Catch Me If I Fall -- DVD Commentary Part 1 (of 7)
Last week I offered to do a DVD commentary meme on any fic that I've done before. Snazzy_Spazzy requested Catch Me If I fall.
Since it's a long fic, I'm going to post the commentary just like I posted the Fic, in 7 parts.
You can find the original fic here.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
Catch Me If I fall - Author Commentary meme
Requested by Snazzy_Spazzy
Okay, let me start by saying that this story was a real departure for me. I've never quite been this experimental with a story. I've never really written anything quite so dark. There was some gritty realism in it that I wrote, and then I sat back and wondered if I'd gone too far.
Clarksmuse beta read this for me, and she did an awesome job. She had to do a lot of hand holding to get me through it.
I've had the whole Special Projects storyline in a sketchy form in my head from the point that I wrote Gods and Monsters. And this was one of the points that I knew I wanted to do. It ended up being kind of different from what I anticipated, and in many ways, better.
And I will walk on water.
And you will catch me if I fall.
And I know everything will be alright.
Everything will be alright.
Storm - Lifehouse
I decided on the story's name, and added the song last. It was a mood piece that Clarksmuse said she was listening to. I listened to it, and thought it would be perfect for the story.
Ch. 1
“Wakey wakey.”
I kind of like the concept of En Medias Res. J.J. Abrams did it so well in Alias. It's like reaching out through the screen, grabbing the viewer by the ears, and sucking them in.
I did this with this one, and I did this with Deliver Us From Evil (the shark/kelpie one. I think that one is actually my favorite).
Chloe awoke to the feel of someone slapping her cheeks. She shook her head - and instantly realized that everything was wrong.
She felt - pain. A lot of pain. Excruciating pain. And for someone with healing abilities - pain was a foreign feeling. In some ways - she felt affronted that she was feeling pain. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
I don't know why Chloe is the one who always ends up injured in these things. Maybe because she can take it. I don't want her powers to be some kind of Deus Ex Machina. But I end up pulling them out of the box more than I'd like to, sometimes.
This passage was inspired by the way Clark always seems to act like a big baby when he's sick or hurt.
Now she understood why Clark always groused like a big baby when he got a little sick. Pain - for someone who isn’t used to it - is incredibly unfair.
She felt like one enormous bruise. She’d been hit at some point - hard enough to knock her unconscious for quite some time. Hard enough that her head was still throbbing. And - something had happened to her throat, because it burned like she’d been trying to swallow red-hot steel wool.
She tried to remember what the hell had happened - but her recent memories blurred together in a confusing montage. She frowned, as she sifted through the memories, and tried to piece them back into order. She could remember making a pit stop at a Wal-mart just over the South Dakota state line. The kid, Issac - all his stuff had been destroyed with the roadhouse.
That's another thing. I was so pleased to be shooting the roadhouse. I danced around my kitchen singing about it. I kind of know how Sera Gamble felt when she was bragging to her co-workers “I killed Sam Winchester.” Because that's the kind of feeling I got.
I killed the roadhouse with a demon laser death ray from outer space. Beat that, Kripke!
Chloe could remember sending Sam with the kid to get a couple changes of clothes. Chloe and Dean were going to wait out in the Impala, and talk. They had a lot to talk about, actually. Dean had just found out the last-biggest secret that she had been guarding. The one she was prepared to die for: Superman’s identity.
And once again: Things are rocky for Chlean. I think that's why I'm so fond of writing Schmoopy Chlean in my latest fics. They worked for it, they deserve it.
To say that Dean wasn’t taking it well was the understatement of the millennia. Dean had self-esteem issues that would rival hers, and a jealous streak a mile wide. So his finding out that her longtime friend and first big crush was Superman - went over about as well as a kryptonite-filled balloon.
Plus, Dean has self-esteem issues.
Dean had run into the store for a minute - ostensibly just to find a men’s room, but she suspected it was one more stall tactic to keep from facing the problem. He’d come back with an odd smile on his face. Chloe remembered turning her back for just a moment. Then - nothing. That must have been when she was hit from behind.
Yep. Nothing good comes from Wal-Mart.
Which meant that Dean did it - and that Dean wasn’t Dean.
With a groan, she tried to force her eyes open and flinched as the light hammered the back of them.
“So sleeping beauty awakens.”
She froze. That voice was Dean’s no question about it. But it sounded so completely - not like him. For one thing - it was completely devoid of his deep southern accent. For another - she’d never heard Dean sound quite that sadistic.
She cracked her eyelids again, and was relieved that the pain in the backs of her eyes wasn’t as bad this time. That made it easier to ignore.
She quickly took stock of her situation. She was standing - chained into an alcove with her arms pinned to her and her hands jammed up to her shoulders. Packed in so tightly that there wasn’t even room to turn around.
Hmmm, what's the worst way that I could possibly torture Chloe?
Judging by the hastily-rearranged clothing, and the soreness she’d felt, she’d been assaulted after she’d been knocked unconscious. Her mind shuddered away from the thought, and she was glad that she hadn’t been awake to experience it. She filed that away as something to deal with when she got the hell out of this particular predicament.
This is one of those passages that I hadn't planned on writing. Sometimes, when I get in the moment, some of the most unplanned-for stuff comes out. This one kind of scared me. My first question to Clarksmuse was whether this one should stand.
Since her hands were near her raw and burning throat anyway, she reached up to feel it experimentally. Pain shot through her at the touch. If she wasn’t wedged so tightly into the alcove - she would have been driven to her knees. She whimpered at the pain, and realized what she was feeling was a bullet hole.
“Sorry that I shot you. Well, not really.”
Chloe looked up, and saw Dean leaning on his forearms against a half-finished wall that closed off the alcove up to about chest-high.
“Howdy,” he smiled at her.
Oh Hai Meg!
Only - it wasn’t Dean. She could tell by the completely un-Dean-like mannerisms that he seemed to have. Then she noted that every charm and protective item that Dean habitually wore - his ring, his bracelet and his amulet - were all missing. It didn't take an Einstein to guess that the anti-possession charm was also gone.
And this is why tattoos are an idea of the good. Maybe now that Kripke has gone there, I'll have the boys get inked, too. Of course, that does Chloe zero good, since her healing abilities would probably purge that ink right out of her skin.
Demon, she realized.
As if it could read her mind - and she realized suddenly that it probably could -- the demon in Dean’s body let its eyes flash black for just a moment before resuming Dean’s normal shade of hazel. Then it smiled a chilling smile.
“I needed to shut you up. Especially since we both know who you can call if you can scream. So-I borrowed your little pea shooter.” It held up the .22 caliber pistol that she kept strapped to her ankle.
Chloe thought immediately of the gun that normally rode against her ribs - a gift from Dean, one with a unique grip that fit comfortably in her smaller hands.
Gun continuity! I actually made up a whole gun meta because one of my readers wrote a story in which Chloe used a .22 to shoot someone based on this scene. Which would have been fine except that it was a situation that she wrote called for a higher caliber weapon. Fortunately, I was her beta, and caught it. So I figured that if people were going to get their gun knowledge from me, they should know why I chose the weapons I did.
Hey, I'm a country girl. I shoot weapons, so I at least know something of what I'm talking about.
But she could tell - as tightly as she was jammed into the alcove - that her other weapon was no longer there.
“A little lead slug right in your vocal chords, and I don’t think you’ll be trying out for the Broadway production of Jesus Christ, Superstar anytime soon.”
So that explained why she hurt like hell. Lead was the one thing that affected meteor-metas universally. If she had lead in her system - it was in all likelihood shorting out her meta healing powers. Even with fear shooting adrenaline into her system - it wasn’t enough to overcome the lead.
She craned her neck to see around him. The scenery behind him spoke of decay and abandonment. It looked like at one time it had been some kind of hotel. Something that had been gutted and then abandoned a long time ago. She shook her head in exasperation. Even if she could make some kind of noise to draw attention to them - there was no one to hear her.
“It’s a little extreme, I will admit,” it said conversationally as it pulled on a pair of work gloves, turned, picked up a brick and a trowel and began to lay the brick onto the wall it had been leaning against. “I could have gagged you instead - but I didn’t want to take the chance that you would throw up, and then choke on your own vomit.
Foreshadowing just how bad it's going to get.
“You see, I want you alive for as long as possible.”
Chloe realized with a sinking feeling exactly what it was doing. It was walling her into the alcove. Her eyes grew wide, and she began to hyperventilate as she realized that she was being entombed in the wall.
“I realize that you’ve got this thing about being put in a box in the ground,” it said without pausing in its handiwork. “And I wouldn’t do that to you. So instead, I thought that maybe you and your boy here would appreciate this.” It pointed to its head.
“Very poetic. Very Cask of Amontillado, don’t you think? No? Well, Fortunato didn’t appreciate it either.”
Chloe shut her eyes, and leaned her head against the cold brick as she tried to get her breathing under control. She did not want to pass out at a time like this.
“Just so you know, Chloe,” it said. “This isn’t about you. Not really. This is all about your boyfriend.
“You see - Dean-o sent me to hell twice. So I figure paybacks are a bitch. And I’ve been letting him see - in detail - everything that I’ve done to you with his body. Everything from the moment I gave you that little hit on the head.
“You can’t see it, but trust me. Your boy here? Inside - he’s screaming.”
This is one of the lines in the story that I envisioned right from the start. And the idea of Dean being trapped in his own head and unable to do anything to stop what was going on was almost as creepy to me as the idea of Chloe being walled up like Fortunato.
He chuckled as the bricks rose higher.
“And I want to keep him screaming as much as possible,” it continued. “Since he wouldn’t go to hell, I thought I would bring a little hell to him. So the longer you’re alive - the longer he has to suffer.”
By this point, the bricks were level with his neck. He stopped again to fix her with an earnest gaze.
“You will die, Chloe. Eventually, even with your healing abilities, you will die. And by the time you do, it will seem like mercy. That is, if the claustrophobia and days of standing in your own waste and stink doesn’t drive you insane first.”
More foreshadowing. Things are going to get very bad for Chloe.
It sniffed, and rubbed its nose absently. “I think you humans can go . . . three days without water? At least, that’s how long my hosts would go before they died, and I had to start re-animating their corpses. It’s tiresome to do all those little things you humans have to do just to keep going. I mean the maintenance! Feeding, washing, relieving yourselves, washing again.” It rolled its eyes.
In a sick kind of way, possessed!Dean was fun to write. Sometimes it's just cathartic to write the bad guy. You get to see just how far you can push the envelope.
“So I figure - with the blood loss you have from that neck wound, you might last that long. I’m going to leave a couple of bricks out at the top here. Wouldn’t do to let you suffocate.”
And based on the research that I did for this story, I found out more about being buried alive than I ever wanted to know.
did you know that during the renaissance, being buried alive was the way that the Italians executed unrepentant murderers?
It takes approximately two minutes to suffocate after being buried alive.
And the thing is, some of this may someday make it into a future writing of mine.
Chloe mastered her breathing with effort. Long enough to glare at the demon wearing Dean’s body. If it could read her thoughts, there was one that she wanted it to hear, more than anything.
'When Dean gets free of you, he’s going to waste your ass.'
Chloe shows early signs of being a Winchester here. With this kind of chutzpah, she's destined to be in the same family with Sam and Dean.
The demon paused, and looked at her thoughtfully. Then it gave her that chilling smile again. “Well, would you look at that? Little Chloe all grown up and talking smack just like Dean. I guess if you spend enough time around the Winchesters, they’re bound to rub off on you. Or at least Dean would have, if you'd given him the chance.
“Tell me something, Chloe? Does dying young feel any different this time around than it did at fifteen?”
Chloe shut her eyes and refused to give the demon an answer.
“Well, suit yourself,” the demon said. “When I see Sammy again, I’ll just tell him that I tried to work things out with you . . . but it’s like you were all walled off.”
I tried to get Meg's mannerisms and speech patterns down for this. It was really important to me that people believe that she was in Dean's body, not just because I told them, but through her actions.
She bit her tongue to keep from sobbing as she heard the last brick scrape into place. She shuddered all over, as she leaned her head against the cold, unyielding brick, softened only by the cushion of her own hair.
I made myself cry over this.
The darkness was cold and tight, and entirely too much like her memories of the box. She wondered how long it would be until the walls started to close in, and she tried to beat her brains out against the brick.
No! She shook her head. Dean had told her. He’d promised her that he was going to be there for her. This was not the box, and Dean wasn’t Clark. He’d find some way out of the mess that he was in. Or maybe Sam would find him. But she wasn’t going to give up hope. Not like this. And in the end - if she did die, then she’d die with hope. Which was slightly better than dying with despair. At least it was something.
When she was satisfied that the demon was probably not around, listening to her thoughts, she let the tears fall at last.