Against Better Judgment
(Note)
by D.C. Logan
(maxwells_salvage@oocities.com)
| WARNINGS: After the war, 6x5, 6+OMC, 1x2 mention of 3x4, past 6+9, 13+11, some police-style violence and humor.
SUMMARY: It's now five years after Endless Waltz. Wufei has been a Preventer agent for years, but has just been assigned a new partner--Zechs Merquise has returned from Mars. NOTES: This will be a longish get-together story with some hurt/comfort elements (since I am innately fond of them). It also contains some spoilers for Episode Zero, the GW series (television and manga versions), and Endless Waltz. It will have some light bits of humor and a few citrusy moments towards the end if my brain cooperates. These aren't my usual characters, and this is my first time playing with some of them, so I'll apologize in advance for unintentional OOCness. The initial draft of this fic was completed in May of 2006 for the MoR Mission Fic Contest, and posted unbetaed and unedited. If you have an emotional attachment to that version, it is available here. If you are interested in how this fic happened to get writ, some additional notes are here. (Revised June/July 2006 and posted here in in other archives.) |
"Everyone sees what you appear to be; few experience what you really are." –Machiavelli
~:~
About three years ago, after a fairly long and involved, "I have absolutely had it with the Gundam Wing fandom and I quit. That's it. No more writing for me ever," episode that I frankly admit was a long time in coming, I was invited to, instead, turn some of my creative efforts into an online roleplaying game in LiveJournal. Trick was, I'd never RP'd before, ever, and I'd never done anything with Zechs as a character before either, and he was supposed to work with and eventually drift him into a 6x5 relationship with Wufei.
So this fic started as a series of blocked out scenes between Zechs and Wufei that I cobbled together after a frantic re-watch of the series, while trying to get a handle on who Zechs was and how I was going to play with him 'in my head', so to speak.
I dropped the scenes into a folder on my hard drive and mostly forgot about them, except to occasionally try and pull them into something useful. They changed voice from first to third person a few times and back again, and I spent a while trying to fit a plot line around the few scenes I liked before scrapping the mess and dumping it back in its folder again any number of times.
Problem was, I hate tossing out anything useful, and at this point I'd invested a fair bit of time in this fic-writing business, and this not-quite story thing had a few scenes that I really liked.
When the MoR contest came around again, I ripped the existing unfinished fic-thing apart for about the seventh time, which left me with about twenty to thirty pages of the original scenes I'd started with, then I added Heero and Duo to the revised outline and wrote like crazy to meet the deadline, quite literally up until the last possible minute.
And there you have it. So be it. Not my best effort, and if the story line is fragmented and if the characterization drifts, that's the reason it does, but at least this particular story is off of my hard drive and I can move my brain onto other projects now.
To all of the people who suffered through reading the draft copy I submitted for the contest, I extend my sincere apologies.
And if you find the single line I adapted from one of my favorite Misty Lackey re-reads, and recognize it, drop me a line. I have an additional bit of fic that I'll send along to you.
--D.C. (June 2006)
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