Ari (creature of dust, child of God) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wisdomeagle) wrote2005-08-22 07:39 pm
wisdomeagle) wrote2005-08-22 07:39 pm
Entry tags:
ficpost: "Library Science" Fred/Giles
Title: "Library Science"
Fandom: Buffy: the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series
Pairing: Fred/Giles
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers/Timeline: Goes AU with "Fredless" and set after "Tabula Rasa"
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon and Melville Dewey
Notes: My knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System is spotty; I used this as my resource. For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
noelia_g in the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
nevermet ficathon. She wanted Fred/Giles, London, rain, and a desk. Many thanks to karabair for the beta.
Summary: A relationship between two librarians that is 000: not otherwise classifiable.
Words: 2162
Library Science
900s: Geography
Where have we come from? How have we arrived here? Where do we go from here? How do you measure the distance between London and Texas, between Los Angeles and Sunnydale (a distance measured some nights in teardrops, in phone calls, in anxious, white-knuckle miles, gears grinding with the words I have some bad news)?
If Fred's boat doesn't capsize, if it steers true and fast, if the wind is with her, could she reach London before Giles, tossing against an uncomfortable airline headrest, dreaming of the ones he left behind? Or will Giles always arrive here first, in every permutation?
A more basic question: does Giles really exist here, unobserved, blending into dark bookshelves and dark books, leather embossed with silvery runes? Or does it take the arrival of a starving-skinny woman in clothes that hang wrong because they are not tattered, a woman who would look more natural with leaves and dirt ground into her hair, to observe Giles into existence?
These are the questions Fred ponders, Giles ponders, and they come to the library to ask them, because a library is a room full of answers, if you know how to search for them.
900s: History
Some precise facts: Winifred Burkle was born more than twenty-five and less than thirty years ago, to Patricia and Roger Burkle. She graduated salutatorian from West Calgary High, and magna cum laude from Rice. Her senior thesis was on molecular decomposition, and she got straight B's in all her non-science classes because she spent the lecture periods doodling and scrawling bits of stories about Fox Mulder and -- but she doesn't write any kind of fanfic anymore, especially not with self-inserts. She got much better quite quickly. Hell will cure most bad habits; that's kind of the point of hell.
Rupert Giles was born considerably longer ago than that, studied hard for more years than he'd like to remember, never married, never had any children, and unless you count a slightly more orderly library at the British Museum and a highly unusual Slayer in Sunnydale, produced nothing of value in his fifty (there; he's confessed it) years of existence.
800s: Literature
What are the great writings? Children's books and frivolity. Empty poems and Gothic romances. They enjoy picking apart the metaphors and deflating the hyperbole, experimenting with understatement of their own. "Not the best poet in history, is he?"
"I suppose there are worse misrepresentations of vampires -- somewhere."
The chronicler neglected fiction when compiling the great texts, so they are forced to make their own sense of their stories. Giles is convinced he's not a hero; when he tries to hold a sword, he can feel Ben's last shuddering breath against the palm of his hand. And Fred knows that Giles is, that no one can come out of Sunnydale unchanged. She's never met Buffy, but she knows what she does to people. In Fred's imagination, Buffy is a fierce and consuming warrior whose radiance burns everyone she touches. Buffy is the truest of true champions, the last of a race of heroes. Fred will not stop believing this even after she is permitted to read Giles's Watcher Diary -- the limitations of literature include its inability to change perception.
700s: Leisure
What do they do in their spare time? What spare time do they have, when there are worlds to be saved, worlds that would remain undiscovered if they didn't read them, know them, love them?
600s: Applied Science
Recipes fall into this category, so Giles's cooking is not leisure time but something more essential, and while he tries to find appropriate seasonings in the garden he's grown for them to share. On a rainy day when the inside of the flat feels too cave-like, Fred builds a chicken-wire fence around it to protect their hard-h herbs from the kind of people who pick plants from other people's gardens. Fred didn't want to have wanted to build it, since she's been homeless too, but she had to build it to have something to do while Giles cooked dinner, while he played his guitar (not leisure, but 200, religion), while he read. Fred can't sit still yet for long enough; she has a room of her own which she's written on, shamefully, after hours, covered with equations for things that will never be built, that couldn't be built in a gravity so heavy, in a world so round. The applications of Fred's theories are purely speculative, machines to be built on the edge of forever, cities that float on the air if only everyone breathes out hard enough, portals that will open and take you away from yourself.
500s: Pure Science
Giles likes books not because they're clean, but because they're not. He likes books the same way Fred loves beakers, and both are full of magic. You can't bottle book-magic in beakers any more than you can scan books into computers and have them still remain themselves, unchanged.
Books require paper to exist, pulpy and fragile. You should be able to tear books, and burn them, to enchant them, transform them. Book magic is the oldest magic but one, and that is the pure magic of science, of bubbling elements combining to create molecular magic.
But all this is theory.
If you stare into a particle accelerator long enough, your eyes will adjust to the smallness, and big things won't exist for you anymore. Everything will be details, everything tiny.
Fred is afraid they are going blind from their self-imposed blinders, that their astigmatism is getting worse and their eyesight deteriorating from lack of new things to look at. This is why she paces, why she draws, why she scrawls stories, algorithms, and equations on the wall of her room. New stimuli will keep them both from shutting down.
400s: Languages
There are evident and non-evident language barriers between them. Giles's accent is often more pronounced than even Wesley's was (is), and his mumbling slurs into incomprehensibility, mostly when he's talking about Sunnydale. But there are other barriers between them. Like this:
"How long are you planning to stay?"
"You want me to leave, don't you?"
"Of course not."
"I could be gone already, if you wanted."
"I don't."
"Are you sure?"
"Certain." Giles's voice can be angry without becoming loud.
Some barriers are natural; she is female, he male, she Texan, he English, she crazy, he sane. And some they erect themselves, the protective layers of his tweed suits and tweed habits, of the babble that bubbles around her without her meaning to let it out of her mouth, swelling larger and larger, polysyllabic words jetting from her mouth and almost drowning both of them in confusion. Giles wipes his glasses and she fears she's gotten some on him, that he is trying to wipe her away, keep the barrier of his glasses intact, protecting himself from seeing her, her from being seen.
She struggles to understand poor eyesight, which is something they share. If their unfiltered seeing is imperfect, then they will not see each other as they really are, but always already processed. In order to properly observe a bacterium, it must be killed, stained. Then it can be visually dissected and understood entirely, but to understand something dead revokes its right to be alive, to be free.
They have certain rights, established by the Magna Carta, though as a big-hearted Texan she sometimes misses home and the Amendments, a longing that can neither be properly expressed through keening nor reading nor lovemaking. And they have personal rights -- to have the upstairs toilet seat left down, to have the kitchen free of science projects when the time arrives for cooking dinner, to have time to be alone, to have time to be together. Fred's never lived with anyone except a stoner roommate her freshman year, but Giles has years upon years of experience in living together and apart, in having flatmates and lovers, in sharing space.
Fred, used to the confines of a cave that was all her own, ponders the logic of living together. Do they each have half the space they would if living apart? Are they pressed into rooms not big enough for them, or, contrariwise, are they, by virtue of squeezing tightly and moving carefully, living almost as fully as they would alone, darting around each other to find room to read or walk or draw or think in silence? They value silence almost as much as they value words, the endless, misleading words of the languages they speak.
300s: Social Science
Learning another person is a vast task, almost unspeakable in its breadth. It is not limited simply to customs and habits, which are difficult enough to perceive rightly, but encompasses the universes that are Giles, that are Fred.
Giles outlines his life in crusty, doughy words, speaking of duty and sacrifice. She learns of Jenny's death and Olivia's defection only through old diary entries; Giles lets her read the less personal diary he kept of Buffy's training, and she can read between the lines and learn his heart. He must have known she would, or else why share the books? Fred herself has no diary of Pylea, although now that it is later, she can write dispassionately about the demons, their customs and their way of life. She can even speak of cows without thinking of herself.
It is sensible for people of their social class and education to cohabit; they have no religion left over to them, no ethics that declares thou shalt not. All over England, men and women are bedding each other, in ways described by Masters and Johnson, Kinsey. People are only 63% of the time vanilla, and when Fred calculates their own percentage, she finds it considerably lower. But neither are they as alternative as they could be; they are slightly liberal but on the whole perfectly middle-of-the-road. There's the age gap, but their heterosexuality perhaps makes up for that. Statistics can't lie; statistics say she is, finally, normal.
200s: Religion
It isn't entirely true that they are religionless, though even their belief has been secularized by their years in libraries. It's not difficult to feel holy in a library your first time, where the books seem chained and ordered as if they had mystical properties (and some do, of course, as Fred now knows), but after re-shelving and repairing books for even half a year, you learn that books are not gods, but just as human as yourself, as fallible as Giles and as fragile as Fred.
They've both experienced disillusion before, however -- Fred was, an impossibly long time ago, a Baptist, and stood in almost sacrilegious awe of the baptismal font until, at age seven, she figured out how the water was pumped from the church's well to the sanctuary and felt for the first time the click of discovery that eroded the fascination she had once had with God.
For his part, Giles -- Rupert; now he is named Rupert (things change, names change, people aren't called what they once were) -- has always been a skeptic, and when he was seven, he was forced to reconsider even that most basic atheism, when he learned that gods were real and also dangerous, and that his sacred duty was to aid in their demise. It was, for a thickset and bespectacled young man, quite a disappointment, though Giles tells the story as a mere anecdote, a moment out of time when he was young and foolish.
Fred thinks perhaps Giles is a little jealous because she is still both.
100s: Philosophy
Knowing Rupert Giles becomes simple with time, like riding a bicycle, like doing trig. Understanding another person, Fred learns, has learned, is learning, is simply a matter of perspective. If you stand too far away, they are blurry with distance, and if you stand too close, you blend into your subject, become the same person. Relationships are levers, and love is the fulcrum. This is easy, now that she knows it.
Knowing herself is still the fundamental question. Who am I? She thought if she left California, she wouldn't have to learn the answer, that if she didn't confront her past, she would be selfless, a free-floating humanoid creature with no past and no destiny. But she has found a place in England, and having a place gives her a name. They've divided their personal library into two sections, his books lining the walls above his desk, her books filling three bookcases and then stacked knee-high on the office floor. She has accumulated possessions, and these give her an identity. She's shared her bed with someone, told him her secrets, and that is another fragment of selfhood.
Having a self is like a shell, a multi-colored sheen of sediment that's painted over her skin, giving her meaning, making her Fred. Like a book with a blurb on its back cover, Fred can now be classified, catalogued. She isn't crazy anymore.
Fandom: Buffy: the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series
Pairing: Fred/Giles
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers/Timeline: Goes AU with "Fredless" and set after "Tabula Rasa"
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon and Melville Dewey
Notes: My knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System is spotty; I used this as my resource. For
noelia_g in the nevermet ficathon. She wanted Fred/Giles, London, rain, and a desk. Many thanks to karabair for the beta.Summary: A relationship between two librarians that is 000: not otherwise classifiable.
Words: 2162
Library Science
900s: Geography
Where have we come from? How have we arrived here? Where do we go from here? How do you measure the distance between London and Texas, between Los Angeles and Sunnydale (a distance measured some nights in teardrops, in phone calls, in anxious, white-knuckle miles, gears grinding with the words I have some bad news)?
If Fred's boat doesn't capsize, if it steers true and fast, if the wind is with her, could she reach London before Giles, tossing against an uncomfortable airline headrest, dreaming of the ones he left behind? Or will Giles always arrive here first, in every permutation?
A more basic question: does Giles really exist here, unobserved, blending into dark bookshelves and dark books, leather embossed with silvery runes? Or does it take the arrival of a starving-skinny woman in clothes that hang wrong because they are not tattered, a woman who would look more natural with leaves and dirt ground into her hair, to observe Giles into existence?
These are the questions Fred ponders, Giles ponders, and they come to the library to ask them, because a library is a room full of answers, if you know how to search for them.
900s: History
Some precise facts: Winifred Burkle was born more than twenty-five and less than thirty years ago, to Patricia and Roger Burkle. She graduated salutatorian from West Calgary High, and magna cum laude from Rice. Her senior thesis was on molecular decomposition, and she got straight B's in all her non-science classes because she spent the lecture periods doodling and scrawling bits of stories about Fox Mulder and -- but she doesn't write any kind of fanfic anymore, especially not with self-inserts. She got much better quite quickly. Hell will cure most bad habits; that's kind of the point of hell.
Rupert Giles was born considerably longer ago than that, studied hard for more years than he'd like to remember, never married, never had any children, and unless you count a slightly more orderly library at the British Museum and a highly unusual Slayer in Sunnydale, produced nothing of value in his fifty (there; he's confessed it) years of existence.
800s: Literature
What are the great writings? Children's books and frivolity. Empty poems and Gothic romances. They enjoy picking apart the metaphors and deflating the hyperbole, experimenting with understatement of their own. "Not the best poet in history, is he?"
"I suppose there are worse misrepresentations of vampires -- somewhere."
The chronicler neglected fiction when compiling the great texts, so they are forced to make their own sense of their stories. Giles is convinced he's not a hero; when he tries to hold a sword, he can feel Ben's last shuddering breath against the palm of his hand. And Fred knows that Giles is, that no one can come out of Sunnydale unchanged. She's never met Buffy, but she knows what she does to people. In Fred's imagination, Buffy is a fierce and consuming warrior whose radiance burns everyone she touches. Buffy is the truest of true champions, the last of a race of heroes. Fred will not stop believing this even after she is permitted to read Giles's Watcher Diary -- the limitations of literature include its inability to change perception.
700s: Leisure
What do they do in their spare time? What spare time do they have, when there are worlds to be saved, worlds that would remain undiscovered if they didn't read them, know them, love them?
600s: Applied Science
Recipes fall into this category, so Giles's cooking is not leisure time but something more essential, and while he tries to find appropriate seasonings in the garden he's grown for them to share. On a rainy day when the inside of the flat feels too cave-like, Fred builds a chicken-wire fence around it to protect their hard-h herbs from the kind of people who pick plants from other people's gardens. Fred didn't want to have wanted to build it, since she's been homeless too, but she had to build it to have something to do while Giles cooked dinner, while he played his guitar (not leisure, but 200, religion), while he read. Fred can't sit still yet for long enough; she has a room of her own which she's written on, shamefully, after hours, covered with equations for things that will never be built, that couldn't be built in a gravity so heavy, in a world so round. The applications of Fred's theories are purely speculative, machines to be built on the edge of forever, cities that float on the air if only everyone breathes out hard enough, portals that will open and take you away from yourself.
500s: Pure Science
Giles likes books not because they're clean, but because they're not. He likes books the same way Fred loves beakers, and both are full of magic. You can't bottle book-magic in beakers any more than you can scan books into computers and have them still remain themselves, unchanged.
Books require paper to exist, pulpy and fragile. You should be able to tear books, and burn them, to enchant them, transform them. Book magic is the oldest magic but one, and that is the pure magic of science, of bubbling elements combining to create molecular magic.
But all this is theory.
If you stare into a particle accelerator long enough, your eyes will adjust to the smallness, and big things won't exist for you anymore. Everything will be details, everything tiny.
Fred is afraid they are going blind from their self-imposed blinders, that their astigmatism is getting worse and their eyesight deteriorating from lack of new things to look at. This is why she paces, why she draws, why she scrawls stories, algorithms, and equations on the wall of her room. New stimuli will keep them both from shutting down.
400s: Languages
There are evident and non-evident language barriers between them. Giles's accent is often more pronounced than even Wesley's was (is), and his mumbling slurs into incomprehensibility, mostly when he's talking about Sunnydale. But there are other barriers between them. Like this:
"How long are you planning to stay?"
"You want me to leave, don't you?"
"Of course not."
"I could be gone already, if you wanted."
"I don't."
"Are you sure?"
"Certain." Giles's voice can be angry without becoming loud.
Some barriers are natural; she is female, he male, she Texan, he English, she crazy, he sane. And some they erect themselves, the protective layers of his tweed suits and tweed habits, of the babble that bubbles around her without her meaning to let it out of her mouth, swelling larger and larger, polysyllabic words jetting from her mouth and almost drowning both of them in confusion. Giles wipes his glasses and she fears she's gotten some on him, that he is trying to wipe her away, keep the barrier of his glasses intact, protecting himself from seeing her, her from being seen.
She struggles to understand poor eyesight, which is something they share. If their unfiltered seeing is imperfect, then they will not see each other as they really are, but always already processed. In order to properly observe a bacterium, it must be killed, stained. Then it can be visually dissected and understood entirely, but to understand something dead revokes its right to be alive, to be free.
They have certain rights, established by the Magna Carta, though as a big-hearted Texan she sometimes misses home and the Amendments, a longing that can neither be properly expressed through keening nor reading nor lovemaking. And they have personal rights -- to have the upstairs toilet seat left down, to have the kitchen free of science projects when the time arrives for cooking dinner, to have time to be alone, to have time to be together. Fred's never lived with anyone except a stoner roommate her freshman year, but Giles has years upon years of experience in living together and apart, in having flatmates and lovers, in sharing space.
Fred, used to the confines of a cave that was all her own, ponders the logic of living together. Do they each have half the space they would if living apart? Are they pressed into rooms not big enough for them, or, contrariwise, are they, by virtue of squeezing tightly and moving carefully, living almost as fully as they would alone, darting around each other to find room to read or walk or draw or think in silence? They value silence almost as much as they value words, the endless, misleading words of the languages they speak.
300s: Social Science
Learning another person is a vast task, almost unspeakable in its breadth. It is not limited simply to customs and habits, which are difficult enough to perceive rightly, but encompasses the universes that are Giles, that are Fred.
Giles outlines his life in crusty, doughy words, speaking of duty and sacrifice. She learns of Jenny's death and Olivia's defection only through old diary entries; Giles lets her read the less personal diary he kept of Buffy's training, and she can read between the lines and learn his heart. He must have known she would, or else why share the books? Fred herself has no diary of Pylea, although now that it is later, she can write dispassionately about the demons, their customs and their way of life. She can even speak of cows without thinking of herself.
It is sensible for people of their social class and education to cohabit; they have no religion left over to them, no ethics that declares thou shalt not. All over England, men and women are bedding each other, in ways described by Masters and Johnson, Kinsey. People are only 63% of the time vanilla, and when Fred calculates their own percentage, she finds it considerably lower. But neither are they as alternative as they could be; they are slightly liberal but on the whole perfectly middle-of-the-road. There's the age gap, but their heterosexuality perhaps makes up for that. Statistics can't lie; statistics say she is, finally, normal.
200s: Religion
It isn't entirely true that they are religionless, though even their belief has been secularized by their years in libraries. It's not difficult to feel holy in a library your first time, where the books seem chained and ordered as if they had mystical properties (and some do, of course, as Fred now knows), but after re-shelving and repairing books for even half a year, you learn that books are not gods, but just as human as yourself, as fallible as Giles and as fragile as Fred.
They've both experienced disillusion before, however -- Fred was, an impossibly long time ago, a Baptist, and stood in almost sacrilegious awe of the baptismal font until, at age seven, she figured out how the water was pumped from the church's well to the sanctuary and felt for the first time the click of discovery that eroded the fascination she had once had with God.
For his part, Giles -- Rupert; now he is named Rupert (things change, names change, people aren't called what they once were) -- has always been a skeptic, and when he was seven, he was forced to reconsider even that most basic atheism, when he learned that gods were real and also dangerous, and that his sacred duty was to aid in their demise. It was, for a thickset and bespectacled young man, quite a disappointment, though Giles tells the story as a mere anecdote, a moment out of time when he was young and foolish.
Fred thinks perhaps Giles is a little jealous because she is still both.
100s: Philosophy
Knowing Rupert Giles becomes simple with time, like riding a bicycle, like doing trig. Understanding another person, Fred learns, has learned, is learning, is simply a matter of perspective. If you stand too far away, they are blurry with distance, and if you stand too close, you blend into your subject, become the same person. Relationships are levers, and love is the fulcrum. This is easy, now that she knows it.
Knowing herself is still the fundamental question. Who am I? She thought if she left California, she wouldn't have to learn the answer, that if she didn't confront her past, she would be selfless, a free-floating humanoid creature with no past and no destiny. But she has found a place in England, and having a place gives her a name. They've divided their personal library into two sections, his books lining the walls above his desk, her books filling three bookcases and then stacked knee-high on the office floor. She has accumulated possessions, and these give her an identity. She's shared her bed with someone, told him her secrets, and that is another fragment of selfhood.
Having a self is like a shell, a multi-colored sheen of sediment that's painted over her skin, giving her meaning, making her Fred. Like a book with a blurb on its back cover, Fred can now be classified, catalogued. She isn't crazy anymore.
no subject
Wow. Would that the two of them had met.
no subject
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
no subject
Giles and Fred do work well together, don't they?
no subject
Yes, yes they do. You've uncovered my secret het!crossover!OTP. (Well, one of them.) :p
(no subject)
(no subject)
no subject
I must confess to not really being an Angel fan; I would be, but I haven't seen most of the episodes since Richmond hasn't gotten the WB since I went off to college and all the episodes on TNT are at times when I either can't see them or they conflict with a particularly good Buffy episode. But I must watch it on DVD now (with
no subject
But WOW, what lovely feedback! Thank you so much!
You, like, have a knowledge of everything it seems
The trick, of course, is that I'm good at faking it. :)
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
I'm such a sucker for this kind of structure, and you use it so well. The other commenters are quite right: it's utterly Fred to use categories to define and shape, and the DD system is a great category-system to use because it's shaping and fluid at once, and the more you poke about in it, the more it reveals - like this story. :)
Giles and Fred work *beautifully* together, and you should write this pairing *all* the time OMG! ;)
Having a self is like a shell, a multi-colored sheen of sediment that's painted over her skin, giving her meaning, making her Fred. Like a book with a blurb on its back cover, Fred can now be classified, catalogued. She isn't crazy anymore.
See, now I'm all teared-up. The shinyness of taking the awfulness of Fred Burkle-as-just-a-shell as well as cave!Fred and flipping them backwards into redefinition and selfhood is just beyond words.
*sniff*
*shuts up now*
no subject
it's utterly Fred to use categories to define and shape, and the DD system is a great category-system to use because it's shaping and fluid at once, and the more you poke about in it, the more it reveals - like this story.
*happy* See, I totally saw all that in my head, and was hoping that it would actually come out in the story, and I'm like, yay, the structure worked, it worked! And yeah, the DD system is the only one I'm at all familiar with in any depth, and I enjoyed a lot structuring their story/Fred's journey with it. Oh yes.
The shinyness of taking the awfulness of Fred Burkle-as-just-a-shell as well as cave!Fred and flipping them backwards into redefinition and selfhood is just beyond words.
Yes. Another connection I was hoping would come across.
*squee* Thanks so much for such thoughtful feedback. :)
Giles and Fred work *beautifully* together, and you should write this pairing *all* the time OMG! ;)
*grin* But then I wouldn't be able to write, like, Willow/Giles and Sam/Hammond.
no subject
what a creative way to organize it. would squee more but I'm on the run.
no subject
no subject
And the writing is equally brilliant: Relationships are levers, and love is the fulcrum. Damn, you have no idea how much I wish I had written that line.
no subject
Ari
no subject
no subject
(no subject)
(no subject)
no subject
no subject
And by the way, am flattered that you friended me -- which because I am le spaz, I noticed when I was scrolling through your recent entries page and saw the little lock symbol and wondered why I was suddenly able to see your locked posts.
*friends back*
(no subject)
no subject
I wanted to quote what I liked most, wanted to say what I loved best, but I can't because it was the whole fic. Every word there is perfect and amazing and... yeah, I'm running out of words myself.
Just - thank you! I'm going to come back to read this over and over again...
no subject
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
no subject
in any case, my sister's a librarian and my husband's a physicist, so I was favorably inclined toward this story--and amply rewarded. The use of the Dewey Decimal system for structure; the small contradictions and conflicts and correspondences between the two, which makes their relationship utterly natural; Fred's love of order-chaos-knowledge.
Particularly poignant lines (among many)
- she got straight B's in all her non-science classes because she spent the lecture periods doodling and scrawling bits of stories about Fox Mulder and -- but she doesn't write any kind of fanfic anymore, especially not with self-inserts. She got much better quite quickly. Hell will cure most bad habits; that's kind of the point of hell.
- In Fred's imagination, Buffy is a fierce and consuming warrior whose radiance burns everyone she touches. Buffy is the truest of true champions, the last of a race of heroes. Fred will not stop believing this even after she is permitted to read Giles's Watcher Diary -- the limitations of literature include its inability to change perception.
- Fred can't sit still yet for long enough; she has a room of her own which she's written on, shamefully, after hours, covered with equations for things that will never be built, that couldn't be built in a gravity so heavy, in a world so round. The applications of Fred's theories are purely speculative, machines to be built on the edge of forever, cities that float on the air if only everyone breathes out hard enough, portals that will open and take you away from yourself. (All right, so I majored in math, and oh, the beauty f her perceptions.)
- If you stare into a particle accelerator long enough, your eyes will adjust to the smallness, and big things won't exist for you anymore. Everything will be details, everything tiny.
- If their unfiltered seeing is imperfect, then they will not see each other as they really are, but always already processed. In order to properly observe a bacterium, it must be killed, stained. Then it can be visually dissected and understood entirely, but to understand something dead revokes its right to be alive, to be free.
I have no idea whether it's canon that Fred went to Rice, but it makes my Houstonian heart proud.
Also, if you ever go into writing popular math/science, please drop me a line.
no subject
I am really delighted that you liked the fic and gave such detailed feedback. :)
As far as I recall, there's no canon on where Fred went to college; I picked Rice because a friend of mine from college transferred there to be closer to home.
And, um, wow! I've never considered writing popular science -- I was a philosophy major and actually took as few science classes as I could -- but it's really sweet of you to mention.
in any case, my sister's a librarian and my husband's a physicist
My girlfriend is a physics major (which is probably one of the many reasons I heart Fred so much). :)
no subject
And you've got a bunch of great lines/ideas:
- he was forced to reconsider even that most basic atheism, when he learned that gods were real and also dangerous, and that his sacred duty was to aid in their demise.
- Fred thinks perhaps Giles is a little jealous because she is still both [young and foolish].
- If you stand too far away, they are blurry with distance, and if you stand too close, you blend into your subject, become the same person. Relationships are levers, and love is the fulcrum.
- a multi-colored sheen of sediment that's painted over her skin
Illyria!!! (only not, of course)
no subject
And yeah. On some list of things to remember about Fred I read somewhere, someone assumed she was raised Baptist, and I am naturally nuts about the idea of former!Baptist!Fred, so yeah. :)
Am glad you liked! :)
(no subject)
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
And wow.
And dead from...everything.
*rereads*
no subject
no subject
no subject
(no subject)
no subject
I like, especially, that you inverted the order Dewey Decimal System, moving in instead of out, the world getting closer and closer rather than more and more expansive.
Suddenly I wish Fred and Giles had shared even a moment of screen time.
no subject
I so love them both and would have happily watched a show devoted entirely to the two of them. *g*
no subject
If you stare into a particle accelerator long enough, your eyes will adjust to the smallness, and big things won't exist for you anymore. Everything will be details, everything tiny.
So often, the idea and phrasing in your writing left me with that breathless attention only superb writing brings about.
The applications of Fred's theories are purely speculative, machines to be built on the edge of forever, cities that float on the air if only everyone breathes out hard enough.
Cities that float on air if everyone breathes out hard enough. Wow.
So--umm--I'd like to friend you. I'm just amazed at the breadth of your fandoms. I'm stuck in the Buffy/Angelverse with one attempt at a Spike/Mal/Firefly crossover. The ship was interested but didn't actually get physically involved with the other two except in a supportive sense. But I certainly want to explore your stories more.
no subject
Feel free to friend me! I bounce among my various fandoms freely and live for crossover crack. *g*
no subject
no subject
here via headrush100's recc
Remember reading other fics of yours in the past and being mightily impressed, as I was this time.
So eloquent. SO perceptive. SO...right!
Your turn of phrase and the depth of your understanding at times gives me goosebumps.
Now making a note to invest time in finding and reading more of your work.
no subject
Absolutely gorgeous! I wish I could say more, but I'm still just overwhelmed by this piece!
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject