Life Fanmix Drabbles
Life Drabbles. Based on lyrics from the fanmix you can find here, and at the bottom of this page. Because I'm evil, and I want you to read first. Even though you can scroll through and get to the bottom, anyway.
Title: Turtables and Back Rooms
Fandom: Life
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Charlie Crews, Dani Reese, Constance Griffths, Ted Earley
A/N: Enjoy. Critique if found necessary. :)
Disclaimer: Don't own. This is purely an NBC baby.
1"
She’s seen it since day one, since the second the sneering C.O. took a step back from the door. Charlie looked up from the other side of the room with desert-empty eyes and abruptly smiled.
Handcuffed to the table, pale as the dead, scraggly beard and a hallow face marked with the jaundice-yellow shadows of bruises, that grin shouldn’t have been there. Not in this place, anyway.
Charlie smiled like he meant it for five seconds, but as time went on and the meeting went on and he realized what she was saying, that false grin and Buddha-like nonsense that seemed to come out of nowhere started to fade. And then vanish. And then - as if realized - come up again. She noticed how he tried to focus on her eyes when she talked but kept drifting off, focusing not only on the top of her blouse but on an ear, maybe a collarbone and the door behind her.
His mask was good, but over time Constance began to recognize it for what it was - a softly screaming fear and boiling rage that overtime had been numbed by a larger, suffocating feeling of helplessness.
It was a good mask, but now - as Constance deals with a free man who happens to be one of her close(st) friends (client, she corrects herself, he’s still a client - kinda) - she wonders what he’s trying to prove. Charlie Crews, a newly exonerated man with money, looks, intelligence and the whole world open to him, moves back into Los Angeles and becomes a detective in the same precinct from which twelve years ago he was dragged in chains.
He goes back to a place that thinks he’s guilty. He goes back to a world that moved on without him, a world that still denies his existence, his abuse, the injustice wrecked upon him. He goes back to a world that never really changed and never really cared in the first place and he stays there. Instead of the alternative of a new life.
His mask is firmly fixed in place with the glue of the unspoken. She sees it just as well as he does (or doesn’t, because Charlie is good at compartmentalizing), and when she walks into his house through unlocked front doors to half-naked women and a mansion with no furniture, Constance ponders.
Charlie, what are you trying to prove?
2"
But revenge is one of those finicky and wickedly cruel creatures, and while it tries to concoct the right chemistry for reaction and retribution, it soon forgets that the place is prison and the time is forever.
Truth of the matter is, that people lie when they say revenge keeps them going. You have to be able to move to get vengeance, and in a cell that’s barely eight feet long and four feet wide, such movement is rather limited.
Charlie forgets revenge. Simple existence and the elimination of senses replaces it.
Only at the end of year ten (when the horizon suddenly appears out of nowhere and Charlie knows deep in awkwardly-healed bones that he is going to get out of here) does revenge come seething back.
It takes a while. Twelve years. But then Charlie walks out into the real world and when he smiles, he knows damn well it’s predatory.
The sun - a rare sight in Crescent City - burns brightly in an early May morning. Charlie looks directly up into the ocean of the sky and smiles again.
Perfect weather for payback, he thinks.
3"
One night, after listening to Detectives Crews and Reese argue over fruit and reincarnation, Bobby Stark comes home to his kids and informs his youngest son that all cops and detectives are crazy people.
“Does that include you?” his son asks.
Bobby narrows his eyes.
“No.”
4"
In 1995, police informant Kyle Hollis slaughtered the family of Rachel Sebolt. Rachel, meanwhile, hid in a corner and watched as Mommy collapsed in the hallway and blood sprayed on the back walls. Her brother was crying, then screaming then nothing, and from downstairs, she could hear the last sobbing sounds of Daddy as his lungs stopped inflating.
Three years later, Kyle Hollis adopted Rachel Sebolt as his daughter.
(She wonders now what it’d be like to really shoot the man that killed Mommy, Daddy, and her big brother.)
5"
The world, Ted reflects, isn’t even as easy as it looked seven years ago. After nearly six hours of trying to figure out how to install the goddamn wi-fi, he sits at the island in an almost empty mansion (and it does creep him out, a little bit), and tries to figure out how the hell to set the time on the microwave, the oven, and then on his goddamn Bluetooth cell phone.
The world wasn’t as complex seven years ago. And Ted - denial or not - misses that.
6"
When Kyle Hollis lies bound and gagged in the trunk of a shit-colored ‘79 Cadillac DeVille, Charlie Crews wonders if he’s stepped outside the frail chicken-wire cage he drew around himself when he left Pelican Bay.
Breaking and entering. Trespassing. Evading the police. Kidnapping. An unregistered firearm. Violating the speed limit in perhaps six different counties.
Is it worth it? Old, plastic-Zen Charlie asks.
Kyle Hollis kicks from the trunk and Charlie’s teeth squeak as he grinds them together.
In a speed zone of 40 miles an hour, the Cadillac’s speedometer hovers at 60.
7"
First day back as a detective, and Charlie Crews finds himself dealing with a dead kid, a severed finger, a pissed off female partner who bridles at his clear violation of the law and the stony stares of a department that doesn’t want him here.
Feels a lot like being back in prison.
8"
Rich people are nosey.
Standing on the sidewalk outside Charlie’s yard, Rebecca and Jonathan Nemeron smile broadly, but their eyes wander and their hands stiffly shake Charlie’s.
“We didn’t see you guys come with a moving truck,” Rebecca says. She is a petite, Beverly Hills transplant whose face reveals the stretches of Botox and whose heels shout vainly of a woman denying her age. “We didn’t even know we had neighbors until we saw your car pull in yesterday.”
Charlie smiles, hands in his pockets.
“Yeah,” he confesses. “We actually arrived today.”
Jonathan raises an eyebrow. “When are you guys officially moving in?”
“Already did,” Charlie says.
The Nemerons exchange a glance with one another.
“Where’s your furniture?”
Charlie’s smile broadens. “We don’t have any.”
9"
When walls move in on Charlie, when he feels unarmed and cornered and when he smells prison in apartment buildings and even the Department, he goes home. Goes out to the backyard, chucks off his shoes and socks, rolls his pants up to his knees and sits on the edge of the pool.
Here the air doesn’t smother or weigh down like the dirty fear, blood and hate of prison.
The air moves, and it is free.
Charlie breathes.
10"
What freaks out Danielle Reese the most about her partner is that five months after she’s assigned with him, both her and Charlie wander into a book store and - somehow, someway - Dani finds herself looking over a book on Zen.
A little Charlie voice that has irritatingly wound up in the back of her head begins mumbling something about the journey.
“Gah!” Dani haphazardly shoves the book back between something on Buddhism and New Age whatever-it’s-called and looks around to see if Charlie is nearby.
Three aisles over, she hears his voice.
“So,” he asks the store clerk, “do you have anything on monkeys?”
11"
A normal man would’ve taken his freedom and run.
Instead, Charlie Crews locks himself in a back room, covers the walls in red paper and starts drawing lines.
(Everything is connected.)
12"
Dani hates him the first two weeks. Hates the Zen shit, the way he’ll look at her and grin happily when she shoots him a glare. Hates the rambles, the tilted head and - perhaps this is her biggest pet peeve - the fruit. Apples, oranges, and a whole variety of weird and misshapen crap that doesn’t even look remotely like something she should be having regular 5-7 servings of.
He’s hiding the fact he’s just as fucked up as everyone else, and for the first two weeks she knows Detective Charlie Crews, Dani decides that she despises him for it.
It had never been that easy for her.
13"
Nothing is easy, coming back to the Real World. So the first three months - as Charlie attempts to get used to a place where men and women cohabit and the probability of being shanked is considerably unlikely - he runs.
Constance is busy with other cases. His ex-wife hangs up twenty-seconds into his call.
Charlie runs. And then he drives. And reads the newspaper and calls Constance constantly and goes for walks and sits on park benches and just tries to soak it in.
There is no Ted Earley this young in Charlie’s story. Only Charlie, a newly-fledged bird booted out of a cage by a steel-toed boot.
“How are you doing?” Constance asks carefully, nearly a week into his release. They’re sitting in her house at the kitchen table. Charlie happily digs into a watermelon as she asks the question, though his eyes flicker when he finally understands what she’s saying
He finishes a slice. Drops it on the blue ceramic plate with a clink.
And then promptly goes after another.
“I’m figuring out,” Charlie says around a mouthful, “that I am excellent company for myself.”
She raises an eyebrow, tilts her head to the side.
“Charlie,” she begins after a moment, slower this time, “how are you doing?”
He pauses and the mask falls with a sigh. Resting his chin on one hand, he glances down at the watermelon rind on his plate.
“I’m finding,” Charlie murmurs, looking back to Constance, “that this is a lot harder than I thought it’d be.”
She reaches towards the middle of the table and hands him a paper napkin. Her smile is sad.
“I know,” she says.
14"
He’s still adapting to being Charlie’s roommate when Charlie comes down the stairs on a Sunday morning in nothing but boxers and sunglasses.
“I’ve decided something,” Charlie announces.
In between a drink of orange juice, Ted pauses, raising his eyes from the L.A. Times.
“I’m going to go out back and tan.” Charlie says.
At first, Ted takes this in stride, nodding slowly and maintaining eye-contact with Charlie for exactly five seconds. But then he stops.
“Charlie - you’re...”
“What?”
He pauses, squints his eyes as he tries to find the words.
“ Won’t you burn?”
Charlie beams.
“Isn’t it great?”
Ted thinks on this for a moment. Purses his lips and then, with a weary sigh, begins nodding again.
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess it is.”
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
zip file is here.
Title: Turtables and Back Rooms
Fandom: Life
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Charlie Crews, Dani Reese, Constance Griffths, Ted Earley
A/N: Enjoy. Critique if found necessary. :)
Disclaimer: Don't own. This is purely an NBC baby.
1"
She’s seen it since day one, since the second the sneering C.O. took a step back from the door. Charlie looked up from the other side of the room with desert-empty eyes and abruptly smiled.
Handcuffed to the table, pale as the dead, scraggly beard and a hallow face marked with the jaundice-yellow shadows of bruises, that grin shouldn’t have been there. Not in this place, anyway.
Charlie smiled like he meant it for five seconds, but as time went on and the meeting went on and he realized what she was saying, that false grin and Buddha-like nonsense that seemed to come out of nowhere started to fade. And then vanish. And then - as if realized - come up again. She noticed how he tried to focus on her eyes when she talked but kept drifting off, focusing not only on the top of her blouse but on an ear, maybe a collarbone and the door behind her.
His mask was good, but over time Constance began to recognize it for what it was - a softly screaming fear and boiling rage that overtime had been numbed by a larger, suffocating feeling of helplessness.
It was a good mask, but now - as Constance deals with a free man who happens to be one of her close(st) friends (client, she corrects herself, he’s still a client - kinda) - she wonders what he’s trying to prove. Charlie Crews, a newly exonerated man with money, looks, intelligence and the whole world open to him, moves back into Los Angeles and becomes a detective in the same precinct from which twelve years ago he was dragged in chains.
He goes back to a place that thinks he’s guilty. He goes back to a world that moved on without him, a world that still denies his existence, his abuse, the injustice wrecked upon him. He goes back to a world that never really changed and never really cared in the first place and he stays there. Instead of the alternative of a new life.
His mask is firmly fixed in place with the glue of the unspoken. She sees it just as well as he does (or doesn’t, because Charlie is good at compartmentalizing), and when she walks into his house through unlocked front doors to half-naked women and a mansion with no furniture, Constance ponders.
Charlie, what are you trying to prove?
2"
But revenge is one of those finicky and wickedly cruel creatures, and while it tries to concoct the right chemistry for reaction and retribution, it soon forgets that the place is prison and the time is forever.
Truth of the matter is, that people lie when they say revenge keeps them going. You have to be able to move to get vengeance, and in a cell that’s barely eight feet long and four feet wide, such movement is rather limited.
Charlie forgets revenge. Simple existence and the elimination of senses replaces it.
Only at the end of year ten (when the horizon suddenly appears out of nowhere and Charlie knows deep in awkwardly-healed bones that he is going to get out of here) does revenge come seething back.
It takes a while. Twelve years. But then Charlie walks out into the real world and when he smiles, he knows damn well it’s predatory.
The sun - a rare sight in Crescent City - burns brightly in an early May morning. Charlie looks directly up into the ocean of the sky and smiles again.
Perfect weather for payback, he thinks.
3"
One night, after listening to Detectives Crews and Reese argue over fruit and reincarnation, Bobby Stark comes home to his kids and informs his youngest son that all cops and detectives are crazy people.
“Does that include you?” his son asks.
Bobby narrows his eyes.
“No.”
4"
In 1995, police informant Kyle Hollis slaughtered the family of Rachel Sebolt. Rachel, meanwhile, hid in a corner and watched as Mommy collapsed in the hallway and blood sprayed on the back walls. Her brother was crying, then screaming then nothing, and from downstairs, she could hear the last sobbing sounds of Daddy as his lungs stopped inflating.
Three years later, Kyle Hollis adopted Rachel Sebolt as his daughter.
(She wonders now what it’d be like to really shoot the man that killed Mommy, Daddy, and her big brother.)
5"
The world, Ted reflects, isn’t even as easy as it looked seven years ago. After nearly six hours of trying to figure out how to install the goddamn wi-fi, he sits at the island in an almost empty mansion (and it does creep him out, a little bit), and tries to figure out how the hell to set the time on the microwave, the oven, and then on his goddamn Bluetooth cell phone.
The world wasn’t as complex seven years ago. And Ted - denial or not - misses that.
6"
When Kyle Hollis lies bound and gagged in the trunk of a shit-colored ‘79 Cadillac DeVille, Charlie Crews wonders if he’s stepped outside the frail chicken-wire cage he drew around himself when he left Pelican Bay.
Breaking and entering. Trespassing. Evading the police. Kidnapping. An unregistered firearm. Violating the speed limit in perhaps six different counties.
Is it worth it? Old, plastic-Zen Charlie asks.
Kyle Hollis kicks from the trunk and Charlie’s teeth squeak as he grinds them together.
In a speed zone of 40 miles an hour, the Cadillac’s speedometer hovers at 60.
7"
First day back as a detective, and Charlie Crews finds himself dealing with a dead kid, a severed finger, a pissed off female partner who bridles at his clear violation of the law and the stony stares of a department that doesn’t want him here.
Feels a lot like being back in prison.
8"
Rich people are nosey.
Standing on the sidewalk outside Charlie’s yard, Rebecca and Jonathan Nemeron smile broadly, but their eyes wander and their hands stiffly shake Charlie’s.
“We didn’t see you guys come with a moving truck,” Rebecca says. She is a petite, Beverly Hills transplant whose face reveals the stretches of Botox and whose heels shout vainly of a woman denying her age. “We didn’t even know we had neighbors until we saw your car pull in yesterday.”
Charlie smiles, hands in his pockets.
“Yeah,” he confesses. “We actually arrived today.”
Jonathan raises an eyebrow. “When are you guys officially moving in?”
“Already did,” Charlie says.
The Nemerons exchange a glance with one another.
“Where’s your furniture?”
Charlie’s smile broadens. “We don’t have any.”
9"
When walls move in on Charlie, when he feels unarmed and cornered and when he smells prison in apartment buildings and even the Department, he goes home. Goes out to the backyard, chucks off his shoes and socks, rolls his pants up to his knees and sits on the edge of the pool.
Here the air doesn’t smother or weigh down like the dirty fear, blood and hate of prison.
The air moves, and it is free.
Charlie breathes.
10"
What freaks out Danielle Reese the most about her partner is that five months after she’s assigned with him, both her and Charlie wander into a book store and - somehow, someway - Dani finds herself looking over a book on Zen.
A little Charlie voice that has irritatingly wound up in the back of her head begins mumbling something about the journey.
“Gah!” Dani haphazardly shoves the book back between something on Buddhism and New Age whatever-it’s-called and looks around to see if Charlie is nearby.
Three aisles over, she hears his voice.
“So,” he asks the store clerk, “do you have anything on monkeys?”
11"
A normal man would’ve taken his freedom and run.
Instead, Charlie Crews locks himself in a back room, covers the walls in red paper and starts drawing lines.
(Everything is connected.)
12"
Dani hates him the first two weeks. Hates the Zen shit, the way he’ll look at her and grin happily when she shoots him a glare. Hates the rambles, the tilted head and - perhaps this is her biggest pet peeve - the fruit. Apples, oranges, and a whole variety of weird and misshapen crap that doesn’t even look remotely like something she should be having regular 5-7 servings of.
He’s hiding the fact he’s just as fucked up as everyone else, and for the first two weeks she knows Detective Charlie Crews, Dani decides that she despises him for it.
It had never been that easy for her.
13"
Nothing is easy, coming back to the Real World. So the first three months - as Charlie attempts to get used to a place where men and women cohabit and the probability of being shanked is considerably unlikely - he runs.
Constance is busy with other cases. His ex-wife hangs up twenty-seconds into his call.
Charlie runs. And then he drives. And reads the newspaper and calls Constance constantly and goes for walks and sits on park benches and just tries to soak it in.
There is no Ted Earley this young in Charlie’s story. Only Charlie, a newly-fledged bird booted out of a cage by a steel-toed boot.
“How are you doing?” Constance asks carefully, nearly a week into his release. They’re sitting in her house at the kitchen table. Charlie happily digs into a watermelon as she asks the question, though his eyes flicker when he finally understands what she’s saying
He finishes a slice. Drops it on the blue ceramic plate with a clink.
And then promptly goes after another.
“I’m figuring out,” Charlie says around a mouthful, “that I am excellent company for myself.”
She raises an eyebrow, tilts her head to the side.
“Charlie,” she begins after a moment, slower this time, “how are you doing?”
He pauses and the mask falls with a sigh. Resting his chin on one hand, he glances down at the watermelon rind on his plate.
“I’m finding,” Charlie murmurs, looking back to Constance, “that this is a lot harder than I thought it’d be.”
She reaches towards the middle of the table and hands him a paper napkin. Her smile is sad.
“I know,” she says.
14"
He’s still adapting to being Charlie’s roommate when Charlie comes down the stairs on a Sunday morning in nothing but boxers and sunglasses.
“I’ve decided something,” Charlie announces.
In between a drink of orange juice, Ted pauses, raising his eyes from the L.A. Times.
“I’m going to go out back and tan.” Charlie says.
At first, Ted takes this in stride, nodding slowly and maintaining eye-contact with Charlie for exactly five seconds. But then he stops.
“Charlie - you’re...”
“What?”
He pauses, squints his eyes as he tries to find the words.
“ Won’t you burn?”
Charlie beams.
“Isn’t it great?”
Ted thinks on this for a moment. Purses his lips and then, with a weary sigh, begins nodding again.
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess it is.”
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
zip file is here.