Fic Commentary: 9.8 Metres Per Second Squared

[the_tenzo]

Yay it's the fic commentary meme! If you'd like to get in on it as well (which I encourage whole-heartedly--I love writing these things to a shameful degree), here's the original post.


Welcome to the commentary for 9.8 Metres Per Second Squared, written by request for fid_gin . I wrote the story for the time_and_chips  Seasons Change ficathon, really against my better judgement because I am rubbish at trying to write for an actual prompt or specific purpose. Ficathon participants were to sign up for one or more seasons. Apparently after it's over there will be voting, so, ahem, take that however you will. ~shifty eyes~

Clearly, the season I picked was Autumn, or as we on this side of the pond call it, Fall. And therein lay the major problem that tormented me with this fic. It's just too good, isn't it? Fall, falling, falling in love, falling down, pride goeth before the fall.... I wound up getting entirely too far up the arse of my own similes and it turned in to a nightmare.

I normally do not employ a regular beta reader. Yes, I know I should, and I read for other people quite happily, but...I dunno. My ego is so fragile and I'm such a control freak. However, I realised quite quickly with this piece that I would need a beta, or perhaps about a dozen. I was really floundering, and jaradel gave it a first pass and helped me make some decisions, and then spikewriter really took the proverbial red pen to it, and it was tough but a very worthwhile experience in the end. I really owe a lot to the pair of them.

Let's begin, shall we? I have a feeling this one's going to be a monster.

Of course he sticks his fingers right in and brings them directly to his mouth, without any cautious preamble, not even a glance. This is a habit that Rose is fairly certain will get the Doctor in to serious trouble eventually. Perhaps even more trouble than he is normally in.

"It's all watery," she says, peering over the lip of the bucket, giving the side a tap and watching the ripples.

Okay, skience fudge #1: Maple trees are not tapped in the fall. I'd already arrived at this scene and this image before I actually went and looked it up (I'm a city girl and, while I live in a state that actually produces more maple syrup than Vermont, it's not a process I'm intimately familiar with). Sugar maples are in fact tapped in late winter/early spring. But I associate the taste of maple syrup with all things autumn for some reason and that idea was sort of too good for me to let actual botany get in the way of my story. And, you know, finger porn.

"That's how it comes out of the tree," the Doctor replies sagely, though the fact that he is still darting his tongue out to take little licks from the end of each finger serves to remove the edge off of his intended tone of authority. "It has to be boiled down before actually becoming syrup."

Rose wrinkles her nose, but pokes the tip of one finger in to the amber liquid, and gives it a good look-see before circumspectly tasting.

It isn't nearly as sweet as she is expecting. The sap tastes faintly of minerals, but it is not an altogether unpleasant experience and she licks the rest off with a slurp. The Doctor is already in to the bucket again for another taste, but her own hand darts out, grabs his by the wrist, and aims his dripping fingers directly at her own waiting mouth. It happens so fast that she can legitimately say that she is as surprised as he.

This is trufax. Maple syrup is reduced down enormously from the actual sap. I have however never actually tasted the sap, so I'm completely speculating on that. So, here begins a little bit of business that I just find unbearably sexy.  Initially, I had toyed around with making this tale a lot more explicit and involving the maple sap to a much greater degree (I'll let you use your imaginations, and if anyone wants to actually write that, please please do), but it just never really panned out.

The look on his face in that moment can only be described as circular. Eyes and mouth all form perfect round O's, punctuated by eyebrows that disappear under his fringe. She notes however, that he is not resisting, and rather quickly his features fall back in to a mask of unconcerned curiosity.
 So, the original form of this story, before I had a complete stroke over how it was turning out, was in three parts. The first part is now gone completely and set-up the rest of the story as being a tale of Rose being the aggressor and getting what she wanted, because let's face it, she's like that. Now, I really liked that bit and I may use it in some other story at a later date, but it wound up not really fitting in with the rest of the themes that developed here. I'll present the first paragraph as a deleted scene though:

"You just want what you want, don't you?"

It was the most ridiculous thing Rose had ever heard, and every time Jackie Tyler had uttered those words over the previous nineteen years, it never got less so. Of course she wanted what she wanted. It wouldn't make much sense to want what she didn't want. It made even less sense to not want what she wanted. If it was supposed to be some kind of insult or put-down, it wasn't very effective.
That line that Jackie speaks there is actually one that my own mom used to use on me all the time when I was, well, Rose's age. I think there may, ah, actually be a reason why I relate to the character of Rose so much. Anyway, it never made much sense to me then and it doesn't make any sense to me now. We all want what we want. And...? What's wrong with that?

She takes his long index finger in to her mouth and begins to suck the sap off, trying to avoid making too brazen of a show by involving any tongue, while he regards her over the rims of his glasses. The look in her eye, as she deals similarly with his middle finger, she hopes to pitch as playful innocence. What's a little finger-licking between friends?

Where I wound up however is much more ambiguous as to who is doing what and why. Sure, Rose is doing some incredibly hot stuff with the finger-licking, but she's still trying to play it off like it's no big deal, and he's still just kind of going with it, not stopping her but not taking things further either. Who's really doing the seducing here? Also: specs. Had to throw that in there.

As she draws his finger slowly out of her mouth, she takes note of every contour. His first knuckle is bony, a little knobby and rough, but the space between that and the second knuckle seems impossibly long and thin. She allows her tongue to lightly touch the whorls and lines of the print, and then closes her lips around the tip as the last bit of sweetness leaves her mouth. She licks her top lip, sliding her tongue over the lingering impression left by his manicured nail, before swallowing and giving a little smile.

Okay guys...I'm a little bit in love with that image. This paragraph underwent some tightening up but remained throughout all versions of this because...*guh*. And yes, I did actually engage in some scientific finger-sucking (my own and Mr. Tenzo's) in order to make sure I got all the little details. The things we do for art. And please tell me that I'm not the only one who has noticed how finely manicured DT's nails always are. He totally has them done ~pets him~

When she releases his hand again, he lets it fall limply to his side.

"Delicious," she pronounces.

Perhaps eager for an excuse to break Rose's discomfiting glances, which do not appear to be innocent by any stretch of the imagination, he tilts his head up, squinting and examining the foliage. His now-laughing eyes crinkle around the edges, going a short way to betraying his great age.

I'm not sure how that last image works. This paragraph got seriously trimmed and tightened over the drafts, and I liked the bit about his crinkly smiling eyes, but he's just been seriously come on to, and I feel like I jump too quickly to the next vignette without really addressing that.

Like a cartoon, he lurches forward and shimmies up the trunk of the sugar maple whose wares they have just been sampling. His trainers send little bits of bark raining down on to her head.

"Be careful!" she pointlessly admonishes, because that is partially her job, to tell him things that he doesn't need to know and will completely ignore. He smiles more broadly and begins to edge out on to a limb ten feet over her head.

"It's all right, trees quite fancy me," he sniffs.

Obligatory Ninth Doctor Reference. I do like that the next thing he does after that scene with Rose is climb a tree--running away, as usual, pretending like nothing is amiss. I'm deliberately staying out of his POV here, and also having a fairly limited Rose POV. It's all a bit of a mystery what these two are up to, and let's face it, we all have our own ideas anyway. I wanted to really just show a series of moments rather than do a lot of analyzing of them, at least not until things get heavy.

He comes to a stop at the point right before where the limb he is standing on would naturally begin to bend and eventually snap under his weight.

"There now," he says softly, leaning precariously in to a tangle of smaller branches. "Look at you." Puckering up his lips and puffing out his cheeks, he blows and one perfectly crimson leaf makes a spiralling descent downwards. Rose opens her hands in front of her and it lands there gently.

In my mind, he was able to do that (find a perfect leaf and blow on it so that it fell directly in to Rose's hands) because of his Time Lordliness. He can see the descent of the leaf before it falls. I opted to not go in to that though because I sort of felt it would interrupt the narrative.

About fifty additional less-perfect leaves immediately come tumbling down after, as the Doctor takes a bad step and catches himself on the limb above the one he is standing on. The sudden violent rustling and crackling of the foliage masks any curses he may have muttered, but he rights himself soon enough.  Cat-like, he crouches down, takes the branch in his hands and hangs from it several feet off the ground before letting go and hitting the earth with a soft thud, his coat billowing behind him. He stands to his full height again and Rose is left looking back and forth between the Platonic ideal of an autumn leaf that she holds in her hands, and this impossible man, gurning and smacking the dirt off of his trouser legs.

There's about one million things happening here. First of all, I find the fact that he went to all that trouble to send one leaf down and then trips and like 50 more fall as well to be really amusing. Then there's him jumping out of the tree which I find completely knickers-dampening. I sort of based it on a scene from Michael Chabon's transcendentally excellent book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay where the hero, Joseph Kavalier, climbs up a fire escape and breaks in to an apartment. The way it's presented in the book, it's incredibly hot. And it occurred to me much later that Joe is really quite Doctorish (me? have a template for fictional men that I love? what?). And then there's the bit with the Platonic ideal of an autumn leaf, which is of course a play on Platonic love.

~o0o~

It's not the beach she requested to take the chill off of their sojourn on Dame Kelly Holmes Close. In fact, this may be the diametrical opposite, but she has to hand it to the Doctor: the view is impressive. Perhaps not the conjunction of a binary star or the explosions of a gas cloud in the Horse Head Nebula, but likewise something she never thought she'd see back when she was just Rose Tyler, shop girl.

So, the clue here is that this takes place after Fear Her and before Army of Ghosts and Doomsday. Which makes it officially Tragic. My personal "official" canon is that they did not have a physical relationship prior to Doomsday, but fanfic isn't really about canon, it's about possibilities. Doomsday is 327% more heartbreaking if you imagine that they had only just previous to it gotten around to really for real becoming lovers.

The rocky outcropping they are reclining on is comfortably covered with fallen leaves as the setting sun begins to withdraw the thermals from under the wings of the raptors which wheel and soar in the valley below.

Another image of falling--the birds of prey losing the thermals on which they've been soaring. I recently saw (I think for the second time, it seemed familiar) a Nova on how scientists study raptor flight to learn about building better airplanes. Now, the building better airplanes bit is totally boring to me, but the birds? Completely amazing. When the peregrine falcon dives (called a "stoop"), she can achieve upwards of 200 mph. Seriously.

"Mountains and rivers without end," sighs the Doctor contentedly, hands behind his head.

Mountains and Rivers Without End is both a famous Sung Dynasty hand scroll (a painting in the form of a long scroll that the viewer is meant to unwrap slowly) and a book-length poem by the only beat poet who actually knew anything about Asian art and religion, Gary Snyder. (I tried to find images from the hand scroll but couldn't find any really good ones, so here are some selections.nbsp; I just assume that the Doctor of course would know all about the painting.

"Pardon?"

"Nothing. There's a painting, this reminds me of it." But rather than continuing to run his eyes over every vivid texture and colour in the landscape, he turns on to his side towards her. She does the same, and they lie inches apart. She wants to make a joke about the Green Mountains not really being all that green this time of year, but it doesn't exactly seem like the right time, not with the Doctor feeling all poetic and expansive.

Mmm. Vermont. When I think autumn, I think Vermont. Mr. Tenzo and I spent a week in Vermont last October (view my pictures from that here. It really is just brain-meltingly beautiful, and I say that as someone who lives full time in a city in the Appalachians. The thing that really struck me about Vermont was not only the colours (which were amazing) but the textures as well. I did want to mention that but I really came up short when it came to actually describing the beauty of the landscape. Artistic fail.

"What are you thinking about?" she finally asks.

"I reckon, for me, the more apt question is what aren't I thinking about?" he says with a cheeky smirk that she half wants to smack right off of his face and half wants to explore the edges of with her own lips.

"All right then, what aren't you thinking about?"

"Well, I'm not thinking about elephants." He beetles his brow and looks genuinely consternated. "Bugger. Now I am."

You have to give the Doctor at least one good one-liner, even in a serious story. The dialogue about "what aren't you thinking" came to me as I drifted off to sleep one night and it made me chuckle. And "what are you thinking" is such a teenager's ploy to getting a guy to open up and make a move. I've used it myself, and had it used on me. With normal guys I think the hope is that they will be so terrified of actually talking about what they are thinking and feeling that they'll instead just snog the stuffing out of you. Of course this does not work on the Doctor.

"Doesn't this view make you feel all sort of...small, though?"

"Rose Tyler, if anything were to make me feel small, I would have found it long before now." She gives him a look and he screws up his face and looks mildly embarrassed. "Oh...that sounds arrogant, doesn't it? What I mean is, there will be a day when you'll not feel small either. And you're not. I'm not. No one is. If there's one thing I want for you, it's for you to not feel small."

I will confess that sometimes it is hard to keep the father-daughter dynamic out of Doctor/Rose. It's a bit squicky, but let's face it...it is there. She's a young girl who never knew her dad, he's significantly (heh) older and wiser. There's...issues. Anyway, it's a natural reaction to feel small when looking at really really big things, unless of course you're an unrepentant narcissist like the Doctor. He's not wrong though. The whole ethic of Who is that nobody is small. Everyone and everything is important, and ordinary people are routinely called upon to be extraordinary. I think part of the journey each companion takes is learning to not feel small (DONNNAAAAA!!!! ~weeps~).

A raptor screams in the valley and they raise themselves up on their elbows to look down over the cliff. As they watch, a falcon tucks her wings and falls in to a stoop. She becomes a dot, and then not even that, as she plunges to the valley floor. She sees what she wants and speeds towards it.

Originally here there was a call back to that "You just want what you want" line from the original first part. I began by explicitly comparing Rose to the falcon, seeing what she wants and going for it, but the whole idea that developed later was that falling lacks real agency, that it's not really controlled by anyone once you step off the ledge.

"Blimey," the Doctor says, laying back down again, unable to enjoy a moment without commenting on it. "Are you getting cold?"

Who among us has not been here? You're outside with the bloke you fancy and you're having a moment, you are ~freezing~ but you don't want to ruin the magic by going and getting a coat or something. I am sure it's not just me that had this happen multiple times in my single years.

Rose shakes her head, which is a lie, but if she owns up to the bout of shivers she's contending with, he'll insist they go back inside, maybe even leave completely, and she doesn't want that. She wants to fall as well.

As I said before this went from Rose really having very strong agency to really the only decision being made is to just take the plunge as it were. After that, it's all just out of her control.

And right here, originally, there was a cut. This was the end of Part 2 and the beginning of Part 3. Both my betas noted the complete awkwardness of the way I had made the transition. The text that is now the story summary used to live at the beginning of Part 3. Once I got rid of the parts, it still was a weird transition from just like la la la thinky thoughts to oooh touching! Taking out the part that is now the summary helped, and doing away with any delineation indicating time has passed between the previous paragraph and this one I think made it work eventually.

Her hand comes up to rest on his cheek, which is rough and cool, even cooler than usual. He blinks and she sees questions in his eyes, for which there are no answers. She wants to tell him that this is so simple. He ventures his own hand to her waist and it fits there like every embrace they've ever shared has left a perfect imprint for him to find and slide in to. He lets his eyes darken and stay that way and in them she sees time and all possibilities. She denies them, every single one of them, and tumbles forward, down the rabbit hole, past the event horizon.

In that mythical first part that got axed, there was some Alice in Wonderland imagery that I quite liked (and I think that's why I kept that part long after I should have just gotten rid of it). What the hell, I'll include another deleted scene here:

His defences would continue to fall, and she would continue to fall after, down the rabbit hole where it was so easy to go and so difficult to come back. Perhaps in the end it would be his manic need to seek experience that would be the final push. Falling is, after all, quite easy. It's the remaining standing that's difficult. He would need to know eventually, what it would be like in that other land. To sigh nonsense words and have them be instantly understood, to break in to a thousand delicate pieces, to lose one's head over trifles.
So there wound up being call-backs through the rest of the story but the original text isn't there anymore. I kept them because I think they still work. I also had a bit that got taken out about the Doctor having control over his physical reactions, his pupils dilating and contracting. It is such a cliche of fic but honestly, this is not something that in real life I ever notice about anyone. I should maybe stop writing about it and learn me some better euphemisms for, "This character is totally turned-on!"

He makes the final backwards step as well, closes the last inch of distance between them, and
there is free fall. The acceleration is overwhelming, the blackness below is terrible and alluring, the wind cries in her ears. She wants to take it all back, claw her way up again, but this falling is so easy. There is no choice in the matter. It is drowning, it is dying, it is being born, it just happens and they are both powerless.

More literary references. In the Zen sutra Fukanzazengi (written by the founder of Soto Zen Buddhism Eihei Dogen Zenji) there is the line, "Take the backwards step that turns the light and shines it inwards." This is the occupational hazard of having a spiritual practice that involves recitation of texts. They tend to seep in to your brain and come out in weird ways.

Other things in this passage: Originally I had written that Rose is really actually quite terrified, there's a bit of tear-shedding, not like actual crying, but it got angsty. Or angstier. But I could't get the Doctor to respond to that in a satisfactory way and then I just started to hate the very idea. So I decided to just stick to the images, and concentrate on the inevitability of what's about to happen. Ready or not, here it comes. And I'm awfully fond of using "terrible" in the archaic sense. I do it all the time. ~makes note to expand vocabulary~

There is an unfolding and an unmasking as things fall apart and away. He murmurs her name against her mouth, sucking and tasting the remnants of their sweet feast, unable to be quiet even now. The leaves crunch as they move together and the spicy, warm scent of decay is released.

Hey hey "things fall apart"! 'Sup, Yeats? "The Second Coming" is really just the ultimate go-to place for random imagery. Thematically that really has nothing in common with this. I just like it. Though I guess there is sort of a shared theme of inexorable forward movement, the "ready or not here it comes"-ness. It's just that in the poem the 'it' is the apocalypse. Here, it's just some shagging.

And of course the smooching, which is very nice, and the fallen leaves again. Fallen and decaying. Fall, falling, fallen, fall fall fall. You see how I got so wrapped up in this that I completely wrote myself in to the Pit of Despair?

He talks. Of course he talks. He names her and he names all the little parts of her that he touches. He names the sensations as if giving a tour of this new land. Over here, we have the nonsense words I will speak in my pleasure. Over there is the taste of how alive you are. And just here, the little shards that I become when we join. The echoes of his narrative amid the trees above and in the valley below fade in to the Doppler shift of rapid descent, a guidebook left behind and forgotten about.

Hey-ho Dirty-talking!Doctor! Yes, please. Okay, so again the random shit that goes on in my head when I'm writing: This non-dialogue dialogue that he's not-really speaking, in my head is actually the scene from A Room With a View (the film version) where the Rev. Mr. Eager is giving a tour of the church of Santa Croce. In my defence, though, there's actually a strong theme regarding guidebooks and getting lost and falling in love in that novel. Though the bit about the echoes and the guidebook was one of the last things I added to the story before finishing and I wasn't consciously thinking about Forster. I also like sciency metaphors. This is not the first time the Doppler shift has made its way in to my fic.

Perhaps their landing will be soft nevertheless, and all of the things that flew away will land nearby, ready to be gathered and put back together again. Maybe they will both walk away from the collision with the ground, when it does finally come to pass. But for now, the falling might as well be flying, it seems as ceaseless and as free.

So from Rose feeling really scared about the consequences of their decision, she surrenders herself to it and enjoys the moment. Fall far enough and I suppose it would become like flying. And of course, Douglas Adams tells us that the way to fly is to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Travelling in time, stories do not progress from beginning to middle and end. Now, however, they slowly flip through the chapters in a quite linear fashion, from tender, tentative preface, to grasping and clutching in a frantic tussle, and then to a slow but unbridled climax. The back pages are filled with shy, quiet murmurings and contented sighs as they lay together, tangled in clothes and making an index of sensations for future reference.

This was another late addition. I felt like I was wrapping things up too quickly, which I have a tendency to do. I didn't want it to be, "And then they totally did it, the end." And I kind of wanted to add a bit more *guh*. If I'm going to be writing all lyrically about sex, I should, you know, write the actual sex. I'm not completely happy with the way it scans, but such is life. I am slightly in love with the image of lovemaking as a book, however, and the acknowledgement that they don't really "do" linear that often in their life of time travel. Which makes it sound like someone else wrote this and I'm just talking about it, but honestly, I don't know where these things come from. They just pop out and I go, "Oh, that's rather good, I'll have that." or "Yikes, delete, immediately."

She feels the inertia of her heart lagging behind her body, as she shivers under a complex of stars that seem so close, she wants to dive upwards and swim in them. This fall will end some time and they both know that when it does, they will not see the ground until the moment of impact. This is certainly a very sensible reason to not jump in the first place, but sensibility can never compare to the tantalising surety of disaster. The falcon overtakes the hare, clouds break and the storm comes, and falling objects hit the ground.

This paragraph went through a lot of wordsmithing and reorganisation. You've got to end a story like this with something impressive and full of oomph, but I was getting really self-conscious about that, and it showed (perhaps it still does). This is my nod to the inevitable tragedy that is soon on its way, and the fact that they both (or at least Rose) is on some level aware that it has to end and when it does it won't be pretty. The Doctor's already had his line in Fear Her about the coming storm, which I reference in the last line. That last line also went through a lot of changes, and originally was based on yet another line from the Fukanzazengi: "If you grasp the point, you are like a dragon gaining the water, like a tiger taking to the mountains." Dragons are at home in the water (according to Asian myth) and tigers of course live in the mountains. It's the inevitability of things returning to their source. Originally I had the line as "The falcon gains the air, the wildcat takes to the hills, falling objects hit the ground. It is inevitable." I retooled it in order to call back to the "coming storm" line and to remove the last sentence. I decided it had more oomph without it. Also, I wanted to make the bit with the falcon more predatory, more scary and raw.

Phew. I think I wrote more words about it than are actually in it. ~checks word count~ Yep. I did.