Jaycee Woods

Since meet-cute scenes are a thing, I included one in Boudica and The Butcher. It gets revisited several times in the narrative with additional details and different perspectives. On meeting during a battle, The Butcher smashes Boudica’s skull with the hilt of his machete nearly accidentally killing her. Adorable; she even gets a scar. 😊

Initially at the end of the first chapter “Harvest of Blood“, while carrying the injured Boudica in a makeshift litter. He confessed unprompted to the medic that he was the one who caused her injury. Further, he had not intended to hit her so hard. Finally, he cursed the rebels for putting a woman as a soldier on his battlefield. This latter being an emotional response from a parallel to the death of his wife from a rebel car bomb at the start of the war, when the rebels took a scene of normal life and turned it into a battlefield.

At the beginning of Ch 2, as she wakes in darkness realizing that she is no longer on the battlefield, she recalls for the reader the scene leading to her injury. In addition to providing the reader their first view of that scene, it is the reader’s first introduction to Boudica, who was unconscious in the first chapter. As violence in the story happens off stage to be retold by the characters, her firsthand memories give a different view on The Butcher as fearsome and murderous in contrast to the end of the first chapter.

Also, in Ch 2, when The Butcher returns to his tent to check on her, he brings light which allows her to understand her surroundings. She begged that he not hurt her. To which, he replied, “I already did” with reference to her injuries from their meeting. This put The Butcher’s brutal honesty on display as he neither sought to comfort/reassure her nor evade the facts.

Later in the story, when she is falling in love with him, she asks him what he likes about her. He reflects on meeting her on the battlefield then cites her courage. In her earlier recalling the scene of their meeting, she thought of him as a monster. The Butcher is literally nightmare fuel for the rebels, yet in her development through the story she faces without evasion the horror in him, while also seeing the good.

In a later scene in the story, she told him that during that battle she felt compelled to go to him. In the moment of the battle, she did not know what was to happen next, only that she had to be with him. In contrast to her feelings, the reader knows from the earlier recollection that she had tried to use her ammo-less rifle like a club to strike The Butcher, before he stopped her.

As part of recently drafted dialogue, The Butcher tells more of the details from their meeting. He talked about how she was wearing a construction hard hat instead of a helmet (the rebels were always lacking equipment & food), during her charge her hard hat fell off, and that his blow to her head might not have done so much injury if she had still been wearing that hard hat. This atypical recollection of specific details by him suggests that The Butcher had been repeatedly reexamining that scene without the reader’s awareness. Further, that is a symptom of Boudica’s feminine voodoo worming its way into The Butcher’s mind to create the opening that will later allow her to save him from the consequences of the war.

I don’t know whether I will find other ways to reuse their meeting but those came organically through the drafting as my subconscious expressed connections.