#the number of things i choose to leave unsaid is truly my worst personality trait

[graffitibible]

zero my beloved, i would LOVE director’s commentary on a work of your chosing

juno my beloved thank you for indulging me

i'm going to choose a very early passage from the first chapter of starry-eyed, just cause there was a lot there that i had to rework before i was happy with it and there are some things that i think i made TOO subtle lol

CUT BECAUSE IT GOT LONG. i'm rambling about doublestar (oc) and her relationship to a very young jet star, since she essentially raised him in my canon!

You don't get to know your mother but you do get to know Doublestar, and she says that she knew your mother enough to know it was her job to take care of you. The ochre trunk of her arm rattles with the circles of beads, wood-carved things that she kisses, sometimes, or whispers things to, too quiet for you to hear.

The day you ask her what they're for is the day that she takes your hand in hers and slowly slides one of her strands of beads over her thick wrist and her knuckles that have become so worn that the calluses have become scar tissue, and onto yours.

It's too big. It hangs from the skinny stem of your arm. Up close, you can see the little figures carved into them - letters made up of squares and lines that you know because Doublestar knows. Black cat, says one, and thirteen says another.

"They're my bad luck beads," says Doublestar. Her smile is strained, but you can feel her eyes on you as you roll the worn, carved beads between your fingertips, carefully inspecting each one. The words have a slight lisp from the dulled-down nubs of her teeth, which she once told you were the result of the pills and chemicals from the City and how they caused her to grind them into grit. "You keep all the bad luck on your wrist, it'll never find you. You always know exactly where it is."

She looks out into the horizon, at the spiky silhouettes of cacti against the fiery pink cast of the setting sun. The pollution-rich atmosphere always ignites the clouds like the ends of flare guns, brilliant and poison-bright.

"People used to say they came from the Witch."

You know the Witch. She's told you about Her, though you've never seen Her for yourself. She's a specter of death, and Doublestar and her crew belong to the mechanical sprawl of Destroya. You're satellite chasers, watching the shooting stars from the dark velvet of the night sky and tracking them until they hit the sand, lighting up the horizon with a blitz of white-hot incandescence. It's a hard job to get there before the exterminators do, but the parts and scrap that used to belong to the service droids built into the pieces can fetch a high price on the right market. That, and it keeps BLi from tracking anyone down using the signals that shoot out into the desert sky.

Doublestar always makes you leave something of your findings to Destroya - buried under the sand, and marked with its name so that the pieces can find their way back. It's a cruel and low sort of person, she says, that doesn't thank their patron for its sacrifice. The Witch guides the dead, but Destroya is a deity for the living.

So she doesn't talk about the Witch very often.

She taps the ridges of the beads hanging loose around your wrist.

"Those ones were your mom's."

She talks about your mother even less.

You look up at her with a new tightness in your lungs that you can't identify.

Doublestar's smile becomes a right-angled thing, a more familiar beast, as she stands and puts a hand to your head as she leaves. The contact is a five-point star of warmth, and it's too brief before it's gone.

It's the only time she ever implies the extent to which she knew your mother.

when i was building jet's backstory i knew several things going in: that he'd have multiple crews that he'd lost was one of the most important things, since jet's wardrobe is very heavy on the death imagery and so i felt it would be truest to the character to ensure he had a close relationship with death. the rest kind of fell into accordance as it came along and i decided to more or less flesh out all the side characters by reverse engineering them from some aspect of jet star that needed to be brought into prominence.

doublestar's character was essential for laying the groundwork in regards to how jet got to be the way he was. she was genuinely well-intentioned and did her best with him and the others in the crew, but she really wasn't cut out to be the parental figure she kinda should've been. i've talked a bit about this before with regards to what she was meant to represent - she was instrumental in developing jet's relationship with his own assertiveness and lack thereof. she meant the best, but it was her way of praising certain things like jet's keen eye or his steady hands that led him to heavily associate his own value to a crew with what he could physically do to support them, and consequently heavily devalue himself, or at least prioritize himself much lower than others.

i was a little worried people might assume doublestar was secretly jet's mother or something, which is not what i meant to imply. her backstory never gets disclosed but the main thing i wanted to come through here was that she really really hated the analog wars, which is why she was so determined to stay out of them and to keep her crew out of them. combine that with a level of professed closeness to jet's unnamed mother, and the takeaway that i wanted people to walk away with was that jet's mother fought in the analog wars and died, and doublestar had to pick up the pieces left behind. she suggests to jet that she was very close with his mother but doesn't say how or why. then you take her name into account - a "double star" can be another name for a binary star, which in many cases consists of a pair of stars that essentially orbit each other.

i didn't mean for the name to be a deliberate thing that synced up with jet star's own eventual name, but once i landed on it, it was too perfect to pass up. i think doublestar's original name was something like "superflare" or something, definitely astronomy-based (because everyone in jet's first crew had that theme going on, which is why he chose the suffix of "star" for himself later) but the word was too unwieldy (it's important to me that killjoy names sound good to say aloud first and foremost, since they're seldom written down and mostly shouted or spoken on airwaves, and "doublestar" just has way more of a compact punch).

so doublestar indicates that she knew jet's mom well enough to have a set of her bad luck beads and to have agreed to look after her kid, hates the analog wars, and titled herself after a star system that exists solely as a pair, and i'd hoped that this would be enough to imply what i meant for it to imply - the implication being, of course, that she was in love with jet star's mother. i'm not sure how many people caught that though.

doublestar is not an innately nurturing character, but she has her reasons for doing the things she does. she would not have taken care of this kid if there wasn't a good reason for it, and that reason is that she felt she owed it to someone she loved and then lost. she's not biologically related to jet in any way and it's never really addressed if her love for his mother was requited or not, but ultimately that doesn't matter. she loved this person enough to decide that she would raise this kid as best as she could and ensure he would not die the same way his mother did. which kind of makes his eventual fate that much more fucked up.

#ask #ceinflower #the number of things i choose to leave unsaid is truly my worst personality trait