A/N: If I owned this television series, I wouldn't be writing on a laptop that pauses every few seconds, now WOULD I? (I am, in case that response was too snarkily evasive for you copyright-infringement-catcher-demons.)
If you know me- and I am assuming you don't, in writing this,- you know that I currently harbor an obsession with the brilliant actor, novelist and all-too-literal-genius, Stephen Fry, one that extends only so far as the point that I am reading his books and watching everything I hear he's in. XP
THUS, I am intrigued by his character on the popular television drama, Bones. However, it upsets me to find that his character has no distinction on the character listing. (Yes, I AM aware that Doctor G.G. Wyatt was in, perhaps, five percent of all episodes. I complain anyway.) So, I am starting to write some drabbling in his honor in an intellectual and slightly slashy lens, partially because of the actor, and partially because I love elaborating characters who do not get much elaboration time. (Yes, I AM aware that homosexual actors needn't always play homosexual characters, and such is certainly true for Fry. Sorry that I'm working Wyatt this way, if you are at all peeved by it. As a teenaged girl, male slash is an unfortunate little fancy of mine.)
Well, I hope that covers everything that may annoy people about the following, except for the actual writing! As the Bard said, "LAY ON, MACDUFF!" 8D
"I observe social phenomena."
That is the statement that defines my entire life, as it has been led to this point. One hates to say that one has come down so low, down to the moment where one can say that one may be properly called by a sequence of four words... ones that could just as easily be used in the description of a career path... But that is just it. The years have turned me against myself, as the aesthetics always said that they would. Each year has robbed me of more experience of life until this point of understanding that nothing shall ever return, and, I expect, I shall someday be able to call myself by one single adjective, that pin's prick that is so incisive that it will draw blood.
As any self-respecting man, I wish that I could say more to justify my life, but psychology makes one into something of a realist, whether or not they choose to allow it to enter into their work. And, so, I can see each event come before my eyes as yet another observation of what peoples' reactions will be, starting with the fantastical tryst of music.
This was, of course, an ill-founded attempt in my youth to explain myself while hiding my identity. It is an oxymoron that I did not see, then, working against myself. By the same token, my youth was the only time in life at which point something could have come of such a threatening and self-defeating situation. Ignorance worked to my advantage... but my ability to see on all sides at one time frightfully barred that discovery which makes men into greats in the way of passionate expression or leads them down the road into adrenaline addiction and, deeper, illegal ones. Every place I turned, I was fraught by a knowledge that I didn't desire borne of a college-level psychology class offered at my secondary school. Why? Why do I allow these grotesques in when I can see that they are only blinded by the passion of a song? (One can only call them 'grotesques'- they are not the working gargoyles of Notre Dame, but, rather, merely the stone spirits which come to life when one desires them the least.) Something inside me disallowed me from continuing in this vein- a rebellion inside myself against the percieved rebellion outside. How interesting.
So I am led to the stage of my life in which everything becomes interesting, every person becomes something to be clinically observed and prodded at by a verbal scalpel that hasn't even yet been washed clean of the prejudices and bloody perceptions of the case before. The schooling and every bit of information that makes one so accursedly didactic, and far beyond one's years, have led to a certain embitterment. Even today, well into my fifties, I feel like I have become insufferable enough to be able to reasonably fool any man into believing I am fifteen years older than the year of my birth tells me.
What is wrong with being didactic, if I must tell you, is the fact that it makes one cold- makes one different. And it is the sort of coldness that is torturous in a whole new way than those passed, for you are not merely estranged, or the 'weird' child on the playground, no- you are simply there to solve and repeat while watching real lives go by without you. You are the teacher, never the participant, and everything you say is taken with that thought, that trust that the person 'knows what he is doing', after, perhaps, one or two facts have been proven true by your voice. Any other man would appreciate this, I suppose as I pen this, but I can't, when I see in the responses of my patients how my offerings of information can so quickly be molded in their minds as perception of either smugness or cruelty. Smugness, obviously, which comes from a combination of qualities that one would think should not matter- referring to myself as a 'Doctor',- or 'Chef', now, if that laughable change makes a modicum of difference,- my Englishness, and even the very elements of my face and the contures of my smile that make me out to be a man I do not think I am. Looking back, perhaps that is why I can call myself wiser in my boyhood for having hidden my identity.
Cruelty is a different beast entirely, and one that I was unaware of in the virgin hours of my practise. Not in the observation of people, certainly- there is no greater depress that can be placed on the seeping wound of a life's gladness than physical or emotional abuse, with or without a 'reasoned' cause- but about my knowledge. There was a brief time in the passing of teenage cynicism and the beginning of a life on my own that allowed me to believe in the pure, chaste sanctity of fact, and the idea that each person could take it with all of the delighted pleasantry that I did. It really is a heartbreak not unlike that of losing a loved one, when one sees that there are people who take hostility to knowledge, and, yet, it happens almost daily now. Looking back, I can see the dumbfounded codfish expression on my face as I received my awakening- it was some short time into the beginning, a man dealing with a very violent and needless dispute with his wife that left her the aggressor, a situation that left the man feeling at his most powerless, thoroughly alone and emasculated. Every day he would come, and every day I would speak to him on the psychology of the individual- tell him what I thought this woman I had never met but through a fearful spouse's words was thinking, and how to proceed under the assumption. He was not a man I considered of great intelligence through our work together, yet... he told me how heartless I was being by offering my clinical opinion. I was no longer of help, I was simply trying to be the clever boy, the first one to work out the solution by myself.
I remedied my ways since that point, but fear that I may have come to an opposite extreme by the end of my career with the F.B.I., that of allowing my patients so much time to take things for themselves that the moment I said the words 'I know', or, even worse, that what they thought was 'wrong', I could see the long-suffering exasperation in them.
What is worst about this, the last piece in this dreaded puzzle of my null-existence, is the fact that I glean such abysmal pleasure out of telling people what to do, of controlling my environment- lord of 'all I survey', as it were, in the field of the mind, and understanding those elements that show how each person is, in essence, exactly the same. This curious, clinical control over life makes it less apparent that I have absolutely no control over those parts that age would have me cling to for the remainder of my years, those periods of sentimentalisation that were existent for, perhaps, only a moment before, in my learned youth, which cast it soon off again in its better understanding of humanity. My creeping middle-aged naivety has brought them back with a vengeance that makes my innards coil together in physical resistance of a virus that I was sure had been brief, and, afterwards, gone forever.
I cannot say that it started with my sudden and mad desire to become a chef- but, then, as a man of deeply-running understanding of people, I cannot say that I did it without knowledge of myself, either, unfortunate as that is. It was a deliberate decision, and, really, only another way to support my proposed thesis, that I am defined by the desire to observe and record people in unprecedented- or, at least, unobserved- positions. I wanted to take charge again, to gorge myself on a veritable fucking feast of truths and theories on silver platters that were displayed as equals on the same sodding table. Anyone could see that it was not a passion that ran through me for my life- could anything be given so grand a title as that, the 'life's dream'? That one, great goal to make one realise everything they ever were, and that the world is truly that clear, pure glass globe held in space by a nest woven of hardened honey? That is far too much of romance... there is no romance for me. Neither in the mad efforts to find that elusive thing to prove that there is never any place for doubt or cynicism that would finally put a manic mind at ease, nor romance in the more carnal sense of things.
Shall I come so easily onto this lament? I suppose that it is inevitable, in these moments, when I feel that I would like to cease existing.
Further evidence for my thesis comes in what attraction I have to people, beyond the platonic, if such a thing can be said to exist for a dodgy, aging English psychiatrist. I know that it does not seem to exist in others, the perception of such feeling. Perhaps I hide it more efficiently than others can- after all, I have been so trained. (Yet it all comes spilling upon the page...) I hardly believe this latter conjecture to be true, but, then, briskness, traces of silver hair and an Oxbridge accent are all that are required to acquire a fixed- even justifiable- stereotype. The object of my 'affection', if it can be given so saccharine a title as that, is none other than that doctor who has come to working very recently as a psychiatrist for the F.B.I.- their own Doctor Sweets, that young man who holds within himself such damnable perfection. (Why should 'perfection' be a damnable offense? Ibelieve that it should be, at any rate. Perfection in evil and perfection in good are not opposites, for each is an exercise in excess.) It is perfection in a way that cannot be described but by one who would label a person 'perfection', of course, perfection defined by the terms of that doddering old redcoat who can likely remember his experience on Breeds Hill all those years ago. If you care to know, I define perfection in the ability to maintain a reasonable dichotomy- a light side and a dark, balanced to create a person who does not have to live at extremes, as I do. A person with the type of control that does not create a constrained individual...
But I am trying to fool you if I shall go on all about the man's personable nature, of course, and deny everything else. The darkness that I can feel hanging over my head like Damocles' saber is loosening my tongue- I shall likely be embarrassed to think that I had ever written such, until I remind myself that when one threatens oneself with death, one will say most anything to bargain their way out again.
He is light and dark in the sense of beauty as much as that of personality, with large, dark eyes and porcelain skin, and a voice that I can only imagine that, when at an ecstatic loss for words, would sound the way a sheep's-gut violin sounds in relation to an identical instrument of metal strings- incomparable.
This is the only observation of social phenomena worth having, of course, as any man will tell you, that of ecstasy. And any man- especially he who cannot throw out his chest and call himself 'a genius'- is the best judge of what is the most satisfying in mind and feeling. The grandest music and therapeutic words and delicately flavorful meals are only millionths of a degree towards that finality, that absolute epitome of romance, the most base and the most divine conflict resolved in love. And I am destined to desire it from a man who is openly and ardently expressive of love for a woman. Is there, then, a greater tragedy? The denial of the best of things?
For the most virtuous man, no. For any man who can call himself a man, and be called so by his fellows. But for the outsider looking in? It is merely something to pass outside his field of vision, just as easily as an insignificant pebble on the landscape would.
I fear that the sword shall fall if I continue on this vein. Perhaps this time, things will not get better. It always feels that way, yet each time there is an overcompensating resurgence- an psychological condition easily diagnosed, but one that sways absolutely. Were I the sort for prayer, I would come to my knees with the vain hope that things would descend further into darkness this time, so that I would never have to see that fucking friendly face sound the words 'Doctor Wyatt' again.
A/N: Hey! Whaddyaknow? I drabbled on for two-thousand words! 8D A bit more, actually. As if you cared.
I apologise for anyone who thought that this would be all about Sweets, because, well, IT WASN'T! (I expect that I'll have said something about it being from Wyatt's perspective in the description, but, anyway...)
If you want to know about this... This will be in two chapters, this being the depressive side, and the following being the manic. I know it's wrong to put actors in the place of their characters, as I mentioned above, but... I couldn't resist making Wyatt bi-polar, as Fry is. (Hey, besides being a reflection of the actor, it's also SOMEWHAT interesting... eh?)
It's a weird premise, borne from my love of writing depressively and contemplatively as men, despite being a seventeen year-old girl. I apologise if it doesn't please.
I am posting this as my first fanfiction (recently, anyway) in a "popular" genre, my others being in Jeeves and (weirdly) Lord of the Flies. I would G-R-E-A-T-L-Y appreciate a read followed by a pleasant little review (or unpleasant, as the case may be. Depends on how you like this).
The manic side is going to be oh-so-sugary about Doctor Sweets, I don't know if I'll have any teeth left by the end. If you didn't care for this depression, but weren't totally adverse to my premise and writing style, perhaps you can stick around for some fluff later. XP
All the best,
-Raven
