"Mending Fences": Commentary Edition
Jan. 22nd, 2004 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bktheirregularWill do commentary for "Scarab" bit by bit, I suppose. There's a lot to be said for that one, plus which it's a fifty-thousand-word novella, so a lot of time must be taken.
In the meantime, a shorter fic from my early early days as a fanfic writer:
Mending Fences
BK the irregular
First posted to the Cross and Stake board sometime around March or April 2001, I think. It was so long ago that I wasn't even calling myself "the irregular" yet.
Standard disclaimer: Angel, Joyce, Kate, and the rest belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Fox, etc. This work is unauthorized and not for profit.
* * * * * * *
Timeframe: The last day of "Epiphany", the day of "The Body"
I was severely affected by "The Body" and enthralled by "Epiphany"; this was written shortly after Buffy came back from that winter's rerun season. It was done in just a few days, taking a few minutes here, a few there, from work and school. I did it about the same time I did my first fanfic, "Moonwalk", so my craft was far from honed. Note the lack of credit for betas; I didn't have any back then.
The Hyperion seemed to mirror the state of his mind. As they had brought the team together under its roof, it had been bright, cheery, molded around the people who fought evil within its walls. Then the break had come, and as he'd become more wrapped in his obsession, the place had begun to deteriorate. Nothing overt - unless you took into account the destruction wrought early the night before, between the moments of despondent passion.
Now Angel looked out at the shambles he'd created through depressed indifference, and it screamed out at him to fix it.
We had hints of this in the episode "Happy Anniversary", with Angel living in something that was slowly approaching squalor, and I wanted to set the tone.
First, the clothing. He grabbed a pile of wrinkled pants, shirts, and sundries, dug for a dusty box of detergent, and was halfway to the door to the laundry room when he happened to take a sniff.
Okay, laundry second. First, shower.
Turn the taps. Okay, they hadn't cut off the water. Adjust the temperature; all right, the boiler still worked. Soap? Check. Shampoo? Still got some. Lather, rinse, repeat; lather, rinse, and out. Towels. Still a couple of clean ones. Hair gel? Oops.
I figured Angel was at the point where he'd be just starting to wonder about things like the water and the heat.
He had to shop. Actually, he had to do a lot of things.
He couldn't go back to the way things had been. "You don't," the Host had said. "You go to the new place." But to do that, Angel had to at least close some doors, make things right.
And he had to do it without ripping open every wound in his soul.
He walked over to the phone, absently noted the blinking message light. He pushed "play" and the voice that came out was almost enough to shatter his resolve right there.
"You did it, didn't you, you bastard?"
Crunch. It felt like that time Buffy had run the sword through his heart. No, actually, this was worse; this time, he knew exactly what he had done, had known going in, and hadn't cared.
Now he cared. And it was too late to go back.
"...And you'll feel all bad, or you won't care, but--"
Angel slammed his hand down on the ERASE button, cutting off Kate's slurred, despondent voice. The past was dead.
Good thing he hit erase when he did; I don't think the rest of Kate's message was scripted. *g*
But Kate wasn't. She'd been lucid enough to order him out of her home after he'd managed to get her to throw up the pills.
The past was dead, but the present was still alive.
So what to do?
He thought. Obviously, the team was still together. He'd fired them; they'd re-created themselves without him. Maybe ... it sounded absurd when he thought of it. Maybe they'd take him back. Hire him back to the team he'd founded.
It was worth a try. He grabbed his coat, headed for the door--
--only to realize that barring an exceptionally long solar eclipse, or a thunderstorm sweeping in out of nowhere, he wasn't going anywhere. Not in the blazing afternoon sun, he wasn't.
Do they get rain in Los Angeles? I honestly don't know.
Okay, so he'd wait.
In the meantime, the phone kept calling to him on a level he didn't understand. He walked over, picked it up, and was dialing before he even knew what he was doing.
The phone had already started to ring before he realized he'd dialed Buffy's number.
You ever have a moment when you were halfway into doing something before you even realized what you were doing? Me too, though generally not on the phone.
At the second ring he remembered: Buffy would be at her dorm. College. Or with Riley.
The phone rang a third time as he finally realized who was going to pick up the--
And here's the whole point of the fic: the conversation between Angel and Joyce. I fudged the timing a bit; since "The Body" took place in one day and "Epiphany" went from night into day and back tonight, I figured that the end of "Epiphany" might line up with "The Body".
"Hello?"
"Joyce?"
A moment of silence, then: "Angel? Is everything all right?"
"Yeah. No ... actually, I guess yeah."
"I'm afraid Buffy isn't around at the moment. She had a little situation."
"It's okay, Joyce." Angel sighed. "Actually, it feels better to talk to you than Buffy, anyway. Too much awkwardness there."
"Awkwardness?"
"What with Riley." And there it was, the reason he hadn't even tried to get in touch for most of the past year. All he could do was mess things up.
Gee, that sounded familiar.
A little personal experience to draw in here, dealing with people one has been carrying a torch for who have moved on to others and are happy. Generalized ouchiness, and I may have been projecting a bit of myself onto Angel. Except without, you know, the whole vampire thing. I tan pretty good.
"Actually ... Riley left."
"Oh ... er ... sorry to hear ... I'm sorry. Is Buffy okay?"
"She's dealing. It's not as bad as..." Joyce's voice tailed off.
**as when you told me I had to decide whether to leave your daughter**
"...I'm sorry. That was tactless," Joyce said.
"No, it's ... you were right. You realize that."
Most of a day's passed, and if Brood Boy's been taking stock of a lot of things, you might figure his relationship with Buffy would be one of them.
"Angel, are you all right? You sound like you've been through hell."
He sighed, then laughed ruefully. "It wasn't quite that bad. Not this time around. Just a bunch of things I've got to work through. Ah ... how are things there? How's Dawn?"
One thing I wish we'd had a chance to see was Angel interacting with Dawn at some point. It would have been cool to see more of how Dawn was written into early Buffy canon. Anyway, I figured Angel would maybe have a bit of a soft spot for Dawn.
Joyce laughed. "She's Dawn. She's just becoming a teenager. A lot like Buffy, except without all the Slayer baggage. It's ... it's been good to have her around, especially after the whole tumor thing."
Angel's cold dead heart froze. "Tumor?"
Joyce suddenly took on a reassuring tone. "Don't worry, the doctors got it all. It was me, not Buffy or Dawn. They're okay."
He almost felt his heart start beating. "Thank God. For you too."
"Yeah. I'm actually starting to live again, it feels. Would you believe I actually had a date last night?"
I wanted to work a parallel: that Joyce is sort of on the same journey that Angel is on, the idea of learning how to move on.
She sounded ... god, she sounded like Buffy had when talking about him when she thought he couldn't hear him. "Good for you, Joyce. It's way past time."
And the laugh on the other end of the line had as much healing power as any spell Angel had come across. "I know. Hey, nobody lives forever ... ah ..."
"Not even me, Joyce. Not if I'm lucky," Angel said quickly into the silence.
"Huh?"
"Prophecy I ran across. Supposedly I'm going to come up against the apocalypse, and if I can beat it, I'll shansu."
"Gezundheit," Joyce said, smothering a giggle. "What's shansu?"
I can't recall if that joke had been made in canon yet; I'd bet money it had been made many times in fandom.
"Die." When there was no answer, Angel added, "Live. The cycle of life and death. Basically, become human. I think. It's not really clear."
"So how will it happen?" Joyce asked.
Angel closed his eyes a moment. "I don't know. And maybe that's the point."
Angel's not realizing this for the first time right now, I don't think; it's something that's sort of come to him during the course of "Epiphany". I figure this is just the first time he manages to put it all into words. (He sounds comfortable with it when he talks with Kate later.)
"You lost me."
"It isn't the goal that matters ... or maybe it doesn't matter. If we prevent an apocalypse this year, there'll be another looming somewhere down the line. I dunno. All that matters, I guess -- is that we just try to help."
"Excuse me, would you put Angel back on the phone?" Joyce asked, laughing.
"Well, last night ... someone pointed out to me that if there weren't evil in us, we'd all be angels. Then I realized that if there weren't good in us, we'd all be demons. We're not. There's things worth doing. People worth saving, all the time." He sighed. "But enough about me and my enlightenment - how's the gang there?"
That was something I always wanted to hear: the flip side of Holland Manners' argument to Angel. Like Sam Gamgee said in The Two Towers: "There's still some good left in the world, and it's worth fighting for." Even if there's a goal, it's about the journey, so to speak.
"Well ... they're going on about like you'd expect. They've got some love-obsessed robot out on the town, Buffy's trying to stop it."
"Love-obsessed robot?"
"That's what Buffy said. Along with some choice words for some guy named Warren."
"Do I even want to know?" Angel asked, shaking his head.
And Joyce laughed like a bell. "Don't worry. Once it's all shaken out, I'll call, I'll tell you everything."
I don't know if Joyce would be the sort who'd take in Angel as a confidant, but I wanted to sort of set the stage, offering that out as a possibility. A sense of putting the past behind her, perhaps. It was more of a set-up than anything else, though, because...
"I'd ... I'd like that."
"Then it's settled," Joyce said. Then there was a moment of nothing but the buzzing of the phone line, then a sharp breath. "Uhh..."
Bang. In a sense, this entire story is built around that one moment, though it's something I wouldn't want Angel to know. Before I started the fic, I'd asked myself, "what would Joyce be doing at that moment?" Buffy and Angel were still closely tied at that point, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to reinforce that connection a little.
"Joyce?"
"It's okay. Just a headache. Still get them on occasion."
"Are you sure? Joyce, you just said--"
"I'm all right, Angel. I'm just gonna lie down a couple minutes, get a bit of rest."
Angel closed his eyes in relief. "I'll let you go then. Take care of yourself, Joyce..."
"Don't worry about me, okay? I'm fine. I'll give Buffy your love, and tell Dawn you said hey, all right?"
"That ... that would be nice."
"And I'll call tomorrow. I promise."
"Take care, Joyce."
"You too," Joyce said, and rang off.
Of course, Angel doesn't know what's just happened ... or, I suppose I should say, what's about to happen.
Angel closed his eyes again. Just hearing a friendly voice ... it was almost like magic. Like the blood of the Slayer against that poison Faith had shot into him, only the magic had come just through the sound of her voice.
And suddenly he had the courage he needed to move on. To leave the old place behind, and go on to the new place. To face his people and make amends.
Another parallel to my own life experience: being able to talk to a friend when you've hit a bad patch, the give-and-take of the voices, can be very therapeutic. I relied on a couple of classmates at law school a lot during those years in that way.
Now all he had to do was wait for the sun to cooperate. And tidy up some of the mess in the meanwhile.
It took an hour to run the laundry and tidy up the broken furniture; by then the sun was crawling down to the horizon. He grabbed his coat, walked into the foyer, grabbed his keys, stalked to the door --
Come to think of it, an hour is probably giving Angel too much credit for fast work. But hey, I was still learning to write fic when I did this.
--and ran smack into Kate Lockley.
"Angel."
"Kate. You look ... better."
"Amazing what a coupla donuts can do." She shook her head. "God, that sounded cliche."
"Uh ... come in. I ... uh ... would you like a cup of coffee?"
Kate closed her eyes a moment. "That ... would be nice."
Angel went back to the office kitchen and set up the coffee machine. "It won't be much. I'm not much of a coffee drinker."
"Somehow I'm not surprised." There wasn't any malice behind her voice. "Don't worry. They don't give you a badge unless you can drink bad coffee."
He ran the machine long enough to pump out a cup, and handed it to her. She took it without a word, took a sip. "You're right. This is bad coffee."
His face fell.
"But it's the best coffee I've had in a year and a half." She sat down, cradling the mug.
I hung out with cops a lot from 1995 to 2002. Coffee is a big deal.
Angel sat down next to her, wondering how to breach the prickly subject.
She spared him. "I feel like such an idiot," she said softly.
"Lot of that going around," Angel acknowledged, comfort and confession in one.
I kinda fell in love with this trick: taking the end of a fic and folding it right back into canon. And in retrospect, it's probably a good defense against people calling for sequels: "You want to know what happens next, just check out the episode." (I did something similar at the end of The Scarab, though it may have been a bit more subtle.)
fin
Second fic I ever did. A lot's happened to me since then, and I can't even remember what I was doing when I wrote it. Had to look up an old review of "Epiphany" to remind myself what happened in the framing canon, but hey. It was enjoyable.
Close entry.
In the meantime, a shorter fic from my early early days as a fanfic writer:
Mending Fences
BK the irregular
First posted to the Cross and Stake board sometime around March or April 2001, I think. It was so long ago that I wasn't even calling myself "the irregular" yet.
Standard disclaimer: Angel, Joyce, Kate, and the rest belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Fox, etc. This work is unauthorized and not for profit.
* * * * * * *
Timeframe: The last day of "Epiphany", the day of "The Body"
I was severely affected by "The Body" and enthralled by "Epiphany"; this was written shortly after Buffy came back from that winter's rerun season. It was done in just a few days, taking a few minutes here, a few there, from work and school. I did it about the same time I did my first fanfic, "Moonwalk", so my craft was far from honed. Note the lack of credit for betas; I didn't have any back then.
The Hyperion seemed to mirror the state of his mind. As they had brought the team together under its roof, it had been bright, cheery, molded around the people who fought evil within its walls. Then the break had come, and as he'd become more wrapped in his obsession, the place had begun to deteriorate. Nothing overt - unless you took into account the destruction wrought early the night before, between the moments of despondent passion.
Now Angel looked out at the shambles he'd created through depressed indifference, and it screamed out at him to fix it.
We had hints of this in the episode "Happy Anniversary", with Angel living in something that was slowly approaching squalor, and I wanted to set the tone.
First, the clothing. He grabbed a pile of wrinkled pants, shirts, and sundries, dug for a dusty box of detergent, and was halfway to the door to the laundry room when he happened to take a sniff.
Okay, laundry second. First, shower.
Turn the taps. Okay, they hadn't cut off the water. Adjust the temperature; all right, the boiler still worked. Soap? Check. Shampoo? Still got some. Lather, rinse, repeat; lather, rinse, and out. Towels. Still a couple of clean ones. Hair gel? Oops.
I figured Angel was at the point where he'd be just starting to wonder about things like the water and the heat.
He had to shop. Actually, he had to do a lot of things.
He couldn't go back to the way things had been. "You don't," the Host had said. "You go to the new place." But to do that, Angel had to at least close some doors, make things right.
And he had to do it without ripping open every wound in his soul.
He walked over to the phone, absently noted the blinking message light. He pushed "play" and the voice that came out was almost enough to shatter his resolve right there.
"You did it, didn't you, you bastard?"
Crunch. It felt like that time Buffy had run the sword through his heart. No, actually, this was worse; this time, he knew exactly what he had done, had known going in, and hadn't cared.
Now he cared. And it was too late to go back.
"...And you'll feel all bad, or you won't care, but--"
Angel slammed his hand down on the ERASE button, cutting off Kate's slurred, despondent voice. The past was dead.
Good thing he hit erase when he did; I don't think the rest of Kate's message was scripted. *g*
But Kate wasn't. She'd been lucid enough to order him out of her home after he'd managed to get her to throw up the pills.
The past was dead, but the present was still alive.
So what to do?
He thought. Obviously, the team was still together. He'd fired them; they'd re-created themselves without him. Maybe ... it sounded absurd when he thought of it. Maybe they'd take him back. Hire him back to the team he'd founded.
It was worth a try. He grabbed his coat, headed for the door--
--only to realize that barring an exceptionally long solar eclipse, or a thunderstorm sweeping in out of nowhere, he wasn't going anywhere. Not in the blazing afternoon sun, he wasn't.
Do they get rain in Los Angeles? I honestly don't know.
Okay, so he'd wait.
In the meantime, the phone kept calling to him on a level he didn't understand. He walked over, picked it up, and was dialing before he even knew what he was doing.
The phone had already started to ring before he realized he'd dialed Buffy's number.
You ever have a moment when you were halfway into doing something before you even realized what you were doing? Me too, though generally not on the phone.
At the second ring he remembered: Buffy would be at her dorm. College. Or with Riley.
The phone rang a third time as he finally realized who was going to pick up the--
And here's the whole point of the fic: the conversation between Angel and Joyce. I fudged the timing a bit; since "The Body" took place in one day and "Epiphany" went from night into day and back tonight, I figured that the end of "Epiphany" might line up with "The Body".
"Hello?"
"Joyce?"
A moment of silence, then: "Angel? Is everything all right?"
"Yeah. No ... actually, I guess yeah."
"I'm afraid Buffy isn't around at the moment. She had a little situation."
"It's okay, Joyce." Angel sighed. "Actually, it feels better to talk to you than Buffy, anyway. Too much awkwardness there."
"Awkwardness?"
"What with Riley." And there it was, the reason he hadn't even tried to get in touch for most of the past year. All he could do was mess things up.
Gee, that sounded familiar.
A little personal experience to draw in here, dealing with people one has been carrying a torch for who have moved on to others and are happy. Generalized ouchiness, and I may have been projecting a bit of myself onto Angel. Except without, you know, the whole vampire thing. I tan pretty good.
"Actually ... Riley left."
"Oh ... er ... sorry to hear ... I'm sorry. Is Buffy okay?"
"She's dealing. It's not as bad as..." Joyce's voice tailed off.
**as when you told me I had to decide whether to leave your daughter**
"...I'm sorry. That was tactless," Joyce said.
"No, it's ... you were right. You realize that."
Most of a day's passed, and if Brood Boy's been taking stock of a lot of things, you might figure his relationship with Buffy would be one of them.
"Angel, are you all right? You sound like you've been through hell."
He sighed, then laughed ruefully. "It wasn't quite that bad. Not this time around. Just a bunch of things I've got to work through. Ah ... how are things there? How's Dawn?"
One thing I wish we'd had a chance to see was Angel interacting with Dawn at some point. It would have been cool to see more of how Dawn was written into early Buffy canon. Anyway, I figured Angel would maybe have a bit of a soft spot for Dawn.
Joyce laughed. "She's Dawn. She's just becoming a teenager. A lot like Buffy, except without all the Slayer baggage. It's ... it's been good to have her around, especially after the whole tumor thing."
Angel's cold dead heart froze. "Tumor?"
Joyce suddenly took on a reassuring tone. "Don't worry, the doctors got it all. It was me, not Buffy or Dawn. They're okay."
He almost felt his heart start beating. "Thank God. For you too."
"Yeah. I'm actually starting to live again, it feels. Would you believe I actually had a date last night?"
I wanted to work a parallel: that Joyce is sort of on the same journey that Angel is on, the idea of learning how to move on.
She sounded ... god, she sounded like Buffy had when talking about him when she thought he couldn't hear him. "Good for you, Joyce. It's way past time."
And the laugh on the other end of the line had as much healing power as any spell Angel had come across. "I know. Hey, nobody lives forever ... ah ..."
"Not even me, Joyce. Not if I'm lucky," Angel said quickly into the silence.
"Huh?"
"Prophecy I ran across. Supposedly I'm going to come up against the apocalypse, and if I can beat it, I'll shansu."
"Gezundheit," Joyce said, smothering a giggle. "What's shansu?"
I can't recall if that joke had been made in canon yet; I'd bet money it had been made many times in fandom.
"Die." When there was no answer, Angel added, "Live. The cycle of life and death. Basically, become human. I think. It's not really clear."
"So how will it happen?" Joyce asked.
Angel closed his eyes a moment. "I don't know. And maybe that's the point."
Angel's not realizing this for the first time right now, I don't think; it's something that's sort of come to him during the course of "Epiphany". I figure this is just the first time he manages to put it all into words. (He sounds comfortable with it when he talks with Kate later.)
"You lost me."
"It isn't the goal that matters ... or maybe it doesn't matter. If we prevent an apocalypse this year, there'll be another looming somewhere down the line. I dunno. All that matters, I guess -- is that we just try to help."
"Excuse me, would you put Angel back on the phone?" Joyce asked, laughing.
"Well, last night ... someone pointed out to me that if there weren't evil in us, we'd all be angels. Then I realized that if there weren't good in us, we'd all be demons. We're not. There's things worth doing. People worth saving, all the time." He sighed. "But enough about me and my enlightenment - how's the gang there?"
That was something I always wanted to hear: the flip side of Holland Manners' argument to Angel. Like Sam Gamgee said in The Two Towers: "There's still some good left in the world, and it's worth fighting for." Even if there's a goal, it's about the journey, so to speak.
"Well ... they're going on about like you'd expect. They've got some love-obsessed robot out on the town, Buffy's trying to stop it."
"Love-obsessed robot?"
"That's what Buffy said. Along with some choice words for some guy named Warren."
"Do I even want to know?" Angel asked, shaking his head.
And Joyce laughed like a bell. "Don't worry. Once it's all shaken out, I'll call, I'll tell you everything."
I don't know if Joyce would be the sort who'd take in Angel as a confidant, but I wanted to sort of set the stage, offering that out as a possibility. A sense of putting the past behind her, perhaps. It was more of a set-up than anything else, though, because...
"I'd ... I'd like that."
"Then it's settled," Joyce said. Then there was a moment of nothing but the buzzing of the phone line, then a sharp breath. "Uhh..."
Bang. In a sense, this entire story is built around that one moment, though it's something I wouldn't want Angel to know. Before I started the fic, I'd asked myself, "what would Joyce be doing at that moment?" Buffy and Angel were still closely tied at that point, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to reinforce that connection a little.
"Joyce?"
"It's okay. Just a headache. Still get them on occasion."
"Are you sure? Joyce, you just said--"
"I'm all right, Angel. I'm just gonna lie down a couple minutes, get a bit of rest."
Angel closed his eyes in relief. "I'll let you go then. Take care of yourself, Joyce..."
"Don't worry about me, okay? I'm fine. I'll give Buffy your love, and tell Dawn you said hey, all right?"
"That ... that would be nice."
"And I'll call tomorrow. I promise."
"Take care, Joyce."
"You too," Joyce said, and rang off.
Of course, Angel doesn't know what's just happened ... or, I suppose I should say, what's about to happen.
Angel closed his eyes again. Just hearing a friendly voice ... it was almost like magic. Like the blood of the Slayer against that poison Faith had shot into him, only the magic had come just through the sound of her voice.
And suddenly he had the courage he needed to move on. To leave the old place behind, and go on to the new place. To face his people and make amends.
Another parallel to my own life experience: being able to talk to a friend when you've hit a bad patch, the give-and-take of the voices, can be very therapeutic. I relied on a couple of classmates at law school a lot during those years in that way.
Now all he had to do was wait for the sun to cooperate. And tidy up some of the mess in the meanwhile.
It took an hour to run the laundry and tidy up the broken furniture; by then the sun was crawling down to the horizon. He grabbed his coat, walked into the foyer, grabbed his keys, stalked to the door --
Come to think of it, an hour is probably giving Angel too much credit for fast work. But hey, I was still learning to write fic when I did this.
--and ran smack into Kate Lockley.
"Angel."
"Kate. You look ... better."
"Amazing what a coupla donuts can do." She shook her head. "God, that sounded cliche."
"Uh ... come in. I ... uh ... would you like a cup of coffee?"
Kate closed her eyes a moment. "That ... would be nice."
Angel went back to the office kitchen and set up the coffee machine. "It won't be much. I'm not much of a coffee drinker."
"Somehow I'm not surprised." There wasn't any malice behind her voice. "Don't worry. They don't give you a badge unless you can drink bad coffee."
He ran the machine long enough to pump out a cup, and handed it to her. She took it without a word, took a sip. "You're right. This is bad coffee."
His face fell.
"But it's the best coffee I've had in a year and a half." She sat down, cradling the mug.
I hung out with cops a lot from 1995 to 2002. Coffee is a big deal.
Angel sat down next to her, wondering how to breach the prickly subject.
She spared him. "I feel like such an idiot," she said softly.
"Lot of that going around," Angel acknowledged, comfort and confession in one.
I kinda fell in love with this trick: taking the end of a fic and folding it right back into canon. And in retrospect, it's probably a good defense against people calling for sequels: "You want to know what happens next, just check out the episode." (I did something similar at the end of The Scarab, though it may have been a bit more subtle.)
fin
Second fic I ever did. A lot's happened to me since then, and I can't even remember what I was doing when I wrote it. Had to look up an old review of "Epiphany" to remind myself what happened in the framing canon, but hey. It was enjoyable.
Close entry.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Really interesting!
Date: 2004-01-23 08:22 am (UTC)