#at the end of the day what im getting at is armand and lee the bad at intimacy brothers

[oldbutchdanielcraig]

queer (2024) // queen of the damned

[timeforalongstory]

@there-goes-all-the-cotton-candy​ asked: “So for when u awaken: #1, 7, 8, and 14 for The Marriage Bargain, and also #1 for heirs bc...im never over heirs. or trevilieu. i think i almost cried about armand a few days back but that's not important”

...i think that’s pretty important bb but we will discuss how we can feed your trevilieu flames later

The Marriage Bargain

1 What was my inspiration for this fic? How did it come to me?

I talked about this once before and I’m going to quote myself:

“My experience of writing is usually that my ideas come from a new spark colliding with something I stored away in the back of my mind years ago, which then merge and grow into something new. In this case, the spark came from the supernatural kink meme. (I don’t watch the show, but damn, that’s the best porn on the internet.) There was a prompt (link) where J1’s family owed J2 a huge debt and J2 demanded that J1 marry him in lieu of the debt, which they otherwise couldn’t pay. Well, as I said, I don’t watch Supernatural, so I would not have been able to write that exact request. But that seed landed in the back of my mind, and by coincidence it happened to land right near where I store my love of Lee and Miller’s Liaden Universe. If you’re not familiar with those books, the Liaden characters organize into clans around bloodline, and your bloodline and your social status are pretty tightly linked. That immediately struck me as a way to make the arranged/compelled marriage and marriage debt more nuanced, and it metastasized rapidly from there. (Now feels like a good time to mention that exactly zero of the social details or social system in the marriage bargain come from the LU book series. To pick the most major difference, marriages in those books only last a year and are explicitly for the purpose of making babies! What kicked my brain into gear was just the notion that your bloodline and family were more significant than your individual achievements as far as Society was concerned. Everything else is entirely from my own head.)”

7 Were there any major decisions I made about the fic that could have made it go a whole different direction?

I think I've mentioned before that Eobard and Barry were originally supposed to get married much earlier in the fic, and that there was originally no employment contract. But then I came up with the employment contract and it was so much BETTER and smarter and gave them more time to fall in love, and also let me introduce Malcolm as a threat BEFORE the marriage, which was just better in every way, so I'm very happy with the result :)

8 Was there anything I only learned about the fic after I had finished it? (themes, motifs, symbolism, etc)

Ugh, yes - I way undersold Barry's emotional journey for anything other than Malcolm and falling in love. To be fair, those were Big Deals to him, but when I was writing his little mental Coma Safari Grand Tour at the end of the fic, I basically tripped over all these other issues that Barry was lugging around that had never been raised or dealt with. Like resentment over the Wests' inferior financial situation, which Barry hated even feeling, because that's a jerk way to feel, but nevertheless he did feel it, and shoved it in a closet and tried not to deal with it, where it festered. The result was that I had to raise and then deal with those issues really fast at the end of the fic, which meanwhile putting everyone else into a holding pattern for much longer than I meant to while waiting for Barry to wake up. To this day I wince when I read those coma sections. It's my Queen Of All The Witches (TM) moment (looking at you, Robert Jordan) and the biggest thing I need to fix in a revision. Either the issues need to be raised earlier and dealt with throughout the fic, or they need to have been resolved by Barry before the fic proper begins. But I can't just cut the text and ignore them, because they are foundational for how Barry acts throughout the fic - I just didn't dig them up and hold them to the light until way, wayyyyy too late.

14 If I were to write a sequel to this fic, what would it be about?

It would probably be the Hartley/Cisco Four Weddings And A Funeral fusion. Romance novels don't usually do 'true' sequels, but they will go off and take one or two other characters who were more minor in the first novel and give them their own romance novel. So that's what I'd do here.

And since someone is bound to ask: there are two reasons that fic hasn't happened yet. One is that I've been working on converting TMB to original fiction in my spare time, which is a slow, agonizing process that is nowhere near done, but makes me leery about writing Hartley/Cisco instead of writing in the 'new' orig fic universe. And the second is more of a technical writing problem. Unlike Barry/Eo, whose love story was told in a fairly linear fashion from A to B over a continuous span of time, Hartley and Cisco have a story with a lot of false starts, false stops, and interruptions, told over a period of most of a decade. That's much harder to write and I'm still trying to get the issues ironed out. (Which is basically a long, drawn-out way of saying that I haven't found my spark yet, because I only obsess over writing technicalities when I'm not inspired :p)

Heirs

1 What was my inspiration for this fic? How did it come to me?

The prompt. It was completely the prompt. There wasn't even the slightest wisp of this fic in my head until I read the prompt. That's really unusual for me, usually I have little bitty headcanons and fragments tucked away in my brain and then something like a prompt comes along and electrifies a few of them and they all fuse together and come out as a fic. But in this case it was entirely from the prompt - which had no Trevilieu at all, but the minute I read it I was like okay, but what about the Trevilieu, and WHAM I was writing. I wrote like 10k in that first week. 50k in the first month. These days that's more typical for me but at the time it was insane, I'd never been so productive before. The prompt just GOT ME. So you all owe heirs to Elenduen!