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bakerstreet2021-12-17 01:19 pm
mllememe) wrote in bakerstreet2021-12-17 01:19 pm
Entry tags:
quote prompts.
How to play -
1. Comment with your character. Include prefs and the like, if you wish.
2. Others will leave a quote/lyric/poem. Try a sea of quotes or tumblr if you need help searching for a quote.
3. Reply to them with a setting based on the quote/lyric/poem.
Credit.
sockies. [ Source ]
michel | find me | ota
( one )
( two )
( three )
( four )
( five )
one.
anne. maman. that woman who she'd learned to resent for the chronic illness that somehow hadn't killed her (so why couldn't she have stayed, how hard would it have been) and the mother tongue that she didn't want after it stopped being her motherland. the regal, elegant anne who'd liked that gwenaëlle used her married name for a nom de plume (nom de guerre, she liked to say over cocktails, like it was a joke) and who she'd had the better part of a decade to rebuild a relationship with (and hadn't, if they were both honest),
dead, finally. in a car accident (in paris? no— I've driven there, imagine the odds of living there and dying in a car accident somewhere else, I hope she had time to appreciate the irony,) alongside her husband, the charming parisien francois who had fond tales of his stepdaughter's early life and only tired, smiling vagueness on nothing recent more intimate than could be read in the society pages. the 8th arrondissement residence will go to her, she knows, but only because it had been thrown at her like a gauntlet a few years ago and she hadn't been able to attend the reading of the will, nor the funerals. she is speaking to francois's lawyer through zoom, of all fucking things, and an assistant has connected them so it's clear why gwenaëlle wynne-york had ghosted the entire rest of proceedings when she sits down, visibly and heavily pregnant, if not why no one gossiping about her absence had known.
her french is skillful — it had been like riding a bike, returning to the first language she'd ever spoken — but slower than seems it would be natural to her, like the words she's looking for are never quite at the tip of her tongue. she greets him, ) M. Laurent, I'm sorry for the delays and the hassle in speaking with you,
( wonders if she has been passed up or down the hierarchy, if the sauvageons had been important clients or if someone thinks she could be if handled with sufficient sensitivity. she wonders what she would find sufficient. what anyone would. )
I've been advised not to travel. I understand your law firm handled the Sauvageons' affairs, and the — finalizing. Thereof.
no subject
It's got nothing to do with the Sauvageon case in particular, his firm handles a number of last wills and testaments, finalizations, post-death affairs and while they always only manage to remind him of his own advancing age, how he's drawing closer to death himself, how Elio has promised to come see him afterwards, close his eyes, Michel isn't particularly put off by seeing what is left behind, when you're finally gone. He has dealt with his own father's death, early on. Then, later, with his mother's. Perhaps he has grown a thick skin. Perhaps he always had a thick skin.
No, the reason he hates his job now, is because he's chained to his computer for this particular meeting and he does hate Zoom with a vengeance, it always freezes up inconveniently, so he has to hastily get his secretary in. And besides, Michel was never passionate about law anyway. He was never passionate about being a lawyer. It earns him a good living, but at times like this, he would rather live the life of a bohème than slave for capitalism, really.
At least there'd be no Zoom, yes?
As she all but waddles into the frame, he can't help smile a little bit, because he remembers his own ex-wife, heavily pregnant, expecting their son, a lifetime ago. Ah, how lives mirror each other. Repeat. It's wonderful! And simultaneously very sad. ]
Mlle. Wynne-York, before we begin. My condolences. I'm very glad we're able to meet online, if not in person. [ White lies. The kind he'd only ever tell professionally.
While talking, he ponders her French. It sounds strangely thoughtful, but then again, she's just lost her mother. All French ought to sound thoughtful in the wake of such a life-changing event. ] Unfinished business shouldn't have to weigh on top of everything else you must be dealing with right now.
[ Usually, Michel doesn't even handle people's wills. It's only because Charles, who has been in charge of the Sauvageon affairs from the beginning, is on sick leave and they haven't found his replacement. Awful timing! That's truly when it sucks being the boss, isn't it?
But he immediately likes her, there's something about her air. He may hate it, but he can be an estate planning lawyer for her sake, just for an hour and a half, he thinks. ]
no subject
are the first she has received. what a strange thing. her mother died, a half a world away, and no one here knows, and she doesn't know what to say, so no one has known to say anything to her. it feels momentarily overwhelming.
she refocuses. )
Thank you. ( that feels right. like a normal thing to say, to a normal thing that he's said to her. )
I don't have French representation at the moment and I think that would make things simpler, for... ( she takes a breath, pinched, and smiles, like she's remembering something frustrating. ) I'm not intending to just sell whatever I've inherited.
( it is rather famously what her father did. anne's scottish accent thicker when she was angry, daddy's little girl. )
I'm hoping that whatever I need to do—I think it will be more seamless? If I can maintain, as much as possible, whatever they had in place.
( she laughs, suddenly, strange and grieving strangely: ) Do you have children?
no subject
He likes her. ]
Their Parisian estate has been left to you. Accepting it will require a transfer to your name, after which we'll send you the papers that need to be signed, most of it pre-filled already. [ Blah, blah, blah, the boring stuff! Michel says it with great care anyway, because she needs to hear it and understand it and accept it. Like you must inevitably hear from someone that your parent has died and you can't flee from that either. He knows. ] If you wish, I can stay on this particular case and ease you into things on my end, but otherwise let things remain as they were.
[ It doesn't feel like a job, for once, perhaps that's why he hates it a little less for every minute that passes. Glancing into the camera directly, he smiles, a wide, endearing smile that somehow goes with her grief, with her little sad laugh and her question that takes him aback. He lets it do so. Michel never gets personally invested in his work, it simply never gets underneath his skin, neither in any inconvenient nor in any passionate way.
He thinks about Elio. Then, he thinks about feeling things. What kind of work would he have done, if he'd felt it to his core? If his mother hadn't said: become a lawyer like your father? What kind of great things might he not have accomplished.
What kind of great things might he still accomplish, then? Perhaps it doesn't matter, what. Perhaps what matters is how.
Does he have children, is the question. His smile grows smaller, though it doesn't disappear. ]
One. A son. A bit older than you.
no subject
that part is easy. paperwork. taxes.
the way that his smile gets quieter. she is conscious of the leeway given to her right now — young, pregnant, bereaved — and of the fact that she wouldn't have hesitated to ask him if she were curious under any other circumstances, either. it's rude. but sometimes people answer rude questions, and then there you are,
feeling listened to, by a stranger through a screen. )
I would appreciate that. ( for him to stay on, to make the transition easy, to—
she taps her fingers against the side of her laptop. )
This is my first one. ( he didn't ask. ) They didn't know I was. Am, they didn't know that I am — making a person.
( usually she at least has the excuse of several vodka shots when she's being this socially un-deft, but she feels like an overfull cup, like she keeps pouring into a vessel that isn't fit to purpose, spilling the things she wants to keep through slippery fingers. )
no subject
However, their chat is far from done, he senses it acutely, in the way she starts talking, stuttering her way through the admittance that her mother and stepfather didn't know she was pregnant, that they'd never get the chance of finding out they were having a grandchild.
Because Michel is an abrasive sort of person who just says things without much regard for how people feel about it, he wants to tell her that it might have been for the best. After all, the horrible thoughts you'd have time to think before a car crashes, if you'd known you had grandchildren you'd never get to see? Michel knows that dread. He has been in that position, he simply came out on the other side of it alive and desperate to heal a relationship that isn't his to govern.
His son has made his decision. Michel has long since given up on trying to find out what decision he's expected to make in turn.
You reach out, you fall. Life!
But because he likes her and because he's still a professional, he doesn't say that, not directly. Instead he asks a question of his own: ]
And you're the kind of daughter who'd have liked for them to know?
[ The smile is gone now, but his expression is more than politely interested, eyebrows raised slightly, lips pursed. She can't see, but his hands are in his lap, folded. Relaxed.
This is not work. No, this is a great accomplishment. ]
no subject
she's not french enough, not settled enough, not smart enough to not repeat the things her mother did not explicitly call mistakes and didn't have to when the sauvageons hadn't communicated with emeric wynne-york other than through lawyers in about twenty years. pregnant by an englishman she doesn't want to keep, alone in a strange country, living an echo of her mother's life while she sorts through the paperwork that will neatly call it finished. )
We didn't have that kind of relationship, ( is what she settles on, and it is itself a kind of grief. a loss. no, she's not that kind of daughter, but wouldn't it have been nice if she had been?
wouldn't it have been something, if they were the sort of family that felt like some sort of family. maybe if they'd had thirty more years to hang up on each other over petty, stupid grievances, )
We moved into that apartment when she married him.
( gwen lived there until she was six. she remembers francois carrying her on his shoulders down the streets of the city, making up stories about the things she pointed out to him, and how anxious he was when he handed her up to her father the first time emeric wanted to give her a feel for horseriding and how it had been a funny story about what a nervous man he must have been until sense memory had caught her at just the right angle, opening a single malt. )
He had family, ( she says, now, like she's reasoning it out. ) They didn't have childre—they didn't have any other children, but I know that he had family. You wouldn't leave a house to someone you didn't love.
( right?
she seems to realize what she's just dropped into his lap— )
Obviously.
( obviously. she's just saying things, it's fine, actually. )
no subject
Ah, but death is always too soon.
She talks about her not having that kind of relationship with her mother and he understands, even if what she's saying is that they didn't have a relationship where it was normal and expected to tell someone you're pregnant, as a woman. He can't pretend to understand completely, what kind of loss that it, and yet... Perhaps he can, perhaps he's suffered the same loss once, perhaps his son has also suffered.
Michel looks at her. Wonders absentmindedly whether these are the kind of conversations Charles is allowed to have with his clients, whether Michel is just usually occupied with the wrong branch of law altogether.
But really, he thinks it's just this girl.
Obviously, she says like it decides it, but it doesn't decide anything. Do you leave a house to someone you don't love? Do you travel across continents to close the eyes of a man you weren't bound to in some way?
Elio would know the answer. Elio knew all the questions and thus, most of the answers, too.
He takes a deep breath, sounding a bit like he's impatient, but he's just thinking. ]
No, you wouldn't leave a house to someone you didn't love, as you wouldn't accept a house with all the obligations that follow from someone you didn't love.
[ Clearing his throat, he discreetly puts down his pen and reaches for the glass of water placed well out of getting-in-the-electronics reach. He takes a sip, frowns and sips it again. Oh, what he wouldn't give for it to be a good single malt, this. Putting the water down again, he looks at her through the screens and the many miles separating them, trying to read her gaze.
His father would've known. As Elio would. Michel has stagnated in corporate law for too long now. ]
You may not have had that kind of relationship in life, but it's the kind of relationship you have now.
[ In death, he means, but doesn't say it out loud, it's heavy enough as it is. Death, he knows, he has experience, often reveals the true nature of our feelings for one another. He hopes she understands. ]
no subject
when she'd decided to weather the storm of her too-public break-up in paris, it had been the same apartment and the same old bedroom she'd gone home to; the disorienting juxtaposition of a place held for her somewhere she'd felt unwelcome, unwanted. paris is overrated, she's told so many people, casually, dismissively, projecting her bitterness imax-style to a whole city; it's full of fucking french people.
what's she? born in calais to expatriates, raised in italy, educated in the uk, about to give birth in the states. her father had sold the family pile, bought himself a castle, called her its princess. (a masturbatory monument to his delusions of adequacy, anne had said, not sorry enough that gwen had heard.) this feels, sort of,
she imagines an apology. we didn't mean to tell you this wasn't your home. come home. she imagines if she'd been willing to hear it before it was empty. she registers his sigh, and she does think it means impatience, but there's a terrible, clawing loneliness to the willingness to ignore it, to keep talking because he hasn't tried to well, since that's sorted— his way out of it yet, because he's listening. )
I've been publishing under their name, ( she says, leaning on her elbows on the table she's sitting at — not in an office but some open plan, neutral and concrete penthouse monstrosity, wide space behind her, expansive windows, high up. ) For my whole writing career, my nom de guerre.
( poetry is sort of like combat with oneself, or at least it is the way she does it.
they were always a part of a most important part of her. it's a shock of cold water to understand too late it might not have been as one-sided as she was always so convinced—
she tucks her hair behind her ears. )
And my poor fucking parents, completely unable to stand one another with their clothes on, tied together for the entire rest of their lives by this evidence they definitely fucked.
( —is an unusual description of 'their child', but not an inaccurate one. )
Did you plan? Yours? Your son.
M'ahina Molkoh | ffxiv WoL OC | OTA
Jason Todd | DC Animated Movies
1) "All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair." - Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
2) "I'll never forget the beginning of our falling apart." - Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me
3) "They say age brings you wisdom, but it isn't true. All you ever get is a better sense of your own limitations." - Curtis Edmonds, Rain on Your Wedding Day
4) "It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it." - Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts
5) "There can never be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save." - Isaac Asmiov, Pebble in the Sky
6) Wildcard! Bring your own quote and we'll work something out.
kristin ortega | altered carbon
"listen to me as one listens to the rain
without listening, hear what I say" - Octavio Paz
"Sometimes it feels good to take the long way home." - Carol Rifka Brunt
"Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection." - Wendell Berry
[ Or bring your own quote. Infopost here. Open to both cross-canon and canon stuff. ]
natasha romanoff | mcu | ota
kendall roy | succession
— Nayyirah Waheed, 'Salt'
2. Eating a bagel and being a cunt. Cursing all the Christmas tea gift boxes from people who pity me. I wonder who loves me every day, all the time.
— Sara Sutterlin, 'I Wanted to Be the Knife'
3. I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire.
— Ingeborg Bachmann
4. [ throw something at me! ]
Egon Spengler | GHOSTBUSTERS 1 & 2
Re: Egon Spengler | GHOSTBUSTERS 1 & 2
She believed she could do she did.
She needed a hero so that’s what she became.
Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
#1, with bonus time travel bullshit cause I do what I want.
When it happened, for just an instant, Egon was back on that roof again.
The two drunk men in the experimentation room were just about to come to blows when it happened: the hum, the flash of light—the portal that deposited a young girl wearing what looked like a proton pack in the path of a large man about to hit her instead of Egon’s research participant.
He opened his mouth to order an assistant intervene—then the girl just kicked the subject square in the balls.
Egon did not laugh. It was a very near thing, however.
Now he was doing a medical evaluation on the child, checking her pupils…and trying not to be haunted by a pair of dark eyes that were familiar in ways he couldn’t quite explain.
“No sign of concussion.” He finally decided aloud, pocketing his pen light. “Can you tell me your name, young lady?”
no subject
Honestly, a part of her is sure she should find that weird or be horrified that she was suddenly so far away from her friends and family. Internally, she was screaming and in a panic and in shock.
Especially when she turned and was face to face with Egon. Her grandfather. Alive and so many years younger.
But she really didn’t. Past the internalized freaking out, one Phoebe Spengler was pretty calm. If a bit wide eyed as her grandfather poked and examined.
She chews her lower lip for a moment, frowning at the question. Not because she doesn’t like it, but because she can’t lie and that’s probably going to cause problems.
“Phoebe. Phoebe Spengler,” she finally states after a deep breath, ready with many, many theories as to the how’s and the whys of what she’s doing in New York circa well before she was born.
no subject
Eyes that reminded him of another pair on a much younger child that no one, no one, knew about.
“I’m—I’m sorry, you said your last name is Spengler? As in the philosopher?”
no subject
"My mothers name is Callie. I'm not at all supposed to be here, but my team and I were fighting something some warped devotee of Gozer called up and then there was this flash and suddenly I'm here."
Years and years before she's supposed to exist.
no subject
The very idea of time travel, for a single moment, was irrelevant. As Egon stared at this teenaged girl, with that name on her lips and those eyes in her face (the same eyes that told him on a level he couldn’t define, before seeing the little girl and going through the numbers), he couldn’t make himself care.
Egon didn’t realize he was touching her until he felt the brush of her hair on the back of his hand, her cheek warm against his palm.
Gozer. Gozer had a role in this, and Egon saw red.
Outwardly, he was serene, shifting his hand to the top of Phoebe’s head, then running his fingers through her hair before he stepped back.
“Miss…Phoebe…can you tell me what year it is, by your reckoning?”
no subject
So, good times we’re had by all, she guesses. The hand in her hair is familiar, but still gets a curious look and a twitch of an almost sad smile. The last and only other time he did that was right before his ghost floated off to wherever he was meant to be.
She never expected it to happen again.
“What year is it here?” She has a mild understanding of what happened when for the original Ghostbusters. Knowing what year she’s in will help her understand what’s going on, just a bit.
no subject
The mention of the man's name had him looking away briefly, avoiding eye contact for a few moments before he looked into Phoebe's face again.
It wasn't like he was doing anything wrong...and, legally, he couldn't act on anything with authority, but Gozer's attempt to break through had been serious. So many more lives could have been lost...
So he'd been doing some reading. Nothing more than that, just reading--and he hadn't told any of the guys about it yet.
Clearing his throat, Egon offered Phoebe a hand down from the table she was perched on so Egon could examine her previously.
"It's 1989." he replied briskly, a hand on her shoulder to steer her out of the experiment room and into the main part of the lab. Several rooms were visible through one-way mirrors.
"Unfortunately, I've been legally barred from operating as a paranormal investigator, so I'm doing what I can with the things I learned as a Ghostbuster to further parapsychology in the sciences."
no subject
She passes by the table they’d set her stuff on and she grabs for it, tucking her revised proton pack under the jacket she’d been wearing to keep it hidden. If he’s been barred from being a Ghostbuster, she doesn’t want to risk getting him in trouble.
“It’s almost New Years, right? We were just getting ready to drive my brother to look at tech colleges over the summer. He wants to work with cars. I fully support him.”
He got the Ecto-1 working. She believes in Trevor Spengler.
Kylo Ren/Brianna Solo • r63!Star Wars • ota
toss a quote (or quotes) at me, or sample one of the ones below: ]
Ivan Carrera ¤ Altered Carbon (netflix)
frodo | lotr
aragorn | lotr
pippin | lotr
legolas | lotr