DCTV moodboards: Coldwestallen - 1930′s nightclub AU
Made for @coldwestallenweek2019 day 1, prompt ‘30s’.
Quotes from the lyrics of “Dream A Little Dream Of Me” by Ella Fitzgerald.
Barry really needs a job and Leonard Snart, despite his speakeasy reputation, appears to be going legit these days. It’s not that good a prospect at first – errands and odd jobs – but doing grunt work seems to earn everyone’s respect.
One day, a bright red automotive turns up - finer than any Barry has had the pleasure to look at before – and Snart tosses him the keys. “Drive me,” is all he says. Barry reacts fast, fumbling a touch but still catching them alright. He gapes at little at the keys in his hands but doesn’t actually have to be asked twice. Later the story comes out that it was a deliberately ostentatious ‘gift’ from one of Snart’s business associates. Not to his tastes by all accounts and quite likely used anyway out of spite.
From then on Barry is the only one to drive him anywhere and always in that earnestly red vehicle. He tries desperately not to ask too many questions but it’s in his nature. Snart – who insists he doesn’t call him Mister – takes his babbling a lot better than Barry expects. There’s plenty of eye rolling, and frequent comments that are part-derisive, part-something else (that could be affection or simply amused tolerance), but he isn’t fired or busted back to errand boy.
And then Snart signs his showstopper. The illustrious Ms. West headlining at his premier club. Barry isn’t the only one who can’t take his eyes off her, but her voice is something spectacular and Barry can see she’s earned every accolade. Soon enough the papers get to printing rumors about her and Len – she’s never called him anything else, right from the start.
Barry doesn’t know what to make of it that somewhere along the line Snart had decided he was also fine to use the nickname, that could be construed as overly familiar. Barry drives Iris too, anywhere and everywhere, amiably chatting as if they are old friends. Each day he watches her look wistfully at the papers as if she wished they said different about her, despite the praise mingled in with the gossip.
Of course, the gossip shifts focus, to her and Barry, friendlier than a star and her driver are supposed to be. The papers like to imply many things, including Len’s tastes stretching further afield than some might expect and a small part of Barry feels hopeful at hearing that. He shouldn’t care. It shouldn’t matter, but maybe it does…to him at least.
The papers will probably never guess how much fondness there is between them three, however separate each connection is. They’d never guess what it is he dreams of when he allows himself to dream properly of a life with fewer boundaries than the one he currently inhabits. Perhaps it’s lucky then that neither Iris nor Len care much for sticking to the rules when the rules don’t tend to serve them.