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With the first story, my main goal was to explore the idea of amnesia. I’m fascinated by it, because I have a lot of dreams where I recognize the people around me but I don’t know “the script” and just have to play along until I can figure out what’s going on. (Often it involves me having a child, like a five-year-old, that I’ve forgotten about and that someone else has been taking care of.) This is exactly where Charles is at the beginning of the first story. He knows his first name, he understands that the other man in the bed is named Erik, and he knows or quickly realizes that he’s an Omega in heat who’s just had sex for the first time, presumably with Erik. He has no other context, not just for Erik but for anything else in his life. And of course they’re at a somewhat isolated location, so he can’t ask anyone else what’s going on.
And, he feels a compulsion to try and keep his ignorance a secret, to play along and glean what clues he can. There’s a certain fear underlying that—he doesn’t want to anger or upset Erik, because he doesn’t know what kind of person he is, and Alphas can be aggressive (and Erik is not the most comforting person when he’s acting normally). But, there’s also just this sense that it’s completely ridiculous that he doesn’t remember, and any moment his memory will come back, so why get people upset or even make them feel insulted to be forgotten, when of course he’ll remember again in just a second?
And from that, this whole universe evolved, as I got into the relationship between Erik and Charles, and the background for them. A lot of that came just because I wanted to have something for Erik to tell Charles, that would explain Erik’s behavior—he’s known Charles for years and is quite used to handling him and ordering him around, and Charles either enjoys it or stoutly resists with no fear of reprisal, so Erik doesn’t bother trying to be “nice.” Obviously, if Charles no longer remembers that background, Erik’s actions seem much more negative. But, the more I develop their relationship and history, the more poignant the first story becomes in retrospect, I think.
I like that Erik is a bit of an a—hole. He loves and cares about Charles, and having grown up together since their childhood bonding, Charles just laughs it off and sees what Erik really means. I hope I can get into a bit of stuff about Erik’s teenage dating adventures—he was allowed to date other Alphas or Betas, as long as it was understood these were temporary and casual—because he’s emotionally stunted in some ways, yet at the same time, hard to blame because he’s being honest. He tells someone flat-out, “This is only a casual fling, because when he’s old enough I’m going to marry Charles,” but he can be charming and charismatic and confident and generally swoon-worthy—and then when he’s had enough he’s like, “Okay, good-bye now. Why are you getting upset?” It’s like he’s devoted his emotional resources towards only a few people in the world, like his mother and Charles, and doesn’t save any for other people in general. I think that’s really essential to Erik’s character, across a lot of stories—intense devotion to a small group, but let the rest of the world burn if necessary.
One of the first lines I clearly remember is when amnesiac Charles is on the phone with Raven, and she asks about Erik and he says, “Yeah, Erik’s been really nice… and a bit of an a-----e,” and Erik laughs and Raven says, “Yeah, that’s normal for Erik.” I think I basically constructed a lot of his character around that line.
Another line I remember early on was when Charles is better, and Erik is saying how he called his mom to say what had happened, revealing that she was full of sympathy—for Charles. “Because I know you yelled at him, Erik!” Which also informed Erik’s character, as well as establishing a warm relationship between Erik’s mother and Charles.
“Sweeter than Heaven, hotter than H—l” is a line from a song by Florence and the Machine. Someone used it in a Cherik fanvid that I thought was quite good. The song line gets repeated over a scene of James McAvoy in the bathtub, which made me think of using it for the bathtub scene in “Bewildered.”
As I type “Bewildered” I’m definitely thinking of it more as a second draft, and not just transcribing. There were some things I wanted to check on and fix, some of which will be detailed in notes I wrote by hand after first writing the story. Another thing I recently decided to fix was Charles being nervous about attending his new school. I never really liked it; it didn’t seem to fit with Charles’s general enjoyment of school, ease of making friends, and overall confidence. I’m changing it a bit so that he’s still cautious, but more because he’s worried it won’t be as academically challenging, and that it might be dull to have only bonded Omegas as classmates, when he’s enjoyed having friends from all genders.
I think part of the confusion, for me, was my evolving view of the world Omegas live in. There are still child bonds and marriages that start with the first heat, obviously, but they’re becoming much less common. Charles’s classmates from public school who went into heat probably came back to school afterwards, likely using suppressants unless they had a significant other their parents approved of them sleeping with during heat. A high school just for bonded Omegas (married, post-heat) would have been progressive at one point, akin to a school for teenage parents, but now society has reached a point where people are more likely to be saying, “Why are they getting married that young at all?”
The new expectation is that they’ll remain single until they’re old enough to maturely decide to get married, likely well beyond high school. Obviously, enough people still follow the older method that there are schools for bonded Omegas, but it’s just becoming less common. I liken it to getting married right out of high school—first almost everyone did it, then maybe half, then maybe a quarter, then even fewer, and eventually it became weird. Right now their society is probably in the quarter-or-less stage.
Amnesiac!Charles calling Erik “traditional” and his sputtering reaction to that was part of my early concept of the story. However as the details filled in, it became apparent that Erik was quite traditional in some ways, at least regarding Charles if not other Omegas, so I had to make sure and highlight that discrepancy.
Now finished typing the first story, “Bewildered.” It clocks in at about 35,400 words, or 75 pages. Pretty substantial! The next one is shorter. I made extensive cuts in the final scene, making Charles’s worry about his new school just the lack of diversity among the students, and generally reducing the angst. I like my stories to be emotional, of course, but it did feel like I was throwing in angst that didn’t really fit the characters, so I tried to trim that back. I also think it flows better with less time spent recording the thoughts of each person.
By the way, “Bewildered” takes place in March. It’s hard to work that in anywhere—you can’t put that at the top of the story, it doesn’t make sense because Charles wouldn’t remember the month. Charles’s next heat should be in six months, so September, but as we will see, that gets messed up, too.