(no subject)

[kittydesade]

Conversations in E Minor
I started rewatching Touching Evil for some reason I can't remember shortly before Yuletide, so when it came up in the fandoms I could tickybox to offer, I went for it. And then I got it!

The part that I remember first striking me is that my recipient requested Rivers as a character (in addition to the main), and Bradley Cooper had just been named the People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive. And I had a sudden image of this being ported into the Touching Evil world and Rivers being nominated like that and I about died laughing. No, if you haven't read the story, I didn't write that fic. But now I really kind of want to. I may have to make a note of that.

Anyway, so, Rivers. I do like Rivers, and I really felt bad about what happened to him in the show. And my recipient also wanted Creegan, so I fished around for some things I could do with the two of them together. Conversation was the first thing that came to mind, because a lot of scenes in Touching Evil are Creegan having long, rambling conversations with the people he's closest to. Which also struck me, that Creegan simply walks away from the people he doesn't feel comfortable with (if he's not deliberately provoking them), whereas the people he wants to be around he'll walk with or sit with and just talk, almost endlessly. So it had to be conversation between Creegan and Rivers. I started in the hospital because it was a natural place to start that the show gave me, where Rivers is basically captive in his bed recovering and Creegan can visit him and talk at him, and I moved on until it seemed to come to a natural conclusion. And I did work the sexy-Rivers-photoshoot thing in there somewhere. Hopefully smoothly. Mostly because I really, really wanted it to come up somehow because Rivers would be so embarrassed.

Branca, I hadn't actually intended to feature at all. But Creegan dug his heels in and refused to put himself in any organic fashion at the funeral, so I sent in Branca. And I ended up thinking, yes, Rivers does need her calm and stoic, more logical kind of compassion and strength. Not all the time, but in small doses.

The title came about because one of the ways I (and later, my friend and beta) think about the atmosphere of Touching Evil is that it's in a minor key. And always in the rain, or in the shadow of rain. So I turned that over a bit, Conversations in a Minor Key was the original title, and then I thought, rain should be in here somewhere. A lot of Irish songs are in E minor, and it certainly rains enough on the isles. There, boom. Done.


The Deeper Magic
So, I got this prompt, and I see that the person requested Steve fixfic. Fair enough, I want Steve fixfic, too. Actually there was a pile of fixfic but I focused on Steve because it seemed the easiest. AHAHAHAHA seemed being the key word there. I then spent the next three days trying to figure out what the hell artifact could bring him back with a minimum of monkey's paw effects. I think Once Upon A Time is probably to blame for the Snow White coffin thing. It did occur to me that since he'd essentially had a heart attack, the rest of his body was pretty intact and if they could get him into the coffin pretty quick, it'd work. I didn't come up with a backstory for the artifact because, um. I couldn't think of one. >.> At least, not one suitably innocuous.

I also loved the idea of Claudia coming to terms with Steve's death, though, and becoming stronger for it. I like Claudia very much as a character, and I want to see her grow; unfortunately that also means occasionally doing some nasty things to her. The more I banged this into shape, the more I liked the idea that the desperate, please-I'll-do-anything love wouldn't be the kind to trigger the restorative powers (which might be how it ended up in the warehouse in the first place, maybe someone thought it didn't work?) but the calm, confident, this is a person I have feelings for love is something that worked, is less fraught with emotional static and interference and therefore triggers the artifact. I also liked the idea that true love's kiss can be any kind of kiss, from any kind of love, as long as it's 'true.' In this case, platonic friendship love that nonetheless is constant and ... pure, unconditional, or a word like that.

Finally, I threw in some little snippets of everyone moving around through their own grief and trying to help Claudia through hers, because they are like a family. And at first Claudia's pain is so loud she can barely hear anyone, and eventually it eases.


She-Wolf
I actually struggled with this a fair bit, at least in part because this season was really painful to watch. What I wanted to write was Tig and Gemma running off together because I wanted to slap the everliving crap out of Clay for being a jackass and an idiot. Ahem.

What I ended up writing was ... not really that? A bit similar, but I wanted to explore Gemma as a family person, Gemma the Momma wolf, and at that point I had just seen the last two episodes back to back and there was a lot of ache and abandonment in her at the finale. I thought, anyway. Her son took his place where she wanted him, yes, but it took the CIA to make it happen. Tara, the woman she'd been not-so-subtly training to be the next, well, her, had done exactly as she would have done and the series even lampshaded it with the picture fade. And Gemma, I think, is not a person who takes well to women as strong as she is. She needed Tara to be strong for her son, and I think she really thought she wanted Tara to be like her, but when Tara did become like her, she couldn't handle it. Clay had by this point gone completely bugshit and tried to destroy everything she held dear, while lying to her face about it the whole time, so she didn't have him anymore. And I think she had a lot invested in him, so that took a lot out of her too. So the Gemma I found myself with by the end of the series was tired, empty, and questioning. But still Gemma.

And then I had her talk to Tig, because of all the members, and I'm not sure why but I think there's some history there, but of all the members left she trusts him. And she can lean on him. To an extent, because she's lying to him too, about Clay's involvement with all the shit that's come down on the club, but she can still lean on him. There was a scene towards the end of the season where Tig finally sees what Clay did to her and she tells him "Not now, Tiggy," and I interpreted that to be a kind of, don't feel sorry for me, don't try to comfort me, because if he did she'd fall apart.

Hopefully, with all of that, I managed to convey that she still had strength in her. Because if there's one thing Gemma is, she's a fighter. She does not give up easy, she's cunning and fierce, and she's got immense reserves of strength. I was aiming, at least, for the battle-weary woman taking comfort with a friend, and I hope I managed that.

(And no, not that kind of comfort, for those of you who've seen 2x11 Service. I don't mind that they started, but I really like that they stopped, that they both realized that what they wanted came from an immediate, wounded place and that they didn't actually want to go there.)


Everything in Circles
The requested characters were actually Rachel and Rosen, but after a couple of days of trying to think I could not make that story start. Fortunately the recipient offered that she wouldn't mind Nina either, and that one came immediately. I did latch onto the last couple of lines in the Dear Yuletide Writer letter, not so much as to try and write Nina/Rosen but the part about not being able to see Rosen sleeping with his therapy patients. Which led me to thinking of a young Nina who had just seen her boyfriend at the time walk off a roof because of her and her Alpha ability, needing to deal with that. And finding Rosen, who helped her, and attaching onto him like that.

Actually when I started outlining the fic I added in a scene where she uses her compelling voice on him, not extensively. But enough to get him to be a little more intimate with her in terms of an embrace or even a kiss. I had it half structured to be like the scene in Blade Runner where Deckard forcefully woos-to-rapes Rachael, depending on your interpretation, and then I just scrapped it entirely once I started writing. The way they came out in the fic, it didn't have a place in their relationship, and she wouldn't do that after all.

By coincidence, when I was working on this with some episodes still playing in the background, one of them had her saying "I've known him for 8 years, and ..." So I looked on the imdb for the actress's age and subtracted 8. And I thought back to how old she would be then, how she'd react, how she would grow and develop with him as a therapist, and it occurred to me that she would need to be one of those very put together and poised ladies. She's a beautiful woman, she probably always tried to be some kind of beautiful, but I think she took a kind of strength of self from his counseling that helped her be, more than a lot of women, more beautiful in the ways that are uniquely her. Not chasing fashion, but doing the styles and colors that are right for her. That's the poise, and because of her need to keep control, of her emotions and her power and so on, she'd always be put together. There's also some element of, when we're depressed or grieving, a lot of times personal grooming is one of the first things to go, so her rebuilding herself was one of the signs that she was getting better.

Rosen spoke of Marcus Ayers as his greatest failure, and from the way Nina talked and reacted in that episode she was invested in Ayers as well. But by that point she also would have known Rosen pretty well, and I wanted to show she had come to be strong enough to help Rosen. Which then led to my title, Everything in Circles, because first she is brought to him for help dealing with a failure of hers, and then she goes to him to help him deal with what he perceives as a failure of his.

A Pain That I'm Used To
Melisande. Melisande Melisande Melisande. I grabbed onto the "letters that Melisande wrote Phedre" part of the request, and then I grabbed onto the idea of Melisande writing steamy letters to Phedre mostly to mess with her mind. And from there it really did flow. I made that comment to my beta, who was following along with me when I wrote, why am I not surprised that Melisande's voice comes so easily. And then she threw her surprised face at me. It's in a jar she keeps on the desk next to the heart of a small child and the brain of a genius.

It started off with "I knew what it meant to be Kushiel's scion before anyone in my generation ." I knew that much when I sat down, and then the next words followed smoothly, and boastfully of course, and then when I got to the third paragraph I realized she was talking about Phedre in the third person. So, this wasn't a letter to her, obviously. But it didn't seem like a letter to Imriel either. And somewhere around the middle I realized it must be a letter to Joscelin, her one rival for Phedre's love. Ouch.

Knowing that it was to Joscelin actually made it even easier to fit the sexual aspect in. I could very much see Melisande nudging him about his Cassiline reserve, his unwillingness to treat Phedre with the violence of some of her other patrons. I do think Melisande understands that Phedre loves and desires him no less for that, that she loves Joscelin for who he is, but I also think Melisande wouldn't hesitate to use that against Joscelin if she thought she could. And I think she wrote this letter at a very bitter and, well, pissy time in her life. And then, of course, it was never sent, I think out of love for Phedre.

This was a fun exercise, though. I did really enjoy getting into Melisande's head, dark as it is in there. She isn't purely wicked or heartless, and I enjoyed exploring some of her side of things.


He's Off, You See, The Wizard
I had to write this fic. I had to. I don't remember what started it but there was something about Gold/Rumplestiltskin's first born baby dealing tendencies and then I was watching Labyrinth and then my eyes lit up and I was all THEY SHOULD BOND OVER THEIR BABY STEALING FAILURES and it just snowballed from there. The whole thing itself came out pretty quick, I held it in my mind a couple days before putting it down on the word processor. But, basically, once I thought of it, it had to be written. Jareth and Gold are old, familiar characters, not in and of themselves (well, Jareth is) but their archetype and pattern, I just had to sit my butt down at the computer and let it all flow out as I heard and pictured it. The title is a favorite phrase of mine, when talking about conniving manipulative backstabbing lying-with-the-truth entrancing enchanting magical sons of bitches. Then it was just a matter of finding someone who requested something that matched, and if I couldn't, hell, it could just go on AO3 anyway. Fortunately I found someone I thought would like it.

Heat Possessed
Somewhere in between A Pain That I'm Used To and this one elynross emailed me back to say I'd grabbed this pinch hit too, and included "and the pseud is glutton (for punishment), yes? <3 <3 <3". So, yeah, by this point I was just running on momentum and piles of ... I don't know what.

I grabbed this one because I am an avid fan of the Merry Gentry novels, despite now not being a fan at all of the Anita Blake novels. It's not even that I mind the fairy porn. It's more that Anita Blake started out as something I liked, and then became something entirely different and I chose not to make that switch. Anyway, so I grabbed this one for the fairy porn. Because who doesn't enjoy writing hot fairies having sex every now and again? (Well, I'm sure someone doesn't. But it's not me.)

In some ways, there's really nothing I can do to make this sound deep. It's porn. I know I was writing porn, I meant to write porn, it's softcore fairy porn. Softcore because if you've noticed, Laurell K Hamilton very rarely uses actual, directly related nouns in her pornographic scenes. And I was trying to match the mood rather than adapt it to my own. Although now that I think about it, I should try that sometime. But in a Yuletide challenge where what might appeal to the recipient IS the original tone, I wasn't going to try that. So, matching the tone, softcore porn, I explained to my beta in very shorthand terms about all of Merry's main men. She suggested Rhys and Sholto. And then she demanded at least six countable tentacles or she was going to be sad at me. And I always do what my beta tells me. *nods sagely*

The fairies were much more cooperative with writing porn than Melisande was, I have to say.


Ton Egoisme M'Inquiete
This actually was, I think, my first or second chronologically grabbed pinch hit. My email knows for sure. I loved Swordspoint when I first read it right up to how I still have it now on my bookshelf of comfort reading. I put it off for a bit, did a couple other ones I could more readily pull because I hadn't read the book in a while, and then sat down one chilly afternoon with a cup of cocoa and mainlined the whole thing. I pulled out the main people, I set them up in my mind's working space, and I set to work.

The person said she wanted Richard as Highwayman fic, this actually fit with me having watched Plunkett and Macleane with my best friend and beta maybe a week or two before that. I was good and in a highwayman mood, I just needed some kind of starting point. It started, apparently, with Richard in the grass getting wet, which did not make it into the final draft. The first scene, which I may reproduce and rewrite here so that by the time you see this there will be another post of deleted scenes, involved him lying in the grass, getting wet, and not getting much for his pains. At which point he went to the tavern in a foul mood, and met Jessamyn, and that was the end of that.

I don't remember a specific reason why I included Jessamyn. She was just there in my mind, very vivid and very stubborn about being there, although not particularly vocal. She also insisted that she had loved Richard, which fit with what Katherine said about the two of them being good together, just not necessarily a healthy kind of a good. And given that we also knew she was good with a knife, and fierce, it made sense that she would be a highwayman along with Richard. Proud, wicked smart, but with a wicked temper. And maybe some really poor impulse control, to provoke Richard that way.

I decided not to take it to the ultimate point because we know where it led them, and because it was getting too painful for my beta to read, so I left it at a happier point. It was a good conclusion.


K-9 Haven
You know, I'm actually not happy with that title. I wasn't then and I'm still not, I just couldn't think of a better one.

Yes, there is a lot of Dwight as Dog imagery. The thing about Dwight that gets me is that throughout his portrayal in the show he's very calm and placid, very loyal and obedient (we can probably thank/blame Army training for that one) and very big and fluffy and innocuous unless pressed to it. And given the Army ranger thing and just how tough one would have to be to survive a bullet magnet Trouble in freaking Afghanistan, he's also probably capable of being very, very vicious and maul-y.

I was actually really bouncy when this one came across because I love Dwight. I want to glomp him and burrow my 5'1" self into his 6'5" broad and stocky self and get all the hugs ever. Somewhere around here I have Mary Sue fic starring Dwight. No lie. And there's only a handful of Dwight eps, so fleshing out their relationship wasn't too hard. The biggest problem was Dwight seemed to come out of nowhere in the second season, after Garland was dead. And I had kind of an impression that the writers decided it would be a good idea, and so threw him in. I deviated a little from my recipient's request, for Garland and Dwight, to make it Nathan and Dwight and Nathan thinking about what his Dad was thinking, because, yeah, I have no idea what Garland was thinking either. I could make some guesses. And did, when I tossed it in as a family business. Someone had to recommend Dwight to Garland. And it didn't sound like it would be Dwight's father, who didn't tell his son about his bullet-attracting Trouble even when he was going to be walking into a firestorm. I gave him an uncle who was a cleaner instead, and probably much more responsible.

I implied little hints and things in Dwight's speeches, but Dwight doesn't talk about himself very much. He specifically said that Garland hadn't asked a lot of questions, which makes it hard to get him to tell Nathan what he's been up to. I threw him in with some cleanup of some other episodes he wasn't actually featured in. Such as the one with all the tree branches and vines covering the entire barn, because really, how did they plan on dealing with that?

Dwight, I don't think, likes being encased in armor. This is my in-character reason for why that Kevlar vest seems to appear and disappear (no, seriously, look at some of the t-shirts he wears and tell me how you can hide a Kevlar vest under there with no bulkiness or bumps where the seams are, I dare you). Dwight likes being free to move around, feel the wind on his body through whatever plain t-shirt he wants, he likes being unencumbered.

And in case anyone's wondering, the numbers on Nathan's phone on speed dial are 1-his father, 2-the station, 3-Audrey.

Fractal Universe
More Fixfic! This one was interesting because the recipient requested Marcus not dying/coming back, rather than what I've usually seen which is bring Jinks back! I found it easier to get inside Jinks' head to manipulate the circumstance and get Marcus back alive, although reviewing and creating background for Marcus might be a forthcoming challenge. And then, this time, I used the device of the pocket watch.

The first challenge was making it so that Jinks remembered and could adapt as he learned, rather than just doing the same thing and getting killed over and over. Once Jinks doesn't die, the team gets some of the vicious taken out of it and Marcus might get to live, plus there was the request of maybe a Marcus and Jinks team. So, clearly, the pocket watch would turn back time but it had to have a certain field where time wasn't necessarily turned back for everyone. Claudia (yes, it was Claudia in my head) made the watch believe Jinks was its wielder by using the sleeve of his coat to wind the watch, then placing it in his pocket and running away really quick.

Obviously, the more he dies and comes back, the rougher it is on him. The memory of his death as well as knowing the impact and how many times his friends have discovered his body, even if they don't. It makes him more reckless a little, also more edgy which, I think, actually bonds him closer to Marcus. Steve is, at heart, a nice guy, and I don't think Marcus is, and that puts sort of a divide between them. Giving Steve an edge means Marcus feels the contrast less, and makes him trust him that little bit more so that the fourth time around, Steve can talk him away from taking the coin and himself back to Sykes. The dialogue near on wrote itself, jumping from topic to topic and eventually coming up with enough arguments that Marcus started to doubt. And then he kept driving.

I chose a fractal motif because in the simple definitions of a fractal, they are created so that if you turn one way instead of the other, it creates a different end picture entirely from the first. It's one of my favorite metaphors for storytelling, and I thought it worked well here, too.

Three Dinners and a Dance
A character study of Wendy! I can do that!

The first thing I needed was a framework, and I wanted one where I could explore her in several different settings. Because she does go through a character arc over the course of the story, I wanted to set up little pings along each part of the arc, which would have to be finessed a bit because her development is fairly subtle. Not entirely. But somewhat.

I chose dinner because in a lot of places there's a great emphasis on community and family at mealtimes. The functional reasons for this being by the end of the working day most people are tired and want to relax, but they also have to eat, therefore it's easiest to get the most people in the closest space and share around the food so nobody has to wander too far to get the water or the milk or the bread or the meat or the cheese or the fruit or whatever. Very broad, overall terms. And in a way, too, each dinner scene reflects the other. The Lost Boys are trying to balance between mimicking grown-ups so as to have what they perceive as the grown-up privilege or the grown-up good parts without actually having to grow up themselves. The pirates obey their father figure, Hook, and their new mother figure, Wendy. And then the roles are reversed when Wendy has her own mother figure to guide her when she returns home.

I threw in a little dance coda because I thought it would be nice to illustrate how the lessons she's learned and implemented affect her behavior and mood and how she's viewed by others, and how she approaches life after her adventures. And of course the Boy, what are you waiting for? calls back to the first thing she ever said to Peter, Boy, why are you crying?

(Whether or not that is Peter I leave as an exercise for the reader.)

Low Life
Oh, Gambit. Gambit Gambit Gambit. He was, as with many many other young women and girls, my main crush among the X-Men for so many years. I read many comics, devoured the cartoons, and watched his part of the movie more times than I probably should admit.

I had the structure of it in my head, or at least, how it started. Gambit literally tripping over Wolverine after the movie, because let's face it, healing factor or no, an amnesiac Wolverine is not going to get very far or be very cogent for a while. Especially without support personnel and with, perhaps, several people in a couple different governments looking for him. I decided he was as likely to end up in an alley in the Big Easy as anywhere else, so I stuck him there and made Gambit trip over him. The problem was, Gambit was just as likely to walk on by as stop and help.

So I yelled at him. And stuck a big ol' lampshade on it.

There were parts I knew I wanted in this fic. Gambit and his glass coffee table, black leather couch. I knew his apartment was decorated like a picture book or a real estate book, the image of what a swank gentleman with a sketchy side should be, and I knew that some of it actually was stuff he liked. The bookshelf was symbolic of that, favorites he liked to read mixed in with the stock I Am Smart items. I knew he had a Steinlein on the wall, because he could and because he liked it. Maybe felt a little guilty for it being such a cliche.

I threw in Bella Donna, although I don't even know if that's a canon story anymore it's been so long and it's been changed and rebooted so much. But I threw it in because this is young Remy, and love and loss is still very much a part of his world. Older Gambit, he's more hardened to it. Young Remy still feels it all as keenly as any soap opera hero, even if he's a little more judicious about how he expresses it. Also I couldn't resist the Marlowe reference.

Now that he's made the decision to help Logan, he's not going to go by half measures. So he puts him to bed in his bed, tender and a bit of a softie as he is, especially young.

The biggest thing I had to decide for this fic, I think, was the speech patterns. Gambit has a very definitive speech pattern as anyone who's familiar with the character knows; I could punctuate and mangle the crap out of it, e.g. Dat was a lon' time ago, cher. Or I could exaggerate the word choice a little bit and leave the words intact for the most part, which I thought was more legible. I also made Logan's speech patterns more suitable to Logan, who has a different dialect, and colored the narrative of the whole thing with Gambit's, because it was his point of view. I should also add here that one of the things I do for any film media where I have samples of the characters' voices is as I'm writing, to try and "hear" the characters in my head saying these things. If I can hear it in their voice, it stays. If I can't, nine times out of ten it goes. I'm a very cinematic-process type of writer, a lot of the time I try to make the story unfold in my head as though I'm part of or watching a movie. It helps keep everyone straight as they're wandering around someone's living room critiquing the art.

The Call to Adventure
I hated Jumper. It made my plot and coherence and intricacy loving heart very sad. On the plus side, people beat up Hayden Christensen. I think he's a sucky actor. But I'd seen it before, and I knew there were characters I liked in it, which is my only excuse for picking Griffin as a POV character. Griffin is a snarkmaster extraordinaire.

Hilarious vigilante buddies it is, along with serious issues! To start with, all vigilantes need to hang out on roofs. And because Griffin is Griffin, I got to lampshade the hell out of it. In fact, the dialogue of this movie being what it was I got to toss in references to, in no particular order: Star Wars, Angel: The Series, Batman, Underworld, Monty Python, X-Men, The Matrix, and Trigun. Mixed and bastardized references, but still.

It's titled The Call to Adventure because that's the first step on the Hero's Journey, you know? Griffin is calling them to adventure, he's also calling David out for destroying his home and his work, which I rather thought needed to happen, given how the movie ended. But in the end, and because they do have a common enemy, they work together. Slowly, awkwardly, and with much mutual insulting, but they do. They're also young and resilient, in a lot of ways. It helps.

Photophiliac
I wrote this story about nine years ago. I am so not kidding. I saw Riddick and knew I could do almost anything in there, caught the pinch hit, looked at the assignment and the dear writer letter, and immediately PM'd my beta to scream in all caps "OMG I WROTE THIS STORY ALREADY. NINE YEARS AGO."

Of course, be damned if I was going to give my recipient a story I'd written with nine years less of experience and skill, the new trick would be not repeating myself too much. Which, I have to say, is not a challenge I ever expected to find in Yuletide.

I stuck Fry on New Mecca for a couple of reasons. First, the brief impression they give us in Chronicles of Riddick is that even at night, the cities are very brightly lit. Second, after Fry gets off the planet she wouldn't be in much state to say or do or respond to anything, so it would have to be a planet she had either heard of recently or that had reason to stick in her mind. Third, it'd also be possible that if either Jack or the Imam had heard she was alive, they would have brought her there to a place of safety.

Most of it flowed, some of it was deliberate. Dawud is a Muslim name (actually a name of a co-worker of a friend), Fry receives and gives a Muslim greeting and seems to know what it means. Fry not being on speaking terms with peace, because she didn't strike me as someone with few troubles to begin with. She knew what she was about to do, what she almost did or maybe had done before? There were a lot of issues tied up with both the passenger dump and how she treated it afterwards. And that's before she got carried away and mauled by many creatures. The scars, of course, I had to try and imagine what would have happened to her. Raising her arms to protect herself would result in a mangled if not ripped off arm. I did consider making her disabled in the way of having lost limbs, but then decided for reasons of time and workload that it wasn't practical to go researching prosthetic science and the advances thereof and trying to formulate based on what we know of the technology in Riddick's world, what kind of prosthetic medical care she'd have access to. If any. I'd definitely be interested to explore a fic that goes there, though.

And finally, the big two for this fic, her PTSD and her relationship with Riddick. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is something I keep coming back to looking at, because of writing so many characters who live with it to one degree or another. For story purposes I needed her to be functional enough to interact, so she's had some care, but not enough and she has no major or intimate support structure here. I tried to convey that with her attention to light and dark, small spaces and open spaces where she could see what's coming. Riddick, of course, lives in the dark. He's used to it, it's his element, and to an extent he's crippled in the light. (I shake my fist at you, Chronicles of Riddick, for largely abandoning that!) But Riddick is also the one who survived the monsters, who got them out, and as scary as he was for a while he is still not scarier than what haunts her. And is even a little comforting in that half her memories of him are memories of him helping and then rescuing them from the monsters. And finally, physically, he's big and solid and a very vivid, almost overwhelming personality. Sometimes, if they do spend more time together, I don't doubt it would trigger her. Other times, it would help.

18 and a Half Minutes
I'll confess, I actually wanted to do a story from Gary's point of view, but by the time I got this pinch hit it was two days till final deadline and I didn't think I could do him justice in that time. I'd want to have it picked by an expert on such things, and after seeing some of the picking requests sit on the board for days, I decided not to try something at the very last minute where I had no guarantee of being able to sit down with someone and, essentially, poke them repeatedly with "Am I doing this right? Am I doing this right?" The other option would have been to call my cousin, who is already in enough trouble. Very long story, the relevant portion being that I have a cousin whose autism is almost on the same severity level as Gary's seems to be. And, from what I remember from the last time I was home for the holidays, similar in manifestation. Minus Alpha powers.

ANYway. The next part that caught my attention was fallout from the Season finale and missing scenes. Yeah, that I could do. Only when I started it it was far back enough that it ended up not quite being fallout, but rather the missing details of what happened in the office while Rosen was getting ready to and then making his speech. Starting with Nina. I rewatched the end scene, where she went up to Rosen and hugged him pretty closely and a bit lingering before he left. He didn't seem used to it and perhaps was a bit uncomfortable with it, and to me it looked as though she wanted to cling to him a bit, keep him safe. She worried what would happen to him. I think she feared he would be black-bagged, which we'll have to discover in the next season. I tried to convey that when I started with her.

Nina's relationship with Cameron is so new, I didn't think she would automatically seek him out for comfort, and decided she was preoccupied with worrying about Rosen. I gave Cameron some protective urge to seek her out, then some banter between them that they were comfortable with, and then her fidgeting and moving on to Gary. Who is safe, in a way, because he's Gary. Regardless of the outside circumstances, he almost always acts like Gary, and that's comforting when everything is in flux.

In the conversation with Bill, I tried to lay in subtext his faith in the system. He's an officer of the law, he has faith in the system and that what he is doing is just and right, as well as believing that if something were wrong it would be caught by the failsafes in place. One of those failsafes being freedom of the press and free speech, and the ability and right of citizens to be informed, which I think overrides his concerns about Dr. Rosen doing this. Whistleblowers are protected by a set of laws because sometimes an organization does become corrupt, and then it is the duty of a right-thinking employee to, as the saying goes, blow the whistle on them. Abuse, violence, detention camps are part of that corruption.

But, he's also married. And he's keeping a secret from his wife, and that concern of what happens when she finds out carries them into the next conversation with Rachel, who also worries what her family will think. I threw the X-Men movies into this universe because it didn't seem too unreasonable that they'd exist, and because of that excellent anv-- er, metaphor, the "Have you tried not being a mutant" conversation.

The last part was, I'm afraid, very self indulgent. It begins with a textual rendering of the footage, the commentary from Bill, etc. And then comes in help, sent by Rosen, because I believe that he would have made arrangements in the event that he was arrested or black-bagged. He's too smart not to think they'd do that, and he'd want his people safe. That's not the self indulgent part. The self indulgent part came because I was talking about Rosen kicking over the game board. My beta commented on how that was an extremely John Sheridan (from Babylon 5) move. I was just punchy enough to take that for a good idea, especially since the actor had portrayed a spy in a previous TV series and a politician in a later one. And a retired spy, come to think of it. Enter: Agent David Sheridan, with his gentle smile and his "Lee sent me." I have to admit, I am curious to see where they'll take the TV show after such a massive reset button.

It's A Raymond Chandler Evening
Noir and pulp fiction is my thing. I have a long shelf of my books devoted to just to Hammett, Spillane, and Chandler. I wrote an urban fantasy noir novella for Nanowrimo, I'm hopefully going to spin that into a collection of short stories since I have several others I wrote for various things, I love pulp detective stories. Noir. All of it.

That said, this story still made me a nervous wreck, possibly because my standards are impossibly high. I opted to do a day in the life scene rather than plot out a full-on case and try to juggle all the factors within. My choice of a modernized version of Christopher Marlowe is due entirely to my punchiness and the vaguely noir aspect of his murder, rumors and conspiracy and a knife to the eye. My beta suggested the modernized version of Ingram was Graham, and we went with it. It really is about that simple.

Pinch Hits Part II || Behind the Scenes in General