Random hc but Richie reads scripts with Ruth when she imagines that she's the lead for a play that she's actually tech for so Richie developed a theater accent
Hatchetverse|Charlotte Sweetly x Melissa|hurt/comfort
The CCRP holiday mixer was the kind of event that existed to be endured rather than enjoyed — folding tables dressed up with plastic poinsettias, a punch bowl nobody trusted, and forty people in ugly sweaters standing exactly as far from Corporate as they could manage without leaving the room. Melissa liked it anyway. She liked most things. She'd worn the sweater with the cat on it, the one with the little bell sewn into its felt collar, and she'd spent the better part of an hour refilling the cheese tray because nobody else seemed to think of it and somebody had to.
She noticed Charlotte the way she noticed most people from Accounting — pleasantly, peripherally, a woman with soft eyes and a softer voice who always said thank you so much like she meant it twice. Charlotte was standing near the drinks table in a green dress that didn't try very hard to be festive, nursing a plastic cup of something red, and Melissa was refilling the little dish of pretzels beside her when Greg Bishop wandered over.
Melissa had a private taxonomy for men like Greg. Loud men. Men who touched the small of a woman's back to steer her somewhere she hadn't agreed to go. Men who laughed at their own jokes before anyone else had a chance to.
"There she is," Greg said, too close, his tie already loosened like the day had personally wronged him. "Charlotte Sweetly. You get prettier every year, you know that? Somebody oughta tell your husband he's a lucky man." He said lucky like it was something he was owed and hadn't gotten.
Charlotte's smile didn't move, but something behind it did — a small contraction, like a hand closing. "That's kind of you to say, Greg."
"I'm just being honest." He leaned an elbow on the table, knocking Melissa's pretzel dish half an inch and not noticing. "You ever get tired of Sam, you let me know. I'll show you what a real man does with a woman like you."
There was a pause. Melissa, half-turned away with the pretzel bag still in her hands, felt it more than heard it — the particular quality of silence that came before Charlotte said something.
"You know," Charlotte said, mild as milk, "my mother always told me you can tell everything about a man by how he behaves when nobody's making him behave. And you behave like a dog, Greg. Not the sweet kind. The kind that gets into the trash because it doesn't know any better and bites the hand that tries to stop it."
Greg blinked. Somewhere behind him, someone from Sales laughed into their cup and turned it into a cough.
"Jesus, Charlotte, it's a compliment—"
"I know what it was." Her voice hadn't risen at all. That was the part that stayed with Melissa later — how gentle it remained, how unbothered, like she was commenting on the weather instead of skinning a man down to the thing underneath. "Go bother somebody else's dish, would you? You're getting your paws all over the pretzels."
Greg left, muttering something about women and their moods, and the office swallowed him back up into its noise, and Charlotte picked her cup back up like nothing at all had happened.
Melissa stood very still with the pretzel bag crinkling in her hand.
A dog, she thought. She called him a dog. Not clumsy, not thoughtless — she'd said it exactly the way Melissa thought it, the precise shape of it, dog in a man's clothes, dog that had learned to stand on its hind legs and ask for things it hadn't earned. Melissa had spent years being the only person in any room who could see it. She'd learned to keep it folded up small and tucked behind her smile, because the one time she'd said it out loud — he's not really a person, you understand, he's just wearing one — a girl from Human Resources had looked at her like she'd grown a second head.
But Charlotte had just said it. To his face. Sweetly.
Melissa set the pretzel bag down very carefully, the way she set down anything she didn't want to spill, and came around the table.
"That was wonderful," she said, and she meant it with her whole chest. "What you said to him."
Charlotte looked faintly startled, like she wasn't used to being complimented on cruelty, or on anything, maybe. "Oh — I don't know if it was very nice."
"It was true, though." Melissa tilted her head, cat-bell chiming faintly with the movement. "Sometimes true is better than nice."
Something passed over Charlotte's face — not quite recognition, not yet, more like the first warm draft before a fire catches. She looked at Melissa properly for what might have been the first time all night: the sweater, the bell, the eyes that were a little too bright, a little too steady.
"I suppose it is," Charlotte said slowly.
"You should say it more often." Melissa smiled, the wide easy smile that made people forget to ask her follow-up questions. "The world's just full of dogs pretending they walk on two legs. It's nice, meeting someone else who notices."
Charlotte laughed, a small uncertain sound, and looked down into her cup as if the punch might explain what she'd just been told. "I don't know that I notice anything. I just say what I'm thinking. Probably too much."
"No," Melissa said. "Not too much. Not nearly enough, I'd bet."
They ended up by the window, away from the noise, because Melissa had steered them there without seeming to steer at all — a hand light on Charlotte's elbow, a murmured it's stuffy over there, isn't it, and Charlotte had gone along easily, the way people always went along with Melissa, never quite noticing they'd been led.
Outside, the parking lot was strung with the same tired lights as the office, red and green smearing on wet asphalt. Charlotte watched them rather than look at Melissa directly, turning her cup by the rim.
"Can I ask you something?" Melissa said.
"Mm-hm."
"Do you actually think that? About men. About — dogs." She kept her voice light, curious, the voice she used when she asked people how their weekend was. It cost her nothing to sound harmless. It never had.
Charlotte was quiet long enough that Melissa thought she might not answer at all. "I think," she said finally, "that some men have a look. Right before they say something ugly, or do something ugly. Like a — a hunger that doesn't know it's rude to be hungry. I've been married eleven years and I still can't always tell who's going to get that look until they get it." She glanced sideways, almost apologetic. "That probably sounds insane."
"It doesn't," Melissa said, too quickly, too warm. "It sounds like you've been paying attention. Most people don't. Most people just let the ones with that look walk right past them, over and over, and never once ask why does he keep getting away with it."
"You've thought about this a lot."
"I think about it constantly." Melissa laughed, and it came out fonder than she meant it to. "I used to have a cat named Boots. Best boy in the world. Never once bit anyone who didn't have it coming. And I used to think — well, wouldn't it be lovely if people worked that way. If you could just tell, right off, who was going to be good and who was going to be a problem. Save everybody so much trouble."
"And Greg's a problem."
"Greg," Melissa said, "is a very obvious problem. That's not even interesting. What's interesting is that you saw it too, and you didn't wait for someone else to say it for you." She turned, and there wasn't very much space left between them, and she didn't step back to make more. "I don't meet a lot of people who say things out loud. Mostly they just think them very loudly and hope somebody else does the saying."
Charlotte's breath caught, just slightly, the kind of catch a person doesn't mean to let show. "I don't usually say things like that at all. I don't know what came over me."
"I think you knew exactly what came over you." Melissa reached out, unhurried, and tucked a strand of hair behind Charlotte's ear that hadn't really needed tucking, and let her fingers rest there a half-second longer than the gesture required. "I think you've been holding your breath around men like that for a long, long time, and tonight you just finally let a little of it out."
Charlotte didn't pull away. That was the thing Melissa would turn over later, lying in bed with Boots purring against her collarbone — she hadn't pulled away, hadn't laughed it off, hadn't glanced over her shoulder for Sam. She'd just gone very still, the way a held note goes still right before it breaks.
"You're very forward," Charlotte said, but it wasn't quite an objection.
"I'm very honest." Melissa smiled, and let her hand drop, because she was patient, because she had learned a long time ago that the animals worth keeping were the ones you never had to chase. "It's a family trait."
"Sam says I overthink people," Charlotte said, to the window, to the parking lot, to anyone who wasn't quite Melissa. "He says most people are just people."
"Sam sounds like a very trusting man."
"He is." A small, complicated pause. "I love him. I want you to know that — it isn't that I don't."
"I didn't think it was." Melissa said it gently, and meant it, because it wasn't really the point, and she was old enough in her own strange way to know that jealousy was a waste of a good evening. "I just think loving someone doesn't mean you stop being able to see clearly. You can love a person and still notice all the dogs standing around him at a Christmas party."
Charlotte huffed something that was almost a laugh, wet at the edges. "You're strange."
"I get that a lot." Melissa didn't seem bothered by it in the slightest. "I like to think of it as observant. Strange is just what people call observant when it makes them nervous."
"You don't make me nervous."
"No?"
"No." Charlotte looked at her then, fully, for the second time that night, and something in her face had loosened, the careful accounting-department composure slipping just slightly off true. "You make me feel like I've been saying the right things to the wrong people my whole life."
Melissa felt that sentence land somewhere under her ribs and stay there, warm as a coal. She had loved things before — Boots, mostly, and the particular clean satisfaction of a job done thoroughly, and her mother, in the uncomplicated way a person loves the first thing that ever taught them anything true. She had never before felt anything that moved quite like this: quick and total and faintly alarming, like a door opening onto a room she hadn't known was in the house.
Oh, she thought, with the same simple wonder she brought to everything. There it is.
"Well," Melissa said, and her voice came out softer than she'd planned it, "then I suppose you've finally found the right one."
Somewhere behind them, inside, someone had put on music, tinny and cheerful through the propped door, and Greg's laugh rose and fell over it like something that couldn't be drowned out no matter how loud the party got. Charlotte glanced toward the sound instinctively — toward Sam, maybe, or the idea of him, the whole warm ordinary shape of her marriage waiting a few miles away — and then back at Melissa, who hadn't moved, who was simply standing there in her cat sweater with her bell chiming faintly whenever the wind came through the propped door, watching her with an attention that felt like being seen in a way Charlotte wasn't sure she'd been seen in eleven years.
"I should get back," Charlotte said finally, though she didn't move.
"Mm," Melissa said. "You should."
Neither of them did, for a little while longer. And when Charlotte finally did turn back toward the lights and the noise and the life waiting for her on the other side of the door, Melissa watched her go with the same fond, patient, terrible tenderness she reserved for things she had already decided, quietly, to keep.
Differences in Paul that I noticed rewatching the og and remount
The remount Paul seems nicer even though he's clear about his boundaries. Still trying to use a polite tone and be supportive. In the og he's very blunt and doesn't bother trying to soften his tone and kind of an asshole.
Based on Mr. Davidson's tone when he asked for the weekly reports from Paul, in the og Paul is probably very reliable and turns things in on time but in the remount Paul is probably bad at his job and turns things in late a lot. Probably not extremely late but still not on time.
In the og he absolutely hates Ted but in the remount he doesn't seem to have much of an opinion on him but is uncomfortable with Ted trapping him on Ted's legs.
He's more earnest in wanting to talk to Emma and get to know her verses in the og he's still earnest but he's comfortable with her so he shares his opinion.
With his relationship with Greenpeace girl he genuinely seems to have beef with her and not like her meanwhile in the original he was just annoyed with her.
In the og he's confused and weirded out and hates musicals but in the remount he's terrified and his dislike of musicals is more of a phobia.
In the remount he seems very reliant on routine, if everything follows his routine no matter how bad or weird of a day he is having he can hold himself but if it doesn't he crumbles with Paul going to Beanies for the second time in the musical. In the original he hasn't processed anything fully yet and is losing his mind.
Paul was more protective over Charlotte in the og, Paul does care about her in the remount but in the og Paul got between Charlotte and a gun and he didn't in the remount.
Remount Paul was such a good listener and og Paul was so starstruck by Emma that he was happy to learn more about her and not being as grumpy with her while remount was really taking in what she was saying and empathizing with her and being quiet.
Remount Paul made the decision to go with Bill to the school a lot quicker. It was during the silence after Ted was saying that Bill was going to get lost. In the og Paul didn't make the decision until right before he outright says that he was going to. Not because of his lack of caring but because he's being analytical.
When the og Paul says that he wants something more than friendship with Emma he's more certain about it but with the remount it's like he's realizing that's what he wants but trying to mask that it's a realization so he doesn't get shot.
Og Paul tried to suck it up when Emma grabbed him by his tie to kiss him after she coughed up blood on him but he chickened out at the last second but for remount Paul he was like "moments ruined, not doing that" immediately after she got blood on him.
With the line "God help me out" during Let it Out in the og it feels like Paul is and always has been a atheist (I wouldn't say he's anti religion but just not something that he believes in) but this is where it fully sets in for the first time that there's supernatural beings so there might actually be a higher power but in the remount with what he does with his hands I don't know, I got the vibe that he grew up in a Christian household but left and abandoned his faith (maybe religious trauma) and while he's in a very stressful situation, losing his autonomy, knowing that he wasn't going to survive this his brain went back to familiarity for comfort which was his abandoned faith.
tgwdlm:r is so goddamn funny because originally, Paul was like. disturbed. annoyed. in the remount, Paul is just TERRIFIED. in the original, he’s like, concerned and a bit scared. In the remount he’s SHITTING HIS PANTS. this guy HATES MUSICALS.
When I rewrite Something to Sing About (a fic where infected Paul finds Richie) when would be a good time for that to happen to get the top angst experience?
When Paul and Bill go to the school to find Alice and they split up
What would you guys think about a dinluke au where Vadar hired Din instead of Boba Fett to track down and capture the crew of the Millennium Falcon and Din has already met Luke on Tatooine when his ship crashed and Din didn't realize that Luke was part of the Millennium Falcon?
Thinking about lawyerzone and Gary is actually a really good lawyer but when he starts talking to Frank he's trying to be professional but Frank gives him a gay panic and he starts talking about the audits being in Frank's yin yang and audits in his yazoo Gary's mind went very inappropriate and suggestive and was trying to hide it but it was not working at all because he's a little freak
Tell me if this makes sense to anyone else (I might just be overthinking this because I have a religious background) but with the line "God help me out" in the og it feels like Paul is and always has been a atheist (I wouldn't say he's anti religion but just not something that he believes in) but this is where it fully sets in for the first time that there's supernatural beings so there might actually be a higher power but in the remount with what he does with his hands I don't know, I got the vibe that he grew up in a Christian household but left and abandoned his faith (maybe religious trauma but I don't know) and while he's in a very stressful situation, losing his autonomy, knowing that he wasn't going to survive this his brain went back to familiarity for comfort which was his abandoned faith. Again, I could just be overthinking it and projecting.
2087
origamiaround
prguitarman