[Tangled] The Snuggly Duckling Finishing School of Romance 7/?
So I didn't get the promotion at work (new boss will start in January), but I had an amazing time with friends yesterday, I'm off tomorrow, The Hush Sound is back together, I get new albums from A Fine Frenzy and ZZ Ward this week, I'm thoroughly enjoying Juliet Marillier's Heart's Blood, and I've done some writing.
Title: The Snuggly Duckling Finishing School of Romance
Status: Incomplete Series Fic
Date Chapter Completed: October 14, 2012
Series: Disney's Tangled
Genres: Humor, Romance, Buddyfic
Rating: 10+ for a little language and mild sexual references
Pairing: Eugene/Rapunzel
Summary: Who would've thought that the best teachers in the ways of the heart would be hulking, hairy, tattooed, walking armories? Eugene plans to pop the question to Rapunzel on her birthday, that is, if he can survive the pub thugs' assistance.
Parts I | II | III | IV | V | VI
We're clear that there is no actual plot to this, right? It's just all Eugene humiliation all the time. And if you would like some truly awesome finger or hand puppets of your own, check out Folkmanis for all of your adorable hollow-plush-animal needs.
Love Battle, Round 2: Elocution and Pillow Talk: Puppet Mastery with Fang!
It's several hours past the dawn of a brand new day when I slink through the door of the Snuggly Duckling, my eyes sliding of their own accord first to and then far away from the scorch marks on the hallway leading into the back kitchen. Visible from the doorway, huh? Oops. Oh well, go big or go home, I always say. In the case of my dessert fireball of doom, I did both.
Many pairs of curious eyes follow me and the pub owner outright glares at me as I cringe my way to the bar, and I can't really blame him after yesterday's debacle. Actually, wait, yes, I can. It's totally not my fault, man. You're the one who opened a bar catering to a rough and tumble clientele. Why wouldn't you expect more kitchen fires? Think of the all boiling oil this place has seen! And then, as a natural consequence of unexpected, more mundane kitchen fires, no one should be surprised when a newbie cook freaks out because his cherry dessert is blazing and no one else seems to care and so he throws flour on the fire. I thought it would smother it. I didn't know I'd make flour bombs. Practical explosives weren't covered in Thievery 101.
"Took you long enough to get here!"
Oh good, however displeased everyone else in the world may be, Big Nose is far from deterred by yesterday's minor setback. There's nothing like a little arson and inferno and some big, big bangs to be a complete mood killer amongst normal people, but with these guys it's like a warm-up or trust building exercise.
As his arm loops around my jugular, I cast silent pleas to the filthy, smoke-stained ceiling. Simple! Let today be something simple, please!
I resign myself to Big Nose's clutches and go limp in his hands as he hauls me over to where Fang's little puppet palace stands as tall as a normal man and five times as wide. It is, of course, the width of only two thugs. These guys are built.
I try to think of what I know of Fang. It's very little. It's probably not really that he's such a forgettable guy-no thug could be-but more that I haven't really seen him out and about very often on my scant visits. He does spend a surprising amount of time behind that fancy box of his.
As we approach, two dolls pop up on the stage, one a generic knight puppet, the other a generic knight puppet with gobs of yellow yarn glued to its head. Gee, I wonder who they're supposed to be. While I watch, the two puppets bounce around one another in a reasonable facsimile of drunken dancing, stop to suddenly smash their faces together in a passionate kiss, and then fall together in a wriggling, moaning heap. I can feel the red creeping up my chest and neck to suffuse my face.
"She doesn't look like that anymore!" I somehow manage to grind out between clenched teeth as Shorty pops up above the stage with a face-splitting leer. My relationship with Rapunzel isn't like that… yet… but only because I can't figure out how to get it that far.
"Hey there, lover boy," he slurs, "you finally ready to get down to business?"
Another puppet appears, and unfortunately Shorty doesn't have quite enough arms to account for it. This time it's... well, I think it might be intended as a dragon. It's got painted scales and sharp teeth and teeny tiny wings, but the whole thing looks a bit flattened, like a bat mated with an alligator mated with a salamander.
"Today," Fang's voice-it has to be Fang's voice; I don't recognize it as anyone else's and it rings with the distinct cadences of The Teacher-announced, " you will be working on the words of the proposal itself."
Speech lessons. Speech lessons from a man hiding behind the guise of a pancake reptile. Great. Why not?
I step forward, resigned to my fate and prepared to do my duty and take up my own puppet before I'm unpleasantly and forcibly required to do so, and that's a mistake. You see, the puppet show loses some of its magic if conducted outside the bounds of the puppet theater. And we just absolutely, positively cannot have that!
Fang's free arm seizes my collar while Big Nose’s foot implants itself in my derriere. There is a sudden flip of the world upon its axis, and I am behind the theater, flat on my back and wheezing, surrounded by enormous pillows, with Shorty perched gleefully on my chest.
"Darling!" he exclaims with a waggle of tufted eyebrows, and I barely manage to lunge away from his puckered lips. The chaos and horrors that follow include Shorty repeatedly lunging at my face like a stubby, booze-soaked over-amorous snake and me discovering just how far I can jerk my head and neck to the side, forward, back, and upside down without wrenching them from my body. Our altercation is thankfully brief, or I think my head may have actually fallen off my shoulders, and it ends, as these things do, in exhaustion and concussion when Fang and Big Nose grow tired of our games and smack us both. I consider fainting but that would be unmanly, and certainly I must strive to be the manliest of men in this crowd.
"Say the words," Fang says patiently, shoving the generic knight puppet down over my hand.
"But I really-"
"SAY IT!" he roars and Shorty tumbles off my stomach with a squeak.
"I'm sorry!" I'm pretty horrified myself so I rush to assure Fang.
"Not those words. What will you say to Rapunzel? Look, she's right here looking at you with those adoring green eyes."
Shorty obligingly bats his eyes and coos, clutching my bicep against his thankfully clothed chest.
"Yeah," Big Nose chimes in. "How will you tell her of your love and devotion and then ask her to be yours body and soul until the end of both your days?"
Oh, gag me.
"Okay, first of all, you? You sound like a creep. And not a romantic creep, just the creepiest kind of creep. Rapunzel already thought I was a creep once, and I'm not too keen to relive those happy memories."
"Hmph, I was engaged before you were," Big Nose points out smugly, and I weigh the consequences of smashing my fist into his face, ultimately deciding that the benefits wouldn't outweigh my losses.
"Secondly," I forge on, "I really don't think we're going to be in this situation when it happens."
At this point in the hell I call my life I'm face to face with Shorty, our heads on a single pillow, his rank breath, so like decomposing onions and pig brains, searing the tender innards of my nostrils and making my eyes water. Scratch that, with the way I'm sweating, he must be searing every mucus membrane I have, and there are a surprising lot of those on my face.
Because there's no way any of this could actually be making me nervous. None, nada, zero, zilch.
"You don't have to use his ideas. Your speech should be special, unique, impassioned," Fang interjects. "But now that you've got her where you want her, what are you going to tell her?"
They seriously think I'm going to be proposing in a bed? Hahaha, yeah, in my dreams.
But I do have the threat of blows raining down upon my shapely and defenseless head if I don't say something, so I mumble.
"What was that?" Shorty asks, as the two sitting over us lean in closer.
I mumble a little bit louder.
"Yes, yes, one more time," Fang encourages me, tapping on the side of my jaw. "Open your mouth wider."
I know Big Nose and Shorty are idiots, and maybe Fang is too, so there's less shame in embarrassing myself in front of them, but I'm hyperaware of the silent, listening audience gathered around the bar out of my sight. I don't want to even know what they're thinking about all this. Well, actually I do, but I'm pretty sure the knowledge would leave me mortified, petrified, all kinds of -fied.
I try again, obediently opening my mouth more, but the volume still doesn't noticeably increase.
"I can't hear you!" Shorty singsongs out.
And again.
"Not working!"
I grit my teeth and swallow convulsively, memories of past failures rising and clogging in my throat. We won't even address the crushing embarrassment of my vision being filled with a beaming, expectant Shorty in a dress, yellow today. I should perhaps be concerned that he seems to have such a collection, but I block those thoughts out, close my eyes.
"Rapunzel." I get her name out okay, but it's all downhill from there. "I loveyouwillyoumarryme?"
Shorty throws his arms around my neck and scoots in close. "You do get to breathe, you know."
No, no, I don't really think that's a viable option right now, given that I'm choking on his body odor.
I shake my head, my own arms wrapped around him, trying to pry him off me, but it's as useless as attempting to remove a barnacle with a feather.
Shorty twists in my arms to stare up at our watchers. In a voice dripping with scorn, he announces, "He can't talk."
"We noticed. It's most disappointing," Fang responds while Big Nose chuckles in agreement.
They're implying that I am wimpy, spineless, and cowardly.
I feel so vulnerable. I need to go grab and snuggle Rapunzel, to cleanse the palate, as it were. But I'm also angry. I don't know if Fang has a girlfriend, but I'm positive I've had more ladies lovestruck and swooning in a day than Big Nose has had in his entire life. Who do these guys think they are? Who do they think I am?
"Of course I can talk!" For emphasis I bellow, roar, yodel. Okay, I don't yodel. But I am really, obnoxiously loud, which has the unexpected benefit of causing Shorty to clap his hands to his ears.
I'm free! Just like that I’m back in business and rolling to my knees. It's time to blow this puppet stand, and I would have succeed too, if not for the sudden iron grip on my generic knight puppet-garbed wrist that made it quite clear that no one absconds with Fang's puppets.
"Propose." Fang cuts in, short and to the point, which you wouldn't so much think a puppet master would be. "Now."
I glare.
He glares harder.
"Rapunzel, I loveyouwillyoumarryme?"
"Again."
"Rapunzel, I loveyouwillyoumarryme?"
"This isn't going to work!" Big Nose throws his hands in the air, one covered with a bright pink poodle, the other a unicorn. I hadn't realized he was getting in some puppet action of his own while I was being tortured, and from the curl of Fang's lip, I don't think he realized it either. He snatches the poodle from Big Nose's hand and then beckons to me.
"Come here, come talk to the puppet."
But a pink poodle? Really?
"Look, pal, there is no way I'm-"
"Puppet, talking, now." The familiar snarl of Hookhand interrupts us all, and I wince at the flash of metal at my jawline.
"No need to be hostile, big fella. You know I'm always happy to see you."
"And I know you need to start seriously trying to marry Rapunzel." The hook presses into the soft flesh beneath my chin. "So start. Now."
"Rapunzel, I love you," I say very carefully, as one does when one has a sharp hook waiting to cut out one's tongue from underneath. That's the simpler part out of the way, and I am indeed starting to breathe a bit between the words now. Fear of stabbing just does that me. Now for the toughie. "Willyoumarryme?"
And… nope.
Hookhand growls, but Fang waves him away. "This is progress. Try singing it out."
The bad part is, of course, that he's serious about the singing.
And that's how I spend the next three hours, in a pile of cushions, with a puppet on one hand and the other hand on my diaphragm as Fang rattles on about proper vocal control, saying and singing and screaming and crying the same set of eight words over and over again to an endless stream of progressively more ridiculous puppets.
But I do get the words out, finally.
"Rapunzel, I love you. Will you marry me?"
Please say yes, please say yes, please, please, please say yes.
I find myself kneeling on the floor in proper gallant courtier proposal mode, singing my love to Shorty, our fingers interlocked so that my generic knight puppet hugs the Rapunzel avatar puppet. Shorty trills back in falsetto and pounces my around my neck.
"Yes! Yes! Ooh, I'm going to finally be a bride!"
This is my life, folks. I'm going to be a king.
Title: The Snuggly Duckling Finishing School of Romance
Status: Incomplete Series Fic
Date Chapter Completed: October 14, 2012
Series: Disney's Tangled
Genres: Humor, Romance, Buddyfic
Rating: 10+ for a little language and mild sexual references
Pairing: Eugene/Rapunzel
Summary: Who would've thought that the best teachers in the ways of the heart would be hulking, hairy, tattooed, walking armories? Eugene plans to pop the question to Rapunzel on her birthday, that is, if he can survive the pub thugs' assistance.
Parts I | II | III | IV | V | VI
We're clear that there is no actual plot to this, right? It's just all Eugene humiliation all the time. And if you would like some truly awesome finger or hand puppets of your own, check out Folkmanis for all of your adorable hollow-plush-animal needs.
Love Battle, Round 2: Elocution and Pillow Talk: Puppet Mastery with Fang!
It's several hours past the dawn of a brand new day when I slink through the door of the Snuggly Duckling, my eyes sliding of their own accord first to and then far away from the scorch marks on the hallway leading into the back kitchen. Visible from the doorway, huh? Oops. Oh well, go big or go home, I always say. In the case of my dessert fireball of doom, I did both.
Many pairs of curious eyes follow me and the pub owner outright glares at me as I cringe my way to the bar, and I can't really blame him after yesterday's debacle. Actually, wait, yes, I can. It's totally not my fault, man. You're the one who opened a bar catering to a rough and tumble clientele. Why wouldn't you expect more kitchen fires? Think of the all boiling oil this place has seen! And then, as a natural consequence of unexpected, more mundane kitchen fires, no one should be surprised when a newbie cook freaks out because his cherry dessert is blazing and no one else seems to care and so he throws flour on the fire. I thought it would smother it. I didn't know I'd make flour bombs. Practical explosives weren't covered in Thievery 101.
"Took you long enough to get here!"
Oh good, however displeased everyone else in the world may be, Big Nose is far from deterred by yesterday's minor setback. There's nothing like a little arson and inferno and some big, big bangs to be a complete mood killer amongst normal people, but with these guys it's like a warm-up or trust building exercise.
As his arm loops around my jugular, I cast silent pleas to the filthy, smoke-stained ceiling. Simple! Let today be something simple, please!
I resign myself to Big Nose's clutches and go limp in his hands as he hauls me over to where Fang's little puppet palace stands as tall as a normal man and five times as wide. It is, of course, the width of only two thugs. These guys are built.
I try to think of what I know of Fang. It's very little. It's probably not really that he's such a forgettable guy-no thug could be-but more that I haven't really seen him out and about very often on my scant visits. He does spend a surprising amount of time behind that fancy box of his.
As we approach, two dolls pop up on the stage, one a generic knight puppet, the other a generic knight puppet with gobs of yellow yarn glued to its head. Gee, I wonder who they're supposed to be. While I watch, the two puppets bounce around one another in a reasonable facsimile of drunken dancing, stop to suddenly smash their faces together in a passionate kiss, and then fall together in a wriggling, moaning heap. I can feel the red creeping up my chest and neck to suffuse my face.
"She doesn't look like that anymore!" I somehow manage to grind out between clenched teeth as Shorty pops up above the stage with a face-splitting leer. My relationship with Rapunzel isn't like that… yet… but only because I can't figure out how to get it that far.
"Hey there, lover boy," he slurs, "you finally ready to get down to business?"
Another puppet appears, and unfortunately Shorty doesn't have quite enough arms to account for it. This time it's... well, I think it might be intended as a dragon. It's got painted scales and sharp teeth and teeny tiny wings, but the whole thing looks a bit flattened, like a bat mated with an alligator mated with a salamander.
"Today," Fang's voice-it has to be Fang's voice; I don't recognize it as anyone else's and it rings with the distinct cadences of The Teacher-announced, " you will be working on the words of the proposal itself."
Speech lessons. Speech lessons from a man hiding behind the guise of a pancake reptile. Great. Why not?
I step forward, resigned to my fate and prepared to do my duty and take up my own puppet before I'm unpleasantly and forcibly required to do so, and that's a mistake. You see, the puppet show loses some of its magic if conducted outside the bounds of the puppet theater. And we just absolutely, positively cannot have that!
Fang's free arm seizes my collar while Big Nose’s foot implants itself in my derriere. There is a sudden flip of the world upon its axis, and I am behind the theater, flat on my back and wheezing, surrounded by enormous pillows, with Shorty perched gleefully on my chest.
"Darling!" he exclaims with a waggle of tufted eyebrows, and I barely manage to lunge away from his puckered lips. The chaos and horrors that follow include Shorty repeatedly lunging at my face like a stubby, booze-soaked over-amorous snake and me discovering just how far I can jerk my head and neck to the side, forward, back, and upside down without wrenching them from my body. Our altercation is thankfully brief, or I think my head may have actually fallen off my shoulders, and it ends, as these things do, in exhaustion and concussion when Fang and Big Nose grow tired of our games and smack us both. I consider fainting but that would be unmanly, and certainly I must strive to be the manliest of men in this crowd.
"Say the words," Fang says patiently, shoving the generic knight puppet down over my hand.
"But I really-"
"SAY IT!" he roars and Shorty tumbles off my stomach with a squeak.
"I'm sorry!" I'm pretty horrified myself so I rush to assure Fang.
"Not those words. What will you say to Rapunzel? Look, she's right here looking at you with those adoring green eyes."
Shorty obligingly bats his eyes and coos, clutching my bicep against his thankfully clothed chest.
"Yeah," Big Nose chimes in. "How will you tell her of your love and devotion and then ask her to be yours body and soul until the end of both your days?"
Oh, gag me.
"Okay, first of all, you? You sound like a creep. And not a romantic creep, just the creepiest kind of creep. Rapunzel already thought I was a creep once, and I'm not too keen to relive those happy memories."
"Hmph, I was engaged before you were," Big Nose points out smugly, and I weigh the consequences of smashing my fist into his face, ultimately deciding that the benefits wouldn't outweigh my losses.
"Secondly," I forge on, "I really don't think we're going to be in this situation when it happens."
At this point in the hell I call my life I'm face to face with Shorty, our heads on a single pillow, his rank breath, so like decomposing onions and pig brains, searing the tender innards of my nostrils and making my eyes water. Scratch that, with the way I'm sweating, he must be searing every mucus membrane I have, and there are a surprising lot of those on my face.
Because there's no way any of this could actually be making me nervous. None, nada, zero, zilch.
"You don't have to use his ideas. Your speech should be special, unique, impassioned," Fang interjects. "But now that you've got her where you want her, what are you going to tell her?"
They seriously think I'm going to be proposing in a bed? Hahaha, yeah, in my dreams.
But I do have the threat of blows raining down upon my shapely and defenseless head if I don't say something, so I mumble.
"What was that?" Shorty asks, as the two sitting over us lean in closer.
I mumble a little bit louder.
"Yes, yes, one more time," Fang encourages me, tapping on the side of my jaw. "Open your mouth wider."
I know Big Nose and Shorty are idiots, and maybe Fang is too, so there's less shame in embarrassing myself in front of them, but I'm hyperaware of the silent, listening audience gathered around the bar out of my sight. I don't want to even know what they're thinking about all this. Well, actually I do, but I'm pretty sure the knowledge would leave me mortified, petrified, all kinds of -fied.
I try again, obediently opening my mouth more, but the volume still doesn't noticeably increase.
"I can't hear you!" Shorty singsongs out.
And again.
"Not working!"
I grit my teeth and swallow convulsively, memories of past failures rising and clogging in my throat. We won't even address the crushing embarrassment of my vision being filled with a beaming, expectant Shorty in a dress, yellow today. I should perhaps be concerned that he seems to have such a collection, but I block those thoughts out, close my eyes.
"Rapunzel." I get her name out okay, but it's all downhill from there. "I loveyouwillyoumarryme?"
Shorty throws his arms around my neck and scoots in close. "You do get to breathe, you know."
No, no, I don't really think that's a viable option right now, given that I'm choking on his body odor.
I shake my head, my own arms wrapped around him, trying to pry him off me, but it's as useless as attempting to remove a barnacle with a feather.
Shorty twists in my arms to stare up at our watchers. In a voice dripping with scorn, he announces, "He can't talk."
"We noticed. It's most disappointing," Fang responds while Big Nose chuckles in agreement.
They're implying that I am wimpy, spineless, and cowardly.
I feel so vulnerable. I need to go grab and snuggle Rapunzel, to cleanse the palate, as it were. But I'm also angry. I don't know if Fang has a girlfriend, but I'm positive I've had more ladies lovestruck and swooning in a day than Big Nose has had in his entire life. Who do these guys think they are? Who do they think I am?
"Of course I can talk!" For emphasis I bellow, roar, yodel. Okay, I don't yodel. But I am really, obnoxiously loud, which has the unexpected benefit of causing Shorty to clap his hands to his ears.
I'm free! Just like that I’m back in business and rolling to my knees. It's time to blow this puppet stand, and I would have succeed too, if not for the sudden iron grip on my generic knight puppet-garbed wrist that made it quite clear that no one absconds with Fang's puppets.
"Propose." Fang cuts in, short and to the point, which you wouldn't so much think a puppet master would be. "Now."
I glare.
He glares harder.
"Rapunzel, I loveyouwillyoumarryme?"
"Again."
"Rapunzel, I loveyouwillyoumarryme?"
"This isn't going to work!" Big Nose throws his hands in the air, one covered with a bright pink poodle, the other a unicorn. I hadn't realized he was getting in some puppet action of his own while I was being tortured, and from the curl of Fang's lip, I don't think he realized it either. He snatches the poodle from Big Nose's hand and then beckons to me.
"Come here, come talk to the puppet."
But a pink poodle? Really?
"Look, pal, there is no way I'm-"
"Puppet, talking, now." The familiar snarl of Hookhand interrupts us all, and I wince at the flash of metal at my jawline.
"No need to be hostile, big fella. You know I'm always happy to see you."
"And I know you need to start seriously trying to marry Rapunzel." The hook presses into the soft flesh beneath my chin. "So start. Now."
"Rapunzel, I love you," I say very carefully, as one does when one has a sharp hook waiting to cut out one's tongue from underneath. That's the simpler part out of the way, and I am indeed starting to breathe a bit between the words now. Fear of stabbing just does that me. Now for the toughie. "Willyoumarryme?"
And… nope.
Hookhand growls, but Fang waves him away. "This is progress. Try singing it out."
The bad part is, of course, that he's serious about the singing.
And that's how I spend the next three hours, in a pile of cushions, with a puppet on one hand and the other hand on my diaphragm as Fang rattles on about proper vocal control, saying and singing and screaming and crying the same set of eight words over and over again to an endless stream of progressively more ridiculous puppets.
But I do get the words out, finally.
"Rapunzel, I love you. Will you marry me?"
Please say yes, please say yes, please, please, please say yes.
I find myself kneeling on the floor in proper gallant courtier proposal mode, singing my love to Shorty, our fingers interlocked so that my generic knight puppet hugs the Rapunzel avatar puppet. Shorty trills back in falsetto and pounces my around my neck.
"Yes! Yes! Ooh, I'm going to finally be a bride!"
This is my life, folks. I'm going to be a king.