Fic:: Listening Their Fear [S&A]
Sep. 12th, 2007 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenThis is not, as may be very clear, my original AMSF story, which is a lot longer than this, and also a lot less, er, finished. Last night I changed prompts, changed fandoms and wrote this in one fittingly crazy go.
Fic:: Listening Their Fear
by Raven
R, Slings & Arrows, het, Geoffrey/Ellen. For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
hawkfromhandsaw.
45. “Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.”
--Tony Kushner
“Geoff! Did you take an umbrella?” Ellen calls through the open door, but Geoffrey’s gone already, bounding across the grass through the falling snow. His boots leave imprints half an inch deep, and he’s surprised to see them, concrete evidence of himself as solid, rather than just a focus for nervous energy, insubstantial. Cold snap, says the weather forecast, and Geoffrey snaps with it, twanging and ricocheting all the way to the theatre.
There are stacks of paper on his desk, but he can’t sit still to read them, not this morning when the wind is blowing from the north, so he bounces out into the corridor and towards the front desk, breathless and demented, to ask Anna for coffee.
She says, “Cream and sugar?”
She says: he has snow in his hair, and that look in his eyes.
“Who, me?” he asks, stupidly.
She says: “Of course, Geoffrey. It was you who wanted the coffee, right?”
She says: it’s going to be a long day.
“Anna?” he says, trying for vocalisation over the noise – and there is noise, he realises; all around him, there are whispers and shouts and caresses, murmurs and wails, poetry read into the theatre, and rich, low laughter.
She pats him on the shoulder, you’ll be all right after some caffeine, and leaves him be.
“Oh, God,” he mutters, and rests his head against the wall.
*
Once he’s let it in, it’s a quiet, cacophonous din. Geoffrey stands up and walks down the corridor, through into his office, back to Anna’s desk, through into the theatre, back out into the foyer and onto the street and in and out again. He holds the coffee mug from the base, scalds his hands, knocks it back and scalds his tongue.
Anna looks at him, concerned; she’s thinking about paperwork and if Richard isn’t careful he’ll have a heart attack, and isn’t the town pretty in the snow.
From her table, Maria thinks like a tiny firecracker with added sulphur and spit, fucking actors and fucking directors and look at the way the light falls through the dust, sharp-edged, lovely.
Audible even from his office, Richard is thinking about corporate sponsorship and money and single malt, but he’s got a song from A Chorus Line stuck in his head.
One of the apprentices brushes past, looking at the ground, looking at her hands, looking at a boy vanishing out of sight. I’ll do anything to make him love me.
“Are you all right, duck?” Frank asks Geoffrey, who’s walking, fists clenched, in the direction of the “Rehearsal In Progress” sign. “You’ve gone pale.”
“Fine,” Geoffrey says wildly, “I’m fine.” Frank is thinking about Cyril, and Geoffrey can feel the mirror image on the other side, Cyril watching Frank walk along the lines of seats.
Geoffrey sits down, drapes his feet across the seat in front of him, breathes in, and he’s calm, he’s calm, he’s the suspended silence between two repelling poles, and he says: “Let’s take it from where we left off.”
“The raven himself is hoarse,” calls Ellen from the stage, looks straight at him, and Geoffrey is wholly, entirely undone.
*
It’s a half-hour break for lunch and they collide, breathless and shivering, in her dressing room. “The door,” she says quickly, “the door, the door!” – and Geoffrey kicks it shut with one madly flailing foot. His hands go for buttons and hooks and half-mangled costume zippers, a frenzy of new undoing, but she’s different: careful, soothing, stripping him methodically of his layers so his coat flies neatly off his shoulders, becomes a puddle of cloth on the dressing-room floor with a certain artistic inevitability. She holds him down with her, matching him to her rhythm so he’s tasting her lips rather than kissing her, languorous and slow.
He closes his eyes. Scraps of her come to him unbidden, yes and love and Geoffrey, and he’s becoming substantial again, more than just a loose focus of stimulus but a mind in a body, when her hands slice between sweat-slicked cotton and skin, describing the curve of his hips with each sharpened nail. It hurts – she knows it hurts him, she knows, she’s always known, this is how he wants it to be – but beneath it he feels the rush of red fire, the burn of possession – mine, she thinks, mine, and the shiver that runs through his body is fraught and anticipatory and ultimately, a harbinger of things to come.
And of course it’s good, because he can read her mind, for fuck’s sake, and because it’s Ellen, because they have had years to explore each other in all the ways madness lies. It’s good, and not sweet, and the last of the snow is melting out of the roots of his hair as she holds him close to her – oh, oh, he hadn’t thought of this – and arches back with lips parted in a small perfect O.
Ah, he thinks, dazedly, la petite morte, right before his head explodes.
Later, when she is Lady Macbeth and he is the artistic director of the festival and they are both late for rehearsal, she looks at him blindly rooting for his clothes and his papers and asks, “Geoffrey, are you all right?”
It’s like a musical canon; she thinks it and says it, but not at the same time, and there are other melodies lurking beneath, vivid percussive notes of love and fear and exasperation.
He doesn’t answer, because he can’t feel his own mind.
*
The birds sing. Electricity hums in its wires, busy busy positive negative. Trees think as they grow, solemn as preachers in their steady advance towards the sky. Geoffrey Tennant goes mad.
He stalks down the centre aisle of the theatre, past all of them and their interminable monologues – she’s off on one again, ducky / oh, for God’s sake Geoffrey / fucking artists / someone ought to fix his collar / so foul and fair a day I have not seen – and stands on the stage, thinking about theatre, space and distance, raising himself out of the bedlam.
For a moment he teeters, reeling from unexpected silence. And then someone in his head says, not so hard, yes, right there, yes! and he freezes. It’s a girl’s voice, it echoes in a particular way off rafters and wood, and he knows exactly where the bolthole is, the sacred space beneath this and every stage where young maids and fairies go when they don’t have dressing rooms and do have sex.
Taking a long deep breath, he looks at the actors and says, as neutrally as possible, “I think we’ll go back to the beginning for this afternoon. Witches?”
The witches make their way to the stage, and that’s his cue to get out of the way, but all at once there’s a sourness in the air, something twisted and sick-making and he can’t move. I think I changed my mind, she’s thinking, with underscoring notes of fear and revulsion. I won’t do anything, I don’t want to do this.
“When shall we three meet again?” – and the witch is thinking some very witchy thoughts in Geoffrey’s direction, because he’s right there in the middle of her blocking and he can’t seem to get his feet to come unstuck from the floor.
I wish you wouldn’t, it hurts, and the echoes are still hitting the boards and Geoffrey’s whole body is shaking. The witch looks at him and rolls her eyes, in-character. There’s a mundanity in everyday tragedy, Geoffrey thinks wildly, not everyone’s lucky enough to have harbinger hags. She’s staring and Geoffrey’s trembling and the fairy-girl thinks: please, no.
Jumping off the stage, he shouts, “Enough! I changed my mind! Rehearsals are cancelled indefinitely! Nahum, take this opportunity to sweep underneath the stage!”
He’s gone mad, they chorus. “Yes!” he yells. “Yes, I finally, irredeemably have! You’re free to go! Go!”
He hits the ground running and doesn’t stop. Behind him, Maria shouts, “Geoffrey, rehearsals! When should...”
“When the rest is silence!” he calls over his shoulder, and he’s gone.
*
He leaves silence in his wake. Ellen can’t find him in the bar or by the river, the warmth of body heat has evaporated from her dressing room, and after a few hours she starts to panic. There is no record of a man with dark curls and a psychotic disposition in any of the local hospitals, and the RCMP seem to think he’s not their responsibility. Unless he’s throttling wildlife again, someone says, and she gives him a slap.
She comes home late in the afternoon to find the radio on in the kitchen and the windows open, but no sign of Geoffrey.
“And the strange unseasonable weather in southern Ontario has disappeared as quickly and mysteriously as it came. Temperatures are rising again, and should be at least five degrees above by Monday...”
She snaps off the weather forecast and takes a moment to breathe in the fresh, balmy air. There’s a scent on the breeze, flowers and spices like the last breath of an Indian summer. Stepping across to the window, she finds him at last. Geoffrey is lying flat on his back on the lawn, the sprawl of his limbs marked by a certain peace.
Even with his eyes closed, he seems to know she’s watching, and he smiles. She fights the urge to kill him and yells, “Geoffrey! Where the hell have you been?”
“Listening to the silence,” he says, still with the smile. He’s very pale, she notices, and his hands and feet are bare and must be half-frozen with cold. Patches of white still cling to the garden, blades of grass poking sharply through the last of the blanket, but every leaf is dripping and the world is alive with the sound of running water. “Listening,” he says, more quietly, “to the snow melt.”
I love you, she thinks. “You worried me half to death, Geoffrey, you fucking idiot.”
“Yeah,” he says, rueful, “I know.”
Without thinking she’s gone through the window and out into the garden, sitting with him in the coming warmth of the wind. “God, you’re crazy,” she says after a while.
He nods, and sitting up, he kisses her. Even his mouth tastes of rainwater, harsh and cold, and she reaches for his hands. “You’re freezing, Geoffrey. Come inside.”
“The wind’s changed,” he says, wonderingly, and leans on her as she leads him home.
*
The day ends with an early sunset, the air rich with the promise of warmth, and Geoffrey falls asleep to the sound of silence. Ellen walks around the flower-scented house, quiet and still, and listens to him breathe.
finis
Fic:: Listening Their Fear
by Raven
R, Slings & Arrows, het, Geoffrey/Ellen. For
hawkfromhandsaw. 45. “Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.”
--Tony Kushner
“Geoff! Did you take an umbrella?” Ellen calls through the open door, but Geoffrey’s gone already, bounding across the grass through the falling snow. His boots leave imprints half an inch deep, and he’s surprised to see them, concrete evidence of himself as solid, rather than just a focus for nervous energy, insubstantial. Cold snap, says the weather forecast, and Geoffrey snaps with it, twanging and ricocheting all the way to the theatre.
There are stacks of paper on his desk, but he can’t sit still to read them, not this morning when the wind is blowing from the north, so he bounces out into the corridor and towards the front desk, breathless and demented, to ask Anna for coffee.
She says, “Cream and sugar?”
She says: he has snow in his hair, and that look in his eyes.
“Who, me?” he asks, stupidly.
She says: “Of course, Geoffrey. It was you who wanted the coffee, right?”
She says: it’s going to be a long day.
“Anna?” he says, trying for vocalisation over the noise – and there is noise, he realises; all around him, there are whispers and shouts and caresses, murmurs and wails, poetry read into the theatre, and rich, low laughter.
She pats him on the shoulder, you’ll be all right after some caffeine, and leaves him be.
“Oh, God,” he mutters, and rests his head against the wall.
Once he’s let it in, it’s a quiet, cacophonous din. Geoffrey stands up and walks down the corridor, through into his office, back to Anna’s desk, through into the theatre, back out into the foyer and onto the street and in and out again. He holds the coffee mug from the base, scalds his hands, knocks it back and scalds his tongue.
Anna looks at him, concerned; she’s thinking about paperwork and if Richard isn’t careful he’ll have a heart attack, and isn’t the town pretty in the snow.
From her table, Maria thinks like a tiny firecracker with added sulphur and spit, fucking actors and fucking directors and look at the way the light falls through the dust, sharp-edged, lovely.
Audible even from his office, Richard is thinking about corporate sponsorship and money and single malt, but he’s got a song from A Chorus Line stuck in his head.
One of the apprentices brushes past, looking at the ground, looking at her hands, looking at a boy vanishing out of sight. I’ll do anything to make him love me.
“Are you all right, duck?” Frank asks Geoffrey, who’s walking, fists clenched, in the direction of the “Rehearsal In Progress” sign. “You’ve gone pale.”
“Fine,” Geoffrey says wildly, “I’m fine.” Frank is thinking about Cyril, and Geoffrey can feel the mirror image on the other side, Cyril watching Frank walk along the lines of seats.
Geoffrey sits down, drapes his feet across the seat in front of him, breathes in, and he’s calm, he’s calm, he’s the suspended silence between two repelling poles, and he says: “Let’s take it from where we left off.”
“The raven himself is hoarse,” calls Ellen from the stage, looks straight at him, and Geoffrey is wholly, entirely undone.
It’s a half-hour break for lunch and they collide, breathless and shivering, in her dressing room. “The door,” she says quickly, “the door, the door!” – and Geoffrey kicks it shut with one madly flailing foot. His hands go for buttons and hooks and half-mangled costume zippers, a frenzy of new undoing, but she’s different: careful, soothing, stripping him methodically of his layers so his coat flies neatly off his shoulders, becomes a puddle of cloth on the dressing-room floor with a certain artistic inevitability. She holds him down with her, matching him to her rhythm so he’s tasting her lips rather than kissing her, languorous and slow.
He closes his eyes. Scraps of her come to him unbidden, yes and love and Geoffrey, and he’s becoming substantial again, more than just a loose focus of stimulus but a mind in a body, when her hands slice between sweat-slicked cotton and skin, describing the curve of his hips with each sharpened nail. It hurts – she knows it hurts him, she knows, she’s always known, this is how he wants it to be – but beneath it he feels the rush of red fire, the burn of possession – mine, she thinks, mine, and the shiver that runs through his body is fraught and anticipatory and ultimately, a harbinger of things to come.
And of course it’s good, because he can read her mind, for fuck’s sake, and because it’s Ellen, because they have had years to explore each other in all the ways madness lies. It’s good, and not sweet, and the last of the snow is melting out of the roots of his hair as she holds him close to her – oh, oh, he hadn’t thought of this – and arches back with lips parted in a small perfect O.
Ah, he thinks, dazedly, la petite morte, right before his head explodes.
Later, when she is Lady Macbeth and he is the artistic director of the festival and they are both late for rehearsal, she looks at him blindly rooting for his clothes and his papers and asks, “Geoffrey, are you all right?”
It’s like a musical canon; she thinks it and says it, but not at the same time, and there are other melodies lurking beneath, vivid percussive notes of love and fear and exasperation.
He doesn’t answer, because he can’t feel his own mind.
The birds sing. Electricity hums in its wires, busy busy positive negative. Trees think as they grow, solemn as preachers in their steady advance towards the sky. Geoffrey Tennant goes mad.
He stalks down the centre aisle of the theatre, past all of them and their interminable monologues – she’s off on one again, ducky / oh, for God’s sake Geoffrey / fucking artists / someone ought to fix his collar / so foul and fair a day I have not seen – and stands on the stage, thinking about theatre, space and distance, raising himself out of the bedlam.
For a moment he teeters, reeling from unexpected silence. And then someone in his head says, not so hard, yes, right there, yes! and he freezes. It’s a girl’s voice, it echoes in a particular way off rafters and wood, and he knows exactly where the bolthole is, the sacred space beneath this and every stage where young maids and fairies go when they don’t have dressing rooms and do have sex.
Taking a long deep breath, he looks at the actors and says, as neutrally as possible, “I think we’ll go back to the beginning for this afternoon. Witches?”
The witches make their way to the stage, and that’s his cue to get out of the way, but all at once there’s a sourness in the air, something twisted and sick-making and he can’t move. I think I changed my mind, she’s thinking, with underscoring notes of fear and revulsion. I won’t do anything, I don’t want to do this.
“When shall we three meet again?” – and the witch is thinking some very witchy thoughts in Geoffrey’s direction, because he’s right there in the middle of her blocking and he can’t seem to get his feet to come unstuck from the floor.
I wish you wouldn’t, it hurts, and the echoes are still hitting the boards and Geoffrey’s whole body is shaking. The witch looks at him and rolls her eyes, in-character. There’s a mundanity in everyday tragedy, Geoffrey thinks wildly, not everyone’s lucky enough to have harbinger hags. She’s staring and Geoffrey’s trembling and the fairy-girl thinks: please, no.
Jumping off the stage, he shouts, “Enough! I changed my mind! Rehearsals are cancelled indefinitely! Nahum, take this opportunity to sweep underneath the stage!”
He’s gone mad, they chorus. “Yes!” he yells. “Yes, I finally, irredeemably have! You’re free to go! Go!”
He hits the ground running and doesn’t stop. Behind him, Maria shouts, “Geoffrey, rehearsals! When should...”
“When the rest is silence!” he calls over his shoulder, and he’s gone.
He leaves silence in his wake. Ellen can’t find him in the bar or by the river, the warmth of body heat has evaporated from her dressing room, and after a few hours she starts to panic. There is no record of a man with dark curls and a psychotic disposition in any of the local hospitals, and the RCMP seem to think he’s not their responsibility. Unless he’s throttling wildlife again, someone says, and she gives him a slap.
She comes home late in the afternoon to find the radio on in the kitchen and the windows open, but no sign of Geoffrey.
“And the strange unseasonable weather in southern Ontario has disappeared as quickly and mysteriously as it came. Temperatures are rising again, and should be at least five degrees above by Monday...”
She snaps off the weather forecast and takes a moment to breathe in the fresh, balmy air. There’s a scent on the breeze, flowers and spices like the last breath of an Indian summer. Stepping across to the window, she finds him at last. Geoffrey is lying flat on his back on the lawn, the sprawl of his limbs marked by a certain peace.
Even with his eyes closed, he seems to know she’s watching, and he smiles. She fights the urge to kill him and yells, “Geoffrey! Where the hell have you been?”
“Listening to the silence,” he says, still with the smile. He’s very pale, she notices, and his hands and feet are bare and must be half-frozen with cold. Patches of white still cling to the garden, blades of grass poking sharply through the last of the blanket, but every leaf is dripping and the world is alive with the sound of running water. “Listening,” he says, more quietly, “to the snow melt.”
I love you, she thinks. “You worried me half to death, Geoffrey, you fucking idiot.”
“Yeah,” he says, rueful, “I know.”
Without thinking she’s gone through the window and out into the garden, sitting with him in the coming warmth of the wind. “God, you’re crazy,” she says after a while.
He nods, and sitting up, he kisses her. Even his mouth tastes of rainwater, harsh and cold, and she reaches for his hands. “You’re freezing, Geoffrey. Come inside.”
“The wind’s changed,” he says, wonderingly, and leans on her as she leads him home.
The day ends with an early sunset, the air rich with the promise of warmth, and Geoffrey falls asleep to the sound of silence. Ellen walks around the flower-scented house, quiet and still, and listens to him breathe.
finis
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no subject
on 2007-09-12 08:18 pm (UTC)Very very well done.
no subject
on 2007-09-13 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-12 08:19 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-13 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-12 08:42 pm (UTC)I love you, she thinks. “You worried me half to death, Geoffrey, you fucking idiot.”
“Yeah,” he says, rueful, “I know.”
Agh, woman! You're too, too good at this.
no subject
on 2007-09-13 07:52 pm (UTC)And hey, you! Yes, you! Why aren't you pimping your fic, huh? It's great and people should read it!
no subject
on 2007-09-14 11:22 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-13 02:03 am (UTC)When does this take place? During season two or between two and three?
...the RCMP seem to think he’s not their responsibility. Unless he’s throttling wildlife again, someone says...
And thereby hangs a crossover, hmm?
no subject
on 2007-09-13 09:37 pm (UTC)And thereby hangs a crossover, hmm?
Heh! Yes, well, it should've been the Ontario Provincial Police, I guess, but I couldn't resist. *g*
no subject
on 2007-09-13 05:41 am (UTC)kind of hateenvyadmire you for being able to write something like this in one night.#2, oh. Oh. You touched on this concept in "Letters to La Paz," didn't you, but I didn't expect you to expand upon it in another story. I'm glad you did; it's such a fascinating idea, and so Geoffrey, really, to be tuned to a slightly different frequency than everyone else is.
I love, also, that it gives you a chance for all these spot-on cameos from the other characters. Especially Maria; this is such a beautiful sentence: From her table, Maria thinks like a tiny firecracker with added sulphur and spit.... And, OH, Richard, and that sad little part of him that wants to be more than a drone. (Now I want to know what Chorus Line song it is. I'm amusing myself by thinking maybe "Dance: Ten; Looks: Three.") And Frank and Cyril! The real OTP of New Burbage.
Also great is pretty much the whole of the sex scene, which manages to be incredibly intimate and immediate without ever, y'know, saying most of the words. And sdklsfklkfsklsfkl, "because they have had years to explore each other in all the ways madness lies," YES.
But I think my very favorite part of this whole fic is how you get right into Geoffrey's twisted mind, now also trying to bear the weight of this new bit of insanity, and it's so... oddly, compellingly internally consistent, in a way? Like this: The birds sing. Electricity hums in its wires, busy busy positive negative. Trees think as they grow, solemn as preachers in their steady advance towards the sky. Besides being a lovely set of lines, that's crazy but it also makes sense, it's what we've already seen in Geoffrey only taken to the extreme. He starts out hearing a dead person, and he ends up hearing everything, living and dying. That's brilliant. And what's even more brilliant is that you take this idea and it's not just a vignette, it actually grows plot, with Geoffrey "overhearing" what's going on underneath the stage.
Have I mentioned lately how right the world feels now that you're apparently writing this fandom regularly? It's a beautiful thing. :) I need to go and read what you did for the S&A ficathon now.
no subject
on 2007-09-13 09:44 pm (UTC)One thing I like about this fandom is how it doesn't have magic or SF or anything like that, but somehow or other you can shoehorn Geoffrey-the-lunatic-telepath into the gaps in canon without too much trouble.
Also, I can't write sex. I get really, really embarrassed and then I go hide in metaphor. *blushes* Thank you.
Have I mentioned lately how right the world feels now that you're apparently writing this fandom regularly?
I don't know how it's happened, honestly! It's pretty much all because of you! Thank you again for making me watch this show.
no subject
on 2007-09-13 11:52 am (UTC)I love it. He really is only mad north by northwest. When the wind is southerly.... Wonderful story.
no subject
on 2007-09-13 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-13 09:53 pm (UTC)*boggles a bit*
I'm sneaking this in right ahead of dinner company, so I can't even go back again for pull quotes, but this is bitchin', baby. *smooches you hard* Mad Geoffrey gets me where I live. Must read again later.
no subject
on 2007-09-17 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-15 11:19 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-17 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-06-07 02:58 pm (UTC)