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Meme results: DVD commentary bits.
Ahahahaha okay so this meme is a lot harder than I thought it would be when I posted it! So I apologize if my responses are totally unsatisfying. Feel free to ask follow up questions if I am that person who just rambles uninformatively about something no one cares about in DVD commentaries.
Oh God I am the person who just rambles about boring things in DVD commentaries.
Ahem.
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alexseanchai requested a couple of bits from To Course Across More Kindly Waters Now (Supernatural, Dean and Castiel):
There was only one word, and the word was Sam.
He cried out Sam unceasingly, and it encompassed the whole of his existence: an agony comprised of fear (never allayed, never fulfilled) and pain (never eased, never mercifully overwhelming) and beneath it all the tiny, stubborn thread of knowledge of time before and time after (it had not always been so; it might not always be so).
Sam.
"Sam," a voice repeated back to him. The inflection of the voice emphasized the smallest of things, the belief in time. The voice made time exist--time before the voice, time after. And with the voice came a sensation that was not pain but presence--a presence other than his own, another who spoke his whole world back to him. "Sam."
Sam.
Pressure, all around him, and then change--pain both lessened and sharpened, while fear fell away in wonder. Time before was now that place of unceasing agony, and time after was as unimaginable as time present, which was this incomprehensible place of straight edges and clear lights.
"Dean," said the voice, in company with a small, painless pressure against the top of his head.
Dean. Dean was not-Sam; Dean was himself. He was separate from the one behind him who was still holding on to him, the one who spoke to him. He looked down and saw himself--his body, Dean, a familiar view of chest and belly and dick and knees and feet--and saw the other, too, in the form of other arms wrapped around him. He could feel what he saw: pressure where the other's arms touched him, and not where they didn't. Pain clung to his body like cinders and blood. The other's arms contrasted starkly against the hurt and darkness of Dean's body, and the regular whiteness below his red-black feet was almost blinding.
"Motel bathroom," the voice informed him. Motel bathroom--this was a place he knew. He recognized it, shapes taking on meaning in his eyes: toilet, shower, sink, water, soap, tile floor under his feet, fluorescent light above his head. This was a place to become clean, a place to heal, a place to make ready or to recover--beginning and ending, night and morning. Dean remembered this, these shapes and edges and boundaries and the ways that they belonged to him, and he to them. A whole world could be unraveled from here--motels, gas stations, the highways that connected them, and all the other places along the way.
"Time to get clean," the voice said, and Dean saw that the shower was running, already hot, just how he liked it. There was a stack of towels waiting for later, with a bar of soap on top. "Go on."
[…]
"That was all symbols, so I could understand," Dean said, waving his hand back toward the motel, at the top of a hill that wasn't there anymore.
Castiel nodded.
"So what did you really say to me, when you came to get me? Because what I heard--that wasn't what you said, was it. That was just what I could understand."
Castiel watched him, giving him nothing.
"Say it to me again," Dean said. "I bet I can hear you this time."
He wasn't going to beg and plead, but he wanted to hear it again. That voice that had been the first glimmer of something changing. If he could just hear it again, he'd be ready to go, he knew it.
Castiel maybe smiled, or maybe that was just the way the light was passing through him. He reached for Dean, settling his right hand over the scar and his left hand on the back of Dean's neck. He leaned in close, and whispered into Dean's ear, and his voice thundered all around them. It blew back the grass and knocked down the trees and shook loose the earth they stood in, but under that, Dean could still hear Castiel's voice like he'd always heard it. This time it fell into the words--the symbols--that tradition required.
The angel said to him, "Be not afraid."
Okay, so the "Sam" part just comes from the fact that that's what Dean is screaming when we see him in Hell, and I like to be canonical. *g*
The most important thing to know about the story, though, is that it was incoherent untiliulia made me fix it. And this was one of the rare stories where I felt like I was doing something ~artistic~ and tried to argue with Iulia that it was perfect the way it was and, ahem, as it turned out I was wrong. This is in fact always the way this scenario turns out, so I'm not sure why it still happens from time to time. But there you go: the extent to which this story, especially the first part where language is only slowly becoming meaningful, is intelligible at all, it's because of Iulia kicking my ass.
"Be not afraid" obviously was a BIG MOMENT in the story, and part of why I fought with Iulia over fixing things is that I really, really wanted to get the story out ASAP once I'd written it, because I was absolutely convinced that that line was going to get Kripked, that it was inevitable that Castiel would say that to Dean at some point. In fact, I had to write a whole other fic to explain to myself why he didn't show up and say it during "Yellow Fever".
Oh, also! This isn't strictly contained within the excerpt, but the title comes from the beginning of The Purgatorio (as translated by Allen Mandelbaum), which seemed appropriate given the subject matter. And that is everything I can think of to say about that story!
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maerhys requested a bit from Chapter 27 of Missing Persons (Numb3rs, Don/Charlie):
Charlie tipped closer to him, nudging one leg between Don's, kissing his cheek and nuzzling at his throat. "This'll be okay, right? Close enough to visit, not close enough to draw attention to you. And I bet the Detroit field office has better things to do than keep tabs on me."
Don sighed. That much was true, and had figured into his own decision to come here. "Seriously, though? Michigan? It really does get cold here. You hate being cold."
"I'll buy a coat," Charlie said softly. "And a hat, and mittens, and boots, and an electric blanket, the whole deal."
There was a moment there, where Charlie didn't say you could keep me warm and Don didn't promise he'd be there to do it. He could feel the words on his tongue, and he just couldn't say it, not yet, not when he could barely grasp the idea of Charlie being within fifty miles of him all the time. As badly as he wanted Charlie, as badly as he should want this, if this was going to be his life--for a few awful seconds, the idea of Charlie here made his throat close, made his heart beat fast with the same old trapped sensation, locked in with Charlie and nowhere to go. But Don took a deep breath and reminded himself it was just tonight, just visits, just sometimes, just Charlie.
Charlie didn't seem to notice what Don didn't, couldn't say, or didn't seem to mind. He shifted away a little, stretching. "Anyway, I think I'm going to fit right in at the university. I mean, you know who their math department's famous for, don't you?"
Don blinked, staring at the ceiling. "I'm, uh--"
Charlie was smiling in his peripheral vision, telegraphing the joke a mile away. Don played along anyway. "I'm not really up on my mathematicians who aren't you."
"How about your criminal masterminds?" Charlie was almost laughing now, an edge of hysteria in his voice, and Don remembered he wasn't the only one who'd been trapped, who couldn't quite believe he was free. "The Unabomber's an alum."
There are two things going on here within the story: Charlie's relocating to the University of Michigan, and Don's still feeling kind of panicky and trapped about their relationship.
As far as Don's reaction, this was kind of my way of highlighting how damaged Don still is, because he didn't get the time that Charlie had to recover and regain his equilibrium. Don's just been running around feeling like he doesn't deserve to recover from the fallout--like he wasn't a victim so he doesn't need or deserve any care--and so this is the result. He still associates his relationship with Charlie with their captivity, and he's not really over any of it, he's just gotten good at ignoring his problems; by the end of the story, he's starting to turn a corner with this and actually recovering.
Meanwhile, Charlie is relocating to the University of Michigan partly because I was thinking Don should go somewhere cold and desolate to hide, and I thought about the Northeast and Big Sky Country and then I realized that Detroit is actually a lot of people's archetype for cold and desolate. *g* And as I was working at the University of Michigan at the time, it was obvious where I would send Charlie--which is why you suddenly get lots of geographic details when Charlie gets to Ann Arbor! Although in fairness I also was a crazy person and researched the locations of rest areas on the interstate in Wisconsin for that part.
Anyway, true fact, when I went to a new-employee orientation event, I wound up sitting next to the woman whose job it was to open the mail the university got from the Unabomber. U-M holds his papers as part of the Library's Special Collections, so he would send a bundle of correspondence from prison every week or two. Obviously, one way or another, that had to get into the story.
Outside the story, I wrote this scene in ... probably March of 2008, nearly three full years after I'd first started plotting Missing Persons and long after finishing the story had become a grim slog. So while it was logical for the final chapter to be a staccato arrangement of glimpses of Don and Charlie's lives going forward, there was also the fact that I could not bear to write more than I had to, and was packing as much resolution as I could into the smallest possible space.
rubynye requested the end of Crossing the Line (Numb3rs, Don/Charlie):
Charlie pushed up a little, far enough to breathe, to move away if Don wanted him to. Don slid down beneath him, flat on the floor, and tugged Charlie back down to rest half on top of him. They kissed again, slower now, and Charlie's mouth felt raw, tingling at every light touch. He slid one hand over Don's hair as Don's hands settled on Charlie's hip and back. "Don," Charlie whispered, "tell me what happens next." Charlie could see where tonight fit the pattern of the past, but he couldn't extend the pattern into the future--there were too many wild cards in the equation, and the one lying under him on the rug might be the wildest.
Charlie's eyes had adjusted a little, but he still couldn't make out Don's expression; just a familiarly shaped shadow, a faint reflected light on his open eyes, staring up past Charlie at the ceiling. "I don't know," Don whispered, his voice small and hollow. That was honest, at least; Charlie didn't know either. He didn't want to give up what he might have with Amita for this, any more than he'd wanted to when he and Don had agreed to end it. He was also running out of room for the belief that he could give up Don for anything, or that Don could give him up. And all that was to say nothing of the real problem.
Charlie kissed Don's cheek, his temple, the rim of his ear. "Stay tonight?"
Don nodded.
Charlie brushed his lips across Don's hair. "Work tomorrow?"
Don shook his head. "Monday," he said, and Charlie could hear the abused rasp in his voice. "Paperwork, shooting review, bureau psychologist."
Charlie rested his forehead against Don's. "And then?"
Don blew out a long slow breath against Charlie's mouth. "I have to trust them to be able to tell if I've lost it completely," he said finally. "Trust my team to have an eye on me."
Charlie nodded, and Don lifted his head and kissed him. "Have to trust you," Don said, so softly Charlie felt the words as much as heard them, the motion of Don's chest against his, Don's lips against his.
It was a terrifying responsibility--so much more dangerous than being Amita's boyfriend, so much more scope to screw it all up--but it had been fifteen years since there hadn't been something terrifying between him and Don. Charlie was getting used to it. He laid his head down beside Don's, resting one hand on Don's chest. The beating of his brother's heart under his hand was everything Charlie had always wanted and worth every terrifying second. "Yeah," Charlie whispered. "You can."
So the truth is that this whole section of the story, as far as I recall, was me stumbling along desperately in search of an exit line. :) It was an episode tag, and I wanted Don and Charlie to have sex! Crossing a line! And then I really was not sure how to tie it off, and this is what I came up with.
In the larger sense, of course, this was a story about the way that Don and Charlie's relationship--as brothers, even brothers who had sex--would always endure despite whatever other relationships they had, even other sexual/romantic relationships. That was something I had found interesting about the idea of Don/Charlie from the start, and this story was an attempt to write that while also presenting Charlie being sincerely in love with Amita.
It also--the something terrifying paragraph especially--somewhat reflects the central idea that I had about what I was doing when I was writing Don/Charlie, being an incest ship, which is writing two people who represent too many things to one another, a relationship that lacks boundaries, that is too intimate, and so sometimes dangerous and scary (and, ha! I was still writing just the same thing in the Missing Persons scene above, actually).
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stele3 requested a bit from Burn Up in Love, Love, Love (Panic! at the Disco OT4):
Jon stared at the ceiling as it faded into the deepening darkness. He wouldn't have to make up his mind if he just kept doing exactly what he was doing; this was him fucking it up right here, and he knew that. This was all he had to do--just do nothing--and he could stay alone for good. Maybe it would all fall apart without him--not the band, but this other thing, this Brendon-and-Ryan-and-Spencer-and-Jon thing that wasn't Panic! at the Disco. There was a reason the other three hadn't gotten together before he came along. He was responsible for the rest of them and for what they were doing together, oldest and calmest and sanest, and still the one who'd said, "I don't know, why not give it a try?" while the other three twisted themselves into knots.
To be honest I have no idea how they got together, beyond that glancing explanation. The story was about a) the porn and b) setting up the porn with a little bit of angst as efficiently as possible. I really never gave any thought to the story of what happened before then. Sorry! Worst explanation ever. Sometimes the porn is just porn.
end_of_thyme requested a bit from Chimerical Romantics (My Chemical Romance, Frank/Gerard, historical AU):
Gerard has been in love before: at least twice at boarding school, before he'd quite figured out what it was, and then in a mad flurry at university--a different boy each term of his first year, and then the same boy (who was also in love with him, oh bliss) for the first two terms of his second year, until they had a falling-out and Gerard spend all of Trinity term nursing his broken heart. Third year was like first with more drinking and more boys, down to the last one, in the run up to Gerard's Finals, whose name and college (or whether he was in fact at a college and not just the apothecary's boy) Gerard never did know. His second-year requited passion aside, Gerard learned that actually becoming personally acquainted with someone with whom he was in love frequently ruined the whole thing--but he scarcely even remembers his passion for the mysterious blond boy anymore. He was too busy to write very many wretched poems about him, and the inevitable and requisite heartbreak got rather lost during Finals, and then it was on to the continent and his grand tour.
The trip extended in a leisurely fashion beyond the standard year, as Gerard felt no great compulsion to return home--Toro paid for things just often enough to keep Gerard afloat, and Gerard sold the occasional painting (more through the prettiness of his face than his art, he knew, but the end result was that people paid him for his paintings as though he were an actual artist) and it was sufficient to get by.
He fell in and out of love at a slightly more languid pace in Europe, and once again experienced the occasional brief requital. He did also, as he occasionally had in university, go to bed with the sort of woman one went to bed with, but he never fell in love with a woman, whether that kind or a more suitable one. Rutting between the sheets is nothing compared to the briefest touch of hands with one he loves, and the prospect of marriage crosses his mind only as the same sort of dreadful inevitability as death.
Gerard returned to Jersey in the winter of Michael's final year of university, seized with the first truly dark bout of melancholy he had ever suffered. It was a strange affliction disconnected from any loss of love or failure of art, though he was obsessed with both as signs of the dreadful pointlessness of his existence. He felt the occasional frisson of interest in someone during the years that followed, but being in love in Jersey, in the lap of his family, seemed incongruous and dangerous. Gerard never dared even to think about those men too much.
He is not precisely certain whether he has ever consummated any of his grandly passionate loves. Certainly there were kisses with some of them--some followed immediately by blows, some allowed to progress farther. During his second year of university, he and the Classics scholar got all the way to the point of nakedness once or twice, consumed as much with their own daring as with each other. Even without actually disrobing there had been many furtive touches in secret places, a leavening of furiously carnal pleasure in the midst of their otherwise largely poetic passion for one another.
It wasn't that Gerard didn't know boys could do other things to and with each other; it was just that all the truly definitive acts he'd heard of sounded like things that happened to you if you were unlucky in your choice of bullies at school. Gerard had been lucky, but some of his friends hadn't, and it all sounded quite terrifying and was evidently painful and injurious. He wanted no part of any of that, certainly not in relation to any boy he'd ever loved. Perhaps he did think about what it would have been like to be less lucky, once in a while, and perhaps those thoughts were quite engrossing when certain moods were upon him, but they were only thoughts and he knew it wouldn't be like that, truly.
This, and the following two parts in Frank's POV, were really the crux of the emotional story between Frank and Gerard. They have entirely opposite experiences of romantic love and sexual activity between men. Gerard, having studied the Classics and gone to English schools with a tradition of homosocial/homosexual bonds between students, has a whole mental and emotional framework for loving other men, so he thoroughly understands his own attachments. He's inexperienced as far as actual sex, a little afraid of it.
Meanwhile, Frank has no concept--no words--for a relationship like the one he's stumbling into with Gerard. And on the other hand sex between men is something he's had lots of experience is and regards totally matter-of-factly. It's the emotional area of his relationship with Gerard that is totally uncharted and frightening territory; Frank doesn't have any way to articulate what he wants, or to form any expectation of what he might be able to hope for in a relationship with Gerard.
So these were my star-crossed lovers, whose classes, educations, and social backgrounds left them completely alien to each other and trying to negotiate a relationship almost without a common language. And that is why, if I had actually really written the story all the way, it would have been half a million words long. They had a lot of sorting-out to do.
elainasaunt asked for a bit near the end of Get Loved, Make More, Try to Stay Alive (Torchwood, Jack/Ianto):
Ianto managed to lift his head enough to look at his left arm. His wrist was bandaged--his left wrist.
"The bracelet?"
Jack laughed, almost a sigh, and nodded. "I was a bit too clever there, nearly drove myself crazy--you remember, when you first came, I said I was always expecting to turn around and see you at Torchwood?"
Ianto nodded. Jack's fingers trailed ticklishly up and down his arm above the bandage. "I really, honestly did, for years--the knot in the bracelet, it wasn't just that I remembered it from seeing it the first time round. I knew it. I learned it as a kid on the Boeshane Peninsula--Sea Scouts--and that knot was the one you'd tie in the end of a line when you'd tested it and knew it was safe to use. It means I may be relied upon."
Ianto stared at him, remembering every time Jack had touched the bracelet, the knot--he'd thought Jack was just obsessed, jealous, but... "Trust me."
Jack met his eyes and nodded. "And I did, but I didn't know who I was trusting--you, or me, or... And I kept having these dreams, these really good dreams--"
Those leftovers from the retcon. Ianto realized with a jolt that he still couldn't tell Jack about that--that was all ahead of them, Indy's childhood crush, Indy's gap year. Ianto hadn't missed it after all. Hell, if Indy was still playing a video game Ianto recognized, he couldn't have missed much at all.
"--and I'd wake up and spend the whole day waiting for you to just walk through the door. Took me years to realize you weren't coming. And then you did, only you weren't safe yet."
The big timey-wimey finish! It all comes back around and (hopefully) ties up neatly! I'm not sure I can any longer bend my brain in the direction required to quickly sum up all the time loops in this story, but they (mostly) resolve here, with the explanation about the bracelet, and Ianto's realization of where the last loop will resolve, fourteen years later.
SO! Now seems like a good time to tell the story of how I came up with the entire plot of Get Loved in one day. At work.
I was at work, where the internet was heavily filtered, and someone had mentioned the "Papa Don't Preach" vid to me - in the sense that I knew there was an mpreg vid out there - and I was sitting at my desk and thinking about it. And because I love a good miserable worst case scenario, I concocted chapter one: Ianto is pregnant, he doesn't on any level want a child, not in his body, not in his life, and Jack desperately does want that child - and Ianto - to live, outside Torchwood, and there is no good solution and everyone is at an impasse and everything is horrible and nothing will ever be good or happy again.
All morning I wallowed in the miserable impossibility of it, and I sat at lunch and was really sad, and then I started thinking "okay, how do I FIX it?" It was important to me to stay within the rules of the universe while doing that; I couldn't just wave a wand, or change the scenario I'd set up. Torchwood had to stay as important and lethal as it was, Ianto couldn't suddenly turn out to be immortal, no one could have a magical change of heart.
So first I figured, okay, they could have an alien artifact that would get the baby out of Ianto. That lowered the stakes a little bit. But Ianto would still die young and never see his baby and that was still kind of depressing.
Aha, I thought, it would be a nice gesture for Ianto to write something, or leave something, for the baby. Okay, that's kind of sweet and softens the blow.
Oh! I thought - because it had been one of my pet theories for a while that Ianto knows perfectly well who the Doctor was, and could have figured out that Martha knew about him - he could get Martha to get in touch with the Doctor and the Doctor could deliver the message safely!
OH THE DOCTOR COULD TAKE HIM TO VISIT! I worried about that development quite a lot - but I figured Doctor Ex Machina is essentially the entire point of the show, so, fair's fair, that could fall in Ianto's favor at least once.
So I'd gotten as far as that, Ianto getting to see the kid, which was sort of nice but STILL gloriously depressing, and then I figured out the end, that Jack and the Doctor could find some means of redeeming Ianto from his death and bringing him back and then I walked around work with a huge, giddy smile on my face, because everyone was going to live, and I knew I had to write the story.
The end! \o/
This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/534396.html.
Oh God I am the person who just rambles about boring things in DVD commentaries.
Ahem.
alexseanchai requested a couple of bits from To Course Across More Kindly Waters Now (Supernatural, Dean and Castiel):There was only one word, and the word was Sam.
He cried out Sam unceasingly, and it encompassed the whole of his existence: an agony comprised of fear (never allayed, never fulfilled) and pain (never eased, never mercifully overwhelming) and beneath it all the tiny, stubborn thread of knowledge of time before and time after (it had not always been so; it might not always be so).
Sam.
"Sam," a voice repeated back to him. The inflection of the voice emphasized the smallest of things, the belief in time. The voice made time exist--time before the voice, time after. And with the voice came a sensation that was not pain but presence--a presence other than his own, another who spoke his whole world back to him. "Sam."
Sam.
Pressure, all around him, and then change--pain both lessened and sharpened, while fear fell away in wonder. Time before was now that place of unceasing agony, and time after was as unimaginable as time present, which was this incomprehensible place of straight edges and clear lights.
"Dean," said the voice, in company with a small, painless pressure against the top of his head.
Dean. Dean was not-Sam; Dean was himself. He was separate from the one behind him who was still holding on to him, the one who spoke to him. He looked down and saw himself--his body, Dean, a familiar view of chest and belly and dick and knees and feet--and saw the other, too, in the form of other arms wrapped around him. He could feel what he saw: pressure where the other's arms touched him, and not where they didn't. Pain clung to his body like cinders and blood. The other's arms contrasted starkly against the hurt and darkness of Dean's body, and the regular whiteness below his red-black feet was almost blinding.
"Motel bathroom," the voice informed him. Motel bathroom--this was a place he knew. He recognized it, shapes taking on meaning in his eyes: toilet, shower, sink, water, soap, tile floor under his feet, fluorescent light above his head. This was a place to become clean, a place to heal, a place to make ready or to recover--beginning and ending, night and morning. Dean remembered this, these shapes and edges and boundaries and the ways that they belonged to him, and he to them. A whole world could be unraveled from here--motels, gas stations, the highways that connected them, and all the other places along the way.
"Time to get clean," the voice said, and Dean saw that the shower was running, already hot, just how he liked it. There was a stack of towels waiting for later, with a bar of soap on top. "Go on."
[…]
"That was all symbols, so I could understand," Dean said, waving his hand back toward the motel, at the top of a hill that wasn't there anymore.
Castiel nodded.
"So what did you really say to me, when you came to get me? Because what I heard--that wasn't what you said, was it. That was just what I could understand."
Castiel watched him, giving him nothing.
"Say it to me again," Dean said. "I bet I can hear you this time."
He wasn't going to beg and plead, but he wanted to hear it again. That voice that had been the first glimmer of something changing. If he could just hear it again, he'd be ready to go, he knew it.
Castiel maybe smiled, or maybe that was just the way the light was passing through him. He reached for Dean, settling his right hand over the scar and his left hand on the back of Dean's neck. He leaned in close, and whispered into Dean's ear, and his voice thundered all around them. It blew back the grass and knocked down the trees and shook loose the earth they stood in, but under that, Dean could still hear Castiel's voice like he'd always heard it. This time it fell into the words--the symbols--that tradition required.
The angel said to him, "Be not afraid."
Okay, so the "Sam" part just comes from the fact that that's what Dean is screaming when we see him in Hell, and I like to be canonical. *g*
The most important thing to know about the story, though, is that it was incoherent until
iulia made me fix it. And this was one of the rare stories where I felt like I was doing something ~artistic~ and tried to argue with Iulia that it was perfect the way it was and, ahem, as it turned out I was wrong. This is in fact always the way this scenario turns out, so I'm not sure why it still happens from time to time. But there you go: the extent to which this story, especially the first part where language is only slowly becoming meaningful, is intelligible at all, it's because of Iulia kicking my ass."Be not afraid" obviously was a BIG MOMENT in the story, and part of why I fought with Iulia over fixing things is that I really, really wanted to get the story out ASAP once I'd written it, because I was absolutely convinced that that line was going to get Kripked, that it was inevitable that Castiel would say that to Dean at some point. In fact, I had to write a whole other fic to explain to myself why he didn't show up and say it during "Yellow Fever".
Oh, also! This isn't strictly contained within the excerpt, but the title comes from the beginning of The Purgatorio (as translated by Allen Mandelbaum), which seemed appropriate given the subject matter. And that is everything I can think of to say about that story!
maerhys requested a bit from Chapter 27 of Missing Persons (Numb3rs, Don/Charlie):Charlie tipped closer to him, nudging one leg between Don's, kissing his cheek and nuzzling at his throat. "This'll be okay, right? Close enough to visit, not close enough to draw attention to you. And I bet the Detroit field office has better things to do than keep tabs on me."
Don sighed. That much was true, and had figured into his own decision to come here. "Seriously, though? Michigan? It really does get cold here. You hate being cold."
"I'll buy a coat," Charlie said softly. "And a hat, and mittens, and boots, and an electric blanket, the whole deal."
There was a moment there, where Charlie didn't say you could keep me warm and Don didn't promise he'd be there to do it. He could feel the words on his tongue, and he just couldn't say it, not yet, not when he could barely grasp the idea of Charlie being within fifty miles of him all the time. As badly as he wanted Charlie, as badly as he should want this, if this was going to be his life--for a few awful seconds, the idea of Charlie here made his throat close, made his heart beat fast with the same old trapped sensation, locked in with Charlie and nowhere to go. But Don took a deep breath and reminded himself it was just tonight, just visits, just sometimes, just Charlie.
Charlie didn't seem to notice what Don didn't, couldn't say, or didn't seem to mind. He shifted away a little, stretching. "Anyway, I think I'm going to fit right in at the university. I mean, you know who their math department's famous for, don't you?"
Don blinked, staring at the ceiling. "I'm, uh--"
Charlie was smiling in his peripheral vision, telegraphing the joke a mile away. Don played along anyway. "I'm not really up on my mathematicians who aren't you."
"How about your criminal masterminds?" Charlie was almost laughing now, an edge of hysteria in his voice, and Don remembered he wasn't the only one who'd been trapped, who couldn't quite believe he was free. "The Unabomber's an alum."
There are two things going on here within the story: Charlie's relocating to the University of Michigan, and Don's still feeling kind of panicky and trapped about their relationship.
As far as Don's reaction, this was kind of my way of highlighting how damaged Don still is, because he didn't get the time that Charlie had to recover and regain his equilibrium. Don's just been running around feeling like he doesn't deserve to recover from the fallout--like he wasn't a victim so he doesn't need or deserve any care--and so this is the result. He still associates his relationship with Charlie with their captivity, and he's not really over any of it, he's just gotten good at ignoring his problems; by the end of the story, he's starting to turn a corner with this and actually recovering.
Meanwhile, Charlie is relocating to the University of Michigan partly because I was thinking Don should go somewhere cold and desolate to hide, and I thought about the Northeast and Big Sky Country and then I realized that Detroit is actually a lot of people's archetype for cold and desolate. *g* And as I was working at the University of Michigan at the time, it was obvious where I would send Charlie--which is why you suddenly get lots of geographic details when Charlie gets to Ann Arbor! Although in fairness I also was a crazy person and researched the locations of rest areas on the interstate in Wisconsin for that part.
Anyway, true fact, when I went to a new-employee orientation event, I wound up sitting next to the woman whose job it was to open the mail the university got from the Unabomber. U-M holds his papers as part of the Library's Special Collections, so he would send a bundle of correspondence from prison every week or two. Obviously, one way or another, that had to get into the story.
Outside the story, I wrote this scene in ... probably March of 2008, nearly three full years after I'd first started plotting Missing Persons and long after finishing the story had become a grim slog. So while it was logical for the final chapter to be a staccato arrangement of glimpses of Don and Charlie's lives going forward, there was also the fact that I could not bear to write more than I had to, and was packing as much resolution as I could into the smallest possible space.
rubynye requested the end of Crossing the Line (Numb3rs, Don/Charlie):Charlie pushed up a little, far enough to breathe, to move away if Don wanted him to. Don slid down beneath him, flat on the floor, and tugged Charlie back down to rest half on top of him. They kissed again, slower now, and Charlie's mouth felt raw, tingling at every light touch. He slid one hand over Don's hair as Don's hands settled on Charlie's hip and back. "Don," Charlie whispered, "tell me what happens next." Charlie could see where tonight fit the pattern of the past, but he couldn't extend the pattern into the future--there were too many wild cards in the equation, and the one lying under him on the rug might be the wildest.
Charlie's eyes had adjusted a little, but he still couldn't make out Don's expression; just a familiarly shaped shadow, a faint reflected light on his open eyes, staring up past Charlie at the ceiling. "I don't know," Don whispered, his voice small and hollow. That was honest, at least; Charlie didn't know either. He didn't want to give up what he might have with Amita for this, any more than he'd wanted to when he and Don had agreed to end it. He was also running out of room for the belief that he could give up Don for anything, or that Don could give him up. And all that was to say nothing of the real problem.
Charlie kissed Don's cheek, his temple, the rim of his ear. "Stay tonight?"
Don nodded.
Charlie brushed his lips across Don's hair. "Work tomorrow?"
Don shook his head. "Monday," he said, and Charlie could hear the abused rasp in his voice. "Paperwork, shooting review, bureau psychologist."
Charlie rested his forehead against Don's. "And then?"
Don blew out a long slow breath against Charlie's mouth. "I have to trust them to be able to tell if I've lost it completely," he said finally. "Trust my team to have an eye on me."
Charlie nodded, and Don lifted his head and kissed him. "Have to trust you," Don said, so softly Charlie felt the words as much as heard them, the motion of Don's chest against his, Don's lips against his.
It was a terrifying responsibility--so much more dangerous than being Amita's boyfriend, so much more scope to screw it all up--but it had been fifteen years since there hadn't been something terrifying between him and Don. Charlie was getting used to it. He laid his head down beside Don's, resting one hand on Don's chest. The beating of his brother's heart under his hand was everything Charlie had always wanted and worth every terrifying second. "Yeah," Charlie whispered. "You can."
So the truth is that this whole section of the story, as far as I recall, was me stumbling along desperately in search of an exit line. :) It was an episode tag, and I wanted Don and Charlie to have sex! Crossing a line! And then I really was not sure how to tie it off, and this is what I came up with.
In the larger sense, of course, this was a story about the way that Don and Charlie's relationship--as brothers, even brothers who had sex--would always endure despite whatever other relationships they had, even other sexual/romantic relationships. That was something I had found interesting about the idea of Don/Charlie from the start, and this story was an attempt to write that while also presenting Charlie being sincerely in love with Amita.
It also--the something terrifying paragraph especially--somewhat reflects the central idea that I had about what I was doing when I was writing Don/Charlie, being an incest ship, which is writing two people who represent too many things to one another, a relationship that lacks boundaries, that is too intimate, and so sometimes dangerous and scary (and, ha! I was still writing just the same thing in the Missing Persons scene above, actually).
stele3 requested a bit from Burn Up in Love, Love, Love (Panic! at the Disco OT4):Jon stared at the ceiling as it faded into the deepening darkness. He wouldn't have to make up his mind if he just kept doing exactly what he was doing; this was him fucking it up right here, and he knew that. This was all he had to do--just do nothing--and he could stay alone for good. Maybe it would all fall apart without him--not the band, but this other thing, this Brendon-and-Ryan-and-Spencer-and-Jon thing that wasn't Panic! at the Disco. There was a reason the other three hadn't gotten together before he came along. He was responsible for the rest of them and for what they were doing together, oldest and calmest and sanest, and still the one who'd said, "I don't know, why not give it a try?" while the other three twisted themselves into knots.
To be honest I have no idea how they got together, beyond that glancing explanation. The story was about a) the porn and b) setting up the porn with a little bit of angst as efficiently as possible. I really never gave any thought to the story of what happened before then. Sorry! Worst explanation ever. Sometimes the porn is just porn.
end_of_thyme requested a bit from Chimerical Romantics (My Chemical Romance, Frank/Gerard, historical AU):Gerard has been in love before: at least twice at boarding school, before he'd quite figured out what it was, and then in a mad flurry at university--a different boy each term of his first year, and then the same boy (who was also in love with him, oh bliss) for the first two terms of his second year, until they had a falling-out and Gerard spend all of Trinity term nursing his broken heart. Third year was like first with more drinking and more boys, down to the last one, in the run up to Gerard's Finals, whose name and college (or whether he was in fact at a college and not just the apothecary's boy) Gerard never did know. His second-year requited passion aside, Gerard learned that actually becoming personally acquainted with someone with whom he was in love frequently ruined the whole thing--but he scarcely even remembers his passion for the mysterious blond boy anymore. He was too busy to write very many wretched poems about him, and the inevitable and requisite heartbreak got rather lost during Finals, and then it was on to the continent and his grand tour.
The trip extended in a leisurely fashion beyond the standard year, as Gerard felt no great compulsion to return home--Toro paid for things just often enough to keep Gerard afloat, and Gerard sold the occasional painting (more through the prettiness of his face than his art, he knew, but the end result was that people paid him for his paintings as though he were an actual artist) and it was sufficient to get by.
He fell in and out of love at a slightly more languid pace in Europe, and once again experienced the occasional brief requital. He did also, as he occasionally had in university, go to bed with the sort of woman one went to bed with, but he never fell in love with a woman, whether that kind or a more suitable one. Rutting between the sheets is nothing compared to the briefest touch of hands with one he loves, and the prospect of marriage crosses his mind only as the same sort of dreadful inevitability as death.
Gerard returned to Jersey in the winter of Michael's final year of university, seized with the first truly dark bout of melancholy he had ever suffered. It was a strange affliction disconnected from any loss of love or failure of art, though he was obsessed with both as signs of the dreadful pointlessness of his existence. He felt the occasional frisson of interest in someone during the years that followed, but being in love in Jersey, in the lap of his family, seemed incongruous and dangerous. Gerard never dared even to think about those men too much.
He is not precisely certain whether he has ever consummated any of his grandly passionate loves. Certainly there were kisses with some of them--some followed immediately by blows, some allowed to progress farther. During his second year of university, he and the Classics scholar got all the way to the point of nakedness once or twice, consumed as much with their own daring as with each other. Even without actually disrobing there had been many furtive touches in secret places, a leavening of furiously carnal pleasure in the midst of their otherwise largely poetic passion for one another.
It wasn't that Gerard didn't know boys could do other things to and with each other; it was just that all the truly definitive acts he'd heard of sounded like things that happened to you if you were unlucky in your choice of bullies at school. Gerard had been lucky, but some of his friends hadn't, and it all sounded quite terrifying and was evidently painful and injurious. He wanted no part of any of that, certainly not in relation to any boy he'd ever loved. Perhaps he did think about what it would have been like to be less lucky, once in a while, and perhaps those thoughts were quite engrossing when certain moods were upon him, but they were only thoughts and he knew it wouldn't be like that, truly.
This, and the following two parts in Frank's POV, were really the crux of the emotional story between Frank and Gerard. They have entirely opposite experiences of romantic love and sexual activity between men. Gerard, having studied the Classics and gone to English schools with a tradition of homosocial/homosexual bonds between students, has a whole mental and emotional framework for loving other men, so he thoroughly understands his own attachments. He's inexperienced as far as actual sex, a little afraid of it.
Meanwhile, Frank has no concept--no words--for a relationship like the one he's stumbling into with Gerard. And on the other hand sex between men is something he's had lots of experience is and regards totally matter-of-factly. It's the emotional area of his relationship with Gerard that is totally uncharted and frightening territory; Frank doesn't have any way to articulate what he wants, or to form any expectation of what he might be able to hope for in a relationship with Gerard.
So these were my star-crossed lovers, whose classes, educations, and social backgrounds left them completely alien to each other and trying to negotiate a relationship almost without a common language. And that is why, if I had actually really written the story all the way, it would have been half a million words long. They had a lot of sorting-out to do.
elainasaunt asked for a bit near the end of Get Loved, Make More, Try to Stay Alive (Torchwood, Jack/Ianto):Ianto managed to lift his head enough to look at his left arm. His wrist was bandaged--his left wrist.
"The bracelet?"
Jack laughed, almost a sigh, and nodded. "I was a bit too clever there, nearly drove myself crazy--you remember, when you first came, I said I was always expecting to turn around and see you at Torchwood?"
Ianto nodded. Jack's fingers trailed ticklishly up and down his arm above the bandage. "I really, honestly did, for years--the knot in the bracelet, it wasn't just that I remembered it from seeing it the first time round. I knew it. I learned it as a kid on the Boeshane Peninsula--Sea Scouts--and that knot was the one you'd tie in the end of a line when you'd tested it and knew it was safe to use. It means I may be relied upon."
Ianto stared at him, remembering every time Jack had touched the bracelet, the knot--he'd thought Jack was just obsessed, jealous, but... "Trust me."
Jack met his eyes and nodded. "And I did, but I didn't know who I was trusting--you, or me, or... And I kept having these dreams, these really good dreams--"
Those leftovers from the retcon. Ianto realized with a jolt that he still couldn't tell Jack about that--that was all ahead of them, Indy's childhood crush, Indy's gap year. Ianto hadn't missed it after all. Hell, if Indy was still playing a video game Ianto recognized, he couldn't have missed much at all.
"--and I'd wake up and spend the whole day waiting for you to just walk through the door. Took me years to realize you weren't coming. And then you did, only you weren't safe yet."
The big timey-wimey finish! It all comes back around and (hopefully) ties up neatly! I'm not sure I can any longer bend my brain in the direction required to quickly sum up all the time loops in this story, but they (mostly) resolve here, with the explanation about the bracelet, and Ianto's realization of where the last loop will resolve, fourteen years later.
SO! Now seems like a good time to tell the story of how I came up with the entire plot of Get Loved in one day. At work.
I was at work, where the internet was heavily filtered, and someone had mentioned the "Papa Don't Preach" vid to me - in the sense that I knew there was an mpreg vid out there - and I was sitting at my desk and thinking about it. And because I love a good miserable worst case scenario, I concocted chapter one: Ianto is pregnant, he doesn't on any level want a child, not in his body, not in his life, and Jack desperately does want that child - and Ianto - to live, outside Torchwood, and there is no good solution and everyone is at an impasse and everything is horrible and nothing will ever be good or happy again.
All morning I wallowed in the miserable impossibility of it, and I sat at lunch and was really sad, and then I started thinking "okay, how do I FIX it?" It was important to me to stay within the rules of the universe while doing that; I couldn't just wave a wand, or change the scenario I'd set up. Torchwood had to stay as important and lethal as it was, Ianto couldn't suddenly turn out to be immortal, no one could have a magical change of heart.
So first I figured, okay, they could have an alien artifact that would get the baby out of Ianto. That lowered the stakes a little bit. But Ianto would still die young and never see his baby and that was still kind of depressing.
Aha, I thought, it would be a nice gesture for Ianto to write something, or leave something, for the baby. Okay, that's kind of sweet and softens the blow.
Oh! I thought - because it had been one of my pet theories for a while that Ianto knows perfectly well who the Doctor was, and could have figured out that Martha knew about him - he could get Martha to get in touch with the Doctor and the Doctor could deliver the message safely!
OH THE DOCTOR COULD TAKE HIM TO VISIT! I worried about that development quite a lot - but I figured Doctor Ex Machina is essentially the entire point of the show, so, fair's fair, that could fall in Ianto's favor at least once.
So I'd gotten as far as that, Ianto getting to see the kid, which was sort of nice but STILL gloriously depressing, and then I figured out the end, that Jack and the Doctor could find some means of redeeming Ianto from his death and bringing him back and then I walked around work with a huge, giddy smile on my face, because everyone was going to live, and I knew I had to write the story.
The end! \o/
This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/534396.html.
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I bet the reason SPN angels don't say "be not afraid" is because people can't really go their whole lives anymore seeing almost nobody but folks from their village, because this isn't a world where an unfamiliar face is an unusual and often frightening thing in and of itself. Or alternately that was just Gabriel's shtick and obviously he no longer gives a shit.
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Well, I think--after the display he gives in his first appearance--a "be not afraid" from Castiel still wouldn't have been unwarranted; he's not entirely the boy-next-door. *g*
But I realized at some point that it actually fits in with a larger trend in the SPN angels' behavior, which is that they are very Old Testament angels. While they exist in a nominally Christian framework (they treat Christians as their people, and a Latin rite of exorcism is effective against demons, and so on) they really are not messengers of good news or redemption. Which I guess is another way of saying that none of them give a shit about Gabriel's old schtick.
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That's...a really good point, actually.
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