Secret Mutant fics!

[kaydeefalls]

Secret Mutant reveal has happened! So now I can 'fess up at last. Both of these fics drew heavily from personal experience, so fair warning, I'm about to blather on a bit.

First up, my original assignment:

Trigger Discipline (3931 words) by kaydeefalls
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Characters: Raven Darkholme, Moira MacTaggert, Erik Lehnsherr, Charles Xavier
Summary: In which Raven learns how to fire a weapon, and maybe even when not to.

So I knew going into this that very few people would even bother reading this fic, and unsurprisingly, that was the case. I'm assuming people saw the lack of boyslash in the heading and automatically gave it a pass. In fairness, I was tempted to slap a Charles/Erik pairing tag on it -- they are the primary background pairing -- but that seemed disingenuous, so I didn't. Because this fic is not about them. It's about Raven, and who she is as a person, and how conflicted she feels in her longstanding loyalty to Charles, who she loves but doesn't like very much, and the temptation represented by Erik. It's about how impulsive she is by nature, and how strongly she feels everything. This was a very difficult fic for me to write, in that sense -- I personally don't identify with Raven very much at all. She's strongly driven by emotion in a way that I'm just...not.

But it's also about Moira teaching Raven how to shoot a gun, and how Raven internalizes those lessons and how they begin to shape her outlook on everything else. As soon as I saw littledust's prompt, I knew this was the story I wanted to tell. Look, guns are scary, and they're immensely powerful, and I personally find them completely abhorrent. And over the summer, when I was living in Colorado, an old friend of mine who was stationed at Fort Collins drove up to visit me in the mountains, and he took me to an outdoor firing range and taught me how to fire a semiautomatic pistol. I agreed to the lesson partly because I figured it would come in handy for writing someday (and boy, I had no idea how on-the-nose relevant it would shortly become!), and partly because, well, know thy enemy. I'm a vocal supporter of gun control, and I wanted to understand better what I was talking about, what other people were talking about. And, yeah, I do get that there is a sort of seductive thing about firing a gun. It makes you feel very powerful. And that's scary as shit.

My friend was very, very responsible about teaching me -- he would not let me touch the pistol until he'd drilled me in those four primary rules of firearms safety, then took the gun apart to show me each of the component parts, what they did, and how to put them together. (I do have to add that my beta, tricksterquinn, was absolutely invaluable in providing me with further informations about firearms and safety beyond what I could remember from a months-old lesson.) So I structured the fic around Moira teaching Raven the gun safety rules, and then flashing back and forward to examples of how those "rules" directly impacted Raven's personal life -- which, seriously, once you know about firearms safety, it's kind of mindboggling how clearly Erik is shown violating each and every one of those rules in the beach showdown, which directly leads to Charles's paralysis. So I wanted to show that by simply broadening Raven/Mystique's awareness of the danger, by making her take another couple of seconds to think about her actions, she might have been able to make a decision that completely altered the outcome of the film. Yeah, I veered off into fix-it territory in the end -- it was very important to me to give Raven that agency, rather than just allowing her to be so easily swayed by stronger personalities.

So, yeah.

Next up, the incredibly obvious pinch-hit:

The Opposite of People (9217 words) by kaydeefalls
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Characters: Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr, Raven Darkholme, Sebastian Shaw, Alex Summers, Logan (X-Men), Armando Muñoz, Hank McCoy, Ororo Munroe, Jean Grey
Summary: In retrospect, it probably didn't help that the first time Charles met Erik Lehnsherr, the man was up a ladder in well-worn, close-fitting jeans. Modern!nonpowered!AU where they all work in the theatre, Shaw is still a bastard, and Charles is doing his best to get this damn show open with his sanity (relatively) intact.

a.k.a. the Theatre!AU I've been talking about for over a year now. Seriously, this is my ultimate id!fic. No, you don't understand, that fic is a 100% accurate and true representation of my life. Except for the romance part. Although -- the very first scene I wrote, way back last autumn, was the scene in which Charles meets Erik, which was a situation I lifted directly from the show I was working on at the time. I came into the theater an hour before rehearsal started to find the entire fucking space completely coated in a fine layer of sawdust, because our failboat production manager had never corrected a long-since-outdated production calendar, so the technical director thought he had an extra hour to work in the space before rehearsal started. TRUE FUCKING STORY. In my case, it was the lighting designer who was rather advantageously up a ladder at the time, and again, true story, we did wind up dating for a while after the show closed. But that's neither here nor there.

I did write the majority of the fic in that week between getting the pinch-hit and the deadline; I picked it up primarily because I'd spent a fair bit of time in chat with afrocurl during the X-Men Reversebang this summer, and I wanted to give her something nice. I'd initially planned on filling a different prompt entirely, but as inspiration failed to strike, realized that it would take very little adjustment to fit my long-abandoned theatre!AU to one of her other prompts (which was basically a meet-cute where Charles and Erik are drawn to one another due to the power of one or the other's smile; I basically added a couple of lines to one existing scene and then wrote another later scene entirely to fit the prompt). And, man, I really am glad to finally have had the excuse (and deadline) that I needed to finish that thing.

Look, I could ramble on about this one for quite a long time, but basically, if you ever want to understand me as a person, just read this fic. I didn't write myself in as Charles -- we're very different people -- but everything he has to deal with in that fic is what I have to deal with in my job on a daily basis. He handled most of it better than I did in real life -- ah, the benefits of hindsight. The production in the fic is basically a compilation of two productions in particular that I've stage managed -- the miserable shitshow that was Company this past fall, and a very stressful adaptation of Henry IV that I SMed last year, also in the fall. (The autumn is a cursed season for me; my worst clusterfuck shows are ALWAYS in the autumn, for some damn reason.) Every single experience or technical difficulty mentioned in the fic is something I have personally experienced on a professional production; I actually had an awful lot of fun trawling through my old rehearsal and performance reports for notes I could directly use (or only slightly adapt) for Charles's. The nonsmoker's smoking break is a trick I picked up from an SM a couple of years back; I started calling them "sunshine breaks". When Charles snaps at Jean, it's a line I stole directly from another SM I assisted once -- it's the single most important piece of stage management advice I've ever received ("solve problems, don't create them"). And so on, and so on. The only thing that's never actually happened to me personally was the actor love triangle, but seriously, straight men in theatre are always trouble, it's only a matter of time. (I have had to deal with sexual harassment issues, which are a joy forever.)

Also I wrote a fucking glossary for this thing. What is my life.

Also I can say that my gift fic was written by ninemoons42, which was hilarious and awesome because she's one of my usual betas, and I recognized her writing style instantly. :D :D :D