elrhiarhodan | Kingsman Fic - Life's a Long Song - Written For Chocolate Box 2019

Title: Life's a Long Song
Author:

elrhiarhodan
Fandom: Kingsman (Movies)
Rating: Mature
Characters: Harry Hart | Galahad, Gary "Eggsy" Unwin, Merlin (Kingsman), Roxy Morton | Lancelot, Charlie Hesketh, Chester King | Arthur, Victoria Winslow
Relationships: Harry Hart | Galahad/Gary "Eggsy" Unwin,
Word Count: 32,333 / 8/8 Chapters
Spoilers: None
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: Discussion of HIV/AIDS and discussion of a memory for a request for assisted Suicide (at the end)

Summary: Harry Hart, multiple award-winning playwright and screenwriter and sometime actor, has occasionally had lapses in judgment. The biggest one of late had been an ill-considered relationship with the young and not-so-talented actor, Charlie Hesketh. It's awards season, Harry's nominated for several BAFTAs, and so is Charlie. Merlin, Harry's best friend since their teenage years, and his agent, is insisting that Harry needs to bring someone prettier, younger, and more talented as his arm candy for all the red carpet events coming on during Awards Season.

And he has just the young actor in mind - Eggsy Unwin, recent RADA graduate (with honors), has been getting the rawest of deals from his own agent, Chester King. Merlin knows that Eggsy will appeal to Harry for many reasons, and offers Eggsy a representation contract if he just goes to meet a client of his - no other strings attached.

Related Work: Artwork for Plays Mentioned in Life's a Long Song

Author’s Note: See below the cut

__________________

On AO3: Life's a Long Song

I was so delighted with my recipient for Chocolate Box that anyone who lives on the East Coast might have heard my squeal when I found out that I would be writing for

deep_dark_waters. They are one of my all-time favorite writers in the Kingsman fandom, on so many vectors - kink, humor, character. They know London and it shows. They also wrote a story that became something like life support for me when I was so very sick this past summer (they didn't write it for me, it just helped me smile when smiling was barely possible).

So I had a very high bar to meet, but their request had so very many things I love: fake/pretend relationship, clothes sharing, competence kink, clothes as gift, suit porn, dressing and undressing, just to name a few. Honestly, it was like looking at a menu of the kind of story I love to write.

It also gave me the chance to work on an idea I've had for Kingsman almost since I decided to write for the fandom, the idea of Harry Hart as a famous playwright, Eggsy as a student at RADA (which is Taron Egerton's alma mater), and a play about HIV/AIDS that is NOT The Normal Heart. I'd spent many happy hours sketching the story out in my head and even went as far as naming this in-fic play - "Young Queers With Old Faces" (more about that below).

The version I'd mapped out about eighteen months ago had a very complex and complicated relationship between Harry and Merlin and then Merlin and Eggsy, and it would have taken me months to write, and I was never sure I liked that part of the story. So I set the project aside for other story, and then, well, life took a sharp left hand turn last year and I didn't write a thing from mid-May to late September. Hard to fic when you're barely able to sit up.

Anyway, when I got my assignment for Chocolate Box, and saw the Fake/Pretend Relationship as the first thing my recipient wanted, I realized I could write the playwright Harry A/U and had an easy way out for the whole set of problems I was bringing with Merlin by simply making Merlin not part of the relationship at all. He's a good friend and a prime mover in the plot, but that's it.

I didn't go in to this planning on writing a 32K story. I figured - okay - I don't know what I figured, except that around week three, I started panicking because if I took the story to the end I'd planned for, it would be 75K and I'd end up defaulting because I couldn't finish in time.

But I had an epiphany on the drive home one night, because I do my best ficcing in the car. There could be two parts to this story - the getting together part with a soft, warm, sweet ending, and then the second part, with a bit more drama before the flash-bang super-duper happy ending I'd originally planned. I have a few challenges to complete, but I hope to write this Part II in the summer. It's all in my head, just got to get it out onto the computer.

Anyway, the real reason for these excessive notes is that there are a whole bunch of Easter Eggs in the story. Little things that make me happy but are probably meaningless for everyone else, and rather than clutter up the AO3 posting with those oddities, I'm putting them here.

Life's a Long Song isn't a song fic per se, but it is filled with references and bits of lyrics to various Jethro Tull songs, principally, from the 1974 album, Too Old to Rock 'n Roll: Too Young To Die. That got started when I started thinking about the play-within-the-fic, Young Queers With Old Faces. That's taken from the song, "From a Dead Beat To An Old Greaser", and the actual lyrics are: "Old queers with young faces --- who remember your name,". I had changed "old" to "young" because it made more sense in the context of the play, about dying young from AIDS, and how the disease aged a whole generation of gay men and women.

From there, I found myself popping in references to all of the songs on the album:

At one point, Merlin suggests that Harry and Eggsy go on a quiz show (still a staple on British television), which is a reference to the first song on the album, "Quizz Kid", and late in the story, Eggsy corrects a reporter on a minor bit of trivia, saying "encyclopedic knowledge may be barbaric, but it's fun…", a direct line from that song.

The second track on the album is called "Crazed Institution", which is about the trials and tribulations of a musician facing changing public taste:

Just a little touch of make-up; just a little touch of bull;
just a little 3-chord trick embedded in your platform soul;

One of the early motivators for Harry in the story is his BAFTA nomination for his role in a movie called Three Cord Trick (which I inadvertently misspelled and have since corrected).

The third track on Too Old To Rock 'n' Roll... is "Salamander", and the brief lyrics are surprisingly lyrical for mid-1970s Jethro Tull, but seemed perfect as a title for one of Harry's early and most lauded plays.

The fourth track is "Taxi Grab", and while I couldn't think of a scenario where Harry and Eggsy steal a black cab, they do ride in several of them over the course of the story.

The fifth track is "From a Dead Beat To An Old Greaser", and in addition to subverting the line about old queers, when Eggsy's looking at Harry's library, he notes inexplicably random biographies of unconnected people, namely Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and René Magritte:

And tired young sax-players sold their instruments of torture ---
sat in the station sharing wet dreams of Charlie Parker,
Jack Kerouac, René Magritte, to name a few of the heroes
who were too wise for their own good

In Chapter Four, when Merlin pays a call on Harry to see how his first meeting with Eggsy went, Harry takes his time getting ready, and then says to Merlin, "Well, I wouldn't want you to see me all bad-eyed and loveless", which is the title to the sixth track. And honestly, after nearly 40 years of listening to this song, I have ABSOLUTELY no idea what that means (I get the rest of the song, but the meaning of the title is just way too obscure. Mid-70s London slang, perhaps).

"Big Dipper", the fifth track, is a one-act play Harry had written about a heterosexual encounter he'd had in his long-ago youth. See below for more details.

The title track, "Too Old To Rock 'n' Roll" is about giving up (and also possibly about suicide), but also about riding a motorcycle through London. Harry had tried to be a bad-ass motorcyclist, but couldn't even get the bike out of the shop.

He'd stuck the leather jacket he'd bought in the back of his closet, which is the reference for "Pied Piper", which is memorialized when Eggsy buttons up Harry's leather jacket ("So follow me. Trail along. My leather jacket's buttoned up, and my four stroke song will pick you up").

The last song on the album, "The Checquered Flag (Dead or Alive)" was memorialized only very tangentially. It's about life and death and failure, and rather not force it, I just let it rest in my head as the underpinnings to Harry's speech to Eggsy after the leave the BAFTA dinner and walk through Hyde Park to home, when Harry tells Eggsy about how personal Young Queers is to him.

There are a few other Jethro Tull references:

Back Door Angels, one of the other fake plays that I did book covers for, is a title of a song from the album, War Child. That play had originally be called "Walking on Smith Street" but I thought that was way too heavy handed. There's a bit of dialogue I've cut and saved for the next part of the story, when Harry and Eggsy talk about Back Door Angels, and Eggsy tells him how wrong he'd gotten the whole rentboy thing.

The two other plays mentioned: White Queen is from a line in "Something's On the Move" (Stormwatch) and "Old Ghosts" is the title of another song on Stormwatch.

Pushing Moonbeams, the title of the screenplay Harry wrote (and then rewrote for Charlie) is from the lyrics for "Wounded, Old and Treacherous", on Roots and Branches.

And the last Jethro Tull reference (that I can remember), the actual title of the story, is from "Life Is a Long Song" from Living in the Past.

When you're falling awake and you take stock of the new day,
and you hear your voice croak as you choke on what you need to say,
well, don't you fret, don't you fear,
I will give you good cheer.

Life's a long song.
Life's a long song.
Life's a long song.

If you wait then your plate I will fill.

Other, non-Jethro Tull, Easter Eggs:

1.

deep_dark_waters had also requested a crossover between Harry Hart of Kingsman and Victoria Winslow of RED, and they have written some very excellent stories for this pairing. So I wanted to include Victoria as a side character - an old friend of Harry's and a noted actress, with a career is based on Helen Mirren, the actress who played Victoria in the two RED movies - not only because of DDW's request, but because of one of Dame Helen's very early roles. In 1981, the Arthurian epic, Excalibur came out and my parents (to their ever-lasting regret) took me to see it for my sixteenth birthday. Helen Mirren played the very sultry and very evil Morgana. It seemed natural to give her the role of Morgana in Young Queers, which is an Arthurian-themed story.

2. In that same scene, Harry remembers his one sexual encounter with Victoria. It is a riff on a story

violetsmith had written for DDW as part of their Bespoke series, called Blush, which is about Victoria pegging Harry.

3. Again, in that same scene, Harry muses on the pegging, his reaction to it, and the one-act play he'd written, but never staged, called "Big Dipper". I'd written this a few days before I read the savage review of "When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other", starring Cate Blanchett, and I was startled to read:

The final scene finds the twice Oscar-winning Ms. Blanchett lubricating a strap-on dildo which she is preparing to use on her (excellent) co-star, Stephen Dillane, as the curtain falls.

So maybe the one-act "Big Dipper" isn't as outlandish as I'd originally thought.

4. Later in this scene, when Charlie's trying to cause trouble, Eggsy quote "Manners Maketh Man" at him, after a brief back and forth about public schools (the St. Andrews that Charlie mentions in the movie). In doing my research, I was surprised to learn that this is the motto of Winchester College (another great British public school, and Colin Firth's alma mater). I found it amusing because Charlie, in canon, taunts Eggsy about working the concession at the Winchester Service Station.

5. Just a note about the fake play back covers, "Samuel French" is a real publisher of plays, both the versions used by performers and the consumer versions. The notations at the top of each volume indicate the type of play (comedy, drama) and the performers (number of male/number of female), and in certain circumstances, the type of set required (usually on school or competition editions).

There are probably a bunch more Easter Eggs that I've simply forgotten about. If I do remember them, I'll add them back here, just so that I've got a record of them.

Thank you for reading the fic and this meta. I hope you've enjoyed both.