10 Works by putanauhere
Listing Works
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He’s a vet, Buck would bet his last dollar. The combat boots tucked inconspicuously under the jeans are one thing, but it’s the faded green jacket that says it all - Diaz barely visible where it’s stamped over his chest, the way his shoulders sit tense and set back underneath it. Buck looks more military than Diaz does - he’s still keeping it high and tight, clean shaven, his arms are starting to finally fill in after all that PT. Diaz, by contrast, has a few days’ growth on him at least, dark shadows scrubbing across his cheeks, darker over his lips even, and a few long tendrils of wet hair still plastered to his forehead.
“Hey,” Buck says, “what can I do you for?”
“I need a room,” Diaz answers. “Can you do day to day?”
Buck looks outside at the long line of absolutely goddamn nothing and no one for miles, except Mr. Han in the Spade Suite, which he wouldn’t even be sure about himself if it weren’t for his towel hanging on the door knob every other morning at 10 am like clockwork. “Yeah, man, I think I can swing that.”
[Or Buck has a dead end job at a highway motel and a mysterious stranger arrives at night.]
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Whitaker has never called out sick for any job he’s had. Not even at six years old with chicken pox, crying as he fed the chickens and Noah folded himself over the fence to tell him that he might as well try the feed too while he was at it since he was turning into a chicken himself. Not even his newspaper route at thirteen when the only things that held the jagged flesh of his thigh together were paper towels and an ace bandage. And none of the days leading into a full moon night where he feels like his skin is stretched too tight over his bones and any wrong move could split him apart at his seams and birth a monster onto the scuffed white floor of the ED.
Sometimes hearing everything means you hear nothing at all. Between the beeping and whirring and murmuring and shouting and rolling and squeaking and slamming, Whitaker could have thought once an emergency department might be hell on earth. But all that noise around him means he can’t hear any of the noise within him, and that is in itself a blessing.
[Or Whitaker's first full moon at the Pitt.]
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He’s in the kitchen with the wives, though even the wives were there too, and the 118 are crowded together, stuffed onto a couch that doesn’t fit four, closer than they’ve ever been in more ways than anyone will be able to name.
Not for the first time in his life, Eddie stands on the outside looking in. He can’t have this again, this family that he fell into - it’s a flash in the pan, lightning in a bottle. His new crew waits for him back in El Paso, a new collection of strangers he can't let himself get close to.
Buck looks up and around, catching Eddie’s eyes when he finds where Eddie has gone. He moves his arm to the back of the couch, fingers reaching out in what looks like an invitation. Eddie stands in the kitchen and begs himself - take it, take it, take it.
[Or coming together and coming apart in the days surrounding Bobby's funeral.]
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“Did you hear about the wolf attack on the full moon two years ago? That hiker found with his arm ripped to pieces,” Chimney says, an obvious ploy to cheer Buck up. It says a lot about Buck or a lot about Chimney that violent tragedy is meant to cheer Buck up. “Has anybody checked that guy to make sure he doesn’t go awoooo during his special time of the month?”
Eddie can already tell it’s not going to work, so he reaches across the gap between their seats to clasp a hand to Buck’s shoulder, his thumb close but not quite touching the vulnerable skin of his neck. If he presses hard enough, he can almost make himself feel the phantom ropes of raised skin from when Buck was left with a jagged lightning scar across his shoulder, matching yet way cooler than Eddie’s sad excuse for bullet dug and fang mauled shoulder scars. It has the desired effect, and he relaxes under the weight of Eddie’s hand.
“There are no wolves in Southern California,” Buck states, another bit of trivia. He just doesn’t know it’s a lie.
[Or Eddie has enough on his plate this summer – a newly empty nest, a terrible new captain, and a new mustache – without adding a new werewolf to the mix.]
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Mike doesn’t answer his phone in the two calls Richie shoots his way before he gets to the Beef. Richie parks in Mike’s favorite parking spot, because fuck him, and storms his way into the office in the back. It’s just as they left it last night, a couple of bottles of Miller Lites each still on the desk, cigarette butts stubbed out in each of the bottle caps, at least three mountains of paperwork, the Mother Mary, and a desk calendar still sitting on April. Richie pulls open the top right drawer and doesn’t find the bottle of pills Mike keeps stashed in there. The only thing on his desk Richie doesn’t remember seeing when he finally stumbled out to his car last night, leaving Mike to finish locking up, is a can of tomatoes.
[Or Richie Jerimovich's Day Off.]
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It’s 1962, which has never been a real year to him, just a number you’d see written down on paper, history long since tucked away in a book, and while he realistically knows everything that happened before he was alive to take notice is actually still real and not some fever dream the world’s population has agreed to play along with, it still doesn’t feel real. Maybe it’s not.
Luther tries to remember quickly what day of the week it is - it’s not Thursday, which is the day he reserves for sheer existential dread, the kind of deep seated fear that has him thinking he died when the Moon struck Earth and he’s now stuck in some kind of purgatory or some kind of hell. On Thursdays, he thinks this place was designed to torture him and it just isn’t working because he’s built up a hell of an immunity, 30-plus years at the hands of his father’s daily doses, as well as several of his own.
It’s Friday. Luther picks at the bread stuck in his teeth with the toothpick that speared his sandwich, and thinks to himself, TGIF.
[Or Luther becomes Jack Ruby’s Number One.]
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a portrait of the artist as a con man by putanauhere
Fandoms: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (2019)
11 Jun 2020
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“And how did you come across a particularly sloppy Renoir reproduction?” Theo can’t help but ask as Boris gestures at the bartender for another two shots and smirks when Theo says reproduction. Even if Boris struck Theo as the art type, a fake Renoir is not the sphere of work that Theo could imagine Boris’ collection to be.
Boris ticks a thumbnail against the side of his glass pensively. “Friend of friend gave it to me. A gift of sorts. One of my associates suggested I get it looked at by professional.”
“And you found me,” Theo finishes for him.
Boris holds his hands out, palms up, and replies, “Small world, no?”
[Or art restoration expert Theo Decker finds himself slowly pulled into the high risk/high reward world of art forgery at the hands of his old classmate, Boris Pavlikovsky.]
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sunlight sunlight sunlight by putanauhere
Fandoms: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (2019)
27 Oct 2019
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Stood on the sand-dusted pavement, Boris had popped open an umbrella and said, “I don’t like the sun,” but it wasn’t then.
It was in the car, driving through Hell’s Kitchen - Theo had laughed and said, “I’m a ‘vampire’ too,” his fingers crooking quotes around the word in the air.
“What is this?” Boris had laughed back, mimicking the gesture over and over until everything he said over the next twenty minutes had read like sarcasm, like a figure of speech.
It was in the hall outside the ballroom, Boris standing in front of an ornate mirror he wasn’t reflected in, and at the time Theo’s mind had worked too fast around the details of getting his painting back to think much of it, other than a passing thought that it couldn’t have been a mirror then, but rather an empty frame to enclose around Boris until he became a painting himself.
[Or Theo loses his life in Amsterdam, so Boris gives him another.]
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He’s not spent six years hanging his whole hat on sailing halfway to Dunkirk, he’s not plagued by the sound of Spitfires in his dreams. He thinks he’s rather moved on from all of it, as much as he can, and the guilt that hits him, when it hits him, is momentary, fleeting. There and gone like those moments when you’re alone, in the dark, and it occurs to you afresh that one day you’re not going to wake up, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
Usually he can bottle it up, store it away inside him somewhere it won’t come rolling back out if he can help it. He can’t today, only half his mind on Aristotle.
The other half of his mind thinks the boy’s eyes were green.
[Or they learn when survival just isn't enough.]
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Steve watches him at a vendor. He picks up a plum with his left hand and gives it a light squeeze. The hand is gloved, hiding the metal away under something that looks smooth and black. Steve can’t tell if Bucky’s got senses in the fingers that fire and tell him it’s a good plum.
Steve has only ever seen the arm cause immeasurable damage, probably caused more than its fair share of nightmares for those who’ve seen it. He knows Bucky is right handed, but Bucky goes through the stall’s fruit with only his left hand, like he’s making a point. Steve watches closely until he gets it.
Bucky is practicing being gentle. He smiles at the vendor, an older lady who smiles back at him with some level of familiarity. He looks. Innocuous.
[Or Steve goes looking for his best friend in Bucharest, he's just not sure if he's found him.]