#kittenscully

i wanted kim taking charge and setting off all the fireworks to have similar energy to the bottle throwing scene in canon. this gleeful and danger-edged way of relinquishing control on her hyper-controlled mask. venting some of the gas from the kim pressure cooker. 

here, it sets up her opening up to jimmy in the next scene. like, this explosive release of tension sets up for the quieter and more personal one when they sit on the car.

He throws on his old leather jacket and slides her the other one across the roof—an ancient, fleece-lined corduroy thing he brought back from Cicero after Thanksgiving [...]

Kim shrugs it on as he walks around to her. It was always big on him and it’s enormous on her, the sleeves hanging over her hands.

@transatlanticalienart drew a slippin’ jimmy in a jacket like this once, so i snuck it into the fic! look at the angry boy!

Kim is always a dark silhouette in an oversized coat between him and the brightness, always closer than him, always backing away from each fuse at the last possible moment.

character arc words! “i go too far you pull me back” my ass!

Then the hissing trail of the fuse starts, and she stays beside it for so long that Jimmy almost calls to her, stepping unconsciously forward, but then she’s running to him; and she doesn’t even look back at the firework as it screams and whistles into the air and explodes in an enormous flurry of red sparks—but it lights up the edges of her, and she’s grinning this strange grin, and she comes up and presses him against the side of the car and kisses him.

i’m really proud of some of the prose in the scene! i love when i’m able to think of ways to mirror the story/action in the structure of the language itself, and this was a great scene for that. the sentence starts with the fuse lighting and runs and runs and runs and then ends with the kiss. 

i also think it’s one of the scenes where i best managed to present the vibe/setting -- the smell of it, the sound of it, the haze of smoke. any time i write anything, i always have to remind myself to really think through that sensory stuff, and often i think i come up a bit short, but i’m happy with how this one came together. 

... returning to the stack of fireworks that traveled all the way to White Sands and back and have been sitting in his kitchen cupboard ever since.

and also sitting as a note in my planning doc like “hey buddy you gonna do anything with those fireworks?” 

i did NOT have a plan for them for a long time 😂

Some of her hair still clings to his own chest, like static, connecting them with threads.

thenationalpullofyou.mp3

“Kim,” Jimmy says, falling back to the name yet again, to the sharpness and the hum.

oh you know, that old thing about them saying each other’s name = them saying ‘i love you’.