For the DVD commentary: I don't know if this is too long ago a fic, but can you do After, chpt 1? I don't think I can c/p 500 words into this box but how about that section that starts 'Whatever fears they have on that long fall down ...' and ends 'It’s six months after they make it out that Tartarus wins anyway.' (I love that last line.)
I WILL TALK ABOUT AFTER INTO THE SUN TBH my child
and god i’m still super proud of that whole passage even five years later, it really marks a Step Up in my writing in general and my fic writing in particular
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Whatever fears they have on that long fall down aren’t enough. this is on of the really wonderful effects of listing. ‘long’ ‘fall’ ‘down’ - they’re all conveying the same thing, but when they’re all together like that it just emphasizes howwwww faaaaaaar they’re falling.Whatever expectations they’ve had are overwhelmed. Whatever hopes, prove hopeless. i used the rule of threes for these opening sentences - essentially for the same reason as the listing, to really hammer home that this is a mental fall as well as physical and they are not going to come out unscathed The single, solitary alliteration! there really is One Reason! reason they make it through is because of a stubborn, desperate determination to keep their hands locked together and to drag each other onward. a call back to ‘never again’. the whole thing with After as a story was that they were the only reason they survived, and as such they were capable of doing the worst damage to each other after
The worst thing about Tartarus, isn’t what happens to them inside it. Tartarus isn’t only a place; it’s a living, breathing, thinking thing, and it breaks off a piece of itself inside them even as they crawl out over the threshold. Tartarus is something that stays with you, becomes a part of you, long after you’ve passed through its doors. THIS IS MY FAVOURITE CONCEPT and i have replicated it across dozens of pjo fics over the years because i firmly believe it! this isn’t hell is other people, it’s hell is yourself; the damage that is done to you and the damage you do to other people. it’s ptsd as hell, it’s the idea that just because something is over in the literal, physical sense, that doesn’t mean you have escaped the repercussions.
in order for After to be a story about healing, it had to be first a story about damage.
They try. They give everything they have to each other after it’s all said and done, and then they scrounge around and give more. They’re the only ones that can calm the nightmares, but every time they look at each other, it’s a reminder or what happened, what they went through, what they’ll never, ever be able to escape. this is where we start to understand that damage. interestingly there was a narrative of ‘codependent is bad and these two are codependent’ floating around at the time, which i was not actually engaging with! Percy and Annabeth’s story here is about how you can’t rely on your partner to fix you, especially not went they are just as broken. they need each other desperately because they’re the only ones who understand, but at the same time their jagged edges are cutting each other, not soothing.
She’s the one who voices it. annabeth always takes charge, says the uncomfortable thing, and is more willing to leave percy than percy is willing to leave her. It’s late on a Wednesday night i like the juxtaposition of being extremely specific about the day here (because of course they remember), but then....not knowing the exact time lol., or maybe early Thursday morning, and they’re curled up on the floor of his cabin. Wrapped around each other. i did very much want to lead into this with the implication of sadness and exhaustion, and then hit you with the ugliness underneath it. It might have been a sweet scene, if heartbreaking, but there are scratches on his face from her fingernails and she wears bruises on her arms. There is no sweetness left here. They mistake each other for the monsters more often than they save each other. Just because they’re the only ones that can help, doesn’t mean that they don’t hurt more.
this is the thing that has bugged me over the years because there’s a lot of discourse about Abuse etc in this fandom, but....by and large people have missed in this story (or dismissed) the fact that Percy and Annabeth were hurting each other. Not just Angst, but literal physical hurting. i went there because i genuinely thing it would take something momentous to pry them apart, which is not to say that mental anguish ISN’T momentous, but that physical damage is more obvious and usually an Escalation. i wanted it established that percy and annabeth leaving each other in this universe was very much the necessary, and in fact Only choice they could make.
Every time I look at you, she says, I see the end of the world.
WHAT A GOOD FUCKING LINE i remember very clearly that this line is the distilled version of a number of conversations i had while RPing with @romanitas. this sounds sort of Dramatic and Metaphorical but it’s actually very literal - essentially that when Annabeth looks at Percy, she knows that he chose to jump into Tartarus with her rather than continue on with the quest/saving the world. At the time i wrote After I was very convinced that there would be some serious consequences for Percy saving Annabeth instead of the world which did not...eventuate in canon, but definitely did in the (somewhat ill-defined because who has time for that) world of After
And he has to let go of her, because clenching his fists and hating himself are more necessary than holding on.
this is just a pretty baldly stated sentence about what is happening. they can no longer support each other, they are too hurt and damaged to do it.
I know.
this is percy giving up.
Annabeth leaves the next day, returns to her boarding school and forces herself to remember the definition of normal. Annabeth is just better at....locking everything up than Percy is. her way of coping (toi begin with) is by pretending that she han’t just ripped her own heart out. Percy stays at Camp, because he knows he can’t. and honestly, he’s not safe in the real world. like it’s not safe for other people to be around him. he is so violent and dangerous at this point, it probably took a straight year before he was in any kind of place to venture out into life again
It’s six months after they make it out that Tartarus wins anyway.
this is just circling back to the beginning - the clear conclusion stating exactly what i just told you in more roundabout fashion above. again, it’s a concept i’ve carried through multiple fics because im just love it so much. that tartarus was never really just a place or a god, it is a state of mind and that much more difficult to defeat because of it.
