Justified Fiction: "All Roads Lead To Harlan" (PG-13)

[halfshellvenus]

Title: All Roads Lead To Harlan
Fandom: Justified
Author: HalfshellVenus
Characters: Rachel, Raylan (Gen)
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Summary: This is one place Rachel will never fit in.
Author's notes: My You'll Never Leave Harlan 2013 Fic Exchange story for scioscribex-x-x-x-x

Comments

[jenthegypsy]

Awesome! You have a great Rachel voice ~ and your Raylan rings true. Nice entry.

[halfshellvenus]

Thank you!

Rachel and Raylan spent some time driving around in my longer Raylan/Boyd zombie AU, and I found that I really liked writing her, especially in contrast with Raylan. She's reasonable and soft-spoken, and Raylan is impulsive and cranky. Not to mention that she is not snowed by Raylan one little bit. She likes him, but he doesn't fool her at all. :D

[jenthegypsy]

Got a handy-dandy link to your zombie fic? I'd like to check it out sometime.

[halfshellvenus]

Sure-- it's here!

The PG-13 rating is more for language than anything-- the story is humorous rather than gory (because I'm not a huge fan of the grossness myself). :)

[bleodswean]

Really, really nice. GREAT voices! Thoroughly enjoyable.

[halfshellvenus]

Thank you! It is fun to write dialogue for these two, with their styles being so different. One of these days, I fully expect Rachel to get so fed up that she padlocks Raylan inside a shed or a barn, just to give herself a break. :)

[chemm80]

Nice little slice of marshal life, with great character voices. I enjoyed it.

[halfshellvenus]

The requester really wanted a Rachel story, which is how this became my first Gen story for Justified. I really like working with Justified's characters-- they are so distinct and often ill-behaved. Rachel is one of the most normal people on this show, which makes everyone else look every bit as cantankerous as they really are. ;)

[chemm80]

She really is, and even though we don't know much about her past, what we do know is kind of messed up, too. (I just wrote a Gen Kill crossover for the intoabar exchange, which was when I realized how little we really know about her.)

[halfshellvenus]

I was a little surprised to find out in S4 that she was married, but moreso that she was getting divorced! We know she went to Ole Miss, but where did she live before that? What made her decide to become a Marshal? The path is so much less obvious than Tim's, and I keep hoping we might someday learn it.

I read Leonard's "Raylan," which seems to have been written after the show premiered. His Raylan is dumber and his Rachel fiercer than what we see on the show, but they feel as if they belong to an entirely different universe-- so there isn't much help in that.

[tsuki_no_bara]

i am coincidentally watching a justified rerun as i type! from s3. rachel's in it. :D

anyway. the voices are so good in this - i can hear the actors in my head as i read. and i love how unimpressed rachel is by raylan's manpain.

[halfshellvenus]

I am so pleased that people find the voices authentic. Really, that's a big part of how I write fanfic: I have to hear the characters' voices clearly in my head. Where I get into trouble is characters with no discernible personality, or ones (an example from Prison Break) where the voice changes so radically from one moment to the next that you can't get a solid feel for it.

One of the things I so love about Rachel is that, despite her quiet behavior and soft-spoken-ness, she holds her personal line very firmly. The fact that she isn't loud or pushy does not make her a pushover, and you rarely see that in TV or movie characters. She knows exactly what Raylan's up to, and it's not a question of whether she'll be swayed so much as whether she might-- this time-- indulge him.

Thinking about your email comments from last week, I had a lot more fun with Mackelby than I realized. Those Harlan County cranks are something else. :)

[chelseagirl]

Fantastic. Always love Rachel and Raylan interactions, and you've done a great job. Especially when Rachel calls Raylan on his privilege, because, hello??!

[halfshellvenus]

Glad you enjoyed it!

Especially when Rachel calls Raylan on his privilege, because, hello??!
Exactly! He has no idea how much worse Harlan would have been for her, OR that most of that isn't something she gets to "grow out of" by getting older.

Thanks for reading!