I’m going to keep posting snippets from the Back Up There WIP, to keep me on track (and let you know that it is actually happening…)
Maisie stands in the doorway to the sun room and surveys Jamie’s small pile of boxes with her hands on her hips.
“More smelly boy things.” She wrinkles her nose, even though Jamie’s sure that his things don’t smell. All of his clothes are clean, he made sure of that during the week when he still thought he might be living out of his car for the summer, and his hockey gear is all still down at the rink.
Hopefully it can stay there. Max said that he wanted to re-sign Jamie, but now that the team’s going bust and maybe being bailed out by this Canadian businessman, Jamie’s not really sure what’s happening. There really isn’t room to put his kit in here as well.
The sun room is just about big enough for the two-seater sofa bed to be unfolded. There’s a chest of drawers, which Jamie is pretty sure wasn’t here when Scott had the team over for drinks a couple of weeks ago, and a bookshelf that’s been emptied out. Jamie will just about have room to walk around the bed, when it’s made up, but he’s clearly going to have to fold it up in the mornings if he’s got any hope of functioning.
He’s incredibly grateful to be here.
“My things don’t smell!”
Maisie rolls her eyes with all the disdain a seven year old with two older brothers can bring.
“You’re a boy, so you smell.” She delivers this verdict with utter certainty, and Jamie finds himself unable to argue.
A moment in Tiny's home life, for Docbeeski to interpret in line with her personal headcanon.
It's already Christmas in Australia, so this one's for @docbeeski, who volunteered to be the cheerleader I needed for Hector's Boys and ended up as beta reader, keeper-of-plot-secrets and friend.
Quite a few people, through various different methods, got in touch to ask me who won the playoffs, so I wanted to put the response somewhere everybody could see it...
I chose to wrap up the story the night before the semi-finals for two reasons.
First, it seemed like the right place for the narrative to end. The Huskies are the underdogs who’ve beaten the odds to get this far, they’ve exceeded everybody’s expectations and they’re on a high. If we take the story further, we’re either looking at a fairytale ending where of course they have to win, beating first their semi-final opponents and then their biggest enemies (because in that version, it has to be the Tornadoes they’d meet in the final) to win the prize. Or, we have to face the facts and accept that they’re not the strongest team and they’re not used to the high pressure games and they might not win, and then the ending’s kind of sad. So I wanted to end with the possibility of a win, at a point when their achievements to date aren’t overshadowed by whatever happens next.
The other reason not to take the story on to the finals is because I’m intending for there to be at least one other story set during the 16/17 season. I’m working on a story for one of the other semi-finalist teams, and I didn’t want that to go out with everybody knowing who won before it even starts. I want to get you all to root for a fresh set of guys.
I’m still considering whether I’m also going to drop that story at the same place, and then write a separate four-team story set over the course of the finals weekend, in which you will hopefully find yourselves rooting for each team in turn and come to hate me for making you feel conflicted - bearing in mind that our contenders include not only the Huskies but also Seb, Josh and Deets, Marek, Dominik and Ricky, and [REDACTED - SPOILERS]
I don’t actually know if that will get written, it depends how I get on with And The Sand Runs Down, which is currently very much a WIP.
Oh, okay.
I don’t actually know who wins. I’m conflicted about it myself, and unless it becomes clear during And The Sand Runs Down then I might not even know until/unless I write that four team weekend.
There was also a question about Leah’s relationship with Stan, as revealed in the final chapter, and whether Leah’s aware of it.
So, from Leah’s perspective, Stan’s brother Arthur would have been her great-uncle, as he was her father’s uncle’s partner. Due to the era Arthur and Stan grew up in, Arthur was never particularly open about being gay, but as the years went by and it stopped being illegal and eventually became more accepted in everyday life, it wasn’t a secret by the time Leah was born. Arthur hadn’t lived in the Hall since before Leah was born, as the place was used as a conference/wedding venue, but he was her father’s godfather and she’s grown up having him in her extended family. By the time she was old enough to know who they were, Arthur and his partner weren’t hiding their relationship, and she’s always called him “Uncle Arthur”.
As Stan and Valerie never had children, Arthur never had nieces and nephews of his own to give him great-nieces and nephews. Although neither his own parents nor his partner’s parents and siblings were particularly accepting of his sexual orientation, the younger generations were more relaxed about it and Arthur came to see Leah and her sister Charlie as if they were his own grandchildren. (Stan didn’t have a problem with Arthur’s orientation, as such, but he was all the way in Canada and they mostly just wrote to each other so he wasn’t there.)
Charlie and Seth got married a few months before Arthur died, and he’s in the wedding photographs in a wheelchair. Stan and Valerie came over for the wedding, and Leah occasionally wishes that she’d known how important Stan was going to be later on and had taken the opportunity to get to know Valerie - although of course at the time she was so busy getting her big sister married and welcoming the collection of new in-laws from New Zealand that she didn’t think about sitting down with elderly relatives from Canada… and Valerie would never have expected her to.
So, TL:DR, yes, Leah does know about her relationship to Stan, but at the same time he falls comfortably into that collection of older people in the extended blood-marriage-found family who get addressed as “uncle” regardless of actual relationship. She knows that he’s as good as being her great-uncle’s brother, but she’d still treat him like family if she thought he was really just her father’s godfather’s brother. If that makes sense.
I’m happy to answer other questions about any part of the series or universe. Drop me an ask - I’ll answer publicly unless you tell me otherwise :)
