Gin is scattered on the coffee table in front of them. He goes down on her on the couch, first dragging her trousers down her legs before biting at the naked crook of her knee, grabbing her by the hips, hauling her against his mouth. Peggy doesn’t know why she initiates it. She thinks it’s because he’s always there. He’s always around and that makes this a thing impossible to resist. She also tells herself it’s different with Stan, different from Pete, from Duck, from Ted. He’s not her boss, he has no rank over her, and if honesty is a thing she can achieve with herself, then maybe she can admit that they haven’t just been about business for a long time now.

He makes her come with his mouth, and he pushes into her when she’s still coming down, and it’s a lot, too much, and she can hear herself whining his name, him chuckling in her ear, the sound bitten off fast into a low groan as she arches up under him, Peggy saying something that sounds a lot like more.

After:

“You left bite marks on my thighs.”

“Do you want me to apologize, or you want more?”

She shoves him away, a dumb smile on her face and he laughs.

Again: on her knees against her littered coffee table, bumping her chin on the edge of it when she comes, Stan groaning behind her.

Again: only once again at his apartment, no reason for them to venture outside of the Upper West except on business, the both of them stoned, her skin prickling under his hands, feeling like they’ve been fucking for hours, no sense of time, Stan telling her she’s hilarious when she’s high.

Again: they fuck, her on top, her body flush with his, his feet planted against the mattress fucking up into her, telling her to go slower. He likes to fuck her slow, likes her impatience, how given enough time and enough pressure, she inevitably cracks, says anything, begs him. This time, all she does is smirk and snap her hips faster. “Jesus, fuck, Peggy.” He tips his head back and sucks in a breath. “I’m gonna fucking come.”

“Good. I want you to,” and that makes him laugh breathless and groan at the same time, like everything about this and her is impossible. She watches his face when he comes, can feel him inside her, makes her bite her bottom lip.

“Talk to me,” Peggy says into the dark. “Like you do on the phone.”

The sheets stick to her legs and the mattress shifts as Stan moves beside her.

He chuckles, but the sound is appreciative. “I spend every waking hour with you. I’ve got nothing to tell.”

“That’s work. And I don’t want to argue about wigs or city comptrollers or taxis. Talk to me about something other than work.”

He sighs, but then he starts to talk. He talks about movies. He is always talking about movies. He’s always talking about stories that happened to other people or rooted faraway in the fictional, yet somehow still all too telling about him.

He mumbles beside her, his beard and his mouth occasionally brushing her shoulder, about the skeleton fight scene in Jason and the Argonauts and how he saw it for the first time on a date and after the movie ended that was all he had wanted to talk about but she didn’t and he saw the movie three times more in theaters but he never saw that girl again.

He can’t remember her name but he can remember that fight scene. He can remember exactly how it made him feel.

31.

These are the things Peggy has learned about Stan: he’s still obsessed with biker films and he made her see Easy Rider twice in theaters. He likes to hum Ennio Morricone scores while he works and the bulk of 1966 for her is marked by the theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as performed by a preoccupied Stan Rizzo. He thinks that The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was the first movie he ever saw in a theater and she thinks it’s strange that he can’t remember for certain. She told him that, for her, it was All About Eve, and that had made him smile, lines crinkling around his eyes as he said of course, as he said, no wonder you’re always gunning for that brass ring.

She’s learned that he’s a night owl, that morning finds him cranky and irrational, easy to anger, but his anger is quick, both to spark and then to settle and go at best forgiven, at worst forgotten. That he likes her mouth, her lips. When they fuck, he likes to pass his fingers over and into her mouth. How all she has to do is bite, lick, suck a little and his whole body seizes up.

That he talks too much. He talks too much in bed, not just dirty, but conversationally, telling her about an idea Ginsberg had about a chain restaurant who wanted their business while biting at her breast, about how some buddy of his got arrested at some protest down at Washington Square while he lazily fucks her. Peggy has a hard time keeping up her end of the dialogue when he does this, her body too responsive to his, her mouth made clumsy.

He has the movie poster for Blow-Up on the wall in his kitchen. He had called it the most depressing movie he had ever seen, but there it was, pasted on his wall (his aversion to photography was a nerve she loved to poke at with him, and it seemed the same held true for him, like a sore tooth he couldn’t stop worrying with his tongue).

That he’s well-read in a way that never ceases to surprise her (a fact he takes as an insult against not just his person but his brain, as he has told her multiple times). He’s always reading. There’s Stan on her couch reading back issues of the New Yorker Peggy forgot she had. Reading Bukowski poems, reading Philip K. Dick sci-fi novels. Reading Vonnegut and Vidal and Mailer and Updike.

“You have a decidedly male perspective when it comes to literature,” she told him one night. They were in bed, they were naked, and Peggy had picked up a book -- Roth this time, she remembers the cover -- he had left on the nightstand on her side of the bed.

Stan had looked down and she had followed his gaze until she rolled her eyes at his half-hard cock. “I have a decidedly male perspective on most things,” he had said, taking the book from her.

32.

That fall they take a meeting with Ray-Ban. Since going into business on their own, they’ve managed to attract some attention, including a brief write-up in the Daily News as arranged by Joan. Leading up to the meeting with Ray-Ban have been two other successes: first, Gordon’s Gin and then Kool-Aid.

So they take the meeting with Ray-Ban at the Hilton in Midtown. So Peggy and Stan make their pitch while Joan and Ken entertain.

And they sign them.

“I believe this calls for a celebration,” Ken says.

They celebrate. And like every other drunken outing, Peggy and Stan are the last ones standing at the bar.

“We left Ginzo all alone,” Peggy says, on the verge of giggling. “He’s alone in my apartment; we have to come home to that.”

“We could get a room.” She meets his eye; heat unfurling in her.

“We can’t afford a room,” she points out. “We can barely afford these drinks.”

“Is this a Dickensian romance, or what.”

“Romance?” she says. “There’s a word.”

She can’t read him for a beat. “Which word would you prefer.”

“I don’t know.” They maintain eye contact, and the only thing Peggy can think is that she’s in so much trouble here. “Finish your drink.”

He smirks, almost meanly. “You going to romance me?”

Peggy slides off her stool and presses her body against his side. “No. I’m going to fuck you,” she says against his ear.

He clutches the sweaty glass and downs its contents. His hand rests at the small of her back as he steers her first out of the bar and then into a cab.

The house is dark when they get back, no sign of Ginsberg. They stumble through her apartment, Stan’s blazer dropped in front of her door, her dress already pushed up over her hips.

“Not on the table,” she gasps into his mouth. “We work on that table.”

She rides him on the bed, brutal, the muscles straining in her thighs, their hips rubbing together. As she’s about to come, she leans her body down against his, his hand gripping the nape of her neck. She comes hard, tucks her face against his chest. He rolls them, fucking her through it. Not the way she fucked him, but slower, deeper, kissing her -- her mouth, her jaw, along her face -- and her arms are wrapped around him, tight.

After, he makes a move to roll from her and she grabs him by the shoulder.

“Don’t move,” she says just under his ear.

“My ass is cold,” he mumbles. She laughs against his neck, runs the heel of her foot against the curve of his ass and he hitches against her. He pulls back, grabs the blanket at the foot of the bed and drapes it over them, wrapping himself around her again.

They lay there for awhile, diagonally across the bed, their bare feet poking out from under the blanket. Her fingers drag through his hair and she can feel his breath hot against her neck, his own fingers running over, testing, the sharp curve of her bare hip.

“I keep waiting for this to be a bad idea,” Peggy says, “to prove to be this . . . really bad thing. But it’s not, it doesn’t.”

“You think I’m a bad idea.”

“No. Not at all. I think mixing work and . . . ”

“Romance?”

“You and that goddamn word.”

33.

Peggy finds that New York is full of possibility again. They’re succeeding with the agency. The weather has begun to turn. The anticipation of 1970 is carried inside of each of them.

Late that fall, heading into the winter months, New York feels like the city it had been when Peggy had first moved to Manhattan from Brooklyn -- new and exciting, something potentially waiting for her in each and every building she passed, down every street and avenue she did not travel.

There’s an article in the Times that Sunday about the uptick in time capsules being buried in anticipation of 1970 and the advent of a new decade.

“I don’t like the idea of returning to the people I’ve been.”

Stan looks up at her over the portion of the paper he had poached from her. “I’m sure they were all perfectly lovely ladies.” He smirks then. “I remember the you I met. You were so angry, wound so tight.” He laughs quietly at the memory.

“And you were such an asshole.”

“Well, yeah. Sure. But you knew exactly what to do with me.”

She raises her coffee to her mouth, pausing before taking a sip. “I did, didn’t I,” she says proudly.

34.

Stan tried to teach her poker one night.

He sat down across from her at the kitchen table. “Okay,” he said, “the game is Texas Hold ‘Em -- $100 bet minimum -- ”

“Shut up,” Peggy had giggled, interrupting him and bumping her teeth against the top of her bottle of beer with an audible clack, which only made her laugh harder.

“You are drunk,” he said, taking a long pull of his own beer. He pointed at her. “I am gonna take advantage of this. I am telling you now. I’m gonna clean you out, take you for all your money.”

Peggy had waved her arms around, indicating her apartment. “This is all my money,” she said mid-laughter before busting open in another gale.

He talked of small blinds and big blinds, the turn, the river, showdown. They both learned quickly that Peggy had no gambling sense whatsover.

“Can I bet the cat?” she asked after another disastrous hand for her. “You can have the cat, she likes you better anyway.”

“Everyone likes me better! And no, no felines in the pot. Give me that -- don’t look at the cards yet.” He batted at her hands as she said, “okay, okay, okay!”

She looked at her cards in her hand anyway and then looked back up at him. “You better not let me win.”

“Let you? Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t dream of it.”

He won easily, a pot ultimately comprised of bottle caps, paper clips, chewing gum and idle threats issued by Peggy. He got her naked in her bedroom, told her to get down on her hands and knees on the bed, and she did. She glanced at him over her shoulder as she settled on the mattress, her loud breathing drowned out by the creak of the springs, and he had paused, his hands still at his belt, his unbuttoned trousers.

“What are you doing?” she asked and Stan leaned over, his open mouth tripping hot down her bare spine.

“Taking my reward,” he mocked, and when he touched her she had moaned.

35.

Ray-Ban proves to be their biggest coup. Joan is proud to announce that by the end of the year, barring catastrophe or act of god, they should have enough set aside to rent actual office space.

“Can’t say I’ll miss this hovel.”

Joan spearheads the real estate hunt and as the holidays approach she finds what she deems to be the perfect spot: two blocks over from the Time-Life Building on Fifth Avenue.

Which brings them to now: packing up all that’s come to accumulate within Peggy’s brownstone and prepare to open the offices of HCOR.

Here is the thing: Peggy is excited. This is exactly what they had wanted when they stepped away from their previous jobs. This is the mark of success. But at the same time, she feels as though a chapter she had no idea she ever even wanted to open is about to close. She’s enjoyed the hard scrabble strangeness of working out of her home, of having them all here, of Stan --

So early one morning she does the obvious thing: she picks a fight.

It starts with Peggy saying something glib, about how she’ll need someone else to overpopulate her apartment now that they’re all vacating it, goes one further when she adds, “warm my bed, now that the winter months are here.”

Stan freezes at the stove, ignoring the eggs frying up. “What are you doing?” he asks, slowly.

Arguing is nothing new with Stan; it’s hardly a novelty. They do it daily, over things both big and small, but this, she knows, already feels different. It’s one thing to argue about a vision for how to best sell gin or whether Nixon really is going to bankrupt American values or their movie viewing choice on a Friday night. This time, though, is about them. About everything they have let go unsaid, about how he makes her feel flayed open sometimes, all the sensitive raw parts of her showing, how in this moment she fears what he might do with her like that.

“Well, we may not have had a pension or bonus system in place, but we figured out our own benefits scheme, didn’t we.” She says it acidly and Stan doesn’t react for a beat. He turns back to the eggs, taking them off the stove when he realizes they’ve burnt.

Stan shakes his head, his back to her as he scrapes the eggs off the pan and onto a plate. “Sometimes I think you learned all the wrong things.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He folds his arms over his chest and leans back against the kitchen counter, facing her. “How to treat people, how you think they think of you,” he says slowly and then he shakes his head again. “You paid attention at the wrong time to all the wrong lessons. You missed the punchline, and now you call a joke a proverb.”

Something sours inside of her. “Hit the right nerve and look who finally gets artistic.”

“You don’t need to be mean,” he says patiently, but she doesn’t think he’s only referring to what she said.

“And you don’t need to insult me.”

He takes a deep breath. “Whatever you have to say, just say it. I’m not doing this bullshit waltz with you.”

She could tell him a lot of things. She could tell him that she likes having him here -- in her house, in her business, with her. That he has managed to permeate every aspect of her life, and the most curious part is that she finds she not only doesn’t mind, but that she likes it. That she doesn’t want him to leave, that she’s terrified he will.

Instead, she says, “If you’re going to hurt me, just get it over with and do it now.”

He frowns, confused, on the cusp of saying something when her front door opens.

“Jesus, not even Thanksgiving and we’ve got the snow and the snowplows and the fucking snowmen out there,” Ginsberg says, shaking himself off like a dog on the threadbare rug in front of the door.

“Oh, breakfast!” he says, kicking his boots off.

They work the rest of the day in mutual silence. Ginsberg notices, clearly, and the chatter he fills her apartment with to compensate for the both of them is incessant and exhausting.

That evening she picks at a plate of cold lo mein at her kitchen table, an array of sunglasses scattered around her she knows she needs to box up to move soon, and Stan joins her. He cracks open a can of beer.

“Are we going to talk about earlier.”

Peggy looks up at him, her face drawn and unyielding.

“Okay,” he says, “Then I’m going to talk.” He clears his throat; she thinks it’d be entirely unlike him to have prepared a speech or invented lines for this conversation, but he strikes her as nervous, which makes her wary. “I don’t know what is going through that head of yours right now, but I’m pretty sure, whatever it is, it’s really fucking off-base.”

“Are you going to leave?”

He frowns. “Leave for where?”

She smiles small, shaking her head slightly.

“Are you mad at me?”

He smirks, looks at her. “You at me?”

She shakes her head again, but she says, “Sometimes you are . . . just,” and then she stops.

“Right back at you.”

She wants to ask him if he’s staying but she can’t bring herself to say it. Instead he breaks the silence, says, “I’m hungry,” and reaches over for her plate.

STAN.

This is a thing Stan has learned about Peggy: she has the single strangest collection of facts stored in her head. One night she told him about the old news reel theaters. That there was a sign in the lobby, “The thirst for news may now be quenched, so drink thy fill of Knowledge.” Stan likes her weird set of knowledge. There’s so much she doesn’t know or pay attention to, but when she does, she absorbs it all.

36.

“You feed the cat?” Stan asks. He scratches at the back of his neck and rummages in the fridge.

Peggy screws up her face, looking up from the typewriter at her kitchen table. She’s still in her robe and he’s in his undershirt and a pair of boxers, hair uncombed, socks on, the floor too cold. She watches him at the fridge, taking the milk out of the fridge even though she hasn’t answered him. She really can’t remember if she fed the damn cat. When she tells him that, he just looks at her like he knows her, like of course, why bother asking, and he likes her for that.

He’s talking to the cat, unscrewing the bottle of milk that’s probably been in the fridge too long and taking a sniff. She watches him, the way the muscles in his back shift and ripple under his shirt, how in theory this all ends by the end of the month when they officially move into the new office space. The pretext is removed: there will be no reason why he needs to spend the amount of time he spends with her in her apartment. Maybe that reason never existed though. It’s a Sunday morning and the only person here with her is Stan.

Can you imagine coming back from that? he had said back in July. He had meant the moon, he had been talking about astronauts, but sitting there in her kitchen, she finally understands what he meant.

“I love you. You know that, right?”

Her words just hang in the air and he freezes, the bottle of milk still in one hand, the other gripping the handle of the fridge door. He looks at her over his shoulder. “I do now,” he says, almost smug.

“I just thought I should say it. Because. I don’t know.”

“Because I fed your cat?”

After breakfast, Peggy brushes her teeth.

Stan stands in the doorway and when she’s done, when she has turned the faucet off, she looks at him. He steps into the small bathroom, puts a hand on her waist and she stumbles forward into him. He bumps his forehead against hers and says, “You know I love you too.”

“Yeah,” she says just as quietly. “I do.”

37.

At the end of this particular story, Peggy finds Don again. Peggy runs into Don, on Fifth Avenue, not far from her new office.

He’s there, on the sidewalk, a heavy wool coat, a hat, black gloves. He looks the same as when she last saw him, and it’s strange to her how that gives her a bit of peace. She wonders if Don has been in New York this entire time, just that far off her radar. It’s hard for her to imagine New York without Don in it.

“It’s been a long time,” he says as a greeting.

They sit down in a darkened restaurant surrounded by Christmas shoppers on their lunch break. Up close, she can see he does look different, if only a little. His face is softer, not as cruel, and there are more lines collected around his eyes.

“I saw the announcement,” he tells her. “Consider this my overdue congratulations.”

“You found out we seceded from the union in the newspaper?” It seems kinda cold when it’s laid out like that.

“That, and Roger a few months back.”

Their conversation feels stifled to her, like he’s a stranger. She thinks there are some people you can go months and years without seeing or speaking to and when you encounter them again it all picks up again, like no time as passed at all. With Don it feels like too much time has passed.

“Lately I find myself wondering about the past,” he says, cryptic and vague, though also like he knows exactly what she’s thinking. “You ever do that?” He lights his first cigarette since sitting down with her.

“Sure,” she says, non-committal. What she wants to say is of course she does.

She’s always going to imagine a great many different avenues she might have taken. She’ll wonder about Don’s office and if it ever could have been hers, and if it that had been a possibility, would the host of problems associated with that office have been worth it. Because there would be problems, just as many if not more than she has now. Because she might have wanted a great many things -- out of this job, out of her life, out of every person she has ever come in contact with -- but she has never wanted to be Don.

Their conversation ends when he asks her, “Are you happy?” She doesn’t think it’s a question she’s ever heard Don ask.

A small smile spreads across her face. “I am.”

“I know we didn’t . . . leave things well,” she says on the sidewalk. Wet flakes of snow have begun to fall. Don’s face betrays nothing. “But I really am grateful.”

He puts his hat on and looks down at her, extending his hand. “And I really am happy for you, Peggy.”

She takes his hand and rather than shake it, she gives it a firm squeeze and smiles.

38.

Peggy meets Ken over at the new office space in Midtown.

“Not quite Paris,” he says, the two of the them standing side-by-side in front of the window in what will be his office, surveying the view, “but I’m helping to take you somewhere, right?”

Peggy smiles up at him.

“I think I liked you better with the eyepatch,” she says.

“Funny, Cynthia said the same thing.”

HCOR. Holloway Cosgrove Olson & Rizzo.

The four of them stand back looking at the sign.

“Would you look at that,” Joan says.

“I still like HOCR better,” Peggy says.

“Of course you do,” Stan says.

“It’s alphabetical, it’s neat,” Ken says. “Well, minus Joan. But she put the most money in . . . ” Ken continues to ramble about Joan selling her shares of SC&P, about how alphabetical order is easier to remember, until he becomes static white noise beside her.

“Holloway, Cosgrove,” Peggy whispers to herself, a slight pause, “Olson and Rizzo.”

39.

Things Peggy has accumulated over the course of 1969: cheap gold ashtrays that crop up all over her apartment; detritus of Stan’s record collection bequeathed to her in the name of re-education and de-schoolmarm-ing herself (his phrase, not hers); the terrible habit of asking without a glance over her shoulder, “What d’you think?” thereby assuming that Stan is always there to answer; more debt than she had imagined herself saddled with by the age of 30; a mother who continues to attempt to set her up on blind dates with members of some sad Catholic men’s league; and a photograph taken that first morning they started working out of Peggy’s brownstone. In the photograph, Ginsberg is waving his arms (it was Dawn behind the camera, insisting they all be in it) like he’s trying to stop the photo from being taken. Joan is posed professionally next to the couch, her body turned at just the right angle, same for her chin, her smile cool and polished. Ken is leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees, beside Peggy on the couch. Peggy sits in the middle, her posture straight, but her head is slightly turned. She’s looking not at the camera, but to the right of her. Not quite where Stan is sitting, but as though he has caught her attention and she is turning to look. In the photograph, Stan sits to her right and he’s laughing, sprawled out against the couch, his arm slung behind her.

40.

On New Year’s Eve, Peggy and Stan sit together in her empty office. An empty bottle of champagne rests in the center of the room and she sits with Stan on the floor, the city illuminating the darkened room from outside the bare windows above their heads.

Peggy can remember a homily from when she was younger, fifteen or sixteen, and the priest had asked, “Do you know where you are going tomorrow?”

The priest had meant it in terms of eternal salvation, in terms of taking an inventory of one’s soul, but Peggy had been fifteen, she was sixteen, and she had taken him literally. It became a prayer all its own each night, a call and response: where will I go tomorrow?

Peggy always thought that it was important to have an answer to that question. For a long time it was easy to have an answer, and then it wasn’t. Then it was a warm summer night and she was asking Stan where he was going tomorrow. She was asking him because if she knew where he was going then maybe she’d know where she was going too. Not because she needed to be led, but because maybe she wanted to be where he was.

Where Stan is would be a good place to go tomorrow.

The city waits at their backs. Last year, she thinks, feels very far away.

fin.
1. | 2.

fic: in event of moon disaster (mad men) (2/3)

falseeeyelashes — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 20:12:53 GMT

14.

“You’re coming tonight,” Joyce had said that morning. “I’m not above the use of brute force.”

Peggy sighs, pushes her hair out of her face and considers the dress.

It’s late that spring and the office has gone quiet. Joyce had said the party was to start at nine; it’s a little after eight-thirty now. Peggy knew even when she had agreed to go that she wasn’t going to arrive at the party at nine.

“This isn’t another set-up, is it?” Peggy had asked Joyce, and then, as though the two were somehow connected, said, “if it rains, I’m not coming.”

“No,” Joyce replied, faux-solemnly, or perhaps, earnestly and truly sorry -- her tone was difficult to parse over the phone, always that dry monotone implying casual disinterest. “I have given up on enabling your romantic prospects, or lack thereof. And it’s not going to rain.”

It hasn’t rained, which is why Peggy supposes she is still here, in her office after hours, clad in only her underwear and hosiery, pulling a fresh dress off the hanger when her door swings open.

Stan freezes in the doorway, staring at her, eyebrows raised. She stares back.

“What are you doing?”

“No one was out there!” He gestures wildly. “Your secretary wasn’t out there!”

“And you thought a closed door meant ‘please, open me,’ as opposed to, I don’t know, knock?”

Stan doesn’t reply. Instead he has that stupid slack-jawed look to him, and it’s sort of flattering. It’s like when she first started working with him, she thinks. Back at the Waldorf, he wore that same expression.

“Jesus. Shut the door!” she finally spits out. He does, though he remains on her side of it.

“I meant with you outside.” She braces her hands on her bare hips, and if it’s possible, his eyes glaze over that much more.

He ignores her, blatantly raking over her with his gaze. “This what goes on behind closed doors in your office, huh? I gotta stop by more often.”

Peggy rolls her eyes, reaching for her dress. “I think you stop by enough.” She pulls it over her head then drags it down her body. “I have to go . . . ” she grumbles, “to a party, and I’ve been lectured plenty in the past about my . . . wardrobe choices, so. I figured. I would change first.” The dress hangs on her, gaping open in the back.

“Right,” he says, but his voice has dropped to that low grumble he does. She doesn’t think he’s heard a word she said. He’s still looking at her in a way that makes something hot and needy expand inside of her, and she thinks she shouldn’t want that, that she doesn’t have time for that, not tonight, not ever.

So she says the dumbest thing she can possibly say in this scenario:

“If you’re going to stand there and gawk, you can at least zip me up.”

It is the single worst thing she could have said, and a part of her knows that. The other part of her, that dangerous part, is curious. Not if he will do it, but what it’ll feel like. What it would feel like to have his hands on her, what it would feel like to want him again, the same way she wanted him at the start of this year. She thinks that’s a thing that can be repeated; she’s felt small flashes, tugs of it, since then. She thinks that’s how it works: you let a man touch you once and you’ll continue to be drawn to him after, if only out of curiosity to see if lightning really can strike twice.

He reads the dare in her and his mouth twists. It really is the Waldorf all over again, she thinks. Another game of sexualized chicken, but the stakes are different this time.

His hand is hot on her hip and he’s slow with the zipper along the back of her dress. His knuckles brush against her spine, her exposed skin, as he goes, their breathing loud and low, and it’s the most stupidly erotic thing to happen to her in recent memory.

He pulls the zipper all the way up but neither of them moves. They just stand there, his hand still on her hip, the tips of his fingers barely brushing the nape of her neck, the only sound in the quiet office the shared rasp of their breath.

“Stan.” It’s all she says. She says his name, and she doesn’t know if she intended to say more than that, if there’s freight hidden in that even from herself, but his name is quiet when she says it, sticking in her mouth.

“Peggy.”

He slowly pulls her hips back to him, her ass pressed flush against him. He’s hard, and that makes her want to squirm, makes her want a lot of things. He presses his mouth, open and wet, to the back of her neck, and she bites the inside of her cheek after sucking in a harsh breath. She wraps her hand around his wrist when she can feel blunt teeth at her neck, heat tripping electric down her spine, and drags his hand from her hip down between her legs, under her dress. Stan’s breath stutters against her skin.

His fingers cup her and then press against her. Peggy fights the urge to make a sound, pushes her body back against his, which seems to embolden him: his fingers press firmer against her and start to rub. He’s got to be able to feel how wet she is, his hand moving roughly now, and just thinking that makes her flush. His other hand drags up her body, covering her breast and then up to the column of her throat, her pulse thumping in her ears. She can picture it perfectly, him bending her over the desk and fucking her; she gasps, and he grinds against her, his breathing loud against the back of her neck, each threatening to tip forward into a groan. Her own fingers squeeze too tight around his wrist, and when she touches his thigh with her other hand he grunts, pushing against her that much harder, like he’s actually trying to fuck her with his pants on, his mouth sucking a bruise at the base of her neck. It’s then that she realizes that she’s panting, making these high, tight noises, her head tipped back against his shoulder, mouth parted open, her hips rolling back against him and then into his hand. She needs to come, she needs him to make her come, she --

There’s a knock at the door, and they both freeze.

“Peggy?” they hear Joyce call.

“Shit,” Peggy whispers, and then louder, “just a minute!”

She pushes Stan away from her, continuing to mutter the word shit under her breath. “I have to go,” she says hurriedly, running a hand through her hair and then another over her dress, ignoring the fact she seems to ache at every pulse point on her body. “Do I look . . . ”

“Presentable?” His voice is too low, too raspy, and she thinks about pushing him down into her desk chair, straddling his lap, and just ending this -- whatever the last few years have been leading up to, whatever just happened in her office -- right here.

To her credit, Stan seems to be having just as much difficulty dealing with this as she is. He fidgets, like he’s considering doing exactly what she’s thinking (or like he’s got a raging hard-on no amount of deep breathing is going to cure; it really is the Waldorf all over again).

“Okay, I’m gonna go,” he says suddenly, stepping to the door.

“She’ll see you!” Peggy hisses, snapping her compact shut and throwing it into her purse. She looks good enough.

“She’ll assume we’re working!” he hisses back, throwing the door open.

“Stanley,” Joyce says, her arms folded over her chest. Stan salutes her mockingly, and then he’s gone. Joyce continues to stand in the door.

“I’m coming,” Peggy says.

Joyce cocks her head. “And here I had hoped you already had.”

“You’re not funny,” Peggy says, shutting her office door behind her.

“I see why you weren’t into any of my prospective suitors now.”

The elevator dings.

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.”

15.

Peggy goes to the party with Joyce. She drinks too much and she gives her phone number to a man with glasses who tells her he reviews movies for a living. When she asks him what his favorite movie is he says Citizen Kane with too much gravitas, as though he is proud of his selection. Peggy regrets giving him her phone number but she doesn’t ask for it back.

The entire cab ride home she scrambles the numbers in Stan’s address until she convinces herself that she has remembered it wrong. She has remembered his address wrong, she has remembered the encounter earlier wrong. She’s remembered him wrong, too. She can’t recall which number goes where, and by extension, where he goes. In this city, in this situation, inside of her. She tells herself it would be pointless to try each possible combination. That there’s not enough time for that.

Instead she closes her eyes and leans her head back against the seat, remembers leaning her head back against him and doesn’t think she’s wrong about that. Stan’s favorite film is not Citizen Kane, but The Wild Angels.

She should have asked the man with the glasses what he thought about that.

The next morning Stan gets to the office before she does. He doesn’t say a word and neither does she and when it starts to rain that afternoon Peggy calls it one day late.

16.

Lou Avery is a problem.

Stan likes to tell Peggy that anyone occupying that office (Don’s) and that chair (Don’s) behind that desk (Don’s) would be considered a problem by her. He’s probably right, and he probably doesn’t need to hear that.

The pitch meeting with Palmolive does not go well. Stan’s flashes her that “shoot me in the face and pour cheap whiskey on my corpse” look of his (he only ever used that line once, accompanying the same familiar expression he’s wearing now, but the line stuck for her). She grimaces, mouths, “S.O.S.,” at him and then takes a seat.

Lou clears his throat, shifts in his chair. “Now, see, I agree: this probably wasn’t the greatest fit for your product and for your image. But sitting here got me to thinking, and all I ask is that you hear me out.” Lou clears his throat again and leans forward; Peggy casts a quick glance at Stan and finds her own confused curiosity mirrored back.

Peggy listens to Lou talk, the first line of his pitch familiar in a way she can’t place, but by the second line she knows. Stan gave the exact same pitch in yesterday’s meeting and Lou rejected it outright, deeming it “inappropriate,” or, no, “outlandish” had been his word. She listens and she tries to hide her surprise. Beside her, Stan sits very still; she watches him out of the corner of her eye.

The men from Palmolive laugh when Stan would have wanted them to laugh, and at the end, they all shake hands, Ken and Lou stepping out of the conference room with them, leaving Peggy and Stan alone.

“You didn’t say anything,” she says to him.

“Of course I didn’t! What? I was going to interrupt him mid-pitch?”

Peggy stands. “I’m gonna talk to him.”

“No you’re not,” Stan says dismissively.

“Yes. I am.”

“No, you’re not. I don’t need you riding out, tilting windmills for me, Quixote.”

Peggy scowls. She leaves Stan to the empty conference room. She talks to Lou anyway.

“Well. That went well.” It’s the first thing Lou says when she closes the door to his office, his obliviousness seemingly genuine.

“You know that was Stan’s idea, right? You rejected it.”

Lou’s expression doesn’t falter. “The clients love it.”

“The clients think it’s yours.”

“The important thing is that the client goes home happy. Mine, yours, ours, his, hers: ownership really that big of a sticking point for you?”

“You don’t care because you got the credit.”

Lou considers Peggy from behind his desk. “Peggy,” he says, a note of condescension she thinks comes easy when you’re the one behind not in front of a desk like that. “This is no longer Don Draper’s office. I don’t know the specifics of how business was conducted here in the past, but I do know you were afforded certain liberties. That ends now.”

There’s an ugly implication in what he’s said and Peggy thinks fishbowls and Los Angeles and St. Joseph’s, she thinks there’s a truth to be found in those who say history is circular -- not so much that the events are bound to repeat themselves, but rather you can’t help but run into the past.

“Will that be all?” Lou asks. Peggy shuts the door.

17.

“I didn’t even like the work,” Stan says. He takes a drag off his cigarette and Peggy wrinkles her nose at him. She drops down in Ginsberg’s empty chair; their muted reflections stare back in the darkened window.

“You did though,” she says. “It made you laugh. It made me laugh.”

He chuckles to himself, and then he points at her with his cigarette. “You shouldn’t have talked to Lou though. He’s gonna have such a hard-on for us, gunning for our assured destruction.”

“No, he’s not. Not unless you give him the blueprints for it.”

“Lazy son of a bitch,” Stan mumbles around his cigarette, laughing softly.

Peggy reaches over and snags the cigarette hanging from his mouth. “Are you happy here?” she asks, the question quiet but sudden.

He glances sidelong at her. “It has its moments,” he says, looking at her mouth, his cigarette.

“I don’t think I’m happy here.” It’s strange saying the words out loud, putting voice to the thought that’s been biting at her for what feels like weeks now.

Stan looks up at her with resolve in his eyes, his hands clasped behind his head as he leans back in his chair.

“Hey, you remember what we talked about? New Year’s Eve?”

“Which part?” she hedges.

He smirks, and then he ignores her. “My suggestion? You open up shop.”

She considers him, inhales, and replaces the cigarette in his mouth, her fingers briefly brushing his lips.

“Would you come with me?” The question is small and nervous, and it’s her tone that catches them both by surprise, not what she said.

Stan looks at her, something bright and excited to him. “Of course,” he says. “Can you even imagine? It’d be this all the damn time.”

“You’re serious.”

“I was then and I am now.” A pause stretches between them, but it’s like they’re still communicating on the same wavelength, envisioning a similar shared future, imaginary tin cans strung between them. “I meant what I said to Don, about building one desk into an agency. I want that -- now more than ever. And you want that too. I can see it.”

“I’ve worked so hard to get here,” she says, still quiet.

“You have. But, the writing's on the wall: we’re not going any higher. Not under this regime. Get Pol Pot out as Creative Director, and maybe. But it’s . . . it’s so static here, man. You think we’re ever gonna get the kind of work we wanna be doing here?” He’s not wrong, she thinks.

“Olson and Rizzo,” she says dramatically, her hands spread like she’s showcasing a sign.

“Sounds like a semi-successful detective agency,” he says around his cigarette.

She starts to laugh. “Advertising by day . . . ”

“ . . . murder by night.” Her laugh jumps an octave and fills the room.

“I think we’d be more than semi-successful,” she says after a beat.

“As detectives?” he teases.

“As anything,” she says, and then realizes how that sounds. She looks up to find him gazing at her. There’s too much gentleness and too much of something else in how he looks at her. He smiles and her own grin reflects his.

“Though,” he says, passing her the mostly burnt-down cigarette, “we’re gonna need one more.”

“Hmm? One more what?”

“Two things,” he says, like he’s already given this a lot of thought and he was just waiting for the right moment to showcase his findings. “One: the name. O&R? R&O? Either we’re ripping Y&R or we sound like a defunct railroad.”

She snorts. “Okay. And two?”

“Two: neither of us are accounts men.”

She doesn’t argue with that. She grounds the cigarette butt out in the ashtray. “Who do you have in mind?” she asks, because he very clearly does have someone in mind. “Don’t say Pete.”

“Not Pete. Kenny. That ol’ sawbones Ken Cosgrove.”

“He doesn’t look like a pirate anymore, his eye’s fine,” she says, but she’s smiling. “We used to talk about doing something like this,” she says. It’s not entirely the truth, but Stan doesn’t know that.

“Then it’s destiny,” he says, grand and hilarious for it.

“We’re gonna have to bring Ginzo over,” he says. His tone has returned to something more serious, and he’s still looking at her like he’d follow her anywhere. It makes her not only feel powerful, but something else, too. Something she won’t name.

“Okay,” she says.

“I think he’s become my surrogate son now,” he says and she laughs. He lights another cigarette and he passes it to her.

18.

1969 is the year Peggy celebrates her thirtieth birthday.

She goes to her mother’s and her mother makes her a cake and Anita bought her a scarf they both know Peggy will never wear and at the end of the evening, Peggy splurges on a cab rather than taking the train, justifying the expense simply in her head: “It’s my birthday.”

During the ride back into Manhattan, Peggy thinks she hasn’t really gone anywhere. In that moment, on her birthday, it feels to her the only distance she has traveled is the one between her mother’s place in Bay Ridge and the brownstone she bought with Abe. Last year it had felt like so much, that she had managed to travel so far and there was still so much road left in front of her. This year all she feels is static, like Stan said, a television left on the same channel for too long, tuned to nothing.

“I have to work in the morning, Ma,” Peggy had said. She dried her hands on a faded dishtowel, left the plates to drip next to the sink, ignored Anita when she offered more cake.

The cab descends into the Battery Tunnel as they cross the East River.

“You have to work, you have to work, of course you have to work,” she had said, waving her off. “Always the work with you.”

19.

“Tell me what you’re going to do tomorrow,” Peggy says into the phone. Stan laughs to himself on the other end.

“Why you wanna hear what I got planned?” His voice carries lazy over the line. “You looking to ask me out? Finally make an honest man of me?”

“I’m not a miracle worker,” she says, deadpan, and he laughs again. Silence pulls between the both of them and Peggy winds the cord around her finger. The first of June brought rain this year, and now as midnight approaches the skies have cleared but the humidity remains, steam rising up off the street below. Peggy thinks that means it’s going to be a hot summer. She had told Stan that earlier in the call and he had doubted her. “It’s weather, not fortune telling,” he had said, no prophecies to be divined from a rainstorm in June.

They would talk about something as flat and impersonal as the weather rather than acknowledge that despite the fact they now spend their entire days together in the office, their nightly phone calls have continued. She thinks if she was ever to bring it up, his response would be similar: no prophecies to be divined from a rainstorm in June, a phone call after dark. She winds the cord tighter around her finger.

“Sometimes I can’t imagine the next step. Sometimes I find that impossible.”

Something must carry in her voice, a tonal shift to the conversation, because he doesn’t tease her. He doesn’t say anything at first. He clears his throat and she can hear him shifting. She imagines him in bed; she tells herself it’s innocent when it’s not.

“You’re allowed to stand still,” he finally says, playing into the metaphor she hadn’t entirely intended to set up for him. “You don’t have to be on the move all the time.”

“I do. I need that.” The abrupt vehemence of it almost surprises her. What she wants to tell him is that she feels like she has been standing still since last year. Since Ted and Don decided to merge, since Ted decided first he wanted her and then he could leave her, since Lou Avery took over that office. She hasn’t been moving in a long, long time.

“What do you want?” he asks, a low rumble of a question. “You figure that out, and you go from there.”

“Yeah,” she whispers, suddenly exhausted. She doesn’t fill in the rest. That she wants everything. That she’s tired. That it’s tiring wanting everything.

“I’m gonna go to work tomorrow,” Stan says, that same low, intimate tone. “And so are you. And depending on how you play the next ten minutes of this conversation, I might just bring you a cup of coffee. We have a status meeting . . . some time before lunch.”

“10:30,” she interrupts.

“Right, but first I’ll waste about an hour checking in with the Ginz and the state of his strange, strange little world. I’m gonna spend the rest of the day learning too much about lipstick, probably incur the wrath of Old Man Lou on Maytag again. I’ll have too many beers, smoke too much. I’ll talk to you. And I will sleep. That’s what I’m doing tomorrow, weather and lack of sudden spontaneity permitting.”

She grins and doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t either. They don’t always need to talk. She’s not sure when she realized that about him. That silence was okay. That silence was a thing that could be shared. That sometimes saying nothing said more than you could possibly shape with words. She can hear him breathing and he can hear her, and that’s enough.

“I think we should do it,” she says into the phone.

Stan pauses. “Do what?” Two words, but it’s enough or she knows him enough to read more than hesitation there. She ignores it.

“The agency.” She presses her lips together. “Our own agency. I think we should do it. We should open our own shop.”

He laughs softly. “I say? You sleep on it. And we’ll revisit this again tomorrow. After the ten o’clock meeting.”

“10:30,” she reminds.

“10:30,” he repeats.

GINSBERG.

“You guys want me to come?” Ginsberg gestures to himself. “I mean, of course you do. I’m a goddamn talent.”

Peggy rolls her eyes and there’s not a hint of surprise to Stan. When they had laid out their plan a few minutes ago, all Ginsberg could think of were those heist movies, like The Italian Job or something, the part of the movie where the heroes (or, well, villains, if you’re on the side of the law and not entertaining storytelling) try to assemble a crack team against all odds.

But if he’s being honest, with himself and with these two, he’s gotta admit he digs the idea. He likes the idea of getting away from the Cutlers and the Sterlings of the world, falling in with these two and whatever miniature empire they think they’re gonna create. It’s a slight improvement.

Peggy keeps watching the door while Stan’s sprawled lazy in his chair, slowly draining a semi-decent cup of coffee. They’re in a diner over on West 38th, and Ginsberg had fought them tooth and nail the entire walk over for the honest explanation as to why they were going over ten blocks out of their way for a mid-afternoon coffee break, a thing, he pointed out, they had never done in their shared professional lives together, not once, not ever.

Ginsberg cocks his head towards Peggy, still watching the door. “What’s this? Your Night of Long Knives or something? Looking for spies, waiting for the brass to come through the door, jumpstart this coup.”

Peggy looks blankly at him while Stan shakes his head, clearly not interested in getting involved.

“1934,” Ginsberg says, “the Röhm-Putsch, the purge of Nazi Germany -- you know what? Nevermind. Read a book.”

“We’re not long-knifing anyone,” Peggy says. Stan raises his eyebrows, shaking his head again while he drinks the coffee he had (falsely, if only based on his facial expression following each sip is one of complacency and not newly reached nirvana) claimed was the best in the city and that was why they had to come here on what had to be the second hottest day of the summer (in Ginsberg’s opinion, the hottest day hadn’t happened yet, the worst is always waiting around the corner). Ginsberg had sweat through his shirt on the walk over, and if he had, so had Stan, and they still got another few hours left to clock in at the loony bin and ten-plus blocks left to walk back, and he’s still gotta share an office with surprise-escape-plan-mastermind Stan Rizzo, and he can only begin to imagine the stench that will emanate from their shared office and sweat-stained shirts, and it’s disgusting, he’s disgusted already.

“What?” Peggy asks Stan. “We’re not.”

“ . . . but we may be bayoneting.”

“You’re not funny.”

“I am funny. And you really should read a book.”

Peggy turns back to Ginsberg. When she talks about this new, nascent agency, she makes it sound exciting. It almost sounds like some delirious fresh start, a step into the coming decade, free of the shackles of Dow Chemical or Jim Cutler’s glasses or Bob Bensons lurking around the corner (Bob Benson is a lurker, Ginsberg’s been saying that since day one). It’s not hard to believe something this fanciful could’ve sprung from the drug-addled brain of Stan or Peggy’s starry-eyes -- it’s just kinda crazy how much thought and planning has clearly already gone into it. The tunnel out of the prison is already being dug and they want him to join them on the crawl to freedom! (he’s gonna have to remember that metaphor; he likes that one, it’s visceral).

“You know, I was wrong,” Ginsberg says after a beat. “We’re not going the German route of history here -- it’s the Russian.” He says Russian a little too loudly and the couple at the table next to them glances at them warily. Ginsberg doesn’t notice or he doesn’t care, but both Peggy and Stan do, offering small wan smiles in their direction. “This is the siege on the Winter Palace! The start of a new order!”

“Oh my god,” Stan mutters.

“You wanted him,” Peggy says, like Stan brought a pet dog home and he’s got no grounds to complain when it pisses on the rug (Ginsberg doesn’t care for that metaphor so much).

Ginsberg places his hand on Stan’s upper arm. “That is really very touching, and I thank you for it.”

And then he goes back to his oral recitation about the Winter Palace in 1917 and what he believes was called “the greatest hangover in history” thanks to the contents of a massive wine cellar discovered by the toppling army, and if he knows these two at all he’s assuming they’re gonna try and rival that historically epic hangover track record.

“Speaking of wine,” Peggy says, “you think you can bring Manischewitz with you?”

“I thought we were having a moment here, and you wanna talk business? I was having a moment!”

20.

“Are you busy?”

Joan looks up from her desk. “No more than usual.”

“I wanna run something by you,” Peggy says, stepping into her office and shutting the door.

Joan leans back in her chair and lights a cigarette. “Try me.”

It had been Peggy’s idea, not Stan’s, to ask Joan to join them. “Trying to even out the playing field?” Stan had teased. “Boy girl, girl boy.”

Now, in Joan’s office, Joan levels Peggy with a stare Peggy is far too familiar with. “Peggy. I’m a partner here.”

“I know that.”

“I just can’t leave.”

Peggy thumbs ash off the end of the cigarette she had bummed from Joan into the small gold ashtray on her desk. “But you could. They buy you out, and you’re free to do whatever you want.” Peggy pauses, trying to read Joan’s face. “You -- we could have more than this.” She gestures at Joan’s office, hopes she’s remembering all the same details that are on Peggy’s mind.

She must be, because Joan says, “I got us Avon.”

“You did.”

“And don’t for a second think a company like that will abdicate from here for some boutique shop started by a pair of unmarried women and some men they’ve never heard of before.”

Peggy frowns. “They’d like us more if we were married?”

“Not my point, Peggy.”

Peggy nods. “I know. But my point? We’re both better than this. There are better things out there. I want to go find them, and I want you to come. I think you’d be invaluable.”

Joan exhales a cloud of smoke. “Well isn’t that a thing to say to a girl.”

21.

Peggy sits on the floor of her apartment, directly in front of the television. Her legs are crossed, the phone’s receiver in between them.

“Are you still watching this?” she asks, unable to hide that little bit of awe.

“Of course I’m still watching this,” Stan says. “I’m alive and an American, I’m pretty sure the entire country is still watching.”

Peggy snorts, her eyes still glued to the screen. A man on the moon. The surreal quality of it all has yet to fade for her. They all had watched earlier in the office, crowded around Harry Crane’s desk and television set, and then took up residence in an already overcrowded bar on West 49th.

“If you could, would you go?” she asks.

“That your idea of a solid vacation plan?”

A pause stretches as they both watch their separate televisions. “I’m serious,” she finally says.

“No,” he says, slightly distracted. “I don’t think I’d be that brave.”

“You wouldn’t want to see that?”

“Of course I’d want to see that.” She can picture him gesturing at his TV set, his eyes wide in that expression that doubles for both are you crazy and am I crazy. “But then you’d have to come back. You can’t live on the moon,” he says, like maybe he thought that she thought you could. “Can you even imagine trying to come back from that? Everything -- everything would always pale next to that.”

He says it passionately, like it would be the worst thing to happen to a human being and if she was to ask, he would say he has never felt worse for two people than Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (Buzz especially, on account of that name and on account of being the second not the first man to step foot on the moon).

“One could even say,” he says, and she can hear the laugh buried in his voice, “everything would be eclipsed.”

“Oh my god,” she groans.

“Give me a few minutes and I’ll definitely have a few more moon puns for you.”

“No one would miss if you decided to live on the moon.”

He laughs at her faux-insult. “Are you kidding? So many people would miss me.”

“I mean real people. People other than your friendly neighborhood pot dealer.”

“He’d hold . . . a fucking vigil for me.” Peggy abandons her spot on the carpet in front of the TV for a more comfortable perch on the couch. She draws her knees to her chest, her chin balanced on top. “You’d miss me,” he says, his voice low in her ear, sounding as though he is both farther away than any distance a street in Manhattan could yield from her and close, too close. “You’d miss me so much.”

“If I did -- if!” she stresses when he makes a noise that sounds a lot like triumph, “I’d drive down to NASA -- ”

“You’d drive to NASA?” he repeats, laughing. “In what? Your moon buggy?”

“I’d go to mission control!” she says over his laughter. “And you could talk to me over your radio. Tell me all about your lunar adventures.”

“From inside my moon rock igloo.”

“That’s not a thing.”

“Neither is moon-dwelling. We’re inventing as we go here.”

He might be onto something, she thinks, as her attention drifts back to the television screen.

22.

By the end of the month, some real things are happening. Things like Joan says yes. Ken says yes. Ginsberg agrees to come onboard.

They’re at Stan’s apartment. They’re sitting on the floor behind his coffee table, the couch at their backs, his kitchen table cluttered with their earlier work -- so many lists, all she seems to do anymore is make lists: potential clients, potential expenditures, cost-benefit analysis as funneled through Joan’s sharp eye.

The two had been on the phone with Ken. When they hang up, Peggy is grinning, wide. So is Stan. The moment turns or the moment has already been there, always been there, they just have refused to recognize it as such. Their shoulders are brushing, their faces close, and they both are watching the other. His eyes drift down to her mouth and then back up again and she finds herself doing the same.

“So we’re really doing this,” she says softly.

“Yeah we’re really doing this,” he says just as quietly, but his voice is low, makes something ache within her.

 So she does the inevitable, so some histories are circular: she kisses him. There’s nothing light or hesitant about it this time, more of a collision than anything else, her mouth crashing into his, their noses bumping, everything about it awkward and off. But he reaches for her, cups her jaw, and the kiss goes open and filthy.

Peggy pitches forward into Stan’s lap as they kiss noisy and frantic, like every aborted attempt in the past has done nothing to lessen this, but rather intensify it. His fingers are thick inside of her as she pushes against him, pulls at his belt, pushes him back against the couch; he jerks his wrist and his fingers push harder, deeper, into her, making her shudder, stammer out a sound that isn’t a word. Her hands are clumsy as she tries to pull his pants open while his fingers twist and she clenches hard around them on a high whine, her head dropped forward; he groans against her neck, fingers working faster. She pulls her dress over her head, he drags the straps of her bra down one-handed until she’s naked in his lap and he can’t stop touching her, she can’t stop touching him, shoving his shirt off his shoulders, her bare chest pressed against his.

Stan’s patience snaps at that point. He mumbles something down at the dip of her throat, something that sounds a lot like gonna fuck you, and even that -- his voice, those words (those stupid words), the combination of his voice and those words -- is enough to make her hips buck against him, a quiet moan caught in the back of her throat.

He lays her out naked on the carpet and he fucks her. That burn of flesh against flesh as he pushes inside of her is almost too much at first and her heel skids down the back of his thigh.

The carpet scratches against her back, must be hard on his knees, but the only he’s saying is the occasional yes murmured into her skin. He’s rough with her, and she likes that, likes the way his fingers bite into the flesh at her hips, etc. He doesn’t treat her like anything weaker than himself, anything he could break. Their teeth knock together when they kiss; she bites at his bottom lip, and he snarls at first and then he laughs. She can’t stop rocking her hips into his, urging him on, making these stupid breathless babbling sounds, his name twisted into something polysyllabic and crude. She arches up under him, almost begging please, and when she comes, it catches her by surprise.

After:

She looks up from her vantage point on the floor and the lamp looming above her, that halo of light, the bright bulb. She stares at it as she steadies her breath, her thighs wet from him.

“Oh god,” Stan groans, rolling off of her, his shoulder colliding with the leg of the coffee table, his hair messy from her hands.

“Shit,” Peggy says, still naked, still flat on her back. And then she starts to laugh.

23.

They quit their jobs that August. That August is heavy and hot, merciless, and if Peggy was a better Catholic, she might even call it punishing.

Ted calls her office on her last day. They’ve done a decent job of dodging each other the rare times he’s visited the office in the last six months. He never calls her directly, like he worries that even her voice would result in another lapse in marital fidelity. She supposes that should be flattering, and maybe a year ago it would have been. Now all it inspires is another bout of weary disdain.

“I imagine you’ve heard,” she says, and for a moment she sounds like the sort of woman free of all past attachments. “The transcontinental grapevine, as conducted by Harry Crane.”

 Ted doesn’t laugh. “Peggy,” and he doesn’t so much as say but rather sighs her name. “Have you really thought this through? I mean, really, really thought about this?”

“Of course I have.” It’s funny, she thinks, how quickly she can get mad. Her anger still feels as new as it did back in November, but now she finds it’s tempered by something else. She’s angry, but she’s not invested. She still feels insulted, but she’s tired of nursing that hurt. She rustles though an old file on her desk purposefully, trying to distract herself. She can picture Ted’s face in her mind, can see clearly the way he’d stand in front of her desk, one hand raised as he tries to make a point, like a professor speaking behind a lectern. Like a man who thinks he already knows everything and there’s still so much left for her to learn. She knows now that he’s wrong: when it comes to her, he doesn’t know a goddamn thing.

“It’s . . . I would hate to see you go. I’d hate to see you risk so much for so little. I’ve been there before, and it is a hard, hard road. And there’s so much that we could still do for you here, with the firm. So much I -- ”

“Don’t,” she bites off. “Do not say another word.” She scrubs at her face quickly, grateful this conversation is happening over the phone rather than face-to-face. “I am so tired of men like you promising to do things for me.”

“Peggy,” that same sigh again. “I just think -- ”

“I don’t care what you think, Ted.” Her voice is tight but calm, and she finds the words are true.

“All right then,” he concedes.

“All right,” she repeats.

A pause stretches, punctuated by yet another sigh from Ted. “Peggy. I didn’t want to end things the way we did, when I left, and I don’t want to end them like this either.”

“But you wanted to end it, isn’t that the point.”

He sighs, again. At this point, it’s almost comical: he’s one belabored sigh away from a feigned asthma attack. “I didn’t want to. I had to.”

“I’m not getting into an argument about semantics with you,” she snaps.

He chuckles. “No. We won’t do that.” He pauses. “We never did argue much, did we.”

“We didn’t do a lot of things.”

“Why didn’t we ever argue?”

“I don’t know,” she says, but she does. Arguing would’ve broken the spell, arguing would have made the both of them real and fallible. They only time they ever fought brought him first into her bed and then out the door, out of New York.

“What if we could do it right. What if I came back.”

Peggy’s speechless for a beat. “You are unbelievable,” she says. It surprises her, that animal outrage burning in her veins is absent from her voice.

“Excuse me?”

“You find out I’m moving on, that I’m making my life happen, I’m -- what were your words? ‘Flourishing and succeeding in your absence?’ And you pull this?” She’s yelling now. She rubs at her temples, takes a deep breath, and in her head, she dares him to sigh again, like it must be so goddamn hard being him. “You’re just like the rest of them,” she snarls. “You don’t just want to have it all, you think you deserve it. That you’re entitled to it. That I’ll take you back after . . . after all that. That I ever even had you.” Her voice has dropped, quiet now, belying more hurt than she’d ever want him to hear.

“Peggy -- ”

“I’m done,” she interrupts him. She takes another deep breath. She takes a look around her office and wonders if there will come a time when she will miss it. “I deserve it all too, you know,” she says, her voice quiet but sure. “Not just a piece of something, or someone. But the whole thing. I deserve that.”

Ted doesn’t respond.

“I’m going to go now,” she says.

“Good luck,” Ted finally says.

“Good bye,” she says.

24.

For the first time in a long time, she thinks about Don. She thinks of the good things about him. She makes herself remember that. She thinks he’d be excited for them. A part of her longs to confirm this, but she knows she won’t make an effort to do so.

With change you don’t so much forget, but you step away. You make that distance grow and you grow from that. Peggy has taken a lot of steps.

“Are you going to miss it?” Stan asks as they leave the SC&P lobby that evening. Peggy smiles, looks back at the sign just the once. She looks to Stan.

“I don’t think we’ll have time for that,” she says.

She’s started to leave it all behind.

25.

Since they arrived at the bar, some upscale place in Midtown not all that far from the Time-Life Building (“it’s poetic, in a way,” Ginsberg had said; “no it’s not,” Stan said), Ginsberg has been making a spectacle of having only one beer.

“We’ll probably never be able to afford this again -- so, bottom’s up.” Stan raises his glass.

“That’s a terrible toast,” Ginsberg scowls. “A celebration of poverty is hardly a celebration at all!”

Peggy grimaces as she takes a sip. “This is . . . not good. It’s all vermouth.” She takes another sip. “This is why I never order martinis.”

“Then why’d you order a martini?” Stan asks with that oversized incredulity that always seems to creep into his voice.

“I thought this place was supposed to be nice! People drink martinis in nice places! This? Is not a nice martini.” She pushes the overly full glass towards Stan. “Drink some -- it’s awful.”

“With a glowing testimony like that . . . ” he says, but he hasn’t reached for the glass. She arches her eyebrows at him in expectation.

“For the love of all that is pickled and holy, order the girl another drink. Please,” Ginsberg says.

“Why don’t you order me a drink?” Peggy asks Ginsberg, theatrically coquettish and definitely already drunk. She’s almost glad they decided against champagne to accompany their final day at SC&P; she’d be even drunker by now. Stan laughs.

“No. Never. I have zero interest in your . . . school dance, swing set, pigtail-pulling,” he waves his hands at both of them like he’s trying to find the right words, “ . . . flirtation tactics. Whatever this is. I wash my hands of the both of you.” Peggy’s eyes widen.

“What are you talking about?” Peggy asks. She doesn’t look at Stan because if she looks at Stan, that would give them away. Ginsberg would know then. Rationally she knows that makes little to no sense, but the martini in front of her and all the drinks that came before that are telling her otherwise.

It’s at that point that Ken arrives. At that point, the conversation is abandoned.

Ginsberg holds fast to his One Drink Only rule; the rest of them abide by their own rules of conduct.

They sit there, drinking rail whiskey (Ken’s cut with water, Stan’s with ice, Peggy’s straight). Their idle chit chat gives way to grandiose borderline delusional plans for their future agency, jokes about Pete in Los Angeles (most of which seem to revolve around his hairline and the probability of a sunburnt scalp), and a recap of past office antics (Harry Crane a star of most of the stories).

You do that, Peggy thinks. Look back before moving forward.

Towards the end of the night, Stan and Peggy find themselves alone at the table. Ginsberg’s gone to the bathroom and Ken is at the bar ordering another round.

“We can’t . . . do that again,” Peggy says quietly. Her head’s bowed when she says it, penitent, if only for a moment, before she raises her eyes to him.

“What a shame,” he says, looking directly at her mouth, no need for her to clarify.

“We’re business partners,” she says. She wanted to sound decisive, the way a business partner would sound (or at least the way she imagines someone who can call themselves a business partner would sound), but instead it sounds like a not-so-subtle innuendo. She really has had too much to drink.

Stan smiles wide. “That we are.”

26.

When they leave the bar, the sun has set, the city dark, heat still thick.

Doubts surface in her mind. Doubts tied to nerves, and for the first time since they started all this, it strikes her as a terrible idea. They’re unemployed. They have no clients, at least not for sure. Tomorrow morning she’ll wake up and for the first day in a long time, she doesn’t know what happens next. They start from the bottom, she supposes, and then work their way up. No, not the bottom entirely. Even now, she thinks, they’re a long way from where she started.

She grabs Stan’s arm as they step out onto the sidewalk. The side of her body bumps against his. “Aren’t you afraid?” she asks, apropos of nothing.

He shrugs, like he hadn’t considered that until now. “Part of the fun, I guess.”

“It’s not going to be fun if we fail.”

He stubs out his cigarette under his show on the sidewalk and he looks down at her. “We’re not going to fail,” he says. She must look at him with too much doubt in her eyes, because the cockiness slips from him, just a little. He steps closer to her. She can smell the cigarettes on him, the beer he switched to after the whiskey, heat, his skin.

“It’s gonna be great,” he says, too quiet, almost tender. His words are threatened by the roar of the traffic beside them, a car horn blaring at the end of the block, the crush of equally drunk and equally sweaty people passing around them on the sidewalk. Stan cups her face with her hands and he kisses her forehead. She smiles small, looking down at their feet, her breath stuck in her chest. He’s still holding her face and she’s still looking down when she places her own hands on his forearms, her grip loose. He rolled his shirtsleeves back at the bar and his skin is hot and damp under her hands.

Peggy glances up at Stan. She looks away quickly, and she will remember this later as foolish. It’s just she doesn’t think she’s ever seen a man look at her with that much open kindness before.

Someone bumps into her back, and she stumbles into Stan before stepping away entirely.

“See you tomorrow.”

continued:
1. | 3.

fic: in event of moon disaster (mad men) (1/3)

falseeeyelashes — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 20:01:16 GMT

in event of moon disaster

mad men. one small step, one giant leap: peggy at the close of the 1960s and the start of something more. peggy/stan, et al. 24,370 words.

notes: consider this a faux Season 7, aka the one where Peggy and Stan, with the aid of Joan, Ken Cosgrove Accounts/Eyepatch, and Ginsberg, start their own agency -- and also start some other business. this got absurdly long and I feel like I've been writing this forever, so this is me washing my hands of this haha.

You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.
JOAN DIDION

With you or without you I’m moving on. And I don’t know if I can do it alone. Will you help me?
MAD MEN

1.

Peggy doesn’t win a Clio that year.

In fact, St. Joseph’s first dropped the ad, citing that original thorn, original sin: “budget issues” the Monday after Thanksgiving. And now, a week later, they’ve dropped her too, tied to a request they return to the drawing board.

Peggy’s been doing that a lot lately: returning to the drawing board.

“I never liked it in the first place,” Ginsberg had said, staring down at the storyboards, all that remained of the original idea. “Too spooky,” and then he shuddered.

2.

It’s Lou Avery who takes her off St. Joseph’s.

Lou Avery took over for Don in anticipation of the fact that Don will never come back. Don’s not anywhere Peggy knows, yet each time she steps into that office, she surprises herself by expecting to find him there.

“Your vision’s been compromised,” is what Lou says to her from behind Don’s desk. The line is delivered with the word kid implicit at the end, like he’s the good sheriff and she’s run afoul of the law. She stands there silent for a beat too long; the way he said it made it unclear whether this is an edict passed down from the St. Joe brass or Lou’s own opinion, and therefore, his own decision. She doesn’t ask for clarification; she doesn’t want to know the answer.

She leaves Lou’s office with a nod.

Something no one thinks to warn you about is that the ad world is a fishbowl and they’re all swimming in the same polluted stream. Everyone knows about her and Ted. They might not know the specifics, but they know enough.

“Discretion,” Joan had said coolly to her the day Ted left, the same day Harry Crane had been in the office and looked at Peggy like she was equal parts leper and Bond girl, “goes a long way for one’s reputation.”

“Did I ask?” Peggy had snapped before she stalked out of the conference room. The thing was: she hadn’t been mad at Joan. She hadn’t really even been mad at Harry Crane. If she was mad at anyone then and if she is still mad at someone now, it’s herself, and it’s Ted. All that effort it had taken to prove that she hadn’t gotten where she is now by sleeping with Don -- wasted, and thrown back in her face. Like she said, and like St. Joseph’s said: back to the drawing board.

Peggy walks into the creative lounge only to find it empty, save for Stan.

“Where is everyone? It’s two in the afternoon?”

He glances up at her, pen still poised against the paper in front of him. “Working, presumably.”

She frowns. “What are you doing?”

Stan sighs, drops the pen onto the table and leans back heavily in his chair. He takes a long drag off a joint before replacing it in the makeshift ashtray he’s created with a roll of mostly used masking tape and a plate from the kitchen. He casts a sidelong glance at her as he inhales, curious and challenging at once. “Working. Presumably.”

“My turn to ask what you’re doing?” he says when she continues to stand there, all pent-up energy, her hands braced on her hips. She plops down at the table across from him, watches stray wisps of smoke smolder up from his joint. She catches his eye and the lines around his eyes crinkle as he almost offers her a smile.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says.

A thing to remember is that in the lead-up to the last year of the 1960s, there is a lot of promise of change. Promise, or threat, depending on one’s position on the premise, or precipice, of change.

Here is a flash to the end of the story: Peggy will not end 1969 in the same place she ends 1968. If someone was to pull Peggy aside, tell her that by the end of this year she will have everything she wanted but nothing she would ever know she she wants now, Peggy wouldn’t believe them. Peggy would ask, well, then, what should I want.

At the close of 1968, Peggy doesn’t know what she wants and she doesn’t know where she will be in one year’s time. That makes the present unbearable and the recent past something worse.

At the close of 1968 there is a lot Peggy does not know. We will land on the moon that summer, and Peggy doesn’t know that yet. She will not win a Clio and Don will not come back. Ted will not come back. Oliver! will win Best Picture and Stan will rant about Kubrick for the better part of a week and she doesn’t know that yet either. She already knows too much and not enough about Stan. That will change too. Not the part where she knows too much, but the part where she does not know enough; with him, she will find the word enough does not apply.

But it is still 1968, and Peggy sits in the creative lounge while Stan continues to sketch and to smoke and Meredith attempts to navigate a string of garland down the hall, shedding pine needles in her wake.

Peggy doesn’t know a goddamn thing.

3.

“I could never sleep with my boss,” Joyce says. “For one thing, he has this whole stomach girth thing happening. For another, he’s a he.”

Peggy makes the mistake of telling Joyce about Ted. She tells Joyce about Ted the same week she is dropped from St. Joseph’s, the week everything is too fresh for her and the city has begun to freeze over: sugar crystal ice mapping over glass window panes, storefronts glittering in red and green and plastic-faced Santas, Peggy’s hot whiskey cooling at the bar too quickly.

The whiskey warms her chest and Joyce’s eyes narrow as she considers her. “He’s old, right?” Peggy glares. “Okay, not old old, but he’s married. And your boss. So that makes him old at heart. Geriatric, even.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Peggy says and Joyce merely sighs.

“An affair doomed from the start,” Joyce says with a surprising lack of judgment (and an even more surprising amount of wistfulness). “Like all the great tragic literary heroines of yore.” Peggy quirks a brow at the word yore. Joyce leans forward, the side of her body braced against the bar; Jimmy Durante sings city sidewalks, busy sidewalks. “We need to find you a train to fall in front of, or a moor to wander, or,” and at this, Joyce lights up, her elbow bumping the full glass of beer she left unattended on the bar, “a new and improved, unattached,” she says pointedly, “gentleman caller.”

This will be how Peggy winds up meeting Ralph, a tall man with severely parted dirty blonde hair, who does accounts somewhere within the bowels of the Time-Life Building.

“Cheer up, Pegasus,” Joyce says, reaching for her beer. “At least you’re no one’s wicked stepmother. Yet.”

Peggy can’t help but grimace behind the lip of her glass. All that time spent begrudging Ted his family and she had never once considered the possibility they could have ever become hers.

“Jesus.”

Joyce raises her glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

4.

Peggy meets Ralph at a movie theater over in the East Village. Joyce had picked not only the theater but the movie they would see -- some film about a girl gang of bikers, a selection which leads Peggy to consider that maybe Joyce hasn’t fully abandoned Abe’s side of the aisle in the wake of the great bayonet-stabbing-cum-ambulance-break-up -- lending the entire evening a sentiment they are being observed by an invisible third party chaperone.

Ralph’s cringing reaction to the movie is more entertaining than anything that happens on the screen and any piece of shared conversation from earlier that evening. Peggy wants to ask him what kind of movies he actually likes, but finds that she doesn’t really care. War movies -- he looks like the sort who would like a good (or bad, taste is supposedly subjective) war movie.

By the time the houselights come up, Peggy has already written Ralph off. The future of their night ahead ends, in her mind, on the sidewalk outside the theater.

She’s wrong. As they exit the theater, awkward conversation stretches between her and Ralph, like stale taffy stuck to the pull. And it’s there that she runs into him: Stan.

Peggy had been wrong when she said the most entertaining part of the night had been Ralph’s mounting disgust at a girl gang of bikers. The most entertaining part is the way Stan does a double take when they both spot each other, how, like always, his curiosity is tempered by a profound amusement at her expense.

They both freeze by the theater’s exit, Ralph at Peggy’s side, and what appears to be Stan’s date at his, the whole encounter a low-rent West Side Story stand-off. Peggy doesn’t bother to try and disguise her surprise, but she smoothes her hands over her dress, painfully aware that she’s still wearing the same thing she wore to work. She holds her chin a little too high, a little too imperious.

“Well, well, well. She does leave the office,” Stan says, his smile impish, eyes bright. His date is tall, thin in that willowy, chicly underfed way. Peggy notices her lipstick is faded, smudged just a hint below her bottom lip. Something mean lurches in Peggy and her eye keeps wandering to this woman’s bottom lip.

“Don’t make a comment about gin joints,” Peggy says, cutting him off at the pass. His smiles grows larger, but he’s eyeing her, looking at her in a way (she thinks) he never considers her in the office. Wolfish, she thinks; that’s the word.

“I wouldn’t dare. In fact, I’m personally offended you’d even think I could be that clichéd,” he says, that stupid smile of his not faltering for a second. His gaze drifts to Ralph briefly, amused question writ obvious on his face. “What brings you out here? Didn’t think this was your kinda movie.” She wonders if this is how their entire conversation is going to progress: Stan toying with her, his growing entertainment with her discomfort, each question and statement lobbed her way loaded with an understanding only she could have. He knows this isn’t her kind of movie; he knows too much about her.

“It’s not,” Peggy says at the same instance his date says, “I loved it.”

Peggy arches her eyebrows and mouths, “She loved it,” at Stan who only smirks.

“Joyce, our friend Joyce, picked it. For us,” Ralph says haltingly, choosing this moment to speak up, and Stan laughs, like he now understands everything. “I’m Ralph,” he says, extending a hand. Peggy feels a flush of embarrassment as Stan takes his hand and shakes, offering first his own name to Ralph and then Peggy’s name to his date (Francine, he says her name is Francine).

“So J-Bird’s playing matchmaker again?” Stan says. Peggy’s eyes snap to his arm as he wraps it around Francine’s waist, and Ralph starts a little at Stan’s use of again. Peggy glares. “Good luck with this one, man,” he says to Ralph, all jocular boys’ club, and Peggy’s bites the inside of her cheek. She doesn’t know what she’s irritated by more: this dialogue between Ralph and Stan or Francine’s smudged lipstick. Either one, or both, largely informs what happens next.

“We were gonna go grab a drink,” Stan says, “if you guys wanna come.”

“I’m not -- ” Ralph says.

“Sure!” Peggy says.

Stan’s face passes from surprised to suspicious quickly, like a shade drawn at dusk, his offer clearly an empty one.

He hangs back and grabs Peggy by the elbow, leans in as they leave the theater. “Ralphie that bad, huh?”

She looks down at his fingers wrapped around her arm and then back up at his face. “Shut up,” she says lightly.

 “Gonna have to save a seat for Doris Day to round out this plot.” He holds the door for her.

“Stop talking to me.” She can hear him chuckling behind her as they step out onto the sidewalk.

They grab a table at a bar near the theater, a place Peggy would never frequent. The interior is dark, dim, crowded with too many people, the heat inside near oppressive. She pulls her coat off immediately, casting an eye warily around the place.

Over their table is a giant crude painting of a shipwreck in a chipped wooden frame, an apocalyptic beginner’s attempt to crib Goya (or at least that’s what Stan says about it when he catches Ralph looking up at it).

“So how do you know Peggy?” Ralph asks.

Stan smirks as he swallows his beer. “Oh. I’m her brother.”

Peggy rolls her eyes.

Ralph looks slightly taken aback. “I didn’t know you had a brother. You mentioned a sister, not a brother.”

“He’s the black sheep of the family,” Peggy says, maintaining eye contact with Stan. He grins. She turns back to Ralph. “He’s not my brother,” she says, and Ralph only looks more confused. “I work with him.”

“So you’re both in advertising,” Francine says, her tone flat, her posture slumped, Stan still looking at Peggy like he knows what it feels like to imagine them together and alone. Peggy nods, pinned by Stan’s gaze. Peggy is a lot of things, which sometimes all too often can include naive, but she’s not stupid. There is a knot of tension pulling itself tighter at that table, something electric she has always shied away from giving too much spark. Ralph is still casting glances at the shipwreck on the wall and Francine is watching Peggy’s hands, her face bored and unreadable. She is watching the space between them and Stan’s, the two of them seated across from each other, both their hands flat on the table as though they are both waiting for someone to call the word draw! -- and then pistols, bang. Peggy doesn’t look at their hands but she thinks about Stan going home with her (with Francine, not Peggy). She thinks about the smudged lipstick, drinks her own beer greedily and feels an odd fission of something (something she refuses to call jealousy, even if it feels a lot like jealousy, and labels it as loneliness instead) spread within her.

Peggy slips her hands in her lap. The band that had been playing when they arrived has stopped and over the radio, Bing Crosby this time, sings children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile.

“You know,” Peggy says, and for just a beat the awkwardness at the table, that mismatched chemistry, is suspended and obvious before them all. “This song has been following me . . . for days now. Just this song, no other Christmas carol.”

“Yeah?” Stan asks, his voice a low drag. He takes his hands and he cradles his beer. He looks to Francine, the song ends, and the moment dissipates.

5.

“You enjoy the movie last night?” Stan teases her in the office the next day.

Peggy looks up from her desk. “You and I both know I only care a fraction what you do about fictional biker gangs.”

He smiles, almost laughs, pleased with either her or himself. Maybe both; maybe, sometimes, they’re knotted up that tight for him, interchangeable and indivisible. He pauses, and Peggy watches him, his face an almost comic mask of deep consideration.

“You think there’s a commercial in that?” he says finally.

Peggy crosses her arms over her chest, pushing back a little from her desk. “What? For Sunkist? Some oranges rolling down an open highway, chased by a roaring gang of bikers?”

He gets a faraway look to his face like he’s imagining exactly that. “I would watch that commercial. I would love it.”

She waves him off, returning to the notes she has scattered across her desk. “Get out of here. Go do some actual work.”

He pokes his head in on his way out.

“You think we could get Peter Fonda?”

“Good-bye,” she calls.

6.

The idea to start their own agency comes about that New Year’s Eve.

Stan comes over, boards for Avon tucked under one arm. Before the holidays, there had been a sudden burst of momentum on the Avon front, and now, according to Lou, Pete, Joan, and probably God, they're behind. It had been Peggy’s idea to work at her place rather than the office. There was something decidedly dark and depressing about spending two New Year’s in a row at work, and considering the year that followed in the wake of last year’s, and considering (though she is loathe to admit it) Peggy takes stock in things like omens, she figured a change, if only in scenery, would be a good start.

With him, Stan brings a bottle of expensive-looking single malt whiskey someone must have bought him for Christmas.

“I didn’t get you anything,” she says when she opens the door, eyeing the bottle. She crosses her arms over her chest and leans against the doorframe.

He smirks. “Good. I didn’t either.” He raises the bottle. “This is for me.”

“So chivalrous,” she says, stepping out of his way just enough to allow him entrance. The small hallway is freezing and she closes the door quickly after he brushes past her, bits of snow from him now clinging to her sweater and her jeans. “Merry Christmas.”

“Nice tree,” he teases.

She still has her Christmas tree up, a sad little thing she had picked up on an equally sad weekend she had been determined to make not-sad (and she had mostly succeeded, buying the tree, buying the ingredients she thought went into her mother’s spice cookies but she forgot the molasses; she bought a string of lights and cheap multicolor bulbs and tinsel, and it was back at home that she realized the molasses was missing, and the cat had found the tinsel and the tree looked too bare and too small and Burl Ives was on the radio and -- )

“There’s some cookies in the kitchen,” she offers. “I don’t think they’re stale yet.”

“With an offer like that . . . ”

Peggy can smell the cold on him, snow still melting in his hair and his beard, on the shoulders of his coat. “Give me that,” she says and she takes his coat from him.

“You order food?”

“Chinese,” she calls, pulling two beers from the fridge. “How was the family?” she asks him.

He shrugs. “Familial.” He takes the beer from her. “And how was the Olson clan?”

Peggy offers him a tight-lipped smile he returns until it spreads too wide across his face and he bares teeth.

“They’re good,” she finally says. “They were good. The Christmas ham was good. Mass was good,” and Stan interrupts her with an amen. “Everything was good.”

“Good.” His smile shifts, softens even, until she thinks it’s something past friendly -- too intimate and knowing, yet there is a marked lack of judgment from him. It makes her uncomfortable, the bottle of beer clenched tightly in her hands.

“So,” she clears her throat. “Are we going to get to work, or what?”

They get to work. They eat the Chinese, they argue over the distribution of egg rolls or whether the Szechuan chicken from this place is any better than the kind they get at the office, and they drink the beer. They brainstorm idly about Avon without really getting anywhere.

Around ten, Peggy turns the television on and Stan pulls out his stash.

“Quitting time already?”

“Time,” and he pauses, his concentration split, “to usher in the New Year. Care to partake?” he asks, slow and distracted as he rolls a joint. Peggy watches him. She likes his hands, likes looking at his fingers -- thick and suggestive, yet their movement precise and adept.

“The New Year’s not really a thing that should be ushered in alone.”

“1969,” he drawls. He flicks his lighter and inhales deeply.

She picks up the bottle of unopened whiskey left on her coffee table. “This is fancy,” she says, her tone turning mocking. “You don’t do fancy. This should only be drunk by, like, the Stanley Rizzos of the world. Not the Stans.”

He snorts, passing her the joint.

He unscrews the cap on the bottle of whiskey while Peggy takes a hit, watching him through narrowed eyes. He pours a generous helping into the two coffee mugs she left out on the table, both imprinted with a faded SCDP logo.

They clink their mugs together. “To the Stanley Rizzos and Margaret Olsons of the world,” he toasts.

7.

“1969,” Peggy says. “Go.” The talk of starting their own agency is borne out of drunken talk of resolutions.

Stan sighs heavily, leaning back against the couch cushions. “No more forgetting I do not in fact enjoy tripping on acid, and trying again is really unlikely to change that.”

Peggy laughs. “There’s a morally responsible resolution.”

“I’m a paragon of moral responsibility.” He takes a long sip from his mug, punctuated by a low gasp as he swallows. “You. Go.”

“No more sleeping with married men.” She says it quickly, without thinking. She’s drunk, and she laughs at that too -- at what she said, at her own drunkenness. Stan looks at her with a creeping smile, like she might have just proven him right, answered a question she had no idea had been posed.

He sighs again, leans forward and sets his empty mug down on the table. He rubs at his beard like he’s mulling something over. “What?” she asks, halfway afraid to hear what he might say.

Instead he surprises her.

He surprises her when he says, “Start our own agency.”

Here is the thing that will carry with her throughout not just the coming year but for a long time after: he said our instead of my. He had included her from the start.

“What?” she asks again, on the verge of another laugh (she almost feels bad they’ve all but wasted this bottle of whiskey on their own unrefined, stoned palates), but this time, the caution is gone.

She knows that Stan had wanted LA. She also knows that they will never talk about it, how Stan had wanted Los Angeles and it was Ted who took his place. How in a way that could tell another story -- Stan wanted it, Ted took it -- but they’re never going to talk about that either.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it,” he says. “Striking out on your own.”

She has, and he knows it, so her mouth twists slyly. She doesn’t know when they closed the distance between them on the couch -- sometime between that first sip of whiskey and this conversation -- but Stan’s still leaning forward, their knees almost touching, and she looks at him, actually looks at him. It’s a casualty of daily encounters with the same person: you stop looking at them. When they’re no longer new, you don’t pay as close attention. She’s paying attention now, and he’s paying attention to her. Stan looks like the sort of man who would want to build something (based on the beard, she thinks that should be a log cabin or a rocking chair or a better rock anthem -- not this). Like he’d want to create something from nothing and know that it was his. She supposes most men would want that, that she even wants that for herself, but as of late it’s begun to read plain and obvious in him.

“Thinking about it is one thing. Resolving to do it? That’s another.”

“Humor me,” he says, and she looks at him like that’s all she ever does. But she smiles as she imagines it. Stan with ambition, with obvious ambition, is another thing too. It’s a thing she likes.

Which she supposes is why she kisses him.

Peggy kisses him first.

In that moment, she wants him. She wants everything he’s saying but it’s also him she wants. So she leans over that much closer and she kisses him. The kiss is tentative at first, like when he had kissed her back at the office, after Ginsberg had stabbed him in the arm. She can feel him sigh against her mouth and he hesitates. He hesitates, not her. He’s too close for her to view him clearly (and hasn’t always been the case? He’s always too close, she can never comprehend what she is seeing, she has no distance and she has no bigger picture where Stan is concerned).

“You know. That wasn’t a line to get up your skirt,” he says.

“I’m not wearing a skirt,” she breathes against his mouth. His hand slides up from her knee to grip her thigh and squeezes once. So she kisses him again, more confident this time, and he kisses her back, grabbing her to him, the kiss going deep and sloppy. His tongue is hot, pushing against her own and his hand on her thigh drags her closer, her own mouth rough and aggressive with his, her hand pulling at his hair. She’s stoned and more than kind of drunk, but it all feels good, feels good in this impossible, foreign way she know she can’t fully chalk up to the weed or the whiskey. She wants this, she wants him, and that strikes her as borderline insane.

When Peggy grinds down against his thigh, she can feel the hitch in his breath, can hear the loud wet smack of their lips when they separate, his beard rubbing at first her neck and then her collarbone as he bites his way down her throat. His hand drags up her body, feeling her up through her sweater, and she can’t stop panting, feeling like she always does with Stan, but heightened: like he has managed to find that loose thread inside of her and rather than stitch her up, he’s pulling, he’s unwinding her. He’s hard against her, she can feel him, but there’s no real demand or insistence from him, instead just taking what she’ll give him.

They abruptly stop kissing when the New Year hits. The countdown on the television interrupts them, “Auld Lang Syne” playing tinny and small yet filling her apartment. They sit there together, separate, not touching, catching their breath and watching the TV coverage. Peggy’s lips feel hot, swollen and bruised, and she fights the urge to press her fingers to them. She can’t look at him, afraid she’ll have that shellshocked look to her. They’re still sitting too close and he reaches over for the smoldering joint he left in the ashtray, taking a drag. It all feels a bit like something she made up, a bizarrely graphic fantasy, if it wasn’t for the puffy mouth and the ache still pulsing between her legs.

“Happy New Year,” he says as he exhales.

She finally looks at him. His eyes drift to her mouth and his lips tip upward. They’re drunk and they’re stoned, and it will surprise her how easy this will be to push from her mind. It will be easy for business as usual to resume the following days and the days they continue to work on Avon, while he’ll draw pictures of women with full and colored lips and Peggy will attempt to plumb the depths of female desire where a pretty made-up face is concerned.

“Yeah,” she says. She takes the joint, turning her attention back to the television. “Happy New Year.”

8.

In January of 1969, here is a collection of things Peggy knows for sure: she will not trust Joyce to set her up with any more prospective blind dates; she will not return to the salon on 7th Ave., even if it is that much closer to the office; she shouldn’t kiss Stan; she shouldn’t kiss Stan and pretend that if she keeps kissing Stan it’ll be a thing that adds up to nothing; Lou Avery is not Don and Don is not coming back; the dry cleaner’s one block from her apartment is almost definitely an Italian mob front; Ted is in Los Angeles and Ted will remain in Los Angeles and when if ever she thinks of Ted she will remind herself: Los Angeles; she does not think of Ted much anymore.

9.

Peggy doesn’t think of Ted much anymore. When she does, she finds there is no longing, just a humiliating sense of futility shrouded in something darker, something angrier. When she does, she finds it’s all ruined, marred by how he left it. How he left it, not her; because of him, not her. When you have no say, she thinks, you can’t be the one who left anyone or anything behind.

Because of this, the departed party doesn’t get a say in how they are remembered after their exit, be it hastily, planned, or entirely unexpected.

For once, Ted doesn’t get a say.

Ted belongs in the dustbin now with all the other men, men who left her with a variety of things, a catalog of different adjectives for different emotions, but namely disappointed. Ted belongs to Los Angeles now -- where they say the sun is always shining, where his wife is always blonde, a place where Peggy has never been.

Certain things are ruined now, not just her idea of him.

(He’s not that virtuous -- he’s just in love with you: she had called the first a lie and the second the truth, but now she wants to flip them, revise her thinking, no longer a lie followed by the truth, but a truth paired with a lie, or two truths, she still doesn’t know what to do with that line, he’s just in love with you.

She had asked Stan about it once -- the virtue, not the love -- though not directly and not in detail. It was in early in December. It was early December and Peggy still sometimes thought of Ted. She often thought of Ted. “Who’d you say is the most virtuous person you know?” she had asked him abruptly. It was early December and it was dark out, it was late, and they were still at the office.

He had frowned when he looked up at her. He stretched back in his chair, tipping it back, mumbling to himself more so than to her, “I don’t think that word’s even in my vocabulary,” before returning the chair to the ground and on all four legs. “I honestly have no idea,” he said. “I don’t think I keep much company with the virtuous sort.” He said the word virtuous like it soured in his mouth.

“You don’t think I am?”

Stan bit down on a smile (and knowing him, a laugh as well). “No,” and he said it with pride, not for himself, but her.

Something must have shown in her face because his own gentled. “Virtue’s overrated,” he said, and either wholly unaware or all too aware of the irony, poured some whiskey into his coffee mug.

“How’s that?” she had asked, pushing her own cup forward. He took it from her.

“Because,” he said, distracted, as he poured, “you put yourself up there on that pedestal,” he paused as he screwed the cap back on the bottle, and then looked at her, “from which one can only fall,” he concluded dramatically.

She rolled her eyes and took a long pull from her cup. She smacked her lips. “Who do you think is the most virtuous in the office?”

He considered the question. “Caroline,” he said definitively.

“Roger’s secretary?” she laughed. She took another sip and then said, “Oh my god, I think you’re right.”)

Take, for example, Rosemary’s Baby. Take the film itself, take the ad, take the theater they saw it in, where Don saw them. Take it all from her -- even thinking about it makes her feel embarrassed, a tight knot that threatens in the center of her gut, making her feel small and stupid. Played. It makes her feel played.

He was right, that’s the worst of it. She could almost thank him for it, thank him for how he left it. Left her. He left no room for her to want him back, no desire to repeat any of that again, all the small humiliations lit up cruel and obvious in his wake.

So Peggy does not remember Ted fondly. For a good while there, Peggy does not remember Ted fondly, until, eventually, she will not remember him much at all.

When Ted calls the office he talks to Lou or Stan. He talks to Lou as his equal and to Stan about art; he checks in with Lou and makes demands upon Stan.

She doesn’t talk to Ted much now and when they do they talk about oranges. Peggy finds she can manage that: she’s never much cared for the taste of oranges.

10.

Ted’s departure was without ceremony. He slinked off the island of Manhattan with only a memo offered as a farewell.

“I know you will flourish and succeed in my absence,” the memo read. It had been addressed to the SC&P creative team at large, but Peggy took it personally.

Ginsberg had held the memo in his hand. “Who knew he was quite the wordsmith,” Ginsberg said. They had looked at him and he had shrugged. “Never actually read these things before. But this one was nice. I almost feel bad.”

“Don’t,” Mathis said. “He’s with the angels and the palms and Raquel Welch now.”

“And Pete Campbell,” Stan had said and they had laughed.

Peggy hadn’t said anything.

That evening she sat with Stan and a bottle of rye in the creative lounge. It went unremarked how easily they had reverted to their previous working relationship after she came back from CGC, after Ted left. Stan never talked to her about Ted, never goaded her or needled her the way he had about Abe (or about Mark, about Duck, and had there been another man who wasn’t Ted, it would have been more of the same).

The most she ever said to him on the subject of Ted was that night, and this came after three glasses of rye. The side of Stan’s hand was stained with ink and she kept staring at it, the work for Maytag abandoned between them on the table.

“People, I have found,” she had proclaimed, “disappoint you.”

“Yeah. They do,” Stan nodded. “They do do that,” he said, his understanding quiet and implicit. He sat there with her and neither of them said a thing.

And that was that.

People, she has found, not only disappoint, but they move on.

So Peggy moved on.

11.

Peggy doesn’t win a Clio that year, and in fact, she’s not even nominated. There’s a moral buried somewhere in that story, but Peggy is tired of seeking out morals almost as much as she is tired of fearing the words, “I told you so,” strung in bitter succession and then whispered in her ear.

The same month the Clios are held, the New York Ad Association holds a dinner. SC&P is invited, and by extension Peggy is invited, so Peggy buys a dress. It’s a plain dress, black, no frills, no bows, all harsh, unfeminine lines.

“It’s a dinner, Peggy,” Joan tells her at the open bar. “Not a funeral.”

It might as well be one, the serious tone struck for the night managing to be both somber and self-congratulatory. At their table, Roger is tipping towards the unseemly side of drunk. Cutler is eyeing the room, and Peggy’s unclear if he’s on the prowl for potential clients or potential employees to poach from rival firms. Ken is explaining something elaborate and mechanical, if only based on his dramatic hand gestures, to Stan. And Stan -- she’s not entirely sure how he does it, but he’s managed to make a black tie event look casual: his lazy posture at the table, his indifferent but amused attitude, and his utter lack of self-consciousness in the way he wears a tux.

He glances over at Peggy and Joan as they approach, raking his eyes deliberately over Peggy before meeting her face with a smirk. Peggy takes the empty seat next to Stan, waving him off when he -- after a delay -- attempts the gentlemanly and stands, reaching for her chair.

“You clean up nice and severe,” Stan says, his eyes drifting over her and her dress again.

She narrows her eyes at him. “Your tie’s crooked.”

His grin is loose and boyish. “Wanna fix it for me? Tell me I’ve been a bad boy? Get you a whip and you’d definitely have that whole disciplinarian, dominatrix-y vibe -- ”

“Please stop talking.”

He laughs. “Yes, ma’am,” he says as the emcee takes his place at his podium, the banquet hall going quiet in drips and drabs around the room.

It’s a boring speech, and she finds herself watching Stan out of the corner of her eye. He traces a finger over the condensation dripping down the side of his glass. She didn’t eat enough earlier and they have yet to be served dinner; she feels lightheaded, which is what she’s choosing to blame for any and all thoughts running through her head right now (all thoughts dealing exclusively, it would seem, with Stan, Stan and his crooked tie, Stan and his wet fingers, that tux, his mouth on New Year’s Eve, his mouth now -- all bad thoughts).

She turns her attention back to the speech, cheeks slightly flushed. Stan doesn’t fix his tie.

They’re at the bar after dinner, waiting on another round of drinks.

The man next to her introduces himself. Peggy misses his name, but she catches that he’s from Geyer. That’s the important part, she assumes, at an event like this.

“I’m Peggy. Peggy Olson. SC&P.” She leans to the side a little, reaches back and grabs Stan’s arm. “This is Stan. This is . . . ” she turns her head towards Stan and mumbles indistinctly, “from Geyer.” She really should have eaten more for dinner and drank less. A lot less.

The nameless man from Geyer takes Stan’s hand and shakes it. “You’re the husband?” Geyer says. Peggy freezes, and so does Stan, still holding this guy from Geyer’s hand. He drops his hand and they stare at him wide-eyed. Oddly, it’s Peggy who recovers first.

She laughs, the sound high and nervous. “Might as well be,” she says, but she says it too cheerfully. Stan just squints at her before laughing to himself, taking their drinks from the bartender and standing there with both in his hands.

“Give me that,” she mutters, taking her drink from Stan.

It’s not long after that when he asks her if she wants to get out of there. It’s like a line from those dumb biker movies he likes so much, only he’s wearing a tux instead of leather, and she’s Peggy and not anybody else. She grins all the same, trying on her own version of a Hollywood line:

“What you got in mind?”

12.

“Whose party is it?” Peggy asks.

He shrugs, his hand bumping against her thigh. “A friend.”

They are in a cab, en route to a party over on Mercer in the Village. Peggy’s loaded already, crowded in the backseat with Stan, and this close, she can smell him: the cigarettes he smoked one after the other at the bar, a faint hint of aftershave he never wears, the clean starch of his shirt, and him, the heat of him. She rolls her head towards him.

“We’re gonna be so fancy,” she says, “so, so fancy,” and then she starts to laugh.

She has no idea whose party this is or who Stan’s friend is hosting it. Peggy had been right in the cab: they are grossly overdressed. A friend of Stan’s -- his name either Karl or Carl -- will only refer to her as “Pat Nixon,” laughing each time like it’s the funniest joke. “Look at you two,” a man in a frayed Army vest and a tattoo of a dreamcatcher covering most of his upper arm says (a man who turns out to be Stan’s dealer, a fact that makes itself known to Peggy when she witnesses their exchange of cash for grass), “a fucking portrait of upstanding Manhattan citizenry. You the mayor yet?”

The party is its own carnival of lost and chemically-altered souls, Peggy thinks. A girl with tall white boots and a wide mouth, drinking tequila neat, keeps describing Peggy as being “familiar” with Stan -- as in, “This one, in the dress, she’s familiar with Stan,” like Peggy not only knows Stan, but she has learned all his tricks. A skinny guy with his shirt unbuttoned, his hipbones poking out above the low waistband of his jeans, is holding court over by a dented keg, telling about the time he spent an entire night with The Doors, his sermon infused with the fervor of an evangelical, though his every word a blaspheme.

Stan catches Peggy’s eye. “He spent two hours at a diner with a roadie for the band. That’s his story.”

“Do they know that?” Peggy asks, pointing at the meager crowd surrounding the guy, now proclaiming the inherent apocalyptic eroticism of The Doors’ music.

Stan shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. They just wanna hear a story.”

She wants to accuse him of being cynical, yet she also thinks he’s probably right. She loses Stan soon after to some guy with a bolo tie and a freckled complexion hidden by aviator shades. She loses him to an argument about Cambodia or Nixon’s bombs or both Cambodia and Nixon’s bombs, or they’re not arguing, they’re agreeing, their voices are merely raised. Peggy bums a cigarette off a crying woman in harlequin checkered pants, sitting on the floor alone like a jester without a court to serve. Peggy is told this woman is having a bad trip (either meaning the acid she took when she got here or her entire stay in New York) and that she is to be ignored. She is also told that no one knows who the woman belongs to, and that’s almost enough to make Peggy feel sad. Instead she takes her cigarette, lights it with a book of matches she finds next to the phone, which she notices, is off the hook. Peggy replaces the receiver back into the cradle then sits down, ignoring the crying woman, watching Stan argue or agree, smoking her cigarette. A girl with smudged eyeliner and tanned bony shoulders sits down next to Peggy on an old love seat that threatens to buckle under their weight. She recommends to Peggy a cocktail of Dexedrine and gin, for, she tells her, when the times are hard. The girl leans in to Peggy, as though she has a secret in mind.

“The times,” she says, “are always hard.”

13.

The bottle of ketchup at their table is empty.

Back at the party, Stan had said, “I’m starving. You starving? I’m starving,” his shadow looming over her as she sat looking up at him. He led her out of the apartment, his hand pressed against the small of her back, fingers flexing, and down three blocks into a diner.

He’s bleary-eyed across from her in a booth, the red vinyl cracked, his tie undone, and she has his tux jacket draped over her shoulders. Her hair’s gone limp, her lipstick completely faded, and she thinks they’re both approaching the other side of drunk, a headache already starting to threaten. They order greasy cheeseburgers and she chokes down some burnt-tasting coffee.

“Your friends are weird,” she says, picking at the remains of her burger.

“They’re just some people I know.” She’s not sure if that’s supposed to be a mitigating statement, if he’s trying to pardon himself, or if that’s really how he sees them.

She takes another sip of her coffee and regrets it immediately. She makes a sour face. “Tomorrow’s Friday,” she says.

“It is.”

“I don’t want it to be Friday.”

“It’s basically the weekend.”

“Yeah,” she concedes. “Wild weekend plans?” she teases.

“Oh yeah.” He stifles a yawn. “Hot date Saturday.”

“I pity the lucky lady.”

“You met her actually.” He says it too casually, and Peggy blanches, pictures the woman with the white boots at the party, the crying woman, the girl who warned her, the times are always hard. “Francine?” he adds.

It takes Peggy a beat, and then she remembers. Francine. Francine and the girl gang of bikers, the bar with the shipwreck and “Silver Bells.” The smudged lipstick. “Oh, right. Her,” she says. “That was awhile ago,” she says after a too-long pause. “The same girl, all these months later. And she hasn’t kicked you to the curb yet.” She had aimed for levity, but even to herself she sounds like a woman scorned. Stan must hear it too.

“Don’t do that,” he says.

A bell chimes over the door and Peggy looks over. An anonymous man in a hat shuffles his way to the counter and she watches. She looks back at Stan.

“Do what?” Peggy plays innocent, snags a French fry off his plate and eats it even though it’s cold.

“You don’t get to do that.” It’s been a long night, she thinks, and now it feels like it has taken yet another turn. Stan’s expression is not unkind, but it is also without patience. It makes her wonder how long she’s been working to earn that, his lack of patience. She own expression goes stony as she looks at him, a half-eaten fry held up to her mouth.

“You comment about the men in my life all the time,” she says. She’s already gone defensive and they both know it.

Stan shakes his head. “Not the same.”

“Oh? Really?”

He looks away and then back at her, everything about him long-suffering, and she thinks that’s unfair. “Yeah. Really.”

She leans forward, her elbows on the table. “Explain that to me then. Dazzle me with your reasoning.”

“No dazzle necessary.” He says it lazily, like this isn’t even worth talking about it, but he pauses too. He pauses too long. They’re at the edge, the place they don’t ever go further than, at least not with words. “I never resent you for it,” he finally says.

“I don’t -- ”

“Maybe you don’t,” he interrupts, holding up his hands. He sounds so reasonable and calm about it; it makes her furious. “But you expect me to just hang around. You expect me to always be around and stay . . . available.” She almost sighs in relief that he didn’t use the word single.

“That’s not true,” she says, but her voice is too quiet.

Her voice is too quiet, and he looks at her almost pityingly, like he doesn’t believe her. “If you say so,” he says. Peggy looks back at the man at the counter. He’s eating soup now.

Stan might be right. That’s the uncomfortable, unfortunate part. It’s uncomfortable and unfortunate that he’s right, and god, she hates when he’s right, he’s intolerable when he’s wrongheaded about ideas but that much worse when he’s actually right about something, but also because -- well, yeah, she does like when he’s around all the time. She does want him to always be around, or at least when she wants him there. She wants to be the one he makes exceptions for, and god, that really is uncomfortable and unfortunate and should be wrong instead of right.

What she can’t admit to herself though is what any of that might mean. Thinking about Stan that way is like trying to chase down a misplaced thought or a mostly forgotten dream and each time you try to remember, each time you think you’re getting closer, the further it recedes from your grasp.

Something like that -- something awful.

Peggy points at him with another one of his fries. “You’re drunk,” she tells him.

continued:
2. | 3.

FICATHON » LIKE A HEAT WAVE!

falseeeyelashes — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 19:15:19 GMT

~ it's getting hot in here so take off all your clothes
SUMMER COMMENT FICATHON!

Hey! Happy almost Fourth of July, America! I'm pretty sure the Revolutionary War was fought so we all could write super suspect pornographic things, and I'm also pretty sure the overheated dull dog days of summer are approaching -- hence! A ficathon!

RULES:

1. Any and all fandoms and RPF are welcome! Go wild! Prompt (and hopefully write) to your heart's content!
2. One prompt per comment, but prompt as much as you want.
3. Fill the prompts! FILL ALL THE PROMPTS! Warn if any warnings apply.
4. HAVE FUN! ENJOY SUMMER! DRINK A LOT OF LEMONADE!

fic: witness statements (mad men)

falseeeyelashes — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 19:11:09 GMT

witness statements
missives from manhattan’s weirdest precinct.

mad men au. peggy/stan w. ginsberg. 4860 words.

notes: IT'S THE BUDDY COP!AU!!!

wherein, it's the 1970s and Peggy and Stan are detective partners with the NYPD and Ginsberg is the medical examiner down in the morgue. THIS WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN W/O ALL THE HILARIOUS MESSAGES EXCHANGED WITH YOU, JAKK, so bless. also a scene in this was definitely ripped straight off of Top of the Lake, mainly because I couldn't prevent my imagination from going to there.

1.

“I thought you dropped that shit off at the evidence locker,” Peggy says. She shuts the door behind her and plops a stack of files down on the table.

“Most of it,” Stan says as he inhales. Peggy stares at him and the joint in his mouth, her hands braced on either hip. They’ve taken over an old empty interrogation room as their own private headquarters.

 “Gimme that,” she snaps, and for a quick second, Stan looks almost guilty (though not guilty enough not to take another hit before passing it to Peggy).

She looks at him and then the joint and then raises it to her own lips, inhaling deeply.

“Hold it in your chest,” he says, and his voice has turned low, like he’s instructing her to do something else entirely with her mouth, his gaze fixed on the smoke and her lips.

“I know what I’m doing,” she says, even though she’s coughing. She takes another hit.

“If Don catches us in here, it’s all on you, buddy,” she says tightly, more smoke seeping out of her mouth.

Stan leans back in his chair, his arms folded over his chest. “Don smokes with me.”

Her mouth slips down into a frown, an exhibition of distressed surprise. “Really?”

“Yes, really.” The doubt remains on her face; Peggy has a hard time believing things she hasn’t seen for herself.

Peggy sits down at the table and passes the joint back to him. She opens a file and Stan averts his gaze from the crime scene photos. They don’t talk about that; he hasn’t gone so much soft and squeamish as he has tired.

“So. You come here often?” he teases.

“Get to work,” she says lazily, handing off a sheaf of witness statements.

He turns on the radio and starts singing along with “Midnight Train to Georgia” in an unconvincing falsetto. She tunes him out. She looks at the body instead, brushes her fingers against his when he hands her the joint again.

2.

Ginsberg talks to the radio in the basement, never the bodies.

He makes a point of making that distinction to both Stan and Peggy when they show up unexpectedly (not that much of his routine or talking points would have been altered had he known they were coming) while he’s mid-diatribe about Pinochet in Chile.

“It’s a disgrace, is what it is,” he says. Peggy nods at him, her expression mostly blank while she tries to peer at the open file on their victim. Stan looks simply bored.

“What? You two don’t follow the news? Huh? You too busy making the crime beat, that it? Buncha fascists.”

Stan holds up a hand. “Alright, man. Be cool. Everyone loves civil liberties, here, Ginzo. Everyone’s glad we aren’t living in fucking Chile. Or dying in Chile, if you’re this guy,” he points to the body on the table.

Ginsberg ignores him, plopping a tepid liver down on the scale. Peggy winces.

“I woke up this morning and I knew it was a bad day,” he says, “I just knew it. And now all this?” He shakes his head, removes the liver from the scale. “And here I am! Here I am, and I work for the police state, I know that, I’m not just finding out some great secret, I work for the enemy, I am the enemy, I AM DEATH. WE ARE ALL DEATH, and you two, I bet you two wear your guns down here with your fucking jackboots.”

Peggy and Stan wear twin expressions of amused, confused concern.

“So how’d this guy die then?” Stan asks after a beat, pointing again at the stiff on the table.

“Apathy!” Ginsberg shouts.

3.

Peggy stabs Stan by accident.

They had been investigating an abandoned tenement house, Peggy jumpier than a detective has any right to be, and as Stan had joked while they hobbled together back to the car (Peggy’s body pressed against his while she pressed a hand against the wound) at least she hadn’t gone for her gun.

Here’s the other thing: they both need to keep this off the record. Stan’s been cleared for duty by the skin of his teeth (his medical chart is thicker than even their most high profile cases; Ginsberg’s got this theory about Stan that involves him having an unspoken death wish that no one, least of all Peggy, ever talks about, and it’s probably the most interesting thing about Stan, if you ask Ginsberg) and a knife wound to the side really isn’t going to help matters on that front. And Peggy -- Peggy’s been before the review board explaining a discharged firearm more times than the public would most likely feel comfortable with; adding knifing a fellow officer to her list of police activities would only add to that sentiment.

So when Peggy asks, Ginsberg agrees to help. It’s fun, he decides, to be included. It’s also nice to get out of the morgue, and it’s even nicer to know that now both Peggy and Stan owe him.

They’ve set up improvised-emergency-room in Deputy Commanding Officer Cosgrove’s former office.

Ginsberg can hear them as he approaches. “You’re not putting me on a fucking table with a dead guy,” Stan’s saying. He can’t hear what Peggy says in response, but it makes Stan laugh.

They don’t notice Ginsberg when he pushes the door open. The office is mostly empty, just a desk (that Stan’s laying on) and a bunch of boxes full of old files. Peggy’s got a hand covering the side of Stan’s body, the space between his ribs and hip, a balled-up shirt already soaked through. There’s a shocking amount of blood. It stinks in a way the morgue never does.

“Ya didn’t say somebody gutted him,” Ginsberg says in the doorway. Both Peggy and Stan look up quickly at him.

“Nobody gutted him,” Peggy says, but the defiance in her voice is marred by an obvious attempt to stay calm and there’s a tremble to it, like try as she might, she can’t tamp those nerves down.

“Like a stuck pig,” Ginsberg mumbles as he shuts the door behind him. The room’s dark; they only flicked on the desk lamp, likely to avoid detection (hey, he could be a detective too), but he can see that Peggy’s got Stan’s blood all over her. She must have tried to push her hair out of her face because there’s blood smeared across her neck and along her jaw.

Ginsberg pushes Peggy out of the way to get a better look at the wound. It’s not all that long or all that deep, more superficial than anything, which is good. He can work with that.

“Who did this to you?” Ginsberg asks (his voice sort of a mix of outrage blended with intense curiosity), that detail left out when Peggy had called him.

“You’re lookin’ at her,” Stan grunts and then laughs. “She likes to stick things in me.”

Peggy rolls her eyes.

“Do you stick things in her?” Ginsberg asks. Only after he asks it does he hear the implication, but Stan’s already laughing again, grinning at Peggy and Peggy’s glaring at nothing in particular.

“Sure hope to once you stitch me up here, doc.”

“Shut up,” Peggy says while Ginsberg holds up a hand.

“I just want you to know -- I am not a licensed physician.”

“Yeah, but you sew people up all the time,” Stan says, sounding more like he’s trying to reassure himself than anyone else.

“Sure. Dead people.”

“I can fix that part for you,” Peggy says through gritted teeth and Stan smiles, even though the pain is starting to make itself known across his face.

“I think you already got your one shot for the night,” Stan says to her thickly.

Stan hisses when Ginsberg cleans the wound. It’s so different from the dead bodies Ginsberg works with. When he presses down on the wound, Stan’s face reflects that, his mouth pulling tight, eyes squeezing shut. When he presses again, it makes Stan groan. The reaction is instantaneous. It’s almost sexual in that sense. It’s fascinating.

“Are you okay?” Peggy asks sharply.

“Yeah, I’m great,” Stan says, sighing and hissing again.

Stan’s drinking straight from a bottle of Hennessy Ginsberg suspects they swiped from Draper’s office. He takes a long pull while Ginsberg dabs at the wound with a little more peroxide. Live flesh is infinitely more interesting than dead flesh, he decides.

“You’re gonna throw up,” Peggy says.

“Add that to the list of expelled bodily fluids enjoyed tonight.” She scowls at him.

While they talk, Ginsberg investigates. He’d like to open Stan up, that’s what he thinks. He’s never found Stan more interesting than he finds him right now -- how his body reacts to pain, how deep this wound might go, how the human body accommodates for that. If Ginsberg wanted, he could talk to him while he works instead of the radio, and Stan would talk back.

In fact, Stan’s talking back right now:

“Come on, man, what’s taking so long: just stitch me up.”

Stan’s words attract Peggy’s attention and she looks down at Ginsberg’s hands and Stan’s wound, now wider than when she had first helped drag Stan up onto the desk. Her eyes go wide, too. You’d think for a New York detective she’d have a stronger stomach, Ginsberg almost says.

“Are you -- what are you doing?” Peggy asks. Stan must hear the horror in her voice because for the first time since they started playing real-life Operation, Stan actually looks concerned.

Ginsberg shrugs. “I was curious.”

“Sew him up!”

 “What’s he doing?” Stan practically yells, wincing when he tries to sit up and look down at Ginsberg’s handiwork.

Peggy pushes him back down with a hand spread over his face. Stan doesn’t fight her, lays back down, and Peggy distractedly drags her hand through his hair.

“Sew him up,” she says again, and Ginsberg holds a hand up in supplication before getting to work. Stan winces and grunts and Peggy swipes a sip of the cognac.

“Can you write prescriptions? Can coroners do that?” Stan mumbles.

“He deals with dead bodies. Of course he can’t.”

There’s a long gap of silence while Ginsberg works, broken when Stan says, “I’m gonna throw up.”

4.

Stan always wants her after he’s been hurt.

He ripped his stitches one time, but that didn’t stop him. Peggy pressed a hand to it, could feel his blood on her own bare stomach, hot and sticky.

 That didn’t stop her either.

5.

Stan’s body is a mess. He’s got a blown-out knee, an old injury he brought with him into the police academy. His shoulder is still a wreck from that time impatience had won out and he used it to bust a front door down. Peggy remembers that; it had been one of their first cases they worked as detectives together.

“Don’t say you told me not to,” he had said that night, a bag of ice clutched to his shoulder, some of the cubes in her own glass.

Peggy kicked her feet up on his desk; his gaze had seemed rooted to her ankle for too long.

“I won’t,” she said, “because I never said that.”

“Don’t say anything!”

Stan’s been shot twice, two healed wounds to show for it.

The first time, a bullet grazed his neck, and according to Ginsberg, that doesn’t even qualify as a gunshot wound. It only needed three stitches, count ‘em, three stitches, and even though Stan had bitched through the entire “medical procedure” (Ginsberg provides the air-quotes whenever relating the epic tale of The Time Detective Stan Rizzo’s Neck Near Met With A Bullet Discharged From A Heroin-Dealing Landlord’s Gun), it still wasn’t a real gunshot wound, not really, and it wasn’t right to count it as such, to which Stan would typically arch his eyebrows and ask Ginsberg if he was willing to test that theory because he’s got the gun and he’s got some bullets and Ginsberg definitely has a neck, so it’s really just a question as to whether he’s willing to stick it out.

The second time, Stan grew a beard after -- though in his words, it wasn’t because he’d been shot. Not really. He was put on medical leave (this time, there had been no dispute as to whether his injury qualified as a gunshot wound, but instead when this event was ever discussed, a lot of emphasis was put on centimeters and internal organs, and much like the neck wound, had Stan been to his left just a little, the story would have become a story told only in dark Irish pubs at other dead cops’ drunken wakes and Peggy would have a new partner). He spent three weeks holed up in his apartment, and as a result, he grew a beard. At first he intended to read a lot of Walden, the sort of shit that stressed a man’s place in the world, self-reliance, that kind of thing. Instead he took more pain killers than recommended and when that prescription ran out (and when his doctor refused to refill it and Stan refused to press the issue because a cop with an addiction to narcotics was not only a sad thing but it was also a cliche) he started smoking more weed than usual. And he read. He read a lot of Pynchon and he read some Vonnegut and Bukowski and a whole lot of Batman.

He also ignored his phone.

Peggy had come over to inform him that he was needed. That the guy who shot him, an event that save for the persistent ache and pain radiating out from his abdomen felt as though it had happened to someone else (“someone without a beard?” Peggy had asked when he relayed this thought to her), was facing trial and they needed him to testify.

“You up to it?” she asked, her hands on her hips. She had ignored the rest of the apartment. The dishes piled up next to the sink, the newspapers he collected and read and never bothered to recycle. The teetering stack of books next to the couch and littered in front of the television. She didn’t say anything about that and she didn’t say anything about the beard, not until later.

“Ginzo misses you,” she said when they walked up the steps of the courthouse, bumping his elbow with her own. “I think Don does too, if only to help wrangle our favorite medical examiner.”

“Wrangle or strangle?”

She shrugged like they were interchangeable and then stepped through the doorway.

So he’s got a whole roadmap of scars and marks he’s collected over the years on the force. For example, there’s still a faint, raised pink line that stretches under his ear a couple inches around his neck that he got that time he was near garroted in that flophouse down in the East Village.

Peggy had shot the pimp with the wire around Stan’s neck, and there was so much blood. Stan’s, the pimp’s, and for a wild, sickening second, Peggy had thought she had shot Stan instead.

When they fuck (and when they do, it always plays out like a moment of weakness, like one of them has broken and apologies will need to made), she likes to press a wet open mouth to that scar, if only because it makes him grab her that much tighter, make a sound like if he could, he’d maybe cry.

6.

“I still don’t get it.”

“You don’t have to get it.”

“If you’re going to speak in code, then I ask you to get out of my morgue.” Ginsberg catches Peggy’s smirk behind the lip of her coffeecup and the quick glance she shoots Stan’s way. He assumes it’s reciprocated because her smirk grows a little more.

“Nancy Drew here’s shacking up with her boyfriend.”

“Okay. I -- okay. So what. That means nothing to me.”

“So, said boyfriend just so happens to be a journalist who runs so far left he crashes straight into the goalpost and off the field.”

“That metaphor doesn’t make any sense,” Ginsberg says quietly, more to himself than Stan.

“Oh, please, feel free to exaggerate more,” Peggy says to Stan, one hand braced on a cocked hip.

“And what I don’t get?” Stan continues, ignoring Peggy. “Is what a guy like that is doing dating an officer of the law.”

“Maybe he’s writing a story about you, you ever think of that?” Ginsberg asks pointing a scalpel at her.

“He’s not writing a story about me.”

“I’ll write a story about you,” Stan says, and Peggy’s dispassionate glare at Stan has all the wrong heat behind it, Ginsberg thinks, completely ruined by the appreciatively amused slant her face takes on first while he blatantly looks her up and down.

“Stop flirting. There’s a body on the table.” Ginsberg gestures widely to the aforementioned table. “Show some goddamn decency.”

7.

They first met Ginsberg in the morgue.

When they got down there, he talked to them the way a shut-in might speak to a grocery store clerk or doorman or a fellow bus passenger: earnestly and embarrassingly enthusiastic. He hopped from one subject to the next, starting with his own credentials and his opinions on midtown Manhattan before leaping to disparate topics, like the release of The Godfather and the persistence of New York stereotypes and how the death of Janis Joplin still haunted him and he was glad she had died in California instead of New York because had she died in New York that might have been too much to bear. Ginsberg was, in a word, overwhelming. Peggy couldn’t decide if it was a good thing that the company he kept was silent and dead.

“You’re pretty for a cop,” Ginsberg said suddenly. “I don’t mean no offense. I’m not being forward. I just didn’t know they made them that way.”

“Pretty?”

“Female.” He turned to Stan. “She good in a clinch?”

“Better than he is,” she said dryly, and Stan had just laughed.

He didn’t mention the body until Stan asked about it. And then he wouldn’t shut up.

8.

Ginsberg hides in the bathroom a lot.

Not from the bodies or death or anything that heavy or macabre, but rather his coworkers. Pete Campbell from the DA’s Office had been in that morning, and if you asked Ginsberg (no one ever asks Ginsberg), that’s more than enough reason to spend upwards of a half hour hiding out in the bathroom on the second floor. Namely, because no one ever comes here. It’s not a nice bathroom even though it’s closer to police commissioner Cooper’s office than all the other bathrooms in the building (Ginsberg knows; he’s done his research) (in fact, his research has led him to conclude that in all likelihood, Cooper has a private bathroom attached to his office, and Ginsberg suspects that that bathroom would rank the nicest of all the bathrooms in the building).

Most of the other offices around this bathroom have been re-appropriated as storage on account of the remodel happening. Ginsberg likes to read the angry editorials in the paper at night about how pissed everyone is that their tax dollars are going to work to make the precinct more architecturally en vogue. Sometimes he cuts them out and slips them in Deputy Chief Sterling’s mailbox anonymously.

He’s thinking about that when the bathroom door slams open, bouncing off the wall loudly, followed by noisy shoes clacking against the linoleum. Female. She exhales loudly, like the start of a crying jag but it goes uncompleted, followed up by water running from the faucet instead. Cold water, Ginsberg knows; the hot don’t run in here.

The gap between the door and the stall is wide enough for Ginsberg can see through it. It’s Peggy. She’s got herself braced against the sink catching her breath like she ran straight here, and maybe also through greater Manhattan. She fills her hands with cold water, lets it seep out through the cracks of her fingers and then blots her face with her wet hands. She does that shaky exhale thing again; it’s only then that Ginsberg considers that maybe she’s mad, barking, furiously angry rather than just winded or sad or shirking her professional responsibilities (Ginsberg thinks he’s all those things too, so that makes her a kindred spirit in that regard, and not just because she chose the same bathroom he did as an oasis amidst the desert that is their midtown Manhattan precinct).

The door swings open again (so much for being the emptiest bathroom in the building) and Peggy’s head darts up. The door clicks shut and Ginsberg doesn’t have as clear a view of the door as he does Peggy. He cranes his neck a little and then finally thinks to peer through the other gap on the right side of the door.

It’s Stan. Of course it’s Stan, this is the least surprising development in his day.

“What do you want?” she asks. The water’s still running and she shuts it off. The bathroom is uncomfortably quiet and he wonders what Stan did that’s got Peggy so mad. He’s still assuming she’s mad, but the way she asked what do you want? sounded more exasperated and hurt than anything else.

Peggy pushes her hair behind her ears and moves to the door, but Stan doesn’t move. He also hasn’t said a word, and if you ask Ginsberg (as already mentioned, no one ever asks Ginsberg anything) that’s the weirdest thing happening right now: Stan’s silence.

“Get out of my way,” Peggy says, quiet and mean. Stan’s still not moving, until suddenly, they’re both pushing against one another -- Peggy trying to get past him and Stan trying to hold her in place, and just as suddenly, Stan drops to his knees in front of her. Peggy freezes, and Stan’s hands are at her belt first and then the button and zip of her slacks; the word what? seems to stick in Peggy’s mouth and it hangs in the air. Stan drags her slacks and her underwear down and without any prelude whatsoever, his mouth is between her legs while Peggy’s mouth parts open and her head drops back.

Ginsberg just stares.

This might be the most surprising development of his day.

Stan’s hands keep rubbing over her hips and her bare ass (Peggy is incredibly pale, for the record) and his mouth earns a sharp gasp from Peggy, who claps her hands against the door to brace herself, her hips bucking forward against him. Everything echoes off the tile. Peggy drops one hand from the door and buries it in his hair; Stan grunts, the sound muffled, and Ginsberg can see a slight tremble to the muscles in Peggy’s thigh.

 Ginsberg holds his breath -- it’s too quiet, just Peggy’s loud breathing punctuated by occasional involuntary-sounding noises (at one point, it sounds like she’s about to let loose the cry Ginsberg had thought was threatening when she first showed up in his bathroom, but she doesn’t, choosing instead to bite her bottom lip) and the sound of Stan’s mouth against her, a sound that makes Ginsberg uncomfortable (wet, it sounds wet).

Ginsberg can’t figure out if this is a normal thing that happens between them -- drive-by oral -- or if this is as strange and unexpected for them as it is for Ginsberg.

Peggy comes quickly and silently but her entire body shakes with it. Stan’s breathing as hard as Peggy and he wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand when he pulls away from her.

Neither of them are looking at each other and Ginsberg can’t stop looking at them. Stan rises all slow and creaky, like his body can’t handle the strain and Peggy pulls up her pants, her hands unsteady with her belt. Ginsberg can see them trembling.

Without a word, she pushes past Stan and she leaves.

“Fuck,” Stan says to the bathroom, and Ginsberg has to bite down on the impulse to reply.

Stan repeats the same position Peggy had before he arrived -- braced against the sink and breathing hard.

Dummies, Ginsberg shakes his head and waits for Stan to leave.

9.

They first time they fucked it was at a bar after a case had closed without a conviction.

They were in a booth together and without preamble she had crawled into his lap and bit at his neck, her mouth wet and sloppy. It wasn’t a cop bar, but his mind still lit on getting caught, someone seeing them. That didn’t stop him from kissing her, grabbing at her ass and pushing up against her when she bore down on him.

He fucked her in the bathroom. Locked the door and bent her over the sink, a band that sounded like The Doors but wasn’t The Doors playing live on the other side of the wall, only the vibrating thrum of the bass carrying through to them. It was fast and clumsy and she was practically coming before he even pushed into her.

After, Peggy had that look to her she only adopted when she felt the world was off-balance. The look she took on when a witness’s statement didn’t match with another’s, when a jury didn’t vote the way she thought they would, when she overestimated each and every person she came into contact with and wound up disappointed. She was the most idealistic and optimistic detective Stan had ever met. Scratch detective -- she was the most idealistic and optimistic person he had ever met. And because of that, her world was often rendered off-balance.

After, she washed her hands, and wouldn’t look at him.

“What, you only fuck girls in bathrooms,” she said to her hands. “Like some kind of pervert.”

When he laughed, the sound was breathless. He watched her reflection. “Funny. I didn’t seem to be alone either time.”

“You initiate it,” she said. It was her cop voice and that made him want to laugh.

“Do you want an apology or a confession?” What he wanted to say was that she was the one who crawled in his lap, that she was just as culpable as he was, but he didn’t say it. He let the band on the other side of the wall drown him out instead.

“I’m going home,” she had said after a beat. And, disappointed (with him, in herself, it was never entirely clear), she had.

10.

Stan likes to watch Peggy work. He likes to watch the way she pieces together information, the resolute look her face takes on before they enter the interrogation room (he’s good cop nine times out of ten to her bad; her temper’s got a way of snapping, her lip taking on a snarl, whereas Stan remains the steadfast trustworthy figure, unruffled and unsurprised, the one who’ll bring you coffee, light your cigarette, make small talk until Peggy throws the book at you).

He likes the rigid posture of her body when she has her gun raised and aimed. The gun never looks entirely natural in her hands. He likes that. (He thinks it looks entirely too natural when he pulls his, an easy extension of his own arm, no cautious charge to his body, not like hers; he holds a gun like it belongs there, like he was made to pull the trigger).

He likes her. How she makes their cordoned off corner of the bullpen smell like a woman. She doesn’t wear perfume, but they keep close quarters. He can tell you when she swaps out her shampoo for a new brand or trades bars of soap. He can tell you too many romanticized details about her and he doesn’t let himself bother to consider if she could do the same.

They’re tied to each other, he thinks. She smokes his cigarettes and never carries her own. She’s killed two people over the course of the job and both times were because of him; he didn’t put the gun in her hand, but he made her shoot it. He was made to pull the trigger, and he made her do the same. He took a bullet for her, and they never ever talk about that.

They never talk about any of the times Peggy has wound up with his blood staining her hands while she radioed in for back-up. The only time he saw her panic was when he was gut-shot .
 That was a long time ago. That was before he had a beard and before Peggy lived with Abe. That was before she admitted to liking him, an admission that never comes with words, but still with her mouth, her hands, the way she’ll wrap herself around him and pretend it’s only because he needs it.

And he does. He needs it all the time. But then, he thinks, so does she.

Dummies, Ginsberg would say.

fin.

FICATHON » THIS CLUB HAS EVERYTHING

falseeeyelashes — Sun, 26 May 2013 02:33:16 GMT

THIS ~~CLUB~~ FICATHON HAS EVERYTHING:
Clones, 1960s ad executives, velociraptors, doctors in outer space, sketch comedy shows, Pawnee's Parks Department, inappropriately assumed sexual innuendo, a police consultant named Sherlock, a one-handed knight, Tracy Morgan saying WELCOME TO YOUR FANTASY!, the Vice President of the United States, puppets in disguise --

Puppets in disguise? It’s that thing of when Alf wore a trenchcoat, so he could go out into public --

and maybe even Stefon himself.

(Also: I really hope one of you used to write for Smash.)

It's Memorial Day weekend! So, hey! It's time for a comment ficathon!

CODE OF CONDUCT:

1. Any fandom and RPF welcome here! Be cool, sodapop! (Also, I never met an AU I didn't like, so feel free to go to there if you please).
2. PROMPT! PROMPT A LOT! All I ask is one prompt per comment, but comment at will, dude. (Oh! And warn for spoilers if you're prompting something sorta spoilery for any recent big summer movies, etc.?)
3. FILL THE PROMPTS! Let's write some real weird shit!
4. HAVE FUN!!!!!!!! And remember, at this ficathon, our motto is:

FICATHON » GOLD GUNS GIRLS

falseeeyelashes — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:43:44 GMT

GOLD GUNS GIRLS
All you need for a movie is a gun & a girl.

It's that time of year!: summer blockbusters and TV season finales! And like anyone needs to twist my arm to convince me to set up a comment ficathon, so here we are! THERE IS NO THEME, JUST AN EXCUSE FOR SHAMELESS PORNOGRAPHY!

RULES:

1. Any and all fandoms or RPF are welcome here! Like I said, no theme, so the sky is the limit, believe in your dreams, etc., etc.
2. PROMPT AWAY! One prompt per comment, all that jazz, you know the drill.
3. FILL THE PROMPTS! Fill them all! An empty ficathon is a sad ficathon! Also, warn if any warning are needed for whatever your fill might be.
4. HAVE FUN! And go in peace!

fic: SOUSED (mad men)

falseeeyelashes — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 16:00:39 GMT

SOUSED
we could make cocktails out of ice & water

mad men. rather than make amends, peggy makes mistakes. post-6x04. peggy/stan. 4580 words.

notes: um, porn?!?! over the last week, I've apparently not only fallen headlong into obsessing over mad men, but these two in particular? this takes place immediately following the events in 6x04, so, spoilers. also, this will all probably be rendered irrelevant come tomorrow night's episode, but whatever! no regrets! have a gif!

con • di • ment
noun
a substance such as salt or ketchup that is used to add flavor to food.

ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin condimentum, from condire ‘to pickle.’
See also PRESERVE (VERB), CONSERVE (VERB), SOUSE (VERB).

1.

Peggy saw The Graduate for the third time the other week. She told Stan that over the phone, after he asked about her day.

(The first time he ever asked her how her day had been, back when their after hours calls began, her response had been to laugh. “Absence really has made the heart grow fonder, huh?” she said, to which he replied, defensive and amused: “I’m making conversation here!”)

“Ahhh. Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson.” A pause while he cleared his throat. “You blocked? Hoping for some creative lightning to strike via the silver screen?”

“Yeah,” she said. “And I like the movie.”

And then he told her that the movie had made him sad, but also not sad, because Anne Bancroft, and her legs, and she had listened while he rambled (primarily about Anne Bancroft, and her legs), more to the tone and the cadence of his voice rather than his words.

She smiled contently to herself and let him talk.

2.

Peggy stays at the bar. So does Stan.

The sun will eventually set and when they leave, they will leave together and the city will be dark.

Pete had left after Stan had moved to a booth and then Ted had left, but not before asking Peggy if she was coming. She wasn’t.

Stan sits alone in a booth with his beer. She knows; she looked.

She could get up. She could ask him, “What happened to your friend?” her tone deliberately light. He’d see through that -- he’s more perceptive than she gives him credit.

“Gone,” he’d say, maintaining eye contact, not yielding. A challenge.

“Can I sit?”

And he wouldn’t say anything, he’d just grimace, that familiar begrudging gesture of whatever you want.

Behind the bar, a glass shatters when it hits the floor. Her attention snaps to that, and she’s back at the bar and she hasn’t moved at all.

She drinks the second rye Ted ordered her and she doesn’t move. She doesn’t get up and she doesn’t question a lot of things. She chomps down on the ice from her glass and the chill forces its way down her spine. She thinks about the loose button on her coat, knows she won’t fix it tonight. She thinks about the work waiting for her on her desk back at the office, rolls her neck first and then her shoulders, decides she’ll think about that after she finishes her drink, crunches another cube of ice between her back molars, shivers.

Here’s the thing:

CGC lacks the landscape of personality SCDP had. She learned that immediately. Or maybe it wasn’t the landscape that was wrong, but her. She had thought what she wanted was an untethering from her history, a clean slate, fresh start, all those new beginnings cliches rolled into one and manifest in this new job.

What she found was that fresh starts are often lonely.

She takes another sip of her drink, watching the bartender clean up the broken glass. She thinks Stan’s still sitting behind her.

In fact, she’s pretty sure of it.

3.

Peggy has a pack of cigarettes on the bar top at her elbow. She’s had the same pack for over a month now, preferring to bum her cigarettes off of others rather than smoke her own.

Stan approaches and sits down next to her at the bar, replacing Ted. “And then there was one,” he says, faux-ominously. She offers him a small smile; he doesn’t reciprocate, and she feels her own sluice off her face into something close to a sneer. He smiles at that and she looks away.

They sit in silence for what feels like too long to her. When she finally glances at him, he’s looking at the pack of cigarettes on the bar.

He sighs heavily.

“You fucked me. And you didn’t even have the decency to buy me dinner first.” There’s no malice to his voice, but then, she doesn’t think she’s ever heard true malice buried in his tone. Petulance, sure. Surliness, discontent, aggravation -- all of the above. But there’s always an element of laziness to him, even and especially his anger. It’s not apathy, because he cares -- if she’s learned anything about him, she’s learned that much -- but it’s like he decided a long time ago that he didn’t have the energy for true spite and fury.

That, or he really does smoke too much grass.

Stan reaches over, takes a cigarette from the pack on the bar in front of her, lights up with his own lighter. “Figure at the very least you could provide me a post-coital cigarette.” He exhales in a cloud of smoke. “Good for you too, babe?”

He says the word babe like any other four-letter word, an impish (familiar) grin threatening.

She doesn’t say anything but she watches him inhale.

He gestures towards her nearly empty glass with his cigarette, smoke trailing in its wake.

“He knows your drink order, huh. Ted.”

Peggy looks at his face quickly and then away. She realizes this implies she has something to hide so she looks at him again. She gives the glass a quick shake. “Rye on the rocks, hardly a challenge to anyone’s memory.” She swallows down the watery residue from her glass. “Besides, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” he feigns innocence. “Just an observation from the peanut gallery. The Greek chorus to whatever tragedy you’re in the process of performing.”

Peggy rolls her eyes. She wants a cigarette too. She wants something to do with her hands. Instead she catches the bartender’s attention, holding her empty glass up and says, “Another round,” including Stan in her request for more.

There’s a lot that she could tell him. But she won’t, she thinks, in the name of professional weakness. She could tell him that she told Ted no at first. That she thought about him, heavy with guilt but not so heavy she couldn’t bear it.

She’s found there’s a lot that she can bear. She's not going to tell him about that either.

“I could buy you a burger,” she says finally. “Lots of ketchup.”

His beard hides too much of his face and it’s difficult to gauge his reaction. He finally snorts; the bartender places their drinks down in front of them, foamy beer sloshing over the side of his pint.

“Lots of Heinz, you mean.”

4.

When she left SCDP, she figured she had left him, too.

She was wrong.

There is no point in their shared history she can pick out and say, “There. That’s when we tied ourselves to each other.” Because that’s what all relationships are anyway -- a lot of knots, a lot of tangled emotions and experiences.

But she could hazard a guess.

He called her first. Back when she had started at CGC he had called her. His voice had been so familiar, mocking yet good-natured, and for the first time since leaving, she let herself consider how much she missed it all.

“How much groveling would it take to drag you back to the homestead?” he asked on the heels of an unflattering story about Ginsberg.

She had laughed. “I’m happy here,” she said and mostly meant it.

He laughed. “I’m telling you -- I’m not above begging.”

5.

They’ve moved from the bar back to the booth he was occupying before.

“Don had me working in a goddamn bunker on this.” Slight upward tip to his lips. “Ginsberg was going fucking nuts. Totally thought I was working on like . . . a super soldier robot for the government, ‘the cure for the common communist.’” He sighs and laughs at the same time, stubbing out his cigarette. “Best week of my life.”

Peggy watches Stan’s fingers, still pressing down on the butt of the cigarette into the ashtray, stray wisps of smoke still escaping.

“Sometimes I miss it,” she says and her voice sounds very faraway.

He looks up at her sharply, a mean grin ghosting over his lips. “Save the sentiment for after Cosgrove murders us all. I expect a fine, fine eulogy from you. Unless,” he adds, mouth twisting, “you decide to aid and abet one Kenneth Cosgrove in my demise.”

Her mouth goes sour. “It was business, Stan. It wasn’t personal.”

There is a pause, and Stan considers his beer instead of her. “You know, people only trot that line out when they know the exact opposite is true.”

“Don’t be a girl,” she snaps, smiling. Stan raises his eyebrows at her.

He shrugs. “Sometimes I forget.” It’s all he says.

“Forget what?”

He looks at her before turning his attention back to the beer in front of him. “We’re not playing for the same team anymore, Champ.”

“Does that make me your Benedict Arnold?”

“Nah. I’m pretty sure that role belongs to me.”

“Hmm,” she hums. “Yeah. Feeding intel to the enemy camp.”

“Speaking of, I should probably check you for a wire. Enemy camp, and all that,” he says with a dramatically pointed expression, like one of those bumbling cops on TV.

“That just an excuse for you to feel me up?” She means it as a joke, and so does he, but his expression has gone that much darker, like he’s thinking about it. Imagining his hands under her clothes, seeking her out, her flesh versus artifice.

“You know me -- always looking for that window of opportunity.”

For a single beat, he is unbearable. Maintaining eye contact with him is unbearable. She doesn’t look away and either does he, and it’s like they’re back at the Waldorf again, back at the start of each other, trying to see which one of them is going to jump first.

This time, it’s her. She clears her throat, averts her gaze, and takes to her drink.

“How’s Abe doing?” Stan asks suddenly, leaning back heavy on his side of the booth.

“I don’t want to talk about Abe.”

He leans forward again, his elbows braced against the edge of the table, hands clasped around his beer. “Okay. So no Abe. I’m also thinking no Sterling Coop gossip, considering how well that played out last time. We could talk about Kenny." He sighs wistfully. "I really thought he was gonna give up the milquetoast act and go full beast on us.”

She smiles small, lips pressed together. “I didn’t know you all were going behind Kenny’s back.”

“And I didn’t know you were going behind mine.” He takes a long pull from his pint. “Cyclical conversation,” he says, gesturing wide. “Let’s not do that.”

She nods.

It’s strange being this physically close to him after so much time apart. There’s a table dividing them, but it reminds her of all those days and nights spent working opposite each other. There’s a lot you don’t necessarily remember wrong but simply don’t remember about a person at all. The way he fidgets, his fingers in constant motion, like he’s itching for pen or pencil, something to keep his hands and mind occupied. How his mouth shifts tightly up and to the side when he’s unsure whether to smile, what he means to say. The way he watches her -- critical but oddly kind, like he can’t wait to pick her apart but expects to find all the things he likes.

She gets that faraway look to her for a beat, unsure where to steer the conversation. “Abe was telling me the other day, about the whole Penn Central thing, how it’s . . . emblematic of monopolistic tendencies in an untethered capitalist -- ”

“I thought we weren’t talking about your Abraham,” Stan interrupts, studying her carefully.

“We’re not. We’re talking about what he told me.”

“I don’t want to talk about the railroad,” Stan says.

“What do you want to talk about then,” she asks, her voice not just quiet but young sounding to her. He’s still looking at her, and she thinks he’s had too much to drink because his face is open in a way she doesn’t know what to do with. Maybe that means it's her who has had too much to drink. There’s nothing romantic in the way he’s looking at her (she refuses to see that), but there’s a whole lot of undisguised . . . something there. Want. She thinks it’s want.

(And here’s the thing: it’s not one-sided. Under the table, she presses her thighs together, her knee knocking against his in the process.

It feels good, she decides, to want something. Someone. Whatever. His knee presses against hers again and this time, she calls it deliberate -- though on her account or his she’s not ready to say.)

He was right when he said this was a cyclical conversation. It is. They keep coming back around to the points they thought they other had abandoned. He keeps coming back around.

Even through her pantyhose, through his slacks, his knee feels hot against hers.

“You know,” he says, eyes flitting between her eyes and her mouth, “we do miss your . . . distinctly feminine presence around the office, fangs and all.”

“We,” she repeats softly.

“Me,” he says.

“Yeah?” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. She bites her bottom lip; he doesn’t blink.

6.

She stifled a yawn when she picked up the phone. The first week of December and it was snowing again in earnest.

“How’d you know I’d still be here?” she asked after he greeted her with, “Burning that midnight oil, huh?”

“Lucky guess,” Stan said.

“You guys slammed over there?”

 “Eh, no more no less than usual. Working at the mercy of Czar Draper. How’s life on the other side of the Wall, comrade?”

She snorted. “Busy.”

“And cryptic,” he teased when she didn’t elaborate. He sighed and it stretched into a yawn. She could hear the sound of clothes and papers rustling on his end. She pictured him sprawled out on the couch in the lounge and knew that she was right.

“You know what I could go for?” he said, voice scratchy. “Some pork . . . fucking egg rolls.” There was a brief pause. “And a blowjob.”

She laughed loudly. “Not sure who’s still delivering this late. You might have to hold out till tomorrow.”

He chuckled. “Too bad you’re no longer a mere desk away,” he said faux-longingly.

“I don’t have any egg rolls,” she said after a beat, and then she listened to him laugh.

7.

They finish their last round of drinks.

Peggy wipes her palms on her thighs under the table.

 These are the things she is thinking about:

Whether Ted expected her back at the office by now. What Don would say if he was here and hadn’t left. Why it matters what Don would have to say about any of this, about anything about her. What would happen if she slid around to the other side of the booth -- if all of Stan ran as hot as the leg pressed against her own beneath the table. What it means that she wants to know.

“I’m gonna -- ” she points in the general direction of the restroom. “I’m gonna hit the washroom, freshen up. Before we . . . head back,” she trails off.

Stan follows her, crowding her space as she turns the knob and opens the door.

“What are you -- ” she asks, turning around to face him, leaning heavy on the door. She can hear her pulse in her ears.

“It sounded like an invitation,” he says, just enough hint of lechery blended with humor to read as familiar. His face goes serious just as quickly.

“Tell me I’m reading this wrong,” he says. Her mouth feels dry as she steps aside and he steps into the bathroom with her.

He locks the door.

And then they just stand there, facing each other in the small bathroom, a stalemate like anything else between them.

“Are you still mad at me?” she finally asks quietly.

“I’ll get over it,” he says, his voice a low rumble. He takes a step towards her.

There’s something bravely deliberate about the way he touches her face. His fingers skim the side of her cheek, his thumb passing over her chin, like he’s marking her for memory. She’s drunk, but drunk in that way where she’s filled with a belief of how anything is possible -- the sort of drunk when she usually gets her best work done.

Stan’s possible, but then, he always has been.

When he kisses her, it’s nothing like when he kissed her back at SCDP all that time ago. For one thing, he has a beard. For another, the kiss is that much harsher because he means it that much more now (she thinks, assumes, she’s drunk and all things are possible, even and especially this).

For another -- she kisses him first.

She bridges the gap, she kisses him, tentative and open-mouthed, sucking lightly on his bottom lip, his hand still on her face. He makes a deep, guttural noise, almost a growl, and fits the curve of her jaw in his hand and he kisses her back.

8.

When Abe kisses her, it’s like he’s trying to share something with her, a secret, an emotion, and this is the only way he knows how to get his point across to her. Peggy rarely gets the point.

 Stan kisses her like all he wants is to get inside her -- all force and wet tongue, a single-minded drive comprised solely of want.

Infidelity, she’ll find later, is easy -- like a dirty secret she has always known.

Later. She doesn’t consider it until later, it’s that easy at the time. Abe as afterthought.

She thinks that makes disloyalty natural for her. Stan would probably agree.

9.

His hand is hot on her hip, making her breath stutter despite herself.

Everything about the way they are kissing each other is filthy -- rough and noisy, with obvious intent. His other hand grips tight along her neck, dragging down her body, hauling her tighter against him. She gasps, sharp and desperate, which makes him grunt, press his hips against hers.

Clumsy, she hits her knee hard on the toilet paper dispenser, winds up half muttering, half moaning, “ow,” into his mouth.

“That was your knee?” he mumbles, entirely unconcerned. She doesn’t answer, pulls at his loosened tie instead. She pulls too hard and his fingers dig in against her hip, his breath rushing out against her lips. She pushes his blazer off his shoulders, leaves it crumpled on the floor, while his fingers stumble over the buttons along the front of her dress.

His mouth tastes like beer, like the cigarettes he smoked out at the bar, flat and oddly familiar. He tastes the way most men she’s fucked have tasted -- the beer interchangeable with something harder. She can taste the saltiness from the peanuts he ate at the bar, and he’s licking into her mouth like he’s trying to taste her too.

He’s loud, keeps groaning, making these low appreciative humming noises in the back of his throat as he kisses her. She can feel him hard against her, and that makes her feel hot, like her skin is too tight, like she’s already regretting the fact there’s no way he’s going to be able to touch every part of her right now. So she grinds down on his thigh between her legs and he grabs at her ass under her dress, his mouth going slack, bumping open against her chin when he bucks his hips back against hers.

He’s thought about this; she knows that much about him. So has she: there’s the ugly secret.

It makes sense, she thinks, head fuzzy, distracted, that of all places they’d do this here. There’s nowhere else for them to go, not together. His apartment would be a commitment, would imply more premeditation than she is willing to lend this, and her apartment is impossible (it’s a lie to say she doesn’t think of Abe until after because she does, she thinks of him here, thinks of him walking in on them, how Stan would be the one to speak and not her, an ill-conceived quip that does nothing to mitigate the fact he’d still be inside of her; the thought makes her flush and she doesn’t think it’s with shame).

Stan’s hand slides high under her dress, fingers gripping tight around her thigh before dragging farther up. His fingers pluck at the waistband of her pantyhose, the sink pressing cold and hard against her back, his patience quickly waning.

“Like Fort fucking Knox, Jesus Christ,” he mutters before finally ripping them down the center seam; she bites down on whatever sound was tripping its way up her throat, clenching hot and empty between her legs. “Should be marketing these as goddamn chastity belts.”

“Those were new,” she says. He ignores her, his hand covering the crotch of her panties, stroking her through them, the cotton soaked and she flushes when he pushes the fabric against her, lines creasing around his eyes like he’s somehow just proven a point and he likes that.

“I like a woman who likes practical underwear.”

“Shut up,” she pants.

He watches her face when he pushes her panties to the side and touches her, her hips rolling forward into it. He makes wide circles with the pads of his fingers, and she hears herself say, “More.” His mouth trips up in an almost derisive smirk before he increases the pressure, his breathing labored, though not as much as hers, her grip white-knuckled against the edge of the sink.

He rubs at her roughly before sliding his fingers inside her, her hips canting towards him, breath catching in her chest. It’s more than the novelty of fucking someone else, she thinks, having someone else touch you. It’s not just someone else -- it’s Stan.

Her hands tremble when she reaches for his belt. She’s too far gone to feel embarrassed about it and he’s too distracted, his hips jerking when the side of her hand brushes against the front of his slacks. His fingers slip from her, leaving her wet and empty, and his nose bumps along her cheekbone as his hands join hers at his belt.

He’s thick in her hand (but what isn’t thick about him? Body, skull, makes sense his cock is too). He has the kind of body that at one point was probably super fit (high school -- when she first met him all she could see was varsity football) but has gone to seed, though not entirely. His arms are still strong, she can still feel some muscle, and he lifts her easily up against the sink and countertop. Her legs wrap around his hips, and he’s already rubbing himself against her. She grabs at his chest with this choked-off sounding groan stuck in her throat when his cock passes over her clit. She thinks he says her name, he says something, and then he’s pushing into her.

He moves slowly at first, a croaking, “Oh, Jesus,” from him. It sounds too close to tender and that frightens her, makes her dig her nails into his shoulder, makes him hiss and push in deeper. She was stupid not to ask him for a rubber, but he feels good inside her, hot, stretching her, making her ache. She’s already thinking how she’ll feel this tomorrow, feel it in her inner thighs, the way the muscles are stretched. The thought makes her twitch against him, and he exhales like the start of a laugh.

Peggy catches his eye. He’s still rolling his hips, shallow thrusts that are making her own respond of their own volition, but she wants more.

“Are you going to fuck me, or what?” He finally laughs, breathless and winded, the sound fading out as he slams his hips against her. He fucks her hard, the counter making rattling noses under them, Peggy dragging her fingers through his hair, his mouth open against the column of her throat.

She’s getting that desperate feeling tripping down her spine, settling low in her gut, making her clench around him, tip her head back, mouth open but silent. She can hear him mutter, “fuck,” at the hinge of her jaw, almost reverent, losing the rhythm between her legs.

She comes like that, surrounded by him and his voice in her ear.

10.

“Is this going to be . . . we’re okay?” she asks, smoothing her hair behind her ears.

Stan’s mouth cracks into a crooked smile and he readjusts his belt. “Sure, why wouldn’t we be?”

11.

They leave together and then go their separate directions -- Stan to SCDP, her to CGC.

Peggy pulls her coat tight around her as she walks, her pace brisk. The night is cold, the smell of snow on the air, and she blinks up at the sky, sees only towering buildings, bright lights that make her blink.

She walks. She walks and she thinks about all the things she has been trying not to think about. The button on her coat, now hanging by a thread. Abe. Abe at their apartment. Abe waiting. Stan’s voice on the phone. Stan’s voice in her ear.

She thinks their story would have always ended up this way.

Ended is the wrong word to use, makes her feel tight in her chest. Not the end, but a wrench, a fork in the road. They were always going to meet this fork in the road and there was only one path they would ever take: this one.

Maybe tonight didn’t have to end like this -- that’s not what she means. She means generally: he was always going to fuck her and she was going to want it. Maybe today she could have gone back to the office with Ted. Maybe in three days’ time one of them would have folded, called the other after their respective offices had gone quiet and they’d already opened the bottle, flicked the lighter, picked their poison. It would’ve been her first. She would have been the one to call him and when he answered, she would have been the one to say, “don’t hang up,” and maybe, “please,” but probably not, “I miss you,” and definitely not, “I’m sorry.” He wouldn’t hang up. He’d play tough, he’d aim for mean, but he’d get bored, and sitting alone -- her office, her window at her back, her city waiting -- his voice, low and heavy, would wash over her and the word she’d want to use for it would be warm.

And eventually there’d be a bar, a bar a lot like this one or maybe this one exactly, and they’d drink (because they had a bad day, because they had a good day, because neither of them is ever going to say, “I miss you” outright), they’d drink too much and they’d get sloppy with each other and that night would have ended same as this night.

She’s not entirely sold on the objective truth of it, but she believes it, and that’s enough. That’s enough to make it true.

She heads back to the office. When she arrives, she'll be missing a button.

12.

“Are you here for an affair, sir?” the Room Clerk asked Benjamin in The Graduate.

Peggy had laughed at that scene.

fin.

COMMENT FICATHON » WELCOME TO JURASSIC PARK!

falseeeyelashes — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 06:03:09 GMT

HOLD ON TO YOUR BUTTS
A Jurassic Park-themed comment ficathon!

This post is a result of peer pressure! And the knowledge that the only thing I seem to post here anymore are ficathons. Or fic. All of a questionable nature. THIS IS ALSO A PRODUCT OF THE FACT THAT JURASSIC PARK WAS RE-RELEASED IN THEATERS AND THAT IS AWESOME! Also, tequila. Also: where are all the Jurassic Park AUs?! Serious question that lacks serious good answers. Hence, this.

THE RULES:

1. We have a theme! Jurassic Park! If that means you want to prompt about the actual movie(s) and stuff, that's cool, go on and do you. If you want to prompt some weird AU shit (like, hey, Dany from Game of Thrones hatched some dinosaurs instead of dragons, Westeros is really Jurassic Park or something, Breaking Bad is the story of Walter White playing god with dinosaur embryos instead of meth, Amy Poehler needs to go rescue her friends from T-Rexes, WHATVER!) that is even more excellent. SCIENCE!
2. PROMPT AWAY! One prompt per comment blah blah.
3. WRITE SOME WEIRD DINO-THEMED SHIT, MAN! Get weird. Get scientific. Life finds a way.
4. Don't breed velociraptors.
5. HAVE FUN!

AU COMMENT FICATHON: TOO HUNGOVER TO CREATE A THEME

falseeeyelashes — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:35:22 GMT

AU COMMENT FICATHON!:
Pretend there's a reason other than boredom for this!

Hello, friends!!! I don't even have anything interesting to say here other than my hangover is finally subsiding, I'm watching Flight with my roommate and probably fearing airplanes for the rest of my life, and I have realized all I ever want in this world is a whole lot of AU fics about hot people I like doing it in stories they don't belong in, lol. SO THAT'S WHAT THIS IS!!!

THE RULES!:

1. It's an AU ficathon! So your prompt has to have some sort of AU-business happening there! The AU aspect doesn't have to be huge -- they don't have to be fighting aliens in outer space -- and can be as simple as HEY, THAT ONE EPISODE ENDS DIFFERENTLY, WRITE THAT, PLEASE. Be creative! Let's get weird!
2. RPF will happen bc I am me and I don't think I care about anything else fandom-wise on most days. When I say let's get weird, I don't mean get weird and judge-y, at least not in this post.
3. PROMPT AWAY! Fire at will! All I ask is one prompt per comment.
4. FILL THE PROMPTS! FILL THEM ALL! Writing is fun for everyone! Include any warnings that might be needed.
5. HAVE FUN! Play nice! Write some weird shit!!!