[FIC] Eastern Promises/The Big Empty: in the desert sky we find home
I have literally been writing this fic for months. I think I received the prompt from helena_s_renn in October last year when I was prodding her for prompts to give me. It was something about Cowboy being an alien and something with Cowboy and Frank Hopkins or Nikolai. (It's actually been so incredibly long that I don't remember if she actually did send me the
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I'm happy to get your comments anywhere I can have them, lovely. /snugs
like Nikolai is telling this story about himself while feeling like a stranger in his own skin
You're doing it again, that bit where you tell me things about my writing that I never knew. It's almost eerie how often you do that, seriously. Because I've never thought of it this way before and you just hit the nail on the head with regards with the kind of storytelling here - that it's so detached, yet so intimate, that it's essentially Nikolai telling the story of himself to himself. In the sense of 'I'll write the end of my story and after that I will stop having a story.' /snugs you tightly.
I like the cryptic nature of all of their conversations which - at the same time - are so very clear and eloquent.
What they're saying makes a lot of logical sense, but the meanings are almost completely lost and escapes in what seems like thin air, really. Clear, yet ungraspable. I'm so, so happy that I managed to get that across because man, it seemed impossible when I was trying to do it.
LOVE this. Cowboy stays not only mysterious but potentially dangerous, and it's what draws Nikolai to him, whether he wants to or not.
You know, it's odd, because I agree about Cowboy's potential dangerousness, that he is deliberately mysterious and therefore unsafe. It's pretty much the sense I got from him in the movie. And this is odd because I managed to agree with you about this bit while disagreeing completely that Cowboy is the least sexual for me. His physical presence, the fact that we know nothing about him... I don't know, it makes him unearthly, but at least same time I find him intensely attractive because of that unearthliness. Because he's not a porcelain doll like Arwen or a regal figure like Galadriel; instead he's someone who 'roughs it out' and is unearthly because he works on a different realm of logic. It doesn't mean that he can't work on human logic; that he can't be egoistical, if behaving like that fit his particular brand of logic.
I'm not very sure if I'm being very clear. But basically: Cowboy is hot because of his unearthliness to me. And also his voice and his mouth, man. /breathes into hands
I do see why you're torn, and now I'm wondering if my rambling has nudged you towards one direction or another? :3?
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Nikolai is immensely contradictory that way, I think. His autopilot is basically to go directly against what he actually wants, ahahah. He's a huge control freak - at least in this story - so even his attempt to lose control just gives him even more.
But at the same time (and this is what Nikolai is thinking at one point) how much is due to Cowboy's manipulation?
Oooooh, this is actually intensely fascinating. Because the other comments are talking about how comforting it is that Cowboy basically takes Nikolai home by force, and you're telling me that Cowboy is basically preying on Nikolai here and forcing him to find the loss of control to be comforting. Or Nikolai is so broken that he finds something horrid to be good, and that's very eerie.
I think, honestly, given that I have no idea what I was writing, both works. It really depends on whether you believe in Nikolai's POV or not. Because somehow Cowboy is still strange and cryptic and unearthly here because we don't get his POV at all.
(And it's strange that you picked out those three lines in particular, because it's only after I wrote those lines that I finally realised where this was going, and I had to go back to edit. :3)
I still have difficulties bringing these to versions together. Hm.
What do you mean here, lovely?
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I would have to say this this bit is at least a little bit deliberate. >_>
Why these three lines? Explain :)?
Because before this, I wrote Cowboy as being a lot more... benevolent. A lot gentler, I think, almost like the Tolkien Elves in his inhumanity instead of being utterly alien. My original idea - the one I started writing in February - had him comforting Nikolai by telling him about the world in the skies, and I think part of why I couldn't write it is because the film gave no idea about it and it didn't feel authentic for Cowboy to be that nice. Then I wrote the three lines in the beginning of this month, I think, and I realised the direction I was going was completely wrong, so I rewrote everything.
I was refering to my two interpretations of Cowboy and his motivation and how I still can't decide which one is the 'true' one for me...
I think, for Cowboy especially, having more than one interpretation is perfectly fine. :3
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