#I still have all my drafts for rarepair week

[tinylittlelilac]

I’m looking to hire a hitman to kill this thing if you have any information dm me

[yonemurishiroku]

Give me a list of all your Nico ships,I don't care how long it is or even who you ship him with,I want to know (Favourite Nico Ship?)

Yeah I want to know too.

No seriously. At this point I can't even keep track of my pairing list. It also doesn't help that I can practically eat everything that has Nico in it - regardless of... everything else. Jesus Christ.

But since you asked, I gotta try my best. I guess it's also a good chance for me to wrap up my own messy thoughts too---

Welp. Let's see. A list of Nico ships I actively contribute in because I have no idea what I know of at this point:

Solangelo, Jasico, Percico: have written about/ have plans to write about

Nico/Alabaster: tons of ideas and headcanons but have yet to decide on a writing plan. I could kill for them tho.

Thanatos/Nico: written one fanfic. Would love to write more but I run out of ideas

SELFCEST NICO. I'M SERIOUS FIGHT ME.

Eros (Cupid)/Nico: once unhealthily enjoyed making Love-you-like-an-enemy headcanons. Still do.

Erebus & Nico: I wouldn't say this as a ship... unless the term 'platonic ship' exist. I prefer to think of them as... soulmates? What do you call two lonely souls seeking each other's company?

Now to the pairings which I leech from others' content, meaning: consume but yet to contribute

Magnus/Nico: It exists and it's true and it's AWESOME

Pollux/Nico: There're at least two fics out there that had me in a chokehold

Child of Persephone x Nico ahsdjkahdkjahdka it was just one fic C'MON

Cecil Markowizt/Nico: Again. ONE fanfic. And it was Portuegeues.

Lukico

Or just platonic in general because there's potential and no one's seeing it so I'm taking it.

primordial god! chronos x ananke! nico courtesy of @avaetin. I fell so hard for it and I'm not even ashamed

Poseidon/Nico: all's Happy's fault. Like. Really.

Nipollo ajdhsajkda Brig shares the blame ok fine I'm crazy about it too and just bc Apollo's a hoe----

Anubis/Nico: thank you @/LapisLazuli13 on AO3

Dionysus/Nico but only if it's by @/robindrake93 on AO3. They have a distinguished figure for Dionysus and I'm neck deep in it

Minos/Nico: shout out to @/silenttoad on AO3 because it's the softest thing ever omfg 😭😭😭 Just for the record, their Minos is worlds different from the canon one. He's actually really nice.

Tons of crossover ships: Arthur/Nico (legitimately my RELIGION), Ciel Phantomhive/Nico,... That time I say Nezha and Nico could be friends. Like I don't... quite ship them but akdsaksaj this proves that you should never hope anything from me

I'm sure this is not all of them... I mean. I have read more. And probably forget a bunch...

I wouldn't say I have a favourite ship... well there're times that I would invest more in a specific pairing, but that doesn't mean I like other ships any less. I have 5 drafts for Jasico and then I have a Nicobaster week and then a Percico-marathon. Generally speaking though, I would say I usually... prioritize (?) the rarepairs. Since you know, the canon one and the more popular ones alr have people building the empire for them. I might be the only one invested in a Son of Persephone with Nico, for example, so I tend to gravitate towards it, in hopes of contributing a small brick for this little tent compared to their nation; or sometimes it's just because there's someone else more invested in me and their dedication fuels me (yes you @drksanctuary).

Anw I hope this gives you an insight into how wild of a being I am LMAO. I'm a proshipper. I have no qualms when it comes to enjoying fiction - as long as I enjoy it. Be free. Trust me.

As I've said, I forgo everything when it comes to Nico. He's my exception. He's always right. If he's wrong I have a few words to Rick------ jk lol or maybe not---

[contentment-of-cats]

Part II: Growing Pains

When we ended Part I of our overview of Fandom, we saw fic evolving from Zines and independent publishing to fic specific platforms such as Fanfic.net, LiveJournal, Ao3, and Dreamwidth. The hand-off from one platform to the next was not always a process of evolution, nor a smooth transition, rather often necessity demanding invention. With the transition from paper to online exposure came the opportunity to develop community and an opportunity for problems.

We’re back at the Asker’s Studio™️, so grab a cat, move a cat, kick the toys out of the way and get comfortable.

Today, I would like to discuss what I like to generally define as Growing Pains. These are the issues that arose on all fronts which ranged from the highly personal, to technical assaults that threatened the mere existence of fic, online.

I have chosen a few topics that reflect on the evolution, creation and demise of Fandom platforms/archives/host sites. Let’s begin with the big one: Censorship. Over the months, I have heard fragments about a wave of censorship that hit both FF.net & LiveJournal. I understand that the results caused rifts/fragmentation in the fandoms. Since those platforms existed before my time, could you briefly describe what they were, how they served your needs, and what ultimately led to their demise?

Out of the ashes grows a rose: AO3. I understand that Ao3 was borne as the answer to the failings of the aforementioned FF.net & LiveJournal. However, it is not without its own attacks/problems - as recent as the last two weeks, hackers with content issues successfully took down the site for a solid day. Could you add any insights to these purity attacks & whether they are a continuation of the long war on creativity? Even less spoken of are issues of internal strife, regarding fic content/underage content. Having participated in several Fandom platforms/host sites, was the creation of Ao3 the answer that Fandom participants were looking for, or do problems evolve along with solutions? (I invite @olderthannetfic to feel invited offer any historical perspectives on the creation of AO3 at this time)

Finally, I would like to throw out what I call The Next Frontier: the introduction of AI. Many of us have locked our accounts and designated them Registered Users Only, as the AI beast lands like a pack of Death Eaters. We see the entertainment industry walking the picket lines with AI being one of the contract issues. Can you offer some insight on this topic?

This is a hackneyed list of issues - both human & technological - that has confronted Fandom/fic over its long and short history. Please feel free to add, abridge, omit or expand on anything I have brought up. As always, thank you very much for your time..

*settles in*

I wanted to answer this sooner, but really needed to think about some of my answers. This has been through a few drafts, so hold steady.

Censorship:

In the beginning (Usenet), there was always censorship. The fandoms would start off with 'all are welcome' but that was never actually the truth. Popular ships always eclipsed rarepairs, and people got downright nasty about it and there was also a lot of anti-smut action. Then there was the slash vs. het vs. noromo (no romance - now called 'gen) disputes. The fragmentation came with e-groups and members only listservs where people could write their stories without the censorship of the majority or characterization cops. There was still more fragmentation over other subjects, the purity police existed to make more wedges. The first time I ever saw a fight over 'queer' being a slur was on a Skinner/Mulder e-group so that was around 1996ish. E-groups purged a lot of slash and smut lists before it was bought by Yahoo, and Yahoo did the same.

Archives were curated sites on accessible hosting sites like Geocities, Angelfire, and so on. either dedicated to a specific fandom, pairing, or genre. Posting power rested in the hands of an archivist or a board of archivists. There was a lot of favoritism, and some authors posted their own work on a private website and often joined a ring of likeminded sites.

Fanfiction came out of the woodwork of the internet in 1998 when fanfiction.net came to be. FF.net was the equivalent of a publisher's 'slush pile.' A knocked-over fire-hydrant geyser of fic and fandoms as opposed to the neatly bottled and displayed stuff. It took a while, but the tweaks started in the early 2000's (dammit I am so fucking old) with banning works from a specific source (Anne Rice, Archie, Terry Goodkind etc.), then moving on to banning reader insert, filk and songfic, RPF, NC-17 and sexually explicit material (purging existing content also). They banned CYOA, Self-Insert, Character/Reader (You) fic. A lot of this was for two reasons.

The leadership of ff.net wanted to make the site attractive to advertisers.

They wanted to play nice with publishers, studios, media, real people depicted in fic, and intellectual property attorneys.

The migration to LJ placed fic in the hands of the author. They could post whatever they wanted and screw the mods.

If fanfiction came out of the woodwork on ff.net, it came out of the closet on LJ.

LJ came along in 2000ish, it originally was a place for fans to interact with other fans - like a forum where you could also post fic. The ban and excision of NC-17 and explicit fic from FF.net made LJ into a fandom hub, and for a short while kept the fan-run archives from dying out. However, even the hosting services did not want smut, slash, or other possibly-prosecutable fic on their servers, and were shutting down those sites. It was haphazard, but not random, as fandom grudges and the purity police would rat archives out.

LJ also saw the rise of the BNF, and also the phenomenon of Dark Fandom and Fandom Wank (FW originated on LJ and was driven off several platforms). LJ was sold to 6 Apart in 2005, and the Russian company SUP in 2007, with the founders mostly bolting after Strikethrough and Boldthrough - instigated by Warriors for Innocence (actual identity unknown, speculation attributes to Ms.Scribe). However, 6 Apart and SUP also wanted to - you guessed it - make LJ profitable. WFI was arguably the first successful, large format purity troll. I was already moving away from LJ and FF.net at the time, that just hammered the nail in.

Archive of Our Own:

That leads us to Ao3 (called AoOO and cue the 'Werewolves of Fandom' jokes), began with a 2007 LJ post by @astolat. The genesis of Ao3 was widely mocked, but fifteen years later it is still standing. I remember hearing about it and wondering if it had any relation to the essay 'A Room of One's Own' by Virginia Woolf.

"But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what, has that got to do with a room of one's own? I will try to explain."

I view the attacks on Ao3 as an attack on marginalized groups using nontraditional media. There are still vast numbers of people who do not want women or other marginalized groups to have a room of one's own, much less an archive, much less an archive that can't be held by the balls via their wallet, or threatened with a squad of foot soldiers with Esquire and Juris Doctor next to their name. Ao3 is now a part of fandom culture - good, bad, and ugly - and is a target for purity trolls using straw man, gaslighting, and red herrings to pull Ao3 apart for their own purposes.

Ao3 does have the problems that any institution has - and those unique to those dependent on user-generated content. It has its own internal struggles with the content that users generate as it pertains to underage/noncon and other squicks. To censor or not to censor? Is it enough to ask grown ass people to tag their work or to ask other presumably grown ass people to use tags when to eliminate content they do not want to see? are they doing enough to attract a diverse staff? How is that staff being treated? It is non-profit, staffed with volunteers, and lives on funding drives like US public television and NPR. It has a big enough base that understands the mission and is active enough to parse board candidates. In much the same way as NPR/Public Television, the content is a draw for trolls. Legacy media was the means to control the message, but when you can shoot content on your phone, write and publish from your connected device, the media can't control the message. It scares the piss out of people who have every reason to want to control the message.

When people attack Ao3, their reasons are spurious troll food for the most part. There's another, deeper, more nefarious agenda at work.

AI and the War On Creativity:

AI art, music, and writing is the idea of someone who views media as something to be consumed. You buy a book, you watch a show, and that is monetized.

Nobody has ever successfully monetized fandom.

The war between creators and media controllers heated up when technology handed creators the tools to make their own content and the platforms to distribute it whether it's video, writing, art, or music. AI is an attempt to wrest that control back.

To the Powers That Be, fandom is a resource that needs to be squeezed for money. People consuming fanworks for free are people not giving their money to Disney, Sony, Warner Bros, and so on. The PTB have taken over the cons, despite the inclusion of artists alleys, so that they can once again control the media and control the message. The PTB like to deem themselves creators and disruptors. However, creative human beings are an unruly lot. The PTB want creatives and what they produce, but under their control. No unions, no contracts, no pesky IP issues.

An AI has no rights, no needs, no true consciousness and thus can only copy or derive when it 'creates' content. Their 'disruption' is for everyone but themselves. So when we bar them from scraping our content, they see it as our refusing to give them something that they are entitled to use.

AI scraping from Ao3 and venues like DeviantArt are attempts to make unpaid use of creators' content. Creators write and create art that is uncompensated, which is then shared. Some writers and artists have 'tip jars' or take commissions, but the vast majority get nothing but comments and likes. Since this work is uncompensated, the PTB deem it 'free' and therefore they can do what they want with it. When they scrape a work to train their AI, they are working to replace creatives. Full stop.

For that matter, a scraper doesn't need to be from Google or MicroSoft. You can download scrapers for Wattpad like this one:

There are also tools available on sites like GitHub that can be used to scrape Ao3 and FF.net. Moreover, there are a fuckton of AI specifically marketed for fanfiction writing to fanfiction writers - all of which have been trained on fan-generated content. There are AIs for art and for music. It could be argued that these AI will help people unleash their own creativity, improve stories, and unearth creative potential. The thing is that none of these tech companies does anything for free in the long term.

Finally, the US Copyright office has ruled that you can't copyright anything - image, writing, music, video - that you create with an AI. anyone can use it for any purpose, without you having any legal recourse. There must be a minimal 'human involvement' - in this particular case, the art generated by a human entering text prompts into an AI was deemed insufficient to meet the standard. The ruling is the first of its kind, and more will follow, but keep in mind that you are one ruling from the AI creators assuming a stake in your work.

[television-bodies]

fic writer tag game

thank you for the tag @palmviolet ! love things like this. blessings upon you and all your sheep

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

five! my ao3 account is but a baby

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

63k. in approximately ten days this is going to jump by ~15k so perhaps i should have waited to do this tag but alas. impatience

3. What fandoms do you write for?

currently only les mis. so many themes to explore... so many characters to sink my teeth into... so many dynamics to look at and so many situations into which i can drop people...

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

i mean. this is going to be all of my fics but here's the ranking

suckerpunch

visiting hours

restoring the balance

tech week

the two sides of monsieur valentine (the perils of rarepairs)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

yes!!! i love comments. fuel. life blood

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

well. there's a major character death marinating in my drafts, yet to be unleashed

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

currently all of them have pretty happy endings, which is something i'm sort of trying to change because i'm starting to get a little bored of writing that all the time. sorry. scared of getting myself into a funk! all things considered though, it's probably tech week. those final lines were in my head from the very start of the fic, and with the whole christmas vibe... yeah. that one, i think

8. Do you get hate on fics?

not so far! hoping that will not change!

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

not as of yet and i can't see myself doing so if i'm honest but i'm also a big believer in never saying never because i don't know who i am (or more importantly, who i will be). so. not at the moment. but in ten years maybe i'll look back at this and laugh. you know

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?

again, not as of yet! not a full crossover, with characters from each thing intersecting, anyway. i've got some AUs for les mis that are specific to other interests, but nothing closer than that.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

i don't think so.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

i don't see many fics in the les mis fandom getting translated at all anymore! the fandom is so lovely but it's definitely quieter than it has been in the past, so it doesn't surprise me. i'd love for it to happen, but no, not yet.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

nooo. i like the idea of it, if there was someone i think i worked well enough with -- but i don't know anybody over here well enough for that yet, i don't think. i am currently bad at messaging people/interacting on any level deeper than reblogging posts or commenting on their fics, which is really something i should work on. open to the possibility though!

14. What’s your all time favourite ship?

enjolras and grantaire, oh my god. living in my brain for goddamn YEARS now. years upon years. with that said, i do have certain Feelings about them -- maybe i'll go more into detail with this someday on some other post but really i think that the way they're done in canon is kind of perfect, which is why i don't write canon era fic for them. there's nothing i can do to that that would make it worthwhile, to me. but putting them in different time periods or situations? ohhh yeah

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

i've got bits and pieces of a les mis AU for the BBC series race across the world which i am still sort of attached to but can't see myself doing anymore, purely because writing the logistical parts of how the race etc functions in that show was boring me, and i don't want to be bored by something that i'm doing for my enjoyment. but maybe i'll do a post at some point laying out the main plot points if anybody's interested because i do still like the concept

16. What are your writing strengths?

probably still nailing this down, if i'm honest. i like descriptions.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

i always think i'm not great at dialogue, but i've been told the opposite, so who knows! i think my issue with it comes more from wondering where the conversation should go/what should go in the middle of two points i want the characters to make, rather than making it sound realistic. i think i'm fairly good on the realism front.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

occasionally i'll make characters say the odd phrase in another language, but nothing more than that. i'm not fluent in any language other than english, so unless it's something i'm sure of in spanish i think i'd just be worrying if the translation is correct, which isn't worth it to me (and there isn't much use for spanish in what i'm currently writing lmao)

19. First fandom you wrote for?

fanfiction dot net days are ones we do not talk about... a haze in my mind... banished to the darkness... but i actually do know the answer to this -- it was dracula, for some fucking reason. (i know the reason. but i'm not sharing)

20. Favourite fic you’ve written?

i'm quite fond of suckerpunch, just because i think it's sort of speedrunning my personal exr manifesto, but i don't know! seriously no answer to this! taking that as a good sign: maybe my favourite is yet to come.

no pressure tags go to @pumpkinspice-prouvaire @sereendy @shamedumpster and anybody else who wishes to do it!

[whostarlockeda03]

1, 18 & 23 for the end of the year fanfic asks please!

Heya! Arrggghh I was going to answer these all on the 31st but then Things Happened and I didn't get a chance :( Anyways, here ya go!

1. What's your favourite fic you wrote this year?

Y’know, I’m actually really proud that I managed to do rarepairs and fatherly love week! I always struggle to write to a deadline, so finishing all seven fics in time (I know I fell behind but I also caught up again during the week), was a huge thing for me! Of those stories, I really really love In The Still Of The Night (I’ll Share My Secrets With You) and Nightmares Fade In A Warm Embrace.

And in the same vein, my piece for the reverse bang (The Day The Glaives Went AWOL) gave me a few challenges, but I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

Of course, I’m also super proud of the works in the Tucked au!

18. What is your current number of wips?

Haha, there are too many XD

Already got 9 posted (3 of them are marvel fics) all of which I shall endeavour to continue. As for drafts I have started, well, there’s at least 16 just for ffxv that I can think of off the top of my head! And that's only the ones I've started! XD

23. Are there any fics you wanted to write but didn’t?

Hmm, okay… I totally thought I’d get more done than I did this year but alas, isn’t that always the way? But if I had to pick one, I guess my I Will Be series. I really thought I could finish that this year. The next fic in it is a monstrous multi-chapter thing, and I'm still not happy with the first chapter XD so it's probably going to be a while

[thelightofthingshopedfor]

the really frustrating thing about taking most of a week off work to Get Shit Done, actually, is that...you still have the same brain that makes it so hard to Get Shit Done under normal circumstances, so even with all that extra time it’s still hard to get anything done, plus there’s kind of more pressure because you took the time off! you have all this extra time! finally you’re going to do all those things you’ve meant to do for ages but never had time!

and then you...don’t, and it feels worse because you don’t even have the excuse of being too busy

I mean I did do...a decent amount of absence training with Hazy. and I took the first couple steps to figuring out what happened with an Etsy package that was returned to me. and I posted a “adventures of tiny Loki & Thor” photo for the first time since early August oops. and I did a decent amount of work on some outstanding Etsy orders while finally watching some Disney+ stuff, although I only got to that last night. and I...did some other things too, probably. (played a lot of Fallout 76. continued to fixate on Loki pins. also oops.) it’s just, you know, I meant to do a lot of other things, specifically

some cleaning

everything for my outstanding Etsy orders, at the beginning of the week, plus extras for samples and so I maybe won’t have to scramble next time I get an order

a whole bunch of writing for Whumptober, because I really want to do that and I was going to have more time for it after I realized I couldn’t possibly finish my Loki Rarepair Big Bang fic in time and dropped out after panicking about it for a couple days, and instead I have done...very, very little

some asks that I have been meaning to answer for months, in at least one case, plus probably some other drafts

rearrange and hang my pin boards

and, well, I still have some time to do some of those things, and it’s not like it’s totally useless that I took a week off and got to sleep in (although I kept having problems with neck pain waking me up early, so...didn’t sleep as much as I wanted to). but it’s frustrating, and it’s hard not to beat myself up about it.

[shinobimagpie]

Naruto Rarepair Week - Day 1 - Perfect Timing (ShikaTemaTayu)

My entry for day one of @narutorarepairweek I wrote like half of this on tumblr mobile only for the app to EAT MY DAMN DRAFT. The prompt wasn’t for YOU you stupid blue website! Anyway...

Perfect Timing 

for @narutorarepairweek 

Characters: Tayuya/Temari/Shikamaru

Prompt: Bad Things Happen/Good Things Happen

Warnings: Tayuya-typical language

“You can’t be serious!”

“Three WEEKS?!”

They are both on their feet immediately, speaking over each other in protest.

“Wh-that’s half the exam period! She can’t… they can't just...” Shikamaru tries to start.

“She’s going to laugh in your face when you tell her that.” Tayuya cuts in, jabbing her finger at the woman across the desk. “And when she realizes you mean it she’s going to try to kill you with her mind. She might even pull it off.”

“She can be as angry about it as she likes, but that doesn’t change the post-surgical requirements.” Shizune says sternly, crossing her arms and leaning back to stare them down calmly, nonplussed by either Tayuya’s upset or Shikamaru’s practically pleading look.

“Her injuries were extremely serious. If she doesn’t keep the leg raised over the course of recovery she risks losing the foot.”

Tayuya curses, running a hand roughly back through her hair, trying to form a protest that isn’t just a frustrated scream. Shikamaru has her back, as usual.

“We know it’s serious, Shizune-san, but her mental health is important too, isn’t it? She can’t have just an hour a day or something?”

“Bedrest.” Shizune repeats, though with a little more gentleness this time. “I don't put active shinobi on these kinds of restrictions lightly, I know this will be hard on her, but the activities she has to get up for like bathing and the bathroom will be enough stress as is. Her blood and chakra flows are in an extremely delicate state right now. I know I don’t need to tell you how important it is that she have a complete and uninterrupted recovery from her injuries.”

Shizune gives a pointed look to the arm-crutch that Tayuya is bearing half her weight into and the red-head rolls her eyes at the ceiling.

“I fucking KNOW, Shi, but… but you…”

“You don’t have to find a way to entertain her for 506 hours.” Shikamaru grumbles, pinching the bridge of his nose to stave off his instant headache.

Tayuya draws herself up straighter, adjusting the collar of her interrogator’s uniform with her free hand.

“Three whole weeks? You're SURE?"

“You can count today, since she was on the table so early.” Shizune concedes and Shikamaru and Tayuya heave a united sigh.

“Alright, just… better to let us tell her.”

-

“I could just put her in a genjutsu.” Tayuya says idly as they ride the elevator down to the inpatient floors.

“She won’t fall for that.” Shikamaru scoffs immediately, arms crossed as he leans on the opposite wall. “She’s done way too much training with you.”

“Where are all those Uchiha motherfuckers when you need them...?”

“Tayuya…”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding, fucking hell...” she sighs, feeling drained before the real conversation has even begun. Her shoulders sag and a moment later, Shikamaru has pushed off the far wall and come to put an arm around her, rubbing her back in small soothing circles.

“She’s gonna hate this.” Tayuya says miserably, pressing her forehead to his shoulder, guilt swamping her the more and more she thinks about it. "I shouldn’t have pushed her so much in training…"

“Don't do that to yourself." He says firmly, kissing her temple. "You couldn't know what was going to happen once she got in the field. It was supposed to be a B rank mission for godsakes."

Tayuya sighs, knowing he’s right but hardly feeling less guilty for it. Still she tips her head up to kiss his cheek in return, leans on him until the elevator doors open and they emerge onto the recovery floor.

"So, do you wanna break it to Tema or you gonna make me do it?" Tayuya asks as they turn down the hall.

"Break what to me?" Temari's voice cuts in from behind them. They both swing around to find their wife peering at them with concern, hands full of coffee for herself and a bottle of soda for their shared patient.

Shikamaru and Tayuya trade a look and Temari groans, knowing already what it means.

"Shit. For how long?"

Tayuya takes a deep breath.

"Three weeks."

"WEEKS?!" Temari's voice pitches up into a squeak of shock, blue-green eyes welling up as she takes in the gravity of it.

"It was really that bad? But, her exams…"

Shikamaru winces, nodding as he reaches out to rub Temari’s shoulder. Tayuya takes the coffee from her so she can put an arm around him in return.

"Asuna's gonna be so upset." The blonde sniffs as Shikamaru kisses her head, and Tayuya sighs, feeling helpless all over again.

"I know, sunshine..."

"We'll get her a really good present, see if we can't make it suck a bit less." Shikamaru suggests, squeezing Temari reassuringly.

Tayuya makes a thoughtful little sound that makes both her partners look at her.

"What?" Temari asks, one elegant brow raising.

"You better not be thinking what I think you are..." Shikamaru says, pinning her with his most suspicious of looks.

The redhead shrugs. "I'm just thinking. Now might be the perfect time to cave and get her that saxophone she’s been begging for. Let her get the first few weeks of screeching out while she's, you know, hospitalized? Instead of in our house?"

Temari can’t help the laugh that bursts out of her at the sly suggestion.

"Well, she's still gonna be mad but that will take the edge off for sure. The nurses might all hate us by the time she leaves though."

".....It's so hot when you're sneaky like that." Shikamaru adds with a dreamy sigh and Tayuya just grins, sipping a bit off the top of Temari's coffee.

"That's why you keep me around, no?"

[chamomileteainabuttercup]

2021 fic year in review

I was tagged by @staranon95, thank you!

I have to say that as I begin this I'm not altogether sure how to get the information I want out of AO3 (isolating stuff posted this year) but I'll try my best. Oh hey, looks like "Statistics" is what I want.

number of completed works - How to count this? I guess if I just count short one-shots, and then there's a fic continuing from 2020 that I finished in 2021, 11 - and the number is only so high because I did Dincobb Week. I don't usually finish things. I get fired up for an idea and write a lot before I peter out.

total word count - 633,795 - longer, in total, than Moby-Dick, but with more actual dick in it. This has been a pretty dickful year in fanfic for me, a departure from some earlier years which were more pussy-intensive. These things are presumably cyclical.

fandoms written in - Star Wars, particularly The Mandalorian, and The Witcher (Netflix).

did you write more, less, or about what you’d expected? - honestly, it felt like I must have written more but I am always vague about anything to do with numbers.

what’s your own favorite story of the year? - "Just Business, Nothing Personal" has been a lot of fun to write. It's quite rude but also quite rewarding, and grew from a silly, horny idea about Boba Fett propositioning Cobb Vanth into something that feels quite emotionally sincere.

did you take any writing risks this year? - I wouldn't say so, I kept writing the same sort of stuff I always write. Pornographic homosexual/bisexual fanfic with not much plot but a lot of character/relationship development and humour. It wouldn't be worth it to me without the humour. Two goals, get people's genital humours flowing, and make them cackle.

do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the new year? - No, I think setting goals for something that I do just for fun would make it much less fun for me. I would just like to keep writing as and when I get ideas, and enjoy the process.

most popular story of the year? - Going by hits, "Curse of Chamomile," by a pretty long shot. Many thanks to the Geraskier fans! It's the same by kudos and bookmarks, but "No Peeking" has it beat on subscriptions. Many thanks to the Dincobb fans!

story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion - Honestly, I'm just grateful for any attention. I don't care if that sounds a bit desperate, it's true.

most fun story to write - Still "Just Business, Nothing Personal," because it was such a cracky rarepair and that gave a great sense of possibility and irresponsibility.

biggest disappointment - that I didn't manage to fill all the Dincobb Week prompts. At one stage I thought I really might, because I started planning and drafting bright and early, but I just couldn't come up with sufficient ideas for each of them before the deadline. I did, however, manage to produce at least one thing for each day of the week, so the "biggest" disappointment was really pretty mild.

biggest surprise - that I actually thought of a way to finish "Curse of Chamomile," albeit I didn't ever get to a lot of things that I earlier thought might happen in the story. (There was going to be an orgy in Oxenfurt. They never actually got there. It's probably for the best, it would have been exhausting for both the characters and the author.)

I have elected not to tag anyone because I think everyone I would've tagged has been tagged by someone else already, and/or I don't wish to impose, but anyone should feel free to jump in if they would like to. If you're reading this, consider yourself tagged. You're it.

[thinkingisadangerouspastime]

So it's been 1 year today since FFWF was created! In honor of that, can you take us through how your fanfic writing has evolved in the past year?

happy ffwf!! this is such a good question, girl, also even though i know my writing has changed it feels like it hasn't 😂 i think a fun way to answer this would be to compare two excerpts of my writing, one from a year ago and one from my most recently-written fic!

here's the first paragraph from of cats and curses, my catradora-meets-kyoru crossover, posted June 15th, 2020:

Catra had been more than willing to let Adora do most of the talking. She was normally more eager to learn about the new planets they were exploring, but that day… Ugh. She really wasn’t sure what was making her mood so foul. Or she couldn’t pinpoint a singular cause, anyways. It was probably some God-awful combination of the pittering drizzle of rain falling from the gray sky around her, the fact that the miserable planet ‘Earth’ she was on seemed to have no traces of magic whatsoever, and the immediate reality that Adora was no longer by her side. Which was the main downfall of Adora doing all of the talking - Catra was left behind. At her own request, of course, so she could only blame herself, but still. She wanted to stew in her misery for a bit.

and here's the first "paragraph" of veritas, a oneshot i wrote where bucky grapples with the fact that tony stark is the one person he can never make amends to, posted June 1st, 2021 (N.B. i know my aang rarepair week ficlets are posted more recently than this story, but they were actually written several weeks prior to this fic, making veritas technically the thing i've most recently written):

Veritas. Latin. “Truth.”

The truth was that there was one name Bucky would never—no, he could never cross off his list.

Bucky remembered when he’d first started drafting in Steve’s journal, when he’d first started taking note of every person he owed amends to, he hadn’t been able to write that one name down. It was shameful, yes, guilt-inducing, even more so. But he couldn’t. Bucky couldn’t document what could never be stricken, never be removed, never be undone.

He’d never forget, though. He’d never rest easy again.

clearly fics of very different voices and very different tones, lmao! still, since this is strictly for a fun, i think a comparison can be made anyways. for one, i clearly still love long sentences (although in veritas it is for Dramatic Effect while in of cats and curses it's more me being overly wordy 😂). i still use past tense (i think i've only written one fanfic in present tense and that was my yuaang ficlet, ataraxia). personally, i think veritas reads a little more smoothly than of cats and curses, but that's more of a subjective thing. i also think i used more adverbs in of cats and curses than i did in veritas, and even though i love adverbs, it's probably for the better i don't use them as much now as i used to 😂 as you can see, i am using the proper em dash in my fics now (thanks, jake!), which i used to Not do. however, i am yet to lessen my use of commas, ahahaha.

all in all: i would say there's distinct improvement, but maybe i just want to think im getting better and im actually just stagnant, lmfao! this was such a fun question boo thank you for sending it in!! 💛

[which-star]

WIP Tag Game!

thank you @justmattycakes for tagging me! Because I usually post when I have a sizable buffer and I do a lot of one shots, I literally only have like one released WIP right now. but I will show some unreleased things in the drafts 👀

*all unreleased titles are working titles; they may change!

relax my mind - WINX: Fate Saga Aisha/Musa fic. They're girlfriends your honor!! Next chapter is a cuddle sesh and I no longer know if it counts as canon-compliant or not.

Coming soon:

white on your heart (don't freeze cold) - Marvel Luna Snow(Seolhee)/Haewon. Rarepair central babey. This is currently the one I'm most excited about. I started this, like, one-two days ago and it's already reaching 5k... Hae Won is barely even a character, but she's kidnapped and Seol has to save her <3 Agents of Atlas cameos will be made. There's no audience for this fic, just my whims, so here's two snippets. Haewon gasped, hips bucking. "Seol, Seol." Her head landed on Seol's shoulder, a whine muffled by the fabric. "Your hands—.. They burn."

Breaking In - unreleased silkcat. This is just whump and reconciliation.. yeah I love them, what about it? Close to being done. "Who let me out of the bag?"

Ice rinks and roller skates - MCU Gwen/Cindy. I'd say, about halfway finished? I call this Effortlessly 2.0(affectionate) in my brain lmaooo. It's one thing to accept a kind family's invitation to drive you home, it's another to find the daughter that invited you ridiculously attractive.

SILK week: no spoilers!! But just know that I have mentally checked off every single challenge and have started writing😏 Still juggling my WIPs around to see which ones will be posted during this week but I have more or less of a plot for each prompt except one

Development Hell:

I'll be your beggar, your fool - unreleased Liz/Cindy. I just got to say, ever since I wrote Effortlessly... I am a SUCKER for this ship, I will go down with it. Still figuring things out, have written a few scenes. A look of relief broke out on Cindy's face. "Oh! Elizabeth Toomes, is that you?"

To Learn Every Note - Winx Club Aisha/Musa. I never should've had each chapter be like 6k... the chapter I'm working on is like 2k and it just. Won't. Grow.

What is Good, What is Bad - atla mailee. Superhero au!! 2 chapters out, 3rd I have started and gave up 💀 will pick back up eventually (I hope)

Save Me - unreleased atla Suki/Mai. Suki's taken prisoner; Mai oversees her trip to the Boiling Rock. This has been in the drafts for almost a year omg but it's over 10k words

Floral Killer - unreleased mailee mailee mailee (atla). Mai's heading back to Caldera with Ty Lee and Aunt Mura in tow for the Festival of the Fire Lily. During then she deals with flowers, assassins, legalizing same sex marriage, and maybe... fall in love? Wrote the beginning, still figuring things out tho

Flowers for... Azula?! - unreleased Mai/Azula au. Azula delivers Zuko's flowers to some girl. Yeah, some girl alright; if you can even call Mai "some girl."

that's all I'm gonna share! Only a drop in the WIP ocean. Everyone better read my Luna Snow fic when I publish 😤 I'm really liking it so far, rated M .... maybe E😳 (probably M because I am a COWARD)

[atamascolily]

getting an early start on this whole "end of year fic review" thing

Okay, I found my "2019 Year in Fandom Review" post with my goals for 2020 after some frantic tumblr-archaeology. It was fun to see my guesses for what I would accomplish this year, especially given how weird this year has been on so many levels.  It’s only early December, but I figure I might as well write this now since the numbers are unlikely to shift too much in the next three weeks.

One of my goals was to finish Through a Glass Darkly, my Star Wars Legends/ST fix-it--that did not happen, lol! However, I did write 6 chapters (about 40K) with possibly one more on the way before the end of the month, so that's certainly an achievement! Glass is now 81K, which is the longest fic I have posted to A03 to date! Yeah!!

[To put it in perspective, I have more or less covered all the events of TLJ (with a few more appearing in flashbacks) and now I just have one more movie's worth of events to cover...]

Long fics are hard, and Glass is extremely challenging for me, because of the rapidly expanding cast, the crappy world-building of the sequel trilogy, and the fact that researching for it is hella depressing. Still, it's been extremely cathartic to write, and I can feel myself growing as a writer, which is why I've stuck with it (also I've been snickering over certain plot points for MONTHS now and I want to share them with the world but they really only make sense in context).

Glass also continues to be my most popular fic, although that's not the main reason I'm writing it. Comment screening continues to be a godsend - most readers are great, but every now and then I get some really weird ones and it's nice just to delete on sight and move on.

Moving forward in Glass: The events of TROS will be lampshaded, but most of the plot will be its own thing. Ideally, every character will get a full and satisfying arc (even the minor ones!). It's gonna be EPIC if I can actually get it on the page and out of my head. We shall see! Maybe 2021 will be the year this fic finally reaches its conclusion!

This year, I continued to experiment with genres and tropes: My first modern AU fics!  My Star Wars daemon fic! More crossovers with different fandoms! Becoming more comfortable with present tense!

Also, I wrote my first two E-rated fics this year! Major kudos to @myevilmouse for her encouragement and enthusiastic beta skills. Smut is so challenging for me - everyone who writes it deserves a medal!

Still Water is probably my low-key favorite of the fics I wrote this year, but all my Luke/Callista fics will always have a special place in my heart. I am such a sucker for this pairing, okay? Luke/Mara is amazing and my forever OTP, but Luke/Callista is really interesting even when (BECAUSE) it is dysfunctional and doomed.

I finally posted the last chapter of my Earthsea fic, Out of the Wind, which had been languishing in my drafts for years, and also that Lady or the Tiger fic, which was just sitting there since 2018. I have been going through my files recently to see what else might be ready to post soon as well as anything I just really want to be done with.  

I participated in two formal fic exchanges - Star Wars Rarepairs 2020 and Yuletide 2020. They are a lot of work to sign up for - figuring out what to write, and what I want other people to write takes a lot of time and energy - but I wrote some fics I probably wouldn't have written earlier, and got a lot of great ideas that I can refer back to later. Since “picking the right prompts” is 80% of the challenge - 10% is writing it, and 10% is making sure it meets my recipient’s criteria without violating any DNWs - this will be helpful in expediting future sign-ups. But after years of hearing people talk about these kinds of events, it’s nice to finally participate!

More informally, I posted fics for Crosstober and the Luke Deserves All the Blowjobs Challenge hosted by @myevilmouse, also a lot of fun and encouraging me to continue pushing boundaries. 

Podficcing has been on the back burner after posting 4 podfics early in the year. I love recording them, but editing them was not so fun, and it was too much on top of writing. Also, I just haven't felt like it much this year, so... we'll see what happens in the future?  

Posted to A03 this year: approximately 110K WIPs: hard to say, but at LEAST 40K of various projects

...to be honest, that's not as much as 2018 or 2019, but I think it's absolutely fantastic given how batshit crazy this year has been, and how hard it's been for me to write sometimes. (This also does not include meta, tumblr rants, or other fannish writing, such as the articles I’ve written for Fanlore!)

Goals I am 90% certain I can meet in 2021:  

-Continue to work on Glass and finish if possible. -Start posting Moebius (one of my WIPs). -continue to write more short fics and experiment with different styles, tropes, genres, fandoms, etc. -participate in challenges and exchanges as time and energy permit.

... and of course, be open to whatever comes up!

[cactusandfir]

phew, flyers exchange fest is finished! i’m still taking a break from regular writing to read the amazing fic, there are so many rarepairs and interesting concepts! last week i said i wasn’t going to have time for another fest but i’m already looking at the Hockey RPF Trans Fic Fest like...i had a pretty immediate idea too, so i might try to outline a bit this week and see if it coalesces into anything. i definitely have that writing hangover where i want to write all the new things, but i do want to finish some wips and i have a rough idea for when i want to finish them over the next few months so we’ll see if i can stick to it.

i have two wips that are shorter like, not wordcount wise, but timeline within the fic? like, one to three scenes at most, and i want to focus on creating richer imagery and more steady pacing. i feel like my writing’s been slowly improving overall (which is wild, refuse to believe that practicing a little bit every day actually works), but i focused on some specific things last time and it worked well to have like, a benchmark, so i might do some writing-specific research and see what happens.

i also MUST remember to leave open a period of time after the expansion draft for KRAKEN FIC!! consider this a warning (or a promise??) that i will be immediately combusting upon the creation of the sea monsters(affectionate) and even if none of my favorites end up there, their social media/advertising is already so good i’m sure we’re going to get SO MUCH content!! that i can assume i will immediately need to process via fic!! (it’s also the closest franchise to my physical location, so the possibility of seeing hockey games again in the future is exciting)

okay, after all that future planning, i did write a post-mortem for a little heads up but it got super long and i figured i’d do a separate post later this week in case you haven’t read the fic that JUST posted or would rather scroll on by!

[hddnone]

The Writings | Year 2020 Review

Eons ago in the beginning of 2020 I had 2 goals.  1: Write >250K, stretch goal >300K 2: Write a fic that was >30K

#1 was accomplished with a total of 356,524 words written in 2020. This might be surprisingly high and that’s because only ~50% of those words ended up posted on AO3 with 182,811 words. Which is absolutely why I started tracking word counts differently!!

Note: Word count doesn’t track small edits, but if I did massive rewrites than I did include the words of the second draft because I was usually writing into a blank document anyway with very few sentences remaining the same. 

#2 wasn’t accomplished, and I wasn’t at that close. The highest word count on a fic I achieved was The Three Heart Problem at 21K, but given that was the only >10K fic I finished and posted this year was still quite an accomplishment! 

More reviews & musings below the cut

# of Fics Posted : 66 4 of which are incomplete WIPs 29 of which counted as bingo fills 

# of WIPs Unposted : 25

34 of my fics were rated teen 14 were explicit 11 were mature 7 were unrated (prompt collection) 0 were gen (because teen is my default)

which means I don’t write as much smut as I think I do, though my most popular works this year were my StevexTonyxBucky explicit fics (the most popular fic in both hits & kudos being A/B/O with breeding kink wow what a shocker XD).

The majority of my fics (39) were TonyxBucky - another complete surprise, I know! But there were some other pairings including: StevexTonyxBucky (12), TonyxBuckyxNatasha (4), and a new pairing for me this 2020 : TonyxBuckyxClint (2)! For non-TonyxBucky content there was a handful of no pairings (some of which are Tony & Bucky though... hahaha) and a TonyxEddiexVenom and a TonyxPepperxSteve. 

I participated in a number of events this year: Winteriron Week Teratober Winterironshield Reverse Bang Marvel Reverse Big Bang (to be posted in 2021...) Stuckony Summer Stockings Stuckony Discord Server Prompt Event Rarepair Event Winteriron Month MTH 2019 (2/3 fics posted) What2Finish (fics to be posted in 2021)

and a handful or three of bingos: Starkbucks Bingo (9 squares) Stuckony Smut Bingo (3 squares) Bucky Barnes Bingo (14 squares) Marvel Polyship Bingo (3 squares) Tony Stark Bingo Round 3 (25 squares) Tony Stark Bingo Flash Rounds (6 squares) Season of Kink (3 squares) *MCU Kink Bingo (4 squares) *Tony Stark Bingo Round 4 (7 squares) *Steve Tony Bucky Bingo (2 squares) *Banned Together Bingo (2 squares)

*means the bingo round goes into 2021

If I did my math right that’s 78 bingo squares. Which sounds like a lot but it’s like blacking out 3 bingos which makes it sound like a lot less to me considering there’s 11 bingos on the list. I adore bingos as an event. I LOVE all the ideas I get, even if I don’t end up writing them. But I’m probably going to need to change this going forward to write the things I want to write in 2021. 

Okay a break from the numbers game into more feelsy review/recollection. 

I wrote more words in 2020 than I expected, and that might be because of the pandemic - or maybe I would’ve written more without COVID, who knows. Writing in March and April took hits, but I scraped by and met the progress goals but then delved into writing in May, June, and July as an escape from COVID things. Then writing got harder and harder towards the end of the year - October was rough, I didn’t complete Nano, and Dec I limped along. 

The numbers I like because it shows that I met the overall writing goals even though right now I don’t have that feeling of accomplishment. There’s fics I owe, deadlines I’ve missed, so many things I needed to write & finish but haven’t. But I can be proud of what I’ve done, and I am. 

Never expected to write Hanahaki Disease, but I did. Fluffy, of course. Why die from flowers in your lungs when you could woo your intended with the beautiful bouquet? 

Tony and Natasha as bumblees and Bucky as an injured wasp? Yes it’s crack and yes it was absolute fun. 

Well, that was 2020. I worked on things. I learned things. Hopefully I improved in things. 

2021, here we go!

[generallynerdy]

And when I am called to quit this life, my feet will not spurn the sod (Cody X Fay)

Summary: Cody is dying. He can feel it. For a second, when a gorgeous, terrifying woman stands above him, he thinks that he’s hallucinating in his final moments. But then, she’s healing him. Fay is too late to save any of his siblings, but she’ll do her best to save this one commander. In the process, she finds something made of darkness in the man’s head, shrieking at her touch. Could this be a lead on the Sith Lord she’s chasing?

Warnings: Blood and Injury, Major Character Injury, Burns, Fake Character Death, Fix-It of Sorts, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Near Death Experiences, Mentions of Rako Hardeen Arc, Vomiting Word Count: 2,115

Author’s Note: this is the first of many star wars one-shots that won’t leave my brain,,,please don’t convince me to make any of them into a series because I’m a weak bitch and I probably will. I didn’t know Fay existed until I read a few fics with her and now I’m in love whoops. Title is from The Optimist, a poem by J. W. Hammond. WOW this is a rarepair, I actually think it doesn’t have any other fics on AO3? Wow. What have I done.

Read the rest of the series on AO3

*

Cody is dying.

He can feel it as easily as hunger or exhaustion, despite the ringing in his head.

The explosion was massive and he was at the forefront of it. No, wait, that's not right. He was the furthest from it. Why was he far away? The memory is fuzzy.

He gasps, pained, wheezing, as he tries to move, tries to speak. Fire crackles around him, smoke and dust filling the air. His lungs burn with it and he's certain there has to be something impaling him because it hurts more than just a bruised lung. Why does he know what that feels like?

The men. He was leading the men away when the explosion happened. There were mines in the ground, he didn't realise-- oh Ka'ra, how many are dead? How many--?

He tries to sit up again and stops, falling back when he hears screaming. It takes him a long moment to realise that it's his voice, his screams.

"Peace."

Cody thinks he's hallucinating it, maybe imaging the voice of an angel in his final moments. *He must be, he decides when a woman appears above him, her dirty blonde-- almost brown, really-- hair falling over her shoulder to reveal a pair of slightly pointed ears. Her eyes are bright despite the frown on her face, almost eerily so.

Cody doesn't know why he's imagining some sort of Sephi woman come to take him away. He generally finds the men of the species more appealing.

"Keep breathing, Commander," she tells him, her voice light and airy, but determined in a familiar way. "You'll be able to do it without it hurting soon."

Cody coughs a little, trying to ignore the taste of blood in his mouth and the fact that it's dripping down the side of his face, too. He can barely get in any air, but he tries to speak regardless. She can't be his imagination. No, she would've called him Kote, not by his title.

"Who--?" he tries to say.

"Shh, keep your strength," she murmurs.

He can't see what she's doing, but with a jolt of movement, the pain in his chest becomes stronger and he screams again, almost against his will. The thing that was impaling him is gone-- she removed it.

Panic rises in him. He’s going to bleed out. He’s going to die right now, right here, in this mysterious woman’s arms.

“Breathe,” she warns again, firmly this time.

Cody wants to laugh, wants to tell her she sounds like General Kenobi with that heartbreaking last-minute, death-bed hope. He usually has nothing to hold onto, nothing but the people around him and he holds them fiercely. If this were him, he would refuse to accept that Cody is slipping away, not until his last breath.

What he fails to realise is that this woman isn’t denying his death because she doesn’t want it to happen; she’s denying it because she can and will prevent it.

He flinches as best he can when he feels her hands peel apart his armour. It’s burned into his blacks and when it pulls off his skin, he wants to scream again but makes a weak, wounded noise instead. Then, her hands on his bare chest, fingers pressed against his wounds.

“Buy me a-- a drink first,” he wheezes out, chest heaving.

Her laugh is a song, which is a stupid, cheesy thought that sounds like something out of Rex’s holofilms. Cody almost wants to bleed out just for thinking it.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re exactly like your Progenitor?” she asks dryly.

He snorts. “He was the rough draft. I--”

The gasp leaves his throat without his permission, a flaring heat stretching out from where her fingers meet his chest. It surrounds his entire body, cradling him in a gentle heat and almost numbing his pain.

When it reaches his head, however, a stab of pain goes through his skull. He writhes with the wave of intense pain, vision going fuzzy with tears.

“Stop, stop, stop--” he begs, sobbing.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes out, moving to rest her hand on his face. “It’s not me.”

Her fingers are cold against the heat she’s brought on, ice-cold as they dance across his skull, seeking out the source of his pain. They stop on a spot on the right side and press firmly there. When Cody gasps again, she stops as quickly as she started and the heat recedes from that place in an instant.

“Let any Sith in your head lately?” she asks.

He shakes his head viciously. “No, no-- why?”

“We’ll worry about that later. Take a deep breath.”

Attempting not to focus on that worrying tone, Cody does as she says, inhaling as deeply as he can, though it hurts. The moment he gets a good breath in, the warmth intensifies.

His eyes widen, terrified, but then it’s all gone; the warmth, the pain, the dizziness, the fuzzy vision-- everything. He flings himself up from the ground, hand flying up to his head. His fingers still come away bloody, but he can tell the wound is gone.

“How did you--?” he starts to ask her. He sees her robes and stops immediately. “I didn’t know Jedi could do that.”

She smiles. “Most can’t, I admit. It’s taken me a long time to learn. Anything still hurt?”

He pauses, assessing, before finally shaking his head. “Thank you. Did-- did anyone else--?” He hesitates to ask.

Watching her face fall is a punch to the gut. “No. I’m sorry, Commander, but you were the only one still breathing when I arrived.”

Cody shuts his eyes tightly, willing away the tears that threaten to break again.

So many siblings. So many gone, all but him. It always seems to end this way, he thinks bitterly.

“Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum,” he whispers.

He jumps when the woman places her hand on his, eyes opening. “Commander, I know you’re grieving and recuperating, but the Separatists will be all over this field soon. I have a request to make of you.”

Cody frowns. “General?”

“Ah, just Master,” she corrects, her smile a little sad-- something Cody has noticed with many Jedi when he calls them that. “Master Fay.”

“Marshal Commander Cody, of the 7th Sky Corps and the 212th Attack Battalion.”

Her smile widens. “Obi-Wan Kenobi. He’s lucky to have you.”

He glances at the ground, but only for a fraction of a second. “Thank you, sir, but I think it’s the other way around.” He pauses. “You said something about a request?”

“What I felt in your head...it was pure darkness,” Fay mutters.

She reaches forward again, the tips of her fingers on the very spot she’s speaking about. Cody finds himself leaning into the touch, reminded of the sharp difference between her skin and the heat that had come over him. He stops when she smiles a little at the movement, somewhat sheepish.

“Obi-Wan thinks I’m dead,” she says abruptly.

Cody blinks a few times. “Pardon?”

Fay sighs. “Myself and three other Masters faked our deaths so we could hunt the Sith Lord over Dooku. I think that they might have to do with whatever is in your head; it has the same darkness.”

He knows what she’s asking of him before she even finishes.

“You want me to come with you. If I disappear, they’ll assume I died in the explosion,” he works out.

Again, the smile that comes over her expression is sad. He’s clever, Fay thinks, like many of his siblings, but it doesn’t make her feel any better about the offer. She would never wish this fate on anyone, no matter the blood on their hands.

“I don’t want to take you from your family,” she admits, “but you may hold the key to finding the Sith Lord in your head, Commander.”

“I--” he pauses. “General Kenobi faked his death once. It felt-- It felt like the galaxy was ending. When he came back, I was...pissed. Couldn’t look at him for weeks. If I do the same thing, I don’t know if they’d forgive me.”

His thoughts drift to Rex. Rex would kick his ass for even thinking of pulling a Rako Hardeen.

And what about the other commanders? After Ponds...well, Cody doesn’t think they’d be able to lose anyone else.

But they could end the war. This is different from just catching a handful of bounty hunters trying to kill the Chancellor, this is saving the galaxy. What kind of soldier is Cody if he passes this up?

But what kind of soldier is he if he abandons his men?

(Good soldiers follow orders. Good soldiers follow orders.)

It’s not like he has much of a choice in this matter, though. He can’t exactly explain his miraculous survival of the explosion or the fact that he’s completely uninjured. What would he tell General Kenobi? That a long-dead Master healed him?

And how could he live knowing there was something dark in his head? Not ever finding out what it was?

“I’ll come with you,” he declares finally. “I need to know what this is. If it helps end the war, I have to.”

Master Fay grimaces. “You don’t have to do anything, Commander, if you don’t want--”

“I want to. I want to save my vode, sir. I can’t let this --” he gestures to the chaos around them, “--happen to any more of them.”

Fay lets out a deep breath. Cody is something. He and Obi-Wan must make quite a pair.

“Alright,” she says. “You’ll have to leave the armour; it stands out too much.”

He nods and takes her offered hand, standing with her. “I want to leave something for my brother, Rex. He won’t say a word, I trust him.”

“And I trust you, Commander,” she says with a smile. “I’ll contact the other Masters and give you a moment.”

“Sure, sir.” After a second, he clears his throat. “And, uh, Cody is fine.”

Fay hums. “Cody? You don’t have to call me sir. Just Fay. Or Master, if it physically hurts you to keep from using titles.”

Cody can’t help but laugh. “Thank you, Master. I’m glad we understand each other.”

*

Rex feels sick standing over the explosion site.

“Rexster? Rex?”

He snaps back into attention, finding a worried Ahsoka squinting at him. “Sir?” he asks, hoping it doesn’t come out as broken as he is.

Her grimace tells him that it does.

“We don’t know that he’s down there, Rex,” she says softly.

Rex swallows roughly. “Yeah.”

He’s trying to keep the hope, but it starts to fade with every step they take and every body they find. Not a single one of them made it out alive. He knows, logically, that Cody would have been at the front of the squad and the farthest from the explosion, but the damage is extensive.

“Sirs! Over here!” Jesse calls.

The sight of Cody’s armour, splattered with blood and reeking of burnt flesh, makes Rex gag. He has to rip off his helmet and duck away from the Generals, Ahsoka, and Jesse, retching.

When he returns, General Kenobi is kneeling beside the pile of displaced plastoid, grief etched on his face. He picks up a vambrace with shaking hands and lets out a weak breath. Ahsoka, meanwhile, sobs, letting General Skywalker pull her into his side.

Rex steels himself and moves toward them again, waving Jesse off when he gives him a concerned look. He kneels beside General Kenobi, who puts a hand on his shoulder.

He picks up Cody’s helmet, numb.

He can’t even find it in him to cry.

The Generals give him a long time there to think, to grieve. Jesse stays by his side, waiting and watching his six.

"Ni partayli, gar darasuum,” Rex says, finishing the remembrance. He holds Cody’s helmet in his hands, pressing his forehead against it in a Keldabe kiss. Despite himself, he chokes out; “Ni partayli, vod.”

He opens his eyes, meaning to pull the helmet away, and stops abruptly.

There’s something carved on the bottom of Cody’s visor, in Mando’a. Rex frowns. That’s a new addition, he’s pretty certain, at least since the last time he saw his brother.

It takes everything Rex has in him not to sob with relief when he translates it.

Cody is a stupid bastard and he loves his stupid bastard brother. He’s going to kill him.

Rako.

Fucking Rako.

“Wherever you are, I hope you know I’m gonna kick your ass when you get back,” Rex whispers to the helmet as if Cody is there with him. “And all the commanders are gonna help me.”

*

River’s Tags: @hahaboop & @mystoragehatesme

Masterlist

[birlcholtz]

hey if you’re still doing rarepairs - how about coach bittle w george martin?

i feel like i don’t know enough about sports to accurately portray their relationship BUT LET’S GIVE IT A GO ANYWAY. as always if other ppl have more hcs they want to add on feel free!! i love seeing what y’all come up with!!!

i’m torn between them meeting in college and them meeting when bitty’s in college (infidelity is NOT my jam so dw about that, we’re doing handwavey magic shit), so let’s do both! pick ur own adventure, i have HCs for them as a couple at the end that work no matter what the origins are

#1: meeting in college (im estimating in the mid-late 80s if u want to envision an Aesthetic. i googled when title ix was passed for this. 1972 if ur wondering)

rick has never been much of a ‘winter sports’ guy, and the whole idea of voluntarily stepping into a building with a massive fucking sheet of ice in the middle is NOT his jam

naturally they meet at a mixer bc come on this is college sports we’re talking about. george is wearing heels that make her taller than rick who’s instantly heart-eyes for this tall hockey player with a tight ponytail who says people call her ‘george’ and has a look on her face that dares him to make some comment about it being a man’s name. he definitely makes some sort of comment about being from georgia when she says her name and then definitely is internally like ‘why did i say that wtf get it together’

also if you don’t think richard bittle drinks his respect women juice then ur WRONG

so they hang out at this party for a while like half-flirting and it is unfortunately cut short because george has to take her VERY drunk friend back to her dorm. but on her way out she’s like hmm maybe you should come to a hockey game sometime :) and rick is like hmm maybe i will

george doesn’t actually expect him to follow through on it but sure enough, next home women’s hockey game, rick is THERE. he cheers for the whole team but he cheers the loudest for george and ALL of george’s teammates are like oooOOOOoOooOOo who’s THAT and then chirp her

so obviously they go to each other’s games constantly until one of them actually asks the other one out

#2: meeting while bitty’s in college, under the cut bc holy shit LONG

coach comes up to PVD for a couple of days the summer after The Kiss because he loves his son and wants to make sure he’s doing okay

at first it’s just a couple of days because bitty is understandably a bit wary but literally the day coach gets there they have a big talk and things turn out okay and bitty asks if he wants to stick around a little longer, bitty and jack can show him around PVD and introduce him to some of the falcs (coach was already sold on the idea of playing tourist for a week or so w his son and his son’s pro athlete boyfriend but now he’s EXTRA sold holy shit), maybe drive up to samwell and bitty can unlock the haus and give him a tour, y’know, bc coach hasn’t been to family weekend before

so that’s what they do. there’s an impromptu family skate bc i love those, everyone meets coach and there are more than a few side comments to jack about sucking up to the future in-laws

and THIS is where richard bittle meets georgia martin. once he finds out she’s a gm they have a loooooooong discussion about bigotry in sports and talk about their diff experiences being a coach vs a manager, high school versus pro, they find out they both played sports in college, it’s absolutely fascinating to both of them and they literally talk for over an hour and exchange emails so they can keep discussing approaches and strategies even once coach has left

i’m sure both of them have restrictions on what they can and can’t use work emails for so let’s say they’re personal emails just bc i don’t want to deal with those restrictions

and thus rick and george: sports pen pals BEGINS

they send each other articles and have ridiculously long threads about diff scenarios they want to be ready for and there are plenty of tangents about drafts and olympic teams and all-star games and things like that, and etc etc etc feelings happen

OKAY ON TO HCS

they run together OBVIOUSLY

‘if i don’t have to dress up i’m wearing athleisure end of discussion’

they both like fancy watches and it’s becoming a problem because they keep giving them to each other. neither of them has enough wrists for all of these wristwatches unless they’re gonna pull a chad in high school musical and wear multiple watches on one arm

george has really thick hair and likes to pull her hair back pretty tightly so of course sometimes her hair ties break. coach carries extras in his many pockets (because if he’s not wearing athleisure or dressing up he’s wearing cargo shorts. you know i’m right) for this exact reason

they’re both the type of people who WANT to be morning people but are kind of............... not. but that won’t stop them from trying

coach totally makes dad jokes and george always rolls her eyes but is also trying not to laugh (and sometimes she fails)

george is still taller than coach in heels and coach is still into it

[chaoskatya]

unfinished brooke x katya hatefuck fic

hi yall :^) so ive had this sitting in my drafts for a WHILE and ive barely dented the actual planned plot but still i felt like it was kind of a waste of what i did write to not ?? idk do something with it? this was originally written for AQ’s rarepair event but irl stuff got in the way so it never got finished, and i kinda lost the inspo to finish it (for now? idk) so here it is, posted unedited in however it was when i last touched it

brooke x katya hatefuck, (well, planned, i obv hadnt written that far) inspired by pics of trixie and brooke together that one time they were weirdly hanging out a lot irl and that one outfit brooke has that looks like that one outfit katya has the polkadot one u know it

“Ugh, I swear, Vi! She really has something against me! I think she hates me!”

Katya punctuates her sentence with a flail of her arms for emphasis before flopping back onto her bed. Violet just rolls her eyes at her roommate’s dramatics, as per usual. This is the third time they’ve had this conversation this week.

“So she’s a little icy, what of it? It’s not like you’re not used to having a mega bitch around, you live with me,” Violet responds plainly, not even bothering to look up from her laptop, “and I don’t think anybody could hate you, Kat.”

Katya huffs at that. “No, I swear, she hates me.”

Katya Zamolodchikova is absolutely sure of three things in her university life: One, Trixie Mattel is her best friend. Two, nothing gets in between her and Trixie. Three, Brooke Lynn Hytes is absolutely making her best fucking attempt.

Katya and Trixie had met last year, Katya being a sophomore in visual arts and Trixie a freshman in musical theater, when Katya had accidentally crashed Ginger’s (kind of pathetic) attempt at being a tour guide for the freshmen of her course. They’ve only known each other for a year, but ever since then the two quickly became inseparable and a year had felt like a lifetime. All of their friends knew, and Katya held it close to her heart, that nothing could possibly stand in their way. That is, until the beginning of this semester.

Trixie had been elected as class representative at the start of their sophomore year, which did not surprise Katya one bit. But that meant that when Canadian exchange student Brooke Lynn Hytes had arrived for the semester, it was Trixie’s job to show her around and make her feel welcomed. And being that Brooke’s degree in classical dance meant her and Trixie had quite a few overlapping classes, the two hit it off and had gotten closer and closer since. It’s only half way through the semester, yet Katya feels as though she’s slowly becoming more and more of a background character in Trixie’s life. They still text each other when they can, but hangout times have slowly grown increasingly thin and so has Katya’s sanity. Not that it’s Trixie’s fault, of course…

“I can’t explain it. But I promise, it’s almost like she’s purposefully occupying Trixie from me! Every time it looks like we might get a chance to even just talk, she’s there coming round the corner asking Trixie for help in one of their classes or for show recs or whatever. And she always looks me dead in the eye, with her stupid fucking smirk, like she knows what she just did! I can’t explain the feeling I get when I see her!”

Katya’s hit full ranting steam now, half hanging off her bed still flailing as animated as ever.

Violet shuts her laptop and turns to face her. “Mama, sounds like you hate her. Sure it’s not just in your head because you’re jealous the amazon’s occupying your barbie?”

There’s a beat of silence. “Jealous? I guess?” Katya scrunches up her face and sits up. “I mean, how could I not be? With her stupid long legs and her flowing blonde hair, like god, Vi, she’s practically perfect! And have you seen her dance?”

Katya turns to pose her question, but Violet is just staring, giving her a look she can’t decipher. She continues,

“So then, fine, of course I’m jealous, but that’s because Trix is my best friend. I barely see her anymore, and when I do she’s always there and I just get so riled up! And I’m sure Trix has started to notice because god I just can’t stand it when she’s near, it just sets me alight in an awful way. I’ve never felt this way about anybody before!” And it’s true, Katya really does not think of herself as someone capable of fully hating someone else. But by god, is Brooke really testing that.

Violet scoffs, turning away to open her laptop once more. “Look Mary, all I gotta say is that that’s an awful lot of emotion for some best friend jealousy. Also, you have a lecture starting in ten minutes.”

Fuck! Katya checks her watch and immediately jumps up to scramble for her belongings, deeply thankful for her roommate’s type A tendencies yet internally chastising herself for allowing her ranting to consume her time like that. She quickly kisses Violet on the cheek and bids her farewell before putting on her boots and heading out of their dorm room to make her best effort to speed walk to class.

But as luck would have it, not that Katya has a lot of it, she quite literally walks right into the subject of their prior conversation. Well, speak of the devils…

“Oh! Trixie, hi!” Katya laughs, immediately reacting to steady Trixie from where Katya had almost knocked her over with the door. From the way she was standing, she figured she had opened the door just as Trixie was about knock.

“Katya! Thank god, I was worried you wouldn’t be in,” Trixie smiles back brightly, smoothing her fluffy golden hair back into place. (Not that it’s ever really out of place, Katya thinks to herself.) 

Katya smiles at her, a sight for sore eyes she thinks, but when she realizes Brooke is standing at the end of the hall waiting for Trixie, her smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes. Whether Trixie noticed Katya’s tension or not, she didn’t let on. At least Brooke had the decency to wait at a reasonable distance.

“Uh, yeah, I was just heading out though,” Katya replies, trying her best to look sympathetic. She doesn’t mind that she’s running late anymore, just feels bad she even has to go. “But did you need something?”

Trixie looks equally as sympathetic. “Yeah, uh, listen, I’m really sorry. I know we haven’t been able to hang recently and I’m really sorry for that, midterms and all…”

“Hey, it’s alright, I knew you were busy. It’s no problem, really.” That’s a lie.

“But now that it’s over, let’s celebrate! Let me make it up to you? Be my date to the Edwards party tonight?”

Katya’s smile softens. As much as she was planning to trade in the party for a well-deserved movie night in with Violet and Pearl, she finds she really can’t say no to Trixie, especially not when she’s looking at her like an apologetic puppy. Whipped.

“Down for anything with you, Barbie. Meet you at the dorm hall at 8?”

Trixie squeals and picks Katya up by the middle, “AAAAAAAH yes!! See you bitch!!”

Katya squirms violently to be put down but laughs it off anyway. She really can’t be too mad at her best friend.

“Anyway, I gotta run, see you later Trix!” She rushes to hug Trixie quickly once more before escaping as briskly yet casually as she can out the door. This fails her when all semblance of casualty is lost as she passes the point where Brooke is, all tall and blonde and beautiful even just standing around. As she passes, her gaze quite obviously steels ahead to avoid looking Brooke in the eye, but she can’t fail to catch the quite obvious smug smirk the Canadian has posed on her painted lips.

----

Katya managed to make it to class with only 5 minutes late, thankfully just as her professor was entering the other door. She plops down into her usual seat with an audible groan and immediately drops her head in her hands.

Brooke. Stupid fucking Brooke Lynn Hytes. Lately, Katya’s wandering thoughts always go back to her. There hasn’t been a time where her idle time hasn’t been haunted by a certain ballerina chipping away at her precious concentration. She sees perfect long blonde hair, icy blue eyes, and tone legs that go all the way up. 

If she’s being completely honest with herself, she is just a bit jealous of Brooke but not for the reasons Violet insinuates. I mean, sure, she misses Trixie to bits. But that’s only one of the many straws on the camel that is Katya’s completely rational anger. 

It’s not that she’s perfect, either, but that sure adds another straw. Seemingly introverted, but able to capture the hearts of anyone in her path through quick and honest charm. Graceful and poised, where Katya is not, and tall and curvy, where Katya is not. Katya really doesn’t understand how someone can attend 7am dance classes with a flawless mug and still leave rehearsals with not an eyelash out of place, it’s inhuman.

No, it’s that no matter how much others testify on her behalf, Katya does not understand it. She doesn’t know what she did, but she has somehow done something to aggravate Brooke against her, and it bothers her endlessly that she doesn’t even know what she did to incur such spite. Katya doesn’t see any of the charm or kindness that others profess, only smug smirks and cocky passive-aggressive jabs and a seemingly passionate desire to find any way she can to poke Katya’s buttons and prompt some kind of response. She’s lucky Katya has a lot more self control than most, and she’s restrained herself from biting back thus far.

She thinks back to the first time she spotted Brooke, on the first day of the semester when Katya had gotten bored and decided to drop in on Trixie’s representative duties despite explicit instructions not to intrude. She had found her in one of the gardens of the student commons, and instinctively made her way to run up and tackle her before realizing Trixie wasn’t alone and stopping dead in her tracks.

Trixie was sitting next to someone Katya didn’t recognize, which was a surprise in itself because Katya knew next to everybody personally in their modestly sized arts college.  The girl was sitting next to Trixie on a bench, both hands holding one of Trixie’s own as Trixie appeared to animatedly be telling some story. Trixie then finally noticed Katya frozen standing awkwardly at some distance and paused in the middle of her speech to yell at Katya and becon her over. 

“Katya! This is Brooke Lynn, a Canadian exchange student for the semester. Brooke, this is Katya, my best friend!”

Brooke lazily shifted her gaze from Trixie to give Katya the once over, glancing her up and down. Whatever she saw, she suddenly stood up and crowded into Katya’s space, gazing down at her intensely directly from the advantage their clear height difference gave her.

“Well, it’s certainly nice to meet you… Katya.” 

And on her lips, the same painted red smirk. The same stupid smirk that would continuously haunt her until…

“Kat, you with us girl?” Hissed Pearl in her ear, jabbing her hard in the side.