Hello, all. So, this is a trial run. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this story, so I thought I would post this here just to see how people feel about it. Essentially, Gatsby handpicks an heir out for himself and leaves his entire estate to him after his death in order to keep his legacy going. Please let me know how you find it so I can see if I should continue! Thank you so much for reading!
Jay Gatsby has never been a particularly pragmatic sort. No, it was better to thrive from hope. It was better far to allow dreams to sustain his life. Of course, there were a few necessary practicalities that lingered on the horizon of his wandering mind. The house, for example. The business for another. But, beyond that, practicalities were left for others to deal with.
He had a man for nearly everything, it seemed. A man for the bills, a man for the cars, a man for the candles and electric lights. The service of those men was invaluable. They allowed Gatsby to retreat, to delve into his past to forge a future. And, in doing so, he realized there was one practical matter he had forgotten. Perhaps practical matter is not the entirely right word. It was an emotionally driven decision.
It came on a clear dark night as he looked in his trophy room. Mementoes of his time with Dan Cody suddenly spoke to him. They seemed to tell him that he had made a mistake in all of his wealth gathering. The same mistake that Dan Cody made. Undeserving people get all of the spoils, it occurred to Gatsby. The Cody family. Tom Buchanan. Perhaps it was a sense of duty that forced this thought into him. Perhaps it was spite. Perhaps, it was a lingering, quiet loneliness. Or, perhaps it was an inexhaustible sense of justice, the kind that looks at someone and says, "if you do well by the world, the world will do well by you."
No matter what pushed him to do it, it was decided all the same. Jay Gatsby would give to some poor wretch what Dan Cody had given to him all those years ago. He could never give someone good breeding or old money. But he could give someone training, just as Dan Cody had given him. He could give them wealth and position, two things Cody never gave him. He stood up from his high-back leather chair with an excited bounce.
There was so much to do, so many things to accomplish by tomorrow morning. A room to be prepared, a wardrobe to be ordered-no! Several wardrobes, one for each season and in several sizes- books to be chosen, a car to be brought round, a place to be set at the table... And then, there was the matter of finding the boy.
It would be difficult, of course. Gatsby knew that from the start. The boy would require a strength of character, a thirst for knowledge, and, above all, the ability to climb. Yes, that climbing would be the most important bit.
That night, when Gatsby lay in his bed, he looked out for a moment through the window. His face was painted with faint green light. And, surely, for a moment, he glimpsed the future. It danced in his eyes, all of it. Daisy holding his hand, draped in white at an altar in Louisville. Her daughter sitting in his lap, giggling as they opened presents before a splendidly decorated tree. And this boy, this son that he would adopt, growing into a man before his eyes. And, for a moment, as his eyes slid closed, Jay Gatsby must have been at peace.
He began his search the next morning. From the driver's seat of his yellow car, he saw everything, searched everything. He began with a few of Wolfsheim's crowd. Fruitless enterprise that was. The boys were nothing like the faint, foggy vision Gastby had dreamed up in the evening light. They were either content with their lives of running liquor and popping other men's champagne or they were entirely too sharp-elbowed, brutishly clawing their way toward seats of power. Both sorts coated Gatsby's stomach with a veiled disgust. The boy he sought would be a diamond in the rough. Someone like...well, someone like himself.
There were more stops in the city after his visit with Wolfsheim. The ballpark. The back stoops of restaurants he frequented and the front stoops of tenements now made light by stock market cash. But he found no young man touched by that special kind of light he sought. For a moment, as he drove the gilded streets of New York, a touch of heated panic brimmed Gatsby's cool skin. His jaw tightened and his grip on the steering wheel grew painful. It is only fitting that Gatsby would find his heir at the most unlikely of places. A stop light.
He sat there, enjoying the ogling eyes of passerby as they took in the sight of his magnificent car and splendid outfittings. But then, he heard shouts. Wild, excited ones. His head turned, and shortly after so did the steering wheel. Commotions call to Jay Gatsby as lighthouses call to ships in the night. He slammed on the breaks at the foot of the building's stairs and swallowed his surprise as he looked up. A library. He was standing at the bottom step of a library. But it is not that which entirely transfixed him. At the top of the stairs, the library doors slammed closed, like the final sliding of prison doors. Police brutality is nothing special, not in New York, not anywhere. Gatsby has witnessed it and commanded it.
But before him is the most startling image he has seen since arriving in New York. A figure was thrown to the ground, pushed from the arms of two vaguely familiar police officers. Blood flung through the air like party streamers against the white stone. The brutality continued, even as the boy tried to struggle, even as he tried to crawl to his feet.
He was touched by an extra light. Gatsby could see it. It was so tangible, so close, that Gatsby could have touched its soft wings if he stretched his arm just a little further. Taking long strides, tapping each step with the gold tip of his walking stick, Gatsby called out.
"Officers, officers!"
There was a solid, but unpronounced authority of his voice. It was the voice of a man who knows the power he holds, a man who isn't afraid to use it. Everything stopped at the sound of that voice. Looks brimming on guilt flashed across the two uniforms, as though a spell has been broken at Gatsby's words. They instantly parted, leaving a coughing boy at their feet. Gatsby pointed the end of his walking stick in the direction of the huddled mass on the ground.
"What, exactly, is going on here?" He asked.
He finished climbing the steps, taking the last few in bounding hops. The glasses did not slide from his eyes as he looked at the two guilty parties. An anxious shift tinged the air; the police officers changed their weight anxiously, like schoolchildren watching the clock for math class to dismiss. They recognized the man before them- who couldn't recognize the Jay Gatsby who gave so many officers joy rides at his Barbershop?- and, certainly, neither of them could believe the rotten turn of their luck.
"This young man was in the library-" That much was obvious. "And he was disturbing the other readers."
Gatsby finally turned his attention to the boy, who managed to move himself from a huddle mass on the ground, crawling over to the wall of the building. As the eagle lamp fixture looked on, the boy wrapped his arms around his knees, trying to catch his racing breath. A kind of fighting defeat pressed in on his shoulders, but there was a spirit in his clear, bloodied eyes that Gatsby cannot ignore. This is the one. He was certain of it. The boy's clothes spoke a life like the life James Gatz once endured. The buttons of his shirt must have ran away in a fit of angst once dirt and dust took up residence on the broadcloth. His shirt may have once been white, but there is no telling now. His shoestrings are mismatched. The dirty mop of hair on his head hasn't seen a brush in months. The only thing disturbing about him was the way he looked; no one wants a street rat in their library.
"I can take care of this from here, gentlemen."
This caught the attention of the injured boy. Both policemen looked ready to argue, but with one flash at Gatsby's smile, they were goners. It seemed no one was immune to his charms. When they became nothing but two blue blurs in the distance, blending in to the crowds passing by, Jay took a few cautious steps toward the boy. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew a handkerchief, presenting it with a magician's flourish.
There was a moment where something incommunicable passed between the two men, a kind of understanding that cannot broach words. An unspoken conversation that only broke when the red from the boy's lip stained the white cotton handkerchief. Gatsby removed his sunglasses and stared proudly at his prodigy.
"My name is Jay Gatsby. Want to tell me what that was all about?"
Jay Gatsby. Jay Gatsby. That name tickled the back of the bloodied kid's mind; like an old piano tune whose melody is half remembered or the colors of a sunset seen as a child, it edged on reality, but somehow eluded him all the same. Jay Gatsby. He looked out at the busy New York streets, watching the people doing their coming and going, oblivious to the lives happening on the library's front steps. It didn't hurt him as it used to. He no longer wished for New Yorkers to abandon their carelessness. It was something he accepted.
"I wasn't bothering nobody. I just wanted to read, that's all."
Gatsby felt the boy was on the brink of something. That special light that radiated from deep within him glowed a little brighter, even as the world seemed to beat him so mercilessly. He shook his head, rising to his feet with all of the strength he had. Gatsby admired the movement; he only faltered once.
"But they don't want me to read. They want to keep me right where I belong...the bottom."
A single hand pulled at the roots of his hair.
"But they can't keep me down forever."
The words barely rose over the din of the city's symphony. But Gatsby heard it, just as Gatsby hears everything. The boy balled up the ruined handkerchief and holds the ruined fabric outward. It meant nothing to him.
"What's your name?"
"Samuel."
Gatsby nodded. It was a solid enough name. Samuel Gatsby. Yes. It will do nicely.
"Sam, how would you like to have lunch with me-talk some things over?"
Please let me know what you think! I would love to hear if it should continue. WHile the beginning portion does focus on Gatsby and Samuel, it will eventually turn into a SamuelxOC romance... Just let me know! Thanks for reading!