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[magibrain]

Nabbed from a number of people, at this point:

The Top 5 Meme: Ask me my top five fannish anything and I'll tell you. (Or top 5 things about me as a writer, my writing, specific fics written or unwritten, introductory sorts of things, etc.)

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[magibrain]

[And it works on so many different levels - with the anklet, and being extremely good at what he does, and also not at all inclined to take orders except when he feels like it ...]

Yess. And there's this one... very odd person, actually an OC I imported from a different project, who Neal ends up working with at one point, who expands out the metaphor like so, as they're caught somewhere near the edge of Neal's radius, phoneless, and being pursued by bad guys:

"You've read the Achilleid?"

Neal tilts his head. "I'm familiar with it."

"Thetis tried to make Achilles immortal by dipping him in the Styx," Dmitri says. "But she was holding him by the ankle, and I guess Styx-water has less penetration than a good saline bath, or she didn't think to pass off hands. Trust the idiom and it'll tell you that the Achilles Heel is the superlative weak spot, and you might be tempted to think that." She looks down, then knocks her toe against his anklet. "They kinda forget that that weak spot only exists because Thetis was busy making him invulnerable."

She exhales, scanning the dark street.

"We're about to call the wrath of the FBI down on some poor unsuspecting mob enforcers. That's a hell of an invulnerability, and that–", she taps his anklet again, and he moves his foot away, "–is the tradeoff. That's where they hold you."

Which throws Neal's brain for a loop or two. And then he talks about this with Mozzie, who is super not impressed with that chain of reasoning:

"Of course, she's romanticizing your relationship with the feds. She sounds like she practically is one." Mozzie sets down his glass with just enough force to make a point. "The Achilles Heel is a weakness. She says it's where they hold you? It's also where they kill you. That's its entire narrative purpose. It's the only reason they bring it up at all."

[...]

"Achilles wouldn't have been any stronger without it," Neal says.

Mozzie shakes his head. "There are plenty of historical accounts where Achilles was never invulnerable at all."

And basically, extended metaphors are too much fun.


[... I have this whole "Five Alternate Endings for S2" epic thing I keep meaning to write, which is turning into more Six or Seven Alternate Endings, basically rewriting that final confrontation with Adler in different ways and how that affects things.]

Oh, nice. And it was just such a... weird episode, too, with so many ways that things could have changed. (I kinda want to know what would have happened if Peter had refused to get in the car, for example.) And such a clusterfuck at the warehouse, too.

The fun thing with misverse is that a lot of the seeds for the warehouse scene getting jarred onto another track entirely do actually flow out from Misfire. Like, Peter isn't back to fieldwork yet; Diana is still Neal's handler. And Diana doesn't have the sort of relationship with him that leads to her showing up at his apartment at odd hours, so she's never seen the painting whose scrap flies out of the warehouse. Instead it gets to be Neal who sees it and recognizes it, and in the state he's in, that's not a reassuring recognition:

[...]and his mind says, oh, okay, then. This is a little splinter of madness sneaking in, kind enough to announce itself, because he knows that the scrap of blues and silvers and golds can only be part of his life flashing before his eyes; maybe Adler did plant a bullet in his skull, maybe his brain is dealing with the intrusion the only way it knows how, throwing bits and pieces of remembered sensory input together to paper over the fact that nothing's coming in any more, because it's all drowned in blood and endorphins.

He knows when he's painted a forgery. And that picture of the Chrysler building was not a forgery of anything that should have been on that U-boat.

But when he tries to grab it, Diana notices, and talks him into handing it over; he has to, it's evidence, and it's not like there's a big surplus of evidence that will have survived the fire. Which means that when Neal gets the card and the key, afterwards, and goes to the warehouse to see the treasure, a couple things are different:

1) He knows it's Mozzie's handiwork, because not only would Mozzie have access to that painting, but Mozzie is the only person in the world who Neal can think of who'd not only steal the treasure but then turn around and share it with him, and

2) His first reaction to that isn't glee, it's an overwhelming sense of Oh, CRAP.

And then, of course, there's the fact that Diana didn't kill Adler, and possibly as a result of that, possibly as a result of the FBI investigation or other things, the secret of the treasure leaks out into the criminal underworld a lot faster than it did in canon, and then everything just completely goes to shit.


[the one where Neal is killed in the explosion]

Oh, man. Every time I rewatch that scene, I have to wonder if Mozzie considered that people would be showing up, looking for it. Because that was pretty damn close, and I wonder if some kind of remote surveillance and detonation system would have been too big a risk and too much of a time investment to set up. And it's hard to tell whether Mozzie wanted someone (Adler) to be there to see it go up in flames for dramatic effect, or whether he just set a timer and trusted that no way would anyone have luck improbable enough to be right there when it blew, or what.


[And then I have at least two different AUs where Neal shoots Adler. Because I also like to break things.]

Breaking things is one of the finest parts of writing fanfic. ^`_´^


[And I love the guardian angel idea - there's so much potential to play around with, there.]

I am loving it perhaps more than I should.

One of the big thematic elements of the Rift was this overwhelming sense of choicelessness, being forced to make the best out of a bad set of options, and dealing with this overarching supernatural landscape which can seem implacable, capricious, or downright cruel, which has a habit of saddling people with things they're not entirely equipped to deal with.

And, like, the nature of the guardian-ward bond, if it's not being drowned out by prescription drugs, means that Peter has access to observe a lot of parts of Neal's psyche which Neal really doesn't want him seeing, and that Peter can't actually get too far away from him (like, being in different cities would likely be physically painful), Peter can't think rationally if Neal's in danger, and if something were to happen and, say, Neal were to die, the best-case scenario for Peter in that would be being flung into a catatonic state for an unknown amount of time. It's a really rotten deal for both of them, and neither of them want it, but Peter taking tetrasalvadine is the absolute limit of what they can do about it. The only way to break a bond is if the guardian or the ward dies.

(Which leads to an amusing conversation with Mozzie about how some vampires will take money to turn you, but how buying your way into vampiredom is the equivalent to selling your soul to the Mob, only worse, and how Neal has negative desire to become a vampire, so no, that's not an option.)

And then, of course, if it were to become general knowledge, the entire criminal underworld would probably shut Neal out, because there's an FBI agent who can track him down wherever he is, given enough notice to start cutting down on the tetra dosage. And on Peter's end, for one thing, if he's not on tetra, there'd be no way he could be in a direct supervisory role over Neal or involved in any case concerning him, and the perception that he is, perhaps, a little soft on criminals would get a lot of additional fuel. They both get handed the capacity to seriously screw up each others' lives, which is one of the reasons Peter didn't tell Neal about the bond when it first set in – Neal was heading to trial for bond forgery, the Guardian-Ward bond wasn't relevant so long as Peter was on tetrasalvadine, due to the byzantine nature of law surrounding angels and angelic Callings, and Peter did not want to hand him any ammunition that he could use in any way against him. And then he just never brought it up, through all the time Neal was in prison, and after they struck the deal with the anklet. And Neal gets really, really pissed about this, because all this time, at any time, Peter could have chosen to ease back on the drugs and just casually peek into his hindbrain and Neal would have had no say in this nor any power, legal or pragmatic, to stop this, and the fact that Peter didn't do this still doesn't cancel out the fact that he could have and still could and Neal didn't even know.

So when Neal first discovers this and confronts Peter about it, it devolves pretty quickly into a lot of bitter sniping before they come back around to the unspoken equilibrium that is "Peter will continue taking tetrasalvadine and they'll both try not to think about it too much." And it's not until some time has passed and they've both had a chance to cool down from the sniping a little that they can sit down and talk about how they can work around this and use it, if necessary.

Great. So they can both screw each other over. Funny how that doesn't make Neal feel any better.

Peter glares at him for a while, then shifts his wings, repositions himself, and offers what Neal assumes is an olive branch. "...If it makes you feel better, everyone says getting a ward is supposed to be the happiest day of a guardian's life."

Neal raises his eyebrows, at that. "What, like, romcoms and riftcoms, 'you complete me' sorts of things?" His voice is still bitter, but Peter looks like he's swallowing something unpleasant, so Neal assumes that's a yes. And now his curiosity is piqued, and he can't help but ask, "What was it actually like?"

Peter studies him for a while, like he's searching for the proper metaphor.

"Like being handed a three-thousand-page case file for the first time and realizing you already know what it's going to say," he says, at length. "And being told that no one else can take it over, no one else can help you, no one else can even look at it. And it's up to you to solve it, except you don't know if it can be solved, and everything else you're meant to be doing gets thrown off to the sides and it can never be put on top of that case in the pile."

Neal turns that over and over in his mind, but the metaphor is too far buried in Peter's experience, Peter's worldview, Peter's life, for him to make out much beyond the obvious. And of course the bond doesn't go both ways; Neal can't look into Peter's mind and uncover what he's feeling, root around in the unease. "And your response was to shove the file into a file cabinet and throw away the key."

"You can't throw away the key," Peter says, darkly. "You have to keep re-locking it every twelve hours or it will bust out and lay waste to your case pile again."

"Every twelve hours," Neal repeats, and his eyes flick to Peter's IV. He's not sure if Peter is taking the tetrasalvadine by pill or intravenously, and there's no real point in asking, or in stating the blindingly obvious – he's seen what happens when those twelve hours pass by, and laying waste is a pretty accurate assessment. They're leashed to each other unless Peter is leashed to the tetra. That turns the bond into an opponent on Peter's end, something to be fought, something to be subdued – and a sword of Damocles on Neal's; a possibility, an eventuality, that he has no control over but which has the ability to cut him deep, if it falls. "For the rest of your life."

Peter's gaze is even, hard. "Or yours."

It's great, because despite the romcoms-and-riftcoms thing (and there's a whole 'nother section about how Angels and demons made up such a small percentage of the population, and such a small percentage of them wanted to busy themselves with scriptwriting for Hollywood, that what was shown could only ever bear a passing resemblance to reality), the guardian-ward bond is not a warm and fuzzy thing. It can become one, with the right people, but... there's no requirement that a guardian and ward have to like each other, or work together well. The guardian just has to protect the ward; that's the requirement. And there's no protection for the guardian against the ward turning around and exploiting the hell out of that bond, and the only real limits on a guardian's behavior are that it's painful for them when their ward is in physical or emotional distress. Peter probably could have just thrown Neal in prison and not gone on tetra so long as he was scrupulous about not leaving the city; so long as Neal didn't get shanked or have a nervous breakdown, the bond considers itself fulfilled.

The Rift is fun because it breaks everything.


...</rambledanse>