#parole fic

[avrilsboy]

all that happened to randy and he couldn't even jerk off about it for months afterwards. and this is why he's insane at 43 years old.

[avrilsboy]

---

a couple chapter two edits i like in particular.

[avrilsboy]

everyone pushes ahead, and the smell of the past is everywhere.

(chapter five.)

Fandom: The Passenger (2023)

Relationships: Benson/Randy Bradley

Summary:

When they stop at the intersection that leads to Route 100, he doesn’t look up — he doesn’t have to. The compass forever leading him back home pulls awful at the nearness of the road that leads to Evangeline. It always had, even during the times he wanted to keep heading north to get lost in the Kisatchie for a while, to keep going north still until he couldn’t anymore. Now, though, the pull feels desperate, with claws and teeth and a whine high in the back of its throat, hind legs quaking. A long-lost dog finding its way back to the scent trail that smells of its owner and a familiar bed; that dog remembering the last time he sped down this road, where from and who with. Beside him, Randy sucks in a tight little breath through his teeth while he waits for the left turn red to never turn green, and the pulling thing in Benson claws at the sound. It chokes itself on its pull as Randy drives forward. It cries and yelps and Benson thinks again that everything is wrong as the momentum pushes him gently back into the passenger seat. If they were to go east, they’d hit the burger joint after about a mile. They go west.

[avrilsboy]

remembering when i made benson self harm by proxy by getting into fights with other inmates... guy that lives by the rule of never killing yourself because what is he, a pussy? but it's okay if you make someone else do it for you. preferable even.

[avrilsboy]

it is genuinely embarrassing that this part of parole fic has taken me months to sledgehammer through but i think i'm finally getting somewhere with it.

[avrilsboy]

back to the "albums to keep at 10% volume in the background" fic writing rotation

[avrilsboy]

completely rewrites + adds a thousand words to the parole hearing scene. 👍

[avrilsboy]

HI ABBY ⭐pls 👂👂👂

(fanfic director's cut; ask about a particular scene or send a ⭐ to let me dive into whatever i want <3)

yay okay i had to sit here and really think about what exactly i wanted to dive in on but one part of epa that i really like in particular is retaining randy's canonical issues with exaggerating his memory, his struggles with his memory (emotionally, and in terms of passage of time) and his incorrect, steadfast belief that his memory is reliable.

this exchange between randy and miss beard, chapter one:

“Right. And they said he’d never even gotten in trouble before that. Nothing but a few speeding tickets that he’d paid off.” “Gosh, I’d forgotten about that. You know,” she says, and he can hear the faint smile in her voice, “you’ve always had a strong memory, Randy. That’s a precious thing to keep.” Randy can’t help but get flustered, feeling his ears heat up at the sudden compliment. Years ago now, he had pored over the court transcripts when he finally felt as though he could sit through it all without wishing something would bludgeon him into unconsciousness. He’s probably read it another ten times in the years since.

randy after seeing benson, chapter three:

In the days since he had seen Benson at the Harwich Diner, he had felt the constant tides of nausea threatening to expel all the trace things inside of him he knew were unfortunately human and all his own making. He had started to hope that his mind, withering with sleeplessness, would write it off as a hyper-realistic dream that he would forget with steady decay, but he clung to its realness, and he so rarely forgot. He wasn’t about to forget that he had chased after Benson after he’d told himself that he only wanted to see him, just once, from afar, or that he’d lured Benson towards the gleaming jaw of a parole violation while Randy tried a small smile and felt its quiver. He wasn’t about to forget that Benson sat so close to him again their knees almost knocked under the table. So close that Randy could nearly feel the phantom grip on his shoulder tugging him closer, the murmur of horrible things buzzing deep in his ear as though a cadavered fly pushed to the drum had turned poltergeist.

a scene from randy's apartment, chapter five:

When he leaves his apartment, cleaned up though still tired in the eyes, in nice enough clothes that hadn’t yet made it to the hamper or the floor, he makes a point to avoid looking at the living room. The dehydrated splotches on the coffee table, the dirty set of lowball glasses he’s resigned to reusing instead of cleaning, the worn thick file with its contents spread along the floor in sections, redacted sentences and mere references to exhibits and all. Everything is more or less where it’s been for days. He knows that. There’s no use staring at it.

& this exchange between randy and benson, chapter three:

“Um… No. No, I don’t think I’m cut out to be a dad, really.”   Benson keeps his thoughts to himself on that one. Still, he stares at Randy, who’s suddenly very invested in his lunch, and he feels some aggravating heat creep up his neck. “Why the hell not?” “I just don’t. I don’t know, there’s no single reason. Besides—” Randy lifts his sandwich again, and over it he gives some odd, pointed look at Benson, not mean but conveying something passive aggressive. “—I’ve been told that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea for me to have children.” 

from the start, randy, forever relying on his memory to direct him and thus relying on his memory to be accurate, is set up for failure. not just because this is impossible to achieve, but because he receives the affirmation of having a good memory from miss beard, the original source of his obsession with his own memory (yes this is @sylveriasarcana's post about the portrayal of ocd in the passenger and yes it's required reading). and while he quickly brushes off the compliment, attributing it instead to his reading and rereading of the court transcripts, he does subconsciously retain her affirmation that his memory is good and reliable. for this in particular, he is near-chemically bound to hold her perspective in immensely high regard.

in the same paragraph where he says that he clings to the realness of seeing benson again for the first time in over twenty years, he says he "so rarely forgets" even if he wishes for something to be a dream. he then promptly exaggerates the reality of their meeting: "...[he] could nearly feel the phantom grip on his shoulder tugging him closer, the murmur of horrible things buzzing deep in his ear as though a cadavered fly pushed to the drum had turned poltergeist." he speaks of phantoms and poltergeists, haunts; these are the things that always twist his memory. they're what twisted his memory of miss beard and gave him recurrent nightmares where she moans and screams and gushes blood as she crawls towards him, becoming and remaining a vengeful spirit within the confines of his memory.

he's further revealed to be doomed to fail when the contents of the court documents he relies on to retain the infallibility of his memory are revealed: they are not in their original form. they've been redacted. with the court transcripts, only a single aspect of the courtroom has been recorded and put to hard copy (the dialogue); much of the information within a courtroom is immediately lost through the initial transcribing of the scene via the court stenographer's shorthand keyboard, which is then transcribed again when it's decoded; information is deliberately removed during court when items are stricken from the record and deliberately removed from the transcript in the form of redactions. that which he relies on for the surety of his own memory is inherently incomplete. he also reads through these documents while he's drinking. he has to deliberately impair himself in order to read through them. he has never once read through the documents sober; he has never been able to.

his inaccurate memory is laid on the table between him and benson when he says to benson, quite pointedly, that he was told it wouldn't be a good idea for him to have children. this is of course in reference to benson telling randy in canon that he's better off being a virgin at his age (21) because "too many guys start fuckin' too early and they end up with kids they don't want", and that by being a virgin he's "doing the world a favor". benson doesn't know what he's referencing here at all, and over their next few conversations, randy's somewhat aggravated with benson for appearing to forget what to him are very clear points of dialogue between them. but randy has always had in place a filter in which things that are said to him become skewed, warped by his own beliefs about himself. in the movie, he says to benson, "maybe you're right, maybe i am a waste of space" when benson had said to him, only hours earlier, "you are twenty years old, and you are already more pathetic than every person in this godforsaken town, and that bugs the living shit out of me. but there's something about you. there's something fixable."

randy, canonically, does not have a good, accurate, or kind memory. but it's all he feels he has. all of the court documentation in the world can't accurately relay to him what he experienced, or heard, or said on the day benson killed their coworkers and took him hostage, and when benson himself cannot confirm to him the things they said to one another — when benson, twenty years older, appears to act in ways incongruent with the man in randy's memory — randy may just have to contend with the reality that he is not and never has been a soothsayer.

[all of this is then juxtaposed by benson, who struggles to forget though he wishes to, and who now does forget things in the face of twenty years passing and having new priorities to worry about. one of those priorities being his ailing mother suffering from dementia.]