#its like an character study essay in the middle of a fic

[dbphantom]

maybe i should have gone into practical effects instead of computer science...

[aplainmeresimp]

In the Blue Hours of the Morning: Chapter 1 - Compete Against the Stars

Summary: You're in your final semester at Piltover’s University, and in your endeavors to revise one of your final papers, you meet Professor Heimerdinger's assistant. He’s quick. Intelligent. And surprisingly charismatic. A last minute friendship forms as you ask for his help to have the best chance to graduate on time and become a scientist yourself. Things are looking up for your studies…Until your stress mixes with some unpredictable feelings.

Story tags/warnings: pre-season 1, no use of y/n or real world language, strangers to friends to lovers, fluffy, acts of service as viktors love language, academic weapon reader, viktor pov chapters, sky pov chapter, eventual nsfw. unrequited love towards sky :( random oc created for the sole purpose of being a side character. not a song fic, chapters names are just inspired by song lyrics. the only thing viktors insecure about is him being an assistant, he knows he’s fine.

Word Count (Chapter 1): 2.3k

Chapter 1 of 21

Read on AO3

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Four years. Four years of university were almost over. And yet there wasn’t time or room to slack off, especially not now. You needed to turn in final projects, write essays, and take your final exam. Not take it… Ace it. Demolish it.

Every day was almost always the same. You woke up, dressed yourself, and adjusted your vest with its two pairs of diamonds, and headed to class. No matter how tired you were, you had one goal in mind: success.

And damn, you were getting there.

You were among the top three students in your class, always shifting between number one, two, and three. It hadn’t been easy, especially in science and engineering. One doesn’t make it that far without a system. You had a list of rules for yourself:

Do the homework the day it’s assigned.

Study the homework.

Read ahead.

Borrow books to read more about every subject. 

Attend every class. No absences even if you were sick.

No distractions. No parties, no leisure time if an assignment is due. Work first. Always.

Annotate everything that the professors say. Even the small comments.

Study at least three days before a test.

And the most important one:

Don’t let anyone see you fail. Not once.

Perfection was key. Inside and outside of the classroom alike. 

Except… it was draining; you couldn’t deny that. This wasn’t in your nature. Maybe it wasn’t in anyone’s nature to try so much. You cherished the moments when you rested in the middle of the gardens in spring, with the birds softly chirping and the grass rustling in the wind. Nothing was better than being right in the middle of the semester, with nothing to do and nothing to turn in. You’d go out to lunch with some friends, maybe read a book or something. Whatever it was, the choice was yours.

That bliss would come again, and soon. Just as soon as you pushed through for one final time to earn your third pair of diamonds.

You could not fail. Not when your parents worked their tails off to leave the undercity and raise you in Piltover. Even when they were still alive and well, they always told you to be the best for yourself. They screwed that into your head ever since you were little. More so when they both got sick from the fumes they had inhaled their whole life. It was the fate of a large chunk of people living in the underbelly of Piltover. Especially people like you who were born in the lower parts of the entresol level. Your parents managed to scrape together enough to rent a small shack on the outskirts of town near the cold and uninviting harbor. Having daily access to sea air over toxic fumes gave you much better odds. 

Seeing them cough up blood, lose mobility, and losing them to illness gave you the final push to be self-sufficient.  You got into Piltover’s University yourself. You filled out the dormitory paperwork so you wouldn’t sleep on the streets like they once had to. You applied for weekend jobs to feed and clothe yourself during university.

You did that. You, your perseverance, and nobody else. 

And gods be damned if anyone thought you would slack off a month before the final exam. 

The long corridors went on and on as you swept through them, trying to keep your papers in your notebook. 

Fuck, fuck, fuck. I hope he’s in his lab right now. You thought.

You needed Professor Heimerdinger to look over your paper for one of your classes. Normally, you wouldn’t have asked for his help, knowing he had much more important matters at hand. But he had offered help to anyone in one of his classes you took. So, you had to take his word for it. You didn’t have the time to guess if you had done the homework right. 

It was due in two days. If there was something wrong, you needed to know. Stat. These kinds of equations were so unforgiving when you put a decimal one space more than it needed to be. With sleep deprivation, any mistake was possible.

Once you made it to his lab, you straightened your vest, sleeves, and organized your pages. Then, with three swift knocks, you made your presence known. The professor's voice echoed through the lab and grew closer with little tip-taps of his feet. The door opened inward, and you looked down. 

There he was, short as always and his fur covered in dust. “My! If it isn’t one of my best pupils! Come, come. Come in!” He stepped aside to let you in with a smile. Sheepishly, you skulked in, having never entered his lab. You followed him toward the back of the room to resume what he was doing. It looked like he was organizing and cleaning up the lab. Papers lay scattered, and screws were sprinkled all over the place.

It was amazing. 

Its walls stood tall with elevated bookshelves filled to the brim with books. At the far left were three large windows that would let the incoming sunset in. So many gadgets and contraptions were everywhere, big and small. Some finished, some open and in the middle of repairs. And by Janna, the sketches. Endless notes and sketches of invention ideas pasted on walls.

“Apologies for the mess! You know how it is with the end of the semester. Cleaning out old ideas in favor of new ones!” You could have looked at it all day until the professor brought you back to the moment, “what can I help you with today?”

“Oh, well. In the last class of this semester, you said if we ever needed help with anything, we could come to you for help, right?” You pulled the papers out of your notebook. “And I need it. I really do—"

The soft hum of the lab door stopped your words and another student waltzed inside in a hurry.

“Professor Heimerdinger! I’m here about the funds for the library improvements. The student body wants to hand over the list of expenses to you and the council so we can get approval.”

“Oh yes! How exciting! Come! Come in!” Professor Heimerdinger skipped past you and took the stack of papers from the student. He skimmed through them and looked back at you. “I’ll be with you in a second.”

“It’s fine," you said, putting your hand up. "I can wait."

“Thank you, I was waiting for this visit– Actually, let me call my assistant." He looked up from the papers and called out. “Viktor! Could you assist me here for a minute?” He smiled at you from below. Professor Heimerdinger was your favorite by far; he was always so kind. His short stature likely contributed to the friendliness he gave off.

Wait. Is someone else in the lab?

Soft metal clinks came from the hidden part of the professor’s lab along with some footsteps. Your ears searched for the sound’s origin, but your eyes beat you to it. They landed on a tall, slender stranger with nicely combed brown hair along his angular face.  The stranger seemed pretentious and intimidating with his golden cane wrapped in fine maroon leather.

Until he spoke.

“Good afternoon,” he said with a softness as he passed his cane to his other hand to greet you. Your mind looked through its catalog of faces. Had you seen him before? It wasn’t a face you could recall on the spot. Maybe you’d know if you hadn’t sequestered yourself in your studies for the past four years.

“Have you met?” The professor asked.

“I don’t think so.” You shook his hand firmly as the professor said your name to him. 

Professor Heimerdinger handed him your seven equation-filled pages. “This is Viktor, my assistant. My right hand, if you will!” Viktor seemed to count the pages as the professor continued. “I’m going to have him look through your paper, if it’s alright with him. And you!”

Another student checking your homework made you feel nervous. What if he missed a crucial error? A thousand what-ifs filled your head and you pushed them out with one logical thought.

If he’s the professor’s assistant, he must know what he’s doing, right?

Between all your mental chaos, you gave a simple answer. “That’s fine by me.”

“It’s not a problem, Professor. I remember this project.” Viktor straightened the papers out, "it'll be a refresher.” 

As soon as he said the word 'refresher', you noticed his three sets of diamonds on his vest. It meant only one thing. 

He had already graduated.

Not an upperclassman. This is going to be so embarrassing if it’s wrong. The thought ate at you. You hoped it didn't show on your face.

“Oh goody! I’ll be done in a minute.” He hurried over to the student.

Viktor’s head tilted towards the back of the lab. "We can sit if you’d like.” A small table with four chairs near the tall windows waited for you, covered in papers like the rest of the room.

“Yeah, that works.” You followed him, still gazing at the immensity of the lab. So many books for the professor to have on hand. One could only dream.

Arriving at the table, you reached for the chair in front of you, but Viktor had placed his hand on it.

I should’ve waited for him to pick a chair first.

He pulled it out and motioned for you to sit.

Oh. 

You sat and adjusted your vest. “Thank you.” 

He soon followed, placing his cane on the side of the table and clearing his throat. Without another word, he started looking through it. His gaze focused on the problem at the top. He looked intimidating again with his thick brows cinched together. 

Your eyes wandered through the silence. Well, almost silence. The shuffling of your project paired with the professor’s voice made your nerves skyrocket. Still, you had to sit still like nothing was wrong. Otherwise, you’d be pacing around the room with your arms crossed. You decided to break the quietness. 

Be polite.

“Thanks for looking through my project." You huffed, "I’m about to graduate and I don’t want to repeat the class. Ever.” 

No, seriously. That was the worst class you’d ever been through. Sleepless nights and dark eye bags were the prize every student had after taking the class. Professor Penmark was the filter for graduation. Condescending to absolutely everyone, so it wasn't personal towards you.

“It’s no problem. I graduated a year ago. I still remember this class. That teacher isn’t lenient, huh?"

“Not at all.” You chuckled, still keeping your posture rigid and proper.

His face relaxed, “I remember how the class gasped when he said that this homework–project-thing… was going to decide if you passed or not." Then his eyes widened. "Fun.” He kept flipping through the pages quite swiftly. Was he even looking through it? “Looks like he made it more complicated this year. Not impossible, but—" Viktor looked up. “How long did this take you?”

“Six hours. With breaks.”

“Hm.”

Viktor went back to the pages and looked intimidating again because your fate of passing the class was in his hands. A few short hums, or huffs, came from him. That made you worried. A hum or a huff could only mean one thing: a mistake.

Let’s say it was wrong. That meant it was back to square one. The teacher gave you three days to complete it. You were already one day down. If it took you six hours and it was wrong this first time, you had another seven tries at the most to try again. You sat there, praying to whatever would listen that your calculations had been right, with every symbol correctly switched and—

“So, what’s wrong with it?” His voice cut off your train of thought.

All you could muster up was a measly, 'what?' 

“You brought it here to fix any mistakes, no?” He looked up from your papers, looking terribly confused. More confused than you, actually.

“W-wait. Is it correct? The whole thing? Are you sure?” 

There’s no way.

“Well... Yes. What’s the issue?”

You didn’t know what to feel. Satisfaction, anxiousness, relief? You figured out the problem on the first try? Clear? No repeats, a clean sweep?

“No, that’s what I wanted to know, if it had no mistakes,” you took the paper when he handed it back to you. “Oh my—I can finally rest.”

There was a brief moment of silence before the professor’s voice became louder, “yes, very well! I’ll make sure to let them know! Check the corrections I gave you and come back!” He escorted the person out and came back to you both in little steps, "oh, I’m terribly sorry, you two. I was caught up in some council duties, but now that that’s out of the way, did Viktor look over your project?”

You sprung from your chair, “yes! It’s done. No mistakes.” 

“It’s to be expected; you have a knack for numbers!” He looked up at Viktor. "And with a talent like this boy's, it’s inconceivable that it’s wrong!”

"It never hurts to be extra sure." Your hands kept fidgeting with your papers.

“I suggest turning it in right now! You don’t want to end up forgetting!” The professor walked to the door as you followed. Thankfully, the project was over and completely correct. Now you could finally take a small break.

Wait.

How could you forget to say goodbye?

How rude of me.

You turned on your heel and waved, "it was nice to meet you!"

He was already standing up before you called to him. For a second, he was taken aback. 

Then, he replied. "Likewise."

[quaranmine]

Hi, not sure if you remember me, but i sent an ask a while ago saying how i love the Incadescence of a dying light and that i talk about it with my friend and how we both really liked the story and are juts you know discussing it well update to now. we still do that lol. i cant stop thinking about it, i listen to the firewatch OST on the daily, resonating with each track at a time. I love it. I live it. I am enamored. Everytime Im studying Polish (my native language) and revising each epoch for my upcoming finals i cant help but connect themes and motives to that wonderful story of yours. If i land on a fitting topic in my oral final exam (like pop-culture, creativity and arts, certain themes in modern media) you BET Ill be talking about this fic (with all the credit I can give of course!) cause USARWSETDYRVUHUISC I cant get it out of my head. Its such an amazing example of how the media of fanfiction elevates the story to its maximum potential. How knowing the characters makes it so much easier to connect and resonate, even though Mumbo is absent from the majority of the fic, we still feel hurt after finding out whats happened to him. Like, its such an amazing creative medium I love fanfiction and TERSSXEFJNKVCRXSERARXSXERCDJNGIKKDc :thumbsup: oh gosh The Incadescence of a Dying Light. yeah so fun fact i actually had to look up what it means cause i didnt know the word before and oh. oh. oh its so much worse and more painful. really love it, i do, oh i do! I now have acquired (idk how to spell it lul) the never subsiding lust for nature and outdoors and hiking and being a part of it. I love it, you made me regain my love for it. I loved it before, yes, but i was caught up in my own head and had so much stuff i had to do, but now i love to look out my window even more, i love strolling in my garden. i love it. thank you, thank you, thak youuuuu!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :thumbsup: So yeah, this fic is one of my faves of all time, i like it a lot, it has inspired me to live more and be alive basically and also. and for the end a fanart of an alternative ending where Mumbo somehow survives and just lives in the forest like a wild animal, living his best life, eating berries (i decided on drawing him eating berries [peace love and plants] instead of chowing down [is chowing a word??] on some rabbit lol) and then grian finds him and its super awkward

HI! Yes, of course I remember you! First of all, had a really wild day yesterday at work, but I read this at soooome point on my phone during the middle of the day and it made me smile :)

This ask is just so??? AAAAAAA???? I almost don't know how to respond, because it's just SO wonderful to hear this about something I created. Like I did that? I made a thing that is sticking deeply with people? I'm just soooo <333333

I like your point about how fanfiction can maximize story potential! I think it'd make a wonderful essay topic honestly. I have thought about this in connection with fanfic a lot--specifically, the divide between original fiction and fanfiction. In original works, you have to make the audience care. You have to introduce me to a character, setting, and story I will be interested in. I've read a lot of negative book reviews that start off with "the author didn't make me care about the characters" (i have also...said this myself about books I ended up not liking.) With fanfic, you skip that step! It lets you jump right in. I don't have to explain Mumbo and Grian's friendship or demonstrate it to you. You just Know. Someone reading it fandom blind would get the implication about how important they are to each other simply by seing the depth of Grian's grief, but for my intended audience, I can do whatever I want because I trust you to already have the background information you need.

The title is from a line I really like in a song (Post Humorous by Gus Dapperton). It just...painted such a nice word picture. Especially for a story about grief death and fire!

I just. Love that this fic helped you regain a desire for nature? That just makes me feel...warm, I guess, to know that I was able to spark that with something I created. I hope it goes well for you, and you get to take many walks. This spring I've been using the trails near my aunt's house (not.....hiking paths. too urban.) much more. I wanted to walk this week but I was too busy lol. I hope you have many wonderful experiences out in the Great Outdoors <3 one of these days, I swear I'll up and move to a place with "better" nature and "real" trails close by.

Also, SKFJSLFJSKFLSJKF your fanart made me laugh so much. I have like. Entertained this idea. Not as an actual or serious part of the story but I was like man wouldn't it just be off-the-wall if he was just vibing Out There 😭😭😭 You've caught the vibe perfectly LOL

this was all around such a special message to hear, thank you SO much!

[karizard-ao3]

My son (9) read Assassination Classroom recently. I read only the first few chapters and couldn't get into it, but he was enthralled. He hates handwriting anything because he still struggles with penmanship, but he was so excited about the series that he would laboriously copy down character stats onto a notepad. The ending made him cry. I was sitting next to him on the couch, working on a wip or maybe playing a game, when he said, in a trembling voice, "Mom?"

I looked over at him. Tears were pouring down his face. "[spoilers]," he said. "I want to stop reading. I'm so sad."

But he couldn't stop reading so he kept going and he kept crying. And he was still thinking about it days later.

I didn't think much about it at the time, because at this point, I've been deeply affected by so many pieces of media that I take it for granted. I cried at the end of the new Pixar short, Carl's Date, right there in the middle of the theater. I was a broken zombie for days after the end of Attack on Titan. My brother finished Attack on Titan and had to go lie down for a while before we could talk about it.

But, this morning, I found one of the note pages where my child had so enthusiastically copied out a character's details, and, left with a moment to think because he's away at his dad's for a month, I realized that this is maybe the first time he's become really invested in media. Like, he's had favorite shows and whatnot before, but I don't think he's ever let himself become so fully immersed in a story before. And I started thinking, what a beautiful and human experience it is to lose yourself in something that another human being has created, to have it find something inside you that connects you to it in such a deep and profound way that it makes you feel visceral joy and sorrow, that you want to talk about it and think about it and wrap yourself up in it. How lovely that a work does not have to be high brow or genius (in general, I haven't read Assassination Classroom to make that call for it) to get you in its grip and light you up. What a joy of being alive.

Bringing this back around to fanfiction, this reminds me of something else I've thought before. Being a fan of post-apocalyptic dystopias to begin with, and with the news over the past few years being the way it has been, I've thought a lot about society collapsing, and the future anthropologists (if there are any left) who will study our society. And imagine if all they have left of us is a remnant of the internet (I'm not a computer person. I do not know if this is even possible) where they find AO3, a digital library of tributes to original works. The original works themselves are gone, or lost behind a paywall, but the fanfiction is there, and the future anthropologists and historians and digital archaeologists (I made that up, as far as I know, but why not?) base all their understanding of how we engaged with and created stories based on our fan writing. What would they infer about us and Attack on Titan based on studying our Eremika fics? Would they read our "ancient classics" and be consumed by the characters like we were? Will they write essays about the many faces of Eren (is he a fuckboy or a simp? A toxic daddy or a pathetic goofball?)? Will they speculate about whether Eremika or Jeankasa is the true pairing? What can our portrayals of Mikasa reveal about our society's internalized misogyny? Surely they'll be able to tell from the comments and author's notes that these stories are based on other media, but what if fanfic is all that's left? Isn't that interesting to think about?

God, sorry, I went off on a tangent. It's just so exciting. Art and creation is so exciting, and the idea that these pieces of our minds can live on and change people even long after we're gone.

In conclusion, I just think it's all so neat.

[icedhoneyy]

*pops head out of the pile of blankets i've been buried under*...uhm hiiii??

[elamarth-calmagol]

What actually is LACE? (an informal essay)

What’s LACE?

Laws and Customs among the Eldar, or LACE, is the most popular section of the History of Middle Earth books.  It's available online as a PDF here: http://faculty.smu.edu/bwheeler/tolkien/online_reader/T-LawsandCustoms.pdf .  There’s a lot of LACE analysis in the fandom, Silmarillion smut fics are usually labeled “LACE compliant” or “not LACE compliant”, and I’ve been seeing the document itself show up in actual fics, meaning that the characters themselves are discussing it.

LACE is an unfinished, non-canonical essay split into several parts.  It covers the sexuality of elves, which is mostly what people talk about.  It also covers elvish naming (which I want to make a whole different post about), the speed at which elves grow up, changes that happen throughout their lives, their death and rebirth, and finally the legal and moral issues of Finwe remarrying after Miriel’s death.  The discussion about rebirth conflicts with Tolkien’s later writings about Glorfindel’s re-embodiment, but to the best of my knowledge, LACE is the best or only source for most of the topics it covers.

However, LACE is not canon since it doesn’t show up in the Silmarillion.  Counting all of the History of Middle Earth as canon is literally impossible, considering Tolkien contradicts himself all over the place.  It is only useful because it has so much information that is never discussed in the actual canon.  Many people consider it canon out of convenience.

Another important thing to remember is that, other than presumably the discussion of the growth of elvish children, the information is only supposed to apply to the Eldar (meaning the Vanyar, Noldor, Teleri, and Sindar) and not the dark-elves such as the Silvan elves and Avari.

The rest is behind the cut to avoid clogging your feeds.

Problems with LACE interpretations

But because it’s hidden in the History of Middle Earth (volume 10, Morgoth’s Ring), barely anyone actually gets the opportunity to read it.  I don’t think most people are aware that you can get it online, so it doesn't get read much.

I feel like this leads to a handful of people saying something about LACE and everyone else going along with it.  I definitely did this.  I was amazed by all the things that were in the actual essay that nobody had ever told me about, or had told me incorrectly.  For example, most people seem to believe that elves become married at the completion of sexual intercourse (whatever that means to the fic author).  In fact, LACE explicitly says that elves must take an oath using the name of Eru in order to be legally married.  Specifically: 

It was the act of bodily union that achieved marriage, and after which the indissoluble bond was complete… [I]t was at all times lawful for any of the Eldar, being both unwed, to marry thus of free consent one to another without ceremony or witness (save blessings exchanged and the naming of the Name); and the union so joined was alike indissoluble.

I’ve seen a marriage oath being included in a few stories recently, but most writers leave out the oath entirely and just have sex be automatically equivalent to marriage.  What would happen if elves had sex without swearing an oath?  I don’t know, but I’d love to see it explored.

Then there’s a footnote that might explicitly deny the existence of transgender elves... or not, but I’ve literally only seen it mentioned once or twice.  Overall, I feel like all of LACE is filtered through the handful of people who read it, and we’re missing out on a lot of metanalysis and interpretations that we could have because most fans never see the actual document.

Who wrote LACE?

I mean within the mythology of Middle Earth, of course.  Since LACE appears in the History of Middle Earth and not the Silmarillion, we can be pretty sure that J.R.R. Tolkien himself wrote it and it wasn’t added to by Christopher Tolkien.  But that’s not the question here.  Remember that Tolkien’s frame narrative for all of his Middle Earth work is that he is a scholar of ancient times and is translating documents from Westron and Sindarin for modern audiences to read and understand.  The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings come from the Red Book of Westmarch, and I believe The Silmarillion is meant to be Tolkien’s own writings based on his research (though it might also be an adaption of Bilbo’s “Translations from the Elvish”, but I haven't looked into that).  So what does LACE come from?

Christopher Tolkien admits in his notes that he doesn’t know.  He says, “It is clear in any case that this is presented as the work, not of one of the Eldar, but of a Man,” and I agree, because of the way it seems to be written as an ethnographic study rather than by someone who lives in the culture.  Honestly, it talks too much about how elves are seen by Men (e.g. speculating that elf-children might look like the children of Men) to be written by an elf.  This changes once it gets to the Doom of Finwe and Miriel, but that could be, and probably is, a story told to the writer by an elf who was there at the time.

Tolkien actually references Aelfwine in the second version of the text.  The original story behind The Lost Tales, which was the abandoned first version of the Silmarillion, was that a man from the Viking period named Aelfwine/Eriol stumbled onto the Straight Road and found himself on Tol Eressea.  He spoke to the elves and brought back their stories to England with him.  So it makes a lot of sense that Aelfwine would also write about the lives and customs of the elves for an audience of his own people.

Does LACE exist in Middle Earth?

I keep finding fics where first age elves discuss “the Laws and Customs” openly, as if it’s a text in their own world.  I usually get the impression that it was brought by the Noldor from Valinor.  But did the document actually exist in that time period?  For me, the answer is definitely not.

First of all, LACE was probably written by a Man, meaning it could not have dated back to Valinor in the years of the Trees, because Men hadn’t awaked yet.  In fact, the closest thing to an established frame narrative for it is that it was written by Aelfwine, who comes from the time period around 1000 CE (though Tolkien doesn’t seem to have pinned him down).  This is at least the fifth age, if not later.

But what if you don’t believe that it was written by a Man?  It still couldn’t have been written in the First Age, because it discusses the way the relationship between elves’ bodies and souls changes as ages go by.  For example:

As ages passed the dominance of their fear ever increased, ‘consuming’ their bodies... The end of this process is their ‘fading’, as Men have called it.

A lot of time has to go by in order for elves to get to the point of fading.  As a bonus, here’s another reference to the perspective of Men. LACE also discusses the dangers that “houseless feas”, which are souls of elves who do not go to Mandos after their bodies died, pose to Men.  How would they have known about that in the First Age?  It further says that “more than one rebirth is seldom recorded” (which isn’t contradicted anywhere I know of), and that’s not something you would know during your life of joy in Valinor, where almost nobody dies.  That’s something you learn after millennia of war.  This has to be a document written well after the Silmarillion ends.

So what about the sex part?  That’s all we care about, right?  Well, it is entirely possible that this was written down by the elves and Aelfwine translated it (though my impression is that he mostly recorded stories told orally to him and that elves were not very much into writing, at least in Valinor where you could get stories directly from someone who experienced them).  However, why would the elves write this down?  They know how quickly their children grow up.  They’ve seen actual marriages.  They don’t need that described to them.  And if they did have a specific document or story explaining the expectations of them when it comes to sex and marriage, why would they call it “Laws and Customs”?  That’s a very strange name for a set of rules for conduct.  I’m sure they had a list of laws written out somewhere in great detail, like our own state or national laws (that seems very in character for the Noldor, at least).  But I seriously doubt that those laws are what we’ve been given to read. LACE is not an elvish or Valinoran document.

Is LACE prescriptive or descriptive?

Here’s the other big question I’m interested in.  Prescriptive means that the document describes the way people should behave.  Descriptive means that it describes how people do behave.  And the more I worldbuild for Middle Earth and the culture of elves, the more I want to say that LACE is prescriptive in its discussion of sex, marriage, and gender roles.

But wait.  I’ve been saying for paragraphs that I think LACE is Aelfwine or another Man’s ethnographic study of elvish culture.  Then it has to be descriptive, right?

Does it?  How long do we think Aelfwine stayed with the elves?  Did he wait fifty years to see a child grow up?  Did he get to witness a wedding ceremony?  Did he meet houseless fea?  I don’t think he could have done all of that.  Maybe a different Man who spent his entire life with the elves could, but then when was this written?  When the elves were still marrying and having children in Middle Earth or when so much time had gone by that they had begun to fade already?

Whoever wrote this was told a lot of information by elves instead of experiencing it firsthand, the same way he heard the stories from the First Age from the elves instead of being there.  Maybe it was one elf who talked to him, maybe several different ones.  But did those elves accurately describe their society the way it was, give him the easiest description, or explain the way it was supposed to be?  If I was describing modern-day America, would I discuss premarital sex or just our dating and marriage customs?  Maybe people would come away from a talk with me thinking that moving in together equated to marriage for Americans in the early 21st century.  And I don’t even have an agenda to show America in a certain way, I'm just bad at explaining.  Did the elves talking to what may have been the first Man they had seen in millennia have an agenda in the way they presented themselves?

Or did the writer himself have an agenda?  Imagine going to see these beautiful, mythical, perfect beings, and you find out that they behave in the same immoral ways Men do.  Do you want to share the truth back home?  Or do you leave out things that don't match your worldview? Did Aelfwine come back wanting to tell people what elves were really like?  Or did he want to say “this is how you can be holy and perfect like an elf”?

Anyone studying the Age of Exploration will tell you that Europeans neber wrote about new cultures objectively, and often things were made up to fit the writer’s idea of what savages looked like. For example, my Native American history teacher in college told a story of how explorers described one tribe who (sensibly) didn't wear clothes as cannibals, because cannibalism and going around naked went together in their minds and not because of any actual incident.  Unbiased scholarship barely existed yet. Even Tolkien was extremely biased and tended to be imperialistic, as we all know.  There’s absolutely no reason to think that Aelfwine wasn’t biased in his own way.  (Of course, now we have to consider what biases a Danish or English man from the centuries around 1000 would have when it comes to things like gender roles. I assume he would have been more into divorce and female warriors than the elves are said to be.)

But is that what Tolkien intended? Probably not. He probably wanted LACE to be descriptive. But he also never got much of a chance to analyse the essay after the fact, which might have led to him discussing its accuracy and even the exact issues I just pointed out about explorers. Anyway, we know he's biased, and honestly, what he intended has never slowed down the fandom before.

Conclusion

In short, I take LACE to be a prescriptive document describing the way elvish culture is supposed to be, not a blueprint I have to stick to in order to correctly portray elves.  I also don’t believe the document that’s available for us to read existed even in the early Fourth Age, where The Lord of the Rings leaves off.  There maybe have been some document outlining the moral behavior of elves, as a set of laws, but thats not the Laws and Customs we have.

Of course, canon is up to you to interpret.  If you want Feanor discussing LACE with someone back in Valinor, go ahead.  If you want to throw out LACE entirely, go ahead.  It’s not even a canonical essay.  All of this analysis is honestly useless when you consider the fact that no part of LACE exists in any canonical book.

But that’s Tolkien analysis for you.

[imsorryithurts]

im torn between writing essays on what the symbolism on disco elysium means to me and writing fics in which i shake the shit out of those middle aged men in a jar until they threw up. i can not choose both im swamped with work and other junk 😭

anyway, glad to see another DE whump enjoyers, if you had any fic recs please please please tell me (esp if its kim centric, i really like the caretaking reversal trope)

I FEEL YOU. DE is such a deep and beautiful game but also. I want Kim's picture framed on my wall like that one person in the news.

I remember thinking "I'm not going to fandom-fy this. I will enjoy this like a normal adult person". Which is pretty good, but then you have the writers posting stuff like "yeah, I think Jean and Harry fucked", and fan artists posting the characters as c.alico critters, and fanfiction writers writing literal novels as fan sequels, how can I resist??

But then someone comes and does a deep analysis of themes, characters and motifs and I'm like "damn. should I be poor meow meowing these men?"

Anyway, I guess the conclusion I came to was:

DE is such an amazing game and it leaves space for both brain rot and intellectual reading. It's not often I get this involved with media that tackles complex and real issues and criticisms, with characters that are not really great people but they are so incredibly charismatic you forget, and at the same time makes silly jokes, has an idle animation of them cracking each other's backs and makes you want to pet these greasy/balding middle aged men. So I'm managing to balance both Fandom Brain and Enjoyer of the Actual Game and it's Brilliance Brain so far. I guess what I'm trying to say is that most fandoms I'm in I don't take the media so seriously, but I absolutely would submerge myself in a pool of DE source material and be serious about it.

I don't know. I'm not rusty with words. All I know is DE good, and I want to see them hurt.

I'll rec some fics under the cut so this doesn't get too long!

So, you might have already filtered AO3 by "whump" and "hurt/comfort" and found these. But here are some I really enjoyed and have saved:

Tenth of a Second by SupposedtobeWriting

AU where Kim gets shot after the tribunal and Harry is the one that takes care of him. One of the first fics I came across when I first searched the fandom tag. One of my favorites, I remember having to pace myself while reading it to make it last longer!

Small Light in a Dark City by SupposedToBeWriting

Kim has a nightmare after the case. More psychological whump.

An Impression of Smoke by nicpic

I'm just going to copy the tags: kim is sick, jean is soft, That's it, that's the fic

Also really like this one :) The Day After comes before in the series, and it's also fun, just short and lighter on the whump.

nicpic also has Blood on Snow, it's a bit more heavy on the hurt, and Jean is the hurt one. Plus, they seem to have some really cool fics I havent gotten around to reading yet.

In sync by DistressPlop

Tribunal aftermath, Harry whump, with some Kim psychological whump. I remember reading this, but I must have read it in bed before sleeping because I don't remember much about it lol. Guess I'll get to enjoy it fresh one more time.

sans sommeil by narramin

Kim, who was undercover until then, shows up hurt at Jean's door. Now that I think about it, this one might have been one of the first fics I read. I was finishing up this list and my brain went "wait what about that undercover Kim one?" and I had to search for it, because I read it before making my ao3 account. I don't remember much about it, except that I really liked the whump in it.

Ace's (All-Time) Low by new_career_in_business

Kim shows up hurt at Harry's door. TW for homophobia

I believe Ace's (All-Time) Low was the last one I read before deciding to not pick up new ones because I really need to focus on studying for the admittance test of the master's program I want to get in. So now I only have a bunch marked for later, both whump and non-whump. Maybe I'll do an updated list in the future, I'd like to have a neat little list so I can revisit them easily :).

Happy reading, and feel free to rec back! Here's to more DE whump in our lives! *raises glass*

[darkhymns-fic]

The Stars Pull Us Together

Having recently transferred to Luin Academy, Colette prepares to start on one of her first assignments - which she needs to use the school's own observatory for.

She didn't expect to literally run into Lloyd on the way.

Fandom: Tales of Symphonia Characters/Pairing: Lloyd Irving/Colette Brunel Rating: G Mirror Link: AO3 Notes: For Colloyd Week, Day 4: Stargazing! Because I need to write at least one modern au fic of them.

--

It was still early evening when Colette arrived at the observatory, the sun just teetering at the edge of the horizon, painting the sky in shades of pink. There were only two of the dome structures, a bit smaller than she expected, just off to the side of the campus grounds and overlooking the undulating hills that made up the Asgard terrain. The autumn season made the air brisk, the wind slightly strong as it tugged at her hair. She had to hug her books close, hunch her shoulders just to withstand the sudden cold.

I just need to get inside, she told herself, feet crunching against the gravel. A hand reached out to the door handle of the first observatory, pulled on it and… found it stuck? Oh…

It took Colette a good minute to realize that this was the wrong observatory anyway, once she saw the construction sign to the left of her, half-hidden in the shadows. Slightly embarrassed, but at least relieved that no one was around to see her blunder, she then walked to the second observatory.

She sensed there was something different here, until she noticed the rows of potted plants that lined the steps and small ledge that circled around the building, from small ficuses to even a charming aloe vera. It was a pleasant spot of greenery over the stark whiteness of the observatory’s walls. There were no construction signs here – unless you counted the little greeting by the small steps (with a small cactus plant placed next to it) that said, ‘Welcome to the Luin observatory! Please watch your step!!!’ The letters looked to be handwritten, and Colette couldn’t help but draw her attention to it, marveling a bit at the multiple exclamation marks…

And by looking at it, she didn’t watch her step at all.

Colette flailed, and by doing so, she had let go of her books to fall to the ground. She was about to crash headfirst into the door until it suddenly opened inward, along with a shout of, “Whoa what-!?”

So she wasn’t the only one at the observatory tonight. 

Papers falling around them like lost wings, a groan beneath her chin, and Colette was ready to faint from the shame of not only falling down, but bringing another person down with her… “Ah… I’m so sorry…” she voiced, blinking open her eyes to find herself inside the observatory now. It was mostly bare except for a few laptops on a nearby desk, a coffee maker to the side, and of course, the great telescope that was in the middle, its end pointing upwards to a currently shuttered roof.

Another groan. “S’okay… I kinda walked into that one anyway.”

The voice was familiar to her. Colette looked to see a guy half-seated, one hand planted against the floor. His plaid jacket caught her eyes on the rich redness of the fabric, reminding her suddenly of winter flurries that would freeze her cheeks, and summer storms that always came by so fast, and how he would try to shield her with a broken umbrella… “Wait, Lloyd?”

He blinked, looking so confused for a moment that she wondered if she was mistaken. But the tousle of brown hair on his head, going off in different directions, told her otherwise. “Hold on a sec… Colette! It’s you!”

“Y-yeah!” When he smiled, she was brought back to the boy with the scuffed sneakers, whose home she’d visit that was off the road, overrun by bramble on the way. “I haven’t seen you since we graduated.”

“Right, like that was what, three years ago?” Lloyd mused on that as he tried to shift upwards, and then couldn’t with Colette still half on him. “Um.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.” She giggled as she hurriedly got to her feet, trying very hard to not slip and fall again. She inwardly winced at her laugh, that nervous tic that she could never get rid of, even now. “Guess I’m still a klutz.”

“Don’t worry about it… It’s good, because I’m still catching you!” He laughed too, and the sound brought back even more memories out on the grass, with the sky stretching overhead that, for a brief moment, she was lost in it.

Lloyd looked older, now that she got a better look at him when she wasn’t at a tilt anymore. There was only the hint of a stubble at his chin, but his hair had grown out more, even as it made the same waves that she remembered back from childhood. He wore similar clothes from high school still, with his plaid jackets, his frayed jeans, and his work boots. It was so familiar, that she wondered if maybe they had never separated at all.

“…Colette, you alright?” Lloyd asked her, in a tone that felt comforting all at once. “You didn’t really hit your head, did you…?”

“Ah, no no, don’t worry! I’m still just… surprised to see you!” Her hands clasped each other as she looked up at him, noticing the few inches he had gained in height now. “Does this mean you go to Luin Academy too?”

“Oh, well… about that…” Lloyd’s gaze shifted to the side, and she thought she caught something pass in his expression – that is, until a flying piece of paper smacked him right in the face. “Ack!”

“Oh no, I forgot!”

After a hectic dash of Lloyd and Colette trying to grasp the sheets that had escaped her textbooks, some of them flying far back outside to the second observatory, eventually they’d gotten them all. Or, Colette hoped they did. But at the end, she was shivering and felt a little winded from chasing about various articles that her professor had given her all over the grounds.

“It’s seriously cold out. You don’t have a jacket with you?” Lloyd had latched shut the metal door, leaving them both in the observatory that was basically one mid-sized room with a giant telescope in the middle. Colette noted the metal staircase on the side, leading to the curved ceiling and any other mechanisms that she missed. There was even more of an assortment of plants here, some set nearer the ceiling while others were at the table she sat at. There was the soft hum of a laptop next to her, which she carefully placed her books near. Lloyd was already brewing up coffee, the scent quickly filling the air.

“I didn’t think I’d need it.” Colette shivered in her blouse. Though long-sleeved, the material was still light. She gratefully took the warm mug he handed to her, heating up her palms. “It gets even colder out here than back at home.”

“Yeah, no kidding.” Lloyd took a seat next to her easily. “I can give you one of mine if you want.”

“I’m sure I still have the last one you gave me!” She laughed, making sure to swallow her sip of coffee before doing so. Not too hot, not too bitter. In fact, it had a sweetness to it – of vanilla creamer – and she was surprised he still remembered.

“That old thing?” Lloyd asked with such curiosity in his eyes that it made her smile even more. “It’s fine if you wanted to throw it away! Does it even still fit?”

“Yup! It fits me like a blanket still!” And it was true, that old spare jacket that Lloyd had once given her as a joke gift, but she had treasured it all the same. It wasn’t uncommon for her to wear it often when they went to school together, getting stares from other students, but neither caring at all.

She clutched the now half-full mug, looking at Lloyd with a bit of awe. He was holding his, its surface a bit more scratched, but fitting him oddly well. “You know, I thought you went to that other college?” he asked, scrunching his forehead as he tried to remember the name. “The…Spirit…something?”

“The Spiritua University,” Colette corrected kindly. “But, I was having trouble adjusting, so I transferred to Luin instead. Sorry, I think I forgot to tell you that in my last email.”

“Oh, don’t worry.” Lloyd rushed a hand through his hair, grinning. “I kinda…forgot the password to that email anyway… Genis was supposed to make me another one but he’s been busy over at Palmacosta.”

“I haven’t talked to him much either.” It had been so many months without seeing her old friends – yet here was Lloyd before her, as if walking straight out of her memories.

Maybe she had been staring for too long – a nervous chuckle from Lloyd, the exact same tone that she remembered from years back. “It’s probably weird to just find me here, huh?”

Colette shook her head. “I don’t think that’s weird. I think it’s lucky that we’re able to find each other again.”

Lloyd visibly relaxed his shoulders. “Heh, you know, I think so too.”

She took her time studying him even more, from his more grown-out (but still messy) hair, to the way he sat on the plastic chair. The lights inside of the observatory were dim, just bright enough for reading, but not too much light pollution to make using the telescope difficult. It felt relaxing being in here, with him.

She remembered his words from earlier, then gently asked, “How come you are here though?”

It only took a moment longer before Lloyd explained himself. “Well… I did actually try to get into Luin. Did the application and everything. I think I wrote the longest essay of my life too. But… my grades really held me back anyway, I guess.”

Lloyd had still been undecided when she left for school back then. He would travel instead, he told her, or he’d take over Dirk’s specialty workshop. She’d never asked him if he’d wanted something else entirely. “I’m sorry.”

“You dork, you’re still apologizing for nothing after all this time?”

“I can’t help it!”

Another laugh, feeling as warm as the dim lights around them. “I don’t think I’m a good fit for it anyway.” Lloyd shrugged, but she saw the grin still on his face, boots tapping the floor in barely concealed excitement. “But you know? One of the teachers read my essay and contacted me! He…kinda kept talking about all the spelling mistakes and junk, until he told me about a side job I could do here. I wouldn’t have to be in classes but he said he’d teach me anyway.”

Even Colette was stunned at this random act of kindness from a stranger. “Really?

“Yeah! And, it definitely seemed a little weird that he just offered, but then I thought, why not? So that’s why I’m here!”

Curious on the story, and having her suspicions, she asked. “Who was the teacher that spoke to you?”

“Oh, it was…” Lloyd scrunched his forehead, but then his eyes lit up, remembering. “Kratos Aurion, I think. Maybe you know him? He really liked what I wrote.”

“He’s my astrophysics professor! I’m actually doing an assignment for his class.” Colette was slowly figuring out what he must have written. She gauged it from where they sat at, from the past nights they’d both lay on the grass of his backyard, matching patterns in the black as much as they could go. “You did always like the stars, didn’t you?”

The same smile she would sometimes think about before she slept beamed at her just then. “So do you. That’s why you’re here, right?”

She nodded, feeling more excited than before – or maybe it was just the caffeine in her system taking over. “And now you work at the Luin observatory. That’s great, Lloyd!”

“Yeah! But uh… I didn’t realize that you basically needed to know math to be an actual astronomer… So I just clean up things here and make sure stuff is working alright. It’s good enough!”

Colette giggled, looking around at the small room, neatly tidied up, just how much coffee he drank in here. “You even got some of your plants here too!”

“Hehe, well at least the ones that at least don’t need much sunlight. So no flowers or anything..”

So natural had they fallen into the rhythm of talking aimlessly like they used to, that Colette nearly forgot why she was here. It took the beeping of her phone alarm – to warn her of the small time window that she had – to jog her memory, as well as Lloyd’s.

“Oh shoot, sorry! You came here to use this thing, didn’t you?” Lloyd quickly got to his feet, downing the cup of coffee in one go, surprising Colette that he could do so while it was still fairly hot. “I may not be smart, but I’ve been learning how to operate these machines. It’s not too hard once you get the hang of it.”

“Ah, well, maybe then…” Colette went to grasp the papers, at the numbers she had written out hastily over the gridlines. “Professor Aurion gave me some coordinates to look up, can you use these?”

She suspected Lloyd wasn’t as bad at math as he claimed. Because when it came to something he really liked, he always did try his best. He looked at where she pointed, then gave her a thumbs up. “You got it.”

Luin’s observatory was a first for her, but she had used such things before. She gathered her notebook in her lap, looking over at the telescope that was bigger than most. It swiveled gently as she moved it to the right, checked over the viewing piece. It was well-maintained, which she had expected.

“Ready?” Lloyd called from the side, hands hovering near a panel.

“Ready!” she called back. Her hands turned the dial of the telescope, and then adjusted the contraption just a bit on its tripod so that it hit the exact angle for her. It was a tall piece of equipment, so she had to perch on a metal seat just underneath to view it properly.

Once the lights dimmed even lower, the ceiling of the dome shifted. She could see it rotate to the coordinates she had told Lloyd of. Another small shake, and then the middle shutter of the dome slowly panned open, revealing the now clear night sky, the blanket of stars up above.

Sometimes it was a gamble when the skies would be good for observing, especially during the cold seasons – but the cold season was also the best time to stargaze too. That was one thing that she remembered from back then.

And looking at the stars had always calmed her.

“Can you see through it okay?”

“Um, just a bit…” She tried to get more comfortable in her seat, but the metal of it was prodding her leg, and soon she knew she had edged out too far to nearly stumble off.

By then, she already felt hands on her shoulders, Lloyd quickly climbing up to join her in the observing seat. “Do you need me to be your seatbelt?”

Colette hoped her happiness didn’t show off too obviously, but his hands felt even stronger too now. “Hehe, maybe for a little while if you don’t mind it.”

She leaned back to the telescope and near the eyepiece, hands gently placed on the handles while she felt Lloyd nearby, keeping her steady.

The night was clear, and the coordinates Lloyd had set the observatory had been right. She didn’t have to get used to any haziness, or peer through a cloudy sky. The stars were so numerous, painted against greyscale, or an old film reel. But she found the cluster she had been looking for, and already set to write down her findings.

“Lloyd, you should see this too!”

“You sure? I’ve looked through it plenty of times this week.”

Colette shook her head, bringing Lloyd’s hands from her shoulders to the telescope. “I think you’ll like it.” She winked at him. “Besides, have you seen it from this spot?”

“Ya got me there.” And like an excited kid, which she had already suspected had never left him, he looked through it too, hands handling the telescope with care and precision. Colette craned her head to look past the instrument to the sky above. While specific nebulae and clusters were hidden from her, the stars to the naked eye were still spread out, like a trail through the dark.

“That’s awesome! That’s the Hercule something, right?”

“The Hercules cluster, yeah!”

It was and yet wasn’t like stargazing out in the fields, with just the crickets and the gentle breeze for ambience. A metal room instead of outdoors, (though the plants helped) and the sky partially blocked from the roof, but she still saw the same light in Lloyd’s eyes – always whenever he would look up at the starry skies.

“So, what did Kratos wanted you to do for this?”

She tilted her head. “You know, it was kind of strange but… he just said I should count the stars here.”

Lloyd turned to her in disbelief. “Huh? Wait… all of these stars? There’s too many! And just plain impossible!”

“He said that too! That an average human lifespan isn’t enough to count every single one…not to mention new ones appear while others fade away.” She tapped her pen against the paper, feeling a smile curve her lips. “But he said we should try anyway.”

“Man… this guy’s weird.”

“Hehe. But he’s very kind. Don’t you think?” Colette took Lloyd’s hand, held it like it was second-nature. “I told him about Iselia. I wonder if he figured out that we knew each other.”

“Huh.” Lloyd gripped her hand back, still half perched on the side of the observing seat, not at all mindful to the height. “He could’ve just asked one of us.”

Colette, feeling more confident then she had in years, scooted a bit from her seat and gestured for Lloyd to come near. “There’s room for both of us here! Maybe if we counted together, we could get it all.”

Lloyd barely hesitated, sitting next to her in only a somewhat tight fit. But she didn’t mind the feel of his jeans pressed against her leg, the scent of him comforting in its familiarity. “I bet I could count more! Though, can we even share the telescope between us?”

“Hmm…we can take turns!” And even as they did at first, giggling as both tried to take their stay at the eyepiece for longer, they eventually leaned back to watch the stars through the open shutter, clear from light pollution and misty clouds.

She had always liked the stars too, she thought, with Lloyd leaning against her shoulder, eyes bright as the night continued, way past the closing hours for the observatory. But now, she knew the exact reason why.

[dragonofthedepths]

29/100 (29th of June 2021)

(29/100) Written/posted for the #100daysofwriting challenge by @the-wip-project

I spent several hours today filling out a survey on my fanfiction reading habits! This was not supposed to take several hours, but my inability to answer any free form question without writing multiple paragraphs dragged it out much longer than it was supposed to be! Considering that this was done around baking, having a friend over, and finishing a drawing that according to the timer on my art program took me a cumulative 22.5 hours to complete, I figured I would just copy and paste some of my more interesting answers here for today!

Here’s the link to the survey if you want to take it yourself, apparently it’s part of some kind of collage study: 

https://robertgordonuniversity.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/fanfiction-questionnaire

Question:

What type(s) of library/libraries do you use? What activities or purposes do you use them for?

Answer:

The local library. I go there every now and then when I’m looking for an actual book to read, I usually have what I want already in mind, but might end up picking up something new from the same section if anything particularly catches my interest. Very occasionally I grab a few reference books, usually on things like religions that are harder to find a comprehensive reference for online beneath all the sensationalism and opinions.

I almost always spend at last a couple hours there, looking through my selection and reading a chapter or two. the only reason I’ll leave without sitting down and beginning at least one book is if I’m already late for something somewhere else.

Tldr: I use my local library, I do not go very often but I take my time when I do.

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Question (fanfiction.net):

If possible, please explain your typical process for finding fanfiction to read.

Answer:

Whenever  I get interested in a new show I’ll latch on to a concept or particular character interaction eg. Villain!hero, ensemble finds out secret, character A needs a hug, character A adopted by character B, character C & character D friendship & hurt/comfort. Sometimes (especially if it’s a lesser known thing/has a small fandom) I’ll be as vague as favorite character, timetravel, wingfic, or soulmate AU. Whatever it is that I’ve latched onto, I’ll enter it into the search bar on whatever browser I’m using, and open whatever links look most appealing in a new tab, giving preference to stories from any website except Wattpad* over any king of collection, and links to Ao3 preference over links to anything else.

From there I work my way through everything that was offered, and as I do so I eventually come across new things that capture my interest, and —in general terms— follow them.

On ff.net I’ll follow the link back to the page for whatever franchise this is, then open the filter menu, select "all ratings" and begin using the filters to look for whatever character or pair of characters (seeing as looking for idea is not really possible on ff.net) interests me most in either the family, hurt/comfort, or angst genre depending on which has the most stories, unless one of them has stories in excess of 3 or 4 hundred, in which case I’ll pick whichever has the least stories. I’ll then go through the offerings, opening any story that look is interesting in a new tab. If I make it through all of that and somehow haven’t found something better to do on Ao3, then when I’m done I’ll go back to the genre filter and pick whichever had the middling number of stories, then after that the one on the opposite end of the spectrum from most to least. If at any point I’m offered more than 1,000 stories I’ll add additional filters until the results drop below 1,000, because I am not dealing with slogging through that much ff.net at once. If there is that much written for whatever I’m looking for, then either there’s some on Ao3 and I can leave, or I’m actually looking for something more specific and was just over-estimating how vague I’d need to be to get results at all. This is very methodical probably because I do not like this site and am putting up with it only to find what I’m currently looking for, I never get new ideas prompted to me or am enticed to wander off the beaten track. I don’t use ff.net very often, though still more often then I go to the library.

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Question:

Are there any search features or filters you wish fanfiction.net had for readers and searchers?

Answer:

Fanfiction.net is not a functional website, it’s a particularly shitty ghost town that is actively crumbling to pieces around its few remaining inhabitants. I it’s a hassle to read on and I only do so because I’m a fan of rare pairs, and have to take anything I can get, and because I’m a fan of a particular kind of low-brow overpowered-hero fanfiction that tends to be more common there then on Ao3 or Tumblr.

I wish it didn’t have adds in the middle of a page, every time I hit next chapter, ect.

I wish it didn’t have pointless captchas every time I  start a new session.

I wish it had a visually pleasant format for presenting the stories for you to select from. Whether they’re search bar results, the results of a filter search, stories in a collection, or stories on an author’s page. It’s the same aggressively bad format and makes it hard to tell them apart from eachother and hard to pick which one(s) I want.

I wish stories could have longer summaries. They are so short that it forces everyone to sound same-y and rushed, and if an author want to include trigger warnings they have to be even shorter.

I wish there was a way to exclude/search/mark trigger warnings.

I wish you could select more than four characters in the filters, I wish authors could TAG more than four characters.

I wish there was a way to search/mark platonic relationships instead of only romantic.

I wish there was a way to search/mark a single character in multiple separate relationships eg. [A/B] and [A/C]

I wish there was a way to search for certain tropes or cliches without relying on pure hope that either the author used part of their limited summary space to mention it, or that someone else already made a collection for that trope and managed to find at least a few (they never have all) of the fics containing it.

I wish you could copy and paste the text without having to switch to the mobile version of the website. I don’t personally know why you can’t do this on desktop but I’ve heard other people say it’s because it’s actually generated as a pdf instead of genuine text.

I wish there was a way to open the whole story in one tab instead of being forced to go through it other by chapter.

I wish there was a way for authors to include author’s notes without it being part of the chapter.

I wish there was a way for authors to respond to comments without doing so in the author’s notes.

I wish the formatting wasn’t so aggressively bad as to be actively harming the quality of the story. I have found stories that were posted on both Ao3 and ff.net and read them on both websites, no differences in text, in punctuation, in anything at all, but on Ao3 it flowed much better, was much easier to read, and I’d have given a higher estimation of the author’s skill level if asked. All because it wasn’t actively being dragged down by ff.net’s formatting.

There are probably a fair few more things that I’m just not managing to think of at the moment, but considering there’s no way ff.net will ever be fixed and is in fact very likely to completely implode and die in the near future, I think this is good enough.

Sorry for the essays every time I’m allowed to write an answer but you’re asking loaded questions.

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Question (Ao3):

If possible, please explain your typical process for finding fanfiction to read.

Answer:

Whenever  I get interested in a new show I’ll latch on to a concept or particular character interaction eg. Villain!hero, ensemble finds out secret, character A needs a hug, character A adopted by character B, character C & character D friendship & hurt/comfort. Sometimes (especially if it’s a lesser known thing/has a small fandom) I’ll be as vague as favorite character, timetravel, wingfic, or soulmate AU. Whatever it is that I’ve latched onto, I’ll enter it into the search bar on whatever browser I’m using, and open whatever links look most appealing in a new tab, giving preference to stories from any website except Wattpad* over any king of collection, and links to Ao3 preference over links to anything else.

From there I work my way through everything that was offered, and as I do so I eventually come across new things that capture my interest, and —in general terms— follow them.

On Ao3 I’ll head back up to the top of a fic I really enjoyed and click on the tag for whatever little bit of it I enjoyed the most, and begin browsing again from there, refining with filters and following links and tags from new stories.

I will filter out reader inserts, original characters, y/n, or notps if I keep seeing too many of them in my results, but otherwise I’ll just scroll past them. Sometimes if I’ve been reading for a specific idea for a while I’ll sort by word count and begin going through it from least to most to see if there’s anything I’ve been missing because it’s not been updated recently. And sometimes if I feel like reading fanfiction but don’t have anything particular in mind I’ll just head to the Ao3 page for the main character (more reliable then a fandom tag, if a franchise exists in multiple forms of media they’ll usually each have their own tag the fanfiction will be scattered accordingly) of one of the bigger fandoms I’m in and start trawling the page for anything that looks interesting.

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Question:

Please use the box below to write any thoughts or opinions on this questionnaire or the subjects within it that you did not get the chance to share.

Answer:

On how I find fanfiction to read on websites that are not ff.net or Ao3, copy-pasted from the original all-encompassing answer I wrote before I realized you were looking for answers only about the website you’d just been talking about:

Wattpad (which I did not select when asked what websites I search for fanfiction on because I never willingly go looking there I just end up on it sometimes to my great frustration.):

Whatever idea it is that I’ve latched onto, I’ll enter it into the search bar on whatever browser I’m using, and open whatever links look most appealing in a new tab, giving preference to stories from any website except Wattpad* preference over tags or other collections, and links to Ao3 preference over links to anything else.

(*If links to Wattpad make it onto the first page of results, I’ll take whatever meager scrapings I was offer from other websites, then give up the search as a lost cause and pick a new idea as a I mourn the lack of the content I want to read. Only if I am already very attached to an idea and very desperate will I follow a link to wattpad. That website is the only one I have ever encountered worse then ff.net and it is an absolute unnavigable MESS.)

Tumblr:

If I’m on tumblr (mobile, I’ve never used tumblr on the computer but I don’t think it works the same) then once I find one thing to read that I like, I’ll begin tapping my way through the suggested posts on the bottom based on whatever looks the most interesting from what little I get to see of it. Sometimes I’ll end up on a specific blog or a specific tag, and I’ll just scroll through reading anything that looks even mildly cool regardless of whether it has anything to do with what I was originally searching for or not, until I click on a specific post for some reason (usually a “read more“), and then I’m back to navigating by suggested posts again. I tend to wander through fandoms and subfandoms a lot faster here, trading one interesting idea for the next as they’re presented to me. It’s a lot of fun and I sometimes discover completely new stuff! I’ll often end up following Authors I really like so that their stuff will end up in my feed, and this is really the only site on which I do that.

Just another couple comments on my general media consumption habits that I didn’t really see anywhere else to put:

Everything I stated about my fanfiction habits when getting into a new show applied if it’s a movie or book or game too, it’s just that 90% of the time it’s a show. My favorite movies are documentaries so I’m not sure what fanfiction for them would even look like, I prefer video essays and theories for games, and I just don’t read as many books as I used to. About half of the remaining 10% of the time is actually probably musicals.

It’s not unusual for me to have seen only three or so episodes of a show, but to have read insane amounts of fanfiction for it. I have difficulty sitting down to actually watch a show, and I usually only expend the effort for my absolute favorite series, so most of my interaction with most shows ends up being fanfiction. Getting into a new show because I came across some really good fanfiction for it is not uncommon either.

[digitalworldbound]

Either 78 or 138 involving Taichi, Hikari and hand-me-downs?

Numbers 78 and 138: “That’s my shirt. So is that…wait!” & “Is this our closet? Or your closet?”

Characters: Taichi & Hikari. Hello, anon! I headcanon that Hikari sneaks into Taichi’s room to steal t-shirts for sleeping, his old hoodies from middle school, etc. I reckon half of his closet is in hers by now.  Also, this is kind of short ‘n’ sweet, but if you ever want a longer sibling fic, PLEASE let me know (I love them so much!) ((Also - sorry for any mistakes! I am on mobile!)

Send me a prompt of you’d like!

On a calendar next to her bed, the day’s date was circled in red marker: Taichi’s Soccer Camp. With her older brother preoccupied, it was the perfect day for another of Yagami Hikari’s heists.

While Taichi was away for eight hours, Hikari had the perfect window of time to rummage through his belongings. Their mother hummed in the kitchen, concocting a meal that would surely leave her children on the toilet for the rest of their lives. Slipping on socks, Hikari planned the route to best avoid drawing attention to herself.

First, she would need to “go to the restroom”. Because the bathroom was conveniently located right next to Taichi’s door, she would be able to discretely open his room without her mother’s suspicion. Afterwards, she would go back to her room and turn on her CD-player (partly to distract her mother, and partly because she wanted to feel like a spy with cool background music).

Next, she would have to sneakily slip behind the sofa, staying underneath the level of their dinner table. Then, after crawling to the other side of the room, she would have to lightly push her brother’s door open. This is the most difficult part. The top hinge was bent out of shape from age and made a horrible screeching sound when it was opened too far.  If Hikari could manage to keep the “Screams of the Damned” at bay, she would have free reign in her brother’s closet.

Tying a black bandana in her hair, Hikari made her way to the bathroom.It was “go time”.

Approximately one second after leaving her bedroom, her mother’s head perked up, looking like a bird poised for attack. “Oh, hey, honey! I forgot you were home! I hope you’re hungry; I’m making egg salad milkshakes!”

Hikari grimaced. “I’m okay for now, Oka-san. There is some homework that I need to catch up on.” Disappointment briefly flashed in her eyes, but Hikari did her best to ignore it. She was on a mission. 

Once her mother’s back was turned, she made a break for the toilet. She closed the door and counted down from one hundred. “Wait! You don’t have any homework! It’s summer break!” her mother called.

Quickly, she flushed the toilet without using it and half-heartedly washed her hands. Her mother’s eyes trailed on her figure as she sheepishly stepped into the kitchen. “Miyako needed some help with studying for her entrance exams, so I offered to proof-read one of her essays.” Her mother’s gaze was unwavering, and for a second Hikari wondered if she could see through the lie.

“Oh! Okay, have fun!” her mother smiled, and turn her attention back to the half-empty carton of eggs.

Hikari breathed a sigh of relief. As quietly as she could, she twisted the knob on her brother’s door. She prayed to whomever may be listening that the door would contain its screaming. Silently, the hinges popped open. ‘Yes! Success!’

Once she was safely back in her room, Hikari gave herself five minutes until the most important part of the heist: snatching The Hoodie. While her brother had a plethora of old hoodies that she would periodically borrow (and never return), she held a special in her heart for only one. It was a heather grey, worn from three soccer seasons. The “Odaiba Middle School” print was partially worn off, but that only added to the appeal. It practically qualified as vintage in the terms of other middle school girls. Hikari needed it.

She popped in her Barenaked Ladies CD before sneaking across the living room. Her knees scraped against the linoleum of her dining room, but her mother was too busy mixing eggs and mayonnaise to notice. “It’s been one week since you looked at me! Cocked your head to the side and said ‘I’m angry’!” her mother crooned, spoiling the milk. 

Once she reached the threshold of her brother’s bedroom, her palms grew sweaty. She was losing her nerve. From across the apartment, the Barenaked Ladies cheered her on, and Hikari quickly found her courage. Nudging her brother’s door open further, she squeezed her hips through the small opening. She was in!

The air in Taichi’s space was stagnant. A sweaty, grassy odor washed over her, but she did her best to stomach it. Immediately, her eyes were drawn to The Hoodie. Her heart rate picked up. Sandwiched between dirty cleats and a stack of half-finished homework assignments, a limp grey sleeve poked out.

“Hikari-chan, come out and try this milkshake! I even topped it with parmesan for you!”

Her temporarily heart froze, then beat erratically. She was running out of time. Gently prying the sweatshirt free was no longer an option.With a massive tug, The Hoodie was freed. 

Before Hikari had a chance to perform a little victory dance, the dirty cleats cascaded towards the floor. Papers floated through the air like rain, her huff of annoyance scattering them further. She narrowly avoided the “Screams of the Damned” only to wake the dead with the crash of her brother’s smelly shoes.

The blankets on the bottom bunk shifted. “H-Hello?”

“Onii-chan?” Hikari gasped. She stood rigidly in fear, her eyes dilated and palms sweaty.  Sitting up, Taichi tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes. “What about soccer camp?”

His brown eyes glazed over in confusion. “Soccer doesn’t start until the thirteenth. Today is only the third.” He eyed his sister suspiciously. Her body was tense, a startled look etched into her features. It was obvious from her body language that he surprised her, which meant that she really believed he was gone. “Why were you sneaking around in my room?” It was only then that he noticed the limp garment in her grip. Taichi offered a singular raised eyebrow before Hikari cracked underneath the pressure.

“Uh, I was just coming in here to tell you that the egg salad milkshakes are ready. I, uh, accidentally tripped and your shoes must have fell.”

Taichi held back a chuckle. “So that’s why you’re strangling my favorite hoodie to death, then?”

Her eyes widened, resembling a deer caught in the headlights. Cheeks coloring, she stammered out flimsy excuses, wringing the fabric tighter and tighter until her knuckles turned white. “I thought you moved out last summer, Hika-chan. Is this our closet? Or your closet?”

“Uh, well, I was just wondering if I could borrow this hoodie. You see, Oka-san keeps the air conditioning on and it’s chilly. My arms are all prickly with goosebumps and everything!” Hikari thrust her arm out as proof, but the humid air of her brother’s room chased away any chill bumps she might have had. She had tried her best. This time, Taichi chuckled outright.

“What about the other six hoodies you have of mine then? Are they incapable of keeping you warm?”

Her face flushed again. Lowering her eyes, she muttered a small “Gomen,” before putting on her best puppy dog eyes.

“No way, it’s not working. I’ll freeze to death this winter if you keep this up. Drop the sweater and help me clean up this mess.”

[tsthrace]

White Knuckles

Awhile back, I asked y’all to send me a song so I could take its energy, lyrics, and/or feeling and write you a 1,000-word Clexa fic.

This one shot meandered way beyond 1,000 words. It’s based on White Knuckles by Tegan and Sara, as requested by @damiana-atx.

Angsty academia AU. No content warnings except for some swearing.

You can also find it on ao3.

-----------------------------

“Fuck, this is good,” Clarke said aloud to no one as she tossed the journal on the table. She leaned back in her chair. Godlessness Centered: Negotiating Queerness in The Left Hand of Darkness by Alexandria J. Woods, PhD. When Clarke had first picked up the journal, she scoffed. The Left Hand of Darkness? Really? And queerness? How overdone.

But it was brilliant. A discourse on Le Guin’s own spirituality and how it defied casual dualities.

I should have thought of that.

She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes.

---

Lexa smoothed the lapels on her blazer, though they were already perfectly flat. She gazed at herself in the hotel mirror, staring at the buttons on her shirt. She had a choice to make—the choice of the one awkward button. Button it, and she would seem, well, buttoned-up, uptight. But unbuttoned, it was a bit...revealing. There was no middle ground.

She pushed her glasses up on her nose and took a breath. Then buttoned the button.

---

They met in Bloomington, Indiana. All the sci fi literature conferences seemed to be in random small cities in the Midwest. They were strange events. Mostly men in khaki and tweed carrying beat-up leather satchels, experts on Vonnegut and Wells (H.G., that is). But there was also the overt geek element. Undergrad boys carrying frayed copies of Asimov and Gaiman, their laptops covered in Star Trek and My Little Pony stickers, and the occasional girl wearing a Strong Female Character t-shirt.

Then there was Lexa, sharp in a plain black cashmere sweater and grey herringbone slacks, her glasses suggesting both intelligence and the ability to break you. The geeks followed her but kept an admiring distance.

Clarke, for some reason, seemed more approachable. As she sipped her gin and tonic at the hotel bar, the kids (as she called college students) would creep up to her, their eyes down.

“Dr. Griffin?” they’d ask.

“Call me Clarke,” she’d say, smiling.

“I just had some questions on your takedown of the Darkover series.”

Clarke would always give them about twenty minutes then politely end the conversation, turning back to her drink.

She had had three such conversations when she felt a tap on her shoulder. Clarke didn’t mind the attention, but she was getting tired. She spun around, ready to dismiss herself.

“Dr. Griffin.” Lexa stood above her.

“Dr. Woods,” Clarke replied, nodding politely. She had read all of Lexa’s work. She had to. They were two of the only feminist sci fi lit scholars who were regularly publishing. But they’d never actually met.

“I don’t really prefer the term ‘doctor.’” Lexa said, looking just past Clarke. “It’s a little....” She didn’t finish her thought. After a moment she tilted her head. “Do you really think we should stop reading Bradley because of her scandal?”

Clarke put her drink down. “Scandal is kind of an understatement. And I didn’t say we should stop. I just said it’s hard.”

Without invitation, Lexa sat down at Clarke’s table. “If we bring every artist’s personal life into how we engage with their work, we probably won’t be able to enjoy anything.”

Clarke raised an eyebrow. “I never took you for a modernist.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“That sometimes shitty people create amazing art.” Lexa’s eyes lit up with her smile, like she was issuing a friendly challenge.

“Are you flirting with me?” Clarke returned her version of the same smile.

Lexa sat back and shrugged. She took a sip of her martini.

---

A few hours later, Clarke was sprawled across Lexa’s bed looking up, her hair in tangles across the pillow, a corner of the sheet pulled over her midsection. Lexa was curled up next to her, sweaty and wondering what just happened. She took a few breaths, looking for words. She squinted to herself, couldn’t think of anything to say. She felt Clarke shuffle a bit and prepared for the awkward banter that would come when they’d get up to look for their clothes.

“Do you believe in God?” Clarke asked instead. She didn’t get up.

“Pardon?”

“Do you believe in God?” Her tone was so casual.

“I...I don’t know.” Lexa looked up at the ceiling. She suddenly felt cold and reached down for a blanket. “Why do you ask?”

“I think I do,” Clarke said, not answering the question.

“Why?”

“I just look around this world, and it seems pretty incredible to me. Like it wasn’t an accident. Someone had to have created all this. Created us. Then made us creators.” Clarke shook her head and looked past Lexa. “It all seems like such a miracle.”

“Are you a Christian?” Lexa felt her face crumple.

Clarke laughed. “I don’t know. I do like the idea of the trinity.”

“When I grew up, my parents took me to one of those born again churches.” Lexa looked down. “It was mostly Jesus. I mean, I know what the trinity is, but…” Why was she telling her this?

“No, that’s not what I mean.” Clarke shook her head. “Not like God as some guy who makes you love him or else you burn in hell. That’s bullshit.”

Lexa squinted.

“The trinity. It’s like a dance between these three ways God reveals herself.” Clarke smiled. “It’s beautiful actually.” She looked at Lexa. “Did you ever read A Wrinkle in Time?”

Lexa side-eyed her. “Clarke, I’m a sci fi scholar.”

“Okay, so there’s Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which…”

They stayed up the rest of the night, moving from L’Engle to Shelley to Jemisin and the spiritual worlds of their stories. Evil and suffering, goodness and hope. Retribution, sacrifice, and justice. Beauty and joy. Mouth to neck, hands to curves, skin to skin.

By dawn, Lexa had found God.

---

Lexa went back to UC Irvine and Clarke returned to her adjunct job at Georgetown, but they emailed constantly. Long, meandering messages about particular chapters of The Stone Sky and Spinning Silver. Clarke sent her Marilynne Robinson essays, and Lexa responded with questions. Together, they laid theologies over imagined worlds, mapped them out and connected them to other imagined worlds. They took down Ender’s Game, built up The Hainish Cycle, and even let themselves dabble in Stardust, which they both had to admit they secretly admired. Back and forth, tens of thousands of words over the course of months. They only talked on the phone a few times, but the emails were constant.

Not long into their messages, Clarke had mentioned how her father had died when she was young. Lexa hinted at being on her own at age 16. These details were wrapped in blankets of analysis and metaphor, the theological undercurrents of the imagined worlds they studied, the anthropology of beings who only existed on pages and in minds.

They made plans to meet in Cleveland to present together at a lit crit conference. A week before, Lexa bailed. “Sorry,” the text said. “An emergency came up.”

“Everything okay?” Clarke responded.

Nothing.

The conference was rough. Clarke knew it would be, but she thought she’d have Lexa’s powerful presence demanding attention. The lit crit crowd all secretly loved what they called “genre” fiction—sci fi and fantasy—but they publicly derided it as “unserious” or “not literary.” She held her own, but it wasn’t fun.

She texted Lexa when she got back to her hotel room. “Wish you had been here. Same straight white male bullshit as usual.”

Silence.

“Did I say something wrong?” Clarke texted a few days later. At that point, though, she knew Lexa was gone.

A heaviness set in on her. Clarke reread their messages looking for hints, but Lexa’s words seemed wide open, even joyful. What happened?

She immersed herself in a chapter she was writing for a textbook on book fandoms and lecturing on feminism and postmodernism in Harry Potter—not her favorite topic, but it was a popular course. She had almost let herself forget about Lexa when, six months later, she was flipping through Foundation: The Journal of Science Fiction and saw her byline in the table of contents. Justice & Joy: The God Revealed in the Feminist Imagination. By Alexandria J. Woods, PhD.

Clarke turned to page 137 and ran her eyes down the columns. She bit her lip. The essay was essentially a catalog of their emails, one idea bridged skillfully to another by Lexa’s pointed and lucid prose. But they weren’t just Lexa’s ideas. They weren’t just Clarke’s, either, but a stream of their thoughts flowing together like a river. It was beautifully done.

Clarke didn’t notice that her hands were balled into fists until she felt her nails cutting into the skin. She opened her laptop and pulled up the messages. Lexa had been careful to rephrase Clarke’s words, but it was all there, even with citations of Marilynne Robinson. The Death of Adam.

Clarke pounded out an email. How dare you...couldn’t even ask for me to be a coauthor...you hadn’t even thought about these things until you met me. She knew Lexa wouldn’t see it. She probably had blocked her address. She didn’t bother hitting send.

Her face fell into her hands. She remembered that night in San Diego. Lexa’s smile—that curiosity despite herself. The way her hands traced the skin over Clarke’s side.

That woman wouldn’t have done this. But there it was. Twenty-six pages of shared conversation now claimed for Lexa only.

---

Clarke’s department was buzzing about it the next day. The religious studies chair was also a huge geek who kept up with Foundation, and he had been blown away by how seamlessly interdisciplinary the article was. “I hadn’t thought to connect the Christian trinity and A Wrinkle in Time, but it’s really so obvious when you think about it.”

Clarke seethed. She thought about printing up the emails, sending them to Foundation and the UC Irvine Disciplinary Committee, but something stopped her. Allegations of plagiarism would ruin Lexa’s career as a scholar. And was it really plagiarism? Clarke wanted to be sure, but she wasn’t.

So she wrote instead. A deep and cutting rebuttal highlighting where Alexandria J. Woods’ religious arguments were rudimentary at best, illustrating how shallow her connections were, and then plunging further, mining Catherine Keller and other theologians for an even deeper exploration of the worlds of Butler and Clarke (Arthur C., that is). Foundation published her essay the next quarter. Lexa answered, bringing in Buddhism and Humanism. A spotlight grew around their debate, so they continued writing—back and forth between literary, cultural, and religious journals. WIRED magazine picked up the story: Feuding Feminists Shifting the Sci Fi Landscape.

That’s when the invites started rolling in. A conference on spirituality and pop culture invited them to speak on a panel together, but Clarke refused. She couldn’t bear to see Lexa in person. Instead, she accepted an invitation to lecture at NYU while Lexa spoke at Cal.

Clarke’s classes filled with long waitlists every semester, her success intertwined with Lexa’s and their endless intellectual feud. They both thrived. Lexa’s ideas sharpened Clarke’s, and Clarke’s sharpened Lexa’s. She couldn’t admit it, but she needed Lexa as much as she despised her.

---

Lexa was in her office when the call came.

“Dr. Woods?” A male voice.

“It’s Professor Woods.”

“Excuse me, Professor Woods,” he corrected himself. “This is Dr. William Porter at Georgetown. The chair of the Department of English.”

Lexa felt something jump in her chest. “Good morning.”

“I’m calling because a very generous donor has recently endowed a tenure-track professorship here specifically for women in science fiction studies.”

“You’re kidding me.” it felt like a prank, and a mean one at that. Lexa had never heard of such a thing.

“Uh, no.” Dr. Porter seemed thrown off. “We’re inviting only a few people to apply, and you’re on our short list. Is this something you’d be interested in?”

They hung up with lingering plans to arrange flights and meetings.

Lexa sat for a few minutes, her fingers tapping idly on her closed laptop. Clarke would be one of the other candidates—and maybe the only other candidate—she was sure. She looked down and shook her head, thinking back to that day when she made the worst decision of her life.

She had printed out some of the emails she had sent Clarke to reference them against some short stories when the dean knocked on her door. He noticed a copy of L’Engle’s Walking on Water open on her desk.

“What’s that about?” he asked.

“Uh, just a side project I’m working on.” Her face burned with the exposure of her new interest in religious studies.

“Mind if I look?” he asked, picking up one of the print-outs before she could answer.

She bit her lip as he read, his forehead creasing.

After a few minutes, he looked up. “Professor Woods, this is good stuff.”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “Thank you. I’ve been working with Professor Griffin at Georgetown—”

“But these are your words, right?”

“Yeah, what you’re holding. That’s mine.”

“You need to publish this. It could be really good for you and the department.”

“Yeah, Professor Griffin and I—”

“Lexa,” he said in that kind but firm I’m-A-Man-In-Charge voice, “there’s a distinction to be made between attribution and inspiration. I’m inspired every day by the ocean, by James Joyce.” Lexa hid her contempt. Scholars who pretended to understand Joyce were pretentious liars. “But I’m not citing them.”

“Dr. Titus.” Her voice was firm. “I couldn’t have written that without Professor Griffin.”

“Professor Woods.” He looked her straight in the eye. “This department doesn’t need a co-authored paper with someone from Georgetown. We need a win.” He tapped the paper. “These are your words. Are they the product of a broader conversation? Sure, but what isn’t?” He looked out the window at the budding trees. “We took a chance on your genre work. And I’m seeing some good stuff. But I need to see more if we’re going to keep you on.”

Lexa looked past Dr. Titus and took in a silent breath. Jobs in her specialty was rare. UC Irvine had invested more than most schools to create a department where someone like her could thrive. She nodded.

“Get me an abstract and outline next week,” the dean said. “The managing editor at Foundation is a former student.”

When he left, she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She would need to cancel her panel with Clarke in Cleveland. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever be able to look at her again.

---

Clarke let out a deep breath as she stepped into the crisp fall air. It had been a long day of interviews. She stopped on the stairs. She knew Lexa was close by. She had to be. They were the two people in the country most qualified for the job. She’d been on these interview panels before. Two, sometimes three, a day, candidates rotating between deans and panels. Clarke was surprised she hadn’t seen her yet.

She shook her head. Maybe she should have said something about that first paper. The job would be hers if she had. But would she even be considered without that paper? It had launched her career. Her public debate with Alexandria J. Woods, PhD, got her lectures around the country, a longform article in The Atlantic, and the keynote spot at conferences that two years ago would have never taken her seriously. Their refusal to appear together added to their mystique. Geeks and academics alike lined up on reddit and twitter to take sides.

Her success was bound to Lexa’s, two sides of the same double helix.

She bundled a scarf around her neck. It didn’t matter where Lexa was. Clarke loved the work she did, and she had rocked the interviews. But she was tired. It was time for a drink. She pulled out her phone to call a Lyft. Something about the fading purple sky changed her mind, though, and she decided to walk.

The cobblestones on O Street felt somehow comforting under her feet. Solid. Old. Not going anywhere. She thought about calling Dr. Reyes from the engineering department to join her—Raven was always good for either a loud night of much alcohol or a quiet night of raw, stinging truth—the latter of which was why Clarke had never told her all that had happened with Lexa. She shook her head. Maybe she just needed some gin and silence.

She sat at the bar at L’Annexe and ordered a Tom Collins. Bartenders always smiled curiously at her when she ordered one. Funny, you don’t look like a 75 year-old man to me. She’d smile back impatiently. Just make my damn drink. When the drink arrived, she took a sip and let out a deep breath as the gin started to glow through her. No one can fuck up a Tom Collins. It was simple and always felt good and sharp and bright going down.

She was halfway through her drink when a man sat next to her and ordered a scotch. Clarke glanced at his plaid scarf, wool sweater, and worn leather shoulder bag. Definitely a TA. He noticed her looking at him and smiled.

“I’ve seen you,” he said. “You teach that Harry Potter course.”

Clarke’s stifled a sigh. “That’s me.” She tilted her head back and drank the rest of her Tom Collins in one swig.

“Can I get you another?”

“No,” she said, picking up her bag. She made eye contact with the bartender. “I need to pay.”

“Whoa,” the man in the scarf said, raising his hands. “I’m just trying to be nice.”

“And I was just trying to be alone.” Clarke nodded towards the guy sitting on the other side of him. “Maybe you can be nice to him.” She dropped some cash on the check that had arrived and made her way to the door.

It was darker outside than when she’d arrived. And colder. She buttoned her wool coat and started making her way down Pennsylvania Ave. towards the bus stop.

---

Lexa was sipping a Syrah at a window table when she saw Clarke walk by outside. She took in a breath, remembering how Clarke’s eyes got soft when she asked, “Do you believe in God?” She shook her head. She could just let her keep going, and they could go on avoiding each other forever. Unless Lexa got the job.

Shit.

She grabbed her coat, leaving a $20 under her mostly full glass. By the time Lexa got out the door, Clarke was halfway down the block, almost lost in a crowd of loud students. Lexa didn’t button her coat, and it billowed out as she jogged down the street.

“Clarke!” she shouted as she got closer. She saw Clarke stop, her back straighten and stiffen. She didn’t turn around.

---

Clarke wanted to be angry. When she heard that voice, she wanted to spin on her heel and unleash a cascade of expletives that would make the passersby uncomfortable. She not only wanted Lexa to hear the words traitor, cheat, betrayed, she wanted her to feel the force of them rip through her body like a landmine.

But she froze. When she heard that voice, she felt tears sting at the corner of her eyes. She felt a slow storm in her chest, all rain and no lighting. She closed her eyes. She wanted to be angry, but all she felt was heaviness. She held her breath and waited.

When she opened her eyes, Lexa was in front of her, her eyes uncertain and her arms folded in front of her. “Hey…” she said after a few moments.

Clarke bit into her lip, hoping not to draw blood. She looked up, her blue eyes blazing, about to spark. She could tell Lexa was waiting for her to say something, so she stayed silent.

Lexa nodded. “I’m so sorry, Clarke.” She didn’t know what else to say.

Clarke’s eyes locked on Lexa’s, but she refused to respond.

“I don’t expect you to understand...” Lexa trailed off. “It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.” She looked past Clarke to a stoplight turning from yellow to red.

Lexa’s open coat revealed a gray plaid suit, smart and uncompromising, the top button studiously and chastely buttoned. So she had interviewed today. In this moment, though, it all felt wrong. Lexa seemed so small to Clarke. She wasn’t the woman she met at the hotel that night, but she also wasn’t the woman who submitted that article. This woman was drawn in on herself, her hair falling around her face like a curtain. Clarke remained silent.

Lexa sucked in her lips. “I know you probably hate me, and I get it.” She looked down. “I hate me, too.”

“No.” Clarke’s voice was deep and quiet. “You don’t get to do that.” She felt confused when she saw a shadow of relief cross Lexa’s face.

“You’re right,” Lexa said. “That’s not fair.” She took a long, deep breath and let it out. “I’m going to tell them.” She looked Clarke in the eye. “I’m going to tell Georgetown, and I’m going to tell Foundation. I’ll—”

“Don’t.” Clarke cut her off. “It’s done.”

“But—”

“Fuck you, Lexa.” She barely looked at her as pushed past, a slow fire burning through her as she walked briskly towards Dupont Square.

---

Lexa was freezing by the time she got back to her hotel room. She had stood on the sidewalk for a long time, watching Clarke get smaller and smaller. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting. Forgiveness? Punishment? Clarke had given her neither, which is what she knew she deserved.

She had never written a paper more carefully, never thought about the ideas so closely, never danced so delicately around sentence structure and tense. In a twisted way, she was proud of it. It was sophisticated but accessible, and completely defensible. Even if Clarke had tried to accuse her, she was sure she would have won.

She shook her head sharply. That’s not who I am. But it was. She was intelligent and ambitious and ready for a breakthrough. She knew Titus had been threatening her, but she also knew that what she had been writing with Clarke was good. Really good. She had never felt so alive in her work as when she was in conversation with Clarke. No one had ever challenged or inspired her like that. Even after that first paper, her debates with Clarke from essay to essay were electric, almost feverish. Clarke tapped something in her that was insatiable.

She picked up her laptop and opened some of the first emails she and Clarke had exchanged after Bloomington. She couldn’t help but smile. There had been a giddiness to them, this breathless excitement to constantly share new discoveries, interesting connections. They had sent seven, sometimes eight, messages a day. Thousands of words.

And that night in Bloomington.

She closed the laptop. Was it worth it? For months, Lexa had tried to convince herself that it had just been one night, that she didn’t even really know Clarke. When she saw Clarke on that sidewalk tonight, though, she knew that was all bullshit.

They had been falling for each other the best way they knew how. Lexa had betrayed all of it.

—-

Lexa was sitting on the floor outside Clarke’s office when she arrived the next morning.

Clarke sighed. “Seriously?” She didn’t look at her as she slid her key in the lock. “What are you doing here?”

“I had a meeting to cancel.” Lexa shrugged, not getting up.

Clarke pushed her door open. “I don’t have anything else to say to you, Dr. Woods.”

“I withdrew my name.”

Clarke froze. “Why?” Clarke noticed jeans and a sweater under Lexa’s coat. Her hair was pulled back in a messy bun. She was serious.

“You know why.”

Clarke’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I did,” Lexa said steadily as she stood up. The smallness from the night before was gone. She stood tall, her shoulders thrown back. “I don’t know who else they’re interviewing, but I’m not your competition anymore.” She swallowed and looked into Clarke’s eyes. “I don’t want to be your competition anymore.”

Clarke let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. She wanted to say, Good luck, Dr. Woods, and close the door behind her, but instead she felt herself pushing the door open, heard herself saying, “Come in.”

Lexa bit her lip. “You sure?”

Clarke nodded and ushered her in. The door clicked as it closed behind them. Clarke set her bag down and sat at her desk. She shook her head, frustrated. “I just want to hate you. That’s all. I want to tell you to fuck off, and I want to go on with my life.”

Lexa sat in the reading chair in the corner of Clarke’s office. She nodded, looking down at her hands. “Then why don’t you?”

Clarke huffed, a cynical laugh. “I can’t get away. You’re everywhere.” She threw up her hands. “I saw you on the fucking New Yorker site this morning. How did you land that?” A rhetorical question. “I assign your essays for my classes. I have to. I hate how good you are.”

“You’re good, too, Clarke,” Lexa said quietly. She looked up. “Very good. I keep researching and writing because you keep responding.”

Clarke closed her eyes. She knew it was the same for her, but she didn’t want to say it. Finally she looked up. “Why did you do it?”

Lexa looked past her at Clarke’s diplomas on the wall. Undergrad at Cornell. She shook her head, almost said I don’t know, but she didn’t want to lie. “I wanted to do something big.” She gathered the courage to look at Clarke’s face. “I wanted to do it with you, but my dean pressured me to take solo authorship.” She closed her eyes, ashamed. “And I was a coward.”

“Yeah.” Clarke leaned back in her chair. “You were.”

Everything that came into Lexa’s head to say felt like an excuse, so she kept her mouth shut. They both did, the loud ticking of the cheap clock on the wall cutting through the silence.

Finally Clarke shook her head. A corner of her mouth curved up. “It was really beautifully done.”

Lexa looked up, her head tilted.

“I was so fucking angry, Lexa.” Clarke breathed out like she was letting something go. “I should have been a coauthor, but, fuck, it was well written. Like it was on a whole other level.”

Lexa’s green eyes were bright as they locked in on Clarke’s. “You inspire me, Dr. Griffin.” She sat back. “It’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” She paused and sucked in her lips. “I think we should write a book together.”

As soon as Clarke heard the words, she knew it was a good idea. Maybe the best idea. But all that would come out was, “Fuck you, Lexa.” It was almost a laugh.

Lexa’s face was stone, but her eyes were alive. “An editor already approached me. If I brought you on…”

“You can’t buy your way out of the shitty thing you did, Lexa.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Lexa ran her hand over her hair then looked up, her face suddenly soft. “I meant it, Clarke. I’m better with you.” She shrugged. “And I think you’re better with me, too.”

Clarke bit her lip. She took in a heavy breath, and let it out in a long sigh. She stood up. “Come here.”

Lexa squinted her eyes.

“Just come here, please. You owe me that.”

Lexa stood up in front of Clarke. Clarke lifted her hand to her face and leaned in, her lips barely touching Lexa’s. Lexa didn’t move, but Clarke felt her shiver. She leaned in and kissed her softly. Then she pulled back.

“I just…” Clarke didn’t know where the end of that sentence was supposed to go, and she didn’t tried to find it. Instead, she lifted her eyes and looked at Lexa as her chest rose and fell, rose and fell.

Lexa held her breath.

Finally Clarke smiled, almost laughing at herself. “That’s not a yes, Dr. Woods. But it’s not a no.”

[thisstableground]

hey! what was your first experience with in the heights/how did you discover it & how did you become so thoroughly overtaken by it? i hope you feel better soon

ooh, i like this question!

so i got into hamilton around november 2016 and thats what lead me to it. first listened to in the heights must’ve been early january 2017, because i remember it was the day before i went back to my home in brighton from my mum’s where i had spent christmas  break, and i was laying on the couch in mum’s living room and eating grapes the first time i listened. i don’t remember much of my emotions towards it that first time, other than enjoying it but finding the story harder to keep track of (it was only the second musical soundtrack i’d ever listened to, after hamilton, which is a lot easier to follow because it’s sung through). i can remember unexpectedly laughing out loud at usnavi in the club and going “wait what” when abuela died and that’s about it. but i vividly remember my second listen to it the day after. i’d gone and read all the story summary on the Genius lyrics page so i understood it more, and i can remember getting on the train back home just as i was listening to It Won’t Be Long Now on headphones and getting such shivers that I nearly cried (and then i did cry on the train later, at Alabanza), and it entered frequent rotation between my near-constant relistens of hamilton.

so i really liked it from the start but i think it didn’t completely take over my heart until i started writing fic for it. fic for me is about learning who the characters are and it really took no time at all of writing some character study and dialogue for usnavi and vanessa before they just grabbed something in my heart and made a permanent home there, now that i understood them a little more.

i love the music and the originality and the skill that is in it, but i think that something that made it really stick emotionally and become my favourite is that it was about such ordinary people. it was about people who struggle and who aren’t necessarily doing anything that will make them go down in history but aren’t any less valuable or lovable for that, and it was a revelation for me at that point in my life, where i still only defined myself by my grades and intelligence and was really struggling with the fact that i could just barely get through a day functionally, never mind do anything world-changing to establish a legacy, which at the time felt very important to me and is part of what drew me to hamilton. it’s hard to explain, but in the heights just made me feel like it’s okay for your legacy to be that you work hard in the ways you are able to and support the people around you and look for help from them when you need it. it felt like permission to live an ordinary life and reassurance that you can find happiness doing that.

it’s funny because with all of that, i would’ve thought that nina would’ve been my favourite – i’m a former gifted kid university dropout who put way too much pressure on myself with grades. and i do love her but somehow it’s usnavi who i relate to most. the getting stuck, the way that his past and his grief have given him sort of tunnel vision for what he wants from his future and how he needs to think more about what he wants now, and what he wants outside of what other people think he wants. the big ADHD vibes, the nervous chatter. and relating to him in some ways made me want to be more like him in others – the positivity and kindness, which i’m 100% sure is something that i developed more in myself the more i listened to his parts in the musical and wrote stories about him. i talk a lot more now than i used to, because i’m not so self-conscious about the fact that i talk very quickly and excitably, and that sometimes i make an idiot of myself by babbling.  i like who i am much more now that i lean way more towards an usnavi than an alexander. 

it also came along like, when i wasn’t exactly mental health recovered but i had been living in brighton a while and gotten past the worst parts and even with all the problems i was still having i felt like i was in the place i was supposed to be, for the first time in my life. i remember when i was younger i used to be in my own bedroom just sobbing and thinking “i wanna go home” and not knowing what i meant because i was in the only place that i could technically consider home but still didn’t feel like it, and always feeling torn between different parts of my identities and not knowing where i belonged within those identities and communities that i’m a part of. i’d never want to claim that this means i understand what it means to be latino or an immigrant because i dont and i know i never will, but even though ITH is not my identity narrative, it comforts me to hear it anyway. it felt and still does feel so, so good to listen to finale where usnavi says i’m home and think yeah, me too, and to know that he’d been looking for so long for that certainty and finally found it just like i had.

its been the fuel for so much of my creativity, alongside other LMM fandoms. i think part of it is  because of an interview i read with lin once, where he said he wrote ITH because nobody was writing the roles he wanted to play so he had to do it himself. that attitude but turned towards my own areas of neurodiversity and mental health has since been the centre of most of my academic work and the foundation of what i did for most of my creative writing degree: the idea that if the story you want doesn’t exist it’s not because it’s not worth telling, it’s because maybe you need to write it yourself. i’d never had enough of a sense of purpose before to sustain any creativity.

 before i started writing fic and doing art prompts back in december 2016 i hadn’t made or written anything much for years and years, and even before that i’d never really done more than write a few poems and some essays and doodled some abstract art at very sporadic intervals like once or twice a year. and i started that creative journey off with hamilton but it’s ITH that stuck with me and that i’ve stuck with (and DNH, but like, i’m into that for the opposite reasons i am into ITH, where ITH is a beautiful thing that inspires me want to make more beautiful things, and DNH is a trash fire that i’m frantically trying to put out and then weave a nice rug to cover all the damage).

GOD this gave me all my big ITH feelings again. i can remember writing fic after nightmares when my PTSD was still bad. i can remember being in the phase where i was still surprised whenever i woke up and felt good about life and i’d put ITH on with headphones and turn the corner out of the street i lived on at the top of a hill and could see all the brightly coloured houses leading down to the sea and felt safe. i have such a strong memory of a day when i had been in the middle of undergraduate dissertation panic where i just went outside and went to the park which was empty because it was pouring with rain and i went on the swings and played ITH loudly and sang along because nobody was there to hear. the people i’ve met through fandom are some of my favourite people ever.   i just love this show so, so much and it has a really important place in my life and my memories.

[wingsoffireaus]

Fanfiction Recommendations

Just a few of my personal favorite Wings of Fire fanfictions. I'm going to try and keep them organized but no promises.

Also please give these fics love by leaving a review. They are honestly really good and lot of them have like maybe five reviews at the most. I'm trying to get better at leaving reviews myself. It is so important to make sure they know it is being enjoyed by others.

If anyone has a fic they don't see on here let me know since I might have forgotten it or not read it yet. Thank you and enjoy!

Shipping

Healed by @sandshadow

Summary: Flame has a lot of issues and has been sent away to the healing center in the Sky Kingdom to deal with them. The last dragons he expected, or wanted, to see there were Umber and Sora. As Flame spends more time in the healing center, and with Umber, he starts to heal in more ways than one. But can he overcome the hate that's been growing in him for so long? T for coarse language.

A personal favorite of mine. And Flumber has quickly become a favorite pairing of mine in this fandom. The only problem I have is there's not a lot of Flumber outside of this fic. But that's okay since there has been an addition to the lore (is that the right word here?) of the fic with an adorable two-shot that takes place a little bit after the events of this fic.

But on other news it's honestly just a good character piece as well. Umber and Flame get great focus and we also get to see Sora again. And there's therapy. Honest to goodness these characters are getting therapy. Praise the Moon's!!!!

10/10 will read again. (Honestly its become one of my therapy fics that I read when I get upset. 😆)

Embracing Peril by Ilral (for the life of me I couldn't find out if there was a Tumblr for them so please let me know so I can add it onto this post.)

Summary: Peril always knew she was different, of course, but it still surprised her just how many ways the world came up with to make her distant. Oh well, at least Clay is here now to buoy her up. And they might just have more in common than she realizes...

A pretty good Cleril fic that deals with a lot of potential prejudices the dragon society might have. A lot of these aren't my headcanons but I can still appreciate the work that went into the fic. And the characters are written pretty well. I like seeing Clay and Peril as an established couple.

A perfect example of it being possible to enjoy a fic even if you don't necessarily share all of the same headcanons as the author.

How to Dance with Rainwings by @quasimagical

Summary: Deathbringer had never anticipated the harsh reality of being pushed away by the love of his life. But when the RainWing queen presents him with a new assignment, he finds himself trapped in the middle of an even more puzzling predicament. AU.

OMG. It's a Jambringer fic. Honestly this one is really cute and I totally ship it. Just a warning Glorybringer isn't the only ship the author breaks up. And while I personally don't ship all the ships they went with I'm the type of person who can still roll with it. Haha.

Another issue is it actually has not been finished but from what I've heard the author does plan on picking it up again sooner or later. But it's definitely worth a read. It's good to see a Deathbringer fic where he is actually treated as a character and not... Well you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Anyway give it a read and review! It's worth it. :)

The Prince and the Body Guard by @a-croissant (based off of their bio on ffnet so hopefully that's right.)

Summary: A oneshot between Turtle and Pike. When Turtle notices that Anemone gets rid of Pike, and Pike runs away, he decides to go after him.

That's right it's a Pike/Turtle one shot. Low key this is really cute. That's kind of all I have to say about it. I ship it and it's adorable.

Character Fics

Winter: A Character Study/Faded Portraits by @sandshadow

Summary: Winter lies awake thinking of everything he's done wrong. The family he disappointed, the love he lost, and the friends he pushed away, but as the night wears on he comes to a new realization about himself.

Wow! Two @sandshadow fics on the list? What?!

Nah but seriously guys this is potentially one of my favorite fics in the fandom. Because I don't know if you know this but I am a Winter fan. And I am still bitter about how he was treated at the end of DoD.

(Also if I have to read any more Winterwatcher fics about him apologizing to Moon for being reasonably upset about a legitimately traumatic experience I am going to scream. )

Anyway. This is what I wish his epilogue in DoD had been. Read it for yourself. Leave a review... I practically an essay myself. My bad. 😅

Winter Returning by Fatespeaker (I can't find a Tumblr for this author so if anyone knows please let me know so I can add it to this post.)

Summary: A week before Icicle's trial, Winter returns to the Ice Kingdom for a very awkward visit. Tensions are high. Old conflicts have resurfaced. With his tribe still reeling from the recent disaster, his family destroyed, and a complicated friendship to deal with, Winter is left picking up the pieces of his old life...and discovering hope for a new one.

Surprise, surprise. It's another Winter fic. I love this boy so much.

Honestly this is done pretty well and we also get to see Winter interact with his family some more as well as getting to see him face some of his own trauma.

It's angsty in all of the best ways.

Aftermath by Fatespeaker (this author has some pretty good stuff honestly.)

Summary: When it comes to living family, Starflight definitely got the short end of the stick. He's kept his distance from his mad scientist father. Well-meaning Fatespeaker wants to help her friend by interviewing Mastermind, but even the briefest of conversations can dredge up uncomfortable truths. War is complicated...its aftermath is messier still.

Kudos to the author for touching on a pretty controversial character. I mean I completely understand why people dislike him. But I can't help it. The fact that his first thought when meeting Starflight was "look at my beautiful boy isn't he astounding!" It was just so refreshing in all the best ways.

I knew the shoe would drop, and what a shoe it was, but I still have a weird fondness for him. And don't fuss me. People can like characters who did horrible things and the thing is I think he's not beyond saving. It will be a lot of work but its possible.

Mastermind- The Scientist and Mastermind- The Monster by The Friendly Space Marine (Again. I don't know if there is a Tumblr for this author. I am so sorry.)

Summary: Mastermind. The NightWing who would become infamous for experimenting on live RainWing subjects. But what is the story behind Starflight's often demonised father? Why did he do it? What drove him to such lengths?

Mastermind. The NightWing embodiment of the mad scientist archetype. A dragon held in contempt by his own son. A monster responsible for unspeakable crimes against the RainWings. What made him do it? Did he ever truly realise the gravity of his actions? 

I really like this take on the character! It adds a new layer to him that nobody really wants to acknowledge or see which I think comes back to the fact that people want to always see characters as good or bad. And I've already stated that I hate that mindset. Like... Wow, people with that mindset must live in a very boring and frankly cold world. I'm sorry for your loss.

Story Driven

Stories that are a little more story driven. Although some are very character-based too so this was kind of hard for me separate. Anyway enjoy!

Finding Peace by @warriorofspectra (for some reason it won't link. I don't understand Tumblr!!!)

Summary:Peacemaker has enjoyed a happy seven years. Raised by his mother and living amongst the RainWing and NightWing Tribes, he would ask for no better life. But with the emergence of nightmares, which have grown increasingly vivid upon arriving at the Jade Mountain Academy, Peacemaker begins to question whether or not the life he lives truly is his own or the shadow of another.

Ey... I already talked about this one before but it's definitely up there as one of my favorite fanfictions and probably my favorite Peacemaker fanfiction.

I don't even want to say anything in too much detail because it's just too good. All you need to know is the characters are great, including OCs. Peacemaker is adorable and almost makes me feel bad for hating the strawberry scene... Almost. Seriously just read it. And then take a peak at the authors side drabble series from POV of the other characters. There's one about Winter that I read just because it makes me so happy to see him again. Agh!

In the Light of the Moon's by Qebui (which is actually a group of people. So I have no clue if there are any Tumblrs associated or not)

Summary: We know the Dragonets of Destiny. Five dragons hatched on brightest night. However, what if the dragonets had hatched in the moonlight instead?

That's right we got a thrice born Starflight and Sunny Fanfiction. Not too much to say about this one. I just love this concept and I like what the authors are doing with it. :D

And... I think that's pretty much it. Wow, this was a lot of hard work. But fun. Lots of fun. And it was good coming back to some of these. Again if there was any I missed please let me know and I will glad I do an updated list adding them to it.

Thanks so much and see ya next time!

[trashforgubler]

Hold On

Word Count: 2,466

Summary: You try to kill yourself and Spencer (your boyfriend) is left to deal with the aftermath

Extra Info: This fic was inspired by the song “Hold On” by Chord Overstreet and as always I 11/10 recommend you listen to it. Also, I would like to note that this is an extremely sad and dark piece so please please please do not read it if you know it will trigger you. I promise not all my stuff will be this dark but because I watch too much criminal minds I am a little bit “dark and twisty” so this kind of stuff will come up every now and then.

Warnings: Light swearing, cutting, self hatred, suicide, dark humor, literally if it’s depressing its probably in here

Requests: Open pls send

Feedback pls and thank

masterpost 

This was it. You were done. You couldn’t do it anymore. You breathed.

Inhale.

Exhale.

As you looked around the room, your eyes fell upon a photograph. It was taken on the day you and Spencer went ice skating together, and he pretended to not know how just so he could hold your hand. A smile made its way onto your face for the first time in a while, but you hated the bitter sweetness of old memories. On the one hand, you loved thinking back to times when you were happy. Truly happy. Oh, how times had changed. Now thinking about those memories made you cry, because you knew there was no way to go back to how things had been. How was it possible to want to cherish something and forget about it at the same time? You sighed and stared at the blade sitting on your desk. Your hands rested on its cool surface as you learned up against it, head hung low as a million thoughts flew through it.

I can’t do this to him. He won’t survive.

Thoughts swarmed your head like a hurricane. You wracked your brain, trying to think of a way out that wouldn’t kill you both. And then it came. You opened the desk and took out a flimsy piece of notebook paper and a pencil, as if a note explain yourself would make it all better. Maybe it wouldn’t erase his pain, but you hoped it spare him some. You heard somewhere that the not knowing is the worst part for the people left behind. After a while, they could grasp the fact that you were gone, that was easy. It was not knowing the reason why that eats at them for an eternity. Spencer had to know he wasn’t a reason. You picked up a pen and held it against the paper, watching as the dot of ink grew larger and larger. Nothing had ever prepared you for this moment. English class had taught you how to write a 2,000 word essay in one night, but you couldn’t ever recall “how to write a suicide note,” being on a syllabus. You figured if you didn’t think about the words to much, they would just come to you.

Dear Spence,

I don’t know how to say this. I’m sorry. I’ll miss you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I love you.

You were planning on something a little more extravagant than that. That’s what always happened in books in movies. Characters writing big long letters to their loved ones, explaining every detail of their decision. A play by play to the exact moment they decided they were going to cut their life short. But in that moment, you couldn’t even bring yourself to think what you felt. Trying to put your reasoning on paper was impossible, as if you had to have a good enough reason to kill yourself. Almost as if there was a court that approved your application for suicide. “Oh, you hate yourself and you think you’re a burden to everyone? Sorry, Mike over here just overfed his goldfish and killed it. Please try again in 20 years.” Realizing the fact that you couldn’t even figure out what you were feeling suddenly frightened you. If you couldn’t even understand your own brain, how could Spencer? Words started floating through your head as you attempted to put a label on what you felt. Sad? No, not really. Depressed maybe, but not necessarily sad. Angry? Angry at the world? Yes. Angry enough to die? Probably not. Guilt? Guilt. That was it. You probably felt guilty because that you were leaving an innocent man to suffer while you got to be free. But you couldn’t help it. You were trapped.

You placed the note on the counter and undressed yourself. As you walked into the bathroom, blade in hand, you caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. Cringing, you studied each and every part of your body. The body you had despised your entire life. You were too big, had too many stretch marks and too many scars. The cuts covered your body. Your eyes strung with tears as you realized this is the last time you would ever look in a mirror. You didn’t know whether those tears are of happiness or sadness. It was all irrelevant anyways, none of it mattered anymore. In a few minutes you would be dead, completely useless to the world as you always had been. You never had a purpose, you had just become tired of pretending that would ever change. The water stung the cuts on your thighs as you stepped into the bath. Slowly, you sank down into it. The coldness seeped into your veins, leaving chills across your skin. The blade in your hand stared at you, taunting you, daring you to cut.  You bit your lip, but you weren’t sure why. You had no doubts, no fears. This is what you wanted to do.

“I’m in complete control”, you reminded yourself, although you knew it was bullshit. You weren’t the one who decided to do this. The monster that has slowly been possessing your body for the past three years was. The person you once were was gone. She died the day you put a blade to your small wrist for the first time. Just as you were about to do for the very last time. Inhaling, you plunged the blade into your arm despite your shaking hand. You drug down your arm, following the blue vein that ran down it like a map. A map to death.  Blood began pouring out of you and mixed in with the bath water, turning it a murky red color. Black dots began to appear in front of you as your head spun. The cold water seeped closer and closer to your face as you sunk down into it, slowing losing conscious. You were so close to death that you didn’t even hear the front door open. The last thing you saw before you blacked out completely was Spencer leaned over the bathtub, tears cascading down his red face as he wrapped his arms around your limp body, trying to pull you from the tub.

Spencer’s POV

Your lifeless body stared at Spencer from the bath mat, your blood staining the once white fabric. He couldn’t take his eyes off you, even as he fumbled to reach for his phone.

“911 what’s your emergency?”

“My girlfriend is bleeding out.”

The words, “my girlfriend tried to kill herself in our bathtub with a blade she got from a broken pencil sharpener,” refused to come out of his mouth, but he assumed it didn’t matter. All he knew was that you were probably dead. Time was nonexistent. The next thing he knew he was riding in the back of the ambulance as he watched you slowly fade further and further away from him. He felt like he was dreaming. This couldn’t be real. Everyone else who fell in love got to be happy. They got to give each other valentines and go out on movie dates and kiss each other whenever they please. His stomach twisted when he realized he might not get to kiss you ever again.

As soon as he arrived at the hospital, a nurse pulled him away from you as you were whisked off to surgery. He stood there, in the middle of the ER, completely helpless. His pulse racing and could hear his heartbeat in his ears as it echoed loudly inside his chest. His head was swimming with a million thoughts all at the same time, and he couldn’t get them to stop. God, he just wanted them to stop. The nurse asked if he wanted to call anyone. All his concentration was put into trying to remember anyone’s name. “J- Jennifer Jareau,” he finally stammered out. The nurse nodded and lead him to a waiting room and then left him. Alone.

The ticking of the clock was starting to drive him insane. Why was there so much noise? He put his head in his lap and clamped his arms over his ears, trying to block it all out, but it persisted with no avail. The clock, the crackle of the AC, they sound of people shoes as they walked outside the door. It was too much.

“Spence.”

The sound of a soft voice startled him. His arms fell from his ears and dangled at his sides, but he kept his head down, to embarrassed to look up. JJ was standing before him, tears in her eyes as she said his name. “Spence?” she asked, bending down to look at him. She brushed a loose curl out of his face and looked him in the eye, eyebrows furrowed in concern. Spencer felt a tear trickle down his cheek and land on his cardigan. He sniffed as he pursed his lips and shut his eyes, still not believing any of this was happening. She was fine. He told himself. I thought she was fine. The more he thought about her, the more he began to cry. The now bitter sweet memories of seeing her smile when he woke up every morning or hearing her laugh when he complained about being referred to as a “pipe cleaner with eyes,” tore at his heart. “Aww Spence.” JJ said, wiping away a tear. She didn’t know how to help him. How do you help someone who was waiting to see if the love of there life was alive or not? She didn’t know. “Spence did you cut yourself?” JJ asked with motherly concern, seeing the jagged tear in his jeans that was seeping blood.

Spencer shrugged, “probably just the blade she dropped,” he said plainly.

The words made JJ’s heart ache. Here he was, slumped in a hospital chair, crying because he didn’t know what was going to happen, and she knew it killed him knowing that he couldn’t fix it.  Whenever there was a problem, Spencer made fixing it his number one priority. He couldn’t fix this. He couldn’t bring you back to life, or make your pain go away. He was so caught up in it that he hadn’t even noticed that he hurt himself on the blade you tried to take your life with.

“What can I do?”

“Just…” Spencer started before having to stop to compose himself, “Be here,” he finished, voice breaking as he did. He bit the inside of his cheek, trying to contain his emotions.

“Okay.” JJ nodded, sitting down in the chair next to him. He tilted his head to rest on her shoulder and collapsed further into her as he felt her arms wrap around him. “Okay.” She repeated. “Okay.”

Hours passed. Or maybe it was only a few minutes, Spencer wasn’t quite sure, but before they knew it, the doctor had come out to talk to them. “Are you Y/N’s family?” She asked them.

“Yes.” They both said in unison.

“Okay, well she’s stable for now, but we’re not sure when she’ll wake up. We had to suture her wrists and replace a lot of her blood, but she should be fine, with the expectation of lots of therapy of course.”

Spencer let out a sigh of relief as he allowed a small smile to appear on his face. JJ thanked the doctor as they both head into your room. They made themselves comfortable in chairs by your bed. Spencer took your hand in his as he learned back into his chair, falling asleep to the sound of your steady breathing, and the beeping on the heartrate monitor. He loved that sound. It meant you were alive. That you were okay. That he would be okay.

 Your POV

You woke up to the sun streaming in through the window pane, casting a warm glow onto your face. You almost smiled at the feeling. It reminded you of carefree summer days spent at a neighborhood block party, eating red, white and blue popsicles with your friends. It just made you happy. You could hear soft snoring coming from the person next to you.

Spencer.

Oh shit, Spencer. Had he been there all night? Had he been there more than one night? You quickly realized that this question would be a lot easier to answer if you knew what day it was. You squeezed his hand gently to wake him. He opened his eyes, which were red from either sleep deprivation, crying, or both. You didn’t know. Another pang of guilt stabbed you the more you looked at him. His messier than usual hair, the crescent shaped circles under his eyes. You did this to him, and you didn’t even know why.

“Hey beautiful,” he said groggily, rubbing sleep from his eyes. You managed to give a small smile in return. He brushed your forehead with the edge of his thumb and you relaxed at the feeling, as if all your problems and this giant mess you’ve gotten yourself into were now gone because of the way his hands felt up against your skin. Not in a sexual way, but in a pure way. The way only Spence could make you feel. He made you feel safe.

“How long have I been here?”

“Just a day.” He responded.

“And you?”

“Just a day,” he repeated, looking down at your hand as he smiled. His eyes then wandered over to your wrists, which were covered in big white bandages, but they did nothing to hide the other cuts up and down the upper part of your arms. “I love you,” he started, bringing an edge of seriousness you’ve never heard from him before. He looked up at you with those big brown eyes. “You know that, right?”

“Of course, I do, Spence.” You dreaded where this conversation was heading.

“You know you can talk to me about anything.”

“I know.” You said quietly, breaking eye contact as shame consumed you.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked in a low voice, leaning towards you as he said it. You promptly shook your head. To say you have zero interest in talking about it would be the understatement of the year. You know that you can talk to him, but you don’t want to cause him any more pain than you already put him through.

“Okay.” He said, understanding. “Not now, but eventually we need to talk about it okay?”

You nodded in agreement. As much as you hated to admit it, he was right. As always. He bent down and placed a gentle kiss on your forehead, and you felt a small tear drop trickle off his face. “I love you Y/N.” he said. “Sleep.”

[creideamhgradochas]

Thanks to the lovely @notimetoblog for taking the time to answer these! Get to know more about her, go give her a follow and then show her some love!

These questions are from this list. You should check it out, there’s 50 questions all together and they’d be great to ask your favorite fic writer!

2) Do you prefer writing OC’s or reader inserts? Explain your answer.

I tried writing an original character in a creative writing class but didn’t enjoy it as much as I do writing reader inserts. I’m not entirely sure why, but reader inserts just come more easily to me.

5) When is your preferred time to write?

I tend to prefer writing in the afternoon. This is in part because I have the most time in the afternoon and I usually have the house to myself so it’s very quiet. It’s hard to concentrate when there’s many people around having conversations.

6) Where do you take your inspiration from?

My inspiration comes from various sources. I sometimes listen to songs that jump start my imagination and I find myself daydreaming of scenarios. Things that happen to me in real life also have inspired some stories I have written. Writers I follow, of course, also inspire me to continue writing.

7) What’s your favorite scene that you’ve written?

My favorite scene to write, so far, has been the café scene in Falling. I love writing flirty Bucky, and he was just piling on the charm in that scene. Anything involving banter is also a favorite of mine.

9) Who is your favorite character to write for? Why?

BUCKY BARNES! Sorry was that too loud? I think part of the fascination with this character is his determination to overcome something that to many might be unsurmountable. His past is full of pain and torture, something that still affects him. I think, though, that it also motivates him to find himself and be the caring person he truly is. He is a hero that, apart from fighting crime, has to fight his inner demons. This is something that many people can relate to. He is such a strong character that it is very appealing to write for him. My need to constantly surround him with love and fluff in my stories is practically endless at this point.

11) How do you come up with the titles for your stories?

The titles usually come at the end. I will write out my stories and then I find myself sitting back and thinking of the title. I don’t think I’m the best at titles, so I usually stick to what I think are obvious ones. The title to my very first story was chosen because it was a phrase that I kept repeating in the story. Other stories have been titled after the song the story was based on.

12) What do you think is the best idea you’ve had for a story so far?

*gasp* This is a tough one! I’m not sure. I DO know that I was recently chatting with a friend here on tumblr and an idea for a mini series came up! I’m very excited about it and have been researching for the past few days. Can’t wait to write it out! I feel its going to be a special one.

13) Do you have any abandoned WIP’s? What made you abandon them?

I do have abandoned WIPs. I haven’t been writing for too long so I’m still a bit unsure about my writing. One particular aspect I’m unsure about is writing angst. I have two WIPs that have been abandoned because I feel like I haven’t been able to write out angst the way I hope to.

14) Are there any stories that you’ve written that you’d really love to do a sequel to?

Nights in Spanish. I had a couple of people ask for a possible sequel and I think it would be a fun one to revisit. A lovely person suggested some ideas for the sequel and I’ve been trying to get to work on those.

16) Tell me about another writer(s) who you admire? What is it about them that you admire?

There are many writers I admire. One that immediately comes to mind is @bitsandbobsandstuff​ . Her work is just incredible. I don’t think any of the words I could type out will ever do justice to how talented she is. All her stories are so vivid, raw, real, and simply amazing. Her way of describing environments and characters just plays out so well in my mind. It’s like I can see exactly what shes writing playing out. She’s incredible and I screamed every time I was notified of a new Safe With Me chapter.

Another would be @irndad​ . I always make sure to tell her how magical and lovely her stories are. The way she describes emotion is beyond amazing. I was hooked after I read one story by her. I immediately needed more.

@sgtjbuccky​ is another writer I admire. She’s amazing and so very kind. Her series are always full of fluff but when she unleashes the angst, my poor heart suffers (even though I love every minute of it). There are many more, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to finish if I keep going.

18) Do you prefer listening to music when you’re writing or do you need silence?

I like to listen to music while I write. It’s become a habit while I study, so I just transitioned it to my writing. For some reason, music doesn’t distract me but the tv or conversations happening around me, do. I really don’t know why.

19) Have you ever cried whilst writing a story?

Not yet. One day, maybe my angst skills develop to that point and I’ll be so very happy. I have teared up while reading stories, though.

21) Do you make a general outline for your stories or do you just go with the flow?

I’ve never written an outline for a story. I usually go into a story knowing how I want it to start and where I want it to go. There have been some stories that have deviated from my original plan, so I have just gone with the flow.

22) What is something you wished you’d known before you started posting fan-fiction?

HOW ADDICTING IT COULD BE! I seriously didn’t stop writing when I posted my first story. I went all in with a multi-chapter series and just couldn’t stop!

26) What’s the biggest compliment you’ve gotten?

Any comment I get melts my heart. People have been very kind to me, so much so that I consider my biggest compliment any interaction they have with a story of mine. The fact that people take their time to write out a comment, look for a gif, like a story, or reblog a story, makes me so happy. THANK YOU!

28) Do you share your story ideas with anyone else or do you keep them close to your chest?

I have shared ideas with people on tumblr. I was nervous about posting my latest series, so I asked a friend to look over it and she gave me the confidence to post it. Like I mentioned before, another conversation with another person led up to an idea for a future mini-series.

29) Do people know you write fan-fiction?

No. I think people think I’m writing a bunch of essays while I’m working on a story.

30) What’s your favorite minor character you’ve written?

I loved writing Maya in Not the Time. I loved how strong she was and how determined she was to help out her friend, even if it meant standing up to a super soldier. I also love writing Sam into my stories (although I wouldn’t consider him a minor character).

33) Can you remember the first fic you read? What was it about?

It was a while ago! It was on ao3, when I just heard about that site through twitter. I don’t remember the title, but I remember Bucky and reader had become very close friends. She would cook for the team and he would always eat with them since he loved her cooking, but he suddenly stopped. He would not eat with them and just take large amounts of food up to his room whenever she cooked salmon. Reader was worried and thought maybe he was upset. Turns out, he had found a box of kittens (*swoon*) when he was out by a bakery buying cookies for reader, and he was keeping them a secret from Tony who would not allow him to keep them. Reader discovered this after catching him in the middle of the night feeding and playing with the kittens. It’s all fluff and now I have to go back and find it because I’m still not over how adorable it was.

34) If you could write only angst, fluff or smut for the rest of your writing life, which would it be and why?

FLUFF!! I love it. I am a complete and total sucker for it. I also don’t think my heart would be able to take writing angst (especially for Bucky) forever.

[irrevocably-delicious]

Hey you guys wanna preview of that soulmate au I’m working on?

Anyway here’s the first ~3000 words. This is gonna be a long fic.

Hope you guys enjoy the direction this is going

Keith feels his eyes blink awake as he’s suddenly aware of how uncomfortably warm it is in his bedroom and how the skin of his thighs stick together. He rolls over and groans. His knees pop. He reaches for his phone to check the time.

 11:12 am

 He sighs feeling disappointed in himself. He used to get up and run 10km before 7am, but his night classes are now taking their toll. He tosses his phone to the side and that’s when he sees it. Written in what looks like blue pen, in fine, scratchy, writing, three words are written across the back of his left hand.

 Eggs

Milk

Rice

 He squints at the words. Was I supposed to buy these? He thinks. They’re clearly a shopping list of some sort, a kind of reminder, but Keith has no memory of writing down the list. He also has no memory of needing any of these ingredients. He had always been a restless sleeper, perhaps he had written it in the middle of the night in a bout of sleepy inspiration?

 Keith pays it no mind and decides to finally begin his day. He hops into the shower and relishes the feeling of shedding his layer of night sweat. He feels even better when he takes a handful of body wash and begins lathering up his body. This is when he notices the second peculiar thing about the note on his hand.

 It doesn’t come off. Not only does it not come off, but it doesn’t fade or bleed or even smudge. The note looks exactly like a plain blue ballpoint pen, but it behaves like its tattooed onto Keith’s skin.

 Keith rubs at the note more aggressively. His nails scratch at his skin, hoping it’ll lift up, when he pauses. His eyes narrow on the note as realization hits.

“I’m fucking lactose intolerant.” He scoffs.

 The note haunts Keith for the rest of the day. He wishes he could let it go, but upon further investigation things just start to get odder.

 He has no memory of writing the note. He’s lactose intolerant, so there would never be a need to buy milk, and now Keith is pretty sure that the handwriting isn’t even his. He’s sitting at the dining room table rewriting the words “eggs milk rice” over and over again, trying to compare them to the one on his hand. He supposes he could have possibly written this? Maybe if he was half asleep and his motor skills were off? But the g’s look dramatically different and the lowercase k is all wrong. He groans.

 “Studying?” Shiro walks in and seems impressed at the image of his little brother surrounded by paper with what looks like notes on them.

“Shiro, do I sleep walk?” Keith blurts. Shiro blinks at the odd outburst. He pauses for a moment until he registers the question he has just been asked.

“Ah I mean…” He scratches the side of his cheek in thought. “Maybe? I dunno. You’ve always been a pretty light sleeper. Generally once you’re awake, you’re fully awake.”

Keith pouts and Shiro sees that this is not the answer he was looking for.

“But sleeping habits change all the time, so you never know. Like it’s common for people who maybe slept really heavy as kids to get more sensitive when they’re older.”

 Keith nods, but the wrinkle between his brows does not go away.

 He manages to pull his focus from his hand for the rest of the night. His night classes are tiring, but they work wonders in distracting him. Keith collapses in bed at the end of the night and doesn’t remember his hand until he’s in the shower again. He breathes a sigh of relief when he notices that it has faded. It still doesn’t smudge in the shower, but at least it looks like it will not be permanent.

 The note is almost completely gone by evening. Only shreds of letters remain in faint blue. Keith lounges on the couch, judging Shiro as he plays his video game and his character falls off another ledge.

“You can jump on your hat remember.”

“Fuck, no, I always forget that.”

“Or you know, just get better at hitting x. That’s literally all this is.” Keith smirks. Shiro elbows him in the ribs. Keith pushes him back.

 “Next time you die I…” But Keith can’t finish his thought. Because there, written on his hand in fresh ink, on top of the last note that has not quite completely gone away, are new words.

 Piano recital 6:30

 “Next time I what?” Shiro asks. Keith can barely hear over the pulse in his ears.

“I gotta pee.” He slurs out. His footsteps betray his panic in how quickly they rush across the floor. Shiro stares after him with concern.

 Keith crashes into the bathroom with labored breathing. He stares at the note. His head is full of screaming questions.

I’ve been awake this whole time, how did this happen? I didn’t write this… did I?! No! I would remember! Also I DON’T KNOW ANYONE WHO PLAYS THE PIANO!

 He shoves his hand underneath the tap and begins to scrub. Hard. He scrubs until his skin is raw and dry, but the blue words remain as fresh as ever. He stares at the note in defeat, his gut growing cold.

 Keith is scared.

 Over the next few weeks more notes appear. All of them are in that same scratchy writing. All of them impossible to remove, but seem to fade of their own accord. Most appear on his hand, but several appear on his forearm and palm. Sometimes it looks like ink stains his fingers.

 Remember permission slip

Cake pan 4 Hunk

Pick up Lisa

Get Tony’s cake

Uniform money

 Each note references an event or even a person that Keith does not know. He doesn’t have a uniform, and definitely no permission slips since he was expelled. Who the hell is Lisa? These words start to make Keith less afraid, but they being to feel otherworldly. Like something is trying to reach out to him. He sees glimpses into a life that is not his.

 Children’s drawings appear on his arm. Or at least he hopes it was drawn by a child. The classic square house with a triangle roof. Several crude looking human figures. A scribble that could be a dog. These make Keith the most nervous and curious.

 Keith rolls out of bed one morning and holds his arm above his eyes to survey what damage may have been done during the night. It’s become a habit by now. Wake up, look at arm, stare in frustration at any new notes, contemplate their meaning, wonder if he’s crazy, acceptance.

 This morning Keith gasps. His eyes roam over his arm to see that it is completely covered. Any bare skin that was left has now been marked with fresh notes and doodles, while old notes on his hand and wrist are just beginning to fade. His entire arm is a smattering of marker and pen, and some drawings have even made their way over to his other arm. Some are just swirls, while others are flowers or what looks to be a coding language. There’s a particularly large cupcake on his bicep with the words “Hunky cakes” written underneath it.

 Keith is horrified. He dresses in a long sleeved shirt even though it’s a particularly warm spring morning. Keith curses global warming as he tries to make himself a chilly breakfast smoothie. He goes about his day, running to the grocery store and working on some readings for his classes, whilst trying to keep his core temperature from climbing dangerously high. He wears shorts and ties his hair up, before he starfishes on the ground.

 When Shiro comes home from a long day of running tutorials he crashes on the couch next to Keith.

“Long day?”

“They’re so stupid.” Shiro whines. It’s one of his more common phrases these days. It’s not unusual for him to burst into Keith’s room late at night, brandishing some student’s essay that he’s marking, and start screeching “What the fuck?! What the fuck?! They’re so stupid! I told them so many times…. How do they…?! How do they not swallow their tongues in their sleep?!”.

 “Sorry,” Keith chuckles at his brother slumped next to him. “At least you don’t have any first years next semester.”

“I guess. But then I get angry at my students because they should know better.”

Shiro picks himself up by leaning on Keith, but visibly grimaces when he makes contact.

 “Ugh, bro you’re so hot.” He wipes his hand on his pants. Now that he’s close to Keith he can feel the heat coming off of him in waves. It’s making him uncomfortable, so he can’t imagine how Keith feels.

 “Jesus, why are you wearing this shirt? You should get changed.”

“I’m fine.” Keith shrugs. Shiro had felt that Keith’s shirt was damp with sweat. Hardly fine.

“At least push up your sleeves…” Shiro touches the cuffs of Keith’s sleeve, but Keith’s hand snaps down on top of his. He snatches his arm away.

“I said I’m fine.” He snaps.

 Shiro’s eyebrows rise in concern. Keith knows he’s fucked up now.

“Roll up your sleeves.” Shiro says. It’s not a request anymore.

“I don’t want to. I’m not hot.”

“Yes you are. Now roll up your sleeves and show me your arms.” Shiro shifts his body in a way that shows his brother that he is prepared to use force. He plants both feet firmly on the ground.

 Keith, troubled younger brother with a history of abandonment and anxiety problems understands Shiro’s concern. He knows what Shiro is thinking. Lord knows he displays the symptoms, but he can’t tell him the truth.

 “I’m not hurting myself.” Keith replies weakly.

“Then show me.”

Keith’s mouth hardens into a scowl.

 He holds up his hands to push back, but Shiro is too fast. His larger hand wraps easily around Keiths slender wrist, and even though Keith scratches at his hands and protests, he still feels his sleeve easily wrenched upwards. Shiro stills.

“What the…?” His eyes roam over the markings on Keith’s arms.

 They’re confusing, but harmless. He tries to read the notes, but doesn’t seem to understand the references to people or events that have no place in Keith’s life.

“What is this?” His tone is gentle. He releases Keith’s arm with an apologetic look.

“I don’t know!” Keith snaps. The stress and fear that had been simmering underneath his surface for weeks bursts forth. He’s terrified, but there’s a weird sense of relief that someone else knows now. That maybe someone else might believe him.

 “They just started appearing. Sometimes during the night, sometimes during the day. I can’t wash them off no matter what I do, but over time they do seem to fade.” Keith’s words are erratic.

“I don’t know who… who any of these people are!” He points at a note on his elbow. This one is in different handwriting that reads Katie was here.

Shiro pulls his arm close and inspects the notes closer. He also doesn’t recognize the names. His eyes ghost over one note that makes him gasp. It’s more faded but the words are unmistakable.

Get Dad’s dry-cleaning.

 “Keith… you definitely didn’t write these.” He admits.

“Yes thank you, I know that. My handwriting isn’t even the same. Believe me I’ve tested it.” With his secret out, Keith tears off his shirt in a huff. The fresh air against his sweaty body immediately makes him feel better.

“No I mean… I think someone else is writing these…” Shiro goes on. Keith continues to scowl.

 “I think this might be your soul link, Keith.”

Keith lets out a long, shuddering sigh.

“Fuck.” He slumps forward. “I was afraid of that.”

“What? No Keith this is great! This is exciting!” Shiro grabs the smaller boy’s shoulders and shakes him. Keith flops apathetically.

“Shiro, I just…”

“Have you written anything back?” Shiro beams. At least someone is thrilled.

“God no.” Keith scoffs. He pulls himself away from Shiro’s touch. Shiro sits with a shocked expression.

 “What?! Why not?!”

“Shiro!” Keith shouts. “You don’t understand. Like, I’ve gotten children’s drawings on here before! What if he’s old and has kids already? What if he’s…” He deflates.

“What if he’s already married?”

Shiro smirks.

“What if it’s not even a he?”

“Oh my god why would you even say that!?” Keith hisses and shoves his brother as he cackles into the couch cushions. Shiro lets him get in a couple of good hits. He deserves it.

 …

 Weeks pass and the notes on his arm continue to come in, but thankfully he is no longer covered. It’s back to the odd reminder on his hand, or a doodle on his wrist. Keith is thankful that he no longer has to hide them. For the first few days when Shiro would spy them he would get this know it all “You’re being unreasonable” look on his face, but now he has completely dropped it.

 Life goes on. Keith spends his days at the gym and his nights at the community college down the road trying to build up credits. He chips away at homework and punching bags, his days passing in the quiet way they always had. Shiro teaches during the day, and when their paths cross, they play video games together or go window-shopping with Matt.

 Matt crashes into their flat unannounced one night. He balances a box of a dozen donuts in one hand and a bag of ciders, soft drink and rum in the other. There’s a tube of pringles in the pocket of his jacket.

 “I just handed in the first draft of my thesis and now I need to get FUUUUCKED up!” He announces.

 Shiro and Keith stare from where they hover in the kitchen. Shiro is the first to move as he smirks. His hand reaches into the top drawer and he spins a bottle opener around on his finger.

“Right on, man.”

 After the initial congratulations, the three fall into a familiar pattern. Matt pulls out his laptop and they crowd around the coffee table, fingers greasy with pizza, and hop from vine compilation to some niche video Matt has found.

“Look at this premium content.” Matt whispers as his fingers excitedly enter new search terms.

 When they grow tired of what weirdness the internet has to offer, Shiro pulls out the videogames. They play mariokart (Matt yelling “dibs on waluigi”) but it’s around the time Shiro is playing Breath of the Wild with Matt helping him to solve a shrine puzzle, that Keith feels himself drifting off. He shouldn’t be surprised. Night school was really starting to wreak havoc with his sleep schedule. His head hits the armrest with a heavy thud and he doesn’t move for 10 minutes.

 “Dude, hey…” Matt whispers. Shiro hums in acknowledgement.

“Is Keith asleep?”

Shiro looks over his shoulder. Keith’s breathing is heavy and regular. His chest rises and crashes in a steady rhythm. Shiro chuckles.

“Aw poor little guy. He hit the wall.”

Matt starts to giggle gleefully to himself. He shuffles over to his back and pulls out a black marker.

“Punishment, punishment…” He chants under his breath. He uncaps the marker and gets close to Keith.

“Aw no, dude, no.” Shiro weakly protests, but he’s still laughing when Matt tip toes in close.

“He knows the rules! First one to fall asleep…” His hand hovers over Keith’s forehead.

“No! Dude, dude! Not the face! I’m serious, don’t.” Shiro hisses. Matt pouts a bit but understands.

“Ok ok, I’ll put it somewhere he can hide it.” He sighs.

 …

 “Morning,” Matt blearily greets Shiro as he pads to the fridge. He pulls out a gallon of orange juice and downs it straight from the bottle.

“Matt,” Shiro scowls over his coffee.

“What?” Matt wipes away his orange juice moustache. “I’m boosting your immune system. You should thank me.” He smirks.

 He starts to prepare his toast and he and Shiro fall into a comfortable silence. The room is quiet but for the quiet tinkle of Matt’s knife occasionally hitting his plate.  There’s a light breeze through the window and no one has anywhere to be for several hours.

 “WHAT THE…?!” The silence is broken. Both Matt and Shiro begin to laugh at Keith’s distant shout.

 It takes three seconds for him to come screeching in, brandishing his forearm in front of him. Matt’s crudely drawn dick covers most of the skin there.

“WHO THE FUCK DREW THIS?!” Keith is livid. His face is red.

Matt’s face matches, but it’s because he’s trying to keep in his laughter. He weakly raises his hand. Keith’s eyes are blazing.

 “MATT I WILL FUCKING-!”

“Hey, Keith, bud come on. You know the rules-“ Then Shiro’s eyes go wide. He claps a hand over his mouth and guilt rises in his throat.

“OH MY GOD I FORGOT!” He cries. “Keith, I’m so sorry! I let him-!”

“YOU FORGOT???!!” Keith’s voice pitches dangerously high.

“Just go wash it off! He may not have seen it yet!” Shiro tries to find some silver lining. Keith sprints towards the bathroom.

“IT’S NOON!” He cries behind him.