mosca
in
femslash07
"Those Creatures Jumped the Barricades," by mosca (Freaks and Geeks, Lindsay/Kim)
Very important note: This is, in fact, the story that I wrote.
Title: Those Creatures Jumped the Barricades
Author: mosca
Recipient: sionnain
Fandom: Freaks & Geeks
Pairing: Lindsay/Kim
Rating: PG-13 for language and kissing
Word count: about 1,700
Spoilers/Continuity: Futurefic with vague spoilers for the whole show.
Summary: At least three good reasons to go to your tenth high school reunion.
Disclaimers: Freaks & Geeks is the intellectual property of Apatow Productions and DreamWorks. This original work of fan fiction is Copyright 2007 Mosca, and I wrote it for free. Therefore, this story is protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. All rights reserved. All wrongs reversed. The past is gone, but something might be found to take its place.
Notes: Thanks to callmesandy for the beta. Title is from "Belong," by R.E.M. sionnain, it was a pleasure to write for you and to revisit this fandom -- I hope you enjoy the fic!
There was a reason, Lindsay reminded herself as she attempted to blend into the cream-and-teal wallpaper despite the blackness of her dress, why people did not attend their high school reunions. There were in fact many reasons, and most of them were wearing nametags and exclaiming about how pleased they were to see her while she wracked her brain for some connection between the familiar name, the now-unfamiliar face, and her fractured and repressed memories of adolescence. Half of the time, she couldn't recall a single thing about them beyond having disdained them in one class or another. The other half of the time, she had clearer memories, but unflattering ones.
Fortunately, most of them stopped exclaiming and found somewhere else to be by the time she'd finished detailing her career path since high school: B.S. from Princeton, Ph.D. in math from Cal Tech, a year's fellowship in Germany, and now a tenure-track position at Washington University in St. Louis. If boredom and intimidation failed, she was pretty successful at getting rid of people when they asked if she'd like to see pictures of their kids and she said, "No, thank you." As expected, they hadn't done much with their lives beyond finding boring jobs and breeding, and as expected, Lindsay had become a perfect overachiever. Except for the part where they couldn't understand why she wasn't making any money at overachieving. It was bad enough hearing the question from her dad, who asked it out of love and not as a way of prolonging a conversation past its logical expiration date.
She was only at the reunion because it was her summer vacation -- academia meant always having the option of blowing off a July to backpack in Europe or follow the Dead or visit her parents in Detroit. Her mother had cajoled her into making an appearance. "You can see all your old friends. Catch up on old times."
"My friends won't be there," Lindsay had said. "And I've lost touch with all of them anyway."
Naturally, that prediction had come back to bite her in the butt. Her high school friends were exactly the kind of people to never leave town or develop anything better to do than attend their ten-year high school reunion. She spotted Nick and Ken immediately. They were taking unfair advantage of the open bar. Nick was wearing a thrift-store corduroy suit the color of fresh cement, and Ken was animatedly ridiculing everyone who walked in. Lindsay waved but didn't approach them. She had a hunch she'd wind up over there sooner or later, wishing she still had that army jacket to hide in, but she wanted to be able to tell her mom she'd made an effort. Besides, she knew her post-high-school pedigree would make Nick and Ken ashamed of their own lame lives, and she wouldn't delight in doing that to them. They weren't exactly the pep squad.
So alone she stood, sipping punch and clashing with the wallpaper.
"Hey!" someone shouted in Lindsay's direction. Lindsay looked up, already bored. Her latest attacker was a large-boned woman with long ironed-straight hair dyed jet black and a prominent nose ring. Someone who'd rebelled belatedly after escaping from suburbia and rendered herself unrecognizable.
"Hi," Lindsay said.
"Wow, do you not recognize me?" the woman said. "Way to forget your best friend."
The woman proceeded to throw her arms around Lindsay. The loudness and the bizarre social boundaries gave her away. "Kim, wow," Lindsay said. "You look really different."
"You don't," Kim said, releasing Lindsay from the stranglehold.
"What are you doing here?" Lindsay said. "You hate this stuff more than I do."
"I'm here to gloat," Kim said. "Just like you are."
Lindsay scoffed. "No, I'm here because I was in town anyway and my mom made me go."
You really haven't changed," Kim said. She sized Lindsay up. "So what are you, some big shot doctor or something?"
Lindsay told her about the Ph.D., the fellowship, and the new job. She went on longer than she meant to, explaining her research. "It's all really theoretical," she said. "Like it's all, the universe isn't actually shaped like a donut, but if it were..."
Kim was the first person all evening to say, "That sounds really cool."
"You think?" Lindsay said. "Most people are just like, 'but if it's all pretend donut world, why do you even care?'"
"No, it's totally you. You're doing something so completely brilliant that nobody else in this stupid town comes close to getting it, so they're all just like, whatever, and they get to feel superior while you run rings around them. And that was always you."
Lindsay tried not to smile, but Kim's admiration had always gotten the better of her. Even when Kim had been using her, the admiration had been genuine. "So," Lindsay said. "What do you have to gloat about?"
Kim shrugged. "I own three bars in Milwaukee," she said, like that was something most twenty-eight-year-old women rolled out of bed one morning to discover they'd achieved. "And a house. My mom still fucking rents, and I own three bars and a house. So I'm already doing ten times better than anyone ever thought, right?" She rummaged in her purse. "I need a cigarette like a motherfucker," she said. "Wanna blow this joint?"
Lindsay shrugged. "Sure."
"Did you ever start smoking?" Kim said, choosing an alcove near the hotel's back door and lighting up cathartically.
"No," Lindsay said.
"Good for you," Kim said.
"So," Lindsay said, watching Kim smoke. "Three bars?"
"Yeah. Like, I hooked up with this guy, right?" Kim said. "And he got into some trouble with DUIs, you know, whatever, so we went to Wisconsin, and once we were there he was just fucking stoned all the time and someone had to pay the bills, so I got a job as a cocktail waitress. Which, it turns out, I am fucking excellent at." Her cigarette was burning itself out. "So the bar was, like, going under, because the owner was, like, a total lush, so one of the bartenders and I applied for a loan and bought him out. We fixed the place up and it started doing mad business. There was this other place up near my apartment, so we bought that and did the same thing, refurbished, brought in live music on the weekends. And with the money from that one, we got the third place. I never have to wake up early or pay for a beer. It kicks ass."
"That sounds great," Lindsay said. Without meaning to, she sounded disdainful. "Seriously and unironically, you sound really happy."
"I am," Kim said. "I mean, not perfect, I've got a fucking ex-husband with a drug habit that the fucking courts are making me support, but other than that."
"So you and the bartender? The guy you bought three bars with?"
"Business partner," Kim said. She dragged on her cigarette. "He's a total fag anyway."
"So you're not --"
"Dating at all," Kim finished. "I'm, I don't know, I'm really busy and guys are such assholes. So I bet you're married, right?"
"Married to math," Lindsay said. It was a funny joke in the halls of academe, but smoking with Kim Kelly, it sounded lame. "Most math guys are pretty boring."
Without warning, Kim threw her arms around Lindsay again, holding her cigarette carefully to avoid burning a hole in the back of Lindsay's dress. "I'm so glad I got to see you!" Kim said.
Lindsay was on the verge of making a joke about non sequiturs, but she didn't want to make Kim feel ashamed. That was the last thing Kim needed to feel ever again. She'd worked so hard to find something to be proud of, an accomplishment that would end conversations at high school reunions. "Me too," Lindsay said.
"Right, I mean, what's the point of going to your high school reunion unless you get to hook up with someone you had a crush on ten years ago?"
Lindsay backed away. "You had a crush on me?"
Kim rolled her eyes. "Obviously."
"And you --"
"Only if you're into it," Kim said. "But I figure, hey, we're in a hotel, I'm going back to Milwaukee the day after tomorrow, what the hell, right?"
Lindsay knew the smart response to that rhetorical question. But she also knew that whenever Kim Kelly said 'What the hell?' they both ended up in serious trouble, having the time of their lives. Graduate school didn't offer a lot of opportunity for that, and an assistant professorship offered none at all. It wouldn't hurt to feel that exhilaration one more time. One more time she would follow Kim Kelly to the ends of the earth, then laugh and speed away. "Okay," Lindsay said.
Kim dropped her almost-spent cigarette on the asphalt and ground it out with her toe. She looked like a bull getting ready to charge. But Lindsay was the one to kiss first. Kim's lips were chapped under her lipstick, and the nicotine had made her breath bitter. But her embrace was warm and tight with ten years of longing, and her tongue was wise with ten years of experience.
"You know what would rock?" Kim said. "If we could, like, break into a boiler room or something. It would be so totally high school."
"A hotel room might be better," Lindsay said, sounding exactly like her mom.
"Yeah, it's not like we can't afford it, right?" Kim said. "I'm still getting used to affording things."
"I'm still getting used to you having a crush on me for ten years," Lindsay said.
"So, whatever," Kim said. "Everybody's got stuff to get over, right?" She grabbed Lindsay's hand and tugged her towards the door like they were going to throw a bag of dog shit into someone's yard and scream away in Kim's Gremlin, like they were going to cut gym class to dangle their legs over the overpass and blow bubbles at the cars passing below, like they were seventeen and about to have an amazing amount of fun.
Title: Those Creatures Jumped the Barricades
Author: mosca
Recipient: sionnain
Fandom: Freaks & Geeks
Pairing: Lindsay/Kim
Rating: PG-13 for language and kissing
Word count: about 1,700
Spoilers/Continuity: Futurefic with vague spoilers for the whole show.
Summary: At least three good reasons to go to your tenth high school reunion.
Disclaimers: Freaks & Geeks is the intellectual property of Apatow Productions and DreamWorks. This original work of fan fiction is Copyright 2007 Mosca, and I wrote it for free. Therefore, this story is protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. All rights reserved. All wrongs reversed. The past is gone, but something might be found to take its place.
Notes: Thanks to callmesandy for the beta. Title is from "Belong," by R.E.M. sionnain, it was a pleasure to write for you and to revisit this fandom -- I hope you enjoy the fic!
There was a reason, Lindsay reminded herself as she attempted to blend into the cream-and-teal wallpaper despite the blackness of her dress, why people did not attend their high school reunions. There were in fact many reasons, and most of them were wearing nametags and exclaiming about how pleased they were to see her while she wracked her brain for some connection between the familiar name, the now-unfamiliar face, and her fractured and repressed memories of adolescence. Half of the time, she couldn't recall a single thing about them beyond having disdained them in one class or another. The other half of the time, she had clearer memories, but unflattering ones.
Fortunately, most of them stopped exclaiming and found somewhere else to be by the time she'd finished detailing her career path since high school: B.S. from Princeton, Ph.D. in math from Cal Tech, a year's fellowship in Germany, and now a tenure-track position at Washington University in St. Louis. If boredom and intimidation failed, she was pretty successful at getting rid of people when they asked if she'd like to see pictures of their kids and she said, "No, thank you." As expected, they hadn't done much with their lives beyond finding boring jobs and breeding, and as expected, Lindsay had become a perfect overachiever. Except for the part where they couldn't understand why she wasn't making any money at overachieving. It was bad enough hearing the question from her dad, who asked it out of love and not as a way of prolonging a conversation past its logical expiration date.
She was only at the reunion because it was her summer vacation -- academia meant always having the option of blowing off a July to backpack in Europe or follow the Dead or visit her parents in Detroit. Her mother had cajoled her into making an appearance. "You can see all your old friends. Catch up on old times."
"My friends won't be there," Lindsay had said. "And I've lost touch with all of them anyway."
Naturally, that prediction had come back to bite her in the butt. Her high school friends were exactly the kind of people to never leave town or develop anything better to do than attend their ten-year high school reunion. She spotted Nick and Ken immediately. They were taking unfair advantage of the open bar. Nick was wearing a thrift-store corduroy suit the color of fresh cement, and Ken was animatedly ridiculing everyone who walked in. Lindsay waved but didn't approach them. She had a hunch she'd wind up over there sooner or later, wishing she still had that army jacket to hide in, but she wanted to be able to tell her mom she'd made an effort. Besides, she knew her post-high-school pedigree would make Nick and Ken ashamed of their own lame lives, and she wouldn't delight in doing that to them. They weren't exactly the pep squad.
So alone she stood, sipping punch and clashing with the wallpaper.
"Hey!" someone shouted in Lindsay's direction. Lindsay looked up, already bored. Her latest attacker was a large-boned woman with long ironed-straight hair dyed jet black and a prominent nose ring. Someone who'd rebelled belatedly after escaping from suburbia and rendered herself unrecognizable.
"Hi," Lindsay said.
"Wow, do you not recognize me?" the woman said. "Way to forget your best friend."
The woman proceeded to throw her arms around Lindsay. The loudness and the bizarre social boundaries gave her away. "Kim, wow," Lindsay said. "You look really different."
"You don't," Kim said, releasing Lindsay from the stranglehold.
"What are you doing here?" Lindsay said. "You hate this stuff more than I do."
"I'm here to gloat," Kim said. "Just like you are."
Lindsay scoffed. "No, I'm here because I was in town anyway and my mom made me go."
You really haven't changed," Kim said. She sized Lindsay up. "So what are you, some big shot doctor or something?"
Lindsay told her about the Ph.D., the fellowship, and the new job. She went on longer than she meant to, explaining her research. "It's all really theoretical," she said. "Like it's all, the universe isn't actually shaped like a donut, but if it were..."
Kim was the first person all evening to say, "That sounds really cool."
"You think?" Lindsay said. "Most people are just like, 'but if it's all pretend donut world, why do you even care?'"
"No, it's totally you. You're doing something so completely brilliant that nobody else in this stupid town comes close to getting it, so they're all just like, whatever, and they get to feel superior while you run rings around them. And that was always you."
Lindsay tried not to smile, but Kim's admiration had always gotten the better of her. Even when Kim had been using her, the admiration had been genuine. "So," Lindsay said. "What do you have to gloat about?"
Kim shrugged. "I own three bars in Milwaukee," she said, like that was something most twenty-eight-year-old women rolled out of bed one morning to discover they'd achieved. "And a house. My mom still fucking rents, and I own three bars and a house. So I'm already doing ten times better than anyone ever thought, right?" She rummaged in her purse. "I need a cigarette like a motherfucker," she said. "Wanna blow this joint?"
Lindsay shrugged. "Sure."
"Did you ever start smoking?" Kim said, choosing an alcove near the hotel's back door and lighting up cathartically.
"No," Lindsay said.
"Good for you," Kim said.
"So," Lindsay said, watching Kim smoke. "Three bars?"
"Yeah. Like, I hooked up with this guy, right?" Kim said. "And he got into some trouble with DUIs, you know, whatever, so we went to Wisconsin, and once we were there he was just fucking stoned all the time and someone had to pay the bills, so I got a job as a cocktail waitress. Which, it turns out, I am fucking excellent at." Her cigarette was burning itself out. "So the bar was, like, going under, because the owner was, like, a total lush, so one of the bartenders and I applied for a loan and bought him out. We fixed the place up and it started doing mad business. There was this other place up near my apartment, so we bought that and did the same thing, refurbished, brought in live music on the weekends. And with the money from that one, we got the third place. I never have to wake up early or pay for a beer. It kicks ass."
"That sounds great," Lindsay said. Without meaning to, she sounded disdainful. "Seriously and unironically, you sound really happy."
"I am," Kim said. "I mean, not perfect, I've got a fucking ex-husband with a drug habit that the fucking courts are making me support, but other than that."
"So you and the bartender? The guy you bought three bars with?"
"Business partner," Kim said. She dragged on her cigarette. "He's a total fag anyway."
"So you're not --"
"Dating at all," Kim finished. "I'm, I don't know, I'm really busy and guys are such assholes. So I bet you're married, right?"
"Married to math," Lindsay said. It was a funny joke in the halls of academe, but smoking with Kim Kelly, it sounded lame. "Most math guys are pretty boring."
Without warning, Kim threw her arms around Lindsay again, holding her cigarette carefully to avoid burning a hole in the back of Lindsay's dress. "I'm so glad I got to see you!" Kim said.
Lindsay was on the verge of making a joke about non sequiturs, but she didn't want to make Kim feel ashamed. That was the last thing Kim needed to feel ever again. She'd worked so hard to find something to be proud of, an accomplishment that would end conversations at high school reunions. "Me too," Lindsay said.
"Right, I mean, what's the point of going to your high school reunion unless you get to hook up with someone you had a crush on ten years ago?"
Lindsay backed away. "You had a crush on me?"
Kim rolled her eyes. "Obviously."
"And you --"
"Only if you're into it," Kim said. "But I figure, hey, we're in a hotel, I'm going back to Milwaukee the day after tomorrow, what the hell, right?"
Lindsay knew the smart response to that rhetorical question. But she also knew that whenever Kim Kelly said 'What the hell?' they both ended up in serious trouble, having the time of their lives. Graduate school didn't offer a lot of opportunity for that, and an assistant professorship offered none at all. It wouldn't hurt to feel that exhilaration one more time. One more time she would follow Kim Kelly to the ends of the earth, then laugh and speed away. "Okay," Lindsay said.
Kim dropped her almost-spent cigarette on the asphalt and ground it out with her toe. She looked like a bull getting ready to charge. But Lindsay was the one to kiss first. Kim's lips were chapped under her lipstick, and the nicotine had made her breath bitter. But her embrace was warm and tight with ten years of longing, and her tongue was wise with ten years of experience.
"You know what would rock?" Kim said. "If we could, like, break into a boiler room or something. It would be so totally high school."
"A hotel room might be better," Lindsay said, sounding exactly like her mom.
"Yeah, it's not like we can't afford it, right?" Kim said. "I'm still getting used to affording things."
"I'm still getting used to you having a crush on me for ten years," Lindsay said.
"So, whatever," Kim said. "Everybody's got stuff to get over, right?" She grabbed Lindsay's hand and tugged her towards the door like they were going to throw a bag of dog shit into someone's yard and scream away in Kim's Gremlin, like they were going to cut gym class to dangle their legs over the overpass and blow bubbles at the cars passing below, like they were seventeen and about to have an amazing amount of fun.