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Oct. 21st, 2007 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsFor a while now I have been dutifully reading through novels for class during the day, and then sneaking home to cheat on them with Hilary Mantel's A Place Of Greater Safety. I normally try to be faithful one book at a time, but . . . I'm sorry, other novels! It seduced me with its giant scope and catnip-like prose!
I have been going veeeery slowly through the book, for two reasons. One is the aforementioned need to do other readings for class; the other is that thing that happens when you're reading really good books, the fact that I didn't want it to be over. Both because then there would be No More and because when you're reading a novel about historical figures you know pretty much how it's going to end and I didn't want to reach that point. However, two days ago, the book came up overdue at the library, so I raced through the final two hundred pages yesterday, reread the final chapter this morning, and am now struggling with the need to return it to the library instead of reading it through all over again.
But back it must go, so instead, I will blithely ignore all the writing I am supposed to be doing for school-like things and throw out that drabble meme instead.
The first ten (or however many, really) people to comment on this post get to request a drabble from me. In return, you can post this meme in your journal and keep yourself busy for DAYS.
I do not promise speediness for ANYONE. But all drabbles will eventually get written! Fandoms include Heroes, Avatar, BSG, Milliways-related things, Wasteland-related things, Fionavar Tapestry, anything Diana Wynne Jones, and . . . probably a whole lot more I'm not thinking of; if you think that I know it, it's fair game. And there's never any harm in asking!
I have been going veeeery slowly through the book, for two reasons. One is the aforementioned need to do other readings for class; the other is that thing that happens when you're reading really good books, the fact that I didn't want it to be over. Both because then there would be No More and because when you're reading a novel about historical figures you know pretty much how it's going to end and I didn't want to reach that point. However, two days ago, the book came up overdue at the library, so I raced through the final two hundred pages yesterday, reread the final chapter this morning, and am now struggling with the need to return it to the library instead of reading it through all over again.
But back it must go, so instead, I will blithely ignore all the writing I am supposed to be doing for school-like things and throw out that drabble meme instead.
The first ten (or however many, really) people to comment on this post get to request a drabble from me. In return, you can post this meme in your journal and keep yourself busy for DAYS.
I do not promise speediness for ANYONE. But all drabbles will eventually get written! Fandoms include Heroes, Avatar, BSG, Milliways-related things, Wasteland-related things, Fionavar Tapestry, anything Diana Wynne Jones, and . . . probably a whole lot more I'm not thinking of; if you think that I know it, it's fair game. And there's never any harm in asking!
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Date: 2007-10-21 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-21 08:40 pm (UTC)And I knew you would ask that. *weeps and attempts to muster up all possible skill*
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Date: 2007-10-22 12:58 am (UTC)Danton’s women: it is a catchphrase now, a joke, like Camille’s women, like Camille’s wife.
Danton’s wife is not a joke, not in that sense, but Gabrielle is fairly certain it is only a matter of time. With the strange way they are all living, with Camille and his women and his wife and Danton’s arms around his wife in full view of entire dinner parties, how long will it be before someone suggests that Camille is getting his own revenge between the sheets? The notion is idiotic, of course, to anyone who knows Camille and herself at all, but people are astonishingly willing to believe idiotic notions these days.
(The notion that the King of France may be executed like a common criminal: idiotic.
The notion that the nice young lawyer one married not so long ago would eventually make you Madame Septembriseur: idiotic.
The notion that Camille Desmoulins, of all people, may be one’s only possible ally – may be, in a certain sense, one’s best friend: beyond idiotic; beyond conception, except it seems to have occurred.)
So Gabrielle takes care, for the most part, not to be alone with Camille. This is not difficult, with little Louise Gely always at her side and the children in need of attention and Lucile breezing in and out of places trailing men or perfume or political ideas behind her. It does make discussion difficult. But then, the way in which Camille is her ally is not something that Gabrielle particularly wishes to discuss. It is an unspoken conspiracy between them: they are the last two people in the whole world to have a stake in the nice young lawyer from Arras, the last two people in all the world to remember that he existed, and like members of a séance they close their eyes tight to so many things and attempt to summon him into existence. If he does not really come, they can manage. They have both gotten used to pretending.
This, at least, is how Gabrielle thinks of it, in the moments when she thinks of it. Mentioning it to Camille might prove that, like everything else, it is not what she thinks, and end their conspiracy. That would be disastrous. With all the conspiracies going on these days, the ones Robespierre talks about and the ones that fly in whispers up the Mountain and the ones between Lucile and Camille and Caroline Remy and all the rest, Danton’s women, Gabrielle feels she deserves a conspiracy of her own – needs one, even. If you haven’t got a conspiracy of some kind or other in this new world her husband and his friends have made, then you are probably nothing.
Camille Desmoulins loves Gabrielle’s husband. But this is all right, as everything else is not, because he loves the one that Gabrielle married, and so though people look at her with a kind of fascinated pity in their eyes Gabrielle is at least not the only fool.
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Date: 2007-10-22 01:30 am (UTC)Becca! You are my best friend! You wrote about Gabrielle and Camille and Danton and - ! Used outside-of-book knowledge! I must sing you the Carmagnole.
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Date: 2007-10-22 01:41 am (UTC)- wait, I used outside-of-book knowledge? What knowledge did I use? :O
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Date: 2007-10-22 01:45 am (UTC)*gets the rope*Um, Madame Septembriseur is. Or seems like it. That entire incident is unclear enough in the book if one has no outside knowledge (I think... ) that I wouldn't expect one to pick up on it like that.
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Date: 2007-10-22 01:51 am (UTC)Ca ira?. . . oh, okay, yes. I will accept your praise. *dignified*
(I identify bizarrely with Gabrielle, and I am not sure why. But I want to hug her and give her a pet sympathetic llama or something.)
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Date: 2007-10-22 01:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-22 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-22 02:01 am (UTC)Now you have to watch the Gerard Depardieu Danton movie with the implicitly abused shrinking Louise Gély child. It's weird.
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Date: 2007-10-22 02:09 am (UTC)(I should have known Gerard Depardieu had played Danton at one point or another. Epic and facially unusual!)
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Date: 2007-10-22 02:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-21 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 08:33 am (UTC)Kara has better things to do than go see the frakking pilot school musical, and she does not hesitate to tell Zak this.
“Like what?” Zak asks, and Kara says, sweetly, “Like watching grass grow,” and then says “ow!” when he flicks her shoulder. (Anyone else she would laugh at – a flick? Seriously? – but it’s important to keep Zak’s self-esteem up.)
“I wouldn’t go either,” Zak says, changing tactic, “but Helo’s going to be in it, and we need to support the guy, right?”
Kara rolls her eyes. “Yeah, you call that an incentive?” Helo has appeared in every student production since his arrival at flight school. He looms over the rest of the chorus, singing off-key and with great and cheerful concentration, and enunciates his speaking lines with about as much affect as a toaster with a head cold. “Give me one good reason why I should waste a night off this way. Seriously, just one. Anything.”
Zak pauses. “Well.” He looks down, and then back up at Kara, with an extremely solemn expression. “There is something. But if Lee kills me for telling you this –”
Kara’s eyes have sparked; now she kicks Zak, and says, “Either Lee kills you later or I kill you now. Spill the beans, Adama.”
Zak makes a show of looking around for spies and then leans over to whisper in her ear, and the a few seconds later the whole hallway hears Kara laughing.
Lee is not exactly sure how he has ended up sitting backstage between a painted tree and a plaster model of a giant dinosaur with desperately reading through the script of the musical – student-written, involving a lot of crude in-jokes and a campy Cylon in a tutu – but nonetheless, there he is.
“Don’t worry,” Sarah had said last month. Sarah is directing the play; she is also Lee’s current girlfriend. “We hardly ever actually need the understudy – the play only lasts a week, no one’s going to miss it. And it means you can hang out backstage instead of getting chased out by the Ass-Prods –”
“What?” Lee had said, and Sarah had explained, patiently, “Assistant Producers. Come on, Lee – you’d be doing me a big favor. And think of all the extra time we could spend together!”
Hardly ever need the understudy. Yeah right, Lee thinks bitterly, adjusts the yellow polka-dotted spandex that makes up most of his costume, and tries to remember whether the first entrance is in five minutes or ten. Rico Elmarin, who plays the lead, has never been sick a day in his life. He’s famous for it, so where the frak is he?
(It hasn't crossed his mind to just leave. He took on the responsibilities of the understudy, and an Adama always does his duty.)
“Do you really think it is a Cylon attack,” declaims Helo, from the stage. (Say what you will about his acting, Lee thinks, the guy’s voice carries.) “But then how do you explain the lipstick and the flowers.” He marches behind the curtain into the alcove where Lee sits and gives him an encouraging smile and thumbs up.
Lee glares back, and marches onstage. He takes a deep breath, realizes he’s forgotten his first line, says, “Uh,” and then sees someone waving cheerfully from the front row.
Kara beams up at him, her face lit up with what Lee can only characterize as demonic glee. Sitting next to her, on one side, is Zak, looking shamefaced; on the other is Rico Elmarin, beer in hand. He shrugs when he sees Lee, and then glances over at Kara as if to say, ‘what can you do?’
Kara Thrace, Lee vows, is going to pay for this. Somehow. In spades.
(She does. But she’ll always say it was worth it.)
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Date: 2007-10-21 08:39 pm (UTC)>:D
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Date: 2007-10-21 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-21 10:17 pm (UTC):D?
:D?
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Date: 2007-10-21 10:54 pm (UTC)(Your fic is coming. It's just stubborn.)
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Date: 2007-10-22 10:10 pm (UTC):D?
That can include pre-pilot but post-Out of Gas flashbacks, if you want.