Happy Holidays, Vari!
Title: Rejoice
Author: Unovis/ unovis_lj aka Robbie the Reindeer
Written for: Vari/agardenafter
Characters/Pairings: Duncan/someone
Rating: PG *WBR*
Warnings: BEWARE OF LITERATURE!
Author's Notes: At least it's not runes in a bag. Many feather-headed but still sincere thanks to the readers who saw this in various stages of completion while I was dithering away (carenejeans, I'm sure I inflicted it on you several times).
Summary: Pages had gone out from a Paris postmark, pages torn from a book, with a message written over in red ink: Yes I will, yes, it said, and Come, and a time and place. Oh Yes was written on the envelope back in smudgy pencil.
Rejoice
***
There were the good times and the bad times, the centuries of boredom and the years of plenty, the decades of loss and the moments, the minutes, of joy.
Pages had gone out from a Paris postmark, pages torn from a book, with a message written over in red ink: Yes I will, yes, it said, and Come, and a time and place. Oh Yes was written on the envelope back in smudgy pencil.
Who writes in pencil now? thought Duncan, when he received his. Who writes, summoning me to Paris? And he scanned the written words again and his heart kicked. Don't overthink it, he thought, as he packed. Not runes in a pouch, at least. Oh Yes. He liked the sound of that. He packed lightly. Paris was no longer home and the barge was a decade gone. I'll buy if I need to, he thought, or borrow or steal. He knew the place without checking the address.
(From Paris, he thought, in the shuttle on the way to JFK.)
(From Paris, he thought, on the plane, before falling asleep. Oh Yes.)
The chatter of Roissy washed over him, and the echoes, the glare, the recycled air, the milling crowds grinding him inevitably on and out. He supplied the datawork and retrieved his sword. His hired car was unsatisfactory and had to be changed and more forms and more grimacing over his international driver's license must be endured. He smiled at the girl behind the counter, ineffectually. "Duncan MacLeod," he repeated and signed, and believed his name never had less meaning nor was in more demand. You'd like me if you knew me, he thought at the girl. She did not read his mind. He admitted he could be wrong.
The car smelt overly new. The feed across the windscreen was purple instead of red. Traffic was not yet mad, but hectic enough that he was well on his way, well onto the Boulevard de Clichy, before he first noticed the chestnut trees in leaf. The air, the light. He let down his windows and breathed, and yes, through the fumes, it was ever stone and gold and green, it was Paris in spring. Rejoice.
He left the windows down and the overhead lightened. He strained the air for scent, polluting his lungs, dizzying himself pleasantly. He passed the cross street for his goal and slowed to see that all was well and still in place. He couldn’t see its facade from here. It had endured for over half a century; he willed it would for a century more. A horn sounded behind him and he resumed the crawling city speed. Under an hour to the designated time. He drove on, around and around and pulled over and parked in the employees’ space beside Le Blues Bar. The building was dark and mute, closed up tight, but the pavement outside had been freshly swept. Duncan knocked once at the service door. He knocked again in the old rhythm, an unconscious tic. There was no answer, no movement. He dug for paper in his pockets; nothing. He had no wallet, just a card clip; but in his inner jacket pocket he found a lone paper dollar. He tore it in half, wrote across the pale face ~Missed you. Back tonight. DM~, and poked the folded bill into the lock. What the hell. He felt light and amused. He left the car parked and locked and walked back the way he'd driven. Joe was...somewhere. Alive, he was sure. In health, he hoped; hale in his 60s and strong in his 70s. Disinclined to communicate, these past few years. Of course, Duncan could have called. Runes, runes, runes in a bag. He let the cloud pass over his heart...he'd pay respects at the site of St. Julien, bow his head before he left. He squinted in the sun, the green, the stone, the gold. And crossed the last street and stepped around the last corner, and here he was, easily early, at Shakespeare and Company.
It was a party, after all: there was an indefinable sense of community and celebration. Young men smoked, illegally, brazenly, in front of the windows and display stands. People moved in and out of the front doors and gathered in twos and threes outside. Men in hats, women in dresses and heels, the young and not-so-young flaunted costumes expressive of les années folles and jazz. The Twenties. The decade had a different denotation, far less dashing, in the 2000s. Were all invited as he was? He smiled at a white-haired woman in a chartreuse cloche, squeezed behind a plump man in linen, and stepped through the door into another crowd, all the time looking at hands, hoping to spy a page, a scrap of print scrawled with red ink. The bookstore was improbably, genuinely, unchanged. He unclipped his mobile from behind his lapel and thumbed it on--and smiled when it failed to detect a local catalogue. Books, old and new books, books on paper, books bound and generously offered, and conversation and coffee: the shelves rose all around, embracing him. He passed into the next room, indexing his delights, and stepped into an Immortal buzzing Presence. He searched faces and bodies and saw no one he recognized. He saw no one looking unusually alert. The buzz hummed like an Immortal beehive; it could be anyone or any number. It felt, before it faded into ambience, as though it rose through the floor, through his feet.
Well, of course. It had to be. He saw his hair, an elbow, from behind a girl in jeans. He took a step, to look, to greet, and his shoulder was tapped from behind.
“Hello, stranger.” Marcus Constantine, politely smiling, showing his hands. “It’s good to see you.”
“Marcus?” Oh. Duncan grasped his shoulder, making up for his initial pause. Not a disappointment. No, of course not. “I wondered who it was.”
“Ah, more than a few of us here. Friends all, I hope.”
“I hope.” Duncan looked back, but the hair and elbow had submerged. Well. He hadn’t been sure, after all. “Looks like quite a party.” Did you invite me?
“Any excuse for one. It’s foolish, I suppose; hashed dates, wrong year, wrong place, certainly. But all in the spirit of the thing. Post-supra-cyclo-Modernism, eh?”
He had no idea what Marcus was talking about. “Hashed dates?” he hazarded.
Marcus took his arm and steered him through the door to the cafe. “Back end of the centenary, I suppose. June 16, yes. The real fanatics are in Dublin, this year, every year. Come have a coffee. They began reading in the back room, moving through the store.”
Bah. The tumblers clicked and fell into place and the world was bit less wonderful. “Bloomsday. A hundred years ago.” He hadn’t looked at the pages. He’d never completely read the book. He really didn’t give a damn.
Marcus secured a table in the crowded room and their coffee with martial ease. “Do you have your pages? We’re taking turns reading them. Not in order; damned nonsense I think, but I’m in the minority. A fractured flow, how in the mode.” The cafe smelt of espresso and burnt cheese. Springtime was nowhere in it.
“No. I didn’t think...” He hadn’t thought. He took the meaning, he knew the address, he didn’t need the page. It was on his desk? In the trash basket? Under a rock on the bookcase by the door?
“I’m sorry, I thought you were asked. Just wandered in? I’d heard you were in America.”
It said Yes, oh yes and come and he came.
“It’s not the first thing I thought of,” Duncan said. “Who organized this?”
“The current Whitman, I imagine. The store’s still in the family. You knew the original, didn’t you? Sylvia Beach?”
“Yes. A fine woman, a fine place.” It had different memories from its second incarnation, here. He preferred the writers of the Twenties to the Fifties, overall. But not enough to read Ulysses. Oh, hell, to sit through that. “I was invited. I think. I don’t know by whom, or how they found my address. I haven’t been a regular here for decades.”
Marcus stared at him, bemused. “Serendipity or sinistra? Maybe the pages were a clue; you really should have come prepared.”
Runes in a bag, after all. Had he read anything? He thought... “‘Yes. Oh, yes.’ Molly Bloom’s soliloquy? The last page.” Oh, yes you fool. Fool, fool.
“My dear. That’s traditionally reserved for the belle of the ball. It caps the climax.” Marcus was known for his poker face. Duncan cemented his resolve not to read. He’d never be missed in this crowd. Some other willing victim would step in, and read and sigh and come to Yes.
He wondered when Joe’s would open. Marcus was talking. “...my turn, then browse. Come see me while you’re in town.” He rose and pressed Duncan’s hand in farewell. “Watch your head.” Then he was gone, leaving Duncan under the avaricious eyes of two women in matching argyle sweaters and horn-rimmed glasses, the meaning of which escaped him. He sipped his bitter coffee and checked the time. Odd. It lacked a minute or so to the hour given in the message...but if the readings were already in progress, and randomly sequential at that, then why...was Marcus right to suspect a Challenge? He snorted. Not here. Not him, not today. He stood, abandoning the table to the argyle pouncers, and sidled back through the throng at the door. He felt stifled. The gold and green and sweet spring at its late course were away, somewhere else. The mannequins, the actors in their linen and silk costumes pressed against his sides and back, blocking his way. The reading had moved to this room, against the Classics stacks. He stood, trapped for the moment; he recalled a detail the mimers missed, the powder that would fall in crumbs from women’s faces in the heat and crush of gatherings like this, the sticky rouge that stained collars and shirt fronts. They smelled different, too. Gardenia and tuberose. And the men...he closed his eyes. Pomaded hair. Elastic, braided, starched, textures in combinations unlike anything today; bands and closures to press past and beneath, to reach satin, yielding skin. Oh, gone, gone.
The reader’s words rolled over him. It was the hour. He felt the Presence. He turned in the crush, stepping on sliding feet and shoes, displacing elbows and breasts, and saw no one he knew. A new reader, a woman began. A murmur went through the crowd: “Penelope.” The beginning of the end, if out of place. Someone else had been found. Or he was never truly wanted, not invited after all.
“...and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron...”
He turned full around again, trying to wheel for the door, for any exit, and the Presence grew stronger. Marcus, he hoped. His sword was in the car. Kiss the iron or steel. He stepped back, back into a body between his back and the stacks of old books he could smell.
“...and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets...”
A hand steadied his shoulder; an arm came around, an arm with a long, strong hand against his chest, holding him against the body behind. Two arms now, holding him, and Duncan choked off the memory and fear and put his head back, and leaned into the embrace.
“...and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said...”
“...yes I will Yes.”
“Oh, yes,” answered the voice, the deep voice in his ear, and Duncan laughed.
***End***
Author: Unovis/ unovis_lj aka Robbie the Reindeer
Written for: Vari/agardenafter
Characters/Pairings: Duncan/someone
Rating: PG *WBR*
Warnings: BEWARE OF LITERATURE!
Author's Notes: At least it's not runes in a bag. Many feather-headed but still sincere thanks to the readers who saw this in various stages of completion while I was dithering away (carenejeans, I'm sure I inflicted it on you several times).
Summary: Pages had gone out from a Paris postmark, pages torn from a book, with a message written over in red ink: Yes I will, yes, it said, and Come, and a time and place. Oh Yes was written on the envelope back in smudgy pencil.
Rejoice
***
There were the good times and the bad times, the centuries of boredom and the years of plenty, the decades of loss and the moments, the minutes, of joy.
Pages had gone out from a Paris postmark, pages torn from a book, with a message written over in red ink: Yes I will, yes, it said, and Come, and a time and place. Oh Yes was written on the envelope back in smudgy pencil.
Who writes in pencil now? thought Duncan, when he received his. Who writes, summoning me to Paris? And he scanned the written words again and his heart kicked. Don't overthink it, he thought, as he packed. Not runes in a pouch, at least. Oh Yes. He liked the sound of that. He packed lightly. Paris was no longer home and the barge was a decade gone. I'll buy if I need to, he thought, or borrow or steal. He knew the place without checking the address.
(From Paris, he thought, in the shuttle on the way to JFK.)
(From Paris, he thought, on the plane, before falling asleep. Oh Yes.)
The chatter of Roissy washed over him, and the echoes, the glare, the recycled air, the milling crowds grinding him inevitably on and out. He supplied the datawork and retrieved his sword. His hired car was unsatisfactory and had to be changed and more forms and more grimacing over his international driver's license must be endured. He smiled at the girl behind the counter, ineffectually. "Duncan MacLeod," he repeated and signed, and believed his name never had less meaning nor was in more demand. You'd like me if you knew me, he thought at the girl. She did not read his mind. He admitted he could be wrong.
The car smelt overly new. The feed across the windscreen was purple instead of red. Traffic was not yet mad, but hectic enough that he was well on his way, well onto the Boulevard de Clichy, before he first noticed the chestnut trees in leaf. The air, the light. He let down his windows and breathed, and yes, through the fumes, it was ever stone and gold and green, it was Paris in spring. Rejoice.
He left the windows down and the overhead lightened. He strained the air for scent, polluting his lungs, dizzying himself pleasantly. He passed the cross street for his goal and slowed to see that all was well and still in place. He couldn’t see its facade from here. It had endured for over half a century; he willed it would for a century more. A horn sounded behind him and he resumed the crawling city speed. Under an hour to the designated time. He drove on, around and around and pulled over and parked in the employees’ space beside Le Blues Bar. The building was dark and mute, closed up tight, but the pavement outside had been freshly swept. Duncan knocked once at the service door. He knocked again in the old rhythm, an unconscious tic. There was no answer, no movement. He dug for paper in his pockets; nothing. He had no wallet, just a card clip; but in his inner jacket pocket he found a lone paper dollar. He tore it in half, wrote across the pale face ~Missed you. Back tonight. DM~, and poked the folded bill into the lock. What the hell. He felt light and amused. He left the car parked and locked and walked back the way he'd driven. Joe was...somewhere. Alive, he was sure. In health, he hoped; hale in his 60s and strong in his 70s. Disinclined to communicate, these past few years. Of course, Duncan could have called. Runes, runes, runes in a bag. He let the cloud pass over his heart...he'd pay respects at the site of St. Julien, bow his head before he left. He squinted in the sun, the green, the stone, the gold. And crossed the last street and stepped around the last corner, and here he was, easily early, at Shakespeare and Company.
It was a party, after all: there was an indefinable sense of community and celebration. Young men smoked, illegally, brazenly, in front of the windows and display stands. People moved in and out of the front doors and gathered in twos and threes outside. Men in hats, women in dresses and heels, the young and not-so-young flaunted costumes expressive of les années folles and jazz. The Twenties. The decade had a different denotation, far less dashing, in the 2000s. Were all invited as he was? He smiled at a white-haired woman in a chartreuse cloche, squeezed behind a plump man in linen, and stepped through the door into another crowd, all the time looking at hands, hoping to spy a page, a scrap of print scrawled with red ink. The bookstore was improbably, genuinely, unchanged. He unclipped his mobile from behind his lapel and thumbed it on--and smiled when it failed to detect a local catalogue. Books, old and new books, books on paper, books bound and generously offered, and conversation and coffee: the shelves rose all around, embracing him. He passed into the next room, indexing his delights, and stepped into an Immortal buzzing Presence. He searched faces and bodies and saw no one he recognized. He saw no one looking unusually alert. The buzz hummed like an Immortal beehive; it could be anyone or any number. It felt, before it faded into ambience, as though it rose through the floor, through his feet.
Well, of course. It had to be. He saw his hair, an elbow, from behind a girl in jeans. He took a step, to look, to greet, and his shoulder was tapped from behind.
“Hello, stranger.” Marcus Constantine, politely smiling, showing his hands. “It’s good to see you.”
“Marcus?” Oh. Duncan grasped his shoulder, making up for his initial pause. Not a disappointment. No, of course not. “I wondered who it was.”
“Ah, more than a few of us here. Friends all, I hope.”
“I hope.” Duncan looked back, but the hair and elbow had submerged. Well. He hadn’t been sure, after all. “Looks like quite a party.” Did you invite me?
“Any excuse for one. It’s foolish, I suppose; hashed dates, wrong year, wrong place, certainly. But all in the spirit of the thing. Post-supra-cyclo-Modernism, eh?”
He had no idea what Marcus was talking about. “Hashed dates?” he hazarded.
Marcus took his arm and steered him through the door to the cafe. “Back end of the centenary, I suppose. June 16, yes. The real fanatics are in Dublin, this year, every year. Come have a coffee. They began reading in the back room, moving through the store.”
Bah. The tumblers clicked and fell into place and the world was bit less wonderful. “Bloomsday. A hundred years ago.” He hadn’t looked at the pages. He’d never completely read the book. He really didn’t give a damn.
Marcus secured a table in the crowded room and their coffee with martial ease. “Do you have your pages? We’re taking turns reading them. Not in order; damned nonsense I think, but I’m in the minority. A fractured flow, how in the mode.” The cafe smelt of espresso and burnt cheese. Springtime was nowhere in it.
“No. I didn’t think...” He hadn’t thought. He took the meaning, he knew the address, he didn’t need the page. It was on his desk? In the trash basket? Under a rock on the bookcase by the door?
“I’m sorry, I thought you were asked. Just wandered in? I’d heard you were in America.”
It said Yes, oh yes and come and he came.
“It’s not the first thing I thought of,” Duncan said. “Who organized this?”
“The current Whitman, I imagine. The store’s still in the family. You knew the original, didn’t you? Sylvia Beach?”
“Yes. A fine woman, a fine place.” It had different memories from its second incarnation, here. He preferred the writers of the Twenties to the Fifties, overall. But not enough to read Ulysses. Oh, hell, to sit through that. “I was invited. I think. I don’t know by whom, or how they found my address. I haven’t been a regular here for decades.”
Marcus stared at him, bemused. “Serendipity or sinistra? Maybe the pages were a clue; you really should have come prepared.”
Runes in a bag, after all. Had he read anything? He thought... “‘Yes. Oh, yes.’ Molly Bloom’s soliloquy? The last page.” Oh, yes you fool. Fool, fool.
“My dear. That’s traditionally reserved for the belle of the ball. It caps the climax.” Marcus was known for his poker face. Duncan cemented his resolve not to read. He’d never be missed in this crowd. Some other willing victim would step in, and read and sigh and come to Yes.
He wondered when Joe’s would open. Marcus was talking. “...my turn, then browse. Come see me while you’re in town.” He rose and pressed Duncan’s hand in farewell. “Watch your head.” Then he was gone, leaving Duncan under the avaricious eyes of two women in matching argyle sweaters and horn-rimmed glasses, the meaning of which escaped him. He sipped his bitter coffee and checked the time. Odd. It lacked a minute or so to the hour given in the message...but if the readings were already in progress, and randomly sequential at that, then why...was Marcus right to suspect a Challenge? He snorted. Not here. Not him, not today. He stood, abandoning the table to the argyle pouncers, and sidled back through the throng at the door. He felt stifled. The gold and green and sweet spring at its late course were away, somewhere else. The mannequins, the actors in their linen and silk costumes pressed against his sides and back, blocking his way. The reading had moved to this room, against the Classics stacks. He stood, trapped for the moment; he recalled a detail the mimers missed, the powder that would fall in crumbs from women’s faces in the heat and crush of gatherings like this, the sticky rouge that stained collars and shirt fronts. They smelled different, too. Gardenia and tuberose. And the men...he closed his eyes. Pomaded hair. Elastic, braided, starched, textures in combinations unlike anything today; bands and closures to press past and beneath, to reach satin, yielding skin. Oh, gone, gone.
The reader’s words rolled over him. It was the hour. He felt the Presence. He turned in the crush, stepping on sliding feet and shoes, displacing elbows and breasts, and saw no one he knew. A new reader, a woman began. A murmur went through the crowd: “Penelope.” The beginning of the end, if out of place. Someone else had been found. Or he was never truly wanted, not invited after all.
“...and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron...”
He turned full around again, trying to wheel for the door, for any exit, and the Presence grew stronger. Marcus, he hoped. His sword was in the car. Kiss the iron or steel. He stepped back, back into a body between his back and the stacks of old books he could smell.
“...and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets...”
A hand steadied his shoulder; an arm came around, an arm with a long, strong hand against his chest, holding him against the body behind. Two arms now, holding him, and Duncan choked off the memory and fear and put his head back, and leaned into the embrace.
“...and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said...”
“...yes I will Yes.”
“Oh, yes,” answered the voice, the deep voice in his ear, and Duncan laughed.
***End***