FIC: Super!Alan
Jan. 26th, 2005 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
3pipeproblemWritten for the everyday superheroes fanfic challenge.
Alan with superpowers. Shameless attempts at imitation of Kavalier and Clay. And that's about it. Oh--I don't read comics, so, you know...pretend it's because I'm poverty-stricken and please don't mock.
Nothing started the day quite like a swerve of jagged yellow lightning rupturing the panel in two. Well, Kona coffee always gave things a jolt, but that, unlike the flimsy pages resting on his palms as though he were preparing to preach from them, happened to be in short supply. Alan turned the page— while it rendered the text practically unreadable, the looming shadow of the conference room table did lend the drawings an interesting nuance—and tilted his head to a more advantageous angle.
“Mr. Shore.” He thought he’d detected irritation, but whenever he chanced to browse a comic book—chanced, as though it’d been somehow mistakenly included with the Globe’s Wednesday entertainment section—he began detecting any number of things, entertaining thoughts of senses heightened and radioactive substances spilled like soda over the sidewalk.
“Sixty-eight, Miss Hershenhorn,” he announced triumphantly, wetting a fingertip and turning the page. When the sensation of a glower somewhere in the vicinity persisted, he had no choice but to tear his eyes from a strikingly rendered vision of Storm emerging from a curtain of rain, bosom thrust outward for the benefit of…humankind, and face the withering stare of Paul Lewiston. “My apologies. You caught me mid-flashback.”
“Mr. Shore, as I’ve informed you time and time again, this is a staff meeting, not an opportunity for you to indulge in—“
“Ultimate X-Men?” Alan asked, managing to produce the comic from beneath the table and raise his eyebrows in perfect harmony.
Brad dipped his head slightly so that he might mutter into his right shoulder, “Something new every week.”
“That’s the general idea. Maintain consumer interest without the added expense of nicotine.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
Alan spread his hands, allowing the slim volume to topple after a momentary balancing act. “Well, whomever the yes-man at your right was supposed to be, Lori appears to have replaced him. Although I’m sure that given the proper incentive, she says ‘yes’ wonderfully.”
Three people—the three who happened to be seated opposite him, actually—fixed him with glares ranging from seething hatred to suppressed amusement. It made for an excellent panel, one he mentally captioned “meeting adjourned.”
He flipped through every single page for the sound of it alone, that rich crackling noise only ink-saturated paper could produce. When Tara stepped into the office he was examining pink-tinged blood and attempting to mentally reduce furniture to simple, bold strokes.
“What are you doing, Alan?” She sounded faintly bemused; the fact that it was a comic book full of tightly-clad, invariably attractive mutants rather than a copy of Hustler on his desk appeared to have earned him a point or two.
He looked up. “Research. Care to read over my shoulder?”
She moved to the side of his desk with calm, continuous grace that he simply couldn’t imagine boxing into an illustration. “You have a client who’s suing Marvel.”
He chuckled and, for her benefit, turned back to the beginning, to the impressive two-page spread of a fight with every shred in clothing, every bit of pierced flesh drawn in so that you could imagine the texture of the inner lining of the masked villain’s jacket against the surreal meld of light and dark brown hues—equally textured, in comics the background, the air had texture—that comprised the backdrop to the scene.
Tara looked impatient and rather bored.
“No.” He leaned back in his chair to demonstrate that the stapled collection of pages he’d purchased for $2.25 bore no hold over him whatsoever. “If only.”
She perched herself delicately on the edge of the desk and he felt a momentary flail of separation anxiety as the comic was whisked away. “What, then?”
“I recently discovered I have the power to project beams of concussive force from my eyes.”
She looked at him sideways. “That’s wonderful news, Alan, but isn’t this the sort of conversation you ought to be having with Denny?”
“On those occasions when you feel I’ve gone completely round the bend, you’re free to inform me of that fact, and you know perfectly well Denny would be jealous.”
“All right,” she crossed her arms and he was torn between basking in the elongated “all” and lamenting the obstructed view. She tossed the comic book to the desk—he winced at the carelessness—and raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”
He raised an eyebrow back. “It’s red. I’ve yet to ascertain range or the specific degree of force, but given time—“
“Alan.”
“It does not, however, come with accompanying onomatopoetic exclamations in bubble letters and incidentally, the member of the X-Men who possesses this power is rather…I wanted x-ray vision.”
Tara frowned at him, oblivious to the confessional heft of the remark, so he reached for the comic to once more begin at the beginning. It didn’t seem to want to move from where Tara had thrown it, primarily because her hand was resting on top of it.
He allowed his eyes to meander from hand to arm and, after a scenic detour across her chest, to her face. “Go on,” she repeated. “Demonstrate.”
He struggled for a moment to consign her expression to either the realm of disinterest or that of skepticism. Did people ever look skeptical in comic books? Not that he could recall. It was a waste of time. Why draw in the arched eyebrow, the faintly disbelieving stare, when you could douse a panel with oranges and reds and pinks and explosions and swirling capes and POWs and preemptively eradicate all skepticism without even acknowledging its existence.
“It isn’t altogether that impressive,” he said. “Aside from being red.”
He looked across the room. That was it.
Alan enjoyed watching it, enjoyed the catalogue of descriptive nouns for light that he’d scroll through at his leisure—wave, particle, beam, burst, yes, shaft—and from which he’d finally select the one most in accordance with his mood.
He had an affinity for problems, and not only for causing them; they clung to him, were directed toward his office or his name in the phone book or his face in the courtroom by some irresistible force. He also had a way of looking at them, or maybe the novelty lay in the fact that he looked at them at all. A problem: a set line, a premise, and everything else ready to lock into place around it with the right slant of viewpoint.
His trashcan had vanished, if something that had exploded and come to be embedded in various portions of the wall could be described as “vanished.”
Whenever he did this, it felt like everything had locked into place.
“This should save us at least a thousand dollars in shredding costs, don’t you think?”
“You just—“
Her mouth hung open, reminding Alan why he wasn’t fond of panic. It wasn’t attractive on anyone, not even Tara. “I’ll replace it. Better yet, Brad will.” When she didn’t respond, he sighed. “Do you need a drink?”
She shook her head, kept shaking her head as he struggled to adjust to a completely unfamiliar repertoire of body language; the way she was gnawing her lip, the exactitude with which her eyes avoided his.
The way she flinched when he stood to assure her that everything was going to be all right.
“I used to be fond of them,” Alan admitted, sipping his scotch. He’d made an attempt to use it as a coaster, but the comic had proven remarkably ill suited to beverage bearing. In fact, a corner of a rooftop showdown of some sort still clung to the bottom of his glass.
“Sure you did,” Denny agreed. “Kids like superheroes. But you gave that up, because now you have a real hero.”
“Denny Crane.” He could see that much coming, although of late his foresight had a tendency to flicker.
“I,” Denny said, in such a way that Alan couldn’t tell whether he was about to make a profound statement or lose his train of thought entirely “…have had a lot more sex than anybody in a comic book.”
“You forget that all superpowers are essentially a means of having better sex,” Alan pointed out.
Denny grunted in assent. “What about Batman? He doesn’t have superpowers.”
”Batman has money.”
For want of anywhere else to rest his eyes, he surveyed the city. The balcony extended just far enough to eliminate any glimpse of the street. From here they inhabited a world of towers, buildings that pinnacled among the clouds. The lowest rooftop—he squinted, searching it out—that was ground level.
He hadn’t liked comic books because he’d been a kid who wanted a hero in his life. He’d liked comic books up until 10:17 this morning because…He took a drink. Because they made lousy coasters.
“What’d she say?” Denny asked at long last.
“Who?” He had to stop himself from imagining what sort of sound beams of concussive force would make upon colliding with the window.
“Your girl. The English one.”
“Not mine,” he corrected automatically, laughed ruefully into his glass. “Certainly not anymore.” He glanced over at Denny. “Not unless you can turn back time.”
The great Denny Crane nearly choked on his drink. “Again?”
Alan with superpowers. Shameless attempts at imitation of Kavalier and Clay. And that's about it. Oh--I don't read comics, so, you know...pretend it's because I'm poverty-stricken and please don't mock.
Nothing started the day quite like a swerve of jagged yellow lightning rupturing the panel in two. Well, Kona coffee always gave things a jolt, but that, unlike the flimsy pages resting on his palms as though he were preparing to preach from them, happened to be in short supply. Alan turned the page— while it rendered the text practically unreadable, the looming shadow of the conference room table did lend the drawings an interesting nuance—and tilted his head to a more advantageous angle.
“Mr. Shore.” He thought he’d detected irritation, but whenever he chanced to browse a comic book—chanced, as though it’d been somehow mistakenly included with the Globe’s Wednesday entertainment section—he began detecting any number of things, entertaining thoughts of senses heightened and radioactive substances spilled like soda over the sidewalk.
“Sixty-eight, Miss Hershenhorn,” he announced triumphantly, wetting a fingertip and turning the page. When the sensation of a glower somewhere in the vicinity persisted, he had no choice but to tear his eyes from a strikingly rendered vision of Storm emerging from a curtain of rain, bosom thrust outward for the benefit of…humankind, and face the withering stare of Paul Lewiston. “My apologies. You caught me mid-flashback.”
“Mr. Shore, as I’ve informed you time and time again, this is a staff meeting, not an opportunity for you to indulge in—“
“Ultimate X-Men?” Alan asked, managing to produce the comic from beneath the table and raise his eyebrows in perfect harmony.
Brad dipped his head slightly so that he might mutter into his right shoulder, “Something new every week.”
“That’s the general idea. Maintain consumer interest without the added expense of nicotine.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
Alan spread his hands, allowing the slim volume to topple after a momentary balancing act. “Well, whomever the yes-man at your right was supposed to be, Lori appears to have replaced him. Although I’m sure that given the proper incentive, she says ‘yes’ wonderfully.”
Three people—the three who happened to be seated opposite him, actually—fixed him with glares ranging from seething hatred to suppressed amusement. It made for an excellent panel, one he mentally captioned “meeting adjourned.”
He flipped through every single page for the sound of it alone, that rich crackling noise only ink-saturated paper could produce. When Tara stepped into the office he was examining pink-tinged blood and attempting to mentally reduce furniture to simple, bold strokes.
“What are you doing, Alan?” She sounded faintly bemused; the fact that it was a comic book full of tightly-clad, invariably attractive mutants rather than a copy of Hustler on his desk appeared to have earned him a point or two.
He looked up. “Research. Care to read over my shoulder?”
She moved to the side of his desk with calm, continuous grace that he simply couldn’t imagine boxing into an illustration. “You have a client who’s suing Marvel.”
He chuckled and, for her benefit, turned back to the beginning, to the impressive two-page spread of a fight with every shred in clothing, every bit of pierced flesh drawn in so that you could imagine the texture of the inner lining of the masked villain’s jacket against the surreal meld of light and dark brown hues—equally textured, in comics the background, the air had texture—that comprised the backdrop to the scene.
Tara looked impatient and rather bored.
“No.” He leaned back in his chair to demonstrate that the stapled collection of pages he’d purchased for $2.25 bore no hold over him whatsoever. “If only.”
She perched herself delicately on the edge of the desk and he felt a momentary flail of separation anxiety as the comic was whisked away. “What, then?”
“I recently discovered I have the power to project beams of concussive force from my eyes.”
She looked at him sideways. “That’s wonderful news, Alan, but isn’t this the sort of conversation you ought to be having with Denny?”
“On those occasions when you feel I’ve gone completely round the bend, you’re free to inform me of that fact, and you know perfectly well Denny would be jealous.”
“All right,” she crossed her arms and he was torn between basking in the elongated “all” and lamenting the obstructed view. She tossed the comic book to the desk—he winced at the carelessness—and raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”
He raised an eyebrow back. “It’s red. I’ve yet to ascertain range or the specific degree of force, but given time—“
“Alan.”
“It does not, however, come with accompanying onomatopoetic exclamations in bubble letters and incidentally, the member of the X-Men who possesses this power is rather…I wanted x-ray vision.”
Tara frowned at him, oblivious to the confessional heft of the remark, so he reached for the comic to once more begin at the beginning. It didn’t seem to want to move from where Tara had thrown it, primarily because her hand was resting on top of it.
He allowed his eyes to meander from hand to arm and, after a scenic detour across her chest, to her face. “Go on,” she repeated. “Demonstrate.”
He struggled for a moment to consign her expression to either the realm of disinterest or that of skepticism. Did people ever look skeptical in comic books? Not that he could recall. It was a waste of time. Why draw in the arched eyebrow, the faintly disbelieving stare, when you could douse a panel with oranges and reds and pinks and explosions and swirling capes and POWs and preemptively eradicate all skepticism without even acknowledging its existence.
“It isn’t altogether that impressive,” he said. “Aside from being red.”
He looked across the room. That was it.
Alan enjoyed watching it, enjoyed the catalogue of descriptive nouns for light that he’d scroll through at his leisure—wave, particle, beam, burst, yes, shaft—and from which he’d finally select the one most in accordance with his mood.
He had an affinity for problems, and not only for causing them; they clung to him, were directed toward his office or his name in the phone book or his face in the courtroom by some irresistible force. He also had a way of looking at them, or maybe the novelty lay in the fact that he looked at them at all. A problem: a set line, a premise, and everything else ready to lock into place around it with the right slant of viewpoint.
His trashcan had vanished, if something that had exploded and come to be embedded in various portions of the wall could be described as “vanished.”
Whenever he did this, it felt like everything had locked into place.
“This should save us at least a thousand dollars in shredding costs, don’t you think?”
“You just—“
Her mouth hung open, reminding Alan why he wasn’t fond of panic. It wasn’t attractive on anyone, not even Tara. “I’ll replace it. Better yet, Brad will.” When she didn’t respond, he sighed. “Do you need a drink?”
She shook her head, kept shaking her head as he struggled to adjust to a completely unfamiliar repertoire of body language; the way she was gnawing her lip, the exactitude with which her eyes avoided his.
The way she flinched when he stood to assure her that everything was going to be all right.
“I used to be fond of them,” Alan admitted, sipping his scotch. He’d made an attempt to use it as a coaster, but the comic had proven remarkably ill suited to beverage bearing. In fact, a corner of a rooftop showdown of some sort still clung to the bottom of his glass.
“Sure you did,” Denny agreed. “Kids like superheroes. But you gave that up, because now you have a real hero.”
“Denny Crane.” He could see that much coming, although of late his foresight had a tendency to flicker.
“I,” Denny said, in such a way that Alan couldn’t tell whether he was about to make a profound statement or lose his train of thought entirely “…have had a lot more sex than anybody in a comic book.”
“You forget that all superpowers are essentially a means of having better sex,” Alan pointed out.
Denny grunted in assent. “What about Batman? He doesn’t have superpowers.”
”Batman has money.”
For want of anywhere else to rest his eyes, he surveyed the city. The balcony extended just far enough to eliminate any glimpse of the street. From here they inhabited a world of towers, buildings that pinnacled among the clouds. The lowest rooftop—he squinted, searching it out—that was ground level.
He hadn’t liked comic books because he’d been a kid who wanted a hero in his life. He’d liked comic books up until 10:17 this morning because…He took a drink. Because they made lousy coasters.
“What’d she say?” Denny asked at long last.
“Who?” He had to stop himself from imagining what sort of sound beams of concussive force would make upon colliding with the window.
“Your girl. The English one.”
“Not mine,” he corrected automatically, laughed ruefully into his glass. “Certainly not anymore.” He glanced over at Denny. “Not unless you can turn back time.”
The great Denny Crane nearly choked on his drink. “Again?”
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 12:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 01:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-03 01:16 am (UTC)Just wanted to say I enjoyed it very much and it cracked me up. :D
no subject
Date: 2005-02-13 02:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-30 04:50 am (UTC)The last line is AWESOME. Absolutely awesome. Yay, yay, yay. That was so killer.
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Date: 2006-01-30 04:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-30 05:00 am (UTC)Karly and I wrote some Jimmy & Caleb hero!fic, but, alas, it remains unfinished. We should write more of it.
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Date: 2006-01-30 05:03 am (UTC)HAHAHAHAHA. Yes, you should. What're their powers?
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Date: 2006-01-30 05:06 am (UTC)Caleb could make people do whatever he wanted them to do as long as they didn't know that he had that power, and Jimmy had his bones and the power of empathy. Also, a membership to the Big Organization of White Hats. And a guilt complex. He's just loaded, man.
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Date: 2006-01-30 05:10 am (UTC)Awww, poor Jimmy.
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Date: 2006-01-30 05:12 am (UTC)...Garrett can have the power that one kid in X-Men: Evolution does that if he bumps into something, he multiplies. He can do everyone's work for them! It's MANIFESTED EAGERNESS.
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Date: 2006-01-30 05:16 am (UTC)Oh God. Multiple Garretts is a scary mental image. Mainly because of his hair. What would Brad's power be?
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Date: 2006-01-30 05:29 am (UTC)...Righteous indignation? OH! An arm that doubles as an AXE. He can be