Fic: "The Truth About Lying", RPF (Diane Kruger/Til Schweiger), M
TITLE: The Truth About Lying
FANDOM: Inglourious Basterds RPF (Diane Kruger/Til Schweiger, hints of Daniel Brühl/Mélanie Laurent)
RATING: M
DISCLAIMER: This isn't real. MORE'S THE PITY.
The Truth About Lying
Inglourious Basterds RPF, 11th January 2010
--
NOTES: With thanks and >:| faces to butchiemcgee, my enabler to end all enablers. This is the photo mentioned as to where they met (where Til looks like a streaker), this is how they looked at the Berlin photo-call and this is Pacey Joshua Jackson's good friend Dawson crying in GIF form. With thanks to Farin Urlaub Racing Team for the title.
--
All things
Move towards their end
"Do You Love Me?", Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
--
BERLIN
She only sleeps with him when she's too tired for anything else.
It's easy, probably, because he's hiding from his wife, and she's hiding from her husband, and he makes her eggs in the morning despite her hating them.
They go to waste, the yoke cracking on her plate as he lets himself out, and she's alone in an apartment his wife doesn't know he has, in the new role of mistress she wasn't sure she know she'd accepted.
The sun is bright in the small, sparse kitchen, and Diane drinks the lukewarm coffee left for her before she locks the door behind her.
PARIS
Diane suspects it'll be awkward, but only in that way it's always awkward when you meet someone you've seen naked more than once.
He's nothing but polite, as they stand side-by-side at the generic casting office in a generic building in France and let the air crackle with whatever - he's better at playing the game than her, he thinks, so she takes her cues from his German stoicism, crossing her arms and waiting for her lines.
By the end of the day, she plays it better; because she's gotten good at pretending he doesn't affect her at all.
POTSDAM
Michael is a gentleman, and she can tell Til hates it. He's asking about Joshua, about her life and her career and her hobbies as they wait for the scene to be set up; her responses are cordial and smart and funny and she barely looks at Til as he talks to August and Gedeon with one eye completely not on her.
"You know Til, then?" asks Michael, and she lights a cigarette to stay in character.
"Yes." A drag, a teethy smile.
"Where did you meet?"
"At a photoshoot." She nods towards August, gestures with the smoke. "With him, and Daniel Brühl, too."
Michael laughs, and fiddles with his boot. The Nazi insignia looks odd on him, she thinks, like a lamb out for slaughter, or like an Englishman trapped in a scene with too many Germans with intersecting pasts. Her hand gets itchy, and she looks away in case he looks up to see her frowning.
"Best friends, then?" And he says it in a way that makes her fall for a moment -
"The best," Til answers for her, and he smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes.
He watches her in that way that makes her think he knows her, sees her, and she swallows down anything like emotion for fear of ruining her makeup and drawing too much attention to the scene that seems so loud in her own head.
She offers the cigarette and he takes it, sucking in the smoke from where her lipstick yells red at the tip.
Later, they play the scene where he dies, and she holds his hand under the table even though the director tells them not to.
BERLIN
"This isn't sex."
"It feels like sex," and he runs the tip of his nose along her thigh and she pulls her eyes to ceiling.
CANNES
He's taking pictures of everyone but her with his camera, and she hides with Josh at a table near the back. Here, she can see them all - high on the reaction and ovation, her boyfriend's hands over hers as they drink in the night and the champagne she's trying to pretend isn't stopping an old hurt from being a present one.
Mélanie's leaning into Daniel's neck and laughing, touching the nape of her neck; it's the beginning of a story Diane once knew the middle and end to.
A story, she knew, would end in Berlin - feet tangled together and four-word sentences, all which were designed to avoid the subject of whowhatwherewhenhow and all the better to summarise the then-and-now. Let's order room service or you have beautiful hands, selective and intuitive sentences that, in all actuality, spoke more than monologues about their spouses or his children or her dogs ever could.
Diane takes a swig of Moet and watches the French girl and German boy, and wishes nothing but heart-aching joy and the lover's lament that comes with secretive hotel rooms and the avoidance of paparazzi.
It's hard to admit, especially as she sits beside a man who completes every part of her - but she's left a little bit of herself with Til, and she never, ever wants it back.
--
Til's to her left, as Josh and her stand to make their exit. She knows the sharp-edge of her boyfriend's words as she falls into him accidentally - the ones coloured by the booze and the lack of sleep - mean nothing, and she apologises to the waiter Josh falls into because of her.
"Geez, Diane, for fuck's sake!"
She can't apologise and say "it's because I was distracted by a man you think I barely know".
She can't explain it.
And when Til punches Joshua in the nose, sending him to the ground, she does nothing but watch in a Tarantino-induced haze.
CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT
"I can see the way you look at Fassbender."
"What is wrong with you? Seriously? You could have broken Josh's nose, he could have -"
"Are you going to sleep with him?"
"Who? What?"
"Fassbender."
They're speaking in German so her boyfriend doesn't hear them, a slight black eye poking out from under his sunglasses as he talked on a phone and pretended Til didn't exist.
It's not that easy, she thinks, and Til's running his hands through his hair as he looks anywhere but at her; the two of them amongst a million people while feeling like the only ones in the terminal.
It takes everything she has not to punch him like he punched Josh, and just a little bit more not to drag him into the bathroom to forget everything that was, and wasn't ever going to be.
BERLIN
It always ended up in Berlin. They stood there, in front of the cameras and she couldn't make a smile.
Her back always bent towards him, even when she tried hard to stand straight.
"Your hat is stupid," and he smirks, and she feels the change and shift between them, like the final chapters were written behind her back while she was away having a new life that was so different to the one they'd shared, together, in secret.
She feels the press of his hand against the back of her little yellow Louis Vuitton dress, sees the play of sorts between Daniel and Mélanie, and she smiles.
"Diane! Over here!"
She looks to the throng of press, and pretends for a moment that they were anything but the flash of a camera and the blink of an eye.
---
Fin.
---
LOL PACEY
FANDOM: Inglourious Basterds RPF (Diane Kruger/Til Schweiger, hints of Daniel Brühl/Mélanie Laurent)
RATING: M
DISCLAIMER: This isn't real. MORE'S THE PITY.
The Truth About Lying
Inglourious Basterds RPF, 11th January 2010
--
NOTES: With thanks and >:| faces to butchiemcgee, my enabler to end all enablers. This is the photo mentioned as to where they met (where Til looks like a streaker), this is how they looked at the Berlin photo-call and this is Pacey Joshua Jackson's good friend Dawson crying in GIF form. With thanks to Farin Urlaub Racing Team for the title.
--
All things
Move towards their end
"Do You Love Me?", Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
--
BERLIN
She only sleeps with him when she's too tired for anything else.
It's easy, probably, because he's hiding from his wife, and she's hiding from her husband, and he makes her eggs in the morning despite her hating them.
They go to waste, the yoke cracking on her plate as he lets himself out, and she's alone in an apartment his wife doesn't know he has, in the new role of mistress she wasn't sure she know she'd accepted.
The sun is bright in the small, sparse kitchen, and Diane drinks the lukewarm coffee left for her before she locks the door behind her.
PARIS
Diane suspects it'll be awkward, but only in that way it's always awkward when you meet someone you've seen naked more than once.
He's nothing but polite, as they stand side-by-side at the generic casting office in a generic building in France and let the air crackle with whatever - he's better at playing the game than her, he thinks, so she takes her cues from his German stoicism, crossing her arms and waiting for her lines.
By the end of the day, she plays it better; because she's gotten good at pretending he doesn't affect her at all.
POTSDAM
Michael is a gentleman, and she can tell Til hates it. He's asking about Joshua, about her life and her career and her hobbies as they wait for the scene to be set up; her responses are cordial and smart and funny and she barely looks at Til as he talks to August and Gedeon with one eye completely not on her.
"You know Til, then?" asks Michael, and she lights a cigarette to stay in character.
"Yes." A drag, a teethy smile.
"Where did you meet?"
"At a photoshoot." She nods towards August, gestures with the smoke. "With him, and Daniel Brühl, too."
Michael laughs, and fiddles with his boot. The Nazi insignia looks odd on him, she thinks, like a lamb out for slaughter, or like an Englishman trapped in a scene with too many Germans with intersecting pasts. Her hand gets itchy, and she looks away in case he looks up to see her frowning.
"Best friends, then?" And he says it in a way that makes her fall for a moment -
"The best," Til answers for her, and he smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes.
He watches her in that way that makes her think he knows her, sees her, and she swallows down anything like emotion for fear of ruining her makeup and drawing too much attention to the scene that seems so loud in her own head.
She offers the cigarette and he takes it, sucking in the smoke from where her lipstick yells red at the tip.
Later, they play the scene where he dies, and she holds his hand under the table even though the director tells them not to.
BERLIN
"This isn't sex."
"It feels like sex," and he runs the tip of his nose along her thigh and she pulls her eyes to ceiling.
CANNES
He's taking pictures of everyone but her with his camera, and she hides with Josh at a table near the back. Here, she can see them all - high on the reaction and ovation, her boyfriend's hands over hers as they drink in the night and the champagne she's trying to pretend isn't stopping an old hurt from being a present one.
Mélanie's leaning into Daniel's neck and laughing, touching the nape of her neck; it's the beginning of a story Diane once knew the middle and end to.
A story, she knew, would end in Berlin - feet tangled together and four-word sentences, all which were designed to avoid the subject of whowhatwherewhenhow and all the better to summarise the then-and-now. Let's order room service or you have beautiful hands, selective and intuitive sentences that, in all actuality, spoke more than monologues about their spouses or his children or her dogs ever could.
Diane takes a swig of Moet and watches the French girl and German boy, and wishes nothing but heart-aching joy and the lover's lament that comes with secretive hotel rooms and the avoidance of paparazzi.
It's hard to admit, especially as she sits beside a man who completes every part of her - but she's left a little bit of herself with Til, and she never, ever wants it back.
--
Til's to her left, as Josh and her stand to make their exit. She knows the sharp-edge of her boyfriend's words as she falls into him accidentally - the ones coloured by the booze and the lack of sleep - mean nothing, and she apologises to the waiter Josh falls into because of her.
"Geez, Diane, for fuck's sake!"
She can't apologise and say "it's because I was distracted by a man you think I barely know".
She can't explain it.
And when Til punches Joshua in the nose, sending him to the ground, she does nothing but watch in a Tarantino-induced haze.
CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT
"I can see the way you look at Fassbender."
"What is wrong with you? Seriously? You could have broken Josh's nose, he could have -"
"Are you going to sleep with him?"
"Who? What?"
"Fassbender."
They're speaking in German so her boyfriend doesn't hear them, a slight black eye poking out from under his sunglasses as he talked on a phone and pretended Til didn't exist.
It's not that easy, she thinks, and Til's running his hands through his hair as he looks anywhere but at her; the two of them amongst a million people while feeling like the only ones in the terminal.
It takes everything she has not to punch him like he punched Josh, and just a little bit more not to drag him into the bathroom to forget everything that was, and wasn't ever going to be.
BERLIN
It always ended up in Berlin. They stood there, in front of the cameras and she couldn't make a smile.
Her back always bent towards him, even when she tried hard to stand straight.
"Your hat is stupid," and he smirks, and she feels the change and shift between them, like the final chapters were written behind her back while she was away having a new life that was so different to the one they'd shared, together, in secret.
She feels the press of his hand against the back of her little yellow Louis Vuitton dress, sees the play of sorts between Daniel and Mélanie, and she smiles.
"Diane! Over here!"
She looks to the throng of press, and pretends for a moment that they were anything but the flash of a camera and the blink of an eye.
---
Fin.
---
LOL PACEY