extremely normal all the time

The lightning strike moment of inspiration came when I was rewatching Station Eleven last spring (just to get it out of the way: I love the show and I love the book and I think both are spectacularly suited to their respective mediums). There's a scene in episode 7 where Kirsten asks Jeevan what he would have done if he knew the flu was coming, and Jeevan's response is:

"I would have come home earlier from LA. And I would have spent time with my mom before she died. And Siya. And that idiot. And we would have been together. I would have just done… I would have made the choice I wanted to make, you know? I'm always late for everything."

And that line just stuck in my brain and wouldn't leave. The "idiot" in question is Jeevan's brother, Frank, who's an agoraphobic drug addict but arguably the more successful of the two prior to the flu. What are Lucanis and Illario, if not brother(cousin)s who feel trapped by their own choices, or lack thereof?

What would it look like if they were stuck in an apartment together and couldn't leave, like Jeevan and Frank? Would they be able to rely on each other? How long before the fighting started? Would they eventually find a way to reconcile?

This setup felt like a perfect way to strip everything down, focus on the characters, and get the characters to focus on each other. Narratively, this bubble makes for a lot of great little mundane moments of humanity, which are some of my favorite things to write and something Station Eleven (the book) has in spades:

“On silent afternoons in his brother's apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.”

(That last line was direct inspo for chapter 2, iykyk.)

I also borrowed heavily from the beginning of Station Eleven in how it introduces the main characters. Jeevan is out at a play and then meandering home through the snow on the night society starts to collapse. It's this beautiful little glimpse into his normal life before everything suddenly falls apart and he ends up stranded at Frank's apartment. The tension in the book is drawn out a little more and feels a little more surreal than in the show, where the first episode is laser-focused on Jeevan and his mounting fear as he realizes what's going on. I was going for a mix between the two when I wrote chapter 1 of TWAWKI, but the idea of Illario and Lucanis just going about their lives and only surviving the initial outbreak through sheer happenstance definitely came from Station Eleven.

The DATV inspo is hopefully more obvious. The Dellamortes don't kill people but they do kill pests. Caterina's influence looms large even after she's dead. There's a banter in the game where Lucanis talks about him and Illario flipping tables and taking swings at each other at dinner, and the idea that their relationship inevitably devolves into arguing and bickering (and eventual punch-throwing) is front and center in TWAWKI. Unlike Frank and Jeevan, these two constantly let their personal shit get in the way of their survival. I wrote it in very close third person POV with the intention of making them as unlikeable as possible. They're a Bad Ending version of themselves, with no Rook or Veilguard crew around to help pull their heads out of their asses. Illario's a red-pilled manosphere gym bro. Lucanis is a lonely, pathetic drug addict who's convinced he doesn't have a problem.

The addiction subplot is something I waffled on at first, mostly because I do have personal experience there and it's not something I was sure I wanted to tackle in a fic. But addiction as an analogy for Spite (specifically, and Lucanis's self-destructive behavior in general) just fit so perfectly, and they say you're supposed to write what you know, right?

One of my family members is an alcoholic, the hides-bottles-of-vodka-in-the-car and crashes out and goes to rehab and gets sober and pretends none of it ever happened kind. It's caused decades of tension and resentment in my family. It's one of the big reasons I stopped drinking a few years ago, because functionally, I'm also an alcoholic. I abused alcohol in my 20s as a way to deal with my anxiety, and in the early years of the Covid pandemic that tendency came back hard, like couldn't-stop-after-one-drink hard. Just because I never got blackout drunk or did anything stupid doesn't mean I wouldn't have eventually. So I stopped. I didn't want to go down the same path as my family member and cause anymore heartache than they already had.

So on the one hand, it was easy to get into both characters' headspaces. I've been Illario. I've been the family member who's frustrated and scared and tired of an addict's behavior. I've almost been Lucanis, the family member who can't see what their self-destruction is doing to everyone else around them. On the other hand, it's made writing this fic a lot more difficult: is what they're doing in character or am I projecting my own shit too hard onto them? Does it still tie into the overall themes of the fic or am I grasping for something that isn't there? Does it honor the fic's inspiration or fall short?

Maybe I'm overthinking it, but TWAWKI is important to me in a way that nothing else I've written has been. It's about what DATV and Station Eleven are both about: inheriting a world full of problems. Doing more than just surviving in the face of hopelessness ("survival is insufficient"). Deciding what you'll sacrifice for the ones you love. Mostly it's about very flawed people doing their best, making their choices, and figuring things out, sometimes a little too late.