Summary: Jayce Talis, newly promoted soloist at City of Progress Ballet, has just been cast in the role of a lifetime: the male lead in What Could Have Been, a rarely-performed ballet he happens to be obsessed with. The role originated by his celebrity crush Viktor. The role in which Viktor had a career-ending injury.
It’s already a lot of pressure. And then guess who shows up to rehearse it with him.
Read the fic here
Listen to the score for What Could Have Been here
Special thanks to @jaynovz for the beautiful moodboard!
The most interesting question you can ask about any character is not what do they want. it's what do they believe they deserve. because those two things are almost never the same and the gap between them is where your entire story lives. a person can want love completely and believe they don't deserve it and that belief will destroy every good thing that comes toward them in ways they won't even notice they're doing. write the gap. the gap is the character.
Day six of #jayvikkissweek: hickeys!! 🫦💕 I love hickeys, I love hickey hijinks, I love the idea of Jayce being bullied for having them by his Very Proper Mother… plus some fuckin' cause its the weekend 👯♀️
Translation in alt.
At some point over the 8 months of writing once again, as partners, I started to really miss New York City, where I lived for about 15 years. Then I was like wait, New York City is a real place and I can go there. So I did, at the beginning of this month. And because I am that kind of nerd, I thought it would be fun to do a little tour of some of the locations that appear in the fic.
My first stop on a Sunday morning was Brooklyn Kolache, the bakery and coffee shop that Viktor considers to be irredeemably hipsterish but I found quite charming.
(I try my best not to include people in my pictures without their permission, but this is very difficult in NYC!)
They had a really cute little back garden area that was completely empty when I got there at 10:30 (unfashionably early by New York brunch standards).
Are the koláče authentic? I have no idea. But they were delicious. I got poppyseed (traditional) and a lemon curd one that was divine, plus an iced coffee that was not quite $7, but nearly.
After breakfast it was time to hop on the G train for a few stops, getting off in downtown Brooklyn, right near 160 Schermerhorn Street, the real building that Viktor's affordable housing apartment building is based on.
This is a pretty busy commercial street near office buildings and the county courthouse, but walk just a few blocks and you're in the leafy residential streets of Boerum Hill, where Corin Reveck lives.
This neighborhood is full of gorgeous old townhouses, mostly brick, built in the 1840s-1870s. You can still find carriage houses (easily identified by their wide double doors at street level) and the occasional wood-frame house that probably predates the brick ones.
While this is now one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Brooklyn, that wasn't always the case. In the late 19th century it was home to a mix of immigrant workers, small business owners and professionals, more economically and ethnically diverse than nearby Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill. In the mid-20th century it was downright dilapidated, and whole sections of the neighborhood were at risk of being demolished to make room for a new expressway (a plan eventually held off by the first wave of gentrifiers who started buying and renovating houses there in the 1960s). Corin's great-aunt was probably seen as eccentric bordering on insane for continuing to live there while the rest of the Reveck family got rich and decamped to Connecticut. But because the townhouse was continually occupied by members of Corin's family, it wasn't divided up into apartments or boarding house rooms the way many other buildings were. When Corin moved there, some time in the early 1980s, it would have still been considered a rough neighborhood (along with much of New York) but he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would be bothered by that.
The part of Atlantic Avenue that runs along the edge of the neighborhood is also part of the historic preservation zone and has tons of cute little storefronts, although I imagine Corin's ballet studio being in a slightly more industrial-looking building.
I wasn't originally looking for one specific building to inspire Corin's townhouse, but when I stumbled on the real estate listing for 433 Pacific Street I was immediately like Oh That's The One. (It would be set up in the "alternative floor plan" layout mentioned in the listing, with a one-bedroom apartment on the garden level and the rest as a single-family home.)
It's a very beautiful house.
It's also, like many historic buildings, wildly inaccessible, because in addition to being a narrow building that's four stories tall, there are no entrances that don't have stairs either up or down. It would probably be a real pain to live there with any kind of mobility limitations.
In my fantasy real estate search for the kind of apartment Viktor would want to live in long-term, I kept coming across listings in one particular co-op complex, Concord Village, about a mile from where I imagine the Reveck School of Dance to be. The buildings aren't much to look at on the outside, just your bog standard mid-century brick, but the apartments have great details inside and are (by bonkers NYC real estate standards) reasonably priced for this part of Brooklyn. I decided to check it out.
The first thing you see upon approaching the buildings is a burst of green.
Inside the grounds, it's really calm and beautiful, but you still feel like you're connected to the city. The complex sits practically on top of the A train, and the 2/3 is nearby.
I think Viktor would like it here. :-)
It wasn't until a few days later that I got to do the second part of the adventure, which had to happen at night.
The theater where Jayce and Viktor go see Blisters and Bedrock is loosely based on St. Ann's Warehouse, and I've always liked that little corner of DUMBO; there are a lot of cool old warehouse buildings down there which once housed many arts nonprofits (although some have now been priced out) and I love how the Manhattan Bridge just sort of looms in the background, a slightly eerie mismatch of scale to everything else around it. I remember a particular section of the waterfront at the end of Jay Street, sandwiched between the bridge and the Con-Ed power substation, being not particularly scenic or approachable, but in recent years it's been developed into a really nice little park, and this is where I'd imagined them having their ice cream not-a-date. I'd looked at the area on Google Maps but hadn't actually seen this part of the park in person.
Y'all I legitimately started laughing when I turned this corner into the park because it was like absurdly romantic and beautiful and date-worthy and I was just like THESE FUCKING IDIOTS AND THEIR PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY.
The area a little further south in the park, near the carousel and the Brooklyn Bridge, is quite touristy and brightly lit and now ringed with stores and food places. But this corner was quiet and almost deserted on a weekend night, while still well-lit enough to feel safe.
There are walkways that lead you over a tidal marsh. There's a sign for the Billion Oyster Project, an initiative to rebuild New York Harbor's oyster shoals, which in addition to being good for the harbor ecosystem, provide natural protection against storm surges like the one that flooded parts of the city during Hurricane Sandy. There's a spot where you can sit at the water's edge and listen to trains rattling over the Manhattan Bridge above you, a sound I find kind of meditative and soothing. And yes there's tons of benches on which some guys can be be mutual-pining idiots to each other over fancy ice cream.
But fyeah, you say. This is all very cute, but did you go to the ballet while you were on your ballet au-inspired trip?
Yes I did. I went four (4) times in the span of a week! But I'm going to make a separate post about that.
Normalize leaving unhinged comments on ao3 fics you like. I'm tired of being the only one brave enough to write "I am chewing on this fic" in the comment section. Be weird. Authors will love you for it
finally finished this thing I started last year, then took multiple months break on for surgery & moving, then cranked to the finish line this past month to have in time to give to some friends at fanime ^^ please enjoy my blankie feelings
