A spot of meta for you this evening.
I've been feeling the need for meta this week, particularly meta as it concerns some issues in my various fics. So here - the fruits of my efforts.
Honestly, I think the reason I was so upset about the existence of Kyle Harmon was because he utterly, thoroughly, and finally Jossed “Little Brothers” pseudo-canon. I could dodge the conversation at the beginning of “Nailed”, albeit with some serious footwork on my part, but a son was going to be hard to ignore, especially if this meant another Horatio Backstory Inconsistency ™.
Happily, there was fairly little backstory inconsistency, so, if I so chose, I could incorporate Kyle Harmon’s existence and the circumstances thereof. If I so chose. I’m not sure I want to, but at this point I’m not really sure I have an excuse for ignoring it. Julia and the Pensacola task force represent such a (comparitively) small part of Horatio’s backstory that not including them would seem an oversight on my part. Or just vindictive. Take your pick.
After all, according to Season 4 canon, which is the version I’m going with, Horatio didn’t leave New York until he was…either 35 or 37, depending on how you figure the timeline; I call it 35 (it also depends on whether you consider episode airdate as in agreement with at least the year in which the actual episode takes place, in which case canon’s already a bit screwed over because if the age Horatio quoted at Calleigh in Season 1 is accurate, and we’re expecting that to be concurrent with the information on the official site/wiki, then every episode of Miami technically takes place two years in the future and I’m not sure I want to think about that anymore), and he would have worked in Pensacola at 31 (again, given Kyle’s age and ignoring Miami’s odd timeline duality), which leaves him plenty of time to mosey on back to New York, take on the Resden case, pack up his things and move to Miami. So…in conclusion, I have no excuse not to include Pensacola, Julia Everly Eberle Pensacola Love Interest et al. He knew her for a period of months; it’s not like she does any permanent damage to my timeline.
Thing is…um…I’m not sure I want to include Julia. At least, not the way she exists in most recent canon. Now I don’t want to write her out, don’t get me wrong, but…I find that in spite of my initial satisfaction with the way the Missing Son Subplot™ was handled, I don’t like having to work with it in my fic.
Why? Simple. It’s boring. A three-or-four-month romance that ends badly works when we actually know both parties involved and if one of them is Marisol Delko - you KNEW I would figure out a way to work my Miami!OTP into this, admit it, but when one of them is a background character with one line of description? It just…does nothing. Other than demonstrate that Horatio has always failed at relationships, and PTB, darlings, we knew that already.
I want to do something just a shade different with Julia and Pensacola. Nothing radically different, nothing that would majorly shake up stated canon - hell, a little bit more bobbing and weaving, and I wouldn’t even have to slap that reader-killing AU label on it. Trouble is, I’ve been tossing this idea around ever since the premiere, and while I like it, I’m not sure if it works in a character sense. And I’ve already had to dismiss quite a few ideas for the LB past-verse as too implausible (and by “too implausible” I mean “Hon, if this actually happened, how would Horatio even function without a metric fuckton of psychiatric meds which knowing him he wouldn’t even take?”), so I no longer totally trust myself as a judge of what I may and may not write. Therefore, I would like to run it by you, my wonderful flist, for you are no doubt better judges than I.
The idea runs thusly: How many people, when given a chance to create a temporary new identity, would honestly pass up the chance to do something they normally wouldn’t? After all, in a month or two you’re going to be gone, and no one will ever need to know you existed if you don’t want them to. And most people, even well-adjusted people, get occasionally sick of being who they are. For example, I can’t tell you how many straight-A students I’ve talked to who’ve expressed a longing to skip school, drink themselves sick, or do some other insane-but-supposedly-fun thing - how many of them long to stop trying, stop needing to put in so much of an effort.
Which brings us to the task force Horatio’s working with in Pensacola. Whatever it is they’re doing requires Horatio to adopt an alias and an undercover identity, and all the temptations inherent in such a requirement soon follow. While I don’t think Horatio’s aware of this on a conscious level (I don’t see him as being quite that self-aware yet), by the age of 31 he’s a little bit sick of being who he is. He’s tired of being his brother’s father figure; he’s tired of being the protector/consoler/Pillar of Support in every relationship he’s in; he’s tired of needing to be in control of a situation. After all, he’s been locked in those roles since about the age of 16.
And then he gets to be John Walden for a few months. And while he obviously won’t undergo a huge personality change, I have a feeling John Walden won’t be quite the same person as Horatio Caine is. John doesn’t have a younger brother to watch over 24/7. John (because of the nature of his work) is not ‘protecting and serving’ every waking minute. John can, for example, flirt with women who are nowhere near Horatio’s ‘type’.
Which is where Julia enters into the picture. Now, I’m still debating whether or not I want Julia to be one of his co-workers on the task force - she was a military nurse, so it would make sense, but if she was his coworker, she’d also have access, in an emergency, to his real identity, if she didn’t know it already (I’m still researching precisely how task forces work, so get back to me on that one). Right now, I’m going with Julia being someone he just happens to meet while he isn’t on the job.
And she’s different, Julia is - so much different than the tiny brunette Latinas rather passive young ladies that Horatio generally ends up with. Horatio’s relationships with women, even non-romantic relationships, tend to echo (in a totally not creepy way I swear to you) the relationship he was forced into with his mother - that is, almost, but not quite, taking the place of the father as the confidante, the emotional support, and the structural center of the family. He finds himself falling back into this role with almost every woman he gets involved with; Julia, who doesn’t need his help or his support, offers him an escape from that. (Side note: I also think this is what draws him so powerfully to Yelina - she doesn’t need him, but she seems to like him anyway. Note also that, by repeatedly withholding information from Yelina within the series, he renders her dependant on him and starts going back to the safe and comfortable relationship structure that he’s used to. I promise I have a life.)
What’s more - and here’s the part I’m really not sure about - because Julia isn’t dependant on him the way others tend to be, he doesn’t have to think of her as a soulmate. He doesn’t have to be committed to her forever and ever, amen. Since the very concept of a casual relationship is almost absent in his life at this point, a short-term thing with Julia is quite freeing for him. Of course, his concept of a ‘casual’ relationship doesn’t align precisely with the rest of the world’s - he still gets fairly involved with her - but the fact that he never gives Julia his real name, I think, says something about the way he’s treating it. He knows this will eventually end, and he’s okay with that. Now, that attitude does directly contradict what he told Yelina, but I think I can account for that.
So, the story goes thusly. Horatio, along with a few more NYPD detectives (possibly including his partner, Peter Creedy? I don’t know if it’s feasible, but I really want to include Peter. I’m beginning to grow quite fond of him and he’s in maybe two chapters), ships down to Florida to do some specialized work that I haven’t quite decided yet. I’m thinking it could have something to do with homegrown terrorism - maybe tracking down a group of violent protesters who have struck in New York but are based in Florida? That seems the most likely scenario for both jurisdiction-crossing and the possible military involvement. Plus, if the people they’re after are terrorists, they may be using explosives, which would potentially pique Horatio’s interest in joining the bomb squad once he gets to Miami. Anyway, the New York folk have to adopt undercover identities so they won’t be recognized by potential suspects/targets/etc.
Sometime off the clock, Horatio (who is either by himself or with Peter) catches the eye of Julia, a very blonde, very not-Latina young lady by herself in the (bar/restaurant/other place where you meet people). Now, he’s not normally one for casual flirting, but he figures what the hell, nobody knows me here. He buys Julia a drink, they get to talking, and before too long they’ve got something going.
And he finds that he’s having more fun than he has any right to, because Julia is so different and he’s different, in some way he can’t quite place. He doesn’t need to provide a shoulder for Julia to cry on; he doesn’t need to tell her that everything’s going to be okay; he doesn’t need her to need him. And it feels so good not to be needed for a change.
After about two, maybe three months (according to his Very Strict Relationship Timetable), they become intimate - and this is the part that I’m worried about, because I had managed to keep Little Brothers almost entirely sex-scene-free except for maybe one scene involving Ray. And I’m not sure a)what the inclusion of this scene would do to Horatio as a character and b)how those reading the fic would react to it.
Especially since I want the scene to have a slightly disturbing note to it - there are lines in there about how he doesn’t have to be gentle with Julia, and how he doesn’t have to look away and pretend she’s Yelina. After 13 or so chapters of gen lightly spiced with H/Y and R/Y (The “Julia” chapter would be much further in than the chapter I’m currently writing, as I need time to plan), I don’t really know how a scene like that’s going to go over.
But part of the whole point of Little Brothers (such as it were) is to write Horatio as something less than perfect and Raymond as something more than a failure at everything, so I want to include that scene (and I’ve already self-censored out the ickiest bits). I think it’s important to his character as it exists in my personal LB-fanon.
Anyway. Continuing with the story. Horatio and Julia are together for a few more months, but by then his investigation is starting to wrap up, and Horatio has to prepare to go back to his old life. He’s starting to drift away from Julia. More importantly, he’s starting to feel intensely guilty about his casual relationship. He knows he’s not telling her the truth, that he (in his view) took advantage of her. He begins to contemplate telling her who he really is, and wondering just how important she really is to him. The fact that she isn’t all that important to him just adds to the guilt.
Julia, who we can tell is no fool, starts to pick up on the guilt and the distance between them, and one night she calls him on it, asking what it is he’s keeping from her. He doesn’t answer - passing up his last chance to set things right. Angry, Julia abruptly ends their relationship, saying that she deserves a little honesty if nothing else. Convenient for Horatio - he doesn’t have to do the breaking-up thing himself - but there’s still the nagging feeling that he’s done something really wrong, that he should have told her the truth. Which he totally should have. (You see, this was all just an excuse to continue my long-standing tradition of blaming the man for absolutely everything that goes wrong in a relationship. My policy: If you’ve got the single X chromosome, it’s your fault. No exceptions.)
Now, given his hang-ups at the end of the relationship, I can see how he may have convinced himself that what happened between him and Julia was “serious” - hell, his identity practically requires that it be serious. But I’m not sure that I could really get away with that, and I’m quite concerned that I might finally have to give in and slap an AU label on Little Brothers, which kills me because I know there are plenty of fen who avoid AU fics like the Black Death. Can’t say I blame them, but I just…don’t want that to happen to my fic. Selfish, yes, but still.
So, thoughts? Think I could get away with non-AUing this baby? Think the story will suffer if it is finally declared an AU? Should I scrap this plotline and go with something more canon-flavored? Is a (vaguely written and totally PG-13) sex scene too much? Does it disrupt the fic? I am conflicted and lost and require your assistance, my lovelies.
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And some Lucy Saxon-related Doctor Who meta, because she is the awesome.
Attempting to write “Thrall” has made me realize just how little I really understand of Lucy Saxon. She’s more complicated than she first appears, and understanding her fully requires an understanding of the Master that I’m not sure I possess. (Especially not with my limited access to the episodes in question and my all-but-nonexistent access to Classic Who.)
My first reading of Lucy was that she, like everyone else hooked up to Archangel, was spellbound by the Master, hence the title of the fic. But while everyone else was hypnotized by the subliminal messages embedded in their own electronics, Lucy fell under the spell of the Master himself, whom even the Doctor called ‘hypnotic’. She knows who he is in TSoD, which means he must have told her at some point (surely with a few embellishments on his part), and given what he could tell her of Gallifrey and the Time Lords and worlds beyond her own, who wouldn’t be seduced by that?
Of course, this would mean that there was already a touch of something darker in Lucy, something that a)wouldn’t freak out over all of this and b)was willing to cooperate with his schemes, no matter how many deaths they caused. And I can certainly believe that - look at her dancing in TSoD, as the Toclafane pour out of the rift. That’s not a healthy psyche right there.
But what, exactly, is that touch? Would it have manifested earlier in her life? Supposedly, she didn’t even want to follow her father into politics, and in mundane, modern England, what better method of assuming power would there be? What was it about Lucy that was won over so easily to following the Master? Did some part of her dream, even before she knew, of a wider universe? Did she wish it for her own? Perhaps she never thought of becoming a politician because she knew she could not be satisfied with something so plain. Perhaps her aims were higher.
Or perhaps she never even knew what she wanted, but the Master did. The Master chose her as his “faithful companion” because he knew what she dreamed of even if she didn’t - knew that beneath a harmless biographer lay a woman who longed to stand above the Universe and watch it. Because one of the impressions that I get from the Saxon arc is that the Master knows people. He may not know the Doctor, not perfectly, but he knows people. Again, I can’t %100 confirm this until I get my mitts on some Classic!Master, but something so simple as one human’s latent ambition, latent desire - or even, to put it in simpler terms, latent longing for something beyond, something more, a desire not so different from many of the Doctor’s companions if you think about it - should be easy enough for him to perceive.
Which leads to the next question - why would he do that? Why would he care? One other impression that I have of the Master (and which a few Classic!Who fans have stated) is that he’s not much bothered about anyone other than himself. He goes to extraordinary lengths specifically to survive, including almost imploding the political structure of Gallifrey itself. And then they’re the whole “conqueror” angle, which lends itself to a certain egomania.
But! The premise that the Master only cares about the Master is somewhat in doubt by the end of LotTL. Near the end of LotTL, the Doctor tells the Master that “the one thing he [Master] won’t do” is kill himself, or do anything that would cause him to die. Fair enough; if the Master’s foremost importance is himself, any kind of suicide mission would be fairly pointless. But then we get to the end, and the Master chooses to die rather than offer the Doctor any hope of ending his solitude.
What about that? What motivated that? Spite? Would the Master really kill himself because he knew it would torture the Doctor? Or did he see it as the only way out of being locked up in the TARDIS forever? The second option seems unlikely - I don’t think the Master would view death as a viable ‘plan’ under any circumstances, considering what he’s done before to keep himself alive (I do know that much about Classic Who, at least). But when the circumstances arise…
It leaves one to wonder what the Master would have done if Lucy hadn’t shot him. And whether that gunshot just might have been part of the plan. After all, he was goading on Francine when she had the gun to his head. Maybe dying was his escape plan, since he apparently had some sort of Chameleon Arch-like object on him when he was burned. Or maybe dying was the only blow he could strike against the Doctor at that point (“How about that? I win.”). In which case we need to revise our statement somewhat - the only thing more important than living and conquering is finally, truly, breaking the Doctor.
Which leaves me to puzzle out Lucy’s place in all that. I’m going with the interpretation (for now) that the Master used/seduced Lucy for his own gain rather than for any personal reasons. If Mr. Saxon has a wife, that makes him a more convincing political figure, plus Lucy’s family could provide him with some of the social foothold he needs. And so he charms the (relatively) harmless woman with stories of a wider universe and time travel and Gallifrey, and tells her he will lay it at her feet if only she will help him. She has no reason not to believe him (except for the Murphy’s Law of Science Fiction which states that anyone offering you power and glory or anything for any reason is thoroughly evil and will either betray you or die on you).
What else does he tell her, I wonder. Does he let any of the uglier realities of his long life slip out? Does he tell her about the Time War? About the Daleks? About the Doctor? About the never-ending drumming? About the rotting husk that Time Lords become once they run out of regenerations? He may not tell her about those directly, but I’m sure she picks up something considering all the time she spends around him. And maybe, maybe, some part of her pities him. Keep note of that; it’ll be important later.
And so, with Lucy’s help, the Master rises to power, creates the Paradox, and rules the world, mwahaha. And then, apparently, promptly forgets that Lucy exists. At least, that’s how it looks in Last of the Time Lords. Lucy becomes an accessory in a red dress; he’s taken her to the top of the world, true, but he’s also abandoned her there, isolated and friendless and out of her element. A side helping of emotional torment to go with the world conquest. Mmmm. Torment.
(Note: Supposedly, by this point, Lucy’s sporting some nasty bruises, although frankly I never saw them. Plus, I find that sort of unnecessary and I don’t particularly like it. It’s already abundantly clear that the Master is not a nice man; does he have to be a wife-beater too? I’d find it more effective if he just stopped paying any attention to her at all - if she was not even significant enough, in his eyes, to merit anger.)
Dear Lucy has started to have second thoughts about this whole Master business, I imagine, given that the man who told her he’d save her from her mundane life is treating her like crap. Now, granted, I could make the characterization of Lucy much more straightforward by just taking it from there: desire for a larger world with just a dash of latent lust for power, seduced by Master, turns on the Master once he starts being a jackass to her.
But…but…but that just seems so simple. And thus unsatisfying. And it doesn’t take into account all those other hypothetical-but-likely details. And it leaves a few conspicuous blanks in her characterization.
Yes, her chanting the Doctor’s name along with everyone else is easily explained away by her wanting to be rid of the Master. But what about the gunshot? The Master had already taunted Francine when she had the gun, and it was abundantly clear by that point that, as I discussed above, death would be preferable to the Master than being locked up in the TARDIS. So why does Lucy shoot him - effectively, giving him what he wants? If she’s on the Doctor’s side, why does she strike this huge blow to the Doctor’s psyche by killing the Master?
Does she know that’s what she’s even doing? You could argue that she doesn’t - she just shot to kill, with no idea that she was providing the Master with a way out. But that assumes that she knows nothing of Time Lords, or the War, or the Doctor. And maybe she doesn’t, but considering what she already knows of the Master, I think it’d be more likely that she’d know. In which case, shooting him makes even *less* sense, because wouldn’t he just regenerate?
Or maybe, in some twisted way, killing him was an act of mercy. Death would stop the drumming. Death would save him from the Doctor, who she may or may not see as a threat to him or herself.
I don’t know if any of this makes sense, and the more I try to read into it the more needlessly complicated it all gets, but there’s just so much about that shot - and her emotionless expression when she fires - that it almost pains me to dismiss it as yet another battered wife getting revenge on her abuser. It’s so commonplace. Which I guess is the point, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
(Of course, you could bring up the possible point that the Master was human when he was shot, and that maybe Lucy knew about it (or maybe she didn’t) - after all, as I’ve indicated, that ring that The Mysterious Lady With The Fingernails Of Evil picks up from the Master’s pyre has some suspiciously Chameleon Arc-like designs on it. Not saying that he was definitely human, but it would explain how he could “refuse” to regenerate.)
Thoughts? Am I the only one frustrated by the apparent simplicity of Lucy’s motivations? How much do you think the Master told her? Why did she shoot him? Seriously, any and all thoughts on this topic would be greatly appreciated.-----
Honestly, I think the reason I was so upset about the existence of Kyle Harmon was because he utterly, thoroughly, and finally Jossed “Little Brothers” pseudo-canon. I could dodge the conversation at the beginning of “Nailed”, albeit with some serious footwork on my part, but a son was going to be hard to ignore, especially if this meant another Horatio Backstory Inconsistency ™.
Happily, there was fairly little backstory inconsistency, so, if I so chose, I could incorporate Kyle Harmon’s existence and the circumstances thereof. If I so chose. I’m not sure I want to, but at this point I’m not really sure I have an excuse for ignoring it. Julia and the Pensacola task force represent such a (comparitively) small part of Horatio’s backstory that not including them would seem an oversight on my part. Or just vindictive. Take your pick.
After all, according to Season 4 canon, which is the version I’m going with, Horatio didn’t leave New York until he was…either 35 or 37, depending on how you figure the timeline; I call it 35 (it also depends on whether you consider episode airdate as in agreement with at least the year in which the actual episode takes place, in which case canon’s already a bit screwed over because if the age Horatio quoted at Calleigh in Season 1 is accurate, and we’re expecting that to be concurrent with the information on the official site/wiki, then every episode of Miami technically takes place two years in the future and I’m not sure I want to think about that anymore), and he would have worked in Pensacola at 31 (again, given Kyle’s age and ignoring Miami’s odd timeline duality), which leaves him plenty of time to mosey on back to New York, take on the Resden case, pack up his things and move to Miami. So…in conclusion, I have no excuse not to include Pensacola, Julia Everly Eberle Pensacola Love Interest et al. He knew her for a period of months; it’s not like she does any permanent damage to my timeline.
Thing is…um…I’m not sure I want to include Julia. At least, not the way she exists in most recent canon. Now I don’t want to write her out, don’t get me wrong, but…I find that in spite of my initial satisfaction with the way the Missing Son Subplot™ was handled, I don’t like having to work with it in my fic.
Why? Simple. It’s boring. A three-or-four-month romance that ends badly works when we actually know both parties involved and if one of them is Marisol Delko - you KNEW I would figure out a way to work my Miami!OTP into this, admit it, but when one of them is a background character with one line of description? It just…does nothing. Other than demonstrate that Horatio has always failed at relationships, and PTB, darlings, we knew that already.
I want to do something just a shade different with Julia and Pensacola. Nothing radically different, nothing that would majorly shake up stated canon - hell, a little bit more bobbing and weaving, and I wouldn’t even have to slap that reader-killing AU label on it. Trouble is, I’ve been tossing this idea around ever since the premiere, and while I like it, I’m not sure if it works in a character sense. And I’ve already had to dismiss quite a few ideas for the LB past-verse as too implausible (and by “too implausible” I mean “Hon, if this actually happened, how would Horatio even function without a metric fuckton of psychiatric meds which knowing him he wouldn’t even take?”), so I no longer totally trust myself as a judge of what I may and may not write. Therefore, I would like to run it by you, my wonderful flist, for you are no doubt better judges than I.
The idea runs thusly: How many people, when given a chance to create a temporary new identity, would honestly pass up the chance to do something they normally wouldn’t? After all, in a month or two you’re going to be gone, and no one will ever need to know you existed if you don’t want them to. And most people, even well-adjusted people, get occasionally sick of being who they are. For example, I can’t tell you how many straight-A students I’ve talked to who’ve expressed a longing to skip school, drink themselves sick, or do some other insane-but-supposedly-fun thing - how many of them long to stop trying, stop needing to put in so much of an effort.
Which brings us to the task force Horatio’s working with in Pensacola. Whatever it is they’re doing requires Horatio to adopt an alias and an undercover identity, and all the temptations inherent in such a requirement soon follow. While I don’t think Horatio’s aware of this on a conscious level (I don’t see him as being quite that self-aware yet), by the age of 31 he’s a little bit sick of being who he is. He’s tired of being his brother’s father figure; he’s tired of being the protector/consoler/Pillar of Support in every relationship he’s in; he’s tired of needing to be in control of a situation. After all, he’s been locked in those roles since about the age of 16.
And then he gets to be John Walden for a few months. And while he obviously won’t undergo a huge personality change, I have a feeling John Walden won’t be quite the same person as Horatio Caine is. John doesn’t have a younger brother to watch over 24/7. John (because of the nature of his work) is not ‘protecting and serving’ every waking minute. John can, for example, flirt with women who are nowhere near Horatio’s ‘type’.
Which is where Julia enters into the picture. Now, I’m still debating whether or not I want Julia to be one of his co-workers on the task force - she was a military nurse, so it would make sense, but if she was his coworker, she’d also have access, in an emergency, to his real identity, if she didn’t know it already (I’m still researching precisely how task forces work, so get back to me on that one). Right now, I’m going with Julia being someone he just happens to meet while he isn’t on the job.
And she’s different, Julia is - so much different than the tiny brunette Latinas rather passive young ladies that Horatio generally ends up with. Horatio’s relationships with women, even non-romantic relationships, tend to echo (in a totally not creepy way I swear to you) the relationship he was forced into with his mother - that is, almost, but not quite, taking the place of the father as the confidante, the emotional support, and the structural center of the family. He finds himself falling back into this role with almost every woman he gets involved with; Julia, who doesn’t need his help or his support, offers him an escape from that. (Side note: I also think this is what draws him so powerfully to Yelina - she doesn’t need him, but she seems to like him anyway. Note also that, by repeatedly withholding information from Yelina within the series, he renders her dependant on him and starts going back to the safe and comfortable relationship structure that he’s used to. I promise I have a life.)
What’s more - and here’s the part I’m really not sure about - because Julia isn’t dependant on him the way others tend to be, he doesn’t have to think of her as a soulmate. He doesn’t have to be committed to her forever and ever, amen. Since the very concept of a casual relationship is almost absent in his life at this point, a short-term thing with Julia is quite freeing for him. Of course, his concept of a ‘casual’ relationship doesn’t align precisely with the rest of the world’s - he still gets fairly involved with her - but the fact that he never gives Julia his real name, I think, says something about the way he’s treating it. He knows this will eventually end, and he’s okay with that. Now, that attitude does directly contradict what he told Yelina, but I think I can account for that.
So, the story goes thusly. Horatio, along with a few more NYPD detectives (possibly including his partner, Peter Creedy? I don’t know if it’s feasible, but I really want to include Peter. I’m beginning to grow quite fond of him and he’s in maybe two chapters), ships down to Florida to do some specialized work that I haven’t quite decided yet. I’m thinking it could have something to do with homegrown terrorism - maybe tracking down a group of violent protesters who have struck in New York but are based in Florida? That seems the most likely scenario for both jurisdiction-crossing and the possible military involvement. Plus, if the people they’re after are terrorists, they may be using explosives, which would potentially pique Horatio’s interest in joining the bomb squad once he gets to Miami. Anyway, the New York folk have to adopt undercover identities so they won’t be recognized by potential suspects/targets/etc.
Sometime off the clock, Horatio (who is either by himself or with Peter) catches the eye of Julia, a very blonde, very not-Latina young lady by herself in the (bar/restaurant/other place where you meet people). Now, he’s not normally one for casual flirting, but he figures what the hell, nobody knows me here. He buys Julia a drink, they get to talking, and before too long they’ve got something going.
And he finds that he’s having more fun than he has any right to, because Julia is so different and he’s different, in some way he can’t quite place. He doesn’t need to provide a shoulder for Julia to cry on; he doesn’t need to tell her that everything’s going to be okay; he doesn’t need her to need him. And it feels so good not to be needed for a change.
After about two, maybe three months (according to his Very Strict Relationship Timetable), they become intimate - and this is the part that I’m worried about, because I had managed to keep Little Brothers almost entirely sex-scene-free except for maybe one scene involving Ray. And I’m not sure a)what the inclusion of this scene would do to Horatio as a character and b)how those reading the fic would react to it.
Especially since I want the scene to have a slightly disturbing note to it - there are lines in there about how he doesn’t have to be gentle with Julia, and how he doesn’t have to look away and pretend she’s Yelina. After 13 or so chapters of gen lightly spiced with H/Y and R/Y (The “Julia” chapter would be much further in than the chapter I’m currently writing, as I need time to plan), I don’t really know how a scene like that’s going to go over.
But part of the whole point of Little Brothers (such as it were) is to write Horatio as something less than perfect and Raymond as something more than a failure at everything, so I want to include that scene (and I’ve already self-censored out the ickiest bits). I think it’s important to his character as it exists in my personal LB-fanon.
Anyway. Continuing with the story. Horatio and Julia are together for a few more months, but by then his investigation is starting to wrap up, and Horatio has to prepare to go back to his old life. He’s starting to drift away from Julia. More importantly, he’s starting to feel intensely guilty about his casual relationship. He knows he’s not telling her the truth, that he (in his view) took advantage of her. He begins to contemplate telling her who he really is, and wondering just how important she really is to him. The fact that she isn’t all that important to him just adds to the guilt.
Julia, who we can tell is no fool, starts to pick up on the guilt and the distance between them, and one night she calls him on it, asking what it is he’s keeping from her. He doesn’t answer - passing up his last chance to set things right. Angry, Julia abruptly ends their relationship, saying that she deserves a little honesty if nothing else. Convenient for Horatio - he doesn’t have to do the breaking-up thing himself - but there’s still the nagging feeling that he’s done something really wrong, that he should have told her the truth. Which he totally should have. (You see, this was all just an excuse to continue my long-standing tradition of blaming the man for absolutely everything that goes wrong in a relationship. My policy: If you’ve got the single X chromosome, it’s your fault. No exceptions.)
Now, given his hang-ups at the end of the relationship, I can see how he may have convinced himself that what happened between him and Julia was “serious” - hell, his identity practically requires that it be serious. But I’m not sure that I could really get away with that, and I’m quite concerned that I might finally have to give in and slap an AU label on Little Brothers, which kills me because I know there are plenty of fen who avoid AU fics like the Black Death. Can’t say I blame them, but I just…don’t want that to happen to my fic. Selfish, yes, but still.
So, thoughts? Think I could get away with non-AUing this baby? Think the story will suffer if it is finally declared an AU? Should I scrap this plotline and go with something more canon-flavored? Is a (vaguely written and totally PG-13) sex scene too much? Does it disrupt the fic? I am conflicted and lost and require your assistance, my lovelies.
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And some Lucy Saxon-related Doctor Who meta, because she is the awesome.
Attempting to write “Thrall” has made me realize just how little I really understand of Lucy Saxon. She’s more complicated than she first appears, and understanding her fully requires an understanding of the Master that I’m not sure I possess. (Especially not with my limited access to the episodes in question and my all-but-nonexistent access to Classic Who.)
My first reading of Lucy was that she, like everyone else hooked up to Archangel, was spellbound by the Master, hence the title of the fic. But while everyone else was hypnotized by the subliminal messages embedded in their own electronics, Lucy fell under the spell of the Master himself, whom even the Doctor called ‘hypnotic’. She knows who he is in TSoD, which means he must have told her at some point (surely with a few embellishments on his part), and given what he could tell her of Gallifrey and the Time Lords and worlds beyond her own, who wouldn’t be seduced by that?
Of course, this would mean that there was already a touch of something darker in Lucy, something that a)wouldn’t freak out over all of this and b)was willing to cooperate with his schemes, no matter how many deaths they caused. And I can certainly believe that - look at her dancing in TSoD, as the Toclafane pour out of the rift. That’s not a healthy psyche right there.
But what, exactly, is that touch? Would it have manifested earlier in her life? Supposedly, she didn’t even want to follow her father into politics, and in mundane, modern England, what better method of assuming power would there be? What was it about Lucy that was won over so easily to following the Master? Did some part of her dream, even before she knew, of a wider universe? Did she wish it for her own? Perhaps she never thought of becoming a politician because she knew she could not be satisfied with something so plain. Perhaps her aims were higher.
Or perhaps she never even knew what she wanted, but the Master did. The Master chose her as his “faithful companion” because he knew what she dreamed of even if she didn’t - knew that beneath a harmless biographer lay a woman who longed to stand above the Universe and watch it. Because one of the impressions that I get from the Saxon arc is that the Master knows people. He may not know the Doctor, not perfectly, but he knows people. Again, I can’t %100 confirm this until I get my mitts on some Classic!Master, but something so simple as one human’s latent ambition, latent desire - or even, to put it in simpler terms, latent longing for something beyond, something more, a desire not so different from many of the Doctor’s companions if you think about it - should be easy enough for him to perceive.
Which leads to the next question - why would he do that? Why would he care? One other impression that I have of the Master (and which a few Classic!Who fans have stated) is that he’s not much bothered about anyone other than himself. He goes to extraordinary lengths specifically to survive, including almost imploding the political structure of Gallifrey itself. And then they’re the whole “conqueror” angle, which lends itself to a certain egomania.
But! The premise that the Master only cares about the Master is somewhat in doubt by the end of LotTL. Near the end of LotTL, the Doctor tells the Master that “the one thing he [Master] won’t do” is kill himself, or do anything that would cause him to die. Fair enough; if the Master’s foremost importance is himself, any kind of suicide mission would be fairly pointless. But then we get to the end, and the Master chooses to die rather than offer the Doctor any hope of ending his solitude.
What about that? What motivated that? Spite? Would the Master really kill himself because he knew it would torture the Doctor? Or did he see it as the only way out of being locked up in the TARDIS forever? The second option seems unlikely - I don’t think the Master would view death as a viable ‘plan’ under any circumstances, considering what he’s done before to keep himself alive (I do know that much about Classic Who, at least). But when the circumstances arise…
It leaves one to wonder what the Master would have done if Lucy hadn’t shot him. And whether that gunshot just might have been part of the plan. After all, he was goading on Francine when she had the gun to his head. Maybe dying was his escape plan, since he apparently had some sort of Chameleon Arch-like object on him when he was burned. Or maybe dying was the only blow he could strike against the Doctor at that point (“How about that? I win.”). In which case we need to revise our statement somewhat - the only thing more important than living and conquering is finally, truly, breaking the Doctor.
Which leaves me to puzzle out Lucy’s place in all that. I’m going with the interpretation (for now) that the Master used/seduced Lucy for his own gain rather than for any personal reasons. If Mr. Saxon has a wife, that makes him a more convincing political figure, plus Lucy’s family could provide him with some of the social foothold he needs. And so he charms the (relatively) harmless woman with stories of a wider universe and time travel and Gallifrey, and tells her he will lay it at her feet if only she will help him. She has no reason not to believe him (except for the Murphy’s Law of Science Fiction which states that anyone offering you power and glory or anything for any reason is thoroughly evil and will either betray you or die on you).
What else does he tell her, I wonder. Does he let any of the uglier realities of his long life slip out? Does he tell her about the Time War? About the Daleks? About the Doctor? About the never-ending drumming? About the rotting husk that Time Lords become once they run out of regenerations? He may not tell her about those directly, but I’m sure she picks up something considering all the time she spends around him. And maybe, maybe, some part of her pities him. Keep note of that; it’ll be important later.
And so, with Lucy’s help, the Master rises to power, creates the Paradox, and rules the world, mwahaha. And then, apparently, promptly forgets that Lucy exists. At least, that’s how it looks in Last of the Time Lords. Lucy becomes an accessory in a red dress; he’s taken her to the top of the world, true, but he’s also abandoned her there, isolated and friendless and out of her element. A side helping of emotional torment to go with the world conquest. Mmmm. Torment.
(Note: Supposedly, by this point, Lucy’s sporting some nasty bruises, although frankly I never saw them. Plus, I find that sort of unnecessary and I don’t particularly like it. It’s already abundantly clear that the Master is not a nice man; does he have to be a wife-beater too? I’d find it more effective if he just stopped paying any attention to her at all - if she was not even significant enough, in his eyes, to merit anger.)
Dear Lucy has started to have second thoughts about this whole Master business, I imagine, given that the man who told her he’d save her from her mundane life is treating her like crap. Now, granted, I could make the characterization of Lucy much more straightforward by just taking it from there: desire for a larger world with just a dash of latent lust for power, seduced by Master, turns on the Master once he starts being a jackass to her.
But…but…but that just seems so simple. And thus unsatisfying. And it doesn’t take into account all those other hypothetical-but-likely details. And it leaves a few conspicuous blanks in her characterization.
Yes, her chanting the Doctor’s name along with everyone else is easily explained away by her wanting to be rid of the Master. But what about the gunshot? The Master had already taunted Francine when she had the gun, and it was abundantly clear by that point that, as I discussed above, death would be preferable to the Master than being locked up in the TARDIS. So why does Lucy shoot him - effectively, giving him what he wants? If she’s on the Doctor’s side, why does she strike this huge blow to the Doctor’s psyche by killing the Master?
Does she know that’s what she’s even doing? You could argue that she doesn’t - she just shot to kill, with no idea that she was providing the Master with a way out. But that assumes that she knows nothing of Time Lords, or the War, or the Doctor. And maybe she doesn’t, but considering what she already knows of the Master, I think it’d be more likely that she’d know. In which case, shooting him makes even *less* sense, because wouldn’t he just regenerate?
Or maybe, in some twisted way, killing him was an act of mercy. Death would stop the drumming. Death would save him from the Doctor, who she may or may not see as a threat to him or herself.
I don’t know if any of this makes sense, and the more I try to read into it the more needlessly complicated it all gets, but there’s just so much about that shot - and her emotionless expression when she fires - that it almost pains me to dismiss it as yet another battered wife getting revenge on her abuser. It’s so commonplace. Which I guess is the point, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
(Of course, you could bring up the possible point that the Master was human when he was shot, and that maybe Lucy knew about it (or maybe she didn’t) - after all, as I’ve indicated, that ring that The Mysterious Lady With The Fingernails Of Evil picks up from the Master’s pyre has some suspiciously Chameleon Arc-like designs on it. Not saying that he was definitely human, but it would explain how he could “refuse” to regenerate.)
Thoughts? Am I the only one frustrated by the apparent simplicity of Lucy’s motivations? How much do you think the Master told her? Why did she shoot him? Seriously, any and all thoughts on this topic would be greatly appreciated.-----