Yuletide fic for Sunshine (2007)
Jan. 1st, 2020 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynFor Yuletide this year, I gamed the system so hard (something I've never done before) so I could write one of bond_girl 's prompts for the 2007 movie Sunshine, starring Cillian Murphy and Chris Evans as a "science ice prince and competent military hothead" fighting with each other across the solar system, among an incredible cast that includes Michelle Yeoh, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rose Byrne, and Benedict Wong.
The Sun Was the First Star We Knew (12720 words) by gwyneth rhys
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sunshine (2007)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Robert Capa/Mace
Characters: Mace (Sunshine), Robert Capa, Kaneda (Sunshine), Corazon (Sunshine), Searle (Sunshine), Cassie (Sunshine), Harvey (Sunshine), Trey (Sunshine)
Additional Tags: Slow Burn, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Everybody Lives, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Always Listen to Captain America, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Survivor Guilt, Touch-Starved
Summary:
I never really talk about my Yuletide reveals, like, that didn't occur to me, but apparently it's a thing some people do, andminim_calibre wants me to do it. I've written longer stories for the exchange (last year, for instance, my Push/Political Animals crossover was 14.5k), but this was definitely the one with the most world-building I've ever done, and I guess I do have some things to say about that.
My writing always starts super late, because of the damn birthday at end of November, and this year I had multiple rush editing projects through November and December, and then there was the whole thing with getting pieces of me cut and burned off and the fucking infection in my face, so the fact that I got 12.7k done with extensive world- and relationship-building kind of boggles my mind. Plus, I felt like I could write this forever, but I knew I needed to bring it to a close so it felt like a standalone story, bring it to a natural conclusion. But man, I didn't want to give up Mace and Capa at all. There were multiple prompts I could do, too, so who knows, maybe I will do them, even though this is one of the smallest, least active fandoms I've ever written in.
A couple years ago,bond_girl guessed my Gifted story, so I was constantly afraid she'd know it was me, and also, she mentioned my Sunshine vid of a few years back, Havoc in Heaven, as her mood board for her prompts, which added a whole other layer to OMG how do I keep this secret. I thought for sure she'd guess me, especially with all the world-building in this thing, because I do go on.
It helped enormously that HBO was showing Chernobyl again, because I realized that was the tone I wanted: elegiac, a little haunted, tense, where two guys start out as enemies, become friends trying to save their world, and in this case, fall in love. I also had just watched The Terror, and that had the similar tone: "Are we brothers, Francis? Because I would like that very much." Ugh, swoon. I live for that kind of shit.
There was this Robert Altman movie in the late '70s called Quintet that my friend and I, who are the only people who liked and remember it, just really adored, even though it's an objectively terrible movie and I normally despise Robert Altman movies. It's about this future ice age where the last dregs of humanity survive in outposts and are obsessed with this board game called quintet, which I never understood completely. I was just fascinated by the apocalyptic feel of it, and what an ice age would do to people, and so when I saw Sunshine (back when I hated Chris Evans! when I thought he was weird-looking and unattractive! what was wrong with me?! I mean, he was one of my favorite characters in the movie and yet that didn't get me over the general dislike of him as an actor back in what...2008, when I saw the movie) I immediately latched on to that solar winter horror and never let go.
In the movie, the sun is dying gajillions of years ahead of schedule because of this theoretical thing called a Q-ball, and our intrepid astronauts are taking a "stellar bomb" to reignite it and save the planet. There's a strong implication that things are covered in ice and snow anywhere below the Tropic of Capricorn and above the Tropic of Cancer. So I started thinking about what would survive, trying to remember some of the stuff they did in Quintet, but since the movie's not available anywhere easily, I was pulling from a lot of other sources, including conversations with my science fiction authority and real sciencey BFF. Every time I'd think about what would happen for people in the wake of a dimming sun, I'd think of another thing: like, first, food production would be affected on a global scale, which would lead to people moving further and further toward the equator, which would mean larger countries like the US and China and Russia would be invading everyone, which led to things like food riots, which led to animals dying off (sob!), and so on.
And none of that is especially cheerful, but since I was already in a terrible mood brain-wise especially after my cheek got infected, and I'd finished my first draft, I started plunking in all these things that people would get used to, terrible things that no one would want to get used to but that they'd gradually not even realize they were accommodating, that whole boiled frog thing. One thing I really didn't want to do was have a lot of expository dumps, so I had to work all this in as organically as possible, with how it affects Mace (Evans), who's the POV of the story, just giving little hints of these things in his backstory.
Because man, that whole mission is just one big setup for massive PTSD for all the crew: the first mission to bomb the sun disappeared, no one knows why, and there's no more material left for them to do another mission after this one, so they have ALL of humanity's, the world's, hopes on their shoulders. If they fail, everything dies. Mace has this impassioned speech about how they have one mission, that's it, and if they fail, everything they care about dies. Unfortunately, no one listens to Captain America and they go off-mission to see if they can find out what happened to the first mission when they catch its distress beacon. Then everyone dies, but fortunately the payload gets delivered. It's...not a cheerful movie (seriously, rocks fall, everyone dies), but I kept thinking about "if they return home, if they don't go off-mission, then they're going to have some serious emotional issues." Especially Mace and the physicist who created the bomb, Capa (Murphy), because they'd be the ones who said no, we're continuing on course.
And it takes years to journey to the star and then from it, so there'd be a completely different world to come back to--one with a bright, hot sun instead of the slowly dying one that someone like Mace would grow up with. So then there's another whole layer of trauma you'd have to deal with. Humans are good at trying to science the shit out of things, so they'd come back to a world of rebuilding, but it would have been decimated when they left. How much would that mess with your head? A lot. The answer is a lot.
So all that was rolling around in my head, and also, I wanted a way for these two guys--who attack each other and are kind of shitty to each other the whole movie until the very end, when there's this "homoerotic" connection as director Danny Boyle called it--to get together, to be drawn together and see past their differences. They would have had a high degree of empathy, though, and so I could imagine that drawing them together, pulling them closer when they got home, because they share a very unique bond (one that Mace thinks of in the fic as partners in crime because they didn't go off-mission to the first ship). Which means, also, that in the post-Winter world, they'd both want to keep doing things to help humanity, and Capa would be THE rock star scientist everyone would want to work with on whatever project he was doing to make that happen. Having him enlist Mace into a project seemed like a natural extension of it--Mace is a superb engineer because he made the cut for the mission, at least it seems to me that's the natural conclusion.minim_calibre gave me a great little idea for a way to start them talking.
I collect weird little bits of data to use in fiction (like the monument in Bulgaria that I used in Don't Wait Up for Me), and I saw this post on tumblr about how many people who were born without hearing but gained it in later life thought the sun would make a sound. A few people added to that, and one of the points was that the sun does make a noise, we just can't hear it through the vacuum of space, but if we could, it'd sound like a train horn going off a few feet from our faces, ceaselessly. Which since Mace is dealing with PTSD from a mission to bomb the sun, became the line that the sun made the sound of exploding bombs. I was really happy with that one.
Other weird little data bits: bio-dome experiments where people try to live in self-contained environments, greenhouse farming as a way to offset climate conditions, the Svalbard seed vault in Norway and the potato museum in Peru, photos of deserts where carpets of flowers or trees come to life that haven't been seen in decades because climate change has brought rains there, a bridge collapse that happened up north of here a few years ago because we already do such a shitty job of infrastructure maintenance in this country. The desert's "Cave of Swimmers" in The English Patient.
And I thought a lot about what to call things, how we give names to cataclysmic events--I thought they'd probably refer to this period as the Winter, and the name the Melt came about because it would be catastrophic when all that ice and snow began to melt away and subsumed islands, coastal lands, etc. A number of years ago here, we had an ice storm followed by like almost a foot of snow, followed by another ice storm and then rain where the temperature didn't go up enough to melt all the snow, so it became completely waterlogged, paralyzing the city because unless you had a super high clearance vehice, even tire chains wouldn't help you get around in it. Buildings collapsed, trees fell on houses and cars, it was a nightmare. I couldn't stop thinking of that, but all the names I tried didn't sound right till I hit on the Melt.
We'd also have to give up things like having pets, because commercial food production would be so devastated, livestock-keeping would dry up except toward the equator and eventually there too. There have been serious food riots in countries struck by famine, so...that. Repopulating abandoned areas would be slow going, especially with a decimated population (and yeah, seeing Avengers: Endgame this year brought a lot of this to mind, as well). They couldn't fly airplanes any longer outside equatorial regions.
You could have your pick of real estate, and probably jobs, as they rebuild! But I also think that they wouldn't return exactly to the old systems, or at least, a lot of people wouldn't want that, so I could see a guy like Capa using his big squishy brain to fix the new problems, and that's how I could bring Mace and Capa together. I wanted it to be positive, under all the sadness, where these guys find love in a hopeless plaaaace.
(Also, this is, weirdly, the first time I wrote intracrural sex, and that surprises me! But I didn't want the smut to be too smutty, at least at that point, because I wanted it to be more about these enemies to friends to lovers. See the mention of Chernobyl and The Terror.)
Okay, that's almost as long as the story itself, yikes. All in all, despite my doubts, I think I achieved what I set out to, and this is maybe one of my favorite things I've ever written, one of the best things I've done, too, and judging from the long and excited comment from my recipient, it succeeded.
bond_girl 's prompts for the 2007 movie Sunshine, starring Cillian Murphy and Chris Evans as a "science ice prince and competent military hothead" fighting with each other across the solar system, among an incredible cast that includes Michelle Yeoh, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rose Byrne, and Benedict Wong. The Sun Was the First Star We Knew (12720 words) by gwyneth rhys
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sunshine (2007)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Robert Capa/Mace
Characters: Mace (Sunshine), Robert Capa, Kaneda (Sunshine), Corazon (Sunshine), Searle (Sunshine), Cassie (Sunshine), Harvey (Sunshine), Trey (Sunshine)
Additional Tags: Slow Burn, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Everybody Lives, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Always Listen to Captain America, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Survivor Guilt, Touch-Starved
Summary:
Capa was only five years older than him, but Mace felt like some middle-school dipshit who’d been suddenly, inexplicably befriended by the star high school quarterback.
I never really talk about my Yuletide reveals, like, that didn't occur to me, but apparently it's a thing some people do, and
minim_calibre wants me to do it. I've written longer stories for the exchange (last year, for instance, my Push/Political Animals crossover was 14.5k), but this was definitely the one with the most world-building I've ever done, and I guess I do have some things to say about that. My writing always starts super late, because of the damn birthday at end of November, and this year I had multiple rush editing projects through November and December, and then there was the whole thing with getting pieces of me cut and burned off and the fucking infection in my face, so the fact that I got 12.7k done with extensive world- and relationship-building kind of boggles my mind. Plus, I felt like I could write this forever, but I knew I needed to bring it to a close so it felt like a standalone story, bring it to a natural conclusion. But man, I didn't want to give up Mace and Capa at all. There were multiple prompts I could do, too, so who knows, maybe I will do them, even though this is one of the smallest, least active fandoms I've ever written in.
A couple years ago,
bond_girl guessed my Gifted story, so I was constantly afraid she'd know it was me, and also, she mentioned my Sunshine vid of a few years back, Havoc in Heaven, as her mood board for her prompts, which added a whole other layer to OMG how do I keep this secret. I thought for sure she'd guess me, especially with all the world-building in this thing, because I do go on.It helped enormously that HBO was showing Chernobyl again, because I realized that was the tone I wanted: elegiac, a little haunted, tense, where two guys start out as enemies, become friends trying to save their world, and in this case, fall in love. I also had just watched The Terror, and that had the similar tone: "Are we brothers, Francis? Because I would like that very much." Ugh, swoon. I live for that kind of shit.
There was this Robert Altman movie in the late '70s called Quintet that my friend and I, who are the only people who liked and remember it, just really adored, even though it's an objectively terrible movie and I normally despise Robert Altman movies. It's about this future ice age where the last dregs of humanity survive in outposts and are obsessed with this board game called quintet, which I never understood completely. I was just fascinated by the apocalyptic feel of it, and what an ice age would do to people, and so when I saw Sunshine (back when I hated Chris Evans! when I thought he was weird-looking and unattractive! what was wrong with me?! I mean, he was one of my favorite characters in the movie and yet that didn't get me over the general dislike of him as an actor back in what...2008, when I saw the movie) I immediately latched on to that solar winter horror and never let go.
In the movie, the sun is dying gajillions of years ahead of schedule because of this theoretical thing called a Q-ball, and our intrepid astronauts are taking a "stellar bomb" to reignite it and save the planet. There's a strong implication that things are covered in ice and snow anywhere below the Tropic of Capricorn and above the Tropic of Cancer. So I started thinking about what would survive, trying to remember some of the stuff they did in Quintet, but since the movie's not available anywhere easily, I was pulling from a lot of other sources, including conversations with my science fiction authority and real sciencey BFF. Every time I'd think about what would happen for people in the wake of a dimming sun, I'd think of another thing: like, first, food production would be affected on a global scale, which would lead to people moving further and further toward the equator, which would mean larger countries like the US and China and Russia would be invading everyone, which led to things like food riots, which led to animals dying off (sob!), and so on.
And none of that is especially cheerful, but since I was already in a terrible mood brain-wise especially after my cheek got infected, and I'd finished my first draft, I started plunking in all these things that people would get used to, terrible things that no one would want to get used to but that they'd gradually not even realize they were accommodating, that whole boiled frog thing. One thing I really didn't want to do was have a lot of expository dumps, so I had to work all this in as organically as possible, with how it affects Mace (Evans), who's the POV of the story, just giving little hints of these things in his backstory.
Because man, that whole mission is just one big setup for massive PTSD for all the crew: the first mission to bomb the sun disappeared, no one knows why, and there's no more material left for them to do another mission after this one, so they have ALL of humanity's, the world's, hopes on their shoulders. If they fail, everything dies. Mace has this impassioned speech about how they have one mission, that's it, and if they fail, everything they care about dies. Unfortunately, no one listens to Captain America and they go off-mission to see if they can find out what happened to the first mission when they catch its distress beacon. Then everyone dies, but fortunately the payload gets delivered. It's...not a cheerful movie (seriously, rocks fall, everyone dies), but I kept thinking about "if they return home, if they don't go off-mission, then they're going to have some serious emotional issues." Especially Mace and the physicist who created the bomb, Capa (Murphy), because they'd be the ones who said no, we're continuing on course.
And it takes years to journey to the star and then from it, so there'd be a completely different world to come back to--one with a bright, hot sun instead of the slowly dying one that someone like Mace would grow up with. So then there's another whole layer of trauma you'd have to deal with. Humans are good at trying to science the shit out of things, so they'd come back to a world of rebuilding, but it would have been decimated when they left. How much would that mess with your head? A lot. The answer is a lot.
So all that was rolling around in my head, and also, I wanted a way for these two guys--who attack each other and are kind of shitty to each other the whole movie until the very end, when there's this "homoerotic" connection as director Danny Boyle called it--to get together, to be drawn together and see past their differences. They would have had a high degree of empathy, though, and so I could imagine that drawing them together, pulling them closer when they got home, because they share a very unique bond (one that Mace thinks of in the fic as partners in crime because they didn't go off-mission to the first ship). Which means, also, that in the post-Winter world, they'd both want to keep doing things to help humanity, and Capa would be THE rock star scientist everyone would want to work with on whatever project he was doing to make that happen. Having him enlist Mace into a project seemed like a natural extension of it--Mace is a superb engineer because he made the cut for the mission, at least it seems to me that's the natural conclusion.
minim_calibre gave me a great little idea for a way to start them talking.I collect weird little bits of data to use in fiction (like the monument in Bulgaria that I used in Don't Wait Up for Me), and I saw this post on tumblr about how many people who were born without hearing but gained it in later life thought the sun would make a sound. A few people added to that, and one of the points was that the sun does make a noise, we just can't hear it through the vacuum of space, but if we could, it'd sound like a train horn going off a few feet from our faces, ceaselessly. Which since Mace is dealing with PTSD from a mission to bomb the sun, became the line that the sun made the sound of exploding bombs. I was really happy with that one.
Other weird little data bits: bio-dome experiments where people try to live in self-contained environments, greenhouse farming as a way to offset climate conditions, the Svalbard seed vault in Norway and the potato museum in Peru, photos of deserts where carpets of flowers or trees come to life that haven't been seen in decades because climate change has brought rains there, a bridge collapse that happened up north of here a few years ago because we already do such a shitty job of infrastructure maintenance in this country. The desert's "Cave of Swimmers" in The English Patient.
And I thought a lot about what to call things, how we give names to cataclysmic events--I thought they'd probably refer to this period as the Winter, and the name the Melt came about because it would be catastrophic when all that ice and snow began to melt away and subsumed islands, coastal lands, etc. A number of years ago here, we had an ice storm followed by like almost a foot of snow, followed by another ice storm and then rain where the temperature didn't go up enough to melt all the snow, so it became completely waterlogged, paralyzing the city because unless you had a super high clearance vehice, even tire chains wouldn't help you get around in it. Buildings collapsed, trees fell on houses and cars, it was a nightmare. I couldn't stop thinking of that, but all the names I tried didn't sound right till I hit on the Melt.
We'd also have to give up things like having pets, because commercial food production would be so devastated, livestock-keeping would dry up except toward the equator and eventually there too. There have been serious food riots in countries struck by famine, so...that. Repopulating abandoned areas would be slow going, especially with a decimated population (and yeah, seeing Avengers: Endgame this year brought a lot of this to mind, as well). They couldn't fly airplanes any longer outside equatorial regions.
You could have your pick of real estate, and probably jobs, as they rebuild! But I also think that they wouldn't return exactly to the old systems, or at least, a lot of people wouldn't want that, so I could see a guy like Capa using his big squishy brain to fix the new problems, and that's how I could bring Mace and Capa together. I wanted it to be positive, under all the sadness, where these guys find love in a hopeless plaaaace.
(Also, this is, weirdly, the first time I wrote intracrural sex, and that surprises me! But I didn't want the smut to be too smutty, at least at that point, because I wanted it to be more about these enemies to friends to lovers. See the mention of Chernobyl and The Terror.)
Okay, that's almost as long as the story itself, yikes. All in all, despite my doubts, I think I achieved what I set out to, and this is maybe one of my favorite things I've ever written, one of the best things I've done, too, and judging from the long and excited comment from my recipient, it succeeded.
