#it's a mishmash of two different flood accounts

[meltorights]

always amusing to me that everyone remembers the "pairs" of animals in the flood myth in genesis. yhwist who.

[notbang]

gimme the commentary for you're the fire and the flood, anything you have to say about the section starting with "He wakes to the acrid burn of smoke in his nostrils and his throat, one of the overhead smoke alarms apparently clinging to the last of its battery power long enough to sound a pathetic wail in warning." and ending on “Drink some three year old tequila with me?”

send me a scene from one of my fics, and I’ll give you the equivalent of a dvd commentary on it! - you’re the fire and the flood

He wakes to the acrid burn of smoke in his nostrils and his throat, one of the overhead smoke alarms apparently clinging to the last of its battery power long enough to sound a pathetic wail in warning. His first foggy thought is Rebecca, his arms reaching for her out of repressed habit but coming up empty, and when he pushes himself bleary eyed up onto his elbows on the couch he can’t see her on the bed, either. Once he discerns the soft grey haze is filtering out from the kitchen he scrambles to his feet in a panic.

Since one of the central conceits of this fic is that Rebecca has been in jail for the past three years -- and Rebecca has cut off all communication with everyone for the past two -- something I was playing around with was the jarring sense for the both Rebecca and Nathaniel that they’ve gone from zero contact to being trapped not only together but in this fucked up time capsule Nathaniel has left of their stuff in his apartment after moving out (dude, get some fucking therapy, stat). So for Nathaniel in particular, the memory overload is wreaking a little a havoc on his dreams (which may or may not also have something to do with those pesky Santa Ana Winds). He’s just spent the night dreaming of a moment they shared back when they were together, so when he’s pulled from slumber Rebecca is immediately on his mind.

She’s flattened against the wall when he finds her, eyes wide and vacant as she stares at the sink where the flames are already starting to lick up the wall. When he calls her name she’s unresponsive. He tries again, rougher this time.

“Rebecca.”

She snaps out of it, then, coughing and crumpling against him before mirroring his movements and tucking her mouth into the crook of her elbow.

“The water,” she chokes out, batting helplessly at the smoke. “There’s no water coming out.”

Since it’s the apocalypse and all, we had to up the stakes a little beyond trapped in an apartment with someone you don’t want to be trapped inside an apartment with and cut off the water supply. And the most [in]convenient moment for that to become apparent was of course when Rebecca decided lighting a small fire in the sink was a good idea.

He nudges her aside and goes for the rug in the entryway, pushing past her to get back to the sink and slapping at it with the heavy fabric until he’s managed to smother most of it out, the sides of it singeing in the heat but the lack of oxygen ultimately winning out. When the smoulder is contained to the basin again he returns with one of her saucepans of water, extinguishing the remnants with an angry hiss against the stainless steel.

I just... really liked the idea of Rebecca being accidentally prepared for the apocalypse? Being in jail for three years has affected her in different ways, and I think she’s learned to hone the more manic aspects of her personality into a very specific brand of survival. The apartment ends up fully stocked with food because she goes kind of overboard hoarding all the things she’s missed out on eating for the past three years (and incidentally, things Nathaniel wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, which was hilarious to me). They still have water because she took some advice she heard on the news (which she’s been obsessing over as a means to reacquaint herself with the world) to the extreme. Plus I enjoyed the mental image of this already ridiculous mishmash apartment being added to with a minefield of miscellaneous vessels filled with water.

He drops the pot in the sink with an aggressive clank before turning back to face her.

She hasn’t moved from the spot the entire time, still stood frozen and numb, and he grunts in annoyance before hoisting her into his arms and carrying her out of the smoky kitchen over his shoulder, finally waking her up.

“Put me down,” she growls, pummelling him angrily with her fists. “I’m fucking serious. Put me down, you asshole.”

He deposits her unceremoniously back on her feet near the foot of the bed, sidestepping before she can hit him again and raising his hands defensively.

“Are you insane? What was that?”

“I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. I was stupid. I wasn’t thinking.”

“What were you even doing? Did you start that fire on purpose?”

So this entire fic is basically just one continuous fire metaphor for Rebecca’s inner tumult. I’ve always been intrigued by her association with fire in canon, and in a way this was a 22k extrapolation of that. As we know, Rebecca has a tendency to set things on fire when she wants them seared out of her life, and apparently being stuck in the middle of a wildfire apocalypse is no exception. In fact, I kind of imagine she drew inspiration from the wildfires raging outside when she made the very deliberate decision to start her own fire in the sink. This time, she’s not burning her ex boyfriends’ stuff, though -- she’s burning a stack of photos from Darryl of this universe’s equivalent of Hebecca, because she’s struggling with much the same multitude of emotions we saw her wrangle in 4x09. (As an aside: in this universe, the baby is named Bianca, meaning ‘white’ -- a reference to Whitefeather and White Josh.) The baby was born the night she was arrested, so even more so than what we got in canon Rebecca has been happily pretending she doesn’t exist for the last three years. Add to her internal unrest the fact that half the town has already gone up in flames -- she’s not just dealing with the existence of her biological daughter, but the fact that her life could very well be in danger. So almost understandably, Rebecca decides to Nope out of that mental mess in typical destructive Bunch fashion.

He notices the way she’s favouring her left arm, tucking it into her chest and his nostrils flare as he snatches at it, yanking her closer so he can see.

“Ow!”

“You burned yourself? Jesus Christ, Rebecca.”

Grip like iron around her elbow he drags her over to the dining table where she’s been keeping her collection of makeshift water vessels; tripping over her own feet from the angry force of him Rebecca yelps, aiming a protesting kick towards his shins in self-defence but stumbling in the process, coming to an abrupt stop when he shoves her forearm down into the portable foot spa Valencia had gifted her as a pre-wedding present so many moons ago.

“Stop it, you’re hurting me,” she snaps, and only then does he let her go, her skin imprinted faintly with red where he’d been holding her.

“Oh, sorry, I’m hurting you? You seem to be doing a pretty good job of that yourself.”

She scowls, but keeps her hand submersed in the tub anyway, the room-temperature water for the most part ineffectual at soothing any of the sting.

Nathaniel closes his eyes and tries to calm himself, tries to breathe through his heart beating hard like it’s going to break through his chest on overdrive. They’re both a little panicked, he knows; fraught with fire-related tension and highly strung, and as his pulse slows back to a steady throb he feels the shame creep in at adding to her distress—it’s never been his intention to frighten her. His own brief flare of terror still strums insistently in his fingertips, though, and he can’t keep the accusation out of his voice.

As we find out a little later, once the tequila gets involved, the last three years haven’t exactly been kind to Nathaniel. He left West Covina to move on, but he’s still very much affected by the pervasive sense that he’s doomed to feel like he’s losing Rebecca over and over again -- when you take her suicide attempt, their two break ups, her pleading guilty and then later taking him off her visitor’s list into account and add all to that the fact that the way she re-entered his life was in a hospital bed, the dude’s understandably got a bit of a complex going by this point. I hesitated at having him get so (however briefly) physical with her, but I think the important distinction here is that it’s nothing to do with anger. She’s just scared the absolute shit out of him, again, and he’s course-corrected a little too hard in trying to protect her.

“What the hell, Rebecca?” he demands. “You are crazy. You could have gotten us both killed.”

“I know! I am crazy. I’m losing my fucking mind, Nathaniel. Because I’ve spent the last three years of my life behind bars and now I’m finally out I’m just trapped all over again. I just want to start over but I can’t, because I’m stuck in this stupid town, and now I’m stuck in this stupid apartment with all this stuff, with you, and with all these reminders of everything I’ve missed and I feel like I can’t breathe.” She pulls her arm out of the flooded foot spa and gestures erratically at her chest, sending out a spray of dislodged droplets, eyes wild and wide and welling with tears. “I’m suffocating and I don’t want to be in here anymore. I can’t…”

If Nathaniel’s feeling the cabin fever at being trapped, Rebecca’s feeling it tenfold. If it weren’t a violation of her parole, she wouldn’t even be in the state right now, so her current circumstances are A Lot. So while it was mostly about her complicated feelings regarding what she’s missed out on in her absence, her starting the fire had an undercurrent of self-sabotage to it, too. 

She lets out a strangled sob before promptly bursting into tears, crumpling forward, collapsing against him and burying her head in his chest. Force of nature that she is it’s so easy to forget how small she is until she’s tucked against him, over a head of height difference and two years of uneasy silence between them.

“Please. I just—I just want to get out of here,” she hiccups into his shirt, hands fisting in the fabric. “I feel like I can’t—”

“Breathe,” he says quietly, cradling the back of her head on autopilot. “Hey. Just breathe.”

He’s never really consoled anybody before but it seems like he’s doing something right; her hand not nursing the burn pulls tighter at his shirtfront but her choked sobs ease somewhat, her breathing eventually slowing into synchronisation with the gentle back and forth of his palm across her shoulder blades. For a half-second he thinks he should be disgusted by way she’s snivelling into his shirt but the disdain never comes; all he feels is an unexpected rush of latent tenderness for her and the overwhelming urge to encase her firmly in his arms.

Hugs!!!! Emotionally overloaded hugs!!!! An R/N staple. That is all.

She’s embarrassed, so embarrassed, not just about the fire but the hopeless way she’s clinging to him and she can’t bring herself to let go because she doesn’t want to see his face or let him look at hers, doesn’t want to look at anything in the apartment for a moment longer. Her nostrils fill with the familiar scent of him as she inhales deeply, shakily, and crushes her nose into his collarbone.

“You’ve been through a lot, Rebecca,” he murmurs into the crown of her head. “You’re going to survive this too. I promise.”

It’s the softness in his voice that finally gives her the courage to pull away, rubbing the back of her palm across her snotty nose and glancing up at him with wet, abashed eyes.

He steps back but moves his hands to her waist, holding her gently as if he’s not entirely convinced she can keep herself upright.

Up until this point their every interaction has been rife with tension -- a mixture of unavoidable sexual tension and the resentment they’re each carrying over how certain things have played out between them -- but here they stop and take a breath together, and it’s kind of like the fire in the kitchen was the high-pressure crucible that’s made reforging their dynamic possible. Rebecca’s letting herself be vulnerable, rather than angry, and Nathaniel -- dumb smitten dweeb that he is -- has just melted at their physical contact.

“Truce?” she surprises herself by offering with an ungraceful sniff, not much more than a mumble but he hears it all the same.

There’s a beat, and then he drops his arms away from her and nods. “Truce.”

His eyes don’t leave her back as he stands there mutely, watching her make her way across the room to rummage through some boxes in the corner until she finds what she’s looking for and turns back to face him.

She sniffs again, and raises the bottle.

“Drink some three year old tequila with me?”

Because adding alcohol to the mix is always a good idea!!