Oh noes, it's ... fanfic?

[weewarrior]

Most people who know me know that I don't really write fanfiction, partly because I'm a stickler for canon and don't really like to be jossed, and partly because, well, I have a writer's block about as huge as the Himalaya which makes it a raging achievement if I manage to write as much as a shopping list. The closest I came to writing something in my most "active" fandom over the last few years was some of the work I did for MI.net, namely the biographies of Cassidy Casablancas and Mercer Hayes. (These contain spoilers for Season 2 and Season 3 of Veronica Mars, respectively.)

So, how did this entry come about, then? Well, I suppose I might have infected selenak with one (or two, or three, or ten) Heroes plotbunnies (completely accidentally of course) and so she demanded that I should at the very least make up for that by writing two lists we talked about in connection to two Heroes characters and their respective long-suffering wives - and posting them here in my journal.

As it were, this is the first one:

Twenty things Noah Bennet is not allowed to use as a rationalization for mindwiping his wife Sandra

1. "I did it all for Claire."


2. "I did it all to protect you."


3. "The Company I used to work for stood for something, but it has been corrupted."


4. "I didn't know the Haitian's power could physically harm you."


5. "Lyle is still young, I'm sure it wasn't harmful for him, and it was only this one time."


6. "But I only used it when you saw something unusual concerning Claire or other superpowered people,never when it would have been otherwise convenient."


7. "The mind wipes were never the easy way out instead of telling you what was really going on."


8. "You may have been scared every time I send a strange man into your house, but I always made sure he made you forget about that, too."


9. "This isn't a sign that I don't trust you enough, or that I'm emotionally distant from you."


10. "I never avoided simply talking to you because I was afraid that you would leave me if you knew the truth."


11. "I never made the Haitian erase the memory of anything or anyone really important."


12. "The Haitian always could have stopped erasing your mind if he had thought it too harmful. Always."


13. "I didn't want to harm you. It seemed so much responsibility, I thought sharing it would be unfair to you.


14. "I never did it because I wanted to be the most important person in Claire's life, the only one who knew her secret."


15. "I didn't do it because the older she got, the more this became my only means of having some control over the situation."


16. "It wasn't because sometimes I wasn't sure you wouldn't betray Claire to the company if you knew."


17. "I did it because you - the family, all of you - deserved a normal life."


18. "It wasn't because you often get so absent-minded, I wouldn't have trusted you not to tell the milkman, or the guy at the gas station, or a judge in one of Mr.Muggles' contests."


19. "I did it because there was no other way."


20. " I didn't do it because at the end of the day, the thought of losing her hurts me more than the thought of losing you."

Comments

[wee-warrior.livejournal.com]

Thank you! List!fic, hee. I was wondering what to call something like this.

I think he really rationalizes it mostly along the lines of "It's best for everyone involved, and telling them would put them in danger." He does have a real paternalistic streak ("People are fragile - like teacups.") and while that is to a certain degree understandable in regards to Claire and Lyle, because they are his children, it becomes remarkably less so in regards to adults, and especially his wife. No matter how much I love Noah, this is a part of his personality that I find seriously abhorrent. (Nathan has it, too, to a lesser degree - and it goes in a somewhat different, less superficially benign direction. Hm. What does it say about me that I like these characters?)