Music Track: THERE IS A TAVERN IN THE TOWN (The Drunken Song) ~ Folk song
FALL ~ Daft Punk
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EMMA'S POV
I went to Gabriel's thing – this lecture that he was giving. So yeah, apparently he's the hot shit atheist the party was for but his face still didn't seem familiar to me. Perhaps because I don't watch PBS or some other boring old-white-men-in-cardigans fare. I finally put two and two together when Gabriel walked up to the podium and the packed auditorium exploded into applause. I guess scientists are the new rock stars. Who knew? This "people gaining notoriety for their brains not their beauty" thing was so divorced from the Hollywood D-set I've encountered the last few months, the people who only ever cared when their next Botox appointment was. I thought: I can't really still be in Los Angeles. It felt like I had walked into another reality. Or Communist China.
I wasn't even sure why I was here other than he was here and I was with him. Rather, waiting for him. This wasn't like me. I don't wait around in the wings for guys.
It. Does. Not. Happen.
But here I was, backstage, watching him from the wings, while he went blahblahblahblahblah to the enraptured audience who hung on his every word. Occasionally a handler or backstage crew member would shoot me a sympathetic smile, realizing I must be bored out of my mind and obviously here for only one reason that it didn't take a rocket scientist to guess. Their arched eyebrows and flat smiles said: "Oh, I see..." when they got one good look at me, and I could only imagine how I looked to them. A leggy blonde in a slinky dress, standing backstage like some groupie or worse!
Ugh! I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remind myself they were narrow-minded eggheads whose last lovers were obviously the palms of their own hands.
I don't know why I just didn't tell Gabriel to join me at my hotel suite after. I mean... that's obviously where this whole night was heading. A quick pleasure-intensive tousle before going our separate ways. He back to wherever hence he came, and me back to the road less travelled.
But after the lecture, people would want to speak to him, and then go on to congratulatory drinks, and there would be hangers-on, both men and women, and he might forget all about me if I wasn't standing here to tempt him as the best offer of the evening, and then...
Goddammit Emma. He's just a man. Stop behaving like a school girl.
But was he just a man? He seemed something more. More powerful than a man. More... well, just...more. I thought back to his tease about being supernatural and rolled my eyes at the thought.
I stared up at the intricacies of the backstage ceiling, the ropes and curtains and lattices and metal bridges. I thought about how it all looked like a bundle of chaos to me, but must be all arranged in an order that makes sense to someone... like the spider whose web only she understands the pattern of.
I began to pace, which engendered a look of caution and quiet from a backstage organizer towards my high heels clanking loudly on the long wooden plank floorboards. I politely smiled and kicked them off and resumed pacing, throwing my gaze up at the ceiling and clasping my hands together behind my back. I don't know how long I planned to do this. As a child I used to spin and spin and spin in circles, just daring myself to get dizzy but I rarely did. I always suspected it was an inner ear thing. I won't elucidate what Gran suspected.
I closed my eyes and continued to pace in a meditative laps, and just imagined the sundry of weights and pulleys above my head, where each of them were or where I expected them to be. If I did this long enough I would turn into butter like the old tiger who ran round the tree too many times. My legs and feet certainly began to feel like butter, and I wondered how long I had done this for. Just another endurance test to push my body to the point of collapsing. How long was this lecture, anyways? Surely it had already been forty-five minutes or had it been only five?
I continued pacing in my little circle for many more minutes after that. And then I must have somehow wandered off track, because I felt this slight twitch along my cheek as if I had brushed up against fabric. I felt the smack of cold air hit my face and I opened my eyes to locate where I had wondered off to. I caught my breath in my throat and gasped at what I both saw and felt.
I was standing in the middle of a dark street with wet cobblestones under my feet and a lamppost off in the distance. I could barely make out the colour of my hot pink porno heels. Hadn't I taken off my shoes? And hadn't they been a dark velvety blue to match my dress?
Wait! There was no way I managed to actually wonder off and find myself outside! I must have fallen asleep. Had I slept-walked here? Or was I still dreaming?
The cold air burned my throat and I felt gentle rain fall on my shoulders and cheek, but when I went to brush my face dry, I realized my hand was entwined in another's.
"Why are we stopping, Emma," said the soft-spoken masculine voice attached to the hand. My eyes tiptoed from the man's hand to the face that it belonged to:
The hipster. From the market.
No. Not him. The same face, and voice and everything, but this man was... confident in himself. Self-assured. And dressed in a lean, dark, black, swank suit that seemed both vintage and new and snapped up his spine at atten-hut. He looked stronger, healthier, with meat on his bones. He was debonair almost, handsome even.
Now I knew I was dreaming.
I must have been gaping because he suddenly looked at me with grave concern. "Are you scared?" he asked. "It's normal. This is your first time." Even his voice had a different... timber to it. Like before he had been an over grown boy, but now he was a fully grown man.
He patted my hand soothingly, and whispered, "We just need to keep the pretense up to the post, and then we can both go our own separate ways. You're doing fine. People will not forget what you did here tonight."
He smiled softly at me, and his warm brown toast eyes crinkled at the edges. He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and gently pressed me forward. "It would help if you sang. Let's sing," he said and with that he pressed his weight onto me as if he was suddenly heavy with drink. With his arm slung round my shoulders now, I could breathe in his heady scent, and it made my head swim. He smelt of cedar and cinnamon and rich earth and a long, hard day's work.
Since this was obviously a dream, I decided to go along with it. What choice did I have? The hipster... well, I could hardly call him that now, could I? It barely fit the person whose hot breath was caressing my neck. The man with the soft brown eyes started to sing a song of lyrics I had never heard before, but he pinched my shoulder to encourage me to sing, so I tried my best to follow along with him a beat or two behind. "There is a tavern in the town... and there my true love sits him down... and drinks her wine as merry as can be... and never, never thinks of me," he sang, and I followed.
As we weaved our way slowly along the street, I could see we were getting closer and closer to a gated post at the end of the road, with guards dressed in strange grey uniforms inside. Such a strange uniform for campus parking lot security – really going for the militia look here, I guess. The closer we got to the post, the louder and more belligerent the man with the soft brown eyes sang, "He left me for a damsel dark... each Friday night they used to spark... and now my love who once was true to me... takes this dark damsel on his knee."
He was becoming so heavy in my arms that even I began to think he was indeed drunk. I saw movement inside the post and a guard looked up at us with a grave stare. My stomach tightened and then I realized it was because he had a rifle slung round his shoulder. That's intense, I thought. And then I reminded myself: this was only a dream.
"And now I see him nevermore," we sang, with me always a note ortwo behind, "He never knocks upon my door... oh, woe is me; he penned a little note... and these were all the words he wrote."
The man with the soft brown eyes gave my shoulder another tight squeeze. For courage this time?
"Hey," the guard shouted, "This is a restricted area. Go home for the night."
"Home....?" the man at my side slurred. "Home? HOME! Home on the range..." And he began to sing obnoxiously now.
The guard shot me a look that said: Well, do something!
I gave him a weak smile, unsure what I was supposed to do. This isn't any of my fault! Blame the dream! I wanted to scream. But I could hardly tell the guard that.
I began to see several guards approaching from different directions out of the corners of my eyes. The more they approached, the more I could feel the weight of the man, who sang louder and louder... it began to hurt my ears. I could not understand how I had not woken out of this dream yet with the racket he was creating. The guards kept approaching, all smug, with light-hearted eyes but business in the Billy sticks they had poised and ready in their hands. Maybe there were four of them, or more, I could no longer tell. They were cajoling for us to leave, but I could see from the leers of a few of the men they weren't so sure they did not want me to stay.
"Oh, dig my grave both wide and deep," the man sang, returning to the original song. "Put tombstones at my head and feet, head and feet..."
Suddenly, the man with the soft brown eyes swung around and was facing me, groping my sides with his hands and nuzzling his rough whiskers into my neck. He slurred his lyrics, "And on my breast you may carve a turtle dove... to signify I died of love," but when he bent his head down to my neck he hoarsely whispered, "Ready?"
Ready for what? To wake up now? Yes, please!
I just stared at him with wild eyes as he pulled his head up from resting against my cheek to sink his brown eyes over me like a cozy blanket. And then he drew himself towards me and kissed me full on the mouth, with warm soft lips, while the guards began to whoop and holler. Despite his fire-branded breath, I shivered at his touch. And what else could I do but kiss him back? This was all a dream, wasn't it? His hot-coal hands were all over me now... running up and down my sides and tracing into my hair, pinching my waist. I could feel the cold eager expectant eyes watch us. As if they were watching a show.
And maybe they were.
"One," the man with the soft brown eyes said to me so that only I could hear as he pulled my jacket roughly down my shoulders to the ongoing delight of the guards.
"Two," he said again as he slid his hands down my shoulders to the front of shirt.
"Three," he said as he dug his hands into my jacket pockets and then slid them up again. I could feel traces of cold metal snake up the sides of my blouse. All the while he stared at me with a calm, sober look in his eyes.
And without changing his expression I watched as he fired several quick shots in rapid succession at each of the guards. It was so fast my brain had no time to register what had just happened. If it weren't for the loud ringing in my ears and the bodies hitting the ground at my feet I would have insisted I had just imagined it. A cold sweat began to pool down my body.
And then the man with soft brown eyes regarded at me with a sullen face. "You know what you need to do," he said, while he cocked and put the guns away into the holsters hidden inside his black suit jacket.
I gaped at him, my knees locked and shaking and teeth chattering.
"Run, Emma. RUN!" he commanded and suddenly his face was fierce and full of fury.
I turned to face the direction he had nodded his head towards, back where we had come from.
And then I was back at the lecture, about to walk onto the stage, but someone, a stagehand, pulled me backwards at the last second. Someone else was yelling in the audience and I only caught the tail end that sounded a lot like "...SEA FOAM!"
My knees were locked and legs were still shaking and my teeth still chattering and I still felt a heavy ringing in my ears but despite all of the above, I kept whispering to myself over and over: it was a dream, it was a dream, it was a dream.
I looked down at my shaking legs and reached down to hold them and keep my knees from knocking. As I did, so my gaze travelled down to my feet, to the hot pink porno heels, and then I saw it: the smatter of blood mingled with rain dripping onto the backstage planked floor beneath my feet.
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A/N
BAM!!! I bet you didn't see THAT coming! My my my my my...how complicated this little love triangle is going to get with another David in the mix. What do you think of him so far? Could he steal a small place in your heart?
This is one of the favorite scenes I have written so far in All Your Fates. And I'll tell you why. I wasn't supposed to have written it. It was never supposed to have existed. Right before launch or our first chapter and app, I was super stressed out, and couldn't concentrate on writing any more. And I had a bad day for other reasons and had been crying.
So I put on headphones, listened to Daft Punk's Fall (from Tron Legacy soundtrack), closed my eyes and just sat in front of the blank screen. And suddenly I had this image of David standing on a cobblestone road with Emma in the rain. Soon I was writing like mad, and I didn't want to break the spell so I put the song on infinity loop until I had finished the chapter. The next day when Tom read it, he said: Holy Shit! You should listen to Daft Punk more often. Which I took as a high compliment indeed.
I won't tell you how significant a role this new David character has developed since...but let's just put it this way: he's taken on a life of his own -- which we will be announcing ALL about it in a month or so. Stay tuned.
<3
~C
P.S. Over 20,000 reads!! I am excite!
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All Your Fates © 2012 Carrie Cutforth, Jim Martin and Tom Liljeholm. All Rights Reserved.