Icon Meme

[brightknightie]

batdina posted an icon meme on Friday, and agreed to play it with me.  Would you like to join in?

1. Reply to this post, and I will pick up to four of your icons.
2. Make a post of your own (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts, in a spreading spiral of icon squee!

batdina pointed out my Tracy, Natalie and IB icons.  (As a word of caution, I may replace icons with others of the same name in the future, and then of course this post would no longer make sense. ~g~)

***
Tracy:

This image is from "My Boyfriend is a Vampire," of course.  Tracy Vetter is just about to say her "babe cop" line, in her dispirited complaint about being forced to appear on The Jerry Tate Show, and Vachon -- why? why?! -- is rooting around in her refrigerator.  "You alphabetize your refrigerator?" he will ask in a moment, probably with irony rather than as a strictly literal observation.

The idea that Tracy tries -- vainly -- to organize her world into submission is the key tidbit that has made her character for me, and this is where it was articulated.  She's a Type A overachieving control freak out of defense, not desire, and perhaps the best defense is a good offense.  I refer to it every time I write her; it matters.  And I am still amused by the question of what Vachon was seeking in her refrigerator -- really! what does he expect? -- and how she's completely blase to the vampire in her kitchen.  Does she think she has him handled, that she knows what's what and it's all neatly slotted -- if so, she should see his flashbacks: ick -- or is she just consumed right then by frustration with the exercise of going on that stupid talk show all dolled up?

I have been using this mainly as my "huh" icon.  As in: Golly, but the world just isn't quite what it ought to be.

***
Natalie:

This image is from "Only the Lonely," naturally.  Natalie Lambert is looking up from her desk as Grace and other coworkers bring her a twinkie with thirty lit candles.  I'm afraid this icon is very boring, explanation-wise, as I simply wanted a sturdy, standard, serviceable Natalie image with room for my "Bright Knight" logo.  (I put the logo on all of them because I want people to know at a glance that a post is mine; I have ambivalent feelings about the distinction between user icons and mood icons, and the logo-branding feels like the right compromise to me.)

Of course the morgue is Natalie's domain, so while I could have picked something from the precincts, Nick's loft, her own apartment, many a crime scene, and more, the morgue is both more generic and more story-driving as a set for her.  The tag line I use with it -- "Everyone's favorite Medical Examiner" -- might read as a take-off of that Liam O'Neil line in "Bad Blood," but it's not; she's certainly my favorite M.E., and FK's, too.

I have been using this icon lately mainly when speaking with the Natpacker moderator of the femme_fic ficathon.

***
IB:

As we all know, "IB" stands for "Immortal Beloved," the Nick/Janette couple affiliation.  I have this icon in part because I also have an N&N (Nick/Natalie) icon, and the N&N icon in part because I have this one.  And yet I don't have a UF (Nick/Lacroix) icon, which has become an equal contender in the fandom, and my Faithful (Lacroix/Fleur) icon is nearly the first I created, though that affiliation has always been minuscule.  So it's not all about proportional representation.

I don't do couple factions anymore, as such. From an interpretational stand, I will gladly take whatever makes the best story in any given scenario ("best" conditioned in light of canon).  But ever since I figured out that, in the tag of "A Fate Worse Than Death," Janette is expressing full support for Nick in his quest -- not because she believes in it but because she believes in him -- and that this is reflected in actions rather than words in many places in the first two seasons, I've leaned a bit IB.  (I once told leela_cat my proposed scenario for a story in which Janette, through no effort of her own, becomes mortal, and Lacroix then decides that Janette must be his Fleur-revenge, as Nick's love for her over eight centuries approaches Lacroix's psychosis for Fleur in a more satisfactory parallel than any other Lacroix could imagine; i.e. only Janette is worthy of being his sociopathic sacrifice to Fleur's memory; leela_cat did not approve the scenario. I dunno. I may write it someday anyway.)

I do not know from what episode this image came.  Do you?  I have the original (in color, larger) on my hard-drive from years and years past, when screenshots were much harder to come by, labeled only "Janette and Nick."  The Nick in the image looks almost second-season-like, from hair and stubble, but Janette's dress is black and she wears a choker, which suggests first season.  They're in the Raven, and blue and red strobes are flashing (so it can't be from "If Looks Could Kill," because the lighting color does not match).  I turned it sepia to give it a more timeless feel, because there is so much time between them, and in my imagination of them.  I like the stance, him embracing her from behind as they look out at the same scene.

The tag line I associate with it -- "What makes you think I'd take you back?" -- is from the "Partners of the Month" flashback, of course.  Nick asks that petulently as Janette is leaving him; it is too much to demand that anyone be graceful at such a moment.  He can be petulent, or he can be broken.  He chooses to hold together by what must have seemed more dignified in that moment, but really was not; I wonder if he knows better after four centuries more?  So he asks, and Janette kisses him.  "That," she says, meaning not the kiss, but the attraction and connection burning in it even as she is walking away.  In the present-day image in the icon, I imagine they both know "that," and know they each will always take the other back -- "always" until Nick is mortal, that is, and that is the part apart.