Juxtaposition
I BRING YOU HISTORY BOYS FIC! Because
rainfire_dancer commanded it and I am her slave. I'm also writing some Ianto/Owen, but NOT JUST ANY IANTO/OWEN, it's a (fully-authorised) sequel to
kohl_rimmed_eye 's Hamartia, and I just hope it's as good as the first one. :D
...And I just realised this is an incredibly tame PG-13. Oh, well; maybe I'll write a porn-filled sequel or something. ;)
Title: Juxtaposition
Author: misplacedmarble
Fandom: The History Boys
Characters/Pairing: Dakin/Posner
Word Count: 1952
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Sometimes you can’t explain the things that happen; sometimes you shouldn’t try.
Author's Notes: AU like WHOAAAAAA, I suppose - I think my characterisation totally ran away with me here…I got caught up in the moment. ALTERNATING POVs - ‘cause I’m cool like that…And, yes, I think Fiona would call Dakin ‘Stuart’. But maybe not. I don’t know. I think that’s it, except that I would absolutely LOVE feedback, even if you just want to say ‘I liked it’ or ‘this is the worst piece of rubbish I have ever read, you should crawl into a hole and die’. Except I quite hope it’s not the latter. XD It's also written for 1sentence.
Cross Posted: misplacedmarble, 1sentence, history_boys, drinkswithdakin
Juxtaposition
#26 Lost
Posner thinks the exact moment he fell in love with Dakin was during the first year of secondary school - the first day, in fact - when they sat next to each other in Geography; Dakin smiled at him, they shared a textbook, and Posner was lost.
#32 Pretty
Most of the time Dakin doesn't censor what comes out of his mouth (the sheer number of detentions he's accumulated over his school career are testament to that), but he thinks it very unlikely that he will ever tell Posner how pretty he is; no good could ever come of that particular opinion.
#07 Despair
Posner says that being in love with Dakin is half struggling in a pit of despair, half basking in sublime sunlight; Scripps tells him to stop being melodramatic.
#09 Drink
Dakin has a lot of thoughts about Posner that he can’t voice to anyone; like about how much fun it would be, for instance, to ply him with alcohol, get rid of the prissy accent, mess up his clothes and ruffle his hair and then - Dakin never gets farther than this, though, which is probably for the best.
#23 Honor
Posner knows Dakin uses his crush on him as a badge of honour, his cross to bear, so to speak, with a long-suffering sigh and world-weary shake of the head.
#36 Secret
What he doesn’t know is that Dakin actually thinks it’s a bit sweet.
#06 Dark
Lying in his darkened bedroom one night, Posner tells himself that being with Dakin probably wouldn’t be all that brilliant anyway - it actually works until the next morning, when he sees him passionately snogging Fiona in front of the bike sheds.
#43 Summer
Dakin distinctly remembers thinking, during the summer holidays, that this would be a remarkably uninteresting term; he now thinks he has never been more wrong.
#47 Water
Another thing Posner tells Scripps is that it doesn’t matter what Dakin feels about him, because he’s sure this is just a phase (the liking of Dakin, not the liking of boys in general) and he’ll get over it soon; this explanation doesn’t hold water with anyone, least of all himself.
#34 Regret
The first time Dakin kisses Posner, it’s hesitant, a bit clumsy, and nothing like any kiss he’s had before; it also makes him shiver from his head to his toes, and he regrets every single time he made fun of the younger boy, because he’s perfect.
#12 End
The first time Dakin kisses him, Posner never wants it to end.
#03 Beginning
Dakin has never begun something this exciting; he began his O-Levels, his A-Levels, this crash-course they seem to be on now (‘How To Get Into Oxbridge In Ten Easy Steps’, or something like it), he even began this strange, tentative flirtation with Irwin - but this is unexpected, like a car ramming into you from your blind spot and he can’t believe how exhilarating it feels.
#45 Ugly
He knows that there are going to be a lot of firsts in this relationship, but the one Posner is most frightened of is the first time they get naked together; what if Dakin just laughs?
#11 Earth
Being with Fiona is hard, and real, very sexual and earthy and now, while being with Posner is like…
#04 Bugs
It feels like a small victory when Posner discovers Dakin’s utter disgust (fear, really, but that’s not very manly) of insects, as it means Posner isn’t entirely useless to him; he might keep him around for a while, if only so he doesn’t have to deal with the spiders in the bath.
#16 Flying
…Being with Posner is like flying.
#17 Food
Posner would be the last person to dispute that poetry is food for the soul, but something he quickly finds problematic is that it absolutely fails to nourish sex-related hunger pangs.
#14 Fire
The first time they…tried anything, Dakin almost lost patience with Posner’s painful hesitance and thought about chucking the whole thing in as a lost cause; he’s so very, very glad he didn’t though, because when they got going - let’s just say that, for the next few weeks, Dakin was pretty hesitant himself when it came to taking off his shirt in front of anyone.
#44 Taboo
Posner tries to avoid talking to his parents as much as possible, because he knows what he and Dakin are doing shouldn’t even be contemplated by good little Orthodox Jewish boys, but he also knows that that doesn’t make it wrong; he only feels like it is when he looks his father in the eye.
#15 Flexible
Dakin would never (ever) have guessed that Posner was this…flexible.
#39 Solid
The feel of Dakin’s body underneath his is solid and comforting; something to hang onto amidst the storm of change and upheaval that is his life at the moment.
#05 Coffee
The first time Dakin asks if he’d like to be sucked off, Posner spills hot coffee all over the other boy’s copy of Macbeth; Dakin attempts to explain to Hector that he was so overcome by the final confrontation between Macbeth and Macduff that he had an involuntary muscular spasm, but he still ends up having to pay for a new copy, as well as writing an essay on the proper care of schoolbooks (this last being the Head’s brilliant idea).
#10 Duty
Another reason (as if he needed one) for Posner to avoid his father is that he keeps going on about ‘duty’; his duty to do well in school, to appreciate his life, to honour all the Jews who died in the war by passing his heritage on to his children - and it’s really only this last one he has a problem with, but he doesn’t know how to tell him.
#13 Fall
Dakin thinks falling in love should be more frightening than this - maybe it’s because it’s Posner.
#21 Head
Posner’s brain keeps telling him this isn’t a good idea, but he’s wanted this for a very, very long time and anyway, doesn’t everyone say your head never agrees with your heart?
#48 Welcome
The one and only time Dakin visits Posner’s house, he feels utterly unwelcome, even though Mrs. Posner is very nice (almost overly so) and offers him biscuits at every opportunity; this may be because of the suspicious glares of Mr. Posner, or possibly the fact that the sole instant when Dakin actually tries to bloody kiss him (this being the younger Posner; Dakin is kinky, but not that kinky), he’s stiff as a board and pulls away a second later, looking like a terrified rabbit.
#50 Wood
“It’s The Man And His Wood, by - Oh, for God’s sake, Dakin, you’re eighteen, not eight.”
#46 War
Dakin finds himself strangely reluctant to discuss the Holocaust now - he hopes Irwin doesn’t put two and two together (because he’s Irwin; of course he’ll get four).
#02 Apples
It takes Posner three weeks and two days to work out that he can make Dakin whimper by licking his Adam’s apple.
#28 New
Everything about his…his relationship with Posner is still so strange, so fresh and unfamiliar, that Dakin sometimes finds himself yearning for Fiona’s easy, uncomplicated companionship; she never asked for anything he couldn’t give.
#08 Doors
“Oh, oh, God, Stuart,” her voice comes through muffled, but the words are still clear; it is absolutely amazing how thin the doors of this school are.
#27 Metal
Dakin tastes the metallic tang of blood in his mouth as he looks from Posner’s raised fist to Fiona’s shocked face and swollen lips; he’s stronger than he looks wars with I’m an idiot.
#22 Hollow
He’s walking away from them, from both of them, her dawning realisation and his stunned eyes; his face is set in a thundercloud of anger, but inside he’s as hollow as the thudding of fist against bone.
#29 Old
He’s not sure what’s supposed to happen now; he feels younger than he ever has before, yet…yet older even than Hector.
#31 Poison
Posner has no idea why he trusted him; what he did, how Dakin betrayed that unspoken promise between them, is like poison flowing through his blood, leaving in its wake only helpless anger and a very familiar kind of pain.
#33 Rain
Dakin sits outside Posner’s house in the pouring rain for two hours before Posner lets him in - he feels like Hercules, except there are only two trials for him (and a little water is by far the easiest).
#37 Snakes
Something twists and turns snake-like in his stomach as he looks at the bruise on Dakin’s face; he feels sick and a little proud.
#25 Light
“It wasn’t serious, or anything - it’s not like I’m in love with her,” Dakin says, defiance lighting up his eyes.
#24 Hope
“So,” Posner tries for derision, but only manages a pathetic nonchalance coloured with hope as he continues, “Do you love me, then?”
#18 Foot
“I don’t know.”
#42 Strange
Posner is confused, to say the least; this is certainly more than he’d ever hoped for, yet something’s missing, and he doesn’t know where to go from here.
#35 Roses
Dakin doesn’t speak to Posner for two days, nineteen hours and thirty-six minutes before he decides that yes, he really is an idiot, there’s no doubt about it; he also decides that yes, a dozen roses is unforgivably girly, so he settles for one and a charming smile.
#01 Air
When Posner comes down from Cloud Nine, he’s still not sure which is the most unbelievable thing: that Dakin actually apologised, that Dakin actually looked sorry, or that Dakin actually brought him a flower…Posner is about to have a heart attack, he just knows it.
#20 Green
Dakin wonders briefly if Posner noticed that the rose has a decidedly greenish tinge to it (well, it’s not his fault if the woman next door doesn’t take care of them properly).
#30 Peace
It’s different than it was before, for him, but he thinks for Dakin, too - it’s less of a turbulent fling, more of a calm - well, a calm…nebulous, sort of…thing; they still haven’t gotten around to definitions yet.
#41 Stable
Dakin doesn’t know if anyone would quite call what they have together ‘stable’, but then again, there are a lot of things he doesn’t know, like the million digits of pi or the exact height of Mt. Everest; so he just adds it to the list and moves on.
#38 Snow
The definition of snow is ‘precipitation in the form of crystalline water ice’; Posner, who is, if anything, over-given to think about their relationship and its stability (or lack thereof) thinks that crystalline is the perfect word for it - completely, totally fragile, and constantly taking his breath away.
#49 Winter
December, Dakin thinks, is a fitting time for a death; when everything in the landscape around you is slowly fading, when the old year is dying and giving way to the new, it doesn’t seem so shocking that the people in your life should also do the same, as if overcome by some invisible force compelling them to bow to the call of the inevitable…Dakin also thinks he might have been possessed by Hector’s wandering spirit, if this particular train of thought is anything to go by.
#19 Grave
The most shocking moment of Hector’s funeral is, surprisingly, not his body being lowered forever into the unforgiving ground, but merely Dakin’s hand tentatively brushing his, and looking up to find a mirror of his own misty eyes.
#40 Spring
Winter is a time of death, and of endings, but spring is for new beginnings; that just has to be a good sign.
rainfire_dancer commanded it and I am her slave. I'm also writing some Ianto/Owen, but NOT JUST ANY IANTO/OWEN, it's a (fully-authorised) sequel to
kohl_rimmed_eye 's Hamartia, and I just hope it's as good as the first one. :D
...And I just realised this is an incredibly tame PG-13. Oh, well; maybe I'll write a porn-filled sequel or something. ;)
Title: Juxtaposition
Author: misplacedmarble
Fandom: The History Boys
Characters/Pairing: Dakin/Posner
Word Count: 1952
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Sometimes you can’t explain the things that happen; sometimes you shouldn’t try.
Author's Notes: AU like WHOAAAAAA, I suppose - I think my characterisation totally ran away with me here…I got caught up in the moment. ALTERNATING POVs - ‘cause I’m cool like that…And, yes, I think Fiona would call Dakin ‘Stuart’. But maybe not. I don’t know. I think that’s it, except that I would absolutely LOVE feedback, even if you just want to say ‘I liked it’ or ‘this is the worst piece of rubbish I have ever read, you should crawl into a hole and die’. Except I quite hope it’s not the latter. XD It's also written for 1sentence.
Cross Posted: misplacedmarble, 1sentence, history_boys, drinkswithdakin
Juxtaposition
#26 Lost
Posner thinks the exact moment he fell in love with Dakin was during the first year of secondary school - the first day, in fact - when they sat next to each other in Geography; Dakin smiled at him, they shared a textbook, and Posner was lost.
#32 Pretty
Most of the time Dakin doesn't censor what comes out of his mouth (the sheer number of detentions he's accumulated over his school career are testament to that), but he thinks it very unlikely that he will ever tell Posner how pretty he is; no good could ever come of that particular opinion.
#07 Despair
Posner says that being in love with Dakin is half struggling in a pit of despair, half basking in sublime sunlight; Scripps tells him to stop being melodramatic.
#09 Drink
Dakin has a lot of thoughts about Posner that he can’t voice to anyone; like about how much fun it would be, for instance, to ply him with alcohol, get rid of the prissy accent, mess up his clothes and ruffle his hair and then - Dakin never gets farther than this, though, which is probably for the best.
#23 Honor
Posner knows Dakin uses his crush on him as a badge of honour, his cross to bear, so to speak, with a long-suffering sigh and world-weary shake of the head.
#36 Secret
What he doesn’t know is that Dakin actually thinks it’s a bit sweet.
#06 Dark
Lying in his darkened bedroom one night, Posner tells himself that being with Dakin probably wouldn’t be all that brilliant anyway - it actually works until the next morning, when he sees him passionately snogging Fiona in front of the bike sheds.
#43 Summer
Dakin distinctly remembers thinking, during the summer holidays, that this would be a remarkably uninteresting term; he now thinks he has never been more wrong.
#47 Water
Another thing Posner tells Scripps is that it doesn’t matter what Dakin feels about him, because he’s sure this is just a phase (the liking of Dakin, not the liking of boys in general) and he’ll get over it soon; this explanation doesn’t hold water with anyone, least of all himself.
#34 Regret
The first time Dakin kisses Posner, it’s hesitant, a bit clumsy, and nothing like any kiss he’s had before; it also makes him shiver from his head to his toes, and he regrets every single time he made fun of the younger boy, because he’s perfect.
#12 End
The first time Dakin kisses him, Posner never wants it to end.
#03 Beginning
Dakin has never begun something this exciting; he began his O-Levels, his A-Levels, this crash-course they seem to be on now (‘How To Get Into Oxbridge In Ten Easy Steps’, or something like it), he even began this strange, tentative flirtation with Irwin - but this is unexpected, like a car ramming into you from your blind spot and he can’t believe how exhilarating it feels.
#45 Ugly
He knows that there are going to be a lot of firsts in this relationship, but the one Posner is most frightened of is the first time they get naked together; what if Dakin just laughs?
#11 Earth
Being with Fiona is hard, and real, very sexual and earthy and now, while being with Posner is like…
#04 Bugs
It feels like a small victory when Posner discovers Dakin’s utter disgust (fear, really, but that’s not very manly) of insects, as it means Posner isn’t entirely useless to him; he might keep him around for a while, if only so he doesn’t have to deal with the spiders in the bath.
#16 Flying
…Being with Posner is like flying.
#17 Food
Posner would be the last person to dispute that poetry is food for the soul, but something he quickly finds problematic is that it absolutely fails to nourish sex-related hunger pangs.
#14 Fire
The first time they…tried anything, Dakin almost lost patience with Posner’s painful hesitance and thought about chucking the whole thing in as a lost cause; he’s so very, very glad he didn’t though, because when they got going - let’s just say that, for the next few weeks, Dakin was pretty hesitant himself when it came to taking off his shirt in front of anyone.
#44 Taboo
Posner tries to avoid talking to his parents as much as possible, because he knows what he and Dakin are doing shouldn’t even be contemplated by good little Orthodox Jewish boys, but he also knows that that doesn’t make it wrong; he only feels like it is when he looks his father in the eye.
#15 Flexible
Dakin would never (ever) have guessed that Posner was this…flexible.
#39 Solid
The feel of Dakin’s body underneath his is solid and comforting; something to hang onto amidst the storm of change and upheaval that is his life at the moment.
#05 Coffee
The first time Dakin asks if he’d like to be sucked off, Posner spills hot coffee all over the other boy’s copy of Macbeth; Dakin attempts to explain to Hector that he was so overcome by the final confrontation between Macbeth and Macduff that he had an involuntary muscular spasm, but he still ends up having to pay for a new copy, as well as writing an essay on the proper care of schoolbooks (this last being the Head’s brilliant idea).
#10 Duty
Another reason (as if he needed one) for Posner to avoid his father is that he keeps going on about ‘duty’; his duty to do well in school, to appreciate his life, to honour all the Jews who died in the war by passing his heritage on to his children - and it’s really only this last one he has a problem with, but he doesn’t know how to tell him.
#13 Fall
Dakin thinks falling in love should be more frightening than this - maybe it’s because it’s Posner.
#21 Head
Posner’s brain keeps telling him this isn’t a good idea, but he’s wanted this for a very, very long time and anyway, doesn’t everyone say your head never agrees with your heart?
#48 Welcome
The one and only time Dakin visits Posner’s house, he feels utterly unwelcome, even though Mrs. Posner is very nice (almost overly so) and offers him biscuits at every opportunity; this may be because of the suspicious glares of Mr. Posner, or possibly the fact that the sole instant when Dakin actually tries to bloody kiss him (this being the younger Posner; Dakin is kinky, but not that kinky), he’s stiff as a board and pulls away a second later, looking like a terrified rabbit.
#50 Wood
“It’s The Man And His Wood, by - Oh, for God’s sake, Dakin, you’re eighteen, not eight.”
#46 War
Dakin finds himself strangely reluctant to discuss the Holocaust now - he hopes Irwin doesn’t put two and two together (because he’s Irwin; of course he’ll get four).
#02 Apples
It takes Posner three weeks and two days to work out that he can make Dakin whimper by licking his Adam’s apple.
#28 New
Everything about his…his relationship with Posner is still so strange, so fresh and unfamiliar, that Dakin sometimes finds himself yearning for Fiona’s easy, uncomplicated companionship; she never asked for anything he couldn’t give.
#08 Doors
“Oh, oh, God, Stuart,” her voice comes through muffled, but the words are still clear; it is absolutely amazing how thin the doors of this school are.
#27 Metal
Dakin tastes the metallic tang of blood in his mouth as he looks from Posner’s raised fist to Fiona’s shocked face and swollen lips; he’s stronger than he looks wars with I’m an idiot.
#22 Hollow
He’s walking away from them, from both of them, her dawning realisation and his stunned eyes; his face is set in a thundercloud of anger, but inside he’s as hollow as the thudding of fist against bone.
#29 Old
He’s not sure what’s supposed to happen now; he feels younger than he ever has before, yet…yet older even than Hector.
#31 Poison
Posner has no idea why he trusted him; what he did, how Dakin betrayed that unspoken promise between them, is like poison flowing through his blood, leaving in its wake only helpless anger and a very familiar kind of pain.
#33 Rain
Dakin sits outside Posner’s house in the pouring rain for two hours before Posner lets him in - he feels like Hercules, except there are only two trials for him (and a little water is by far the easiest).
#37 Snakes
Something twists and turns snake-like in his stomach as he looks at the bruise on Dakin’s face; he feels sick and a little proud.
#25 Light
“It wasn’t serious, or anything - it’s not like I’m in love with her,” Dakin says, defiance lighting up his eyes.
#24 Hope
“So,” Posner tries for derision, but only manages a pathetic nonchalance coloured with hope as he continues, “Do you love me, then?”
#18 Foot
“I don’t know.”
#42 Strange
Posner is confused, to say the least; this is certainly more than he’d ever hoped for, yet something’s missing, and he doesn’t know where to go from here.
#35 Roses
Dakin doesn’t speak to Posner for two days, nineteen hours and thirty-six minutes before he decides that yes, he really is an idiot, there’s no doubt about it; he also decides that yes, a dozen roses is unforgivably girly, so he settles for one and a charming smile.
#01 Air
When Posner comes down from Cloud Nine, he’s still not sure which is the most unbelievable thing: that Dakin actually apologised, that Dakin actually looked sorry, or that Dakin actually brought him a flower…Posner is about to have a heart attack, he just knows it.
#20 Green
Dakin wonders briefly if Posner noticed that the rose has a decidedly greenish tinge to it (well, it’s not his fault if the woman next door doesn’t take care of them properly).
#30 Peace
It’s different than it was before, for him, but he thinks for Dakin, too - it’s less of a turbulent fling, more of a calm - well, a calm…nebulous, sort of…thing; they still haven’t gotten around to definitions yet.
#41 Stable
Dakin doesn’t know if anyone would quite call what they have together ‘stable’, but then again, there are a lot of things he doesn’t know, like the million digits of pi or the exact height of Mt. Everest; so he just adds it to the list and moves on.
#38 Snow
The definition of snow is ‘precipitation in the form of crystalline water ice’; Posner, who is, if anything, over-given to think about their relationship and its stability (or lack thereof) thinks that crystalline is the perfect word for it - completely, totally fragile, and constantly taking his breath away.
#49 Winter
December, Dakin thinks, is a fitting time for a death; when everything in the landscape around you is slowly fading, when the old year is dying and giving way to the new, it doesn’t seem so shocking that the people in your life should also do the same, as if overcome by some invisible force compelling them to bow to the call of the inevitable…Dakin also thinks he might have been possessed by Hector’s wandering spirit, if this particular train of thought is anything to go by.
#19 Grave
The most shocking moment of Hector’s funeral is, surprisingly, not his body being lowered forever into the unforgiving ground, but merely Dakin’s hand tentatively brushing his, and looking up to find a mirror of his own misty eyes.
#40 Spring
Winter is a time of death, and of endings, but spring is for new beginnings; that just has to be a good sign.