Last ficlet onna card as was in the mail
For wenlet, who asked for Nana fic. Thanks to my London hosts, apologies for appropriation of imagery. (There was also this Ciara video I caught at least five times on Belgian MTV during my holiday? And the Pet Shop Boys I keep threatening.
...I still need a decent rip of this song. ^^;)
King's Cross
They told Ren two weeks, give or take. At first he would return to Japan on the Saturday after next, then it was pushed back to Monday.
Dates didn't matter. Dates were no guarantee: they were worth less than the slip of paper that marked your turn in a government office queue. All he could do was wait.
*
The decision to fly was so abrupt it took a day or two to round up the equipment and crew, let alone the permits for shooting. Management set him loose, perhaps in exhaustion. Any damage he could do here was negligeable compared to the home front.
He liked the city. It kept him aware. His name was nonsense here; he was superfluous, disdained, a reader of symbols. His nerves were jacked up. There were no predators in sight but he went looking for trouble, and that was a scent that clung to one's skin like cigarette smoke.
It was difficult to tell the age of buildings. Signs were darker and colours jarred less. Over the weekend the internal life of drinking establishments spilled onto the streets and below, spreading through the narrow tunnels of the Underground like water through plumbing. The boys who dressed like him here had to bend their heads as they stepped from train to station; they ran along the platform shoving each other, and he wasn't in time to tell if they were laughing.
There were no girls who dressed like her, apart from a ghost or two haunting their little velvet-rope shrines. There were no girls like her at all.
*
Monday they had morning call. Reira stuck her tongue out at Naoki when he complained, saying he and Ren were lucky - all they had to do was lie about on the lawn in Kensington Gardens and not fall asleep with the cameras pointed in their faces.
As always he did what was asked of him. After the cameras had stopped rolling he remained in position, staring up at the sky and feeling the dew creep through his borrowed morning suit jacket.
It seemed pleasantly distant, all of it.
Eventually he turned his head. In the distance Reira was leading a white horse beneath tall oaks, gingerly, on a long rein. The wedding veil floated behind her as weightlessly as smoke, but her white silk train slid over the grass, catching here and there on the exposed roots of trees. It was early autumn. The leaves had not quite begun to turn, but there was a golden haze in the air.
Earlier on she had pointed at the groundskeeper's lodge and said to him, laughing, A little house with a very big garden - isn't that what you've always wanted?
She caught sight of him and waved, disrupting the shot.
Ren smiled and closed his eyes.
...I still need a decent rip of this song. ^^;)
King's Cross
They told Ren two weeks, give or take. At first he would return to Japan on the Saturday after next, then it was pushed back to Monday.
Dates didn't matter. Dates were no guarantee: they were worth less than the slip of paper that marked your turn in a government office queue. All he could do was wait.
*
The decision to fly was so abrupt it took a day or two to round up the equipment and crew, let alone the permits for shooting. Management set him loose, perhaps in exhaustion. Any damage he could do here was negligeable compared to the home front.
He liked the city. It kept him aware. His name was nonsense here; he was superfluous, disdained, a reader of symbols. His nerves were jacked up. There were no predators in sight but he went looking for trouble, and that was a scent that clung to one's skin like cigarette smoke.
It was difficult to tell the age of buildings. Signs were darker and colours jarred less. Over the weekend the internal life of drinking establishments spilled onto the streets and below, spreading through the narrow tunnels of the Underground like water through plumbing. The boys who dressed like him here had to bend their heads as they stepped from train to station; they ran along the platform shoving each other, and he wasn't in time to tell if they were laughing.
There were no girls who dressed like her, apart from a ghost or two haunting their little velvet-rope shrines. There were no girls like her at all.
*
Monday they had morning call. Reira stuck her tongue out at Naoki when he complained, saying he and Ren were lucky - all they had to do was lie about on the lawn in Kensington Gardens and not fall asleep with the cameras pointed in their faces.
As always he did what was asked of him. After the cameras had stopped rolling he remained in position, staring up at the sky and feeling the dew creep through his borrowed morning suit jacket.
It seemed pleasantly distant, all of it.
Eventually he turned his head. In the distance Reira was leading a white horse beneath tall oaks, gingerly, on a long rein. The wedding veil floated behind her as weightlessly as smoke, but her white silk train slid over the grass, catching here and there on the exposed roots of trees. It was early autumn. The leaves had not quite begun to turn, but there was a golden haze in the air.
Earlier on she had pointed at the groundskeeper's lodge and said to him, laughing, A little house with a very big garden - isn't that what you've always wanted?
She caught sight of him and waved, disrupting the shot.
Ren smiled and closed his eyes.