Fic: Genius Loci (Revenge, Nolan/Jack)
This has been sitting around forever. Time to set it free!
Title: Genius Loci
Fandom: Revenge
Pairing/Characters: Nolan/Jack, The Amanda (the boat)
Rating: NC-17 for explicit sex
Warnings/enticements: None standard.
Spoilers: Takes place during "Perception."
Summary: The Amanda looks after her two drunken sailors.
Word count: about 2100.
Disclaimers: Revenge is the intellectual property of ABC, Temple Hill, and Page Fright. This original work of fan fiction is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License; attribution should include a link to this post. This story is a labor of love, not money, so it's protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976.
Notes: Thanks to fox1013 for continuing to encourage me and then beta reading.
*
Amanda's captain was sad. She could feel his moods and wondered if this was peculiar to their relationship, or if all boats had this relationship to the humans who sailed them. She swayed in the placid midsummer breeze, waiting for him, and he came early, abandoning his bar, day drinking on the deck, petting her prow and telling Amanda she was the only girl who had ever loved him back. Amanda couldn't understand how that could be true. For one thing, she wasn't a girl, except metaphorically.
Jack cried, and he talked to Amanda, to himself. He talked about an Amanda who was a girl, not a boat, but not the girl he'd named Amanda after. It all got confusing. Amanda, the boat, lost track. She could do nothing except rock him gently and bear his weight against the sea.
When he drank, he left mementos behind: empty beer cans and whiskey bottles. Amanda liked the way they clattered and clinked as they rolled up and down her deck, as if he were there.
There was another man in Amanda's life now. Not her captain, but he had the keys. He didn't claim any real ownership of her, but she was still his, in some official human way that she couldn't understand. Like Jack, he boarded Amanda to be alone. He cleaned up Jack's garbage, clucking his tongue. Amanda didn't love him the way she loved Jack, but she admired his fastidiousness and embraced his need for solitude.
He installed a wireless router below decks. It buzzed pleasantly.
Amanda's men - her captain and her whatever-he-was - were arguing on the dock as if she were not watching. "When are you going to see that you're better off?" her whatever, Nolan, was saying. "I can't believe you thought you could trust that girl."
"I loved that girl," Jack said, with the passion and earnestness that most endeared him to Amanda.
"Yes, and you'll love another girl tomorrow. Because that's how you are. Weren't you in love with Emily the other day?" Nolan was mean. Amanda admired that about him, but it was why she hoped she would never have to be solely his.
"That doesn't mean I loved her less," Jack said.
Nolan rubbed his chin. "You know, I can't find a way to disagree with that. But." He paused to let the sea air into the conversation, the yelps of gulls and the whistle of the wind over the Sound. "You could do better than Wild Turkey. Especially before noon."
Jack laughed. Amanda hadn't heard that sound in a while. Like surface ripples when it was just beginning to rain, light and ominous.
"Got any suggestions?" Jack said.
"No, but if you have half an hour, I am capable of driving myself to a liquor store."
Jack folded his arms. 'What do you want this time, Nolan?"
"I want to get drunk on my boat," Nolan said. Amanda suspected that was not all he wished to accomplish. Amanda suspected that Nolan was making sure it was clear he had other motives and that he was not going to give them away. Nolan, like Jack, was unsubtle. Amanda didn't know what she would do if she ever came into the possession of a human whose mind she could not read so easily.
After Nolan left, Jack boarded Amanda to take off his shirt and lie on her deck. She loved the warmth of his body against her cool fiberglass. He fell asleep there, between her and the sun.
When Nolan returned, he stepped too heavily on her, making her pitch to starboard, stirring up waves. Together, the men raised her anchor and sailed her out into the open water. Amanda normally enjoyed being sailed - it was what she was designed for, after all - but she knew they would be drinking and did not trust them to guide her back to the dock. She protested as well as she could, resisting tack and seeking out eddies of calm water. But ultimately, she obeyed the wind.
Nolan had two large paper sacks and a small plastic bag. He displayed their contents to Jack as if they held religious significance. "I tried to represent the spectrum. Jack Daniels, the depressed day drinking classic. Andong Soju, if you're feeling exotic. Cinnamon Schnapps, if your despair is so deep that all you want is burning pie-flavored misery. Chicken-walnut salad and bread from that deli in Amagansett, if you decide to go off your liquid diet long enough for lunch. And last but not least, if you promise not to question my motives - Johnnie Walker Blue."
Jack gasped audibly. "I... promise not to question your motives."
They dropped Amanda's anchor in a placid pool of nowhere, land in sight but distant. She let the wind and sea caress her. They opened the Johnnie Walker first, trading gulps as if it were cheap, as if it were water. Then, they were alternating the Jack Daniels and the Schnapps, until Jack brought cups up from the hold and they mixed the two together. Amanda resigned herself to never seeing the dock again, or to a humiliating police tow.
Amanda was thinking about the mortification of tugboats when she noticed that they'd put down the liquor, that something else was happening. She hoped it wouldn't involve vomiting on her deck. But they weren't drunk to the point of illness, only to the point of overdramatic honesty. "So I'm an trusting person," Jack was saying. "I thought that was a good quality. Shouldn't that be a good quality?"
"It's certainly a rare one," Nolan replied.
"So that's what I'm supposed to do?" It wasn't clear whether Jack was talking to Nolan or shouting at the wind. "Just not trust people?"
"You'll get better with practice. Start small. Try not trusting me."
"I already don't trust you," Jack said. Amanda wished she could convey to him that if he didn't trust Nolan, he shouldn't have sailed her into open water and gotten drunk with him. But this was the point being made: Jack was a trusting person, and it should have been a virtue.
"Look." Nolan came up behind Jack, curling like a cat to whisper in his ear. "Not as hard as you thought."
"Oh. That's what you brought me out here for. And got me drunk. See? Trusting." But Jack didn't move and didn't turn around.
Nolan kissed Jack's cheek sharply, as if lighting a match, and strolled away. He leaned against the mast and stared out at the sea.
First of all, I didn't bring you. You sailed yourself," Nolan said. "And second of all. I visited you because you're useless when you're like this. There are few enough good people as it is, and it's that much more difficult if you won't make yourself useful."
Jack was silent. Amanda steeled herself for a tearful drinking binge when Nolan was gone, which would be soon, because Jack would summon just enough sobriety to steer her home and kick Nolan off.
"I didn't mean to insult you," Nolan said.
"I didn't mean to be insulted." Jack smiled a little; Amanda was relieved to see him calmer. "But I've been rejected a lot lately."
"Do you... want me to not reject you?" Nolan crept closer to Jack, invading his space and concentrating their weight in so small a space that Amanda had to correct her balance.
"I don't know. Kind of. I'm thinking - I've had bad enough luck with women lately, if there's an alternative, I'll take it."
Nolan squinted at him. "So you want me to be your experiment?"
"Something like that," Jack said.
"Better than blackmail," Nolan murmured. He turned Jack's face toward his with the flick of a finger, then sat still, looking into Jack's eyes as if there were no world beyond them.
Their first few kisses were rough, as if they were finishing an old argument, but they found their stride. Amanda normally watched them protectively, affectionately, but now her motives turned toward fascination. She had seen sex before but could not claim to understand it. Both Jack and Nolan had masturbated in her hold, Jack to pictures of girls in underwear and Nolan to computer videos of men in acrobatic configurations. Less frequently, Jack had brought women aboard, most recently the girl who shared Amanda's name. Amanda understood the uses of sex, always for pleasure and sometimes for closeness between people, but she did not see why they were ashamed of it, why they hid it. She thought people should celebrate what gave them joy.
Jack and Nolan lay across the benches of her deck, bare chests pressed flat together, Jack's arms around Nolan's waist holding them there. They kissed as if it were the remedy for talking, as if taking their tongues out of each other's mouths might make them erupt in words. Nolan fumbled one-handed with Jack's belt, not incompetently but slowly, giving fair warning. He rubbed Jack's cock through his boxers, Jack swelling against the fabric, staining it with drops of precum.
"Last chance to say you're straight and back out," Nolan said.
Jack didn't reply, and his silence might have spoken consent, but Nolan didn't allow it to. He waited with his hand around Jack's cock until Jack said, "I'm not backing out."
"Then sit up."
Jack obeyed Nolan, and Nolan knelt below him on the deck. "You have a beautiful body," Nolan said as he rolled Jack's boxers down his legs. "I hope you work hard for it."
This time, Jack's silence won out against Nolan's patience. It amazed Amanda how in this position of power, hand cradling Jack's balls and mouth deep around Jack's cock, Nolan was the vulnerable one. But also the skilled one, the hotshot prodigy, bobbing his head and sucking hard until Jack came, his orgasm a thing Nolan had programmed and assembled, an accomplishment.
Self-satisfied, the sun reflecting golden off his hair, Nolan stood and walked away.
"Where are you going?" A yawn distorted Jack's words.
"Below deck to take care of myself," Nolan said with his back turned.
"You don't have to do that."
"Let me," Nolan said.
Jack came up behind him, pressing his spent cock up against Nolan's ass, running his hands over Nolan's chest. "You know I'm not the kind of guy to do that."
"Hmm," Nolan said. Knowing he was unsteady on his feet, Amanda calmed the ripples under her hull. "You know, you're lucky. Nobility makes me hard." He took Jack's hand and guided it down his lean stomach to his cock. Jack nudged Nolan's erection to pop out of the fly of his briefs. "Hot but uncomfortable," Nolan said, and he took the briefs off. He raised Jack's hand to his mouth, licked it wet, and returned it to his own cock, leading Jack in each stroke, each flick of the wrist. Jack held him close, a firm arm bracing his chest. He feathered kisses along the back of Nolan's neck. Amanda held them steady and kept them safe.
Nolan encouraged Jack, "That's good, that's good," until the words became a mantra, a guide in themselves, and he whispered it a few more times after he came, lingering in Jack's embrace.
They lay naked on Amanda's deck, the sunshine like a blanket over them. Amanda studied the salt of their skin, trying to taste the vestiges of pleasure in it.
"Just to be clear," Nolan said, lacing his fingers in Jack's, "I'm not in love with you, and I don't want to be."
"Well." Jack drew out the syllable. "Thanks for not leading me on. It's refreshing."
"I've been trying to be your friend. I'm not doing such a great job, obviously."
"You're doing fine." Jack squeezed Nolan's hand. "I mean, you got me to knock off the binge crying."
"Until the next girl breaks your heart, at least," Nolan said.
"And your dick will be right there waiting?"
"Might be." Nolan pulled his hand away and got to his feet. As he put his clothes back on, he said, "No promises."
"No promises," Jack echoed. "Words to live by."
The wind had shifted, and Amanda yielded to it, letting it pitch her back and forth. Jack dressed and set busily about pointing her home. His proud Amanda, carrying her creation back to shore, this alliance she'd build with her own sails.
Title: Genius Loci
Fandom: Revenge
Pairing/Characters: Nolan/Jack, The Amanda (the boat)
Rating: NC-17 for explicit sex
Warnings/enticements: None standard.
Spoilers: Takes place during "Perception."
Summary: The Amanda looks after her two drunken sailors.
Word count: about 2100.
Disclaimers: Revenge is the intellectual property of ABC, Temple Hill, and Page Fright. This original work of fan fiction is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License; attribution should include a link to this post. This story is a labor of love, not money, so it's protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976.
Notes: Thanks to fox1013 for continuing to encourage me and then beta reading.
*
Amanda's captain was sad. She could feel his moods and wondered if this was peculiar to their relationship, or if all boats had this relationship to the humans who sailed them. She swayed in the placid midsummer breeze, waiting for him, and he came early, abandoning his bar, day drinking on the deck, petting her prow and telling Amanda she was the only girl who had ever loved him back. Amanda couldn't understand how that could be true. For one thing, she wasn't a girl, except metaphorically.
Jack cried, and he talked to Amanda, to himself. He talked about an Amanda who was a girl, not a boat, but not the girl he'd named Amanda after. It all got confusing. Amanda, the boat, lost track. She could do nothing except rock him gently and bear his weight against the sea.
When he drank, he left mementos behind: empty beer cans and whiskey bottles. Amanda liked the way they clattered and clinked as they rolled up and down her deck, as if he were there.
There was another man in Amanda's life now. Not her captain, but he had the keys. He didn't claim any real ownership of her, but she was still his, in some official human way that she couldn't understand. Like Jack, he boarded Amanda to be alone. He cleaned up Jack's garbage, clucking his tongue. Amanda didn't love him the way she loved Jack, but she admired his fastidiousness and embraced his need for solitude.
He installed a wireless router below decks. It buzzed pleasantly.
Amanda's men - her captain and her whatever-he-was - were arguing on the dock as if she were not watching. "When are you going to see that you're better off?" her whatever, Nolan, was saying. "I can't believe you thought you could trust that girl."
"I loved that girl," Jack said, with the passion and earnestness that most endeared him to Amanda.
"Yes, and you'll love another girl tomorrow. Because that's how you are. Weren't you in love with Emily the other day?" Nolan was mean. Amanda admired that about him, but it was why she hoped she would never have to be solely his.
"That doesn't mean I loved her less," Jack said.
Nolan rubbed his chin. "You know, I can't find a way to disagree with that. But." He paused to let the sea air into the conversation, the yelps of gulls and the whistle of the wind over the Sound. "You could do better than Wild Turkey. Especially before noon."
Jack laughed. Amanda hadn't heard that sound in a while. Like surface ripples when it was just beginning to rain, light and ominous.
"Got any suggestions?" Jack said.
"No, but if you have half an hour, I am capable of driving myself to a liquor store."
Jack folded his arms. 'What do you want this time, Nolan?"
"I want to get drunk on my boat," Nolan said. Amanda suspected that was not all he wished to accomplish. Amanda suspected that Nolan was making sure it was clear he had other motives and that he was not going to give them away. Nolan, like Jack, was unsubtle. Amanda didn't know what she would do if she ever came into the possession of a human whose mind she could not read so easily.
After Nolan left, Jack boarded Amanda to take off his shirt and lie on her deck. She loved the warmth of his body against her cool fiberglass. He fell asleep there, between her and the sun.
When Nolan returned, he stepped too heavily on her, making her pitch to starboard, stirring up waves. Together, the men raised her anchor and sailed her out into the open water. Amanda normally enjoyed being sailed - it was what she was designed for, after all - but she knew they would be drinking and did not trust them to guide her back to the dock. She protested as well as she could, resisting tack and seeking out eddies of calm water. But ultimately, she obeyed the wind.
Nolan had two large paper sacks and a small plastic bag. He displayed their contents to Jack as if they held religious significance. "I tried to represent the spectrum. Jack Daniels, the depressed day drinking classic. Andong Soju, if you're feeling exotic. Cinnamon Schnapps, if your despair is so deep that all you want is burning pie-flavored misery. Chicken-walnut salad and bread from that deli in Amagansett, if you decide to go off your liquid diet long enough for lunch. And last but not least, if you promise not to question my motives - Johnnie Walker Blue."
Jack gasped audibly. "I... promise not to question your motives."
They dropped Amanda's anchor in a placid pool of nowhere, land in sight but distant. She let the wind and sea caress her. They opened the Johnnie Walker first, trading gulps as if it were cheap, as if it were water. Then, they were alternating the Jack Daniels and the Schnapps, until Jack brought cups up from the hold and they mixed the two together. Amanda resigned herself to never seeing the dock again, or to a humiliating police tow.
Amanda was thinking about the mortification of tugboats when she noticed that they'd put down the liquor, that something else was happening. She hoped it wouldn't involve vomiting on her deck. But they weren't drunk to the point of illness, only to the point of overdramatic honesty. "So I'm an trusting person," Jack was saying. "I thought that was a good quality. Shouldn't that be a good quality?"
"It's certainly a rare one," Nolan replied.
"So that's what I'm supposed to do?" It wasn't clear whether Jack was talking to Nolan or shouting at the wind. "Just not trust people?"
"You'll get better with practice. Start small. Try not trusting me."
"I already don't trust you," Jack said. Amanda wished she could convey to him that if he didn't trust Nolan, he shouldn't have sailed her into open water and gotten drunk with him. But this was the point being made: Jack was a trusting person, and it should have been a virtue.
"Look." Nolan came up behind Jack, curling like a cat to whisper in his ear. "Not as hard as you thought."
"Oh. That's what you brought me out here for. And got me drunk. See? Trusting." But Jack didn't move and didn't turn around.
Nolan kissed Jack's cheek sharply, as if lighting a match, and strolled away. He leaned against the mast and stared out at the sea.
First of all, I didn't bring you. You sailed yourself," Nolan said. "And second of all. I visited you because you're useless when you're like this. There are few enough good people as it is, and it's that much more difficult if you won't make yourself useful."
Jack was silent. Amanda steeled herself for a tearful drinking binge when Nolan was gone, which would be soon, because Jack would summon just enough sobriety to steer her home and kick Nolan off.
"I didn't mean to insult you," Nolan said.
"I didn't mean to be insulted." Jack smiled a little; Amanda was relieved to see him calmer. "But I've been rejected a lot lately."
"Do you... want me to not reject you?" Nolan crept closer to Jack, invading his space and concentrating their weight in so small a space that Amanda had to correct her balance.
"I don't know. Kind of. I'm thinking - I've had bad enough luck with women lately, if there's an alternative, I'll take it."
Nolan squinted at him. "So you want me to be your experiment?"
"Something like that," Jack said.
"Better than blackmail," Nolan murmured. He turned Jack's face toward his with the flick of a finger, then sat still, looking into Jack's eyes as if there were no world beyond them.
Their first few kisses were rough, as if they were finishing an old argument, but they found their stride. Amanda normally watched them protectively, affectionately, but now her motives turned toward fascination. She had seen sex before but could not claim to understand it. Both Jack and Nolan had masturbated in her hold, Jack to pictures of girls in underwear and Nolan to computer videos of men in acrobatic configurations. Less frequently, Jack had brought women aboard, most recently the girl who shared Amanda's name. Amanda understood the uses of sex, always for pleasure and sometimes for closeness between people, but she did not see why they were ashamed of it, why they hid it. She thought people should celebrate what gave them joy.
Jack and Nolan lay across the benches of her deck, bare chests pressed flat together, Jack's arms around Nolan's waist holding them there. They kissed as if it were the remedy for talking, as if taking their tongues out of each other's mouths might make them erupt in words. Nolan fumbled one-handed with Jack's belt, not incompetently but slowly, giving fair warning. He rubbed Jack's cock through his boxers, Jack swelling against the fabric, staining it with drops of precum.
"Last chance to say you're straight and back out," Nolan said.
Jack didn't reply, and his silence might have spoken consent, but Nolan didn't allow it to. He waited with his hand around Jack's cock until Jack said, "I'm not backing out."
"Then sit up."
Jack obeyed Nolan, and Nolan knelt below him on the deck. "You have a beautiful body," Nolan said as he rolled Jack's boxers down his legs. "I hope you work hard for it."
This time, Jack's silence won out against Nolan's patience. It amazed Amanda how in this position of power, hand cradling Jack's balls and mouth deep around Jack's cock, Nolan was the vulnerable one. But also the skilled one, the hotshot prodigy, bobbing his head and sucking hard until Jack came, his orgasm a thing Nolan had programmed and assembled, an accomplishment.
Self-satisfied, the sun reflecting golden off his hair, Nolan stood and walked away.
"Where are you going?" A yawn distorted Jack's words.
"Below deck to take care of myself," Nolan said with his back turned.
"You don't have to do that."
"Let me," Nolan said.
Jack came up behind him, pressing his spent cock up against Nolan's ass, running his hands over Nolan's chest. "You know I'm not the kind of guy to do that."
"Hmm," Nolan said. Knowing he was unsteady on his feet, Amanda calmed the ripples under her hull. "You know, you're lucky. Nobility makes me hard." He took Jack's hand and guided it down his lean stomach to his cock. Jack nudged Nolan's erection to pop out of the fly of his briefs. "Hot but uncomfortable," Nolan said, and he took the briefs off. He raised Jack's hand to his mouth, licked it wet, and returned it to his own cock, leading Jack in each stroke, each flick of the wrist. Jack held him close, a firm arm bracing his chest. He feathered kisses along the back of Nolan's neck. Amanda held them steady and kept them safe.
Nolan encouraged Jack, "That's good, that's good," until the words became a mantra, a guide in themselves, and he whispered it a few more times after he came, lingering in Jack's embrace.
They lay naked on Amanda's deck, the sunshine like a blanket over them. Amanda studied the salt of their skin, trying to taste the vestiges of pleasure in it.
"Just to be clear," Nolan said, lacing his fingers in Jack's, "I'm not in love with you, and I don't want to be."
"Well." Jack drew out the syllable. "Thanks for not leading me on. It's refreshing."
"I've been trying to be your friend. I'm not doing such a great job, obviously."
"You're doing fine." Jack squeezed Nolan's hand. "I mean, you got me to knock off the binge crying."
"Until the next girl breaks your heart, at least," Nolan said.
"And your dick will be right there waiting?"
"Might be." Nolan pulled his hand away and got to his feet. As he put his clothes back on, he said, "No promises."
"No promises," Jack echoed. "Words to live by."
The wind had shifted, and Amanda yielded to it, letting it pitch her back and forth. Jack dressed and set busily about pointing her home. His proud Amanda, carrying her creation back to shore, this alliance she'd build with her own sails.