Entry tags:
Notes for "Love is Blind"
(@ AO3)
But love is blind and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit;
- The Merchant of Venice
I first1 had this idea when I pondered the consent issues that could arise from Henry's omnipresent grin. Unexpectedly, the next idea I had was that Inigo should give Olivia sex advice, because receiving sex advice from your not-yet-conceived son is the most embarrassing thing in the world.
I envisioned this story to be lighthearted and funny but unexpectedly dark, and I think the result follows through on that, though at present2 I wonder if it might have been better if I had just gone with dark. Still, I suppose in a way it was good practice. I have now written a romcom pairingfic. ... With consent issues and marital problems stemming form past abuse3.
I like relationship issues, and as other people have noted, Henry is basically a walking relationship issue. Awakening has a lot of very fast relationships and very fast weddings, and Henry--who probably has the most secret baggage that takes the longest to work out--comes post-timeskip with only minimal past ties to anyone, and can only marry someone in the span of a couple of months.
Realistically speaking, that should be an outright disaster.
But FE13 is an optimistic work and for the sake of some vague sense of belonging to the canon I'm willing to be optimistic, too. Besides, Henry canonically sorts himself out well enough to be a good father and shows himself to be pretty thoughtful about his flaws and how relationships don't work.
Things might be all right.
Dubcon, as a genre or a trope, is often not actually "dubious consent" but something more like "softcore rape."
But I was interested in exploring a genuine gray area. I was hoping to depict a hurtful situation arising from not-inconceivable circumstances without willful malice or ignorance, nor obvious power imbalance.
I thought several times while writing this that it was infinitely to my advantage that the "victim" in this case was male. In this part of the internet, we have strong biases when it comes to questionable sexual situations when the victim is female, and it would've been messy to stand between one crowd screaming about how regret isn't rape and the other crowd screaming about how socialization implies all sex is rape. (I mean, I'm already writing on a delicate enough topic4 even before politics comes into play.) I'm more about the communication issues, and I hope the flipped gender dynamic let the relationship questions get through the hot-button-issue barrier.
I love friendships. Don't you love friendships? The Olivia+Maribelle friendship was one of my favorite things to write in this story.
Hilariously, it doesn't pass the Bechdel test anyway because this story is about Olivia getting with a dude and their conversations are relevant to that.
Assorted notes on practical matters:
- The Roman army often went 8 soldiers to a tent, but the numbers in the Awakening universe don't match up with the numbers in the Roman army. I'm of the opinion that either there are a lot fewer soldiers, or the playables are elite soldiers, and either way that means fewer tentmates.
- I don't conclusively address the issue of what exactly happened to Henry in this fic because this fic is about their relationship and the only thing you really need to know about Henry is that he has issues. But if you'd like to know the story behind the scars for the sake of closure, here is my headcanon. His clinginess, though, comes largely from the canon attestations about his (repeated) abandonment.
- Inigo's Valmese drink is vaguely based off Chinese liquor. Feroxi cuisine was vaguely based off Swedish cuisine. Princess cake is an actual delicacy which originated in the early 20th century, and for that reason I was on the fence about picking some other delicacy, but it could feasibly be made with a low level of technology and Ylisse is very, very strange about which "century" it's set in.
- There is no medical reason to keep a person with a concussion from going to sleep. Actually, the sleepiness is your brain wanting to have some downtime to recover and the Actual Medical Advice is to let them go to sleep so that it can do that.
1 I started this in late March, finished a draft by late May, and by now I am just really sick of it.
2 Because waiting a bit after finishing anything can make you doubt everything about it ever.
3 Someday I will write a Henry fic that does not require the "Past Abuse" tag but, uh, this is not any of my past or present ideas.
4 ... Although presently I feel like I just mucked through a zillion delicate topics I have no right to handle.
Here, have some outtakes.
I thought the original beginning was funnier, but it set the wrong perspective. It's incredibly important for this fic to be clearly grounded in Olivia's perspective so I reworked several passages like this one that seemed to suggest an objective viewer.
The army had long grown accustomed to weddings. Their steady discovery of children from a lost future ruined more than a few surprises. Therefore when Olivia announced that she would be marrying Henry, nearly a month after silver-blond Inigo had joined their band, the only real question was how they would fit it into the schedule. Next week was already reserved for Maribelle's suspiciously urgent marriage, and aside from Lissa (who loved weddings) and the groom (who loved cake) no one wanted to entertain the idea of having more than one wedding a month. So Robin promised them that they'd find some time in the middle of July, after the Resistance was on firmer ground.
There used to be a lot more words about the period wherein Henry does not bang Olivia. I took them out because this fic was too slow to start. But some of these words are cute.
On their first night of being married, they slept (or at least attempted to, ignoring the foul stench and thin air) by the mouth of cavern leading deep into the Demon's Ingle. They didn't raise tents, for fear of the canvas igniting from a stray cinder and burning them all alive. The second night they fought the Valmese by the glow of the earth's fire with no view of the sky, and by the time Yen'fay had been struck down and the forces defeated, they emerged to find that the sun had long since retired, and the moon, a mere sliver. Robin wagered it was too dangerous to climb down from the mountain in the darkness; they slept a second night in the open.
It was on the third day that they left the volcano and began to feel human again. The army had the time to stop by a brook to wash, but the scent clung to everything. If she sniffed the back of her hand, Olivia could still smell ash and sulfur. And so it was on the third night that, tinged with the odor of something rotten and burnt, they shared a tent for the first time.
Without a blanket in the summer heat, Olivia laid in the middle of her—their—bedroll, and waited expectantly as Henry unclasped his cape and draped it over his small pile of tomes. (How could he bear wearing a cape in this weather? Plegians, really.) He came over to their pallet and paused with a smile that to her looked uncertain. Then, as if deciding, he laid down next to her on the pallet to her left.
He made himself comfortable on his side, rested his left hand on her shoulder, and gave a deep sigh of contentment. With that he seemed to drift to sleep.
They were both plenty tired from their weeklong marathon of marching and fighting, she reasoned. Olivia scooted a little to give him room, and soon fell asleep herself.
The next morning, with sunlight shining brightly through the gaps in the tent, she roused to the sound of the wake-up call. Chrom had decided to give them an easy few days so that they could recuperate and it was long past daybreak. Regardless, the light made her head hurt, her shoulders were stiff, and she still wanted to sleep. [rephrase]
She heard shifting beside her. For a moment she was alert, until she realized it was just Henry.
Though half-open eyes she watched him sit up, blocking the light, his hair a hazy sunlit tangle. He slowly stretched his back, seeming to contemplate something as he stared at his cape in the corner. Olivia couldn't help but stretch too, working out the staleness in her muscles.
Henry noticed her, and brushed his fingers against her cheek. She closed her eyes and let his knuckles pass over her skin.
Then he chirped, “Good morning!” and it was just simply too soon to be up and marching.
[...]
On the fifth day they fought in a skirmish against the Risen to defend Lady Tiki and they were tired. And on the sixth night it was hot again, or so she told herself. (By then she had realized that when Henry had said he wanted to sleep with her, he meant sleeping.) Mercifully, after their awkward conversation, Inigo seemed to leave her alone about the subject.
Not so mercifully, Inigo had mentioned the matter to his best friend Owain, who (in exchange for information about his own father's days as a “steward”) told Brady, who then went and redeemed his ill-begotten bit of gossip with his mother for a pat on the head and momentary reprieve from criticism.
This is a bit from when I still planned for Olivia to do kinky explicit things. I decided against it because the kinkiness and explicitness was rather beside the point, and kinkiness is salient enough to distract away from the more delicate point.
“Um, Maribelle?” she ventured.
“Yes, darling?”
“I was er, wondering, actually, if you know any ways to, umm... maybe, ummm....”
“Yes? Come on now, speak up.”
Olivia shook her red face vigorously and cupped her hand around Maribelle's ear to whisper.
“Mmhmm? Oh? ... Oh. ... Oh my, Olivia. You do have ... interesting taste.” Olivia rocked back and forth on the heels of her feet and giggled like a schoolgirl who'd just said a naughty word. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do know a few ways of going about that.”
“Oh, please tell me,” Olivia said with her voice no higher than a whisper.
“Well you see, you could—” Maribelle stopped, glanced about her with narrowed eyes, muttered something like, you can never be too cautious with Kellam around, and whispered through her cupped hands into Olivia's ear.
“Oh my gods,” Olivia gasped, her face heating back up. “Really?”
“Really,” Maribelle said sagely. “But you have to be careful, because...” (whisper whisper whisper) “... and it will be hard on your back at first, but...”
“I do want to try it.”
“Very well. I can give you one. Do inform me of how things turn out for you.”
The above conversation was rewritten to end more like this, before I decided to take it out altogether.
“Really,” Maribelle said sagely. “But you have to be careful, because...” (whisper whisper whisper) “... and it will be hard on your back at first, but...”
“Oh. Well, I...”
“Oh, you needn't feel obliged,” Maribelle reassured her. “It is something of an exotic practice, and does require a great deal of courage. More on his part than yours, perhaps.”
“Maybe... maybe later,” Olivia said, still working through these strange ideas that had yet to seem real to her. She had known performers who worked as courtesans on the side and she could've sworn that they knew less than her noble friend, newly wed. “Say, Maribelle?”
“Mm-hmmmmm?”
“Well, I was just wondering... where did you learn about these things?”
“That—is none of your business! And how uncouth of you to ask! Do I look like a tawdry gossip to you? I think not! I respect those who trust me with their occult knowledge and expertise.” Maribelle's fingers clenched about both ends of her umbrella, and Olivia could tell she was warring within herself whether or not to share something simply too good not to be shared.
Olivia gave Maribelle her best wide-eyed innocent look.
“That won't work on me, Olivia,” she said, all the while wringing her umbrella.
“Well, if it were Gaius, it wouldn't be much of a secret,” Olivia mused out loud.
“Which is why it's not—oh, I see. Very clever of you.” Maribelle peered at her, opened her umbrella, and threw it over her shoulder, turning to leave. “We'll be on the move soon. I'd best take my place. Good luck to you.”
The answer, by the way, is Miriel. That was a subplot I decided against as I started to reach the end of the first draft.
The following is the original full version of the scene where Olivia dances. It is slow and ponderous and irrelevant and not very good. The dance in question is vaguely based off an Indian one, or as far as the narrative goes, but I did not hew closely to the actual style of Indian dance.
Feeling the nice evenness of the ground beneath her feet, she unconsciously leaned forward into her toes as she began to stretch her neck, rolling her head about. As if the motion bled down into her body, she rolled her shoulders, circled her hips, then rose up on her toes to kick lightly into the air. Then she began a set of repeated leg lifts, and reaches up to the roof of her tent, and before very long she let these repetitions vary and carry her about however she liked, hopping a little into the air, back-stepping in a circle within the edges of her tent.
It was rather nice to be able to practice in her own tent, she thought. They usually made camp upon the flattest ground in the area, and it used to be such a pain to find a nice flat spot away from curious eyes—Maribelle used to have a bit of tea set up in their tent between setting up camp and going to sleep, complete with her second-best set of porcelain, and prancing about in their tent was never an option. Henry attended Frederick's training sessions at this hour, and his things humbly watched from the corner.
She paced back to the center of the tent as she caught her breath and wondered which dance she would use for practice. She'd gone over her favorites many times with Inigo, she figured, so she ought to practice some of the lesser-known dances she knew, to make sure she remembered them.
She thought of one, allegedly from the southernmost reaches of Plegia, about a disguised spirit visiting a noblewoman. She remembered it because she had been charmed by its style—curiously playful yet reverent, strangely deliberate yet sensuous. First came the spirit—he donned his disguise—he visited the noble as a poor girl offering to wash her feet. And then Olivia, the dancer, played both roles in quick alternation, the disdainful refined noblewoman, the seductively feminine man-spirit and his trickster tale. Though she hadn't the music to go with it, the disks on her belt clinked in rhythm in the dark of her tent; she hummed to herself what she could remember of the tune.
While writing the first draft, I fumbled a lot with one of the timeskips and ended up writing myself into a battle before I decided to do some major backtracking. Some of it is cute.
They were too close not to engage them, and so they formed up and met the enemy by the capital gates.
From the middle of the formation, Olivia drew closer to Henry as she counted their numbers.
“Looks like fun,” he hummed.
“Isn't that the Emperor's crest? We'll be fighting his very own guard.” She laid a hand on his arm to ensure she had his attention. “Please be careful.”
“I'll be fine!” he said, wrapping his arm around her for a public one-armed hug that made her blush. “Stay close so I can protect you, okay?”
“A-All right.”
The Valmese reinforcements were endless. Several times they charged out from the forts before she could get of the way, and she was narrowly saved by Henry's attentiveness. (And then, darting past their guard and striking well-placed blows, she even felled one or two herself.) [cut? but I like female warriors...] By the time someone had broken through their lines and forced the emperor to retreat, the sun had half melted into the horizon. When she learned that the cries from the south were from new allies, she only felt relief that the fighting was over for the day.
She soon discovered that the blood on her legs was her own. Her menses had arrived, a day early, and forced her to attend to them. By the time she was finished at last, she had missed supper, it was dark, and all but the nightwatch had turned in.
Olivia found her tent and quietly made her way in. Henry was already curled up on his half of the bedroll, and drew in a half-waking breath as she entered. She made sure not to disturb him as she settled in, but he opened his eyes and inched next to her anyway.
“Good night,” he mumbled.
“Good night.” And with that, he fell right back asleep. She didn't really know what she was expecting. Not sex, not while she bled, and not between two days of battle while they slept with weapons within reach. Conversation, maybe. She would have liked to thank him for earlier, at least. Well, there would always be tomorrow—so she reasoned as she drifted into much-needed sleep.
The next morning they woke before dawn and reached the castle just as the sun lit up the sky. Their Valmese allies charged the gates and opened the way for them to storm the castle.
Sometimes I had ideas for funny lines that were inappropriate for the scene.
“She'll be fine,” Maribelle said, and Olivia realized that she was talking to Henry. “You'd do better to go after their wyvern riders than stand about worrying.”
“But don't you need someone to get you water and bandages?”
“I have enough with me. Shoo. Go kill something.”
I originally wanted to poke in a little bit about Henry and fatherhood, but the ending had enough on its hands. I ultimately recycled this idea into Vessel.
["...] I think Inigo would like this place too.”
“Let's bring him here tomorrow,” Henry agreed. “It'll be nice to spend some time together. Plus, the servant girls could use a break.”
Olivia giggled. Before she could think of a witty enough response, Henry spoke again. “Hey, Olivia? If we have a child someday, do you think we could name him something else?”
Thrown by the change in topic, she said, “Sorry, what?”
“He won't be the same as Inigo, you know? And I like Inigo. We've gotten to know him pretty well and I just think it would be kind of weird.”
“Oh. Yes, I agree.” Off-handedly, she added, “We'll have to figure out another name. I'd only ever wanted to name my child Inigo.”
“We can come up with a name together! I don't have any ideas yet 'cause I never thought I'd have any kids,” Henry replied cheerfully. “But Inigo turned out well, so I guess it'll be all right.”
The idea of raising a child with him still seemed distant and foreign. But she supposed that Inigo himself was proof that, once in another world, everything had more or less worked out—with their child, and between themselves.
I think that's all the outtakes even vaguely worth seeing.
The pretty follies that themselves commit;
- The Merchant of Venice
I first1 had this idea when I pondered the consent issues that could arise from Henry's omnipresent grin. Unexpectedly, the next idea I had was that Inigo should give Olivia sex advice, because receiving sex advice from your not-yet-conceived son is the most embarrassing thing in the world.
I envisioned this story to be lighthearted and funny but unexpectedly dark, and I think the result follows through on that, though at present2 I wonder if it might have been better if I had just gone with dark. Still, I suppose in a way it was good practice. I have now written a romcom pairingfic. ... With consent issues and marital problems stemming form past abuse3.
I like relationship issues, and as other people have noted, Henry is basically a walking relationship issue. Awakening has a lot of very fast relationships and very fast weddings, and Henry--who probably has the most secret baggage that takes the longest to work out--comes post-timeskip with only minimal past ties to anyone, and can only marry someone in the span of a couple of months.
Realistically speaking, that should be an outright disaster.
But FE13 is an optimistic work and for the sake of some vague sense of belonging to the canon I'm willing to be optimistic, too. Besides, Henry canonically sorts himself out well enough to be a good father and shows himself to be pretty thoughtful about his flaws and how relationships don't work.
Things might be all right.
Dubcon, as a genre or a trope, is often not actually "dubious consent" but something more like "softcore rape."
But I was interested in exploring a genuine gray area. I was hoping to depict a hurtful situation arising from not-inconceivable circumstances without willful malice or ignorance, nor obvious power imbalance.
I thought several times while writing this that it was infinitely to my advantage that the "victim" in this case was male. In this part of the internet, we have strong biases when it comes to questionable sexual situations when the victim is female, and it would've been messy to stand between one crowd screaming about how regret isn't rape and the other crowd screaming about how socialization implies all sex is rape. (I mean, I'm already writing on a delicate enough topic4 even before politics comes into play.) I'm more about the communication issues, and I hope the flipped gender dynamic let the relationship questions get through the hot-button-issue barrier.
I love friendships. Don't you love friendships? The Olivia+Maribelle friendship was one of my favorite things to write in this story.
Hilariously, it doesn't pass the Bechdel test anyway because this story is about Olivia getting with a dude and their conversations are relevant to that.
Assorted notes on practical matters:
- The Roman army often went 8 soldiers to a tent, but the numbers in the Awakening universe don't match up with the numbers in the Roman army. I'm of the opinion that either there are a lot fewer soldiers, or the playables are elite soldiers, and either way that means fewer tentmates.
- I don't conclusively address the issue of what exactly happened to Henry in this fic because this fic is about their relationship and the only thing you really need to know about Henry is that he has issues. But if you'd like to know the story behind the scars for the sake of closure, here is my headcanon. His clinginess, though, comes largely from the canon attestations about his (repeated) abandonment.
- Inigo's Valmese drink is vaguely based off Chinese liquor. Feroxi cuisine was vaguely based off Swedish cuisine. Princess cake is an actual delicacy which originated in the early 20th century, and for that reason I was on the fence about picking some other delicacy, but it could feasibly be made with a low level of technology and Ylisse is very, very strange about which "century" it's set in.
- There is no medical reason to keep a person with a concussion from going to sleep. Actually, the sleepiness is your brain wanting to have some downtime to recover and the Actual Medical Advice is to let them go to sleep so that it can do that.
1 I started this in late March, finished a draft by late May, and by now I am just really sick of it.
2 Because waiting a bit after finishing anything can make you doubt everything about it ever.
3 Someday I will write a Henry fic that does not require the "Past Abuse" tag but, uh, this is not any of my past or present ideas.
4 ... Although presently I feel like I just mucked through a zillion delicate topics I have no right to handle.
Here, have some outtakes.
I thought the original beginning was funnier, but it set the wrong perspective. It's incredibly important for this fic to be clearly grounded in Olivia's perspective so I reworked several passages like this one that seemed to suggest an objective viewer.
The army had long grown accustomed to weddings. Their steady discovery of children from a lost future ruined more than a few surprises. Therefore when Olivia announced that she would be marrying Henry, nearly a month after silver-blond Inigo had joined their band, the only real question was how they would fit it into the schedule. Next week was already reserved for Maribelle's suspiciously urgent marriage, and aside from Lissa (who loved weddings) and the groom (who loved cake) no one wanted to entertain the idea of having more than one wedding a month. So Robin promised them that they'd find some time in the middle of July, after the Resistance was on firmer ground.
There used to be a lot more words about the period wherein Henry does not bang Olivia. I took them out because this fic was too slow to start. But some of these words are cute.
On their first night of being married, they slept (or at least attempted to, ignoring the foul stench and thin air) by the mouth of cavern leading deep into the Demon's Ingle. They didn't raise tents, for fear of the canvas igniting from a stray cinder and burning them all alive. The second night they fought the Valmese by the glow of the earth's fire with no view of the sky, and by the time Yen'fay had been struck down and the forces defeated, they emerged to find that the sun had long since retired, and the moon, a mere sliver. Robin wagered it was too dangerous to climb down from the mountain in the darkness; they slept a second night in the open.
It was on the third day that they left the volcano and began to feel human again. The army had the time to stop by a brook to wash, but the scent clung to everything. If she sniffed the back of her hand, Olivia could still smell ash and sulfur. And so it was on the third night that, tinged with the odor of something rotten and burnt, they shared a tent for the first time.
Without a blanket in the summer heat, Olivia laid in the middle of her—their—bedroll, and waited expectantly as Henry unclasped his cape and draped it over his small pile of tomes. (How could he bear wearing a cape in this weather? Plegians, really.) He came over to their pallet and paused with a smile that to her looked uncertain. Then, as if deciding, he laid down next to her on the pallet to her left.
He made himself comfortable on his side, rested his left hand on her shoulder, and gave a deep sigh of contentment. With that he seemed to drift to sleep.
They were both plenty tired from their weeklong marathon of marching and fighting, she reasoned. Olivia scooted a little to give him room, and soon fell asleep herself.
The next morning, with sunlight shining brightly through the gaps in the tent, she roused to the sound of the wake-up call. Chrom had decided to give them an easy few days so that they could recuperate and it was long past daybreak. Regardless, the light made her head hurt, her shoulders were stiff, and she still wanted to sleep. [rephrase]
She heard shifting beside her. For a moment she was alert, until she realized it was just Henry.
Though half-open eyes she watched him sit up, blocking the light, his hair a hazy sunlit tangle. He slowly stretched his back, seeming to contemplate something as he stared at his cape in the corner. Olivia couldn't help but stretch too, working out the staleness in her muscles.
Henry noticed her, and brushed his fingers against her cheek. She closed her eyes and let his knuckles pass over her skin.
Then he chirped, “Good morning!” and it was just simply too soon to be up and marching.
[...]
On the fifth day they fought in a skirmish against the Risen to defend Lady Tiki and they were tired. And on the sixth night it was hot again, or so she told herself. (By then she had realized that when Henry had said he wanted to sleep with her, he meant sleeping.) Mercifully, after their awkward conversation, Inigo seemed to leave her alone about the subject.
Not so mercifully, Inigo had mentioned the matter to his best friend Owain, who (in exchange for information about his own father's days as a “steward”) told Brady, who then went and redeemed his ill-begotten bit of gossip with his mother for a pat on the head and momentary reprieve from criticism.
This is a bit from when I still planned for Olivia to do kinky explicit things. I decided against it because the kinkiness and explicitness was rather beside the point, and kinkiness is salient enough to distract away from the more delicate point.
“Um, Maribelle?” she ventured.
“Yes, darling?”
“I was er, wondering, actually, if you know any ways to, umm... maybe, ummm....”
“Yes? Come on now, speak up.”
Olivia shook her red face vigorously and cupped her hand around Maribelle's ear to whisper.
“Mmhmm? Oh? ... Oh. ... Oh my, Olivia. You do have ... interesting taste.” Olivia rocked back and forth on the heels of her feet and giggled like a schoolgirl who'd just said a naughty word. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do know a few ways of going about that.”
“Oh, please tell me,” Olivia said with her voice no higher than a whisper.
“Well you see, you could—” Maribelle stopped, glanced about her with narrowed eyes, muttered something like, you can never be too cautious with Kellam around, and whispered through her cupped hands into Olivia's ear.
“Oh my gods,” Olivia gasped, her face heating back up. “Really?”
“Really,” Maribelle said sagely. “But you have to be careful, because...” (whisper whisper whisper) “... and it will be hard on your back at first, but...”
“I do want to try it.”
“Very well. I can give you one. Do inform me of how things turn out for you.”
The above conversation was rewritten to end more like this, before I decided to take it out altogether.
“Really,” Maribelle said sagely. “But you have to be careful, because...” (whisper whisper whisper) “... and it will be hard on your back at first, but...”
“Oh. Well, I...”
“Oh, you needn't feel obliged,” Maribelle reassured her. “It is something of an exotic practice, and does require a great deal of courage. More on his part than yours, perhaps.”
“Maybe... maybe later,” Olivia said, still working through these strange ideas that had yet to seem real to her. She had known performers who worked as courtesans on the side and she could've sworn that they knew less than her noble friend, newly wed. “Say, Maribelle?”
“Mm-hmmmmm?”
“Well, I was just wondering... where did you learn about these things?”
“That—is none of your business! And how uncouth of you to ask! Do I look like a tawdry gossip to you? I think not! I respect those who trust me with their occult knowledge and expertise.” Maribelle's fingers clenched about both ends of her umbrella, and Olivia could tell she was warring within herself whether or not to share something simply too good not to be shared.
Olivia gave Maribelle her best wide-eyed innocent look.
“That won't work on me, Olivia,” she said, all the while wringing her umbrella.
“Well, if it were Gaius, it wouldn't be much of a secret,” Olivia mused out loud.
“Which is why it's not—oh, I see. Very clever of you.” Maribelle peered at her, opened her umbrella, and threw it over her shoulder, turning to leave. “We'll be on the move soon. I'd best take my place. Good luck to you.”
The answer, by the way, is Miriel. That was a subplot I decided against as I started to reach the end of the first draft.
The following is the original full version of the scene where Olivia dances. It is slow and ponderous and irrelevant and not very good. The dance in question is vaguely based off an Indian one, or as far as the narrative goes, but I did not hew closely to the actual style of Indian dance.
Feeling the nice evenness of the ground beneath her feet, she unconsciously leaned forward into her toes as she began to stretch her neck, rolling her head about. As if the motion bled down into her body, she rolled her shoulders, circled her hips, then rose up on her toes to kick lightly into the air. Then she began a set of repeated leg lifts, and reaches up to the roof of her tent, and before very long she let these repetitions vary and carry her about however she liked, hopping a little into the air, back-stepping in a circle within the edges of her tent.
It was rather nice to be able to practice in her own tent, she thought. They usually made camp upon the flattest ground in the area, and it used to be such a pain to find a nice flat spot away from curious eyes—Maribelle used to have a bit of tea set up in their tent between setting up camp and going to sleep, complete with her second-best set of porcelain, and prancing about in their tent was never an option. Henry attended Frederick's training sessions at this hour, and his things humbly watched from the corner.
She paced back to the center of the tent as she caught her breath and wondered which dance she would use for practice. She'd gone over her favorites many times with Inigo, she figured, so she ought to practice some of the lesser-known dances she knew, to make sure she remembered them.
She thought of one, allegedly from the southernmost reaches of Plegia, about a disguised spirit visiting a noblewoman. She remembered it because she had been charmed by its style—curiously playful yet reverent, strangely deliberate yet sensuous. First came the spirit—he donned his disguise—he visited the noble as a poor girl offering to wash her feet. And then Olivia, the dancer, played both roles in quick alternation, the disdainful refined noblewoman, the seductively feminine man-spirit and his trickster tale. Though she hadn't the music to go with it, the disks on her belt clinked in rhythm in the dark of her tent; she hummed to herself what she could remember of the tune.
While writing the first draft, I fumbled a lot with one of the timeskips and ended up writing myself into a battle before I decided to do some major backtracking. Some of it is cute.
They were too close not to engage them, and so they formed up and met the enemy by the capital gates.
From the middle of the formation, Olivia drew closer to Henry as she counted their numbers.
“Looks like fun,” he hummed.
“Isn't that the Emperor's crest? We'll be fighting his very own guard.” She laid a hand on his arm to ensure she had his attention. “Please be careful.”
“I'll be fine!” he said, wrapping his arm around her for a public one-armed hug that made her blush. “Stay close so I can protect you, okay?”
“A-All right.”
The Valmese reinforcements were endless. Several times they charged out from the forts before she could get of the way, and she was narrowly saved by Henry's attentiveness. (And then, darting past their guard and striking well-placed blows, she even felled one or two herself.) [cut? but I like female warriors...] By the time someone had broken through their lines and forced the emperor to retreat, the sun had half melted into the horizon. When she learned that the cries from the south were from new allies, she only felt relief that the fighting was over for the day.
She soon discovered that the blood on her legs was her own. Her menses had arrived, a day early, and forced her to attend to them. By the time she was finished at last, she had missed supper, it was dark, and all but the nightwatch had turned in.
Olivia found her tent and quietly made her way in. Henry was already curled up on his half of the bedroll, and drew in a half-waking breath as she entered. She made sure not to disturb him as she settled in, but he opened his eyes and inched next to her anyway.
“Good night,” he mumbled.
“Good night.” And with that, he fell right back asleep. She didn't really know what she was expecting. Not sex, not while she bled, and not between two days of battle while they slept with weapons within reach. Conversation, maybe. She would have liked to thank him for earlier, at least. Well, there would always be tomorrow—so she reasoned as she drifted into much-needed sleep.
The next morning they woke before dawn and reached the castle just as the sun lit up the sky. Their Valmese allies charged the gates and opened the way for them to storm the castle.
Sometimes I had ideas for funny lines that were inappropriate for the scene.
“She'll be fine,” Maribelle said, and Olivia realized that she was talking to Henry. “You'd do better to go after their wyvern riders than stand about worrying.”
“But don't you need someone to get you water and bandages?”
“I have enough with me. Shoo. Go kill something.”
I originally wanted to poke in a little bit about Henry and fatherhood, but the ending had enough on its hands. I ultimately recycled this idea into Vessel.
["...] I think Inigo would like this place too.”
“Let's bring him here tomorrow,” Henry agreed. “It'll be nice to spend some time together. Plus, the servant girls could use a break.”
Olivia giggled. Before she could think of a witty enough response, Henry spoke again. “Hey, Olivia? If we have a child someday, do you think we could name him something else?”
Thrown by the change in topic, she said, “Sorry, what?”
“He won't be the same as Inigo, you know? And I like Inigo. We've gotten to know him pretty well and I just think it would be kind of weird.”
“Oh. Yes, I agree.” Off-handedly, she added, “We'll have to figure out another name. I'd only ever wanted to name my child Inigo.”
“We can come up with a name together! I don't have any ideas yet 'cause I never thought I'd have any kids,” Henry replied cheerfully. “But Inigo turned out well, so I guess it'll be all right.”
The idea of raising a child with him still seemed distant and foreign. But she supposed that Inigo himself was proof that, once in another world, everything had more or less worked out—with their child, and between themselves.
I think that's all the outtakes even vaguely worth seeing.
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Re: Princess cake-- that stuff is delicious but you've gotta have the jam layer for it to work. I'm not sure I got a Scandinavian vibe from Olivia's account of Feroxi food, though, but that may be because potato dumplings are such an Eastern European thing to me. I couldn't really get a much clearer sense of Ferox than I had going into the story, not that it mattered much.
Gaius and Maribelle were a great, great couple in this.
The Roman army often went 8 soldiers to a tent, but the numbers in the Awakening universe don't match up with the numbers in the Roman army. I'm of the opinion that either there are a lot fewer soldiers, or the playables are elite soldiers, and either way that means fewer tentmates.
Yeah. That's the kind of historical forcing that reads false to me. This is so, so, SO not Ancient Rome and if you wanted to retcon Ancient Roman tenting practices, old-tyme Archanea would be a better venue for it anyway. You know, two thousand years in the past and generic mooks? (And I refuse to believe that Seliph's Special Snowflake Army put up with those conditions a thousand years prior to *that*).
Now, onto the meat of the 'fic.
I thought several times while writing this that it was infinitely to my advantage that the "victim" in this case was male
Yes. That said, I thought you did a very good, very realistic job of portraying that gray area, because honestly it's something that never entirely goes away. Couples can get more experimental over the years, and people in long-term relationships can find themselves pushing the boundaries in other ways (both parties drunk/sleep-deprived but think they're not, etc.) Contrary to what zealous internet commentators might say, "Ow that hurts" doesn't always mean STOP and "I don't feel like it right now" doesn't always mean NO. Not in the context of an established relationship that already has a foundation of trust and respect and other boundaries.
And sometimes they do mean NO and STOP and miscommunications happen even among people who've known one another for decades. Doesn't mean anyone involved is evil or criminal.
Though yeah, it was definitely in your favor that the aggressor was the female in this case. :/
no subject
Regarding sex tips from Inigo... I don't recall what vibe I had originally conceived of, but it was less serious than this. And I figured that some fudging for comic effect would be worth the trade-off. But after I was not very far in, I realized that if I was going to handle something this delicate in limited PoV, everyone had to be precisely in character and acting realistically at all times. And in that case, Inigo was at heart too shy to be giving his mom sex tips, for sure.
(Though if by meandering fluff you're referring to the editing pains this went through, most of the last two months were spent improving the diction in dialogue and the general flow. The flow wasn't really fixed until I pulled up like four scenes by their roots, re-ordered some of them, and replaced a few more. That part wasn't so much a shift in priorities or subplots so much as it was your routine "writing is hard and this bit drags"-type problems.)
I suppose I'm not surprised, at all, that you agree with the thesis. :P Still, I'm glad to hear that you thought it worked exceptionally well. Most of my angst about this story was in its execution so that success makes me happy.