Do Things Differently

[tekuno]

This was going to be something I was going to write after the rewrite of Vga518's story/concept Caveman, which hasn't even started being posted yet. (Vga518 must be getting impatient, considering how many things keep getting pushed in front of that. Sorry! I was just lying in bed last night thinking of how this story would go, and I had some ideas I liked so much that I decided to write it out immediately.)

This was originally going to be sadder and more open-ended than it ended up being, as well as longer. But the new ideas I had not only made the title work even better but made it much shorter. (Unfortunately, they also made it so that the muscle growth happens before the story starts, so no actual growth scene.) And so I was able to finish it tonight, and here we go.

-----

Do Things Differently

When the man walked into the pub, he was immediately the cynosure of all eyes. Conversations halted and people stared openly.

He was dressed in what might have been a parody of a motocycle gang member if it weren't so obviously his real clothing -- a pair of worn workboots, dusty and torn blue denim trousers with a thick belt of rough leather, and an equally dusty brown leather jacket, open to reveal his torso, and a pair of sunglasses.

What drew everyone's attention was not his clothing, exactly, although that was certainly unusual enough. It was more everything about him at once.

For one thing, he was the most physically perfect man anyone in the bar had ever seen. At a glance, he was probably 6 foot 6, and every inch of him was crammed with muscle. The arms and back of his jacket and the legs of his trousers strained to contain the muscles underneath, while the chest and abs revealed in the front were almost impossibly large. He looked like there wasn't an ounce of fat on him anywhere, but at the same time his pectorals were so large and striated -- so deep that the cleavage between them never disappeared, no matter his position -- that there seemed to be no question that he must be a heavy eater.

The bulge at the front of his trousers was substantial as well, a fact which did not go unnoticed, given the nature of this particular pub. Several customers found a sudden need to reach downward.

Up top, the man had brown hair, cut short. His face was lean, and his facial hair was unshaven in a way which ordinarily would have been scruffy but, on his model's face, contrived to merely look casual and attractive.

The clientele of the bar were no strangers to athletes, bodybuilders, and male models, but the man was something entirely outside of their experience. Several of them were breathing hard, and more than one of them developed wet spots in the crotches of their clothing.

The man took off his sunglasses, revealing piercing blue eyes, looked around the pub, and spotted the keyboard, guitar, and microphone the local band had left in the corner when they finished their set. He strode over, picked up the guitar, and began to sing a slow, mournful song into the sudden, deep silence of the pub:

"My passion has set me aflame
And as I burn, I sing;

"In surprise I must exclaim
that I surrender everything.

"But though I burn, I still
Can feel a source of pride

"That all my love was and will
Be only at my lover's side.

"Nobody else shall ever see
This tenderness that springs from me
I swear, I swear, that such a thing will never be."

As the song ended, various people around the bar realized that they had been holding their breaths, and breathed out. There was a sudden, spontaneous round of applause. The man looked around the pub, shook his head, set down the guitar, and walked to the bar.

"Bring me a bottle of wine, please. Your best red, whatever that may be."

"Certainly, sir. One moment, please."

When the wine arrived, the man threw down a note and murmured "keep the change".

The man sat and drank. Around him, the pub's conversation began to reassert itself, although everyone else in the room found a reason to look in the man's direction now and again. Those who had come in hopes of finding a companion for the night, even those who usually regarded the rest of the pub clientele as being beneath their standards, found that they could not achieve the confidence necessary to approach the man, and so he sat in the center of a small empty circle, staring abstractedly into space and slowly drinking his glass of wine.

It was, in the end, Andy who talked to the man. There is a certain kind of man -- it's always a man -- who simply cannot conceive of the notion that others might find them anything but irresistible. Usually, these men complement their brazen arrogance with a level of physical undesirability which borders on the grotesque; they smell like strong cheese, or have a screw-on toupee, or have forehead acne which spells out advertising slogans. Andy, the local representative, was unusually attractive, being simply gifted with an oily personality, a Cockney accent never heard anywhere in the vicinity of London, and somewhat below-average looks and physique, but he was tolerated because it was largely his dogged attendance had assisted in establishing the pub as the local gay meeting place. The tolerance was extended to Andy's crew of horrible friends, who provided a background of mindless, raucous chatter to cover other people's assignations.

"Wotcher, guv, that was a bloody good song!"

"Thank you. It's my own version of a song I heard when I was younger."

"Bit odd, though. You got a bit of an accent. Not from around 'ere, eh, guv?"

The man looked at Andy roughly three seconds longer than an ordinary person would like -- enough that even Andy was somewhat abashed -- before replying. "Yes. I was born in a foreign country."

"Still, I fink you sing quite well, for a foreigner."

"Thank you."

"You always walk in and start singin', or was this an exhibition?"

Once again the man paused. "You must excuse me for my upbringing. We did things differently there."

"An' where, exackly, was that, yer royal highness?"

The man stiffened. Then he sighed. "You want to hear about me, but I do not think I will tell you. Instead I will tell you a fairy tale. Or maybe a legend."

Andy positively cackled. "Sure, guv. Just wot we need. Come 'ere, folks, we're going to 'ear tell of a fairy tale." Andy's friends inched closer, and conversations around the pub grew quieter. You could feel the ears straining to catch the man's words.

"Once upon a time--"

"'ats the way to begin, right proper, guv." Andy's friends shushed him.

"Once upon a time, in a country you would not recognize, there was a very foolish king. He was not, you understand, an evil king, or an unwise king, or even an unpopular king, but he was nevertheless foolish.

"And the proof of his foolishness was this; that when he was thirty, he fell in love with a young man only slightly more than half his own age."

"Wot's wrong wiv bein' in love?" Just for a moment, it was possible to imagine Andy in this unlikely position.

"Nothing is wrong with being in love. But when a king is in love, it can be very bad. Being a king, you see, is not just privilege, or at least once upon a time it wasn't. Much is made of the idea of The Divine Right of Kings, but what is seldom mentioned is The Divine Burden of Kings. In those days, kings were told that they were given charge of the country because they had been charged with its protection by God. Now, when royalty has become little more than a pampered tourist attraction, that seems like a privilege, but once it was a terrible burden. If the kingdom failed to thrive, it meant that the king was not doing his job, at peril of his soul.

"To say nothing of the fact that one of the duties of a king to provide an heir -- I'm sure it has not slipped your notice that I said the king was in love with a young MAN. Nevertheless, the king did his duty and remained in a marriage to a queen he did not love to produce the heir who was his obligation.

"Now, the king's desire, targeted at a young man of no property, produced a terrible pressure. There is nothing the king would have liked more than to renounce his duties and remain with the object of his desires, but to do so would be to abrogate the job which God himself had assigned. And so this particular king became angry and irritable, and resigned himself to his loss when the young man became a talented singer and announced his intention to depart and travel the world as a troubadour.

"The king grew despondent, and after the young man left he gathered all the news he could of troubadours, hoping to confirm that his love was still alive and well. And finally, he had the opportunity to go abroad. He was nearly delirious with joy to discover that not only was Jea--- the singer still alive and well, in the intervening time abroad, the singer had come to realize that he, too, loved the king. Only by being apart had he realized how much it meant to be together.

"But in the midst of the king's happiness came evil: a traveler brought word from a faraway kingdom of an amazing wizard. This wizard, said the traveler, had powers and wisdom not seen since the days of King Solomon. It must have been the devil himself who planted an idea in the king's head -- he would travel to the wizard and ask to be made the singer's own age, and send a duplicate back to reign in his stead."

The man took a deep drink from his glass, his eyes staring into a distance which only he could see. "But, of course, a king could not, in those days, travel freely at will. Every little tinpot noble with a tower would instantly kidnap any king who appeared without an army. And, of course, travel was much slower, so the kingdom had to be left in reliable hands lest it collapsed while the king was away.

"But the king was so foolish that he cast around for an excuse to go to the wizard's country, far away, and found one: recently, a local ruler had captured most of the area, which had long been more than usually chaotic, and was refusing to let people from the king's own country enter. Ordinarily, this would have been a minor annoyance, but the king was desperate for an excuse to travel there, and publicly vowed to solve the problem.

"He wasn't quite so foolish, though, that he couldn't see the dangers of leaving his kingdom unguarded, and so he convinced the kings of the two nearest kingdoms to travel with him as well, thus ensuring that they would not take advantage of his absence to conquer his kingdom. He may have hated his throne, but he did not hate his people.

"This, however, proved to be his undoing. His plan had been to arrive with all his army at the faraway kingdom, and then make a pointed show of failing to attack. Instead, he would appeal to the other king's sense of justice, and by demonstrating the harmlessness of even the most warlike of his countrymen, he would sway the other king to permit visitors. And even if he failed, the king could probably still request an audience with the wizard.

"But, alas, the other kings did not understand his plan, or perhaps they simply did not wish to follow it. They captured a city, raping, looting, and killing, and then sat there for years like malignant toads. And every time the local king whose land they had taken offered a parley, they sent back his messenger without a head."

The man's stare into the distance was no longer wistful; if looks could kill, Andy felt, whoever he was staring at was due for an appointment with the coroner.

"Finally the king slipped away with a small group of knights, and sneaked into the city where the wizard lived."

"And the wizard was a fake?"

"No, no. Things would have been better for the king if the wizard had been a fake. The wizard was genuine. And every bit as powerful as the traveler had said.

"The king bowed to the wizard -- which was quite a gesture in those days; kings recognized no higher authority other than God himself -- and explained why he had come. And then... and then the wizard threw back his hood and the king saw a face which was all too familiar.

"'You have brought death to my lands, foolish king,' said the wizard, 'and your friends have killed my brother to steal his city from him. I will grant your wish, o king. You and your bard will be forever young, forever beautiful, everything you could desire from each other, and you shall have a double to return and govern in your stead. I will spare your people, though you have not spared mine. But I curse you, Rich-- king, for the deaths you have caused. You shall not find your lover's face by light of sun or moon or flame; you shall not travel to him by foot, nor shall boat nor beast of burden carry you to his side; none who you shall ask for his whereabouts shall have looked upon his face or heard him speak. Suffer for eternity, foolish king.'

"As you may expect, the king was dismayed; he ran from the wizard's lair to find that his knights no longer knew him. In fact, his double had arrived and taken them away almost as soon as he had left them. In fact, his double was no longer his double. He had always been a large man, but when the wizard had spoken, the king had grown taller and thicker, and his face had altered as well, until he was an entirely different person. There was no point in even trying to claim his throne, so he simply left for home. But when the king finally made his way back to En-- his kingdom, he found that the bard had disappeared months earlier.

"And so he threw himself into the sea."

The man stopped. His crowd of listeners waited. Finally Andy spoke.

"And then wot, guv?"

"What do you mean?"

"Werl, this 'ere's a fairy tale, innit? There's got to be an 'appy ending, guv."

"But I told you, the king threw himself into the sea."

This time it was one of Andy's horrible friends who spoke up.

"Ah, guv, that wouldn't matter. 'e was under a curse, amiright?"

"Yes?"

"Worl, it stands to reason, then, wiv a curse like that, the king didn't die. The curse said 'e wouldn't die. 'e must have just sat around a bit looking at fish and feeling a bit silly, and then come back ashore, amiright?"

The man looked away, slightly embarrassed.

"Yeah, guv, that wasn't 'alf a story. Go on."

"There's nothing more. The king and the bard never saw each other again."

"Huh. That's no ending, guv. Now, in a GOOD fairy tale, when a wizard casts a spell, you listen to the terms, and that tells you eggzackly what has to be done to get the spell over wiv."

"Right, right. Now, take that first thing, the one about light."

"Yeah, the king might've gone looking with a blindfold."

"Don't be daft."

"Worl, then, a flashlight."

"Weren't no bloody flashlights in fairy tale times."

"Worl, so what? 'e's gonna live forever, amiright? That means 'e must still be around now, stands to reason. So 'e could take a bloody flashlight--"

"'e wouldn't even need no bloody flashlight, Reg, 'cause 'alf the time in a city at night you can't see the bloody moon or stars anyway, and they don't light the bloody streets with torches, not 'alf!"

"Right, then. So 'e could just go looking in cities."

"Well, what about the rest?"

"What, no feet or boats or beasts of burden? What did you ride 'ere on, anyway, a bloody horse?"

"Worl, alright, then. And aeroplanes, I grant you."

"Right. But how would you find someone, then? Can't go round in a bloody 'elicopter at night."

"Hire a detective."

"Nah, mate, s'not allowed. Nobody who gets asked 'as seen the bloke, right?"

"Well, then, maybe on telly or radio?"

"Hah! That's the stuff, amiright?"

"Good thinking, Reg, if 'e shows up on telly then the viewers 'aven't really 'looked upon his face', 'ave they? They've just seen a picture."

"Yeah, Andy, but why would the bard show up on telly? 'e's a fairy tale bloke, why would 'e want to show 'is face?"

"Worl, why not? I suppose 'e'd make up a reason."

"Huh. If it was that easy, you could just snap on the telly and watch for 'im."

Andy hit a button on the remote to emphasize his words. The television in the corner behind the bar switched on, showing the annual Eurohearing Song Competition. From the speakers came a tune which was familiar; it took the pub patrons several minutes to realize that it had been sped up and pushed into a major key.

"L 'amours dont sui espris
Me semont de chanter;

"Si fais con hons sopris
Qui ne puet endurer.

"Et s'ai je tant conquis
Que bien me puis venter:

"Que j'ai piec'a apris
Leaument a amer.

"A li sont mi penser
Et seront a touz dis;
Ja nes en quier oster."

The announcer's voice came on under the video. "That was French singing sensation Jean Blondel with his entry for this year, performing live here in London. There was some controversy over his inclusion in this year's rankings, since the song is a remix, but he argued successfully that since he had done all the work he should be permitted an entry. It looks like the judges are not only going to permit him to remain, but may even permit him into the next round.

The camera zoomed in on the singer; he was tall and muscular. With the exception of his outlandish costume and his blond hair, he was strangely familiar. The eyes of Andy and his friends were drawn slowly to the man...

...who wasn't there. From outside the pub came the sound of a motorcycle starting and driving off at full throttle. Andy carefully turned off the television, and the patrons of the pub resumed their usual conversation, perhaps a little louder than they usually did.

A few days later, the landlord of the pub received a case of brandy and a letter announcing that it was "for the horrible oily gentleman at the bar and his friends, for assistance rendered". It lasted them for nearly a week.

[Mdlftr]

Do Things Differently

......................................

What drew everyone's attention was not his clothing, exactly, although that was certainly unusual enough. It was more everything about him at once.

For one thing, he was the most physically perfect man anyone in the bar had ever seen. At a glance, he was probably 6 foot 6, and every inch of him was crammed with muscle. The arms and back of his jacket and the legs of his trousers strained to contain the muscles underneath, while the chest and abs revealed in the front were almost impossibly large. He looked like there wasn't an ounce of fat on him anywhere, but at the same time his pectorals were so large and striated -- so deep that the cleavage between them never disappeared, no matter his position -- that there seemed to be no question that he must be a heavy eater.

...........................................

The man stopped. His crowd of listeners waited. Finally Andy spoke.

"And then wot, guv?"

"What do you mean?"

"Werl, this 'ere's a fairy tale, innit? There's got to be an 'appy ending, guv."

"But I told you, the king threw himself into the sea."

This time it was one of Andy's horrible friends who spoke up.

"Ah, guv, that wouldn't matter. 'e was under a curse, amiright?"

"Yes?"

"Worl, it stands to reason, then, wiv a curse like that, the king didn't die. The curse said 'e wouldn't die. 'e must have just sat around a bit looking at fish and feeling a bit silly, and then come back ashore, amiright?"

The man looked away, slightly embarrassed.

"Yeah, guv, that wasn't 'alf a story. Go on."

"There's nothing more. The king and the bard never saw each other again."

"Huh. That's no ending, guv. Now, in a GOOD fairy tale, when a wizard casts a spell, you listen to the terms, and that tells you eggzackly what has to be done to get the spell over wiv."

"Right, right. Now, take that first thing, the one about light."

"Yeah, the king might've gone looking with a blindfold."

"Don't be daft."

"Worl, then, a flashlight."

"Weren't no bloody flashlights in fairy tale times."

"Worl, so what? 'e's gonna live forever, amiright? That means 'e must still be around now, stands to reason. So 'e could take a bloody flashlight--"

"'e wouldn't even need no bloody flashlight, Reg, 'cause 'alf the time in a city at night you can't see the bloody moon or stars anyway, and they don't light the bloody streets with torches, not 'alf!"

"Right, then. So 'e could just go looking in cities."

"Well, what about the rest?"

"What, no feet or boats or beasts of burden? What did you ride 'ere on, anyway, a bloody horse?"

"Worl, alright, then. And aeroplanes, I grant you."

"Right. But how would you find someone, then? Can't go round in a bloody 'elicopter at night."

"Hire a detective."

"Nah, mate, s'not allowed. Nobody who gets asked 'as seen the bloke, right?"

"Well, then, maybe on telly or radio?"

"Hah! That's the stuff, amiright?"

"Good thinking, Reg, if 'e shows up on telly then the viewers 'aven't really 'looked upon his face', 'ave they? They've just seen a picture."

"Yeah, Andy, but why would the bard show up on telly? 'e's a fairy tale bloke, why would 'e want to show 'is face?"

"Worl, why not? I suppose 'e'd make up a reason."

"Huh. If it was that easy, you could just snap on the telly and watch for 'im."

..............................................
A few days later, the landlord of the pub received a case of brandy and a letter announcing that it was "for the horrible oily gentleman at the bar and his friends, for assistance rendered". It lasted them for nearly a week.[/QUOTE]

This was AWESOME - funny and sexy and sarcastic all at once! I LOVE the descriptions, from the "pectorals that were so deep that his cleavage never disappeared" to the conclusion that "he must be a heavy eater"?! I love the juxtaposition of sexy and silly.

As an American I don't hear/read Cockney accents very often, except in British books and on television (BBC, anyone?) so Andy, as the local troll, was a hoot. "Wotcher" is a great word - sounds like someone clearing his throat and hawking a loogie while trying to get your attention.

Andy and his greasy friends are the chorus that solves or narrates the back story, so the king/cyclist, aka "Rich[ard the Lion-Hearted' can find his Blondel [famous troubadour].

Very well done. Very original idea. So the muscle growth occurs beforehand --pfft! for that being a problem. Good job!

Mdlftr

[Gymini29]

first time i have ever seen "cynosure" used in a piece of erotic fiction.


gymini29

[Rarity]

I take it that this is supposed to be sad, so to spare myself of the saddy-waddies I will read this after I am done my work. :<

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by Mdlftr

Andy and his greasy friends are the chorus that solves or narrates the back story, so the king/cyclist, aka "Rich[ard the Lion-Hearted' can find his Blondel [famous troubadour].

In a way, it's an inversion of the Blondel legend; the original, of course, has Blondel locating Richard Lionheart by singing, rather than the other way around.

Oh, and you can blame Tom Holt's very funny book Overtime for permanently associating that song with the whole idea in my mind. In reality, "Blondel" is essentially a legendary character. He is usually considered to be Jean de Nestle, who seems to have been a real person and who is associated with a body of songs, of which some survived in both words and music. L'amours dont sui appris is one which is definitely his, and you can listen to it if you look it up on Google (but to modern tastes it sounds awful).

The rhyming translation in the story is my creation, but not an actual translation because my French isn't that good. (I just cribbed the meaning from a literal translation I found online and mushed it around until it rhymed.)

Originally Posted by Gymini29

first time i have ever seen "cynosure" used in a piece of erotic fiction.

Oddly enough, it really is a word which comes to my tongue easily. I did hesitate to use it here, though -- and then I decided that since I was trying to make the king's description just a little too serious, and the meaning was obvious from the context to those who didn't know it already, it would be okay.

Originally Posted by Rarity

I take it that this is supposed to be sad, so to spare myself of the saddy-waddies I will read this after I am done my work. :<

Nope, this one has a happy (implied) ending.

Originally, the title was just a reference to the famous L. P. Hartley quotation which the king uses early on. The king was going to be singing out in public in a town square, and the fairy tale was going to be in that format because there would be a crowd of children. I was going to make the story end with the king finding someone who had heard the song sung the previous summer while on vacation in France, and have him set off in search, and the ending would thus be much more ambiguous.

And then I was lying in bed thinking about the story idea, and it came to me that -- and this should have been obvious right from the start, I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't realize it sooner -- I needed to explain why Richard Lionheart would still be walking around in a modern setting. And I came up with a curse (which was originally a little too foolproof, since it also had a clause about 'no road shall bring you to him' -- bang goes the motorcycle idea). And then I realized that it would be a good plot device if the curse broke down because it was entirely focussed on medieval technology, and the king could break it by "doing things differently", which would then give the title extra meaning.

But I needed a way to explain this to him, and so Andy and his crew were invented and the location moved to a bar. But since I wanted to have the song in French (as an aid to Google searches, if nothing else) it had to be in Europe somewhere, because we Americans are, by and large, far too stupid to have foreign languages in our pop culture, so the bar became an English pub. So Andy became kind of a merge of Nobby from Terry Pratchett and the various weedy Monty Python characters (I'd give you a YouTube link, but the stuff available at Pythonline are the original TV and movie versions, so the really broad Cockney accents they used in the audio-only versions aren't there. Pity.) with lower-class accents. The comment about the accent not actually passing muster in London was to cover myself if I dropped a few bricks while composing his speech -- I wonder if the line about "the French of Paris was to her unknown" was there for similar reasons, or whether it was purely a sneer at the divergence of actual French French and the French spoken in Norman-conquered England, like scholars say? (Not like we'll ever have a chance to settle that question!)

[tekuno]

Since it looks like I'm getting a reputation for posting weird stuff:

I have another shortish story in the works right now which will be a muscle theft story (I'm trying to write different things, rather than stick with any one type of story). It's a bit... extreme in some ways, not quite an unambiguous "bad guys win" scenario but definitely pretty vicious and morally ambiguous. (Then again, muscle theft usually has that kind of feel to it anyway.)

And then there's Caveman coming sooner or later. That's going to be pretty conventional for this board, and pretty long. Erotic fiction is never "G-Rated" but it will probably appeal to most people here, at least insofar as my writing does, at any rate.

And then I have a somewhat long-ish story, tentatively titled In Corpore Sano, which is going to be very difficult to write because it mixes in a genre which is hard to get right in the first place (and I don't know if I could even do that right all by itself, although it will be fun to try). It's definitely not going to be for everyone, but I'm hoping that the people who like it will like it a lot.

Edit: I just sat down and wrote the prologue to In Corpore Sano, because I had a mild headache and didn't feel like working on anything else. I had a lot of fun doing it. It's tempting to post it as a teaser, but I hesitate because I don't plan on working on that until Caveman is at least going strong. Anyone think I should, just for grins? (Or would like me to send it to them as a PM?)

I have a good idea for a sad-with-a-possibly-hopeful-ending short story as well, although I haven't started thinking out the details yet. And then I'm going to do the "happy ending" version of A Word Out of Place. (But I am deliberately not starting that until Caveman is over. It's bad enough that I promised to write that and then squeeze in all these shorts first, without starting on a longer thing as well.)

[tekuno]

Come to think of it, you can imagine Andy as basically being Eric Idle's character from the Nudge Nudge sketch:

Nudge Nudge Wink Wink

[nnnrg]

You post LITERATE stuff. It's fun to read for that reason as well as for the more fetishy bits.