Fic: Shoes of Velvet Green - War for the Oaks
Archiving here as well as AO3 - written for Yuletide madness 2009, but I messed up the loading, so it wasn't anonymous.
Since I'm trying to crosspost everything, here, there and everywhere, or more precisely, LJ< Skyehawke, and AO3, it needed to come here now.
Dan didn't notice it at first. Oh, the obvious stuff he did - part of him was still pissed off about the reveal at rehearsal and the way they did it. So he spotted the fairy queen and the other fairy queen until the music took him up and over and nothing else mattered. But later, over days and weeks and months, he noticed when Eddi changed perfumes or shampoos to something that smelled like mown grass instead of candy and chemicals and when the Phouka brought cookies to Carla's birthday party, well, he took one, ate it even, scattering crumbs over a vintage silk shirt in a spectacularly eye-searing combinations of colors, but he hesitated, just for a second, and thought of pomegranate seeds and Tam Lin. But Carla handed him a beer and he nodded to Hedge, hiding in the corner behind his bass, noodling along with the fiddler on the porch and it was just a cookie. A good cookie, even, shortbread, butter-rich, with mint and something else he couldn't identify.
If he was a little faster, a little sharper, a little more avant garde, he could tell himself that it was just because he had someone to bounce ideas off of, a band who would follow where he led, Carla to drum out backing rhythms at four in the morning when he woke up with a refrain on repeat, or Eddi, flat on her back in the warehouse, her legs up against the wall, to tell him where the layers piled too high, pushed the art of noise into just noise.
So it went, through the festivals and the regional ones and the A&R guy and the label and the plane trip and the studio with a mixing board out of Star Trek or his wet dreams, which, he would never admit, sometimes looked a lot like Star Trek themselves. Through years of other festivals back home, too, ones where there were no tickets and no video screens, sitting back to back on a log with Hedge picking out Def Leppard on other people's zithers, and the ice castle in the park under starlight the week before the first Christmas he brought Carla to meet his family.
He saw his own family less often, his sister's voice getting shrill as she grew older, his brothers staying home with their own families and it got easier to stay away after the first few years, to spend Christmas Eve at a label function, Hawaiian print bright under a tuxedo jacket, playing the eccentric musician card, smiling for TMZ and watching Eddi's dandelion head on the other side of the room, Carla right behind her. He went back when it was important, though - his sister's wedding, both nephews' confirmation, his grandfather's funeral. Each time, his grandmother would put one hand on his cheek, just along the jaw and tease him, tell him that Carla was good for him, that he hadn't aged a day since the last time she'd seen him.
But back at the house, his aunt picked up a photo of them, all of them, clustered together to fit into the viewfinder and she smiled at it, then looked up at him, sharply. Surprised. He shouldn't have seen her, wouldn't have, except he was checking in the piano's finish for poppyseeds in his teeth. He finished the tune and kissed his grandmother on the cheek before drifting over to the table of photos, all muddled together, generations back to back, black and white and faded Kodachrome in mismatched frames, years of a growing changing family captured in moments and his cousins' gap toothed smiles. He found the wide frame Aunt See had been holding and smiled at the picture, all of them together, himself to one side, behind his sister five years and twenty pounds ago, his grandmother a little taller, his grandfather standing behind her chair.
He looked in the mirror and thought that he wasn't really the one to notice it at all.
Since I'm trying to crosspost everything, here, there and everywhere, or more precisely, LJ< Skyehawke, and AO3, it needed to come here now.
Dan didn't notice it at first. Oh, the obvious stuff he did - part of him was still pissed off about the reveal at rehearsal and the way they did it. So he spotted the fairy queen and the other fairy queen until the music took him up and over and nothing else mattered. But later, over days and weeks and months, he noticed when Eddi changed perfumes or shampoos to something that smelled like mown grass instead of candy and chemicals and when the Phouka brought cookies to Carla's birthday party, well, he took one, ate it even, scattering crumbs over a vintage silk shirt in a spectacularly eye-searing combinations of colors, but he hesitated, just for a second, and thought of pomegranate seeds and Tam Lin. But Carla handed him a beer and he nodded to Hedge, hiding in the corner behind his bass, noodling along with the fiddler on the porch and it was just a cookie. A good cookie, even, shortbread, butter-rich, with mint and something else he couldn't identify.
If he was a little faster, a little sharper, a little more avant garde, he could tell himself that it was just because he had someone to bounce ideas off of, a band who would follow where he led, Carla to drum out backing rhythms at four in the morning when he woke up with a refrain on repeat, or Eddi, flat on her back in the warehouse, her legs up against the wall, to tell him where the layers piled too high, pushed the art of noise into just noise.
So it went, through the festivals and the regional ones and the A&R guy and the label and the plane trip and the studio with a mixing board out of Star Trek or his wet dreams, which, he would never admit, sometimes looked a lot like Star Trek themselves. Through years of other festivals back home, too, ones where there were no tickets and no video screens, sitting back to back on a log with Hedge picking out Def Leppard on other people's zithers, and the ice castle in the park under starlight the week before the first Christmas he brought Carla to meet his family.
He saw his own family less often, his sister's voice getting shrill as she grew older, his brothers staying home with their own families and it got easier to stay away after the first few years, to spend Christmas Eve at a label function, Hawaiian print bright under a tuxedo jacket, playing the eccentric musician card, smiling for TMZ and watching Eddi's dandelion head on the other side of the room, Carla right behind her. He went back when it was important, though - his sister's wedding, both nephews' confirmation, his grandfather's funeral. Each time, his grandmother would put one hand on his cheek, just along the jaw and tease him, tell him that Carla was good for him, that he hadn't aged a day since the last time she'd seen him.
But back at the house, his aunt picked up a photo of them, all of them, clustered together to fit into the viewfinder and she smiled at it, then looked up at him, sharply. Surprised. He shouldn't have seen her, wouldn't have, except he was checking in the piano's finish for poppyseeds in his teeth. He finished the tune and kissed his grandmother on the cheek before drifting over to the table of photos, all muddled together, generations back to back, black and white and faded Kodachrome in mismatched frames, years of a growing changing family captured in moments and his cousins' gap toothed smiles. He found the wide frame Aunt See had been holding and smiled at the picture, all of them together, himself to one side, behind his sister five years and twenty pounds ago, his grandmother a little taller, his grandfather standing behind her chair.
He looked in the mirror and thought that he wasn't really the one to notice it at all.