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3pipeproblemTitle: The Perfect Crime
Fandom: Boston Legal/Boondock Saints
Notes: Written for the 2007 Finishathon (master list available at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
multific). Smecker/Shore is my cracktastic crossover OTP; this takes place in the AU ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dien and I dreamed up (I think I had a part in dreaming it up, anyway) where they attended law school together. For more--and vastly superior--Smecker/Shore, check out dien's LJ.
Paul had never once been invited to Alan’s apartment—that would have been too deliberate, too formal, would have given him the opportunity to decline. Instead, Alan dragged him along on convoluted, haphazard walks, pausing at street corners and affecting to study the prevailing winds, taking sharp turns into alleyways strewn with discarded flyers or broken glass or hand-lettered posters announcing next Friday’s farmer’s market. “Look where we are,” he’d say at last, halting to marvel slack-jawed at the stoop of his own building, at worn concrete steps his feet had to have trampled at least a thousand times.
Conveniently, the climb to Alan’s third-floor apartment afforded Paul just enough time to master the urge to smack the other man upside the head.
Today, though, Alan had called, voice transmuted by the phone into something brittle and metallic, the rattle of a faulty car engine. As always, no invitation had been issued, but from the truncated syllables and the yawning abysses between words, if not the very fact of the call, Paul had inferred desperation, or at least a Shoreian approximation thereof.
A short—infuriatingly short, after the labyrinthine treks he’d endured—drive later, Paul slung himself between two enormous arms of orange suede, dangled a shoe from the toe of one extended foot. The shoe clattered to the floor as his host swept in from the bedroom, baggie scissored between middle and index fingers and lofted high above his head. "You said—“ Alan started, as though he'd been promised ice cream.
"Three months ago."
"Has the statute of limitations expired?"
"I know what I said. Why do I get the sense you only listen to me when you're trying to prove me wrong?" Since Paul's last visit, Alan's apartment had gained one eyesore of an armchair and taken a sudden turn toward slovenliness, each item of furniture having undergone an incremental shift this way or that. Taken one piece at a time, the change was nothing drastic, but as a whole, the room seemed off-kilter, as though a minor earthquake had rearranged its contents.
"You said I couldn't," Alan reminded him. "Your exact words were, I believe, 'no fucking way.'" He tossed the baggie into Paul's lap, hand outstretched partially in follow-through but mostly in show. Ever since he'd made mention of the—‘the goods,' as he was destined to refer to them at any moment—Alan had moved as though atop a stage or, more aptly, before a jury, energetic and forceful and insufferably smug.
"Maybe I said it because I like seeing you preen like a peacock. This chair is hideous, by the way."
Trailed by secondhand perfume and the (undoubtedly firsthand) odor of marijuana, Alan flung himself at the foot of his monstrosity-on-loan. "I'm holding it for a friend."
Paul sniffed the air as a sommelier would a cork. "Alan Shore. I leave you alone for two weeks and return to find you leading, as they say, the high life—and spare me your indignation." He gave a preemptory wave of his hand, mirroring, consciously or not, the other man's flourish-laden entrance. "My odious pun is nothing next to this chair. Is that—Alan.”
Alan's hair, daring two weeks ago and now simply unruly, scattered across the chair as he tilted his head back—strands of yellow in an expanse of orange. "Paul," he drawled.
"Tabu?"
"Pardon?"
Watching from above as Alan's eyebrows arched toward his hairline was disorienting. Paul gave a rapid series of blinks in the hopes that doing so would return the world to its correct dimensions, but he remained in the improbable orange chair, his friend's chin thrust defiantly at the ceiling. "Your musk."
"Fragrance," Alan corrected, snapping his head forward before Paul could think to check his pupils for dilation. "Is doubtless what it says on the bottle. What are we waiting for?"
He removed his shoes—sneakers, scuffed into antiquity—with the weary air of a soldier stripping himself of battle garments, clicking the heels superfluously before aligning them against the wall. He slid to the window in his socks, wrestling with the rusted hatch, welcoming dank spring air with closed eyes and half a sigh. "For ventilation purposes," he said over a sudden syncopation of car horns.
"Yeah. Got it." Paul kept the first attempt at a joint for himself. The considerably neater second—a product of muscle memory's reassertion—he passed to Alan. "Here. Blunt your intellect."
Alan sat down Indian-style, spun the joint once between his fingers before sliding it behind his ear. “I’d rather share.”
He hadn't taken note of Alan's absence until the first week swung ‘round to the second, had been heartened, if anything, by that fact. The other man seized on him in halls, called him at hours that promised trouble—one AM, noon on a warm day—dealt fast and loose with their now collective supply of cigarettes, and Paul'd begun to wonder if Alan's whims weren't Alan's but rather a form of shared madness.
When he troubled to cast a faintly skeptical glance in Alan's direction, he found him the picture of innocence, eyebrows arched delicately, smile twitching at his lips, as though every feature were being held in check. "That's how these things are done, Paul."
***
"You're going about this all wrong."
The joint resting behind Alan's ear had been puffed away, smoke whisked out the window into approaching twilight. Several more had followed, Paul's fingers moving with increasing languor, the smirk pasted on Alan's face growing more and more stupid. Someone, in a bygone era of productivity, had thought to put on a record—Alan, evidently, since the room fairly rang with Bob Dylan's prophecy of a coming hard rain.
"Which part? The murder itself or the eventual cover-up?" Gradually, glacially, Paul had subjected himself to a seemingly endless and impossibly uncomfortable series of positions. He now lay—in violation of a long-standing resolution never to allow his face within two inches of any surface for whose cleanliness Alan Shore was solely responsible—sprawled on the floor, head propped against his hand.
"It can't be murder." Alan's eyelids had begun to droop like half-closed blinds; his voice sounded distant, threadbare. "Murder's imperfect by definition. Not to mention sloppy. You kill someone because you can't think of anything better to do with them."
"It's an exercise." Paul reached to pry the joint from Alan's fingers. "An intellectual exercise. Murder is the classical model. You kill whichever poor bastard wins the three-million-dollar poor-bastard jackpot to show—I’m paraphrasing Nietzsche here—“ He raised the joint to his lips, closed his eyes and inhaled. "To show how goddamn smart you are."
"And I am very goddamn smart," Alan said, solemnly at first. Then, as Paul watched, a smile, helpless and forlorn, skidded across his features like an escapee trying to evade a searchlight.
"You've discovered irony," he observed.
"Fuck you," said Alan matter-of-factly.
They passed a moment in imperfect silence, static crackling from the record player. Alan rose and—carelessly, it seemed to Paul—shooed the needle from the groove. "Bank robbery was my thought."
Paul snorted. "As long as I get to be Bonnie."
"You don't want to be Bonnie. I've seen pictures."
"You've seen pictures." A vision of a young—younger—Alan Shore, a volume of his dad's Britannica balanced on his bare knees, inspecting with avidity the contours of Bonnie Parker's grainy black-and-white breasts, hijacked Paul's train of thought; he opened his mouth to say as much.
"She's frumpy." Alan stretched out beside him, the youthful machinery of his back producing—to Paul's grim satisfaction—a collection of minute but discernible clicks and pops. Oblivious, he crossed his arms behind his head.
“That’s the trouble with a life of crime. It leaves you no time to attend to your figure.” Though he’d long since become immune to the inexpressibly foul scent that had wormed its way into the fabric of Alan’s clothing, Paul wrinkled his nose. “And bank robbery, Alan? You’d be on the run for—well, knowing you, all of five minutes before the police had you hauled in or—“
Alan curled onto his side and, with a gentleness encountered only when exhaustion had rendered the body incapable of malice, draped an arm over Paul.
“Shore,” he snapped, in tones most often employed when training the more pliant members of the canine family. “Shore.”
“Sorry.” Alan didn’t look contrite—wasn’t, Paul suspected, capable of doing so—and didn’t shift the offending limb, but there was something pitiful in the way his eyes so determinedly avoided Paul’s. “My…I was at my mother’s funeral.” As if confounded by his own words, he blinked. “And then…” Laughter overtook him, seizing his muscles, distorting his speech.
"Your mother died?"
Alan nodded.
Paul breathed in, watched Alan’s arm rise and then fall with his chest. "That bitch."
Fandom: Boston Legal/Boondock Saints
Notes: Written for the 2007 Finishathon (master list available at
multific). Smecker/Shore is my cracktastic crossover OTP; this takes place in the AU dien and I dreamed up (I think I had a part in dreaming it up, anyway) where they attended law school together. For more--and vastly superior--Smecker/Shore, check out dien's LJ.Paul had never once been invited to Alan’s apartment—that would have been too deliberate, too formal, would have given him the opportunity to decline. Instead, Alan dragged him along on convoluted, haphazard walks, pausing at street corners and affecting to study the prevailing winds, taking sharp turns into alleyways strewn with discarded flyers or broken glass or hand-lettered posters announcing next Friday’s farmer’s market. “Look where we are,” he’d say at last, halting to marvel slack-jawed at the stoop of his own building, at worn concrete steps his feet had to have trampled at least a thousand times.
Conveniently, the climb to Alan’s third-floor apartment afforded Paul just enough time to master the urge to smack the other man upside the head.
Today, though, Alan had called, voice transmuted by the phone into something brittle and metallic, the rattle of a faulty car engine. As always, no invitation had been issued, but from the truncated syllables and the yawning abysses between words, if not the very fact of the call, Paul had inferred desperation, or at least a Shoreian approximation thereof.
A short—infuriatingly short, after the labyrinthine treks he’d endured—drive later, Paul slung himself between two enormous arms of orange suede, dangled a shoe from the toe of one extended foot. The shoe clattered to the floor as his host swept in from the bedroom, baggie scissored between middle and index fingers and lofted high above his head. "You said—“ Alan started, as though he'd been promised ice cream.
"Three months ago."
"Has the statute of limitations expired?"
"I know what I said. Why do I get the sense you only listen to me when you're trying to prove me wrong?" Since Paul's last visit, Alan's apartment had gained one eyesore of an armchair and taken a sudden turn toward slovenliness, each item of furniture having undergone an incremental shift this way or that. Taken one piece at a time, the change was nothing drastic, but as a whole, the room seemed off-kilter, as though a minor earthquake had rearranged its contents.
"You said I couldn't," Alan reminded him. "Your exact words were, I believe, 'no fucking way.'" He tossed the baggie into Paul's lap, hand outstretched partially in follow-through but mostly in show. Ever since he'd made mention of the—‘the goods,' as he was destined to refer to them at any moment—Alan had moved as though atop a stage or, more aptly, before a jury, energetic and forceful and insufferably smug.
"Maybe I said it because I like seeing you preen like a peacock. This chair is hideous, by the way."
Trailed by secondhand perfume and the (undoubtedly firsthand) odor of marijuana, Alan flung himself at the foot of his monstrosity-on-loan. "I'm holding it for a friend."
Paul sniffed the air as a sommelier would a cork. "Alan Shore. I leave you alone for two weeks and return to find you leading, as they say, the high life—and spare me your indignation." He gave a preemptory wave of his hand, mirroring, consciously or not, the other man's flourish-laden entrance. "My odious pun is nothing next to this chair. Is that—Alan.”
Alan's hair, daring two weeks ago and now simply unruly, scattered across the chair as he tilted his head back—strands of yellow in an expanse of orange. "Paul," he drawled.
"Tabu?"
"Pardon?"
Watching from above as Alan's eyebrows arched toward his hairline was disorienting. Paul gave a rapid series of blinks in the hopes that doing so would return the world to its correct dimensions, but he remained in the improbable orange chair, his friend's chin thrust defiantly at the ceiling. "Your musk."
"Fragrance," Alan corrected, snapping his head forward before Paul could think to check his pupils for dilation. "Is doubtless what it says on the bottle. What are we waiting for?"
He removed his shoes—sneakers, scuffed into antiquity—with the weary air of a soldier stripping himself of battle garments, clicking the heels superfluously before aligning them against the wall. He slid to the window in his socks, wrestling with the rusted hatch, welcoming dank spring air with closed eyes and half a sigh. "For ventilation purposes," he said over a sudden syncopation of car horns.
"Yeah. Got it." Paul kept the first attempt at a joint for himself. The considerably neater second—a product of muscle memory's reassertion—he passed to Alan. "Here. Blunt your intellect."
Alan sat down Indian-style, spun the joint once between his fingers before sliding it behind his ear. “I’d rather share.”
He hadn't taken note of Alan's absence until the first week swung ‘round to the second, had been heartened, if anything, by that fact. The other man seized on him in halls, called him at hours that promised trouble—one AM, noon on a warm day—dealt fast and loose with their now collective supply of cigarettes, and Paul'd begun to wonder if Alan's whims weren't Alan's but rather a form of shared madness.
When he troubled to cast a faintly skeptical glance in Alan's direction, he found him the picture of innocence, eyebrows arched delicately, smile twitching at his lips, as though every feature were being held in check. "That's how these things are done, Paul."
***
"You're going about this all wrong."
The joint resting behind Alan's ear had been puffed away, smoke whisked out the window into approaching twilight. Several more had followed, Paul's fingers moving with increasing languor, the smirk pasted on Alan's face growing more and more stupid. Someone, in a bygone era of productivity, had thought to put on a record—Alan, evidently, since the room fairly rang with Bob Dylan's prophecy of a coming hard rain.
"Which part? The murder itself or the eventual cover-up?" Gradually, glacially, Paul had subjected himself to a seemingly endless and impossibly uncomfortable series of positions. He now lay—in violation of a long-standing resolution never to allow his face within two inches of any surface for whose cleanliness Alan Shore was solely responsible—sprawled on the floor, head propped against his hand.
"It can't be murder." Alan's eyelids had begun to droop like half-closed blinds; his voice sounded distant, threadbare. "Murder's imperfect by definition. Not to mention sloppy. You kill someone because you can't think of anything better to do with them."
"It's an exercise." Paul reached to pry the joint from Alan's fingers. "An intellectual exercise. Murder is the classical model. You kill whichever poor bastard wins the three-million-dollar poor-bastard jackpot to show—I’m paraphrasing Nietzsche here—“ He raised the joint to his lips, closed his eyes and inhaled. "To show how goddamn smart you are."
"And I am very goddamn smart," Alan said, solemnly at first. Then, as Paul watched, a smile, helpless and forlorn, skidded across his features like an escapee trying to evade a searchlight.
"You've discovered irony," he observed.
"Fuck you," said Alan matter-of-factly.
They passed a moment in imperfect silence, static crackling from the record player. Alan rose and—carelessly, it seemed to Paul—shooed the needle from the groove. "Bank robbery was my thought."
Paul snorted. "As long as I get to be Bonnie."
"You don't want to be Bonnie. I've seen pictures."
"You've seen pictures." A vision of a young—younger—Alan Shore, a volume of his dad's Britannica balanced on his bare knees, inspecting with avidity the contours of Bonnie Parker's grainy black-and-white breasts, hijacked Paul's train of thought; he opened his mouth to say as much.
"She's frumpy." Alan stretched out beside him, the youthful machinery of his back producing—to Paul's grim satisfaction—a collection of minute but discernible clicks and pops. Oblivious, he crossed his arms behind his head.
“That’s the trouble with a life of crime. It leaves you no time to attend to your figure.” Though he’d long since become immune to the inexpressibly foul scent that had wormed its way into the fabric of Alan’s clothing, Paul wrinkled his nose. “And bank robbery, Alan? You’d be on the run for—well, knowing you, all of five minutes before the police had you hauled in or—“
Alan curled onto his side and, with a gentleness encountered only when exhaustion had rendered the body incapable of malice, draped an arm over Paul.
“Shore,” he snapped, in tones most often employed when training the more pliant members of the canine family. “Shore.”
“Sorry.” Alan didn’t look contrite—wasn’t, Paul suspected, capable of doing so—and didn’t shift the offending limb, but there was something pitiful in the way his eyes so determinedly avoided Paul’s. “My…I was at my mother’s funeral.” As if confounded by his own words, he blinked. “And then…” Laughter overtook him, seizing his muscles, distorting his speech.
"Your mother died?"
Alan nodded.
Paul breathed in, watched Alan’s arm rise and then fall with his chest. "That bitch."
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 12:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-06 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 01:02 am (UTC)Then I shall return. :)
no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 02:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-06 04:56 pm (UTC)Yes, see it! Run, don't walk!
no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 02:07 am (UTC)(I'll manage something coherent later)
no subject
Date: 2007-11-06 04:57 pm (UTC)