Fic: Eaten Up in Miserable Circumstances
Title: Eaten Up in Miserable Circumstances
Author: gileonnen
Fandom: Pre-Richard II
Characters/Pairings: Richard, Anne, Robert; mentions of Richard/Anne and Richard/Robert
Rating: PG
Warnings: Casual references to a polyamorous relationship, academic wittering on
Summary: Richard had entertained dreams of revolutionizing the field of medieval studies, once. Now, he thinks that adequacy would do.
Author's notes: Written for angevin2, who long ago requested 'Richard writing his thesis' fic. Title from the conclusion of Mempricius's section in Lewis Thorpe's translation of the Historia Regum Britanniae.
Richard has begun finding strange slips of paper about his person. There is one folded in half in the front pocket of his coat, another rolled scrupulously into a little scroll and then packed into the toe of his shoe; one has been folded into a miniature aeroplane and chucked across the room (its nose points away from his desk, at least), although it has missed the rubbish bin by more than a meter. When he unrolls or unfolds the papers, he comes across strange ciphers: Ashm. 573 and Langtoft MS, Bod?? and mépris, contempt; malin, crafty (perj. & cont. ??). They are all written in his own hand, but he hasn't any memory of committing the words to paper.
Once, Robbie plucks a fag from behind Richard's ear. He gets a quizzical expression just before he lights it, then slips his lighter back into his pocket and unrolls the paper. It's clear at once that it's not cigarette paper--it's stiff, and empty, and scrawled over with shelfmarks.
"I hope you didn't try to smoke one of these," says Robbie, and Richard can't actually remember whether or not he has.
On their coffee table, Anne has begun building a model bridge out of wood. It's a light, porous wood, easily snapped and difficult to join; each piece represents a steel girder, bolted to its neighbors with glue and suspended with thin floss. "I should buy you tiny cars for your tiny bridge," he teases; "Work on your thesis," she tells him placidly.
He admires the way she can work--slowly, steadily, for hours at a time. She scarcely fusses when she joins her wood bits poorly and has to peel away the glue and start again. As she pieces the bridge together, she the neat log of equations beside her bridge, which she has explained are meant to translate the tensile strength and mass of the wood into that of steel.
Hers is a queer alchemy, a transmutation of matter by means of mathematics.
When he is closed away in the study with his decrepit word-processor (like him, he thinks, its glory days passed in the eighties), Richard envies her the neatness of her glue and her calculations. There is a tangible sense of progress as he watches her bridge come together; she is building something of material use, and he's spending long hours copying the entire bloody manuscript collection from the Bod in longhand.
"You could learn shorthand," Robbie tells him, when he complains.
"It would take longer to learn it than to write longhand," Richard answers. He drapes his arm about Robbie's shoulders and nuzzles his cheek, asking in a very small and very put-upon sort of voice, "Kiss me? I'm languishing."
"Work on your thesis," Robbie answers with a laugh.
Richard has decided that Robbie is in league with Anne, and they are conspiring to ensure that he never has sex again.
At the desk in the study, he keeps a list (longhand) of conjectures that he might plausibly be able to apply to the kingship of Mempricius. He has already crossed off Generally unwise to get eaten by wolves, but left Good kings are only bad kings who don't get caught in case it sparks something useful later. The list is so hatched with crossings-out and slantways addendums that it looks as though he has released a tin of spiders to crawl over the paper; the words swim when he neglects to wear his reading glasses.
There were days, Richard remembers, before he required reading glasses. Those days, alas, are gone.
What if this is all there is? he wonders on some endless midnight, with the desk lamp angled toward his notes and four empty mugs resting on the windowsill beside him. What if I never finish, and I'm destined to spend the rest of my life making inappropriate jokes about dead kings and puns on the Matter of Britain?
"Come to bed," Anne says from the doorway. She leans on her elbow against the doorframe, her free hand on her hip; he can scarcely make out her face for the light spilling out from the hall behind her, and it's only then that he realizes how dark the study as become.
"Come to the desk," he offers instead, with a hopeful look. He knows that she can't resist him when he looks at her over his glasses, his lips pursed just so. "If we had sex on the desk, I'd have positive associ--"
"No," says Anne firmly. "We have a rule about that. No sex on the coffee table, and no sex in the study."
"But my notes aren't delicate; they could stand to be crushed--"
"We work here, Richard," she tells him. He sighs, but her point is a fair one, and in the end he concedes. Slowly, he rises from his chair and turns off the desk lamp.
Anne and Richard have bookshelves stuffed with scholarly works and thrift editions of classic novels, plays in German and reams of graph paper; the shelves smell of slick covers and cheap ink and paper, all commercial and noisome. Richard's father's library had smelled of leather and cigars, brandy and genteelly aged paper--and the Bodleian, he thinks, smells of old men hours from death. (He has grown uncharitable toward the place that has become his prison; Robbie has found him there more than once, slumped over a table with his head on his arms, and plied him with promises of coffee and cigarettes until he revived). In his dreams, Richard is chained to a lectern like a dangerous and valuable book, and when he raises his hand to his face, it is covered in writing in an ancient hand.
There are very few manuscripts remaining from the reign of Mempricius (called 'Mempris' or 'Mepris' in later chronicles), and there are certainly no printed documents. Richard has combed every one of them for evidence of any opinion at all on the king, and every chronicle after--that he died in a hunting accident seems to be widely accepted, and that he slept with his favourites is an article of faith among his detractors; that his brother died under suspicious circumstances at a parley is the one universal constant, although his supporters claim that Malin was struck down by the hand of God rather than the hand of his brother ...
... and all of this means something about chivalry and manhood, but Richard hasn't the faculties to divine it. In Froissart's condemnations of Malin's murder for its dishonourable secrecy, Richard might read a mandate that chivalrous conduct be placed on display. In his giddy accounts of Mempricius's prowess at the chase and the gayness of his hunting party, Richard might read a celebration of that most performative display of masculine valor. Mempricius might be the flower of manhood or the canker, and to concede that he was both will drive Richard mad.
"What I wouldn't do for a pack of wolves," he sighs, and a senior librarian gives him a very sharp look.
He avoids his thesis for nearly a week, instead throwing himself back into tutorials--his students are almost pathetically grateful for the attention, and they stumble over themselves trying to earn his approval. One wants to be a cultural historian, and he keeps harping on women's literacy and malapropisms and commonplace books; one is a student of military history, otherwise uninspired but lighting up like a flare at the first whisper of strategy. In their way, he supposes, they will be adequate to their tasks, and perhaps he's adequate, as well, if he can encourage them to think critically.
He had entertained dreams of revolutionizing the field of medieval studies, once. Now, he thinks that adequacy would do.
One evening, Anne is working her patient equations and Richard is lounging on the sofa and trying to pretend that he isn't avoiding his thesis. They have only slightly burnt their dinner, and although Anne has lit scented candles against the smell, the faint aroma of seared lentils still hangs on the air.
"How are you doing?" Richard asks. When Anne doesn't answer, he repeats the question, and she looks up with a sheepish smile.
"It could be worse," she says. "I think I have to accept that it's never going to be a masterpiece ... but civil engineers don't need to make masterpieces. They need to make things that stay up."
"It looks like a masterpiece to me," says Richard, and if he had known anything at all about bridges, then perhaps it might have been a comforting platitude--but he knows nothing about bridges, and he can say it with complete sincerity.
Anne's bridge extends from the coffee table to the settee, a mesmerizing lattice of floss and fairy-wood; there's a touch of the Golden Gate to its silhouette, but the scale is so modest that the resemblance is only faint. It is, he thinks, the very model of a bridge that is designed to stay up.
She leans up to kiss him on the cheek. "No sex on the coffee table," he warns her; "There are no rules about kisses on the sofa," she retorts. For a second, he thinks that she is going to kiss him properly; her lips are close, her breathing shallow--
"Work on your thesis," she whispers.
Richard goes to the study with his notes and his ancient word processor and his anxieties, and he leaves all of them there for a few precious moments while he brews himself coffee and rings Robbie to complain.
"It's this Mempricius chapter," he says, with a long sigh to punctuate it. "I'm utterly blocked on it, and until I can get past it, I'm never going to make any progress on the rest."
"Just write," Robbie advises. "Your advisor will tell you it's crap anyway; why not just write?"
"I can't just write," says Richard, which is the problem that he'd been so keen to call about in the first place, and this is certainly not the sort of comfort that he wants from his boyfriend in his time of need.
There is a pause on the other end of the line, and Richard can tell that Robbie is swallowing his first response and possibly his second and third. "It doesn't have to be perfect," he says at last. "You can revise it for the monograph, all right? This is your first draft, and it's not going to be perfect."
"I love you, you bastard," Richard says, as though by rote, and then he rings off. He'll never quite convince himself that his thesis doesn't have to be perfect, and he doesn't see the sense in trying.
In the study, his anxieties are waiting at the desk--right where he left them.
He puts the coffee cup on the windowsill and touches pen to paper. It's too early for him to commit text to the word processor; he's still in a thinking stage, still gathering cards and bits of paper with shelfmarks and lists with inane comments about wolves.
There is a piece of paper folded like an aeroplane, still more than a meter away from the rubbish bin after all these weeks. He stoops and picks it up, undoing the folds and reading it over.
mépris, contempt; malin, crafty (perj. & cont. ??)
Contempt and craft, he thinks. If neither brother were pure--if both were allegorized as failed efforts, didactic misfires of masculinity--
That's a good line; he jots it down.
He isn't particularly interested in didactic allegory or providential history, but it's a starting place, and it's the first starting place that he's found in weeks. If he can follow that slender thread of inspiration, perhaps it will lead him to the argument that he really means to make.
Through the open door comes the sound of a tape kicking into life: something upbeat in the disco tradition, the sort of music that Anne listens to when she's finished her work for the night and wants to relax with a book on erosion theory.
He wonders, for the first time, if she ever really puts her work aside.
Author: gileonnen
Fandom: Pre-Richard II
Characters/Pairings: Richard, Anne, Robert; mentions of Richard/Anne and Richard/Robert
Rating: PG
Warnings: Casual references to a polyamorous relationship, academic wittering on
Summary: Richard had entertained dreams of revolutionizing the field of medieval studies, once. Now, he thinks that adequacy would do.
Author's notes: Written for angevin2, who long ago requested 'Richard writing his thesis' fic. Title from the conclusion of Mempricius's section in Lewis Thorpe's translation of the Historia Regum Britanniae.
Richard has begun finding strange slips of paper about his person. There is one folded in half in the front pocket of his coat, another rolled scrupulously into a little scroll and then packed into the toe of his shoe; one has been folded into a miniature aeroplane and chucked across the room (its nose points away from his desk, at least), although it has missed the rubbish bin by more than a meter. When he unrolls or unfolds the papers, he comes across strange ciphers: Ashm. 573 and Langtoft MS, Bod?? and mépris, contempt; malin, crafty (perj. & cont. ??). They are all written in his own hand, but he hasn't any memory of committing the words to paper.
Once, Robbie plucks a fag from behind Richard's ear. He gets a quizzical expression just before he lights it, then slips his lighter back into his pocket and unrolls the paper. It's clear at once that it's not cigarette paper--it's stiff, and empty, and scrawled over with shelfmarks.
"I hope you didn't try to smoke one of these," says Robbie, and Richard can't actually remember whether or not he has.
On their coffee table, Anne has begun building a model bridge out of wood. It's a light, porous wood, easily snapped and difficult to join; each piece represents a steel girder, bolted to its neighbors with glue and suspended with thin floss. "I should buy you tiny cars for your tiny bridge," he teases; "Work on your thesis," she tells him placidly.
He admires the way she can work--slowly, steadily, for hours at a time. She scarcely fusses when she joins her wood bits poorly and has to peel away the glue and start again. As she pieces the bridge together, she the neat log of equations beside her bridge, which she has explained are meant to translate the tensile strength and mass of the wood into that of steel.
Hers is a queer alchemy, a transmutation of matter by means of mathematics.
When he is closed away in the study with his decrepit word-processor (like him, he thinks, its glory days passed in the eighties), Richard envies her the neatness of her glue and her calculations. There is a tangible sense of progress as he watches her bridge come together; she is building something of material use, and he's spending long hours copying the entire bloody manuscript collection from the Bod in longhand.
"You could learn shorthand," Robbie tells him, when he complains.
"It would take longer to learn it than to write longhand," Richard answers. He drapes his arm about Robbie's shoulders and nuzzles his cheek, asking in a very small and very put-upon sort of voice, "Kiss me? I'm languishing."
"Work on your thesis," Robbie answers with a laugh.
Richard has decided that Robbie is in league with Anne, and they are conspiring to ensure that he never has sex again.
At the desk in the study, he keeps a list (longhand) of conjectures that he might plausibly be able to apply to the kingship of Mempricius. He has already crossed off Generally unwise to get eaten by wolves, but left Good kings are only bad kings who don't get caught in case it sparks something useful later. The list is so hatched with crossings-out and slantways addendums that it looks as though he has released a tin of spiders to crawl over the paper; the words swim when he neglects to wear his reading glasses.
There were days, Richard remembers, before he required reading glasses. Those days, alas, are gone.
What if this is all there is? he wonders on some endless midnight, with the desk lamp angled toward his notes and four empty mugs resting on the windowsill beside him. What if I never finish, and I'm destined to spend the rest of my life making inappropriate jokes about dead kings and puns on the Matter of Britain?
"Come to bed," Anne says from the doorway. She leans on her elbow against the doorframe, her free hand on her hip; he can scarcely make out her face for the light spilling out from the hall behind her, and it's only then that he realizes how dark the study as become.
"Come to the desk," he offers instead, with a hopeful look. He knows that she can't resist him when he looks at her over his glasses, his lips pursed just so. "If we had sex on the desk, I'd have positive associ--"
"No," says Anne firmly. "We have a rule about that. No sex on the coffee table, and no sex in the study."
"But my notes aren't delicate; they could stand to be crushed--"
"We work here, Richard," she tells him. He sighs, but her point is a fair one, and in the end he concedes. Slowly, he rises from his chair and turns off the desk lamp.
Anne and Richard have bookshelves stuffed with scholarly works and thrift editions of classic novels, plays in German and reams of graph paper; the shelves smell of slick covers and cheap ink and paper, all commercial and noisome. Richard's father's library had smelled of leather and cigars, brandy and genteelly aged paper--and the Bodleian, he thinks, smells of old men hours from death. (He has grown uncharitable toward the place that has become his prison; Robbie has found him there more than once, slumped over a table with his head on his arms, and plied him with promises of coffee and cigarettes until he revived). In his dreams, Richard is chained to a lectern like a dangerous and valuable book, and when he raises his hand to his face, it is covered in writing in an ancient hand.
There are very few manuscripts remaining from the reign of Mempricius (called 'Mempris' or 'Mepris' in later chronicles), and there are certainly no printed documents. Richard has combed every one of them for evidence of any opinion at all on the king, and every chronicle after--that he died in a hunting accident seems to be widely accepted, and that he slept with his favourites is an article of faith among his detractors; that his brother died under suspicious circumstances at a parley is the one universal constant, although his supporters claim that Malin was struck down by the hand of God rather than the hand of his brother ...
... and all of this means something about chivalry and manhood, but Richard hasn't the faculties to divine it. In Froissart's condemnations of Malin's murder for its dishonourable secrecy, Richard might read a mandate that chivalrous conduct be placed on display. In his giddy accounts of Mempricius's prowess at the chase and the gayness of his hunting party, Richard might read a celebration of that most performative display of masculine valor. Mempricius might be the flower of manhood or the canker, and to concede that he was both will drive Richard mad.
"What I wouldn't do for a pack of wolves," he sighs, and a senior librarian gives him a very sharp look.
He avoids his thesis for nearly a week, instead throwing himself back into tutorials--his students are almost pathetically grateful for the attention, and they stumble over themselves trying to earn his approval. One wants to be a cultural historian, and he keeps harping on women's literacy and malapropisms and commonplace books; one is a student of military history, otherwise uninspired but lighting up like a flare at the first whisper of strategy. In their way, he supposes, they will be adequate to their tasks, and perhaps he's adequate, as well, if he can encourage them to think critically.
He had entertained dreams of revolutionizing the field of medieval studies, once. Now, he thinks that adequacy would do.
One evening, Anne is working her patient equations and Richard is lounging on the sofa and trying to pretend that he isn't avoiding his thesis. They have only slightly burnt their dinner, and although Anne has lit scented candles against the smell, the faint aroma of seared lentils still hangs on the air.
"How are you doing?" Richard asks. When Anne doesn't answer, he repeats the question, and she looks up with a sheepish smile.
"It could be worse," she says. "I think I have to accept that it's never going to be a masterpiece ... but civil engineers don't need to make masterpieces. They need to make things that stay up."
"It looks like a masterpiece to me," says Richard, and if he had known anything at all about bridges, then perhaps it might have been a comforting platitude--but he knows nothing about bridges, and he can say it with complete sincerity.
Anne's bridge extends from the coffee table to the settee, a mesmerizing lattice of floss and fairy-wood; there's a touch of the Golden Gate to its silhouette, but the scale is so modest that the resemblance is only faint. It is, he thinks, the very model of a bridge that is designed to stay up.
She leans up to kiss him on the cheek. "No sex on the coffee table," he warns her; "There are no rules about kisses on the sofa," she retorts. For a second, he thinks that she is going to kiss him properly; her lips are close, her breathing shallow--
"Work on your thesis," she whispers.
Richard goes to the study with his notes and his ancient word processor and his anxieties, and he leaves all of them there for a few precious moments while he brews himself coffee and rings Robbie to complain.
"It's this Mempricius chapter," he says, with a long sigh to punctuate it. "I'm utterly blocked on it, and until I can get past it, I'm never going to make any progress on the rest."
"Just write," Robbie advises. "Your advisor will tell you it's crap anyway; why not just write?"
"I can't just write," says Richard, which is the problem that he'd been so keen to call about in the first place, and this is certainly not the sort of comfort that he wants from his boyfriend in his time of need.
There is a pause on the other end of the line, and Richard can tell that Robbie is swallowing his first response and possibly his second and third. "It doesn't have to be perfect," he says at last. "You can revise it for the monograph, all right? This is your first draft, and it's not going to be perfect."
"I love you, you bastard," Richard says, as though by rote, and then he rings off. He'll never quite convince himself that his thesis doesn't have to be perfect, and he doesn't see the sense in trying.
In the study, his anxieties are waiting at the desk--right where he left them.
He puts the coffee cup on the windowsill and touches pen to paper. It's too early for him to commit text to the word processor; he's still in a thinking stage, still gathering cards and bits of paper with shelfmarks and lists with inane comments about wolves.
There is a piece of paper folded like an aeroplane, still more than a meter away from the rubbish bin after all these weeks. He stoops and picks it up, undoing the folds and reading it over.
mépris, contempt; malin, crafty (perj. & cont. ??)
Contempt and craft, he thinks. If neither brother were pure--if both were allegorized as failed efforts, didactic misfires of masculinity--
That's a good line; he jots it down.
He isn't particularly interested in didactic allegory or providential history, but it's a starting place, and it's the first starting place that he's found in weeks. If he can follow that slender thread of inspiration, perhaps it will lead him to the argument that he really means to make.
Through the open door comes the sound of a tape kicking into life: something upbeat in the disco tradition, the sort of music that Anne listens to when she's finished her work for the night and wants to relax with a book on erosion theory.
He wonders, for the first time, if she ever really puts her work aside.