King Kong fic. Omg.
Dec. 27th, 2005 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
girlofpreyThis - came out in a slight rush. I started it, and then was tweaking it, hating myself for having lost the 'feeling' of it - and then suddenly found it, in a rush, using the cunning device of writing the bits I could feel, aka starting in the middle/end. I'm not sure exactly how it turned out - but I quite like it. I should totally have been working on my essay. I almost don't care. Hmph.
Title: Translation
Fandom: King Kong
Rating: PG-13.
Notes: Jack. Character study. F.Y.I., I was semi-delighted, in my study of ye olde English literature, to find that 'translation' often meant physical 'translocation', often to different countries, as well as/instead of the translation of words. Yes.
Disclaimer: I don't own them. I barely know them. I'm sure Adrien Brody would make me a lot of money if I did own him, but I don't, and I'm not.
He’s normally very good with words. When Carl comes out on deck to ‘talk’ to him, he’s thinking a lot with just four letters in them, but he doesn’t say them. He stares at the receding dock, and listens, and holds his tongue. Carl is his friend, after all. And it wouldn’t change anything. And the fact is…he didn’t jump.
When they give him a cage to sleep in – complete with typewriter – he thinks of a lot of things he could say, and complaints he could make, but he doesn’t say anything. He sighs, and tries to make the mattress and the straw beneath it as comfortable as he can, and he tries to get some sleep.
At first he can’t. The growls and screeches, the heavy rasping breaths, the fact that he’s sleeping not ten feet away from man-eating tigers, keep him a little too much on the edge, and he spends the first few nights wide-awake, the first few mornings trying to communicate to everyone he sees just how much he hates Carl and everyone else on the boat with just his eyes. But he gets used to it surprisingly quickly – long before he finds his sea-legs. After a few weeks, the mild cacophony even starts lulling him to sleep at nights, when even the animals settle down, breathing in and no longer noticing the heavy scent of animal musk and straw.
* * *
During the journey, he learned the words ‘Ann Darrow’, and a lot of secondary ones, like ‘golden’, and ‘ringlets’, and ‘beautiful’. He watches her wordlessly on deck, and then goes back down to his cage, through the ever-open door, typing out more pages of script and the idle beginnings of a new play, drinking black coffee and thinking about her eyes.
* * *
The island is stony, and grey, and imposing, but it’s good to get out of the cage, and even away from the typewriter, into the fresh, clear air, so he goes along with them when Carl asks. The sea spray dashes over his face in a way it never does on the steamer, and he stares up at the blank faceless rock of the cliffs, speculating. Ann is sat next to him, watching him. He can feel it. He looks around at her, and smiles, squinting. She looks into his eyes for a moment, and then smiles back.
The rocks are slippery under his ‘genuine leather’ shoes – if he’d been told to pack boots, he wouldn’t even be here – but he manages not to fall. They shoot a few scenes, naturally, and then go exploring. The further in they get, the quieter they are, sticking closer together and looking at anything but each other. At the rocks, at the wall. At the bones.
The little native girl, barely even human-looking, appears, and they all go very still – watching. Except of course for Carl, who never could be told anything. As such, they make only a vague attempt at stopping him, which he naturally ignores.
Jack knows better, and, in between watching to make sure Carl doesn’t hurt the girl, looks at their surroundings. Whatever he might have been thinking before, he puts it completely out of his head.
That night he finds his way up the gate, in the dark, past the torches, his head still slightly swimmy from the blow, like he’s been there before, but too late, and when he looks there’s only empty jungle to answer him. He stares for a while, almost uncomprehending, and then climbs back down. Eventually he notices how Carl is acting, and knows why, and asks, eventually, what they’re up against. But Carl doesn’t answer, and it doesn’t really matter.
And then they go into the jungle, and everything goes to Hell.
* * *
When he’s finally on his own, when the others have finally quit on him, he tries not to think, and for the most part, succeeds. Everything now is the jungle, and the darkness, and the fact that he has to keep moving. He doesn’t say it, doesn’t really think it, but he feels, at least, that there’s nothing else this island can throw at him, nothing new, nothing worse. He’s done things he couldn’t even imagine back in New York – can’t even really imagine now. He’s closer to understanding the meaning of the word ‘death’ than he's ever been. He’s looked it in the face – literally. His only hope lay in a shower of bullets. Their survival was, and remains, incidental – and he’s still here, carrying on.
Thinking about it wouldn’t change anything.
He edges past trees, sliding under and around huge, spiky leaves, casting about him for anything that might move. He’s smeared with dirt, and though he notices it more than ever, he cares much, much less. He grasps rocks, ignoring the cuts and scrapes. His arms pull him up, his legs push him.
There are still words, of course, of course there are words, and the main one is ‘Ann’, repeated, over and over in his head, driving him on.
He comes through darkness, under a cloud of bats he’s careful not to disturb, into the air, and there, there is the giant face again, sleeping, and he’s thinking things like ‘oh…my…God…’, and ‘What am I doing? What am I doing…?’, but only at the same time as he’s skirting the nose of the beast, the cloud of breath that’ll carry his scent, keeping his steps careful and soundless, keeping one eye on the huge face, and one on the mass of golden hair against it’s dark, shaggy paw. He gets as close as he can, and crouches, leaning forward.
“ Ann, ” he whispers. “ Ann. ”
She wakes up, and looks at him, and he reaches out a hand. When she – finally – takes it, it’s really just a matter of evading the beast, getting down the cliff, and then getting her back to the wall. And he does it, to the best of his ability. She put herself in his hands, after all.
* * *
On the ship, they don’t speak much. The crew think she’s in shock from her ‘ordeal’, but she didn’t push them away, with that look in her eyes, and he knows better. Too often when they do speak, they’re interrupted by a slow, rumbling groan from down below, which sets her staring at the floor, watching, and sends him completely still, listening. She’s not allowed down there, and it’s generally, silently agreed that it’s best if he stays away. He has an unfortunate effect on the creature. Kong.
Ann is angry. Wordlessly, blazingly angry. And she’s angry with him, somehow, for not stopping them, somehow. For not telling them to stop, telling them to let him go. As if they’d listen to his orders. Truth be told, he’s made a few half-hearted tries, but if Carl doesn’t know why this is wrong, and stupid, and the worst and most pointless thing they could be doing, then nothing Jack could say would convince him. And he’ll never convince the men, who look at both him and Ann with blank, stony eyes. Especially not the captain, who doesn’t leave the bridge much these days. Their friends are dead, their crew is decimated, and they’ve lost too much for it all to be for nothing.
He sits in his cabin – elevated, now that they need the room below decks, and, well, it’s not like there weren’t plenty going spare – and drinks his coffee and rattles out new pages for his play, and knows exactly how they feel.
* * *
There’s an odd sense of dislocation as he watches Carl, watches the ‘natives’, watches Kong. The feeling of something familiar but not quite right. Small talk with Preston brings him back to real world, but then it ends and the silence sends him spinning again.
When it breaks loose, and starts smashing up the theatre, the crowds screaming and rushing around him, he watches, silently, as everything slowly clicks back into place, hideously, horribly, helplessly.
Then the beast looks at him, right into his eyes, and the words crowd back into his head again, and it’s only the fact that his feet start moving before his brain starts thinking that keeps him alive. He runs up and down stairs as they crumble behind him, out of the building as it shakes, and then against his better judgement stops, and turns, and wonders what to do.
Kong is out, and roaring, and picking up tiny blonde figures and tossing them aside. Roaring. Angry. Lost.
He’s heading for a car at the same time as he thinks it, and then driving. He always was a good driver. For the moment he doesn’t need words, and Kong, when he sees him, certainly doesn’t.
In order to keep driving, he has to not see the people around him, the other cars, except as obstacles. He has to not hear the crashes and the screams behind him. He can’t help but notice the roof being ripped off from above his head, and the words suddenly start coming back, in time with his pounding heart, ‘oh shit, oh shit…’. But he carries on for as long as he can, and eventually everything just goes black.
* * *
When he wakes up, he’s alone, and alive, and knows what it means before he's even out of the car. He slips out the twisted metal, stumbles onto the street, and follows the flow of the crowd, the sound of the sirens.
Policemen are raptors, centipedes, and he jumps them, dodges them, not looking back. He’s in the lift, the button pressed, before they’re even at the door. The next few minutes are stretched out interminably, waiting, staring up at the ceiling.
When he gets to the top, she’s on her own, lonely and small against the sunlight, looking down. He doesn’t know what to say, apart from ‘Ann’. She looks at him, and he looks back at her, and then holds out his arms. When she – finally – comes over to them, into them, he wraps them around her, her bones against her bones. The feel of her body, the smell of her hair, is almost enough.
Title: Translation
Fandom: King Kong
Rating: PG-13.
Notes: Jack. Character study. F.Y.I., I was semi-delighted, in my study of ye olde English literature, to find that 'translation' often meant physical 'translocation', often to different countries, as well as/instead of the translation of words. Yes.
Disclaimer: I don't own them. I barely know them. I'm sure Adrien Brody would make me a lot of money if I did own him, but I don't, and I'm not.
He’s normally very good with words. When Carl comes out on deck to ‘talk’ to him, he’s thinking a lot with just four letters in them, but he doesn’t say them. He stares at the receding dock, and listens, and holds his tongue. Carl is his friend, after all. And it wouldn’t change anything. And the fact is…he didn’t jump.
When they give him a cage to sleep in – complete with typewriter – he thinks of a lot of things he could say, and complaints he could make, but he doesn’t say anything. He sighs, and tries to make the mattress and the straw beneath it as comfortable as he can, and he tries to get some sleep.
At first he can’t. The growls and screeches, the heavy rasping breaths, the fact that he’s sleeping not ten feet away from man-eating tigers, keep him a little too much on the edge, and he spends the first few nights wide-awake, the first few mornings trying to communicate to everyone he sees just how much he hates Carl and everyone else on the boat with just his eyes. But he gets used to it surprisingly quickly – long before he finds his sea-legs. After a few weeks, the mild cacophony even starts lulling him to sleep at nights, when even the animals settle down, breathing in and no longer noticing the heavy scent of animal musk and straw.
* * *
During the journey, he learned the words ‘Ann Darrow’, and a lot of secondary ones, like ‘golden’, and ‘ringlets’, and ‘beautiful’. He watches her wordlessly on deck, and then goes back down to his cage, through the ever-open door, typing out more pages of script and the idle beginnings of a new play, drinking black coffee and thinking about her eyes.
* * *
The island is stony, and grey, and imposing, but it’s good to get out of the cage, and even away from the typewriter, into the fresh, clear air, so he goes along with them when Carl asks. The sea spray dashes over his face in a way it never does on the steamer, and he stares up at the blank faceless rock of the cliffs, speculating. Ann is sat next to him, watching him. He can feel it. He looks around at her, and smiles, squinting. She looks into his eyes for a moment, and then smiles back.
The rocks are slippery under his ‘genuine leather’ shoes – if he’d been told to pack boots, he wouldn’t even be here – but he manages not to fall. They shoot a few scenes, naturally, and then go exploring. The further in they get, the quieter they are, sticking closer together and looking at anything but each other. At the rocks, at the wall. At the bones.
The little native girl, barely even human-looking, appears, and they all go very still – watching. Except of course for Carl, who never could be told anything. As such, they make only a vague attempt at stopping him, which he naturally ignores.
Jack knows better, and, in between watching to make sure Carl doesn’t hurt the girl, looks at their surroundings. Whatever he might have been thinking before, he puts it completely out of his head.
That night he finds his way up the gate, in the dark, past the torches, his head still slightly swimmy from the blow, like he’s been there before, but too late, and when he looks there’s only empty jungle to answer him. He stares for a while, almost uncomprehending, and then climbs back down. Eventually he notices how Carl is acting, and knows why, and asks, eventually, what they’re up against. But Carl doesn’t answer, and it doesn’t really matter.
And then they go into the jungle, and everything goes to Hell.
* * *
When he’s finally on his own, when the others have finally quit on him, he tries not to think, and for the most part, succeeds. Everything now is the jungle, and the darkness, and the fact that he has to keep moving. He doesn’t say it, doesn’t really think it, but he feels, at least, that there’s nothing else this island can throw at him, nothing new, nothing worse. He’s done things he couldn’t even imagine back in New York – can’t even really imagine now. He’s closer to understanding the meaning of the word ‘death’ than he's ever been. He’s looked it in the face – literally. His only hope lay in a shower of bullets. Their survival was, and remains, incidental – and he’s still here, carrying on.
Thinking about it wouldn’t change anything.
He edges past trees, sliding under and around huge, spiky leaves, casting about him for anything that might move. He’s smeared with dirt, and though he notices it more than ever, he cares much, much less. He grasps rocks, ignoring the cuts and scrapes. His arms pull him up, his legs push him.
There are still words, of course, of course there are words, and the main one is ‘Ann’, repeated, over and over in his head, driving him on.
He comes through darkness, under a cloud of bats he’s careful not to disturb, into the air, and there, there is the giant face again, sleeping, and he’s thinking things like ‘oh…my…God…’, and ‘What am I doing? What am I doing…?’, but only at the same time as he’s skirting the nose of the beast, the cloud of breath that’ll carry his scent, keeping his steps careful and soundless, keeping one eye on the huge face, and one on the mass of golden hair against it’s dark, shaggy paw. He gets as close as he can, and crouches, leaning forward.
“ Ann, ” he whispers. “ Ann. ”
She wakes up, and looks at him, and he reaches out a hand. When she – finally – takes it, it’s really just a matter of evading the beast, getting down the cliff, and then getting her back to the wall. And he does it, to the best of his ability. She put herself in his hands, after all.
* * *
On the ship, they don’t speak much. The crew think she’s in shock from her ‘ordeal’, but she didn’t push them away, with that look in her eyes, and he knows better. Too often when they do speak, they’re interrupted by a slow, rumbling groan from down below, which sets her staring at the floor, watching, and sends him completely still, listening. She’s not allowed down there, and it’s generally, silently agreed that it’s best if he stays away. He has an unfortunate effect on the creature. Kong.
Ann is angry. Wordlessly, blazingly angry. And she’s angry with him, somehow, for not stopping them, somehow. For not telling them to stop, telling them to let him go. As if they’d listen to his orders. Truth be told, he’s made a few half-hearted tries, but if Carl doesn’t know why this is wrong, and stupid, and the worst and most pointless thing they could be doing, then nothing Jack could say would convince him. And he’ll never convince the men, who look at both him and Ann with blank, stony eyes. Especially not the captain, who doesn’t leave the bridge much these days. Their friends are dead, their crew is decimated, and they’ve lost too much for it all to be for nothing.
He sits in his cabin – elevated, now that they need the room below decks, and, well, it’s not like there weren’t plenty going spare – and drinks his coffee and rattles out new pages for his play, and knows exactly how they feel.
* * *
There’s an odd sense of dislocation as he watches Carl, watches the ‘natives’, watches Kong. The feeling of something familiar but not quite right. Small talk with Preston brings him back to real world, but then it ends and the silence sends him spinning again.
When it breaks loose, and starts smashing up the theatre, the crowds screaming and rushing around him, he watches, silently, as everything slowly clicks back into place, hideously, horribly, helplessly.
Then the beast looks at him, right into his eyes, and the words crowd back into his head again, and it’s only the fact that his feet start moving before his brain starts thinking that keeps him alive. He runs up and down stairs as they crumble behind him, out of the building as it shakes, and then against his better judgement stops, and turns, and wonders what to do.
Kong is out, and roaring, and picking up tiny blonde figures and tossing them aside. Roaring. Angry. Lost.
He’s heading for a car at the same time as he thinks it, and then driving. He always was a good driver. For the moment he doesn’t need words, and Kong, when he sees him, certainly doesn’t.
In order to keep driving, he has to not see the people around him, the other cars, except as obstacles. He has to not hear the crashes and the screams behind him. He can’t help but notice the roof being ripped off from above his head, and the words suddenly start coming back, in time with his pounding heart, ‘oh shit, oh shit…’. But he carries on for as long as he can, and eventually everything just goes black.
* * *
When he wakes up, he’s alone, and alive, and knows what it means before he's even out of the car. He slips out the twisted metal, stumbles onto the street, and follows the flow of the crowd, the sound of the sirens.
Policemen are raptors, centipedes, and he jumps them, dodges them, not looking back. He’s in the lift, the button pressed, before they’re even at the door. The next few minutes are stretched out interminably, waiting, staring up at the ceiling.
When he gets to the top, she’s on her own, lonely and small against the sunlight, looking down. He doesn’t know what to say, apart from ‘Ann’. She looks at him, and he looks back at her, and then holds out his arms. When she – finally – comes over to them, into them, he wraps them around her, her bones against her bones. The feel of her body, the smell of her hair, is almost enough.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-27 03:55 pm (UTC)I like the idea of how important words are to Jack - the fact that he deals in them, as a playwright, and yet is a bit rubbish with them, especially with Ann. What I love about his character arc in the jungle is that he learns to do without words, to do things without thinking about them, and is actually pretty damn good at it. And the same applies whether he's in the jungle or the city - when terrible things are happening and he has to get to Ann, he does whatever it takes. But the jungle is where he learned to do it, so that's going to colour his future judgement. I wanted to play with this idea, and so just focused on the moments that I think are important to that - to the 'inner' Jack, or rather to my Jack.
I'd like to write some random fluff about playwright!/respectable!Jack, but for the moment jungle!Jack just pushes my buttons a little more. Thanks for the feedback - it's probably egotistical, but I do like to discuss what I've written and why. And thank you for making it so positive. It really has given me a lovely warm glow :D
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-27 03:21 pm (UTC)Okay, what did I love. How you summarised the movie, and yet still managed to convey Jack, his thoughts, his love of language. Your repetition of "-finally -" in regards to Ann's actions, because it was just as ambiguous as the film and absolutely perfect. How you had New York reflect the island at the end. How you included the Jack/Kong moment in the theatre, and then in the taxi because BEST BITS EVER, why yes. :D
Amazing, m'dear. I'll try not to pester too hard for more King Kong fic from you, because essays are a bit of a nuisance, I know. And yet, well, you may have to excuse me a little bit of nudging, because I loved it. And Jack!
I have to stop commenting with longer comments than the commentors, but that's squee for you
Date: 2005-12-27 04:09 pm (UTC)Because it's Jack
Best. Feedback. Ever.
This ::gestures upward:: is what I mean about Jack's subtle wordlessness. I love Jack's love of language, but I love more the fact that he sort of casts it aside when things are really important, especially in the jungle. Or is just (canonically) rubbish with it, what with 'ooh, good legs!' and not being able to tell Ann how he feels. But he also learns to do without words - to act without thinking, on instinct, in the jungle, and his instincts turn out to be pretty damn good. Which is lovely and makes me squee and write fic :D
Ann's ambiguity - lady has some serious trust issues, I think. And I can't see Jack being completely ignorant of the fact that she chooses Kong without thinking, and takes time to come to him.
And no fic/recap would be complete without the Kong/Jack theatre moment! Because the BEST BITS EVER, for the movie and Kong and Jack. It only takes a bit of Kong-action to turn Jack into the jungle-hero once more!
Please don't pester. Jack and Kong do that, and essays hurt my brain. But thank you for the love.
(It was so almost worth it.)