[Fic] "In the Absence of Sun (The Grief Inside Your Bones)" -- BtVS/A:tS

[edenfalling]

Remix reveal day! I wrote two stories this year: In the Absence of Sun (The Grief Inside Your Bones) for templemarker and Sword and Stake (Hath Yet Her Honor and Her Toil) for rthstewart. I'm going to talk about each in a separate post.

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In the Absence of Sun (The Grief Inside Your Bones): 5,175 words, May 2014. Buffy goes to LA after Angel's private little war. Faith trails her like a dark mirror, chasing her own demons and debts. Neither expects to run into Wesley. Buffy/Faith/Wesley, explicit sex.

Remixed from In the Absence of Sun, by templemarker.

So yeah. I wrote porn for Remix. Weird, isn't it?

I did not actually mean to write porn at all, nor to write in this (these?) fandom(s). I matched templemarker on Inception and Star Trek: AOS, and my initial intent was to remix Conversation Piece, in which Ariadne sneaks into one of Arthur's dreams and discovers a 1940s bar. I rewatched the movie specifically to refresh my memory of their interactions, and got a few hundred words written. But while I was poking around templemarker's archive, trying to choose a fic to remix, I read In the Absence of Sun and that scenario just point-blank refused to get out of my head, no matter how hard I tried to concentrate on writing Ariadne and Arthur.

So I said the heck with it and went with the story that wanted to be written.

I don't know exactly why I decided to switch to Buffy's POV -- that was not a conscious choice, properly speaking, just something that I'd apparently decided very firmly before I so much as opened a new Word document. *shrug* The rest of it... I am not good at PWP, really. I think it's partly because porn is still not my go-to toolkit as a writer, and partly because world-building and character exploration are my catnip. So I wanted to know more about the situation that led to Buffy and Wesley meeting Faith in a bar, and this led to the (possibly inevitable?) conclusion that Buffy had come to Los Angeles after the events of "Not Fade Away," as had Faith (for similar-ish reasons), and that Wesley had mysteriously recovered from his case of fatal death and was not coping well. (Buffy isn't coping terribly well either, though the narrative doesn't draw attention to that nearly as much as it draws attention to Wesley's issues. Tight third-person POV is an interesting tool. *wry*)

And then they all have sex.

The opening two scenes -- Buffy goes to LA, and Buffy runs into Wesley -- are entirely my creation. The next three -- Buffy and Wesley meet Faith in a bar, the car ride and actual sex, the aftermath -- are a close-but-not-exact variation on the events of templermarker's story. This is partly because we're in Buffy's POV rather than Wesley's and they're not always in the same place or paying attention to the same things, but I also actively altered some of the characters' actions, both during the actual sex and during the aftermath, because the emotional through-line of my story is different. Which is the fun of remixing, really: taking the same notes and arranging them into a new tune.

Comments

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

And thank you SO MUCH for my Remix Madness. I just love Lucy training Watchers and Dawn Watching Lucy. It was a fun little 3SF and I adored how you built it out. Thanks so much.

[edenfalling]

You're welcome! It was very fun to write. :-)