(no subject)
Title: Camaraderie
Fandom: Merlin
Characters/Pairings: Gwen + Merlin, the beginning of a friendship for the ages
Rating/Warnings: PG, mild swearing, badly-run school theater
Written for: hs_bingo, prompt "class - drama."
Wordcount: 1600
A/N: None.
The school theater smelled like sawdust and turpentine and sweat and harsh industrial cleaner, Gwen noticed as she slipped inside the door. The area in front of the stage was crowded with people: perched on the edge of the stage, tailor-style on the floor, leaning against the steps on the right, pacing back and forth across the same few feet of royal-red carpet. Gwen hurried down the aisle and dropped into one of the front-row seats; oddly enough, she was one of the only ones choosing to actually sit in the audience, barring a couple of panicked-looking girls with their hands covering their eyes. Gwen eyed them with some concern, but guessed that it was probably stage fright and she couldn’t help with that, so she took stock of the rest of the room.
A few people were talking to their friends, giggling nervously in little clumps or whacking encouragingly at each others’ shoulders, but most were frantically muttering lines and sketching out gestures, shifting arms and shoulders and feet and the angle of their heads. Most looked silly, like caricatures of melodramatic statues, but a few seemed to have something going; there was one boy, short with sharply-cut red hair, who managed to make the navy blazer look like armor with just the way he held himself, and near the stage door an Asian girl with clunky earrings raised her twisted hands to the ceiling and commanded the gods to damn her with such snarling passion that it made Gwen shiver.
“Hey,” someone said and Gwen was abruptly jerked back to the official reality of school uniforms and faux-velvet seats, where she found the seat next to her occupied by a boy who appeared to be ninety percent ears.
“Hey,” she echoed, smiling shyly since there was a friendly grin hovering between the aforementioned ridiculous ears. “You’re, um, sorry, I know I’ve met you, I mean, it isn’t that big a school but I don’t always meet everyone, sorry, and, um - anyway, I’m Gwen. Er.”
“I’m Merlin,” he answered, politely ignoring the verbal trainwreck, and she immediately started fighting to bring her eyebrows under control. That evidently failed, because he was blushing a pale pink as he added, “I know, it’s a stupid name. My mom has this thing about Celtic history.” He sketched out the universal hand-signal for parents, what can you do about them? “So, what part are you hoping for?”
“I’m not, actually. I’d forget all my lines the instant I saw an audience, so I’m just here to sign up to do sets. I like to paint, you see.”
“Nice!” He stretched out a fist with a sideways grin. “I’m a techie too. Lights and sounds for me, though.”
She touched his fist with her own, a chuckle lurking at the corner of her mouth for no reason in particular. “Nice,” she agreed.
It took them about two weeks to discover that being a techie meant you were destined to be press-ganged into half a dozen extra jobs; Merlin scowled and sulked and railed, while Gwen threw up her hands and bullied Merlin into helping with some of the painting of mountains and building of hedges that she couldn’t do if she was supposed to decorate three tunics and a ballgown. He smudged sunset-pink paint into her hair, cackling, and for revenge she used him as a model for the three Victorian-lady hats and two jester caps that she’d somehow agreed to trim.
Less than a month before opening, she got a phone call from Merlin that began “Oh God, Gwen, help,” and didn’t get any better from there.
“What on earth is the actual problem here?” she managed, struggling to juggle the phone without burning the tomato soup she was trying to make. “And breathe for a second, honestly.”
The scratch of static implied that he took that bit of advice. “Marcus - the senior actually running the lights - he quit. Something about failing his science class.”
“Oh. Ouch.” She tasted the soup. Probably needed more salt; Tom preferred more flavor.
“Gwen. He was the only other one left in the booth.”
“Oh. Hell.”
“Yeah. Please can you take over? I can teach you how it all works, but I can’t run both lights and sounds at the same time, especially if something goes wrong, and I don’t know who else to ask.”
“Uhm. I’m already supposed to help out with Jo’s costume changes in the third act -”
“I can spare you for that part, just please, Gwen, I’m totally fucked here.”
“All right, fine, I’ll manage somehow. When do you need to start teaching me?”
“Uhm. We were originally going to start testing out the systems with the sets in half an hour -”
“Oh, damn everything. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Gwen nearly dropped the phone in the soup as she tried to dump it into a Tupperware and filled a thermos for herself at approximately the speed of light.
The new duties trebled Gwen’s stress levels in the following weeks, but she came to sort of love the close confines of the booth. It was usually hot and looked like something off of Star Trek, and it was constantly full of technically illicit coffee cups and half-modified costumes and permanently-undone homework and Gwen’s sketchbook teetering on top of it all, where she could grab it to try and pencil out the general sense of a scene in between the cues.
It was also sort of like a bomb shelter; it gave them some protection from the maelstrom of panic outside, although nothing could keep them out of it altogether, and hiding in it together gave them a sort of camaraderie. Gwen listened to Merlin’s passionate rants about maths teachers and stupid arrangements of their precious sets and people who couldn’t stick to the blocking, and he learned to recognize her fits of panic (usually hallmarked by a high-pitched and rapid recitation of everything that she had left to do and when she could unreasonably expect to do it) and how to talk her down.
So when, at nine o’clock in the theater in the last week before the show, she saw Merlin say goodbye to the director and then punch the wall, she stayed in their booth for a few more minutes.
“What is he thinking?” Merlin groaned, slumping against the door. Right on schedule.
“What did he say?” Gwen asked, making a bit of a show of gathering up her books.
“He wants to rearrange the sets, because the blocking for the final dance isn’t working out. He’s moving the mountains, which means we have to change all the lights too - you weren’t here the first time we set up the lights, but it’s bloody hellish. I almost broke my neck about five times trying not to fall off the ladder.”
“Oh, ugh,” she offered, more to demonstrate sympathy than to communicate actual disgust.
“Yeah. Signing up for this might have been pretty stupid.” He rubbed at his forehead, a gesture which was quite familiar by this point.
“Why did you sign up anyway?” she asked, because talking about the changes would do nothing tonight besides get both of them upset.
To her surprise, he blushed dramatically; were she drawing him, she’d shade in with a red colored pencil rather than the pink. “Well, I needed something to do, and - well. The theater boy thing, and all.”
“I’m sorry?” she asked, frowning. The rubbing had shifted to the back of his neck, awkwardness instead of exhaustion, and his eyes were flickering around the booth in an obvious search for an end-of-conversation wand.
“You know,” he muttered. “The whole - gay boys into theater, all of that. Just…”
“Oh.” She thought of the oversized flannel shirts hanging in her closet, the books she’d thought a dozen times about buying. “Feeling like you sort of ought to fit the whole image and everything, you mean?”
“Kind of, yeah.” The blush was still on the deep end of crimson, but he was meeting her gaze again, obvious relief seeping into the red. “And also, kind of hoping I’d, you know, meet somebody, or something.”
“A boyfriend, or just - someone else, like you?” she asked. He shrugged, a clumsy flicker of motion at the corner of her eye, and she pressed on, twisting her hands into the crisp navy pleats of her skirt. “Because, if it’s the second.... you sort of already have.”
“You’re gay too?” he asked, and the surprise and welcome in that let her finish the confession smiling.
“A lesbian. Yes.” Lifting her head meant she found the awkwardness was as thick and sticky as molasses, but the look on his face was perfect understanding. The universal eye-signal for I know exactly how naked you feel.
The silence was a bit awkward, if a comforting, accepted sort of awkwardness, and Gwen smoothed the edge of her skirt again. She sort of wanted to jump up and hug him, but it felt a bit strange. It wasn’t their biggest secrets that they were baring, here. Really. (Frightening tense anxious things that they did not discuss with most, but no actual secrets. She was quite determined about that.)
“We should probably go,” she said, interrupting the moment. “My dad will be waiting for us.” She grabbed her bag and then paused as he detached himself from the door. She caught sight of his face - still a little drawn and anxious; maybe this was in some ways a secret for him after all - and reached out to squeeze his shoulder, and abruptly found herself squeezed into a crushing, bony hug.
There was a lot she could have said, hypothetically, but she just hugged him back.
Fandom: Merlin
Characters/Pairings: Gwen + Merlin, the beginning of a friendship for the ages
Rating/Warnings: PG, mild swearing, badly-run school theater
Written for: hs_bingo, prompt "class - drama."
Wordcount: 1600
A/N: None.
The school theater smelled like sawdust and turpentine and sweat and harsh industrial cleaner, Gwen noticed as she slipped inside the door. The area in front of the stage was crowded with people: perched on the edge of the stage, tailor-style on the floor, leaning against the steps on the right, pacing back and forth across the same few feet of royal-red carpet. Gwen hurried down the aisle and dropped into one of the front-row seats; oddly enough, she was one of the only ones choosing to actually sit in the audience, barring a couple of panicked-looking girls with their hands covering their eyes. Gwen eyed them with some concern, but guessed that it was probably stage fright and she couldn’t help with that, so she took stock of the rest of the room.
A few people were talking to their friends, giggling nervously in little clumps or whacking encouragingly at each others’ shoulders, but most were frantically muttering lines and sketching out gestures, shifting arms and shoulders and feet and the angle of their heads. Most looked silly, like caricatures of melodramatic statues, but a few seemed to have something going; there was one boy, short with sharply-cut red hair, who managed to make the navy blazer look like armor with just the way he held himself, and near the stage door an Asian girl with clunky earrings raised her twisted hands to the ceiling and commanded the gods to damn her with such snarling passion that it made Gwen shiver.
“Hey,” someone said and Gwen was abruptly jerked back to the official reality of school uniforms and faux-velvet seats, where she found the seat next to her occupied by a boy who appeared to be ninety percent ears.
“Hey,” she echoed, smiling shyly since there was a friendly grin hovering between the aforementioned ridiculous ears. “You’re, um, sorry, I know I’ve met you, I mean, it isn’t that big a school but I don’t always meet everyone, sorry, and, um - anyway, I’m Gwen. Er.”
“I’m Merlin,” he answered, politely ignoring the verbal trainwreck, and she immediately started fighting to bring her eyebrows under control. That evidently failed, because he was blushing a pale pink as he added, “I know, it’s a stupid name. My mom has this thing about Celtic history.” He sketched out the universal hand-signal for parents, what can you do about them? “So, what part are you hoping for?”
“I’m not, actually. I’d forget all my lines the instant I saw an audience, so I’m just here to sign up to do sets. I like to paint, you see.”
“Nice!” He stretched out a fist with a sideways grin. “I’m a techie too. Lights and sounds for me, though.”
She touched his fist with her own, a chuckle lurking at the corner of her mouth for no reason in particular. “Nice,” she agreed.
It took them about two weeks to discover that being a techie meant you were destined to be press-ganged into half a dozen extra jobs; Merlin scowled and sulked and railed, while Gwen threw up her hands and bullied Merlin into helping with some of the painting of mountains and building of hedges that she couldn’t do if she was supposed to decorate three tunics and a ballgown. He smudged sunset-pink paint into her hair, cackling, and for revenge she used him as a model for the three Victorian-lady hats and two jester caps that she’d somehow agreed to trim.
Less than a month before opening, she got a phone call from Merlin that began “Oh God, Gwen, help,” and didn’t get any better from there.
“What on earth is the actual problem here?” she managed, struggling to juggle the phone without burning the tomato soup she was trying to make. “And breathe for a second, honestly.”
The scratch of static implied that he took that bit of advice. “Marcus - the senior actually running the lights - he quit. Something about failing his science class.”
“Oh. Ouch.” She tasted the soup. Probably needed more salt; Tom preferred more flavor.
“Gwen. He was the only other one left in the booth.”
“Oh. Hell.”
“Yeah. Please can you take over? I can teach you how it all works, but I can’t run both lights and sounds at the same time, especially if something goes wrong, and I don’t know who else to ask.”
“Uhm. I’m already supposed to help out with Jo’s costume changes in the third act -”
“I can spare you for that part, just please, Gwen, I’m totally fucked here.”
“All right, fine, I’ll manage somehow. When do you need to start teaching me?”
“Uhm. We were originally going to start testing out the systems with the sets in half an hour -”
“Oh, damn everything. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Gwen nearly dropped the phone in the soup as she tried to dump it into a Tupperware and filled a thermos for herself at approximately the speed of light.
The new duties trebled Gwen’s stress levels in the following weeks, but she came to sort of love the close confines of the booth. It was usually hot and looked like something off of Star Trek, and it was constantly full of technically illicit coffee cups and half-modified costumes and permanently-undone homework and Gwen’s sketchbook teetering on top of it all, where she could grab it to try and pencil out the general sense of a scene in between the cues.
It was also sort of like a bomb shelter; it gave them some protection from the maelstrom of panic outside, although nothing could keep them out of it altogether, and hiding in it together gave them a sort of camaraderie. Gwen listened to Merlin’s passionate rants about maths teachers and stupid arrangements of their precious sets and people who couldn’t stick to the blocking, and he learned to recognize her fits of panic (usually hallmarked by a high-pitched and rapid recitation of everything that she had left to do and when she could unreasonably expect to do it) and how to talk her down.
So when, at nine o’clock in the theater in the last week before the show, she saw Merlin say goodbye to the director and then punch the wall, she stayed in their booth for a few more minutes.
“What is he thinking?” Merlin groaned, slumping against the door. Right on schedule.
“What did he say?” Gwen asked, making a bit of a show of gathering up her books.
“He wants to rearrange the sets, because the blocking for the final dance isn’t working out. He’s moving the mountains, which means we have to change all the lights too - you weren’t here the first time we set up the lights, but it’s bloody hellish. I almost broke my neck about five times trying not to fall off the ladder.”
“Oh, ugh,” she offered, more to demonstrate sympathy than to communicate actual disgust.
“Yeah. Signing up for this might have been pretty stupid.” He rubbed at his forehead, a gesture which was quite familiar by this point.
“Why did you sign up anyway?” she asked, because talking about the changes would do nothing tonight besides get both of them upset.
To her surprise, he blushed dramatically; were she drawing him, she’d shade in with a red colored pencil rather than the pink. “Well, I needed something to do, and - well. The theater boy thing, and all.”
“I’m sorry?” she asked, frowning. The rubbing had shifted to the back of his neck, awkwardness instead of exhaustion, and his eyes were flickering around the booth in an obvious search for an end-of-conversation wand.
“You know,” he muttered. “The whole - gay boys into theater, all of that. Just…”
“Oh.” She thought of the oversized flannel shirts hanging in her closet, the books she’d thought a dozen times about buying. “Feeling like you sort of ought to fit the whole image and everything, you mean?”
“Kind of, yeah.” The blush was still on the deep end of crimson, but he was meeting her gaze again, obvious relief seeping into the red. “And also, kind of hoping I’d, you know, meet somebody, or something.”
“A boyfriend, or just - someone else, like you?” she asked. He shrugged, a clumsy flicker of motion at the corner of her eye, and she pressed on, twisting her hands into the crisp navy pleats of her skirt. “Because, if it’s the second.... you sort of already have.”
“You’re gay too?” he asked, and the surprise and welcome in that let her finish the confession smiling.
“A lesbian. Yes.” Lifting her head meant she found the awkwardness was as thick and sticky as molasses, but the look on his face was perfect understanding. The universal eye-signal for I know exactly how naked you feel.
The silence was a bit awkward, if a comforting, accepted sort of awkwardness, and Gwen smoothed the edge of her skirt again. She sort of wanted to jump up and hug him, but it felt a bit strange. It wasn’t their biggest secrets that they were baring, here. Really. (Frightening tense anxious things that they did not discuss with most, but no actual secrets. She was quite determined about that.)
“We should probably go,” she said, interrupting the moment. “My dad will be waiting for us.” She grabbed her bag and then paused as he detached himself from the door. She caught sight of his face - still a little drawn and anxious; maybe this was in some ways a secret for him after all - and reached out to squeeze his shoulder, and abruptly found herself squeezed into a crushing, bony hug.
There was a lot she could have said, hypothetically, but she just hugged him back.