Fic: Another Sky (6/11)
Another Sky (6/11)
by me, doctorpancakes
Fandom: Nathan Barley
Pairing: Dan/Jones
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1644, this chapter (7558 so far)
Warnings: mentions of past drug use, underpants, and idiots
Disclaimer: Hands up who owns Nathan Barley! *lowers hands with sad resignation*
Author's Notes: Is it weird when your characters have insights about your writing that you yourself weren't aware of until they told you? Because that happens in this chapter.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
The grating beat thrummed into Jones’ ears as he bowed his head forward to meet his hands, palms flat against the floor. Slowing his breathing, he exhaled deeply, letting his calves extend down and his spine relax into the inverted pose. Sliding his feet backwards and tucking in his elbows, he rolled his spine back into a supple curve, raising his head to -
“Jones, what the hell?” Claire glared at him from the doorway.
“Oh! All right, Claire,” he shouted over the music, unbending himself into standing position.
“Jones,” she repeated through gritted teeth.
“What?” he replied, puzzled.
It was then that Jones noticed that Claire was not alone: behind her were Carys and her burgeoning baby bump, and a smartly-dressed woman of approximately middle age holding a briefcase. It was then also that it occurred to Jones that he was, in fact, stood in the middle of his living room wearing nothing but a pair of Aquaman-printed underpants that were probably originally intended for a large child, if their... tightness over the slight swell of Jones’ skinny hips was any indication.
“Oh, right,” he laughed. “Back in a minute.”
Claire facepalmed as Jones skipped off to the bedroom to dress, turning the music back down to eleven on his way.
“Make yourselves comfortable, I guess,” she said to the two women. “Guess I’ll just go see if Dan’s about.”
She found him in the kitchen, attending gingerly to a pot of something simmering on the stove.
“Hey sis,” he nodded.
“What are you doing?” she hissed.
“Vegetable dumplings?” he said.
“Thanks for being dressed, at least. I just had the pleasure of introducing Carys and the lawyer to Jones’ hairy torso,” Claire grumbled with mild, but fading, annoyance.
“Oh yeah, he always -” he stopped himself. “What lawyer?”
“For God’s sake, Dan, the lawyer? With the paperwork? For the adoption? I told you we were coming round,” sighed Claire. “Would it have killed you to be prepared?”
“Shit, that was today?” he squinted, drawing a hand over his beard.
“Is this going to be the kid’s room?” shouted Carys. Dan and Claire left the kitchen to find her staring in wonder at the stars and rocketships in the nursery.
“Jones decorated,” said Dan.
“It’s lovely,” she enthused. “Not as yellow as I’d expected. Yellow’s a normal baby colour, isn’t it? Looks like a bunch of sick to me, the yellow rooms. This is good. I’ve got a really good feeling about you two.”
“Alright, gang?” said Jones from the living room. “Got my trousers on and all that. Let’s get to work!”
---
Carys stared uncomprehendingly at the endless shelves of plastic bottles before her. There stood rows and rows of things that looked almost but not quite identical, half a dozen different versions of the same thing, and scores of incomprehensible names of things she never knew she needed to live until just then.
“Which ones am I meant to be taking?” she asked.
Claire scanned the shelves, fingering a large white bottle with a blue label. She placed it in Carys’ hands.
“I think this should be the only one you need,” she said, squinting at the label. “Yeah. Standard prenatal multivitamin. There should be directions on the back.”
“Been bloody ages since I took any good drugs,” Carys blushed.
“You... don’t do a lot of drugs though, do you?” Claire asked, concerned.
“Oh you know, just a bit of coke at parties, the usual,” Carys shrugged, as their shopping cart rounded a corner, into the toilet tissue and bottled water aisle. “Except I’m not now. It’s proper weird: I can’t drink, can’t smoke, can’t do a bit of coke at parties. I’ve no idea how to eat!”
“I’m sure it’s not that different from a normal diet,” Claire assured her. “Just no soft cheeses or sushi or anything, loads of vegetables and protein, but not too much soy, because of the hormones. Do you eat meat at all?”
“No, I don’t really eat much of anything. Look at these legs,” Carys scoffed, gesturing towards her spindly lower appendages. “Do these look like the legs of someone who eats?”
“For God’s sake, Carys, you’ve got to eat sometimes,” sighed Claire. “The vitamins are just a start, you know. You’ve got to supplement them with good food, exercise.”
“Well, we’re exercising right now, right?” Carys grinned, as though, on some level, she were just as much trying to convince herself.
“We’re... walking, at a moderately slow pace, through a supermarket,” said Claire. “I don’t think this qualifies.”
“Oh. Well, fuck,” said Carys.
“How about something gentle, like yoga?” suggested Claire, as they turned into the produce aisles.
“Yeah, maybe,” Carys grimaced. “but how do I eat?”
Claire let out a heavy sigh. This was going to be an uphill battle. But Carys was a nice girl, full of good intentions, and despite her apparent shortcomings, was carrying Claire’s future neice or nephew.
“This is a bag of salad,” said Claire, pointing to a cellophane package of mixed lettuces. “You don’t need to do anything to it, just dump it into a bowl, bit of dressing, and eat it. And then eat other things, and you have to repeat this every day. Easy enough?”
Carys nodded.
“Good. Next, think you can handle opening a single-serve yogurt pot? Maybe when we get home, I’ll take you through how to do cheese on toast.”
---
Fire years previous, Dan Ashcroft had jumped out of a window. Somehow, through some combination of relentless caring and incessant encouragement, Jones convinced him that it would be a good idea to write that book he had been always meant to getting around to writing.
And he did.
And then some people published it. The result of all this, more or less, was that Dan had suddenly found himself with a publisher and an agent and that this, while not on the scale of full-on Idiocy that surrounded him during his tenure at Sugar Ape, was, at the best of times, shitty.
Dan Ashcroft did not like having a literary agent. Or perhaps, he wondered, he just did not like having his literary agent for a literary agent. He especially did not like when his agent telephoned him, which almost invariably meant he had bad news.
“Dan Ashcroft,” he grumbled.
“Dan! How’s my favourite writer in the universe?” asked the cheerful voice on the other end of the line.
“Hello, Crizz, you irredeemable cunt,” he cringed. The man’s name was Crizz, ferchrissakes. “What the fuck do you want?”
“I hope you haven’t forgotten about today’s book signing!” enthused Crizz.
Yup, thought Dan, bad news.
Book signings were one of the apparent necessary evils of being a published author that Dan would rather find blood in his stool than ever have to do. Not that he had had the pleasure of doing any previous book signings, but it was something he knew he would be much happier to avoid altogether.
Inevitably, therefore, he found himself sat at a small table in Waterstone’s that afternoon, a stack of books to one side of him and an extra-large coffee on the other. More or less, these events would mean that he got to sit at a table for a few hours until they let him go home, occasionally having to talk to a reader, who - if he was lucky - would not want to talk at great length about their painful misreadings of his narrative or ask questions about it that he himself had no answers for.
On this day, however, Dan was not so lucky: after three quarters of an hour of trying to live down the shame of one woman who announced that she thought, based on the impression given by his “About the Author” photo, that he would be better-looking, along came two of his former colleagues.
So rarely were Ned Smanks and Rufus Onslatt seen outside of one another’s company that Dan went so far as to theorize that the pair shared a single brain cell between them.
“Aaaaaashcroooooooooft!” exclaimed Rufus, who was inexplicably wearing a bow tie over his orange track jacket.
“Oh, hey,” nodded Dan.
“High fives and shit about the book, Preach?” said Ned, whose thick-rimmed spectacles nearly eclipsed his entire face.
“Yeah, it was well transgressive,” said Rufus.
“So you read it, did you?” squinted Dan. “Do you even know what transgressive means?”
“Yeah, we did a review for Sugar Ape,” explained Ned. “Like, we liked how it was, like, about the past and shit? And how it keeps, like, manifesting itself in the present? And then how the one bloke’s looking for something that, like, don’t exist no more, and the other one’s, like, disavowing something that’ll always be a part of his identity and stuff.”
Dan blinked. For Ned Smanks, that outburst was surprisingly insightful and sounded very nearly literate. Dan was not sure what mirror universe he had woken up in that day, but something about this was properly unsettling to him.
“That’s... thanks, Ned,” he said, bewildered, accepting the compliment with shell-shocked and possibly slightly woozy gratitude.
“And then that bird from Bristol turns into, like, a bloke and shit?” added Rufus. “Well bum. So what’s his junk look like, anyway? How would they, like...? Does he still have a lady’s - ”
“That doesn’t matter, okay?” sighed Dan. And with that, the normal order of the world reasserted itself, and Dan was quietly comforted in his irritation.
Chapter Seven
by me, doctorpancakes
Fandom: Nathan Barley
Pairing: Dan/Jones
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1644, this chapter (7558 so far)
Warnings: mentions of past drug use, underpants, and idiots
Disclaimer: Hands up who owns Nathan Barley! *lowers hands with sad resignation*
Author's Notes: Is it weird when your characters have insights about your writing that you yourself weren't aware of until they told you? Because that happens in this chapter.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
The grating beat thrummed into Jones’ ears as he bowed his head forward to meet his hands, palms flat against the floor. Slowing his breathing, he exhaled deeply, letting his calves extend down and his spine relax into the inverted pose. Sliding his feet backwards and tucking in his elbows, he rolled his spine back into a supple curve, raising his head to -
“Jones, what the hell?” Claire glared at him from the doorway.
“Oh! All right, Claire,” he shouted over the music, unbending himself into standing position.
“Jones,” she repeated through gritted teeth.
“What?” he replied, puzzled.
It was then that Jones noticed that Claire was not alone: behind her were Carys and her burgeoning baby bump, and a smartly-dressed woman of approximately middle age holding a briefcase. It was then also that it occurred to Jones that he was, in fact, stood in the middle of his living room wearing nothing but a pair of Aquaman-printed underpants that were probably originally intended for a large child, if their... tightness over the slight swell of Jones’ skinny hips was any indication.
“Oh, right,” he laughed. “Back in a minute.”
Claire facepalmed as Jones skipped off to the bedroom to dress, turning the music back down to eleven on his way.
“Make yourselves comfortable, I guess,” she said to the two women. “Guess I’ll just go see if Dan’s about.”
She found him in the kitchen, attending gingerly to a pot of something simmering on the stove.
“Hey sis,” he nodded.
“What are you doing?” she hissed.
“Vegetable dumplings?” he said.
“Thanks for being dressed, at least. I just had the pleasure of introducing Carys and the lawyer to Jones’ hairy torso,” Claire grumbled with mild, but fading, annoyance.
“Oh yeah, he always -” he stopped himself. “What lawyer?”
“For God’s sake, Dan, the lawyer? With the paperwork? For the adoption? I told you we were coming round,” sighed Claire. “Would it have killed you to be prepared?”
“Shit, that was today?” he squinted, drawing a hand over his beard.
“Is this going to be the kid’s room?” shouted Carys. Dan and Claire left the kitchen to find her staring in wonder at the stars and rocketships in the nursery.
“Jones decorated,” said Dan.
“It’s lovely,” she enthused. “Not as yellow as I’d expected. Yellow’s a normal baby colour, isn’t it? Looks like a bunch of sick to me, the yellow rooms. This is good. I’ve got a really good feeling about you two.”
“Alright, gang?” said Jones from the living room. “Got my trousers on and all that. Let’s get to work!”
---
Carys stared uncomprehendingly at the endless shelves of plastic bottles before her. There stood rows and rows of things that looked almost but not quite identical, half a dozen different versions of the same thing, and scores of incomprehensible names of things she never knew she needed to live until just then.
“Which ones am I meant to be taking?” she asked.
Claire scanned the shelves, fingering a large white bottle with a blue label. She placed it in Carys’ hands.
“I think this should be the only one you need,” she said, squinting at the label. “Yeah. Standard prenatal multivitamin. There should be directions on the back.”
“Been bloody ages since I took any good drugs,” Carys blushed.
“You... don’t do a lot of drugs though, do you?” Claire asked, concerned.
“Oh you know, just a bit of coke at parties, the usual,” Carys shrugged, as their shopping cart rounded a corner, into the toilet tissue and bottled water aisle. “Except I’m not now. It’s proper weird: I can’t drink, can’t smoke, can’t do a bit of coke at parties. I’ve no idea how to eat!”
“I’m sure it’s not that different from a normal diet,” Claire assured her. “Just no soft cheeses or sushi or anything, loads of vegetables and protein, but not too much soy, because of the hormones. Do you eat meat at all?”
“No, I don’t really eat much of anything. Look at these legs,” Carys scoffed, gesturing towards her spindly lower appendages. “Do these look like the legs of someone who eats?”
“For God’s sake, Carys, you’ve got to eat sometimes,” sighed Claire. “The vitamins are just a start, you know. You’ve got to supplement them with good food, exercise.”
“Well, we’re exercising right now, right?” Carys grinned, as though, on some level, she were just as much trying to convince herself.
“We’re... walking, at a moderately slow pace, through a supermarket,” said Claire. “I don’t think this qualifies.”
“Oh. Well, fuck,” said Carys.
“How about something gentle, like yoga?” suggested Claire, as they turned into the produce aisles.
“Yeah, maybe,” Carys grimaced. “but how do I eat?”
Claire let out a heavy sigh. This was going to be an uphill battle. But Carys was a nice girl, full of good intentions, and despite her apparent shortcomings, was carrying Claire’s future neice or nephew.
“This is a bag of salad,” said Claire, pointing to a cellophane package of mixed lettuces. “You don’t need to do anything to it, just dump it into a bowl, bit of dressing, and eat it. And then eat other things, and you have to repeat this every day. Easy enough?”
Carys nodded.
“Good. Next, think you can handle opening a single-serve yogurt pot? Maybe when we get home, I’ll take you through how to do cheese on toast.”
---
Fire years previous, Dan Ashcroft had jumped out of a window. Somehow, through some combination of relentless caring and incessant encouragement, Jones convinced him that it would be a good idea to write that book he had been always meant to getting around to writing.
And he did.
And then some people published it. The result of all this, more or less, was that Dan had suddenly found himself with a publisher and an agent and that this, while not on the scale of full-on Idiocy that surrounded him during his tenure at Sugar Ape, was, at the best of times, shitty.
Dan Ashcroft did not like having a literary agent. Or perhaps, he wondered, he just did not like having his literary agent for a literary agent. He especially did not like when his agent telephoned him, which almost invariably meant he had bad news.
“Dan Ashcroft,” he grumbled.
“Dan! How’s my favourite writer in the universe?” asked the cheerful voice on the other end of the line.
“Hello, Crizz, you irredeemable cunt,” he cringed. The man’s name was Crizz, ferchrissakes. “What the fuck do you want?”
“I hope you haven’t forgotten about today’s book signing!” enthused Crizz.
Yup, thought Dan, bad news.
Book signings were one of the apparent necessary evils of being a published author that Dan would rather find blood in his stool than ever have to do. Not that he had had the pleasure of doing any previous book signings, but it was something he knew he would be much happier to avoid altogether.
Inevitably, therefore, he found himself sat at a small table in Waterstone’s that afternoon, a stack of books to one side of him and an extra-large coffee on the other. More or less, these events would mean that he got to sit at a table for a few hours until they let him go home, occasionally having to talk to a reader, who - if he was lucky - would not want to talk at great length about their painful misreadings of his narrative or ask questions about it that he himself had no answers for.
On this day, however, Dan was not so lucky: after three quarters of an hour of trying to live down the shame of one woman who announced that she thought, based on the impression given by his “About the Author” photo, that he would be better-looking, along came two of his former colleagues.
So rarely were Ned Smanks and Rufus Onslatt seen outside of one another’s company that Dan went so far as to theorize that the pair shared a single brain cell between them.
“Aaaaaashcroooooooooft!” exclaimed Rufus, who was inexplicably wearing a bow tie over his orange track jacket.
“Oh, hey,” nodded Dan.
“High fives and shit about the book, Preach?” said Ned, whose thick-rimmed spectacles nearly eclipsed his entire face.
“Yeah, it was well transgressive,” said Rufus.
“So you read it, did you?” squinted Dan. “Do you even know what transgressive means?”
“Yeah, we did a review for Sugar Ape,” explained Ned. “Like, we liked how it was, like, about the past and shit? And how it keeps, like, manifesting itself in the present? And then how the one bloke’s looking for something that, like, don’t exist no more, and the other one’s, like, disavowing something that’ll always be a part of his identity and stuff.”
Dan blinked. For Ned Smanks, that outburst was surprisingly insightful and sounded very nearly literate. Dan was not sure what mirror universe he had woken up in that day, but something about this was properly unsettling to him.
“That’s... thanks, Ned,” he said, bewildered, accepting the compliment with shell-shocked and possibly slightly woozy gratitude.
“And then that bird from Bristol turns into, like, a bloke and shit?” added Rufus. “Well bum. So what’s his junk look like, anyway? How would they, like...? Does he still have a lady’s - ”
“That doesn’t matter, okay?” sighed Dan. And with that, the normal order of the world reasserted itself, and Dan was quietly comforted in his irritation.
Chapter Seven