#anyway lol this is getting complicated but i do love 00Q because they -are- complicated

[blackidyll]

@svengooliecat replied to your post “ramblings ramblings ramblings”:

this sounds like it would make for a fantastic fic...10/10 would read. My condolences on your loss, tho, and having to deal with the govt.

Thanks :) (and sorry for the late reply, I’ve been away this weekend without net access). 

TBH a big part of why I’m not actually writing the fic is because I don't want to do hours of research into funerals in Britain and the legalities of death and the governmental processes involved LOL and also because other than copious amounts of angst and worrying and a lot of introspection on the nature of their line of work a lot of the fic would just be random things that annoys Q to no end. Like: 

Q gets informed about Bond’s “death” by the police while some of his neighbours are around (because Q’s ex-royal navy now-personal security consultant boyfriend has been out on business for more than two weeks now and that flat must get lonely) and when he finally gets time to place a call to Moneypenny she assures him that there’s no confirmation that Bond’s actually dead (”It’s so hard to tell with him, so we draw no conclusions until we have a body”) but also they have to go head with killing Bond’s cover and so on because something clearly went wrong on their mission, and: 

Eve: so we’re going to have a funeral for closure Q: and what will we do when people ask to see James one last time? Because believe it or not, Eve, but he can be surprisingly charming when he wants to be and half our neighbours either love him or are in love with him.  Eve: so it’ll be a closed casket funeral  Q: And that means the so-called body is too mutilated for the public to see. Thank you, Eve, thank you so much I’m never getting a moment of peace now. 

And sure enough Q doesn’t get much of a moment alone after that news goes out. Friends and neighbours and almost everyone he and Bond have had contact with in this undercover mission have turned out in support. Whenever he’s gone for too long someone comes up to find him, and there’s rotation of people who volunteer to bring meals and stay overnight and try to help out with the whole process (”What do we do? When does the morgue release the body? What arrangements do we need to make? Paperwork?” “I don’t know, let’s Google it” and meanwhile Q is thinking I honestly don’t know either, because I’ve either ordered the extraction/clean up team to do their jobs and just attend the funerals afterwards or I’ve just directly hacked into the relevant agencies to check off all the right forms so he pulls off the distressed and confused bereaved boyfriend quite convincingly). But actually Q just wants like an hour to himself so he can get into Q-net and actually set his systems to find Bond, because he trusts in his Q Branch comms team but they’re not him and they don’t know Bond like Q does. And then Moneypenny reminds him that even if he had privacy he’s still undercover as a civilian, so Q can’t raise any flags doing the type of searches he’s used to, and certainly not without the system setup and network of connections he has in Q Branch or his home office. 

The frustration of not being able to do anything productive + the continued radio silence from Bond makes Q a bit of a loose canon the next couple of days, so Moneypenny and 0010 show up as Q’s “best friend from uni, and a fellow officer from James’s RN days” to help manage the situation, maintain Q’s cover but mostly to contain Q (because Q conducted some rather illegal operations very well indeed on his own before his recruitment to MI6).

Also greeting visitors and well-wishers is unexpectedly very tiring? Everyone keeps giving Q their condolences and he has no idea what to say in return, because even if this wasn’t fake what could he say? And they all want to reminisce about Bond, of course. And Q knows that it’s just a cover, that many of the stories they share are just things Bond or he have had to do to maintain their cover... but sometimes they’ll say things like how it was the way Bond was always looks at Q that clued them in that they were a couple, when they first moved into the flat, or how it was always so endearing to see them interacting, because somehow Bond always anticipates what Q needs before he says anything out loud, whether it’s passing Q the milk for his tea or fetching him a tool from his toolbox when Q is tinkering or gently steering him down the sidewalk when Q is too engrossed on his phone, and those, Q knows, aren’t part of the cover at all. 

And then, inevitably, there are the gossip-mongers, the curious busybodies who want to get all the juicy details (”but no really, how did he die again?” or “how did you feel when you got the news, it can’t have been pleasant at all” or “oh dear, the mortgage for this flat can’t be cheap, however will you manage now? Will you move out?”) and come by in groups and make little side remarks to each other just in Q’s hearing, and Q can’t help himself, his responses become politer and sweeter at each question until Moneypenny has to intercede when someone mentions, “well dear, you’re young yet, you’ll find someone else” because Q might not be a field agent and he’s undercover but he’s also very fond of tasers and has built them into all manner of common household items. 

Q gets two whole hours to himself after Moneypenny gets him out of that room, and while he’s busy hacking into MI5′s systems (because now M’s got a team watching to make sure he doesn’t use his own credentials to log into Q-net, damnit) he also thinks to himself that if he’s already on a short-fuse, he can’t imagine how someone who is truly grieving would cope with the whole situation, and because he’s painfully practical, makes a mental note to put contingencies in place so that when the inevitable happens, he doesn’t get blindsided by in all the minutiae and legalities involved. The both of them being attached to MI6 makes things both simpler and more complicated, because Q can cut through all manner of red tape easily, but the nature of their work means neither of their legal covers actually really exists so it’s not like their relationship will ever be official in the eyes of the law. 

(and because Q is aware that the world more or less runs on chaos and entropy, he also plans to customise contingencies for his own file, in case he’s the one that turns out dead first. He’s well aware of how Bond copes with the death of a loved one, especially one that falls in the line of duty). 

After it all, Q’s already erratic sleep pattern gets even more shot to hell, because Bond’s alive, they’ve left those cover identities behind them, but Q’s brain won’t turn off and he keeps getting flashbacks to the fake funeral whenever he closes his eyes, and it doesn’t make any sense because it wasn’t real, but he can’t stop thinking about it. So he just plows through work or shuts himself in his workshop until Bond drags him back into bed, and if they somehow always wake up with Q clinging so hard to Bond’s wrist or arm Bond never says a word, and from then on Bond goes on missions and even if 99% of his mission kit gets destroyed he somehow preserves his comms unit or phone, so he can always ping a well encrypted I’m alive signal at Q every couple of days. 

As you can see... I have quite a few headcanons about this random semi-AU 00Q verse haha. Thanks for letting me share them. 

[greaseonmymouth]

Fanfic Author Meme

@gracerene09 tagged me in this...a week ago?

Author Name: nerakrose (it’s what my ao3 account is under and it’s also the name I use pretty much everywhere else but tumblr)

Fandoms You Write For: Primarily HP and the Volstovic Cycle, though I’ve written for the MCU in the past, Yuri!!! on ICE, Skyfall, and Temeraire. I’m still more than willing to write for those fandoms (excepting, perhaps, MCU) when given the chance. I’ve written for other, forgotten, fandoms as well.

Where You Post: ao3. I like having my stats and feedback all in one place. (When I was still posting on LJ I used a statcounter to track hits. it could differentiate between returning visitors and unique hits which is a feature I wish ao3 had.)

Most Popular One-Shot: going by ao3 stats, in terms of kudos, hits and comments, that’d be Don’t Blame Me (It Was All a Blur Last Night). It’s a Harry/Draco accidental marriage fic with a strong domestic slow burn focus.

Most Popular Multi-Chapter Story: I don’t post very many multi-chaptered fics and when I do I usually post the whole thing at once. That said, going by ao3 stats, in terms of hits, kudos and comments that’d be Little Deaths and How to Avoid Them (or Draco Malfoy’s Guide to Stop Dying and Start Living Instead). (You can refer to this fic as Little Deaths, lmao.) It’s a very long slow burn Harry/Draco fic where they fall in love over reading queer books. 

Favourite Story You Wrote: All time? because I’m not sure I could answer that question. I have a fairly eclectic range of fics...hmm. Ok you know what, I’ll pick one fic I like from each year I’ve posted on ao3, except for 2010 because there’s only one fic there (there used to be more, I’ve taken a fair number offline).

2011: Early Morning, London Skyline - a Remus/Sirius steampunk AU that I had a lot of fun writing.

2012: oh, this one’s a toss up between Here Now, Gone Yesterday (or Back To The Future) and Fragments of a Life (this was also the year I wrote How to become a superhero which I do still like, but it’s not my favourite). Those are both Teddy/James, though the timetravel fic also has a Remus/Sirius aspect. I like them for different reasons - in the time travel fic I wanted to dig into the father-son relationship between Teddy and Remus and in Fragments of a Life I was going to just write a simple Teddy/James fic but got derailed entirely by an OC (James’ friend, he appears in other T/J fics as well) and I had to wrestle it back into a T/J shape. in hindsight this was like...a precursor? to future polyamorous fic I’d go on to write, in that James has a very significant relationship with two different people but back then I remember thinking that I couldn’t do that or nobody would read the fic. nobody likes OCs in HP fandom, lol. at least not like this. 

2013: This is where we begin (you know how it’ll end) - a magic AU/accidental marriage 00Q fic. I had fun with it.

2014: Up all night to get Bucky - Sam/Steve. I’m picking this because of how much fun I had writing it. 

2015: no longer easy on the eyes - Remus/Sirius muggle AU. in this one I wanted to dig into the father-son relationship between Remus and Teddy again, but this time Remus got to raise him. 

2016: Molasses - a volstovic cycle bakery AU. Ivory/Raphael slow burn. (hence the title.)

2017: oh man I had many fics this year I love. I’m going with Hope & Legacy: Black Brothers Edition, which is a Remus/Sirius ice skating AU (modern, but not muggle AU!) co-written with @eatingfireflies. we had a blast writing it and I’m still in love with the end result.

2018: I could pick Little Deaths - and I love that fic - but I’m going to go with Quickie, which is a bit of a weird fic but has a bunch of things in it that I love, namely complicated relationships. Harry/Ginny, Harry/Draco, Ginny/Blaise. Harry and Ginny are polyamorous in this fic and Harry is also aromantic.

2019: I barely wrote fics this year, but I have a soft spot a mile wide for Anthony J Crowley Fell, which is a Good Omens fic about Crowley falling and what he is falling towards.

Story You Were Nervous to Post: I’m not usually nervous about posting fics. I just post them. One notable exception is Quickie, because it’s very different from what’s “common fare” in H/D fandom and while it does have Harry/Ginny (and in the backseat, Ginny/Blaise), Harry/Ginny was established relationship while Harry/Draco was getting together so there was slightly more focus on them. But also H/D fandom is fairly notorious for Ginny bashing and keeping Harry away from her as much as possible (and making him gay rather than bi), so yeah, I was a bit nervous about what kind of feedback I would get on it, and to be honest there have been some incredibly shitty comments. I haven’t had this many offended and angry people in my inbox (both on ao3 and on tumblr) about a fic before I posted this one.

How Do You Choose Your Titles: I don’t have a process, I just agonise about it, and 80% of the time the working title ends up the final title so I don’t even know why I bother.

Do You Outline: Sometimes. It depends on the fic. I have made semi-detailed outlines for fics before (I say semi-detailed because the outlines are usually vague as heck) but most of the time I just write without a plan. I do always have some idea in my head of what’s happening next or some scenario to work towards (not necessarily the ending) so it’s not like I’m just...fumbling in the dark? I just prefer not to be bound to outlines because then I just have to rewrite the outline and that’s just...pointless.

Complete: I’m not sure what this means? do I always complete my fics? no. I have abandoned wips on various harddrives that I’ll never pick up again. In the past few years I haven’t started fics unless I truly intended to finish them, so my ratio of completed fic vs abandoned fic has vastly improved. When I was younger I was much more liable to just start another new fic without considering whether it would even work out - these days I give it a lot more consideration because I have less time to write, so I don’t want to waste it by working on something that isn’t viable.

In-Progress: I haven’t posted a wip since 2006 and I’m not about to start again.

Coming Soon: I don’t have anything coming soon. I have two fanfic wips I want to finish, but I have no deadline in mind for either of them so who knows if they’ll even be completed this year. I have a few origfic wips as well I want to finish, and I’m actively working on one of them right now.

Not yet started: Does it count that I want to sign up for holiday exchange fests this year, life circumstances permitting?

Do You Accept Prompts: Sometimes, usually when I explicitly ask for them. I don’t always fulfil them, they’re more of a brain cleanser.

Upcoming Story You Are Most Excited to Write: the wip I’m working on right now! since I don’t have brainspace for anything else anyway. I’m having fun with it.

I’m tagging: @eatingfireflies and @velikaia