A Distraction from Politics

[in_the_blue]

miriammoules challenged me to do another writing challenge, so here goes.

---

Rules:

Fandom: any fandom, original or not. If you're feeling nostalgic and confessional, Real Person Stuff^(TM) allowed too.

Word count: oh, let's don't limit ourselves. Go for it. Any length.

Main theme: Life is measured in song.

Ratings: No restrictions.

Duration: Challenge opens now (October 25) and closes at the end of day Friday, November 7.

---

Post your fics as comments to this entry but if the rating on yours is >PG-13, please post them in your own journal with appropriate flagging and link to your story below. Feel free to do as few or as many as you want, and if you see one you really like, be sure to leave a review or a comment. Everyone's welcome, so have fun.

P.S. Can't wait for Season Five of Lost? Write with us at 815survivors.

Comments

One of Two

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

Fandom: original
Word Count: idkmybffrose
Title: "Why I Love Little Feat"

When I was in college a million years ago, a guy named Lee who had a thing for me. Picture Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters but with long blonde hair and you've got Lee exactly. Glasses and all. He worked production for Don Law, a Boston-area concert promoter. To get on my good side (and to try to get into my bed), Lee invited me to see Little Feat with him. Because of his status he had comped tickets (they were all comped; in our music production circle it was a question of honor not to pay for concert tickets) and the seats were pretty good. I didn't know a whole lot of Little Feat's music, not really being into the whole trucker rock thing outside of an abiding affection for the Grateful Dead, who used to blow through Springfield on a regular basis. This guy friend of mine had a story about being picked up hitchhiking by Bob Weir (yeah right) who shared his exceedingly good Columbian with him. Stoned people make up the funniest stories. I was more into the whole neo-punk movement: the Clash, the Damned, Richard Hell, stuff like that. I wore a black leather motorcycle jacket covered with pins and buttons and they were all full of attitude. The night of the Little Feat concert the one featured right on my lapel was a Clash one: I Want Complete Control. It was very bright, black and white and pink, but small so you had to bend over to look at it because I'm a little bit tiny. 5'3 on a good day. A petite prize for Lee and his long blonde hair, maybe, like that was going to happen.

So we got to the Springfield Civic Center and we had pretty good seats but not the best. It only took a few minutes' contemplation to assess Lee's importance to the Don Law organization based on the seats. Nowhere near the most important guy, nowhere near the least. Yeah, just as I'd suspected, and the lights went down and the Kaz-Fuller band (Pure Prairie League in disguise) opened. At that time, who didn't know their hit song "Amie?" But you know concert crowds and opening acts, and besides, this was Little Feat so the joints were flowing freely down the aisles, one lucky concert-goer to another. Wasn't the Feats' theme song Don't Bogart That Joint? For those in the know it sure was.

My future-Mythbuster-in-disguise date took advantage by throwing his arm around me for the whole set, passed the jay on to the next person. Between sets I was too wasted to remember if he got up to "check" on things backstage or not -- he wasn't working this concert -- but he was back and forth a bit. Maybe he was out buying condoms in hopes of a lucky post-concert thing, I'm not sure. What I do know is this: Little Feat, once they got going, kicked ass. I even wrote down the set list sometime later, because when you worked as many concerts as I did in those days, you had a tendency to forget. And it wasn't just because of the smoke.

(Teenage Nervous Breakdown. Rock and Roll Doctor. Time Loves A Hero. Day Or Night. Texas Rose Café. Keepin' Up With The Joneses. All That You Dream. Fat Man In The Bathtub. Spanish Moon. Gringo Jam. Day At The Dog Races. Old Folks Boogie. Dixie Chicken. Then there were the encores: Willin'. Don't Bogart That Joint. Feats Don't Fail Me Now.)

All that in a three-and-a-half-hour concert. And damn if it wasn't one of the best concerts I'd ever seen, both technically and artistically. I ran stage crew in those days for a lot of bands. Roadied, set up lights and sound systems. That gives a girl a unique perspective on the craft that goes into a stage show and Lee had the same appreciation although he did more of the grunt work than me. I didn't want to lift 40-pound amps. I just wanted to crawl up around on top of a cherry picker adjusting lights and swapping out gels. Back in those days we ran everything manually. An actual human ran the lighting board; it wasn't all computerized and pre-programmed. We did what worked in the moment, and it was a precision art and a thrill and a privilege. This Little Feat setup -- their Waiting for Columbus days, Lowell George's last gasp with the band -- knocked my socks off, or would have if I'd been wearing any.

1/2

[lostinapapercup.livejournal.com]

Fandom: Samurai Champloo

Each silken string of the shamisen is pliant under your fingers; it pours its soul out to you at the gentlest tug of your fingertips or stroke of the bachi.

You know each song you sing by heart. You know the lyrics as if they were your own. You feel as though you've lived them yourself.

Your voice never breaks.

---

You're a goze, and you're not a goze. Blind from birth and orphaned at too young an age, your options have always been limited. Very early on, you began to learn the shamisen.

Your senses are sharp: you can feel the ground beneath you tremble when another approaches, and you can feel changes in the air around you. You "see" a certain aura for every living thing, and even soft breaths can be audible.

At the age of eight, you were teased for the last time about your blindness. The master of the local dojo saw you fight that day, and your life hasn't been the same since.

Masterfully trained for years by that respected teacher, you took up the kama-yari as your second instrument. In your mind it wasn't hard to liken each fight to a song, and in a short time you were as noted for your skill as a fighter as you were for your skill as a musician.

One day a man, Kariya Kagetoki, came to observe your dojo. His name meant nothing to you, but within a month you were pursued by the Shogunate, wanted on their side, needed in their employ.

You listened to their proposal. You reluctantly considered it. You refused.

Six months later, you refused again. You enjoyed having the skills you did, but you never wished to become an assassin. The Shogunate didn't like it, but you had nothing to lose.

Later that year, you met him. He approached you after hearing you perform, and he was kind. He was charming. You could hear his smile in his voice, and you liked it. You grew accustomed to his presence, to his kindness, to his aura. He respected you. He complimented you. He knew his boundaries with you.

The first time he kissed you, you'd been starting to wonder if it would ever happen. He didn't know the first thing about music, he said, but he came to listen every night you performed and you thought his voice was the sweetest melody you'd ever heard.

For six weeks you were happy. For six weeks you lived as you never had, and you loved him. You loved him when he stopped coming around, when he stopped showing up on nights you performed. You loved him for days after that, for weeks. You loved him when nobody could tell you what became of him, when there was no trace left of him. You loved him when you discovered you were going to have his child.

He never came back.

The child was a boy, and you had an undivided adoration for him from the moment he was born. You don't know which of you he looked like, but you suspect it was you. Being a mother was something you had given up much hope of before, but you took to it with the same quietly burning passion that had driven you with your music and your spear.

You had help but refused charity. The baby was yours, and you wanted to raise him to be strong.

He was just over a year old when the Shogunate came back into your life. This time there were no offers, no pleasantries, no requests. There were only demands, threats, and this time they took your son to gain your loyalty.

They got what they wanted.

[prplhez8.livejournal.com]

Fandom: LOST
Word Count: Um....yeah.
Title: O Holy Night

It's really all I have left in the right now.

Our songs.

I pick up the album's and 45's that we listened to carelessly in the not so distant past. They're everywhere in taste, really. Just like us, I imagine. We floated along on the balmy sea of us for quite a time until everything went wrong and we capsized. That makes me the rescue vessel now, doesn't it?

I walk over to the window. I stood here and cried after he last left me.

"Eight years, Penny..."

I didn't believe him, you know. Who would? Who in their right mind would believe that I wouldn't hear from him for eight years? Twinkling red and green lights shine through the window and I can hear carol singers walking and spreading their seasonal cheer.

I miss him every day. Every beat of my heart echoes his name.

The phone rings.

"Penny?"

It's him. It's really him.

It's just a small thing to get me in the spirit of things. HOpe it's not over terrible.

Astraea's Song: Part one

[siriusstar.livejournal.com]

This is so late I'm sureno one will even know it is here, but I said I had something for this and here it is! I'm sure it'll get edited more and the second part will get longer.

Fandom: Original
Word count: Erm... 1,123 to be exact.
Title: Astraea's Song

**

On the last day of my Astraean life I remember the sound of bells playing. Thousands of them, great and small, with voices as deep as my oceans once were and as high as the thin winds that sang through my mountains. The bells rang with the voices of my younger children, with their song of love and of mourning for what they had lost and for what I could no longer give them. But their song was also laced with hope and with desire to know what lay beyond my boundaries. I knew my younger children would endure their loss. They would embrace the challenges their new world would offer to them. They would cherish their bells and remember me in their songs but their lives would go on. They would lend their wisdom and their understanding to others and become wiser and more beautiful. My pride for the Lemari- my gentle Bell People- was without bounds.

With the bells of the Lemari I heard also the glorious voices of my cherished elder children. Voices that pierced my soul with the depth of their feeling. There was no joy or hope in the songs of the Mithic. Their cries of despair and of their devotion to me broke my heart. They who had sought in vain to change what must be; what is the fate of every world when the star to which we are irrevocably bound perishes. They could not accept my fate and toiled ceaselessly against it. They grew greater in power and deeper in the wisdom of the universe, but it could not avail them. I pleaded with my elder children to look to their own fates, but they would not listen.

Yet all of my pleas had not been vain. At the end of all my hope one among the Mithic listened and understood. He who would now save all of my people from sharing in my fate. He who learned more of my secrets than any other. He who discovered the secret pathways that lie hidden in the darkness between worlds. I heard his voice above all, singing of his love and his sorrow, but also of his determination. I heard the vow he made to me in his heart. He knew I would find life again and swore to return to me, no matter how long he had to seek for me. As I listened to his vow and felt his tears falling I knew that Fate would hear his words and would heed them.

Despite the heats of my parent star stealing away my oceans and my rivers. Despite my rains having long ago ceased to fall; upon the face of my beloved as he sang fell my last tears.