#like I could make it work but just not in a mase way yknow?

[arolesbianism]

I've decided that Ako and Tomoe still get to be sibling adjacent in the eternal gales au but like in a comedy of errors kind of way. They've been able to message eachother since they were kids and have picked up a similar but to the left dynamic as in canon but over all the years they've known eachother they've never once realized that the other is an alien. Every oddity has completely flown over their heads and it's not until the other staliens and humans are allowed to contact eachother that they find out and theyre just like :O

[pinkydec]

weird dreams with ally part 66

So I had this dream that I was friends with the england squad but I was also decs sister?? and we all went to this lake together to relax and like we were all in and out of the water and like there was four players still in the water along with one of my best friends and then all of a sudden this lightening struck the water and like a bunch of us that were out of the water got injured but not badly, but there was people in the water when the lightening struck and so we went looking for them, called search and rescue and such, and we couldn’t find them and this was like dec, kalv, tyrone, my friend and phil f?? and they searched for a long time for them but couldn’t find them so they called the search off and basically said they were missing presumed dead and me and mason broke tf down and then it time skipped to five years forward??

but the five years forward was like a flash of stuff we did in the years and apparently when they didn’t have training and such we would go around and keep an eye on water so nobody else had to go through what we went through but we missed them all so bloody much, and we were at the exact same lake one day but I was with my nephews and mason had his niece and we were all playing and I swam out a bit but had this gut feeling that I needed to move so I did, and then we all got out the water because of my gut feeling and then lightening struck again.

and then the missing lot turned up?? and they hadn’t aged one bit?? like they were still the exact same age they were when the first lightening struck. and we walked around to where they were and we didn’t believe it was them because it’d had been 5 years? so me and mason are clutching each other because decs right infront of us and we didn’t know if we could handle it if it wasn’t them.

and for them, they were only gone a day?? but in fact it had been five years and we ended up breaking down on each other because like even though we didn’t want to admit they were dead, we all believed that they were?

so when dec and the others disappeared mase and dec had just admitted they had feelings for each other and were organising a date, so after like we told everyone they were alive, like everyone ended up round my house and it was just floods of tears and breakdowns.

dec and mase ended up going on a date to this restaurant, and me and chilly snuck after them and they went on a boat from mine to the restaurant and we snuck on one behind them and had to keep swerving behind stuff to make sure they didn’t see us.

And we eventually got there, and got seated at a table a few down from them but we’d dressed up to make it look like it wasn’t us, and chilly was like order whatever you want I’m paying🥺, while dec and mase are taking the piss out of each other and overall having a good date??

and yknow who walks in? kalvin who spots us instantly and he was going on a date with someone but calls our names and basically exposes us that were here to dec and mase, and I give kalv his post because I was in charge of all their posts when they went missing”

and dec and mase ask us why we’re here and we’re like oh we’re on a date trying to cover it up and dec starts getting a bit upset because that’s his baby sister on a date with one of his closest friends?? but it doesn’t work because mason knew me and Ben classed each other as brother and sister and so he just raised an eyebrow and explains that to him and so they go back to what the fuck are you doing there z

so me and chilly are like fine we’re here to keep an eye on you since you’re my brother and my best friend and like?? you’re now my baby brother considering the fact I’m now four years older than you?? and I just wanted to check it went perfectly for you both because mason and I were always there for each other after you disappeared and dec gets out of his chair and half hugs me over mine and is like you’ll always be my baby sister no matter what and thanks mason for being there for me while he was gone and the other way round and chilly and I end up leaving so they can enjoy the date

[nothingunrealistic]

just for fun, some snapshots of this fic as it was being written, with commentary. under a cut to avoid dumping dozens of screenshots in a row on anyone’s dash. also i’m going to reblog this and add some more because tumblr is cutting me off from saving any more changes but i’m not done saying what i wanted to say.

i got this prompt back in july, dropped it into a new google doc, and then didn’t do anything with it until october. as you can see, i didn’t immediately have any good ideas, so i just let it percolate in the back of my mind (along with one or two dozen other writing prompts and projects) for a while.

then, three and a half months later, i finally had an idea! at three in the morning! (not pictured: half a dozen links to pages about autistic burnout, meltdowns, and shutdowns. research is important but it’s not as fun to look at.)

sometimes you think of dialogue well before you think of how to fit it into a scene.

this was eleven days later.

finally! some actual prose! and a way to tie the story to the events of canon! (after this, i worked on this particular fic every day until it was done.)

just putting stuff in brackets works basically every time. the bracketed notes start out as a more high-level interview of what’s going to happen, then get broken down / separated / elaborated on further until they pretty much stand in for individual paragraphs / sentences / lines of dialogue or inner monologue.

see: stuff from the Big Block Of Text getting copied and pasted to where it should be.

pretty sure *this* big block of text got written on one of the rare occasions where i actually managed to write for the entire hour i have set aside specifically For writing. if i were to break down the revision history further, it’d almost certainly show that many of these paragraphs started out as bracketed not-quite-prose, some of which still remained at this point. (also pictured: one particular line from mafee that did not make it into the final draft.)

more details from canon and just details in general.

mafee does Not have rights. (also, it turns out it’s much easier for someone to press their hands against their whole face if they’re not wearing glasses.)

by far the funniest change i made while writing this.

writing any new character’s pov is an adventure in trying to nail down how they’d talk inside their own head. doubly true for any new billions character given that no one talks like a normal person on billions; triply true when it’s a character like rian who Knows no one talks normally and is trying to fit in with the Accepted Dialect.

i’m like dropping hints that winston is having a bad time right now.

winston is having a bad time right now.

rip post-it note fidgeting; long live pen fidgeting. (another research topic: what *do* quants do all day that they might still be working on late at night? well, possibly, backtesting and optimization of algorithms.)

two character threads that started here: rian trying (and ultimately failing) not to make it obvious that she Cares about winston, and winston speaking more tersely than usual, for obvious reasons.

i watched Many clips from the show trying to figure out whether the doors at axe capital ever stayed open on their own, what sound they made when people opened them, and if it was even plausible for characters to hear construction noise through the glass when the doors were shut. (on that last point, i ultimately decided that if the mase cappers could hear becky lynch yelling through a closed door — and most likely they did hear her before they saw her — they could certainly hear power tools.)

“everyone else went home” was the best reason for mafee to walk back into the tmc office that i could think of. he just wants to hang out with Someone yknow?

mafee’s made the noise worse not only by leaving the door open, but also by sitting down loudly and talking a lot!

mafee’s use of “quisling” is a very specific shoutout to the incident he’s describing. axe declared that there was a quisling in the office; mafee had to ask what that meant, and donnie defined it for him; a few episodes later, mafee went out of his way to drop “quisling” into the conversation when talking about it to someone he wanted to impress.

getting the wording of this exchange just right was tricky. also rip mafee’s chair spinning.

switched up the placement of hammer noises and drill noises so that it’d be a Continuous, unrelenting noise that forced mafee to talk louder still and ultimately became too much for winston.

also had to figure out how to fit this comment from mafee into the flow of the scene.

mafee jumps to act as soon as he realizes something’s wrong; rian thinks about what the best course of action would be first.

rian’s got a pretty idealistic perspective on how taylor operates. (this connects nicely to a canon comment from wendy about how taylor tries “to solve every problem [they] see.”) she’s also still working out How people talk here.

wanted to include this early point about it being quieter in taylor’s office, but i couldn’t really make it work.

this was the first point at which i had a clear idea of how this fic was going to end / would conclude in any satisfactory way. bringing that “rian cares but doesn’t want that to be Known” detail full circle.

punctuation pickiness! (and the door is finally closed!)

you know what sounds even worse than metal on wood? metal on metal!

i spent so much of one day just working on these few paragraphs.

and then i got the idea to throw in rian’s recollection of winston’s description of the mase cap office either late that night or the next morning and wrote most of it down while sitting through a meeting. (ft. more emphasis on the Separation between rian and winston & taylor.)

DUMBO is an acronym (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) but it isn’t always written in all caps. i found a style guide (from a college department in nyc, though i can’t remember which one) that declared it should be written as Dumbo rather than DUMBO and decided to go with that.

mafee is WELL out of the loop here. no wonder he wants to leave.

i went pretty hard on “mafee is being Less Than Kind And Understanding about this whole situation” and eventually had to have him walk it back with “well i didn’t WANT him to suffer or anything.”

this is everything i managed to get done in the Designated Writing Hour (and then some) the night that the supernatural finale aired. oops.

i was torn between rian hearing Something to alert her of taylor’s presence and hearing nothing at all; ultimately i chose the latter. (this revision was also from the brief period of time where i changed the google doc to a landscape layout in the hopes that the Changed Visual would shake some more ideas loose. it worked, a bit.)

see: rian Not hearing taylor.

this detail was added pretty late — one of the last changes i’d made the day before posting. (i’d also switched the google doc back to portrait mode at this point.)