A New Fandom And A (Sort Of) New Bingo Card
Welcome, folks, to my newest fannish obsession! I just recently finished playing the video game Disco Elysium (despite, overall, not being very much of a video-gamer), and it's been kind of eating my brain in that way that, perhaps, can only be excised by the catharsis of writing fic. So here we are.
Anybody out there played this one? It's a very noir-y game in which you play an amnesiac detective trying to solve a murder, in a reality that's not quite ours, although it certainly bears resemblances to it.
It's definitely not for everybody. I mean, for one thing, it gets pretty much all the trigger warnings for everything. Alcoholism and substance abuse, suicidal thoughts, discussions of sexual assault, gore (not visual, but some of the descriptions are very vivid), you name it. A number of characters are giant racists. (Towards fictional races/ethnicities, mind you, but it's still ugly.) Evil children will hurl homophobic slurs at you. That sort of thing. And whatever your politics, the game will try very hard to make you feel uncomfortable about them. Plus, the lore dumps can be overwhelming, and as for the game mechanics... Well, it's very text-based, and you can sometimes easily spend an hour of real time just talking to one NPC, and everything up to and including combat is resolved desktop-RPG style with a dice role. Personally, those are 100% ideal mechanics for me, but I get that not everyone is likely to feel the same way.
But, oh, the story itself is amazing. The characters are great, the world-building is interesting and rabbit-hole deep. There are some really clever conceits when it comes to how the game uses your skill points that I won't spoil. There's a wonderful dark sense of humor and a lot of philosophy and some complicated themes. There's a sense that you are truly creating a character who can be different from game to game in genuinely meaningful ways. And the mystery plot is challenging enough to give a serious sense of satisfaction when you make progress on it, but doable enough not to get too frustrating. Oooh, and the voice acting! The voice acting is fucking fantastic.
So, um. Yeah. I wrote some fic for it. Turns out, this one ended up fitting very well for one of the squares on the Gen Prompt Bingo card I got back in April and hadn't done anything with yet. I still have no idea what to do with any of the rest of it, but at least now I've narrowed down my choice of which lines to do.
Title: Fail Until You're Good Enough at It That It Starts to Look Like Hope
Fandom: Disco Elysium
Characters/Pairings: Harry/Kim, past Harry/Dora
Summary: You hold onto Kim... but not too tightly. Maybe that's something you're actually learning how to do.
Rating/Warnings: PG or PG-13-ish. Warnings for sexual references/off-screen sex, alcoholism, reference to drug use, and a lot of swearing. All of which, I think, is milder than what you get in the actual game. Also contains various kinds of spoilers.
Length: ~2,000 words
Author's Note: This basically features the version of Harry I played in my own run: an INT-based Sorry Cop who for whom finding out what he did during his blackout was a wake-up call to sobriety, and who managed to fail a rather surprising number of rolls. (For all his faults, I've become very, very fond of that guy.) Written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "Early Morning," because if my brain is going to force me to write fic for a new fandom -- thanks, Conceptualization! -- then at least I ought to get a bingo fill out of it.
Fail Until You're Good Enough at It That It Starts to Look Like Hope
You are waking up.
There were no dreams this time, not that you remember. Only the velvety blackness, embracing you like a friend, then gently releasing you when you were ready to leave. That's happening more and more often now. More often than not, even.
One of these days, maybe it will stop coming as a surprise. It's a little hard to imagine. But then, you've experienced a lot of things you might have once had a hard time imagining. Like... Like...
Like the fact that even now that you've risen from the deep, there's still some embracing going on here. A body close to yours in the pre-dawn dark, resting in your arms, solid and warm against the fragile mortal meat of you.
Eyes still closed, you burrow your face into the warmth of skin, and for a terrible moment, even now, you half-expect to be met with the smell of apricots.
Which isn't there. Of course it isn't. Somewhere inside you, something uncoils a little. Something tight and hard, like a muscle you've held clenched for years, loosening. It aches, like muscles in that situation do. But less than you would have thought.
The smell is very far from apricots. It's a faint scent of motor oil, and the still-clinging smoke of a single cigarette, and of clean, sharp, masculine sweat.
You did that. Made him sweat. Made him gasp and pant, and even swear, once. Made him smile.
Well. No. No, you didn't. No one makes Kim Kitsuragi do anything. He gave that to you. He let you.
He let you.
And oh, God, here they are again, all the voices in your head, bouncing around at once, as you finally open your eyes.
There's the one that's exulting in what you did last night, revved up by it, that wants to do it again and again. You won't give it booze, won't give it speed, but you gave it this, and it loves you for it, loves Kim for it, loves the feel of the firm, lean lines of him against you and wants him with a pure, clean, animal want.
Others are admiring Kim in a slightly more elevated way. His self-possession, his authority, his unconquerable coolness. How does he manage to exude those things even in his sleep? But he does. He does.
There's the one that's still pondering over the look you saw in his eyes last night, the look you couldn't quite bring yourself to understand.
And the one that whispers fearful imaginings into your ear.
Oh, that one. That one. It's drowning out all the others now. It's saying, What are you doing, Harry? Do you have any idea how badly this could go wrong? Think of what's going to happen when you fuck this up.
No, actually, maybe that's not a voice in your head at all. Maybe it's not your imagination. Maybe it's just you. The sorry, fuck-up core of you.
What is going to happen when when this fit of temporary, un-Kim-like insanity wears off? What happens tomorrow, or next week, or a few years from now, or a few minutes from now as the sun rises, when he realizes he cannot live with you, either, that no one can? No matter how much you... you...
You love him, the voice in your head says. You don't even know which one. Maybe it's all of them. God, probably it's all of them. You love him. Have, maybe, since the day you met him, when he watched you heaving up your boozy guts and handed you a handkerchief and acted like everything was okay, like you were okay, even when the entire world could see you weren't. Or at least since the day you sat together on a swingset whistling intertwining harmonies into the cold spring air, and he was so gentle, so fucking gentle with you as you contemplated the wreckage of the latest beautiful thing you'd ruined.
You love him, and if-- when-- if this whole thing goes bad, goes as rotten as that week-old corpse, what's going to happen to him? He's your co-worker, for God's sake. Because you invited him to be. He loves this precinct, loves the job. He's the best damn cop there. You can't make him leave. And can't make him stay, not with you being all... all you at him every day. Can you? No, you'll have to be the one to go, and what then? No one else will take you. You're lucky these assholes still put up with you. And if you're not a cop, what are you? A gym teacher? You don't even remember that life. Even your body doesn't remember it, except, maybe, when you run.
Really? says the voice in your head. Is that really how it would go?
Don't be stupid, of course it fucking is. Because you're you. You're the man who still dreams about his ex, over and over. Still begs her futilely to stay, over and over.
Are you? says the voice. Did you dream of her last night? Did you dream of her the night before? How long has it been, anyway?
No, you're the man who can't help living in the bombed-out wreckage of his past, even when he doesn't remember it. You're the man who can't stop, can't let go, even when he needs to. Even when the case is unsolvable. Even when everyone gets hurt. And you can't let another person become that for you, not again. Even if you think you could survive it now -- and maybe you can, you think maybe you can -- it wouldn't be fair to them. To him.
Which is something you probably should have thought of before you slept with him.
Really? says the voice Try this. What if Dora were to return, right now. What if she were to walk in that door over there, and come up to you, and tell you she's changed her mind. That she wants you back.
What, into Kim's bedroom? While we're like this? That'd be kind of awkward.
Don't dodge the question, says the voice.
So you try to imagine it. Imagine her returning to Revachol, disembarking from the airship, making her way back to you. Imagine the scent of her breath, the feel of her hands in yours, the sound of her voice telling you she was wrong, begging you to take her back.
You can't. You can't imagine it. Since when have you not been able to imagine it? You've never been able to stop imagining it. Even when you succeeded in killing parts of your brain that remembered her, you couldn't stop.
You see? says the voice. It sounds satisfied. Possibly even smug.
Huh. Just... huh.
In your arms, Kim begins to stir. He rolls around to face you, opening his eyes. In the dim light from the streetlamps outside, he looks at you, squinting a little without his glasses, and he smiles.
That smile. That smile. Barely there, barely visible, but it stirs that same surge of warmth and pride in you that it always does. You have made Kim Kitsuragi smile. It's better than disco. Better than drinking. It's the only thing that feels anywhere near as good as closing a case.
Look at him, says a voice. Look at him. Remember the look in his eyes last night? You need to understand it. Try again.
You're almost afraid to. Because this is how you mess things up, isn't it? Trying to understand people and failing. But then, where has refusing to understand ever gotten you? Only the darkness, and the same pointless dreams, night after night. Only the opportunity to live alone in the burnt-out remains of you own brain.
"Good morning," Kim says. He touches your face. Like you're worth touching. Like you're not literally the sorriest cop in the world. His voice is as soft as always. Maybe a little softer. "Did you sleep well?"
You are naked. You are so completely naked. No clothes to hide behind, nothing to help you project the image of yourself you want the rest of world to see. There is only you here. You and him.
You look into Kim's eyes. And you see it now, the thing you were afraid to see last night. The answer.
The answer is, Kim knows you. He knows you possibly better than you know yourself, because he's not distracted by any of the bullshit in your head. He's seen you, day after day, all the days of the year and change you've been working together. He's seen sobriety ravage your face and then restore it again, not to what it was, but at least to something more human-looking. He's been watching your magnesium intake -- you've seen him making note of it, saying nothing. He's seen how much less of it you need these days. He's paid attention, in that quiet, careful Kim Kitsuragi way.
Why do you think, after a year of you awkwardly flirting with him, a year of you being obviously in love with him, last night is the night he finally said "yes?" The voice is smug. But it's also kind, at the same time. Somehow. You have talented voices in your head. He can see you're finally ready. That you've changed enough to be capable of not destroying both your lives over this.
Son of a bitch. It's right. You're right.
This could still go wrong. Horribly, stupidly wrong. You have a talent for fucking things up, and you know it. But maybe not everything you fuck up has to become a ruin for you to live in. Not everything that ends has to leave you full of scars and nightmares and self-pity. Some things can be beautiful even when they're fleeting, even as memories. Like a glimpse of an impossible creature. Like dancing in a church, in defiance of the void and the silence and the mortality of the world.
And who knows? Maybe not everything has to end. Maybe it is possible to hold onto something other than memories and wounds.
There's really only one way to find out.
"I slept really amazingly well," you say to Kim. Kim, who is used to you, used to the way you pause to debate with yourself like this before you speak. Kim, who seems to like you, maybe even love you, no matter how incredibly weird you are. Kim, who said yes to you. Who wants you. And, hell, you might never understand why he even puts up with you, but the thing about Kim is, you trust him. He's always been a better judge of character than you. And if Kim has decided you're worth having, he deserves to have all of you. That means not leaving pieces of yourself behind fighting a battle you already lost a long time ago. If you've learned nothing else in Kim's company, you've certainly learned the folly in that. You've seen what it does to one's ability to love like a sane person.
You're not a sane person, of course. But you do think, just maybe, you are ready to love like one.
You draw Kim's face to you and kiss him. His lips are warm and soft and fearless on yours. Wherever this takes you, you know he'll roll with it, just like he always does. You could learn a thing or two from him. No. You have learned a thing or two from him.
Outside, the sun isn't rising. Not yet. Probably it will soon. There are, you're pretty sure, still a lot of sunrises left.
But even in the darkness, you think you might just be okay.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1011821.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.
Anybody out there played this one? It's a very noir-y game in which you play an amnesiac detective trying to solve a murder, in a reality that's not quite ours, although it certainly bears resemblances to it.
It's definitely not for everybody. I mean, for one thing, it gets pretty much all the trigger warnings for everything. Alcoholism and substance abuse, suicidal thoughts, discussions of sexual assault, gore (not visual, but some of the descriptions are very vivid), you name it. A number of characters are giant racists. (Towards fictional races/ethnicities, mind you, but it's still ugly.) Evil children will hurl homophobic slurs at you. That sort of thing. And whatever your politics, the game will try very hard to make you feel uncomfortable about them. Plus, the lore dumps can be overwhelming, and as for the game mechanics... Well, it's very text-based, and you can sometimes easily spend an hour of real time just talking to one NPC, and everything up to and including combat is resolved desktop-RPG style with a dice role. Personally, those are 100% ideal mechanics for me, but I get that not everyone is likely to feel the same way.
But, oh, the story itself is amazing. The characters are great, the world-building is interesting and rabbit-hole deep. There are some really clever conceits when it comes to how the game uses your skill points that I won't spoil. There's a wonderful dark sense of humor and a lot of philosophy and some complicated themes. There's a sense that you are truly creating a character who can be different from game to game in genuinely meaningful ways. And the mystery plot is challenging enough to give a serious sense of satisfaction when you make progress on it, but doable enough not to get too frustrating. Oooh, and the voice acting! The voice acting is fucking fantastic.
So, um. Yeah. I wrote some fic for it. Turns out, this one ended up fitting very well for one of the squares on the Gen Prompt Bingo card I got back in April and hadn't done anything with yet. I still have no idea what to do with any of the rest of it, but at least now I've narrowed down my choice of which lines to do.
Title: Fail Until You're Good Enough at It That It Starts to Look Like Hope
Fandom: Disco Elysium
Characters/Pairings: Harry/Kim, past Harry/Dora
Summary: You hold onto Kim... but not too tightly. Maybe that's something you're actually learning how to do.
Rating/Warnings: PG or PG-13-ish. Warnings for sexual references/off-screen sex, alcoholism, reference to drug use, and a lot of swearing. All of which, I think, is milder than what you get in the actual game. Also contains various kinds of spoilers.
Length: ~2,000 words
Author's Note: This basically features the version of Harry I played in my own run: an INT-based Sorry Cop who for whom finding out what he did during his blackout was a wake-up call to sobriety, and who managed to fail a rather surprising number of rolls. (For all his faults, I've become very, very fond of that guy.) Written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "Early Morning," because if my brain is going to force me to write fic for a new fandom -- thanks, Conceptualization! -- then at least I ought to get a bingo fill out of it.
Fail Until You're Good Enough at It That It Starts to Look Like Hope
You are waking up.
There were no dreams this time, not that you remember. Only the velvety blackness, embracing you like a friend, then gently releasing you when you were ready to leave. That's happening more and more often now. More often than not, even.
One of these days, maybe it will stop coming as a surprise. It's a little hard to imagine. But then, you've experienced a lot of things you might have once had a hard time imagining. Like... Like...
Like the fact that even now that you've risen from the deep, there's still some embracing going on here. A body close to yours in the pre-dawn dark, resting in your arms, solid and warm against the fragile mortal meat of you.
Eyes still closed, you burrow your face into the warmth of skin, and for a terrible moment, even now, you half-expect to be met with the smell of apricots.
Which isn't there. Of course it isn't. Somewhere inside you, something uncoils a little. Something tight and hard, like a muscle you've held clenched for years, loosening. It aches, like muscles in that situation do. But less than you would have thought.
The smell is very far from apricots. It's a faint scent of motor oil, and the still-clinging smoke of a single cigarette, and of clean, sharp, masculine sweat.
You did that. Made him sweat. Made him gasp and pant, and even swear, once. Made him smile.
Well. No. No, you didn't. No one makes Kim Kitsuragi do anything. He gave that to you. He let you.
He let you.
And oh, God, here they are again, all the voices in your head, bouncing around at once, as you finally open your eyes.
There's the one that's exulting in what you did last night, revved up by it, that wants to do it again and again. You won't give it booze, won't give it speed, but you gave it this, and it loves you for it, loves Kim for it, loves the feel of the firm, lean lines of him against you and wants him with a pure, clean, animal want.
Others are admiring Kim in a slightly more elevated way. His self-possession, his authority, his unconquerable coolness. How does he manage to exude those things even in his sleep? But he does. He does.
There's the one that's still pondering over the look you saw in his eyes last night, the look you couldn't quite bring yourself to understand.
And the one that whispers fearful imaginings into your ear.
Oh, that one. That one. It's drowning out all the others now. It's saying, What are you doing, Harry? Do you have any idea how badly this could go wrong? Think of what's going to happen when you fuck this up.
No, actually, maybe that's not a voice in your head at all. Maybe it's not your imagination. Maybe it's just you. The sorry, fuck-up core of you.
What is going to happen when when this fit of temporary, un-Kim-like insanity wears off? What happens tomorrow, or next week, or a few years from now, or a few minutes from now as the sun rises, when he realizes he cannot live with you, either, that no one can? No matter how much you... you...
You love him, the voice in your head says. You don't even know which one. Maybe it's all of them. God, probably it's all of them. You love him. Have, maybe, since the day you met him, when he watched you heaving up your boozy guts and handed you a handkerchief and acted like everything was okay, like you were okay, even when the entire world could see you weren't. Or at least since the day you sat together on a swingset whistling intertwining harmonies into the cold spring air, and he was so gentle, so fucking gentle with you as you contemplated the wreckage of the latest beautiful thing you'd ruined.
You love him, and if-- when-- if this whole thing goes bad, goes as rotten as that week-old corpse, what's going to happen to him? He's your co-worker, for God's sake. Because you invited him to be. He loves this precinct, loves the job. He's the best damn cop there. You can't make him leave. And can't make him stay, not with you being all... all you at him every day. Can you? No, you'll have to be the one to go, and what then? No one else will take you. You're lucky these assholes still put up with you. And if you're not a cop, what are you? A gym teacher? You don't even remember that life. Even your body doesn't remember it, except, maybe, when you run.
Really? says the voice in your head. Is that really how it would go?
Don't be stupid, of course it fucking is. Because you're you. You're the man who still dreams about his ex, over and over. Still begs her futilely to stay, over and over.
Are you? says the voice. Did you dream of her last night? Did you dream of her the night before? How long has it been, anyway?
No, you're the man who can't help living in the bombed-out wreckage of his past, even when he doesn't remember it. You're the man who can't stop, can't let go, even when he needs to. Even when the case is unsolvable. Even when everyone gets hurt. And you can't let another person become that for you, not again. Even if you think you could survive it now -- and maybe you can, you think maybe you can -- it wouldn't be fair to them. To him.
Which is something you probably should have thought of before you slept with him.
Really? says the voice Try this. What if Dora were to return, right now. What if she were to walk in that door over there, and come up to you, and tell you she's changed her mind. That she wants you back.
What, into Kim's bedroom? While we're like this? That'd be kind of awkward.
Don't dodge the question, says the voice.
So you try to imagine it. Imagine her returning to Revachol, disembarking from the airship, making her way back to you. Imagine the scent of her breath, the feel of her hands in yours, the sound of her voice telling you she was wrong, begging you to take her back.
You can't. You can't imagine it. Since when have you not been able to imagine it? You've never been able to stop imagining it. Even when you succeeded in killing parts of your brain that remembered her, you couldn't stop.
You see? says the voice. It sounds satisfied. Possibly even smug.
Huh. Just... huh.
In your arms, Kim begins to stir. He rolls around to face you, opening his eyes. In the dim light from the streetlamps outside, he looks at you, squinting a little without his glasses, and he smiles.
That smile. That smile. Barely there, barely visible, but it stirs that same surge of warmth and pride in you that it always does. You have made Kim Kitsuragi smile. It's better than disco. Better than drinking. It's the only thing that feels anywhere near as good as closing a case.
Look at him, says a voice. Look at him. Remember the look in his eyes last night? You need to understand it. Try again.
You're almost afraid to. Because this is how you mess things up, isn't it? Trying to understand people and failing. But then, where has refusing to understand ever gotten you? Only the darkness, and the same pointless dreams, night after night. Only the opportunity to live alone in the burnt-out remains of you own brain.
"Good morning," Kim says. He touches your face. Like you're worth touching. Like you're not literally the sorriest cop in the world. His voice is as soft as always. Maybe a little softer. "Did you sleep well?"
You are naked. You are so completely naked. No clothes to hide behind, nothing to help you project the image of yourself you want the rest of world to see. There is only you here. You and him.
You look into Kim's eyes. And you see it now, the thing you were afraid to see last night. The answer.
The answer is, Kim knows you. He knows you possibly better than you know yourself, because he's not distracted by any of the bullshit in your head. He's seen you, day after day, all the days of the year and change you've been working together. He's seen sobriety ravage your face and then restore it again, not to what it was, but at least to something more human-looking. He's been watching your magnesium intake -- you've seen him making note of it, saying nothing. He's seen how much less of it you need these days. He's paid attention, in that quiet, careful Kim Kitsuragi way.
Why do you think, after a year of you awkwardly flirting with him, a year of you being obviously in love with him, last night is the night he finally said "yes?" The voice is smug. But it's also kind, at the same time. Somehow. You have talented voices in your head. He can see you're finally ready. That you've changed enough to be capable of not destroying both your lives over this.
Son of a bitch. It's right. You're right.
This could still go wrong. Horribly, stupidly wrong. You have a talent for fucking things up, and you know it. But maybe not everything you fuck up has to become a ruin for you to live in. Not everything that ends has to leave you full of scars and nightmares and self-pity. Some things can be beautiful even when they're fleeting, even as memories. Like a glimpse of an impossible creature. Like dancing in a church, in defiance of the void and the silence and the mortality of the world.
And who knows? Maybe not everything has to end. Maybe it is possible to hold onto something other than memories and wounds.
There's really only one way to find out.
"I slept really amazingly well," you say to Kim. Kim, who is used to you, used to the way you pause to debate with yourself like this before you speak. Kim, who seems to like you, maybe even love you, no matter how incredibly weird you are. Kim, who said yes to you. Who wants you. And, hell, you might never understand why he even puts up with you, but the thing about Kim is, you trust him. He's always been a better judge of character than you. And if Kim has decided you're worth having, he deserves to have all of you. That means not leaving pieces of yourself behind fighting a battle you already lost a long time ago. If you've learned nothing else in Kim's company, you've certainly learned the folly in that. You've seen what it does to one's ability to love like a sane person.
You're not a sane person, of course. But you do think, just maybe, you are ready to love like one.
You draw Kim's face to you and kiss him. His lips are warm and soft and fearless on yours. Wherever this takes you, you know he'll roll with it, just like he always does. You could learn a thing or two from him. No. You have learned a thing or two from him.
Outside, the sun isn't rising. Not yet. Probably it will soon. There are, you're pretty sure, still a lot of sunrises left.
But even in the darkness, you think you might just be okay.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1011821.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.