I Saw Her Standing There 8b/10
A/N: Finally, got this last half done. Hopefully there won't be such a wait on chapters 9 and 10 but I can't guarantee anything. This one is a long chapter but I've been writing for this chapter this whole time.
Thanks to mollybeakers for encouraging me to keep in a scene of hospital life, it ended up being the transition I needed.
Enjoy!
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It is always a lot easier to write the younger characters, without the weight of the world and some pep in them, and opportunities still abounding, but it has been quite interesting to write an older Alice meeting with an older Maureen. It was also important to me that they weren't too awkward together, which is why the sense memory thing with the hands is so important. That was theirs for their entirely too short relationship and it opens them up to reconnecting. And Alice has been far too independent for too long, and had no one to really confess her whole past too- never having felt safe to do so with Nell, because for 15-16 years she's felt her mother's words and her father's walking out on her at her lowest moment and felt unworthy. Only when Maureen steps in and comforts her does Alice have any other frame of reference for what happened. And I wanted it shown that Maureen still deeply cared for Alice.
I know it's a lot of backstory but each part had debate and a reason behind it, though initially while I was starting out Alice had been Ms.Cool Independant, not so much baggage, but somewhere along the line I found it wasn't working. The suicide attempt was the first thing I knew had to have happened to her- after 13 or so years of running, to finally confess that she's a lesbian, after playing straight so long, she's lost her footing. The world she's lived in tells her it's sick and wrong to be who she is, and she can't go back to playing at straight. She has to spiral out and hit bottom, and being the people pleaser that she is, it's too much too feel she's failed something.
The husband became apparent she needed to help play straight enough to please her mother. As her mother became more and more horrid, I realized that the only way Alice could successfully play straight was to get married. I'm sure there are a great deal many sham marriages today, and the devastation on both sides is tragic.
And Alice never does or rarely seems to do things for her own self. So the baby, which I knew she wouldn't keep, that either would be stillborn or die shortly after birth, or social services would grant it to her mother, but no matter what, the baby had to happen too. Alice needed someone to be honest for. Having another life to live for would be the only thing to make her come out. If the baby hadn't come up, Alice would never have come out or taken much longer to do so.
Thank you for you comment and thoughtful insight.
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