All the Roofs of Uncertainty for Scene question!
š Okay this is a sort of funny one to be asked about, because of course I have a ramble in the notes of the fic itself about how I wrote the first draft of chapter one on the back of a receipt, while waiting a very long time at the cardiologist for my diagnosis and prognosis.
There was no towards there, there was just the experience of sitting with the possibility of death.
Dick got a cathartic open-ended death scene and Jason had complicated feelings about it because Iād been in a car crash on the way to the office and been late, so Doctor Phang didnāt have time to clarify how likely a symptom āsudden deathā might be. Thatās why that. It was written from.
But thatās not the fic. Chapter one wound up, much to my surprise, providing the setup for a much larger story premise. I sent Jason to the hospital at first with a vague idea of expanding the same angst-connection to additional siblings, as they all waited to see whether Dick pulled through. It was only after his and Wallyās confrontation got extremely real that I committed to really digging through Jasonās issues.
As soon as I realized I was prepared to bring Bruce onstage and have the two of them try to come to grips with their damage, I was writing toward that. But by the time I finished writing that conversation it was four chapters long, so while itās technically all one scene I donāt think it counts as an answer.
The points I was aiming for got increasingly spread over a lot of space as I edited the very long scene and added bridges and clarified points and expanded arguments and so on, but I think the original core of what I was writing toward wound up in the second half of chapter 8, and especially the opening to chapter 9.
1) When Bruce pointed out that Jason was alive with a future, not some kind of vengeance-powered revenant, and Jason was like āhow do you know?ā
2) When Jason demanded his child self be given the dignity of his choices, and not robbed of agency in favor of Bruceās guilt.
3) When Jason said Bruce had made his choices and he, Jason, didnāt care anymore, and Bruce cared so much about that so obviously Jason couldnāt walk away right then.
and 4) When Bruce apologized better, in that moment when Jason was able to listen, and Jason had to cover his face while he told him to stop and let him go.
They circle back a lot, because and there were other points I definitely intended to touch on that arenāt covered here, and I also had āJason gets mad and expresses it but crucially decides not to escalate to physical violence as a defensive, distracting, or self-soothing tacticā very much on the list, but I think this string of interactions pretty well represents the scene I had in mind.
