Concordia discors

09 May 2009: Without the help of flyingcarpet, who placed references within the text, re-organized the footnotes, and generally helped get this post-ready, this would not be posted right now. Many, many thanks to her for her work and patience.

Disclaimer: Mina de Malfois is an original fictional creation. These stories and characters are the sole property of the author, but she lends them out for fanfic and fanart. This is a work of fiction. No resemblance is intended to any person or persons living, dead, or online. No BNFs were harmed in the making of this fic.

temaris has a podcast of Mina de Malfois and the Young Blood here.



We didn’t get a chance to really converse much, but over the next little while it became something of a habit of PrinceC’s to shoot me a picture every evening. I was building up quite the collection. Not, I hasten to add, that I mean that as any kind of a complaint. To say the guy was easy on the eyes is to understate the matter dreadfully. The average teenage girl has her bedroom walls strewn with posters of various male specimens, and the majority of said specimens, I put it to you, couldn’t compete in the Eye Candy Semi-Finals against PrinceC without taking lethal body-blows to their respective egos.

He had, I noted, a promiscuous approach to fandom. According to the photographic evidence, he’d appeared in full Goth garb at the BloodPsyVampFest; in wizard’s robes at Wands Across the West; and in a spandex concoction I can’t quite manage to describe at KawaiiKon. I began to sense that con organizers must have him on speed dial, so as not to create conflicts in his schedule. He’d graced pretty much everything going with his appropriately clad presence. If he ever decided to make the theatre his career, chances were he’d find it restful, because there’d be fewer costume changes.

So I’d spend blissful hours at a stretch either playing Sanguinity or, more often, creating my elaborate backstory for the dashing Lord Henri Antoine Silvestre de Gravina to inhabit, and when I emerged there’d usually be a picture of the also somewhat dashing PrinceC awaiting my perusal. Not a bad existence, all in all.

The evening I submitted my introductory chapter to Penn’d Passion--a process that took forever, as I lost my nerve at the last minute and re-read the fic three times before I was convinced it was error-free, then had to reload the entire submission form and start the process from the beginning--was no exception. The picture, however, was exceptional indeed.

I’m not sure what prompted PrinceC to decide to advance our relationship, but clearly something had. He had determined, I saw at a glance, that it was time for further intimacy. Our friendship, he obviously felt, was due to lengthen. Er, deepen. I meant deepen.

Because when I, fic finally submitted and self ready for bath and then bed, opened his email, what greeted my astonished eyes was a candid shot of PrinceC in the altogether. His costume, I mean to say, was nil. A bare expanse of male flesh was exposed to my riveted gaze.

I didn’t know what to think of this, but I thought it energetically, without room to spare to think of anything else for quite some time. Such was my state of distraction that I may have washed my face with hair goop and conditioned my hair with face goop--I noticed, climbing into bed, that my face felt untangled and my hair unwrinkled,¹¹ but I didn’t really pay it much heed, because, as I said: naked man flesh. Extremely attractive, smooth, silken manflesh, and the man it belonged to, I had reason to know, capable of gallant and nearly rational conversation. A fine subject for study and contemplation, all in all.

But eventually, of course, the initial daze wore off, and so a day or two later I found myself again wondering whether PrinceC, gentlemanly though he was in his day to day conduct, might not be some species of escaped lunatic. I put it to you: do sane men present their recent online acquaintance with nude photos? I suspect not. It seemed a rash and reckless act on his part. I couldn’t make up my mind whether I ought to be gloating over my acquisition of an internet suitor, or cringing over the appearance on the virtual horizon of a sort of madman.

I decided on consultation.

‘Arc,’ I messaged her breezily, ‘do you have a moment? I want your opinion on something.’

‘Your fic’s still under review, but reports are favourable,’ she assured me. Well, this was good news, but not what I was after.

‘No, not that,’ I told her. ‘There’s this guy.’

‘What guy?’ she asked.

‘This one,’ I said. ‘Hang on, I’m sending you a picture.’ And I emailed her the snap of PrinceC in his pirate garb, having wisely decided that springing the nude photo on her at this juncture would be unnecessarily startling.

There was a pause, and then she asked, ‘What are you doing with a picture of Eva Hamill’s son?’

‘Who?’ I asked, bewildered. I’d known, or I would have known if I’d given the matter any thought, that PrinceC presumably had a mother, but I hadn’t expected Arc to rattle off the mater’s name like that. I know Arc is well informed, but really, this was ridiculous.

‘Eva Hamill,’ she repeated. ‘Eva runs one of the Trek archives.’

‘What, really?’ I asked, amazed. ‘Bit old for that, wouldn’t she be?’

‘She’s in her middle thirties,’ Arc answered, and for some reason I fancied I could feel a slight chill emanating from the screen.

‘She can’t be,’ I protested, ‘not and be this guy’s mother.’

‘She most certainly is,’ Arc said firmly. ‘I knew her at school.’

I saw at once what had happened. ‘No, listen, you have it wrong,’ I explained kindly. I didn’t want to make her feel badly, but she had obviously slipped up. ‘This isn’t Eva Whatever’s son; it can’t be. You must have mistaken him for someone he looks like.’

She argued the point, but I was sure I saw what had happened. Get to a certain age, and everybody’s son looked more or less alike, probably. Still, it left me with a slight feeling of...not concern, exactly, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it concern, but I was uneasy.

‘So, what do you think of university?’ I asked PrinceC casually the next time I caught him online.

‘I’m looking forward to it,’ he responded, all frank open honesty, damn him. My innards sort of froze over, if you know the feeling. He was in his last year of high school, then. Not his last year of a university degree, or his last year of some other adult pursuit. Damn.

And speaking of adult pursuits, I had a nude photo of this young man saved to my hard drive. I felt a sense of shame creep over me, which wasn’t fair, since this whole misunderstanding was his fault entirely. But I had had a strict upbringing, and it told against me now. I blushed to think that I had even looked at that dratted photograph. I would have felt highly indignant, if I hadn’t been busy feeling other things, like ‘complicit’ and ‘perverse’ and ‘embarrassed.’ I mean, really, I’d been hard done by. I was the wronged party, here. I hadn’t asked for his photographs, had I? He’d sent them to me with no encouragement from this end. Where did he get off?

Actually, scratch that last question. That’s not the sort of thing I want to dwell on.

I blame Trek fandom for unleashing their ghastly youngsters on an unsuspecting public.¹² If they spent less time swanning around in costume and running fanfiction archives of dubious morality, and more time attending to the upbringing of their own next generation, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen. It was clear to me in retrospect that this young man had been raised in a lax setting rife with turpitude and debauchery. I’d heard what went on at cons. I glared indignantly at his photographs. That a youth of such tender years should already be cutting a swath through fandom! These young fans, I tell you, should be observed cautiously and at a safe distance.

I checked my email cautiously, wary that it might contain further youthful exposures, and found it filled to the brim. ‘Pornography,’ began the first one I opened, and for one awful moment it felt as if my inbox was somehow reflecting the state of my soul back to me, like that ‘pathetic fallacy’ syndrome I learned about in either lit class or intro psych, I forget which. But I quickly saw that this must be in response to my fic, and not to any online dalliances I may or may not have been toying with conducting. Ah, good: the fic was up, then.

‘You fascist,’ ‘you racist,’ ‘you degenerate pervert,’ cried the next three comments I opened at random. Yes. The fic was definitely up. I breezed through my inbox, keeping a running tally on a scrap of paper, and was delighted to see that the ‘this is the most erotic, romantic, well-written fanfiction I’ve ever read’ crowd were outnumbering the ‘this is immoral, unnatural drivel’ faction. All to the good, then. I basked, yet again, in the glow of internet fame.

‘The comments are flooding in on At His Lordship’s Behest,’ I mentioned to Arc a few days later.

‘I hate to tear you away from the review boards,’ she said, ‘but there are two one-shots in the submission queue awaiting your editorial input.’

‘And no doubt soon there will be many more,’ I assured her cheerily. ‘I expect At His Lordship’s Behest to spark a renaissance of Sanguinity fanfiction.’ Wait, did I mean renaissance? Could you have a renaissance in an entirely new fandom?

‘It’s too early to tell yet,’ Arc said, ‘but I expect we’ll get a surge of Sanguinity submissions, judging by the number of people reading and reviewing the two epic introductions.’

I was taken aback by this news. ‘Two?’ I inquired suspiciously. ‘That would be mine and...another one, then?’

‘I assumed you knew all about it,’ she responded.

‘Ah. Yes. Quite,’ I said, baffled, but with a well-concealed bafflement. ‘Absolutely. Yes. What I wondered was what you thought of this, ah, secondary epic. What’s your opinion of it so far?’ I’d never heard of the blasted thing, but I didn’t like to say so.

‘It complements yours nicely,’ Arc said. ‘It’s ambitious, but by all reports he’s very talented.’ And with that she rang off.

It was with some degree of trepidation that I headed over to ‘Dread Lane,’ PP’s Sanguinity section, to check out this rival epic. When I say ‘rival’ I’m speaking broadly, of course, because it would be nonsensical to imagine that some fanbrat was capable of launching a multi-chaptered work that could pose any kind of threat or serious competition to my own planned work. The very idea was laughable. I laughed now, hollowly, but left off quickly. Really, I was only even checking the recent submissions out of a kind of mild, condescending curiosity as to whether the so-called ‘epic’ was being written by a Booter or a Sammich.

It wasn’t hard to find. There were only two fics listed under ‘book-length fiction.’ One was mine. The other was Of Vice and Velvet, by PrinceC.

I clicked on it, and brief moments later sat in stunned silence, apart from the pounding of my heart and the occasional involuntary gasp of shock. It wasn’t just his masterful handling of the subject matter that shocked me, although certainly he had a level of skill I hadn’t expected from one so young. It wasn’t just his original female character, Lady Horatia Marianna Wilhelmina de Malfois,¹³ crack shot and seasoned sailor, shown, in his introduction, in her elaborate bedchamber.

It was, in point of fact, the dedication. ‘Dedicated, with devoted affection, to Mina de Malfois,’ it proclaimed, ‘whose fiction inspires and moves me, and who haunts my fondest and most private dreams.’

I boggled.



Footnotes:
11. Mina’s face goop and hair goop are probably Lush products.

12. Lots and lots of second and third generation fans have Trek-loving parents. Trekkies must reproduce like Tribbles.

13. PrinceC’s original female character, Lady Horatia Marianna Wilhelmina de Malfois, is based on Mina herself.