Remix: NOW IT CAN BE REVEALED.
andmydog wrote my Remix, and it's here, so if you're one of those people who don't read fic until you've got a name attached, go read it.
And now, because I've wanted to talk about this story FOREVER, are this year's notes on Remix. My story is here. It's Goku and Sanzo, and love, and death.
I was thrilled to get Bridgh, because I love her, and because I remixed a drabble for
remix_the_drabble and it was so much fun.
There was almost a Yami fic this year after all, because my first pick was girl!Hisoka from Five Things That Never Happened to Hisoka, because oh man, someone needs to write girl!Hisoka.
I actually got a bit of it written and most of the fic roughed out in my head, and then I realized that I was not writing so much of a remix as a sequel, and I really, really didn't want to write a sequel. I know some people do at Remix, and I always enjoy them, but to me it's writing a sequel, not remixing an original
So I went back to the drawing board and ended up with a few options, two of which came from the same drabble meme. I finally settled on this one, which in addition to being absolutely perfect, had the world's most beautiful prompt: Sanzo dies. Goku doesn't.
Here's what I took from the drabble: Sanzo dying as an old man and fighting like hell to live; Goku wanting to hang on as long as he could; and that final image, of the body burning at dawn, and everything else fading against Goku's memories.
So of course, the first order of business was changing things. IIRC, that last line was what made me set everything in spaaace; I wanted to keep the line but change it, and getting rid of the sunrise was the first, easiest step.
And then I just dove in. The first paragraph was the one I wrote first:
After a while, Goku was the only one at the temple who remembered when Sanzo's hair was blond. Gojyo would have said it was a wonder he'd kept any hair at all, if Gojyo'd still been around to say it. The young acolytes only knew a foul-tempered old man in robes as white as his thin hair, swinging a cane around with the ferocity of a master decades younger.
And that was how I killed Gojyo. I felt bad about doing it, but that line, 'if Gojyo'd still been around to say it,' was there, and it was right. And I liked the idea of Sanzo outliving the others out of sheer stubbornness.
One of the reasons I enjoyed doing the story so much was it gave me a chance both to expand the original story and the world in spaaaaace I had just made up. I figured Goku would never really fit in at the temple, so I tried to use that tension as much as possible-- as well as the fact that when Sanzo finally goes, in some ways, it'll be a relief to Goku in a lot of ways, though it's something he'd never express out loud, or maybe even mentally.
And then it occurred to me that someone else would need the sutra (or sutras, I've never quite figured what will happen to that pile of sutras after the end of things). And that's where Brother Temmu and Sister Izumi came from. Izumi means 'fountain,' or 'spring,' and there's an asteroid with that name; Temmu was the 40th Emperor of Japan. So Temmu got the troubles, and Izumi got...well, different troubles.
I am still unhealthily pleased with the stage business with the peaches. Once I realized there'd be a greenhouse in the temple (and of course the temple would have a greenhouse), I realized there would be peaches to steal, and it would give me a chance both to show why Temmu couldn't be a Sanzo, how he'd be all right directing the temple, and how things changed at the temple (and didn't change).
The chakra appeared on Izumi-- no, Tendai Sanzo's-- forehead as soon as Sanzo stopped speaking. "Do I still have mine?" Sanzo asked.
Goku looked. "Yes," he answered.
"I always wondered about that." He took a drag from his cigarette. "You'll tell Hakkai?"
"He died six months ago," Goku said, before he could remind himself to be kind
And this was when the story started getting really hard to write. I had decided early on that Hakkai would die before Sanzo-- Sanzo's a stubborn bastard, in any universe-- because it would leave Goku alone with a mountain of choices to be made, and none of his old companions to help him. I don't think it was a coincidence that
nekonexus's Saiyuki Reload re-read was coming about this time, because I always love the arc where Goku is separated from the others and decides that no, he can fight on his own, he's strong enough now.
And I think the very beginning of it was right in the drabble; Goku seems so very alone in that last line.
The Master's chambers were at the very top of the temple; the window at the top opened out into an endless distance of stars. Goku opened the panel, and settled back down next to Sanzo. They watched in silence for a while, and then Sanzo's breathing started to slow. Goku took his hand.
"Don't go out," Sanzo said. "The lightning can kill you."
"I'll be careful." Goku squeezed his fingers. He had thought there might be final words between them, but of course there weren't. What was there to say that hadn't already been said?
Blessed are the hospice sites on the Internet, which reminded me of the long, slow process of dying, and of the things that go said and unsaid at the end. They were also responsible for my only substantial change to the story (well, aside from all the rest), which was of Sanzo drowning in air and looking a bit nervous. It was perfect for the original story, but I didn't think it would work for the technologically-savvy era I'd set my new story in.
And Sanzo and Goku, of all the ikkou, have always been good, at least for certain qualities of good; they'd have to be good at the end, no matter what happened.
I really wanted Sanzo to be fussing over Goku at the end. Because he would. And then Goku sat out in the greenhouse for a while, because I wanted him to have that time. He needed it.
The 45-year-peaches still hadn't recovered from their last assault, but the plants were green and growing, and he could pretend, just for a minute, that they were all traveling together still, that JIPU-2 had never stopped running, that Andromeda was still a few more hyperleaps away.
I wanted to put a lot of the scope of the journey in at the end, the endless squabbling and stresses, poor longsuffering Jeep, and the wonderful/exhausting sense of there being more places to go, more things to do, miles to go before they slept.
I fussed and fussed and fussed about the ending.
Goku watched the flames. He thought about light, about a hand reaching for his own, about the world opening to him for the first time.
The cresting Earth was dim against his memories.
Because it was a longer fic and I wanted to set my story in the new place and time, I wanted to use the first image of Sanzo and Goku meeting-- that outstretched hand. It's a universal. Then the last line is the one from Brighd's drabble, with Earthrise replacing sunrise. (But 'cresting Earth' sounded better than Earthrise to me, and less like just a copypaste, even though that's totally what it was.)
So that is the Remix I did, and how I did it. And then
andmydog went and made it better. ♥
Here, enjoy a hilariously dated video of a song I adore, which has a bit of the feel I found myself going for. (In fact, you might just want to close your eyes and listen the first time round.)