Danse Macabre Snark, ch 14

[yaoihuntresse.livejournal.com]

Thankfully, today's chapter is pretty short, but still damn whiny.

14
SAMUEL SMILED AT Jean-Claude, and it was like a lot about Samuel, a very human smile. I realized that he, like Auggie, could be more "normal" than most vamps I'd ever seen. Was it a vamp trick like Auggie's had been? Maybe. Was it any of my business to mess with it, and reveal his secret? Nope. No more grand revelations tonight, not that were my fault anyway. I wasn't messing with anyone or anything tonight if I could help it. My goal was simply to get through the rest of this interview without anything bad happening. Why was I so worried?

Because this chapter is going to be full of so much whining that you'll want to scream, "shut-up" at the screen.

I'd sat back down beside Jean-Claude, but Richard hadn't. Richard was still standing, arms folded, shoulders rounded as if with pain. I knew the look on his face, it was the look that usu- ally meant we were going to have a really bad fight. I didn't want to fight tonight, not with anyone, but especially not with Richard.
Jean-Claude touched my hand. It made me jump, and turn startled to him. "What is wrong, ma petite?"

Anita: Richard is displaying independent thought.

I gave him a look, and rolled my eyes back to our other third. "Ah," he said.
I gripped Jean-Claude's hand tight, and tried to head this fight off. "Richard?" I made his name a question.
He turned those smoldering brown eyes to me. "What?" That one word was so angry that even he flinched. "I'm sorry, what is it, Anita?"
"You don't have to pick a fight with me to leave." There, that was as hon-est and as calm as I couldmake it.
He frowned at me. "What does that mean?"
"It means that ever since we started talking to Samuel about his sons and their problem, your tension level has done nothing but rise."
"And if we were talking about me having sex with three new women, two of them seventeen years old, wouldn't you be angry?"
I thought about it, then nodded. "Yes."
"Then don't expect me to be happy about it."
"What am I supposed to do, Richard, apologize? I wouldn't even be sure what I was apologizing about. Anyway, I've told you that my answer was no on the seventeen-year-old."
"I think, Jean-Claude, Sampson and I will leave you all for the night." Samuel stood. "You seem to have much to discuss."

That is the smartest thing anyone in this story has done.

Sampson stood alongside his fadier. He was about two inches taller dian Samuel, as if he'd gained height from his motJier's genetics. I wondered what else he might have gained. I really didn't know much about mermaids, or sirens. I probably needed to remedy that before I got too up close and per-sonal with any of them.
"Not yet, my friend, please," Jean-Claude said. He looked at Richard, giv-ing a peaceful face to die unhappy one. "We need some riddles answered be-fore we dare take ma petite among our brethren tomorrow night."

Such as what has two legs and a giant crotch of doom?

Samuel nodded, and sat back down. "You're wondering, if you take her among nearly a dozen Masters of the City, whether the night will be even more interesting than this one."
Jean-Claude nodded. "Exactement."
"Are these questions that only a vampire can answer?" Sampson asked.
"It is from a master like your father that I need advice," Jean-Claude said.
"Then, I could go back to the hotel and check on Mother and die twins."
"I think they have enough watchdogs, Sampson," his father said.
Sampson gave his father a look like he was trying to say something with his eyes, and his father wasn't getting it.
"You're leaving because you think it will make me less upset," Richard said.
Sampson looked at him, with that open, honest face, and nodded.
"That's ..." Richard's face struggled with his emotions, because a friendly gesture, honesdy given, always touched him. "That's really ... good of you."
"You obviously don't like sharing Anita, and now here I am asking you to share her again. We need her to help us.

By having her explode and take everyone in this story with her.

I don't want to lose my modier and one, or both, of my little brothers." Sampson shook his head, eyes staring off into space, but not seeing anything in this room. The look in his eyes was haunted as if he, like his father, had given up on avoiding the tragedy. As if he'd been picturing it all in his head for months, trying to make peace with it, and failing.
He looked up at Richard. "I won't give up this chance to save my family, but I am sorry that it's causing you pain." He came out into the middle of the room, facing Richard. "If my going will make you feel better, I can do that."
Richard hung his head, his newly long hair hiding most of his face. When he raised it again he looked like a man coming out of deep water, shaking his hair back from his face.
"Insult to injury, damn it."
"Did I say something wrong?" Sampson asked.
"No, nothing wrong," Richard said. He sighed, and his arms started to unfold, stiffly, as if it hurt him to let go of the anger. "No, I just didn't want to like you."
Sampson looked puzzled. "I don't understand."
"If I can hate you, I can get angry, and storm out. If you'd acted like some kind of lustful asshole, I could have just gone. Wrapped my injured right-eousness around me, and gotten the hell out of here."

Or you could've said that you needed to take a whiz or get something to eat.

I stood up and faced him; Jean-Claude kept my hand lightly in his. "I've already told you, Richard," I said, "you don't have to pick a fight to leave."
"Yes," he said, "I do. Because I know that I cripple us as a power by sim-ply not being here when you need me. If I'd been here, Auggie wouldn't have rolled you.

Or you'd just stand there like all the other idiots did.

I have no one but myself to blame that you and Jean-Claude fucked Auggie." His voice held the edge of warmth, and the first bite of his powerflickered through the room.
I took a few steps, leaving Jean-Claude's hand behind. "Why are you re-sponsible for everything?" I asked. "I deal with more undead than you do; I should have been able to protect myself. And maybe I should have seen it coming, but I'm not beating myself up about it. It happened, and now we deal with it."
"Is it really that easy for you, Anita? It happened, now we deal with it, we move on?"

They could always put Auggie on a nice little nursing home and pray for the best.

I thought about it, then nodded. "Yes, it is, because it has to be. My life wouldn't work if I wallowed in every disaster, every moral quandary. I can't afford the luxury of self-doubt, not to that degree."
"Luxury," Richard said. "This isn't luxury, Anita, it's morality. It's your conscience. That's not a luxury item, that's what separates us from the animals."
Here we go again, I thought. Out loud I said, "I have a conscience, Richard, and my own set of morals.

*busts up laughing*

Do I ever worry that I'm a bad guy? Yeah, some-times I do. Do I wonder if I've traded away pieces of my soul, just to survive?
Yeah." I shrugged. "It's the price of doing business in the real world, Richard."
"This isn't the real world, Anita. This isn't the normal workaday world."
"No, but it's our world." I was facing him now, almost close enough to touch. He was controlling himself, because his power was only a warm pres-sure in the air.
He waved his hands around the room. "This is not where I want to be, Anita. I don't want to live where my choices are sharing you with other men, or having people die. I don't want those choices."

Come on Richard, you're only four more whining fits away from competing with a month's worth of Funky Winkerbean strips. Meet that quota, boy.

I sighed, and let him see that I was tired, and sad, and sorry. "There was a time when I would have agreed with you, but I like parts of my life a lot, Richard. I hate the ardeur, but

Don't really try to control it.

I don't hate everything it's brought into my life. I'd have liked to try that whole picket-fence thing, but I think even with-out the ardeur and the vampire marks, that it wouldn't have been my gig."
"I think it would have been," he said.
"Richard, I don't think you see me. I don't think you see who I am."

A special, darkity-dark snowflake.

"How can you say that to me? If I don't shield I share your dreams, and your nightmares."
"But you're still trying to shove me in a box that I don't think fit me even when we met. Just like you're trying to shove yourself into a box that doesn't fit you, either."
He was shaking his head. "That's not true. That's not true."
"Which part?" I asked.

Absolutely nothing at all.

"I think we could have made it, our version of the white picket fence, without him," and he pointed at Jean-Claude. Jean-Claude was giving his most peaceful, empty face, as if he were afraid to do or say anything.
"Don't try to blame all our problems on Jean-Claude."
"Why not, it's true. If he had left us alone, not marked us."
"You'd be dead," I said.

Which given all this crap, would've been a blessing in disguise.

He frowned at me. "What?"
"Without the extra power of the marks with Jean-Claude you'd never have had the power to kill Marcus and keep the pack."
"That's not true."
I just stared at him. "Yeah, Richard, I was there, it is true. You'd be dead, and I'd still be living alone sleeping with my stuffed toys and guns. You'd be dead and I'd be dead inside, dying of loneliness, not just because you would be gone, but because my life was empty before.

Phooey on friends.

I was like a Jot of people who do police work. I was my job. I had nothing else. My life was full of death, and horror, and trying to stay ahead of the next horror. But I was losing the battle, Richard, losing myself, long before Jean-Claude marked me."
"I asked you to give up the police work. I told you it was eating you up."
I shook my head. "You're not listening to me, Richard, or you're not hear-ing me."
"Maybe I don't want to hear you. Or maybe I'm right, and you're not listening."
We stood barely two feet apart, but it might as well have been a thousand miles. Some distances are made out of things bigger and harder to travel across than mere miles. We stood and stared at each other across a chasm of misunderstanding, and pain, and love. I tried one last time. "Say you're right. Say if Jean-Claude had left us alone you could have your perfect picture. I still wouldn't have given up the police work."
"You just said, it was destroying you."
I nodded. "Just because something's hard doesn't mean you give up on it."

Anita has some good points, but since I can't stand either of them, I have a problem cheering them on.

Somehow I thought I was talking about more than just police work.
"You said I was right."
"I said, say you're right. Let's just pretend that without Jean-Claude here, we would have found a way. But we are bound to him, Richard. We are a tri-umvirate of power. What we would change if life weretotally different doesn't really matter."
"How can you say that?"
"What matters, Richard, is that we deal with the reality of our now, this minute. There are things we can't undo, and we all have to work together to make the best of what's true in our lives."
His face was cold with his anger.

Right now I'm picturing Jean-Claude sitting back with a score card as he watches them argue.

I hated his face like this, because it was both frightening and more beautiful, as if the anger cleaned away something that distracted the eye from realizing just how amazingly handsome he was. "And what is true in our lives?" His power began to flow through the room, hot water, hotter than you'd want in the bath. The guards around the room shifted uneasily.
"I am Jean-Claude's human servant. You are his animal to call. We are a triumvirate of power. We can't change that. Jean-Claude and I both carry the ardeur. We both need to feed the hunger, and that's not going to change."
"I thought you were hoping to be able to feed from a distance at the clubs, the way Jean-Claude did under Nikolaos."
"It crippled his power, which is what the ex-Master of the City wanted to do. I'm not going to cripple us magically because I'm squeamish.

In other words, LKH doesn't want to listen to logic.

No more hiding, Richard. The ardeur is here to stay, and I need to feed it."
He shook his head. "No."
"No, what?"
He let down his shields. I don't know if it was on purpose, or his emotions got the better of him.
Whatever the cause I suddenly heard his thoughts like clear bells in my head: he thought that once I got die ardeur under control I'd dump Micah and Nathaniel and live with him.

Given Nathaniel is a headcase, keeping him connected to an addict that he has to help appease is not the safest thing.

Be with him. He still hoped, seriously, that some day we'd be a nice little monogamous pair.
It took only seconds for me to get all of it, but his shields coming down had brought mine down, too, and he felt my shock. My disbelief that he still thought, seriously, that that would ever happen.
I felt the next thought forming, and tried to stop it, tried to keep it half-formed, or to shut him out, but the emotions were too raw, and I wasn't fast enough. The thought was, Even if I am pregnant, it would never work.
Richard's face showed the shock now. He gaped at me, and whispered, "Pregnant."
I said the only thing that came to mind. "Fuck."

Is it just me or is Richard the whiniest werewolf ever?

Comments

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

"Richard?" I made his name a question just in case you couldn't tell from that question mark I put after it, which would logically indicate both a rising infection suggestive of a question and also, you know, a question.

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

Actually I've been wondering: given their psychic links at the best of times, and the presumable complete lack of control going on during the arugula, how is it that JC and Richard haven't twigged to this pregnancy earlier? She's thinking about it all the time at times when she doesn't really want to, in front of them, and when it would be reasonable to suppose she hasn't got whatever mental shields she uses engaged that powerfully, since they're able to send her brain-warnings and things.

[dagonista.livejournal.com]

You're trying to apply logic to this book?

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

It appears the whole book is really now about shagging and how Anita's newfound sexual desires - which are totes not her fault!! She cannot control them and doesn't even LIKE them! - are upsetting her ex, I mean Richard.

[dagonista.livejournal.com]

I remember reading bits of this book aloud to my fiance when we first moved in together and every ten seconds he was like, "that didn't really happen though, did it? What are you talking about? This is bullshit!" And now whenever I mention Hamilton, he just gets angry and goes on massive rants about how awful she is.

[lliira (from livejournal.com)]

She doesn't even really describe her sexual desires. Or what she feels during the act of sex. Or... anything, really. As far as I've read the book, the only time Anita feels anything about anything is when she's hating someone or when she's afraid of the dark.

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I get the impression that shagging is the price she pays for having lots of men to snuggle with and kiss. Which is a bit sad really. She obviously enjoys the men as she raves about their beauty and touching them and such. But the sex is all forced.

[lliira (from livejournal.com)]

She's a misogynistic stereotype in that way (and lots of others): women don't really want sex, they use it for other things, whether emotional or material. It's really weird how LKH keeps insisting Anita likes sex, but can't seem to show her liking it.

[yaoihuntresse.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean and any woman who does enjoy it for their own sake, is a skank. It comes from the old sexist belief that "nice girls" should only tolerate sex and that's what LKH wants us to think. Maybe Anita is trying to convince and not convince herself that she likes it.

[magdalen77.livejournal.com]

The truly disgusting part about the whole Anita/Richard relationship is that Richard is based on LaLa's ex. What she wants and fantasies about is having her ex desperately hung up on her and being able to constantly wave all the other men she's with in his face. But she gets to be on the moral highroad because she's doing it "to save our people". Instead of the reality where her ex is remarried. DM is fairly soon after her divorce, but as we've seen from Shutdown, the ex is still not allowed to get over her.

[yaoihuntresse.livejournal.com]

Maybe her and Lynn Johnston could trade notes. Both have main characters based on themselves, the significant others are based on their exes (the characters were later villianized in different ways), are willing to wreck their own characters to appease their own need for control in real life, objective morals when it comes to their characters (Elly subtly encouraging her daughter to pursue a married man), strawmaning of anyone who doesn't agree with their characters or fits the author's views and sexist and hypocritical views on women.

The main differences are that while LKH tries to make Anita look tough; manly and adored; Johnston makes Elly into a long-suffering martyr (especially in the reboot). While LKH treats other women as prissy prudes/shrews or sluts, Johnston has a strong dislike of ambitious women who actually want to have a career over a family. This goes double for any female who doesn't have a "feminine" job like teaching or running a book store that specializes in children. Which is ironic since Johnston started her career as a comic strip creator when it was strictly a men's club.

[magdalen77.livejournal.com]

I heard about this. I remember liking the comic strip years ago, long before the character derailment.

[yaoihuntresse.livejournal.com]

Though I think any collaboration these two ever did would result in them being unable to stand each other in two months max.

[magdalen77.livejournal.com]

If Lynn Johnson has anything like LaLa's ego there's no way they could ever collaborate. Neither of them could compromise on their whackadoodle views of life and relationships.

[miss-maggpie.livejournal.com]

I suspect it is because She always must 'be desired'. Isn't that how any woman validates herself and creates her worth? Her desirability?
For someone like LKH, the ultimate validation would be to be desired by someone who don't want her romantically.
Like gay men, many women and, of course, her ex husband.

[magdalen77.livejournal.com]

I really don't understand why everything in life all comes down to sex with LaLa. I enjoy sex as much as anyone, but I don't define myself by it. It seems like she has a very limited life.

[lliira (from livejournal.com)]

She thinks wanting to shag someone = true love. I know she's said things that are a bit different in social media, but in her fictional works, she is very blatant about it. If the only love she thinks exists is sexual, I can see why it would take over her life to such an extent, especially because she lives in an impermeable bubble.

[magdalen77.livejournal.com]

Yeah, she says on Twitter and FB that all of the anonymous sexing she does show how edgy and darkity dark she is, but her books show her avatars in Wuv, Troo Wuv with all of the penis parade. In fact there's so much angsting about whether or not she loves stunt penis number 674 that's obvious she's totally bought into the lie that "only sluts have sex for enjoyment and in the absence of the truest of loves". So Laumerita is still a virtuous woman because she doesn't really like sex and only has it for (reasons) with her 867 troo wuvs.

[lliira (from livejournal.com)]

I don't know about Merry, but while Anita claims she loves the entire penis parade, she doesn't show it at all. She seems to care a little about JC and be totally dependent on him, be obsessed with Richard, and be protective of Nathaniel the way a child is with a favorite toy... and that's it. And, of course, she doesn't seem to actually enjoy sex. So she obviously thinks that she's supposed to like sex, and only have sex with people she loves, because she brags a lot about how much she loves sex and all her penii, but neither of those things is true of her. It's very messed-up.

[magdalen77.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I probably shouldn't have thrown in the Merry avatar as supporting LaLa's since I don't really remember (it's been too darn long since I read those books). But, like you say, Anita embodies the two old-time stereotypes that "good girls only sleep with their true love(s)" and "good girls/women don't really like sex". Despite LaLa's claims that Anita loves sex and she's "sexually aggressive" the standard sex scene involves world class whining about "having" to have sex, someone (Nate, Micah, JC) pushing and manipulating her to have it. Anita finally agrees to have the sex and then she flops down on her back and thinks of England.

[miss-maggpie.livejournal.com]

"What is wrong, ma petite?"

Anita: Richard is displaying independent thought.

Ahahahaha! If only the books were actually written like this.