#less than lethal

I’m not sure if this is a request for an explanation or an excerpt — if you want an explanation, this is my reylo fic where Ben is trying to make up for being a lawyer for an evil manufacturer of domestic chemical weapons by helping biochemist/street medic Rey find out what’s in the latest, especially nasty brew, so she can fight its deployment by the NYPD. Fake dating is involved.

I’m sorry if you’ve seen this excerpt before; I feel like I put it somewhere but I can’t remember. Content warning for vile lawyer bro behavior.

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“God I hate the train,” Huxley says. “Don’t you ever just see those homeless men sprawled out sleeping on a whole row and just want to pull them by their hair, throw them on the ground? I’m not saying I would,” he says in wounded tones, because Paige is looking at him as if he’s holding her hand into the candle flame, Rey is looking like she might want to hold his hand into the candle flame, and Ben can feel his own face doing something he’s not even sure he can describe. “I’m just saying, you get the urge. You know what I mean.”

Sure! It’s been a while since I was on this one, in part because it’s kind of about activist burnout and it was feeling too real. And now of course it feels even realer, because when has this stupid country given us a fucking break.

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The girl at the bar is staring daggers at Paige, and mouthing something which Rey can’t read, and Paige is turning an impressively deep scarlet color. Rey sees her start to mouth something back, before she stops, and turns her head away very pointedly, pretending to pay attention to the argument Ben and Huxley are having about whether a corporate law firm has made drastic strategic errors in venue selection for a case Rey’s never heard of.

It’s probably horrible. ASPCA v. Amalgamated Puppy-Kickers, Inc.

Rey takes a long swig of her drink – it’s still delicious, still a sparkling mixture of sweet and tart that dances on her tongue – and refuses to ask herself whether FO tests its vile shit on animals. She looks at the girl at the bar, who is still laser-focused on Paige. Ex-girlfriend, maybe?

Rey would not describe herself as someone who likes drama, but she can’t deny she’s curious. Curiosity is a scientific virtue. She can see Finn Cavalier looking too. Which only validates her – this is an area of interest. She should investigate.

Chapter 4: Initial Exposure

E, 4/10

But she’s waiting where she said she’d meet him, in the barren wastes of far west midtown, out past the theaters and into the realm of storage and transport companies. She has a duffle and a backpack, which is not quite the right look, but he can’t insist they stop and buy some hard-shelled roller suitcase or something for her. She pulls them into the rental car with her and shoves them down into the foot space. He tries not to wince at how rumpled that’s going to make her clothes, and turns the speakers to zero.

“Do you want to pick the music?” It’s a four-hour drive; what are they going to do, talk?

E, 1/10, CW: violence

Chapter 1: Aerosol Lachrymatory Agent

Summary:

As New York City takes to the streets to demand justice for its people, protesters are being struck down by a new and dangerous kind of teargas. Activists are searching for information to help them treat the injured and protect themselves.

Rey's in the streets as a volunteer medic, and she's seen the gas at work. She knows all about biochemistry, but she doesn't have access to the First Order labs that made the gas. Ben, in-house counsel for FO, can get access but doesn't know shit about biochem. Plus he tends to waver a little bit on the whole "doing the right thing" thing. They have to find a way to get together.

E; 3/10

Ch. 3: Trade Secrets

To give her credit, she does hurry. It’s evident, when the receptionist buzzes her through to their suite and he hurriedly waves her into his office, from the sweat that’s plastering her fly-aways to her forehead, from the way she’s breathing, like she took the stairs and not the elevator.

She’s not wearing polyester, this time. She’s wearing small shorts, which he would appreciate more fully under less stressful circumstances, and a big hoodie that says CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK in large type.

I am so sorry that it has been so long since I updated Less Than Lethal; I do think about it a lot but I have. So many good intentions. And so little brain power. I’m not very far into the story, so here is a quick BTS for the scene where they arrive at the hotel.

The hotel exterior is based on a real upstate hotel which is built inside an old home that was built in the villa style. The actual interior is in some ways appropriate to the region — small rooms, which are easy to heat in winter, and a sort of “cozy” aesthetic. (It’s ugly, imo.) I changed the interior not just because I wanted it to seem glossier and more luxe, but because I wanted to emphasize a design inappropriate to the climate. As you may have guessed from the weather they drove through and the fact that this is a fanfic, these poor idiots have about twelve hours before they get snowed in. “Normally,” it doesn’t snow that early in the year; Rosh Hashanah, though it’s on the lunar calendar and does move, is pretty typically a fall holiday. But all our weather is getting a lot less normal, and that’s thanks to the energy companies like the one Rey is protesting in Brooklyn. High ceilings, glass doors, and big windows all make a place very difficult to heat when it’s very cold outside, which means high energy consumption; the hotel is probably poised to shut down for the winter, and it’s possible that there just isn’t enough gas for them to heat the place through. Instead of building for the climate, it’s been built for the tastes of two centuries of blindly exploitative rich people. It’s unsustainable luxury for people who have contributed to making life everywhere unsustainable. But it also, as Rey notices, very beautiful and pleasant, at least before the snow comes in. That tension — between knowing that something beautiful is built on an essential wrongness, and wanting beautiful things for everyone because we’re all tired and we need our souls restored — is meant to be an underlying conflict in the story.