Kids Inc | Kiss Me: Prompt #7 - Embrace

[luxken27]

Title: Kiss Me
Fandom: Kids Incorporated
Universe: Canon (Season 3+)
Genre: Friendship/Romance
Rating: T
Summary: Sometimes a kiss is just a kiss…and sometimes it means so much more. Seven pivotal moments that defined Stacy’s life and shaped her perceptions of love. A Valentine’s Day ficlet serial.

Links: FF.net | DW | AO3

7snogs prompt table here.

The 7snogs challenge is this: you can interpret the prompts however you wish, but the story must contain a kiss in some way, shape, or form. My twist on this is that my main character - Stacy - would *not* be on the giving or receiving end for each of these kisses.

And, finally, we make it to the end =) This is completely and totally a peek into my head-canon, and how I see these characters evolving past their time on the show. Even though "my ending" tends to run in one direction only, this isn't a spoiler for Stacy in Bloom or its sequel. I've tried to change just enough to make it interesting...and completely implausible in the scenario I've devised over there :P

Either way, my future!Stacy gets into the fashion industry in a big way, starting out as a model. Rather like her real-life counterpart, her interest lies more on the business end of things rather than its glossy exterior, so here, I have Stacy using her modelling experience that she picks up in Europe (!) as a stepping stone towards working with her favorite designer, Givenchy. Can I just say how much fun it was looking into the fashions of the late 80s/early 90s and trying to pick out a look for her? Because it was awesome. Haute couture is a very, very deeply buried secret pleasure of mine, LOL.

I ultimately chose Givenchy as her idol because he shaped Audrey Hepburn's classic look in the 1960s, which is something I think a very fashion-conscious Stacy would like to emulate, especially in black. Her look has become more stylized by this age - I peg her at around twenty-one or twenty-two in this ficlet - something like this, hair and makeup wise. (This is a screenshot from one of my favorite live performances of hers, which you can see here.) The tie back to canon is her fondness for hats, and cloche hats from the 1920s looked especially good over straight hair or soft curls =)

My head-canon dictates that Ryan moves into the music industry. I just really can't see him doing anything else, considering his devotion to the band in canon, and how much of a leadership role he took with them. He's not a Julliard graduate for this ficlet series, but he has moved to Seattle to follow the trends of emerging music, and his dress sense has pretty much followed. 90s fashion for guys was grungy, whether they were or weren't Nirvana fans :P He keeps his precious Chuck Taylors and his aviator sunglasses (which, I dunno, I just think would suit his look so well) to bring him back in line with the canon universe.

As for the setting - I'm not someone to do anything by halves, and if I wanted my main character to be involved in fashion, I was going to send her to Paris, dammit. Plus, it was a great excuse to pull out some of my own memories of travelling in Europe =) Because I'm such a stickler for details, I decided to look up the layout of Charles de Gaulle Airport ~ my only experience with it was actually travelling under it, from the train station to the Paris metro ~ and, to my surprise, this turned out to be a better setting than I'd originally anticipated :D

Here's what the almighty wiki has to say about Terminal 1:

Terminal 1

The first Terminal, designed by Paul Andreu, was built in the image of an Octopus. It consists of a circular central part dedicated to the home for travellers, placed in the middle of tarmac, of which seven satellites which are erected planes and actual boarding rooms tell. The eighth satellite location is occupied by access ramps for motor vehicles and a rail shuttle station.

The central building, with a vast skylight in its centre, sees each floor dedicated to a single function. The first floor is reserved for the technical functions and is not accessible to the public. The second floor contains shops and restaurants, the passengers from the other terminals by the CDGVAL shuttle home and a part of the counters from a recent renovation. The majority of counters is located on the third floor are also the access to travel by taxi, bus and special vehicles. Departing travellers can reach the fourth floor, where duty-free stores and border control posts, and, of, access to satellite terminals in which will take place boarding tunnels passing under the tracks. Travellers arriving in these same satellites follow reverse, road to reach the fifth floor where luggage carpet and customs, as well as the arrival area and exit areas under control. The four upper floors are reserved for parking or use of administration and the airlines.

The passage between the third, fourth and fifth floors is done through a tangle of conveyor belts arranged in the centre of the building. These rugs spend over a court and are therefore open. Each carpet is covered with a transparent tube for insulation mat between inside and outside the building. These treadmills were often used by film (for example, in The last gang of Ariel Zeitoun).

Cool, huh? Even better was learning that U2 had shot their video for "Beautiful Day" there, which meant I kinda got a live walk-through of the place while I was envisioning my big reunion scene! =)

I think you can see the influences the song had on the fic, LOL.

I just love this song, and I think it plays in perfect complement to the final entry in this serial. I saved the best prompt for last - embrace - because I wanted to make it a big one, sort of go out with a bang, if you will.

The final 'rite of passage' in the course of a relationship is its end ~ and, for typical teenagers at least, these relationships don't tend to last for very long. I tried to make this one feel exceptional, however, building it on a foundation of a long friendship and mutual interest, and characters who treated each other as equals in spite of their many differences. It's stronger, lasts longer, and is harder to give up.

A break-up fic for Valentine's Day isn't really my style, though, so instead of bringing this relationship to its perhaps natural end, I went one step further, looked a couple of years into the future, and saw the potential for reunion. Both Ryan and Stacy have grown and changed, experiencing all those moments of teen angst and puppy love and what have you. Their perceptions of the world, of their own lives, and of the concept of love have changed ~ sometimes dramatically, sometimes not. My head-canon always brings these two back into alignment, no matter how far they've drifted away from each other, and that's what this fic is about. The embrace - the reunion - the kiss that proves all was not lost.

And, thus, we come to the end of our journey. I hope you've enjoyed reading it, or will enjoy reading it, if you choose to do so now that the final chapter has been posted and there's no agonizing wait. It was an absolute joy to write, a story I think I'll always be proud of. I love these characters, and they'll always be my original OTP.

Happy Valentine's Day, all =)

Comments

[luxken27]

:D Thank you! I'm so glad you enjoyed the story, and that you seemed to get out of it exactly what I put in. That warms my heart like nothing else <3

There's nothing wrong with leaving squeeful feedback, either ;) I look forward to any other comments/reviews you might leave in the future, but having this immediate visceral reaction is appreciated all the same =)