#he has to reverse ALL the momentum the shield previously had

[evieoh]

Tagged by @alkenifanfiction

2016 AO3 stats:

User Subscriptions: 34

Kudos: 1330

Comment Threads: 295

Bookmarks: 232

Subscriptions: 139

Word Count: 136331

Hits: 19505

Works written in 2016 partially or wholly:

While I try to forget I used to be something great (one-shot, Gen-rated) Hive/Ward skyeward AU after 3.10 "The emotions feel so foreign, he has tasted the edge of them briefly in his long lifetime, through many hosts, but never like this. Never this agony that cries for more. This need for destruction that aches in his bones. She is the sun and he wants to burn in her flames. This is what sends men to war, this is what they die for. And this is the piece that has been missing. She is the spark that lights the void within him."

We gotta have it, We have no control (one-shot, Explicit) Season 3 AU. Shameless PWP. "She gets the most absurd urge to laugh at the absolute insanity of their situation. She is trapped, for all intents and purposes surrounded, making out in a closet with the bad boy. It's like some kind of warped secret agent version of Seven Minutes in Heaven."

and the sequel -

Let me see your hand, Show me what you got (one-shot, Explicit) Ward pov. Smut with a tiny bit more plot than the first part. If you squint.

Between the Shadow and the Soul (6 Chapters, Explicit) Season 3a AU/fix-fic. After Malick kidnaps Skye/Daisy in an attempt to use her to open the portal, she is rescued by Ward and a butterfly effect is set in motion. (My first real multichapter fic, I am so proud of this thing. It is and will always be my baby. I think my writing has improved over the year, but I am still so proud that I managed to write this and get it done in the time frame I set myself)

It's our Time to Make a Move (one-shot, Mature) Skyeward no-SHIELD AU. Skye reluctantly gets dragged to her 10 year high school reunion, where her high school crush returns with a vengeance.

I Pick my Poison and it's You (one-shot, Explicit) Has anyone else wondered how on earth they could get it on in those tiny ass closets they call bunks? The answer, it turns out, is not easily. (Season 1 AU smut. The blame for this fic falls entirely on Daisy, who took my complaining about the impracticality of having sex in the pods on the bus and demanded I write a story from it. My first real attempt at comedy-fluff. I'm pretty happy with it.)

tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us (one-shot, Explicit) Hydra!Skye role reversal set during The Well. Written for Skyeward smutfest. Angsty AF.

We Kiss the Dusk Goodnight (one-shot, Explicit) She finds him in Mexico. It's been eight months since she last saw him. “You came,” he repeats, his voice still sounding amazed and a little surprised. “Of course I came,” she says, leaning her forehead against his. “It just took me awhile to find you.” (Smutty one-shot sequel to Between the Shadow and the Soul.)

we drink the fatal drop (then love until we bleed) (one-shot, Explicit) AU during 1x20. Skye and Ward both know there is no happy ending for them, no way this will end in anything but heartbreak. But neither of them can resist the pull of the other, this force drawing them together. (Smut and angst, my specialty apparently)

I'm Just Dying to be the Friction in Your Jeans (3 Chapters, Mature) When Skye's friend's drag her out for a girls night out for a night of exotic entertainment, she is less than enthused. A certain smoldering dancer catches her attention and might just be enough to change her mind though. (Again, never joke about fic ideas to Daisy. She will not let you not write the thing.)

our hearts are too ruthless to break (one-shot, Mature) Skyeward/Nikita AU. (alternatively, evie tries to cram all of Daisy's favorite tropes into one fic for her birthday fic and also aims to make her cry.)

Maybe I'm Too Busy Being Yours To Fall For Somebody New (6 Chapters, Mature) (College AU!) Skye meets Grant Ward during Freshman orientation and it's Loathe At First Sight. He is easily the most irritating and infuriating person she has ever met. But fate (and their friends) seem determined to push the two of them together. Over the next four years their lives become inextricably intertwined, as they are forced to admit that they might actually be friends.

If The Fates Allow (2 Chapters, Mature) Stuck at the airport on December 23rd due to a snowstorm that has grounded all flights, Skye just wants to get home to celebrate Christmas with her friends. Becoming nemeses with the very attractive but utterly irritating guy sitting next to her was not in her plan. But fate has a funny way of bringing two people together when they least expect it.

Favorite Fic: I think I have to go with College AU (aka Maybe I'm Too Busy Being Yours To Fall For Somebody New), I started writing it back in May and then my enthusiasm dwindled until Daisy came along and kicked my ass until I finished it and I am so forever grateful to her for it. The fic is a tropey cliched mess and I do not care. I had so much fun writing it, and the comments I got on it are my favorite from any of my stories.

Hardest Fic: I think it was probably 'we drink the fatal drop (then love until we bleed)'. I had a really hard time getting the tone right. I knew from the start I needed the story to be from Ward's pov, but then I struggled with my fear of it seeming like Skye was coerced at all without having any way of seeing her thought process. I got so frustrated I nearly quit writing it at least three times, but I had amazingly supportive friends who helped me through it and now it is one of my favorite stories I've written, so I suppose the struggle was worth it.

Do You Plan to Take Prompts in 2017? I'm not great with prompts, I never have been. That said, I would like to be better. I make no promises though.

What was the best thing about 2016? While I technically wrote my first Skyeward fic in the final week of 2015, I'm gonna say that my getting back into writing again for the first time in years. And challenging so many of my previously held ideas about my own boundaries. I wrote a fic that was three times longer than anything I had ever written in the past. I wrote shameless smut. I wrote complete AUs. I wrote fluffy fun cotton candy fics. 

What was the worst thing about 2016? Losing my momentum in the second half of the year.

Any last thoughts for 2016? I am so glad I finally started writing again, and I am so grateful for all of the amazing feedback that inspires me to keep doing it. (And I am so incredibly grateful for @stargazerdaisy for inspiring and demanding and cajoling and encouraging me all the time, I swear I would have only posted like 3 rambling and semi-incoherent fics, riddled with run-on sentences and over abuse of commas, without her)

Goals for 2017: Alias AU! After talking about it for almost an entire year now.

[mechagalaxy]

Nay or Slay!

Politics in the Society of Cogwork Planets were a democracy, sort of.  There were houses for the people, and houses for the nobles, but “The People’s House” was owned more or less lock stock and gunbarrel by the major corporate cartels, and the Noble Houses by the equally rich, equally avaricious Great Houses.  What rights you had theoretically were practically as easy to rely on as you were close to one of those great power blocks.

 There was a vote in the Lower House, a vote organized by me,  Lividius Drussis, to forbid the challenging of elected delegates on matters of the vote on the floor.  In a speech on the house floor I had dared to say;

“No more will the votes of the Cogwork free citizens be stolen from them by the hired murderers of the cartels, outright pirates, or those cast out of the warrior clans as unworthy of their far famed ranks.  Let the votes be cast out of the members sense of duty to their citizens, not out of fear of the cartel’s hired killers!”

 I didn’t expect the vote to pass without a challenge.  The rules as existed meant that if I was challenged, he could choose to defend himself in his Nephillax “Freedom’s Voice”, and none who had challenged him in that had ever known victory.  Of course I hadn’t had to use it in years, and technology had passed him by in the years he had been fighting in the legislature, not on the battlefield.  My own mecha didn’t boast anything higher than the 75 tons that was the limit of technology in his day, and the highered killers of the cartels boasted nothing under 90 tons in their brute squads.  He couldn’t win a straight up fight as the challenger, he must wait until challenged, and face them on equal terms in 40tonners.

 There was a data disk waiting for him in his office, sitting on his blotter.  His security system was clearly compromised, again. Well, at least it wasn’t a bomb. He slid it into his reader and went bone white, it was a bomb, and a nuclear one at that.  Pictures of his daughter, away at the Cogwork Science Academy, except these pictures had her in an interrogation chair, jacked into an Illyrian Pain Simulator.  Vasily “The Butcher” Karkarov smiled sweetly from the table beside her, a remote in his hands.

“Rat teebya veedet, tovarich!”  He laughed “Although you may not be as happy to see me as you are to see your little flower here, nyet?”  He laughed again, and put the Pain Simulator remote down carefully. “You will be challenging me, as the leader of the Nay or Slay vote faction, to battle for the vote on the floor.  If you meet me, unlimited, I will have your proxy for the “Nay” vote, and should you chance to live, or die, you will know your daughter goes free.  Should you stand upon your principals, well, I hear Drake pays top dollar for first rate bodies that are ready for one of his clone brains.  He has been working so hard to get rid of those clone identifiers, but gene tests keep catching them.  Brain transplants are an elegant work around nyet?”

 The response took no thought at all, it was, after all, the motto of his own house.  Not a great noble house, but a house with an ancient tradition of service. Message [To Vasily Karkarovich, Representative of Talbus Arms. I challenge you for your vote in the matter of proposition CXXIV.  To the victor goes the proxy in the named matter.  Oh and one final word. “Cave ab ira vir honestus” (beware the anger of an honest man)]

 I summoned my assistant. “Prepare Sic Semper Tyrannus, I have challenged Vasily Karkov for his vote.  Oh and change our security company, it seems they have been bought out by Talbus Arms again.  So tiresome” Dana, my assistant went pale, which considering her almost perfect onyx complexion was rather difficult, and stammered.

“But chief, he has you by about ten levels, and his machine is one of the prototype Reapers, it has guns on there that have previously only been mounted as Space Based anti starship weapons!!  I know you used to be quite a pilot, twenty years and twenty pounds ago, but Sic Semper Tyranus is a Dilophos, and its even more out of its league than you are!”

 I toyed with my desk paperweight, my daughter had made it for me in sixth grade, it was a purple glass paperweight with radiating filaments inside that fluoresced like my machine.  No, it didn’t matter what the odds were, I had to finish this.  For her.  I smiled and squeezed Dana’s shoulder, let her think this was a ploy, not a farce and a suicide.  Let her think I was still a champion of democracy, not a corpse simply deciding who got to be dead on a slab, me or my daughter.

 The challenge day dawned and my tech and I were arguing. “Look this is what I want, Betrus Processors for my targeting, as I need to hit him.  I know I can get more critical with the Enhanced Senses, but he’s too hard to hit in the first place.  Now the Chassis, I want all my Hercules fibers yanked out, there is no one to fork anyway, and the damage I do can hardly make a difference.  Put in the Wheeled Feet, I need the dodge and speed. Likewise, niodes are not going to save me now, just stock me full of Parallel Relays, I just need to fire first. Healing and damage stacking, even laser boosting aren’t going to make a difference.  He is twice my armour, has way more weapons, and does more damage with them.  If it makes you feel better, you can load any shields you want. I mean, if he hits, its not going to matter anyway”

 Cestus was an old gladiator, won his freedom fighting in the sands as a captured pirate, and never looked back.  Served my house loyally since we brought him in the day he won his rudus, he didn’t like admitting we were outclassed.  He looked at my weapons, and nodded grimly.  He had yanked some of my best damage weapons out, and swapped in some old friends.  Not the most damaging weapons out there, but among the most deadly.

“Aye boss, if ye canna out fight the bastard, at least you can kill him.  Or die trying” I admit, I could have done without the last part, but gladiators lose all sense of propriety when it comes do dying on the sands, which he figured I was on my way to do.

 I stepped out onto the sands and my Dilo (Sic Semper Tyranus) remembered it well, blazing purple and scarlet, it strutted like a warbird across the sands, as the holo screens above the crowds showed my killing Inferno’s, Buchis, other Dilophos, Sever; the kings of the day.  I felt a seismic shiver through the ground, it actually shook as the Reaper “Free Trade” stepped onto the field.  Raising cannon arms, he roared through external speakers, and fireworks shot from his shield emitters, like a cloak of golden glory. The crowd roared to see him, as visions of his breaking, stomping on, tearing apart, every challenger that ever faced him played across the screen.  He spun up his cannons and swung them into line against me.

Oh juicy.  He reads like almost entirely Orcus Wheel, decent speed, more cannon damage, not that he needs it, the force screens on the dome would be lucky to stop what passes through me.  Still, I was a touch faster.  Would it be enough.

 “What his your vote dog, are you going to give it to me here now, or die?  It is NAY OR SLAY”  Karkarov’s booming laughter was what my bill was all about, fear taking our democracy away. Screw that.

 I charged a Flavian Spear and drove a line of glass across the sand in front of him. “Cross it and die.  Surrender, and live.  I will have your aye vote, or your eye teeth, I don’t much care which”  They were good words, if I have to have last ones, these will do.

 He stepped forward across the line, his heavy arms swinging in opposition to his legs. Knowing the mass of those cannon arms, I cued my Dilophos to use our wheeled feet to slide the opposite direction, and his arms couldn’t reverse the traverse fast enough.  A line of Juggernaut slugs chased us half way around him, but stopped before my shields caught more than the dispensing shoe off his sabot rounds.  My own Flavian Spear punched through his shields, but missed his hull.  The distortion from those damned shields made that wall of mecha harder to hit than you would think.

 Again his shots rang out, but my planting my claw and reversing meant that his torso twist anticipating my sprint was caught going the wrong way, and his swinging arm fought the momentum of his turning torso and ended up putting the rounds over my left amour pauldron, tearing off a shield emitter but missing my hull altogether.

 Planting myself low, I thrust out my left weapon pod, and a scream of pure cyan hellfire slammed into the shields above his mecha’s heart.  43 points of armour that little beam would cost you, before my Dilo boosted it to twice its natural power, but still his stacked laser shields drank up the armour tearing fury of it without even coming close to overload.  His machine stutter stepped as the slow effect of the wave disruption caught up to his machine, and he almost tipped over as the torso slowing put it out of time with the arm and leg motions.

 Blue lighting played across the hull as the disruptive energy from my Galaxy Eye played over him, and bright flashes from inside the hull argued that the capacitor banks that drove his rail guns were not handling the disruption well.  Explosion after explosion shook his machine, below the armour, where the massive plates trapped the explosion, and blew engines, gyros, ammunition bins, rather than punching through the massive armour to vent outside. The machine fell onto its back, flames bursting from every joint.  Critical Kill

 I walked my Dilo over, and looked down into his face, raising my Dilo’s claw, I drove it down through the canopy.  The holo screens flashed my mecha’s name, and my enemies sentence Sic Semper Tyrannus, thus always to tyrants. I raised my weapon pods to the sky and screamed my defiance. “YOU WANT MY VOTE?  THE VOTE IS AYE!  GALAXY EYE!”

 Another day for democracy at Cogwork port.

John T Mainer 28840