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Title: Ray Galilei and the Secondary Female Protagonist
Series: Ray
Rating: PG13ish
Word Count: 1550
Summary: Ray does not do well with women.
Notes: Third written in the Ray series.
When Ray was a kid, and therefore a bit of an egomaniac, he was pretty much convinced that if his life a TV show, he would be the hero. And why not? He was smart. He was funny. He had a cool house. He was interesting, dammit, and he didn't care what anybody else said.
By the time he reached high school, he had enough years of identifying with secondary characters under his belt to realize that at best he was the hero's quirky side kick and at worst the guy who died, unmourned, in the pilot because he knew too much and then the hero would find his stash of embarrassing pornography and make some wry remark about it while looking for answers. (Ray doesn't actually have an embarrassing pornography stash, but he figures his house will spontaneously generate one upon his death. It seems like the kind of thing that would happen.) When he's watching Starsky & Hutch, he thinks he wouldn't mind being Huggy Bear, or maybe Starsky's mechanic, but under no circumstances does he want to be Sweet Alice. He is not a hooker with a heart of gold, nor does he ever aspire to be one.
He doesn't give it more than an idle thought when, in college, his friendship with Annette – who's more the type to be lead in some quirky ensemble than your classic hero, but still – bears` out his sidekick hypothesis. Actually being a sidekick takes up a lot of the free time that he once used for introspection.
By the time he's lost and then reconnected with Annette, he's twenty-six and not thought much about any of this in a while. (Aside from that time he found some Starsky & Hutch fanfic on line where Sweet Alice died badly and he doesn't like to think about that.) He has an airship and then an air cannon and then any number of other things to worry about. Which is sort of unfortunate as, if he had thought about it, perhaps he would have seen it coming when it came time for the obligatory 'sidekick gets an evil girlfriend' episode.
Her name was Abby and, in Ray's defense, she built and battled robots. In his mind, nobody who does that could be all bad. Her designs were not only innovative, they had a subtle artistry that only someone who truly understood machines could appreciate. Ray understood. Ray appreciated. Ray’s heart didn't stand a chance.
Later on, he realized he should have known the minute Annette disapproved that Abby was a fraud. But that’s how the plot always went. Sidekick gets girlfriend, protagonist disapproves, sidekick and protagonist fight, protagonist is vindicated. Ray and Alex usually went to underground robot battles (think cockfighting, but with robots) together, but Alex was out of town, visiting family for a couple of weeks, so Ray went alone and met Abby and was smitten. When Annette met Abby for the first time, she smelled a rat pretty much immediately. Being Annette, she handled it with her usual delicacy, and Ray and Annette ended up having a big, screaming argument in the middle of Starbucks. Then, when Alex got back, he thought Abby looked strangely familiar and it turned out she had not only killed two people to steal designs from them, she was most likely planning to do the same to Ray, which was just not cool.
The whole affair left Ray pissed off, both at her and at himself. He was just glad he'd never taken her to the roof. It was his place, his and Annette's and Alex's, and he would have hated himself for screwing up his feng shui. (She had asked about it, because he mentioned going up there with the others, and then pouted when he said it was special for him and his friends and he'd rather not take her up there until they knew each other better. She fed him some line of bullshit about how couples are supposed to share things and, in what he later thought of as his one moment of rationality, he said, “No couple shares everything. They'd murder each other. Me and my friends need our space just like you and me do.” And, later, when she still wouldn't let it go, “They're not more important, just different. Christ woman, don't you have friends?” One need never accuse Ray of tact. The answer, for the record, was 'no'.)
It was to the roof he retreated after giving the police his statement, hopefully ensuring Abby – whose real name was Stella Meyer – would be locked up forever, and it was on the roof that Alex found him, hours later, firing radishes into the forest with a scaled-down potato gun.
“At least we can rest easy knowing there's no chance she's pregnant,” Ray said, when he heard the familiar scrape of Alex's boots coming towards him.
“Why's that?” Alex stood at his shoulder, and watched a radish fly.
“Cause' she'd end up spawning in prison,” Ray explained. “And we'd have to deal with some sort of chronologically impossibly paternity-revenge thing when the ratings slump in season six.”
There was a pause. Ray shoved another radish down the barrel.
“Is this something in your head?” Alex said. Ray fired. “Or did we have a conversation and I just missed it entirely?”
“It's in my head,” Ray said. He dropped the gun on top of the half-full bag of radishes and sighed.
He told Alex about his evolving theories, bringing up Huggy Bear but not Sweet Alice. He still felt weird about that. As he talked, they sat down on the edge of the roof and let their boots hang down. Ray didn't feel like looking at Alex, so he focused on them. His black, Alex's red. Otherwise identical. Steel toes. Doc Marten's. Neither of them were at risk for being mistaken for skin heads.
“So Annette's our protagonist?” Alex asked.
“Don't you think so?” Ray said. It seemed obvious to him.
“Guess so.” A brief hesitation. “If you're the sidekick, what am I?”
“Female protagonists can have more than one male sidekick,” Ray said. “In some genres, it's almost required. Though we are breaking with tradition, somewhat, in that neither of us are her love interest.” He cast a suspicious glare at Alex's boots. “Are we?”
Alex laughed. “I'm not,” he said. “You sure as hell aren't. I think that honor goes to Mark.”
Ray nodded.
After a pause, Alex asked, “So, who's our secondary female protagonist?”
Ray thought about it.
“Lain?” he suggested. “Her or someone else from Annette's office, probably. I guess one us – most likely you, being the better adjusted of the two of us – should develop sexual tension with whoever it is that gets steadily more awkward and forces until you finally pounce on each other in the finale.”
Alex made a sound that eloquently expressed his displeasure with the suggestion.
“Ray,” he said, “I hate to break it to you, but the only person I have unresolved sexual tension with is you.”
Ray shifted uncomfortably. “I was hoping you wouldn't notice,” he admitted.
There was another pause, slightly more embarrassed than the last – at least it felt that way for Ray.
“Does this make you the secondary female protagonist?” Alex asked, all innocence.
Ray considered himself momentarily, and ran an uncertain hand over his leather coat and loosely curling hair. It needed cut.
“Can the secondary female protagonist be in drag?” he asked. “Because I don't know if I know how to be a girl.”
“You said 'quirky ensemble',” Alex said.
He was either failing to be reassuring or succeeding at being an asshole. Ray decided to ignore the issue, because he was still not entirely as ease with the idea at hand.
“Do I have to swoon?” he said. “At moments of high stress, I mean. Do I have to faint?”
Alex laughed, not unkindly. “I was not aware that this was a quirky ensemble Regency romance,” he said.
“Why not?” Ray asked. “It could be a quirky ensemble steampunk Regency romance.”
There was another pause, this one purely respectful of the genius they had clearly created. Ray felt the need to ruin it.
“Or,” he said, “my binding could always be too tight. That's why women swooned back then, anyway. Corsets.” He smirked. “And you would have to rescue me in a fashion that was suitably manly, but also sufficiently satirical that it doesn't come off as sexist.”
“I can do that,” Alex said. “I can do that.” And then, “When do we get to the finale?”
Ray laughed out loud, and finally turned to face Alex. He noticed, not for the first time, that Alex's eyes were a certain shade of brown that wasn't brown at all so much as gold and his hair wasn't exactly black but certainly wasn't brown, and looked almost purple in the fading sunlight. He wondered – again, not for the first time – where a person got that kind of coloration from.
“Don’t know,” he said. “But we’ll be ready when it comes.”
Alex’s hand fell on his shoulder and squeezed. Then they turned, and looked towards the sky, again. For a long time they were silent, watching, and waiting for the stars to come out.
Series: Ray
Rating: PG13ish
Word Count: 1550
Summary: Ray does not do well with women.
Notes: Third written in the Ray series.
When Ray was a kid, and therefore a bit of an egomaniac, he was pretty much convinced that if his life a TV show, he would be the hero. And why not? He was smart. He was funny. He had a cool house. He was interesting, dammit, and he didn't care what anybody else said.
By the time he reached high school, he had enough years of identifying with secondary characters under his belt to realize that at best he was the hero's quirky side kick and at worst the guy who died, unmourned, in the pilot because he knew too much and then the hero would find his stash of embarrassing pornography and make some wry remark about it while looking for answers. (Ray doesn't actually have an embarrassing pornography stash, but he figures his house will spontaneously generate one upon his death. It seems like the kind of thing that would happen.) When he's watching Starsky & Hutch, he thinks he wouldn't mind being Huggy Bear, or maybe Starsky's mechanic, but under no circumstances does he want to be Sweet Alice. He is not a hooker with a heart of gold, nor does he ever aspire to be one.
He doesn't give it more than an idle thought when, in college, his friendship with Annette – who's more the type to be lead in some quirky ensemble than your classic hero, but still – bears` out his sidekick hypothesis. Actually being a sidekick takes up a lot of the free time that he once used for introspection.
By the time he's lost and then reconnected with Annette, he's twenty-six and not thought much about any of this in a while. (Aside from that time he found some Starsky & Hutch fanfic on line where Sweet Alice died badly and he doesn't like to think about that.) He has an airship and then an air cannon and then any number of other things to worry about. Which is sort of unfortunate as, if he had thought about it, perhaps he would have seen it coming when it came time for the obligatory 'sidekick gets an evil girlfriend' episode.
Her name was Abby and, in Ray's defense, she built and battled robots. In his mind, nobody who does that could be all bad. Her designs were not only innovative, they had a subtle artistry that only someone who truly understood machines could appreciate. Ray understood. Ray appreciated. Ray’s heart didn't stand a chance.
Later on, he realized he should have known the minute Annette disapproved that Abby was a fraud. But that’s how the plot always went. Sidekick gets girlfriend, protagonist disapproves, sidekick and protagonist fight, protagonist is vindicated. Ray and Alex usually went to underground robot battles (think cockfighting, but with robots) together, but Alex was out of town, visiting family for a couple of weeks, so Ray went alone and met Abby and was smitten. When Annette met Abby for the first time, she smelled a rat pretty much immediately. Being Annette, she handled it with her usual delicacy, and Ray and Annette ended up having a big, screaming argument in the middle of Starbucks. Then, when Alex got back, he thought Abby looked strangely familiar and it turned out she had not only killed two people to steal designs from them, she was most likely planning to do the same to Ray, which was just not cool.
The whole affair left Ray pissed off, both at her and at himself. He was just glad he'd never taken her to the roof. It was his place, his and Annette's and Alex's, and he would have hated himself for screwing up his feng shui. (She had asked about it, because he mentioned going up there with the others, and then pouted when he said it was special for him and his friends and he'd rather not take her up there until they knew each other better. She fed him some line of bullshit about how couples are supposed to share things and, in what he later thought of as his one moment of rationality, he said, “No couple shares everything. They'd murder each other. Me and my friends need our space just like you and me do.” And, later, when she still wouldn't let it go, “They're not more important, just different. Christ woman, don't you have friends?” One need never accuse Ray of tact. The answer, for the record, was 'no'.)
It was to the roof he retreated after giving the police his statement, hopefully ensuring Abby – whose real name was Stella Meyer – would be locked up forever, and it was on the roof that Alex found him, hours later, firing radishes into the forest with a scaled-down potato gun.
“At least we can rest easy knowing there's no chance she's pregnant,” Ray said, when he heard the familiar scrape of Alex's boots coming towards him.
“Why's that?” Alex stood at his shoulder, and watched a radish fly.
“Cause' she'd end up spawning in prison,” Ray explained. “And we'd have to deal with some sort of chronologically impossibly paternity-revenge thing when the ratings slump in season six.”
There was a pause. Ray shoved another radish down the barrel.
“Is this something in your head?” Alex said. Ray fired. “Or did we have a conversation and I just missed it entirely?”
“It's in my head,” Ray said. He dropped the gun on top of the half-full bag of radishes and sighed.
He told Alex about his evolving theories, bringing up Huggy Bear but not Sweet Alice. He still felt weird about that. As he talked, they sat down on the edge of the roof and let their boots hang down. Ray didn't feel like looking at Alex, so he focused on them. His black, Alex's red. Otherwise identical. Steel toes. Doc Marten's. Neither of them were at risk for being mistaken for skin heads.
“So Annette's our protagonist?” Alex asked.
“Don't you think so?” Ray said. It seemed obvious to him.
“Guess so.” A brief hesitation. “If you're the sidekick, what am I?”
“Female protagonists can have more than one male sidekick,” Ray said. “In some genres, it's almost required. Though we are breaking with tradition, somewhat, in that neither of us are her love interest.” He cast a suspicious glare at Alex's boots. “Are we?”
Alex laughed. “I'm not,” he said. “You sure as hell aren't. I think that honor goes to Mark.”
Ray nodded.
After a pause, Alex asked, “So, who's our secondary female protagonist?”
Ray thought about it.
“Lain?” he suggested. “Her or someone else from Annette's office, probably. I guess one us – most likely you, being the better adjusted of the two of us – should develop sexual tension with whoever it is that gets steadily more awkward and forces until you finally pounce on each other in the finale.”
Alex made a sound that eloquently expressed his displeasure with the suggestion.
“Ray,” he said, “I hate to break it to you, but the only person I have unresolved sexual tension with is you.”
Ray shifted uncomfortably. “I was hoping you wouldn't notice,” he admitted.
There was another pause, slightly more embarrassed than the last – at least it felt that way for Ray.
“Does this make you the secondary female protagonist?” Alex asked, all innocence.
Ray considered himself momentarily, and ran an uncertain hand over his leather coat and loosely curling hair. It needed cut.
“Can the secondary female protagonist be in drag?” he asked. “Because I don't know if I know how to be a girl.”
“You said 'quirky ensemble',” Alex said.
He was either failing to be reassuring or succeeding at being an asshole. Ray decided to ignore the issue, because he was still not entirely as ease with the idea at hand.
“Do I have to swoon?” he said. “At moments of high stress, I mean. Do I have to faint?”
Alex laughed, not unkindly. “I was not aware that this was a quirky ensemble Regency romance,” he said.
“Why not?” Ray asked. “It could be a quirky ensemble steampunk Regency romance.”
There was another pause, this one purely respectful of the genius they had clearly created. Ray felt the need to ruin it.
“Or,” he said, “my binding could always be too tight. That's why women swooned back then, anyway. Corsets.” He smirked. “And you would have to rescue me in a fashion that was suitably manly, but also sufficiently satirical that it doesn't come off as sexist.”
“I can do that,” Alex said. “I can do that.” And then, “When do we get to the finale?”
Ray laughed out loud, and finally turned to face Alex. He noticed, not for the first time, that Alex's eyes were a certain shade of brown that wasn't brown at all so much as gold and his hair wasn't exactly black but certainly wasn't brown, and looked almost purple in the fading sunlight. He wondered – again, not for the first time – where a person got that kind of coloration from.
“Don’t know,” he said. “But we’ll be ready when it comes.”
Alex’s hand fell on his shoulder and squeezed. Then they turned, and looked towards the sky, again. For a long time they were silent, watching, and waiting for the stars to come out.
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