Fic: 'I love you' is a thing you say to people who are dying (10/16); hard R

[quinara]

This part ritually abuses things from all over the place, as you will see, including scripts by David Fury, Drew Goddard, Doug Petrie, the Joss himself, Jane Espenson and Stephen DeKnight, as well as all the wonderful people who've ever put transcripts up on Buffyworld.com. The formatting has not been fun...

And - she says after putting it

Comments

[rahirah]

This is a really brilliant chapter. The script bits segue from actual script into Spike's fantasy(?) totally seamlessly; I felt that I was reading real episode transcripts there. And Lydia turning all his self-centered self-loathing around on him there at the end was fantastic.

[quinara]

Oh, thank you!!! I had a lot of fun with this chapter. I think I liked to see these extra bits as Spike's memories (ie. what actually happened after the scenes cut), though some of them are likely a stretch. The thing with Seeing Red is that the blocking in that scene makes it really weird to try and figure out how Spike would have got out of the bathroom. Either he leaves immediately in such a state to forget his coat, in which case he has to move towards Buffy to pass her to the door, which doesn't make emotional sense, or they both have to wait there long enough that he can pass by her, in which case I'd have thought he'd pick up the coat - or he has to leave the house another way... Taking into account Buffy's reactions afterwards, this seemed like a fairly reasonable fudge

[kerry_220]

Lydia was my avatar on a lot of old BtVS discussion sites. I don't think there is enough of her in fiction :-)

[quinara]

I find all the Watchers highly entertaining - and Lydia is fun. :D

[ever_neutral]

I -

I want to say words but mostly I'm

[quinara]

Yessssssss!!! Glad you enjoyed it!! Although I think ME might have had problems with me arguing about teh Spuffy every script meeting. Good old Lydia. :D

[fangfaceandrea]

Oh I just read this whole story today and it has been amazing! And this last chapter was a fun read, it seems like a lot of work on your part but reading spike's story as an objective report is a very original idea specially because Of Lydia's take on his story as he tells irrelevant it.
Awesome job here :)

[quinara]

Yaaaay!! I'm so glad you're enjoying it!! Putting it together wasn't hard work really, just lots of fiddly stuff at the end which got to be annoying. Hopefully the rest will be up very soon. :D

[the_moonmoth]

Fave passage this chapter :

by which point I’d forgotten Dru was not fun on drugs, but mostly what you saw were these deep, ragged scars inside her that fucking hurt to look at.

Fanfic written as academic discourse is one of my favorite things ever but this... This blows my mind. What a fantastic way to write the experience of being in someone else's head. And all the more interesting for being from Lydia's pov.

I love the tangled reasoning behind his views on Drusilla and how he thought it was his fault they ended. Because I can see his point, but at the same time, Lydia is totally right.

[quinara]

:D Cheers!!! I had so much fun with this in the end. I started on it about the time I'd decided that I wasn't going to do linear chronology, and was looking for a solution to the problem that I was basically going to have to write prose versions of actual scenes from the show (because I wouldn't want to claim that things in 1880 didn't happen how they did), and I hate that... I think the first wacky idea I had was using videos or something, but that sounded like hard work and likely to throw people completely out, so then I remembered the good old days of reading transcripts when S6 was airing and decided this was the way to go. The dear hope was to actually trick people into imagining the scenes (because I always find the screenplays more vivid than prose somehow, even for having less information) and then push it all a bit further, though in some instances I'm not sure the dialogue gets it totally seamlessly