(no subject)
Okay, soooo I hate to start this new chapter off on a sorta unpleasant note, but I wanted to address something that's been kinda bothering me lately.
I've noticed that a lot of the stories on this community tend to borrow or recycle plotlines, or certain paragraphs or phrases, from other fics. And I totally understand the desire of reading something really cool and wanting to put your own twist on it. And I know a lot of you guys talk over MSN and I'm sure ideas/phrases get shared there, and that's awesome and a great way to generate ideas.
However, I think that should kinda be something that's at the author's discretion. I've noticed in some pieces certain paragraphs or phrases that I've written being tweaked a bit and popping up there. And I don't think anyone's doing it to be malicious or trying to 'rip me off' or whatever because everyone on this community is simply wonderful and I love talking/discussing with everyone. Of all the communities I've posted fic for all different fandoms in, this is definitley the most encouraging, supportive, and enthusiastic, and it's simply lovely. However, the borrowing of phrases from my pieces, while some authors may be completely fine with it, makes me rather uncomfortable. I've been writing fanfic for about six years (for different fandoms) and it's a hobby I take pretty seriously at this point. So, if you like my stuff, I'm really, really glad, but please don't take phrases or paragraphs from it, because that takes some of the fun out of it for me.
Please don't feel like you have to comb your work for anything that sounds remotely like something I've written with the fear that I'll explode at you. More common phrases/wordings I have absolutely no problem with. It's just sometimes I read something that I immediately pinpoint as mine, and I kinda get the feeling that someone (without any intention to be offensive) says something along the lines of "ooh, I really like that, I'll keep it in mind for my next fic!". That's what's not cool with me. And I hope you guys know enough about me to know that I'm generally a mellow person. In fact, I was really debating about saying anything at all, but I decided I wanted to get it out there. (PS: Please don't ask me to pinpoint authors/fics, I think that would simply be rude.)
Anyway! I just wanted to get that out there, and I hope no one is offended and kinda understands what I mean. Now onto much more pleasant things, like the next chapter of my fic, which I've decided to dedicate to audreyfamous who whined that she would neeeeeeever get the next chaaaaaapter. Yesterday. :-P (Much love!)
Title: Dangerous Game (10/?)
Author: Juno
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine, never mine.
Timeline: S1 Sundays in the Park with George.
Rex makes arrangements and Bree takes matters into her own hands.
Perhaps Bree was right, Rex decided midway through his flight, and sometimes it was better to simply close your eyes and close your mind to the unpleasantries of life and pretend that they didn’t exist.
For example, at that moment in time, he was looking out the window, trying to concentrate on the shapes of the clouds as he tapped his fingers impatiently upon the book he had bought at the airport but had not cracked open, as though he could move forward time. He tried not to think about his children at home or George Williams in Italy. And he tried not to think about his wife although his thoughts seemed to always wander to her. So perhaps Bree was right, but Rex simply couldn’t occupy his mind otherwise and he was forced to concede that Bree was better at being blind than he was. Then again, it was Bree’s nature to be the best at everything she did. To be perfect.
He wondered how this little excursion of hers fit into her picture perfect world. Travelling to a foreign country with a man who wasn’t her husband certainly didn’t sit well with the image she liked to project of a perfectly polished home, family, and marriage.
Although she seemed to have abandoned trying to present their marriage as something beautiful and clean when she had found out about his affair. Sometimes he almost missed the Bree who wanted to appear as the perfect couple, because even if it was just for appearance, it was more painful when she didn’t care at all. Even when they had reconcilled, sometimes he could feel her slipping even further away from him and he was simply forced to stand there, helpless to catch her. Helpless to try and win her back when everything he said seemed wrong.
Hotel Aldrovandi, Lynette had told him. It was a five-star hotel, expensive, cultured, refined. He didn’t remember much about the hotel he and Bree had stayed at when they had gone to Italy, but it certainly hadn’t been a five-star hotel. They had been a young married couple and he had been in medical school and spending all their savings hadn’t seemed like the best idea before they had left and had seemed like an even worse idea after they returned home. But they had wanted to get away one more time before they really settled down and had children.
He glanced down at a number he had scribbled down at the travel agency desk in the airport. Hotel Aldrovandi. It was going to be hard to explain this to the staff there, especially when he really didn’t understand himself. Was this some left over revenge-gone-wrong for Bree, to get back at him for his infidelity? Did she decide that she wanted to ‘level the playing field’ after all? Or would their marriage forever be a game of getting one up on the other? Or did she decide that she didn’t want him at all anymore?
No matter what her twisted logic had been, Rex was almost more surprised than angry that Bree could run off while he had been so sick, with the man who was trying to poison him (though, he allowed, Bree couldn’t know that), and leave him to chase after her when she sent a message through Lynette that she was ‘in trouble’. For a moment, Rex worried that perhaps he had been sent on a fool’s errand, that Bree wasn’t in any trouble at all. But he knew enough about George Williams now to know that he couldn’t take the chance that Bree wasn’t lying.
She had lied to him, though. And he began to drum his fingers angrily on his armrest when he thought of George Williams laughing at him as Bree told him over the phone that her aunt was fine and recovering. He must have sounded like a fool, thinking poor Bree, pulled to different ends of the country by sick family members. They had probably had a good laugh at his expense and then gone off to some cute little Italian café. Intimate and romantic.
Perhaps their fun had even continued into luring him out to another country while he was trying to recover, trying to help his wife when really he was walking into public humilation. Or perhaps he was walking into his own death trap-he didn’t think it was impossible now that he knew the truth about George Williams.
Furiously he shook his head to clear it of those thoughts. He didn’t want to believe he had lost Bree so completely that he didn’t even know if she would be capable of such things or not. He didn’t want to think that he had let her slip so far away that he didn’t know her anymore. Of course Bree was telling the truth when she said she was in trouble. Even if she had lied about everything else.
Angrily, Rex ripped the plane phone out of its holder in the seat in front of him, furiously swiping his credit card through before dialing the number of the hotel.
“Hello, I’m calling to check what room I could find my wife in,” he said when a voice with a heavy Italian accent came on the line. “Her name is Bree Van de Kamp…yes.” Rex felt a jolt of surprise and anger stab through his stomach at the man’s next words. “She’s staying in the same suite as a Mr. George Williams? Uh, yes. No, there’s no problem,” he lied. “Would I be able to get a key to my wife’s room when I arrive in Italy? As long as I have identification. Good. Yes. No, I don’t think that should be a problem.” He smiled sarcastically at the smooth, practiced confidence with which he delivered his lies. “Thank you for your help. No, no, don’t tell her I’m arriving. It’s supposed to be a surprise.”
--
Bree slid into the chair next to the small dining table in the hotel suite, resting her elbows on the table and placing her face in her hands in a moment of weakness. She sighed and drew a deep breath, collecting herself before glaring at the door as though it had personally offended her by remaining locked and not possessing any spare keys in the whole of the hotel suite.
She knew that for a fact. She had taken the precious time that she had when George had left to pick up dinner from the bistro on the corner to search every nook and cranny of the entire suite, hoping to stumble upon a spare key. And now she was almost out of time-it didn’t take that long to go down the street and order two entrees-and she was still completely and utterly keyless.
She felt as though she were hovering in some sort of limbo, in which each day was a recycle, an exact repeat of the last. She couldn’t understand where George saw this ploy of keeping her in the hotel room going. Did he imagine them staying in Italy forever? Her locked away like Rapunzel in the tower? Did he think that eventually she would break and fall into his arms and they would live in some sort of twisted happily ever after?
Bree no longer believed in happily ever afters, not since she had found out that her husband had had a heart attack and an affair, but she never believed that any semblance of happy ending could be found with George Williams. Of course, when they had dated she had thought about trying to fall in love with him, trying to be happy with him, to build a future. But she had realized after a few dates that she couldn’t try and fall in love with him, and worse, she had realized that she had loved Rex more than she hated him, and she had felt as though both she and George had lost out. And yet now she knew that he had never given up, and worse, that he had never been the man that she had thought. How familiar.
Whatever George’s reasoning, Bree knew that she simply couldn’t spend another day this way and that was why she was eying the large metal rod that held the curtains over the large bay window.
Without consciously thinking about it, she moved her chair over to the window, standing on it and wobbling unsteadily in her high heels before she reached for the curtain rod. With her arm fully extended and her fingers flexed and grasping, it was still a good six inches out of her reach. Huffing in anger, she instinctively grabbed the curtain and tugged as hard as she could.
The flimsy snaps holding the rod up broke, and the rod came crashing to the ground with a loud clang.
Before Bree stepped back off the chair, she got a good glimpse of George’s familiar form heading back towards the hotel, his head bowed, two boxes clutched in one hand and the other hand stuffed in his pocket.
Her heart speeding, she quickly pulled the curtain from the rod, ripping it in her haste. She would have to make sure to send a note of apology for all the damage she was causing-and would surely cause in the next few moments-along with a generous check to replace it, but for now managing to get out of the room before George made his way back to their suite was her most pressing concern.
Pulling off her heels so that she could brace herself, she lifted the metal rod, pointing it towards the door as a sort of battering ram. And then she ran at it.
Her first attempt send her flying backwards from the recoil, landing unflatteringly on her back with the metal rod clanking to the ground as the door remained unbudged. She groaned as her head smacked against the ground before she had time to catch herself, but ignored the throbbing at the back of her head and stood back up, clumsily reaching for the rod again.
The second attempt the door gave a loud squeak, but as she tried the doorknob again, she found that it was still locked. However, she was able to at least keep her balance this time, which she considered an improvement.
It was the third time that she managed to knock the door out of its lock, and the small inch that it moved was all that Bree needed. Ignoring the fact that she was still in her stocking feet, she gave the door a sound kick that both helped her vent lingering anger and sent the door flying open, the hallway stretching in front of her in an open and beautiful invitation.
She didn’t even bother putting her shoes back on, much less grab her purse or suitcase, which still sat completely packed on the sofa where she had left it when George had first told her that he wasn’t going to let her leave. Opening the door had taken longer than she thought it would, and she knew that she only had a few precious seconds to get out and out of sight before George returned and found her missing.
Bree had only taken those first few steps of freedom into the hallway, and hadn’t even turned the corner when someone caught her wrist and she realized that those few seconds hadn’t been long enough to save her.
Yes, I'm evil. I know. I suck. :-P Hope you enjoyed! Comments are always appreciated. :D
I've noticed that a lot of the stories on this community tend to borrow or recycle plotlines, or certain paragraphs or phrases, from other fics. And I totally understand the desire of reading something really cool and wanting to put your own twist on it. And I know a lot of you guys talk over MSN and I'm sure ideas/phrases get shared there, and that's awesome and a great way to generate ideas.
However, I think that should kinda be something that's at the author's discretion. I've noticed in some pieces certain paragraphs or phrases that I've written being tweaked a bit and popping up there. And I don't think anyone's doing it to be malicious or trying to 'rip me off' or whatever because everyone on this community is simply wonderful and I love talking/discussing with everyone. Of all the communities I've posted fic for all different fandoms in, this is definitley the most encouraging, supportive, and enthusiastic, and it's simply lovely. However, the borrowing of phrases from my pieces, while some authors may be completely fine with it, makes me rather uncomfortable. I've been writing fanfic for about six years (for different fandoms) and it's a hobby I take pretty seriously at this point. So, if you like my stuff, I'm really, really glad, but please don't take phrases or paragraphs from it, because that takes some of the fun out of it for me.
Please don't feel like you have to comb your work for anything that sounds remotely like something I've written with the fear that I'll explode at you. More common phrases/wordings I have absolutely no problem with. It's just sometimes I read something that I immediately pinpoint as mine, and I kinda get the feeling that someone (without any intention to be offensive) says something along the lines of "ooh, I really like that, I'll keep it in mind for my next fic!". That's what's not cool with me. And I hope you guys know enough about me to know that I'm generally a mellow person. In fact, I was really debating about saying anything at all, but I decided I wanted to get it out there. (PS: Please don't ask me to pinpoint authors/fics, I think that would simply be rude.)
Anyway! I just wanted to get that out there, and I hope no one is offended and kinda understands what I mean. Now onto much more pleasant things, like the next chapter of my fic, which I've decided to dedicate to audreyfamous who whined that she would neeeeeeever get the next chaaaaaapter. Yesterday. :-P (Much love!)
Title: Dangerous Game (10/?)
Author: Juno
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine, never mine.
Timeline: S1 Sundays in the Park with George.
Rex makes arrangements and Bree takes matters into her own hands.
Perhaps Bree was right, Rex decided midway through his flight, and sometimes it was better to simply close your eyes and close your mind to the unpleasantries of life and pretend that they didn’t exist.
For example, at that moment in time, he was looking out the window, trying to concentrate on the shapes of the clouds as he tapped his fingers impatiently upon the book he had bought at the airport but had not cracked open, as though he could move forward time. He tried not to think about his children at home or George Williams in Italy. And he tried not to think about his wife although his thoughts seemed to always wander to her. So perhaps Bree was right, but Rex simply couldn’t occupy his mind otherwise and he was forced to concede that Bree was better at being blind than he was. Then again, it was Bree’s nature to be the best at everything she did. To be perfect.
He wondered how this little excursion of hers fit into her picture perfect world. Travelling to a foreign country with a man who wasn’t her husband certainly didn’t sit well with the image she liked to project of a perfectly polished home, family, and marriage.
Although she seemed to have abandoned trying to present their marriage as something beautiful and clean when she had found out about his affair. Sometimes he almost missed the Bree who wanted to appear as the perfect couple, because even if it was just for appearance, it was more painful when she didn’t care at all. Even when they had reconcilled, sometimes he could feel her slipping even further away from him and he was simply forced to stand there, helpless to catch her. Helpless to try and win her back when everything he said seemed wrong.
Hotel Aldrovandi, Lynette had told him. It was a five-star hotel, expensive, cultured, refined. He didn’t remember much about the hotel he and Bree had stayed at when they had gone to Italy, but it certainly hadn’t been a five-star hotel. They had been a young married couple and he had been in medical school and spending all their savings hadn’t seemed like the best idea before they had left and had seemed like an even worse idea after they returned home. But they had wanted to get away one more time before they really settled down and had children.
He glanced down at a number he had scribbled down at the travel agency desk in the airport. Hotel Aldrovandi. It was going to be hard to explain this to the staff there, especially when he really didn’t understand himself. Was this some left over revenge-gone-wrong for Bree, to get back at him for his infidelity? Did she decide that she wanted to ‘level the playing field’ after all? Or would their marriage forever be a game of getting one up on the other? Or did she decide that she didn’t want him at all anymore?
No matter what her twisted logic had been, Rex was almost more surprised than angry that Bree could run off while he had been so sick, with the man who was trying to poison him (though, he allowed, Bree couldn’t know that), and leave him to chase after her when she sent a message through Lynette that she was ‘in trouble’. For a moment, Rex worried that perhaps he had been sent on a fool’s errand, that Bree wasn’t in any trouble at all. But he knew enough about George Williams now to know that he couldn’t take the chance that Bree wasn’t lying.
She had lied to him, though. And he began to drum his fingers angrily on his armrest when he thought of George Williams laughing at him as Bree told him over the phone that her aunt was fine and recovering. He must have sounded like a fool, thinking poor Bree, pulled to different ends of the country by sick family members. They had probably had a good laugh at his expense and then gone off to some cute little Italian café. Intimate and romantic.
Perhaps their fun had even continued into luring him out to another country while he was trying to recover, trying to help his wife when really he was walking into public humilation. Or perhaps he was walking into his own death trap-he didn’t think it was impossible now that he knew the truth about George Williams.
Furiously he shook his head to clear it of those thoughts. He didn’t want to believe he had lost Bree so completely that he didn’t even know if she would be capable of such things or not. He didn’t want to think that he had let her slip so far away that he didn’t know her anymore. Of course Bree was telling the truth when she said she was in trouble. Even if she had lied about everything else.
Angrily, Rex ripped the plane phone out of its holder in the seat in front of him, furiously swiping his credit card through before dialing the number of the hotel.
“Hello, I’m calling to check what room I could find my wife in,” he said when a voice with a heavy Italian accent came on the line. “Her name is Bree Van de Kamp…yes.” Rex felt a jolt of surprise and anger stab through his stomach at the man’s next words. “She’s staying in the same suite as a Mr. George Williams? Uh, yes. No, there’s no problem,” he lied. “Would I be able to get a key to my wife’s room when I arrive in Italy? As long as I have identification. Good. Yes. No, I don’t think that should be a problem.” He smiled sarcastically at the smooth, practiced confidence with which he delivered his lies. “Thank you for your help. No, no, don’t tell her I’m arriving. It’s supposed to be a surprise.”
--
Bree slid into the chair next to the small dining table in the hotel suite, resting her elbows on the table and placing her face in her hands in a moment of weakness. She sighed and drew a deep breath, collecting herself before glaring at the door as though it had personally offended her by remaining locked and not possessing any spare keys in the whole of the hotel suite.
She knew that for a fact. She had taken the precious time that she had when George had left to pick up dinner from the bistro on the corner to search every nook and cranny of the entire suite, hoping to stumble upon a spare key. And now she was almost out of time-it didn’t take that long to go down the street and order two entrees-and she was still completely and utterly keyless.
She felt as though she were hovering in some sort of limbo, in which each day was a recycle, an exact repeat of the last. She couldn’t understand where George saw this ploy of keeping her in the hotel room going. Did he imagine them staying in Italy forever? Her locked away like Rapunzel in the tower? Did he think that eventually she would break and fall into his arms and they would live in some sort of twisted happily ever after?
Bree no longer believed in happily ever afters, not since she had found out that her husband had had a heart attack and an affair, but she never believed that any semblance of happy ending could be found with George Williams. Of course, when they had dated she had thought about trying to fall in love with him, trying to be happy with him, to build a future. But she had realized after a few dates that she couldn’t try and fall in love with him, and worse, she had realized that she had loved Rex more than she hated him, and she had felt as though both she and George had lost out. And yet now she knew that he had never given up, and worse, that he had never been the man that she had thought. How familiar.
Whatever George’s reasoning, Bree knew that she simply couldn’t spend another day this way and that was why she was eying the large metal rod that held the curtains over the large bay window.
Without consciously thinking about it, she moved her chair over to the window, standing on it and wobbling unsteadily in her high heels before she reached for the curtain rod. With her arm fully extended and her fingers flexed and grasping, it was still a good six inches out of her reach. Huffing in anger, she instinctively grabbed the curtain and tugged as hard as she could.
The flimsy snaps holding the rod up broke, and the rod came crashing to the ground with a loud clang.
Before Bree stepped back off the chair, she got a good glimpse of George’s familiar form heading back towards the hotel, his head bowed, two boxes clutched in one hand and the other hand stuffed in his pocket.
Her heart speeding, she quickly pulled the curtain from the rod, ripping it in her haste. She would have to make sure to send a note of apology for all the damage she was causing-and would surely cause in the next few moments-along with a generous check to replace it, but for now managing to get out of the room before George made his way back to their suite was her most pressing concern.
Pulling off her heels so that she could brace herself, she lifted the metal rod, pointing it towards the door as a sort of battering ram. And then she ran at it.
Her first attempt send her flying backwards from the recoil, landing unflatteringly on her back with the metal rod clanking to the ground as the door remained unbudged. She groaned as her head smacked against the ground before she had time to catch herself, but ignored the throbbing at the back of her head and stood back up, clumsily reaching for the rod again.
The second attempt the door gave a loud squeak, but as she tried the doorknob again, she found that it was still locked. However, she was able to at least keep her balance this time, which she considered an improvement.
It was the third time that she managed to knock the door out of its lock, and the small inch that it moved was all that Bree needed. Ignoring the fact that she was still in her stocking feet, she gave the door a sound kick that both helped her vent lingering anger and sent the door flying open, the hallway stretching in front of her in an open and beautiful invitation.
She didn’t even bother putting her shoes back on, much less grab her purse or suitcase, which still sat completely packed on the sofa where she had left it when George had first told her that he wasn’t going to let her leave. Opening the door had taken longer than she thought it would, and she knew that she only had a few precious seconds to get out and out of sight before George returned and found her missing.
Bree had only taken those first few steps of freedom into the hallway, and hadn’t even turned the corner when someone caught her wrist and she realized that those few seconds hadn’t been long enough to save her.
Yes, I'm evil. I know. I suck. :-P Hope you enjoyed! Comments are always appreciated. :D