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edenfallingaka pieces of "Five Things That Never Happened to Rex and Ana Lewis (And One That Still Might)" except I am only posting the opening snippets from four of the five AUs, since I haven't started writing the final two sections yet.
---------------
from part 1 - The Best of All Possible Worlds
They're running through the streets of some seaside town in southern Somalia (because it's always fucking Somalia; you can hide anything here if you have enough money), Duke and Ripcord flanking him on either side and gunfire and explosions blooming like water lilies overtaking a pond. Which is a bizarre comparison, but Rex's mind has always worked a little sideways from what he's observed as normal for other people.
They take cover in an alley for a moment, crouched down on the hard-packed dirt of the road, their backs flat to the whitewashed wall of a house that had been well cared for until they ran through. Ripcord is watching back the way they came, M16 braced against his shoulder. Duke has a radio in his hand. Rex knocks the heel of his palm against his temple and swallows, trying to clear his ears and listen in.
"--me? Yeah? Great. How long will it take an airstrike to get to, uh, hang on." Duke looks down at the satellite images they got of the suspected terrorist lab and reads off the coordinates of the house. "To there. Over."
Rex can't hear what the person on the other end of the radio says, but Duke nods. He braces one hand right over Rex's shoulder and looks down the alley toward their target, judging the level of resistance. "Yeah, cool, roger that. I need that house gone in twenty-five minutes. Over."
As Duke listens for confirmation, Rex glances along the alley himself and frowns. Duke's the one who's used to this shit. If anyone can judge how long it'll take to get to the target, he can. Rex will only be second-guessing. But Duke has no clue how long it'll take Rex to figure out what he might find inside that house.
Rex hesitates, then grabs Duke's arm. "Make it thirty-five," he says.
---------------
from part 2 - Be All That You Can Be
Ripcord brings her the news. He shows up at the high school just after noon on a Monday, gets a visitor's pass, and makes his way through the halls to the front room of the guidance office, where Ana is pretending to look busy while really reading articles on Cracked.com about Hollywood's continuing problems with realistic female characters.
He knocks on the doorframe and clears his throat. "Uh. Ana. Hi."
She looks up, a smile automatically rising to her lips when she recognizes his voice. Ripcord's a goofball, but he's as loyal as they come and he knows just how to break her and Duke out of the seriousness they can fall into when left to their own devices. He gets on all right with Rex, too, which is Ana's real test of character. Love me, love my baby brother -- or we're through.
The smile dies at the expression on Ripcord's face. Oh god. Someone's hurt. Someone's dead. Someone's MIA. Rex or Duke, Duke or Rex, she can't say which would be worse.
"Who died?" she hears herself ask.
"Rex," Ripcord says, his voice awkward and soft. He steps into the office, lets the door close behind him. "I'm so sorry, Ana. He was in the terrorist lab when the airstrike came. The flyboys came too soon, almost three minutes before the mark Duke gave them. There was nothing we could do. All I could do was get Duke out before he ran into the fire and got himself killed too." He sinks in on himself, strangely small for a strong, proud soldier. "He would've done anything to keep your boy safe, Ana. I swear. And I'm so, so sorry."
Ana looks out the window to her right, at the little courtyard with its lone cherry tree and five picnic tables that the seniors are allowed to use for lunch on Fridays. The cherry is just falling out of bloom, pink-white blossoms a ragged halo instead of an enchanted cloud. A crow hops along the grass, pausing now and then to cock its head and stare at nothing out of its beady black eyes.
"Where's Duke?" Ana asks.
Ripcord is silent.
---------------
from part 3 - At the Thought of His Immolation
Rex drifts in red-tinged darkness for a long time -- geological ages, perhaps, while the igneous flow of his skin cools to a new form and the gas and ashes settle from his ravaged lungs. Or so he imagines, when Mindbender finally wakes him from the induced coma and explains, in his thready, inflectionless voice, the damage Rex will shoulder every second from now on.
For all his brilliance, it takes nearly thirty-six hours before he works through rage and denial to realize that he's in a lab, not a hospital, and furthermore, that if a terrorist technician is treating him, he has bigger problems than the purely physical. Also, the door is locked.
"Am I a prisoner?" Rex asks when Mindbender wanders in forty-six minutes later. Rex has tracked every one of them on the digital clock in his now detached heart monitor, concentrating on the slight hiss of his gas mask as it expands and contracts around his neck to anchor his thoughts instead of letting them ride him.
The sound of his voice processed through that mask continues to startle him. It's too deep, and strikes the air with a vaguely mechanical clarity instead of the warmth of human lips and lungs. He can hear his natural voice transmitted from his throat to his ears via the bones of his face, and it clashes with the external sound.
"Do you want to be a prisoner?" Mindbender asks, tilting his head as if Rex will make more sense at an angle.
"I want to know what's going on," Rex says, and shakes his head at the disconnect between the synthesized voice and what he knows he ought to hear. He reaches up and tears the magnets off the metal plates in his skull, gasping as raw air hits his ravaged lungs. "I want... to know where... I am."
---------------
from part 4 - The Line Dividing Good and Evil
There's someone in her apartment.
Ana's been knocking herself out with Benadryl since... well, since, but she's trying to learn how to sleep naturally again. It's not going very well, but just now she's grateful for the insomnia. She jolts out of her uneasy doze at the sound of someone stepping on the creaky floorboards near the doorway between her living room and kitchen. Whoever it is stops dead, but there's a weird hissing noise she'd thought was the wind -- had started working into a half-dream about rustling leaves in a barren winter forest -- and that's not right.
She slides the drawer of her nightstand open as quietly as she can, groping for the Browning pistol Rex helped her buy two years ago. She thumbs the safety off and sits up, gripping the gun in both hands.
A shadow fills her bedroom doorway just as she's about to swing her legs off the bed and stand.
"Move and I shoot," she says.
The intruder stops.
Ana can't really see him. The only illumination is the glow of her battery alarm clock and the light pollution of street lamps drifting in between the slats of her Venetian blinds. Just enough to make out black, black, and more black -- hair, coat, gloves, pants, scarf or mask around the face.
"Get the fuck out of my home," she says.
There's another hiss, accompanied by a clicking sound, and the figure starts to laugh.
---------------
Sections 1 and 2 are now finished in rough draft and the whole story is a hair over 8,000 words so far. That is pretty much the only thing I worked on today. *sigh*
Well, I did also read the canon for one of my Yuletide recipient's requested fandoms that we did not match on, just in case, since rereading the canon we did match on has been like pulling teeth. I'd forgotten how badly written that canon is on a words-on-the-page level. Also, ye gods, I did not realize at the time I first read it (I was eighteen, what did I know?), but it is the purest, most ridiculously overwrought distillation of manpain that ever manpained, and I have the terrible feeling that the author agrees with the main character that an awesome sex life is genuinely the most important thing that makes a good marriage. Communication? Trust? Laughter and affection and shared values and goals? Pssh, no. It's all about the orgasms. Which, can I just say, "Ick, no, thanks ever so but I think I'll be over here completely and utterly disagreeing with you."
Bleh.
I can still see why I liked the story underneath the manpain and clunky writing, but I am less able to blithely brush past those aspects these days, especially when I am trying to read with an eye to writing fic and thus have to actually pay attention to the fine details of setting and character. *deeper sigh*
---------------
from part 1 - The Best of All Possible Worlds
They're running through the streets of some seaside town in southern Somalia (because it's always fucking Somalia; you can hide anything here if you have enough money), Duke and Ripcord flanking him on either side and gunfire and explosions blooming like water lilies overtaking a pond. Which is a bizarre comparison, but Rex's mind has always worked a little sideways from what he's observed as normal for other people.
They take cover in an alley for a moment, crouched down on the hard-packed dirt of the road, their backs flat to the whitewashed wall of a house that had been well cared for until they ran through. Ripcord is watching back the way they came, M16 braced against his shoulder. Duke has a radio in his hand. Rex knocks the heel of his palm against his temple and swallows, trying to clear his ears and listen in.
"--me? Yeah? Great. How long will it take an airstrike to get to, uh, hang on." Duke looks down at the satellite images they got of the suspected terrorist lab and reads off the coordinates of the house. "To there. Over."
Rex can't hear what the person on the other end of the radio says, but Duke nods. He braces one hand right over Rex's shoulder and looks down the alley toward their target, judging the level of resistance. "Yeah, cool, roger that. I need that house gone in twenty-five minutes. Over."
As Duke listens for confirmation, Rex glances along the alley himself and frowns. Duke's the one who's used to this shit. If anyone can judge how long it'll take to get to the target, he can. Rex will only be second-guessing. But Duke has no clue how long it'll take Rex to figure out what he might find inside that house.
Rex hesitates, then grabs Duke's arm. "Make it thirty-five," he says.
---------------
from part 2 - Be All That You Can Be
Ripcord brings her the news. He shows up at the high school just after noon on a Monday, gets a visitor's pass, and makes his way through the halls to the front room of the guidance office, where Ana is pretending to look busy while really reading articles on Cracked.com about Hollywood's continuing problems with realistic female characters.
He knocks on the doorframe and clears his throat. "Uh. Ana. Hi."
She looks up, a smile automatically rising to her lips when she recognizes his voice. Ripcord's a goofball, but he's as loyal as they come and he knows just how to break her and Duke out of the seriousness they can fall into when left to their own devices. He gets on all right with Rex, too, which is Ana's real test of character. Love me, love my baby brother -- or we're through.
The smile dies at the expression on Ripcord's face. Oh god. Someone's hurt. Someone's dead. Someone's MIA. Rex or Duke, Duke or Rex, she can't say which would be worse.
"Who died?" she hears herself ask.
"Rex," Ripcord says, his voice awkward and soft. He steps into the office, lets the door close behind him. "I'm so sorry, Ana. He was in the terrorist lab when the airstrike came. The flyboys came too soon, almost three minutes before the mark Duke gave them. There was nothing we could do. All I could do was get Duke out before he ran into the fire and got himself killed too." He sinks in on himself, strangely small for a strong, proud soldier. "He would've done anything to keep your boy safe, Ana. I swear. And I'm so, so sorry."
Ana looks out the window to her right, at the little courtyard with its lone cherry tree and five picnic tables that the seniors are allowed to use for lunch on Fridays. The cherry is just falling out of bloom, pink-white blossoms a ragged halo instead of an enchanted cloud. A crow hops along the grass, pausing now and then to cock its head and stare at nothing out of its beady black eyes.
"Where's Duke?" Ana asks.
Ripcord is silent.
---------------
from part 3 - At the Thought of His Immolation
Rex drifts in red-tinged darkness for a long time -- geological ages, perhaps, while the igneous flow of his skin cools to a new form and the gas and ashes settle from his ravaged lungs. Or so he imagines, when Mindbender finally wakes him from the induced coma and explains, in his thready, inflectionless voice, the damage Rex will shoulder every second from now on.
For all his brilliance, it takes nearly thirty-six hours before he works through rage and denial to realize that he's in a lab, not a hospital, and furthermore, that if a terrorist technician is treating him, he has bigger problems than the purely physical. Also, the door is locked.
"Am I a prisoner?" Rex asks when Mindbender wanders in forty-six minutes later. Rex has tracked every one of them on the digital clock in his now detached heart monitor, concentrating on the slight hiss of his gas mask as it expands and contracts around his neck to anchor his thoughts instead of letting them ride him.
The sound of his voice processed through that mask continues to startle him. It's too deep, and strikes the air with a vaguely mechanical clarity instead of the warmth of human lips and lungs. He can hear his natural voice transmitted from his throat to his ears via the bones of his face, and it clashes with the external sound.
"Do you want to be a prisoner?" Mindbender asks, tilting his head as if Rex will make more sense at an angle.
"I want to know what's going on," Rex says, and shakes his head at the disconnect between the synthesized voice and what he knows he ought to hear. He reaches up and tears the magnets off the metal plates in his skull, gasping as raw air hits his ravaged lungs. "I want... to know where... I am."
---------------
from part 4 - The Line Dividing Good and Evil
There's someone in her apartment.
Ana's been knocking herself out with Benadryl since... well, since, but she's trying to learn how to sleep naturally again. It's not going very well, but just now she's grateful for the insomnia. She jolts out of her uneasy doze at the sound of someone stepping on the creaky floorboards near the doorway between her living room and kitchen. Whoever it is stops dead, but there's a weird hissing noise she'd thought was the wind -- had started working into a half-dream about rustling leaves in a barren winter forest -- and that's not right.
She slides the drawer of her nightstand open as quietly as she can, groping for the Browning pistol Rex helped her buy two years ago. She thumbs the safety off and sits up, gripping the gun in both hands.
A shadow fills her bedroom doorway just as she's about to swing her legs off the bed and stand.
"Move and I shoot," she says.
The intruder stops.
Ana can't really see him. The only illumination is the glow of her battery alarm clock and the light pollution of street lamps drifting in between the slats of her Venetian blinds. Just enough to make out black, black, and more black -- hair, coat, gloves, pants, scarf or mask around the face.
"Get the fuck out of my home," she says.
There's another hiss, accompanied by a clicking sound, and the figure starts to laugh.
---------------
Sections 1 and 2 are now finished in rough draft and the whole story is a hair over 8,000 words so far. That is pretty much the only thing I worked on today. *sigh*
Well, I did also read the canon for one of my Yuletide recipient's requested fandoms that we did not match on, just in case, since rereading the canon we did match on has been like pulling teeth. I'd forgotten how badly written that canon is on a words-on-the-page level. Also, ye gods, I did not realize at the time I first read it (I was eighteen, what did I know?), but it is the purest, most ridiculously overwrought distillation of manpain that ever manpained, and I have the terrible feeling that the author agrees with the main character that an awesome sex life is genuinely the most important thing that makes a good marriage. Communication? Trust? Laughter and affection and shared values and goals? Pssh, no. It's all about the orgasms. Which, can I just say, "Ick, no, thanks ever so but I think I'll be over here completely and utterly disagreeing with you."
Bleh.
I can still see why I liked the story underneath the manpain and clunky writing, but I am less able to blithely brush past those aspects these days, especially when I am trying to read with an eye to writing fic and thus have to actually pay attention to the fine details of setting and character. *deeper sigh*
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-11 03:42 am (UTC)Now that Yuletide's passed, what was that canon you couldn't work with?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-11 04:16 am (UTC)The fandom I hit a brick wall on is the Suburban Gods duology by Brenda W. Clough. The first book is about a nauseatingly normal white yuppie guy named Rob Lewis who suddenly gets mental powers -- telepathy and mind control, basically -- which he cannot control. His life spirals into chaos, so he abandons his wife (Julianne) and their twin toddler children and runs off to be a street bum. Sometime thereafter, he meets a psychologist named Edwin Barbarossa (who has an awesome girlfriend, Carina) and they try to get Rob's powers under control and figure out where they came from... which, in a further turn for the bizarre, turns out to be Gilgamesh. Yeah. Who also has possession of the pearl of immortality, and got bored, and so gave half his powers to a random person -- i.e., Rob -- more or less for kicks. The first book ends with Rob taking the other half of the mind powers away from Gilgamesh and giving the pearl of immortality to Edwin, and then going home to discover that despite ample provcation, Julianne has NOT in fact divorced him and changed the locks on their house.
The second book deals with Rob's refusal to explain his powers to Julianne (he says it's because that went badly the first time, but since that was mostly down to him having no control and all his subconscious fears playing out via the people around him, I think he's just being a whiny douchebag) and the complications that come after Edwin, on a dramatic return from a space mission (seriously, don't ask) is publicly revealed as an immortal. That book ends with Rob finally admitting that he makes awful life choices, only instead of deciding to ask his friends and family for help from now on, he decides to invite Jesus into his heart. No, really.
They are not as bad as I'm making them sound! There's a lot of interesting stuff in them, and Edwin and Carina are awesome. But the more I reread, the more I disliked Rob, and since