DVD Commentary: Autumn Gold
Because three people demanded it!
If you haven't read it already, please read Autumn Gold first. It's a short Saiyuki/Saiyuki Gaiden story, with no spoilers for anything because it's a reincarnation story and takes place outside of canonical timelines.
This story grew out a drabble I wrote a while back, Better Luck Next Time. (Also reincarnation fic, so no spoilers there either.) When I wrote that, I always envisioned those two lines as a longer story, and thought of it as an early Kenren-Tenpou incarnation rather than a later Gojyo-Hakkai one. So when I was contemplating another incarnation that never happened, expanding that one came to mind.
I have always loved writing about soldiers. I went to a military school for a year when I lived in India, which was a great experience that only cemented my somewhat guilty positive feelings about soldiers- somewhat guilty because war is bad, and also that when you give scared young men guns and tell them that killing people is OK but only some people sometimes, predictably awful things tend to happen when some of them, unsurprisingly, ignore the “some people sometimes.” On the other hand, there is also discipline and camaraderie and loyalty and duty and courage and tragedy and bonds closer than brothers. And sexy uniforms.
So I particularly loved that Kenren and Tenpou are soldiers, and I liked the idea of them serving together again. And because of those two lines that I’d already written, I knew that it would be a tragedy, and I knew which one was going to die. Though I didn’t make it explicit in the original drabble, I’d envisioned their relative rank staying the same. I think back then I’d kept it that way because it echoed forward to Gojyo finding Hakkai bleeding to death, which struck me as a key moment that might well have repeated over incarnations.
I wrestled for ages over what to call them. I didn’t want to invent names. For a while I thought of using Japanese ranks, but that seemed weird. Finally I figured that they might well have gotten so into the habit of addressing each other by rank that they’d think of each other that way. I like the way this works, though I had to pause every damn time I wrote “lieutenant,” which is a word I find very difficult to spell. That’s probably part of the reason why it’s written in first person.
I know what fear is.
It’s not fighting for your life. That’s not scary, that’s fun.
Everything’s crystal-clear. You see-no, you know what your enemy’s going to do, so as he starts to swing high, you drop low and thrust. Don’t let the blood blind you. Pull out, duck to the side, move on. You don’t feel pain. Your breath burns in your throat like a shot of hard liquor. There’s no time to think, just to know and do. You stop to think- that is to say, you fuck up- you die. That’s why it makes you feel so alive.
The first few lines set the character for me. It seems a very Kenren attitude. He’s still making sure to escape the boredom that plagued him in Heaven, where he was a soldier who couldn’t kill- and that is what soldiers are meant for, after all.
The description of fighting is taken partly from my experience with free-sparring, and partly from my experience of fist-fights when I was a kid. The jerky tempo is supposed to echo the jump-cut effect of fighting. You could also take words like “pull out” and “thrust” as sexual references- I didn’t do that deliberately, but noticed it when I was revising. It made a lot of sense given the next couple paragraphs and the two big bonding experiences for the captain and the lieutenant, so I left it in.
And hard liquor, of course, is something the lieutenant would be quite familiar with. I always try to keep metaphors in character for the POV character who’s using them.
I didn't want to set it in too specific a time period, but I did want to establish that they're fighting with swords.
The captain says battle is moving meditation. When we’re not fighting, he likes to practice his forms by himself and spar with me. I like to go fishing and climb high places. We both like to drink and fuck. He says those are all types of moving meditation. Well, maybe not drinking. But they all give you that strong pure feeling that’s the opposite of boredom, and the opposite of fear.
More on the “escape the boredom of Heaven” theme. I have only ever heard the term “moving meditation” in reference to martial arts, but battle is the ultimate expression of martial art. The captain may seem a bit more educated than the lieutenant, just by using that phrase-at least, that’s what I was going for. The hobbies of climbing and fishing both come from Gaiden, I think, though now I can’t recall when fishing is mentioned. We see Kenren in a tree a couple times, though I think here he means rock-climbing.
Some soldiers don’t like waiting for battles. They don’t mind once the fighting starts, but the waiting scares them. I just get bored. That’s why I always bring a pack of cards, and he always brings a book or three. I used to think I was afraid of boredom, but that was when I didn’t know what fear was.
I’m hoping the reference to books and cards clues people in to who is who, if they haven’t figured it out already.
Fear is the end of the battle and you can’t find your captain.
He wasn’t there when we re-assembled. He wasn’t in the tent with the wounded. And no one took any prisoners.
Fear is turning over every face-down body in case it’s him, and every face-up one in case he’s underneath. I should have been methodical, started at one end and gone up and down till I’d crossed the whole field, like a farmer in a rice paddy. But I ran back and forth and everywhere, looking in the same place three times, till I finally realized he wasn’t on the field. He must have stumbled off it, like people do when they can’t fight any more and don’t want to get trampled.
It was like I’d been wearing blinders. Once I thought to look for it, I saw the trail right away.
This part took forever to write. I have a lot of trouble with transitions, and tend to get bogged down in scenes when I only need a few sentences.
He was lying under a ginkgo tree, not sprawled like a corpse or curled up in pain, just lying there relaxed like he’d gone outside to read on a sunny afternoon. For a second I was convinced that he’d gotten bored with the battle and wandered off to take a nap. I had it all ready, what I’d say to him for scaring the shit out of me.
I can see Tenpou wandering off a battlefield to nap, can’t you?
The ginkgo tree was originally a cherry, but I decided that I could get the same effect with a ginkgo and be less cliched. They turn gold in autumn, which also symbolizes brief lives.
And then I got to his side, and his eyes were open and his glasses were on, but the blood was just everywhere.
“You stupid fuck!” I blurted out, which was the first part of what I’d been planning to say. “Why didn’t you even try to stop the bleeding?”
He gave me that look, like I was being a dumb-ass. “I did.”
I saw then that he’d knotted someone else’s shirt around his chest, but it was so completely soaked through that I hadn’t even seen that it was there.
This story has almost no conflict, so for narrative drive I mostly built it around the lieutenant’s stages of realization that things were going very, very wrong. There’s a couple of them in there.
Fuck.
“Sorry,” I said. “Guess I’m the one that needs glasses.”
I leaned over to slide my arms under his back, and he took that opportunity to grab my hand. His grip was strong, but cold as a blade.
More military metaphors. Cold skin is also a sign of clinical shock- of which there are more below.
“I’m not going.”
“It’s all right. You don’t have to walk, I’ll carry you. ”
“I said no. Lieutenant.” His breathing was ragged and shallow, but the command voice still worked. “I am not… going to die… upside-down over your shoulder.”
“That wasn’t how…”
I was close enough to see my own face reflected in his eyes, shining bright behind the smudged lenses. Then I sat back up, and for a moment he still looked to me as if he ought to have a book in one hand and a cup of sake in the other, telling me trivia about strategists I’d never heard of. And then I blinked and cleared my eyes, and his face was the color of snow over ashes, and every breath sounded like paper crumpling. And there was all that blood.
There’s a couple things going on here. The main ones are… well, I wrote the thing, and every time I read it, my heart breaks for the lieutenant. The captain’s clearly had time to reconcile himself. The lieutenant is just finding out now. And the terrible moment when someone you love is dying, and it seems so absurd that you can’t just turn time back to the way they were before.
I also wanted to write at least a little bit realistically in terms of medical details, although it’s expressed poetically because the lieutenant wouldn’t know the terms, and because he loves the captain so. “Paper crumpling” is because of the association of the captain and Tenpou with books and paper; it’s also one of the many different sounds associated with fluid in the lungs, though I think more likely with something like congestive heart failure than having been stabbed in the chest.
I opened my mouth to tell him he was wrong, that he had to hang on, that I wouldn’t let him go and I was taking him back whether he liked it or not. But I owed it to him not to be an annoying asshole, just for this once.
It goes by quickly, but this is the key moment in the whole thing; the choice the lieutenant has to make. Does he waste their time in denial, or does he say good-bye? I thought that Kenren would say good-bye. I’m not sure Gojyo would; though I’m also not sure that Gojyo wouldn’t be better-equipped to pull a miracle out of his sleeve.
This is a personal thing for me. When I was younger and more of an emotional idiot, I did miss my chance to say good-bye to some people I loved, because that would have ruined my shiny plastic attitude that everything would be just fine.
The great thing about fiction is that you can make it come out better than it did in real life. It feels like lying if you try to make it come out perfect; in this story, it would have felt like lying if the captain hadn’t died. But it felt right to make it come out better; to give them one last moment together.
I was kneeling already, but I shifted my position to make it formal. “It’s been my very great honor and pleasure to serve under you, captain.” Then, dropping the respect language, I added, “And I mean that in every sense of those words.” I didn’t want to interfere with his breathing, so I just pressed my lips to his forehead.
This is my attempt at rendering keigo in English, to echo back to Tenpou and Kenren’s first meeting. I don’t think I pulled it off at all, alas. It's very difficult to get levels of formality in English.
I am also referencing Li Touten’s equally untranslatable remark to Tenpou about serving under Kenren.
He was smiling when I straightened up. “Mine too. I’ll try… not to go too far… without you.”
A gust of wind knocked a flurry of leaves off the ginkgo tree. They came spiraling down, a hundred tiny fans of old gold, and the captain’s gaze drifted away from me to watch them fall. “Nothing like autumn.”
“Spring is better,” I said automatically. “Sake and cherry blossoms, the weather’s nicer and the women dress all…” That was when it hit me: this was the last time we were ever going to argue over the seasons, or anything else. I choked.
I had to bring in sake under the sakura. It’s just not a Gaiden story without it.
“Lieutenant!” It was the command voice again. My head jerked back. “You are not… to hurry… to meet me.”
I couldn’t speak just then, and anyway I wasn’t going to tell him any lies. “I won’t,” I said at last. “I promise.”
“Good.” He lifted his hand to his face, forgetting, like he always did, that he was wearing glasses. Blood smeared all over the right lens.
Calling forward to Hakkai losing his right eye. I don't, incidentally, think the captain was talking about him actively committing suicide, but about being careless in battle.
“I’ll get that.” I lifted them off his face and hunted for something to polish them with that wasn’t covered in mud or blood or sweat. I had to tear out some of the lining of my vest, but they sparkled when I was through.
Handling someone else’s glasses is a very intimate thing.
When I went to put them on, his eyes were wide and black, and there wasn’t anyone behind them any more.
I cleaned his face before I put his glasses on, and did my best with his hands and hair. I didn’t bother brushing off the leaves that had fallen on to his chest and stuck; he’d have liked that. Then I picked him up and headed back to camp.
When I thought of what would happen when I walked in- exclamations, medics rushing up in case he was still alive, questions about what had happened (I realized then that I had no fucking idea), stories about what a great guy he was, probably even some dumb motherfuckers telling me they were sorry- I wanted to jump in the river instead. But I had promised not to hurry.
The feeling that having to face other people- and worse, break the news- is the most awful thing imaginable is also autobiographical. I was once in the position of calling people up and telling them that someone was dead, and after two phone calls, I could not face another and shoved off the responsibility on to the second person I spoke to.
The lieutenant, here, is again much more mature than I was. Poor guy. I do believe that he keeps his promise.
You better keep your promise, captain, and wait for me.
I didn’t have that line in mind when I started writing, but I know a perfect closing line when I think of one.
If you haven't read it already, please read Autumn Gold first. It's a short Saiyuki/Saiyuki Gaiden story, with no spoilers for anything because it's a reincarnation story and takes place outside of canonical timelines.
This story grew out a drabble I wrote a while back, Better Luck Next Time. (Also reincarnation fic, so no spoilers there either.) When I wrote that, I always envisioned those two lines as a longer story, and thought of it as an early Kenren-Tenpou incarnation rather than a later Gojyo-Hakkai one. So when I was contemplating another incarnation that never happened, expanding that one came to mind.
I have always loved writing about soldiers. I went to a military school for a year when I lived in India, which was a great experience that only cemented my somewhat guilty positive feelings about soldiers- somewhat guilty because war is bad, and also that when you give scared young men guns and tell them that killing people is OK but only some people sometimes, predictably awful things tend to happen when some of them, unsurprisingly, ignore the “some people sometimes.” On the other hand, there is also discipline and camaraderie and loyalty and duty and courage and tragedy and bonds closer than brothers. And sexy uniforms.
So I particularly loved that Kenren and Tenpou are soldiers, and I liked the idea of them serving together again. And because of those two lines that I’d already written, I knew that it would be a tragedy, and I knew which one was going to die. Though I didn’t make it explicit in the original drabble, I’d envisioned their relative rank staying the same. I think back then I’d kept it that way because it echoed forward to Gojyo finding Hakkai bleeding to death, which struck me as a key moment that might well have repeated over incarnations.
I wrestled for ages over what to call them. I didn’t want to invent names. For a while I thought of using Japanese ranks, but that seemed weird. Finally I figured that they might well have gotten so into the habit of addressing each other by rank that they’d think of each other that way. I like the way this works, though I had to pause every damn time I wrote “lieutenant,” which is a word I find very difficult to spell. That’s probably part of the reason why it’s written in first person.
I know what fear is.
It’s not fighting for your life. That’s not scary, that’s fun.
Everything’s crystal-clear. You see-no, you know what your enemy’s going to do, so as he starts to swing high, you drop low and thrust. Don’t let the blood blind you. Pull out, duck to the side, move on. You don’t feel pain. Your breath burns in your throat like a shot of hard liquor. There’s no time to think, just to know and do. You stop to think- that is to say, you fuck up- you die. That’s why it makes you feel so alive.
The first few lines set the character for me. It seems a very Kenren attitude. He’s still making sure to escape the boredom that plagued him in Heaven, where he was a soldier who couldn’t kill- and that is what soldiers are meant for, after all.
The description of fighting is taken partly from my experience with free-sparring, and partly from my experience of fist-fights when I was a kid. The jerky tempo is supposed to echo the jump-cut effect of fighting. You could also take words like “pull out” and “thrust” as sexual references- I didn’t do that deliberately, but noticed it when I was revising. It made a lot of sense given the next couple paragraphs and the two big bonding experiences for the captain and the lieutenant, so I left it in.
And hard liquor, of course, is something the lieutenant would be quite familiar with. I always try to keep metaphors in character for the POV character who’s using them.
I didn't want to set it in too specific a time period, but I did want to establish that they're fighting with swords.
The captain says battle is moving meditation. When we’re not fighting, he likes to practice his forms by himself and spar with me. I like to go fishing and climb high places. We both like to drink and fuck. He says those are all types of moving meditation. Well, maybe not drinking. But they all give you that strong pure feeling that’s the opposite of boredom, and the opposite of fear.
More on the “escape the boredom of Heaven” theme. I have only ever heard the term “moving meditation” in reference to martial arts, but battle is the ultimate expression of martial art. The captain may seem a bit more educated than the lieutenant, just by using that phrase-at least, that’s what I was going for. The hobbies of climbing and fishing both come from Gaiden, I think, though now I can’t recall when fishing is mentioned. We see Kenren in a tree a couple times, though I think here he means rock-climbing.
Some soldiers don’t like waiting for battles. They don’t mind once the fighting starts, but the waiting scares them. I just get bored. That’s why I always bring a pack of cards, and he always brings a book or three. I used to think I was afraid of boredom, but that was when I didn’t know what fear was.
I’m hoping the reference to books and cards clues people in to who is who, if they haven’t figured it out already.
Fear is the end of the battle and you can’t find your captain.
He wasn’t there when we re-assembled. He wasn’t in the tent with the wounded. And no one took any prisoners.
Fear is turning over every face-down body in case it’s him, and every face-up one in case he’s underneath. I should have been methodical, started at one end and gone up and down till I’d crossed the whole field, like a farmer in a rice paddy. But I ran back and forth and everywhere, looking in the same place three times, till I finally realized he wasn’t on the field. He must have stumbled off it, like people do when they can’t fight any more and don’t want to get trampled.
It was like I’d been wearing blinders. Once I thought to look for it, I saw the trail right away.
This part took forever to write. I have a lot of trouble with transitions, and tend to get bogged down in scenes when I only need a few sentences.
He was lying under a ginkgo tree, not sprawled like a corpse or curled up in pain, just lying there relaxed like he’d gone outside to read on a sunny afternoon. For a second I was convinced that he’d gotten bored with the battle and wandered off to take a nap. I had it all ready, what I’d say to him for scaring the shit out of me.
I can see Tenpou wandering off a battlefield to nap, can’t you?
The ginkgo tree was originally a cherry, but I decided that I could get the same effect with a ginkgo and be less cliched. They turn gold in autumn, which also symbolizes brief lives.
And then I got to his side, and his eyes were open and his glasses were on, but the blood was just everywhere.
“You stupid fuck!” I blurted out, which was the first part of what I’d been planning to say. “Why didn’t you even try to stop the bleeding?”
He gave me that look, like I was being a dumb-ass. “I did.”
I saw then that he’d knotted someone else’s shirt around his chest, but it was so completely soaked through that I hadn’t even seen that it was there.
This story has almost no conflict, so for narrative drive I mostly built it around the lieutenant’s stages of realization that things were going very, very wrong. There’s a couple of them in there.
Fuck.
“Sorry,” I said. “Guess I’m the one that needs glasses.”
I leaned over to slide my arms under his back, and he took that opportunity to grab my hand. His grip was strong, but cold as a blade.
More military metaphors. Cold skin is also a sign of clinical shock- of which there are more below.
“I’m not going.”
“It’s all right. You don’t have to walk, I’ll carry you. ”
“I said no. Lieutenant.” His breathing was ragged and shallow, but the command voice still worked. “I am not… going to die… upside-down over your shoulder.”
“That wasn’t how…”
I was close enough to see my own face reflected in his eyes, shining bright behind the smudged lenses. Then I sat back up, and for a moment he still looked to me as if he ought to have a book in one hand and a cup of sake in the other, telling me trivia about strategists I’d never heard of. And then I blinked and cleared my eyes, and his face was the color of snow over ashes, and every breath sounded like paper crumpling. And there was all that blood.
There’s a couple things going on here. The main ones are… well, I wrote the thing, and every time I read it, my heart breaks for the lieutenant. The captain’s clearly had time to reconcile himself. The lieutenant is just finding out now. And the terrible moment when someone you love is dying, and it seems so absurd that you can’t just turn time back to the way they were before.
I also wanted to write at least a little bit realistically in terms of medical details, although it’s expressed poetically because the lieutenant wouldn’t know the terms, and because he loves the captain so. “Paper crumpling” is because of the association of the captain and Tenpou with books and paper; it’s also one of the many different sounds associated with fluid in the lungs, though I think more likely with something like congestive heart failure than having been stabbed in the chest.
I opened my mouth to tell him he was wrong, that he had to hang on, that I wouldn’t let him go and I was taking him back whether he liked it or not. But I owed it to him not to be an annoying asshole, just for this once.
It goes by quickly, but this is the key moment in the whole thing; the choice the lieutenant has to make. Does he waste their time in denial, or does he say good-bye? I thought that Kenren would say good-bye. I’m not sure Gojyo would; though I’m also not sure that Gojyo wouldn’t be better-equipped to pull a miracle out of his sleeve.
This is a personal thing for me. When I was younger and more of an emotional idiot, I did miss my chance to say good-bye to some people I loved, because that would have ruined my shiny plastic attitude that everything would be just fine.
The great thing about fiction is that you can make it come out better than it did in real life. It feels like lying if you try to make it come out perfect; in this story, it would have felt like lying if the captain hadn’t died. But it felt right to make it come out better; to give them one last moment together.
I was kneeling already, but I shifted my position to make it formal. “It’s been my very great honor and pleasure to serve under you, captain.” Then, dropping the respect language, I added, “And I mean that in every sense of those words.” I didn’t want to interfere with his breathing, so I just pressed my lips to his forehead.
This is my attempt at rendering keigo in English, to echo back to Tenpou and Kenren’s first meeting. I don’t think I pulled it off at all, alas. It's very difficult to get levels of formality in English.
I am also referencing Li Touten’s equally untranslatable remark to Tenpou about serving under Kenren.
He was smiling when I straightened up. “Mine too. I’ll try… not to go too far… without you.”
A gust of wind knocked a flurry of leaves off the ginkgo tree. They came spiraling down, a hundred tiny fans of old gold, and the captain’s gaze drifted away from me to watch them fall. “Nothing like autumn.”
“Spring is better,” I said automatically. “Sake and cherry blossoms, the weather’s nicer and the women dress all…” That was when it hit me: this was the last time we were ever going to argue over the seasons, or anything else. I choked.
I had to bring in sake under the sakura. It’s just not a Gaiden story without it.
“Lieutenant!” It was the command voice again. My head jerked back. “You are not… to hurry… to meet me.”
I couldn’t speak just then, and anyway I wasn’t going to tell him any lies. “I won’t,” I said at last. “I promise.”
“Good.” He lifted his hand to his face, forgetting, like he always did, that he was wearing glasses. Blood smeared all over the right lens.
Calling forward to Hakkai losing his right eye. I don't, incidentally, think the captain was talking about him actively committing suicide, but about being careless in battle.
“I’ll get that.” I lifted them off his face and hunted for something to polish them with that wasn’t covered in mud or blood or sweat. I had to tear out some of the lining of my vest, but they sparkled when I was through.
Handling someone else’s glasses is a very intimate thing.
When I went to put them on, his eyes were wide and black, and there wasn’t anyone behind them any more.
I cleaned his face before I put his glasses on, and did my best with his hands and hair. I didn’t bother brushing off the leaves that had fallen on to his chest and stuck; he’d have liked that. Then I picked him up and headed back to camp.
When I thought of what would happen when I walked in- exclamations, medics rushing up in case he was still alive, questions about what had happened (I realized then that I had no fucking idea), stories about what a great guy he was, probably even some dumb motherfuckers telling me they were sorry- I wanted to jump in the river instead. But I had promised not to hurry.
The feeling that having to face other people- and worse, break the news- is the most awful thing imaginable is also autobiographical. I was once in the position of calling people up and telling them that someone was dead, and after two phone calls, I could not face another and shoved off the responsibility on to the second person I spoke to.
The lieutenant, here, is again much more mature than I was. Poor guy. I do believe that he keeps his promise.
You better keep your promise, captain, and wait for me.
I didn’t have that line in mind when I started writing, but I know a perfect closing line when I think of one.