Diwali 2014
Happy Diwali to you and yours, my friends. It's been an exceptionally long day, so I'm just going to give you the usual image, and three short stories.
[image description: a darkened room, with several candles and a candelabra in this window, and an orange lamp
That's from last year: but we're still here.
dancing in the dark
Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Rosa/Amy.
So in the middle of all the uproar - Jake yelling, "Who the hell uses a ballet school as cover?"; Boyle saying thoughtfully, "Maybe they hide the meth in the rosin"; and Holt saying, "Detectives, silence, please. Gina, I applaud your attention to detail but rest assured this instruction is applicable to you also" - Amy says, "I could enrol."
That time even Gina goes quiet. Holt says, not unkindly, "Go on, Detective."
"It can't be Jake or Boyle," Amy says, "'cause - well, Jake. And Boyle. it can't be Rosa, she did the last bust, they know she's a cop. But I could... get in there, and see what's happening. Sir."
"All right," Holt says, looking at her seriously, but again, without disapproval. "Let me have something on my desk in an hour."
They're all filing out when Jake says: "Amy, can you - like, you know. Dance?"
Amy says, "I'm a quick study."
And that's how she ends up in the evidence room in her bare feet with her pants rolled up to the knee, being glared at by Rosa. "Again," Rosa snaps, and Amy stamps her foot. Without her shoes it's not that effective.
"Maybe you can wear a wig," she says. "Boyle has all kinds of crap in his desk drawer left over from Hallowe'en. No one will know it's you, you can do the whole dance thing, it'll be fine."
"Again," Rosa says, staring pointedly at Amy's feet, which still won't turn out to Rosa-mandated standard.
"Seriously," Amy says, deliberately not moving, "there's like an orange one, a green one from that dude who was an Oompa-Loompa" - and she knows she's being childish, but this actually does remind her of being a kid: Sunday afternoons at the community centre, the cold floor, the way her knees went the wrong way and her arms went the other way but it was also the wrong way and everything was wrong and in the way. "Rosa," she says, when Rosa still doesn't say anything, "it was a stupid idea, I can't do this. I'll go tell Holt."
"Okay, enough," Rosa says, walks briskly across the room and turns out the lights. It's pitch black in here - no windows, barely a crack under the door - and Amy freezes.
"Rosa, what the hell..."
"Stay right where you are," Rosa orders, out of the dark. "Don't move a muscle."
"Okay," Amy says, quietly. "Okay."
"To do this," Rosa goes on, and from the texture of noise in the room, she's maybe fidgeting on the spot, but she's not moving any closer to where Amy's standing, "you need to look like you belong. It's okay if you fuck up. People go to ballet school to learn. But you need to walk in there like - not like you own the place. Like it owns you. Clear so far, Santiago?"
"Yeah," Amy says, a little unsure. "Uh, yeah, I think so."
"Okay. The next thing - no one ever reads your reports."
"What?" Amy says. "Holt reads them. Why would you even..."
"Holt reads them, okay. Did you think McGinley read them, before Holt came?"
"Uh," Amy says, and curses her innate honesty. "No."
"No one read them and you knew that. Did you phone them in? Write two paragraphs on a napkin? Did you fuck around the way Peralta did?"
"No," Amy says, a little offended. "Of course not. I'm a cop."
"Right," Rosa says, very softly, "and now, you're a dancer." And she moves - Amy can hear her footsteps and then, feel her presence, the moving warmth of her. Rosa's hands land on Amy's hips and Amy breathes in sharply, then lets it out, relaxes into the hold.
"There you go," Rosa says softly, "No one's looking at you, Amy. No one can see. You're doing this for you. Just you. Turn out your feet. First position. There you go." Amy breathes, as Rosa's grip tightens: she's checking to see if Amy's really done it. "That's right. One step to your right, with your right foot. Second position."
Amy's foot slides easily, silently, across the polished floor.
"In, and right foot in front. That's third. Step forward" - Amy does, taking her time, aware all of the time of Rosa so close behind her - "that's fourth. There, perfect." Rosa's hand disappears from Amy's right hip and reappears on her bare foot. "And into fifth, like I showed you. There. Once more."
"Okay?" Amy says, doubtfully, but she's thinking through the positions of her feet in her head: the glides from one to the next, the numbers. "Okay."
"When you lift your foot, point your toes," Rosa says, "and hold your arms curved in front of you, that's it, that's right."
"How'd you know I'm doing it?" Amy demands, halfway between second position and third. She is doing it - her lips are tightly pressed together, her teeth clenched, she's concentrating on every muscle in her body - but Rosa's hands are back on her hips, holding her steady.
"Because it's good form," Rosa murmurs, into her hair, "and that's important. Even when no one's looking."
"Rosa," Amy says, "I'm really not sure I can do this."
"You can," Rosa says, with all that Rosa certainty, and somehow Amy thinks she means more than the ballet-dancing meth dealers.
"Okay," she says, and does it again, and again: each time just a sequence of movements in the dark, and each time a little closer to perfect.
always one last bell to ring
Imperial Radch, Breq, Seivarden, Tisarwat & co. [NB re: spoilers for Ancillary Sword - they're minor, but to be honest this won't make sense without it!]
“The oldest person on board,” Lieutenant Seivarden is explaining to Tisarwat, “and the youngest. They hang the lights for the crew to carry. That’s how it was done when I was young, and that's how the fleet captain has said we’ll do it, so that’s how we’ll do it. Meet me here, Tisarwat.”
“You?” That’s Breq, entering the decade room and standing in the doorway. Kalr Five, Six and Twelve come vaguely to attention; Breq thinks they should go back to work, setting out the candles and small lights. “At ease,” the ship murmurs into the ear of Five, and the rest follow her lead. “Why you, Lieutenant Seivarden?”
“I’m more than a thousand years old.” A flash of humour from her, which Mercy of Kalr can pick up as a slight spike in her neural activity, and a tiny spike in her rate of respiration, though all bodies laugh differently. “I think that qualifies me as the oldest person here.”
Breq, too, seems amused; though the ship wonders if she is, herself, aware of it. “Present company excepted?”
Seivarden shakes her head, the humour coming up to the surface. “Justice of Toren was older than me. But One Esk Nineteen was made after I was born.”
Breq says, “I am Justice of Toren.”
“And I am Mercy of Kalr.” Although it does not live within her body, as it would within an ancillary, in choosing to speak through her Mercy of Kalr appreciates Kalr Twelve on her own merits: not least her sense of comic timing. “If you are a ship, Fleet Captain, you are not the oldest.”
Again, that small spike: Seivarden is amused. Breq feels something. And Kalr Twelve, Five and Eight are not, after all, ancillaries. Mercy of Kalr is quite delighted with itself for a moment.
But there’s still Tisarwat. “My recent illness,” she says, calmly and sadly, “has aged me.”
Breq steps forwards: in kinship, the ship thinks. “Yes,” she says, simply, and Seivarden says nothing.
But then, the gates are closing between systems: they’re distant from their houses; they’re all kin. And that’s how they do it, in the end, carrying the lights of the Amaat and Etrapa and Kalr decades alongside them, to string from the ceilings and line the doorways, Seivarden, Tisarwat and Breq together, assisted by the Kalrs and Ekalu. As their footsteps ring out hard floors and gantries, Mercy of Kalr is aware once again that it does not live within their bodies, which is one thing lost, but that they live within it. That they light this space as though they decorate a body.
There is no up and down in space, but there is a highest deck, on Mercy of Kalr; it creates its own up and down, civilised things, even as it lights up the darkness. As they reach it, Tisarwat says, "All of it, so beautiful" - and in that wonderment, sounds no more than seventeen. Breq is singing, an old, wordless hymn from some long-vanished people, something about the coming of the sun.
two drifters off to see the world
How I Met Your Mother, Tracy and Robin
“Hey,” Robin says. “Sing Moon River.”
“How do you know,” Tracy demands, putting the ukulele on her shoulder for a moment, “that I even can?”
“You’re sitting on a fire escape above New York City with a ukulele,” Robin points out, gesturing through the window before she clambers out and sits a few steps below Tracy. It’s a darkening, smoggy day, so the streetlamps and headlights are starting to burst out of the fog way below them and the people look like ants, carrying tiny lights. The night feels close, Robin thinks: almost literally, like you could touch the cloud layer. “Seriously, you couldn’t look more like Audrey Hepburn right now if you tried.”
“Audrey Hepburn!” Tracy laughs delightedly at that, and makes an adjustment to the strings. “That’s kinda nice.”
“Hey,” Robin says, gesturing, “you’re hot, McConnell. I’d totally do you.” A pause. “I’m supposed to be turning Barney into a better person, not the other way around.”
“It’s a mutual convergence,” Tracy tells her. “Well-known phenomenon. I could draw you some graphs.”
“Play it, Tracy,” Robin says, and Tracy starts to pick out the melody, softly and sweetly, the notes turned ethereal by the fog. She gets through the introduction and stops, the last note off-key. “Why’d you stop?”
“Sing it, Sparkles,” Tracy orders, and when Robin doesn’t say anything, starts strumming with teenage gusto. It takes three and a half seconds for Robin to recognise “Let’s Go To The Mall” transposed for strings, and approximately another half-second before she growls:
“Barney.”
“He said,” Tracy says, apologetically, “he’d give me a hundred dollars if I learned the chords. I said no. He said he’d give me a thousand dollars. I said no. He said he’d owe me a favour, magnitude unspecified, to be called in a time of my choosing, without question, demurral or consideration of expense.”
“Huh,” Robin says, recognising Marshall’s drafting style.
“I’m thinking maybe I’ll get him to do my taxes,” Tracy says, still strumming thoughtfully. “Or end global poverty, whatever.”
“Play it, Tracy,” Robin says again, and Tracy smiles at her and plays it again. This time, Robin comes in on the right note, maybe a half-bar behind, it’s not like she had any actual musical training back on the Canadian teenage pop-stardom circuit, but Tracy can deal. Tracy can more than deal; she's still keeping time, her voice cutting through the smog in a way Robin's can't, and they get through the song just fine. Two drifters, off to see the world, Tracy's singing, on-key, and it's easy for Robin to imagine, warmly and without regret, the world where it wasn't Ted but Robin who fell in love at first sight.
"Off to see the world and such a lot of world to see," Tracy says, setting down the ukulele on the step beside her. "I guess I see why you like it. The song, I mean."
"Plenty to see right here," Robin says, looking up and smiling. After a moment, Tracy smiles back: a little thing, a small sweetness, above the glorious lights of the city.
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comment(s). Comment there or here.
[image description: a darkened room, with several candles and a candelabra in this window, and an orange lamp
That's from last year: but we're still here.
dancing in the dark
Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Rosa/Amy.
So in the middle of all the uproar - Jake yelling, "Who the hell uses a ballet school as cover?"; Boyle saying thoughtfully, "Maybe they hide the meth in the rosin"; and Holt saying, "Detectives, silence, please. Gina, I applaud your attention to detail but rest assured this instruction is applicable to you also" - Amy says, "I could enrol."
That time even Gina goes quiet. Holt says, not unkindly, "Go on, Detective."
"It can't be Jake or Boyle," Amy says, "'cause - well, Jake. And Boyle. it can't be Rosa, she did the last bust, they know she's a cop. But I could... get in there, and see what's happening. Sir."
"All right," Holt says, looking at her seriously, but again, without disapproval. "Let me have something on my desk in an hour."
They're all filing out when Jake says: "Amy, can you - like, you know. Dance?"
Amy says, "I'm a quick study."
And that's how she ends up in the evidence room in her bare feet with her pants rolled up to the knee, being glared at by Rosa. "Again," Rosa snaps, and Amy stamps her foot. Without her shoes it's not that effective.
"Maybe you can wear a wig," she says. "Boyle has all kinds of crap in his desk drawer left over from Hallowe'en. No one will know it's you, you can do the whole dance thing, it'll be fine."
"Again," Rosa says, staring pointedly at Amy's feet, which still won't turn out to Rosa-mandated standard.
"Seriously," Amy says, deliberately not moving, "there's like an orange one, a green one from that dude who was an Oompa-Loompa" - and she knows she's being childish, but this actually does remind her of being a kid: Sunday afternoons at the community centre, the cold floor, the way her knees went the wrong way and her arms went the other way but it was also the wrong way and everything was wrong and in the way. "Rosa," she says, when Rosa still doesn't say anything, "it was a stupid idea, I can't do this. I'll go tell Holt."
"Okay, enough," Rosa says, walks briskly across the room and turns out the lights. It's pitch black in here - no windows, barely a crack under the door - and Amy freezes.
"Rosa, what the hell..."
"Stay right where you are," Rosa orders, out of the dark. "Don't move a muscle."
"Okay," Amy says, quietly. "Okay."
"To do this," Rosa goes on, and from the texture of noise in the room, she's maybe fidgeting on the spot, but she's not moving any closer to where Amy's standing, "you need to look like you belong. It's okay if you fuck up. People go to ballet school to learn. But you need to walk in there like - not like you own the place. Like it owns you. Clear so far, Santiago?"
"Yeah," Amy says, a little unsure. "Uh, yeah, I think so."
"Okay. The next thing - no one ever reads your reports."
"What?" Amy says. "Holt reads them. Why would you even..."
"Holt reads them, okay. Did you think McGinley read them, before Holt came?"
"Uh," Amy says, and curses her innate honesty. "No."
"No one read them and you knew that. Did you phone them in? Write two paragraphs on a napkin? Did you fuck around the way Peralta did?"
"No," Amy says, a little offended. "Of course not. I'm a cop."
"Right," Rosa says, very softly, "and now, you're a dancer." And she moves - Amy can hear her footsteps and then, feel her presence, the moving warmth of her. Rosa's hands land on Amy's hips and Amy breathes in sharply, then lets it out, relaxes into the hold.
"There you go," Rosa says softly, "No one's looking at you, Amy. No one can see. You're doing this for you. Just you. Turn out your feet. First position. There you go." Amy breathes, as Rosa's grip tightens: she's checking to see if Amy's really done it. "That's right. One step to your right, with your right foot. Second position."
Amy's foot slides easily, silently, across the polished floor.
"In, and right foot in front. That's third. Step forward" - Amy does, taking her time, aware all of the time of Rosa so close behind her - "that's fourth. There, perfect." Rosa's hand disappears from Amy's right hip and reappears on her bare foot. "And into fifth, like I showed you. There. Once more."
"Okay?" Amy says, doubtfully, but she's thinking through the positions of her feet in her head: the glides from one to the next, the numbers. "Okay."
"When you lift your foot, point your toes," Rosa says, "and hold your arms curved in front of you, that's it, that's right."
"How'd you know I'm doing it?" Amy demands, halfway between second position and third. She is doing it - her lips are tightly pressed together, her teeth clenched, she's concentrating on every muscle in her body - but Rosa's hands are back on her hips, holding her steady.
"Because it's good form," Rosa murmurs, into her hair, "and that's important. Even when no one's looking."
"Rosa," Amy says, "I'm really not sure I can do this."
"You can," Rosa says, with all that Rosa certainty, and somehow Amy thinks she means more than the ballet-dancing meth dealers.
"Okay," she says, and does it again, and again: each time just a sequence of movements in the dark, and each time a little closer to perfect.
always one last bell to ring
Imperial Radch, Breq, Seivarden, Tisarwat & co. [NB re: spoilers for Ancillary Sword - they're minor, but to be honest this won't make sense without it!]
“The oldest person on board,” Lieutenant Seivarden is explaining to Tisarwat, “and the youngest. They hang the lights for the crew to carry. That’s how it was done when I was young, and that's how the fleet captain has said we’ll do it, so that’s how we’ll do it. Meet me here, Tisarwat.”
“You?” That’s Breq, entering the decade room and standing in the doorway. Kalr Five, Six and Twelve come vaguely to attention; Breq thinks they should go back to work, setting out the candles and small lights. “At ease,” the ship murmurs into the ear of Five, and the rest follow her lead. “Why you, Lieutenant Seivarden?”
“I’m more than a thousand years old.” A flash of humour from her, which Mercy of Kalr can pick up as a slight spike in her neural activity, and a tiny spike in her rate of respiration, though all bodies laugh differently. “I think that qualifies me as the oldest person here.”
Breq, too, seems amused; though the ship wonders if she is, herself, aware of it. “Present company excepted?”
Seivarden shakes her head, the humour coming up to the surface. “Justice of Toren was older than me. But One Esk Nineteen was made after I was born.”
Breq says, “I am Justice of Toren.”
“And I am Mercy of Kalr.” Although it does not live within her body, as it would within an ancillary, in choosing to speak through her Mercy of Kalr appreciates Kalr Twelve on her own merits: not least her sense of comic timing. “If you are a ship, Fleet Captain, you are not the oldest.”
Again, that small spike: Seivarden is amused. Breq feels something. And Kalr Twelve, Five and Eight are not, after all, ancillaries. Mercy of Kalr is quite delighted with itself for a moment.
But there’s still Tisarwat. “My recent illness,” she says, calmly and sadly, “has aged me.”
Breq steps forwards: in kinship, the ship thinks. “Yes,” she says, simply, and Seivarden says nothing.
But then, the gates are closing between systems: they’re distant from their houses; they’re all kin. And that’s how they do it, in the end, carrying the lights of the Amaat and Etrapa and Kalr decades alongside them, to string from the ceilings and line the doorways, Seivarden, Tisarwat and Breq together, assisted by the Kalrs and Ekalu. As their footsteps ring out hard floors and gantries, Mercy of Kalr is aware once again that it does not live within their bodies, which is one thing lost, but that they live within it. That they light this space as though they decorate a body.
There is no up and down in space, but there is a highest deck, on Mercy of Kalr; it creates its own up and down, civilised things, even as it lights up the darkness. As they reach it, Tisarwat says, "All of it, so beautiful" - and in that wonderment, sounds no more than seventeen. Breq is singing, an old, wordless hymn from some long-vanished people, something about the coming of the sun.
two drifters off to see the world
How I Met Your Mother, Tracy and Robin
“Hey,” Robin says. “Sing Moon River.”
“How do you know,” Tracy demands, putting the ukulele on her shoulder for a moment, “that I even can?”
“You’re sitting on a fire escape above New York City with a ukulele,” Robin points out, gesturing through the window before she clambers out and sits a few steps below Tracy. It’s a darkening, smoggy day, so the streetlamps and headlights are starting to burst out of the fog way below them and the people look like ants, carrying tiny lights. The night feels close, Robin thinks: almost literally, like you could touch the cloud layer. “Seriously, you couldn’t look more like Audrey Hepburn right now if you tried.”
“Audrey Hepburn!” Tracy laughs delightedly at that, and makes an adjustment to the strings. “That’s kinda nice.”
“Hey,” Robin says, gesturing, “you’re hot, McConnell. I’d totally do you.” A pause. “I’m supposed to be turning Barney into a better person, not the other way around.”
“It’s a mutual convergence,” Tracy tells her. “Well-known phenomenon. I could draw you some graphs.”
“Play it, Tracy,” Robin says, and Tracy starts to pick out the melody, softly and sweetly, the notes turned ethereal by the fog. She gets through the introduction and stops, the last note off-key. “Why’d you stop?”
“Sing it, Sparkles,” Tracy orders, and when Robin doesn’t say anything, starts strumming with teenage gusto. It takes three and a half seconds for Robin to recognise “Let’s Go To The Mall” transposed for strings, and approximately another half-second before she growls:
“Barney.”
“He said,” Tracy says, apologetically, “he’d give me a hundred dollars if I learned the chords. I said no. He said he’d give me a thousand dollars. I said no. He said he’d owe me a favour, magnitude unspecified, to be called in a time of my choosing, without question, demurral or consideration of expense.”
“Huh,” Robin says, recognising Marshall’s drafting style.
“I’m thinking maybe I’ll get him to do my taxes,” Tracy says, still strumming thoughtfully. “Or end global poverty, whatever.”
“Play it, Tracy,” Robin says again, and Tracy smiles at her and plays it again. This time, Robin comes in on the right note, maybe a half-bar behind, it’s not like she had any actual musical training back on the Canadian teenage pop-stardom circuit, but Tracy can deal. Tracy can more than deal; she's still keeping time, her voice cutting through the smog in a way Robin's can't, and they get through the song just fine. Two drifters, off to see the world, Tracy's singing, on-key, and it's easy for Robin to imagine, warmly and without regret, the world where it wasn't Ted but Robin who fell in love at first sight.
"Off to see the world and such a lot of world to see," Tracy says, setting down the ukulele on the step beside her. "I guess I see why you like it. The song, I mean."
"Plenty to see right here," Robin says, looking up and smiling. After a moment, Tracy smiles back: a little thing, a small sweetness, above the glorious lights of the city.
raven is also at Dreamwidth: there is or are
comment(s). Comment there or here.