David Bowie oneshot (m)

[Mistress Quickly]

A casual glance at my icon/signature would possibly suggest that I am at present in the throes of a extended bout of Bowie preoccupation. It must be bad, because it's not often that an obsession leads me to actually writing something based on it..well, at least not anything fit for public consumption. Either way, Bowie proves to be a very nice little muse indeed.

Because this is the first 'Real Person' fic I've written (which still has a slight sense of awkwardness associated with it for me), I feel like I should put a massive disclaimer here. This takes place in a hinterland of unspecified early-mid 1970s somewhere in-between Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, when Bowie was having his pretty serious drug problems, and so with this in mind it's rather sad, and pretty dark, and I'd probably reccommend staying away if you think you'd have difficulty with a rather maudlin real person scenario. There's nothing hard-core in it; I've just gone a bit angst-happy. As you do.

Title: Acting Naturally

Fandom: Real Person (yikes)

Warning: Contains implied drug abuse, very mild implied slash and a lightweight reference to blood.

Disclaimer: Absolutely one hundred percent did not happen. Merely a product of my frankly questionable sanity. I'm just using the names of innocent celebrities for my own perversions. Also, as far as I know, Bowie and Mick Ronson (for the uninitiated, Bowie's lead guitarist during the Ziggy Stardust era) didn't see each other again until much, much later after the Spiders from Mars were disbanded, so I'm merely using Mick as something of a cipher in this story, mainly because I couldn't think of another person who would fit and didn't want to invent someone.

Secondary Disclaimer: the title of this story is taken from a line in 'Flesh and the Mirror' by Angela Carter - 'The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally, isn't it? Everything else is artful.' ('Flesh and the Mirror', from Fireworks by Angela Carter, p.89). I play around with and twist this line on several points throughout the story, and darn well quote it in full at one point. Credit where credit's due.

Acting Naturally

After what seemed to be minutes of silence, he suddenly blinked and drew a small, sharp breath inward, flinching slightly as though the action had startled him, his head moving in a vague suggestion of the negative. "You're just...exaggerating," he managed at last, the words slow and pronounced with almost agonising care, but still sounding muffled somehow, as though the relationship between his vocabulary and his tongue had become irrevocably disjointed. A pallid gesture at a frown creased the white skin of his forehead and his narrow, delicately fluted nostrils flared almost imperceptibly, as though the instance of speaking had puzzled him, as though the voice and the mind and the words no longer bore any relation to one another as far as he could perceive. He ran the pink tip of his tongue over dry lips, almost absently, his mismatched eyes unfocusing as his gaze slid past his friend, to the window bright with day. His eyelids flickered again, the line deepening between his brows, and he sniffed.

Mick watched him silently. David's translucent skin was drawn taut across the angular scaffolding of his face, jaw and cheekbones cutting such sharp planes through the lily-white fragility that they seemed to alter the very shadows that melted into every contour; only the childlike cupid's-bow of his mouth remained of what almost seemed like a previous life's sensuality, the corners unconsciously downturned, creating a fine crease on either side of his mouth that ran upwards to the sharp edges of his faintly aquiline nose, the delicate skin of his nostrils quivering, just a little, as he breathed slowly. It was the same fragile edges of his nostrils that were rouged with the faint pinkness of irritation, just lightly inflamed with what could have easily been mistaken for a cold. What was almost certainly the real cause was evident in his dimmed eyes and the numb flicker of consciousness that barely hinted at what had become of the man beneath the suffocating weight of addiction.

"Exaggerating?" Mick repeated softly. "D'you know how much more I could exaggerate? Haven't bloody started, mate."

Something seemed to penetrate, if only to the barest depths of the surface, sending out a ripple that caused David to tilt his chin just slightly upwards and press his lips together; he sniffed once, then again, the second sniff cinching at the skin between his brows as his mouth quirked into a half-sneer, more fretful pout than expression of disdain.

"It really isn't any of your business, love." The endearment came pronounced like a weary threat, and his eyes moved slowly to Mick's feet, then upwards, raking with vague disinterest over the other man's legs folded at the knee, upwards further, preoccupied for several strangely intense seconds by the line and slope of his friend's shoulders before his gaze traveled slowly to Mick's mouth, stopping before he met his eyes. His own eyes flickered, a movement almost too infinitesimal to notice.

"It's not so very mad, really, Mick," he said softly.

Then he almost smiled, almost a shadow of it; Mick could have imagined it, but it was real, its ghost was there at least, something just at the edges, too weak to grow into something more, but not dead, not yet. In that moment, he felt the tears at the back of his throat, and he bit the inside of his cheek hard until that, too, faded, just as David's old, sad, never-smile did.

Another sniff. This time, David lifted his hand, a gesture impossibly graceful in its ordinariness, and delicately rubbed the side of his nose with his wrist, once, twice, the third time gently kneading the joint of his knuckle against his right nostril, very slowly, almost methodically. He sniffed again and wrinkled his nose irritably, scrunching one side of his mouth, then the other, hesitating with his hand still half-raised in front of him, an expression of almost puzzled concentration melting over his alienly beautiful, geometric features as his lips parted and he exhaled. He blinked and his brows quivered in the anticipation of a frown, then with an almost undetectable, almost hesitant inward breath he lifted his hand again, this time hovering expectantly in front of his face, long, slender fingers curling fluidly into an arch. Watching him, Mick saw the tiny flicker beneath his eyes, his sensitive upper lip twitching as he took another, sharper, deeper breath, his eyes sinking closed as his brows lifted into an expression almost resembling surprise. The sneeze pitched him forward where he sat, narrow shoulders jerking inward as the force of it wrenched a wet, desperate sound out of him that seemed far too forceful for his painfully brittle frame. "Ehh-Tschhuh!"

Its echo rang in the bare corners of the little room. David stayed hunched over where the sneeze had thrown him forward, his hand still concealing half his face as his eyes remained closed, his breathing unsteady. Mick watched him, barely daring to breathe himself for the conviction that another sound, another movement would shatter David's frame like lovely, faltering glass.

"Bless you," he ventured at last, his voice emerging gruff rather than gentle. David sniffed twice, raising his head slightly to pinch his nose between his thumb and forefinger; he squeezed his eyes shut with a look almost like pain.

"David..." Mick made a movement to rise, but David lifted his hand, a gesture meant to keep away. His breath snagged and - "Hihh-Tscchhhuh!" - rocking forward once more, both hands now cupping to his face. He made a small, indistinct hiccuping sound, almost a cough, before giving another wet double sniff. The tickle verged on him again and this time he lifted his head up, his pale hands still folded together in anticipation, and Mick saw the look of excruciating need contorting David's glacial features as the sneeze built. The sensation played with him; the sneeze actually brought itself to the brink - his breath clicking in his throat, now reddened nostrils dilating with the irritation - before it retreated just as swiftly. David gave his head a quick shake, an almost feminine keening growl of frustration forming in his throat. He rubbed his nose hard against the back of his hand, drawing his knees up closer to his chest as his breath began to again intensify into shallow, hitching gasps.

"David - "

"hhh-Tschhh-oo!" Overwhelmed, his slight frame was once again gripped by the violence of the sneeze, and Mick felt himself flinch. There was a perfect beat of hesitation, David drew a breath and sneezed again, loudly, its wetness amplified by his hands cupping his nose and mouth. The next breath he took was laboured, rasping with what sounded like growing congestion; he leant back with the build up, his body stilling for the count of a second. He made a small, desperate noise of thwarted relief, exhaled into almost a sigh, before the urge finally seized him and - "ehh-TSCHHHHhuhhh!" - loudly, wetly, fiercely intense. This last sneeze was the most aurally pleasing, peculiar in itself for the strange elegance of such abandon, and for the shiver that Mick felt coursing in delicate prickles across the back of his neck. It was the sense of extraordinary release that the sound of David's sneeze seemed to evoke; the very form it gave to his voice, the helpless, swift build up from tense expectancy to desired, much-needed relief seemed a somehow agonisingly human noise to be wrenched from this waxen, blade-thin, spectral creature of a loveliness made terrible. David's painful striving for a perfected, absolute control in every aspect of his ravaged life could not be applied to an act so nakedly involuntary, the simple, basic exchange between need and release. The lines between artificiality and impulse could not be easily reconciled, and it hurt; Mick could see that much, even as his skin still prickled in the aftermath of David's helpless concession to need.

Finally, David slowly unwound himself from the hunched position the sneeze had thrown him into. His moved his right hand away from his face, gently flexing his long fingers, while his left remained delicately poised at his nose; he sniffled, primly. Another long pause, until slowly, with the fogged, abstracted grace of someone moving in sleep, he ran the line of a finger against the curve of his right nostril, his lips thinning as he inhaled. "Excuse me." His voice coaxed petulance into the words as the smooth skin of his brow puckered fretfully. The fingers of his free hand braced themselves against the floor, and for a moment it appeared that he might rise. Instead, he used his hand to push himself so that his back and shoulders arched in mirror, sweeping his legs inwards from where they had been propped bent at the knee in front of him and knitting ankle beneath thigh in a seemingly impossible paradigm of the laws of human flexibility. Now, his long legs herringboned in upon themselves, his body tilted at an angle that seemed more artful than naturally, fortuitously, pleasing in the shapes it wrought of his body, flattering to the sharp coast and blunt jar and adamantine lustre of bone-tautened skin; that, naturally, the most difficult performance of all. He had long struck picturesque attitudes whilst the world caved in with longing around him, but these were only a habitual management of his arms and legs, for he knew no other way of arranging himself and acting naturally was out of the question. For his form to have eased itself into so beautiful an aspect was no coincidence; that, the most difficult performance of all. Acting naturally.

However, this time there was incongruity setting the artful at odds, for when he at last moved his left hand away from his nose, his wrist flexed with the mathematical grace of a man who knows his every gesture is watched, there was a slight but startling river of crimson running thinly from his right nostril. The event of the colour of blood was so exceptional (the event of colour, against his ashen skin and mourner's black) that it seemed to puzzle even David, who examined his fingers where the blood formed a patina against the pads of his fingertips, an alert interest in his eyes unseen before now.

"David." This third and last time, he looked up, as though finally recognising his name; he blinked his wide, illogical eyes back into focus, his expression at once so unutterably, poignantly vulnerable that Mick's throat ached. They gazed silently at one another, their breathing fleetingly parelleled.

"Do you not at least alternate nostrils?" Mick said at last, with the sort of irony that one can only really ask such a question. The edges of David's mouth quirked.

"It only works on the right. On the left...it makes me..."

"Sneeze?"

"Yes." David smiled with sudden vigour, piercingly lovely. "Strange, don't you think?"

"I don't know, David." He didn't know; he didn't think; it was impossible to have an opinion about something that managed to achieve the pangs of both absurdity and heartbreak at once, not least because David now had the faintly distressed expression on his face that Mick assumed to indicate that another sneeze was approaching. This time, he got up and went to him, as the gossamer-slight, chimerical creature sitting cross-legged by the wall turned his head to hide nose and mouth in a gracefully cupped hand. "Look..." Mick began, with more firmness than he'd intended, but whatever else he was going to say was lost in the powerful release of David's sneeze, "hhh-TSCHH-hhhu!", and in a moment it seemed neither art nor performance to take the sharp-edged body in his arms, and it was natural to graze his lips against David's forehead as he convulsed once again in a violent sneeze, drawing a wet, exhausted sound out of him. Hard, slender fingers pinched the skin with their fierce grip on Mick's arm, calling on bruises later, and in the shivering aftermath, David snuffled into his friend's chest, his blonde head bent low, his face obscured. For a while, there was silence as David's breathing slowed and his grasp on Mick's arm loosened; then with a small sniff, he moved his head, just a little, not enough for Mick to see his eyes.

"It's not very mad, is it, Mick?" he whispered, his voice so small that for a moment Mick wondered if he had heard him at all. He held the angular form a little tighter.

"No, David, it's not very mad," he said at last. "Not very mad at all."

It is the most difficult performance in the world, acting naturally. Everything else is artful.

finis

Any comments, criticisms, opinions are loved.

Edited December 19, 2007 by Mistress Quickly

[Guest silverbirch]

This is wonderful!

I wasn't going to read, but I love Angela Carter. I do like 'Flesh and the Mirror' but I like 'The Bloody Chamber' better personally. Anyway your story is beautifully written, short and sweet.

Oh, are the sneezes inspired by the ones you can hear in 'Please Mr. Gravedigger'?

Silver x

[Mistress Quickly]

Ummm, let's see...just a LITTLE I love that song; didn't really base the sneezes directly on it, but it was certainly a valuable...ahem...research tool...teehee

Thanks for reading, btw. I had a suspicion it might be an acquired taste. Ah well. And yes, Angela Carter is fabulous; I'm pretty new to her work, but am just eating up her startlingly gorgeous short stories at the moment.

Edited October 22, 2008 by Lynne

[Sneesee]

This was absolutely lovely to read! I adore Bowie! And, well, this was perfect to read right before the holidays, thank you SOOOOOO much!

[Guest]

Oh. My. Goodness. wow. Once again, you astound me with the wonderfulness of your writing, and even your choice of characters! I've been a mild fan of David Bowie for ages, and then saw him in a few things, and heard some other things, and so on, and then discovered 'Please, Mr. Gravedigger', which was a great thing I have to say, and liked him a bit more, and now this! Gosh, it's just great. I did have it on 'quote', but I couldn't pick a bit to quote, so I had to delete it. It was all amazing. Thank you for posting it!

[Mistress Quickly]

Aw, thanks Kastrel. Glad you liked it If I can spread the Bowie love, I will, muahaha.

Edited January 3, 2008 by Mistress Quickly

[the texaskid]

All right, I know this thread is about three hundred years old, but I want to comment anyway so I will.

I love David Bowie, have done for a long long time, especially the Thin White Duke years. And this...if I say the sneezing was superfluous, don't take that the wrong way. The sneezing was great. (And is it wrong to find the whole idea of coke sneezes kind of hot? I always have, ever since my misspent youth and a boyfriend who always sneezed after snorting).

But even without it, this is just a beautiful piece of writing, and it's a gorgeous, atmospheric, incredibly visual and striking representation of the strange, fragile work of art David Bowie turned himself into during his mid-70s coked-up alien phase. It makes pretty pictures in my head.

Something about the whole idea of real person fic usually makes me vaguely uncomfortable, but this is good enough that I don't care. (Not to mention there's the whole kind of interesting question of whether a fic about any of David Bowie's incarnations is actually real person fic at all...there's a whole other conversation in that, isn't there?)

[ERWcst]

Ok, I'm sorry for posting on one as old as this.....but I JUST happened to stumble on this one while googling something about a David Bowie song for a friend that didn't believe me. Needless to say when I was alone I googled the same string again JUST to get back to here!!   Thank you Sssoooooo much for this.  I just adored it.  So sad, such a talent is gone WAY too soon.