HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ARIEL
Title: IT WAS THE BEST BIRTHDAY EVER
Rating: Uh?
Pairing: HAHAHA. Well, Sirius/Remus, Sarah/Crack, Ariel/?
A/N: To my darling darling blacksatinrose (or Ariel) on her birthday. RPF freaks you out a little. So I've written some, about you. But everything here I wrote in the lovingest manner ever. That goes for everyone else who was mentioned in this, if they happen to read this. Oh boy, do I feel sorry for them. I love everyone. I jest in love. LOVE. Also: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, booboosheep, if you get here. I think you might like this? Or maybe you'll run away in horror.
:::
It had been a while since Sirius Black strolled naked through Ariel's apartment.
She wasn't immediately worried to wake up and see him standing at her bedroom window, looking out at the night sky. The moonlight might - might - have been described as heavenly, if you were a certain sort of person. It glowed over the planes of Sirius's anatomically perfect body in deep and frosty blues and he looked like the better class of fantasy art. (Generally speaking these are hallucinogenic backdrops with some kind of Amazon woman bursting out of the water like a dolphin with a D-cup.)
"Inspiring, isn't it?" said Sirius.
"Nungwaaaah," said Ariel. She coughed. "Ah - excuse me? What's inspiring?"
Sirius glanced down at himself, then back up at Ariel. He waved his hand down his body, never touching it but following invisible contour lines. His fingers did a little "All this can be yours!" flourish, as if he were a prize in a quiz show, right alongside the ugly dinette set from 1973. "I'm inspiring, in my natural state. Wouldn't you say?" Sirius struck what he must have thought was a terribly erotic pose, and what was actually a near-perfect reconstruction of a water buffalo mating position.
"Huh," said Ariel. "Frankly, no. I'm sorry."
Sirius's pout was audible. Then his expression changed: either it was moonlight or he'd begun to foam at the mouth.
Ariel reached around behind her bed until her fingers closed around the baseball bat. It had just occurred to her that she might be having that recurring dream about the massive shape-shifting Brazilian spider. Or perhaps it was just the neighbors' hot - pardon, pot, the neighbors' pot - creeping in under the door again. Those crazy Baptists and their all-night revivals. Ariel wished they'd stayed in Georgia.
Over at the window Sirius was still frowning. "Really? You don't look at me and feel this, this urge to write? What is it that you people call it - a 'rabbit'?"
"I think you mean a plot bunny."
"And your bunnies are urgeless?"
Ariel nodded. "I'm afraid so. I appreciate the effort - you know, the pantslessness, and all. But I never really did go for that sort of thing. Not that I'm a prude." And to prove this, Ariel gave Sirius's “Mature Audience”-bits a healthy and appreciative look. "You've come to talk about fic, haven't you? You've very nice-looking, of course, but you must understand it takes more than that to inspire me. I just don't know if I can write you, Sirius."
Sirius's bottom lip was sticking out roughly half a foot by now. "All right," he said. "That's fine. I understand. If you don't mind I'd like to stay around for a few more minutes, and so would Remus. He's in the other room, trying to be inspiring too. He's reading melanchol-ilishly. I’m sure he’d love to chat."
"It's fine," Ariel said. It was the trembling chin that did it, and the teardrop that, if spilled, would devastate a small country. “Just give me a moment.” She eased her grip on the baseball bat.
Sirius shook himself out of his abused-puppy look and crossed to the door. His walk made John Travolta’s strut look like hobbling. “I’ll be in the next room,” he said, “with Remus. We’ll be good; we won’t try to influence you any more if that’s not your thing. If you hear anything funny, like, uh, bestial grunts-"
"-then I'll be glad to know you’re making good use of 20th century media,” Ariel interrupted. “Watching a television show about elephants.”
“Yes. Elephants who have pneumonia."
"While falling down the stairs."
"Twice."
“Yes.”
“Exactly.”
:::
Remus smiled brightly. “Hello, Ariel.”
Ariel smiled back and took a seat opposite the two nice gentlemen, both of whose hands had serious cases of wanderlust. (Especially wander. But especially lust.) “Hello, Remus. How’ve you been?”
Remus shrugged. “Oh, you know. The same. Drowning in a well of my own inertia and sorrow. Knocking about in my hand-built castle of morbidity. By the way, I ate your rabbit. I’m terribly sorry, but I couldn’t help it, it was the wolf. The moon’s been giving me a hell of a time as of late.”
“I thought that ‘sway of the moon’ stuff was just a myth?” Ariel said.
“Oh, it is, most of it.” Remus shrugged. “But I was feeling a bit peckish.”
Suddenly Ariel realized she didn’t have a rabbit.
Sirius plucked a pillow out of the corner of his couch - it was the frilliest, laciest, tasseliest, sequiniest, sparkliest pillow in the entire apartment. He placed it over his lap rather strategically and said, “Oh, I don’t care, but I wouldn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.” He snorted as though he couldn’t believe that staring at his groin was anything less than euphoric. “We can’t stay long, anyway. We’ve got places to be.”
“Oh?” Ariel asked politely.
“Yes,” Remus said. “PrincessWolfStar666 has just written her debut fic. ‘Puppy Love,’ I think it is.”
Ariel winced.
“Yeah,” Sirius said mournfully. He adopted a squeaky, sugary voice: "’Siri, may I claim you?' 'Yes, lover, I need your throbbing purple principality inside me now!!!' You know the type. And Remus has got a Snupin coming up around six." He made a closed-off noise in his throat. If looks were beverages, Sirius's face would have morphed into a glass of curdled, 30-year old milk, erupting with blue mold. "And I've got a Harry MPREG to attend."
“Who's the father?” Ariel asked, against all common sense.
“I am,” Sirius said. He glanced off in the direction of the kitchen, perhaps looking for a blender in which to shove his hand.
“I'm sorry.” Ariel shook her head. “I wish things could've been better.”
Sirius and Remus gave her a look pointier than toothpicks.
“If you were really concerned, I should think you’d do something about it,” snapped Frost Queen Remus, breathing ice crystals and Antarctica. “You were such a generous fangirl once upon a time. Whisking us off to exotic lands and, well, tearing us apart, really, playing psychotic mind games with us-”
“But they were thrilling games,” Sirius cut in.
“Of course,” Remus said lightly. “Thrillingly traumatic mind games that have scarred us beyond words. And we thank you for it, really cut through the monotony of drama induced by Snape love triangles. We just love character studies. And the odd gem of pornography. But now you say you can't write us anymore?”
“Look,” Ariel said in a placating voice. “I sympathize, really. But you see, I’ve learned something. We had some good times, sure, but there comes a point where you have to make a decision. You have to say, ‘I’ve said what I wanted to say, and so I’ll go now.’ It’s like....” Ariel screwed up your eyes and thought. “Say you had a fabulously witty uncle. But now he’s senile and sits in the corner at family reunions, and rambles and drools to the houseplant about who did and who didn’t paint whose hen house back in 1931. That’s just sad.”
Sirius and Remus were not impressed.
“You’re not old,” Remus said.
“You’ll never dribble,” Sirius said. “And if you did we’d dab your mouth with a napkin every now and then, no harm.”
“That’s not my point,” Ariel said. “What I mean is...I hate to say it, but I’m just not feeling it anymore.”
Sirius and Remus were not impressed.
“There’s a standard,” Ariel said, a little desperately, as she sensed their stares. “I try to live up to that standard, and I can’t just fake something if I’m not feeling it. Now, if I ever-”
“Wait a moment,” said Sirius. “Stan-dard? What is this stan-dard you speak of?” He rolled the word around in his mouth as though it were a rock that had turned up in his perfectly acceptable bowl of porridge. He looked rather sweetly lost. He glanced at Remus, who shrugged as if to say, Yep, she might as well be speaking Mandarin. Let’s start calling her Lao Tzu.
“I mean standard,” Ariel cried, holding out her hands out imploringly. “As in, there’s a certain quality I aspire to in my writing. As in, I like to have a clear idea, a vision of the characters. Enthusiasm, or some such state! Standards! People have standards!”
Sirius had to pick himself up off the floor laughing.
“No one has standards,” Remus said. He enunciated carefully, in a voice that suggested Ariel had limited mental capacity, or that she was perhaps a houseplant. “Just take a look at the people you associate with. If you think they have standards...! For instance, losselen and statelines write most of their stories under the influence of cough syrup and Flintstone’s multivitamins. starstillwonder's a total addict too, can’t get her off the stuff, even when she isn’t writing. I don’t blame her, it’s actually not so bad. Cocktail sort of thing.”
“Yeah,” Sirius added. “They let us have some, once. Strangest things happened. I never did it backwards on an upside-down table before.”
“Er,” Ariel said thoughtfully.
“And then there’s imochan,” Remus continued. “And yeats. They get their plots from cereal boxes they find in the park, and from the grad students who live under the bridge. sheafrotherdon is actually the automaton PUPLOVE5000, which writes fic at a rate impossible for humans to duplicate.”
“Your pal librae,” Sirius said, “is fucking crippled without the aid of a script that generates pretty words to describe the sunset.”
Remus curled his lip in disgust. “That’s right. Have you noticed some of the stuff she writes? Half of it’s, ‘The winter sky was like the belly of a dead fish, all pink and oily and a little bit blubbery. The clouds rippled like scales flaking off of aforesaid dead fish.’” He sat up suddenly. “And booboosheep, your dear Lara. Oh, I don’t even know if I can bear to tell you the truth about her.”
“What?” Ariel said, frowning. “How-I don’t-”
“She isn’t who she says she is,” Sirius said firmly.
“Well, she is,” Remus amended.
“Oh, yeah, of course she is,” Sirius agreed. “She’s exactly who she says she is. Just...more. If we told you exactly who much-I mean how much-more, well, I think your brains would explode out your ears in tiny pieces. And that would be rather a shame.”
“The point is, no one has standards anymore,” said Remus. “Everyone has no standard. They are standardless as the day is long, and by day, I mean a day in Norway. Land of the Midnight Sun and all. You know, when it’s daylight all day long and you could go out and have yourself a nice game of Quidditch at three o’clock in the morning if that’s what you really wanted, because it’s that light for about two months straight. And then in the winter-”
“All right,” Ariel said hastily. “I understand.”
“So you could pretend to have standards.” Sirius winked. “But here’s the thing: you wouldn’t.”
“Everybody does it,” Remus said.
“Yes," Ariel said. "But I'm not everybody."
She let this sink in for a little while and the world stopped spinning for just a second.
The look on Sirius’s and Remus’s faces seemed to suggest that they’d been asked to factor 8x² - l8x³t + 9x²t², and they’d only just figured it out. Shame-faced, they looked at their hands and exercised their bad puppy looks, only this time there’d be no swatting with a rolled-up newspaper. (Except maybe later, at pornish_pixies, or some such den of debauchery.) In any case, they finally understood that Ariel was a free spirit, like a flower-cheeked, topless hippie at Woodstock, or perhaps like the psychedelic BMW bus that that hippie drove to Woodstock, or perhaps like the lovely patterned butterfly splattered on the windshield of the BMW bus.
She was something, indeed.
Remus cleared his throat. “Right, you’re right. We’re sorry.”
Ariel smiled. “No need. That’s fine.” She remembered that her guests were British. “Would you like some tea?”
Remus perked. “Is it that the Orlando Bloom tea?”
“Ah...?” Ariel looked helpless.
“Never mind, never mind, we’ve kept you long enough as it is. Besides, Sirius and I are probably late for the first spate of ‘Puppy Love’ postings. We like to watch over the proceedings sometimes, you know. The author’s threatened to hang herself if she doesn’t get fifty reviews.”
“Oh dear,” Ariel sighed. “Well, good luck. Someone will come along and give you a break, I’m sure.”
“Yeah,” Sirius said wistfully. “What I wouldn’t give for some Marauder-era introspection with a side of angst. Post-Hogwarts, maybe. Let us know if you have any ideas, one of these days.”
Ariel promised that she would.
Sirius and Remus smiled and disappeared in a whirlwind of swirly colors, on their way back to the Land o' Slash, slightly south of Buttered Fishville, both of which shared a bus route with Slight Delusion. Everyone agreed it was a fine place to visit, all right, not sure if they could take it full time. But the pups were happy enough there, and Ariel was happy that they were happy, and they were happy if she was happy they were happy, and this started a whole chain of happy that included daisies and lemonade and chocolate cake.
It was only later that Ariel found Brian and Justin bound and gagged in her closet.
Rating: Uh?
Pairing: HAHAHA. Well, Sirius/Remus, Sarah/Crack, Ariel/?
A/N: To my darling darling blacksatinrose (or Ariel) on her birthday. RPF freaks you out a little. So I've written some, about you. But everything here I wrote in the lovingest manner ever. That goes for everyone else who was mentioned in this, if they happen to read this. Oh boy, do I feel sorry for them. I love everyone. I jest in love. LOVE. Also: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, booboosheep, if you get here. I think you might like this? Or maybe you'll run away in horror.
:::
It had been a while since Sirius Black strolled naked through Ariel's apartment.
She wasn't immediately worried to wake up and see him standing at her bedroom window, looking out at the night sky. The moonlight might - might - have been described as heavenly, if you were a certain sort of person. It glowed over the planes of Sirius's anatomically perfect body in deep and frosty blues and he looked like the better class of fantasy art. (Generally speaking these are hallucinogenic backdrops with some kind of Amazon woman bursting out of the water like a dolphin with a D-cup.)
"Inspiring, isn't it?" said Sirius.
"Nungwaaaah," said Ariel. She coughed. "Ah - excuse me? What's inspiring?"
Sirius glanced down at himself, then back up at Ariel. He waved his hand down his body, never touching it but following invisible contour lines. His fingers did a little "All this can be yours!" flourish, as if he were a prize in a quiz show, right alongside the ugly dinette set from 1973. "I'm inspiring, in my natural state. Wouldn't you say?" Sirius struck what he must have thought was a terribly erotic pose, and what was actually a near-perfect reconstruction of a water buffalo mating position.
"Huh," said Ariel. "Frankly, no. I'm sorry."
Sirius's pout was audible. Then his expression changed: either it was moonlight or he'd begun to foam at the mouth.
Ariel reached around behind her bed until her fingers closed around the baseball bat. It had just occurred to her that she might be having that recurring dream about the massive shape-shifting Brazilian spider. Or perhaps it was just the neighbors' hot - pardon, pot, the neighbors' pot - creeping in under the door again. Those crazy Baptists and their all-night revivals. Ariel wished they'd stayed in Georgia.
Over at the window Sirius was still frowning. "Really? You don't look at me and feel this, this urge to write? What is it that you people call it - a 'rabbit'?"
"I think you mean a plot bunny."
"And your bunnies are urgeless?"
Ariel nodded. "I'm afraid so. I appreciate the effort - you know, the pantslessness, and all. But I never really did go for that sort of thing. Not that I'm a prude." And to prove this, Ariel gave Sirius's “Mature Audience”-bits a healthy and appreciative look. "You've come to talk about fic, haven't you? You've very nice-looking, of course, but you must understand it takes more than that to inspire me. I just don't know if I can write you, Sirius."
Sirius's bottom lip was sticking out roughly half a foot by now. "All right," he said. "That's fine. I understand. If you don't mind I'd like to stay around for a few more minutes, and so would Remus. He's in the other room, trying to be inspiring too. He's reading melanchol-ilishly. I’m sure he’d love to chat."
"It's fine," Ariel said. It was the trembling chin that did it, and the teardrop that, if spilled, would devastate a small country. “Just give me a moment.” She eased her grip on the baseball bat.
Sirius shook himself out of his abused-puppy look and crossed to the door. His walk made John Travolta’s strut look like hobbling. “I’ll be in the next room,” he said, “with Remus. We’ll be good; we won’t try to influence you any more if that’s not your thing. If you hear anything funny, like, uh, bestial grunts-"
"-then I'll be glad to know you’re making good use of 20th century media,” Ariel interrupted. “Watching a television show about elephants.”
“Yes. Elephants who have pneumonia."
"While falling down the stairs."
"Twice."
“Yes.”
“Exactly.”
:::
Remus smiled brightly. “Hello, Ariel.”
Ariel smiled back and took a seat opposite the two nice gentlemen, both of whose hands had serious cases of wanderlust. (Especially wander. But especially lust.) “Hello, Remus. How’ve you been?”
Remus shrugged. “Oh, you know. The same. Drowning in a well of my own inertia and sorrow. Knocking about in my hand-built castle of morbidity. By the way, I ate your rabbit. I’m terribly sorry, but I couldn’t help it, it was the wolf. The moon’s been giving me a hell of a time as of late.”
“I thought that ‘sway of the moon’ stuff was just a myth?” Ariel said.
“Oh, it is, most of it.” Remus shrugged. “But I was feeling a bit peckish.”
Suddenly Ariel realized she didn’t have a rabbit.
Sirius plucked a pillow out of the corner of his couch - it was the frilliest, laciest, tasseliest, sequiniest, sparkliest pillow in the entire apartment. He placed it over his lap rather strategically and said, “Oh, I don’t care, but I wouldn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.” He snorted as though he couldn’t believe that staring at his groin was anything less than euphoric. “We can’t stay long, anyway. We’ve got places to be.”
“Oh?” Ariel asked politely.
“Yes,” Remus said. “PrincessWolfStar666 has just written her debut fic. ‘Puppy Love,’ I think it is.”
Ariel winced.
“Yeah,” Sirius said mournfully. He adopted a squeaky, sugary voice: "’Siri, may I claim you?' 'Yes, lover, I need your throbbing purple principality inside me now!!!' You know the type. And Remus has got a Snupin coming up around six." He made a closed-off noise in his throat. If looks were beverages, Sirius's face would have morphed into a glass of curdled, 30-year old milk, erupting with blue mold. "And I've got a Harry MPREG to attend."
“Who's the father?” Ariel asked, against all common sense.
“I am,” Sirius said. He glanced off in the direction of the kitchen, perhaps looking for a blender in which to shove his hand.
“I'm sorry.” Ariel shook her head. “I wish things could've been better.”
Sirius and Remus gave her a look pointier than toothpicks.
“If you were really concerned, I should think you’d do something about it,” snapped Frost Queen Remus, breathing ice crystals and Antarctica. “You were such a generous fangirl once upon a time. Whisking us off to exotic lands and, well, tearing us apart, really, playing psychotic mind games with us-”
“But they were thrilling games,” Sirius cut in.
“Of course,” Remus said lightly. “Thrillingly traumatic mind games that have scarred us beyond words. And we thank you for it, really cut through the monotony of drama induced by Snape love triangles. We just love character studies. And the odd gem of pornography. But now you say you can't write us anymore?”
“Look,” Ariel said in a placating voice. “I sympathize, really. But you see, I’ve learned something. We had some good times, sure, but there comes a point where you have to make a decision. You have to say, ‘I’ve said what I wanted to say, and so I’ll go now.’ It’s like....” Ariel screwed up your eyes and thought. “Say you had a fabulously witty uncle. But now he’s senile and sits in the corner at family reunions, and rambles and drools to the houseplant about who did and who didn’t paint whose hen house back in 1931. That’s just sad.”
Sirius and Remus were not impressed.
“You’re not old,” Remus said.
“You’ll never dribble,” Sirius said. “And if you did we’d dab your mouth with a napkin every now and then, no harm.”
“That’s not my point,” Ariel said. “What I mean is...I hate to say it, but I’m just not feeling it anymore.”
Sirius and Remus were not impressed.
“There’s a standard,” Ariel said, a little desperately, as she sensed their stares. “I try to live up to that standard, and I can’t just fake something if I’m not feeling it. Now, if I ever-”
“Wait a moment,” said Sirius. “Stan-dard? What is this stan-dard you speak of?” He rolled the word around in his mouth as though it were a rock that had turned up in his perfectly acceptable bowl of porridge. He looked rather sweetly lost. He glanced at Remus, who shrugged as if to say, Yep, she might as well be speaking Mandarin. Let’s start calling her Lao Tzu.
“I mean standard,” Ariel cried, holding out her hands out imploringly. “As in, there’s a certain quality I aspire to in my writing. As in, I like to have a clear idea, a vision of the characters. Enthusiasm, or some such state! Standards! People have standards!”
Sirius had to pick himself up off the floor laughing.
“No one has standards,” Remus said. He enunciated carefully, in a voice that suggested Ariel had limited mental capacity, or that she was perhaps a houseplant. “Just take a look at the people you associate with. If you think they have standards...! For instance, losselen and statelines write most of their stories under the influence of cough syrup and Flintstone’s multivitamins. starstillwonder's a total addict too, can’t get her off the stuff, even when she isn’t writing. I don’t blame her, it’s actually not so bad. Cocktail sort of thing.”
“Yeah,” Sirius added. “They let us have some, once. Strangest things happened. I never did it backwards on an upside-down table before.”
“Er,” Ariel said thoughtfully.
“And then there’s imochan,” Remus continued. “And yeats. They get their plots from cereal boxes they find in the park, and from the grad students who live under the bridge. sheafrotherdon is actually the automaton PUPLOVE5000, which writes fic at a rate impossible for humans to duplicate.”
“Your pal librae,” Sirius said, “is fucking crippled without the aid of a script that generates pretty words to describe the sunset.”
Remus curled his lip in disgust. “That’s right. Have you noticed some of the stuff she writes? Half of it’s, ‘The winter sky was like the belly of a dead fish, all pink and oily and a little bit blubbery. The clouds rippled like scales flaking off of aforesaid dead fish.’” He sat up suddenly. “And booboosheep, your dear Lara. Oh, I don’t even know if I can bear to tell you the truth about her.”
“What?” Ariel said, frowning. “How-I don’t-”
“She isn’t who she says she is,” Sirius said firmly.
“Well, she is,” Remus amended.
“Oh, yeah, of course she is,” Sirius agreed. “She’s exactly who she says she is. Just...more. If we told you exactly who much-I mean how much-more, well, I think your brains would explode out your ears in tiny pieces. And that would be rather a shame.”
“The point is, no one has standards anymore,” said Remus. “Everyone has no standard. They are standardless as the day is long, and by day, I mean a day in Norway. Land of the Midnight Sun and all. You know, when it’s daylight all day long and you could go out and have yourself a nice game of Quidditch at three o’clock in the morning if that’s what you really wanted, because it’s that light for about two months straight. And then in the winter-”
“All right,” Ariel said hastily. “I understand.”
“So you could pretend to have standards.” Sirius winked. “But here’s the thing: you wouldn’t.”
“Everybody does it,” Remus said.
“Yes," Ariel said. "But I'm not everybody."
She let this sink in for a little while and the world stopped spinning for just a second.
The look on Sirius’s and Remus’s faces seemed to suggest that they’d been asked to factor 8x² - l8x³t + 9x²t², and they’d only just figured it out. Shame-faced, they looked at their hands and exercised their bad puppy looks, only this time there’d be no swatting with a rolled-up newspaper. (Except maybe later, at pornish_pixies, or some such den of debauchery.) In any case, they finally understood that Ariel was a free spirit, like a flower-cheeked, topless hippie at Woodstock, or perhaps like the psychedelic BMW bus that that hippie drove to Woodstock, or perhaps like the lovely patterned butterfly splattered on the windshield of the BMW bus.
She was something, indeed.
Remus cleared his throat. “Right, you’re right. We’re sorry.”
Ariel smiled. “No need. That’s fine.” She remembered that her guests were British. “Would you like some tea?”
Remus perked. “Is it that the Orlando Bloom tea?”
“Ah...?” Ariel looked helpless.
“Never mind, never mind, we’ve kept you long enough as it is. Besides, Sirius and I are probably late for the first spate of ‘Puppy Love’ postings. We like to watch over the proceedings sometimes, you know. The author’s threatened to hang herself if she doesn’t get fifty reviews.”
“Oh dear,” Ariel sighed. “Well, good luck. Someone will come along and give you a break, I’m sure.”
“Yeah,” Sirius said wistfully. “What I wouldn’t give for some Marauder-era introspection with a side of angst. Post-Hogwarts, maybe. Let us know if you have any ideas, one of these days.”
Ariel promised that she would.
Sirius and Remus smiled and disappeared in a whirlwind of swirly colors, on their way back to the Land o' Slash, slightly south of Buttered Fishville, both of which shared a bus route with Slight Delusion. Everyone agreed it was a fine place to visit, all right, not sure if they could take it full time. But the pups were happy enough there, and Ariel was happy that they were happy, and they were happy if she was happy they were happy, and this started a whole chain of happy that included daisies and lemonade and chocolate cake.
It was only later that Ariel found Brian and Justin bound and gagged in her closet.