Wassup ya'll. If you've read my stories before, you know what this is all about, but if you don't, welcome to the Behind the Scenes chapter! This is where I give you a lot of the inside scoop about the writing process, some secrets about the characters, and more! Without further ado, here's everything I got for ya:
The story is called "As the Darkness Approaches the Light" because it is a line from the song "Scissorhands" and it literally represents Caroline living in darkness as a bling person and also mentally being in a dark place because of her past. That darkness turns into light though when Caroline can see again, literally being able to SEE light, and also when she gets her life together with her career and Chris.
Maia Jane Cerulli is the name that I had for Chris and Caroline's daughter that I had in the original version of this story on the motionlessinwhitefanficion website (that I don't think exists anymore?)
Caroline being blind and regaining her sight actually has a HUGE connection to another story of mine, "Deaf Ears Ring". If you haven't read that story yet, SPOILERS. Kaitlin is deaf and never regains her hearing, but she is still whole; she's still perfect just the way she is. I wrote that story that way KNOWING that I would one day write this story again and have Caroline regain her sight; I wanted to have one story where someone is, for lack of better words, "cured", and the other one isn't but still has a happily ever after. So Caroline getting her sight back is the reason I had Kaitlin remain deaf.
I made Caroline allergic to a lot of things JUST so I could make the condom/latex allergy joke in Chapter 8.
This was implied throughout the story, but I'll just state it directly here: Noah told Ricky about only having one leg the day before the New Years Eve party that takes place in the first chapter of the story, which is why Ricky asks her if she is in pain at the party - the "nerve pain" that she often experiences is due to phantom limb pain, which is typically only common in amputees for a few weeks/months after they have their limb removed, and it's only in extreme cases that they will experience the pain years later, which is to show how serious the accident was for Noah. This is also why in the first chapter, Caroline points out that Ricky doesn't "fetishize" Noah - I like to consider myself a fairly sex-positive person, but I hate the idea of fetishizing people with disabilities, people of certain races/ethnic groups, etc. They aren't fetishes, they're human beings. Ricky also tells Chris a chapter or two later that Noah "prefers to tell him things in person", and the fact that Noah waited until he came home from tour to tell him about her leg was what he'd had in mind when he said this.
The reason I made Noah an amputee was to give a little more discussion into the stigma behind disability. I did it a little bit in "Deaf Ears Ring" and obviously Caroline discusses it as well, but since Noah has the option to hide her disability from the rest of the world, she does. So she won't be stigmatized. Caroline had to have her disability exposed, but Noah had the option to hide hers. The point is that you shouldn't have to hide them though, which Noah obviously comes to realize later on.
When Chris first leaves to write the album, it is stated that some of his friends and other people he was working with questioned why he did certain things with Caroline and her ability to do those things (ice skating, watching movies, etc). I included in that part of the chapter that Ricky defends Caroline along with Chris, which is because at this time, Ricky knows that Noah is an amputee, so the idea of his friends and colleagues questioning disabled people hit home for him too - but, of course, you guys didn't know that yet ;)
I tried to make a handful of color connections in this story - for example, Caroline associates the color pink with both innocence and sex. She makes it clear from the get-go that she wants to keep things slow with Chris at first, so her pink scarf that she wears on hers and Chris's first date was a symbol of "innocence". When they have sex for the first time though, she wears hot pink lingerie. "Code Pink" in Chapter 7 was basically Caroline and Noah's code word for "I need to prepare for sex ASAP". Caroline also associates the color red with love, which is why the bridesmaids dresses at hers and Chris's wedding are red (it's assumed that red was one of the main colors for their wedding overall).
This is a bit more obvious because of how I wrote it, but I'll discuss it here too: when Chris and Caroline have sex for the first time, he lets her put on the condom because he knows that the last time she had sex, Kurt had said he'd used a condom and didn't. So Caroline putting the condom on Chris was him letting her know that she could trust him and was safe with him.
In the epilogue, Caroline is still referred to as "Dr. Heights" even though she and Chris are married. That is because I didn't have her change her last name. Now, there is NOTHING wrong with whether or not you change your last name when you get married, I believe that that is a CHOICE and isn't anyone else's business. However, if you are a medical doctor, a PhD, or anything that makes you a "doctor" in anyway, changing your name is extremely difficult because you then have to change your name on all of your professional licenses, and if you're a researcher (which Caroline is) then all of the work you did prior to getting married will be under a different last name. Almost all of my female professors who are married kept their last names or hyphenated it. However, you don't have to be a professional to not want to change your last name; like I said, I think that that should just be a choice.
Before writing this story, I watched a TON of Molly Burke videos (she's a YouTuber who is blind and talks a lot about what being blind is like) to do research for Caroline's character, so I made sure to mention Molly Burke in the story (I think the second chapter?) because she influenced Caroline's character and my knowledge on blindness SO much.
Caroline is pansexual, though she never officially "came out" to Chris. The first time she mentions Avery to him in Chapter 6 is the first time Chris ever hears of Caroline having dated women, and he just goes with it without questioning it, which is how I personally think it SHOULD be.
Also, Avery was Noah's childhood best friend, which was how she and Caroline met, and why Noah got emotional every time Caroline mentioned Avery around her, because Noah obviously had a huge connection to her too.
I made a point of mentioning that Caroline didn't start college until age 20 to show that it's okay to take a couple years off school before figuring out what you're gonna do with your life, and you can still be successful.
And finally - in the very first chapter, Caroline makes jokes about being blind, which shows that she's secure in her own skin about it. We don't see Noah joking about being an amputee until Chapter 11 when she and Caroline go to see Motionless in White perform at the festival and she wears shorts for the first time in years; she jokes about throwing her prosthetic at Chris and tells him to "break a leg", which shows that she too is learning how to become secure in herself.
Also - NO PROMISES, but I have considered writing a Ricky and Noah story...It would take place relatively along the same timeline that this one did, but it would shed some more light on their story. Thoughts?
As far as my next story goes...I don't know. It'll be up when I decide to publish it, IF I decide to publish it. School comes first, y'know? Which means you'll just have to follow me for those updates ;)
xoxo, Scissorhands
YOU ARE READING
As the Darkness Approaches the Light
FanfictionThe new year is often seen as a new beginning, a new start. Chris didn't typically see it this way, that was until he met a girl at a New Years Eve party that would come to change his life. Caroline was just like everyone else, she WANTED to be just...
