fic: they're so underground (rpf)
they’re so underground (you probably never heard of them)
rpf. three’s a crowd / three’s company, too; sometimes it’s not one that’s the loneliest number. ellen page/jospeh gordon-levitt/tom hardy. rated r. 2511 words.
notes: HAPPY HOLIDAYS, vinylroad! um, apparently doped up on cold meds, this is what happens? also, disclaimer: this was, (a) intended to be far pornier, and (b) not so depressing. but you know how i am with le angst lol.
when routine bites hard and ambitions are low
and resentment rides high but emotions won’t grow -
(LOVE WILL TEAR US APART; joy division)
In Paris Ellen buys a small metal cigarette case with black birds painted on it.
“What’s that for, huh?” Joe asks her. He rips off a bite of a croissant as they walk and offers it to her; she shakes her head, slides the case back into the small brown bag. “You don’t smoke,” he says.
She shrugs, and without missing a beat says, “I could keep business cards in it.”
Tom snorts. “Got a rich assortment of businessmen in your line of work, love?”
“Fuck off,” she says, but there’s no heat to it. She steals the rest of the croissant from Joe leaving him with the small piece he ripped for her. She takes a big bite and smiles, mouth full.
If we were to tell this story differently, tell it about normal people (or as normal as any one person can ever hope to be - perhaps anonymous is a better term of art), we would say: they met in a bar.
(Joe would own a record store, would have a consistent, stubbly growth of beard and wear old knit sweaters with the elbow patches, the kind her grandfather used to wear. Ellen would be a student, too smart and too droll for her own good, and she would take women’s studies courses and philosophy courses, and she would hate them, she would decide sophomore year that she wants to major in environmental studies, a decision that would earn her uproarious mockery among everyone who thinks they know her -
God only knows what Tom would become - a map of tattoos spread in ink across his skin one or the other or both would come to learn with their tongue, their hands, that smug self-aware smile, too volatile to be predicted in this manner).
In the real world, the only world we’ve got (lest science gets really awesome in the next few years and finds a wormhole or alternate dimensions, a gap in time only Rod Serling could have predicted - )
(Ellen tried to explain wormholes to Joe once. They were at this awful diner and they were the only ones in there under the age of sixty and she had a hat pulled down over her hair - unwashed, as she recalls, stinking of his pillowcase and her own skin - and he had on layers of flannel, and she started talking about wormholes and time travel and other dimensions, primarily to derail the conversation he was primarily having with himself and a plate of cold french fries, about some music review he read on Pitchfork.com he whole-heartedly disagreed with. She first said, write them an email, but he waved his hand and said something about the decline of artistic debate, to which she rolled her eyes and that’s when she brought up the idea of another universe)
(“I wonder,” she said, “if somewhere, out there, you know, dude, on the other side of the moon there’s, like, this whole other mirror world where you and I are sitting in a diner and we’re actually having an interesting conversation”)
(“I don’t know whether you amuse me or wound me,” he drawled, voice loose and limbs loose on his side of the booth across from her) -
they meet in a bar. Ellen and Joe meet in a bar.
They meet Tom together, but they all are masquerading under different names.
Joe has this black and white print of Jean Seberg on the wall of his apartment in New York.
She jokingly told him once that she was going to buy one of Jean-Paul Belmondo and hang it at her place in L.A. and it’d be like the movie was spread across the country, courtesy of them. She was stoned when she said it, and so was he, and he muttered in French, “‘Informers inform, burglars burgle, murderers murder, lovers love.’”
She snorted into the crook of his arm and he passed the joint to her.
“You like symmetry?” he asked her, voice gravel low and tired. “Is that it?”
She just shrugged. She didn’t think of it so much as symmetry but as equality, but she didn’t tell him that - there really didn’t seem to be a point. She never would buy a poster and she would later realize that she doesn’t even own a copy of A bout de souffle, and that the copy he owns still has the cellophane on it and has never been opened and she’ll think that it makes them a couple of phonies. The realest phonies around.
Later, she’ll get sad when she thinks about it, because symmetry, equality, they both can be achieved with two. When a third is added it becomes impossible.
(Because here is the order of things: Ellen met Joe and then Ellen and Joe met Tom)
(Ellen kissed Joe at a wrap party. Ellen woke up one morning and six months had passed and she was still in Joe’s bed)
Hell, it was probably impossible with two. The illusion was just easier to maintain.
She doesn’t know what order they were cast in. She just knows that the first time she met Tom he was at craft services with an orange in his hand, and the first thing he asked her were if she thought they were in season.
“Dude,” she said. “I look like I came from an orange grove?” He thought that was really funny for some reason. For a long while after that Tom would call her The Girl From The Orange Grove, even though she totally wasn’t, a fact she found herself explaining to Leonardo fucking DiCaprio of all people, and he’d laugh. He’d laugh at himself like it was the funniest joke ever.
He laughed until he started making jokes that weren’t really jokes, all about peeling oranges, getting to the juicy bits under the skin, his eyes dark and predatory in a way she didn’t know what to do with, so she laughed instead, high and nervous, self-loathing of her own self-awareness.
If Joe thought anything of this, of them, he never said a word.
Here’s something you probably weren’t expecting:
Tom fucked Joe first. Tom beat her to the punch, to the bedsheets, got inside him before Joe could get inside of her.
At least in the physical sense, but let’s be real: the physical sense is the one we want to believe matters the most.
People like to say three’s a crowd. People like to say a lot of things, a lot of really trite shit they gleam from movies and chew around in their mouths like it’s got deeper meaning than Ryan O’Neal saying to Ali MacGraw, love means never having to say you’re sorry, which, what the fuck. Love is always saying you’re sorry, or at least that’s what Ellen thinks. It’s like someone’s given you another person and said, oh hey, here is their heart and here are their thoughts and here are their emotions and their well-being, you’re now responsible for that, and if she’s learned anything, she’s learned that that sort of responsibility garners a whole shit ton of apologetic behavior.
Which isn’t to say Ellen’s in love. She was raised in a generation where love is viewed as some sticky, sparkly, Nicholas Sparks mess of a thing and where if you’re cool and if you’re hip you don’t so much as love but simply fall into other people and take bad photographs of yourself together and post them online. It’s like you got to decide which half of things you want to believe in - the cynics, the romantics, the cool cats, the stiffs. Joe told her this once. And she laughed. She called him pretentious and asked him what the fuck a stiff is; “I’ve watched CSI before, man. You talking about dead guys? Because I really don’t think I’m going to start believing in dead dudes, if it’s all the same.” He rolled his eyes and asked her about her soul or something awful and cliche (or maybe he said Aristotle, and she’s remembering it wrong); she told him to stop watching French new wave films and he raised his hand, said Scout’s Honor, he had.
People also like to say three’s company, too.
She believed that one for a bit of time.
(But Ellen didn’t know about Tom when she finally got Joe under her, her teeth blunt along the slight swell of his bottom lip, his lips thin and pressed against her own, the bony cut of her hip pressed against his, and she let him come inside her that first time, the decision stupid and rash but she'd revel in the wet feel of him anyway. And he would tell her later, he would say, yeah, Tom and I, you know, and then he’d shrug, the word fuck nowhere close to cresting on his lips, and she’d shrug too. Ellen would shrug and say, whatever, man, it’s not like I own you, because she didn’t, but neither did Tom, and she wouldn’t say that part, wouldn’t want to say his name for her own selfish reasons -
and she won’t want to say his name, even when he’s filling her, even when she has Tom behind her, the bared expanse of his chest flush with her back, the bumpy cord of her spine dividing his chest in half; it will be Joe’s name she says and Joe’s hands in her hair, but Tom’s tongue in his mouth -
and they won’t speak of Tom again until that morning in New York when Joe turns to her and says, Tom’s in town, you know, and Ellen says, no, I didn’t.
He won’t leave their bed after that).
In this scene, our closing scenes (for us and for them), they wake up in Paris. Joe loves Paris, and he’ll tell them this in French, and Ellen has no opinion of Paris, and Tom loves French women.
There’s a DJ in Paris she really wants to see, some dude from Yemen or Dubai or some shit who plays really bizarre house beats infused with traditional folk music or something. She had explained it that morning in the kitchen, the sky gray and Joe wanted it to be sunny if only because he thinks that with the sun slatted through the bay of windows onto the yellow walls and wood floor, Ellen in his shirt, barefoot, a cup of coffee, it would have been one of those perfect moments you photograph, if only mentally, and store and keep. He tells her this, when the morning is just a footnote in a shared history. She’s run out of demoralizing and chiding insults for him and instead just says his name, just says Joe, and it’s sort of endearing if not a little exhausted.
But there wasn’t any sun that morning and Ellen wasn’t barefoot, she had on a pair of socks, and she was talking rapidly, excited hand gestures that threatened the cup of coffee at her elbow, and Joe just sat there, a small indulgent smile on his face.
“Darling, really?” Tom will say when Ellen poses the plan for him. She’ll raise her eyebrows, and what she really wants to know is when everything they do became a fucking deliberation, like every decision they make has to be trotted out in front of some board of directors and they have to call for a vote. She thinks that’s how decisions get made in business. She doesn’t really know.
But this is the future and in the future you’re supposed to be wiser, and you’re supposed to know things.
In the future there are three, and at first there were just the two, but if you are asking her, she’s not really sure which two she means anymore.
(Paris is a prelude to an end the three had yet to openly acknowledge. They never did go see that DJ and Ellen complained, a heavy pout and a labored listing of all the things she had done for the two of them and why was it so freaking difficult to do her this one favor. Tom said, love, darling, I’ve a headache - can you just let one of us fuck you and you forget it then, eh? And that’s what happened, but not really. She didn’t forget, but it wasn’t the DJ or the house beats infused with folk songs or whatever, but it was what Tom had said - let one of us. One of us. Two instead of three. Three’s a crowd, three’s company; glass half full, half empty conventional wisdom.
She did fuck Tom. She climbed atop him like she had so many times before and Joe watched. When Ellen came, Tom did not, his dick still hard and inside her, and he shifted her off him - Joe descended with his mouth, always that strange mix of both sly and eager as he licked the length first and then wrapped his lips around him. And Ellen laid there, thought about how different this all felt now, different from New York and different from L.A., and she wanted to blame Paris, but she didn’t think that was true. She watched the way Joe swallowed around Tom, she watched the way Tom’s fingers flexed, his hips pushed forward, and how his eyes were trained on nothing at all - not her, not Joe, but the open window and the stretch of gray sky.
On the flight to New York she’ll realize that she forgot the small cigarette case with the birds painted on it; she’ll be home alone in Los Angeles by the week’s close).
Ellen met Joe in a bar in Los Angeles. She was young then, but the term is relative. At that time, she likes to think she had leverage - herself a hot commodity, fresh of the heels of playing a foul-mouthed knocked-up teen whereas Joe was still under the radar, once again, the term relative.
She had a can of PBR and so did he, and of course they did. They were introduced by a mutual friend, a producer or a casting agent, someone in the business whose sole job was to remain behind the scenes and keep the show running.
She doesn’t know what she thought in that moment or if she was thinking anything worth remembering. But they shook hands, her own chilled and damp from the can of beer while his own was dry and warm, and maybe that’s the thing to remember.
They talked about Adam Ant and Freddie Mercury and this place down on Mulholland where he saw a man get stabbed this one time and how it was scary and insane and she had laughed as he told the story, and he had paused asked, all incredulous, why are you laughing at me?, but he laughed too. She remembers that part.
They didn’t meet again until they filmed that movie about dreams and Leonardo DiCaprio and shit, and she told him, I always did want to work with you.
What he did with that comment, she doesn’t know.
Tom was there, too.
fin.
rpf. three’s a crowd / three’s company, too; sometimes it’s not one that’s the loneliest number. ellen page/jospeh gordon-levitt/tom hardy. rated r. 2511 words.
notes: HAPPY HOLIDAYS, vinylroad! um, apparently doped up on cold meds, this is what happens? also, disclaimer: this was, (a) intended to be far pornier, and (b) not so depressing. but you know how i am with le angst lol.
when routine bites hard and ambitions are low
and resentment rides high but emotions won’t grow -
(LOVE WILL TEAR US APART; joy division)
In Paris Ellen buys a small metal cigarette case with black birds painted on it.
“What’s that for, huh?” Joe asks her. He rips off a bite of a croissant as they walk and offers it to her; she shakes her head, slides the case back into the small brown bag. “You don’t smoke,” he says.
She shrugs, and without missing a beat says, “I could keep business cards in it.”
Tom snorts. “Got a rich assortment of businessmen in your line of work, love?”
“Fuck off,” she says, but there’s no heat to it. She steals the rest of the croissant from Joe leaving him with the small piece he ripped for her. She takes a big bite and smiles, mouth full.
If we were to tell this story differently, tell it about normal people (or as normal as any one person can ever hope to be - perhaps anonymous is a better term of art), we would say: they met in a bar.
(Joe would own a record store, would have a consistent, stubbly growth of beard and wear old knit sweaters with the elbow patches, the kind her grandfather used to wear. Ellen would be a student, too smart and too droll for her own good, and she would take women’s studies courses and philosophy courses, and she would hate them, she would decide sophomore year that she wants to major in environmental studies, a decision that would earn her uproarious mockery among everyone who thinks they know her -
God only knows what Tom would become - a map of tattoos spread in ink across his skin one or the other or both would come to learn with their tongue, their hands, that smug self-aware smile, too volatile to be predicted in this manner).
In the real world, the only world we’ve got (lest science gets really awesome in the next few years and finds a wormhole or alternate dimensions, a gap in time only Rod Serling could have predicted - )
(Ellen tried to explain wormholes to Joe once. They were at this awful diner and they were the only ones in there under the age of sixty and she had a hat pulled down over her hair - unwashed, as she recalls, stinking of his pillowcase and her own skin - and he had on layers of flannel, and she started talking about wormholes and time travel and other dimensions, primarily to derail the conversation he was primarily having with himself and a plate of cold french fries, about some music review he read on Pitchfork.com he whole-heartedly disagreed with. She first said, write them an email, but he waved his hand and said something about the decline of artistic debate, to which she rolled her eyes and that’s when she brought up the idea of another universe)
(“I wonder,” she said, “if somewhere, out there, you know, dude, on the other side of the moon there’s, like, this whole other mirror world where you and I are sitting in a diner and we’re actually having an interesting conversation”)
(“I don’t know whether you amuse me or wound me,” he drawled, voice loose and limbs loose on his side of the booth across from her) -
they meet in a bar. Ellen and Joe meet in a bar.
They meet Tom together, but they all are masquerading under different names.
Joe has this black and white print of Jean Seberg on the wall of his apartment in New York.
She jokingly told him once that she was going to buy one of Jean-Paul Belmondo and hang it at her place in L.A. and it’d be like the movie was spread across the country, courtesy of them. She was stoned when she said it, and so was he, and he muttered in French, “‘Informers inform, burglars burgle, murderers murder, lovers love.’”
She snorted into the crook of his arm and he passed the joint to her.
“You like symmetry?” he asked her, voice gravel low and tired. “Is that it?”
She just shrugged. She didn’t think of it so much as symmetry but as equality, but she didn’t tell him that - there really didn’t seem to be a point. She never would buy a poster and she would later realize that she doesn’t even own a copy of A bout de souffle, and that the copy he owns still has the cellophane on it and has never been opened and she’ll think that it makes them a couple of phonies. The realest phonies around.
Later, she’ll get sad when she thinks about it, because symmetry, equality, they both can be achieved with two. When a third is added it becomes impossible.
(Because here is the order of things: Ellen met Joe and then Ellen and Joe met Tom)
(Ellen kissed Joe at a wrap party. Ellen woke up one morning and six months had passed and she was still in Joe’s bed)
Hell, it was probably impossible with two. The illusion was just easier to maintain.
She doesn’t know what order they were cast in. She just knows that the first time she met Tom he was at craft services with an orange in his hand, and the first thing he asked her were if she thought they were in season.
“Dude,” she said. “I look like I came from an orange grove?” He thought that was really funny for some reason. For a long while after that Tom would call her The Girl From The Orange Grove, even though she totally wasn’t, a fact she found herself explaining to Leonardo fucking DiCaprio of all people, and he’d laugh. He’d laugh at himself like it was the funniest joke ever.
He laughed until he started making jokes that weren’t really jokes, all about peeling oranges, getting to the juicy bits under the skin, his eyes dark and predatory in a way she didn’t know what to do with, so she laughed instead, high and nervous, self-loathing of her own self-awareness.
If Joe thought anything of this, of them, he never said a word.
Here’s something you probably weren’t expecting:
Tom fucked Joe first. Tom beat her to the punch, to the bedsheets, got inside him before Joe could get inside of her.
At least in the physical sense, but let’s be real: the physical sense is the one we want to believe matters the most.
People like to say three’s a crowd. People like to say a lot of things, a lot of really trite shit they gleam from movies and chew around in their mouths like it’s got deeper meaning than Ryan O’Neal saying to Ali MacGraw, love means never having to say you’re sorry, which, what the fuck. Love is always saying you’re sorry, or at least that’s what Ellen thinks. It’s like someone’s given you another person and said, oh hey, here is their heart and here are their thoughts and here are their emotions and their well-being, you’re now responsible for that, and if she’s learned anything, she’s learned that that sort of responsibility garners a whole shit ton of apologetic behavior.
Which isn’t to say Ellen’s in love. She was raised in a generation where love is viewed as some sticky, sparkly, Nicholas Sparks mess of a thing and where if you’re cool and if you’re hip you don’t so much as love but simply fall into other people and take bad photographs of yourself together and post them online. It’s like you got to decide which half of things you want to believe in - the cynics, the romantics, the cool cats, the stiffs. Joe told her this once. And she laughed. She called him pretentious and asked him what the fuck a stiff is; “I’ve watched CSI before, man. You talking about dead guys? Because I really don’t think I’m going to start believing in dead dudes, if it’s all the same.” He rolled his eyes and asked her about her soul or something awful and cliche (or maybe he said Aristotle, and she’s remembering it wrong); she told him to stop watching French new wave films and he raised his hand, said Scout’s Honor, he had.
People also like to say three’s company, too.
She believed that one for a bit of time.
(But Ellen didn’t know about Tom when she finally got Joe under her, her teeth blunt along the slight swell of his bottom lip, his lips thin and pressed against her own, the bony cut of her hip pressed against his, and she let him come inside her that first time, the decision stupid and rash but she'd revel in the wet feel of him anyway. And he would tell her later, he would say, yeah, Tom and I, you know, and then he’d shrug, the word fuck nowhere close to cresting on his lips, and she’d shrug too. Ellen would shrug and say, whatever, man, it’s not like I own you, because she didn’t, but neither did Tom, and she wouldn’t say that part, wouldn’t want to say his name for her own selfish reasons -
and she won’t want to say his name, even when he’s filling her, even when she has Tom behind her, the bared expanse of his chest flush with her back, the bumpy cord of her spine dividing his chest in half; it will be Joe’s name she says and Joe’s hands in her hair, but Tom’s tongue in his mouth -
and they won’t speak of Tom again until that morning in New York when Joe turns to her and says, Tom’s in town, you know, and Ellen says, no, I didn’t.
He won’t leave their bed after that).
In this scene, our closing scenes (for us and for them), they wake up in Paris. Joe loves Paris, and he’ll tell them this in French, and Ellen has no opinion of Paris, and Tom loves French women.
There’s a DJ in Paris she really wants to see, some dude from Yemen or Dubai or some shit who plays really bizarre house beats infused with traditional folk music or something. She had explained it that morning in the kitchen, the sky gray and Joe wanted it to be sunny if only because he thinks that with the sun slatted through the bay of windows onto the yellow walls and wood floor, Ellen in his shirt, barefoot, a cup of coffee, it would have been one of those perfect moments you photograph, if only mentally, and store and keep. He tells her this, when the morning is just a footnote in a shared history. She’s run out of demoralizing and chiding insults for him and instead just says his name, just says Joe, and it’s sort of endearing if not a little exhausted.
But there wasn’t any sun that morning and Ellen wasn’t barefoot, she had on a pair of socks, and she was talking rapidly, excited hand gestures that threatened the cup of coffee at her elbow, and Joe just sat there, a small indulgent smile on his face.
“Darling, really?” Tom will say when Ellen poses the plan for him. She’ll raise her eyebrows, and what she really wants to know is when everything they do became a fucking deliberation, like every decision they make has to be trotted out in front of some board of directors and they have to call for a vote. She thinks that’s how decisions get made in business. She doesn’t really know.
But this is the future and in the future you’re supposed to be wiser, and you’re supposed to know things.
In the future there are three, and at first there were just the two, but if you are asking her, she’s not really sure which two she means anymore.
(Paris is a prelude to an end the three had yet to openly acknowledge. They never did go see that DJ and Ellen complained, a heavy pout and a labored listing of all the things she had done for the two of them and why was it so freaking difficult to do her this one favor. Tom said, love, darling, I’ve a headache - can you just let one of us fuck you and you forget it then, eh? And that’s what happened, but not really. She didn’t forget, but it wasn’t the DJ or the house beats infused with folk songs or whatever, but it was what Tom had said - let one of us. One of us. Two instead of three. Three’s a crowd, three’s company; glass half full, half empty conventional wisdom.
She did fuck Tom. She climbed atop him like she had so many times before and Joe watched. When Ellen came, Tom did not, his dick still hard and inside her, and he shifted her off him - Joe descended with his mouth, always that strange mix of both sly and eager as he licked the length first and then wrapped his lips around him. And Ellen laid there, thought about how different this all felt now, different from New York and different from L.A., and she wanted to blame Paris, but she didn’t think that was true. She watched the way Joe swallowed around Tom, she watched the way Tom’s fingers flexed, his hips pushed forward, and how his eyes were trained on nothing at all - not her, not Joe, but the open window and the stretch of gray sky.
On the flight to New York she’ll realize that she forgot the small cigarette case with the birds painted on it; she’ll be home alone in Los Angeles by the week’s close).
Ellen met Joe in a bar in Los Angeles. She was young then, but the term is relative. At that time, she likes to think she had leverage - herself a hot commodity, fresh of the heels of playing a foul-mouthed knocked-up teen whereas Joe was still under the radar, once again, the term relative.
She had a can of PBR and so did he, and of course they did. They were introduced by a mutual friend, a producer or a casting agent, someone in the business whose sole job was to remain behind the scenes and keep the show running.
She doesn’t know what she thought in that moment or if she was thinking anything worth remembering. But they shook hands, her own chilled and damp from the can of beer while his own was dry and warm, and maybe that’s the thing to remember.
They talked about Adam Ant and Freddie Mercury and this place down on Mulholland where he saw a man get stabbed this one time and how it was scary and insane and she had laughed as he told the story, and he had paused asked, all incredulous, why are you laughing at me?, but he laughed too. She remembers that part.
They didn’t meet again until they filmed that movie about dreams and Leonardo DiCaprio and shit, and she told him, I always did want to work with you.
What he did with that comment, she doesn’t know.
Tom was there, too.
fin.