DVD Commentary: "Divine Interventions" (2/12)
Title: Divine Interventions (2/16) [DVD Commentary]
Characters: Dawn, Amy, Cordelia, Ethan, Willow, Kennedy, Rack, and others. One of the motivations for this fic was totally to pull together as eclectic cast of characters as I possibly could.
Genre: Grön.
Rating: The overall fic will include material up to and including NC-17; most scenes are considerably milder, though.
Warning: Noncon. I do not warn for plot elements other than noncon; I will tell you which chapter the noncon takes place in so you can skip it.
Timeline/Spoilers: Takes place after “Why We Fight.” Spoilers up to “You’re Welcome,” with a nod towards "Smile Time." Assume spoilers for all of the Buffyverse canon in the commentary.
Disclaimer: This fic has artistic value (as I believe all fanfic and fanart does) and is thus, in my opinion, allowed under LJ's TOS. Portions of this fic include material which may, however, be illegal to read in Australia. Read at your own risk. Both Dawn and Beth are seventeen in this.
Summary: Unlikely allies must team up to protect Willow from a resurrected enemy and the worshippers of the god Osiris.
Notes: Special thanks to spikendru for a great beta. Thanks again!
The original story is memorified here.
Previous chapter is here. The commentary to the previous chapter, in which I am clever and articulate and everything, is here.
Chapter Two
Amy Madison didn’t know the proper way to address a Higher Being. Even for a Wiccan as powerful as she was, it had never been necessary.
Note that she's using "Higher Being" as a technical term (she means "Higher Power," presumably--I'm not sure how I messed that one up). She has talked to Hecate Herself at this point in Watcher!verse canon, after all, in "That Old-Time Religion," when Hecate tells Amy to cast the "Killer in Me" spell (although apparently several readers interpreted that story as having Hecate be the First Evil in disguise).
She certainly didn’t know how to address a Higher Being who had just happened to pick on her through twelve years of public schooling.
A classic Amy moment. She's caught up in this spiritual world, but never loses track of the mundane reality.
Damn it all, she thought to herself. There’s no way I’m going to be all reverential to fucking Cordelia Chase.
I think for the longest time that was written as "f---ing Cordelia Chase" in the FF.net; for all I know, it might still be on there that way, although I figure I probably changed it when I revised the beginning and wrote the middle and end.
I'm of two minds about having my characters curse at all. In canon, nobody curses, so there is a sense that having Dawn or Faith pull out even one "F--k" or "S--t" is OOC. Pottymouth!Faith is actually fanon, but fanon does influence how one writes--despite never cursing myself, the words come naturally to mind when I'm imagining how others would phrase things--and I end up with my characters cursing a lot more than is strictly canonical.
The use of profanity is only one of many ways that I have to stretch to get the voices of the Buffy crowd. I use grammatical structures they do not (and eschew ones they do), pretty much talking the same way I write, never use slang terms for genitalia, etc.
And with that decided, she opened the door and entered the UCLA dorm room. “Hey, Cordelia,” she said. “I love what you’ve done with your hair.” Where did that come from? Oh, well. She had to admit, Cordelia’s new ‘do was looking pretty good.
“Isn’t it great?” asked Cordelia with a smile. “Benefit of being a Higher Power. Of course, they didn’t tell me what I’d have to go through to earn it. Namely having my body hijacked by a renegade Power and used to give birth to itself.”
Cordelia having awesome hair as a result of her ascension was pretty much established as canon in "You're Welcome," wasn't it?
Amy sat on the bed next to her. “Right. I suppose that’s worse than spending three years as a rodent.”
“Don’t suppose you came up to get me to compare ‘my life sucks’ notes. It'd be a close game, but I think Cordy would win in the end. Of course, Cordy has been freed from the mortal coil, while the potential suckitude of Amy's life is just beginning. It time?
Amy nodded. “Might as well get it over with, right?”
Cordelia got off the bed. “Might as well.”
Amy led Cordelia out of the dorm room, down to the lobby on the ground floor where twelve other girls were waiting. “Girls, this is Cordelia Chase. Cordelia, meet the former UC Sunnydale Wicca group. Or, as UCLA students delight in calling us, the ‘Sunnydale freaks.’”
This probably works better in my head, where it's all cinematic, then on the page. Fiction lacks some of the limitations of film, but has some of its own return.
All twelve girls had been transferred to the Los Angeles campus of the University of California system after Sunnydale’s campus had been destroyed. Amy moved with them. Hell, she even decided to enroll.
Exposition a plenty, but hopefully appearing fairly naturally. I wanted to make sure it was clear that, yes, this is the same Wicca group that we see in "The Killer in Me."
“As you may or may not be aware,” Cordelia began to explain, “I am a Higher Power. I trust you know what that it is?” Eleven girls nodded in unison.
Again, I'm seeing this in my head as a movie, using the sorts of lenses and set designs and whatnot Buffy typically would use. A lot of my stories come to me as text, but especially when there was fresh canon there were plenty that appeared as new episodes in my head.
Only Vaughne, the elected leader of the group, stood to the side, watching.
Remember her from "The Killer in Me"? She was there.
“What that means is upstairs I am a being of incredible power who can’t use it to do a damned thing. Down here I get to get my hands dirty, but I have to leave the big guns behind. End result, I’m pretty much a normal girl with seven thousand years of history crammed into my skull. And since I’m already dead, I keep on coming no matter how many times you strike me down. But beyond that, I’m just a grunt. It’s the thirteen of you who have the real power. You understand?”
More exposition, although we get to see Cordelia speechifying at the same time. I needed to make clear exactly what Cordelia could or couldn't do so early on, there so would be clear rules--rules which would later become a plot point.
Another unison nod.
“I trust you all know who Willow Rosenberg is. Last year, you cast a hex on her. This time, you’re going to be the ones keeping her alive.”
* * * * *
Alexia watched as Rack drained the energy of one of her priests. “We are going to need him, you know.”
“Don’t worry,” Rack answered, letting the boy’s unconscious form fall to the ground. “He’ll live. Could use some more, though.”
I was never quite clear--nor, I suspect, was anyone else--what exactly Rack was doing. He was some sort of magic broker, but where did the excess magic come from? And what exactly was the benefit he gained from it?
“Unfortunately,” Alexia said, moving closer to Rack and putting a hand on the unconscious form of her priest, “we need our priesthood.”
Alexia needs her priests the way Captain Kirk needs his redshirts.
She quickly checked the boy’s pulse; Rack had indeed let him live, although the pulse was weak.
“And I need power,” he insisted. “Dying takes a lot out of one.”
“So I’ve been told,” Alexia said. “I haven’t had the honor of trying it yet.
While she does serve the God of Death, I think she is being facetious when she calls death a honor; she's primarily looking after herself and doesn't plan on dying anytime soon, if ever. But you might read her some other way.
But I know just what you need: some young magic-users you can drain dry.” She smiled. Yes, that’ll do quite nicely. “And I know where we can find them.”
Some days, being evil was its own reward. But most of the time, it was just the beginning.
One of the limitations of written text is that one must always be in someone's POV, even if it's an omniscient narrator. Attempts to hide things from the reader are much more difficult to pull off than with film, where the camera is very good at controlling what the viewer gets to know and when independent of what the characters may or may not know.
* * * * *
“Do you know what I have in my hand, Beth?” Ethan asked.
Beth drew a few lines on the ground in red chalk, creating a geometrical figure. A gem. “An Yrthas crystal,” the boy said as he finished the drawing.
“Have you ever used one?”
“No,” said Beth. “But you have. When you summoned the demon Eyghon, you used it to enter telepathic rapport.”
Having such a young boy blithely assert details of one’s past could be disconcerting-even more so when one had Ethan’s past. Ethan could never know exactly what Beth did or didn’t know. But Ethan had gotten used to that; like most things, it could be endured with the proper discipline.
“She slipped it to me during our interview. She must have wanted me to use it to escape.”
“Even with the crystal magnifying your magic, you won’t be able to pierce the Shield,” Beth pointed out. “You want out, you’ll have to let me in.”
Pretty talky here--but then, there's some exposition that needs to be taken care of if Beth and Ethan are going to get out of that prison (and if they don't, there's no story).
Ethan nodded, knowing the boy was right. The detention facility was surrounded by a heavy anti-magical barrier, known to the inmates as “the Shield.” One person, even with magnified abilities, couldn’t get through it. But two, locked in telepathic rapport, might be able to pool their abilities enough to create an opening in it large enough to travel through.
“You ready?” asked Ethan.
Beth dragged the long side of his chalk across his drawings, obscuring them. “I’m ready,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Ethan nodded (knowing as he did so that Beth could not see the gesture) and stared into the heart of the crystal in his hand, let his mind connect with Beth’s, feel the vibrations of the Shield-
Darkness. No, not darkness, but void. Not even so much color as white or black could have been said to have existed. Then Ethan realized he could feel the emanations of the Shield, and even more than that of Good and Evil, of Chaos and Order. And the emanations went back into the Past, and slipped forward into the Future. Was this how Beth saw the world?
The two slid even deeper into rapport.
Ethan felt a body under his. Female, he could tell from the shape as it pressed upon his. Young. Naked. “Carmen,” he moaned. “Bitch.” He was naked, and he dug his fingernails deeper into the flesh of her shoulders as they-
Again, giving an insight into Beth's underlying misogyny.
Sight came back to Ethan’s eyes. They were outside the detention facility. Outside the Shield.
“How did we get here?” asked Ethan.
“We walked,” the boy answered simply. “Under a mantle of invisibility.”
“You can do that?”
“No,” Beth answered. “I’m just a seer. You’re the mage.”
“I can do that?”
“We got through, didn’t we?”
While Ethan was busy reliving memories of Beth’s sex life, it seemed the boy must have taken control of the telepathic link to not only open a hole in the Shield, but to also cast a mantle of invisibility-using Ethan’s spell-casting ability. The chaos mage shivered. Having his mind at the service of anyone else-least of all a seventeen-year-old blind boy-wasn’t an experience of which he was particularly fond. “So now what?”
“It was your girl who gave you the crystal,” Beth said. “How should I know?”
“Well, where is the bloody bint?”
A cough. “How about looking behind you?”
Ethan turned, and-sure enough-there was Dawn Summers in the front seat of a sporty blue two-door convertible. In her hand, a silver handgun was aimed right at them.
“Welcome to freedom, boys.”
I love showing Dawn being awesome, and this moment in particular I just love (even if the scene leading up to is so dialogue-heavy it is about to fall over). So will-to-powery.
* * * * *
Osiris is planning something.
In the Otherworld, Janus’ two faces did not change expression. I was aware of that, Hecate.
He means to move against Us, to try and remove Willow Rosenberg from that plane of existence.
Hopefully, the lack of quotation marks--indicating that the gods don't need to speak to each other, communicating just by willing it so--doesn't make it difficult to understand who is speaking where. A new paragraph indicates a new reader.
You once thought as Osiris did, Janus reminded Her. Did You not have Your own worshippers move against Willow Rosenberg?
They altered reality, Hecate admitted, causing her fears to become truth. But that reality was broken.
That which can be unmade can be made again. The god’s chide was gentle, but reproving.
I no longer wish it, Janus. I have taken her under My protection, even if she continues to spurn My worship in favor of Yahweh. Recent events have caused Me to reëvaluate her rôle. You know that.
Janus seemed to accept this. I see that You allowed a Higher Power to incarnate. Does she really suppose her presence can make a difference?
She is young, Janus. She feels that she must try. Can You fault her?
Hecate could have sworn She felt a wave of wistfulness permeate the Otherworld. No, He said at last. I suppose not. Yet the fate of Willow Rosenberg does not lie in her hands.
I think I wrote this section when I went back after finishing the piece, once I knew what Cordelia's arc was going to be.
And this girl in whom it does? What do You think of her?
Dawn Summers? Janus asked. She is a creation of pure chaos, after all. The Key. How could I not like her? And chaos follows her, even as it does the witch Willow Rosenberg.
Janus' priorities, like Ethan's, are sometimes questionable.
Hecate wasn’t sure She found that response all that reassuring. She is young to have such a burden placed upon her.
Yes, agreed Janus. As is Rosenberg. As are the Slayers. That is the beauty of it all, Hecate. In a situation such as this, only chaos can possibly result. Wait and see.
She didn’t doubt it. She only feared that this could be the chaos that destroyed Them all.
* * * * *
Amy Madison was about to go to sleep when there was a knock on her dorm room door. She turned back and opened it; outside in the hall was Vaughne, the leader of the Wicca group.
Explaining how the two of these characters meet and how they respond to each other's different approaches to Jossverse Wicca is something I've been planning to explore in "Black Velvet Moonshine," my Amy/Rack/Drusilla threesome fic. Planning to for years, so don't expect it anytime soon, I suppose.
“Can I do something to help you, Vaughne?” Amy asked.
The girl nodded. “Can I come in?”
Amy nodded, and Vaughne entered and sat down on Amy’s bed. “I still don’t understand why we’re helping this Chase woman, Amy.”
Cue another dialogue-heavy scene, but remember that one of my purposes for ficwriting when I wrote the initial scenes was to work through the canon, to try to fanwank it into a more coherent whole. The pr0n came later.
“Cordelia’s an old friend of mine,” Amy lied. After all, they had known each other for years; there wasn’t any need to inform the coven of the animosity-on the few occasions that Cordelia even acknowledged Amy’s existence-that had existed between the two as teenagers. And pre-teens. And children. Pretty much since kindergarten, now that Amy thought about it. “And so was Willow.” That was the truth. Wasn’t it?
“But last year-“
“I know what I asked you to do last year,” Amy said. “And we had our reasons for doing it. She was getting too powerful. Hell, she practically destroyed the world.”
“And now?”
“Things have changed. The Goddess wants her alive.”
“You’re sure of that?” It was a fair question, Amy supposed. After all, she had never been a sycophant. Worship wasn’t exactly her thing. And yet Hecate had chosen her, and told her Her will.
“A Higher Power doesn’t just manifest herself as incarnate by wiggling her nose,” pointed out Amy. “It pretty much requires a divine mandate.”
Note that Amy doesn't go straight to "Because She told me so."
“But I thought you said she’s done it before,” observed Vaughne. “Twice, even.”
“She has. And each time, it was a major affair. The first time, as I understand it, it was the result of another Power manipulating her. It took the combined energies of both of them to get Cordelia to incarnate. And once she did, the other Power took control of her body and used it to give birth to herself, siphoning off Cordy’s energy once again.”
“And the second time?”
“Payback for the first time. She figured they owed her something, that she deserved to get to do it for real, even if for only a short time. A day. The Powers agreed.”
More hashing through canon. I mean, most readers will be familiar with Cordelia's two incarnations, but I wanted to put forth this particular way of constructing the overarching narrative.
“I just don’t get why the Goddess would change Her mind like that,” complained Vaughne.
The gods, They are fickle.
“Is this Rosenberg girl dangerous or not?”
Amy sat down next to Vaughne, put her hand on the other girl’s shoulder. “I have a feeling we’re about to find out,” she said.