#danielle embarks on a forbidden love affair with either jeff or gareth from hellfire

[heavencasteel420]

For the unwritten/unpublished ask game thing, 4 and 5. Preferably that vibes-based Lucas story you've mentioned.

Thank you for asking!

4. Something I'm unsure about including: there might be a love triangle that would require some careful handling regarding race, class, and gender. The fic would be set during fall of freshman year. Lucas and Max aren't going out in any formal sense--she won't go on dates with him or do PDA at school or call herself his girlfriend--but sometimes she'll hang out with him in her trailer home and they'll make out. He wants more than this, but that's about all she can give and he takes it because he misses her terribly. Meanwhile, more girls at school are starting to notice him, because he's good-looking and he's on the basketball team. Patrick, looking out for his younger teammate, introduces him to freshman girl Danielle McCorkle. She's pretty, ladylike, and way into 4-H; the McCorkles are the established black farming family in Hawkins.

(Side note: in the social world of Hawkins, most of the well-to-do black families are farmers who have been around for one hundred years or more and live out in the country; the McKinneys are another example. There is a smaller group of newer arrivals like the Sinclairs--doctors, lawyers, accountants--who are scattered throughout the nice developments, plus some working-class black families who are mostly clustered in one okay-ish neighborhood near downtown.)

Lucas goes with Danielle to a dance, but he feels conflicted about it. He's still hung up on Max, who gives her blessing but kind of sulks about it, but Danielle's really sweet and cute and, you know what, it is cool that she knows so much about how to grow different kinds of peppers even if he never really thought about that kind of thing. At the same time, he starts to feel like he's being encouraged to date her by more than one of his teammates because they're way more comfortable with him dating a black girl from a nice family than a poor, "weird" white girl like Max. Which is one thing coming from Patrick, who's also just trying to get by as a black kid in a majority white school (and who, it turns out, feels protective of Danielle, a younger family friend, and doesn't want Lucas to treat her as second-best), but a lot more infuriating when it's the white guys on the team. They're not like Billy--they wouldn't tell him it's wrong to date a white girl, let alone try to kill him over it--but they're still more prejudiced than they think.

I don't think there's any big fallout--the relationship with Danielle just kind of trails off and Max continues to drift away--but both girls end up feeling slighted, partly for class/race reasons. Max is like "of course he wants Danielle, she's so pretty and perfect and her family isn't a disaster area" and Danielle is like "I try so hard to look the right way and act the right way, and he'd still rather moon over a white girl who doesn't even want him around." And, while neither girl is really being fair to Lucas or understands whether the other girl is coming from, their insecurities are based in real-world prejudices that they have suffered. And I really want to be fair to Danielle, who is getting an incredible amount of shit as a black girl in-universe and doesn't have built-in audience sympathy because she's an OC.

5. Is there any scene I'm excited about writing: not to sound like a sicko, but I am jazzed to give Lucas PTSD and make his (attentive! loving!) parents pretty flawed at handling it, partly because they're working with incomplete information and partly because they never really unpacked Charles's own bout with Vietnam-War-related PTSD shortly after Erica was born. Like they are both trying to help and dissuade him from being down on himself for having trauma, but they won't get him professional mental health care because then it becomes Too Real to them.

Also, he's going to find a hobby that's just for him, that he's pretty sure that no one in his life is going to understand and that he's starting pretty late if he ever wants it to be more than a hobby, but it's all his!!! He gets unexpected encouragement from two people (Max and a surprise person!).