Beyond the Horizon Commentary

[jaclynhyde]

I wrote Beyond the Horizon (Fate/Grand Order, Alex/Waver, Iskandar/Waver, past Iskandar/Waver) for Yuletide and I enjoyed the process of writing it immensely! It's the longest thing I've ever written (possibly excluding my thesis), and I ended up throwing a lot of historical references into it so I figured I'd write it up along with some commentary! Also if you liked it, please check out Spooky (vanishinghitchhiker), who beta'd and brainstormed and helped shape the fic immeasurably. 

Read the fic first, I spoil it completely here! Also one implied Babylonia spoiler, but nothing else from FGO.

• Let me tell you, saving all my quartz to pull Waver Iskandar in FGO and then failing miserably put me into the proper mood to write this fic. (Spooky got Iskandar and has no Waver. My other account got Iskandar and has no Waver. They're Rama and Sita now.)
• "At last!" cried Leonidas, his cape soaring in a sudden gust of wind. Historical tidbit that did not make it in: Alexander's tutor before Aristotle was also named Leonidas, and was extremely strict with him. This might have been cathartic.
• Waver nodded. "That's it. You were ten." Waver, of course, didn't even have to think to know this.
• Did I know Harpalus yet? Harpalus was a childhood friend not in the Hetairoi, as his bad leg exempted him from military service. 
• You'll like the plays, I think, especially if Thettalos is performing— Thettalos is from Mary Renault's Alexander Trilogy; He's an actor Alex loved who offered to spy for him and was nearly killed for it.
• That the Rayshift had focused on Alexander the Great himself, had taken them to a time when he had been in India. When he had been Iskandar. India was the farthest Alexander and his army got, and what he thought was the end of the world.
• And they are given to me directly by my father. Alexander, by this point, has basically disclaimed Philip as his father completely.
• "It's from Peritas, when I pulled my tunic from his teeth." The scar is made up, but Peritas was really Alexander's dog. Like Bucephalus, he got a city named after him.
• "And we'll find you some proper clothes, strategist—no need to wear leggings anymore." At one point in the Alexander trilogy, Alexander is horrified at the idea of wearing pants. I'm glad Fate/ is historically accurate.
• It was, now that he saw what was there and not his worst memories: armor he'd seen in history books, resplendent in silver and gold. RL Alexander, being an even bigger Achilles fanboy than in Fate/, wore Achilles' golden armor. I picture it as looking like Achilles' Apoccypha armor, but gold instead of silver. How does it fit both of them? Magic presumably? 
• "Is that—Cleopatra?" Waver whispered to Alex, brow furrowed. I wrote Ptolemy in before realizing this is Fate/ and someone needed to be an anime girl. Ptolemy was one of Alexander's childhood friends and possibly his half-brother; he later became pharaoh of Egpyt. Spooky realized that of course the anime girl should be Ptolemy and that she needed to be a Cleoface. 
• Antipater must see you! Another childhood friend of Alexander's, and also close to his mother.
• You have family in Epirus? So do I— is Alexander I still king, now? Alexander's uncle on his mother's side.
• Or of warriors who hit with the flat of their shi…who don't kill humans? Waver realized in the middle of this sentence how goddamn ridiculous his Master is.
• "Olympian Omen!" called Alexander, and swung the staff down. Olympian for Zeus and for Olympias. Spooky's excellent name!
• So," he asked, rubbing a hand over his beard, "what does Liang have to say now?" Alexander does not much care about the proper way to say names from another culture, does he? 
• Waver felt a headache coming on. That, and some uncharitable feelings dancing around the edge of his consciousness. I like to believe Zhuge Liang just goes "Fuck this, you're on your own" whenever Waver does something stupid where Iskandar is concerned.
• There's Ptolemy and Antipater and Seluceus, I remember them from this form. Seluceus is the only one who wasn't a childhood friend of Alexander--he remembers him because when Alexander had a massive group wedding of his troops to Persian women, Seluceus is the only one who didn't divorce his wife after Alexander's death.
• "No," said Alex, face pensive. "It's like…a walkthrough. Waver is teaching Alex the important things, like video games.
• But more than that, he'd never slept as well as he had with Iskandar snoring next to him. Hence why Waver just gives up and sleeps on the couch in Case Files.
• "So, the boy is your eromenos?" Probably clear form context, but eromenos is the younger lover in Greek m/m relationships. Waver is slowly beginning to realize that he and Alex are...well, something. 
• "Hephaestion...ah, yes! My double's brother. This one's a Fate/ reference. In recent Lord El-Melloi II Case Files light novels, Faker is the sister of Hephaestion and the double of both him and Alexander. Waver gets beat up so badly by his boyfriend's boyfriend's sister that he ends up in the hospital, because of course this shit happens to Waver.
• Even if Alex remembered Iskandar's feelings, he'd known full well Iskandar would never return the devotion Waver felt for him, not for anyone but Hephaestion, not for a cowardly failure of a mage who never even— If it isn't obvious, Waver's read on Iskandar's feelings is...biased. And wrong.
• "They're afraid of me, the Persian men. I think they're conscripts, and they shouldn't be. They should be as important to him as anyone from Macedonia." Historically accurate! Alexander gave his Persian soldiers commands and Macedonian military titles.
•  "These, we'll send to Sidon. Our people will appreciate them." IRL Alexander tended to let the people he conquered govern their own cities. He told Hephaestion to appoint a deserving Sidonian to the throne; Hephaestion chose Abdalonymus, a distant relative of the royal family working as a gardener. This version of Sidon did not fare so well.
• "Stop!" shouted Alex, shaking Waver out of his stupor. Not unlike how IRL Alex saved Bucephalus.
• After Persia, India. After India, Okeanos. After Okeanos, Pyu. ... "Shouldn't you know, there in the future? It was not the ends of the earth. It was only water." These are my favorite lines and basically the first I wrote once I figured out the plot. The Greeks thought Okeanos, on the far side of India (actually the Bay of Bengal), marked the end of the world. I figured the most likely place for Alexander to go if he did reach Okeanos was further east to Myanmar. The Pyu city-states were technically not formed in that area until a century later, but blame that on Fate/ history.
• So, Iskandar Alter! I was originally planning on writing a nice, reasonably sized shipfic for Yuletide. And then the idea of Iskandar Alter stuck in my head and I couldn't think of anything else but this thing. While historical Alexander was more brutal than Fate Iskandar, I based Alexalter off another point of divergence: his interest in Persia. IRL Alexander rejected the teaching that Persians were barbarians; he took on many of their customs, encouraged mingling of their two cultures, and in fact earned much enmity from the more xenophobic Greeks in his army. Alexalter is just as xenophobic, and takes little joy in his conquering. P.S. the title's foreshadowing for him.
• Heracles—ah, what a swordsman my brother was! Saber Heracles, Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Fic
• Some Persian, Stella, was it? This horrible murder of Arash is Spooky's fault, it's terrible and I love it
• "Bagoas." Alex was looking at him with a sort of wonder. "His name is Bagoas." Alexander's other lover, a eunuch who belonged to Darius III. Also enough historical accounts of Alexander kissing him in public that historians can't no-homo them.
• He'd felt the press of a book under his pillow, and he was sure of the dagger under that; even he couldn't have missed a Grail there. Historically accurate! Never forget Alexander the Great was a big nerd.
• "Hello, Mithrenes," said Alex. Iskandar's messenger from Fate/Zero.
• Leaina doesn't want you to fall off either—she's well-trained. Lioness, inspired by Bagoas' horse in the Alexander trilogy.
• "I wished for you to be remembered as the son of Olympias." And why the change in history affected Alex and Waver's memories specifically.
• You are the one who lives to tell the world of your son." Historically accurate! Unfortunately she didn't outlive him for long.
• They would stay trapped, no beacon of light to follow to freedom. Another line I came up with early on that I really like!
• He couldn't remember him. Could he? He does. Waver will never have his dignity.
• But he never thought he'd see loneliness in those eyes. Alexalter, having lost Hephaestion's friendship, ended up never making the kind of connections Iskandar did. And then came this man who knew him, and he discovered what it was like to be loved and...it was nice. He really did like Waver a great deal, maybe even loved him. I like to believe that one day, in the future, he's summoned to Chaldea along with Iskandar and Waver gets all three of them and will never have peace again.
• Relatedly, while writing a fic where a villain wearing the face of someone's dead lover ends up falling for them, I took a break one weekend to play Bablyonia. ASK ME ABOUT KINGU.
• He could hear Olympias asking about "that nice boy Darius," and he'd...he'd ask what happened in Pella later. IRL Alexander became very close with Darius' mother after his death. Spooky pointed out Darius should return the favor with Olympias. 
• "If you are worthy, I will serve you." He looked up, then, meeting the red eyes he had longed for for so long. "And—I will always, always love you." Note that there's no qualifier for the second half--Waver now gets to mourn Alexalter too. I have the feeling he'll deal with it a little better this time,though.
• The end! I had so, so much fun writing this! I don't know if I'll ever manage something this complicated again, but I'm really glad I did. Go check out my recip warfare's fic, their prompts were inspiring as hell.