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rareslashFandom/Pairing: The film, A Month in the Country (1987).Tom Birkin (Colin Firth)/James Moon (Kenneth Branagh) (friendship) also a slight smidge of Moon/OMC - only very slightly referenced here as it is in the film.
Title: No such thing as dead memories
Word Count: 2,407
Rating: U
Notes:
I'm pretty sure that no-one else has written fic for this film, (although if they have I wanna read it) if only for the fact that for years it's been impossible to see. I saw it recently thanks to youtube (it's still up there), found it quite lovely and pretty soon this flowed out.
From the mouth of his tent, newly opened to the early morning haze of sunlight, Moon watched Birkin approach from the turnstile at the start of the field. That long lean body of his, his slight ambling gait, was fantastically youthful, even at a distance. Like a mirage in a desert, for until he'd arrived in Oxgodby, apart from Moon himself, there were few other young people there.
Well Mrs Keach was technically young too, but Moon doubted that a Mrs, could be really young, even if bodily she seemed to be.
Birkin was amused by something this morning, for as he got closer he was very nearly smiling, a rarity indeed. It seemed already as though the clean air had dissolved much of what had previously clogged him up inside. You could hear it in his voice too. When he'd first arrived he would only have used it, wracked by stammers as it once was, quietly and hesitantly. Now he was only on the edges of Moon's periphery when he opened his mouth and said loudly at him.
"Goodness. At times, it's almost as if the fools actually believe anyone is listening to them other than me."
He was referring, of course, to the churchgoers of the village. It was Sunday so they had been loudly praising The Lord, for hours now, beneath Birkin's bed in the belfry. All of this coming after the thunderous, sleep shattering indignity of the bells chiming through his floorboards.
Moon's tent was in the field next to the church and each footstep closer to it lessened the sound of the congregation. Until now there was only the ghostly atmosphere of the choral music, volume reduced to a level where it was almost pleasant. Moon, was now down on the grass outside his tent, leaning on his side, blue eyes watering, as he tried to ignore the currently docile levels of pain that had begun in his feet and ankles, aware that it would take some serious stamping and agony to rid himself of it and not willing to do it before Birkin unless he needed to, for feeling it rude and not wanting to unnerve him.
He'd only just coaxed the shy young man down from the mural he was cleaning as it was.
"They woke you up again this morning?" he enquired, keeping his voice softness itself, he focused on delivering it over paying attention to his pain. "I love religious people. I mean you of all can't deny that they are responsible for a great many beautiful things."
Moon's voice kept steady whilst he spoke, but the flushing burning in his feet, the cramping in his joints seized his body tightly when he was silent. Pain escalating higher and higher in pitch, challenging his ignorance, until god help him, though he did all he could to resist it, Moon's face twisted a little in response to it.
Birkin, pale face impassive, took a look away at first but when it became clear that it was beyond Moon's control, the darker man asked, deep brown eyes slightly widened.
"Are you alright?"
Face still grimacing slightly, breath a little rasped, Moon was forced to acknowledge his imperfection to Birkin, to excuse himself and disappointment added to the agony.
"Cramp. No matter how I try I can never keep everything straight when I am asleep. It catches up with me."
Moon rose reluctantly to his feet at that, sadly aware that the embarrassing time had come when he would have to shake the pain out, Birkin or no Birkin.
Casting a wary look in the other man's direction, seeing that thankfully he was not looking at him but, instead, as if he knew the dance that was coming, directing a distracted, contemplative eye on the sea of green around them, Moon began to stamp his feet hard against the grassed earth. Hands on hips so he could put real force into the gesture, from pelvis downwards, forcing the elements beneath to come back to efficiency. It hurt a terrible amount, pins and needles began in wincing flurrys and he wondered for a ludicrous second if it was the case that his feet, which he stood on, had somehow died, as if they wouldn't come back from agonising pain. All the while he exhaled sharp, suffering breaths, bearing all with considerable fortitude.
His companion meanwhile continued to ignore him politely, loosing himself in the glowing hum of the sun and the pressing roll of the countryside, it's sights, it's fresh smells.
"I get particularly bad cramps." Moon continued, giving Birkin the signal to look at him again. "I used to have these fits, as a boy. Didn't ever seem to last very long, but a few times when I came back again, I had bashed myself against hard things, my skull, my ankles, or my knees, usually all three. Now it's as if the joints and muscles never quite returned to normal again. Then of course, courtesy of his Majesty, I got a bit of trench foot, shrapnel too, which didn't help. So ever since, every morning, I've been the decrepit misery you see before you."
He was in the final stages of just flexing his ankles to fully work them out as he said this.
Birkin was of course, reasonable, calm and measured in response.
He would be so damnably perfect.
"I think anyone would get cramp sleeping in such a small space." He said, referring to Moon's tent, "Seems like the ideal breeding ground for it."
"Well yes but I don't know. It just feels more intense with me than it should be somehow, more continuous. Still, how would I know if it's appropriate? It's not as if any of us can feel things with another's body."
"No."
"Which is probably just as well for the likes of you and I, don't you think, with the things we've seen. Although perhaps it was the speculation that damaged us? Perhaps if we had felt it all, it shouldn't have hurt half as much?" It was inevitable that Moon came back to the War, there was no way to resist, given that Birkin was someone, of the few he would meet around here who would understand.
"There can be no way to know."
Their words were like sighs, sluggishly given, products of reluctant, sun dozed brains. The brightness and heat really was relentless in it's control, even at this very early part of the day, perhaps particularly. They allowed themselves to fall into a trough of silence, neither quite knowing freedom in each others company. There was a great many things besides between them, but not that so far.
Eventually, glad of the chance to brighten, Moon remembered "Ah the tea should be done."
"Tea?"
"Yes, I saw you coming from ages away, trudging through the field. So I put some on." Moon's own smile found him brilliantly and he could feel it eking out any inertia in his soul and all of it was because of Birkin and so all of it was aimed that way; Birkin the great atheist, the sombre sinner.
They took to their cups and the silence grew thicker. Moon sat back down again and simply watched as quiet, Birkin pushed fingertips through his memories, as his eyes glazed resolutely in surrender to them, in refusal to share them.
"Do you ever get the sensation sometimes, that your soul has gone clear, that there is nothing whatsoever to be said." Moon asked him.
"Out here I do. In town it was rather more that there was everything to be said, just not the capacity to say it."
Moon saw and agreed. Clearly it was the pressure of words that would lead one to stammer as Birkin once had and surely as he was sitting there, he knew it was the pressure of possible words that kept himself tense too. He could not bring himself to nod though, the gesture felt too exuberant, too happy at the blasted circumstance.
"Yes. That might be it instead. I just get the strongest urge to ask you so many things sometimes, and yet they all seem so insignificant to bother with inside the next second."
A pause, a still, an interruption from propriety and the blonde man really felt somehow as if forced to say what he did next, forced to open himself, to lay himself at the other man's mercy, to try to show his affection as he once had so easily in the land before.
"Do you know, I did nothing but dream of you last night, of you and Mrs Keach being wed in the church right there, of you stepping out to be covered with the down of a blossom tree until the whole world was nothing but soft pinkness. I think I dreamt about heaven last night, haven't done that in many years."
"So it was my face which set you screaming?" Birkin said with something near a smirk of amusement.
"I didn't scream last night, did I?" Moon was heartsick at that, he had really not the slightest memory of any such thing.
"It sounded as if you did, from the belfry."
"Oh Lord. It's really more broken up there than one imagines."
"Yes." Birkin said.
Moon huffed tersely.
He really didn't mean to, but his disabilities made him so impatient, he hated being sad and tortured and pitied, he hated thinking about things, it annoyed him. This irritation set a fire beneath his backside and he sprang suddenly to his feet, dashing the dregs of his beloved Breakast tea out into the grass to be dried by the intense sunlight. Setting the cup down he then looked at Birkin and said to him gravely.
"Ah well, if I don't get moving now I don't suppose I ever shall."
Birkin, rather slower, began to stir only reluctantly to his feet, as mentally he was still rather embedded in a cloud of his own thoughts. Only half heartedly making away from the tent he looked, to Moon, for a terrible second like a man with shellshock, not responding to this world in the slightest significant amount.
Moon had once had a boy just like that in the trenches. Poor lad had refused to respond to orders, just stared with vacancy, or cried if you were lucky. He'd done it for days, until Moon had to order the other men to string him up from a post in No Man's Land as punishment, where, likely to his own entire indifference, he was dutifully shot and killed.
Moon snapped out of that thought at once without examining it, because it was so unseemly and depraved that it made him want to scream and scream and never stop.
How could he have done it, he might have asked himself if he was quick but instead he thought to himself, sun. He was out in the country, he was with Birkin, he was safe, he was free. He didn't need to think upon it, therefore he shouldn't.
Turning his attention to Birkin he asked, "Are you ok chap?" Laying a hand on the slightly taller man's arm, coming to realise that he was steadying himself as much as the other man.
"Yes." He received sadly.
There at once from this self interested plowing forth, Moon found himself looking at Birkin's face, seeing his sadness, his pain before his own, just as he had once done so readily with his beloved Cowper. That boy, his boy, the one who had brought the end to Moon's fighting. To think of him now really rather broke his heart apart, it was silly to think about it now, pathetic in it's pointlessness, so he shook him off and brightened himself at once in order to say to Birkin, who had now just about begun shuffling back to the Church.
"Do have fun with your mural."
Birkin stopped and turned to face him, almost smiling.
Then ecstatically laughing Moon came to, could feel himself almost bouncing with childlike amusement to where he was and said
"You know I almost asked you to meet me here for lunch just then."
There was a long gap filled with smiles, because they had established long ago that neither of them ate lunch whilst they were working, this was their first secret shared knowledge. "It wouldn't do would it?" Moon concluded
Birkin reasserted formally, "Well once I'm started I don't really have the impulse to break until the evening."
"No, indeed. By the time it came around, you wouldn't have come and I wouldn't have wanted to see you." Moon returned, convincing himself that this was quite a fine meeting of minds they had.
With a fabulous degree of attention to him and a smile that was crooked beneath his mustache, Birkin said.
"We will lunch one day."
"Yes. One day. In London. When all our pressing work is done and nothing but a dead memory." Of course Moon knew, both of them knew, that such blissful things as dead memories didn't really exist, it was only people who died. But in his speech, in the fantasies which arose from it, came part of his will to carry on.
Birkin, Tom, gave a truly jovial smile at that that finally warmed his whole countenance, it was free and somewhat mobile, one of the sort that it didn't seem his face was capable of until Moon saw it with his very eyes, then he turned and finally made his way off.
He really was lovely, Tom, with the capacity to elevate Moon's heart almost as often as he cast it into hell.
Still.
Moon settled into the thoughtless happiness of the chirruping birds around him, into the mindset of the gorgeous heating sun.
They never wondered what their work was for, or ever let suffering curtail their consistency, so, he thought, as he proceeded to tidy away his camping stove and looked with his eyes for his shovel, neither would he.
Title: No such thing as dead memories
Word Count: 2,407
Rating: U
Notes:
I'm pretty sure that no-one else has written fic for this film, (although if they have I wanna read it) if only for the fact that for years it's been impossible to see. I saw it recently thanks to youtube (it's still up there), found it quite lovely and pretty soon this flowed out.
From the mouth of his tent, newly opened to the early morning haze of sunlight, Moon watched Birkin approach from the turnstile at the start of the field. That long lean body of his, his slight ambling gait, was fantastically youthful, even at a distance. Like a mirage in a desert, for until he'd arrived in Oxgodby, apart from Moon himself, there were few other young people there.
Well Mrs Keach was technically young too, but Moon doubted that a Mrs, could be really young, even if bodily she seemed to be.
Birkin was amused by something this morning, for as he got closer he was very nearly smiling, a rarity indeed. It seemed already as though the clean air had dissolved much of what had previously clogged him up inside. You could hear it in his voice too. When he'd first arrived he would only have used it, wracked by stammers as it once was, quietly and hesitantly. Now he was only on the edges of Moon's periphery when he opened his mouth and said loudly at him.
"Goodness. At times, it's almost as if the fools actually believe anyone is listening to them other than me."
He was referring, of course, to the churchgoers of the village. It was Sunday so they had been loudly praising The Lord, for hours now, beneath Birkin's bed in the belfry. All of this coming after the thunderous, sleep shattering indignity of the bells chiming through his floorboards.
Moon's tent was in the field next to the church and each footstep closer to it lessened the sound of the congregation. Until now there was only the ghostly atmosphere of the choral music, volume reduced to a level where it was almost pleasant. Moon, was now down on the grass outside his tent, leaning on his side, blue eyes watering, as he tried to ignore the currently docile levels of pain that had begun in his feet and ankles, aware that it would take some serious stamping and agony to rid himself of it and not willing to do it before Birkin unless he needed to, for feeling it rude and not wanting to unnerve him.
He'd only just coaxed the shy young man down from the mural he was cleaning as it was.
"They woke you up again this morning?" he enquired, keeping his voice softness itself, he focused on delivering it over paying attention to his pain. "I love religious people. I mean you of all can't deny that they are responsible for a great many beautiful things."
Moon's voice kept steady whilst he spoke, but the flushing burning in his feet, the cramping in his joints seized his body tightly when he was silent. Pain escalating higher and higher in pitch, challenging his ignorance, until god help him, though he did all he could to resist it, Moon's face twisted a little in response to it.
Birkin, pale face impassive, took a look away at first but when it became clear that it was beyond Moon's control, the darker man asked, deep brown eyes slightly widened.
"Are you alright?"
Face still grimacing slightly, breath a little rasped, Moon was forced to acknowledge his imperfection to Birkin, to excuse himself and disappointment added to the agony.
"Cramp. No matter how I try I can never keep everything straight when I am asleep. It catches up with me."
Moon rose reluctantly to his feet at that, sadly aware that the embarrassing time had come when he would have to shake the pain out, Birkin or no Birkin.
Casting a wary look in the other man's direction, seeing that thankfully he was not looking at him but, instead, as if he knew the dance that was coming, directing a distracted, contemplative eye on the sea of green around them, Moon began to stamp his feet hard against the grassed earth. Hands on hips so he could put real force into the gesture, from pelvis downwards, forcing the elements beneath to come back to efficiency. It hurt a terrible amount, pins and needles began in wincing flurrys and he wondered for a ludicrous second if it was the case that his feet, which he stood on, had somehow died, as if they wouldn't come back from agonising pain. All the while he exhaled sharp, suffering breaths, bearing all with considerable fortitude.
His companion meanwhile continued to ignore him politely, loosing himself in the glowing hum of the sun and the pressing roll of the countryside, it's sights, it's fresh smells.
"I get particularly bad cramps." Moon continued, giving Birkin the signal to look at him again. "I used to have these fits, as a boy. Didn't ever seem to last very long, but a few times when I came back again, I had bashed myself against hard things, my skull, my ankles, or my knees, usually all three. Now it's as if the joints and muscles never quite returned to normal again. Then of course, courtesy of his Majesty, I got a bit of trench foot, shrapnel too, which didn't help. So ever since, every morning, I've been the decrepit misery you see before you."
He was in the final stages of just flexing his ankles to fully work them out as he said this.
Birkin was of course, reasonable, calm and measured in response.
He would be so damnably perfect.
"I think anyone would get cramp sleeping in such a small space." He said, referring to Moon's tent, "Seems like the ideal breeding ground for it."
"Well yes but I don't know. It just feels more intense with me than it should be somehow, more continuous. Still, how would I know if it's appropriate? It's not as if any of us can feel things with another's body."
"No."
"Which is probably just as well for the likes of you and I, don't you think, with the things we've seen. Although perhaps it was the speculation that damaged us? Perhaps if we had felt it all, it shouldn't have hurt half as much?" It was inevitable that Moon came back to the War, there was no way to resist, given that Birkin was someone, of the few he would meet around here who would understand.
"There can be no way to know."
Their words were like sighs, sluggishly given, products of reluctant, sun dozed brains. The brightness and heat really was relentless in it's control, even at this very early part of the day, perhaps particularly. They allowed themselves to fall into a trough of silence, neither quite knowing freedom in each others company. There was a great many things besides between them, but not that so far.
Eventually, glad of the chance to brighten, Moon remembered "Ah the tea should be done."
"Tea?"
"Yes, I saw you coming from ages away, trudging through the field. So I put some on." Moon's own smile found him brilliantly and he could feel it eking out any inertia in his soul and all of it was because of Birkin and so all of it was aimed that way; Birkin the great atheist, the sombre sinner.
They took to their cups and the silence grew thicker. Moon sat back down again and simply watched as quiet, Birkin pushed fingertips through his memories, as his eyes glazed resolutely in surrender to them, in refusal to share them.
"Do you ever get the sensation sometimes, that your soul has gone clear, that there is nothing whatsoever to be said." Moon asked him.
"Out here I do. In town it was rather more that there was everything to be said, just not the capacity to say it."
Moon saw and agreed. Clearly it was the pressure of words that would lead one to stammer as Birkin once had and surely as he was sitting there, he knew it was the pressure of possible words that kept himself tense too. He could not bring himself to nod though, the gesture felt too exuberant, too happy at the blasted circumstance.
"Yes. That might be it instead. I just get the strongest urge to ask you so many things sometimes, and yet they all seem so insignificant to bother with inside the next second."
A pause, a still, an interruption from propriety and the blonde man really felt somehow as if forced to say what he did next, forced to open himself, to lay himself at the other man's mercy, to try to show his affection as he once had so easily in the land before.
"Do you know, I did nothing but dream of you last night, of you and Mrs Keach being wed in the church right there, of you stepping out to be covered with the down of a blossom tree until the whole world was nothing but soft pinkness. I think I dreamt about heaven last night, haven't done that in many years."
"So it was my face which set you screaming?" Birkin said with something near a smirk of amusement.
"I didn't scream last night, did I?" Moon was heartsick at that, he had really not the slightest memory of any such thing.
"It sounded as if you did, from the belfry."
"Oh Lord. It's really more broken up there than one imagines."
"Yes." Birkin said.
Moon huffed tersely.
He really didn't mean to, but his disabilities made him so impatient, he hated being sad and tortured and pitied, he hated thinking about things, it annoyed him. This irritation set a fire beneath his backside and he sprang suddenly to his feet, dashing the dregs of his beloved Breakast tea out into the grass to be dried by the intense sunlight. Setting the cup down he then looked at Birkin and said to him gravely.
"Ah well, if I don't get moving now I don't suppose I ever shall."
Birkin, rather slower, began to stir only reluctantly to his feet, as mentally he was still rather embedded in a cloud of his own thoughts. Only half heartedly making away from the tent he looked, to Moon, for a terrible second like a man with shellshock, not responding to this world in the slightest significant amount.
Moon had once had a boy just like that in the trenches. Poor lad had refused to respond to orders, just stared with vacancy, or cried if you were lucky. He'd done it for days, until Moon had to order the other men to string him up from a post in No Man's Land as punishment, where, likely to his own entire indifference, he was dutifully shot and killed.
Moon snapped out of that thought at once without examining it, because it was so unseemly and depraved that it made him want to scream and scream and never stop.
How could he have done it, he might have asked himself if he was quick but instead he thought to himself, sun. He was out in the country, he was with Birkin, he was safe, he was free. He didn't need to think upon it, therefore he shouldn't.
Turning his attention to Birkin he asked, "Are you ok chap?" Laying a hand on the slightly taller man's arm, coming to realise that he was steadying himself as much as the other man.
"Yes." He received sadly.
There at once from this self interested plowing forth, Moon found himself looking at Birkin's face, seeing his sadness, his pain before his own, just as he had once done so readily with his beloved Cowper. That boy, his boy, the one who had brought the end to Moon's fighting. To think of him now really rather broke his heart apart, it was silly to think about it now, pathetic in it's pointlessness, so he shook him off and brightened himself at once in order to say to Birkin, who had now just about begun shuffling back to the Church.
"Do have fun with your mural."
Birkin stopped and turned to face him, almost smiling.
Then ecstatically laughing Moon came to, could feel himself almost bouncing with childlike amusement to where he was and said
"You know I almost asked you to meet me here for lunch just then."
There was a long gap filled with smiles, because they had established long ago that neither of them ate lunch whilst they were working, this was their first secret shared knowledge. "It wouldn't do would it?" Moon concluded
Birkin reasserted formally, "Well once I'm started I don't really have the impulse to break until the evening."
"No, indeed. By the time it came around, you wouldn't have come and I wouldn't have wanted to see you." Moon returned, convincing himself that this was quite a fine meeting of minds they had.
With a fabulous degree of attention to him and a smile that was crooked beneath his mustache, Birkin said.
"We will lunch one day."
"Yes. One day. In London. When all our pressing work is done and nothing but a dead memory." Of course Moon knew, both of them knew, that such blissful things as dead memories didn't really exist, it was only people who died. But in his speech, in the fantasies which arose from it, came part of his will to carry on.
Birkin, Tom, gave a truly jovial smile at that that finally warmed his whole countenance, it was free and somewhat mobile, one of the sort that it didn't seem his face was capable of until Moon saw it with his very eyes, then he turned and finally made his way off.
He really was lovely, Tom, with the capacity to elevate Moon's heart almost as often as he cast it into hell.
Still.
Moon settled into the thoughtless happiness of the chirruping birds around him, into the mindset of the gorgeous heating sun.
They never wondered what their work was for, or ever let suffering curtail their consistency, so, he thought, as he proceeded to tidy away his camping stove and looked with his eyes for his shovel, neither would he.
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Date: 2010-05-07 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-08 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-08 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-09 10:24 pm (UTC)Man Firth is always good but shamefully I found Kenneth Branagh quite beautiful in that film too. See I knew so many people who liked him, but I was always immune until that film. Awwwwww poor Moon. I think I should go watch the fillum again. God it's good that it's on YouTube.
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Date: 2010-05-10 06:05 pm (UTC)You make me wantto watch teh movie again - I will have to check it out!