(no subject)
Something short!
Prompt: Hipster AU
“Okay, tell me what you think of this. It’s for tonight,” Dom says on the other end.
The sentence fades away by the middle, and then there’s several pops and bumps as he presumably sets the phone down against a speaker. For the next fifteen seconds, Arthur patiently listens to a wash of white noise as he plays around with Adobe Lightroom with his free hand.
Dom’s voice abruptly comes back on the line. “Keep that in your head,” he instructs. “Here’s the next one.”
This time Arthur is listening to fifteen seconds of pink noise.
“So?” Dom asks, staticky and excited. “What do you think?”
*
Arthur doesn’t really care when people accuse him of being a hipster. In his opinion, he just happens to genuinely enjoy everything that a hipster would like. Big deal.
Sometimes it’s hard to ignore, though, especially on days that Dom has a gig. As Arthur walks up to the club, he recognizes bits and pieces of his wardrobe on the people standing in line, both guys and girls. The people sharing Arthur’s haircut is also evenly split between guys and girls. He overhears a conversation about the movies that the local indie theater is playing, and he’s seen every single one of them. When he gets in line, he sees that the last five people could pass for his quintuplet brothers.
The club is next door to what used to be a psychic’s office and is now just boarded up with plywood that's covered in layers of fliers. There are some for tonight’s show, about twenty of them all in a neat row, still glistening with fresh wheat paste. Funnily enough, Arthur’s so busy trying to place the font that’s been used to spell out ‘TOTEM’ at an angle on the upper left corner that he doesn’t even realize the background is one of his pictures until a few moments have passed.
It’s an image of the Berkeley skyline looking west, stretching all the way out to the Golden Gate. Fog had been rolling in so heavily that the city had looked like it resided in the clouds; Arthur had set his camera for the slowest shutter speed, then snapped the shot. Now it has Dom’s band’s name and venue information scrawled over the cloud formations. On the bottom right, there’s only a single letter, in a font that looks like dripping paint: E.
Arthur must be muttering threats under his breath, because one of the guys in front of him turns around and says, “Excuse me?”
“Sorry. Nothing. Just making some good old fashioned murder plans,” Arthur says.
The guy just gives him a crooked smile, like he completely understands.
*
Totem is an okay band. Dom always complains about practice being difficult to coordinate, since everyone’s busy juggling several things at once -- “And by ‘everyone’, I mean Yusuf, with that shady culinary school he’s going to. I’m pretty sure the classes are in a Winnebago parked under that overpass by the freeway.” -- and sometimes Ariadne skips out on gigs because she has fashion blog parties to show her face at, but Arthur knows that Dom loves it. All of them do. They have fun, at least, unlike a certain photographer who keeps getting ripped off by a certain douchebag who has no respect for any kind of creative commons license whatsoever.
Dom doesn’t really play guitar in the strictest sense of the word. Mostly he’s prone to tuning it so that the open strings produce some kind of minor add 9 chord. Then he taps the hollow body with different objects until the strings are ringing through the amp, which is when the rest of the band comes in one by one and the music swells and hits its climax around the nine minute mark. It’s actually nice, if Arthur’s in the mood.
Mal is standing off to the side, in a white tank and a calf-length skirt that looks like it was sent through a shredder. There’s also a crown of flowers on her head. She sways to the music, eyes closed, heel of her palm banging the tambourine in slow, half-note hits. On some level, she looks like some kind of ethereal being, awash in the blue lights; on a more real level, she kind of looks like a life-size luau doll that people stick to their car dashboards.
Yusuf’s really banging away at the crash cymbal at this point, and nodding at whatever Ariadne is mouthing to him. Her bass lines are moved up an octave, since the fretboard is too long for her to reach anything below five.
Arthur leans against the bar and sips at his beer. They’re actually sounding really good tonight.
*
He gets home around 4:00 in the morning, after late night pizza and more beers at Dom’s place. Arthur is subletting a room in a house right by frat row, although he might as well be subletting the whole house because he pretty much hasn’t seen any of his roommates in a month. Which is why he almost gets a heart attack when he opens the door to his room and sees someone sprawled on the beanbag.
“What the fuck,” Arthur states flatly.
“How was the show?” Eames asks in a cheerful voice. “Sorry I didn’t make it, but I couldn’t gather up the courage to venture near that place.”
He’s reading the newest Franzen book by the light of the streetlamp that floods in through the windows and keeps Arthur awake at night, even with the curtains drawn. Arthur just sighs and puts his glasses and keys down on the desk. Eames has a shit-eating grin on his face. Far be it from Arthur to not give him what he wants.
“The fliers were nice,” Arthur says pointedly.
“So you liked it! I felt a bit like those lowbrow street artists,” Eames muses.
“Yeah, you’re exactly like Banksy,” Arthur says. “Minus the fact that you keep stealing all my pictures.”
Eames turns his head slightly. The shadows shift to highlight the slopes of his cheekbones, and Arthur has to look away. “But you make it so easy by putting the full sizes up on your flickr,” he counters. “Also, I can’t believe you have an entire sub-folder called ‘light leaks’.”
“They looked really cool,” Arthur tries to defend himself, because they really did. “Whatever, I don’t care. How long have you been here? Go home.”
“Right,” Eames agrees surprisingly, putting the book back onto the shelf before standing up. “By the by,” he says, sticking one leg through the window and straddling the sill for a brief pause, “I’ve been switching out your Lucky Strikes for Pall Malls.” He flashes a grin before ducking under and swinging his other leg out.
“It’s not like I wouldn’t have noticed. Lucky Strikes say ‘Lucky Strikes’ on each one,” Arthur calls irritably.
Eames’s voice echoes throughout the entire block. “You really wouldn’t have, because you hang around exclusively in places that are lit with 20 watts, maximum. That’s too dark to see anything of importance,” he yells. Distantly, a cat screeches in response.
Then he sticks his head back in through the window and says, at a normal volume, “Good night, Arthur.”
“I’m going to fix that window, I swear to god,” Arthur says.
Eames laughs as he leaves. The window stays open, and Arthur leaves it that way when he finally crawls into bed.
Prompt: Hipster AU
“Okay, tell me what you think of this. It’s for tonight,” Dom says on the other end.
The sentence fades away by the middle, and then there’s several pops and bumps as he presumably sets the phone down against a speaker. For the next fifteen seconds, Arthur patiently listens to a wash of white noise as he plays around with Adobe Lightroom with his free hand.
Dom’s voice abruptly comes back on the line. “Keep that in your head,” he instructs. “Here’s the next one.”
This time Arthur is listening to fifteen seconds of pink noise.
“So?” Dom asks, staticky and excited. “What do you think?”
*
Arthur doesn’t really care when people accuse him of being a hipster. In his opinion, he just happens to genuinely enjoy everything that a hipster would like. Big deal.
Sometimes it’s hard to ignore, though, especially on days that Dom has a gig. As Arthur walks up to the club, he recognizes bits and pieces of his wardrobe on the people standing in line, both guys and girls. The people sharing Arthur’s haircut is also evenly split between guys and girls. He overhears a conversation about the movies that the local indie theater is playing, and he’s seen every single one of them. When he gets in line, he sees that the last five people could pass for his quintuplet brothers.
The club is next door to what used to be a psychic’s office and is now just boarded up with plywood that's covered in layers of fliers. There are some for tonight’s show, about twenty of them all in a neat row, still glistening with fresh wheat paste. Funnily enough, Arthur’s so busy trying to place the font that’s been used to spell out ‘TOTEM’ at an angle on the upper left corner that he doesn’t even realize the background is one of his pictures until a few moments have passed.
It’s an image of the Berkeley skyline looking west, stretching all the way out to the Golden Gate. Fog had been rolling in so heavily that the city had looked like it resided in the clouds; Arthur had set his camera for the slowest shutter speed, then snapped the shot. Now it has Dom’s band’s name and venue information scrawled over the cloud formations. On the bottom right, there’s only a single letter, in a font that looks like dripping paint: E.
Arthur must be muttering threats under his breath, because one of the guys in front of him turns around and says, “Excuse me?”
“Sorry. Nothing. Just making some good old fashioned murder plans,” Arthur says.
The guy just gives him a crooked smile, like he completely understands.
*
Totem is an okay band. Dom always complains about practice being difficult to coordinate, since everyone’s busy juggling several things at once -- “And by ‘everyone’, I mean Yusuf, with that shady culinary school he’s going to. I’m pretty sure the classes are in a Winnebago parked under that overpass by the freeway.” -- and sometimes Ariadne skips out on gigs because she has fashion blog parties to show her face at, but Arthur knows that Dom loves it. All of them do. They have fun, at least, unlike a certain photographer who keeps getting ripped off by a certain douchebag who has no respect for any kind of creative commons license whatsoever.
Dom doesn’t really play guitar in the strictest sense of the word. Mostly he’s prone to tuning it so that the open strings produce some kind of minor add 9 chord. Then he taps the hollow body with different objects until the strings are ringing through the amp, which is when the rest of the band comes in one by one and the music swells and hits its climax around the nine minute mark. It’s actually nice, if Arthur’s in the mood.
Mal is standing off to the side, in a white tank and a calf-length skirt that looks like it was sent through a shredder. There’s also a crown of flowers on her head. She sways to the music, eyes closed, heel of her palm banging the tambourine in slow, half-note hits. On some level, she looks like some kind of ethereal being, awash in the blue lights; on a more real level, she kind of looks like a life-size luau doll that people stick to their car dashboards.
Yusuf’s really banging away at the crash cymbal at this point, and nodding at whatever Ariadne is mouthing to him. Her bass lines are moved up an octave, since the fretboard is too long for her to reach anything below five.
Arthur leans against the bar and sips at his beer. They’re actually sounding really good tonight.
*
He gets home around 4:00 in the morning, after late night pizza and more beers at Dom’s place. Arthur is subletting a room in a house right by frat row, although he might as well be subletting the whole house because he pretty much hasn’t seen any of his roommates in a month. Which is why he almost gets a heart attack when he opens the door to his room and sees someone sprawled on the beanbag.
“What the fuck,” Arthur states flatly.
“How was the show?” Eames asks in a cheerful voice. “Sorry I didn’t make it, but I couldn’t gather up the courage to venture near that place.”
He’s reading the newest Franzen book by the light of the streetlamp that floods in through the windows and keeps Arthur awake at night, even with the curtains drawn. Arthur just sighs and puts his glasses and keys down on the desk. Eames has a shit-eating grin on his face. Far be it from Arthur to not give him what he wants.
“The fliers were nice,” Arthur says pointedly.
“So you liked it! I felt a bit like those lowbrow street artists,” Eames muses.
“Yeah, you’re exactly like Banksy,” Arthur says. “Minus the fact that you keep stealing all my pictures.”
Eames turns his head slightly. The shadows shift to highlight the slopes of his cheekbones, and Arthur has to look away. “But you make it so easy by putting the full sizes up on your flickr,” he counters. “Also, I can’t believe you have an entire sub-folder called ‘light leaks’.”
“They looked really cool,” Arthur tries to defend himself, because they really did. “Whatever, I don’t care. How long have you been here? Go home.”
“Right,” Eames agrees surprisingly, putting the book back onto the shelf before standing up. “By the by,” he says, sticking one leg through the window and straddling the sill for a brief pause, “I’ve been switching out your Lucky Strikes for Pall Malls.” He flashes a grin before ducking under and swinging his other leg out.
“It’s not like I wouldn’t have noticed. Lucky Strikes say ‘Lucky Strikes’ on each one,” Arthur calls irritably.
Eames’s voice echoes throughout the entire block. “You really wouldn’t have, because you hang around exclusively in places that are lit with 20 watts, maximum. That’s too dark to see anything of importance,” he yells. Distantly, a cat screeches in response.
Then he sticks his head back in through the window and says, at a normal volume, “Good night, Arthur.”
“I’m going to fix that window, I swear to god,” Arthur says.
Eames laughs as he leaves. The window stays open, and Arthur leaves it that way when he finally crawls into bed.