Stars Their Brilliance notes
Oct. 18th, 2012 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
estiroseHere's a collection of the notes for "And The Stars Their Brilliance Hide".
Notes for Prologue
This is the first part of "Harder to be Brave", rewritten from third person limited omniscient into third person objective. Because of the switch, I had to rely more on Ziggy and Doctor K's actions before Ziggy leaves the Garage. I couldn't maintain it for long, which is why this is a prologue. I suspect that there will be at least one other chapter written in the third person objective, though that's very hard for me as I'm more into feelings than description.
Because of the perspective switch, I had to have Ziggy give his name. Doing it was easy, because Ziggy does this throughout the series to Doctor K, and this time he would have been still adjusting to Doctor K referring to him by title. He's also refusing the title because he doesn't feel like he deserves it, so another reason for him to remind Doctor K of his name!
I might have moved Doctor K's screens around a little. Whoops.
Ziggy scratching at his wrist is a reference to "Philosophically Inclined". Luckily for him, Doctor K is so flustered by his actions that she misses he's not wearing his morpher. If she had, it would have been a much, much shorter fic. And novel.
Chapter 1, part 1 notes
This is my second try at writing the sequence into a coherent novel. One of the early difficulties is that three different fics occur pretty much at the same time at this point - "Harder to be Brave", "Easier to Hide" (or at least a small part of it) and "Now the City's Own".
Since "Now the City's Own" is a POV switch for "Harder to be Brave" - and it makes more sense to stick to Ziggy's POV - there's probably going to be more Maria in chapter 1/2, but none of it is from her POV. Ziggy will be talking to Dillon more about her too. (I suspect there will be a reference to "Dreamt-of Call" too, though it will be a bit vague.)
But that's not here yet.
Instead, I start this with Doctor K, the second time I've done so. This time, there's a ton more influence from "Unburdening Oneself", trying to take her back to a time when her tongue was even more acidic but she'd accepted the fact that Ziggy was now a Ranger, even if he wasn't her choice of one. There is a slight departure from that story in that she's well aware of why the morpher chose him (he passed its tests), but she's stubborn enough that she's not going to let him go even if he is a total fail because he's bonded to one of her morphers and therefore must save the world whether he likes it or not.
(The whole test thing is a call back to "Must Be This Tall", which was written from the morpher's POV.)
This part makes a second reference to "Philosophically Inclined" as Doctor K notices that she failed to notice his lack of morpher earlier. But she doesn't have time to dwell on it, because she's too busy trying to find him. The whole following section starts going into the flashback section of "Easier to Hide", and it will be transitioning into Ziggy's POV to cover the rest of "Harder to Be Brave".
Trivia: The reason that Ziggy has a flare in his biofield is because he's essentially been rejecting his morpher. So the entire flare that enabled Doctor K and Dillon to find him, ironically, is because he's trying to not accept it. Also, Doctor K states that Ziggy had seemed amenable to the whole training thing; that is intentional, part of Ziggy's defense mechanism, as he's formulating his plan. Hard to slip away if somebody thinks something is wrong, after all.
Chapter 1, part 2 notes
Part 2! I thought it would be a Doctor K-and-Ziggy POV section, and it turned into a Doctor K-and-Dillon POV section.
Doctor K is now rueing the fact that she didn't pay attention to Ziggy's sleeping habits. Fortunately, Dillon does. I get the impression that Ziggy goes to bed around nine so he can get up and make breakfast. Dillon is under the impression that stress is causing Ziggy to have insomnia. He's partially right.
That "self-inflicted" remark of Doctor K's might not be the world's best thing for Ziggy to hear.
In terms of distance, Ziggy is over a mile away from the Garage. I should probably fix that. Business parks often have call centers, which is where Maria works.
I didn't get as much chance to do much with Maria here, but I did bring up her fangirl tendencies. She also thinks that Ziggy needs better PR. She won't say anything negative about him to Dillon's face because she genuinely cares for him in her own way.
Of course I couldn't lose the line that gave "Harder to be Brave" its title!
Dillon gets more dialogue this time around because I'm more comfortable with him now than I was when I wrote "Harder to be Brave". Ziggy gets to practice lying about what he was doing outside.
Unfortunately for him, Doctor K's holding off the whole bit of questioning until morning. After all, she's tired too. And sarcastic. She knows, and Ziggy knows, that he's not really that tired, but Ziggy's not eager to meet Doctor K's ideas of helping him sleep. He's afraid that she'll figure something out if he doesn't go to bed soon. So he does.
Next part will probably be more dialogue between Dillon and Doctor K. I think. Maybe Ziggy will let me into his head - I suspect that there will be more of "Harder to be Brave" in flashback.
Chapter 1, part 3 and Chapter 2, part 1 notes
These two parts bridge the end of "Harder to be Brave" with the beginning of "Easier to Hide". I realized that with Doctor K and Dillon taking primary POVs that I really hadn't gotten to Ziggy, which I fixed in chapter 1, part 3.
(I'm sure I'm not the only kid who ever pulled the "yeah, I'm asleep" ploy.)
Here, Ziggy goes into his motivations and why he didn't just, well, kill himself on base. This time it seems to be more "yeah, bad idea because I don't want to screw up the Rangers" than "I'm certain to be caught and stopped". (He figures out the whole "too many Rangers nearby" thing next part.)
And Doctor K, concerned about her Ranger, drops him into sleep. (She is more than happy to do so, though it usually involves a dart, not gas.)
The next day, he's back to playing the idiot because he's scared that Doctor K and the others will figure it out. Not that Doctor K doesn't suspect something is going on, and she comes awfully darn close to the truth here. But she dismisses it because she thinks it's a panic attack. Dillon would have told her his misgivings, but he didn't, so she doesn't know everything. Everybody makes the mistake of presuming Ziggy is being stupid/doesn't know what he's doing, when he knows what he's doing. He's got his plan in mind, and he's going to make sure it's not stopped this time.
Ziggy would rather get punished for insubordination than let anything slip that there's something wrong with him. If he gets sent somewhere, they might realize that there's something wrong with him, and he can't let that happen. He can't let them stop him killing himself.
Now, there are little adjustments going on from the original story, which will affect the "Easier to Hide" portion, but I think that'll be in Dillon's POV. Next part.
Chapter 2, part 2 notes
A lot of this part is "Easier to Hide", with a few additions and subtractions. The flashback section was pulled out because it was covered in the previous chapter. There's a point where Doctor K has a line about responsibility that was pulled because she was no longer thinking that; she was thinking Ziggy had a panic attack. Part of Scott's subsequent line was edited because his was a response to hers.
So, her dialogue is in response to the revelation. I'll be going more into her mindset later, but it more or less matches the one she mentions in "Unburdening Oneself" - she is not very happy to find out that one of her Rangers is suicidal.
In the meantime, she at least has scheduled the appointment that she would make in "Sunrises, Sunsets" because she was already preparing to do so for Ziggy's panic attacks. Right now she's cursing herself for not realizing that she had the wrong idea, but the wrong mood disorder. He has depression (and also anxiety, which is what she figured out).
The last sixth or so of the part is all new, because I kind of don't like the tail end of "Easier to Hide". It splits with that story after Flynn mentions that they're willing to stop Ziggy if he seems ready to try to kill himself again.
Ziggy's still trying to get them off of crisis mode, but understandably nobody believes him at the moment. He's still half-hoping to salvage his plan, but he has no clue on what to do other than "get the others to stop worrying", which got ten times tougher.
Scott actually goes into what suicide watch means here, which is nice. Ziggy would have really hated Flynn's version.
I know that Ziggy really appreciates Dillon's action to remove him from the others. He can't quite compute why they're so worried at the moment. Other than they're decent people and they think he's going to kill himself still. Which he isn't. For the moment. Their whole conversation is a more sensical version of the one at the end of "Easier to Hide".
And yes, speaking from experience, people who are suicidal can get that focused on what they need to do to kill themselves. In fact, it's a way to escape your misery by hyperfocusing on your plan, which can include how to avoid people noticing that you're interested in killing yourself. It's not really having a clear mind, really, it's working really really hard on a problem that you want to solve fast. (if Ziggy was thinking clearly, he would have not been trying to kill himself. But that's a solution that's really hard to see if you're that depressed.)
Next up is an ensemble chapter, where everybody except Ziggy tries to cope with what Ziggy was planning to do. In other words, probably a different version of the "Holding Boxes" fics.
Chapter 3 part 1 notes
This part has had several false starts because I felt as lost as my viewpoint characters; how do you deal with a suicidal person?
I finally settled on using Flynn's POV because he's the one I feel most comfortable with after Dillon and Ziggy. He was also the first of the three to get a fic. (He also is a civil servant, so it's easier to get his attitude for me.)
So, this part we go more into the rationale of the suicide watch that the team uses, and address something that wasn't covered in the original storyline, which was why they didn't send him to a hospital. The whole reason being, of course, that he needed to bond with his teammates.
Dillon explains Ziggy's plan. It's a conversation he has with Ziggy offscreen because I didn't feel like writing it. Of course it doesn't make sense to the rest of the team that Ziggy put all this energy into dying when he could have been asking for help, but sometimes when you're that bad, you don't think of obvious things.
And Dillon guesses entirely correctly that Ziggy is still suicidal, by pure instinct. He's too rattled to consider anything else.
Ziggy doesn't understand why everybody's upset (other than 'they're good people, of course they're upset'), so of course he wouldn't realize that he's worried his Ranger team, which is never a good thing.
Next bit? More of the rest of the team as I head into the "Holding Boxes" sequence.
Chapter 3, part 2 notes
There's two major things going on in this part: Ziggy's conversation with Doctor K and Flynn's preparations to make sure Ziggy is not going to do something like hang himself. (He's toned down from the original fics.)
Ziggy, of course, is still trying to figure out how to die. At least his teammates aren't buying it. Doctor K is using his entire title because she wants to get Ziggy used to it because he's going to have to.
Maria gets a little bit because I felt bad about not incuding her more in chapter 1. Angie is Summer's mom; I established the "Dreamt-of Call" version of her as working in Maria's call center. Rob isn't anyone in particular. Naoko is an OC of mine, though I probably wouldn't call her father "sweet". I didn't expect her to be married. Hm.
And here's Ziggy trying to get out of there by going to a hospital. Which in his mind is better because he can escape from there much easier than he could the Garage. Which does occur to Doctor K, but fortunately the Rangers have committed to him being with them.
Doctor K is working under the (logical) assumption that if a Ranger is injured to the point where it would be bad of them to fight, it's a good idea for her to know that. Unfortunately, she doesn't quite realize that Ziggy doesn't act according to what she thinks is proper. She is being practical with her "most assuredly needed" speech, as she hasn't had time to read up on how to help a suicidal person.
…And Flynn is still a bit on the overprotective side, though at least he didn't insist on the pad and comforter. He trusts Dillon enough that he believes that Dillon would stop Ziggy.
Summer's comment about hogging Ziggy is a reminder that Dillon is about the only team member Ziggy's bonded with. When Doctor K mentions the discussion about suicidal ideation with Ziggy, Flynn nearly rolls his eyes. Same with Dillon.
Flynn's attitude is a good reflection of Scott's and Summer's. They really would have preferred that Ziggy not bond with his morpher, but now that he is, they're going to do what they can for him.
Chapter 3, part 3 notes
...And Ziggy's still suicidal. I hadn't meant to write this much in his POV, especially since I should be going into Flynn's, Summer's, and Scott's POVs, but it happened.
I have a feeling that they will be Chapter 4 since the aftermath of "Easier to Hide" was Chapter 3.
Ziggy's indecisiveness is due to the fact that I originally had mapped out in my mind that Ziggy was going to stay in Dillon's room. But Summer notes in her original bit that Ziggy is sleeping under a dark green comforter, and indeed, I don't see Doctor K allowing her depressed Ranger to go to bed without having some green around him.
Needless to say, this is the first time that Ziggy is starting to see living - as depressing as it seems to him - as a possibility. And unfortunately for him, Dillon knows him well enough that he's not fooled about his intentions. Dillon himself is kind of torn between telling the others that Ziggy's pretty well confirmed he's still on his original plan and not making things worse for his friend, in the sense that if they overdo it, Ziggy might withdraw more.
Ziggy's whole "how to survive in prison" bit was from an article I ran across on ex-cons who can be hired to tell white-collar criminals how to make it through prison without getting permanently injured. (Basically, to be careful where they sit and how much protesting they do, and to watch how they act. If you look back to the cafeteria scene, Dillon is breaking all the rules there, and not caring.) He's thinking of these things in a way he can cope with this odd situation where he's stuck with people who want him to do what he doesn't want to do.
I'm presuming that "Go for the Green" took place approximately when it aired, which means the whole thing is kind of taking place in a sort-of March with sort-of March weather, sunrise and sunsets. Assuming I've read the sunrise-sunset calendar correctly for Boston around 2008, sunrise would be occuring just before it's Scott's turn, which makes sense for the beginning of "Sunrises, Sunsets".
The curling up is Ziggy's defensive posture - he just can't comprehend the whole caring for him thing, so it's safer for him to ignore it at the moment.
And next part, next chapter, we get into the whole set of trio fic.
Notes for Prologue
This is the first part of "Harder to be Brave", rewritten from third person limited omniscient into third person objective. Because of the switch, I had to rely more on Ziggy and Doctor K's actions before Ziggy leaves the Garage. I couldn't maintain it for long, which is why this is a prologue. I suspect that there will be at least one other chapter written in the third person objective, though that's very hard for me as I'm more into feelings than description.
Because of the perspective switch, I had to have Ziggy give his name. Doing it was easy, because Ziggy does this throughout the series to Doctor K, and this time he would have been still adjusting to Doctor K referring to him by title. He's also refusing the title because he doesn't feel like he deserves it, so another reason for him to remind Doctor K of his name!
I might have moved Doctor K's screens around a little. Whoops.
Ziggy scratching at his wrist is a reference to "Philosophically Inclined". Luckily for him, Doctor K is so flustered by his actions that she misses he's not wearing his morpher. If she had, it would have been a much, much shorter fic. And novel.
Chapter 1, part 1 notes
This is my second try at writing the sequence into a coherent novel. One of the early difficulties is that three different fics occur pretty much at the same time at this point - "Harder to be Brave", "Easier to Hide" (or at least a small part of it) and "Now the City's Own".
Since "Now the City's Own" is a POV switch for "Harder to be Brave" - and it makes more sense to stick to Ziggy's POV - there's probably going to be more Maria in chapter 1/2, but none of it is from her POV. Ziggy will be talking to Dillon more about her too. (I suspect there will be a reference to "Dreamt-of Call" too, though it will be a bit vague.)
But that's not here yet.
Instead, I start this with Doctor K, the second time I've done so. This time, there's a ton more influence from "Unburdening Oneself", trying to take her back to a time when her tongue was even more acidic but she'd accepted the fact that Ziggy was now a Ranger, even if he wasn't her choice of one. There is a slight departure from that story in that she's well aware of why the morpher chose him (he passed its tests), but she's stubborn enough that she's not going to let him go even if he is a total fail because he's bonded to one of her morphers and therefore must save the world whether he likes it or not.
(The whole test thing is a call back to "Must Be This Tall", which was written from the morpher's POV.)
This part makes a second reference to "Philosophically Inclined" as Doctor K notices that she failed to notice his lack of morpher earlier. But she doesn't have time to dwell on it, because she's too busy trying to find him. The whole following section starts going into the flashback section of "Easier to Hide", and it will be transitioning into Ziggy's POV to cover the rest of "Harder to Be Brave".
Trivia: The reason that Ziggy has a flare in his biofield is because he's essentially been rejecting his morpher. So the entire flare that enabled Doctor K and Dillon to find him, ironically, is because he's trying to not accept it. Also, Doctor K states that Ziggy had seemed amenable to the whole training thing; that is intentional, part of Ziggy's defense mechanism, as he's formulating his plan. Hard to slip away if somebody thinks something is wrong, after all.
Chapter 1, part 2 notes
Part 2! I thought it would be a Doctor K-and-Ziggy POV section, and it turned into a Doctor K-and-Dillon POV section.
Doctor K is now rueing the fact that she didn't pay attention to Ziggy's sleeping habits. Fortunately, Dillon does. I get the impression that Ziggy goes to bed around nine so he can get up and make breakfast. Dillon is under the impression that stress is causing Ziggy to have insomnia. He's partially right.
That "self-inflicted" remark of Doctor K's might not be the world's best thing for Ziggy to hear.
In terms of distance, Ziggy is over a mile away from the Garage. I should probably fix that. Business parks often have call centers, which is where Maria works.
I didn't get as much chance to do much with Maria here, but I did bring up her fangirl tendencies. She also thinks that Ziggy needs better PR. She won't say anything negative about him to Dillon's face because she genuinely cares for him in her own way.
Of course I couldn't lose the line that gave "Harder to be Brave" its title!
Dillon gets more dialogue this time around because I'm more comfortable with him now than I was when I wrote "Harder to be Brave". Ziggy gets to practice lying about what he was doing outside.
Unfortunately for him, Doctor K's holding off the whole bit of questioning until morning. After all, she's tired too. And sarcastic. She knows, and Ziggy knows, that he's not really that tired, but Ziggy's not eager to meet Doctor K's ideas of helping him sleep. He's afraid that she'll figure something out if he doesn't go to bed soon. So he does.
Next part will probably be more dialogue between Dillon and Doctor K. I think. Maybe Ziggy will let me into his head - I suspect that there will be more of "Harder to be Brave" in flashback.
Chapter 1, part 3 and Chapter 2, part 1 notes
These two parts bridge the end of "Harder to be Brave" with the beginning of "Easier to Hide". I realized that with Doctor K and Dillon taking primary POVs that I really hadn't gotten to Ziggy, which I fixed in chapter 1, part 3.
(I'm sure I'm not the only kid who ever pulled the "yeah, I'm asleep" ploy.)
Here, Ziggy goes into his motivations and why he didn't just, well, kill himself on base. This time it seems to be more "yeah, bad idea because I don't want to screw up the Rangers" than "I'm certain to be caught and stopped". (He figures out the whole "too many Rangers nearby" thing next part.)
And Doctor K, concerned about her Ranger, drops him into sleep. (She is more than happy to do so, though it usually involves a dart, not gas.)
The next day, he's back to playing the idiot because he's scared that Doctor K and the others will figure it out. Not that Doctor K doesn't suspect something is going on, and she comes awfully darn close to the truth here. But she dismisses it because she thinks it's a panic attack. Dillon would have told her his misgivings, but he didn't, so she doesn't know everything. Everybody makes the mistake of presuming Ziggy is being stupid/doesn't know what he's doing, when he knows what he's doing. He's got his plan in mind, and he's going to make sure it's not stopped this time.
Ziggy would rather get punished for insubordination than let anything slip that there's something wrong with him. If he gets sent somewhere, they might realize that there's something wrong with him, and he can't let that happen. He can't let them stop him killing himself.
Now, there are little adjustments going on from the original story, which will affect the "Easier to Hide" portion, but I think that'll be in Dillon's POV. Next part.
Chapter 2, part 2 notes
A lot of this part is "Easier to Hide", with a few additions and subtractions. The flashback section was pulled out because it was covered in the previous chapter. There's a point where Doctor K has a line about responsibility that was pulled because she was no longer thinking that; she was thinking Ziggy had a panic attack. Part of Scott's subsequent line was edited because his was a response to hers.
So, her dialogue is in response to the revelation. I'll be going more into her mindset later, but it more or less matches the one she mentions in "Unburdening Oneself" - she is not very happy to find out that one of her Rangers is suicidal.
In the meantime, she at least has scheduled the appointment that she would make in "Sunrises, Sunsets" because she was already preparing to do so for Ziggy's panic attacks. Right now she's cursing herself for not realizing that she had the wrong idea, but the wrong mood disorder. He has depression (and also anxiety, which is what she figured out).
The last sixth or so of the part is all new, because I kind of don't like the tail end of "Easier to Hide". It splits with that story after Flynn mentions that they're willing to stop Ziggy if he seems ready to try to kill himself again.
Ziggy's still trying to get them off of crisis mode, but understandably nobody believes him at the moment. He's still half-hoping to salvage his plan, but he has no clue on what to do other than "get the others to stop worrying", which got ten times tougher.
Scott actually goes into what suicide watch means here, which is nice. Ziggy would have really hated Flynn's version.
I know that Ziggy really appreciates Dillon's action to remove him from the others. He can't quite compute why they're so worried at the moment. Other than they're decent people and they think he's going to kill himself still. Which he isn't. For the moment. Their whole conversation is a more sensical version of the one at the end of "Easier to Hide".
And yes, speaking from experience, people who are suicidal can get that focused on what they need to do to kill themselves. In fact, it's a way to escape your misery by hyperfocusing on your plan, which can include how to avoid people noticing that you're interested in killing yourself. It's not really having a clear mind, really, it's working really really hard on a problem that you want to solve fast. (if Ziggy was thinking clearly, he would have not been trying to kill himself. But that's a solution that's really hard to see if you're that depressed.)
Next up is an ensemble chapter, where everybody except Ziggy tries to cope with what Ziggy was planning to do. In other words, probably a different version of the "Holding Boxes" fics.
Chapter 3 part 1 notes
This part has had several false starts because I felt as lost as my viewpoint characters; how do you deal with a suicidal person?
I finally settled on using Flynn's POV because he's the one I feel most comfortable with after Dillon and Ziggy. He was also the first of the three to get a fic. (He also is a civil servant, so it's easier to get his attitude for me.)
So, this part we go more into the rationale of the suicide watch that the team uses, and address something that wasn't covered in the original storyline, which was why they didn't send him to a hospital. The whole reason being, of course, that he needed to bond with his teammates.
Dillon explains Ziggy's plan. It's a conversation he has with Ziggy offscreen because I didn't feel like writing it. Of course it doesn't make sense to the rest of the team that Ziggy put all this energy into dying when he could have been asking for help, but sometimes when you're that bad, you don't think of obvious things.
And Dillon guesses entirely correctly that Ziggy is still suicidal, by pure instinct. He's too rattled to consider anything else.
Ziggy doesn't understand why everybody's upset (other than 'they're good people, of course they're upset'), so of course he wouldn't realize that he's worried his Ranger team, which is never a good thing.
Next bit? More of the rest of the team as I head into the "Holding Boxes" sequence.
Chapter 3, part 2 notes
There's two major things going on in this part: Ziggy's conversation with Doctor K and Flynn's preparations to make sure Ziggy is not going to do something like hang himself. (He's toned down from the original fics.)
Ziggy, of course, is still trying to figure out how to die. At least his teammates aren't buying it. Doctor K is using his entire title because she wants to get Ziggy used to it because he's going to have to.
Maria gets a little bit because I felt bad about not incuding her more in chapter 1. Angie is Summer's mom; I established the "Dreamt-of Call" version of her as working in Maria's call center. Rob isn't anyone in particular. Naoko is an OC of mine, though I probably wouldn't call her father "sweet". I didn't expect her to be married. Hm.
And here's Ziggy trying to get out of there by going to a hospital. Which in his mind is better because he can escape from there much easier than he could the Garage. Which does occur to Doctor K, but fortunately the Rangers have committed to him being with them.
Doctor K is working under the (logical) assumption that if a Ranger is injured to the point where it would be bad of them to fight, it's a good idea for her to know that. Unfortunately, she doesn't quite realize that Ziggy doesn't act according to what she thinks is proper. She is being practical with her "most assuredly needed" speech, as she hasn't had time to read up on how to help a suicidal person.
…And Flynn is still a bit on the overprotective side, though at least he didn't insist on the pad and comforter. He trusts Dillon enough that he believes that Dillon would stop Ziggy.
Summer's comment about hogging Ziggy is a reminder that Dillon is about the only team member Ziggy's bonded with. When Doctor K mentions the discussion about suicidal ideation with Ziggy, Flynn nearly rolls his eyes. Same with Dillon.
Flynn's attitude is a good reflection of Scott's and Summer's. They really would have preferred that Ziggy not bond with his morpher, but now that he is, they're going to do what they can for him.
Chapter 3, part 3 notes
...And Ziggy's still suicidal. I hadn't meant to write this much in his POV, especially since I should be going into Flynn's, Summer's, and Scott's POVs, but it happened.
I have a feeling that they will be Chapter 4 since the aftermath of "Easier to Hide" was Chapter 3.
Ziggy's indecisiveness is due to the fact that I originally had mapped out in my mind that Ziggy was going to stay in Dillon's room. But Summer notes in her original bit that Ziggy is sleeping under a dark green comforter, and indeed, I don't see Doctor K allowing her depressed Ranger to go to bed without having some green around him.
Needless to say, this is the first time that Ziggy is starting to see living - as depressing as it seems to him - as a possibility. And unfortunately for him, Dillon knows him well enough that he's not fooled about his intentions. Dillon himself is kind of torn between telling the others that Ziggy's pretty well confirmed he's still on his original plan and not making things worse for his friend, in the sense that if they overdo it, Ziggy might withdraw more.
Ziggy's whole "how to survive in prison" bit was from an article I ran across on ex-cons who can be hired to tell white-collar criminals how to make it through prison without getting permanently injured. (Basically, to be careful where they sit and how much protesting they do, and to watch how they act. If you look back to the cafeteria scene, Dillon is breaking all the rules there, and not caring.) He's thinking of these things in a way he can cope with this odd situation where he's stuck with people who want him to do what he doesn't want to do.
I'm presuming that "Go for the Green" took place approximately when it aired, which means the whole thing is kind of taking place in a sort-of March with sort-of March weather, sunrise and sunsets. Assuming I've read the sunrise-sunset calendar correctly for Boston around 2008, sunrise would be occuring just before it's Scott's turn, which makes sense for the beginning of "Sunrises, Sunsets".
The curling up is Ziggy's defensive posture - he just can't comprehend the whole caring for him thing, so it's safer for him to ignore it at the moment.
And next part, next chapter, we get into the whole set of trio fic.
