#this was thought up by my rather more melodramatic eighteen year old self lol i just still like it

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

@lacunasbalustrade OKAY SO this scene is one which I have since deleted and will never happen which is Sad because it has some incredible moments in it character-wise.

so all you really need to know is that in this story, Adira is the main character (who looks like Megan Follows, incidentally), Neil is her adopted uncle (originally a prickly sort of guy who had a marked aversion to his nieces, responsibility and religion, but who warms up to his nieces and religion and figures out how to deal with responsibility without spiraling into a depressive episode ANYWAY-). Neil is also a doctor. Emily is Adira's adopted sister and Neil's actual niece. Tom is Adira's love interest/at that point husband I think. I never fleshed out the scene within the timeline enough to know.

anyway, skipping past lots and lots of exposition, we get to where this scene originally came from.

my dad once had a dream. he's probably forgotten it by now but I remember when he described it to us: very vividly, a dream in which he and others were taking shelter in an old shack, and he saw clouds moving at a tremendous pace. he had just enough time to think 'oh that's gonna be wild wind' before, instead of the wind hitting, he woke up. that's all of the dream, but as he described it i could picture it in a way i still can even though it's years and years later by now. I've had a very similar dream since. it felt apocalyptic.

in this scene, Emily, Adira and Neil are trying to shelter from a violent storm. Adira is waiting for and expecting Tom back, but Neil is casting a very worried eye to the sky and telling her that she needs to shelter. she's terrified for Tom, who will have no or very little shelter. she keeps watching for him.

"you need to come in!" says Neil, because it's getting wild and the storm front is racing towards them. "like, two seconds ago!"

she turns around. "not without Tom," she says.

"you'll be killed!" he says, and without waiting for her to object he straight up grabs her and drags her inside to safety. in the process he is required to hit her to get her to stop fighting him, just on the off chance Tom is there. they shelter while the storm rages. Emily is fuming, and the moment it's deemed safe enough to come out, she snaps and yells at Neil, how dare he strike her sister, &c., and he retorts coldly that it was to save her life. Adira is refusing to contribute to the question, since she fully expects that Tom, who wasn't back in time, has been wiped out by the storm, so she's busy grieving. turns out in the end that he found somewhere else to shelter and wasn't injured, and everything is happy, but I really liked the way Neil and Emily's argument played out. Neil has a tendency to have two sides to him: the warm, loving, deeply feeling side of him, and the cold clinical side, like when he tells Tom things he doesn't want to hear about Adira's health. he's... really not good at combining them, and it's always a fun dynamic when he feels pushed into doctor!Neil for whatever reason. he can be utterly heartless, even though he'll pay for it in the feeling later. he's sabotaged several relationships due to this disparity, including but not limited to an engagement that was broken due to circumstance and he was the one that then kept them apart later. (this is its own post in itself, The Relationship has defined his life in a way and he only gets closure a couple of decades later after some pretty brutal emotional things are said to him by Her.)

anyway i hope i sold this moment to you. i probably didn't, but it's so special to me even though it's never going to happen in the story

tagging @stealingmyplaceinthesun neil mention