templemarker, posts by tag: bandom - LiveJournal

Far From Last
by templemarker

Notes: For natacup82 in popoffacork 2009. With great thanks to minim_calibre for her exemplary beta skills, and to jaew for running the challenge tirelessly, year after year. Brendon/Shane, PG13, circa late 2008/early 2009. Oh, how I miss the days.

Originally posted here.

( Kissing Shane was like--like a breaking dawn, or something else lyrical and grand and everyday.Collapse )

Man, Remix #9 came at essentially the height of job-related stress for me this year, and I'm a little shocked to find I survived it!

I received the truly lovely A Slow Pan (The Scene-by-Scene Remix) by prettykitty_aya, which was a remix of a Brendon/Shane ficlet I wrote ages ago, why you gotta work so hard, baby.

When I was first migrating to this journal, I wasn't really sure what I was going to write--bandom had kind of faded from my heart despite my affection for it, and Generation Kill nor the STXI reboot had taken root for me yet. So I noodled around with a handful of ficlets that I figured no one would ever read, but they were good exercises without committing to a full story. And then I wrote smoke stupid cigarettes and drink stupid wine, which was kind of it for me in terms of original creative thought for bandom (i.e. not challenges).

To have prettykitty_aya take something I'd all but forgotten about and transform it into this truly creative remixed work was humbling. I went back and re-read the original story and was surprised at how much it conveyed about my perception of Brendon/Shane at the time; and A Slow Pan (The Scene-by-Scene Remix) investigates that fully, in what I might imagine Shane's inner narration might be. So, thank you. I loved this, this little jump back in time for me.

And, in the circular nature of contracting fandoms mixed with nostalgia, I wrote for prettykitty_aya as well! I took the author's very first bandom story, Precarious, and retold it from Jon's point of view. It's funny to think about what 2006 was like, five years later--so much has changed, so many fundamental things have changed. It was a real lightness to go back to the beginning and think about what it must have been like for Jon to first have this opportunity--this chance to live a dream (and meet someone who would change your life) before anything fell out the way it did. I hope I served the story well. Precarious (The Inverted Precipice Remix)

My second story for remix was waketosleep's delightfully hilarious Random Acts of Gayness, a Hawaii 5-0 story where Steve...is not Steve. waketosleep had so many awesome H50 stories to choose from, and as it's a fandom that has suckered me thoroughly, it wasn't easy to choose! But I enjoyed the opportunity to do a story from Steve's point of view, seeing as Danny comes much more easily to me. Read the original, and then read the remix! Random Acts of Gayness (The Impersonator Mambo Redub)

And with remix and Inception re:bb over I feel like I can finally take a breath. At least, until Femslash gets under way.

Precarious (The Inverted Precipice Remix)
by templemarker

Notes: For prettykitty_aya in Remix Redux 9: Love Potion No. 9. This is a remix of Precarious, a Jon/Spencer story set shortly after Jon joined Panic. There's a little nostalgia for you.

You can read this story at AO3, DW, LJ, or my fic archive.


( It feels like some kind of dream, like nostalgia or wistfulness, to be back here when he keeps thinking about being on the road with Panic. Or, okay, whatever. Being totally honest, *with Spencer.*Collapse )

half-spent
by templemarker

Notes: Utmost thanks to stele3 and clarityhiding who went above and beyond the call of duty. Set somewhat contemporaneously. Jon/Tom, 1500 words. Thanks to jae_w, for whom this story was written; thank you for being generally awesome.

This story can also be read here at popoffacork

( Jon steps off the plane looking and feeling like shit. Collapse )

smoke stupid cigarettes and drink stupid wine
by templemarker

Three thousand words about Ryan being a twat. You'd think I'd have written it in response to this, but no.

( Ryan liked LA, liked that he didn't quite fit in there and yet his particular sense of style was never more unusual than anyone else's. He was staying with Brendon, and with Shane, crashing on the pulled-out sofa next to Spencer. It felt young, doing that, younger than Ryan had felt in--a long time.Collapse )

Jon's not ever done this for the money. He would have happily teched around with his friends for the rest of his life, occasionally putting up prints of his better photographs on Tom's website, without ever thinking twice about having more than rent and beer money. He's still not used to the revenue his album--his first album as a member of Panic instead of the guy who filled in for Panic--going into his bank account every month like clockwork, sometimes lager and sometimes smaller, but always far, far more than he could have ever made pressing buttons on Verismo machines and taking inventory on cookies and muffins. That was never even going to be his job for more than a summer; when he went to Columbia he thought he could maybe open a studio someday, a small place up north that took pictures of confirmations and weddings and color-coordinated families that would fund his less lucrative photography habits. Even that wouldn't have come close to the kind of money he makes as a member of a successful, touring band.

He remembers what it was like when Panic just started to get big--not the part where people started to know Ryan's lyrics by heart or the guys' faces on-sight, but the slowly dawning realization that the concerts had sold out and whatever financial problems they had, or their parents had anticipated them having, weren't an issue (at least, in the short-term). He was only seeing the touring revenue off that, not even the album sales or a big percentage of the merch, and it was still enough for him to pay off the few thousand dollars in student loans. And to purchase the Leica M6 Classic he'd been coveting since he was 10.

It's strange, the things a person can get used to. He's not rich, and probably never will be, but if someone had told him when he was seventeen that he'd be in a band again, touring all over the world and making enough money to retire on--if someone had told him that, he doesn't think seventeen-year-old-Jon would have believed them. He's grateful for everything that's happened to him, and pretty aware of how lucky he is, even when stuff gets hard. But this is so much more than he ever thought he'd have that sometimes he wishes he was still a tech, fiddling around on other people's guitars for two hours with the rest of the time to himself, on his own guitar.

Only some of the time. Most of the time he wouldn't want to be anywhere else, no matter how much you paid him.

*

we_are_cities 01.01.09.

The thing no one told Shane when he moved in with Brendon was how impossible Brendon would get when he was working on something. He'd heard stories, once the guys had gotten comfortable with him as a friend instead of that guy with a camera trained on them; stories about how their first album came together, how intense both Brendon and Ryan had gotten about what they were creating. Mostly the stories were from Spencer, who always looked tired and tried to hide it when he talked about the studio. Some of them were from Jon, who talked around his stories as if he wasn't sure where the line between what he knew and what he'd been told should be.

Shane understood that kind of work. He'd had one particularly epic assignment for his video editing class that kept him in the editing bay for 72 hours once, without ever coming out of the building until it was finished. But Brendon was different. Brendon didn't just get involved. He disappeared to somewhere inside himself, working through instruments and lyrics and melodies as if they were all interchangeable parts of some larger thing, a thing Shane didn't quite see the edges of.

It wouldn't have been a big deal, except they'd converted the front room into a practice space, and there wasn't any soundproofing. There didn't need to be, at first. But Shane found himself spending more and more time listening to Brendon work, when Brendon didn't even realise he was there, and it was distracting Shane from his own jobs.

Shane leaned against the doorframe, watching Brendon play the piano, shirtless and half-lit in the light from the street coming through the big front window. The melody Brendon was working on was a lazy one, two repeated phrases that wound back in on themselves again and again like a double helix, combining in new ways. Brendon's eyes were nearly shut and there was a thin sheen of sweat on his shoulders that showed just how long he'd been working on the piece. It felt like the notes had been going in and out of Shane's mind for so long that he couldn't remember what it was like not to hear them.

More than anything he wanted to go over there, place a hand on the swell of Brendon's neck, watch Brendon slowly come back to him as his head turned towards Shane. But he couldn't do that; he'd hate it if someone took him away from where he went when he worked, and he loved Brendon too much to bring him home.

***

May 2011: This story has been remixed! A Slow Pan by prettykitty_fic.

When the door shut, Spencer looked around the cluttered living room that, until moments ago, had been a place filled mostly with good memories. He walked over to the couch (where Jon had kissed him for the first time) and moved around some of the magazines on the coffee table. He sat down, stood up again, and didn't turn off the lights when he went into the hallway. (Jon hated complete darkness.)

He ran his hands along the baseboard (that Jon had helped him paint) and didn't look in the bathroom (where Jon had wandered into Spencer's shower that morning, smelling of coffee and sweat and the faint memory of sex). He closed his eyes going into his bedroom, not bothering to look because Jon's shoes weren't on the floor, his jeans weren't a haphazard pile next to them, and Spencer didn't have to step over a dirty t-shirt to climb into bed and pull the covers (that still carried Jon on them) over his head.

Spencer was not a dumb guy. Everything about the last two hours of his life screamed over over over, and for the first time in his twenty-two years he let himself feel so deeply that he gasped for breath until he couldn't breathe anymore.

The hardest thing about closing the door behind him was looking at the blank beige wall that marked the other side of Spencer's door. They had joked so many times about Spencer living in a doctor's office, or an accountant's, while coming back here after a night out. The jokes were silly, not even that funny, but there was a hard burning in Jon's chest even at the thought of laughing with Spencer.

He wouldn't be doing that for awhile.

Jon wasn't lying to either of them. He knew he had fucked up here, that it came down on him in the end, but it didn't change the feeling of anger and sorrow at the way Spencer had just shut down. Jon didn't understand how Spencer could be so completely on one day and then so...blank the next. It was fucked up, is what it was, and Jon thumped his fist in frustration against Spencer's door before pushing off and moving down the corridor.

If that was how he wanted to play it, fine. Fine. Jon could shut down too, turn off all the memories and the happiness and the way Spencer had changed his life. He could do it because it wasn't worth remembering if Spencer wasn't around to share it with him.

As he walked down the stairs to the cold desert December below, he slapped at the half-lit Exit sign that always hung low enough for him to hit when he jumped. He heard it crash behind him, and didn't bother to look back and watch it break.