#Anyway to the actual scene at hand lol ow :') Drawing blood is always fun but I wish it wasn't his ;u;

[sysig]

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#Doodles #SCII #Helix #ZEX #Blood #I knew going into this and it was still so distressing :'0 #Who needs plot twists when you can create such an intense sense of Dread #Probably doesn't help that I read this At Night In the Dark lol - actual shivers #Gods this was a hard scene to read - there have been several instances of my face hurting from furrowing my brow so hard haha #The way that ''Doctor'' is written is So skillful - I'm so impressed by everyone's prose and quirks and syntax! #Not to mention when he breaks character in a later scene to apologize for taking a bit to move the scene along haha <3 Play!! #It really does speak to just how much skill and effort is put into everything <3 It's so well done all the way around!! #Anyway to the actual scene at hand lol ow :') Drawing blood is always fun but I wish it wasn't his ;u; #Ugh the way he takes the surgeries is so well written - fear of course but a kind of stoic suffering as much as he's able to - #Until it comes to his eye #Ugh the /break/ of it all he goes from so eloquent - almost snarky and silly! Still trying to find an out make peace do /something/ #It all goes completely out the window he's so /reduced/ and nothing hurts worse than that ughughugh #For all his intelligence and wit and prior successes and charm and just - everything that makes him /him/ to be dissolved into abject fear #It's so sad ;; And so well done <3 #And he still holds enough of himself to know what he'd be losing wegh it's so sad!! He's so defined by his vision as most VUX are it's fjdsl #Zelnick is already gone by this point but I wanted to throw him in for extra sad flavour :') #Plus - I've mentioned his post-Op was one of the ones from the gallery that Actively kills me every time I look at it #Can you imagine my heartbreak to find out that he didn't have his Captain to comfort him after this in actuality? That he was fully alone? #''Are we home? Is it over?'' ''N...not yet'' - The Absolute Devastation of realizing that Never Was not really #Just tear my heart out why don't you ugh I'm fully bleeding out 💔 #That last one is actually meant to be Max but it's open to interpretation :) #I think it's such a waste that his eye was just disposed of! Someone else could've used that (lol) #I do think there's something to the idea of seeing what used to be a part of your body elsewhere - like the Leftovers! #Even just keeping as a memento tho - a trophy - insult to injury but literally #Just points to no one being special and nothing being sacred I suppose

[luckydicekirby]

fic commentary meme: your favorite part of white collar podcast fic, OR the hallucination scene(s) from bathymetry, orrrrr any part of I Really Am Your Color but that seems less likely

SHOCKINGLY i’m sure, hallucinations from bathymetry wins : P I love a good hallucination/dream sequence! A fact about me I’m sure we’re all unaware of. (My favorite bit of the white collar fic is of course everything El says; I have nothing productive to say about I Really Am Your Color other than ‘damn, still can’t believe that lipstick scene’.)

So this whole Brigmore segment/the back half of chapter 4 was added to the outline really late, because initially what I had written down was like. “They solve the attempted murder plot somehow” and that turned out not to be helpful! So I was like okay there’s a witch, so they must be at Brigmore, whatever, and then that ended up tying in really well with being able to poke at the central problem of Billie being unable to move on from her past. And so the blunt force way of getting at this was to have her LITERALLY confront their past and then handwave it with magic! And I really wanted an excuse to write Delilah.

Also this is way more interesting than doing my job and thus got long, oops. From Chapter 4 of Bathymetry.

“You should run,” says a voice from behind her, muffled.

Billie turns around. There’s a woman there wearing Billie’s old Whaler uniform, mask included. She’s a lot more solid that Billie’s visions usually are. Once Billie focuses on her, she doesn’t disappear. “You should run,” she says again, in Billie’s voice. “Before it’s too late. Before you get tangled up in something else you don’t understand.” 

“I’m not going to abandon her.” She’s talking to a ghost, but she can’t quite stop herself. Billie steps forward. She wonders what she would feel, if she reached out.

lol I actually FORGOT that this bit starts with Billie talking to her past self. obviously, I love it when people talk to their past selves. Mineshaft 2.txt baybee

Anyway part of what I wanted to accomplish on a character level while we were here was Billie very pointedly choosing not to run away--to no longer be the version of herself that would. So, the unsubtle way of doing that is just...having that version of herself explicitly tell her to do it! Externalizing internal conflict for fun and profit.

In my outline this whole scene is written as: “B: maybe has a Think about running away but like. She Isn’t Gonna--lol does Past Fake Memory Billie try to tell her to. OR fake memory delilah. Anyway she literally tells her past to fuck off, and...runs into Thackeray menacing C and O? And hard cut” so if you’ve ever wondered how elegant my outlines are: they aren’t. 

“You think I’m stupid,” says her ghost. “You think I let Delilah lead me around by the nose. Maybe I am. Maybe I did. But do you seriously think you’re any better? Please. You’ve been following around the fucking Empress like a puppy. She’s just a reckless, spoiled kid, and you look at her like she’s going to save you from yourself. That’s who we are now?”

Emily-Delilah comparisons are a fun way to make Billie really upset! Sometimes you’re in love with a woman whose mom you helped kill and who is also the niece of your Terrible Ex, And That’s Fine. Also, there’s something very ouch about your past self saying, disdainfully, oh, you think I’m stupid, don’t you?

“Shut up.” Billie steps forward, gets in her own face. It’s not very satisfying.

The ghost snorts. “We always were a sucker for a pretty face. Admit it. You haven’t changed at all. This is who we’ll always be.”

I think we can only assume that Billie making bad choices because a girl is pretty is canon.

“Say that to my fucking face,” Billie says, and the ghost laughs, and laughs, and takes off the mask. Except when she does, she isn’t Billie any longer.

In some universe where I had restraint, I would have Billie have to deal with EITHER her past self or Delilah, but not both. However, restraint is for suckers.

“Little Billie Lurk, lost without her master,” says Delilah, and she looks more real than Billie’s ghost ever could. 

Writing Delilah dialogue is VERY fun. I really like the cadence of the first line here.

Delilah never looked like she belonged in the real world. She was like what Billie imagined the Void would be like, long before she ever set foot there. Otherworldly and regal and terrifying. “So convinced that you’ve changed. What would Daud say? Oh, that’s right. He doesn’t say anything anymore. You left him in the Void. You didn’t even bother to do the one thing he’d asked of you in fifteen years. 

And of course my other fav thing to do in this fic, bring Daud up so I can be mean about him! And have Billie deal with her guilt about him/decide not to be like him, I guess. But mostly to be mean. 

The both of you were always pathetic, trying so hard to wash away the blood on your hands. You haven’t figured out that it always ends in blood. You’ll never learn that lesson if you don’t let the Kaldwin girl go.”

“It doesn’t have to,” Billie says. “It’s a choice. It’s always a choice.”

This also leans into one of the themes of this fic aka “what I think doto was about”, that you can’t blame other people for your own choices, and that at some point you have to admit that murder isn’t gonna solve your problems. (or more poetically, breaking cycles of violence.)

Delilah steps forward, reaching out to cup Billie’s cheek. Emily touched her there earlier today, and Billie leaned into it, and now she’s somewhere in this house, and Billie has to find her—

Ah yes, the romantic face touch! Also, Billie snapping out of the hallucination a little bit by thinking/worrying about Emily here is important--the need to save Emily is the way she leads herself out of being figuratively and literally stuck in the past. Because that’s romantic, to me personally.

“I thought about asking you to join us,” Delilah says, thumb running across Billie’s cheek. “I would have if you hadn’t taken the first ship out, getting away from this place as fast as you could. Even after you betrayed me to Daud. There was always something about you. That fire in your eyes. Ambition and longing and the knowledge that you were owed more than the hand you’d been dealt. Maybe it’s the same thing Emily sees in you.”

“Now you’re really just trying to piss me off.” Billie barely even thought about it, but the twin-bladed knife is back in her hands. 

Delilah laughs. “You think you’re strong enough to kill me now? I don’t think so. You put on such a good show, Billie, but I know you’ve always been weak.”

Delilah explicitly laying out the idea that turning away from violence makes you weak, so that Billie can immediately refute it.

Her grip tightens on the knife.

She wants to make Delilah bleed. That’s what this knife was meant for. 

There’s some sort of throughline about the twin-bladed knife being a symbol of the aforementioned cycles of violence that is a little weak because I only decided to do it like, 2/3 of the way through the story, but that’s why Billie giving it to Emily ends up being a big deal in the next few chapters. Had I edited this story all at once instead of in chunks, I would’ve gone back and laid some groundwork for it earlier.

That’s what it wanted to do to the Outsider, but the Outsider didn’t deserve it. Delilah does. Delilah deserves everything Billie can give her. Delilah tried to kill Emily twice, and the first time Billie didn’t even know, didn’t even think to try to stop her. There’s still time for her to make up for that.

Billie really WANTS to fight her but...

Delilah’s form flickers, and for a moment, Billie can see the empty manor behind her. 

“Well?” Delilah demands.

Delilah’s gone. Emily made sure of it. And Emily didn’t kill her: she’s always been clever enough to find the ways to give people what they deserve without spilling their blood. 

(low chaos is hot, apparently!)

And she’s going to get a bullet between the eyes if Billie doesn’t find her soon.

“I don’t have time for this,” Billie says. She shrugs off Delilah’s ghost, and turns away.

...she deliberately chooses to focus on the present/Emily instead of the past. Romance! Character development! Yeah! Anyway, this is pretty much the point of the scene--Billie choosing not to, say, do what Daud might have done, and try to get revenge on someone who isn’t even there. I actually had a hard time writing the scenes later where she gets together with Emily, because these were the emotional beats I was planning to hit and then I did them early and had to find new ones.

“She’ll never forgive you,” Delilah says. The same crooning voice she always had, because she isn’t here anymore. She’s gone. Billie’s never going to see her again.

Billie vaults over a banister and doesn’t look back. 

Void, she hates this fucking house. The place echoes, and her eyes keep trying to lie to her, and she is so sick and tired of shit like this. She thought it would be over when she dealt with the Outsider, but it’s never really over, is it. There will always be bad people, but Billie isn’t at their mercy anymore. And she’ll die before she lets Emily be, either. 

And this is a deliberate echo of a doto line-- “you’ve always been at the mercy of bad people, haven’t you?”, which Billie says about the Outsider when she finds his body in the void. I love the doto thing of drawing parallels between Billie and the Outsider and so I do it a lot in this fic. Thackery and Flint being an Overseer and a witch is kind of an attempt to draw this parallel out further--they were at the mercy of bad people too.

#ask meme #ceruleanvulpine