Fic: Archiving Weird Fragments
Posting this because I'm paranoid about it vaporizing, and also I like to keep track of the strange outcomes of peculiar exercises.
Long story short, pandoraculpa and I are playing an evil game to exorcise our respective Christmas demons. It's really pretty simple; we throw out random seeds of prompts in the format of "It's Christmas, and insert XYZ character in a rotten situation which generally encapsulates my feeling at seeing the local drugstore festooned in fake greenery and hideous dangling paper Santa Clauses on November 4th."
And then one of the seeds takes root, and I open up a comment window and extemporaneously cut loose throwing rocks at the characters until I run out of steam.
The result is fragmentary at best, and so far I have learned that I cannot write a grocery list without a 54' trailer packed with backstory, swelling up like a boil underneath it.
Which is why I have to explain that the following snippet involving Fullmetal Alchemist characters is an excerpt from a Mad Men AU which I will never, ever write. It's okay, it doesn't really make sense to me, either.
Ed is out on the fire escape with a cup of cold coffee and half a tin of pumpkin pie, while inside Al's flat, everyone in the fucking universe is getting smashed to celebrate Christmas. At some point, he needs to go back inside to make sure Al's not wearing a lampshade on his head, dancing on precarious furniture, or getting lured into some dark corner by one of the many office floozies that showed up. But he came out here on a tactical retreat, and figures he should give it another twenty minutes or so in order to satisfy the tactical part of said retreat.
This should be enough time, he figures, for him to finish the pie and for Jessica from the typing pool to mop herself up and maybe imagine that he's feeling in some way remorseful for what he said before.
Of course he isn't sorry, not even a little bit, but the air out on the fire escape is sufficiently bracing that he thinks he can probably restrain himself from admitting that, or saying anything worse if he sees her again. All in the interest of keeping the peace and not making his life any more complicated than it already is, understand. If Jessica holds a grudge tomorrow, well he doesn't much fucking care, but a screaming fight at Al's party is Not On, he does understand that, hence the tactical retreat with pie and freezing his nuts off on the fire escape.
Ed hates Christmas. The only thing he hates worse than Christmas is Christmas parties, like they don't see enough of these assholes at the office, why in the nine hells Al would want to pack them all into his living space Ed has no idea. He understands even less why Al would want to feed them all booze and appetizers, entertain them with music and stupid games, but it's what Al wants and Ed is long in the habit of not trying to fathom his brother's ambitions, he just does his best to make sure nobody fucks it up for Al. Which includes excusing himself to the outdoors when his own misanthropy gets the better of him.
He ruminates on the forkful of pie in his mouth, with the strains of "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree" floating to his ears, sniffs the snow-sharpened air, and refuses absolutely to reflect on the overall trend of his life up to this point. Leave that bullshit to the shrinks and philosophers and parole officers, none of which Ed is and neither is he a girl mooning over hurt feelings, which means that nonsense is right out too.
What Mustang does on his own time is none of Ed's business at all; his propensity for turning into some tipsy manwhore at office parties has no relevance to Ed's existence. Mustang is his boss, and if he wants to whoop it up on a Friday night with a herd of goats and a leather catsuit, Ed could not conceivably care less so long as the man keeps bringing in business and turning his goddamn receipts in on time.
He hates Christmas. He hates office parties with a deep and abiding passion. He hates party games, Christmas music, all forms of tipsy revelry, spiked punch, and since it isn't going away, he might as well admit he really hates his manwhore boss too. The only entities in this whole equation he does not hate apparently, are Al and this pumpkin pie, which isn't half bad at all.
He probably doesn't hate Jessica. He could probably forgive her, on the grounds of Mustang's manwhorishness, and the fact that she had no way of knowing what she was getting herself into. Mustang was successful, and well on his way to being ridiculously fucking rich, because he was a devious bastard. And apparently it didn't even matter whether you knew that already, he could still get around you.
In that light, Ed supposes what he said was fairly awful ("You are not seventeen anymore. And there's lipstick on your teeth.", when all she'd said to him was, "Swell party huh, Mister Elric?"). But then her lipstick was also smeared half across Mustang's mouth by the time she toddled up to Ed, more than a few cups of punch past Holiday Gaiety and closing fast on Head-In-Lampshade drunk. So while Ed's remark was harsher than necessary to an unmarried stenographer of twenty-six, it had to be a healthy cautionary wakeup for her.
Mustang would ruin her life. He ruined the lives of everyone who pinned any sort of hope which was not career-based on him. Ed had seen it time and again over the years of their acquaintance, and more to the point, he'd seen it happen to him. Mustang was a curse, a death-sentence for people's faith in human relationships. Ed had only saved Jessica a world of hurt, and someday she'd be able to thank him.
*****
Long story short, pandoraculpa and I are playing an evil game to exorcise our respective Christmas demons. It's really pretty simple; we throw out random seeds of prompts in the format of "It's Christmas, and insert XYZ character in a rotten situation which generally encapsulates my feeling at seeing the local drugstore festooned in fake greenery and hideous dangling paper Santa Clauses on November 4th."
And then one of the seeds takes root, and I open up a comment window and extemporaneously cut loose throwing rocks at the characters until I run out of steam.
The result is fragmentary at best, and so far I have learned that I cannot write a grocery list without a 54' trailer packed with backstory, swelling up like a boil underneath it.
Which is why I have to explain that the following snippet involving Fullmetal Alchemist characters is an excerpt from a Mad Men AU which I will never, ever write. It's okay, it doesn't really make sense to me, either.
Ed is out on the fire escape with a cup of cold coffee and half a tin of pumpkin pie, while inside Al's flat, everyone in the fucking universe is getting smashed to celebrate Christmas. At some point, he needs to go back inside to make sure Al's not wearing a lampshade on his head, dancing on precarious furniture, or getting lured into some dark corner by one of the many office floozies that showed up. But he came out here on a tactical retreat, and figures he should give it another twenty minutes or so in order to satisfy the tactical part of said retreat.
This should be enough time, he figures, for him to finish the pie and for Jessica from the typing pool to mop herself up and maybe imagine that he's feeling in some way remorseful for what he said before.
Of course he isn't sorry, not even a little bit, but the air out on the fire escape is sufficiently bracing that he thinks he can probably restrain himself from admitting that, or saying anything worse if he sees her again. All in the interest of keeping the peace and not making his life any more complicated than it already is, understand. If Jessica holds a grudge tomorrow, well he doesn't much fucking care, but a screaming fight at Al's party is Not On, he does understand that, hence the tactical retreat with pie and freezing his nuts off on the fire escape.
Ed hates Christmas. The only thing he hates worse than Christmas is Christmas parties, like they don't see enough of these assholes at the office, why in the nine hells Al would want to pack them all into his living space Ed has no idea. He understands even less why Al would want to feed them all booze and appetizers, entertain them with music and stupid games, but it's what Al wants and Ed is long in the habit of not trying to fathom his brother's ambitions, he just does his best to make sure nobody fucks it up for Al. Which includes excusing himself to the outdoors when his own misanthropy gets the better of him.
He ruminates on the forkful of pie in his mouth, with the strains of "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree" floating to his ears, sniffs the snow-sharpened air, and refuses absolutely to reflect on the overall trend of his life up to this point. Leave that bullshit to the shrinks and philosophers and parole officers, none of which Ed is and neither is he a girl mooning over hurt feelings, which means that nonsense is right out too.
What Mustang does on his own time is none of Ed's business at all; his propensity for turning into some tipsy manwhore at office parties has no relevance to Ed's existence. Mustang is his boss, and if he wants to whoop it up on a Friday night with a herd of goats and a leather catsuit, Ed could not conceivably care less so long as the man keeps bringing in business and turning his goddamn receipts in on time.
He hates Christmas. He hates office parties with a deep and abiding passion. He hates party games, Christmas music, all forms of tipsy revelry, spiked punch, and since it isn't going away, he might as well admit he really hates his manwhore boss too. The only entities in this whole equation he does not hate apparently, are Al and this pumpkin pie, which isn't half bad at all.
He probably doesn't hate Jessica. He could probably forgive her, on the grounds of Mustang's manwhorishness, and the fact that she had no way of knowing what she was getting herself into. Mustang was successful, and well on his way to being ridiculously fucking rich, because he was a devious bastard. And apparently it didn't even matter whether you knew that already, he could still get around you.
In that light, Ed supposes what he said was fairly awful ("You are not seventeen anymore. And there's lipstick on your teeth.", when all she'd said to him was, "Swell party huh, Mister Elric?"). But then her lipstick was also smeared half across Mustang's mouth by the time she toddled up to Ed, more than a few cups of punch past Holiday Gaiety and closing fast on Head-In-Lampshade drunk. So while Ed's remark was harsher than necessary to an unmarried stenographer of twenty-six, it had to be a healthy cautionary wakeup for her.
Mustang would ruin her life. He ruined the lives of everyone who pinned any sort of hope which was not career-based on him. Ed had seen it time and again over the years of their acquaintance, and more to the point, he'd seen it happen to him. Mustang was a curse, a death-sentence for people's faith in human relationships. Ed had only saved Jessica a world of hurt, and someday she'd be able to thank him.
*****