#catching bullets

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@freekicks Oh man I have lots; so many that I’m making this a new post so I don’t clog up that poor person’s replies with 50 messages, haha! Basically, it’s an expansion on the idea that everyone has headcanons/canon details that are absolutely integral to their enjoyment of the story and any transformative works based on it (hard), and headcanons/canon details that they’re fond of but could still get pretty much unaltered enjoyment out of a fic that contradicts them (soft). Obviously all these are just opinions and what I get out of the story isn’t and shouldn’t have to be the same as what anyone else gets out of it.

One thing that sort of falls in the middle of the headcanon/canon divide is Raylan’s age when his mother died. The show contradicts itself on this point several times, and so it’s sort of fungible. I personally find the idea that Raylan’s mother died when he was very young, like younger than Loretta, while it may serve the parallels between them, to be much less compelling than the idea that she died later. It’s just so much more… boring for a character whose mother died when he was ten or so to have a gross misrepresentation of who she was as a person in his mental image of her. It’s much more compelling to me if he held onto that despite direct evidence to the contrary that he was old enough to understand. Of course he’d forget the hatchet story if it happened when he was eight. If it happened when he was eighteen, that opens up a much realer possibility that he just straight up repressed it, which is fascinating. Also, I don’t think it makes sense if he grew up with Helen in the house for the second half of his life there. To me that doesn’t really jive with their current relationship. (And on a less story-driven note, I am fascinated by the idea that, if Raylan’s mother died when he was thirty, he might not have attended her funeral. Because part of him knew it would challenge the version of her he had to remember in order to maintain his black and white perception of the world.)

Obviously, the mine and what it represents is a necessary component (though the time and place less so—my Old Guard au places them in the miners’ strikes of the 30s, and I’ve read a wonderful fic where the mine in question was on a different planet entirely. However, it does have to be placed in Harlan, or whatever approximation of Harlan fits the broader setting). The boys and their relationships with their daddies is another nonnegotiable for me. Specifically, the way they grew up; different times and causes of death for Bo and Arlo can work just as well. If Raylan and Boyd don’t meet until they’re established adults, that immediately kills my interest. Their rich history is so integral to why I’m drawn to the ship in the first place. It’s a hard sell for me to have Boyd leave or Raylan stay directly after the mine, but I’ve been known to make an exception if the story is compelling enough and doesn’t sacrifice characterization.

I think Boyd’s criminal history is important, though the nature of it less so. And even more important is the fact that Boyd never really makes it big as a criminal—making him some kind of fief lord of crime makes him much less interesting to me. His plans only succeed inasmuch as he always manages to survive their unraveling. I think it’s important that he’s spent time incarcerated. I’m not a huge fan of stories where they meet again outside of Harlan and never go back, it takes away the central tension between them and the place that made them that Raylan so struggles with and Boyd embraces so wholly, which for me is a really interesting part of their relationship, this dichotomy. I also don’t care for stories that give them a ton of good friends outside each other, or casual friends who actually know them and hang out with them—they’re too big of assholes for that. Of course, this doesn’t include the characters they’re close with in canon; I love Raylan and Rachel’s friendship, in particular, and their understanding of each other despite their vast superficial differences is fascinating. I guess I should say instead that I don’t buy either of them having typical friendships, period. They’re just too weird and fucked up for that. They trauma bonded at nineteen and it continues to be one of the most important relationships in either of their lives. Winona puts up with Raylan’s relational weirdness for love; no one is doing that for their drinking buddy. So they may have close friendships, but they don’t look the way you’d expect.

I’d never make their relationship uncomplicatedly sweet and unfraught, or sand down the kind of feral edges of it, and I don’t think they’d be much for traditional PDA—I just love the way in canon the physical (and otherwise) manifestations of their intimacy are so outside of what’s expected from buddies OR lovers. In the same vein, I don’t love it when Raylan goes crazy with the terms of endearment, because he doesn’t use them much with his love interests in canon. I have him use them with the girls in heavy heart more as verbal tics he picked up after spending too much time around Boyd, who LOVES to use them, plus I think he models at least some of his displays of parental affection after Helen, who canonically calls him “honey”. I’m fine with Boyd throwing endearments around liberally; I just don’t do it in my own fics because I love the way in canon he twists Raylan’s name itself into almost an endearment. He just can’t stop saying it every other sentence, so why would he give up the chance to say it by replacing it with another word? Plus, it fits in with how weird they are about each other in general.

More broadly, I have never really enjoyed full aus (based on any story) that don’t try to approximate at least the broader beats of place and history from canon, but I really really love stories that manage it. I respect authors who can sort of map canon onto a completely different stage, like the space au mentioned above, so much. I hope that I manage that at least somewhat with catching bullets.

That’s all the big ones I can think of at the moment, though I’m sure there’s more I’ve forgotten (most of the rest fall more under ic-ness vs ooc-ness, which is harder to articulate; “what makes them themselves?” is a much more difficult question). Ultimately, I think probably a lot of these come across through cross-referencing both of my WIPs—basically, if it shows up in both, there’s a very good chance it’s a nonnegotiable for me, and if it changes between the two, then I can obviously live without it.

[evilhorse]

The man of steel does not reign to reply

[acorrespondence]

Writing Pattern Game

Thanks for the tag @raylangivins ♥️

Rules: Share the first line of your last ten published works or as many as you are able and see if there are any patterns! (from most recent to least recent, starting from the top)

I only have two published works but I thought it might be interesting to see if there are any patterns in how I start a chapter! Every single chapter I’ve posted still only adds up to nine, haha, so it still fits!

i put this heavy heart in you: Miami (Part 1)— It’s hot as hell on the Miami rooftop where Raylan shoots Tommy Bucks, and with the sun in his eyes and the long stretch of water spread out before him, Raylan could almost believe he’s still in Nicaragua.

i put this heavy heart in you: Miami (Part 2) — Boyd plans, because he always plans, tries to get ahead of everything and coax it around in their favor.

i put this heavy heart in you: (The Road) — Fifteen minutes in, Raylan yanks on the wheel and pulls the van over.

i put this heavy heart in you: (The Motel Part 1) — Boyd’s elbow comes down hard on the soap ledge, with a crack fit to set the whole tub to juddering.

i put this heavy heart in you: (California) — Raylan’s phone rings at 12:38 on Lissy’s birthday, while he’s making lunch over the little hot plate on top of the fridge.

i put this heavy heart in you: (Harlan Part 1) — By the time Art comes around to check on them, Rachel and Raylan have been sitting crammed into a surveillance van masquerading as a carpet cleaning business for three days straight.

i put this heavy heart in you: (The Motel Part 2) — “Raylan,” Boyd mumbles from somewhere in the vicinity of his armpit. “Raylan, the door.”

catching bullets in our teeth: (Chapter 1) — The first time it happens, they’re in the mine, sent down beneath the hills to pull Harlan’s black teeth.

catching bullets in our teeth: (Chapter 2) — Boyd’s triumphant return is marred by the fact that the fighting’s already started.

I guess the pattern here is that my opening sentences tend to be fairly short, matter-of-fact statements. A lot of them include orienting details like a specific location, date, time, or a quick summary of recent events. I don’t have much patience for exposition, so I try to get the essential pieces of information into that first sentence to move things along. The exceptions are Miami Part 2 and The Motel Part 2, the first of which is a character note and the second of which is some dialogue, in an attempt to give the moment a sense of urgency that the others don’t have.

I’m going to keep my tagging bare bones because I’m trying to catch up on these, so if I missed you and you want to give this a try, just imagine your handle in the following list: @esteefee @bringmefoxgloves @tallsinspace @norgbelulah @toli-a @willowmckinley @skelingtonsderek

[acorrespondence]

From catching bullets

Shelby leaves when they get back to Bulletville, telling Raylan he’ll let the Guard know where to go. Raylan tells Boyd to point his daddy’s spare shotgun at his head and shoot Raylan before Raylan can shoot him.

They draw down ten thousand times, until Raylan can pull his gun faster than thought. These deaths are quick to come and quick to pass, and stop when they put the guns away.

Raylan never gets close enough to see the holes he puts in Boyd’s head.

When it’s him, he thinks Boyd makes himself look. He wakes up time and again to Boyd’s face hovering over his, grinning like a death’s head, the tips of his hair on fire in the fading light.

The light here is always fading. They’re so deep in the hills that they’re stuck in perennial twilight, the sunset dogging the heels of the dawn. The nights are long and press in on them, like they’re still in the mine. Boyd takes it into himself, somehow, here and gone all at once. Liminal, somehow. Raylan thinks that even when Boyd’s dead, he’s waiting.

...

Boyd shoots Raylan, again and again and again. Even then, he doesn’t look away. This is what the mountain taught him—even killing Raylan Givens won’t get him to stay.

...

They stay in Bulletville for nearly a month, waiting on the Guard Shelby promised. In between killing each other out in the yard, Raylan is restless. The gun in his hand rises easy now—easy as pointing his finger, that old pantomime of childhood, where everyone you shoot stands back up once the game is over. He feels like he’s playing at it, still. Like he’s only a child, and this is just another game. The killing never sticks.

Raylan watches the horizon while Boyd goes inside to sit in that same chair at the table, head bowed as if in mourning. He holds his pocket watch in both hands, the edge pressed against his forehead, like he’s praying to it. Raylan comes inside with his heels itching, spinning up dust under his boots as he paces the floor and starts to think maybe Shelby’s a goddamn liar.

Boyd watches from his chair, gaze on Raylan but head still down. His eyes are so hard to see.

“It ever enter your mind, Raylan, that maybe they got a long goddamn way to travel?” he suggests one day, while Raylan’s boots scratch out a map of his frustration on the floor. “Surely America ain’t the only place in need of guarding.”

That night, Raylan fucks him like they’re both about to die, like they’re not dead already, something inside him still stuck in that moment right before the roof caved in. Boyd lets Raylan collapse on top of him afterward, like a re-enactment, where Boyd is Raylan and Raylan is the mountain.

When Boyd fucks Raylan, he presses down against him like the rocks Raylan died under. Like he’s trying to bury them both.

Thank you so much for sending this, I’m very proud of the excerpt that you chose, and I’m excited to talk about it! There’s a lot going on under the surface in these sections. While Raylan claims that this exercise in repeatedly killing one another is intended to improve his quickdraw, I think it’s also an attempt to inoculate and desensitize himself to death, both his own and Boyd’s (and just in general). It’s also a way of, once again, wresting control over an uncontrollable situation; when they died in the mines, that was a traumatic death outside their control, and in Raylan’s case, he went down into the mines in the first place because he had no other choice. He never wanted to be down there at all. So I think he has the belief that each subsequent death, out in the sunshine on his own terms, sets him just a little bit further removed from that first horrifying experience of death. In this, as in everything, he is running. If he can just put a little more ground between himself and the things he fears, maybe the fear won’t catch him.

However, he doesn’t want to see the aftermath. He doesn’t approach Boyd until he’s already healing. Boyd can’t and won’t stay dead, so why linger in that moment of death? It’ll be over in a moment, so why let it touch you? What does it matter? Of course, Boyd does die, he does experience that, even if he comes out the other side of that experience. Meanwhile, Boyd almost revels in these moments. He knows Raylan won’t leave until he wakes up, so as long as Boyd’s dead, Raylan hasn’t left him yet. And when Raylan’s dead, he’s here, too; so, in some ways, Boyd is at his happiest with Raylan suspended in death, because he’s also suspended in space and time. They’re both in a twilight state, Schrödinger’s cat—here and gone, alive and dead. Boyd is waiting for Raylan to leave, yes, but he’s also waiting for Raylan to come back: because he has to believe that, eventually, he will. Their deathlessness has, in a way, put them outside time, in that while they still experience it in a linear fashion, it can’t really touch them. But, as Boyd learned from the mine, even killing Raylan won’t get him to stay. Maybe for a moment, but not for good.

By the time the Guard comes, Raylan believes that his attempt to immunize himself to death has worked. But here, with Boyd, death has no consequences, or at least no permanent ones. That won’t always be the case, and a part of him knows it, and it’s why he thinks about being a kid again. In the grand scheme of things—in the grand scheme of his own life—he is a child. He’s playing at something that isn’t quite real to him yet. He knows this isn’t always what it will be like; he listened closely enough to Shelby to figure out that much.

Plus, he now has proof that Boyd will get up no matter how many times he’s killed. Raylan can leave him, and he’ll survive. He’ll be okay. (The former, or course, holds true. On the latter, I’ll let you come to your own conclusions.)

Raylan is right; Boyd is already in a state of preemptive mourning, because Raylan already has one foot out the door. And he’s not too far off base when he says Boyd is praying to time, either. He’s counting on the eventuality of Raylan coming back to him one day.

Much is made of how well Raylan can see Boyd’s eyes in any given moment in this first chapter; this is intentional. Raylan tells himself their inscrutability comes down to the fact that Boyd is hard to read, which he can be, but it’s equally true that Raylan isn’t trying too hard to read him, because he doesn’t want to know. If eyes are windows to the soul, there are things Raylan is afraid to see in Boyd’s. He needs to leave, and he doesn’t want to acknowledge how this will affect Boyd. Meanwhile, not only does Boyd look unflinchingly into Raylan’s eyes—his soul, if the metaphor holds—he literally saw the inside of Raylan’s skull, the thing physically behind his eyes. He knows exactly what Raylan means to him, and he doesn’t flinch from it. Boyd leans into their understanding of each other, where Raylan runs away from it. How could he acknowledge what they are to each other and still leave?

In my timeline, the rest of the guard came to get Raylan from India, where the anti-colonialist movement is steadily picking up steam.

And then you have this last section, where they’re both thinking about the mine as they sleep together for what they believe might be the last time before they’re separated. They conceptualize their lovemaking as a reenactment of the collapse, not because they want to be literally back there, but because they want to do to—or for—each other what the mine did to them. While they know they can’t literally trap each other, they want to recreate one specific condition of their trapped state: to take away the pain of the choice, or at least one specific consequence of having that choice. Despite the horror and pain and helplessness of that time, while they were down there, their entire world was comprised of what they were to each other. They were not just the only ones like them down there, but the only ones at all. And there were no hard questions that might divide them with their answers. But as soon as they got out, they were presented with a choice: whether to stay or leave. As soon as that choice existed, their separation became inevitable, because they were always going to choose differently. So when they have sex, they’re trying to let each other live in that moment again, and forget, just for the night, what’s going to happen when the day comes. They want to create a moment for each other where they don’t have to feel the pain of the imminent divergence of their paths.

(Ask game here)

[acorrespondence]

plzzzzzzz do this one.

Raylan finds the bar and posts up in the parking lot. The memory hits him, sudden and clear, how he used to wait like this for Arlo, who drank away his afternoons at the Harlan VFW. His palm itches for a ball as he stares at the brickwork, that same old restlessness taking hold. Won’t be long now, and it’ll have somewhere to go.

It’s less than an hour before the man comes out, weaving with drink. When Raylan puts him on the ground, his hat rolls off across the pavement until it hits his truck tire. There, thinks Raylan savagely, almost nonsensically. Raylan takes the butt of his gun to the man’s face. He feels like he did when Boyd lit that match in the mine all those years ago. Like he’s burning up. He loses minutes to it.

When it’s over, the man is wheezing through a broken nose and a busted jaw, blood running down his temple and into his hair. Raylan opens his mouth to check that his airway’s clear, and the man whimpers against his fingers.

“Hurts, huh?” he asks, getting to his feet. He looks down upon the man, who stares up at him through one good eye. “Do you understand, now?” Raylan wonders if he looks older, in the dark. He puts his boot on the man’s neck. “If you ever hurt one of us again, I’ll come back. And I can’t promise our next meeting will be quite this pleasant.”

I’m really proud of this particular scene, so I’m really glad you chose to send this bit! I think there are obvious reasons as to why Raylan is thinking of Arlo in this moment. He’s outside of an establishment serving alcohol, waiting for a violent man: one who specifically targets people he believes to be weaker than himself for reasons they have no control over. Back then, though, the only way Raylan had to get the restlessness out of his hands (and, as it were, attempt to purge and channel his emotions) was by bouncing a baseball futilely off the wall of the building, perhaps imagining it flying straight through the wall and into Arlo’s head, but unable to actually realize that fantasy. Here, he has more recourse, and he takes it.

I think as soon as Tim mentioned the guy’s hat never coming off during the initial assault, Raylan’s complicated emotional reaction coalesced into the following thought: “I’ll make him lose his fucking hat.” This is why the majority of the description in this paragraph is afforded to the fate of the hat rather than the fate of the man. Once the man’s lost his hat, he’s not worth worrying about. The hat, in a sense, basically represents the power imbalance between them; Raylan taking the hat for himself is a symbolic gesture. And, of course, Raylan keeping the hat has broader symbolism outside this single encounter. Because the parallel was drawn between this man and Arlo, Raylan also symbolically wrested this power from his father. In a way, the violence itself is also impersonal. I purposefully refrained from describing any of the effects of Raylan’s actions in this paragraph, instead focusing on the way he felt. He remembers Boyd with the match after the mine collapse because, as touched on in the first chapter, Boyd lit that match in order to take control, in any small way he could, of a situation which they ultimately had no control over: being trapped in the mine. So once again this memory is intended to hint that this moment represents, for Raylan, taking control of a situation that, at least when it played out in his childhood with his father, he had no control over. “He loses minutes to it;” a literal regression of time.

Then, of course, reality reasserts itself, and he comes back to the present, where he’s confronted with the consequences of his actions. He makes sure the man isn’t dead, but not out of any real care for his life; if he’s not alive, he can’t carry this lesson on past this encounter, and ultimately this idea of “being taught a lesson,” so often used as a justification for abuse, is instead being used in retribution for abuse. It’s necessary for this guy to survive in order for Raylan to properly play out the situation (the one he grew up having no control over) in reverse. So, as much as all of this was for Tim, it’s also very much about Raylan and his own demons.

(Ask game here)

[acorrespondence]

I’m very glad I turned on email receipts for asks yesterday (I didn’t even realize it was off!), because tumblr ate this one from @toli-a!

17. What’s something you’ve learned about while doing research for a fic?

Oh, this is a hard one, because I’m very bad at remembering when and how I learned information unless the circumstances in which I learned it were very memorable, and most of my fic research involves getting lost in a link chain rabbit hole for hours and coming back up like I’ve just woken from a fugue state. Actually, as I was writing this I was thinking about the justified og au and remembered one of the things I researched in depth for that: the details and dangers which “robbing a mine” entails, as well as some very specific instances where attempts to do so ended in disaster. A lot of mining companies would pay people under the table to do this for them, but of course some people did it for themselves because they could make more money per ounce on the coal than the mine was willing to pay them for it. Guess which of these equally illegal activities more often resulted in arrest? Yep; if you were doing this for yourself behind the company’s back, you weren’t just accused of robbing the mine, but also of robbing the mining company.

29. Share a bit from a fic you’ll never post OR from a scene that was cut from an already posted fic. (If you don’t have either, just share a random fic idea you have that you don’t plan on getting to.)

This is from a collection of prequel snippets in the heavy heart universe. It was never intended to be published and instead is really just for my own reference, so it’s rougher than I’d prefer:

"Arlo says the two'a you's queer for each other."

Boyd freezes, but Raylan just rolls his eyes. "Arlo says the mailman's queer because he—I’m quotin, here—‘spends all day shovin things in mail holes.' And when my mama told Arlo that's just his job, Arlo said that made it worse, on account'a he's gettin paid for it."

Johnny laughs. "Shit. Your old man may be an asshole, Raylan, but he's a funny one."

Raylan's said far worse about Arlo himself, but he feels his hackles rise anyway. "You oughtta watch what you say, Johnny."

Johnny lounges back on the dugout bench and looks at Raylan through hooded eyes. "Careful, Raylan. We ain't in high school anymore, when our families left us to it. Your affairs are your daddy's, now, and his affairs are yours, and he ain't exactly got his affairs in order."

Boyd, still lounging against the chain link, having since recovered from his earlier jolt of fear, smirks at him. "Maybe you're well-served to mold yourself blindly in your daddy's image, cousin, but if I am truly to become my daddy, I must first become my own man."

Johnny spits on the ground. "Long as your own man ain't a fag."

(Questions here)

[acorrespondence]

🌤

🌤️ Share your favorite piece of dialogue from your WIP.

Ooh this is tough because a) I am notoriously bad at ranking things and thus almost never have a definitive “favorite” and b) I can’t use this excerpt again since I just answered an ask with it XD All my other favorite bits of upcoming dialogue for heavy heart are at least somewhat spoilery. So, I’ll take this opportunity to plug my other wip, catching bullets. Because of its structure as a series of vignettes, it’s very dialogue-light, and the dialogue is often the last thing I end up writing, so there’s not much to be found yet in the draft for the final chapter. This is a dialogue exchange from what I’ve posted so far that I’m really happy with:

Raylan wants to go. To leave Harlan and its teeth and its stubborn survival behind him. He wants to run and keep running, just to prove to himself that the world isn’t flat, doesn’t drop off sharp at the edge of Harlan County, with every soul who ever tried to flee lying dead at the bottom.

Boyd doesn’t.

They argue about it in the bedroom of the cabin, Shelby on the other side of a closed door.

“You know why I can’t,” says Boyd. “I got my daddy, and Bowman.”

“They think we’re dead, Boyd!” Raylan shouts. His throat aches like he’s been shouting for hours, the weight of tears pressing heavy at the back of it, like a boot on his neck. It hurts him, to think of his mama and Helen at his funeral, praying over an empty box—or pretending to pray, on Aunt Helen’s part, because Raylan thinks she’s too angry at God to ask Him any favors.

He doesn’t care if Arlo thinks he’s dead. If Raylan’s daddy thinks he’s dead, he won’t think to come looking.

Raylan’s words are like physical things scattered on the floor between them, falling the way his tears won’t. We’re dead, dead, dead.

Boyd looks at him sideways. “But we ain’t.”

Only, Raylan’s not so sure.

He lays his hands on Boyd’s shoulders and looks him in the eye.

“This is the only chance we’re ever gonna get.”

Boyd looks back. His eyes are close together and set deep, brown and green mottled together like camouflage, and dark under the shadow of his brow. Sometimes Raylan looks into them, and he can’t see anything at all.

Raylan shakes him. “God, why won’t you just leave?”

Boyd shakes his head like an aftershock, traveling up from Raylan’s hands. “Harlan saved us, Raylan.”

Raylan laughs, loud and sharp. “Harlan killed us.” He takes a deep breath, and in it he can almost taste the salty sea air of his dreams. “There’s other places. I’ve seen ‘em in my dreams. I know that you have, too.”

“Where it feels like you’re there,” Boyd says quietly. Raylan nods, and Boyd does too, like they’re two sides of a mirror. Raylan’s not quite sure who’s the reflection. Not until Boyd smiles, white and cracked down the middle like fractured glass. “They make me homesick.”

(Ask Game here)

[shadowrun-effect]

From the upcoming chapter...

Immediately, he felt the power massively flowing through him and knew that he could do far more with it than the ki power originally could. Missile Parry originally made the adept catch slow-moving projectiles such as arrows, thrown knives, grenades, or shuriken out of the air. Since Andromeda, however, his power, had gone far beyond that capacity; he could catch bullets with it. A year ago he had saved his sister's life by doing so when she had been ambushed by hostile Angara back on Aya. Thrown objects were no difficulty, a bullet was usually impossible to catch, but he could. And that had its price.

This ki power was extremely strong and if it ended, he would clearly feel the withdrawal, despite the implant. This was to block his powers before they killed him.

That gif is a perfect example of how Missile Parry in Samuel’s case is working.