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Entry tags:
.fic: Scarface - D/M 1.1.
Title: Scarface
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: Danny/Martin (more Danny, though)
Rating/Warnings: PG13/R. Darkish.
Disclaimers: Without a Trace belongs to other people, and that makes me sad. Scarface and the random quotations drawn from it belong to... well, whoever owns them, I guess. Certainly not me.
Advertisements: Pre-ep for 4.02, "Safe." PTSD, Pacino.
Notes: I started this fic the weekend after "Safe", when USA was heavily pimping its premiere of Scarface (which was the inspiration for the fic--and we all know Danny loves Pacino), and after my computer broke, I thought it was gone forever. But then I found it on a memory card I almost never use, and by this you may perceive that miracles still happen.
Final caveat: When I say 'darkish,' I probably do actually mean 'really dark.' And quite possibly 'fucked up' and 'deliberately confusing'.
If it's underlined, it's from the movie.
SCARFACE
Danny Taylor can’t remember spending this much time in his apartment before.
He’s been home since six and has:
eaten (or made himself eat – take-out, very bad take-out, cooking’s been so hard lately)
cleaned up
straightened the afghan over his couch, and
watched the news for the five minutes it took for him to get sick of it.
And now he has absolutely no idea what to do with himself. Go out for a walk in crime-infested streets, walk down to the docks and feed the pelicans, saying here pelican, pelican.
(Back when he’d first started at the Bureau, he’d go out, find somewhere to blow off steam, or someone to blow off something else. Always the temptation of a drink, but he’d dealt with it, because too much rode on the wagon with him
– a career, a life, the respect of his teammates, and it’s crazy how quickly they started to matter when even law school hadn’t seemed that important for the three years it took him to get through it
[and why the hell is that, Daniel Alvarez y Reyes?] –
and sometimes the only way to work off the adrenaline and frustration of a case was to move, to go out and be with people who were alive.
Like Martin, and they’d eventually started hanging out, and solid, steady Martin could laugh and smile, could wear normal clothes and live and make Danny think uncoworkerly thoughts about him – You're good-looking, you got a beautiful body, beautiful legs, beautiful face, all these guys in love with you. Only you got a look in your eye like you haven't been fucked in a year! That was Martin, lovely beautiful almost-fucked Martin)
He can’t trust himself now, with the voice – that sweet, blurry voice he’s lived with working on eight years now (eight –
EIGHT YEARS AND STILL COUNTING [months, days, hours – alcoholism keeps an atomic clock] oh my God still counting and pathetic, he can’t believe it)
– growing louder, pointing out all the bars, the liquor and convenience stores on every street (do you see? do you see that bodega right there?), how easy it would be to have
Just.
One.
Drink.
And he knows that if he goes out someone will offer to buy – they always offer, men and women – and he’ll take that person up on it. And maybe more, if he gets drunk enough, and that will be the end of everything.
No, he decides, not the end…
an epilogue, because there are times when he thinks everything ended six weeks ago.
Six weeks ago he might have hung out with Martin, gotten pizza delivered and gone over what they could have done to get Maura Holloway back alive. And Martin would have said
We didn’t have a chance, he would have said, her boyfriend realized too late that she hadn’t only left him, but everybody else, for good, and according to the M.E. she’d died about two hours after we got the case.
Martin wouldn’t have believed that, though, and Danny would have said
You can’t save them all, Martin, he would have said, and Martin wouldn’t have believed that, either.
(You can’t save them all, Daniel Alvarez y Reyes. File for future reference.)
Very carefully, Danny doesn’t plot out the way the rest of the night would have gone. How he would have liked it to go, anyway, if such a night had ever happened – wrapped up in Martin, the two of them on the couch, the floor, in his bed, anywhere so long as he could –
Martin would taste like Martin, like a day at the office and laughter, coffee and Danny’s come from when he’d sucked him off before. And his chest would be smooth and unblemished, no scars, no bandages, just miles of muscle and skin, sweat-covered, eloquent, and being inside Martin would be like going home –
Not home, because home was Hialeah and Hialeah sucked, and did he not just say he was not going there?
Not home, then, and not Heaven because Heaven doesn’t let gay people in according to Señor Paulo – What about homosexuality, Tony? You like men, huh?
(Well, you do like men, Daniel Alvarez y Reyes, and Martin in particular.)
And he is not thinking about this right now
He isn’t going out, and he isn’t going to spend the night obsessing about Martin. These two are absolutely certain. A little desperate now, he casts about his apartment for something to do.
Law texts stacked on his desk, highlighters and notes piled next to them, but he’d missed the bar exam.
(Again, though at least he hadn’t been drunk and in jail this time.
[He would like to note here, for the record, that this was how it all started – a missed exam – and now it was going to end with a missed exam, too. Maybe the universe was telling him he shouldn’t be a lawyer.]
He’d spent his bar exam avoiding Martin’s hospital room and his apartment, and hiding at his desk at work. So you see, the client has an alibi. He was at work.)
Movie. He’ll watch a movie. Something Pacino, because even in the worst days of his life, Al’s always been there for him. Danny has all the movies on DVD now, and he has them on tape too, which is maybe a bit obsessive but he figures Al deserves it.
(Serpico, Tony Montana, Don Corleone, Carlito, Shylock, they’re all there and speaking of which he’s thinking)
Scarface, maybe, the first one he ever saw.
(He, Gabriel, Eva, and Theo hunch in the back row so the usher – this evil old white bitch – can’t see them and this is the third time he’s seen it, third time he’s gotten past the usher, and some part of his dim twelve-year-old awareness loves Tony Montana – Cuban, broke, and good for pretty much nothing, but making it, despite all the people who try to fuck him over.
[And he’d had girls and money – hell, a lot of girls and a lot of money – and to a twelve-year-old, that was better than being king of the fucking world.]
Two hours in that theater and Evil Old White Bitch didn’t once see them.)
Now, legally permitted to watch Scarface without a parent or guardian, Danny starts the DVD and curls up on his couch, flips impatiently through the trailers and the startup menu.
Tony Montana comes to the US during the Cuban Boat Lift. (He remembers his mother talking about it –
we came over so you boys could have a good life [and even when he was eight he knew that his mother didn’t quite believe her own words] so you go to school and be good and learn English)
The first gunshot makes him tense, unpleasant rush of fear curling up from his stomach. He turns down the volume and tells himself it’s just a movie, just a movie, tries to console himself with his favorite scenes and Pacino’s acting.
He watches Tony go one-on-one with the chainsaw, and tells himself it’s just stage blood. Because it is, of course, and Pacino isn’t really going to die, because he went on to make more movies, didn’t he?
Say hello to my little friend!
He’s not fucking terrified now, no no he’s not freaking out because the guns are fake and the smoke is fake and look, they’re in broad daylight
it’s not night, not dark and the street isn’t wet, only it is and the smoke is real and the bullets in Martin’s body are real and Martin’s blood is real
And I remember it, how my head hurt and there was blood in my eyes and blood on my hands and I could smell the gunpowder for the rest of the night and I can still hear it – automatic rifle, semi-automatic pistol.
No, he doesn’t remember, doesn’t want to – Dat's because ju gotcha head stuck in jo culo! says Tony – because this is his favorite movie he’s watching, and the flashbacks are fucking with it.
He knows how Tony ends, of course. Not prettily, because you live by the sword – or the Uzi, he supposes – and you die by the sword. There’s no need to actually keep watching this, replacing the actors’ faces with the memory of ThatNight, shivering, feeling the sweat trickle
down
down
down
his neck and annoy the skin along his spine. He doesn’t need to sit here rocking and begging Martin not to die and twisting his fingers together like a fucking crazy person, because he is not crazy.
One hand locks around the DVD controller and he punches the buttons randomly. Pause, play STOP fastforwardtonextscene(oh look, more blood) Power off.
Gunfire echoes around his apartment, too much sound for eight hundred square feet, too much sound for his head to hold, not enough space for it and him, and he has to get out.
Go out somewhere, anywhere, and he won’t get a drink, he promises himself. Not a single drink.
I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.
He’ll leave his ID at home, he tells himself as he gathers up keys and wallet. It’s still early enough to get into bars that don’t start carding until after eleven. Thanks to the government, most places card grandmothers these days, and if anyone offers to buy he’ll be virtuous and play hard-to-get, and order club soda with a twist of bitterness – he swears this on his soul as he heads out the door.
First step’s the hardest, they say at AA. Not this one.
-end-
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: Danny/Martin (more Danny, though)
Rating/Warnings: PG13/R. Darkish.
Disclaimers: Without a Trace belongs to other people, and that makes me sad. Scarface and the random quotations drawn from it belong to... well, whoever owns them, I guess. Certainly not me.
Advertisements: Pre-ep for 4.02, "Safe." PTSD, Pacino.
Notes: I started this fic the weekend after "Safe", when USA was heavily pimping its premiere of Scarface (which was the inspiration for the fic--and we all know Danny loves Pacino), and after my computer broke, I thought it was gone forever. But then I found it on a memory card I almost never use, and by this you may perceive that miracles still happen.
Final caveat: When I say 'darkish,' I probably do actually mean 'really dark.' And quite possibly 'fucked up' and 'deliberately confusing'.
If it's underlined, it's from the movie.
SCARFACE
Danny Taylor can’t remember spending this much time in his apartment before.
He’s been home since six and has:
eaten (or made himself eat – take-out, very bad take-out, cooking’s been so hard lately)
cleaned up
straightened the afghan over his couch, and
watched the news for the five minutes it took for him to get sick of it.
And now he has absolutely no idea what to do with himself. Go out for a walk in crime-infested streets, walk down to the docks and feed the pelicans, saying here pelican, pelican.
(Back when he’d first started at the Bureau, he’d go out, find somewhere to blow off steam, or someone to blow off something else. Always the temptation of a drink, but he’d dealt with it, because too much rode on the wagon with him
– a career, a life, the respect of his teammates, and it’s crazy how quickly they started to matter when even law school hadn’t seemed that important for the three years it took him to get through it
and sometimes the only way to work off the adrenaline and frustration of a case was to move, to go out and be with people who were alive.
Like Martin, and they’d eventually started hanging out, and solid, steady Martin could laugh and smile, could wear normal clothes and live and make Danny think uncoworkerly thoughts about him – You're good-looking, you got a beautiful body, beautiful legs, beautiful face, all these guys in love with you. Only you got a look in your eye like you haven't been fucked in a year! That was Martin, lovely beautiful almost-fucked Martin)
He can’t trust himself now, with the voice – that sweet, blurry voice he’s lived with working on eight years now (eight –
EIGHT YEARS AND STILL COUNTING [months, days, hours – alcoholism keeps an atomic clock] oh my God still counting and pathetic, he can’t believe it)
– growing louder, pointing out all the bars, the liquor and convenience stores on every street (do you see? do you see that bodega right there?), how easy it would be to have
Just.
One.
Drink.
And he knows that if he goes out someone will offer to buy – they always offer, men and women – and he’ll take that person up on it. And maybe more, if he gets drunk enough, and that will be the end of everything.
No, he decides, not the end…
an epilogue, because there are times when he thinks everything ended six weeks ago.
Six weeks ago he might have hung out with Martin, gotten pizza delivered and gone over what they could have done to get Maura Holloway back alive. And Martin would have said
We didn’t have a chance, he would have said, her boyfriend realized too late that she hadn’t only left him, but everybody else, for good, and according to the M.E. she’d died about two hours after we got the case.
Martin wouldn’t have believed that, though, and Danny would have said
You can’t save them all, Martin, he would have said, and Martin wouldn’t have believed that, either.
Very carefully, Danny doesn’t plot out the way the rest of the night would have gone. How he would have liked it to go, anyway, if such a night had ever happened – wrapped up in Martin, the two of them on the couch, the floor, in his bed, anywhere so long as he could –
Martin would taste like Martin, like a day at the office and laughter, coffee and Danny’s come from when he’d sucked him off before. And his chest would be smooth and unblemished, no scars, no bandages, just miles of muscle and skin, sweat-covered, eloquent, and being inside Martin would be like going home –
Not home, because home was Hialeah and Hialeah sucked, and did he not just say he was not going there?
Not home, then, and not Heaven because Heaven doesn’t let gay people in according to Señor Paulo – What about homosexuality, Tony? You like men, huh?
And he is not thinking about this right now
He isn’t going out, and he isn’t going to spend the night obsessing about Martin. These two are absolutely certain. A little desperate now, he casts about his apartment for something to do.
Law texts stacked on his desk, highlighters and notes piled next to them, but he’d missed the bar exam.
(Again, though at least he hadn’t been drunk and in jail this time.
[He would like to note here, for the record, that this was how it all started – a missed exam – and now it was going to end with a missed exam, too. Maybe the universe was telling him he shouldn’t be a lawyer.]
He’d spent his bar exam avoiding Martin’s hospital room and his apartment, and hiding at his desk at work. So you see, the client has an alibi. He was at work.)
Movie. He’ll watch a movie. Something Pacino, because even in the worst days of his life, Al’s always been there for him. Danny has all the movies on DVD now, and he has them on tape too, which is maybe a bit obsessive but he figures Al deserves it.
(Serpico, Tony Montana, Don Corleone, Carlito, Shylock, they’re all there and speaking of which he’s thinking)
Scarface, maybe, the first one he ever saw.
(He, Gabriel, Eva, and Theo hunch in the back row so the usher – this evil old white bitch – can’t see them and this is the third time he’s seen it, third time he’s gotten past the usher, and some part of his dim twelve-year-old awareness loves Tony Montana – Cuban, broke, and good for pretty much nothing, but making it, despite all the people who try to fuck him over.
[And he’d had girls and money – hell, a lot of girls and a lot of money – and to a twelve-year-old, that was better than being king of the fucking world.]
Two hours in that theater and Evil Old White Bitch didn’t once see them.)
Now, legally permitted to watch Scarface without a parent or guardian, Danny starts the DVD and curls up on his couch, flips impatiently through the trailers and the startup menu.
Tony Montana comes to the US during the Cuban Boat Lift. (He remembers his mother talking about it –
we came over so you boys could have a good life [and even when he was eight he knew that his mother didn’t quite believe her own words] so you go to school and be good and learn English)
The first gunshot makes him tense, unpleasant rush of fear curling up from his stomach. He turns down the volume and tells himself it’s just a movie, just a movie, tries to console himself with his favorite scenes and Pacino’s acting.
He watches Tony go one-on-one with the chainsaw, and tells himself it’s just stage blood. Because it is, of course, and Pacino isn’t really going to die, because he went on to make more movies, didn’t he?
Say hello to my little friend!
He’s not fucking terrified now, no no he’s not freaking out because the guns are fake and the smoke is fake and look, they’re in broad daylight
it’s not night, not dark and the street isn’t wet, only it is and the smoke is real and the bullets in Martin’s body are real and Martin’s blood is real
No, he doesn’t remember, doesn’t want to – Dat's because ju gotcha head stuck in jo culo! says Tony – because this is his favorite movie he’s watching, and the flashbacks are fucking with it.
He knows how Tony ends, of course. Not prettily, because you live by the sword – or the Uzi, he supposes – and you die by the sword. There’s no need to actually keep watching this, replacing the actors’ faces with the memory of ThatNight, shivering, feeling the sweat trickle
down
his neck and annoy the skin along his spine. He doesn’t need to sit here rocking and begging Martin not to die and twisting his fingers together like a fucking crazy person, because he is not crazy.
One hand locks around the DVD controller and he punches the buttons randomly. Pause, play STOP fastforwardtonextscene(oh look, more blood) Power off.
Gunfire echoes around his apartment, too much sound for eight hundred square feet, too much sound for his head to hold, not enough space for it and him, and he has to get out.
Go out somewhere, anywhere, and he won’t get a drink, he promises himself. Not a single drink.
I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.
He’ll leave his ID at home, he tells himself as he gathers up keys and wallet. It’s still early enough to get into bars that don’t start carding until after eleven. Thanks to the government, most places card grandmothers these days, and if anyone offers to buy he’ll be virtuous and play hard-to-get, and order club soda with a twist of bitterness – he swears this on his soul as he heads out the door.
First step’s the hardest, they say at AA. Not this one.
-end-
Danny!
(Anonymous) 2005-10-17 05:49 am (UTC)(link)This is excruciatingly beautiful, like a pointed crystal shard, tipped in blood. This really hurts. Well done. Brava.
Re: Danny!
Where are the people who care about him?!?!?
They are recovering from open-heart surgery or being shot :/ *smites Jack and Sam for being obtuse and insensitive* And this was what killed me about the first two eps... that Danny has no one who seems to care about what he's going through. It's wrong. It's just wrong, it is.
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How close he is to fall off the edge. All he needs is a shoulder to cry on and nobody is offering him one. The only other person (Vivian) who gives a damn about him is also in the hospital.
This is so sad.
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I'd love to see that, too, but whether or not that will happen... *shrug* It seems like the writers are not so much with emotional continuity, unfortunately.
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That was beautiful and frighteningly what could be happening to Danny right now.
Why did Sam find it easy to put her arm around a complete stranger, who is a drug addict and a protstitute and offer her help, yet cannot even give one iota of comfort to her colleague she's worked with for years. Bad Sam and bad Jack for not being there for Danny.
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That's what I'm saying. I really wanted to kill Jack and Sam after the first ep, and then Jack especially after the second. Sam I've pretty much consigned to the deepest bowels of my private hell.
And if the writers don't pick up Danny's current state of mind... I won't be held responsible for what I do to them.
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That being said, what I did absorb was fantastic. Poor Danny, so alone and broken. I can see something like this happening, because eventually he's going to feel the fallout of the shooting, and it'll likely revolve around his alcoholism.
So yeah, much love, with the exception of the underlining, which freaked me right out.
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As awful as it is, I hope this does happen. not that the writers can grasp such simple concepts as 'continuity'
And re: the underlining... I wanted to find a way to differentiate the quotations from the rest of the text, so they stood out a little more. And I had thought about constructing a sort of mini-hypertext, with different fics or things you could link to, with other links contained in those (and so on) but that requires a level of organization beyond me at the moment.
But yeah. The hyperlink has ruined underlined text forever.
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Oh. Oh, this hurts. It hurts and it's so true to Danny's character, this is exactly how I see him and this is how it'll happen and that just makes me hurt for him so so much.
And that last line just kills me. *is ded*
*wails*
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It hurts and it's so true to Danny's character, this is exactly how I see him and this is how it'll happen and that just makes me hurt for him so so much.
I was rewatching "Safe" a few nights ago, and just... God. I wanted to cry. Poor Danny! Falling apart and Jack and Sam doing squat to help him.
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I suspect it might have been even better if I had actually seen Scarface, but it didn't take away from the story.
Great job!
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And, of course, thanks for reading!
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This was just ... excellent.
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And you could see Danny's mind jumping from place to place during the first two episodes--erratic, desperate, terrified--and being able to capture even a hundredth of what EM managed to convey in them... it was a challenge.
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I was completely blown away by this. I don't know what you were hoping to get with the format, but whatever it was, for me, worked, especially the down, down, down part. Probably because I needed to stop reading and actually breath, and the word reminded me the measured rhythm of a falling drop.
*is in love with this fic*
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Glad you liked it, though :)
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He does that, doesn't he? I'd never thought about it in those terms before, but you're right.
*pets Danny* poor boy.
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It's all EM's fault. Just watching his performance in those first two eps. and trying to transfer even a trace of that instability and desperation he brings to Danny, finding some way to convey it in words... Well, it was hard as hell. Inspirational, but hard as hell.