#two floors

[pebblysand]

last time i had a big writing sprint and pushed new chapters, i came out of my writing hole to look at the news and found out about venezuela so i will shut up and never post again now thank you

[nordic-chair]

─•~❉᯽ A Movie-Star Mansion ᯽❉~•─

for Marlo ✦ ˚ *

[pebblysand]

i don't think i've ever written anything that embodies aoife more perfectly.

---

One night, she gets bold. Her laptop in the hotel lobby. We’re never having sex again. You know that, right?

Hahahaha. An enter key.  Sure. 

I don’t know what you’re hoping for, talking to me.

I like talking to you. I’ve always liked talking to you.

Jesus.  You think you’re smooth?

Very. 

I remember you being smoother. She should think more about this. Quickly hits send before she can. With some things.

He takes a minute to answer. Now, look who’s flirting.

She shuts the screen of her laptop. Will certainly not tell Melanie. 

.

It’s the danger of it. That feeling in her stomach. Not a little fish anymore. 

Just a very bad idea. 

And, maybe, so what? This is her life. She can choose how to live it. She’s allowed to knowingly drive herself at full speed into a concrete wall for the second time if she wants to.

Have fun doing it.

---

[pebblysand]

okay so hilariously, i’ve been trying to talk about the stuff i’ve been reading/researching for two floors in my newsletter but without revealing too much cause i didn’t want to spoil … while completely forgetting that i’d already written the plot point i was trying to “hide” into castles and didn’t need to hide it anymore 💀.

so anyway, yeah, i’ve been reading a lot of books and listening to a bunch of podcasts about journalists and war correspondents because aoife becomes a war correspondent, as i already said, and if anyone has any good recs on the subject btw, feel free to drop them below!

[pebblysand]

[short two floors update]

i know there's like maybe two of you remaining reading two floors at this stage per my comment section so i don't mean to spam your dashs but i did sort of still wanted to give quick update.

as i said before, i identified (correctly, now i can say!) one of my lecturers this term as a fanfic girly lmao. this means i was finally able to openly talk to her about the project as an adaptation. she has been the sweetest, most helpful person so far and we've started to slowly work on the adaptation. she gave me homework for it, that i'm doing (i promise!!) but that means i'm sort of putting two floors The Fanfic on hold for now. i still think i will finish it and my lecturer, C - let's call her C - is not opposed to the idea, but this month i really wanted to focus on my "homework" lol. i might pick two floors up again in Feb, i'm not too sure yet.

[pebblysand]

hi! I’m not the best at analyzing texts/hidden meanings and subtexts but for the end of chap 7, is aoife basically saying Fiona killed herself bc she also had an affair with Leo and Leo didn’t really care about her?

Hi anon! Good question!

It's funny, I was talking yesterday about the dynamics between explaining/repeating things v. leaving them inferred/unsaid in text. As I said in that post, I've sort of pivoted recently with two floors into a narration that leaves a bit more "unsaid" because I wanted to explore that a little bit more in my writing and develop that skill, which I couldn't do as much in castles. So, it's fair that you may be a bit confused, it's definitely different.

Anyway, onto your question(s).

Did Fiona also have an affair with Leo?

Honestly, full disclosure? I don't know. I keep going back and forth on it. Leo obviously lies and lied about a lot of things, to a lot of people in his life. He lies to Char, to his children, but also to Aoife. For months on end, there's this massive information imbalance between the two of them where he knows about her past and she doesn't know that he knows, which I think considering how close they were getting, is bordering on lying by omission/information withholding. He says he's never cheated on Charlotte before and that he didn't sleep with Fiona, but 1) he's cheated on girlfriends in the past (and downplays it when Aoife feels like he lied to her about it) and 2) Charlotte is suspicious even before he starts seeing Aoife, and to me in a lot of these cases, there's no smoke without a fire. I love Leo because he is one of my character babies and I love all of my babies equally, but he's also a massive dick and you basically shouldn't believe a word that comes out of his mouth.

At the same time, to be honest, and this is no shade to Aoife, but I think Fiona was a bit too good for him. I think she knew. I think she called him out on his bullshit. I think what possibly happened, which is kind of hinted at in the Aoife/Leo balcony scene, is that he really liked her, and was borderline in love with her, but that she wasn't interested. And, I do think, throughout the years, this did morph into a strong friendship bond, because he eventually understood that was all he was going to get. But interestingly, a lot of what he likes about Aoife is what he liked about Fiona. Her uncompromising strength, her bluntness, again, the fact that she calls him out on his bullshit. I don't think Aoife is a replacement for Fiona, per se, because I think there's a lot of protectiveness and fascination and respect that he feels for Aoife that he didn't necessarily feel for Fiona, but they do inhabit the same space.

Because, let's be clear, Charlotte has a point when she says that Leo was a lot more affected by Fiona's death than he should have been. He completely upended his life, moved to another country, abandoned his wife and children, started an affair with a woman 14 years younger than him - all triggered by her death. It's a mid-life crisis on steroids. And, I do think, to his credit, he's at least trying to do things better post-Fiona. At work (see Cormac), but I also think Aoife is getting a 2.0 version of Leo that is a bit more fragile and self-aware, and that sadly, neither Charlotte nor Fiona ever got.

But anyway, to answer your question, honestly, I don't know. I've gone back and forth on how much he's lying to Aoife (and to himself) about Fiona. Where I land at the moment is that nothing physical ever happened between them because Fiona didn't want to, but I do think he was possibly in love with her, at least at some point.

Why did Fiona kill herself?

So, as I explained in the notes of the fic, Fiona's character is loosely inspired by the story of Vanessa Ford who was a solicitor and a partner at Pinsent Masons. She died after falling onto train tracks following an eighteen-hour day at the firm she was working at (which, per various reports, was a very regular occurrence for her) and consuming a debilitating amount of alcohol. It is unclear if she voluntarily committed suicide or if it was an accident due to her intoxicated state. She left behind two young sons and a husband.

As someone who used to work in this environment and feels very strongly about mental health and the lack of work-life balance in the legal industry (especially commercial firms), this story completely floored me when I saw it pop up on my LinkedIn a couple years back. I think about her all the time, in a way that I can't quite explain. It's the question of: could it have been me, had I not left? Following her death there was an inquiry, which more or less concluded that the firm was guilty of no wrongdoing. That law firms are competitive environments, and that she just maybe wasn't "strong enough" for it. Nothing happened. Pinsent Masons said they would foster "ongoing conversations" about mental health. I'm sure they have great PowerPoint slides now. I hope that deal she was working on day and night for months was worth her life but I highly doubt it.

So, anyway, why did Fiona kill herself? Fiona killed herself because at twenty-seven years old, when Aoife thinks she might be pregnant with Leo's baby, she sits alone in the firm's disabled toilets, terrified, and the first thought she has is: will she be able to get the days off to get an abortion, and will they think she's a slacker? And, when she asks/hopes for a bit of compassion from the person who could have been the father of her baby, he tells her to "put a pin in it" because he has to go into a meeting. Fiona killed herself because these places chew you up and spit you out and she "couldn't resist the pressure". I don't think it was just about Leo, and whatever happened between them. I think it was everything. And, I hope that she died at least so that people like Aoife could see this life and environment for what it is, and save themselves before it was too late.

[pebblysand]

i love how i'm seeing everyone's sweet christmassy fics popping up on my dash while i'm writing about some kid's limbs getting blown off in libya. aren't you glad for the usual pebblysand™ mood boosts?

[pebblysand]

(a little snippet of part ten, to show you i am working on it, i promise 😅)

.

Woken up by Israeli drones. Circling over Sweden. They are raining down Avada Kedevra-s on a beach-side house. Kasper takes a curse to the chest and collapses to the ground. Aoife finds herself surprisingly bereft. At the funeral, his mother says she hadn’t seen him in decades and tearingly asks Aoife if she loved him. A question she ponders over for a second before saying, ‘No.’ His mother nods, ‘Tak,’ before Disapparating. 

Her eyes wide open, now. 

It’s night time again. She’s hungry. She needs to pee. The mess of her bedroom lit by the streetlights outside. An ambulance’s siren in the distance. Once they’d crossed the border, the first time Kasper asked was at the safe house. Before the ceasefire. They’d spent the day at the hospital in Khan Younis, elbow-deep in dust and dried blood. She was interviewing a boy with a collapsed lung and a woman who’d lost half her face in a strike that hit a school. They’d run out of gauze by midday. The power kept getting cut. The air tasted like iron and chlorine. At night, they stayed in a ground-floor flat rented out by MSF, heavy shutters and sandbags stacked behind the windows. Fifteen people and one toilet they had to refill with buckets of water. They weren’t allowed to turn on the lights after dark - it would have been too easy to spot from the air. When the generator ran, you could charge your phone, boil water, maybe get ten minutes of BBC before the signal dropped again. Aoife was quiet and clean and she made herself small. Helped with the meals and moving furniture around. Made herself useful. A skill she’s long since known allows you to blend into the décor without much fuss even after you got in through the chimney. You clock the rules quick, never complain, and you do as you’re told. 

She sat in the corner. Couldn’t sleep at the time. It was the shelling that was the hardest. The way you never know where it’ll drop next. As far as she’s concerned, it’s a form of psychological torture. And, what it leaves in its wake. The rubble and the dead. She fell and opened her arm on an iron pole once, because her foot caught in a child’s leg. They never found the body it belonged to. 

When Kasper asked, she quietly scoffed. A couple of aid workers snoring away on dirty mattresses spread out on the floor. 

He smirked. Low, amused whisper. ‘Is it the war that’s a turn off?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’ 

Got laid in ‘97, if you must know. 

‘What?’

‘Not’ing.’ 

She scooted closer to the wall. Laid her head against the angle of the room and gently closed her eyes. The scarf she covered her hair with during the days when she needed to, now acting as a pillow. ‘Sometimes, it’s just you that’s a turn off, Kas.’ She didn’t want him to touch her.

He layered the hurt in sarcasm. ‘Right.’ 

They had sex after the ceasefire.

.