Da Capo al Fine (new Clair Obscur fanfic)

[queenlua]

This time, Aline will fix it. This time, she'll make it right.

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Aline & Verso, Verso & Clea, time loop + bad parenting + psychological horror + etc, ~16k words.

Read here on AO3.

* This fic sort of started as a shitpost. This one, in particular. Particularly the bit in the comments where I was riffing with someone & we were like "okay what if Verso is just doomed to die. if the fire doesn't get him some other Looney-Tunes-ass death will." And I was like... actually if you do that as a tragedy that's pretty cool, right

* It also sort of started as a modern-day Montana AU? As in Montana the US state? When I first wrote chapter 5, it was trying to be a standalone fic, and I made Verso and Claire be in Montana for some reason (I think this mediocre movie I watched on an airplane leaked into my subconscious), and I was doing some sort of "what if Painters exist in multiple eras of time all at once" kind of thing... anyway the sibling dynamic stuff was FUN and Montana was EXTRANEOUS so it eventually got ditched

* The snake, I initially wrote purely as a sort of placeholder: "I know I want to write a timeloop fic; I don't really give a fuck what the mechanism for the timeloop is; whatever I'll just throw an ominous Biblical-ass snake in for now and write something better later." But... I wound up kind of liking the snake? And the moment I started letting it talk like the KJV Bible, it was kind of over for me; I was TOO enchanted with the weird damn thing. What if The Mysterious Stranger but the angel is very slightly nicer. That kind of vibe.

* (Aside: I gave myself a lot of agony over whether I should be using KJV language at all, because bla bla French game bla bla KJV *really* locks you into some specific-to-English traditions, etc... but at the end of the day, I can't help it, I am a monolingual creature, I gotta work with the source material I got, and the KJV was what popped out here.)

* anyway I've had chapter 5 written for a WHILE now and I LIKE IT VERY MUCH so really the entire rest of this fic was me going into a fugue state to write 13k words of leadup so I could share the part I'm insane about haha

* and I sure needed a fugue state because otherwise I would've psych'd myself out forever over "is this too Very Special Episode" worries

* and I ALSO sure needed a fugue state because wow writing Aline is basically writing an OC right. sorry that i made her just a terror! i doubt she's THAT terrible in canon... but, y'know... the story had Certain Needs and those needs were She Needs To Suck lmao. and also what does the notion of "canon" "compliance" mean when you have "Verso, but he's in a timeline that's been so aggressively manipulated he may well have his personality start to warp" and. then you do that several dozen times. there was a lot going on hahaha

* FUN AS HELL TO WRITE tho; hope ppl enjoy~

* ETA: oh right, a subset of the various things i thought about and/or consulted while writing this: first reformed (2017), various writings by thomas merton, someone's phd thesis on facial disfigurement in ww1 veterans + a nifty online ww1 encyclopedia, nietzsche's eternal recurrence, this philip whalen poem, "what we loved was not enough" by thee silver mt zion memorial orchestra, [redacted] blog post, a few writings by william james esp. this one, faust (obviously lol), "when i'm gone" by eminem, margaret atwood's "happy endings", frank r stockton's "the lady or the tiger?", kiyoaki in the very first scene of yukio mishima's spring snow, beckett's waiting for godot, zola's the masterpiece and l'assomoir, a couple episodes of le bazar de la charité, maupassant's bel-ami, gabriel fauré: a musical life by jean-michel nectoux (trans. by roger nichols), a hell of a lot of wikipedia, charles-valentin alkan's "aesop's feast"

* couldn't find a way to wedge this in anywhere, but: in the chapter 5 loop, alicia's doing okay; she's in the sorbonne & starting to develop a bit of an awareness of Wow My Family's Kind Of Messed Up. verso is still a doting older brother & he Always Manages To Pull His Shit Together when Alicia's around. i had a bit where Clea asks Verso "are you like this around Alicia," and he's like "no, oh god, of course not. hey, don't tell her you saw me like this" and Clea's like "of course i won't," it was very sweet but felt a little mean for her to even MENTION it given the rest of the scene haha