We Came by Night to the Fortunate Isles And Lay Like Fish, requested by darling_ashes



Okay, so everybody knows my tendency to write the fics I want to read when I don’t see them being written? This is one of those fics where I basically went, "Why isn't anyone writing this? FINE, I'll write it!" and then moped for weeks because I couldn’t write it properly.

This fic was a bit of a nightmare when I started writing it. When I usually start any story, I more or less have the introduction down. I hate changing the beginning because that's how I establish flow of the story (I use the first two scenes/segments to determine how I break down the other scenes) and changing the start of the fic would mean I have to change everything else. This might sound really OC, but more often than not, I won’t be able to write anything else in the fic if I can’t start it properly (this is what’s happening to the James Bond AU. Sorry ‘bout that D:)

Anyway, I wrote four different ~introductions for the story. All four started with Dominic’s nightmare scenario, which was being stuck in the NSA. The first one sucked because I took what Dominic said literally—that he was stuck in the NSA. That one got deleted as fast as I typed it.

The second one was a bit better. I took a cue from one of my other fics (the one with head!Dominic), and put Dom behind a desk in the NSA after a promotion. So, it started with Dominic behind his big fancy desk, signing piles of papers, hating his new job and his stupid desk. I thought it was a nice way to interpret his nightmare scenario— he’s an Action!Man after all, and being stuck in a desk where he can’t (il)legally shoot people is an understandable fear. And then, he hears a woman’s voice, making comments about his new office and the exquisite view from the window. Dom refuses to look up because he knows she isn’t real and that he’s ~projecting her because of his guilt.

I scrapped that because it was so similar to that head!Dominic fic, that even I would accuse myself of self-plagiarizing.

The third one was infinitely better and it started with Dominic and Adelle making out. Actually, it looked like I was going to start the fic with a smut scene until… blood! BLOOD!


I really, really wanted to use that last sentence for the fic, but I couldn’t find a scene for it

I almost used this one as the intro. Actually, I wrote four scenes with using this as the start of the fic but head!Adelle became more and more menacing every time she appeared and it wasn’t jiving with my intended ending (vague as it might have been at that time). Also, I introduced all of Dominic’s Attic scenes with them making out, and it got increasingly difficult to continue using that with every jump back to his Attic scenario. But it was my favorite of my nightmare scenarios because it truly would have been a nightmare to Dominic if he was literally stuck inside the NSA while all hell’s gone loose outside and he couldn’t do anything to help, especially since it was him whom ended the world.

The fourth one was the one that started the fic. I realized that I was doing the intro wrong because the Attic scenario should be in a loop. So, Adelle gets shot and dies so that Dom can get his “real” job. I interpreted ‘stuck in the NSA’ very loosely (I mean, he was stuck in the NSA after he realized that the thing with Adelle seemed like a Groundhog Day scenario)… but I think it managed to make a nice build-up to how Dom got out.

Also: Ted Palmer was totally named after Ted and Veronica from Better Off Ted. He was supposed to be called Chet Palmer, but even that sounded too sleazy for an NSA director, so he got named Ted instead.

The other, non-Dominic Attic scenarios were all inspired by childhood fears of my siblings and myself. That creepy Gumby world where children end up cracking their heads open because Gumby and his red donkey were goading them to “go through the walls, it’s fun!” is a… childhood horror story of mine. My sister used to be afraid of clowns. I don’t know where I got the mosquitoes the size of tennis balls, but I’m sure that would be really scary in real life.

We now go to empty, eerie and colorful Times Square. I liked the imagery of Times Square being totally devoid of living creatures and only had its bright lights and signages to show that it’s alive. And then Dominic arrives and he’s missed Arcane once again and there’s a song stuck in his head… which was intended to be ‘Making Love Out of Nothing At All’ by Air Supply.

I guess if you have this song stuck in your head and your Attic!Nemesis keeps on slipping from your grasp, you will throw a rage fit the way Dom did (except for me, since I had that song on loop the entire time I wrote the fic. HAH). If I were to choose my favorite scene for the fic, it would be a tie between this one and the poem-reading-while-naked scene. Lol.

Anywho, the driving reason why Dominic had a head!Adelle was because Adelle had a head!Dominic XD. The other reason is that when I was re-watching the episode, I wondered how Dominic figured out how to get out of people’s dying brains when he didn’t even know he was jumping in and out of people’s brains? How did he know that he only targets newcomers and that Arcane can sense fear? How did he know that they wouldn’t be able to escape after a person’s brain shuts down? Why did he refer to DeWitt as ‘Adelle’ when he was talking to Echo, when he only called her by her first name when during highly-charged confrontations (see: ASitHoL and E1)? You know, the important stuff. The over-analytical side of Me couldn’t overlook those plot holes, so I got head!Adelle back – less menacing this time around – and became the head!Gaius to his confused Six.

So. Yes. Head!people in my fics tend to work with the same rules, so… yeah.

The next scene was Dom stopping himself from getting his NSA badge. I mirrored this scene to the scene in the ep, where Echo’s realizes that she’s in some sort of loop and she had to let go of Victor and Sierra. Dominic had to let go of Adelle to get stop his loop. *nods head*

The next scene is my favorite. A Naked Laurence Dominic reading Neruda in front of a jam-packed theater. YES. I had this plotted out as the part where Dom learns that he needed to do the thing that a person fears the most to get out of a dying brain. The poem-reading part was added at the last minute. He was supposed to read a speech about… Germans? I can’t remember what speech he was supposed to read, but I remember thinking that since I’ve been using Neruda’s poems as the titles of my Dollhouse fics, why not just make Dom read a poem by Neruda? “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines” is like… the saddest poem ever--

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is short, forgetting is so long. (MY CREYS)

-- and totally appropriate to D/D. So I wrote it in, giggling in my seat as I typed the scene. I love it. One of my favorite scenes that I’ve written (my most fave would be a chapter I wrote for my really epic Alias fic. Jesus, that was one epic rescue-gone-wrong scene with explosions and people stabbing and shooting at each other… seven years later, I’m still impressed with how I pulled off that piece of writing at 17)

And of course, Dom ended up in a zombie-apocalypse in a mall after that naked performance and that’s how he got his post-apocalypse-in-the-Attic clothes.

Now, we jump back to his Attic scenario. I had a bit of fanon for Dom, a sort of character analysis written down in a word document, and I had him pegged as someone who had an abusive dad when he was a boy. His mother took them away when he was a bit older, but it was a bit late for him because he already knew what it felt like to be afraid of his own father? This scene where his dad appears to him and he sees his face in his dad’s face… it was another fear of his, to see that he’s just like his father. Which of course, his Attic!dad verbalizes.

We jump out to the ~present, where Dom and head!Adelle have a nice chat by the beach, where a few feet away from them, the person he had just saved from Arcane had resumed her nightmare loop (I EAT CRABS. CRABS DO NOT EAT ME… crabs are creepy motherfuckers. Delicious. But creepy.) It’s a quiet moment, and I tried to show how it might have led to Dom slipping that “Adelle” into the episode. :D

Jumping back to his Attic scenario, Dominic stares at the bottle of whiskey, his dad left him. I basically used the idea that Dominic wouldn’t purposefully and physically hurt people he actually cares about for him to realize that he’s in the Attic. Then Arcane comes in and tries to kill him, which triggers Dominic’s superhero gene, and ends Dominic’s Attic scenario scenes in the fic.

I included a scene from the episode itself and I chose this scene with Echo because this is where it was revealed that Dominic had the ability to jump from one mind to another in the Attic (which he only realized when Echo pointed it out). It was also revealed during this scene that Arcane targets the newcomers and that he sense fear. Since it seemed that I couldn’t get over what I’ve perceived as plot holes, I figured I’d address them in this part of the story. Ta-da.

Also, I imagined that Dom and Clyde would have banded together to save those innocent people from the Attic after Echo and Co. left.

Now the ending was supposed to be some sort of hopeful ending—because Boyd was Adelle’s head of security, and if Boyd was there to ~assist with Dom’s resurrection, then Adelle might have had a hand with it, right? Then, after Getting Closer aired, that ending became the creepiest (and most psychic) shit ever. From, ‘aww, Boyd,’ to ‘holy fucking crap, it’s Boyd!’


Oh, and title is also from a Neruda poem entitled ‘Drunk is Drunk’ :D

Fic DVD commentary meme