#familiar corpse

[phantomrose96]

I put Familiar Corpse on Ao3! because hey why hadn't I done that already

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[phantomrose96]

Can't wait for the sequel where vlad peels danny off the putting green with a spatula, saying nothing but the look in his eyes could reduce the fenton parents to quivering masses of nerves

(Prometheus)

Wait. Wait wait wait *goes rifling through my closet flinging papers and junk and a cat somehow until I emerge with this* you're hitting pretty damn close to something I've got already which is Familiar Corpse. Which was an absolute Delight of a Vlad character study, for me. I'm frankly still chewing on it.

BUT I also delight in resetting everything and putting everyone in a new set of horrors. Because that's the right way to play with blorbos. And I am absolutely turning over in my head what Vlad's response would be in Prometheus... Surely Vlad has dealt on some level with this super-healing from fatal injuries. But anything THIS severe...? Is he maybe the one person who can understand Danny showing up completely whole and healed and mentally absolutely irreparable... or is this even beyond the threshold of what Vlad can fathom?

[phantomrose96]

I'm here to talk more about Familiar Corpse because mom said I could.

This is one of those fics where I think I had more fun with the execution than the actual idea of it. Like I thought about different ways this could go, possibly as a confrontation between Maddie and Danny specifically. But I really liked settling on using Vlad, and using Vlad specifically as a medium for the audience to receive disjoint information simultaneously, as Vlad receives one piece from Maddie and reveals another to the audience through his own recollections. So the dissection, its aftermath, and Maddie's take on it can all hit at once. Really felt like the strategy for maximum "Hey wait."

And Vlad's always a fun character to use to carry a fic cuz, ya know, fucked-up evil ghost vampire billionaire villain trying to adopt the protagonist and date his mom gives a lot to work with. And I think these kinds of dissection stories always present one really integral question: does Vlad help Danny?

Like a decade back I think most fics went with "absolutely, yes," in a way that gives Vlad more credit than he's, perhaps, canonically due. Like he throws away his evil selfish tendencies because he's so aghast at what's happened to Danny.

And there's some fairness to that! The boy you've been evilly scheming to force to be your son shows up at your door sawed open and moments from death wdyd? I do think Vlad would help. But I think there's this much more selfish angle to explore here: that Vlad would help because his future perfect family depends on it.

And that's... also compromised when it's Maddie who's done this to Danny.

I know "unreliable narrator" is everyone's favorite literary term but really this was a fun exercise in exactly that, which I think shows through how split people's opinions are of Vlad in the tags/replies. Familiar Corpse repeatedly explores what Vlad is telling himself... which are things that fall at odds with what his memories reveal he's done.

His memories present a chain of events where Danny showed up nearly dead at Vlad's door, and Vlad saved his life by stabilizing him in the basement. And more than that, it reveals Danny coming back day after day for more medical attention which Vlad readily gives. And even more than that, the audience knows Danny is actually talking to Vlad about how things are at home in a manner that suggests Vlad asked, and suggests Danny feels trusting enough to tell him.

But in Vlad's internal narration to himself, he repeatedly asserts that he doesn't truly care about this whole thing. Like it's just something distasteful that happened. And sure his flame for Maddie seems to be extinguishing itself in real time as these events unfold, but he never admits that's related. He asserts to himself that this is just a little game for his curiosity, that he enjoys having Maddie around his finger, and he'll pick up his real pursual of Maddie and Danny as his family later when he feels like it again.

And then throughout the conversation with Maddie, she reveals things are actually broken in a way entirely unfixable. And this shocks Vlad. And Vlad does make an attempt at course-correcting her, but it fails without proof (which he might have, if he reveals he's Plasmius, if that can convince Maddie that half-ghosts are real and her son is truly her son.)

He doesn't. He doesn't try. He actively decides against trying.

And if Vlad were a better person - he'd have done something. Even if not revealing himself as Plasmius, a better person would perhaps, at least, warn Danny, or better would take Danny's side entirely and do what he can to help Danny, out of actual and genuine human concern.

Vlad is... too selfish for that, though. Because his thoughts are still around his hypothetical family, which is what Danny and Maddie are to him. He settles on something like blame - directed at Maddie and Danny both - Maddie for causing this and falling apart, and Danny being too broken to be Vlad's perfect son. It's his future they have ruined by doing this, by becoming too broken for Vlad's perfect family, and as such, Vlad owes them nothing. And worse, Vlad knows that if he tries, he may end up exactly in Danny's shoes. And he is far, far too selfish to ever risk that.

Throughout the fic Vlad does experience genuine emotions, genuine empathy. He does feel anger on Danny's behalf. He is worried for him. He is upset with Maddie. But when it comes to deciding what to do - deciding what logic to act on - Vlad chooses the selfish approach. He categorizes his own uncomfortable feelings as stemming from the loss of what Maddie and Danny were supposed to be for him, and emotionally removes himself (the only person with the full picture of what's happened, who could possibly stop catastrophe) from the situation all together.

[phantomrose96]

I'm still thinking about the awful, delicious implications of um and fc being sequential. The fact that as far as his parents know phantom never remembered the experiments when killed but this time he escaped so he remembers. The fact that danny went to vlad for help so much more readily than in um. The idea that this is before danny works himself up to more clones so he's still the last one. That him knowing about the cuff might have been the one thing that let him escape. I'm making myself sad

(Under Moonlight / Familiar Corpse)

Really like how you can just stack the awful implications of each of them up on top of each other. Like pancakes.

You could add to the mix FC!Danny (if or when Vlad tells him what Maddie believes) being so utterly wracked with regret of "Why couldn't I have just had the power for one more clone?" because he could have just chosen to allow his self on the lab table to die while the uncaptured clone carried on, avoiding this horrible situation. (At least, for one more iteration.)

[phantomrose96]

THE BROKEN CUFF FROM UNDER MOONLIGHT? im in agony is this actually a part 2 to that fic, was this the last danny that made the decision to Never Know what it was like to be under the knife. im hurting

(Familiar Corpse / Under Moonlight)

GOTTA do something about that broken cuff, Jack Fenton.

So the broken cuff IS a carried-over detail, but it wasn't necessarily my intention to make Familiar Corpse be a direct follow-on to Under Moonlight. Upon further thinking, I don't think there's anything directly contradictory about treating them as such, so if you wanna smash two terrible realities together you can go ham.