The Smoking Mirror

Title: Dead Reckoning
Series: 100 Original Fics
Character: Fox Maharassa
Author: Avarice
Prompt: 003 - Ends
Rating: PG
Pairing: Fox/Collin, Padma/Nefertari
Spoilers: the end of FH
Summary: Nefertari and her family pull together to help Fox after he and Collin finally call it quits.
Word Count: 14142
Date First Posted: 11-07-2011
Date Revised: 17-10-2011
Beta: Eike, Fantisci, Dino.
Awards: -
Notes: If you're familiar with my work (or with me!) you know that I wasn't happy with how FH ended for my favourite characters. According to the post-script of the series, you can either go with the idea that Fox and Collin split, which would lead into the other comic OPB, or they were able to stay together. I am in the latter's camp, but recently I got to thinking about them breaking up. If I entertained the notion of them breaking up... this is how I think it would've happened. I think their characters weren't as tight or as consistently portrayed in the last year or so, but I've done my best to keep the line of story that had been happening, reconciling the old and new characterisations and doing my best to be objective about it, not subjective. To that end, this is a third person limited fic, and it follows Nefertari's experiences with the events. Many thanks to my 3 very talented betas, who put up with me pasting things to them, haranguing them, and emailing rewrites at odd hours. It was important that this fic got a really good going-over, because I wanted it to be good. I think it's about as good as I can make it right now. I hope you enjoy. :)

I had trouble naming this piece, but it came to me as I thought about Fox losing Collin becomes a directionless compass. I looked up some navigation terms and came across 'dead reckoning', which is a way to calculate one's current position using previously determined positions, then extrapolating future positions based on that data. The part I liked the best about it, however, was this: A disadvantage of dead reckoning is that since new values are calculated solely from previous values, the errors and uncertainties of the process are cumulative, so the error and uncertainty in the value grow with time. To me, this is very indicative of what's happening with Fox right at this time, and what will happen to him in the near future.
Feedback: always welcome, as is constructive criticism.
Also Archived At: LJ