#i know some tellings of her story have her being sacrificed willingly or artemis saving her at the last second

[hella1975]

:/ <- thinking about iphigenia again

[birdsgoflying]

Letting Go Ch.2: Behind-the-Scenes

Here is part two of my behind-the-scenes look into my fic, Letting Go!

Link to fic:

http://archiveofourown.org/works/11512686

Analysis of chapter one:

https://birdsgoflying.tumblr.com/post/165566140213/letting-go-ch-1-behind-the-scenes

CHAPTER TWO:

 The only one he hadn’t managed to completely alienate was Jason. …. Dick would see him out of the corner of his eye during patrol – just a flash of a shiny red mask, following him silently to make sure he didn’t hurt himself.

 In the original draft of this chapter, Jason was not referenced at all. It wasn’t until I wrote the end of chapter 5, where Jason tracks him down in Metropolis, when I wrote Jason into chapter two. I did this because I realized that, as far as we know in the canon YJ timeline, Jason is still dead. So as we fanfic authors often do, I decided fuck it and created my own timeline. So, here is the New and Improved Timeline of Jason Todd:

 -          Jason came back from the dead some time during season two.

-          Bruce isn’t exactly wild about broadcasting his “failure” to the rest of the League. (Jason came back very violent and tried to blow up the city, after all, so it wasn’t exactly a celebratory reunion).

-          Jason’s post-rising-from-the-dead meltdown/fight with the rest of the bat-clan happened off-screen during season two, and it is part of the reason why Dick was largely absent from the team during that time period.

-          Jason chilled the fuck out eventually but kept his distance from the family for a while, then started talking to Dick again, very briefly in passing when he would run into him on patrol – a few quiet words exchanged, a respectful nod in his direction, nothing more.

-          He was warming up to the idea of spending more time with Dick when Wally died and Dick started his downward spiral, so Jason kept his distance while keeping an eye on him.

  Wally’s memories swirl around him, mingling with the orange mass of movement he is currently immersed in.

 I wanted to wait until at least chapter two to introduce Wally’s point of view, and to be honest, even chapter two felt too early. I wanted to keep the focus on Dick and his mourning, and I didn’t want to bring Wally into it too early on because I felt like bringing Wally in early somehow lessens the blow of Dick mourning him. Ideally, I would have waited until chapter three or four, to increase the dramatic tension of ‘will Wally come back or not?’, but I ultimately decided to do it in the second chapter. If I had waited until the later chapters, I would have had to cram a lot of Wally’s content together into one chapter, and I wanted to spread it out more to make it flow a little better and make it feel more natural.

  But maybe he’s a little in over his head, he remembers thinking, as they failed mission after mission. He knew the initial high was all too sweet to last. The real world hit them like a cement truck.

 A large part of Wally’s POV during this chapter was based on a drabble that I wrote several months before I even started writing this fic.

 Sometimes, when I am stuck, I put my fanfic playlist (which can be found here https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/kajnsn/playlist/2t9tx7twJ1CBBKdJZPvvCJ if you wish to utilize it!) on shuffle and write a drabble based on whatever comes up. I have until the end of the song to finish the drabble.

 (I usually end up with 300 words or so. The key is to just WRITE, no matter how shitty it is, until the end of the song. You can go back and edit it later, but for now, just write. Misspell words, use poor grammar if you have to, and if you have a word that you want to use but you can’t remember it and it’s stuck on the tip of your tongue, just type the word ‘elephant’ and you can CTRL+F the word ‘elephant’ afterwards and go back and figure out what you wanted to say later on. But for now, just fuckin’ write. Word-vomit all over the page. Do it. DO IT.)

   Anyway, during one of those sessions, “White Houses” by Vanessa Carlton came up. I’ve always loved that song. It is bittersweet, and it’s about friendship, growing up, and the loss of innocence. So I wrote, from Wally’s perspective, about what it felt like to go from the excitement of forming the team to the realization that making sacrifices was inevitable – from the Failsafe simulation to Tula’s death.

 I knew I had to incorporate it somehow when I found the drabble in my “Drafts and Scraps” folder, because thematically, it matched the story very well. I had to rewrite parts of it and expand on other parts of it, and the finished product ended up much more angsty than bittersweet, but it ended up fitting the story, so I was pleased.

  None of them blamed Tula for sacrificing herself. Each of them would have done it in a heartbeat, if put in her place.

 I knew that I wanted to reference Tula dying when I got to Wally’s point of view, because there are a lot of really fantastic parallels that can be drawn between Wally and Tula’s deaths:

-          Tula and Wally both sacrificed themselves because there was no other choice – they needed to save their friends, and the rest of the world, and them dying was the only way to do that.

-          They both willingly and knowingly gave their lives for their cause.

-          They both left their lovers – Garth and Artemis – behind to grieve in the wake of their deaths.

-          They also both left behind another person who loved them from afar – Kaldur and Dick.

-          Tula dying is what ultimately made Kaldur leave the team pre-season two, and Wally dying is what made Dick leave the team at the end of season two.

 (For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story, Tula’s death is outlined in Young Justice: Legacy, the video game released several years ago, which falls between seasons one and two in the timeline. You can watch the cutscenes here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoCXT-M_VSM or you can purchase it on Steam if you would like to actually play it; I don’t think it costs very much. The game’s mechanics, graphics, and most of the cutscenes are genuinely shitty, but the plot is somewhat interesting and it helps fill in the gaps about what happened with Tula and what caused Kaldur, Wally, and Artemis to leave the team.)

  They were thrust, unprepared, into what it really meant to be a superhero when M’Gann hijacked the training simulation and made them all genuinely believe they had died. He had felt himself really begin to come undone after that. It made it all the more real. He had been forced to watch his friends die. Hell, they were still psychically connected, so he hadn’t just watched; he had felt them die.

 The Failsafe episode was a huge turning point for the season one team – it seemed to show all of them, and the audience, that this is very real. I seem to reference the Failsafe episode in most of the fics that I write, because it held a huge emotional impact for me. I reference that episode fairly often in this fic, actually – you will see more references to it later.

  They were thrust, unprepared, into what it really meant to be a superhero when M’Gann hijacked the training simulation and made them all genuinely believe they had died. He had felt himself really begin to come undone after that. It made it all the more real. He had been forced to watch his friends die. Hell, they were still psychically connected, so he hadn’t just watched; he had felt them die. Suddenly, it wasn’t just about glory and inside jokes and hanging out with friends anymore. Of course they felt relief upon waking up and realizing it wasn’t real, but the undertone of dread remained. It was a realization for all of them – someday, this would actually happen. Someday, one of them would end up dying for a mission.

 But the pain they felt upon that realization was nothing compared to the pain of actually losing a teammate when that day finally came. And it was only a matter of time. They all knew the expectation – they needed to be prepared to lay down their lives the very moment it was asked of them, because they were superheroes. This was what they did. Their lives were not their own anymore. None of them blamed Tula for sacrificing herself. Each of them would have done it in a heartbeat, if put in her place.

 But they weren’t prepared for being on the other side of it. For being the ones who survived - facing the aftermath of one of their teammates dying. It was so much harder to be the ones left behind, Wally had thought, as he grieved with the rest of his team. The pain of losing a teammate, the pain of watching a friend grieve their fallen lover. It was almost too much.

 Wally remembers thinking, back then, that it might break him – but of course, it didn’t. People don’t break so easily.

 People usually find a way to keep going.

 That exact thought is what sticks with Wally as he sees flashes of Dick’s face from inside the orange blur surrounding him. Tears, angry eyes rimmed with red, lips pressed to a bottle, a parade of strangers that Dick allows to use his body in exchange for being used in return.

 Wally can’t tell where his own face is inside the blur that envelops him, nor can he feel the tears that he knows he's shedding.

 So, real talk - the final seven paragraphs of chapter two made me cry as I wrote it. Just saying. I think it’s probably the most emotional few paragraphs of the entire story for me.