Amatara

Summary: Five moments in Albert Rosenfield’s FBI career where he didn’t tell the brutal truth, and one where he did without even knowing.
Characters: Albert Rosenfield, along with snatches of Dale Cooper, Harry Truman, Annie Blackburn, Windom Earle - and Diane.
Word Count: ~ 5000
Rating: Gen, PG-13 for language and some serious angst. (and I do mean serious, you guys... *passes y'all handkerchiefs*)
Disclaimer: As always, I bow to David Lynch.
Author's notes: Someone, I believe it was ingridmatthews, once pointed out to me that Albert tends to be completely and brutally honest to everyone, except to himself. I concur, so I took the idea and ran with it. :)
Like so often, this story builds on some of the events of Cooper’s biography My Life, My Tapes (which, incidentally, can be found right here in an electronic version). It's also set in the same universe as my Elegy in Five Movements, aka the one where, after Caroline Earle's death, Albert is one of those to draw Cooper back to the land of the living. Still, nothing for which prior knowledge, outside of the show itself, is essential.

Oh, and as this was written a character study, not a plotty fic, what plot there is tends to be pretty fragmentary - apologies to those who'd have liked to see more plot in some sections. It was hard to give more detail without losing sight of the premise, so please use your imagination to fill in the blanks. And if there's something you really feel is missing, please, feel free to let me know. Still on a learning curve here. :)

[ETA: Suddenly, I felt this needed something more to bring it full circle, so I added an extra scene, call it an epilogue, to soften the sting a little. The rest is unchanged, so can still be read as standing on itself, for anyone who prefers.]

Comments, as always, are very much appreciated.

( Fic: Five times Albert Rosenfield lied (and once he only thought he did) )

( Epilogue (added later) )

I.

It may sound weird, given the tempo at which I've been producing fic (which, for me, is fast as hell) but I seem to be hitting a bit of a dry spell right now. I am writing (ST: TOS fic! My sweet old beloved fandom! *hugs show*) but progress isn't as fast as I hoped, so I'm going to try something to kick myself back into it. I've never done this meme, and I'd love to give it a try, so please, ask away:

If you've ever watched your favorite dvds, and then found yourself eager to hear exactly what the actors, directors, writers and even production designers thought about making the episode, the movie, or whatever - you'll know sometimes the best parts of dvds are hearing the commentaries. Getting into an actor's feelings about the character they play, getting the background behind a writer's plans and metaphors, even just getting the stupid anecdotal stuff that makes you laugh, it's all good.

Ask me about any story, and I'll do a DVD commentary for it! Satisfy your curiosity!

II.

I recently, and wholly by coincidence, bumped into this great piece of meta, now several years old but not less great for it. It discusses text and subtext in fics, specifically in slash fics but not only in those, and how different fen have different expectations of what should be made textual, or kept subtextual. Basically, the author distinguishes between two kinds of fen, "Cold Pricklies" and "Warm Fuzzies", who don't always find it easy to communicate.

Quoting: "The Cold Pricklies want to get gooey feelings of love and eternal devotion from their slash as much as anyone. But their melt-worthy goo has to be delivered mostly on the canonical/subtextual level of emotionality - meat you chew yourself, not pre-chewed. The Warm Fuzzies, on the other hand, appreciate subtext and 'manly handshake' moments in slash just as much as the Cold Pricklies-- after all, they appreciate them in canon-- but their warm fuzzies have to be delivered on the textual level, alongside the sexuality. They don't like having to chew down through the surface of a story to get to the yummy bits." Don't you just love that description? As for me, I'm most definitely the "Cold Prickly" kind, which I suspect will surprise no one. :)

III.

Have I ever mentioned how much I love Television Without Pity and its reviews? Well, all right, I can't generalize - of all shows I've seen the past years, I've only ever looked up a handful on TWOP - but what reviews I read there, I loved. Not that I always agree with them, but I adore the wit, and the mix of unabashed criticism and untempered squee. So every once in a while, I find myself looking up the reviews for a favorite show from the past.

Which I did for Twin Peaks, and it brought me to revisit one particular scene: the one where Albert Rosenfield comes back bearing news of Windom Earle, and in less than two minutes screentime gets more physical with both Harry Truman and Dale Cooper than he's ever gotten in the rest of the series combined. Just to make sure, I'm talking about the scene starting from the 6:05 minute mark of this Youtube clip. The TWOP review of this scene (the rest of which can be found here) had me grinning like you can't believe. And strongly suspecting the reviewer loves Albert about as much as I do. :)

Hee! Incidentally - this was the scene that convinced me, once and for all, of my personal fanon's Albert's love for Cooper, so I can't say I contest the "vaguely gay" interpretation. *g* Taking Truman in a bear hug, and following that up by a far-too-forced handshake with Coop? Hmmm. Cooper's face when Albert pats his shoulder? Hmmmmmmm... Yes, definitely something going on there, this fangirl says. (Though I'll grant, one could just as well interpret that hug with Truman as implying something. ;) Ah, well - the beauty of fandom. *g*)

So Twin Peaks is not a huge fandom, at least not where fanfic is concerned. This is, admittedly, a little sad. And my favorite corner of it, being everything that involves both Dale Cooper and Albert Rosenfield, is even smaller. (Though, really, not quite as small as you’d think. I haven’t done the math, but I strongly suspect that if you count both the gen and the slash, Coop/Albert might well be the fandom’s pairing that’s inspired the most fanfic so far – more than, say, Cooper/Audrey or Cooper/Truman, both of which could be considered more ‘likely’ pairings.)

In any case, fic about these guys isn’t that easy to find, which is why I think it’s high time to compile a little rec list – both for my own convenience, and for that of anyone else interested. Because, you know, the beautiful thing about Twin Peaks fic being so rare, is that nearly everything that gets written is good, even great… which is worth a lot to me, as well! So here are my favorite Cooper/Albert stories, both gen and slash, as well as a number of Twin Peaks fics centered around other characters. The former list is pretty well-researched, the latter’s just a random collection of fics that stuck in my mind, not meant in any way to be complete. I sorted them chronologically, and marked my absolute personal favorites with an asterisk, but really, imho these are all good.

My main resources are The Bookhouse Boys slash archive, the Twin Peaks tags on the Archive Of Our Own (AO3) and FanFiction.net (which contain a slightly different selection), as well as the assorted Yuletide (a yearly rare-fandom fic exchange) archive. If there’s another, please, tell me. :) And naturally, if I left out any fics that you think deserve a mention here, or that I might have missed altogether, I’d be a very happy camper if you’d point them out to me!


Cooper/Albert recs:

( Long rec list here... )

Other characters and pairings:

( A somewhat shorter, but pretty varied, list... )


Enjoy the prettiness! And as I mentioned, any recs to fics that I'd missed before will be received with much squee!

   

       

       

So, it seems I'm in a bit of a Twin Peaks mood these days. Not post-, but pre-canon this time, and entirely gen. Hope you enjoy - as always, any type of comment is welcome (even the critical ones :) ).

Title: Elegy in Five Movements
Summary: Dale Cooper, in those weeks after Caroline's death. Five times Albert tries to make a difference.
Author's Notes:
1. For ingridmatthews, whom I prodded until she came up with a prompt for me to fill. :)
2. This should more or less fit into the events, and time frame, from the novel (Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes), but can be read separately without much of a problem.
Disclaimer: As ever, I bow to David Lynch.


( Fic: Elegy in Five Movements )

Well, I finally finished that Twin Peaks story I've been chewing on since January! Technically, it was written as a New Year's resolution for Yuletide, fulfilling a prompt by my own Yuletide author from last year, who wrote me a gorgeous Twin Peaks fic. Only later, I found out that said author also made a Cooper/Albert Twin Peaks request for Yuletide, and here's my attempt to fill it!

The request was for a post-series fic, dealing with Cooper's possession by BOB, ideally containing some Dale Cooper/Albert Rosenfield slash. Now, as I hinted at before, I wouldn't have been too comfortable writing slash between them that took place during canon, because I have this slightly compulsive thing with sticking to canon pairings, but post-canon slash, well, that was a whole other thing. Still, with the whole possession storyline, there's obviously some dark stuff here. I chose not to cross into non-con, because that's just not my thing, but one could argue it borders the line at times, due to the nature of the material. Apart from Cooper and Albert, some other characters make an appearance as well: Harry Truman and Gordon Cole, most notably (IT WAS GREAT FUN WRITING IN CAPS LOCK for Gordon *giggles*), and there's a cameo of Audrey in there as well. Oh, plus one other character, whose name I'm not going to mention here except to say that writing a conversation between said character and Albert is probably the hardest thing I ever did in a fanfic. Let's just say, I've never read those two characters interacting before, and I hope I did a good job, but - it wasn't easy, seeing how, um, different they are. Though there are some similarities there as well.

Go, read, enjoy! Comments, as always (and this time perhaps more than ever), are very much appreciated. Any kind, including the critical ones. Seriously. I mean, this is by far the plottiest fic I've ever done, and possibly the darkest, so any kind of feedback is welcome. Oh, and I had to cut the story into two parts, as LJ grumbled about post size. Hope you don't mind.

Title: Wake up and face the music
Summary: Post-series fic, trying to resolve the issue of Cooper's little, um, possession. Albert Rosenfield's POV, pretty angsty all around... And a anything else would be spoilery for the story, really.
Pairing: Albert Rosenfield/Dale Cooper
Other characters: Harry Truman, Gordon Cole, Audrey Horne, and one other, which you'll have to read to find out. *g*
Rating: Not quite a solid R, I guess, but more than a PG-13. There is language, and references to sex, though never explicit.
Disclaimer: As always, David Lynch gets all the honors.

( Fic: Wake Up and Face the Music (Part 1) )

Part 2 of the story can be found here.

Phew, this has been a while, hasn't it? Holiday in Austria was lovely - lots of snow and skiing enjoyment, no falls or accidents to speak of, and much relaxing - and I'm ever so happy to see the shortest of the winter days finally seem to be behind us! Also: jeez, those snow storms in the US are really something, aren't they? *peers anxiously at flist pictures of heaps and heaps of snow* Hope y'all managed to stock up in time before getting stuck in your houses... *sends you many virtual blankets*

Meme time! I actually wanted to do these in December, which is when nearly anyone else did, but Yuletide and other writerly stuff kept me busy. Still, seeing as 2009 was my first year of writing fic, I'd say it deserves some kind of mention on here. :)

( Year in Fic #1: First Lines meme )

( Year in Fic #2: Tough Questions meme )

Overall Thoughts on this Year's Fic:
- Not too bad at all for a first year, if I may say so myself *g*. 11 fics and 3 more on the way, which is lots more than I would have guessed when I jumped into this past June.
- My best stories are generally the ones written in response to a prompt. It's by far my favorite way of writing, so I'm repeating previous statements made in this respect: requests are always much appreciated! B5 is still very welcome, of course, but so are more Twin Peaks suggestions, or requests for ST: TOS gen, which I'd be happy to try my hand at.
- I suck at titles. I generally spend more time worrying about titles than I do about any other part of the fic. Any hints on that one (apart from the tried-and-true "ask your beta" :) ) would be lovely.
- While I've gotten better at writing sex or sexual situations, I'm still made of complete fail when it comes to writing any kind of happy sex. I have no idea how to remedy that, though.

In short: thank you all for making my first year on LJ such a lovely one. *snuggles you all* Here's to 2010 - may it bring you lots of fannish joy, and even more of the real-life kind!

Set of 10 Twin Peaks icons, general and slashy both. Made in a teensy obsessive fit following my Yuletide gift. *g*
Feel free to grab if any of them appeals!
Credit would be lovely, credit and a comment even lovelier. ;)


                      

                     
                        

Nothing more squee-inducing than coming home from a weekend trip with husband and parents to find not one, but two Yuletide presents to open! Plus a whole archive full of other goodies still waiting to be discovered! *bounces happily*

My assigned author wrote And the Devil Makes Three for me, a fantastic Twin Peaks fic centering on Albert Rosenfield and his first field mission alongside one Dale Cooper. If you're even slightly interested in Twin Peaks, please, go and read, because it has everything a person (well, me, in any case *g*) could want: great plotting, suspense, foreshadowing, wonderful characterization, as well as healthy portions of Albertesque snark and Cooperish zen, and a resolution that is intense and moving and heartwarming in a marvelously understated way. I love it to pieces. Also, despite my having asked specifically for gen (and very much liking what I got), I am suddenly finding myself craving Cooper/Albert slash like a chocolate-starved hormonal teenager! Alas, once again I seem to be falling for a sadly unpopular pairing: hardly any fic, and not even any icons out there - which is why I went right ahead and made my own. So, dear Yuletide author, please accept this icon (which turned out a bit slashier than I intended, but hey :) ) as a token of my gratitude! Also, if anyone out there can point me to existing fic for this particular pairing, I would be eternally grateful! Until then, I will just read this fic over and over again - which I intended to do anyway! *resumes squeeing and bouncing*

On top of that, I also got a Treat: To Have Him Back is a sweet post-canon Love Actually story dealing with Karen and Harry (portrayed by the ever-exquisite Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman) and their relationship after Harry's fling. Apart from a great take on Karen herself, it also has a gorgeous moment with David, Karen's brother and Prime Minister, who offers to help in a particularly creative way. The story manages to be bittersweet and funny and sad and hopeful all at the same time, and I enjoyed it very much - so thanks a million, dear Treat-writer!

(Only one less joyful bit to report: my plan to get on the Internet during the weekend was sadly ruined by (1) the hotel we stayed in not providing free Internet access despite claims to the contrary, and (2) my laptop's adaptor being stolen in the train station by some guy who calmly snagged my backpack while it was standing right at my feet! *fumes* Well, in truth we got lucky, because the other backpack, which was mercifully still on my back at that time, contained our train tickets and hotel voucher, which would've been a greater loss. Still, getting robbed on Christmas day feels rather sucky.)