....

The filming of [John Wick] had started. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

And so did the other films under LIE Studios; which meant that by any normal measure of how they operate the production teams should be in keen depth of workload.

Usually, Derren and Simon are the ones who are at the helm of it, moving from one film set to another every three hours.

However, this time Simon was left alone with that responsibility; wishlist LIE Studios found a replacement for Derren.

And what was Derren doing?

Well as of now he was sitting across from a woman for two straight without saying anything; what was unusual for Darren, who was not by nature a person who needed time to find words.

He had always had his way of talking his mind, and it was part of what made him good at his job; the ability to be in a room with anyone and find the register quickly.

Laura had commented on it once, early in the months before they were officially anything, that he was the most immediately comfortable person she had ever met in a professional context.

He was not immediately comfortable right now.

...and she noticed the hair, too. It was longer and unmaintained contrary to his usual appearance, which for someone whose work is to handle people can be called unprofessional.

However, Laura decided to wait patiently.

She had learned, in eight months, that Darren’s silences were worth waiting out.

She wrapped both hands around her coffee cup and looked at him across the kitchen table.

....

He was midway through a scene - one of the quieter ones, paradoxically the hardest, where the Joker says something entirely reasonable in a tone that makes it sound like the most dangerous thing anyone has ever said, when the front door opened.

Laura had a key, and she used it occasionally when she was passing after training and he had said she could.

This had worked fine for two months.

She stepped into the hallway and registered the situation in front of her.

Darren in the centre of the cleared living room, furniture pushed to the walls, phone propped against books recording. Wearing a long dark coat he had sourced from somewhere - not his, clearly, given that it pooled slightly at the floor around his feet, and the half-finished mask constructed from craft materials assembled at midnight and now visible in full afternoon light for the first time.

He had not yet noticed her, and he was in the middle of working on the laugh.

This was the part of the character document Regal had written that Darren had been wrestling with most - the specific quality of the Joker’s laugh, which was not a villain laugh in the conventional sense, not the theatrical ha-ha of someone performing menace, but something that arrived from a different place entirely, something that sounded like a man who had found something genuinely funny that nobody else in the room understood yet.

"HAAAHHHAAAAA... HAAAA...AAAAHHHAA."

What was currently coming out of Darren was something that had started as an attempt at the correct laugh, had taken a wrong turn somewhere in the second syllable, and had arrived at a sound that was difficult to categorise - not menacing, theatrical, or the laugh of a man who had found something funny, but the sound of someone who had committed fully to a direction and was now too far in to course-correct, a high-pitched escalating thing that wobbled uncertainly at the top before descending in a way that suggested it had surprised even him.

He tried it again, with a slightly different approach and the result was different in detail and identical in effect.

He adjusted his stance, took a breath and tried a third version that started lower and built more gradually and which was, in objective terms, worse than the first two but delivered with considerably more confidence, which somehow made it funnier than the lack of confidence would have.

Laura stood in the doorway.

She looked at the mask, coat, the phone recording everything, and finally at her boyfriend in the centre of his own living room attempting an evil laugh with the focused seriousness of someone filing a tax return.

She looked at all of this for approximately five full seconds.

Darren turned, saw her, and stopped.

The silence had a very specific quality.

"Huh." Laura said, with the measured neutrality of someone who had decided that whatever was happening, her reaction to it was going to be calm. "Okay. I am not judging. Carry on, Darren... I will just–" she gestured back at the door. "I will leave you to it."

She started to close the door.

Darren moved.

"Wait!! Laura, no, this is... it’s a misunderstanding, hang on-" He crossed the room faster than he had crossed any room recently, which was made significantly more complicated by the coat, which was long enough to be a problem under normal walking conditions and was an active structural hazard at speed.

The hem caught under his foot at exactly the wrong moment, not a small stumble, but a full, committed, nothing-to-be-done-about-it fall, his feet taken completely out from under him by approximately eighteen inches of borrowed fabric.

He went down, flat and face to floor.

Arms out, the landing had the quality of something that happened completely and without any intermediate stages - standing, then not standing, with nothing useful in between.

The mask survived the impact with more structural integrity than seemed fair given its construction materials.

There was a pause.

Laura, turning at the sound, looked at him sprawled on the floor, the coat spread around him like something that had overtaken him, the mask still on his face, tilted just enough to point toward the ceiling.

She started laughing, the kind that starts somewhere you can’t control and takes over before you’ve decided to let it, that comes with the full body involvement of something genuinely funny happening to someone you care about in a way that doesn’t hurt them.

She put one hand on the doorframe for support, which told him everything about the degree of it.

Darren, face against the floor, looked up at her from underneath the mask.

Then he started laughing too.

It took a while to stop.

Every time one of them got close, the other would look at the coat spread across the floor in a three-foot radius around him, or at the mask still on his face at the wrong angle, and it would start again - the particular quality of laughter that feeds on itself until it’s run its full course and leaves everyone slightly exhausted and considerably lighter than before.

Eventually Darren sat up, and gathered the coat around him with the dignity of someone attempting to reclaim a situation that had moved beyond dignity’s reach.

Took the mask off and held it at arm’s length in the way of someone assessing an object they made at midnight and are now seeing in normal lighting for the first time.

Laura wiped her eyes and sat down on the floor across from him, which was where they both ended up when the laughter finally finished and the room went quiet in the comfortable way it goes quiet after something like that.

....

Then Darren finally decided to explain things.

"I am sorry." he said finally. "I have been avoiding you these past few weeks, because I needed to make a decision first, and I couldn’t talk about it while I was still figuring it out."

"Hm... yeah, I won’t lie, that was a bit annoying." she admitted with a small nod, her tone softening. "But I get it."

"Alright, here it is, this might come out of nowhere, but I decided to take a break from my line producing work at LIE."

Laura looked at him steadily. "You are moving to another production house?"

Even as she said it, she didn’t believe it, her expression made that clear, disbelief written plainly across her face.

"No. Never." Derren denied the thought right away.

He was approached by almost all of the Big Six Studios offering big checks multiple times, but he outright rejected them every time; there is no way he would betray Regal.

"...I thought so." Laura said. "Then what’s this about?"

He looked at his hands. "I was offered an antagonist role in a film."

Laura blinked, then set her cup down. "Are you serious?"

"Yeah."

"Oh my god! Darren." She leaned forward slightly. "Really! Why are you telling me this like you’re confessing to something? You’ve been working on your acting for years. This is... why do you look like that?"

Laura is one of the only ones who was supposed to know about Darren working on his acting.

At least the one who he had revealed it too.

"I am thirty Laura." He pointed out. "Changing careers right now has to be the dumbest idea I have ever entertained. You know how foolish it looks, right?"

Derren said as if Laura should understand what he meant; and it sure did.

She did see the point, actually.

Laura is a professional athlete in archery national level.

She had spent the better part of her adult life inside a sport that had its own brutal internal logic about timing; about when you should have arrived, what it meant that you hadn’t, how many years you had left before the window became a question mark.

She knew exactly what it felt like to stand at a threshold you believed you should have crossed years ago and look at the distance between where you were and where you were supposed to be.

In fact the way Derren and Laura had met for the first time was quite the ordinary way.

The clock in your head; she understood it.

....

The way they had met was not particularly cinematic, which Darren had always found privately amusing given the industry he worked in.

LIE Studios’ casting team had been looking for extras with genuine archery experience; not someone who could be coached into looking convincing from a distance, but someone who actually knew what they were doing with a bow in their hands.

Laura had seen the audition notice and shown up, because she was twenty-two and her career was stalling and she was willing to try most things that kept her in the vicinity of her sport.

She didn’t get the role.

Regal had looked at her audition, profile, and done something that was either perceptive or presumptuous depending on how it landed.

He had told her to go back to her training, that she was too good to be an extra, and offered her a sponsorship on the spot.

Darren had been the one assigned to follow up.

Not to manage her; that wasn’t the word for it.

More as a periodic check-in every few months - evaluating whether the investment was being honored, whether the work ethic held up, and whether the ambition had enough structure to sustain real weight over time.

He had started those meetings as an obligation and somewhere along the way had stopped being able to remember when they had become the meeting he looked forward to most.

Eight months ago, they had stopped being meetings entirely.

....

Derren was not casual about this relationship. He wanted to be clear about that, at least to himself.

He was hopeful it would continue; especially after having gone through the roughest patch during his University.

Laura was someone he had watched, up close and over time, choose her sport over easier paths; over more comfortable ones.

And that’s exactly why he doesn’t want to drag her into his sudden wills and career changes.

He had watched her lose competitions and come back.

He had watched her adjust her technique, recalibrate, reassess after every loss without losing herself instead of treating them as setbacks.

He admired her in a way that had nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with evidence.

Which was exactly why he was sitting here now, at this table, reluctant to hand her a version of himself that was mid-career change and uncertain and asking her to factor that into a life that was already full of demands she hadn’t asked for.

She had enough on her plate.

The last thing he wanted to be was another thing on it.

....

"Now... I am really curious about the role. Also, who is the director?"

"It’s Regal."

She blinked. "Are you bragging right now?"

"Noo... Well maybe just a little." He grinned.

"...just do it, stupid."

He laughed despite himself. "Haha, I knew you would say this."

"I would have to be actually stupid to say anything else."

"Yeah." He nodded slowly. "Anyone would say the same."

He looked at her for a long moment after that. Something in his expression shifted.

"Your nationals are in eight months."

"Why would you remind me of that right now? I was enjoying pretending I had more time."

"I want to actually be there for it." he said, more seriously now. "For the whole qualification cycle, not just showing up when I can squeeze it in."

He met her eyes. "If I take this role, the production overlaps with all of it. I will be on set, fully committed, and I won’t be able to show up the way I want to."

Laura studied him for a moment, taking it in.

"Darren." she said finally, calm and matter-of-fact. "I have a coach, a structured training programme, a full support team, a national federation, and a sponsor, who, by the way, happens to be you, so my entire qualification cycle isn’t going to fall apart just because you’re busy making a film."

The corner of her mouth lifted slightly. "I promise you, my archery career can survive your dramatic villain phase."

He laughed, genuinely this time, the kind of laugh that slips out when you’ve been holding something heavy for too long and someone takes it off your hands before you realize how tense you were.

"But..." She paused.

"There is one thing I am itching to mention, the mask is terrible." she agreed.

"But what you just did was not." She looked at him with the directness she used when she was being precise rather than kind, and he had learned in eight months to tell the difference. "That was not what I expected."

She stood, brushing off her training clothes. "Put the furniture back. I will make coffee."

At the kitchen doorway, she paused and glanced back at him still on the floor. "And get a proper coat, one that fits. I don’t know what that was, but it nearly took you out before the film even started."

He stayed on the floor a moment longer in the cleared room, the mask in one hand, the coat discarded to his left, thinking not about the fall, the mask, or Laura walking in at the worst possible moment, but about the scene itself, the delivery, the part of it that had emerged when he stopped questioning himself and simply performed.

He got up, started moving the furniture back, and got a proper coat the following morning.

....

.

[To be continued...]

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