Bit of everything

[nineveh_uk]

If this morning’s hideous bus journey – over-crowded, windows closed, hot and smelly and full of teenage language students behaving as if they’re on a school trip coach – cannot persuade me to walk to work tomorrow, nothing can.

After a week in Leeds wearing my ski jacket in the rain and many, many tryings-on, I have finally brought a proper mac. It is fantastic, albeit probably best not worn with a black beret.

Meme seen round about:

Give me a pairing (original or fic) and I will tell you at least two of:
1. What they most commonly do during sex
2. Who has prettier hair
3. What they argue about most often
4. Who'd cope best if the other one died
5. The happiest plausible happily-ever-after I can think of for them.

Comments

[bookwormsarah.livejournal.com]

St George and Hilary Thorpe (although I'm not sure I want to know the answer to 1...)

[bookwormsarah.livejournal.com]

And how could I forget Bunter/Giant Squid?

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Argh! *rolls up sleeves*

1. Bunter: feel very glad that he insisted on wearing the life-jacket.
Giant Squid: relatively little is known about the mating process in giant squid...
2. Bunter. Giant squid do not have hair, although its cilia are very fine.
3. They don't talk much.
4. The Giant Squid. It can probably find another adventurous human, but Bunter is unlikely to find another amenable Giant Squid. Finer feelings aren't involved much.
5. They both come to their senses and never, ever mention it again.

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

Bunter/St George

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

1. What Bunter wants. Assuming that they do anything at all*. It is possible that such relationship as there is never gets past the "I wouldn't mind a go at that"/"An affair with my uncle's valet would be a bit edgy" stage. Alternative scenario to both the above is solitary passionate yearning (to coin a euphemism).
2. Saint-George. Bunter's hair is perfectly serviceable and greying gratifyingly slowly, but it is not particularly pretty.
3. They tend to avoid arguing as much as possible, as they sense it wouldn't go well. Bunter is occasionally unable to bite back comments about Saint-George's casual irresponsibility being a rather unattractive feature, and Saint-George thinks that Bunter's retreat when challenged into Perfect Unmovable Servant is highly annoying and an unfair way of shutting down an argument.
4. Bunter, I expect. Because he's used to the fact that life is non-ideal, and has a great deal of practice in shutting things away and generally coping in public. Also, the fact that he has known S-G since he was a little boy gives some sort of excuse for being sad when he doesn't conceal it. Whereas Saint-George has to put up with Helen saying that it's really a good thing because the man had far too much hold over Peter, quite sinister really, and ideas far above his station.
5. Probably, given all the complications, that it remains a no-strings-attached occasional shag arrangement, with no deep emotional involvement that both enjoy while it lasts and don't regret when it is over. Alternatively, if both of them were a lot braver than they are, then post-war Bunter retires from his job with Peter, goes off to live in the south of France and take photographs, and Saint-George spends a lot of time there. Between them they have sufficient blackmail material to keep everyone's mouth shut.

*Though I do have a WIP in which they do.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Sylvia and Eiluned?

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

1. Experiment with great enthusiasm. It's not as if anywhere else was going to give them good ideas.
2. Eiluned. It's short but awesome, whereas Sylvia's tends to break and look dull. She secretly regrets thats since leaving school she can't wear it in pigtails any more.
3. When Harriet was with Philip Boyes they argued quite a lot over whether they should tell her to dump him. Eiluned was pro, Sylvia thought that Harriet would be furious that they were interfering. At various points in the next five years each thinks she was wrong, but in the end they decide that the time to intervene was earlier, and anyway, it all ended happily.
4. Gosh, this is dispiriting. Honestly, I haven't really thought enough about it.
5. Both do reasonably well out of their work, achieving in middle age public recognition for its quality. The NHS and state pension takes care of the rest.
5.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Yeah, they'd have gotten together before even _The Well of Loneliness_ and its one line of non-instructiveness ("That night they were not divided").

I suppose it's not too likely they'd be reading back issues of The Medical Times and Register: see http://books.google.com/books?id=2dpXAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA9. Cologne bottles, forsooth.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. They must have been embarrassing consultations. Though I am sure I read a newspaper article that suggested "Doctor, I fell over and landed on a broom handle" continues to be said by both sexes.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

"With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM!"

[fallingtowers.livejournal.com]

If a Vorkosigan pairing would be all right for you:

Miles / Ekaterin (or any of the ACC pairings, really - e.g. Gregor/Laisa, Mark/Kareen, Delia/Duv, Olivia/Dono...)

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

A Vorkosigan pairing is certainly all right. I don't think I've written any of them (though I do have a soft spot for Gregor and Laisa - I love the bit when Alys is banging her head about getting it wrong all these years), so will take the plunge with Miles/Ekaterin.

1. Negotiate. Miles, as we know, likes to order people about, and Ekaterin doesn't have the background of, say, Quinn, to instinctively order him about instead. On the other hand, Ekaterin does have the background to very much not want to be ordered about herself.

2. Ekaterin. IIRC, Miles thinks it is nice in Komarr, and though I may be contaminated by the hideous colours, I imagine Miles with a hideous Barrayaran military crew cut.

3. Miles says he never argues. Ekaterin points out that if you insist on pushing lunatic ideas as if they were incontrovertibly correct, you de facto are arguing and the fact you deny it doesn't mean it isn't true.

4. Ekaterin. For a start, she is more practiced in expecting Miles to die before her, but also, having been swallowed before she has perhaps, in love as she is, unconsciously kept enough of herself back for self-preservation.

5. Continuing social and political success on Barrayar, Ekaterin somehow finds time to complete her studies and get into terraforming the district (while still having time for gardens, which are rather more hands-on), and Miles adjusts to the Countship. The children cause no more upset than is inevitable. Miles makes it to fifty before he dies.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Peter/Viennese opera singer

[glinda-w.livejournal.com]

Oh, seconding this!

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Things could get quite polyglot there -- surely at least *one* of them would throw in a little German as well as English and French?

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

And depending on where the VO is actually from, maybe a bit of Hungarian, even!

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

1. Have a very entertaining time. It is possibly that each is privately a bit self-congratulatory about this and takes the credit to her/himself. The VOS, by the way, is the woman who kicked Peter out of bed for nightmares, ostensibly on the grounds that she needed to sleep because she - unlike him - had to work the next day, but also because she realised that since he politely rebuffed any attempts to actually help with them, that lying there awake and irritated was not going to achieve anything but martyrdom.

2. The VOS, whose hair, long, shiny, and a red colour that Anne of Green Gables would envy, was not in fact what first attracted Peter to her as she was wearing a wig at the time, but it is what attracts everybody else.

3. Peter's occasional tendency to forget that he is no more earthshatteringly important to her than she is to him. He is aware of this fact intellectually, but occasionally the expectations of his class seep out.

4. I think it depends on the circumstances. Neither plans to peg out of TB. If Peter died in WWII and the VOS found out she would, as someone on the other side, be gutted (I have not decided whether she slopes off the US or remains and keeps singing in Austria/Berlin). But its essentially a relationship of mutual friendship, so both would be upset if the other died but its not really a question of coping.

5. Long lives with other people who don't get jealous at "do you remember than evening when...".