(a/n: This chapter is fondly dedicated to Killer Cereal, who has patiently read all the bits of fic I have sent her way and has bucked me up when I've whined about whether anybody was reading my little literary ewe lamb. For a person of somewhat questionable sanity, she gives great advice, and has written some of my very favorite fanfics as well. I know she wants the brittana to get going here (who doesn't?), but it's not quite time yet, so instead have a little ersatz brittana, and my apologies. Also a big thank-you and shout out to Lauren H 91, for the comment she wrote, which made me smile. I'm glad some folks are reading it and enjoying it, at least.)
Small hands, slow and light, caressed Brittany's back, nudging aside her long blonde hair to touch the back of her neck. Tips of fingers gently glided over the exposed flesh of her back, lips eagerly following them. Lying supine and naked on her stomach, normally Brittany wasn't so passive during lovemaking, but this felt so, so good and she didn't want it to stop. And it didn't, because then there was tongue, a wet eager tongue licking just below her left ear. Oh yeah. The tongue licked with a bit more force, feeling more like sandpaper than a caress -
Brittany jolted awake, thanks in large part to Lord Tubbington's efforts. It was time for his second supper, after all. Brittany, still sleep-fogged, reached out a hand and petted him around the ears, "your timing really sucks, Tubbykins," she said ruefully, "I was having the best dream." He placed his forelegs on her shoulder, possibly a warning shot fired in response to the odious nickname. Brittany got the message and carefully dislodged him. "Come on, Tubbs, let's get you fed, and then Mercedes and I are gonna go over to the Double O because we've got a gig!"
It had been a pretty strange day for Brittany. Routinely sure-footed and graceful, even in the perilous New England winter, she'd slipped on the icy slush entering Emerson's main building and had slid into the bulletin board just within the doorway, vertically face planting against a newly tacked notice. In her face – quite literally - was:
GOT TALENT?
WRITING OPPORTUNITY ~ NEW TV SHOW NEEDS NEW WRITER ~ COULD BE YOU!
... and the small print went on to stress how it was a great chance to get in on the ground floor and work with some of the television industry's best people, led by Dinky Littelmann, the genius behind Slip and Tuck. It also mentioned that queer candidates would be especially welcome. Hmm. Brittany's first reaction was that it was a joke, and her second reaction was that it was a publicity stunt. She knew very well that new hire writers were few and far-between and owed more to propinquity than talent a lot of the time. One of her professors, who had written for several TV shows, had once told her that Hollywood writing was all about "who you know, and who'll you do," and then proceeded to ascertain if she'd be willing to do him. (She wasn't.) It had been a sort of life lesson. In any case, Brittany was intrigued by the flyer, but had a "rule of three" for anything of obviously life-changing importance, namely that there had to be three points of contact to triangulate the level of necessity to change. "Math is cool and can be applied to any situation" is a motto to live by, in Brittany's opinion.
Later on when she'd gotten home, she found a copy of the exact same flyer, with a note from Mercedes saying she'd found it at Berklee and thought of her and she should write something up and submit it, what could it hurt? Hmm. That made two points and gave her something to think about as she made her way to her bedroom for a quick nap before the night's band gig, a nap that would ultimately be rudely interrupted by (the always hungry) Lord Tubbington.
Boston and surrounding cities shared an antiquated public transit system colloquially known as the T. When Brittany first moved to Boston and had seen the large round T signs everywhere, she'd been singularly excited, assuming from the ancient subway cars she'd seen that the T stood for time-travel and that all anybody had to do was board one of these magic cars and time and space would be bent and maybe she could finally track down her long dead great-many-times-aunt Prudence Pierce and they could have a beer and maybe talk about Sierpinski triangles and stuff. It had been a sadly bitter blow to find out that the subway was just a subway, only so old and so in need of upgrades that getting from point A to point B was sometimes more theoretical than it ought to have been. The O'Malley-O'Neill's bar (known far and wide as the Double O) was in Kendall Square in Cambridge, which would mean an optimistically quick, albeit non-time-traveling, subway ride over the Charles River from Boston. The bar was located on the very outer fringes of MIT and it tended to be packed nightly with enthusiastic nerds and beer fans. Siobhan O'Neill, a canny and beautiful redhead married to one of the many no-good, no-account O'Malleys that littered up the place (her own words, spoken often), had further had the genius idea of having the occasional local band night, since MIT and environs had more than its share of musically inclined, if not always musically talented, people. One band formed right in the nearby Stata Center, for instance, was comprised of eight scientists playing musical rulers. There was nary a dry eye on those special nights when they performed a moving cover of ABBA's "Fernando" on their rulers, and after a few beers they unwound enough to also explain in detail how and at what rate the sound waves traveled from their rulers to the other end of the bar. They always guaranteed a fun evening. But in more recent times the MIT band of renown was The Pocket Protectors, of which Brittany was a proud member. Mercedes had been taken aback when Brittany sheepishly admitted she went to MIT too ("Lord have mercy, Brittany, isn't one school enough for anybody? When do you sleep?"). But Mercedes had come to love Brittany's bandmates – Stacy, Candy and Anna - and would occasionally provide power vocals guaranteed to bring down the house. Mercedes saw it as great practice in a low pressure, fun environment, and Brittany loved to hear Mercedes sing and watch her have fun. Evenings spent with The Pocket Protectors were full of win.
The opening strains of "Witchy Woman" had barely begun when the audience members started hooting, hollering and making impassioned pleas to "CRUSH IT!" Though the words and level of enthusiasm could be somewhat frightening to strangers who'd wandered into the bar unawares, the words were actually innocuous enough, and directed at the lead guitarist, Candace Zhang, who was in a doctorate program studying Theoretical Biomechanics when she wasn't showing off her mad axe skills on the Double O's diminutive stage. It was hard enough being a lady science nerd, harder still being one named Candace and therefore inevitably called Candy by everyone. The final and ultimate indignity of Candy Zhang's life had come with the release of Candy Crush, which soon became the only thing anyone, including her professors, called her. The poor woman didn't stand a chance. So she "crushed it" with her usual skill and brought the house down, before things got a bit calmer for the rest of their set, which ended with Mercedes jumping up onto the stage and owning a powerful rendition of the classic Gershwin song "Someone to Watch Over Me" by channeling her inner Ella Fitzgerald. (The Pocket Protectors were nothing if not eclectic in their song choices, probably because the only proviso attached to bringing a song into their set list was that they all liked it.) Trooping off the small stage for their break before their second set, Siobhan came by, congratulating them and gushing to Mercedes that soon Siobhan would be bragging to everybody that she knew her before she was famous while quickly passing out beers to the women and offering her husband "totally for free" to any or all of them. As always, there were no takers.
It was while they were having their beers and fending off the attentions of their public that Stacy, the best (and only) drummer that The Pocket Protectors had ever had, pulled out her phone excitedly, nudging Candy to do the same. They both tapped screens for a moment and then showed Brittany online versions of the same flyer she and Mercedes had seen on their respective campuses.
"We stumbled across it on tumblr," Stacy admitted.
"When we were trying to be cool," Candy added.
"Yeah, that," Stacy said, beaming with pride.
"Stace, you're wearing your atoms shirt," Brittany pointed to Stacy's torso, which read You Can't Trust Atoms, They Make Up Everything!
"Yeah, it's cool," Stacy said doubtfully, looking down at her chest and sighing. Nearby Mercedes took a swig of her beer, rolled her eyes, and reflected on the directions your life can travel when you're not fully paying attention. Still ...
"That's three!" Mercedes exclaimed, with way too much enthusiasm, possibly because she'd been drinking beer all evening while the women had been performing. Brittany looked skeptical, but was forced to acknowledge that the triangulation was complete. She'd have to at least seriously consider it.
"What have you got to lose, anyway?" Candy and Mercedes were both quick to point out. "Yeah!" Stacy added, a beat behind. (This was sometimes an issue when the band was playing as well.)
"Well, for one thing, I haven't graduated from Emerson yet," Brittany said reasonably.
"But this is what you really want to do, right? You've said that screenwriting is so special because it can really make a difference," Candy said.
"And my God! Dinky Littelmann!" Mercedes was excited, slightly drunk, and still riding the high of her recent performance. "He always does such groundbreaking stuff! He's ... groundbreaking! I'd love to work with someone like him," Mercedes concluded wistfully. "Like, he's completely color-blind, as far as anybody can tell. I remember reading something he said about how a character isn't written to be white or black, but to be ..." She trailed off, suddenly uncertain of what Dinky Littelmann's characters were.
"Groundbreaking?" Brittany teased lightly, but she hadn't missed just how hopeful and wistful Mercedes had looked. Graduation time was coming up quickly for both of them, and they were both trying to land their dream jobs with all the odds stacked against them.
The second set was a bit more raucous than the first and beer had flowed so freely that their playing was more enthusiastic than accurate, and as they were breaking down after the set, they were curiously maudlin. It was Candy who put their mood into words.
"You're gonna go be a famous writer person," she said, pointing somewhat inaccurately in Brittany's general direction, then turned to Mercedes, "and you'll be this super famous singer, which you certainly should be, don't get me wrong, but you'll both forget about us and we'll miss you so, so much. Do you remember when we only knew how to play 4.3 songs?" She slurred, tears running down her cheeks.
"4.6," Brittany and the rest of the band said in unison, which led to an epic eye-roll from Mercedes, and plaintive, sotto voce muttering that sounded like "math nerds ... I hang out with math nerds, this is my life now, why, Lord, why?"
But then Candy's tears turned to full-on sobs and Brittany, alarmed, scooped her up in a deep, heartfelt hug.
"Don't cry, Candy, we'll always be friends, we'll always be in touch, we'll always be The Pocket Protectors," Brittany soothed. "It's okay, honey, it's okay ..."
"It's ... it's ... not ttttthat," Candy stammered through her tears. "I just realized that ... whhhen I get ... mmmy doctorate everybody is gonna call me Dr Candy Crush! Why couldn't I have been nnnamed Gerrrtrude or something normal like that?" She took a deep, shuddering breath and tried to collect herself. "You know, my parents were huge Murphy Brown fans. That's why I'm Candy Crush now. Who watches freaking, fucking Murphy Brown? Who? WHO?!" She paused, her tears suddenly turning into laughter, "I'm an owl!"
On this somewhat disturbing note, the evening ended, with Stacy and the ever-silent Anna balancing an imbalanced Candy between them, and Mercedes and Brittany heading back to Boston.
When they got back to their apartment, and Lord Tubbington had been fed yet again, Brittany found that she couldn't sleep, despite the long day and the evening's consumption of beer. She started to kick around what she thought of as "word bubbles" in her head, and slowly expanded those until she had a germ of an idea, and then she sat up very straight and reached for her laptop. She knew what she would write for her GOT TALENT? submission.