#rewrite fic

Hi guys I’m back to talk about it again sorry it’s consuming my every waking thought

A friend and I are doing a rewrite of the ST 3/4/5 screenplays- and then probably adapting them into narrative fics that aren’t in screenplay format if that makes sense

If anyone wants to be added to a tag list about this please lmk and I’ll add you!! I have other pots talking more about it

We will have

Byler, Henderhop, more Steve development, Lonnie angst, Jonathan’s relationship with Joyce being addressed, willel sibling relationship, platonic elmike, a healthy mileven breakup, BYLER AGAIN

writing a fix it fic for Wills coming out. bcs im disappointed on how they handled it. robins coming out scene was amazing, and yet they fumble so bad with the MAIN CHARACTERS one...

I know I'm about four years late to this, but after much grieving and healing* I fINALLY got around to reading the spn fic The Goldenrod Revisions by @remythologise (previously thylaa)

This rewrite fic is everything I could have wanted and more for these beloved characters final journey. This is the ending they deserved, it is the ending WE deserved!

*so turns out I wasn't healed... and this fic broke me again, but it healed me also

I cannot recommend it enough, especially for anyone who still feels betrayed by a show so close to their heart

Note: everything in my Sil headcanons post (see link above) will inform my rewrite fic. Also, for purposes of my rewrite fic the sequel movies basically didn't happen, only the first movie is "real" and I will be extrapolating directly from it and treating any unanswered questions in it as blank slates to be filled in with whatever I like. I will freely contradict the writing and worldbuilding choices of the sequel movies whenever it pleases me to do so.

The premise I use is that Sil gave birth to twin boys. The one we see in the first movie is the bolder twin, he wasn't afraid of the humans, didn't hide from them, attacked them, and got torched. He had a twin brother who was more timid, who was more afraid of the humans and hid from them and so survived. I like this much better than the space goo infection thing the actual Species II movie did because 1) it's a more straightforward extrapolation from the first movie, 2) much more importantly, it lends itself much better to a male creature who's interesting in the same way I find Sil interesting. I also like how this gives an immediate hint of characterization.

At one point somebody asks Sil's son his name and he gives himself the name Alex.

I'm going with a "the female of the species is deadlier than the male" angle here: Alex is more timid and less aggressive than Sil. He's much less dangerous than Sil in the short term, but maybe more dangerous in the long term; he doesn't leave a trail of corpses like Sil does, he keeps a low profile, he doesn't draw much attention to himself, and he's much less likely to be noticed by the authorities.

Another inversion of gender expectations: Alex's reproductive strategy is much more focused on careful partner selection and building a relationship with his human partner and getting her to like him. He doesn't have the luxury of treating his human partner as a disposable sperm donor like Sil did! That said, this isn't always nice: he hooks up with an undocumented immigrant woman named Rosa because he picks up from her surface thoughts that she'd be reluctant to go the hospital if there was something strange and disturbing happening with her body. Note: Alex has some plurality going on, the part of him that's very focused on survival and reproduction makes that choice, but it doesn't pass on that information to the more human part of him, which experiences his initial interaction with this woman as "Oh, she's struggling with that big bag of groceries, I should help her, if I help her maybe she'll give me some positive attention, I'd like that" and ending up in a pleasant conversation with her (Rosa reads Alex as an 18-20 year old probably neurodivergent person with a possible history of being neglected/abused, she's thirty-something and feels kind of maternal toward him and eventually ends up letting him stay in her apartment, their relationship eventually drifts toward being romantic).

Alex's human personality is kind of genuinely charming and nice in a very acts of service oriented way, though not very talkative and pretty socially awkward because of his under-socialization (an early incident in his relationship with Rosa is her witnessing in horror him eating an egg by putting it in his mouth raw and whole with the shell still on it and crunching it and being like "OMG, who raised you?!?"). Alex's more evolutionary fairy human-ish side tends to kind of segregate itself in its own corner of his brain and nudge him around with "I just get a feeling that..." impulses while keeping its ickier motivations and calculations to itself. Sil was much more unitary because being likable to humans was less important to her.

Rosa's pregnancy is definitely going to be anomalous and a pretty scary experience for her, but I'm not going to make it chestburster-y. I think the actual Species II movie making the male creature's life cycle chestburster-y was kind of a big mistake, because it made it impossible for him to be sympathetic in the way Sil was sympathetic. I think it's pretty important to Sil's characterization that, while she is definitely an amoral and violent person, most of her violence was at least kinda-sorta defensive (I think her most morally inexcusable act was the killing of a sexual rival, and even that plausibly might have felt kinda-sorta defensive from the inside). It's pretty easy to imagine a version of her that pursued her basic goals but didn't kill people (or at least killed a lot fewer people). Giving her male equivalent a chestburster-y life cycle totally changes that dynamic, it makes him relate to humans in a fundamentally predatory way and it makes it impossible for him to pursue his basic goals without killing people. I'd prefer to continue the spirit of the first movie.

So, Rosa is going to get a pretty scary anomalous pregnancy, considerably accelerated (maybe something like 3-4 months instead of the usual nine) and with alarming symptoms like cravings for bloody meat and an urge to gnaw bones (it's the iron and calcium!), but at the end of it she's going to have a fairly normal birth (at home, without professional help, in pretty scary circumstances, but, you know, pretty physically normal) and she's going to be physically OK, she's going to live to see her daughter grow up (within, like, a few months of the birth, because her daughter is going to have the same accelerated growth and maturity Sil did - litter size is controlled by the mother, so in this case there will be only one baby, as in a normal human pregnancy). The story's danger and horror, insofar as it's around, will mostly be elsewhere.

Thoughts on Alex's and Rosa's daughter, tentative name Lucia: she's the first member of her kind who's going to grow up in a family, with caregivers who see her as their child and in Alex's case have some firsthand idea of the needs of a child like her (because they were one, and didn't get theirs met), so she'll definitely be the least psychologically messed up member of her kind so far.

Illustrative example: Sil and Alex were afraid when their metamorphosis happened because they didn't know what was happening, Lucia will have a much more benign experience because Alex is going to explain it to her beforehand and her parents will be with her when it happens (like I said in my other post, I strongly headcanon that Sil would have done that with her son(s) if she'd lived; she would have wanted to spare them the fear she felt).

Relatedly, Lucia has a pretty weak breeding instinct because it isn't synergizing with loneliness. She kind of likes the idea of having a baby of her own someday, like lots of human women do, but she isn't motivated to get pregnant in the immediately foreseeable future. She already has a family, including a person who's different from humans in the same way she is; she doesn't need to make a companion who can relate to her experiences.

As I said in my other post, my idea for how Sil could possibly start a viable species with one individual is her descendants would discard the DNA of their human parent during meiosis. So genetically Lucia is basically the child of Sil + Rosa. I envision her looking pretty different from Sil because she has a dark-skinned Hispanic or indigenous mother.

For a long time I was held back from working on this fic because I couldn't figure out if it should have an antagonist and, if so, who that should be. The government is an obvious possibility: if they learned about Alex and Lucia they'd want to kill or capture them; the idea of making something kinda-sorta like the plot of the first movie but with the sympathies basically flipped was intriguing. But this seemed kind of uninspiring. But recently I had an idea: the obvious more interesting option is to have Eve exist in this rewrite fic and make her the relative baddie!

Sil had a sister. Probably not a clone in this version.

After what happened when they tried to kill Sil, they decided to spare Eve for the time being. She did not escape.

She had basically the same kind of upbringing as Sil, and has basically the same kind of intelligent but under-socialized personality. She's got a relatively positive relationship with Dr. Baker, kind of like in the actual Species II movie, and this has been her primary source of positive socialization, but this started when she was already an adult

She had an unreliable and mostly one-way psychic link with her sister. They could share dreams sometimes. Eve got secondhand impressions of some of Sil's experiences in the outside world. She kept a lot of them to herself. She didn't particularly want to help the humans find her sister. Eve wants out of her jar too.

She's got a tenuous psychic link with Alex too. She knows he's out there.

She gets an idea for how to escape. She offers herself as a bloodhound and a honeypot. She can psychically home in on Alex, find him, lure out of hiding and into a trap with the possibility of getting to mate with one of his own kind. Of course, this will necessarily involve a loosening of control over her...

Biggest hurdle might be convincing her handlers Alex exists. There might be very little hard evidence for that! But eventually she manages. Maybe a more thorough re-examination of forensic evidence from that cave finds something; Alex is a fraternal twin of his dead brother, genetically distinct, and might have left some trace DNA lying around here and there. Next hurdle is slipping control when she's allowed outside; she manages that too. It isn't easy, but she is clever and physically superhuman...

She finds Alex, takes up residence near him, watches...

She's undecided about what to do. Part of her wants to be a good girl and call in his location just like she was supposed to (she has genuine affection for Dr. Baker!). Part of her wants freedom and wants to mate with him. She spends a long time deciding.

She approaches him for mating, and... he rejects her! He already has a family, people he cares about, and correctly senses she'd be a threat to them. Outrageous! An inversion of the natural order! The male is supposed to court, the female is supposed to select!

He'd accept her if she killed his human mate and their child. Like the lioness will mate with the triumphant lion that took over the pride and killed her cubs. Maybe she'll do that. She's pretty sure she can. Alex was the weak timid runt of his litter, and Lucia the product of the mating of him and a small, weak woman; she is superior to them.

Maybe she'll be a bad girl and do that.

Maybe she'll be a good girl and call in their location, please Dr. Baker, prove that Dr. Baker wasn't wrong to trust her and advocate for her.