the sky above the port

✄ The Person You Are Trying to Reach Is Currently Unavailable;

I don't think I have a Full deleted scene for this one but three I guess extended/alternate scene descriptions:

- alternate version of Annette's voicemail where it's her having recorded it while hanging out with Alonzo, so he can hear himself in the background trying to make her laugh and her yelling at him to shut the fuck up. I still think this idea is super cute and will almost certainly use it elsewhere because while Enrique/Alonzo has plenty of appeal as a ship on its own, both of them adoring and being adored by Annette is essential for me. Their awesome mutual love and loss of their awesome little sister/bestie.

- Miguel agreeing to Alonzo's offer to get him into the club but then getting spooked and disappearing into the night while Alonzo's back is turned. Mysterious! INTRIGUING! But ultimately made less sense to me than him just turning Alonzo down outright, lol.

- Alonzo finding out about what happened to Enrique for the hundredth time via a voicemail left on Annette's phone that she has him listen to. I actually did write this ending but I am almost positive I deleted it after I finished and posted the fic because hey I'm not using it and it was kind of messy anyway (never do this). But it was something along the lines of Enrique calling her as his one phone call and giving her a list of instructions, which Alonzo zones out during, until it gets to the part about him, and then his focus lasering in as he tries to read the emotion in Enrique's voice, fails to identify much of anything, and then when Enrique tells Annette he loves her at the end of the message Alonzo replays the whole thing just so he can hear that again and pretend it's directed at him. Meanwhile Annette is like. Uh Can I have my phone back

∆ Unfinished Business:

Sometimes I find myself wishing I had fleshed out the ghost world more, given more thought to character motivations (both main and background), and explored more themes related to death and the afterlife in more detail because there is so much there to mine and I really only scratched the surface with that fic. But also, if I'm honest with myself, I know that had I thought any more about it than I did I would have risked just locking up and never finishing it at all [coughs lightly as I look at my other unfinished multichaps]. I also think that the very fact that it IS just lightly touching on a bunch of things without going particularly deep on any of them is probably what makes people consistently say that it reflects the show well, so ultimately its messiness is its strength. So despite me having all sorts of random little gripes with it / vague thoughts that I should have done xyz, I actually probably wouldn't do anything different. I'm proud of that fic for just existing as a complete story and being something that a lot of people have really enjoyed, I would rather feel slightly peeved about it not being perfect by my standards than mess that up.

✰ Survivor;

There were a couple of potential directions this could have gone - I considered having Ryan fuck up someone else's parole on his way out / as part of his strategy to gain his own freedom (maybe Beecher?) but decided against it in favor of him just having a little mastermind moment. Less mean spirited and more fun. Toby has suffered enough! The original version of this story also had references to Ryan having been in counselling with Sister Pete, flashbacks to questions she'd asked / statements she'd presented and challenged, which only survives in subtext: the idea around Survivor being the question "what does the future look like?" and Ryan not having an answer to that - "survival" for him is no longer a means to any specific end but just something he does on autopilot without even really caring whether he succeeds, which is why the whole thing is rather bleak. I also considered having Cyril play more of a role here instead of just being a lock of hair in Ryan's pocket - was going to have Ryan ultimately end up at the cemetery where his brother, Tessie, Seamus and Carolyn are all buried, staring at an empty patch of grass - but I kinda lost steam at the end and also thought maybe that was a bit cliche / heavy handed. I now think that would probably have been a better ending, lol, and if you haven't figured it out already Two Coffins is something of an attempt at recycling all of these ideas, as well as envisioning Ryan's relationship with Alonzo as something a little less sad and dark (though I do really love the sad dark version and will probably explore it more elsewhere).