Burn Notice fic

As always, never thought I would. But I did:


Title: Pay It With Flowers

Rating: Rated T (for naughty words).
Summary:
Sam asks Michael - but ends up getting Fi - to help an Irish-born florist who's been scammed out of her holiday. Easy, you say? You must be new to Burn Notice. Set mid season two. Episodically canontastic. And maybe more than a hint of Michael/Fi. I regret nothing.
Disclaimer:
I do not own anyone or anything but the things in my which have receipts.
Linky-link-link: HERE at An Archive of Our Own (because they don’t re-edit your stuff later) and HERE at Fanfiction dot net (because some people still use that place).


Chapter 2 has just been posted; 2 more to go over the next week or so. If you do happen to give it a quick read, then thank you very much.

Tags:
~ fan-fic ~ Burn Notice

Oh dear

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!
Here be SPOILERS for the BURN NOTICE series 6 finale!



I was excited because I actually had a comment on one of my entries. I know about three people a month read this blog and that doesn’t bother me. When I get comments, though, I get excited. But apparently I’ve upset someone. I can’t say who, because they didn’t leave their name. I read the comment. I read it again. And it really pissed me off. Why? Probably not for the reason you’d think.

I wrote down my reactions to the Burn Notice season 6 finale. In it I stated why I was angry with Michael. This, apparently, did not go down well with one commenter:

Let’s put aside the obvious lack of spelling and full versions of words. That does not annoy me. (I know, you’re surprised, right? Me, one of the grammar police, not upset by a non-phonemic short-form used in a context not suitable for getting your point across? It must be Thursday.) Let’s also put aside the name-calling; it’s irrelevant. Let’s get to the crux of the matter:

“He promised Sam he'd make things right”

Yes, he did. Whose definition of ‘right’ are we going by? Sam was ready to go on the run, wounded or no. He didn’t think turning everyone in was ‘right’. How about Fi? She obviously did not want Michael taking any help from the CIA, friendly or not. Jesse? He looked like he was ready to go with any one of a million suggestions, except turning everyone in. So it was Michael’s own definition of ‘right’. At the end of the day, yes, you have to trust your own instincts. But the fact that everyone else would not have agreed might have been enough to ring alarm bells. We’ve seen this before - he goes off on one, entangling his friends in ops and using/abusing their relationship as a team to get things done. What happened then? His mother verbally slapped him and told him to wake up and see what he was doing. She saved him. The team saved him. And now he’s done it all over again. He’s decided, rightly or wrongly, that his solution is the only one, and there’s no point sharing his plan with the team because they either ‘wouldn’t understand how delicate it is’ or they wouldn’t get his angle on the ‘mission’. Either way, he listened to the team, yes - but then he just rode roughshod over them anyway.

“weather he gets locked up, or got a job back in, he got every else out, and everyone is ok, HE DID WHAT HE HAD TO DO TO KEEP HIS PROMISE TO SAM”

Yes, he was keeping his promise to Sam. But in what way? Keeping everyone out of prison was ‘making it right’, but after the way Sam was all ‘last time I said goodbye to my lady, she was crying’, do you honestly think he’d consider what Michael has done to his and Fi’s relationship ‘making it right’? And on the subject of keeping promises, when he and Fi set fire to his loft, what did she say? ‘This was the first place we lived together.’ And he said, ‘It won’t be the last’. Now I wouldn’t go so far as to call that a promise, but I think for Michael it’s right up there with Things He Must Make Happen - so when and how is he going to put that right?

“Fiona is mad, but whatever he did, he did it because it was best for the entire team”

Entire team? Leaving Fi with no contacts, no business, no home of her own - that was what was best for the entire team? And leaving Sam and Jesse to stop Fi from taking on stupidly dangerous jobs for money (since all their accounts were either frozen or are being watched), as well as figuring out where they all stand without their fourth member of the team (some would argue, leader of the team) - was that best for the entire team? Assuming Michael is either working for them or going to prison, if Fi becomes the unofficial head of their three-man-band now, what happens to her and Michael giving up these petty jobs and getting on with their lives? Is that what Michael wants for her, to be doing these jobs, possibly recklessly depending on her headspace?

I still consider what Michael did to be wrong. There were other ways. He should have thought about the entire team before doing what he did. And that’s it.

P.S. ‘Retard’ actually means ‘a person who has a mental disability (often used as a general term of abuse). I’m not sure on all the definitions of ‘mental disability’, but I do know I manage to work in two different primary schools correcting and re-inventing curricula. You might have noticed I also blog a fair bit, so you can judge my level of mental ability for yourself.
P.P.S. I can also refute the accusation of being ‘dumb’ because (1) I can speak, and (2) I have certificates and qualifications from Cambridge. I managed to pass the courses, and, at last formal testing, am a few points inside Mensa membership cut-offs.


Thank you for your time - and commenting! It's actually been fun to tease out why I disagreed (and I'm not even being sarcastic).



~ Burn Notice ~ Michael Westen ~ Fiona Glenanne ~ Sam Axe ~ Jesse Porter

GRR

I fucking hate shopping for watches. Why?

I can't read clockwise timepieces. And by that I mean I have to stare at the clock face and count the segments of five to be able to work out the time - because it Does Not Compute.

Some years ago, my little sister bought me an anti-clockwise watch. I could read it the second I laid eyes on it. Since then, I've only ever bought a 'backwards' 'reverse' watch. I have the same clock on my wall in my front room at home.

Trouble: every few years, my watch corrodes (I like metal ones and I live in HK, so Death By Humidity is more or less a countdown) or becomes too scratched or, in the case of the last one, broken. And then the hunt for another begins.

This time, to spare myself the ridicule of people going 'oh how cute - a funny, novelty watch!' in the comments on websites, or calling something a 'reverse' watch when they really mean a watch with some manufacturing process that has no bearing on the display, I'm looking at digital watches.

And therein lies the fucking rub. Because, for some reason, the 'in' thing just now seems to be making speedometer-like dials with LEDs. This would be fab, except the dial starts bottom left and runs over to the right. This is backwards. It should be bottom right to left. And before you tell me it's not backwards, check your perspective.

For a left-handed person living in a world not made for them, but against them, I seek out tools made for me. My pens in my drawer, my rulers, notebooks, the way I staple sheets of paper, the way I use plastic folders to slide papers into, the direction of my ticks as I mark - I do it because it's the natural way for me. Other people accuse me of 'being difficult', as if they're not forcing ME to do things in an unnatural way.

It's ignorance, plain and simple. But it's excusable - they're not used to it, they've never come across it before, they weren't to know.

THE FIRST TIME.

When people continually move things around my desk on my days where I'm elsewhere, I get annoyed. Do I go to their desks and change everything around so it's not in a natural position to use? Do you see me lecturing them on how their pens are all 'broken' and they should get new ones?

I digress. Watches. And how I can't find one that just simply shows the time - the right way round. Watches without numbers are ideal; I'm not good with numbers, so pictures\representations are excellent. But again, they're all going the wrong way round the face. The watch I really want uses LED shapes to represent hours and minutes. But they start at the top, for 12, and then continue to the right and down. Which for me does not make sense, and so the concept of flash-reading, or pattern recognition, to realise the number is destroyed.

I suppose I'll keep looking. I eventually found one last time, but the company no longer makes those. Yep, you've guessed it - not enough 'demand'.

Archery learnins

So went to archery as normal yesterday and we did the usual things; Jedi training (shooting very short range with your eyes shut to get you to ‘group’ the arrows in the target), balance and knees (still roughing it there) and an even pull on both sides of your back. Then it got round to The Talk.

Instructor: So what do you want to do, here? You’re not coming every week just to play around with arrows, like most of my students. I really think you should do tournaments, competitions.
Me: Do you think I’d have a chance?
Instructor: I think you’d blow most people away eighteen metres.
Me: ...
Instructor: It’s up to you. You'd need to choose your own bow, and you’ve been looking, we know that. Any ideas?
Me: I’ve just been looking at everything, inside the specs you gave me. Nothing’s really jumped out at me - save one.
Instructor: Which one?
Me: A Mathews bow - the Conquest Prestige.
Instructor: Ah yes. Awesome bow. And a factory-made-for-competition bow. Did you know that?
Me: I read something to the effect of ‘our winningest bow’ [cringes at word ‘winningest’] on the website, but I didn’t really pay much attention to that. It just stood out. It looks… like it does the job.
Instructor: Well I think you should get membership to a few organisations so you can start competing. At eighteen metres you’ll make me look very good.
Me: I’d like to compete. It’d be… interesting.
Instructor: There are lots of things we have to cover, though. You don’t just turn up and shoot. There’s discerning which shots you want to take, when to give up a bad shot, things like that. And most importantly, how to ignore people who try to put you off.
Me: What do you mean?
Instructor: Some people can be a bit… rude to newcomers. They’re sarcastic, they try to give advice by saying ‘you’re doing that wrong - do what I do’. It’s confusing, because your coach says one thing but they’re telling you another.
Me: Why would I listen to someone who isn’t an instructor?
Instructor: You’d be surprised how many people do. They feel obliged to try a fellow archer’s ‘helpful tips’ because they’re sharing a range, sometimes. And up at the public range at Lion Rock, more experienced archers tend to look down on new people.
Me: If we’re both students and we’ve both paid to be there, why would I think they know better than you, my instructor? The day they have your certificates and charge what you charge is the day I decide that they’re not just trying to show off.
Instructor: You know what? I think you’ll be alright.


~ archery ~ sport ~ competition

Writing and stuff

So there’s the fic about the brothers Winchester meeting Sherlock and John, and then there’s the small matter of the Burn Notice one that I wrote in two days because I had nothing - and I mean, NOTHING - to do at work for nine hours, and I was only working on those two because I can’t write book six of my space opera (even though half of it is already written in fragments) because no-one wants the first one (total of eight rejection letters that has taken a year to compile), so I decided to finish my other sci-fi one first (about people accidentally swapping bodies; nothing to do with my space opera) and then try to get that ‘sold’ to an agent, seeing as that’s probably a lot more bankable.

Deep breath.

Writing is back as the focus of my life for the first time in a long time, because the rest of it is all so boring. It’s fine - there’s nothing wrong with it. It just goes and goes, with no excitement. It’s just not as exciting as tearing my hair out trying to somehow stop some OC from running amuck.

And that’s it.

~ fan-fic ~ writing ~ agents ~ novel