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Fic: Well, Finally (Angel fandom, Harmony, warnings for...stuff)
So I signed up for all frickin' 14 days of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
14valentines, so here is the first contribution. Today's theme is Body Image, which for me is a big deal because I realized that I haven't looked at a picture of myself taken since Tianyu died that I think I look remotely attractive in. It was rather depressing. But that's me. Bah. Below, is a different kind of body image issue.
Title: Well, Finally
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
amand_r
Fandom: Angel
Characters: Harmony
Warnings: Harmony? God love her, but dumb as a fricking post.
Author's Notes: Almost all of the typos (misspellings) are completely intentional. I know the difference between Voila and viola. Really.
Summary: Back when she had been human, she'd never really stopped to think about what time of day it was. Now it was like, she had even less time in the day than she did before. Like, she had forever but that forever was chopped up into part free-time, and part 'oh no, going outside causes incurable burning cancer or something.'
Marcus had told her that she had fantastic skin. The key—really, no lie—is honey and tofu in the blender. Slap it on your face and let it sit there for about one episode of Saved By The Bell. Then you rinse with chilled tonic water and viola! (That's French for 'Check it out!'). Better than exfoliating with scrubbers.
But well now, Marcus was dead, and she was pretty sure that Wolfram & Hart had transferred LA to hell. Hell, hell, Hell, when is hell capitalized? Spelling is for nerds. Nerds who invented spell check so that she didn't have to worry about it.
It's frickin' dark. Not even dim-dark, where she can see really good, but pitch-dark. Well, okay, she can see pretty good in that too, the little lines in the wood, her nails and how badly they need a polish, and the blanket the nice flight attendant had given her. What had his name been? Bob? Bill? Oh wait, no. Joey. She liked the name Joey. It reminded her of kangaroos and Matt LeBlanc. Matt LeBlanc was hot.
Anyway, it wasn't like she was going to get cold.
She slept for a while, not as long as she wanted to, actually; she would have been pretty skipper to sleep through the entire flight. But she couldn't take any Ambien (hello? Vampire?) and the last time she'd gotten even a little sleepy was that one time in Sunnydale when she'd drained someone who'd taken a few Xanax. Uh, Xanax is the poor man's Ambien, like Tritox is the poor man's Botox. Who even used Botox anymore? Restalyne was where it was at these days. Not that...not that that really even mattered, did it? They knocked her around alot at the airport, and that had kind of sucked.
This was supposed to be glamorous. Like, she should be in first class, with champagne and strawberries and a foot rub (they didn't offer those anymore, they had said at the flight desk, but she was pretty sure that she could have coerced one from her flight attendant In her head, the flight attendant was named Jean-Claude and he looked like Heath Ledger.), and she should be watching the in-flight movie, something calming like, Waiting to Exhale-- she likes when Angela Bassett sets her husband's clothes on fire in his Beamer. She should be relaxing in the lap of luxury and being treated like a movie star or someone important, like, like Paris Hilton.
Being inside the box for so long has given her a chance to think, something she hasn't had in a long time. Like, since Sunnydale long. Well, maybe she had a good think right after that chick from the steno pool set her up and tried to take her job. Or okay, she had planned to have a good think. She might have even pencilled it in on her calendar, like: Work, facial, mani-pedi, speed dating (sponsored by Wolfram & Hart), re-evaluate unlife, bed. But bed time was never her best time to think, especially since she'd taken home a really hot guy who'd told her his name was Vlad. Or maybe Brad. Ugh. She sucked at men's names.
Anyway, moving from Sunnydale pretty much wiped out all her free time. She couldn't even think of the last time she'd had a spa night anyway. Come to think of it, all of her waking ours were spent at work. Well, they had been, before it sorta kinda blew up.
Back when she had been human, she'd never really stopped to think about what time of day it was. Now it was like, she had even less time in the day than she did before. Like, she had forever but that forever was chopped up into part free-time, and part 'oh no, going outside causes incurable burning cancer or something.'
Yeah, so.
It must have been the first leg of the flight to JFK when she thought about Spike, her little lamb, and how much she really kind of loved him, well, that was before she'd read that book, Women Who Ran With the Wolves, or uhm, Finding Your Inner Goddess or was that Confessions of a Social Climber? Because that book had changed her life. She even made notes. In a binder, in pink pen. And she'd highlighted all the good parts. But then she'd left that in Sunnydale because Buffy, well, Buffy made everyone's life hard. Really
But then he'd come back out of the blue, and she'd been so over him, but then not, and then he'd had sex with her, or no –own the moment-- she'd had sex with him and right when she'd been ready to, you know, climax, everything had sort of blacked out, and she'd woken up tied down to a gurney and covered in blood. Ugh. It was actually a little surprising how much that happened at Wolfram & Hart.
Oh, whatever. Sex with Spike was probably only really good because she could bite him in the middle, or because he was her second, not that she'd tell anyone that. Or because he made these little squeaky noises, which she would gladly tell anyone if that would embarrass him. Or maybe not, because you never know if he might like to hit her up again, and she wasn't one to burn bridges. Well, those kinds of bridges. Sex bridges.
She knew that the plane was going to fly over the ocean at some point, but she didn't really know when that was, and she kept listening for it, like maybe there would be some sort of sensation of weightlessness, you know because they weren't over land, right? They were over ocean, and there wasn't gravity there, right? But it never happened, and she wondered what had happened to Marcus. She wondered what had happened to Angel too, but not really. She had tried to please him, really. She even got him a mug, a special mug, like the one she'd gotten for Mr. Mackey in tenth grade that said 'WORLD'S HOTTEST TEACHER.' Come to think of it, he'd never been too happy with that either, and after she'd given it to him, the guidance office had transferred her out of his class and into Mr. Miller's Lit class, and he was so fugly.
But Angel never really paid attention to her and her assets, what she brought to the team, and that was kind of suck. In her head, she had always thought that one day she'd do something really neat (like the camel. That fricking camel was fantastic.), and then they'd all look at her and say, 'well, gee, that Harmony, she's valuable to our operation. She deserves a key to the executive washroom, or the executive something or other.' She never did really get the idea of a bathroom so nice that you needed a key to it, and she'd been to the Bellagio like, fifteen times.
It occurred to her that Angel really only kind of tolerated her and that Wes was just too brainy to think of her in any way other than a secretary. Or a blonde. Possibly a vampire. And Gunn, well, Gunn was a lawyer. She'd always meant to marry one of those, because they had lots of money and were never there, but she just never got around to it.
And Fred. Well, Fred had been nice, until she had turned into raging leather bitch with a bad dye job. She missed Fred, because Fred had taken her out for drinks once, and that had been kind of cool, except for the part about Fred being the biggest nerd in the world. It was like hanging out with Willow. And she would have never hung out with Willow. Oh. She'd tried to eat Willow that one time. What had she been thinking? She'd only done it because earlier that night she'd been looking at her Sunnydale yearbook and seen Willow's anal cramped nerd writing (repressed, REPRESSED!) and read, 'Have a great summer! Keep in touch! Willow Rosenberg' and just felt so fucking cheated for like a split second.
The plane landed when she was thinking about the time that she and Lorney Tunes had gotten blitzed on mimosas of all things, and he had told her that she had fantastic skin, and for a second she had believed him. Well, she never really believed Lorne, because he was in show business.
Once, when she was fourteen, she'd spent the summer in her parents' house in Carmel all by herself, because they'd had to leave for Monte Carlo or something, and she'd met Todd (Tad? Roger?), a studio executive from Paramount. He'd let her dress up in her push up bra and too-small outfit and invited her over to his house, where he made her a Sex on the Beach and gotten out his camera, saying that he wanted to take some screen shots for some movie called Lolita, and that it was like, a love story, and wow, didn't she look just like she could film it right now. She'd hung out on his bed, licking ice cream and Grand Marnier off her fingers while he snapped away, and then she'd let him fuck her, just for fun, he said, but she'd had a few too many and well, he was a Movie Director. He could have made her.
Anyway, there'd been no movie deal, and then she'd rented that movie Lolita and watched it by herself, and god it was creepy. Jeremy Irons wasn't even really that hot, and she didn't think she looked like that Lolita girl at all.
Somehow, she had never liked ice cream after that.
So no, Lorne had been her best friend, if she ever had one at Wolfram & Hart, and even then, he'd just been saying things with that funny lift in his voice that she didn't quite understand. Huh.
***
When the box finally stopped, and the shuffling feet got farther and farther away, Harmony pressed her hands on the lid and shoved all at once, sending the wood splintering into the air. The men at the other end of the freight bay shouted and stammered at her, rushing forward and jabbering in French, or what she thought was probably French. They steadied her hands as she tried to climb out of the box in her Prada skirt, which was way too short to be doing this in front of an audience, but they had been really sweet, and although one of them was kinda hot and looked like Adrian Brody and she really wanted to eat him, she didn't because now wasn't the time. She had one of those things...oh yes! An agenda.
So she thanked them in French, some sort of stupid sentence about buckets, and yanked her suitcase from the foot end of the crate, opened her purse and pulled out her last year Manolos, and tottered out of the cargo bay, up to the doors that led to the airport proper before any of the men suddenly realized that she'd just shipped herself overseas in a box that had been in an unpressurized cabin.
It took three minutes to get a cab. Two more to explain what she wanted (insert another mercy bucket line here), and another thirty to get there, all the time in the backseat spent clutching a ratty old paperback book that her mother had given her the morning of high school graduation. She smoothed the cover and traced the F in 'Frommer's' for the billionth time.
Twenty minutes and a bribe after that, Harmony stood on the top deck of the Eiffel Tower and breathed the night air. Everything below her seemed polished with promise, fresh and exotic and there.
"Well," she murmured, "Finally."
FIN
I had a big ol' speech about Harmony and her body image, and this could have been so many other things, and blah blah, but in the end, I love Harmony, for all her mean girl, fucked up, EVIL clueless ways. So clueless. So much love.
14valentines, so here is the first contribution. Today's theme is Body Image, which for me is a big deal because I realized that I haven't looked at a picture of myself taken since Tianyu died that I think I look remotely attractive in. It was rather depressing. But that's me. Bah. Below, is a different kind of body image issue.Title: Well, Finally
Author:
amand_rFandom: Angel
Characters: Harmony
Warnings: Harmony? God love her, but dumb as a fricking post.
Author's Notes: Almost all of the typos (misspellings) are completely intentional. I know the difference between Voila and viola. Really.
Summary: Back when she had been human, she'd never really stopped to think about what time of day it was. Now it was like, she had even less time in the day than she did before. Like, she had forever but that forever was chopped up into part free-time, and part 'oh no, going outside causes incurable burning cancer or something.'
Marcus had told her that she had fantastic skin. The key—really, no lie—is honey and tofu in the blender. Slap it on your face and let it sit there for about one episode of Saved By The Bell. Then you rinse with chilled tonic water and viola! (That's French for 'Check it out!'). Better than exfoliating with scrubbers.
But well now, Marcus was dead, and she was pretty sure that Wolfram & Hart had transferred LA to hell. Hell, hell, Hell, when is hell capitalized? Spelling is for nerds. Nerds who invented spell check so that she didn't have to worry about it.
It's frickin' dark. Not even dim-dark, where she can see really good, but pitch-dark. Well, okay, she can see pretty good in that too, the little lines in the wood, her nails and how badly they need a polish, and the blanket the nice flight attendant had given her. What had his name been? Bob? Bill? Oh wait, no. Joey. She liked the name Joey. It reminded her of kangaroos and Matt LeBlanc. Matt LeBlanc was hot.
Anyway, it wasn't like she was going to get cold.
She slept for a while, not as long as she wanted to, actually; she would have been pretty skipper to sleep through the entire flight. But she couldn't take any Ambien (hello? Vampire?) and the last time she'd gotten even a little sleepy was that one time in Sunnydale when she'd drained someone who'd taken a few Xanax. Uh, Xanax is the poor man's Ambien, like Tritox is the poor man's Botox. Who even used Botox anymore? Restalyne was where it was at these days. Not that...not that that really even mattered, did it? They knocked her around alot at the airport, and that had kind of sucked.
This was supposed to be glamorous. Like, she should be in first class, with champagne and strawberries and a foot rub (they didn't offer those anymore, they had said at the flight desk, but she was pretty sure that she could have coerced one from her flight attendant In her head, the flight attendant was named Jean-Claude and he looked like Heath Ledger.), and she should be watching the in-flight movie, something calming like, Waiting to Exhale-- she likes when Angela Bassett sets her husband's clothes on fire in his Beamer. She should be relaxing in the lap of luxury and being treated like a movie star or someone important, like, like Paris Hilton.
Being inside the box for so long has given her a chance to think, something she hasn't had in a long time. Like, since Sunnydale long. Well, maybe she had a good think right after that chick from the steno pool set her up and tried to take her job. Or okay, she had planned to have a good think. She might have even pencilled it in on her calendar, like: Work, facial, mani-pedi, speed dating (sponsored by Wolfram & Hart), re-evaluate unlife, bed. But bed time was never her best time to think, especially since she'd taken home a really hot guy who'd told her his name was Vlad. Or maybe Brad. Ugh. She sucked at men's names.
Anyway, moving from Sunnydale pretty much wiped out all her free time. She couldn't even think of the last time she'd had a spa night anyway. Come to think of it, all of her waking ours were spent at work. Well, they had been, before it sorta kinda blew up.
Back when she had been human, she'd never really stopped to think about what time of day it was. Now it was like, she had even less time in the day than she did before. Like, she had forever but that forever was chopped up into part free-time, and part 'oh no, going outside causes incurable burning cancer or something.'
Yeah, so.
It must have been the first leg of the flight to JFK when she thought about Spike, her little lamb, and how much she really kind of loved him, well, that was before she'd read that book, Women Who Ran With the Wolves, or uhm, Finding Your Inner Goddess or was that Confessions of a Social Climber? Because that book had changed her life. She even made notes. In a binder, in pink pen. And she'd highlighted all the good parts. But then she'd left that in Sunnydale because Buffy, well, Buffy made everyone's life hard. Really
But then he'd come back out of the blue, and she'd been so over him, but then not, and then he'd had sex with her, or no –own the moment-- she'd had sex with him and right when she'd been ready to, you know, climax, everything had sort of blacked out, and she'd woken up tied down to a gurney and covered in blood. Ugh. It was actually a little surprising how much that happened at Wolfram & Hart.
Oh, whatever. Sex with Spike was probably only really good because she could bite him in the middle, or because he was her second, not that she'd tell anyone that. Or because he made these little squeaky noises, which she would gladly tell anyone if that would embarrass him. Or maybe not, because you never know if he might like to hit her up again, and she wasn't one to burn bridges. Well, those kinds of bridges. Sex bridges.
She knew that the plane was going to fly over the ocean at some point, but she didn't really know when that was, and she kept listening for it, like maybe there would be some sort of sensation of weightlessness, you know because they weren't over land, right? They were over ocean, and there wasn't gravity there, right? But it never happened, and she wondered what had happened to Marcus. She wondered what had happened to Angel too, but not really. She had tried to please him, really. She even got him a mug, a special mug, like the one she'd gotten for Mr. Mackey in tenth grade that said 'WORLD'S HOTTEST TEACHER.' Come to think of it, he'd never been too happy with that either, and after she'd given it to him, the guidance office had transferred her out of his class and into Mr. Miller's Lit class, and he was so fugly.
But Angel never really paid attention to her and her assets, what she brought to the team, and that was kind of suck. In her head, she had always thought that one day she'd do something really neat (like the camel. That fricking camel was fantastic.), and then they'd all look at her and say, 'well, gee, that Harmony, she's valuable to our operation. She deserves a key to the executive washroom, or the executive something or other.' She never did really get the idea of a bathroom so nice that you needed a key to it, and she'd been to the Bellagio like, fifteen times.
It occurred to her that Angel really only kind of tolerated her and that Wes was just too brainy to think of her in any way other than a secretary. Or a blonde. Possibly a vampire. And Gunn, well, Gunn was a lawyer. She'd always meant to marry one of those, because they had lots of money and were never there, but she just never got around to it.
And Fred. Well, Fred had been nice, until she had turned into raging leather bitch with a bad dye job. She missed Fred, because Fred had taken her out for drinks once, and that had been kind of cool, except for the part about Fred being the biggest nerd in the world. It was like hanging out with Willow. And she would have never hung out with Willow. Oh. She'd tried to eat Willow that one time. What had she been thinking? She'd only done it because earlier that night she'd been looking at her Sunnydale yearbook and seen Willow's anal cramped nerd writing (repressed, REPRESSED!) and read, 'Have a great summer! Keep in touch! Willow Rosenberg' and just felt so fucking cheated for like a split second.
The plane landed when she was thinking about the time that she and Lorney Tunes had gotten blitzed on mimosas of all things, and he had told her that she had fantastic skin, and for a second she had believed him. Well, she never really believed Lorne, because he was in show business.
Once, when she was fourteen, she'd spent the summer in her parents' house in Carmel all by herself, because they'd had to leave for Monte Carlo or something, and she'd met Todd (Tad? Roger?), a studio executive from Paramount. He'd let her dress up in her push up bra and too-small outfit and invited her over to his house, where he made her a Sex on the Beach and gotten out his camera, saying that he wanted to take some screen shots for some movie called Lolita, and that it was like, a love story, and wow, didn't she look just like she could film it right now. She'd hung out on his bed, licking ice cream and Grand Marnier off her fingers while he snapped away, and then she'd let him fuck her, just for fun, he said, but she'd had a few too many and well, he was a Movie Director. He could have made her.
Anyway, there'd been no movie deal, and then she'd rented that movie Lolita and watched it by herself, and god it was creepy. Jeremy Irons wasn't even really that hot, and she didn't think she looked like that Lolita girl at all.
Somehow, she had never liked ice cream after that.
So no, Lorne had been her best friend, if she ever had one at Wolfram & Hart, and even then, he'd just been saying things with that funny lift in his voice that she didn't quite understand. Huh.
***
When the box finally stopped, and the shuffling feet got farther and farther away, Harmony pressed her hands on the lid and shoved all at once, sending the wood splintering into the air. The men at the other end of the freight bay shouted and stammered at her, rushing forward and jabbering in French, or what she thought was probably French. They steadied her hands as she tried to climb out of the box in her Prada skirt, which was way too short to be doing this in front of an audience, but they had been really sweet, and although one of them was kinda hot and looked like Adrian Brody and she really wanted to eat him, she didn't because now wasn't the time. She had one of those things...oh yes! An agenda.
So she thanked them in French, some sort of stupid sentence about buckets, and yanked her suitcase from the foot end of the crate, opened her purse and pulled out her last year Manolos, and tottered out of the cargo bay, up to the doors that led to the airport proper before any of the men suddenly realized that she'd just shipped herself overseas in a box that had been in an unpressurized cabin.
It took three minutes to get a cab. Two more to explain what she wanted (insert another mercy bucket line here), and another thirty to get there, all the time in the backseat spent clutching a ratty old paperback book that her mother had given her the morning of high school graduation. She smoothed the cover and traced the F in 'Frommer's' for the billionth time.
Twenty minutes and a bribe after that, Harmony stood on the top deck of the Eiffel Tower and breathed the night air. Everything below her seemed polished with promise, fresh and exotic and there.
"Well," she murmured, "Finally."
FIN
I had a big ol' speech about Harmony and her body image, and this could have been so many other things, and blah blah, but in the end, I love Harmony, for all her mean girl, fucked up, EVIL clueless ways. So clueless. So much love.