Work Text:
Some people are singers and some people are dancers.
Lumiere was a singer and always had been. He had a light, pleasing baritone and made full use of it.
Cogsworth strongly suspected that the man sang so much because he couldn’t bear to keep his mouth closed for any respectable length of time. It was rather true that, if Lumiere wasn’t talking, he was either singing or unconscious.
Lumiere sang everywhere: in the shower, in the kitchen, and occasionally in bed. At first, Cogsworth had been none too fond of having French lullabies murmured into his ear as he tried to sleep, but he slowly grew accustomed to them.
Lumiere didn’t only sing real songs, either. Occasionally, just as a break from ceaseless talking, he would sing an entire conversation. It often happened when he was far too pleased with himself and needed to express the overwhelming self-satisfaction.
He often sang songs about Cogsworth. He never knew quite what to do with those, when his boyfriend would begin to serenade him quite out of the blue with words that didn’t quite rhyme and rhythms that didn’t quite work.
He did enjoy them, though, even if he only admitted that to himself. The one that had been born from a trip to the grocery store had been a little much, certainly, but he’d liked the one Lumiere had come up with one evening while they’d been playing Scrabble in the living room.
Cogsworth never quite got it clear how the man managed to sing so well, with his horrible smoking habit. He would’ve thought it a certain thing that Lumiere would’ve ruined his voice with his cigarettes, but it never seemed to happen.
He supposed it was just another bit of evidence to show that the universe loved Lumiere--that in addition to looks, charm, talent, and not-inconsiderable brainpower, he was also indestructible.
--
Some people are singers and some people are dancers.
Cogsworth, odd as it may seem, was a dancer.
Not that he showed it off much.
But for a man of his size--a size which Lumiere always considered with rather lascivious delight as being perfect--he was quite graceful. He was prim and proper, naturally, but he knew an awful lot of dances for a person who never performed. In their time together, Lumiere had seen him waltz, foxtrot, two-step, swing, and perform several ballroom dances; to say nothing of his ability to samba, mambo, merengue, and Lumiere’s personal favorite, tango.
Sometimes they tangoed all night.
He was always surprised by Cogsworth’s confidence on a dance floor. When they danced in the living room, his beau was all carefully-honed precision and sublime certainty. He knew exactly how to move and bend and hold Lumiere’s body, how to tweak their styles into compliance. He could sense how Lumiere was going to move, and made it work with what he was doing, creating a perfect whole.
It was when you put him in front of a crowd that things got tricky. Then Cogsworth would freeze, and flush, and start mumbling about indecency and forwardness, and would slap at Lumiere’s hands with the sorts of fussy, nervous gestures that Lumiere had thought only existed in the repertoires of elderly female BBC period actors.
But while they were at home, as Lumiere was lowered nearly to the floor with his leg wrapped tightly around Cogsworth’s hip and the other man’s hand sliding heavily down his lower back, he decided that privacy was a small price to pay for this kind of performance.
--
Some people are writers and some people are readers.
Pleakley was a writer and took pains to keep it a secret.
He’d always been imaginative--to say the very least--but outside of a few sketches of fashion designs and the occasional excellent interior decorating blueprint, he’d never been much in the way of an artist. And he’d never been musical, unless one counted the castanets, which he could play with sublime grace.
Very few people recognized the power and elegance of the castanet.
So Pleakley had had to find some other way to channel that marvelous imagination of his and it turned out that being something of a talker turned into a remarkable felicity of expression when one picked up the pen. Pleakley had filled composition book after composition book with stories, ideas, scenes, character descriptions, long, long poems and short little sentences that captured whatever was floating around in his head.
As a young teenager, he hid all of his journals under his bed, except for one very special, secret journal he hid in a ziplock bag in a bucket in the old well on the back forty of the farm. If anyone had ever found it, well...Pleakley would’ve had more than a little explaining to do! No one ever knew about that journal, and that was the one he took with him when he moved to the city.
When he finished med school and started to work as a nurse, he found that he had very little time for writing, anyway. But on weekends, and sometimes late at night, he’d find himself staging some new scene, running through some old piece of dialogue over and over again. He’d go and type it into a document on his computer, scrolling through his old thoughts and rereading whatever had been on his mind.
After the school system hired him, he found himself with quite a lot of free time, and more than a few new muses! His coworkers were so much more interesting than his old colleagues had been and there was always so much to say about them. Pleakley popped open his secret journal and dug out bits and pieces of plot ideas.
To date, he had about three short books all hidden away in his computer, all about love and farmlands and cities and bright, beautiful young people trying to be happy. Now and then--usually after a few glasses of wine--he’d send one off to some publisher somewhere and never hear back about it.
But that was all right. He was a writer, not an author. He contented himself with taking care of the children and occasionally scribbling something particularly good down on a Post It note, socking it away in the amorphous mass of his collection of words.
--
Some people are writers and some people are readers.
Jumba was a reader, mostly because it was the only option available to him.
As a scientist, he was aware that it would’ve been in his interest to publish some of his research. The experiments he was doing could, conceivably, be perverted to help people, instead of hurt them.
But the last thing he wanted was to be kicked out of yet another country, particularly not when he’d just finally gotten comfortable. And he wasn’t the kind to be suicidally stupid, anyway, so publishing his research wasn’t an option at all.
But he was quite a big reader.
Television could never hold his attention for more than a few moments at a time--the idiot box simply wasn’t to his taste. And musical performances and live plays always left him cramped, sweaty, and dozing. The only reason he ever went out to see a show was because Pleakley had dragged him out. Books, obviously, were the only suitable solace.
Books were quiet. They didn’t require more than their reader’s attention. They promised total absorption for the brief period it took to read them, and then they could be just as easily abandoned as they’d been picked up. Books let him work out the words, carefully decoding them, at his own pace. Books gave him back his own language, his eyes easily tracing over familiar characters and giving him renewed access to a tongue he’d been lately forced to abandon.
He’d read just about anything. He wasn’t a picky man and he could always find something more interesting to hold his attention if the book he was reading failed him. He read scientific journals and travel guides, classic literature and fantasy epics, even a few romance novels when he had absolutely nothing else to do.
He had to make the conscious decision not to read the Post Its and poorly-hidden composition books in the living room. He wasn’t sure if Pleakley meant for those to be exposed to his eyes, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to expose himself to them, anyway.
Maybe someday. When he ran out of everything else to read.
--
Some people are photographers and some people are scrapbookers.
Baloo was a photographer.
He was an amateur to say the least, but he had an old instant polaroid camera that he loved to take out without any warning and capture a few shots of whatever was going on. In his college days, his subjects had mostly been long days out on the quad and the occasional giggly afternoon snapshot of pairs of girls and groups of young men, draped over each other, all long legs and diffuse sunlight.
He had tons of pictures of his family at home. He’d started taking pictures of his brothers as a young teenager, and he had tons of pictures of their weed-like growth and the way they’d filled out, a sped-up film of their adolescence and development into brawny, bearded men. He had pictures of his shrinking, wrinkly, cheerful mother, her sons towering over her.
He had pictures of his students, the ones who’d wandered in as freshmen and had come to hug him when they’d graduated. He had pictures of his coworkers at group parties and the occasional casual meeting.
He had pictures of beach vacations, of bright Christmases and exhaustingly hot July mornings. He had pictures of Priya and Rani tumbling over each other on the carpet, caught before they’d heard the click of the can-opener in the other room.
He had pictures of Bagheera. Baghee from behind as he paused in the doorway of his office, glancing over his shoulder at something outside of the shot. Bagheera flung limp and ragdoll-like on the sofa with a glass of wine in one hand. Bagheera with his arms crossed, scowling at the camera. A few semi-self portraits, the camera held at the end of his arm as Baloo crushed Bagheera to his side and grinned, his smile dominating the space of the frame, even though it was Bagheera’s bright hazel eyes that would really capture one’s attention.
He kept them all in little piles, stuck in books, tucked into his wallet, hidden in vinyl record covers, under coasters, on the fridge, and even stuck with tape on the walls of the house. He liked to look around and find a long-lost memory waiting to sneak up on him and give him back a moment of time that he’d thought was long behind him.
--
Some people are photographers and some people are scrapbookers.
Bagheera was a scrapbooker because he couldn’t stand too much disorganization. He’d be the first to admit that there was something wonderful in finding a picture of himself and Baloo snuck into his lunch bag, but it was a little too much to bear, seeing all those spillable stacks of photographs lying around.
Once in a while, he’d buy a new album and spend a Saturday carefully going over a stack of photos, trying to remember where they’d been and what had been happening when Baloo’d taken the shot. He’d write down what details he could remember and gently stick the pictures into the album, adding in whatever little scraps of their lives they happened to have on hand--a pair of movie tickets, a receipt from a nice restaurant with the price modestly redacted, maybe their horoscopes from the newspaper or a particularly poignant fortune from a cookie.
On a whim, he’d once pasted in an old picture of his mother and himself next to a picture of Mr. and Mrs. Sangita. The heavy, big-boned Mr. Sangita, so like his own son, and little Mrs. Sangita seemed a remarkable contrast to slim, elegant, dark-eyed Ms. Kala and her little gap-toothed boy. He’d dug around for a picture of a young Baloo to paste in as well, wanting to complete the set.
He never knew entirely what to do with the slightly racy ones that Baloo appeared to have a particular fondness for. There was a series that he privately referred to as the Bedhead Photos, in which Baloo had taken a somewhat immature fondness for images of Bagheera, distastefully mussed and still in bed or lingering by the coffeepot, and self-portraits of Baloo, grinning, rumpled, and proudly wearing love bites and scratches in the broad light of morning. He let them stay pretty much where Baloo had put them, only hastily spilling them into the drawers of the end tables whenever they had company.
He kept all the albums on the same level of the bookshelves. Now and then he’d find Baloo leafing through them, smiling to himself as he sank back into their past.
--
Some people are talkers and some people are listeners.
Shere Khan and Scar were both, and neither.
--
Some people are actors and some people are watchers.
Gene was, of course, an actor. He always had been. More than that, he was a story-teller.
Part of acting was that you could become anything or anyone at all. And he could do that, or nearly. He could play a charmingly broken Jay Gatsby, an unrepentantly evil Sykes, or a bright and guileless Nanki-Poo at the drop of a hat. He made a great Teddy Roosevelt and a remarkably good Scarlett O’Hara, and received about equal applause when he performed them.
But he held onto a kernel of himself every time he got on stage. He could give himself almost entirely over to whatever was happening, could throw himself wholeheartedly into every goofy improv, every bone-chilling confrontation, every heart-breaking loss. But there was one small, irrepressible part that was always laughing at it, a little, even at the dark stuff. It made him an actor and not just a character, kept him whole and self-sufficient when the lights came down and he shed the skin of the person he’d been wearing.
He craved the applause and he craved the credulity. People believed in him when he got up on stage, and more over, they believed him. They believed the impossible things he was doing, singing (not all that well, mind) in public and mincing about. They believed him when he claimed there was an ocean on a flat wooden floor and that children were great men and women. They believed him when he lied to them, because they knew he was going to bring them something that would make the dishonesty and the falsehood of it all worth it.
It was crucial. It was precious. People gave him a little bit of their hearts and their minds and let him use them however he liked, as long as he gave him a spectacle, a meaning, something to carry out and bring into real, luscious, truthful life.
--
Some people are actors and some people are watchers.
Sebastian was a watcher, mostly because he couldn’t help but see.
Sebastian had always been a little too sensitive to what was going on with other people. He didn’t always approve, but he could always tell when something was up. In their eyes, in their gestures, in their voices, they betrayed a wealth of their feelings and thoughts. It was like they were broadcasting at the top of their lungs, trying to goad each other from force of will alone into action.
It made him question his career choices, really. What had he been thinking, becoming a music teacher for teenagers, who were simultaneously exhibitionists and the most scrupulous of secret-keepers?
Ultimately he couldn’t help it. He loved music and he loved the way his students, even the totally talentless, tone-deaf ones, got passionate about music. There was too much there to ignore. Working with enthusiastic young people was such a treat.
As much as he tried to keep out of it, he couldn’t always prevent himself from giving someone a nudge in the right direction. He’d always been rather too romantic for his own good and he could easily justify his actions to himself as long as he kept in mind that he was only making discreet, general suggestions--never to any particular person or on any particular subject. Besides, it was almost painful to him to watch people trying and failing to be romantic. It was like a bad comedy of manners.
He kept watch for trouble and he’d do what he could to keep anything inappropriate from happening, but he didn’t stand in the way of people’s happiness, as long as it was on the up and up.
It wasn’t matchmaking. It was...match-facilitating.
Someone had to keep an eye out, anyway.
--
Some people are painters and some people are museum-goers.
Rafiki was a painter.
Rafiki hadn’t always been painting. There’d been a time--not a long time, he’d admit--when he didn’t have any interest in art at all. He’d been interested in ritual, in the words, in the motions of the stars in the sky.
Someone pointed out to him, and maybe it had been in a dream, that he was shunning art for no reason. That it could bring him closer to that elusive whatever-it-was that he was always trying to grasp and understand.
He liked to work with his hands more than he liked brushes, although he could use both. It was something about the cool squish of paint beneath the pads of his fingers and the smooth emptiness of paper or the rough weave of canvas that made it all the more satisfying. It grounded him, got him in touch with his project.
Paint was eternal, paint was forever. Paint could change and deteriorate and shift hue, could blur and blend together. Paint could make a ideal world, could provide the doorway into a space that didn’t exist, a thought that one could almost enter. Paint could sit unseen for a hundred years, a thousand years, and give someone everything with a single glance--a little cut of genius, of crystallized thought in an instant.
Painting a sunset with a few strokes of his fingers and the careful spray of a aerosol can, Rafiki thought that God must feel the same way when the oranges and purples of the twilight shifted on the canvas of the sky. He felt close to his creator in the colors and the textures of his art.
And he felt it when he looked at what his students did, when the long-haired girl painted yet another perfect yellow sun and the young Native American woman created a stark and hauntingly beautiful landscape of hard bluffs and a wide sky, ready to swallow the viewer up.
--
Some people are painters and some people are museum-goers.
Zazu was a museum-goer.
Zazu didn’t have a lot of extra time. He was a terribly busy man and on the few occasions that he did have a few minutes to spend in rest, he’d rather enjoy them on his sofa with a colorful cocktail and a Colin Firth movie.
But he did have one long-standing tradition that he always looked forward to.
On the first days of his summer vacation, he went to the museums in the city. All of them. He liked to wander through the art galleries and the natural history exhibits, curling his lip a little at the corpses of giant squids and twisting himself to try to see all the parts of a Bosch painting.
He didn’t know much about art, but he knew what bored him. Usually it was the European portraits and pseudo-Greek statues. He liked the eerie medieval and Renaissance paintings, played a little game of trying to twist his hands into the postures those artists had recorded in their imaginary subjects. He found himself breathless at the beauty of some images, some techniques, his heart seized by the purity of a painted eye or the elemental fury and dread of a nightmare landscape.
He didn’t know how much he learned in his excursions, but he wouldn’t do without them for the world.
In each single building, there was enough genius to sustain one for years. It reassured him, brought him down and let him rest. It broadened his sight, stretched it out into a long, wide panorama of wonder and shook away the terribly small area of expertise in which he spent most of his days. He saw some of what he missed out on when his days rushed into a long blur of names, dates, atrocities and hypocrisies.
What would remain are the names and the dates and these images. He didn’t know quite what to do with that knowledge.
--
It’s not a conscious decision. Not necessarily. It’s the little things we do on occasion, the private compulsions that we do for ourselves, because we want to. It’s the things no one will ever see.
It’s the overwhelming and self-consuming passion. It’s the only thing we can ever imagine doing.
It’s the neurotic activity of making, of preserving, of seeing from another angle.
It’s what we do to escape, what we do to feel our existence in each time and place more fully.
It’s what we do with each other, for each other, and what we do alone, for ourselves.