fic: gentlemen take polaroids
Friday, 12 December 2008 13:38![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
extemporallyGentlemen Take Polaroids
Ryan takes Polaroids and is a pretentious little weirdo.
g, ryan/keltie, brendon/spencer ~2400 words.
Many thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nova33 for the beta ♥
Ryan finds Polaroids fascinating.
They appear almost at once after being taken and start to fade almost immediately, over a far longer period of time. They cast a tinge of nostalgia over almost every picture taken with them, as though the Brendon making a funny face in the picture is somehow immeasurably, irreversibly worn and faded – an old man now, surely, as though the picture was taken twenty years ago, like he isn’t standing next to Ryan right now, jiggling a little as he says, come on, Ross, let me see it.
Ryan likes Polaroids. The cameras are almost universally clunky, and the cheap, cheerful, coloured plastic they’re encased in is in such bad taste that it makes a one hundred and eighty degree turn, twenty years later, into being retro and awesome and ironic once again. Ryan finds it strange how something so tacky can produce what must seem to him to always possess some strange, sepia-tinged quality of sadness.
Ryan takes a photo with Brendon’s camera, and it makes that click-whirr of a sound before spitting out a white-framed photograph, which he must hold between his index and thumb to wave back and forth, gingerly. Eventually the outlines of people appear before being filled in completely, like Cheshire cats, only that that their bodies appear before their mouths. He’s never quite sure when a photo is completely done.
--
On Ryan’s twenty-fifth birthday, he buys a Polaroid camera.
The tour ended about three weeks ago. Last night, Keltie had just finished a whole string of performances as well, in Las Vegas. They’d collapsed into each other after having wild celebratory sex (at Ryan’s impending birthday, at having survived tours of their own, at being alive, at breathing) and it’s near noon when he wakes up. Keltie’s still asleep, their toes tangling together. Ryan leaves the room quietly, closing the door carefully so as to not wake her. He smiles when he hears her mumbling quietly on the other side of the door.
Outside, it’s unusually cool for late summer. Las Vegas never gets cold, not really. The sun shines still, onto the skylines, making the sharp-edged buildings seem even harsher and softening the outlines of those made of stone. When Ryan squints at the sidewalk the cracks seem to glare with reflected light. Ryan walks for a little while, aimlessly, until he finds himself at Jon’s favourite street in Las Vegas.
Black cameras with their googly, fish-eyed lenses gaze placidly at Ryan where they rest at the back of the shops, behind glass shelves. Ryan knows enough about cameras to know these are the expensive ones, for professionals and the aspiring amateur. Jon’s is something like this, only an older model. He hasn’t got a scratch on his, which is quite an achievement for him. Ryan stares through the windows without much interest. All the cameras look pretty much the same. After a short while, the shopkeepers with their inevitable bookish, plaid shirts start to blur into each other.
At the end of the row there is a shop, far more self-consciously edgy than the rest. It isn’t really a photography shop – there are Polaroid cameras, rolls of film but also arty prints and postcards as well as all the rest of the inevitable paraphernalia of any vaguely arty shop. Ryan stops and looks at the corner where Polaroids are stacked, the purple and yellow and green and orange of the plastic squatting complacently with each other. When he leaves the shop he has a red and purple one, and a roll of film good for fifty prints. The hipster shop assistant pretends not to know who he is, but Ryan can tell from the curiously averted glance that he does.
When he returns to the house with coffee and pastries, Keltie’s just about awake. Ryan raises the camera without thinking, and snaps a picture of her, bare shoulders slipping above the sheets, eyes foggy with morning sleep and hair rumpled curiously. Keltie blinks slowly.
"What’s that?"
"A photo of you: Keltie Colleen, aged twenty three and three quarters, waking up."
"I want to see."
"It isn’t done yet!"
Ryan holds it out of her reach until she lunges up, sheets slipping from her breasts to grab at his wrist. They wrestle half-heartedly. Keltie grabs his wrists and pins him to the bed. Ryan will never stop being amused, and slightly rueful, that Keltie is physically stronger than him. She leans down, suddenly intense, and they kiss. The photo lies to the side, a little rumpled in one corner, forgotten.
--
Ryan begins taking early morning walks, just to photograph the city through Polaroids. He knows what he is doing is clichéd and sentimental but he loves it. Summer is turning to fall and Ryan wants to capture this strange, wistful mood that seems to have overtaken the brash city he’s known forever before it slips through his fingers. He takes photos sparingly, determined to make the roll of film last to the very start of autumn – that his last photo should be of leaves turning to red or maybe starting to drop. One or two days he returns without any new prints, his head full of the photo he would have taken had it looked as well through the viewfinder as he thought it would.
After a while, Ryan usually forgets about the photos that might have been, except for just two, which become almost a part of the collection as the eventual fifty he accumulates: one of the sun shining on a puddle, making tiny rainbows appear like mercury on its surface; and another of a sole window shining bright in a whole block of apartments in the middle of the night.
Ryan’s always alone on these walks. Once or twice Keltie came with him, but he always found himself distracted within fifteen minutes, drawn like a wasp to honey to photograph the tip of her earlobe and the brush of her ponytail against her neck, the blisters on her toes.
--
Five days before everyone’s due to come down to start working on their fourth album, Jon calls, at eleven pm, and says: "I’m getting married."
Ryan nearly drops the phone.
"What?"
"I’m getting married. To Cassie."
"I know who you’re getting married to, who else would it be? Your secret call boy?"
"No, dude. I’m getting married. To Cassie. Sometime next year. I’m holding out for a bird-of-paradise themed wedding, but she says no."
"Congratulations, dumbass. No, really – you realize that you’re not going to be able to photograph your own wedding, right?"
After a while they hang up. Ryan takes a photo of his telephone as it rests on the bedside table, with its dinky rotary dial. Then he turns to Keltie, on the bed, saying, “Jon and Cassie are getting married,” although she was lying next to him when the call came. Keltie smiles lazily and says, “I’m pleased,” before letting her fingertips drag down his neck. They don’t say anything else before they go to sleep, Ryan cradling her from the side. The last alarming thought he has before all the colours dancing on his retina fade is I wouldn’t mind being married too.
--
Spencer and Brendon are hanging out at his home when they find his Polaroids. He’s been tossing his photos from each day into a drawer, without much thought. Brendon breathes, "Hey, these are pretty good," while Spencer raises an eyebrow at him and pulls Brendon onto his lap, while Brendon peruses them intently.
Ryan mumbles, "They’re just random photos."
It’s weird, he’d never contemplated taking photos in any serious capacity before, but if he had, he probably wouldn’t have done it on tour, where there were enough really good photographers to make Ryan feel like an imposter, with his little toy of a camera. When Ryan looks at his photographs objectively, he knows that Brendon is wrong – they’re really nothing special. He knows nothing of composition or lighting (not that the Polaroid offers much choice in that area) to carefully adjust his photographs before they’re irretrievably taken and imprinted onto film, let alone take them with the freewheeling spontaneity most photographers seemed to have on tour, before producing five technically proficient photographs in a row.
To change the subject, he says, "So, Jon and Cassie, sitting in a tree –"
Brendon blushes, for real, and Spencer clears his throat.
"Actually, I kind of asked Brendon to move in with me."
"No way! Are you serious?" He supposes that’s kind of redundant.
"It’s all part of my ploy to get Spencer to cook breakfast for me every morning," Brendon says, curling his arms around Spencer’s neck. Spencer snorts and doesn’t stop him.
"That’s – huh. Wow, okay. Just don’t mention the word 'IKEA' around me and I’ll be pleased for you."
"Why, Brendon, I suddenly have a longing to visit IKEA. The things at IKEA are so brilliant."
Brendon gets the hint and grins, a huge shit-eating grin at Ryan. "Well, of course. I love the things at IKEA. Those cushions at IKEA! Let’s get a new mattress there. Ryan, do you want to come along with us to IKEA?"
Ryan is not surprised that Brendon is being a tool. He supposes they’re all growing up for real now, but he’s oddly gratified to learn that some things never change.
--
Ryan continues working through his roll of film, taking photographs of anything that strikes him as interesting and which he sometimes later regrets: the view of some fences against the sky, the fringe of a woman’s scarf against her back. An old man and a bored indie kid with plastic glasses, both wearing more or less the same plaid shirt, only just captured in the same shot. A sports car in motion along one of the streets of a run-down part of the city. Ryan wanders all over the city he grew up so near to, in this way. He doesn’t know why he takes the photos he takes.
(At home, on the day before Keltie is due to leave again, he takes one more shot of her: dancing thoughtfully in their room, to Kate Bush.)
--
When Keltie leaves, Ryan feels the emptiness of the apartment weighing down on him once more. Happily, it’s the kind of feeling he knows can be lifted easily: by a phone call, an email, a text. In a few hours Brendon and Spencer will probably be over again. They never seem to do anything apart these days, especially since they’re planning to move in together. They haven’t turned succumbed to curtain-shopping syndrome yet, thank god, but apparently there are Things to do. Ryan’s fond of rolling his eyes at them. If Spencer weren’t so in love he’d probably roll his eyes at himself, too.
Still, Ryan listens to Eleanor Rigby on loop, lying on the living room floor as he does so, feeling his toes curl against the dusty carpet.
--
The day Ryan finishes off the roll of film is the same day Jon comes down from Chicago so they can properly start work on the album. Ryan thinks they’re ready for a concept album, finally, but they’ve decided to have a looser storyline to enable a smoother writing process and less narrative detail in the lyrics. He thinks of the Polaroids still waiting in the drawer, and smiles wryly. The Photo Album would have been a great one. Too bad it’s already taken.
They’re all driving down to the airport to get Jon when he takes the last shot. It’s not one of leaves turning red or falling, unfortunately – that was actually the second last one, taken that morning on one of his walks. Spencer is driving and Brendon’s critiquing his skill from the backseat when the control tower looms, steady and sudden, like a slender white block, choking off what seems to be an endless highway. Almost without thinking Ryan sticks his hand out of the car window and snags a shot without even looking at the viewfinder. Then it’s done, the entire roll finished. The only thing left to do is for Ryan to wave it back and forth once again, clutching the photo tightly against the wind lest it fall out. When it’s fully developed Ryan can see that it’s not a bad picture. Slightly off-kilter, and a little blurred, but the essence of it is all there.
Ryan smiles and tucks it into his satchel. (It is not a purse, no matter what Brendon says.)
At the airport there’s the usual greetings and hugs all around. Spencer says, "So, married Jon Walker," gazing at him with bright eyes.
Jon smiles, and it’s not as laidback as his normal smiles. Ryan can tell he’s truly excited about it.
"I know! Still no luck on the bird of paradise themed wedding, but she’s okay with a beach one."
Brendon interjects, "And everyone will wear flip-flops to your wedding, Jon Walker. Good lord."
--
When they arrive at Ryan’s apartment, where Jon’s going to stay, they all pile into the door before Jon goes to shower, and Spencer heads to the kitchen with Brendon tagging along, hooking his chin on Spencer’s shoulder. Now the apartment smells human again, in some starkly undefinable way. The air freshener has been overpowered by the smell of everyone’s skin, and feels subtly warmer. Ryan supposes it’s a prelude to touring.
He tucks the Polaroid into his drawer, before changing his mind and taking them all out. The photographs spill across his bed, but the order they were taken in isn’t messed up. Ryan casts an eye over them – try as he might, he can’t really see a grand unifying theme out of all of them. They’re just snippets, really, of what he might see on any given day in Las Vegas. Bits of his universe. He smiles, a little, as he picks up a picture of a monster yellow truck, next to the one of his desk in his apartment.
“Ryaaaaan! Ryan, do you want eggs?” Brendon yells from the kitchen.
“I’m coming,” Ryan calls, before leaving his sepia-shaded Polaroids on the still-unmade bed, to make his way to the kitchen.
Ryan takes Polaroids and is a pretentious little weirdo.
g, ryan/keltie, brendon/spencer ~2400 words.
Many thanks to
nova33 for the beta ♥Ryan finds Polaroids fascinating.
They appear almost at once after being taken and start to fade almost immediately, over a far longer period of time. They cast a tinge of nostalgia over almost every picture taken with them, as though the Brendon making a funny face in the picture is somehow immeasurably, irreversibly worn and faded – an old man now, surely, as though the picture was taken twenty years ago, like he isn’t standing next to Ryan right now, jiggling a little as he says, come on, Ross, let me see it.
Ryan likes Polaroids. The cameras are almost universally clunky, and the cheap, cheerful, coloured plastic they’re encased in is in such bad taste that it makes a one hundred and eighty degree turn, twenty years later, into being retro and awesome and ironic once again. Ryan finds it strange how something so tacky can produce what must seem to him to always possess some strange, sepia-tinged quality of sadness.
Ryan takes a photo with Brendon’s camera, and it makes that click-whirr of a sound before spitting out a white-framed photograph, which he must hold between his index and thumb to wave back and forth, gingerly. Eventually the outlines of people appear before being filled in completely, like Cheshire cats, only that that their bodies appear before their mouths. He’s never quite sure when a photo is completely done.
--
On Ryan’s twenty-fifth birthday, he buys a Polaroid camera.
The tour ended about three weeks ago. Last night, Keltie had just finished a whole string of performances as well, in Las Vegas. They’d collapsed into each other after having wild celebratory sex (at Ryan’s impending birthday, at having survived tours of their own, at being alive, at breathing) and it’s near noon when he wakes up. Keltie’s still asleep, their toes tangling together. Ryan leaves the room quietly, closing the door carefully so as to not wake her. He smiles when he hears her mumbling quietly on the other side of the door.
Outside, it’s unusually cool for late summer. Las Vegas never gets cold, not really. The sun shines still, onto the skylines, making the sharp-edged buildings seem even harsher and softening the outlines of those made of stone. When Ryan squints at the sidewalk the cracks seem to glare with reflected light. Ryan walks for a little while, aimlessly, until he finds himself at Jon’s favourite street in Las Vegas.
Black cameras with their googly, fish-eyed lenses gaze placidly at Ryan where they rest at the back of the shops, behind glass shelves. Ryan knows enough about cameras to know these are the expensive ones, for professionals and the aspiring amateur. Jon’s is something like this, only an older model. He hasn’t got a scratch on his, which is quite an achievement for him. Ryan stares through the windows without much interest. All the cameras look pretty much the same. After a short while, the shopkeepers with their inevitable bookish, plaid shirts start to blur into each other.
At the end of the row there is a shop, far more self-consciously edgy than the rest. It isn’t really a photography shop – there are Polaroid cameras, rolls of film but also arty prints and postcards as well as all the rest of the inevitable paraphernalia of any vaguely arty shop. Ryan stops and looks at the corner where Polaroids are stacked, the purple and yellow and green and orange of the plastic squatting complacently with each other. When he leaves the shop he has a red and purple one, and a roll of film good for fifty prints. The hipster shop assistant pretends not to know who he is, but Ryan can tell from the curiously averted glance that he does.
When he returns to the house with coffee and pastries, Keltie’s just about awake. Ryan raises the camera without thinking, and snaps a picture of her, bare shoulders slipping above the sheets, eyes foggy with morning sleep and hair rumpled curiously. Keltie blinks slowly.
"What’s that?"
"A photo of you: Keltie Colleen, aged twenty three and three quarters, waking up."
"I want to see."
"It isn’t done yet!"
Ryan holds it out of her reach until she lunges up, sheets slipping from her breasts to grab at his wrist. They wrestle half-heartedly. Keltie grabs his wrists and pins him to the bed. Ryan will never stop being amused, and slightly rueful, that Keltie is physically stronger than him. She leans down, suddenly intense, and they kiss. The photo lies to the side, a little rumpled in one corner, forgotten.
--
Ryan begins taking early morning walks, just to photograph the city through Polaroids. He knows what he is doing is clichéd and sentimental but he loves it. Summer is turning to fall and Ryan wants to capture this strange, wistful mood that seems to have overtaken the brash city he’s known forever before it slips through his fingers. He takes photos sparingly, determined to make the roll of film last to the very start of autumn – that his last photo should be of leaves turning to red or maybe starting to drop. One or two days he returns without any new prints, his head full of the photo he would have taken had it looked as well through the viewfinder as he thought it would.
After a while, Ryan usually forgets about the photos that might have been, except for just two, which become almost a part of the collection as the eventual fifty he accumulates: one of the sun shining on a puddle, making tiny rainbows appear like mercury on its surface; and another of a sole window shining bright in a whole block of apartments in the middle of the night.
Ryan’s always alone on these walks. Once or twice Keltie came with him, but he always found himself distracted within fifteen minutes, drawn like a wasp to honey to photograph the tip of her earlobe and the brush of her ponytail against her neck, the blisters on her toes.
--
Five days before everyone’s due to come down to start working on their fourth album, Jon calls, at eleven pm, and says: "I’m getting married."
Ryan nearly drops the phone.
"What?"
"I’m getting married. To Cassie."
"I know who you’re getting married to, who else would it be? Your secret call boy?"
"No, dude. I’m getting married. To Cassie. Sometime next year. I’m holding out for a bird-of-paradise themed wedding, but she says no."
"Congratulations, dumbass. No, really – you realize that you’re not going to be able to photograph your own wedding, right?"
After a while they hang up. Ryan takes a photo of his telephone as it rests on the bedside table, with its dinky rotary dial. Then he turns to Keltie, on the bed, saying, “Jon and Cassie are getting married,” although she was lying next to him when the call came. Keltie smiles lazily and says, “I’m pleased,” before letting her fingertips drag down his neck. They don’t say anything else before they go to sleep, Ryan cradling her from the side. The last alarming thought he has before all the colours dancing on his retina fade is I wouldn’t mind being married too.
--
Spencer and Brendon are hanging out at his home when they find his Polaroids. He’s been tossing his photos from each day into a drawer, without much thought. Brendon breathes, "Hey, these are pretty good," while Spencer raises an eyebrow at him and pulls Brendon onto his lap, while Brendon peruses them intently.
Ryan mumbles, "They’re just random photos."
It’s weird, he’d never contemplated taking photos in any serious capacity before, but if he had, he probably wouldn’t have done it on tour, where there were enough really good photographers to make Ryan feel like an imposter, with his little toy of a camera. When Ryan looks at his photographs objectively, he knows that Brendon is wrong – they’re really nothing special. He knows nothing of composition or lighting (not that the Polaroid offers much choice in that area) to carefully adjust his photographs before they’re irretrievably taken and imprinted onto film, let alone take them with the freewheeling spontaneity most photographers seemed to have on tour, before producing five technically proficient photographs in a row.
To change the subject, he says, "So, Jon and Cassie, sitting in a tree –"
Brendon blushes, for real, and Spencer clears his throat.
"Actually, I kind of asked Brendon to move in with me."
"No way! Are you serious?" He supposes that’s kind of redundant.
"It’s all part of my ploy to get Spencer to cook breakfast for me every morning," Brendon says, curling his arms around Spencer’s neck. Spencer snorts and doesn’t stop him.
"That’s – huh. Wow, okay. Just don’t mention the word 'IKEA' around me and I’ll be pleased for you."
"Why, Brendon, I suddenly have a longing to visit IKEA. The things at IKEA are so brilliant."
Brendon gets the hint and grins, a huge shit-eating grin at Ryan. "Well, of course. I love the things at IKEA. Those cushions at IKEA! Let’s get a new mattress there. Ryan, do you want to come along with us to IKEA?"
Ryan is not surprised that Brendon is being a tool. He supposes they’re all growing up for real now, but he’s oddly gratified to learn that some things never change.
--
Ryan continues working through his roll of film, taking photographs of anything that strikes him as interesting and which he sometimes later regrets: the view of some fences against the sky, the fringe of a woman’s scarf against her back. An old man and a bored indie kid with plastic glasses, both wearing more or less the same plaid shirt, only just captured in the same shot. A sports car in motion along one of the streets of a run-down part of the city. Ryan wanders all over the city he grew up so near to, in this way. He doesn’t know why he takes the photos he takes.
(At home, on the day before Keltie is due to leave again, he takes one more shot of her: dancing thoughtfully in their room, to Kate Bush.)
--
When Keltie leaves, Ryan feels the emptiness of the apartment weighing down on him once more. Happily, it’s the kind of feeling he knows can be lifted easily: by a phone call, an email, a text. In a few hours Brendon and Spencer will probably be over again. They never seem to do anything apart these days, especially since they’re planning to move in together. They haven’t turned succumbed to curtain-shopping syndrome yet, thank god, but apparently there are Things to do. Ryan’s fond of rolling his eyes at them. If Spencer weren’t so in love he’d probably roll his eyes at himself, too.
Still, Ryan listens to Eleanor Rigby on loop, lying on the living room floor as he does so, feeling his toes curl against the dusty carpet.
--
The day Ryan finishes off the roll of film is the same day Jon comes down from Chicago so they can properly start work on the album. Ryan thinks they’re ready for a concept album, finally, but they’ve decided to have a looser storyline to enable a smoother writing process and less narrative detail in the lyrics. He thinks of the Polaroids still waiting in the drawer, and smiles wryly. The Photo Album would have been a great one. Too bad it’s already taken.
They’re all driving down to the airport to get Jon when he takes the last shot. It’s not one of leaves turning red or falling, unfortunately – that was actually the second last one, taken that morning on one of his walks. Spencer is driving and Brendon’s critiquing his skill from the backseat when the control tower looms, steady and sudden, like a slender white block, choking off what seems to be an endless highway. Almost without thinking Ryan sticks his hand out of the car window and snags a shot without even looking at the viewfinder. Then it’s done, the entire roll finished. The only thing left to do is for Ryan to wave it back and forth once again, clutching the photo tightly against the wind lest it fall out. When it’s fully developed Ryan can see that it’s not a bad picture. Slightly off-kilter, and a little blurred, but the essence of it is all there.
Ryan smiles and tucks it into his satchel. (It is not a purse, no matter what Brendon says.)
At the airport there’s the usual greetings and hugs all around. Spencer says, "So, married Jon Walker," gazing at him with bright eyes.
Jon smiles, and it’s not as laidback as his normal smiles. Ryan can tell he’s truly excited about it.
"I know! Still no luck on the bird of paradise themed wedding, but she’s okay with a beach one."
Brendon interjects, "And everyone will wear flip-flops to your wedding, Jon Walker. Good lord."
--
When they arrive at Ryan’s apartment, where Jon’s going to stay, they all pile into the door before Jon goes to shower, and Spencer heads to the kitchen with Brendon tagging along, hooking his chin on Spencer’s shoulder. Now the apartment smells human again, in some starkly undefinable way. The air freshener has been overpowered by the smell of everyone’s skin, and feels subtly warmer. Ryan supposes it’s a prelude to touring.
He tucks the Polaroid into his drawer, before changing his mind and taking them all out. The photographs spill across his bed, but the order they were taken in isn’t messed up. Ryan casts an eye over them – try as he might, he can’t really see a grand unifying theme out of all of them. They’re just snippets, really, of what he might see on any given day in Las Vegas. Bits of his universe. He smiles, a little, as he picks up a picture of a monster yellow truck, next to the one of his desk in his apartment.
“Ryaaaaan! Ryan, do you want eggs?” Brendon yells from the kitchen.
“I’m coming,” Ryan calls, before leaving his sepia-shaded Polaroids on the still-unmade bed, to make his way to the kitchen.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: Friday, 12 December 2008 14:32 (UTC)This fic really has that sense and feeling of instant nostalgia and a collection of gentle moments that I associate with polaroids, threaded among the words. It felt right.
no subject
Date: Saturday, 13 December 2008 00:08 (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, 12 December 2008 22:01 (UTC)no subject
Date: Saturday, 13 December 2008 00:08 (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, 12 December 2008 22:57 (UTC)no subject
Date: Saturday, 13 December 2008 00:09 (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, 14 December 2008 22:58 (UTC)That's a great song! It was in a play that I worked the sound board for last year, and no one else had heard of it, but they were all like, "Holy shit! That's awesome!"
So yeah.
*runs to read now*
no subject
Date: Monday, 15 December 2008 01:16 (UTC)