Angel Spike All Human Crackfic Idea Part 1
The setting is much like V For Vendetta, which is interesting, since I came up with it before I saw that movie. Perhaps I was thinking of 1984. Anyway, it is present-time, probably, but it feels sort of old-timey, the way the future might have looked in the past. There is an Oppressive Government--the State--everybody fears but no one will stand up to.
William is an upper middle class poet, about 27, who lives with his upper middle class mother. He believes in freedom and justice, ideals upon which the State was founded. He believes that the State has since renounced said ideals, and that freedom and justice are stifled and impossible. His poems are all ardent calls to arms. He writes pamphlets and political essays, too. In them, he claims people should rage against the injustice, should stand up for what they believe in, should reject what the State has become.
But his writing is all spectacularly bad, both because he's an awful writer, and because he's far too starry eyed. Even those waxing rhapsodic about revolution scoff at him, tell him to grow up, and read something by his betters. But William feels his "betters" aren't going far enough, don't believe in the cause enough, are too afraid. In fact, all those who laugh at and reject him, he feels laugh him and reject him just because they don't believe in it enough; they're not willing to go as far as he, William, will go. They just think it's fun to pretend to rebel; it's just a stage for them, like adolescence. They're a lot of talk and not a lot of action, and one day they'll grow up and serve the State just like their fathers before them. They're just a bunch of middle class poseurs bored with their lot in life, jealous of the rich, and philosophizing for the hell of it.
These pseudo revolutionaries are right about William--his writing is bad, and it is naive--but he is also right about them. These rejections from the pseudo revolutionaries, William's own naivete, and the badness of his writings are all reasons he never gets noticed by the State. He might be speaking against the government, but his protests are paltry, and free speech is not repressed to the extent that you cannot say what you want if you are in a completely empty room.
So William goes on writing his pamphlets and his poems. He distributes them; everyone throws them away. He goes to revolutionary clubs and tries to make speeches, and gets tossed out on his ear. The only one who listens to his poetry is his mother, who thinks his writing is lovely precisely because it is so innocent and cheesy. She also likes lace on everything and three lumps of sugar in her tea, and doesn't recognize all his "beautiful metaphor" is poorly concealed revolutionary jargon. She thinks a bright new dawn really refers to morning, but William doesn't bother to explain, because his work is meant to inspire the young and fiery, not generations of the past. More importantly, he wants to protect his mother, does not want her involved in the controversy he longs for.
And then one day Drusilla hears William reading one of his earnest, fiery poems to a group of pseudo-revolutionaries who are barely listening. She hears him, and when they laugh him off, she follows him. She says her crazy stuff about burning fishes, because she's insane, and lures him to a group of "real" revolutionaries.
William quickly sees that the "real" revolutionaries are nothing like the pseudo revolutionaries with which he is familiar. All of these revolutionaries are lower class. They are the people about which the middle class philosopher rhapsodize, because they are the ones most trampled by the State. However, if truly faced with real laborers, William thinks, those middle class philosophers would be terrified. They would be just as terrified as all the privileged lawmakers are, which is why the privileged lawmakers put up boundaries between the working class and everyone else, between the laborers and the "thinkers". They are afraid of the workers, of the masses, of the proletariat. It is the labor class the middle class philosophers philosophically support, but in reality will never help.
And it is these people, these people really harmed by the State, who will go farther than theory. They are not pretending to rebel; they are rebelling. They are not talk; they are action.
Among the underground insurrectionists, William sticks out like a sore thumb. They don't differentiate between William and the pseudo revolutionaries, who they think are a joke. They don't differentiate either between the middle class and the upper, the lawmakers. Everyone is an Oppressor, whether directly or by standing by. They don't see why William would turn his back on his comfortable life in order to join them. They don't see the point of philosophy. They are fighting the regime because they have to. They are a hard people, used to fighting tooth and nail to survive.
The underground insurrectionists are by a man named Liam. Liam is twenty or so. Not much is known about his past, but because he's the toughest motherfucker around, everyone assumes it was bad. That he grew up on the streets, orphaned, homeless, imprisoned repeatedly by the State, both wrongfully and for crimes he did commit. He has a firm burning hatred of the State to back this up, and a couple scars people say proves it.
His lover and co-leader is Darla. She's certainly not as big and scary, but everyone knows that inside she's just as tough or tougher than Liam, because her past was just as bad or worse. The story that goes around about her was she used to be a whore. For a while, she was in the clutches of an infamous terrorist called the Master. The Master had no loyalties to the State or against it; he was a destroyer who killed indiscriminately, without cause. Some say he made Darla do his dirty work, setting bombs, killing people. Others claim she was so broken back then, she did it voluntarily. But everyone knows she found Liam, and taught Liam their way of life. And then Liam took her away. (Meanwhile the Master was caught and imprisoned by the State.)
Little is known about Drusilla, either. Most assume she was either a whore or a factory worker, and that one of the Oppressors took advantage of her and broke her brain. William doesn't care. He's already in love with her.
William is seduced by this world of people in a way his middle class peers never could be. They would tell him he's being romantic, that these are the ignorant, unwashed masses, that these insurrectionists are not fighting for William's principles or philosophies; they are fighting because they're blind barbarians and know no better way. William knows his peers think him innocent, ignorant, knows they think him a fool. But they are only afraid. For all their talk, they're not willing to get down from their ivory towers, and work among the workers. They're not willing to get down into the muck and fight. They are not willing to act on their beliefs. William is.
He joins the underground insurrectionists, and plans to become one of them.
Part 2