Finding Fortune 1/?
It was supposed to be a simple excavation. One chaotic storm later, it has become anything but.
An anthropology AU. Yeah, I have no idea what I was thinking.
The ship was so empty it was eerie. Fabi wandered through the levels, passing almost no one. There was a skeleton crew of housekeeping, cooks, and the actual crew he saw or heard from time to time, but no one else. Fabi knew there were other people around here. Somewhere.
It was so boring.
The ethnomusicologist continued his ambling past the spa and to the glass elevator, which was awesomely cool, taking it down to the floor with the gym. He was hoping to find his brother and fellow ethnomusicologist (Fabi was aware it was a mouthful, but he kind of thought the way people looked a little stunned when he said it more than made up for that), as well as his, uh, well, his something, Mäx.
Mäx was also an ethnomusicologist.
“There’s no one here!” Fabi announced as loudly as possible, throwing the doors wide open. They should have banged against the walls with the sheer force of Fabi’s push, but they must have been pressurized or something because they totally didn’t. It was very sad.
Jo craned his neck up from his position on a bench, where he was supposedly lifting weights (it looked a lot more like he was lying on his back and talking to Mäx. Or maybe staring at him. Who knew.). Mäx seemed unimpressed by Fabi’s grand entrance.
“Of course, there are people here,” Jo contradicted because Jo loved to contradict people.
“Not people who don’t work here.”
“They’re probably in their rooms.”
“Or hiding,” Mäx added. “They heard you coming and got out of dodge.”
Fabi flipped him off as lovingly as possible. “No. There’s really no one here. Shouldn’t cruise ships have, like, lots of people?” Even if they were only on the ship because the people leading the excavation landed it for them. They must have rented the whole ship. Yeah, that was probably the problem. Fabi should have thought of that before. Now he felt a bit stupid.
Jo rolled his eyes.
“Dude, we’re going to Iceland. It’s not everyone’s idea of fun.”
ØØØ
Jo was not happy.
Mäx would say Jo was never happy- Mäx could suck it- but he actually had a legitimate reason not to be happy this time. They were on a teetering, creaking old ship that must have been the first cruise ship ever created and they weren’t on vacation. Nope. They were on their way to a dig. In Iceland.
Could it be more obvious Jo wasn’t on board with this idea? He knew nothing about the Sturlung Era, Austurland, or, fuck, Iceland.
Fabi had signed them up for this because Fabi was a numbnut and couldn’t read long enough to find out who was leading an excavation before putting pen to paper. He’d known where they were going, but Fabi thought he’d get to ride a reindeer and, in his empty brain, that outweighed any downsides. Jo was pretty sure it was illegal to chase reindeer around and try to sit on them, but that was just him.
Anyway, what Fabi hadn’t read was that the Kaulitzes were responsible for this.
The Kaulitzes were the prodigies of the anthropology world. Years ago, while on a dig with their father, they’d discovered, in Çatalhöyük (and who let kids run around Çatalhöyük of all places?), the remains of several houses filled with garbage, the archeological equivalent of a treasure chest. Their “findings” had led to new understandings of prehistoric Anatolian art and religion.
Their fame grew from there, until two kids without college degrees became some of the most respected cultural anthropologists in the world.
Jo wasn’t saying they hadn’t worked hard to get where they were or that they weren’t good at what they did, they just…got results out of proportion with the work they did. Conversely, Mäx, Fabi, and he, three ethnographers with focuses on ethnomusicology, had been huge when they first started, their work lauded by some of the greatest anthropologists in the world (including Bruno Nettl), only to lose the fame and respect for no reason Jo could discern. The Kaulitzes had held strong the whole time, them and the two cronies that made up their core team.
And now, because Fabi was a dumbshit, they would be spending the next six months working intimately with them.
ØØØ
Leaning over the ship’s railing, Linke could see out into the vast, unbreakable stretch of…nothing, really. The Atlantic Ocean was, in the end, just a massive expanse of cold, murky water. Up here, there were some ice floes but nothing too interesting.
Until they docked in Reykjavík (from where they would take another boat to the site), Linke was going to do his best to avoid coming into contact with the rest of the excavation party. A simple look at the map had convinced Linke he was working with genuine idiots, as Reykjavík was on the opposite side of the country from where they were going. There was even a ferry that went from the Faroese Islands or Denmark to Seyðisfjörður, which was not only on the correct side of the island but even in the same region, making it an undeniably better choice than this bullshit. It was like their overlords were trying to waste time and funds. He had no control over the travel plans, however.
He could tour the ship, but that would only convince the stupider parts of his brain that this was a vacation, which it wasn’t. They had landed this very expensive cruise ship for the very simple reason that the Kaulitzes had connections, the type of connections who thought traveling in style was a given and not a luxury. The connections, though greater than anything Linke had, couldn't have been all that great because, if you looked closely, you could see that the ship was in disrepair, a bit older than expected, with some questionable pipelines here and there. Linke didn’t want to go rummaging about and end up flooding his cabin.
Also, he wasn’t exactly keen on running into anyone right now.
Jan and Juri had resumed their not-so-secret flirting from the last trip, and Frank had vanished somewhere. Seeing as he didn’t know where the latter was and didn’t care to find the former two while they were alone together, he’d plant himself right here and stare at the ocean for a while longer.
Linke sighed.
He still liked the Pacific better.
ØØØ
Jan was laughing, caught up in the cold air, the foreign city with its colorful rooftops, and the sheer happiness of being in the field again. He was drinking in the sights of the massive Hallgrímskirkja steeple and Snæfellsjökull in the distance. Linke was lecturing on about Snæfellsjökull and why it was of great cultural importance and blah blah blah blah blah, or so it sounded to Jan, who wasn’t doing a good job of listening. He was too busy snickering at the faces Frank was making behind Linke’s back. Linke could be such a pretentious douche sometimes without even realizing it.
They were helping load their equipment onto the fishing boat that would take them on to Austurland. It was boring and hard work, and Jan really wouldn’t be in any mood to do it if he didn’t have Frank and Juri with him. Linke was of little to no help, all focused on pointing out landmarks and musing about this or that (and, okay, so he’d already loaded his tiny amount of stuff while everyone else was trying to find something recognizable to eat but that didn’t mean he didn’t still have to help), so Jan was more exasperated with him than anything else.
Even with the exasperation, Jan was just so happy, so fucking giddy to be around people he genuinely liked and who liked him back, that he thought nothing could possibly go wrong.
That was when he saw two familiar faces.
An electric bolt slammed through Jan’s heart, which was suddenly beating too fast to be healthy. It couldn’t be them, except it was, it had to be. This was a site in Iceland, exactly what they would go for, what Jan and Linke, and everyone else would go for. Jan had known the two of them too long not to recognize them just by the way they walked, the way they moved their heads together to talk, the way they looked warily at everyone around them, even if one of them looked paler and blonder then when Jan had last seen him.
Cringing, he looked away quickly, not wanting to draw the attention of two people who had been part of his life for so long. That chapter was done now, and there was nothing but pain and regret, and betrayal there. Jan wasn’t going to open barely healed wounds again.
But Linke noticed them, too, and he demanded in a tone so bitter it made Jan cringe even more, “What are they doing here?”
Anthropology wasn’t exactly a field where things remained constant. Oh, the sites remained the same, the material studied, but you didn’t go out with the same people every time you did fieldwork, and sometimes the people you ended up with weren’t even in anthropology. Sometimes they were botanists out to study ancient flora or psychologists doing cultural studies. A lot of times, they were local guides or travelers passing through.
But for a while, a long while, Linke, Timo, David, and Jan had worked together as a group. Their specialties complimented each other, and they were interested in the same areas of the world and the same cultures. Others had added to their group for a time, but there was always that core quartet.
Until funding ran out on a dig they’d been working for almost two years, exacerbating the strains of a bitterly cold winter in the ruins of an ancient city far from modern civilization and the aggravation of working with others too closely for too long. They hadn’t been able to do much due to inadequate gear and increasingly fewer funds for supplies, leaving them to spend far too much time together.
Linke had always had a capricious relationship with Timo and too much arrogance and pride to take well to David’s overbearing attitude and tendency to take more credit than he deserved. Linke’s specialties overlapped with both of theirs, and, just like he didn’t need them, they didn’t need him.
When the weather had let up just a little bit, the snow turning to icy rain and the ground to frozen mud puddles, the worst in David came out and Linke’s anger, held at a barely controlled simmer for so long, boiled over. Their group grew strained under a series of steadily nastier arguments, until, finally, it splintered.
If Jan had thought with his heart and not with his head, he’d be with Timo and David now. But Linke had been right, somewhere in that vitriol he and David had thrown at each other, and Jan had made too many bad decisions following Timo’s lead to not think maybe, maybe this time he should do the smart thing and not the thing he wanted to do. Maybe this time he should preserve his future and get his name first in an academic journal for the work he had done, not as the unnamed et al.
And because there was that little bit of him that whispered, if Linke’s replaceable, you’re replaceable, Jan left. The funding was dried up. He’d find another dig or get a teaching job. Something. Somewhere far from Russia and the cold.
It was rough. It was hard. It wasn’t fun. But he’d made it and Linke’d made it, and Juri and Frank were doing better than the rest of them ever had done together.
And, honestly, wasn’t it kind of his fault when he knew this was where they were headed? What were the chances of those two not snatching this up? None, that’s what.
“Same thing we are,” Juri said slowly, calmly, looking at Jan with an unfathomable expression. “Trying to make a living.”
It wasn’t the cold making every breath hurt.
Next
An anthropology AU. Yeah, I have no idea what I was thinking.
The ship was so empty it was eerie. Fabi wandered through the levels, passing almost no one. There was a skeleton crew of housekeeping, cooks, and the actual crew he saw or heard from time to time, but no one else. Fabi knew there were other people around here. Somewhere.
It was so boring.
The ethnomusicologist continued his ambling past the spa and to the glass elevator, which was awesomely cool, taking it down to the floor with the gym. He was hoping to find his brother and fellow ethnomusicologist (Fabi was aware it was a mouthful, but he kind of thought the way people looked a little stunned when he said it more than made up for that), as well as his, uh, well, his something, Mäx.
Mäx was also an ethnomusicologist.
“There’s no one here!” Fabi announced as loudly as possible, throwing the doors wide open. They should have banged against the walls with the sheer force of Fabi’s push, but they must have been pressurized or something because they totally didn’t. It was very sad.
Jo craned his neck up from his position on a bench, where he was supposedly lifting weights (it looked a lot more like he was lying on his back and talking to Mäx. Or maybe staring at him. Who knew.). Mäx seemed unimpressed by Fabi’s grand entrance.
“Of course, there are people here,” Jo contradicted because Jo loved to contradict people.
“Not people who don’t work here.”
“They’re probably in their rooms.”
“Or hiding,” Mäx added. “They heard you coming and got out of dodge.”
Fabi flipped him off as lovingly as possible. “No. There’s really no one here. Shouldn’t cruise ships have, like, lots of people?” Even if they were only on the ship because the people leading the excavation landed it for them. They must have rented the whole ship. Yeah, that was probably the problem. Fabi should have thought of that before. Now he felt a bit stupid.
Jo rolled his eyes.
“Dude, we’re going to Iceland. It’s not everyone’s idea of fun.”
ØØØ
Jo was not happy.
Mäx would say Jo was never happy- Mäx could suck it- but he actually had a legitimate reason not to be happy this time. They were on a teetering, creaking old ship that must have been the first cruise ship ever created and they weren’t on vacation. Nope. They were on their way to a dig. In Iceland.
Could it be more obvious Jo wasn’t on board with this idea? He knew nothing about the Sturlung Era, Austurland, or, fuck, Iceland.
Fabi had signed them up for this because Fabi was a numbnut and couldn’t read long enough to find out who was leading an excavation before putting pen to paper. He’d known where they were going, but Fabi thought he’d get to ride a reindeer and, in his empty brain, that outweighed any downsides. Jo was pretty sure it was illegal to chase reindeer around and try to sit on them, but that was just him.
Anyway, what Fabi hadn’t read was that the Kaulitzes were responsible for this.
The Kaulitzes were the prodigies of the anthropology world. Years ago, while on a dig with their father, they’d discovered, in Çatalhöyük (and who let kids run around Çatalhöyük of all places?), the remains of several houses filled with garbage, the archeological equivalent of a treasure chest. Their “findings” had led to new understandings of prehistoric Anatolian art and religion.
Their fame grew from there, until two kids without college degrees became some of the most respected cultural anthropologists in the world.
Jo wasn’t saying they hadn’t worked hard to get where they were or that they weren’t good at what they did, they just…got results out of proportion with the work they did. Conversely, Mäx, Fabi, and he, three ethnographers with focuses on ethnomusicology, had been huge when they first started, their work lauded by some of the greatest anthropologists in the world (including Bruno Nettl), only to lose the fame and respect for no reason Jo could discern. The Kaulitzes had held strong the whole time, them and the two cronies that made up their core team.
And now, because Fabi was a dumbshit, they would be spending the next six months working intimately with them.
ØØØ
Leaning over the ship’s railing, Linke could see out into the vast, unbreakable stretch of…nothing, really. The Atlantic Ocean was, in the end, just a massive expanse of cold, murky water. Up here, there were some ice floes but nothing too interesting.
Until they docked in Reykjavík (from where they would take another boat to the site), Linke was going to do his best to avoid coming into contact with the rest of the excavation party. A simple look at the map had convinced Linke he was working with genuine idiots, as Reykjavík was on the opposite side of the country from where they were going. There was even a ferry that went from the Faroese Islands or Denmark to Seyðisfjörður, which was not only on the correct side of the island but even in the same region, making it an undeniably better choice than this bullshit. It was like their overlords were trying to waste time and funds. He had no control over the travel plans, however.
He could tour the ship, but that would only convince the stupider parts of his brain that this was a vacation, which it wasn’t. They had landed this very expensive cruise ship for the very simple reason that the Kaulitzes had connections, the type of connections who thought traveling in style was a given and not a luxury. The connections, though greater than anything Linke had, couldn't have been all that great because, if you looked closely, you could see that the ship was in disrepair, a bit older than expected, with some questionable pipelines here and there. Linke didn’t want to go rummaging about and end up flooding his cabin.
Also, he wasn’t exactly keen on running into anyone right now.
Jan and Juri had resumed their not-so-secret flirting from the last trip, and Frank had vanished somewhere. Seeing as he didn’t know where the latter was and didn’t care to find the former two while they were alone together, he’d plant himself right here and stare at the ocean for a while longer.
Linke sighed.
He still liked the Pacific better.
ØØØ
Jan was laughing, caught up in the cold air, the foreign city with its colorful rooftops, and the sheer happiness of being in the field again. He was drinking in the sights of the massive Hallgrímskirkja steeple and Snæfellsjökull in the distance. Linke was lecturing on about Snæfellsjökull and why it was of great cultural importance and blah blah blah blah blah, or so it sounded to Jan, who wasn’t doing a good job of listening. He was too busy snickering at the faces Frank was making behind Linke’s back. Linke could be such a pretentious douche sometimes without even realizing it.
They were helping load their equipment onto the fishing boat that would take them on to Austurland. It was boring and hard work, and Jan really wouldn’t be in any mood to do it if he didn’t have Frank and Juri with him. Linke was of little to no help, all focused on pointing out landmarks and musing about this or that (and, okay, so he’d already loaded his tiny amount of stuff while everyone else was trying to find something recognizable to eat but that didn’t mean he didn’t still have to help), so Jan was more exasperated with him than anything else.
Even with the exasperation, Jan was just so happy, so fucking giddy to be around people he genuinely liked and who liked him back, that he thought nothing could possibly go wrong.
That was when he saw two familiar faces.
An electric bolt slammed through Jan’s heart, which was suddenly beating too fast to be healthy. It couldn’t be them, except it was, it had to be. This was a site in Iceland, exactly what they would go for, what Jan and Linke, and everyone else would go for. Jan had known the two of them too long not to recognize them just by the way they walked, the way they moved their heads together to talk, the way they looked warily at everyone around them, even if one of them looked paler and blonder then when Jan had last seen him.
Cringing, he looked away quickly, not wanting to draw the attention of two people who had been part of his life for so long. That chapter was done now, and there was nothing but pain and regret, and betrayal there. Jan wasn’t going to open barely healed wounds again.
But Linke noticed them, too, and he demanded in a tone so bitter it made Jan cringe even more, “What are they doing here?”
Anthropology wasn’t exactly a field where things remained constant. Oh, the sites remained the same, the material studied, but you didn’t go out with the same people every time you did fieldwork, and sometimes the people you ended up with weren’t even in anthropology. Sometimes they were botanists out to study ancient flora or psychologists doing cultural studies. A lot of times, they were local guides or travelers passing through.
But for a while, a long while, Linke, Timo, David, and Jan had worked together as a group. Their specialties complimented each other, and they were interested in the same areas of the world and the same cultures. Others had added to their group for a time, but there was always that core quartet.
Until funding ran out on a dig they’d been working for almost two years, exacerbating the strains of a bitterly cold winter in the ruins of an ancient city far from modern civilization and the aggravation of working with others too closely for too long. They hadn’t been able to do much due to inadequate gear and increasingly fewer funds for supplies, leaving them to spend far too much time together.
Linke had always had a capricious relationship with Timo and too much arrogance and pride to take well to David’s overbearing attitude and tendency to take more credit than he deserved. Linke’s specialties overlapped with both of theirs, and, just like he didn’t need them, they didn’t need him.
When the weather had let up just a little bit, the snow turning to icy rain and the ground to frozen mud puddles, the worst in David came out and Linke’s anger, held at a barely controlled simmer for so long, boiled over. Their group grew strained under a series of steadily nastier arguments, until, finally, it splintered.
If Jan had thought with his heart and not with his head, he’d be with Timo and David now. But Linke had been right, somewhere in that vitriol he and David had thrown at each other, and Jan had made too many bad decisions following Timo’s lead to not think maybe, maybe this time he should do the smart thing and not the thing he wanted to do. Maybe this time he should preserve his future and get his name first in an academic journal for the work he had done, not as the unnamed et al.
And because there was that little bit of him that whispered, if Linke’s replaceable, you’re replaceable, Jan left. The funding was dried up. He’d find another dig or get a teaching job. Something. Somewhere far from Russia and the cold.
It was rough. It was hard. It wasn’t fun. But he’d made it and Linke’d made it, and Juri and Frank were doing better than the rest of them ever had done together.
And, honestly, wasn’t it kind of his fault when he knew this was where they were headed? What were the chances of those two not snatching this up? None, that’s what.
“Same thing we are,” Juri said slowly, calmly, looking at Jan with an unfathomable expression. “Trying to make a living.”
It wasn’t the cold making every breath hurt.
Next