Concordia discors

First of all, there's required reading over here: Fannish Climbing, or Politics and Pros. I've developed a major crush on Case, which is awkward, as he's fictional.

Secondly, the Cafe Press version of Season Two is now available.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. No specific resemblance is intended to any person or persons living, dead, or online. No BNFs were harmed in the making of this fic.

Permissions: 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. A list of Mina de Malfois/Sanguinity things by other people can be found here.

Dedicated, for various and sundry reasons, to:
all of you, particularly any of you who need cheering up: THIS WILL BE OUR YEAR;
kalpurna and julietofarcadia: please accept these Bavarian sugar cookies;
bookshop, who was there--if by 'there' we count Facebook, and I THINK WE DO--while I was typing this up;
and most of all to the Clives: you know who you are. You're brilliant. I owe you.



’Twas the night before Christmas break, and I was stuck in an airport. The winds howled and shrieked and flung snow at the windows; the tarmac was rendered completely invisible as well as, obviously, impassible; and I alternately longed for a fireplace, and contemplated hanging myself with one of my own stockings. The airport’s emergency power source wasn’t, evidently, terribly powerful, so only randomly chosen pieces of equipment were functioning, and distressingly few of these were of the lighty-heaty type. I hadn’t even been sure I wanted to go home for the holidays, and now this. And to add to my misery, for some idiotic reason I’d decided to dress up, so I was shivering in an attractive but impractical skirt and blouse.

At least I’d made one wise choice. Knowing I’d be in transit and then in fandom-hostile territory, I’d decided not to sign up for any fic exchanges this year. While this meant I’d be foregoing the pleasure of just possibly finding that someone had produced something absolutely perfect especially for me, it also meant I’d be spared the equally likely possibility of exerting myself to find things to praise about some well-meant fright of twisted perversity and bent grammar. Even more blessedly still, I’d been spared the struggle to produce a timely offering of my own, written to some stranger’s incomprehensible specs. Don’t get me wrong: I adore fic exchanges. But let’s face it, they’re strewn with more stressors and squicks than one needs to face every year at exam time, right? And I could always, I’d thought guiltily, pinch-hit or maybe assist with last minute beta-ing, or steal time to produce an after-the-fact fic to satisfy someone’s unmet desires.

The mini-blanket the airline staff had handed me was as utterly unwarming as their comfortless smiles; they’d chilled me to the core when they’d informed me my baggage had been checked through and couldn’t be retrieved. I was beginning to wonder if they were some sort of demons that fed off human suffering, or if they were conducting experiments in cryogirls, or reducing us all to fishsticks to provision local school cafeterias. Oh, great, I was hallucinating.

Jen or Josh plopped down next to me. Joshen. I giggled. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you to be in my hallucination,’ I said. She gave me an extremely concerned look.

‘Stay here,’ she said, which was what people had been saying to me all bloody day. She vanished, and I was left to slump and wonder idly whether I’d forgotten painting my fingernails blue this morning, or if my hands were turning into something grim by Jack London. Time passed, I suppose, but it’s difficult to tell in airports.

‘Put these on,’ said a voice, and handed me a stack of new clothes. I peered past the fleecy bathrobe and pyjamas.

‘Joshen!’ I said happily, and my former roommate sighed heavily and knelt down in front of me.

‘How long has it been since you’ve eaten?’ she asked crossly, beginning to unbutton my blouse.

I sat up, alarmed. ‘We are in the center of an airport,’ I said, restored to alert dignity by this intrusion.

‘We’re in the center of a dark airport inhabited by semi-frozen zombies,’ she argued back, but at least she removed her hands from my clothes. ‘The washroom’s over there; go change, and you’ll feel less miserable. I’m going to find us some food.’

‘There isn’t any food,’ I said, but went to change anyway.

I emerged dreamily a few minutes later, entirely and utterly snug from bathrobe hood to slippers and at every point between, and with my dressy clothes shoved into my carry-on bag, there to wrinkle irretrievably and lose that whole semblance of ‘attractive independent adult daughter’ I’d been trying to muster. Who had I been kidding, anyway? No one in my family was terribly likely to notice, much less to be impressed or pleased, that I’d dressed up for them. For a moment the pleasantly surreal feeling of wearing warm nightclothes in a cold airport threatened to dissolve in a puddle of maudlin self-evaluation.

‘Here,’ said Josh firmly, thrusting a styrofoam cup of cocoa into my hand. ‘You’ll feel better when you’ve had this.’ I sipped it and, oddly, did begin to feel better, almost instantly. * Now that I wasn’t privately reenacting the Franklin Expedition and had energy for observation and clear-headed thought, I’d made up my mind that this was the Josh mode, not the Jen feature. His hair had grown out to nearly shoulder-length dark curls, gleaming with honey-golden highlights. The brown leather aviator’s jacket with the golden wings pin looked damned dashing, and those were very attractive boots. And thighs. And shoulders.

‘What’s in this cocoa?’ I asked suspiciously.

‘Ask not what’s in the cocoa; ask what’s in your own heart,’ he non-answered. ‘Drink up, and we’ll head over to the elite lounge. I have a distinct feeling they’re going to be able to produce hot dinners for the two of us.’

‘Only frequent-flyer business-class type people have passes to the elite lounge,’ I pointed out. ‘And I don’t think they’d let me in dressed like this. And in case you haven’t noticed, the airport’s running on back-up generators powered by hamsters or something, and nobody’s selling any food.’

‘Are you always this pessimistic?’ Josh asked, and pulled two elite passes from his pocket. They had, I saw, our names on them--or to be strictly accurate, one of them had my name on it, and the other said ‘Josh Amos.’ He grinned and tucked the Mina one into my bathrobe pocket.

‘That doesn’t make any sense at all,’ I objected. ‘How could you possibly...?’

‘I have a lot of influence in airports,’ he said, shrugging. ‘You might say they’re a specialty of mine.’ And he must have been telling the truth or some portion thereof, because they waved us into the ‘Black Swan,’ as the elite lounge was called, without so much as blinking at my clothes, and the waiter didn’t even bother pretending hot meals were hard to come by. Honestly. It just goes to show that the privileged and the people really are two nations.

‘What’s new in your fannish life?’ Josh was asking politely from behind a highball glass.

‘Warr1or’s asked me to write some Housefic for his archive,’ I said. I frowned slightly, and confessed the difficulty this presented. ‘The problem is, I’m strictly a traditionalist in that fandom. I only write House/Wilson; the het pairings don’t interest me at all.’

‘A problem indeed,’ Josh agreed, sounding amused but sympathetic. ‘Especially given that your stance on performative gayness has been so widely lauded.’ He looked, as well he might, a bit smug there. ‘Producing hetfic for a cloistered archive now might strike people as hypocritical.’

Bugger: I hadn’t even thought of that. I suppose there was a certain danger in being too closely linked in the public mind with Warr1or’s carefully guarded domain of hetness, when I’d come out so strongly in support of slashy behaviours. It might, I mean, start to look as if I were trivializing the issue and reducing people’s sexuality to mere enactment. I’m not particularly Derridian myself, but I know fandom can be pretty damned touchy over signs and signifiers, especially if the fans feel they’re being reduced to whichever one of those it is they don’t like being reduced to.

My train of thought switched tracks when the waiter arrived, bringing us the airport version of a hot meal. Possibly it was because I’d gone all day on vending-machine fare, or maybe it was the novelty of eating Christmas dinner in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, but it was, I enthused, one of the best meals I’d ever eaten, and Josh agreed with me. The goose was a veritable feathered phenomenon, the gravy and mashed potatoes and applesauce were perfect (if puzzlingly overabundant for just the two of us), and afterwards there was a peculiarly bland pudding which I just know must have been British. Even the hovering waiter, who looked bone-weary and who had every reason to be thoroughly disgruntled at having pulled this shift, was a marvel of cheerful efficiency, and I planned to empty each pocket of my bag to dig out every possible fragment of tip-money.

‘One last drink?’ Josh asked afterwards, and I suggested raspberry martinis. I know one shouldn’t encourage stalkers or whatever, but he looked so delighted by the shared joke that I was glad I had.

‘Of course the question now,’ Josh said, ‘is which way you want to go.’ I waited for clarification before touching that. ‘I suppose you were on your way to spend the holidays with your family?’

Oh. ‘Yes,’ I said. I’d almost forgotten. ‘You?’

He shook his head. ‘The people who raised us don’t have a lot to do with Rabbit or me anymore,’ he said carefully. ‘So, Mina: do you want to continue in the direction you were headed, or turn around and go back?’

‘You make it sound as if you expect me to be able to do either,’ I said, ‘but I’m stuck here, in case you haven’t noticed, and so is everyone else.’

‘Imagine for a moment my influence extends to ensuring at least one flight takes off safely,’ insisted my clearly deranged former roommate. ‘Which one?’

I thought it over. Visiting my family was never easy or, well, all that pleasant. My sisters were guaranteed not to be satisfied with anything anyone gave them or did for them; I suppose they’re representative samples of consumer culture, but so am I, and I don’t remember being quite that discontented at their age. My mother has many good points, but being demonstrably pleased to see me has never been one of them. And while I was at the familial hearth I could, I knew from experience, expect a steady barrage of criticism about wasting time whenever I sat at the computer, a reliable stream of derision whenever I picked up a pen and notebook, and a lot of bracing honesty about my clothes, hair, weight, life, and prospects--if by ‘bracing’ one means ‘crippling.’

Whereas the nearly-empty campus proffered books, computers, geeks, quiet conversations, alone time, and the constant hope of friendly meetings with aloof librarians and bar-hopping pirates.

No contest, really. ‘Let’s go home,’ I said to Josh, and he smiled.



*It’s instant cocoa, HOBVIOUSLY.