♫ i know it wouldn't come to love ♫

[darkages]

playlist:

1. piazza new york catcher – belle and sebastian
2. a lack of colour – death cab for cutie
3. plasticine – placebo
4. we used to be friends – the dandy warhols
5. white flag – dido

notes:

• anya doesn’t have a surname in canon, so i picked efremova because i liked the sound of it.
• the real joke of this chapter is that none of the albums viktor buys are emo. like, not at all. this is done deliberately for a couple of reasons: i was never an emo so i wouldn’t trust myself to make a good selection of albums; additionally, the point of this is not that viktor becomes an emo. it’s that he’s sad and trying to reinvent himself. there doesn’t need to be congruity. he’s just throwing things at himself and he’ll keep the ones that stick. to match, i have gone for a (mostly) indie theme for this chapter’s playlist.
• i was going to have viktor buy hail to the thief and put a track from it onto the playlist but at the time of posting i couldn't find a non-live version of the song i wanted on youtube so i switched radiohead out for death cab both here and in the chapter. i mean they're way more emo than radiohead, so it works. where i end and you begin is there in spirit.
• yes jj’s parents let him drink but also have statues of jesus in their windows. it’s about keeping up appearances.
• back in the day a text message was strictly 140 characters. (that’s what twitter was based off.) if someone had something longer to say it would send in multiple messages, which was a pain in the arse to receive if you had an older phone, because the lag would be intense. luckily for viktor, as we have established, he’s extra enough to be a teenager with a blackberry, so it doesn’t bother him much.
• do you know how excited i was when i realised that white flag was a period-accurate musical selection for this fic. do you?? i was already going to dial the angst up to 11. this helps.
• not that it’s relevant, but i was listening to a really sad song (not period-accurate for the playlist, unfortunately) as i was writing the apology list scene, and that really messed me up. for contrast, i was listening to bring it all back to you as i wrote viktor cutting his hair. incongruous as hell.
• no long-haired character’s arc is complete without a symbolic hair-cutting moment. it was one of the first things i planned about this fic, before i even knew much of the plot.