stunt_muppet (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stunt_muppet) wrote2010-10-15 02:17 am
stunt_muppet) wrote2010-10-15 02:17 am
Entry tags:
Fic: Someone Else's Story (Buzz/Jessie, G)
Well, I ended up not having nightmares about Takashi Miike movies last night, that was nice. Though I did have a semi-nightmare about Beatrice from Umineko killing people by poisoning their soup, but that's pretty bog-standard dream business for me, sadly.
However, I have finished my first Ficlet Project ficlet HELL YEAH. :D And it did end up helping me accomplish what I wanted it to - I have been writing a lot more lately. And now I have a fic! I haven't done a fic post since April, wow. And yeah, it means I'm up at 2 a.m. again, but it beats being up at 4, and anyway I'M FINISHED so I don't care. :D
Also, as of today I have a pair of earrings shaped like SR-71 Blackbirds with little rhinestones in the wings. I'm pretty sure this makes me cooler than everybody ever.
Title: Someone Else's Story
Fandom: Toy Story
Characters/Pairings: Buzz/Jessie
Rating: G
Summary: The lives of toys are all about stories.
Word Count: 1560 (haha)
Notes: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
livii , who gave me the prompt "Buzz/Jessie, first date", which I took a few liberties with. Hope it's still okay. :D
---
"Psst. Pssst. Hey, Buzz."
Jessie's voice nudged him into semi-consciousness; a long and energetic day of play had left most of them on the floor that night, with Bonnie too tired to assemble them just the way she wanted them on her bedsheets and pillows, so he wasn't quite sure where Jessie had actually been.
"Buzz! Wake up." She gave his shoulder another tug.
"What is it?" He worried, briefly. When she'd first arrived at Andy's she'd hated the dark, even the half-dark of Andy's room with all its open windows; they'd all stayed up with her most nights so she'd know there was someone else still there, that they wouldn't be gone in the morning. The years had mostly eased the fear - she didn't even mind Andy's toy chest so much after a while - but maybe she wanted company again in a brand new house.
"C'mon. There's something I've gotta show you." She was grinning this time, and trying not to, and he was on alert for an entirely different reason now. You never could tell just what she had on her mind when she was hiding a grin like that.
She headed for the door, tiptoeing as fast as she could to quiet her steps, and beckoned him to follow. He almost had to run to keep up with her as she bounded down the stairs to the big couch in front of the TV; nobody slept in the downstairs rooms.
“Well?” He asked as she perched on the seat of the couch, next to the remote. “So what is it?”
She folded her arms, swaggering ever so slightly, and clicked the "On" button with one snappy step - and behind her the screen flicked on, displaying a brightly-colored cartoon with stars whizzing by in the background.
The figure in the foreground was very familiar.
"I had a cartoon?" He asked, sitting down on the edge of the seat.
"Mm-hmm." She'd been suppressing the full extent of her grin before; her smile pulled at her cheeks, just on the threshold of a giggle. Behind her the two-dimensional Buzz Lightyear swooped across the screen, scooping up a three-eyed alien before something huge with long, paper-white teeth took a bite out of it. His voice - he wasn't paying too much attention to the words - was loud and pronounced, every word emphasized and jutting out like his lantern jaw (which he hadn't thought was quite that, er, prominent).
The voice was exactly his, and it occurred to him that his own voice must belong to someone else, some human being behind the ink and pencil.
"Where'd you find this?" He asked, as she sat down next to him, feet kicking.
"Trixie told me about it. She knew she'd seen you from somewhere," she added, poking at him. "Lookit you! You’re two-dimensional! Ha!”
Jessie had apparently been planning this surprise for a while, because the entire first season of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command was all lined up in the home DVR, and she was far too excited about her discovery to sit through an entire episode. She flipped back and forth, from episode to episode, excitedly telling him that, look, in this one, you and your team have to destroy Zurg’s power source, and in this one the robot gets a virus and almost destroys your spaceship, and here’s the big season finale where you’re stuck on the Negative World and you think your ship exploded. And she pointed at the screen when he – the him in the show – swooped in to save the day, and laughed at all the impossible stunts he could perform when he didn’t need a child to hold him up while he flew.
The clock on the wall read just past 2 a.m. by the time the opening credits started to scroll by for the final episode, and Jessie had, for the moment, spent her considerable excitement, her knees drawn up to her chest."Do you remember any of this?" She asked.
"What, you mean the show?"
"Yeah." The smile remained, but it was smaller and closed. "Woody told me, when he first met you, you were..." She looked back at the television, more curious than avoidant. "Well, he told me you didn't know you weren't really a Space Ranger.”
He didn’t quite know how to reply. He hadn’t thought about back then in a very long time – Woody hadn’t mentioned it for years. Even after he’d been reset nobody had wanted to mention it very much. “Well, no. No, I didn’t. I thought I’d landed on a hostile alien planet for a few days there.”
“Did you remember being him?” She glanced back at him; on the screen Cartoon Buzz was standing straight and tall and sure and delivering what seems to be the moral of the day. Buzz wasn’t prone to too many moments of self-doubt even now, but there was a very different sort of certainty that came with being Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger. “I mean all the episodes and stuff. Like, ‘Oh, back when me and the robot guy saved the aliens from the evil Zurg’s alien slime monster!’.” She put her hands on her hips, puffed out her chest, thrust out her chin, and spoke in a much more officious and blustery voice than he remembered having. That couldn’t have been what he really sounded like. Was it? It couldn’t be.
“Um. Well.” She was still giggling a little over her Carton Buzz impression, and he had the sudden urge to clear his throat and scoot as far away from his television counterpart as possible. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t spend too much time reminiscing about his first days at Andy’s house. Why would he want to?
“I don’t...” he began, trying to backtrack to the very beginning, the minutes when he first woke up. The trouble was he didn’t remember waking up, not like that – it was as if, when he’d arrived in Andy’s room, it was another morning, with many mornings before. “There were...facts, things I knew – I knew I had a mission. I…remembered getting into my spaceship and taking off. I remember all the terrible things I thought some other toy did. But they weren’t...” He wanted to say they weren’t real, but it was a different kind of not-real than the stories Andy or Bonnie told. Because those stories were real in every way that was important – they were what you were for, they were alive and vivid and made sense and ended happily. They were what you stepped out of to go back to the smaller, simpler world, and in your memory they were interlaced.
“They weren’t like playtime,” he continued. “They were just things I knew. Like, them, the aliens, I didn’t recognize them,” he said, gesturing back to the TV, but Jessie didn’t look back. “I should have, if I remembered everything. Right?”
“Guess so.” She leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees. The episode ended, and the screen shifted back to the blue boxes of the DVR menu, with some guide program chattering away in the background. Neither of them moved to shut off the TV.
“I didn’t remember anything before Emily,” she said, not looking at him. “I didn’t even know about Woody’s Roundup until Al bought me. I was just Emily’s cowgirl. And that was enough, but...y’know, maybe if I’d known, before...maybe if I’d had somebody else to be, it wouldn’t have been so hard.”
What had it been like for her, he wondered, moving to another new home? She’d seemed to handle it well; she was even prepared to go up in the attic before they’d moved. But she’d been Andy’s by then as long as she’d been Emily’s.
“If it makes you feel any better,” he replied, turning to her, “I’d rather have been Andy’s toy from the start. I’d rather have never thought I was him."
“But at least –” she drew her arms across her chest but kept her voice level, and still didn’t look his way. “At least then if your kid grows up and forgets you, or throws you away, everything you are isn’t gone.”
He put a hand on her shoulder, and it seemed to snap her thoughts out of their downward spiral, because then she managed to look back at him.
“Jessie, there were thousands of dolls out there like you. And each one of them looks and sounds like the Jessie on TV, and says the same thing when you pull on her pull-string.” He gave the ring in her back a very light tug, just enough to make her giggle – at least it was a smile, however fleeting. “You’re the only one who had Emily.”
And she managed a little smile again, and rested an arm around his shoulders, and said “Thanks, Buzz.”
They stayed quiet for a while, not really watching the TV screen and not really listening to the chatter of the announcer, until Buzz cleared his throat and said “Um, shouldn’t we be getting back upstairs?”
“Are you kidding?” She clapped him around the shoulder. “There’s a whole ‘nother season of your show left to watch! Don’t you want to see what else you get up to, spaceman?”
---
The Ficlet Project's still going: The first commenter on this post gets to request a fandom, a character or pairing, and a short prompt. See here for the fandoms I can write. Though do be advised that the ficlet I wite for you might be anywhere from 100 to 2000 words and it will probably take me a million billion years to write it.
And now maybe I can catch up on comments.
Also, any idea where I might cross-post this? Or rather angst about cross-posting it and then never do so?
However, I have finished my first Ficlet Project ficlet HELL YEAH. :D And it did end up helping me accomplish what I wanted it to - I have been writing a lot more lately. And now I have a fic! I haven't done a fic post since April, wow. And yeah, it means I'm up at 2 a.m. again, but it beats being up at 4, and anyway I'M FINISHED so I don't care. :D
Also, as of today I have a pair of earrings shaped like SR-71 Blackbirds with little rhinestones in the wings. I'm pretty sure this makes me cooler than everybody ever.
Title: Someone Else's Story
Fandom: Toy Story
Characters/Pairings: Buzz/Jessie
Rating: G
Summary: The lives of toys are all about stories.
Word Count: 1560 (haha)
Notes: For
livii , who gave me the prompt "Buzz/Jessie, first date", which I took a few liberties with. Hope it's still okay. :D---
"Psst. Pssst. Hey, Buzz."
Jessie's voice nudged him into semi-consciousness; a long and energetic day of play had left most of them on the floor that night, with Bonnie too tired to assemble them just the way she wanted them on her bedsheets and pillows, so he wasn't quite sure where Jessie had actually been.
"Buzz! Wake up." She gave his shoulder another tug.
"What is it?" He worried, briefly. When she'd first arrived at Andy's she'd hated the dark, even the half-dark of Andy's room with all its open windows; they'd all stayed up with her most nights so she'd know there was someone else still there, that they wouldn't be gone in the morning. The years had mostly eased the fear - she didn't even mind Andy's toy chest so much after a while - but maybe she wanted company again in a brand new house.
"C'mon. There's something I've gotta show you." She was grinning this time, and trying not to, and he was on alert for an entirely different reason now. You never could tell just what she had on her mind when she was hiding a grin like that.
She headed for the door, tiptoeing as fast as she could to quiet her steps, and beckoned him to follow. He almost had to run to keep up with her as she bounded down the stairs to the big couch in front of the TV; nobody slept in the downstairs rooms.
“Well?” He asked as she perched on the seat of the couch, next to the remote. “So what is it?”
She folded her arms, swaggering ever so slightly, and clicked the "On" button with one snappy step - and behind her the screen flicked on, displaying a brightly-colored cartoon with stars whizzing by in the background.
The figure in the foreground was very familiar.
"I had a cartoon?" He asked, sitting down on the edge of the seat.
"Mm-hmm." She'd been suppressing the full extent of her grin before; her smile pulled at her cheeks, just on the threshold of a giggle. Behind her the two-dimensional Buzz Lightyear swooped across the screen, scooping up a three-eyed alien before something huge with long, paper-white teeth took a bite out of it. His voice - he wasn't paying too much attention to the words - was loud and pronounced, every word emphasized and jutting out like his lantern jaw (which he hadn't thought was quite that, er, prominent).
The voice was exactly his, and it occurred to him that his own voice must belong to someone else, some human being behind the ink and pencil.
"Where'd you find this?" He asked, as she sat down next to him, feet kicking.
"Trixie told me about it. She knew she'd seen you from somewhere," she added, poking at him. "Lookit you! You’re two-dimensional! Ha!”
Jessie had apparently been planning this surprise for a while, because the entire first season of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command was all lined up in the home DVR, and she was far too excited about her discovery to sit through an entire episode. She flipped back and forth, from episode to episode, excitedly telling him that, look, in this one, you and your team have to destroy Zurg’s power source, and in this one the robot gets a virus and almost destroys your spaceship, and here’s the big season finale where you’re stuck on the Negative World and you think your ship exploded. And she pointed at the screen when he – the him in the show – swooped in to save the day, and laughed at all the impossible stunts he could perform when he didn’t need a child to hold him up while he flew.
The clock on the wall read just past 2 a.m. by the time the opening credits started to scroll by for the final episode, and Jessie had, for the moment, spent her considerable excitement, her knees drawn up to her chest."Do you remember any of this?" She asked.
"What, you mean the show?"
"Yeah." The smile remained, but it was smaller and closed. "Woody told me, when he first met you, you were..." She looked back at the television, more curious than avoidant. "Well, he told me you didn't know you weren't really a Space Ranger.”
He didn’t quite know how to reply. He hadn’t thought about back then in a very long time – Woody hadn’t mentioned it for years. Even after he’d been reset nobody had wanted to mention it very much. “Well, no. No, I didn’t. I thought I’d landed on a hostile alien planet for a few days there.”
“Did you remember being him?” She glanced back at him; on the screen Cartoon Buzz was standing straight and tall and sure and delivering what seems to be the moral of the day. Buzz wasn’t prone to too many moments of self-doubt even now, but there was a very different sort of certainty that came with being Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger. “I mean all the episodes and stuff. Like, ‘Oh, back when me and the robot guy saved the aliens from the evil Zurg’s alien slime monster!’.” She put her hands on her hips, puffed out her chest, thrust out her chin, and spoke in a much more officious and blustery voice than he remembered having. That couldn’t have been what he really sounded like. Was it? It couldn’t be.
“Um. Well.” She was still giggling a little over her Carton Buzz impression, and he had the sudden urge to clear his throat and scoot as far away from his television counterpart as possible. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t spend too much time reminiscing about his first days at Andy’s house. Why would he want to?
“I don’t...” he began, trying to backtrack to the very beginning, the minutes when he first woke up. The trouble was he didn’t remember waking up, not like that – it was as if, when he’d arrived in Andy’s room, it was another morning, with many mornings before. “There were...facts, things I knew – I knew I had a mission. I…remembered getting into my spaceship and taking off. I remember all the terrible things I thought some other toy did. But they weren’t...” He wanted to say they weren’t real, but it was a different kind of not-real than the stories Andy or Bonnie told. Because those stories were real in every way that was important – they were what you were for, they were alive and vivid and made sense and ended happily. They were what you stepped out of to go back to the smaller, simpler world, and in your memory they were interlaced.
“They weren’t like playtime,” he continued. “They were just things I knew. Like, them, the aliens, I didn’t recognize them,” he said, gesturing back to the TV, but Jessie didn’t look back. “I should have, if I remembered everything. Right?”
“Guess so.” She leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees. The episode ended, and the screen shifted back to the blue boxes of the DVR menu, with some guide program chattering away in the background. Neither of them moved to shut off the TV.
“I didn’t remember anything before Emily,” she said, not looking at him. “I didn’t even know about Woody’s Roundup until Al bought me. I was just Emily’s cowgirl. And that was enough, but...y’know, maybe if I’d known, before...maybe if I’d had somebody else to be, it wouldn’t have been so hard.”
What had it been like for her, he wondered, moving to another new home? She’d seemed to handle it well; she was even prepared to go up in the attic before they’d moved. But she’d been Andy’s by then as long as she’d been Emily’s.
“If it makes you feel any better,” he replied, turning to her, “I’d rather have been Andy’s toy from the start. I’d rather have never thought I was him."
“But at least –” she drew her arms across her chest but kept her voice level, and still didn’t look his way. “At least then if your kid grows up and forgets you, or throws you away, everything you are isn’t gone.”
He put a hand on her shoulder, and it seemed to snap her thoughts out of their downward spiral, because then she managed to look back at him.
“Jessie, there were thousands of dolls out there like you. And each one of them looks and sounds like the Jessie on TV, and says the same thing when you pull on her pull-string.” He gave the ring in her back a very light tug, just enough to make her giggle – at least it was a smile, however fleeting. “You’re the only one who had Emily.”
And she managed a little smile again, and rested an arm around his shoulders, and said “Thanks, Buzz.”
They stayed quiet for a while, not really watching the TV screen and not really listening to the chatter of the announcer, until Buzz cleared his throat and said “Um, shouldn’t we be getting back upstairs?”
“Are you kidding?” She clapped him around the shoulder. “There’s a whole ‘nother season of your show left to watch! Don’t you want to see what else you get up to, spaceman?”
---
The Ficlet Project's still going: The first commenter on this post gets to request a fandom, a character or pairing, and a short prompt. See here for the fandoms I can write. Though do be advised that the ficlet I wite for you might be anywhere from 100 to 2000 words and it will probably take me a million billion years to write it.
And now maybe I can catch up on comments.
Also, any idea where I might cross-post this? Or rather angst about cross-posting it and then never do so?
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I JUST WANTED TO SAVE THE SPOT, OK.
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My mouth dropped open when Jessie revealed he had a cartoon, ngl. The twisty po-mo potential of this franchise boggles me sometimes, and I'm curious enough that I should probably go see the other movies (only ever saw the first.) I especially like how it was dealt with here-- as a fact of life, not gimmicky; their toyness has great impact on their selves, and sometimes puts them at cross-purposes with the intersection of "objects to be played with" and "characters from a public narrative."
Aaaaand now I've gotten academisplooge all over your sweet fic. Soz. :(
As for my ficlet... your voice seems like a terribly good fit for Nurse Chapel from Star Trek, but I don't think you've seen any TOS so I'll not burden you with that. So! I'd like to see what you can do with Sulu and the hardship (or not-hardship, seeing how chill Sulu is) of being so dang awesome but always in the background
while certain unnamed persons are hamming it up in the spotlight. A word for further inspiration: "teacup."^_^
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I would recommend seeing the other two movies just because I love them to pieces and they make me smile and laugh and cry and generally act undignified, but the second movie in particular does play with the whole metafictive angle of Toy Story, since that's where Woody's TV show is introduced. But there was a review in my local paper of Toy Story 3 that talked about how the movies were about stories - not just the stories of the movies, but the stories told by the kids, the stories that the toys wanted to be in. That was kind of the jumping-off point for this fic, but while the metafictive themes aren't overt in the movies they are still there.
So, what I'm saying is I'm glad you enjoyed it, and thank you. :D
If you point me to some good Chapel episodes (i.e. episodes where she does things) I'd be happy to give writing her a try - I think I've seen enough TOS that I at least have a grasp of its rules and thematic content, and there's always Memory Alpha to keep me from committing too many canon faux pas. If I do try that, is there a separate prompt you'd like me to use?
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What Are Little Girls Made Of might be the first episode Chapel plays in; she's certainly a big part of the plot and she has a trufax backstory! I mean, it's a backstory about luuuurve but nothing's perfect, eh.
CBS.com has all the episodes available streaming. The URL for What Are Little Girls Made Of is:
http://www.cbs.com/classics/star_trek/video/?pid=IPBsX2d708l7IRciZaO5coI3uM0pkGla
If that doesn't work, then the episode is on page "50" in the "full episodes" tab. The site is not very navigable, so if you have issues let me know and I'll PM you a link to d/l an avi file. (In fact, you might prefer than anyway. :P )
And I, personally, am not super-versed in canon, so don't worry about faux pas on my account. ^_^
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IT SO TOTALLY DOES. *has not got pierced ears but is jealous anyway*
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But this is about the fic, which I really did like, especially the part where he points out she's the only one who's ever had Emily. The prompt gave me pause, but it's not like I can turn down a summary worded so simply and yet with such intrigue, and then you quite pleasantly surprised me with the contents.
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I usually hate to point out typos, by the way, but I wasn't sure if you were archiving this or anything...anyway, thought I'd mention that several times you have a speech tag problem. One is: "I had a cartoon?" He asked, sitting down on the edge of the seat. where there should be a lower case; same problem a couple of other times too. Sorry to nitpick, I just always like people to point out mine, so I've resolved to do so similarly...
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