Challenge #5 - Entry #4 "Gunn's Masterpiece"

[The Muse]

* Title: Gunn's Masterpiece
* Challenge: #5 Dreams
* Fandom: ANGEL
* Pairing/Characters: Gunn, Betta George, Drusilla
* Summary: Betta George (not a therapist) helps Gunn understand his nightmare about a certain ex-lover of Spike's.
* Rating: PG
* Warnings: none
* Disclaimer: All these characters are belong to other people and not me. Kudos to Joss Whedon for starting the whole thing and Brian Lynch for writing an awesome character like Betta George.
* Word Count: a short 'n' sweet 881 words
* Author's Note: I wrote about five different versions of this story, all revolving around the same concept. I'm submitting this one because I think it is the most direct about what I wanted to say with said concept. I hope you enjoy it.

Gunn's Masterpiece

Ticktickticktickticktick

“Gunn, let’s face it, you’re gonna wanna talk about it at some point.”

“No, I really don’t. And I don’t even have to talk to you at all. You’re in my head!”

“Well, okay, but telepathic fishy-ness aside, have you seen whose bed you’re laying in of late? I mean, I’m no therapist, but I don’t think it’s healthy to be sleeping in your kinda-dead ex-girlfriend’s sheets. Although I suppose I should be grateful that her body’s not IN the bed with you…”

“Alright, alright, I’ll talk about it, just please don’t go on.”

“Hey, that’s more like it! So first off I just gotta ask – DRUSILLA?!?”

“Do you want me to talk to you about it or not?”

“Well yeah, but man, Drusilla?! I mean, I get it, it’s been kind of a slow year but-“

“Yeah, OK, we’re done now.”

“Oh, fine, I’ll shut up. Please, tell me what you were thinking of.”

“I guess… it just started as a dream. I was back at Wolfram & Hart, doing… something probably not good. Getting a demon away from 100 years of jail time on a technicality or something. I was standing in the lobby and I hear… her voice.”

“Creepy much? Seriously, you and Dru never met before, right?”

“As far as I can remember, yeah. But suddenly she’s there… and she said… she said…”

“’Lil’ pretty made me my own dollhouse!’ Or something to that extent.”

“You know, it’s not much fun telling a story to someone already knows the ending.”

“I’m flattered you consider me a ‘one’ and not a ‘thing’.”

“It’s just… so freaky how happy she seemed. All of a sudden, the place is up in flames, there’s this whole gang of vamps around us… and she just stood there, smiling that creepy little smile…”

“Well, duh. This is DRUSILLA we’re talking about here. If she’s not wearing a creepy smile, something’s up.”

“And if she starts dancing…?”

“…You’d better grab your coat. We should go for a walk!”

“You don’t walk.”

“Details, Gunn, details! Now get your coat.”


“Ahh, the fresh Texas summer nights… don’t they just taste delicious?”

“You’re no ordinary telepathic fish, are you?”

“Again with the details, Gunn. Speaking of, how about you? Last you talked of your dream, W&H was burning to the ground!”

“And so was Los Angeles. It was the Fall all over again. Hell took a vacation to the City of Angel and decided to make the move permanent. And then there were two vampire gangs and they started gangbangin’ and she just kept dancing like the world wasn’t there anymore.”

“You know, for a woman you’ve never met before, you’re oddly obsessed with her. ‘Course, she does have mind control powers…”

“Now you tell me. All I know is, people kept dying around me, and I tried to cry out, tried to help, but my mind… I was just not in it. And then she dances over to me and she whispers in my ear ‘you’re such a pretty bird now’ and then I vamp out again, and I want to smash her face clean off her body, but… I can’t. I just can’t do it. My arms feel like lead, my legs feel like bags of sand, and my heart just plain don’t feel.”

“And then I woke you up.”

“And then you woke me up. And here we are now… one person and one seriously deranged fish. On a walk.”

“So you got spooked by one little dream. So what?”

“I am not spooked.”

“Yeah, that’s TOTALLY the reason you’re talking to a telepathic fish 5,000 miles away, on a walk in the city where your rotting corpse of a girlfriend grew up. Once again, not a therapist, but Gunn, have you ever thought maybe you have… issues?”

“I don’t like you anymore.”

“Granted. Now stop deflecting.”

“YES, okay? I’m an idiot, I’m a complete and total fool. I indirectly caused a girl I love to get brutally murdered by an ancient demon, I used the Fall of L.A. for my own selfish purposes, and yes, it’s weird that I live in HER house with HER body and NOT HER!”

“And so you dreamed of Drusilla.”

“And so I dreamed of Drusilla. So you gonna tell me what it all means, or can I go back home now?”

“Okay, final time – not a therapist. So don’t blame me if you suddenly decide yoga is a good idea.”

“I haven’t ruled it out yet.”

“Gunn, Drusilla is nuts. We’re talking barebones, no-holds-barred, out-of-the-gutter-schizophrenic nuts. She thrives on death and chaos and all manner of destruction. To her, Hell-A is/was heaven. And not heaven the way Spike saw it, but honest and true redemption. She was sired for no other reason than to be Angelus’s Guernica or Mona Lisa. Evil begets evil.”

“So that’s your roundabout way of telling me Drusilla is symbolic of how I felt during the Fall of L.A.?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, you’ve never met her before, so why else would she be there? I mean, you don’t still miss it… right?”

“…”

“You know what? Forget it. I don’t wanna know. Go back to your dead corpse and get some rest. Stay in touch, yeah?”

“Gets harder every day, George.”

[Emmie]

I think there are some wonderful ideas behind this piece. And you definitely have a talent for dialogue.

And this is some concrit for the writer, which I'll spoiler tag:

SPOILER: Click to show

But I'm left wanting more. It was like you told the story as if it were a tale on the radio and two people were just talking to each other. The entire piece was dialogue, no internal POV, no action to place where the characters are at. We had two talking heads, at sea and lost in their conversation. Without any reference to the physicality of the characters, I'm imagining them as Dolls that have been imprinted with the personalities of Gunn and George. They can talk the talk, sure, but as we listen to this over the radio (that's the closest analogy I can come up with how the story reads), we have no sense for their established identity besides their Voice and this means a lack of genuine, three-dimensional character portrayal.

It's like you imagined the story through the conversation and knocked out the dialogue, but didn't go back to paint in the important details to give the story depth and emotion, something to ground the Voice so that Gunn and George became more than talking heads.

This is more to say I saw great potential here that wasn't fully realized.

[Randi Giles]

Gunn and Drusilla? That's a very weird and different paring.

SPOILER: Click to show

I loved Betta George he or it brought humor to the story. I wish there was a little more backstory on why Gunn would dream of Drusilla.

[Secret Scoobie]

I think this is a really interesting idea for a dream. Gunn dreaming of Drusilla? I enjoyed George in the 'psychologist' type role, it was humourous and ironic considering he's already in peoples head!

I like the story and the dialogue was good, but I did get a little confused about who was saying what a few times... I think I lost the flow when Gunn speaks of what Dru said in the dream, and I was still reading it as "Gunn says" "George says". I would've enjoyed a bit more depth into the scene and the physical world of the characters, I know it was inside their heads, but I felt like I wasn't really 'experiencing' the story, merely overhearing it - because I couldn't SEE what was happening.

Great ideas for a story though, and a good effort al'round.

.. Just saw I've sort of written a similar comment to Emmie! haha sorry Em, so I'll add an "I agree with Emmie"

[siredbyspike]

^ And I will also add an "I agree with Emmie and Scoob" in here. This was a great idea and had very great potential. You wrote Betta George really well, but I found myself confused about who said what at times in this piece. Also, I haven't gotten to read that far into the comics yet and was pretty confused about Gunn sleeping with his ex's corpse you kept eluding to. Is it Fred's actual corpse, or metaphorical? At times, you made it sound like Dru's corpse, but I knew she wasn't from Texas. Also, I felt like there wasn't enough plot about the dream explained here to get any resolution.
Just a suggestion, but instead of having so much dialogue..maybe you could have inserted a flashback or two that Gunn had explaining the situation a little more. You are really great at writing dialogue though, and you did good with this piece, I just felt like it could have been better and there could have been more to it.

[wenxina]

I'm going to say that I disagree with Emmie. I thought that the ongoing dialogue with no description of the peripheral details was stylistically matched to the twist in that this was a telepathic conversation. Kudos on writing the first story I've read in a long time that actually matches form to content.

[Hellbound Hyperion]

Well, this was fun! Now that the authors are revealed, time to chat it up!

First, I think I should explain why I chose the particular plot and subject material that I did. At the time of the challenge being posted, I had just finished re-reading ANGEL #23-25 and ANGEL: ONLY HUMAN #1 and #2. So Gunn and Drusilla were both very much on my mind, and when I read the challenge description, my mind instantly connected the two thematically. To me, Gunn's feelings about how he acted (or remembers acting) in Hell-A are represented most succinctly by Drusilla, a character who thrives on her own madness and foresight.

There was, of course, a simple problem with just having Gunn dream about Drusilla, one that I didn't even fully explain in the fic - Gunn has, at least as far as I can recall, never met Drusilla. At best, he would maybe have heard stories of her tangentially off-screen during the series. So I needed a way to connect the two characters within the dreamworld. Enter: Betta George, quite possibly the most fun character to write in the entire Angelverse. That, and his powers as a telepathic fish that seems to just hop into peoples' minds whenever he wants to made him very handy both as a third character at the focal point of the story and as a plot device to make the dream seem feasible, even if Gunn had never met Dru before.

As I said, of course, I didn't explain this fully. I also feel that I understated the point I was trying to make for the sake of Betta George's dialogue. It was at the very end, when Gunn reveals that he's "been an idiot" and then George rebukes him about his guilt and asks whether he doesn't still "miss" being a vamp. In past drafts, I expounded heavy load-bearing paragraphs about the thing; on reflection, I felt it would be simpler for George to act as a mirror for Gunn to bounce his own thoughts off of - and anyway, George would know the end of the dream story before the reader, so it would be silly for me to dance around that particular point of his character. (And it was funny to have him say "dude, I'm not a therapist, I'm a telepathic fish, you have issues". )

I have mixed thoughts about the final approach I took to staging the story. On the one hand, Emmie makes an excellent point: a dialogue-only fic makes it difficult to ground the thing in reality, which can make it a harder read for the reader. On the other hand, wenxina touches on why I ultimately went with dialogue-only, massacring any reference points - it was a telepathic conversation about a dream, grounding the fic in reality was the last thing on my mind. (Notice, I never said George was physically anywhere near Gunn; I tried to allude to the fact that George could be just about anywhere in the world, but Gunn was most definitely in Texas.)

Some brief explanations. siredbyspike asked if my use of the term "Fred's corpse" was literal or metaphorical. My answer is: both, in the sense that I was talking about Illyria. Next, a mistake I noticed only long after-the-fact: I never revealed the exact time period, but said "Texas air" at the top of the second act, via Betta George. That was a miscommunication on my part. My intention was to put the fic AFTER the events of ANGEL #23, but BEFORE ANGEL: ONLY HUMAN - which would put the two of them living in Fred's old apartment in Los Angeles, NOT Texas. Sorry for not catching that little mistake.

In any case, it was super-fun to write this fic, so thank you all for the comments and concrits (totally yanked that word, thanks Emmie ) especially about my dialogue, which flowed so naturally even I was amazed at how fast I managed to scribble this one out. Brian Lynch, if you're reading, thank you for Betta George. Truly. He is one helluva character.