"Scent of Roses" part 6 notes

[estirose]

So, I posted part 6 in the middle of a bout of insomnia.

I think I know where I'm going with part 7, and it's not how I originally planned this fic. Of course, I've been floating on a plot bunny and a scene fragment for this fic, so that's not surprising.

Anyway, there's one really obvious reference in there that quite a few Toku fans will get, and one that I think about one person will.

A few notes about part 6:
* Hanako (Gai's aunt) is being very, very careful not to mention what happened last time she met with Gai. She's terrified that if she finds out what she did to him, that'll make things worse.
* Apparently she thought about going to the Space Police, but realized that she, oh, had not-so-legal drugs in her kitchen that she didn't want anyone to know about. She did go after she got those cleared away, but they didn't do what she wanted, which was to pull Gai from his team.
* At some point after that, Ahim had a nice little talk with her about Gai that I have yet to write.
* Hanako's PTSD makes her really scared for Gai - but it's overruled by the fact that she doesn't want his teammates to kill her. She's surprised by his appearance and she's very, very eager to send him back to his teammates before they find out he's visited her. (That being said, if Gai had told her he needed to be saved, you can bet that Hanako would have whisked him away from there, because he's still her nephew and she can't bear to see him die.)
* I was going to have Kasumi tell Hanako about Marvelous outside, but Gai walked out before she had a chance.

Hanako's condition (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) isn't mentioned by name in the stories, but she does have it. She remembers vividly the events surrounding her friends' deaths, has nightmares about them, and of course Gai being idealistic like her friends and risking his life is causing her symptoms to get worse because of the guilt she feels over their deaths. Now, her whole plan to "protect" Gai by kidnapping him was totally irrational, probably triggered by the memories and some bad insomnia, and is not typical for people with PTSD; that's just her OTT response to her own feelings about her nephew's safety, because Hanako doesn't want to add Gai to her trauma.

The trick with writing her is that she is the bad guy in her first story (and also the POV character, to make things extra challenging). She's a human being who has her strengths and weaknesses, not just her disease. From what I can tell, she's got a fairly normal life, she writes to keep herself afloat, she has friends to keep her stable. She may not have a doctor or a therapist to help her, but she's got people around her to keep things in check. But on the other hand, she's got fairly untreated PTSD, where you don't quite heal from a traumatic experience, and which influences the way she thinks and acts. Her desire to protect her nephew in any way she can doesn't help. There are some disadvantages to your brain being cockeyed. (Some advantages, too.) I've been trying to write a sympathetic, relatively normal character whose trauma causes her to makes horrendous mistakes in the name of good.