i'm not sure anyone here even watches this show. but wevs
So maybe I'm not done with LJ yet. Boardwalk Empire seems to be pulling me back in; I did a couple short pieces for a ficathon. Spoilers for 2.12.
the angels, not half so happy in heaven (angela, richard, jimmy, gillian)
I. communion
In her last moments, Angela remembers faith. In her earliest memories it takes the form of a white dress and patent-leather shoes, kicking her heels back and forth against the pew, scribbling idly in the back of a hymnal as she waited to give her first confession. The confessional was dark and quiet and smelled of dust, and the priest told her that as long as she was honest then she would be saved.
She still has faith, of a sort. She believes that pencil-strokes and color will fall smoothly from her fingers, that art and beauty and sex and even money are a salve for all wounds, if not a cure. She still believes that Jimmy loves her, although she knows he does not love her well. She believes that they can go on as they have, lives running parallel but never intersecting, and they will never learn to be happy but they will learn to be.
She does not know what awaits her; but in the moment before the bullet enters her brain, she prays.
II. nihilism
"Do you believe in heaven, Richard?"
He pauses in his work of carefully slicing up his steak and pushing the pieces around on his plate. Even if he were willing to eat in a restaurant, which he isn't, he can't chew steak with half a jaw. He glances across the table and realizes Jimmy has devoured half his meal in under three minutes; he feels a surge of jealousy roiling up in his stomach and pushes it back down again. Perhaps it is that sick feeling that makes him tell the truth, rather than saying what will comfort his friend.
"Mmm." He shakes his head. "It never made sense. To me."
"How come?"
Sometimes, when Jimmy starts getting philosophical like this, Richard just ignores him. The questions he asks always require longer answers than Richard is willing to string together and if he just stays silent long enough, Jimmy's attention usually wanders off to something else. But he's three whiskeys into the meal and holding his fork like a trident in his fist, leaning forward slightly, eyes two hot blue flames pinning him to the wall, and Richard knows he has to answer.
"I just don't see how--you could see the things we've seen. Do what we've done. And then go to heaven. And be happy."
"Maybe you forget everything," Jimmy suggests.
"But then you're not--you. The people you loved. Wouldn't know you. And you wouldn't know them."
Jimmy considers this, leans back, lights a cigarette. "Maybe you'd only remember the good stuff," he mutters around the butt, and it occurs to Richard that this philosophy explains a lot about Jimmy and his mother.
Richard thinks of last Memorial Day: how he stared up at the sky, white and unseasonably empty, and he felt an emptying out of everything inside of himself. He remembers Angela's eyes, how blank they were. It is the most comforting thing he could imagine: that they could all just disappear. But there's no point arguing with Jimmy when he's like this.
"You think you'll see her. In heaven?"
"I ain't going to heaven," Jimmy replies, digging into his steak again, "and she's better off without me there."
III. reincarnation
Gillian doesn't think about Jimmy as she takes her grandson up to bed. She will eventually, of course, but she can push that aside for now; it's one of her many talents. She slips the dogtags off his neck and into a drawer without even looking at them. She tucks him in; his hair is plastered against his forehead and his eyelashes leave dark shadows against his cheeks. How like his father he looks.
She can't really remember a time before Jimmy came along and she can't conceive of a time after, but that's all right, because she has Tommy now.
Things went badly with Jimmy. She was young and poor, and he was willful. But everything will be all right now: they have Louis's estate, and Leander's connections, and Richard's protection. She'll watch over Tommy carefully and make sure he doesn't knock up some stupid girl without enough sense not to get herself shot in the head. She can fix this. The men of the world are only so many ivory keys, rising and falling beneath her fingers, and she will go on playing them and letting them believe the song they sing is their own. Things will continue as they always have.
Everything will be all right now. Nothing has to change at all.
with steel and leather and tin (Margaret/Richard)
It's September and the heat is beginning to break, but it's crowded and stuffy inside Babette's, so she slips out the back for a breath of air. The performance of pretending she belongs around rich people is something she can only maintain for so long. There's a movement behind her, at the back door of an adjoining speakeasy. She hadn't expected to see him again; they don't exactly run in the same circles these days. He has a wooden crate bolstered against one shoulder, a shotgun dangling down like an extension of his arm. He has a nicer suit now, but his mask is worse for wear. He's taller than she remembers.
"Mrs. Schroeder."
She starts to correct him, but he's got a closed-off look he didn't have a year ago. Reminding him of her new last name may not be wise. "Mr. Harrow."
Silence hangs in the air between them like smoke. How are you she almost says but his best friend is dead, I'm sorry for your loss but she remembers she's supposed to be keeping up the pretense that James has re-enlisted. What are you doing in a dark alley in the middle of the night but she already knows.
"How are--the children?" he says, in his halting way.
It's not a real question, from most people: simply something one says to mothers. But everything he says is too real, brushing up against her flushed face like the cold breeze, and she feels the way she should feel in a confessional. Emily has polio, she nearly screams, so sudden, so overwhelming is her urge to share her grief with someone who understands what that means, not to be whole. Tell me that it's possible to rebuild a person with steel and leather and tin. Tell me--
But she knows she won't like the answer. He says nothing as she struggles with these thoughts, just observes her in that uncanny fashion of his, head slightly cocked. She thinks of their last real conversation, after her speech, and it occurs to her that he's the last person who saw her before she began her transformation into--whatever she is now, this monster, this shapeshifter. That the old self that reached out to him that evening is dead and buried somewhere in an unmarked grave, just like anything else that gets in her husband's way.
"The children are well."
He nods and begins to pull away, and she feels a wild desire to go with him, to shoot guns and bootleg liquor, a true outlaw, authentic and unwavering. But that's Peg inside her again, and Peg needs to learn to shut the hell up. He is lost in a wilderness of knives; she is stuck in salt-water taffy, sticky and cloyingly sweet, and neither one of them is ever getting out. Looking at him is like looking through a pane of glass, seeing both your own reflection, and what lies beyond it.
Suddenly the choking heat and the circling vultures inside don't seem so bad. "Good evening, Mr. Harrow." She turns away and his guttural voice stops her.
"Be careful," he says. "He'll kill you. If he has to."
"I know," she says, and goes back inside.
And one more:
aftermath (Richard/Angela)
It seems that she can hear the heavy tread of footsteps long after they should have faded. They mix with the deafening report of the gunshot, the hollow declaration--"tell your husband I'll be back for him--" these sounds all clang together in her head, cacophonous.
She bends down, covers Louise's body with her own. An evening breeze is coming through the window and they're both getting cold.
She's not sure how long she stays there or whether she sleeps. She's half-aware of the slam of a car door, the sunlight stinging her eyelids. Every joint aches and her hands are sticky and red. She wakes fully, with a start, when she hears footsteps again; she sits up and clasps her hands over her mouth to stifle a scream. The steps pause outside her bedroom door and she feels her heart pause, a shuddering stop, inside her chest.
When the voice speaks, it's familiar: it doesn't sound like her name, not quite. The first A sound is a voiceless breath, the second a half-swallowed cough. "I'm here, Richard," she answers, and her voice is wavering and shrill.
Her tone must have startled him; when he pushes the door open slowly, she sees he has his gun already drawn. He has a look she's never seen before. His back is straighter, his gaze sharp and glinting like obsidian. Suddenly she understands what she would never let herself consciously see before--what Richard's exact involvement is in her husband's "business."
He scans the room quickly. "Who did this?" he demands in a hoarse bark, going to check the windows.
"I-- I don't know--"
He crouches before her, grasps her chin between his fingers and stares at her hard. "What did he look like?"
"Older. He had an accent. He said he was after Jimmy."
He nods curtly, closes the windows and draws the curtains. "Wait here," he says, and leaves her there on the floor in a pool of drying blood. She hears snatches of conversation on the telephone--"Princeton," "Horvitz," "...no, she's fine."
She suspects that Richard's definition of she's fine and her own are markedly different. She stifles a giggle, presses her fingers to her lips, tastes blood.
He returns with a pile of rags from the kitchen. "You need to get up," he says tonelessly, and pulls her to her feet and leads her to the bed. She scrubs her palms against the bedsheets, staining them, and watches in silent horror as he wraps Louise in her aunt's old patchwork quilt. This is a side of him she never imagined, one that not only does Jimmy's dirty work but cleans up the mess afterward as well. He is as silent as the grave. He moves like a machine.
When he lifts the body, she rolls over and stares at the wall. She can hear the ocean. Her tears are running into her mouth, salty, and as the room seems to spin around her, she thinks: am I swimming? She sleeps, perhaps.
She wakes with a headache beating against her temples like a military tattoo. The floor is empty but still stained, and Richard is in the doorway with a basin and a towel. She knows she should ask what did you do with her but the words stick in her throat, so she says instead: "Shouldn't we call the police?"
"No," he says, but doesn't elaborate.
"Will he come back?"
She expects a Jimmy-answer--"nah, Ange, I'll take care of it"--but Richard doesn't respond, just dips the towel in the basin and begins to methodically scrub the stains from her arms and face. She realizes that he's never lied to her, except for the occasional "thank you" for a breakfast that she knows he hasn't touched. So instead he says nothing for a long time, until eventually, when he's cleaning the blood from underneath her fingernails with the same diligence that she imagines he uses in cleaning his guns, he answers:
"Don't worry. I'll keep you safe."
It was fun to write again. Maybe now that it's Christmas break I should dust off that "Eric broods and thinks too much about Old Norse literature" True Blood fic that I've been poking at for well over a year.
the angels, not half so happy in heaven (angela, richard, jimmy, gillian)
I. communion
In her last moments, Angela remembers faith. In her earliest memories it takes the form of a white dress and patent-leather shoes, kicking her heels back and forth against the pew, scribbling idly in the back of a hymnal as she waited to give her first confession. The confessional was dark and quiet and smelled of dust, and the priest told her that as long as she was honest then she would be saved.
She still has faith, of a sort. She believes that pencil-strokes and color will fall smoothly from her fingers, that art and beauty and sex and even money are a salve for all wounds, if not a cure. She still believes that Jimmy loves her, although she knows he does not love her well. She believes that they can go on as they have, lives running parallel but never intersecting, and they will never learn to be happy but they will learn to be.
She does not know what awaits her; but in the moment before the bullet enters her brain, she prays.
II. nihilism
"Do you believe in heaven, Richard?"
He pauses in his work of carefully slicing up his steak and pushing the pieces around on his plate. Even if he were willing to eat in a restaurant, which he isn't, he can't chew steak with half a jaw. He glances across the table and realizes Jimmy has devoured half his meal in under three minutes; he feels a surge of jealousy roiling up in his stomach and pushes it back down again. Perhaps it is that sick feeling that makes him tell the truth, rather than saying what will comfort his friend.
"Mmm." He shakes his head. "It never made sense. To me."
"How come?"
Sometimes, when Jimmy starts getting philosophical like this, Richard just ignores him. The questions he asks always require longer answers than Richard is willing to string together and if he just stays silent long enough, Jimmy's attention usually wanders off to something else. But he's three whiskeys into the meal and holding his fork like a trident in his fist, leaning forward slightly, eyes two hot blue flames pinning him to the wall, and Richard knows he has to answer.
"I just don't see how--you could see the things we've seen. Do what we've done. And then go to heaven. And be happy."
"Maybe you forget everything," Jimmy suggests.
"But then you're not--you. The people you loved. Wouldn't know you. And you wouldn't know them."
Jimmy considers this, leans back, lights a cigarette. "Maybe you'd only remember the good stuff," he mutters around the butt, and it occurs to Richard that this philosophy explains a lot about Jimmy and his mother.
Richard thinks of last Memorial Day: how he stared up at the sky, white and unseasonably empty, and he felt an emptying out of everything inside of himself. He remembers Angela's eyes, how blank they were. It is the most comforting thing he could imagine: that they could all just disappear. But there's no point arguing with Jimmy when he's like this.
"You think you'll see her. In heaven?"
"I ain't going to heaven," Jimmy replies, digging into his steak again, "and she's better off without me there."
III. reincarnation
Gillian doesn't think about Jimmy as she takes her grandson up to bed. She will eventually, of course, but she can push that aside for now; it's one of her many talents. She slips the dogtags off his neck and into a drawer without even looking at them. She tucks him in; his hair is plastered against his forehead and his eyelashes leave dark shadows against his cheeks. How like his father he looks.
She can't really remember a time before Jimmy came along and she can't conceive of a time after, but that's all right, because she has Tommy now.
Things went badly with Jimmy. She was young and poor, and he was willful. But everything will be all right now: they have Louis's estate, and Leander's connections, and Richard's protection. She'll watch over Tommy carefully and make sure he doesn't knock up some stupid girl without enough sense not to get herself shot in the head. She can fix this. The men of the world are only so many ivory keys, rising and falling beneath her fingers, and she will go on playing them and letting them believe the song they sing is their own. Things will continue as they always have.
Everything will be all right now. Nothing has to change at all.
with steel and leather and tin (Margaret/Richard)
It's September and the heat is beginning to break, but it's crowded and stuffy inside Babette's, so she slips out the back for a breath of air. The performance of pretending she belongs around rich people is something she can only maintain for so long. There's a movement behind her, at the back door of an adjoining speakeasy. She hadn't expected to see him again; they don't exactly run in the same circles these days. He has a wooden crate bolstered against one shoulder, a shotgun dangling down like an extension of his arm. He has a nicer suit now, but his mask is worse for wear. He's taller than she remembers.
"Mrs. Schroeder."
She starts to correct him, but he's got a closed-off look he didn't have a year ago. Reminding him of her new last name may not be wise. "Mr. Harrow."
Silence hangs in the air between them like smoke. How are you she almost says but his best friend is dead, I'm sorry for your loss but she remembers she's supposed to be keeping up the pretense that James has re-enlisted. What are you doing in a dark alley in the middle of the night but she already knows.
"How are--the children?" he says, in his halting way.
It's not a real question, from most people: simply something one says to mothers. But everything he says is too real, brushing up against her flushed face like the cold breeze, and she feels the way she should feel in a confessional. Emily has polio, she nearly screams, so sudden, so overwhelming is her urge to share her grief with someone who understands what that means, not to be whole. Tell me that it's possible to rebuild a person with steel and leather and tin. Tell me--
But she knows she won't like the answer. He says nothing as she struggles with these thoughts, just observes her in that uncanny fashion of his, head slightly cocked. She thinks of their last real conversation, after her speech, and it occurs to her that he's the last person who saw her before she began her transformation into--whatever she is now, this monster, this shapeshifter. That the old self that reached out to him that evening is dead and buried somewhere in an unmarked grave, just like anything else that gets in her husband's way.
"The children are well."
He nods and begins to pull away, and she feels a wild desire to go with him, to shoot guns and bootleg liquor, a true outlaw, authentic and unwavering. But that's Peg inside her again, and Peg needs to learn to shut the hell up. He is lost in a wilderness of knives; she is stuck in salt-water taffy, sticky and cloyingly sweet, and neither one of them is ever getting out. Looking at him is like looking through a pane of glass, seeing both your own reflection, and what lies beyond it.
Suddenly the choking heat and the circling vultures inside don't seem so bad. "Good evening, Mr. Harrow." She turns away and his guttural voice stops her.
"Be careful," he says. "He'll kill you. If he has to."
"I know," she says, and goes back inside.
And one more:
aftermath (Richard/Angela)
It seems that she can hear the heavy tread of footsteps long after they should have faded. They mix with the deafening report of the gunshot, the hollow declaration--"tell your husband I'll be back for him--" these sounds all clang together in her head, cacophonous.
She bends down, covers Louise's body with her own. An evening breeze is coming through the window and they're both getting cold.
She's not sure how long she stays there or whether she sleeps. She's half-aware of the slam of a car door, the sunlight stinging her eyelids. Every joint aches and her hands are sticky and red. She wakes fully, with a start, when she hears footsteps again; she sits up and clasps her hands over her mouth to stifle a scream. The steps pause outside her bedroom door and she feels her heart pause, a shuddering stop, inside her chest.
When the voice speaks, it's familiar: it doesn't sound like her name, not quite. The first A sound is a voiceless breath, the second a half-swallowed cough. "I'm here, Richard," she answers, and her voice is wavering and shrill.
Her tone must have startled him; when he pushes the door open slowly, she sees he has his gun already drawn. He has a look she's never seen before. His back is straighter, his gaze sharp and glinting like obsidian. Suddenly she understands what she would never let herself consciously see before--what Richard's exact involvement is in her husband's "business."
He scans the room quickly. "Who did this?" he demands in a hoarse bark, going to check the windows.
"I-- I don't know--"
He crouches before her, grasps her chin between his fingers and stares at her hard. "What did he look like?"
"Older. He had an accent. He said he was after Jimmy."
He nods curtly, closes the windows and draws the curtains. "Wait here," he says, and leaves her there on the floor in a pool of drying blood. She hears snatches of conversation on the telephone--"Princeton," "Horvitz," "...no, she's fine."
She suspects that Richard's definition of she's fine and her own are markedly different. She stifles a giggle, presses her fingers to her lips, tastes blood.
He returns with a pile of rags from the kitchen. "You need to get up," he says tonelessly, and pulls her to her feet and leads her to the bed. She scrubs her palms against the bedsheets, staining them, and watches in silent horror as he wraps Louise in her aunt's old patchwork quilt. This is a side of him she never imagined, one that not only does Jimmy's dirty work but cleans up the mess afterward as well. He is as silent as the grave. He moves like a machine.
When he lifts the body, she rolls over and stares at the wall. She can hear the ocean. Her tears are running into her mouth, salty, and as the room seems to spin around her, she thinks: am I swimming? She sleeps, perhaps.
She wakes with a headache beating against her temples like a military tattoo. The floor is empty but still stained, and Richard is in the doorway with a basin and a towel. She knows she should ask what did you do with her but the words stick in her throat, so she says instead: "Shouldn't we call the police?"
"No," he says, but doesn't elaborate.
"Will he come back?"
She expects a Jimmy-answer--"nah, Ange, I'll take care of it"--but Richard doesn't respond, just dips the towel in the basin and begins to methodically scrub the stains from her arms and face. She realizes that he's never lied to her, except for the occasional "thank you" for a breakfast that she knows he hasn't touched. So instead he says nothing for a long time, until eventually, when he's cleaning the blood from underneath her fingernails with the same diligence that she imagines he uses in cleaning his guns, he answers:
"Don't worry. I'll keep you safe."
It was fun to write again. Maybe now that it's Christmas break I should dust off that "Eric broods and thinks too much about Old Norse literature" True Blood fic that I've been poking at for well over a year.