'unwinding of the fall (BLACK SWAN AU BABY)'
'the ripple of tenderness (a corrupted tide)'
— i would like to know intimately about both of these things please and please 🌺💛🌹
oh i love you and i am SO sorry for what i am about to unleash on you
(lovingly shortened to just black swan by a friend of mine) is my magnum opus that i have been slaving over for more than 7 months now. it's my first too-ambitious writing project that now spans upwards of 60K words, 14 chapters, a lot of mental breakdowns and is unfortunately nowhere close to being finished.
the premise is pretty simple – the 2022 formula 1 season reimagined through the lens of the obsessed artist; the fatality of devotion and the intricacies of how ambition can deteriorate into fanaticism. i borrow a few plot points, themes and dialogue from the movie black swan but it all takes place in the f1 cinematic universe.
in terms of plot, i am keeping all the results the same until summer break (it's like ferrari did all that clownery specifically for my sadistic streak) and then afterwards i am taking some hefty artistic liberties in order to self-serve my agenda and accompany charles' even bigger spiral into insanity (he's my final girl and my fav literary lab rat). all of this is accompanied by a lot of surrealistic elements, manipulation, hallucinations, disordered behaviour and a bunch of other things i will probably have to tw.
in terms of characters, i envision charles as the white swan and max as the black swan. however, i don't want them to have the same kind of jagged rivalry as nina and lily in the beginning – it doesn't make sense with their personalities now and i think it's going to be even more devastating if max is genuinely trying to get close to charles and charles is a bit hesitant but he starts to lean towards the freely given affections until Something (if you've watched the movie, i think you know what im referring to) happens and he gets a rude awakening, gets stuck in his head and start to twist things. this is where their rivalry starts to lean towards something more tense, an amalgamation of internal strife and becoming a victim to the turbulent flow of events and expectations that start to control you.
(of course, it doesn't help that he hallucinates a more volatile and cunning version of max, which pushes him in the wrong direction. that's neither here nor there.)
this is already too long i am SO SORRY, i will try to keep this brief
"Perfection is not just about precision, it’s not always about predetermination,” starts Max, his eyes boring into him with the intensity of nuclear fission. His thumb brushes gently over Charles’ jaw, back and forth for a moment until it settles underneath the bone. The calming movement coaxes Charles to exhale some leftover dregs, softly so as to not obscure Max’s face. The calm before the storm.
Max takes Charles in, kneeling before him and teetering on the edge of something. Max’s gaze maps him out, trying to find the stray thread and pull. “You cannot save yourself from this if you stifle your driver instincts in the process,” he continues. “You’re not here because you can do calculations in your head. You’re here because you can feel the car better than most, because you can find that golden balance between sending it and staying in control, between holding on and letting go.”
His thumb digs further, hand almost painfully grasping his chin and bringing Charles’ face even closer. “You’re so afraid of not having a contingency plan that you con yourself into believing you can account for all of it. And when something goes astray, like it always does—” Max’s voice catches on the exit, barely louder than a whisper at this point, aimed directly at his lips “—you shatter to pieces because you still cannot bear the fact that some things are bound to be out of your control."
He looks up, lets his head fall back listlessly and pull on the pain in his neck, and closes his eyes. He doesn’t seek guidance or explanation or a sign because he knows this is all on him. He doesn’t deserve any consolation and it’s not like he will get any. The gods above have forsaken him, the ivory of their statues crumbled into remnants he can brush off of his shoulders like lint. There are only the gods on earth who he is accountable to, who will weigh his guilt on the unbalanced scale of justice and demand their pound of flesh. He feels the hairline fractures on his skull proliferate. He feels the anger, thick and heavy, seeping from his ears and staining the car at his feet. He feels pure unadulterated rage, something disfigured and depraved squeezing the nerves from his limbs like wet rags.
He opens his eyes and sees only the sun and the blue sky. He wants to swallow them up like Chronos.
“Let go, Charles,” barely a breath but it resonates like a church bell, a clandestine command. His lips the belladonna petals, his tongue the dagger at his jugular.
Charles listens to his – their – skin whisper and he lets himself go.
Charles drags Max back to him and plunges into this, into Max’s mouth and his iron-clad embrace with an iron-willed determination, metal scraping against metal a siren call that clogs his ears and brain with cotton. He doesn’t grow pliant – he meets Max blow for blow, bruise for bruise. He doesn’t extinguish the fight but leans into it, sinks into the embrace of violence and rejoices.
He feels Max’s teeth in his neck, in his heart and Charles hopes the bite hurts, hopes that Max’s teeth reach bone and everything shatters
the ripple of tenderness (a corrupted tide)
i cannot for the life of me write normal people romance and this silly little story exists solely bc of a friend of mine who incites all kinds of gooey feelings in me. in the beginning i thought it's going to be a nice break from the seriousness of my longer wip but now it's sitting there at 15K and still unfinished.
it's a very standard magical realism trope aka charles falls under a love spell that makes him fall in love with the first person he sees, which surprise surprise, is max, who has been in love with him for ages! wow, who would've thought.
however, i wanted to subvert this take a little bit by making charles not completely lose his mind. i want him to be freely affectionate but with enough rational thoughts online that he feels very disconcerted about not being in control, about potentially making max uncomfortable, about showing so much vulnerability against his own volition. and max, who is such a sweetheart, tries to reassure charles at the cost of his sanity and slowly fraying heart since all of charles' affections are obviously fabricated. i think the slight angst with the inescapable tenderness of their interactions will make for a good combination! but what do i know
Just when he starts to focus a bit too much on all of this, he feels Charles envelop the hand resting on his cheek with his own and push further into it in a complete act of heatstroke-induced insanity. He turns his face back around where Max’s palm doesn’t obfuscate it and finally, painstakingly, opens his eyes.
Max stops breathing for a second.
In Max’s opinion, he hasn’t spent nearly enough time looking into Charles’ eyes. Eye contact has always been a painstaking affair, trying to find an optimal balance between looking into Charles’ eyes and away during their talks in such a way that it would not allude to anything more. Charles’ eyes can look vastly different under different lights – striking green in direct sunlight, molten hazel on rainy days, overtaken by specs of yellow under fireworks. But there is always a simmering warmth there, which can either reach the fiery heights of ambition or the honeyed flames of attentiveness.
Max looks into Charles’ eyes now and feels like Charles is looking through Max’s eyes and into him as a whole. It feels innocently invasive, like a caress that catches on a hangnail. His eyes sparkle with something unnatural and the blush across his cheeks unfurls and fans out until it reaches his neck. The rosy colour of it looks almost sickly. Max unclasps the tunnel visions from his eyesight and realises that Charles’ features as a whole are glossed over with a sheen of misplaced sentiment, spelling something resembling foreboding.
“Max,” Charles whispers, spilling the breaths incasing his name almost into Max’s mouth. His voice is soft like gossamer, his gaze a gentle brushstroke on the contours of Max’s face and Max knows something is undeniably wrong.
so yeah! (lame ass concluding sentence again) thank you so much for asking ! and i will send you your bereavement damages check for dealing with all of this in the mail in 3-5 business days!
