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History Boys fic -- director's commentary! [part 2]
(part one)
~
"This is the most effort I've ever had to go to to get someone into bed," Dakin murmured, trying for annoyed; the glance Irwin gave him as they climbed the stairs confirmed his suspicions that he'd only managed smug.
"Somehow, I'm not surprised."
Writing this was trying. What HAPPENS between the I-Will and the act itself? I expect Irwin would be nervous and silent, and Dakin would be nervous and chatty.
Hands saccading up the polished banister and the gentle sound of their feet, and Dakin found himself thinking about his conversation with Scripps. Boys playing actors playing actors playing roles, swathed in the protective layers of performance. The rapid glide of Posner's voice, high and sweet as it had been then: Et pourquoi mentir, à qui mentir?
And why lie? Lie to whom? This paragraph whacks you with the performance-theme and the lying-theme both at once.
But this was true, Dakin thought; as true as anything he'd ever done.
Implying, too, that he's not performing any more. So if you squint, they're the same theme; or at least they converge, which is a nice thing for themes to do.
"Hang on, there's someone --"
"Aren't you jumpy," Dakin said. Irwin's arm was taut under the heavy material of his coat, but he didn't pull away from Dakin's grasp, and they passed the man in the corridor with nothing more than an exchange of nods. "It's just one of the Scouts."
The fact that I know what a Scout is is due to Easy There, the Merlin/Arthur AU about Oxford rowers. Though once the word was in my vocab I rewatched the film again and it is mentioned in the context of Rudge's father. If you didn't know, a Scout is a College servant; they do things like clean rooms and empty bins.
"The Scouts," Irwin echoed, amused. "And so offhand. You have settled in well."
"Haven't I just," Dakin said, and released him. He could hear Yorkshire's colour fading from his own voice and sometimes he tried to find it in his heart to be sad about it; sometimes he felt awkward and off-balance about the fact that he was living in a place that had its own servants. But mostly he was just glad to be here, where he felt he belonged, and where fewer people than he'd expected cared where he came from -- they just cared where he was going. And Stuart Dakin was going somewhere great.
If I wanted to I could have played around a lot more with the class themes, the fact that the Boys are all working-class kids given a chance to become the academic elite. But there wasn't really room for it. I gave it this nod, though; it seemed like it needed to be brought up at least once.
And of all of them, really, Dakin seems the least likely to have any class-related angst. He thinks too much of himself, and is too good at making himself likable, for that.
"You don't mind --" The act of backing-away was entering Irwin's voice again.
"Oscar Wilde was at Magdalen." Dakin grinned. "I bet I could convince them I'm merely upholding a glorious tradition of the College."
He was, too. I spent some time on the Magdalen College website and its Wikipedia page (did you know the name is pronounced 'maudlin'? Irwin actually says it aloud when he's leading into his 'what’s truth got to do with it' spiel, but I never tied the sound to the name 'Magdalen') and found out all sorts of useless stuff, some of which made its way into the fic.
And that took them into Dakin's room, where Dakin turned on the light and laid his coat across the back of a chair. Irwin pushed the door closed and paused with his hand on the knob for a moment, then turned to lean against it.
Clothing is annoying. You have to mention it so that it doesn't seem like you've FORGOTTEN that your characters just walked through some terrible weather and so were very likely wearing coats, but the mentioning is so teeeeeedious.
"You just don't care what anyone thinks of you, do you?" His arms were crossed in front of him, as obvious a shield as any Dakin had ever seen, but his voice held no hesitation. "As long as they don't think you dull."
Dakin didn't know what he was going to do until he did it, but Irwin's back was to the door and Dakin couldn't stop thinking about the way his mouth had moved around the poetry, and there was no easy escape. For either of them. He didn't know what he was going to do until his chest was pressed against Irwin's arms and his mouth was catching an exhalation of soft emotion; surprise, probably. This wasn't how he initiated most of his sexual encounters, but there it was again, his inability to fragment Irwin into an object.
Body position again. I wanted Irwin to cross his arms, but that made it awkward for Dakin to kiss him, but his arms had to be crossed. Ergo. Awkward enough that it's worth mentioning in the narrative.
One of the things I had to decide on was whether Dakin had any experience with male partners; I decided that there was a good chance he did, because Irwin was a bit of an eye-opener and he's the type to chase down his curiosities without any fear. But I don't know that he would have opened with a kiss, during these experiences.
There's also the fact that Dakin, I think, is not used to having to be the sole initiator. He's used to the hunger that he recognised back in the bar; used to (as he said at the beginning of this scene, once again half-joking but speaking truth) willing partners who don't have to be actively seduced through any particular effort on Dakin's part.
Dakin, when it comes to sex, is spoiled.
Against his lips Irwin's were thin and dry, incurious, and Dakin felt the familiar surge of irritated inadequacy. But it didn't feel like a game. And it wasn't like Irwin didn't want this, no, they'd danced around that fucking nutbush quite enough, so it had to be something more complicated. He'd thought the years would have stripped Irwin of this ridiculous inability to engage.
I wrote this paragraph very early as well, even when I had no idea of its context. Because I definitely wanted the short moment of Dakin needing -- and failing, at least in his own mind -- to impress.
Dakin pulled back, deliberately abrupt, and frowned. "Look --"
But Irwin gave that off-centre smile and said in a low voice like nothing Dakin had heard in his entire fucking life: "I am looking."
And he was, when Dakin himself took the time to look back; behind his glasses his eyes were intent and warm and terribly unshielded, everything the kiss hadn't been. Dakin heard his own voice saying He never gives an inch, does he? in the frustration of youth.
"Do you want me to --"
"Yes," Irwin said with the same low timbre, and that was the gist of it, the précis, in the end. Irwin was willing, but demanded seduction before he'd submit to the script. Stage directions, Dakin thought. All right.
I am so proud of that bit. SO proud. The power shifts here are minute and fast and mmmdelicious. Plus I got to use gist/précis which comes up in the canon as something that Irwin liked to get the Boys to do.
Also: stage directions. The reference is too good not to reuse.
"I'm starting to think," he said, twisting open the first button of Irwin's shirt, "you're more effort than you're worth."
"No. You'd have given up ages ago if you honestly believed that."
"Help me," Dakin ordered, and discovered that Irwin took direction well. There was something scientific in the way that his hands formed a symmetry with Dakin's: one button from the top of the shirt, one from the bottom, until they met in the middle and Irwin gave a quiet disbelieving laugh that set his stomach to shivering underneath Dakin's palms. Something about Newton that had been dropped into Dakin's memory once but had sunk too deep to be retrieved in any recognisable form; the mere skeleton of an idea about actions and their opposites. So Dakin pushed Irwin's shirt from his shoulders and Irwin pulled him closer, fingers deftly bent around the belt loops of Dakin's trousers.
SORRY. Science snuck in. But I made sure it was believably vague, at least? I don't know if the symmetry of 'pushed' and 'pulled' in that last sentence was clear enough, actually.
It was slower than Dakin was used to; quieter, too. There was a distance between Irwin and the door, now, and that hot squirming need flooding through Dakin again, taking him by surprise. Whatever this had started out as, at Cutlers, it was something else now. Irwin, with his freckled angles and his too-clever eyes, had none of the easy good looks that Dakin usually found himself gravitating towards. But perhaps that was the key adjective in the passage: easy. Irwin was difficult, and worthwhile, and there was something elemental in the way his face was changing that made Dakin almost bite his tongue.
Heh. Key adjective in the passage. This really is how students think! You know it to be true; half of you ARE humanities students, I'm just a science student who remembers some of the tricks.
"What is it?" Irwin asked, but then he slid his fingertips across Dakin's mouth with an absorbed expression, finally initiating his own actions, and Dakin was too distracted to make the truth sound clever.
"It's just -- it is about sex. After all."
And that's the final turning point of the realisation. It is about sex. It's not just ideas.
"Incisive as ever," Irwin said, with too much sarcasm for Dakin's liking.
"Sometimes it isn't," he argued.
"Do you think you have to tell me that?"
You have to imagine this line as holding all the bitterness created by Irwin's years of telling himself that Dakin didn't really want him, not in that way, that it was all an amusing intellectual exercise on Dakin's part. Bitterness enough that Dakin picks up on it and gets the wrong idea:
"What is this for you, then?" he demanded, and Irwin produced a small rueful smile that gave Dakin the unpleasant feeling that he'd been seen, that his flaws had been underlined and annotated in ruthless red pen.
Yeah, I recycled this from your red lines. Shhh. My poem, my rules.
"Don't worry," Irwin said. "It really is all about you."
Seen and understood; and accepted. Dakin's stomach gave an uncertain swirl and he grabbed at the back of Irwin's neck with a new violence, not sure if he was angry or desperately pleased. It didn't matter. As though a foot had lifted from the brake of a motorcycle there was an increase in both sound and speed, until Dakin didn't need words to elicit the symmetry, just an impatient tap of his index finger against the fragile frame enclosing the glass. Action. Reaction. Irwin removing the final shield, laying his face as bare as the rest of their bodies.
Motorcycle metaphor! Had to be done. I rewrote this paragraph a few times to get it exactly right, because it had to incorporate all the FUCKING UNDRESSING without me actually taking it step-by-step, and it had to lead up to the thing about the glasses. Thank god for Newton, huh?
This was the thing he'd really remembered, the gobbet that he'd have trotted out to support his arguments if he'd ever experienced one of Scripps' urges to write things down. That moment when Irwin had stopped looking away, or down, or at his diary; the moment he stopped absorbing all of Dakin's attention like an uncertain sponge and finally tossed something back. Taking off my glasses is the last thing I do -- a dirty little gem, delivered with no change in his voice, that told Dakin it was no longer about advancing fronts and negotiating terms, and maybe it never had been: it was a challenge accepted.
Yeah, I took maybe half-a-dozen canon references and jammed them together into a single idea. Impressive? Overkill? Lazy? Who knows.
But seriously, that line about the glasses is ELECTRIC in the film because it really is the first glimpse we get of Irwin's potential once he relaxes. It's brilliant. It's all the power subtly drifting back into his hands, even though Dakin has been holding it for most of the scene.
And it had taken long enough, all these years later, but Irwin had finally bent down once more and picked up the gauntlet from where it lay in history's dust, discarded in the rush, in the inexorable march of events. Here they were again: he and Irwin and the subjunctive. Playing the what-if all the way to a conclusion.
Which is the point of the story, of course; of all the Dakin/Irwin stories ever written in the fandom. And the point of all fanfiction, come to that. The what-if. Fanfiction is the subjunctive.
Irwin folded his glasses with one hand and seemed almost surprised, for a moment, that he had no shirt pocket to tuck them into. Then he produced another of those magical multiple movements and Dakin didn't know what to focus on: Irwin's fingers setting the glasses down on Dakin's disaster of a desk, the abrupt weave of their feet as Irwin stepped forward and forced him towards the bed, or Irwin's eyes, so keenly blue that they seemed to absorb the air.
Then he remembered, wondering how Irwin had made him ever forget it in the first place, that this was something he knew how to do. He laughed and grabbed the initiative back in the form of Irwin's arms, his thumbs laid across the soft hinge of Irwin's inner elbows, and then proceeded to thoroughly show off. There were unfamiliar aspects, of course, and the occasional flash of intrusive memory, but Dakin's philosophy when it came to sex was be generous and act confident and let everything else sort itself out.
I think 'and then proceeded to thoroughly show off' is one of my favourite ways of handwaving a whole lot of smut, because it's so perfectly Dakin.
And if we're working on the assumption that Dakin hasn't done this with another guy before, I think he's that special kind of person who would refuse to let ignorance get in the way of having a good time.
"I've always learned fast," he said into Irwin's gasping mouth, and then stopped moving his hand entirely, experimenting with the extent of his control.
Controooool. Power shifts. Hello.
But Irwin's voice made it from inarticulation to annoyance with remarkable speed. "Come the fuck on."
Dakin smirked. "You don't want to make it last?"
"Nothing lasts, Dakin, you know that." Irwin's fingers at his collabone; he liked this newly-discovered habit of Irwin's, this need to explore with touch. "Everything changes. Regimes, dynasties --"
Now that it's actually, happening, of course, Irwin is proving much less hesitant. Much more like that version of him that knows where Dakin's buttons are.
"Oh shut up," Dakin said, and leaned down to lick exasperation into Irwin's mouth, twisting against the maddening fingertips which moved so sublimely swiftly but never gave him enough pressure, fuck, Irwin was doing it on purpose, the bastard. Dakin made a rough noise of complaint and tried to pretend that he wasn't just a little tangled in the past. If he was the one pinning Irwin down, if it was his hands setting the rhythm, then there should be no space left in his body to feel like he was eighteen and ready to snap with the frustration of entitlement.
For all that it's 'about sex', there was no way Dakin could ever divorce himself entirely from their history. From his need to impress.
"God," Irwin was saying now, "God, God," and the break in his voice was fantastic, so Dakin closed his mouth on the names of his own deities and just listened; contented himself with the rush of air against his teeth and then, when they fell apart, the long, shallow breaths that slid over the excited pulsation of his slowing heart. Tap tap tap through his whole body like that damn motorcycle, idling at the lights.
Motorcycle again. I loved that simile so much that I couldn't not include it, even when it meant repetition.
He ran a hand over his own shoulder, slick with rapidly-cooling sweat, and watched with satisfaction the minute aftershocks that disturbed Irwin's body, tremors running down the flesh that only just covered the man's ribs and the reddened line of his neck.
"Enjoy that, then?"
Again: he's sort of joking, but the joke covers his very real need to be validated.
Irwin gave a slow, tired smile, not opening his eyes. "It may surprise you to learn, Dakin, that I have no intention of grading you on this."
*smackdown*
Stung, but not sure why, Dakin altered his approach, turning back to what had worked already. "All right, it was just a question." Pause for effect. And -- "But are you certain, sir, that you have no remarks to make about my…performance?" That was it, perfect, his flippant tone forcing it into a joke so that if Irwin took offence then he'd be the one at fault. Easy to accuse him of having thin skin.
There is a land called Passiva Aggressiva, and Dakin is its king!
"No." Irwin's eyes opened then, the colour sharp and surprising against his own freckles and the whiteness of the pillow. "Why not? Because it would be too easy. Say I agreed to mark you out of ten: if the mark were five or six you'd pretend not to believe it, but you'd stick around to -- as you'd see it -- show me how wrong I was. If were eight or thereabouts you'd consider the experiment concluded satisfactorily. But if I really wanted to draw you in I'd give you a ten or a one; then you'd know I was lying, which gives me two advantages. One: you like it when I lie. Two: I'd have refused to give you a true assessment. The curiosity would drag you back."
I love moments when this happens, when someone usually quite reticent finds the confidence to lay someone else's personality bare. The reason why Dakin reacts so badly is because, as discussed right at the beginning of the fic, he doesn't like to be known. This isn't just a glance underlining his flaws; it's a frank discussion of them.
Plus he doesn't like to think that Irwin should be able to predict his behaviour so easily when he wouldn't be able to reciprocate with such exactness.
"Or you could compose a fucking essay about my character," Dakin snapped, barely able to talk past the dryness in his throat, "one, two -- Christ -- and ruin the entire fucking moment." He yanked himself and as much of the blanket as he could manage over to the very edge of the bed and then swung his feet to the floor. The chill made him wince, but he was facing the wall, so who the fuck cared.
A sigh from Irwin, behind him. "Dakin. Stuart."
This is the one moment, I think, where you can feel Irwin's age. The seven years he has on Dakin, the slender advantage of emotional maturity.
"Present," Dakin said, the flippancy rising again almost without his consent. He curled his toes against the floor and thought: this, here, could be a turning point. Not a big one. But they never were, not really, not the personal ones.
The turning point is the possibility that everything would deteriorate from this moment, and Dakin's seriously considering it, because he doesn't like relationships that make him feel bad about himself in any way.
"Stuart," Irwin said again, and Dakin looked over his shoulder. Irwin was sitting up, finding ungraceful purchase on the sheets, his back a slow curve of bare skin. His hair was rough and there was nothing for him to hide behind, no glasses, no rolled-up sleeves from which his arms could emerge like twin promises. This was a context entirely new and unfamiliar to Dakin. He liked it, liked it more than he'd expected to and far more than he should.
More reasoning down the 'I should probably stop this here' path, but the arguments are starting to look like reasons NOT to stop. In the right light.
"Tom," he tried, and then addended himself at once: "No: I'm not going to call you Tom. It's lifeless. It's -- Tom Brown, and Tom Sawyer, all those literary rogues. You're not a Tom."
That's Dakin seizing the power back, experimentally, seeing if Irwin will go along with it. It's a test.
Irwin closed his eyes and exhaled through a smile. "No?"
Which Irwin passes.
"No." Fuck this. Dakin liked to think he knew when to let pride get in the way of a good thing, and when to grit his teeth and let it go. He waited until Irwin was sitting back against the headboard and then moved close again, swung one leg across, and settled himself -- along with a tangle of sheets -- across Irwin's hips. "You're not even a Thomas. It'll have to be Irwin, I'm afraid."
Dakin: *grabs all power with both hands*
Irwin looked up at him -- up, yes, Dakin liked that -- and raised his eyebrows. "Stuart's no good for you, either. No wonder you didn't take to the Jacobeans."
Try attaching 'Stuart' as a label to Dakin. It doesn't work at ALL.
The pun here is a very mild one (the Jacobean era = during the reign of the Stuarts) but give Irwin some points for coming up with it while Dakin's sitting on his lap.
Dakin groaned. "Talking history, even in bed. I shouldn't be surprised."
Irwin moved one finger underneath his jaw, slowly, and then drew it away with a flick. Smiled. "I talk about all sorts of things in bed."
This is another gem, exactly the same as 'taking off my glasses is the last thing I do'.
"Good." Dakin caught his wrists and held them; tight and then tighter, shifting his weight until Irwin's breath hitched and he himself could only speak in whispers, his mouth set against Irwin's ear. "Let's talk about me."
<33333 DAKIN. You glorious prat.
~
"Well?"
"…well?"
Scripps gave a deeply put-upon sigh. "Well?"
"Oh, right," Dakin said, regretting his vague tone the second it reached his own ears.
I had a lot of notes-to-self scattered in this section about how there was a need to portray the ways in which Dakin had matured, somewhat, and also the ways in which this particular relationship was in a slightly different mental box to his usual one. The most telling thing is the fact that he doesn't leap onto the phone to inform Scripps of his conquest; in fact, he's still turning the entire Irwin situation over in his head to the point of forgetting to call Scripps at all. Because he's not sure what he'd say about it, due to not finding the victory he'd expected (which I do express in the fic, soon).
Sure enough: "You fucking wanker, is that all you're going to give me? When I had to call you? I assume he had the sense to refuse, then."
GO SCRIPPS.
"Tried to." Dakin smirked. "Not very successfully."
"Then --" Scripps paused. "For fuck's sake, I assumed you'd gone off to nurse your sorely wounded ego with Nancy Whatsername, or else you'd found someone else to brag to." Another pause, this one foreboding. "You didn't tell Posner about it, did you?"
In my head, Nancy is the girl who's kind of hanging around in the hope that Dakin grows up sometime so she can nab him. But in the meantime she's his backup person for when he needs ego-nursing or just feels like sex but is not currently dating anyone. Dakin's feelings for her are a mixture of gratitude and contempt.
Dakin's voice went thin with horror. "What kind of person d'you think I am?"
Oh god can you imagine the trainwreck of that conversation.
"The kind of person who's never been shy about declaring his conquests to his best mate, details and sad military metaphors and all."
Dakin shrugged, mostly for his own benefit; he wasn't sure himself why he'd hadn't bothered to call Scripps yet, so he didn't feel like chewing it over. "Been busy."
This is another incidence of me having to remove character-exposition and allow for the fact that Dakin is not entirely self-aware. All he knows is that he's hesitant to crow about it, and he's the kind of person to trust his instincts.
"Busy," Scripps echoed, taking twice as long to enunciate the word, injecting it with effortless innuendo. "It's that good, is it?"
For once, Scripps is seeing innuendo where Dakin didn't actually mean any.
Good was just as effortless, and true, but what Dakin didn't want to say was: the situation was comparable only to the few weeks he'd spent at the Florio, before he grew tired of the pretensions disguising any merit that might have been found in the apocryphal words. He wasn't a poet. The meetings had blurred and then melded in his mind to create one long winter evening of criticism and the soft sting of port against his tongue, and the softer sting of finding something so close to, yet so unlike, Hector's lessons. He'd been looking for a more sophisticated version of his adolescent arena, a higher stage on which to strut, and hadn't found it there; he'd had to start debating to find that. Likewise, he'd gone after Irwin in search of a victory that he hadn't found. Not exactly.
I am proud of this paragraph! It says exactly what I want it to say.
"It's odd," he said finally. "Good. But odd."
"Well, it's Irwin, isn't it? Christ, I can't believe you actually -- does he give you pointers? I can't even imagine it. Which isn't an invitation," he added. "I suppose I should be encouraging this sudden burst of mature non-disclosure. Though I still think you should've bought him a drink and left it at that."
"That's because you're a man of God, Scripps." He heard the soft, tolerant laughter and talked over it. "And a writer. You're a man who doesn't know what he's missing when it comes to shagging, but doesn't care because he's got his prayers and his blissfully inevitable alcoholism to keep him warm at night."
Scripps laughed again, more sincerely this time. "You know you're starting to talk the most godawful wank. It's like those calls I get at two in the morning, when you've been fretting your head over exams and reading Bertrand sodding Russell. This thing with Irwin, it's not anything serious, is it?"
I love these two. I love how effortless and based on mutual ribbing their friendship is, and how well they know each other.
Dakin let the automatic scoff linger in his throat, unreleased, because this was Scripps. Honesty was part of their agreement, and there was something about his friend -- something almost disconnected from the robust light of his faith, but not quite -- that encouraged confession. He'd make a bloody good journalist one day.
SERIOUSLY.
Scripps whistled, the sound hollow and gusty over the phone.
"Shut up, you arse, I'm thinking."
"The fact that you even have to think about it --"
"No," Dakin said, once he'd bullied a concise expression from his thoughts. "But serious isn't the same as important."
*underlines this one with satisfaction*
"Oh, well, as long as we're all still laughing," said Scripps.
~
There was a look that Irwin gave him occasionally that Dakin pretended not to notice. It was the look that Scripps wore as he watched his hands dance aross a piano, the look that Hector had swept over all of them but Posner in particular: equal parts pride and insecurity. The way you looked at a work of art, searching for pieces of yourself, wondering how you had managed to create such a thing. There were no words to accompany the way Irwin's fingertips mapped Dakin's body, but if it were possible to translate an action into speech then Dakin thought it might say: I changed you, and that makes you mine.
The fingertip-mapping was akin to the pencil-chewing in that it appeared once, then twice, then became a fixture in my mental canon. I had to fight myself hard and refuse to use the word 'cartography' because it's juuuust the wrong side of Dakin's voice. Scripps would use it; Dakin wouldn't.
When you change something, you make it your own was borrowed from
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pogrebin's story arise on the ruins, which is also why I made the nod to Bertrand Russell above :) Which was pretty bloody arrogant for someone who had to be coaxed into bed in the first place, Dakin thought, and contented himself with changing Irwin in return. Irwin was a memory, he still lived as dictated by words on the lines of a diary -- but he was also, inescapably, a whole and immediate person. Whatever this thing was between them, it couldn't be about the past or the present; they had started in one and walked across the dead ground and run smack bang into the other.
I had a lot of trouble with this paragraph and I still think it doesn't quite manage to convey what I want it to convey. Which is a few things:
1) Dakin's subtle rationalisation of the fact that he's not always in control; he finds pleasure in the fact that Irwin is coming out of his shell, and (reasonably enough) takes credit for it
2) Irwin is, by and large, cautious and the type to make plans. But that isn't all he is, and we can't realise every facet of him in such a small space and number of contexts.
3) The recognition that the present can always be informed by the past, but the past can always be interpreted from the perspective of the present -- the random inseparable nature of time and events.
I am very pleased with the last clause of the last sentence. It came out well.
Irwin was no abstract idea; he could be changed. He could be marked. But the thinness of his skin was, like the flush on his face and his slender limbs, deceptive. Dakin found that once seduced, once removed from his own clothes and contexts, Irwin stopped flushing. And once he stopped flushing he wound the tie around Dakin's neck and tied the knot himself, leaving room for three fingers to hook between silk and skin. He kept taking directions but also began to give them himself, starting with buttons and progressing until Dakin was on his knees swearing through bruised bloodless lips, all the blood having of course headed fucking south because Irwin was a capable cheat and just as good as Dakin at finding weakness and plucking at it until things unraveled. So Dakin curled yes, sir, please off his tongue, shamelessly seizing the power, and Irwin whispered filthy things while his fingers scraped Dakin's cock with never, ever enough force. It wasn't about winning, but it was about competing. Dakin wasn't sure if he was playing Peter Pan games or committing the most adult acts of his life to date, but he'd never been afraid of ambiguity so long as the two options were equally interesting.
Okaaaay. This paragraph I wrote at the speed of light, trying to see if I could get the images down before my innate blush reflex interfered. As soon as I typed 'cock' I had to scrunch my legs up to my chest and spin my chair around a few times, clawing at my face, but it was down and it was not going away. I've never used genital nouns in a story before. This is (ha) a turning point, I expect. Anyway, there's something about the way Stephen Campbell Moore holds himself and speaks and pauses that persuaded me that this is in fact a plausible interpretation of Irwin -- more on this later.
My favourite phrase is 'brusied bloodless lips' because of what it says about preceding events and Dakin's state of mind, but I was also very pleased with 'shamelessly seizing the power' because it's like a delicious slap in the face when juxtaposed with the 'yes, sir, please'; Dakin's just the type to learn how to extert control through deliberate and manipulative submission.
The Peter Pan thing slipped in (remember what I said about literary references) and then became an ideal setup for something later in this scene.
Irwin insisted on appointments and turned up with a punctuality to set clocks by, until Dakin decided to push him further and sauntered down the stairs to meet him outside Magdalen's gates, just as the bells struck music from the drenched air. He took firm hold of Irwin's scarf and kissed him in the open space, in the rain, to make the point. To be the one making changes.
"No," he said as he pulled back, either pre-emptive or very belated, "I don't care what people think of me," which was not as true as it could have been, but it was an acceptable falsehood. Not black, not quite white, but the dissolving grey of the clouds.
Through the water on his glasses Irwin's eyes were amused and his mouth curved, at the side.
Writing this sentence, there was a single moment in which I understood Irwin perfectly. It was replaced by insecurity pretty quickly, but it was good while it lasted.
But -- "You're blushing," Dakin crowed, tugging on the scarf in delight. "Thought you'd forgotten how."
Dakin's experiment with shifting contexts has worked, ie. now that he knows that Irwin tends to the shameless in private, he's seeing if he can still elicit reactions in public. Which he can.
"That's enough," Irwin said, the authority entering his voice as it tended to now whenever Dakin played dirty. He looked up and around them in a series of darting magpie glances, as though someone might have heard, as though he could identify the trajectory of public disapproval and duck to avoid it.
Dakin laughed, generous in victory, and kissed him again before Irwin could move.
That day of terrible weather and not having enough chairs to drape their clothes over and not bothering to towel their hair dry and Dakin licking rain from Irwin's throat and Irwin's hands holding Dakin down as he slowly, thoughtfully sucked him off -- that was Irwin's last day in Oxford, and they'd never said a word about what would happen after that. Dusk was descending, subtle against the gloom of the sky, and Dakin thought, not for the first time, about how fucking odd a situation he'd found himself in. Irwin was half-sitting in his bed, mostly clothed again, wearing glasses, lifting and then frowning at a single leaf from the devastation of paper that decorated the sheets. Dakin sat at his desk and edited his own Ethics essay in dark green ink and kept clicking his teeth against the metal of his pen, forgetting that it wasn't a pencil to be slowly ground down and reshaped by his concentration.
Man, I crammed a lot into that paragraph. More porn AND introspection! The image of Irwin sitting in Dakin's bed and using it as a workplace was one that jumped into my head and demanded to be written.
He tried two different versions of a sentence out on Irwin, and Irwin looked up from his articles for long enough to choose the latter. His feet were bare and his shirt only half-buttoned and Dakin thought uneasily how simple it would be to just -- continue, until this was no longer exciting.
There was a very particular note I needed to hit here: normality, something bordering on domestic and sweet -- followed immediately by a soft, lingering dissonance at the concept of these adjectives being applied to Dakin. All the more unsettling because for a moment Dakin buys into the easy appeal of it. But it's not what he wants at this stage of his life (remember Irwin saying 'not yet') and so it's not going to do either of them any good. This is affirmation of what I stated earlier, the fierce-and-brief option.
"When's your train?"
"Tomorrow morning, ten," Irwin said, with the same absent tone that he'd just used to say, go with the second one, it's less ambiguous. This time he barely looked up.
"I've got a lecture," and fuck, what was he doing?
Another brief flash of confused maturity: he feels like he needs to justify, aloud, the casualness of the ending; he's losing track of his own distinction between important and serious.
This time Irwin's focus moved to him properly, almost tangibly, Irwin's faint smile layered with that uncomfortable red-pen recognition. "I wasn't exactly expecting you to wave a white handkerchief."
Whereas Irwin, true to form, went into this with no expectations and is going out of it with none, because after everything, he still knows Dakin better than Dakin knows him.
Dakin exhaled too many emotions to bother identifying, but the dominant one was probably relief. "Right," he said, and that was that until the external light was gone altogether, and Irwin was pulling on his still-damp coat.
"Well," Dakin said, hands in his pockets. "It's been -- what, what's funny?"
"You've got ink -- no, here," and there was one more intimate brush of fingers against his mouth before Irwin leaned in and kissed him, just once. It felt enough like repossession that Dakin wanted to pull away, but Irwin was already doing it for him.
Ink near mouths is a thing of mine. Okay, ink in general. You knew that.
Nothing lasted. Everything changed. This was life, ticking past like a crocodile's smile, turning into history the moment it passed them by.
The simile ONLY works because I'm hoping the Peter Pan reference is still fresh in your mind. Yes? Please?
"Give me a call when you're in town again," he said, and Irwin nodded.
"I will. Will you call me back?"
Definitely was at the tip of Dakin's tongue, but he caught the look on Irwin's face just in time. He recognised it from school, from the times when Irwin was pinning one of them to the chair with his questions, why and why not and says who?, watching to see if they'd break free by producing an original perspective.
Irwin had asked, What's the truth got to do with anything? But the point was that he'd always been able to recognise it, if only to encourage its demolition.
I have a habit of yanking all my themes together at the end, and this is the culmination of the truth/lies theme. It's also -- as you'll see -- Irwin finally doing what a part of Dakin has been wanting him to do all along: test him. Judge him. Find him worthy.
"Maybe," Dakin said, aware of the length of his pause. And then allowed, "Probably."
Because brief-and-fierce isn't exclusive of on-and-off; I like to think that maybe this happens again, later, and that time the pattern is established so the leadup is shorter (but still a game; they need the games) and the ending is just as simple. In the long term…I don't know. It's a mystery. (Thanks, Stoppard.)
Irwin smiled -- steady, approving -- and Dakin's throat swelled with juvenile triumph. True and fleeting. It'd do.
That being the callback to Dakin's first conviction about love or desire or whatever it is they haven't bothered to define: that by any logic it should be true and fleeting or false and falsely extended. What they've been doing in this scene is avoiding a false extension.
And the triumph is, of course, due to what is to come:
"Well done," Irwin said, as he closed the door.
The approval. The victory, sort of.
This isn't the neatest ending line I've ever written, but I think it needs to be the way it is.
And that's it! By the amount of commentary along the lines of 'I am proud of X', I like this story a lot more than I usually like my own stories.
Questions? Discussion? Have at :)
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(And bonus Irwin fic (http://yuletidetreasure.org/archive/55/nightafter.html) by Zoe.)
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(ALSO. EMMA. I READ ALL OF GOODBYE CHAINS IN A SINGLE SITTING AND NOW I AM KIND OF OBSSESSED and kind of...want fic? FOR A WEBCOMIC. what have you done to me.)
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(FAHYE. YOU KNOW WHAT THE SOLUTION IS TO WANTING FIC. YOU WRITE IT??)
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(NO, see, I don't want to write it! I don't have even the smallest urge to write it. Just...read it.)
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(Well this I understand. Man there should be protocols for reading and writing webcomic slash because there are so many pairings that are dear to my heart
*shifty* What is the fic of which you are dreaming?)
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(Nothing in particular! I just want more of the universe to exist, really, and in the absence of more comic then fic would do nicely.
Actually: I want to hear more about Cordy and Bridget!)
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Part of it was that I was told (not by the person who showed it to me, but elsewhere) that it was a revolutionary gay film, GLAAD-winning, etc. But it's just another film about tragic homosexuals and it doesn't talk about gayness as a legitimate sexual expression but as an outgrowth of the British school system, basically, and that makes me unhappy.
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You're right: the only times it's presented as legitimate sexual expression is in Posner's experience (which is doomed, and eventually twisted) and in Irwin's obvious hyperawareness of how inappropriate the whole mess is.
I can't imagine selling it to anyone as a 'gay fim' if they're looking for something affirmative. But I think that for what it is, it's wonderful.
I won't comment on its place in the creative canon of tragic homosexuality because I have a feeling you know more about that than I do; I watch the occasional lesbian romcom and fume about television presentation of queer characters, but I very seldom seek out depressing films.