That Fic Meme
Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any fanfic I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means
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Of course John was the very last place Rodney looked; his quarters. He was stretched out, belly up and paws dangling, drowsing in the afternoon sun. He turned his head and gazed fondly at Rodney, drunk on sunshine.
For a moment, Rodney could see John’s long, lanky, black-uniformed body as clearly as if he had transformed right then, see him squinting in the sun and smiling his slow, warm smile. Stuff like that had been happening all week, little things John did that reminded him of, well, John.
Made Rodney see John. He’d been doing it all week and hadn’t realized what he was...that he...of all the stupid...
Between one blink and the next, John was a cat again, drowsy and ridiculous and so blissed out he could barely keep his eyes open.
“Go back to sleep,” Rodney whispered, not trusting his voice.
John nestled back down into the t-shirt Rodney had slept in last night and twisted slightly to get more sun on his belly.
Rodney went to the bathroom and washed his face, avoided his own gaze in the mirror, and somehow made it to the balcony, where he watched the sun begin its slow descent.
This is one of the most lovely scenes in the whole series.
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OH WAIT A MINUTE, I LOVE YOUR ICON. Perfect!
Anyway, I walked into the room and she did this: He turned his head and gazed fondly at Rodney, drunk on sunshine.
And that image just stuck with me, like a burr, but one in a place I couldn't quite reach, like it was in between my shoulder blades.
And it nagged at me, forever. One day, I walked back into the bathroom/sunroom and there she was, on the window seat, and she did the same thing and I had this huge rush of love for her. I sat down and stroked her sun-warmed fur and said, "Do you know how much I love you?" There was a nearly audible "click" in my brain, and I said, "Oh, Rodney."
Obviously, the moment when Rodney sees John like that is the moment he realizes he's in love with him. I'd mentioned the scene in passing in "Dawning" and I went back to read it and realized I might have to retrofit it to fit this scene a little, but I pretty much had the idea. Noooo problem. Famous last words.
Then I had to write it. I wrote it, spelling the whole damn thing out, but, no, I don't explicitly say that Rodney's in love until "Dawning," don't say that he realizes he's in love, so that doesn't work and it certainly did not deliver the punch in the gut I was looking for.
I backed out of Rodney's brain a little, and decided to write it as lightly as possible, show more than tell what was happening to Rodney. And that took for-fucking-ever, and just wasn't gelling. Pulling back and pulling back and finally, since writing the scene word by word wasn't working, I just closed my eyes, put Rodney in his lab, and started with the moment he looked up from his computer to find that John wasn't in his box. I walked slightly ahead of him so I could see his face, like I was a camera operator holding a steadycam, and just watched until he was out on that balcony, staring at the sun going down on the day, with his poor heart asnarl with love and regret and fear and resignation. And I said, "Oh,Rodney."
And then I realized that the sun going down was a pretty nice metaphor for what he was going through.
And then I wrote it all down.
~~~
Thank you! That was fun!
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Very cool. And yeah, it sure did!
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