ooh can we have a directors cut of that fight scene with hayden in the latest chapter of we all fall down? i'm obsessed that scene has not left my brain since i read it
Ooooo yes yes. This is gonna get so long. be warned.
So. That scene could’ve gone a million ways. I didn’t have to make it a fight! If I was nicer, they could’ve had a good moment where they clear the air and solidify their friendship further! But. Unfortunately. In order for the rest of the fic to go the way I want I need Shane isolated in the locker room. I need to make it so that his allies aren’t necessarily his friends, and his friends aren’t necessarily his allies. It’s also especially important for the dinner party with the rest of the metros that happens later in the chapter, because if Shane has good friends at that party they will defend him. They will insulate him somewhat from the casual homophobia. And this runs counter to my Evil Purposes. So. My one goal going into this is: how do I isolate Shane from Hayden? How do I realistically drive a wedge between these two guys that is severe enough Hayden will leave Shane to face what’s coming all by himself?
This isn’t a hard question to answer from Shane’s perspective. At this point in the fic he is like Mount Vesuvius three days before it obliterated Pompeii. He is so full of angst and wrath and fury and has nowhere to put it, so it keeps leaking out in these small precursor eruptions before the Big Explosion that is going to happen later down the line. So, if I get Hayden to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, Shane will get mean. He will blow up.
So I now have three questions to answer. 1. What is Hayden going to say that makes Shane blow up? 2. How is the conversation going to get there? 3. Why is Hayden going to say it?
The answer for question one I knew I pretty much right away. I kicked around the idea of Hayden saying something mean about ilya, but I discarded that pretty quickly because it doesn’t get at the root of what’s broken in their friendship. And the thing that is broken in their friendship, to me at least, stems from Shane being in the closet. There’s like an unequal closeness there. Hayden can tell Shane about every part of his life, but Shane cannot tell Hayden about every part of his. So the big blowup moment is gonna be Hayden’s genuine hurt over this inequality, and Shane being mad that Hayden is hurt. After all, Shane had it so much worse. Why should Hayden complain to him? It’s not like Hayden is special. Shane didn’t even tell his own fucking parents about his gay marriage. And then I was texting with @luulapants and she helped me nail down how Hayden is like. Justified for feeling hurt. Which I was kind of struggling to wrap my head around due to my own closet experience lol.
But. now that I had an idea of what the big blowup moment was gonna be, I had to work backwards. How do we get there? How do we get from two guys actively trying to get along to blowing their friendship apart? Well. First of all, having undiagnosed adhd helps with this, because for me it’s pretty easy to construct the sort of leapfrogging conversation this scene needs. But for a peek behind the curtain: the conversation has to flow naturally from somethjng innocuous to something adjacent to this issue. I think I took a nap and woke up with divine inspiration for this part. I was like okay we will have them in a sports car and Hayden will make a crack about needing to sell the sports car when Shane and Ilya have kids. And Shane will say something about not actually planning on having kids, and this will shake Hayden so much that he’s like wow. I don’t know you at all I think. Because for years Hayden has been convinced that Shane wants kids, and Shane hasn’t done much to disabuse him of this notion. Shane likes Hayden’s kids, and he’s pretty ambivalent on having his own. He could go either way. The deciding factor in him not wanting kids is ilya, and Hayden clocks this, but interprets it in a bad light. The “I don’t know you at all” moment has an undercurrent of “I don’t know you because your fuckass husband has molded you into a shape I no longer recognize,” which Shane sort of subconsciously picks up on, and that is all the aggravation he needs to get Mad. And from there we can floor it until these men are yelling at each other on the highway.
And then to really make it good, I did a little thought exercise where I tried to put myself in Hayden’s shoes. I think through how he would’ve been feeling after finding out about Shane being gay married. And I think his first reaction was something akin to shame and guilt. Oh my god how did I not know. Was I not safe? Oh god I tried to set him up with women for years. And the thing about shame and guilt is that they are very difficult emotions to sit with, and most people will contort themselves into strange and bizarre shapes to avoid feeling them for any length of time. So once the initial shock is over, hayden gets kind of pissed off. Like, why wouldn’t Shane trust me? Why wouldn’t he have told me to stop? And because Shane gave up on getting Hayden to stop trying to set him up years ago, Hayden can pretty easily memory hole all the times Shane DID ask him to stop. It was years ago. He already barely remembers. And then in the immediate aftermath they’re both kind of waiting for the other person to text first. Shane really wants someone to check in with him, unprompted. Shane is also used to a dynamic where Hayden is the mover and shaker in their friendship. Hayden reaches out, Hayden shares, Hayden invites Shane to stuff, and rarely does the reverse happen. Hayden, meanwhile, is waiting for Shane to reach out as a sort of unconscious friendship test. It’s YOUR turn to text first. Plus, he also doesn’t know what to say, and he really was busy. He wasn’t lying about Jackie getting mono.
And all of this leads to the answer to the third question. Hayden brings it up because he wants to try and fix their friendship. He wants to talk through stuff! And then he hits on a sore spot without meaning to, and Shane blows up. Shane tells him that he doesn’t give a fuck about Hayden’s feelings. It’s not entirely true—it’s the sort of thing you say when you’re mad that’s sort of true but worse than what you really meant. Hayden does not know this. He took what Shane said at face value. And that’s painful! That shit hurts! Of course Hayden reacted by saying okay fine fuck this actually!
Like I think the key to writing a good juicy conflict is being able to get into the headspace of both sides. People do not do things they cannot justify to themselves. Everybody has good reasons for their actions. And if you’re writing the sort of messy juicy argument where nobody is right and nobody is wrong, it’s really important to know how each party is justifying what they say and do. Everybody had a story they tell themselves etc etc. So most of my process for this scene was sitting on the couch staring off into space thinking really hard about Hayden pike’s mental state. It was very taxing lol.
