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Aug. 25th, 2008 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sebastienneMy friends list has over two hundred people on it. If more than ten of you know The Tomorrow People, I'd be surprised. Nevertheless, I'm posting Bowie-crossover TP fic. If you don't know this fandom, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
calliope85 (who also deserves thanks and praise for intelligent beta-reading and words of encouragement) has written an entertaining and enlightening introduction to the main character, John, which is more than enough background, and well worth a read anyway. But basically, there are some kids. They have lots of powers that begin with "tele" and a secret lab. They often save the world from alien invasion. One of them is pretty, and repressed.
The internet has come a long way since I was posting godawful songfics to fanfiction.net.. now I'm able to find the clips I'm talking about on YouTube, and embed them! What a strange, multimedia-fanfic world we live in.
This is also, in part, a tribute to my own Bowie-awakening. He messed with my head long enough and hard enough, and I'm a liberal binary-busting child of the 80s. John's repressed, a workaholic, a conservative child of the 50s (whom I adore, hence this fic, really).
Fic: Oh, You Pretty Things
Fandom: The Tomorrow People
Pairings: None
Rating: PG
Length: < 2,000 words
Warnings: Tories getting genderfucked; spurious Bowie-videos.
*****
John brushed the toast crumbs from his lilac cashmere sweater as his eyes flicked over the papers in front of him one more time. A new kind of fizzy pop was causing trouble in schools - "additives", said the newspapers, but even the flimsiest of the tabloids hadn't made the connections that John had to alien mind-altering drugs.
"TIM, can we cross-reference the locations of the shops selling this new kind of pop with any recent freak weather conditions? Storms and the like - even unexpected fog might give them enough cover."
//There appear to be no correlations.//
A frown creased John's forehead. "Are you sure, TIM? That was a very quick response."
//There appear to be no correlations. I had already determined that you were going to ask the question, as it was the obvious consequence of your learning of the change in the constitution of the drink between manufacturer and consumer. Thus I had already consulted local meteorological data.//
John pursed his lips in resignation.
"Thank you, TIM."
The schoolchildren drinking the pop became hyperactive, but in a focussed way. They were learning more effectively - the thirstiest outperforming their teachers - only the Tomorrow People had noticed that there was anything strange going on. But now that the effects were becoming more extreme, the strange curiosities becoming focussed obsessions..
John's concentration was interrupted by a familiar sound, and he looked up to see Stephen appearing on the jaunting pad. Stephen started to move as soon as he was fully materialised, rushing frantically towards John.
"They know about us, John, the saps, they know about us!"
John stepped down from his stool and looked towards Stephen with concern. The boy was flustered, as if he'd been running, even though jaunting required no physical exertion.
"Come on now, Stephen, what do you mean?"
"I went back to Luke's house after school, and well, you know he has that really weird haircut?"
"Yes - all short on the top and long at the back, another ridiculous teenage fashion."
Stephen looked askance at John: the man with the severe side-parting and the perfectly-creased trousers may have been a few years older than him, but he was still, without a doubt, a teenager.
"Well, he was showing me where it came from: this pop singer, it turns out Luke's a huge fan."
John's face darkened, as if he knew that anything to do with popular culture was likely to be bad news.
"And he was playing me his records, and there was this one song - John, he was singing about us! He was singing about Homo superior!"
"Nonsense, Stephen. If the saps knew about us, we would know about it. TIM would know about it. You must have misheard."
John's faith in the biotronic computer that he had built shone through in his smug expression.
//Actually, John, by searching for the earliest images of the hair-cut you described, I have found the originator of the trend. Stephen, was this pop singer called David Bowie?//
"Yes, that's right!"
//Then I believe that I have found the song that Stephen referred to.//
The sound a slightly out-of-tune piano filled the lab as the video screen flickered into life. Stephen walked across to the sofa, a queer expression on his face. The sofa was facing away from the video screen, so he knelt on it, sitting on his heels and resting his chin on arms folded on the hard back of the chair. John stood, stiffly, a few paces behind. His arms were crossed, his expression mistrustful.
On the video screen, the camera was panning up across the strings of a piano towards its player. Her hands moved gracefully across the keys, a silver bangle adorning one delicate wrist. Her busily-patterned top was cut scandalously low as the camera panned up towards her face. Ah. His face. John's eyes flicked to the back of Stephen's head, but the boy's attention was entirely consumed by the video screen, so he couldn't have noticed John's odd response. Not that the mistake was anywhere but in his mind, anyway, but that's the thing with telepaths. You could never quite be sure. So yes. His face. And what a strange face! As well as the hair-cut of which he was so disapproving, John also noticed that the singer's eyes were mismatched: one green, with a pin-point pupil in the bright stage-lights; the other brown, with a large black pupil. His teeth were uneven, his smile lopsided, and yet his face was captivating. John found himself immediately suspecting that, if there was any substance to Stephen's assertion, then the explanation was to be found with this man. He didn't seem to be quite of this world. When those eyes looked into the camera, it was hard to look away.
"Wake up you sleepy head - put on some clothes, shake up your bed. Put another log on the fire for me - I've made some breakfast and coffee"
Stephen turned to look at John's expression, unsurprised to see that it was as tightly closed-off as ever.
"This is the one, TIM."
"I look out my window what do I see? A crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me. All the nightmares came today, and it looks as though they're here to stay."
The camera shot changed, taking in all of the man who was sitting at the baby grand. He was sitting sideways on the stool, one shiny red-booted foot on the piano pedal, the other dragging a little behind him. With his half-undone jumpsuit and platform boots laced up to his knees, he looked like nothing that John had ever seen before. In a way that John could not quite articulate, he looked alien - dangerously alien.
"What are we coming to? No room for me, no fun for you. I think about a world to come, where the books were found by the Golden ones. Written in pain, written in awe, by a puzzled man who questioned what we were here for. All the strangers came today, and it looks as though they're here to stay."
The lyrics were strange, sounding more like prophecy than pop song, and made John distinctly uncomfortable. When the lighting changed, and the rest of the band came into focus, John's arms uncrossed and he took a step forward in surprise. While they were all dressed in a similarly outlandish fashion to the singer, one of them was wearing something that looked very much like an AE suit.
"Oh, you pretty things - don't you know you're driving your mamas and papas insane? Oh, you pretty things - don't you know you're driving your mamas and papas insane?"
Now it was sounding more like John had been expecting it to - guitar, drums, meaningless and repetitive lyrics. Pop music, he thought, disdainfully.
"Let me make it plain - you gotta make way for the Homo Superior."
And then the bottom dropped out of John's world. The strangely captivating man with the delicate hands and the mismatched eyes was singing about Tomorrow People, right there, were anyone could see...
"Look at your children - see their faces in golden rays. Don't kid yourself they belong to you - they're the start of a coming race. The earth is a bitch, we've finished our news - Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use."
Panic rising in his chest, possibilities flooded through John's head. Even if this man was a Tomorrow Person, had broken out somehow without anyone noticing, there was no reason that he should know the name Homo superior. And those strange eyes - John wasn't sure that he could be Homo anything, anyway. Some kind of alien, then - that could explain the chillingly androgynous appearance - but why? Not inciting the saps to fear the Tomorrow People - if anything this song was a heralding, an incitement to acceptance. And John couldn't for the life of him understand what that was meant to accomplish. So fully had the doctrine of secrecy been forced upon him - images of scientific tests and of circus freak shows came into his mind, unbidden - that he couldn't think other than that what this man was doing was wrong, even when it was clear that the song's existence had done them no direct harm.
Gathering his composure, and with an artificially confident voice, John addressed TIM: "As we've seen and heard no backlash against us, I think we can safely assume that no-one has taken this.. man seriously." John forced the gendered term through into his speech, despite the fact that he felt like his categorisations of male and female could no longer do justice to this creature. The final piano chords sounded in the lab as the video screen went blank.
//It seems that this singer has a small, but committed, group of fans who believe him to be an alien messiah-figure, 'Ziggy Stardust'.//
As John replied, "You mean that there are people who take it seriously?", Stephen interrupted with "Do you think there's a chance that he could be an alien?".
The video screen came to life again, as TIM said: //It is possible. I can find no record of this man before about three years ago. This is a recording from the television programme, 'Top of the Pops'. It is, perhaps, the most overtly alien of this man's songs.//
Another woolen catsuit, just as grotesquely patterned, but this time even more obnoxious in colour. The bizarre haircut was even more extreme, shorter on top and longer in the back, and dyed an orangey red. No piano, this time: he was standing, holding a guitar, although when it was not being played he turned it on its strap, and wore it on his back. At those times, John categorically Did Not Notice a bulge which allowed him to unambiguously put this creature into one of his mental gender boxes. Despite the delicate features: despite the exquisite make-up, the lidded eyes, the frosted lips. And the words.. he could have been singing about the representatives of the Galactic Trig who had first come to visit John after his breakout.
"There's a starman waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us but he thinks he'd blow our minds"
John's cheeks burned pinker than his sweater, as the pretty nonotpretty boy-girl-thing wrapped one delicate arm around the (male) guitarist and gazed intensely into the camera. So this is what the general public would think of, if ever some adversary were to try to give away the existence of Homo superior! Perhaps it was for the best, then, that this queerly-painted creature should parade about in this way, being quite unbelievable: it provided excellent cover. After this confusing spectacle, who could take seriously the suggestion of a Tomorrow People conspiracy? The colour faded from John's cheeks as the song ended, and he reassured Stephen that there was nothing to worry about (somewhat over-paternalistically, Stephen thought; there were only a few years between them, after all), and he returned to his notes about alien chemicals in fizzy pop, barely flustered at all.
*****
When he is absolutely certain that he is alone in the lab, and after swearing TIM to secrecy - as well as a little mechanical tinkering to make absolutely certain of that fact - John sometimes accesses the computer's records of David Bowie's music. (He can't quite articulate the connection he feels with the singer - who is definitely human, he did the research himself - but it has something to do with otherness, exclusion, alienation.) He takes the kohl pencil from where Elizabeth keeps it in the bathroom cabinet (she notices that it becomes inexplicably blunted, sometimes, but would never ever say anything), and applies it with super-human care.
When he makes eye contact with himself in the mirror, it sends shivers down his spine.
*****
Feedback is love.
calliope85 (who also deserves thanks and praise for intelligent beta-reading and words of encouragement) has written an entertaining and enlightening introduction to the main character, John, which is more than enough background, and well worth a read anyway. But basically, there are some kids. They have lots of powers that begin with "tele" and a secret lab. They often save the world from alien invasion. One of them is pretty, and repressed.The internet has come a long way since I was posting godawful songfics to fanfiction.net.. now I'm able to find the clips I'm talking about on YouTube, and embed them! What a strange, multimedia-fanfic world we live in.
This is also, in part, a tribute to my own Bowie-awakening. He messed with my head long enough and hard enough, and I'm a liberal binary-busting child of the 80s. John's repressed, a workaholic, a conservative child of the 50s (whom I adore, hence this fic, really).
Fic: Oh, You Pretty Things
Fandom: The Tomorrow People
Pairings: None
Rating: PG
Length: < 2,000 words
Warnings: Tories getting genderfucked; spurious Bowie-videos.
*****
John brushed the toast crumbs from his lilac cashmere sweater as his eyes flicked over the papers in front of him one more time. A new kind of fizzy pop was causing trouble in schools - "additives", said the newspapers, but even the flimsiest of the tabloids hadn't made the connections that John had to alien mind-altering drugs.
"TIM, can we cross-reference the locations of the shops selling this new kind of pop with any recent freak weather conditions? Storms and the like - even unexpected fog might give them enough cover."
//There appear to be no correlations.//
A frown creased John's forehead. "Are you sure, TIM? That was a very quick response."
//There appear to be no correlations. I had already determined that you were going to ask the question, as it was the obvious consequence of your learning of the change in the constitution of the drink between manufacturer and consumer. Thus I had already consulted local meteorological data.//
John pursed his lips in resignation.
"Thank you, TIM."
The schoolchildren drinking the pop became hyperactive, but in a focussed way. They were learning more effectively - the thirstiest outperforming their teachers - only the Tomorrow People had noticed that there was anything strange going on. But now that the effects were becoming more extreme, the strange curiosities becoming focussed obsessions..
John's concentration was interrupted by a familiar sound, and he looked up to see Stephen appearing on the jaunting pad. Stephen started to move as soon as he was fully materialised, rushing frantically towards John.
"They know about us, John, the saps, they know about us!"
John stepped down from his stool and looked towards Stephen with concern. The boy was flustered, as if he'd been running, even though jaunting required no physical exertion.
"Come on now, Stephen, what do you mean?"
"I went back to Luke's house after school, and well, you know he has that really weird haircut?"
"Yes - all short on the top and long at the back, another ridiculous teenage fashion."
Stephen looked askance at John: the man with the severe side-parting and the perfectly-creased trousers may have been a few years older than him, but he was still, without a doubt, a teenager.
"Well, he was showing me where it came from: this pop singer, it turns out Luke's a huge fan."
John's face darkened, as if he knew that anything to do with popular culture was likely to be bad news.
"And he was playing me his records, and there was this one song - John, he was singing about us! He was singing about Homo superior!"
"Nonsense, Stephen. If the saps knew about us, we would know about it. TIM would know about it. You must have misheard."
John's faith in the biotronic computer that he had built shone through in his smug expression.
//Actually, John, by searching for the earliest images of the hair-cut you described, I have found the originator of the trend. Stephen, was this pop singer called David Bowie?//
"Yes, that's right!"
//Then I believe that I have found the song that Stephen referred to.//
The sound a slightly out-of-tune piano filled the lab as the video screen flickered into life. Stephen walked across to the sofa, a queer expression on his face. The sofa was facing away from the video screen, so he knelt on it, sitting on his heels and resting his chin on arms folded on the hard back of the chair. John stood, stiffly, a few paces behind. His arms were crossed, his expression mistrustful.
On the video screen, the camera was panning up across the strings of a piano towards its player. Her hands moved gracefully across the keys, a silver bangle adorning one delicate wrist. Her busily-patterned top was cut scandalously low as the camera panned up towards her face. Ah. His face. John's eyes flicked to the back of Stephen's head, but the boy's attention was entirely consumed by the video screen, so he couldn't have noticed John's odd response. Not that the mistake was anywhere but in his mind, anyway, but that's the thing with telepaths. You could never quite be sure. So yes. His face. And what a strange face! As well as the hair-cut of which he was so disapproving, John also noticed that the singer's eyes were mismatched: one green, with a pin-point pupil in the bright stage-lights; the other brown, with a large black pupil. His teeth were uneven, his smile lopsided, and yet his face was captivating. John found himself immediately suspecting that, if there was any substance to Stephen's assertion, then the explanation was to be found with this man. He didn't seem to be quite of this world. When those eyes looked into the camera, it was hard to look away.
"Wake up you sleepy head - put on some clothes, shake up your bed. Put another log on the fire for me - I've made some breakfast and coffee"
Stephen turned to look at John's expression, unsurprised to see that it was as tightly closed-off as ever.
"This is the one, TIM."
"I look out my window what do I see? A crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me. All the nightmares came today, and it looks as though they're here to stay."
The camera shot changed, taking in all of the man who was sitting at the baby grand. He was sitting sideways on the stool, one shiny red-booted foot on the piano pedal, the other dragging a little behind him. With his half-undone jumpsuit and platform boots laced up to his knees, he looked like nothing that John had ever seen before. In a way that John could not quite articulate, he looked alien - dangerously alien.
"What are we coming to? No room for me, no fun for you. I think about a world to come, where the books were found by the Golden ones. Written in pain, written in awe, by a puzzled man who questioned what we were here for. All the strangers came today, and it looks as though they're here to stay."
The lyrics were strange, sounding more like prophecy than pop song, and made John distinctly uncomfortable. When the lighting changed, and the rest of the band came into focus, John's arms uncrossed and he took a step forward in surprise. While they were all dressed in a similarly outlandish fashion to the singer, one of them was wearing something that looked very much like an AE suit.
"Oh, you pretty things - don't you know you're driving your mamas and papas insane? Oh, you pretty things - don't you know you're driving your mamas and papas insane?"
Now it was sounding more like John had been expecting it to - guitar, drums, meaningless and repetitive lyrics. Pop music, he thought, disdainfully.
"Let me make it plain - you gotta make way for the Homo Superior."
And then the bottom dropped out of John's world. The strangely captivating man with the delicate hands and the mismatched eyes was singing about Tomorrow People, right there, were anyone could see...
"Look at your children - see their faces in golden rays. Don't kid yourself they belong to you - they're the start of a coming race. The earth is a bitch, we've finished our news - Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use."
Panic rising in his chest, possibilities flooded through John's head. Even if this man was a Tomorrow Person, had broken out somehow without anyone noticing, there was no reason that he should know the name Homo superior. And those strange eyes - John wasn't sure that he could be Homo anything, anyway. Some kind of alien, then - that could explain the chillingly androgynous appearance - but why? Not inciting the saps to fear the Tomorrow People - if anything this song was a heralding, an incitement to acceptance. And John couldn't for the life of him understand what that was meant to accomplish. So fully had the doctrine of secrecy been forced upon him - images of scientific tests and of circus freak shows came into his mind, unbidden - that he couldn't think other than that what this man was doing was wrong, even when it was clear that the song's existence had done them no direct harm.
Gathering his composure, and with an artificially confident voice, John addressed TIM: "As we've seen and heard no backlash against us, I think we can safely assume that no-one has taken this.. man seriously." John forced the gendered term through into his speech, despite the fact that he felt like his categorisations of male and female could no longer do justice to this creature. The final piano chords sounded in the lab as the video screen went blank.
//It seems that this singer has a small, but committed, group of fans who believe him to be an alien messiah-figure, 'Ziggy Stardust'.//
As John replied, "You mean that there are people who take it seriously?", Stephen interrupted with "Do you think there's a chance that he could be an alien?".
The video screen came to life again, as TIM said: //It is possible. I can find no record of this man before about three years ago. This is a recording from the television programme, 'Top of the Pops'. It is, perhaps, the most overtly alien of this man's songs.//
Another woolen catsuit, just as grotesquely patterned, but this time even more obnoxious in colour. The bizarre haircut was even more extreme, shorter on top and longer in the back, and dyed an orangey red. No piano, this time: he was standing, holding a guitar, although when it was not being played he turned it on its strap, and wore it on his back. At those times, John categorically Did Not Notice a bulge which allowed him to unambiguously put this creature into one of his mental gender boxes. Despite the delicate features: despite the exquisite make-up, the lidded eyes, the frosted lips. And the words.. he could have been singing about the representatives of the Galactic Trig who had first come to visit John after his breakout.
"There's a starman waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us but he thinks he'd blow our minds"
John's cheeks burned pinker than his sweater, as the pretty nonotpretty boy-girl-thing wrapped one delicate arm around the (male) guitarist and gazed intensely into the camera. So this is what the general public would think of, if ever some adversary were to try to give away the existence of Homo superior! Perhaps it was for the best, then, that this queerly-painted creature should parade about in this way, being quite unbelievable: it provided excellent cover. After this confusing spectacle, who could take seriously the suggestion of a Tomorrow People conspiracy? The colour faded from John's cheeks as the song ended, and he reassured Stephen that there was nothing to worry about (somewhat over-paternalistically, Stephen thought; there were only a few years between them, after all), and he returned to his notes about alien chemicals in fizzy pop, barely flustered at all.
*****
When he is absolutely certain that he is alone in the lab, and after swearing TIM to secrecy - as well as a little mechanical tinkering to make absolutely certain of that fact - John sometimes accesses the computer's records of David Bowie's music. (He can't quite articulate the connection he feels with the singer - who is definitely human, he did the research himself - but it has something to do with otherness, exclusion, alienation.) He takes the kohl pencil from where Elizabeth keeps it in the bathroom cabinet (she notices that it becomes inexplicably blunted, sometimes, but would never ever say anything), and applies it with super-human care.
When he makes eye contact with himself in the mirror, it sends shivers down his spine.
*****
Feedback is love.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 07:44 pm (UTC)So thanks. This was a unique read and it had my attention to the very end.
Fizzy-pop... (snicker, giggle, GOOGLES "The Tomorrow People")
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 08:00 pm (UTC)So glad that you liked!
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 10:48 pm (UTC)Um.
Wasn't keen on it myself.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 11:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 10:44 pm (UTC)I love crossovers.
And for some reason I'd really like Jack Harkness to get his hands on John... *g*
BTW, some of us still say fizzy-pop.
ETA: I never knew this little bit of info about the term Homo Superior either...
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 10:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 11:02 pm (UTC)*strokes imaginary beard*
One long TP crossover fic, with a different crossover in each chapter...
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 11:10 pm (UTC)Now that I would *love* to see. *rubs hands in gleeful anticipation*
Funnily enough we have some of the same interests (Blake's 7, Doctor Who, H2G2 to name but three).
no subject
Date: 2008-08-26 09:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 11:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-26 08:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-26 03:06 am (UTC)John messing with Liz's make up---I don't think my inner four year old who loved this show can take that, but the concept? I really love the concept.
(The TP, BTW, stands for Tomorrow People.)
no subject
Date: 2008-08-26 10:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-26 12:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-26 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 03:09 pm (UTC)