#maida's little fandom

[winters-on-the-wing]

rip maida westabrook you would have loved sofia the first and jojo siwa.

rip dicky dore you would have loved project gutenberg and temu.

rip arthur duncan you would have loved google maps and freerice.com.

rip rosie brine you would have loved the breath of the wild cooking mechanics and playing warrior cats with friends during recess.

rip harold lathrop you would have loved reddit and marie kondo.

rip laura lathrop you would have loved dance moms and the josh hutcherson whistle meme.

[cillyscribbles]

forgive my stumbling entry into a fandom i know nothing about but have you guys already discussed how with a little insanity we can make this sapphic as fuck??? have you discussed how upon blinding the reaper that attacked her and realizing it was dragging her into the deadzone, marguerit maida chooses to hold on and go down and just hope?? paul's 100% accurate assessment that she was either going to kill it or die trying?? the way she, upon killing the reaper, carves her way into its chest cavity and lives on its flesh and heat for weeks, literally surviving off the thing that was meant to kill her?? that she, when recounting the days she spent inside its body, devouring its flesh from the inside, an alien parasite to this creature, says she doesn't "mean to kill folks, it's just sometimes what you need is on the inside of someone else's ribcage"?? have we talked about how she continually characterizes the reaper as a "her", calls it a beautiful and terrifying creature, and goes back into the freezing fucking ocean to fish its skull out of the depths so she can keep it inside her new home??? displayed as an eternal reminder of the things she went through (together with it, arguably)??? her curse and her blessing, the consequences of her daring's folly that destroyed her previous life but also her indomitable determination to survive that carried her through everything?? have we talked about that already or do i need to write the fic myself????????

[no-literally]

10 books

Rules: 10 books for people to get to know you better, or that you just really like.

Tagged by @lyriclorelei​ and oh boy did I end up going on a lot about these picks!

The Monster at the End of this Book by Jon Stone - I was so extremely a Sesame Street-raised child. This book taught me about meta humor and histrionics, both of which I adore in my media today.

Maida’s Little Shop by Inez Hayes Gilmore - This is a book my grandmother read as a girl, and then my mother read as a girl, and then I got to read. It’s about a rich and sick girl who leaves her family to start a shop (with adult supervision) and finally makes friends. It taught me about pig latin and popcorn balls. (Also, turns out the author was a feminist journalist, so we love that.)

Meet Samantha by Susan S. Ader - I promise I didn’t just read books about wealthy girls from the turn of the century as a child! But I did get HEAVILY sucked in by the American Girl dolls, and I’ve gotten pulled right back as a pandemic comfort coping mechanism. Re-reading this book, I realized it influenced my creative writing, my sense of justice, and my understanding of how to be a good friend.

The Realm of Possibility by David Levithan - As a teenager, this book of interconnected poems from different characters let me feel like I was listening in on a full school’s worth of teenage issues and feelings. It taught me compassion; it let me feel less alone.

As You Like It by William Shakespeare - Seeing this play in college might have been when I fell in love with plays (I’d say theater, but I was sold on musicals by age 8). It’s more or less where my fake dating obsession starts. Give me a ship this messy any day.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - This book is SO SAD and SO BEAUTIFUL and I’m glad I watched the movie to stay in the world a little bit longer. My Andrew Garfield and Carey Mulligan obsessions are due to this book.

Angels in America by Tony Kushner - Another sprawling obsession: I saw the HBO series, I immediately borrowed a copy of the play(s), I bought my own copy of the play, I saw the play(s) in real life, I saw the play(s) filmed for National Theater Live. Now I’m gearing up for another round of obsession when I read the oral history sitting on my bookshelf. I love these characters, the magical realism, the real-life people mixed with fictional ones, and the hope in the ending.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan - This book helped me realize I LOVE linked short stories that share a variety of perspectives. (In creating this list, I’m seeing just how many books I love are proof of that!) I’ve read other favorites, like Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and There There by Tommy Orange, because this book taught me I loved this genre. Also, it has a chapter that’s just powerpoint slides? LOVE that.

The Wicked + The Divine comics by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie - This comic is so well thought-out that random lines and visuals in the first issue reference the plot points of the last. A comic series about fandom, power, mythology, and inspiration. Plus, a murder mystery! I enjoyed every issue, even the one that really, honestly, had too much gore for my liking.

The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite - This was the book that got me into romance novels, which would have been enough of a gift on its own! But in addition to being a wonderful intro to the genre, it stars two women who are passionate about their work (though that work is very different), a romance plot that is people-focused instead of circumstance, and a thesis about who writes history and why notable women’s legacies are willfully erased by the patriarchy. A great, gorgeous read. 

Tagging: @onthecyberseas @dollsome-does-tumblr @homeschoolpromqueen @trianamars @nicoleanell @strix-alba

[viallyvee]

Hello!

I am a growing writer and i would appreciate constructive criticism from now on.

✨I will be writing:

Fluff

H/cs and drabbles

Angst

Angst-comfort, comfort-angst

Characters reacting to a situation (specify which characters and scenario pls)

Canonxcanon

🚫I will not be writing:

Anything sexual ( i see you 📸)

Incest

Matchups

Child/adult

Canonxfanon

Anything showing homophobia and/or transphobia

I may add some things to both lists.

I will write fandoms for

The Owl House

Villainous

Little Witch Academia (i will rarely accept requests for this since im still watching it)

Black Magic (sacredhyacinth on tapas)

Hard Lacquer (tapas)

Unfamiliar (also tapas)

Anon asks are allowed!

If you want me to draw certain characters in a situation, thats ok :) same rules apply to this. Canon characters only thoo

Black Magic characters i will be writing for

Loretta Dalma

Gabriel Williams

Melanie Lycan

Amara Wilson(i forgot her last name :skull:)

Elise Martinez-Welton

Roman Welton

Raquel Martinez

Mina Ito

Reina

Marina

Julius

Marlas

Maida

Sabrina

Hard Lacquer

Claire (will add more later)

Unfamiliar

Planchette

Sunny

that one doctor (did he have a name or i forgot??)

Babs

Pinyon

Little Witch Academia

Diana Cavendish

Atsuko Kagari

Lotte Yansson

Amanda O' Neil

Villainous

Dr. Flug

Black Hat

Miss Heed

Dementia

The Owl House

Luz Noceda

Amity Blight

Eda Clawthorne

Raine Whispers

Kikimora

Hunter Wittebane

See you in my inbox 😉✨

[questionablygourmet]

From your book ask: 2, 15, and 17 please 😊📖

2. top 5 books of all time?

Oh, that one's hard. Let's go with...

One of the Wayward Children novels, by Seanan McGuire. I'm not sure which one, but I've read Down Among the Sticks and Bones and Come Tumbling Down the most.

Kushiel's Dart, by Jacqueline Carey

Daughter of the Empire, by Janny Wurts and Raymond Feist

The Slow Regard of Silent Things, by Patrick Rothfuss

and for a nonfiction.... I'm choosing between a few here, but probably The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt. I was annoyed at my mother for how she recommended it (she seemed convinced it would utterly blow my mind and change my worldview, which it really did not), but it was still a very, very good book with a lot of useful information and concepts that I still find myself referencing.

15. recommend and review a book.

I spent a lot of time on this one on the personal blog, so I'll copy from there, with an additional note that it gave me nontrivial Hannibal vibes -

I just finished The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, by Natasha Pulley, and I would be delighted to recommend it. It is the story of a British government clerk whose life is saved by a mysterious pocketwatch that was left in his flat one day, and the Japanese watchmaker who made it.

It is a little slow to get into (which is why I didn’t read it when I received it as a gift in 2016; I was finishing grad school then and did not have much mental energy to spare); while clearly there is Something Weird going on with Mr. Mori, the watchmaker, it’s hard to believe he’s the person who actually made the bomb that his watch saved Thaniel from, despite another expert’s assertion that the remains of the bomb trigger mechanism bear the hallmarks of his work.

If you don’t know ahead of time - though I’m about to tell you! which will hopefully convince more people to read it (there is a tiny fandom with some good fic and it could use some more!) - the fact that it’s actually a romance really sneaks up on you. I went into it without knowing anything except that my dad had given it to me after he read and loved The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern) on my recommendation, and said that this book had made him feel a similar sort of wonder.

This made me sure it couldn’t possibly be queer despite the neon signposts in that direction for quite a while. xP (My dad, while generally on the progressive side for a rich, cishet white male boomer… does not voluntarily read a lot of queer fiction.) So I got a very pleasant surprise! But I don’t think one loses anything from knowing it’s a queer romance going into it; it’s absolutely delightful to watch it unfold in its meandering, quietly lyrical sort of way.

The story is set in a fictionalized 19th century, with clockwork that can do things it really shouldn’t, and a few other supernatural elements; I think I’d classify it as “steampunk-esque,” but not really steampunk. It’s more that it sits adjacent to that aesthetic category. There’s some exploration of themes of nationalism and cultural shifts (and British cultural hegemony), but they’re secondary to the development of relationships between the characters, and may be a bit too… British in perspective… for some readers. (Clan na Gael/Clann na nGael, a historical Irish republican group, plays the role of something of a bogeyman; they are the architects of some major bombings around London during the course of the story, and the way the story pokes at Japanese cultural shifts was interesting to me but felt a bit under-resolved.)

At any rate, if you like understated, slow-burn romance (with a side of found family and trauma-processing), it’s very worth a read!

17. top 5 children’s books?

Sing a Song of Popcorn: Every Child's Book of Poems - ack, I don't seem to still have a copy, but I'm glad I was able to find the title. I've always loved poetry and these are just. So much fun. I can still recite one of the longer story-poems from it from memory.

The Magic Well, by Maida Silverman - Basically Tam Lin, except with a mother and daughter, where the daughter becomes the ward of the Queen of Fairies. Gorgeous art, and I read it so many times.

Dinotopia, by James Gurney - an absolute fucking classic.

The Paper Bag Princess, by Robert Munsch - more of a young-kid sort of book, but so good. I used to "read" it to my little brother before I actually could read, because I had it memorized.

The Lorax, by Doctor Seuss - I fucking adored all of Doctor Seuss's stuff growing up, but The Lorax was my favorite. My dad did the best voices with that one.

[theemptyquarto]

Abandoned WIP

Warstan (but John got killed off before the story starts) and purely platonic Sherlock & Mary.  Quite AU... John and Mary get together before Sherlock jumped off of Bart’s.  Maybe a little bit of hinted unrequited Johnlock, I honestly can’t remember if I was going there with this fic.  A “Mary is the new Watson” retelling of “The Adventure of the Empty House,” rated T.  This was written before S3 happened and I fell in love with BBC Mary and she actually made me view BBC John as an interesting character in his own right and I rejiggered my alignments.

I’m going to rant here, just briefly, about how ACD’s Mary Morstan is probably one of the most wronged-by-their-author characters that I can think of, which is why I started writing this fic where she takes the lead.

She appears for the first time in the second-ever (authorially, not chronologically) Sherlock Holmes story, “The Sign of the Four,” and is delightful.  Watson falls hard in love right away and acts like a huge dweeb about her, she’s courageous, clever, and kind.  Maybe without all the panache of the later Irene Adler, but a more traditionally Victorian heroine for our more traditionally Victorian junior protagonist.  Her next appearance, “The Adventure of the Crooked Man,” is significantly more tangential, but she sets the action of the story in play and is shown to be a helpful, kind figure.

And then all of a sudden Conan Doyle ships her off to visit her mother (she was established as an orphan), stops using her at all, and finally kills her off.

Not even on the page.  Between books.  And it’s mentioned so tangentially in two lines of “The Adventure of the Empty House” that you can easily miss it if you aren’t looking for it.

(Incidentally this sort of shit is why ACD fandom can’t agree on how many wives Watson had or who the subject  of his “sad bereavement” is.  The number ranges from 1-13.)

Why, Artie?  Why did you do that?  I mean I get if you want to park Watson back at Baker Street you probably do have to off her but you were a fairly good hack and doing it this way made you give up the opportunity to have some sort of emotional payoff in your stories.  Especially since you later introduce another wife character who is in no way distinct from Mary (a niche component of ACD fandom thinks that Mary didn’t die at all and Watson “abandoning (Holmes) for a wife,” was him and Mary reconciling after an estrangement.)

Anyway.  Don’t create cool characters and then kill them for no good reason.  That’s my point.

_____________

The Empty Flat (Mary)

I had been widowed for three months and was rather surprised at how badly I was doing with it. The snug three-bedroom garden flat in Maida Vale had been the perfect size for a not-quite-young couple planning on children.  Now it seemed vast and empty and utterly, utterly silent.  When I slept, which wasn’t all that much, I did it on the sofa.  Our bed still smelled faintly of his aftershave, and I couldn’t stand either to sleep there or to wash the sheets.  Arthur, the blue point Siamese cat who I had bought into the marriage, would curl up on my feet and awaken me with his yowls in the morning.

To some extent I had been able to occupy my mind with work, and the requirements of my job had kept me more or less a functional adult.  But the summer holidays had begun a week previous, and I was thus thrown entirely on my own resources, which were scant. What family I had left were all back in America, and the friends I had made in England seemed to have melted away since John’s death.  Some days, I thought that this was due to the universal impulse to avoid reminders of mortality.  Other days I decided it was more likely due to the fact that I deleted their emails and declined to answer their phone calls.

The truth, as always, was probably somewhere in the middle.  

Whatever the cause, my life was empty.  I ate when I remembered that I was meant to.  I wore pajamas all day.  I left the flat when I ran out of cat food, and at night I would turn on the tv and stare at it without paying attention until I finally sank into oblivion.

Presumably it was on one of those descents into the maelstrom of crap British late-night TV that I first took note of the murder of Ronald Adair.  The dead man was vaguely familiar to me, though I had never watched any of his shows personally.  He was a scion of one of those impoverished but very old-and-noble families that the English keep on out of sentiment. Showing unusual initiative for one of his class, he’d made a success of himself by appearing on a famous reality show, then on the “celebrity” version of that show, and parlaying that into one of those mysterious but apparently quite lucrative careers that consist mostly of having your picture taken.  

And now, he was dead, shot in the back of the head in his own bedroom on Park Lane.

The story struck me, for some reason.  John, when he’d been alive, used to take four daily papers and half a dozen weeklies, and I had not cancelled them yet.  I plucked a week’s worth out of the recycling where I had tossed them, unread, and scanned through them for articles about the murder.

Ronald Adair had been alone in his bedroom, drinking neat whiskey and updating twitter, when he died.  His last tweet (@JustLukeyA, “LOL C U @ Ibiza”) had been sent at 10:11 in the evening. His personal assistant had heard the sound of breaking glass, broken down the locked door that led into the bedroom, seen his body, and dialed 999 by 10:17.  The bullet had been a large caliber hollow point round that had done severe damage to the back of his skull, and he had most likely died almost instantly.

The entire affair was mysterious.  While the police hadn’t released any real statements, the personal assistant had been the only other person in the house at the time of the shooting, and had been released after questioning.  This would suggest the shot had been fired from outside, but the window in Adair’s bedroom, while open, was on the fourth floor.  There was no evidence to suggest anyone had climbed to the window, meaning that the shot had come from somewhere outside.  

This made no sense at all to the gossip rags.  The window faced directly over Hyde Park, and any level shot would have had to come from over a mile away.  And shooting from ground level would have been impossible: the Park was open, reasonably crowded given the warmth of the summer evening, and no one had heard a thing.  The American embassy was less than two hundred yards away, and even its overblown security hadn’t noted any unusual activity.  Essentially, it was impossible that he could have been shot, and yet there he was.

As I read through the papers, I thought how John would have gone through them at the breakfast table to try and figure out what had happened.  Although his professional interest in solving mysteries had died with Sherlock, he never lost his fascination with the more arcane sorts of crime.  He would have loved this one, and I could imagine the crinkles that would form around his eyes as he would describe the possible motives, mechanisms, and solutions.  It was a Sunday, and I suspected that he would have wheedled me into taking our normal long walk in the direction of the crime scene.  I’d have teased him, said he was morbid, but I’d have gone, and he’d have hypothesized happily for a while.

I could so clearly imagine it, and it made me smile, despite myself.  It had been difficult to like Sherlock Holmes, and very difficult to deal with the fact that their association put John into danger on a regular basis.  Yet, now that they were both gone, I found myself forgiving every thoughtless insult and sleepless lonely night the detective ever gave me, since he had made John so happy.  

Wishing to hang on to my happy memory, I decided, abruptly, to take the walk over to Park Lane myself, just as John and I would have done.  It was past time I actually started doing things again.  I would go and see where Ronald Adair had died, and I would try and solve the mystery, and I would remember John.  Quickly, before I could change my mind, I showered, dressed, and left the flat.

July, in London, is one of the few times of the year when it approaches being warm enough, and it was a beautiful day.  I took the long route around Kensington Park, since a straight shot would have taken me directly past St. Mary’s Hospital, where John had worked - and where his body had been taken. The trees were brilliant green, and it seemed everyone in London was sunbathing or playing football or falling in love around me.

Ronald Adair’s flat was adjacent to the Mariott, in one of the converted brick Georgian edifices that infest all of Park Lane.  I had forgotten to take note of the number, but it was easily identifiable by the flowers and stuffed animals heaped up on the low fence that surrounded it. There were a fair number of gawkers, and by asking, I found which window Adair had been shot through.  I was stumped, for the moment, but thinking logically, decided the best route was to see from where I could have made the shot.  The busy street and the shrubbery borders of the park being ruled out, necessarily, I confined my attention to the sidewalks.  I took pictures on my phone, and paced around, and tried to work out the trigonometry involved.  

Then I stopped.  There were half a dozen locations from which the shot could have come.  It would be the hell of a task: the window was small and high, but if it were dark out and the shooter were aiming into a lit room, it would be possible. I had hunted a lot as a kid, and might have been able to make it with a rifle.  John, who had been an excellent marksman, might have been able to do it with a handgun.  But to do it quickly enough to avoid notice in a busy neighborhood, to do it silently?  That was impossible.

All facts that were undoubtedly obvious to the police.  If John had been with me, it would have been a fun little mathematical exercise.  We’d have followed it with a walk home, dinner at the pub on the end of our street, and making tipsy love in the light of a summer sunset in our flat.  But he wasn’t with me, and he never would be again, and the day would end as all days did, alone with the cat and the television and the dark.  The whole thing was a pointless, futile exercise - a little girl’s attempt to play make-believe.

I knew, suddenly, that I was going to cry.  It happened a lot, and it wasn’t an experience I wanted to share with all London, so I spun around to depart and slammed full-force into a souvenir hawker who had been just behind me.  Grace has always eluded me.  The pole she carried, hung with ballcaps and other tat, fell to the ground, and she gave an indignant Cockney squawk of “Oi! Watch it!”  I bent to retrieve her pole and handed it back to her, mumbling, “Sorry, sorry,” and fled outright into the park, keeping my eyes firmly on the ground.  

Leaving the path, I hurried through the park, not really aware of where I was going as long as it was quieter and emptier.  I reached a dim copse free of children, tourists, and lovers, where I sat down, and let the tears flow.

It’s easy to see why the ancient Egyptians thought that the heart, and not the brain, was the source of love.  True sadness isn’t felt in the head, it’s felt in the chest, and I could feel every choked beat of my heart as I sobbed and gasped and tried to catch my breath for what seemed like ages.  But from a pragmatic point of view, I’m sure I didn’t go for long.  Crying is too tiring to keep up for much time.  Of course, I had come out without any tissues, so I wiped my aching eyes and puffy face on the corner of my cardigan.  

At that moment, the hawker walked into the copse.  

“There you are!” she called out, “Wondered where you’d got to!”

I sighed.  “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry about knocking into you.  It was an accident.  If I’ve damaged anything I will be happy to pay-“

“Na, na, love.  Just a load of rubbish.  Can’t hurt it if it isn’t worth anything to start with.  But I saw your face and thought you might be in some trouble.”  The woman was elderly, with a mop of dyed auburn hair and a thick Docklands accent which I would love to render in text, if it didn’t look so silly.  But her blue eyes were kind, and she handed me a miniature water bottle marked with “Souvenir of Hyde Park.”

“I’m – fine.  I just got a little upset.  Thank you.”  The water was lukewarm and tasted faintly of plasticizers, but it soothed my irritated throat.

The woman seemed to take this remark as an invitation, and placing her wares on the grass, sat next to me.  I have lived in London since I was twenty-five years old and I could tell what was coming.  There are two main personality types among the English: the type that is intensely uncomfortable with any sort of emotion, and the type that delights in every possible expression of sentiment and wishes to hear all about it.  They’re like New Yorkers in that respect.

Apparently I had found one of the latter variant.

“You get to see a bit of everything, my line of work,” she said, digging a battered packet of Silk Cut out of her pocket, “Care for one?”

I had officially quit smoking years ago, when I finished my doctorate, and stopped even having the occasional one when I started dating John, since he loathed the things.  Just at that moment, though, it sounded like heaven.  “Yes, thank you.”

She shook two out of the packet, and passed one to me before getting out a transparent plastic lighter.  She lit hers, and then handed over the lighter.  A brief breeze kicked up, and I bowed my head over the tiny flame, trying to make the cigarette catch, as she said, quietly, “Now, Mary, you need to remain calm.”

The cigarette caught, and I took that first delicious, poisonous drag, before the fact that this stranger knew my name really filtered into my mind.  

I looked over, and where the woman had been, sat Sherlock Holmes.

  The Sign of Four (Sherlock)

The art of disguise, as I have often remarked, is in context far more than it is in costume.   Truly approximating the appearance of someone else is only possible from a distance: in ordinary situations major alterations to the face appear theatrical and attract more attention than not.  If, instead, you select a character who would be entirely appropriate in the context in which he appears, you need make only minor changes to your own appearance.  The observer’s mind will then do ninety per cent of your work and you will be de facto invisible.  I intend to write a monograph on the topic when I have the time.

Mary Morstan may have had some subconscious understanding of this.  On the occasion of our first meeting, I observed that she was wearing a carefully calibrated disguise, although I doubt she would have referred to it as such.  Very high heels, but an intentionally prim and boxy suit, severe makeup and hairstyle, heavy-framed glasses.  She introduced herself with a flat, middle-American accent, only slightly sharpened by years of living in London.

Just after she arrived, John walked into the flat, his arms filled with carrier bags of groceries, which he set down with great rapidity in order to shake her hand.  

“Mary Morstan, my associate, John Watson.  Miss Morstan,” I said, “Teaches maths at Westminster School.”

She stared at me when I said that.  John, I noted, didn’t let go of her hand when her attention was distracted.

“How do you know that?” she asked.

I sighed, though in truth I always enjoy it when they ask for the reasoning.  

“You’ve obviously come straight from work, meaning that you work Saturday mornings.  Chalk dust on the right cuff, which is worn in a way that you only ever see with people who spend a great deal of time writing on blackboards.  There are traces of red ink on the heel of your hand and a splotch near the tip of your index finger.  Thus, teacher.”  

As I’d expected, she dropped John’s hand to examine her own.

“You took the tube to get here, and in those shoes you probably didn’t walk far before you boarded at Westminster station: there’s construction digging up the street there and the fresh splashes of yellowish mud on your left stocking are quite distinctive.  Half a dozen schools in that area, but your ensemble suggests older students and moneyed parents. Hence, Westminster School.”

The last was a gloss, as her ensemble suggested nothing of the sort.  It said quite plainly “I teach older boys.”  Her skirt was unfashionably long, her blouse was buttoned up to the neck, and her jacket was boxy in order to conceal her rather large breasts.  Having attended an all-boys senior school, I recognized the style, and the motivation behind it.  But since I was undoubtedly going to receive the ”abrasive” and “show-off” lectures after her departure, I saw no reason to add the “inappropriate” one, and simplified the matter.

“And… maths?”

I sighed again, this time sincerely.  The easy ones are never any fun.

“There’s a graphics calculator in the right pocket of your overcoat.”

At that, she laughed.  Giggled, really.  But almost instantly, she caught herself, cleared her throat, and dropped back into the lower vocal register that she had previously affected.  Everything I could ever have wished to know about Mary Morstan’s character was thus revealed in the first five minutes of our interview.  Nature had given her a respectable brain and deposited it in a body that was small, blonde, and rather fluffy.  Her disguise did a reasonable job of concealing this, but she would spend the rest of her life trying to make people take her seriously.

“That’s amazing,” she said, “I read in your blog, Doctor Watson-“

“John, please,” he interrupted.  Oh dear.

“John.  I read about this kind of analysis but it’s remarkable to see it in real life.”

“Can be a bit creepy if you’re not used to it, though,” John replied, which I thought extremely unfair, given that I had been very polite and not mentioned that her teeth demonstrated her adolescent bulimia or that her fingers and eyebrows strongly implied a mild obsessive-compulsive condition.  I maintained my dignity, and said only,

“Thank you, John.  State your case, Miss Morstan.”

“Right.  Well.   I suppose I have to go back to the beginning.  My father, Thomas Morstan, was English.  I was actually born in Sussex, but when I was two my parents divorced and my mother and I moved back to America. I never got to see him much, growing up, but he always kept in touch, by phone and letters, and then by email when that came around.  Sent birthday gifts and that sort of thing.  Ten years ago I finished grad school, and he offered to buy me a ticket to come and meet him in London.  I hadn’t seen him for several years at that point and I didn’t have a job so, obviously, I said yes.”

“Mmm.  Continue.”

“He’d booked us rooms at the Langham, which I thought was much too expensive for him, but he said it was a treat for my graduation.”

“What was his profession, then?”

“He started off in the Army, but he resigned his commission after the first Gulf War and joined the diplomatic service.”

“As?”

“An attaché.  Just an office job, basically.  Visas and helping distressed tourists and so on.”

“And his rank in the army?”

“Ah, he ended as a Lieutenant Colonel, I believe.

“Go on.”

“I flew to London, expecting him to pick me up at Heathrow, but he wasn’t there.  No answer when I tried to call him.  I took a cab to the Langham and asked if he’d checked in, and he had, but there was no answer when they called up to his room.  Eventually they agreed to open the door – he’d had a heart attack a few years before, and I was getting very upset - and all of his things were in there, but no sign of him.  I never saw him again.”

“Interesting.  Did the police investigate?”  John was patting her shoulder, sympathetically, which seemed excessive given that the death (and yes, it was death, almost certainly) was ten years in the past.  She should have been well beyond it by this point.  But upon closer observation, I could see that he was right: a slight swimminess around the eyes and the set of the jawbone indicating gritted teeth.  Oedipal complex.  She replied, calmly enough.

“Yes.  They didn’t find anything.”

“Of course they didn’t.  They never do.  Did your father have any acquaintances in London?”

“Only one that they could find: a Major Sholto.  He had no idea Dad was even in town.”

“Mmm.  I doubt a disappearance ten years ago would incline you to seek the services of a consulting detective today.  What has changed?”

Morstan cleared her throat and opened the battered leather attache case that had been sitting at her feet.  From a manila folder, she removed a broadsheet page of yellowing newsprint, with a quarter-page sized advertisement in the upper right hand corner circled in red ink.  The paper was the Omaha World-Herald, the date was May 4, 2004, and the advertisement simply stated:

“If Mary Morstan, daughter of Captain Thomas Morstan, will contact the address below, it will be to her advantage” followed by an email address.

“Half a dozen of my friends from high school saw this and forwarded it on to me.”

“And what did you do?”

“I sent them an email.  I said I was Thomas Morstan’s daughter, that I’d relocated to London, and asked what they wanted.”

“Any reply?”

“No.  And when I sent on a follow-up a few days later, it bounced.   It was just Hotmail… could have been anyone.  But then a few days after that, I received this in the mail.”

Reaching back into the attaché case, she pulled out a small pouch made of black jeweler’s felt. Loosening the drawstring, she tipped something small and square into her palm, and passed it over to me.

I could hear John inhale sharply through is teeth as I reached for my lens.  Mary said, wryly, “Yes, that’s pretty much how I felt.  It’s a three carat, blue-white, flawless diamond.  Probably dug up in India, if that’s any help.  It’s worth around $150,000, retail.”

“Unusual cut,” I murmured, looking at the magnified lump of crystallized charcoal, “It’s called the-“

“The old mine cut,” interrupted Mary, “Meaning it was most likely faceted sometime between 1700 and 1900.  I know.  After the police gave it back to me, I had it appraised at Sotheby’s.”

“You went to the police again?”

“I did.”

“Any good?”

“Not really.  They hung onto it a while, but nobody reported any similar gems lost or stolen, and then they gave it back.  Apparently it’s “not illegal to be given things.”  So after that I was on my own.  But I still didn’t feel right about it, so I had the appraisal to see if a real professional could find anything more useful.”

“Well done,” said John, heartily.  He was in a fair way to make an idiot of himself over this woman, although she seemed flattered by the compliment.

“Thank you,” Mary replied, “And then, the thing is, Mr. Holmes, that it didn’t stop with this.  Every year since then, on May 14, I get another one of these in my mail.  I’ve changed addresses and it didn’t make a difference.  Perfectly matched, very expensive diamonds.  I left the rest of them in my safe deposit box: even carrying one of them around makes me edgy.  And then, yesterday, there was this.”

She passed over a letter.  Fine, high linen content paper, no watermark, 10-point… Trebuchet font, printed on an HP laserjet printer. It read, “Be at the third pillar from the left outside the Lyceum Theatre on Saturday, July 9 at seven o'clock. If you are distrustful, bring two friends. You are a wronged woman, and shall have justice. Do not bring police. If you do, all will be in vain. Your unknown friend.”

There was no signature or address.

“Did you keep the envelope?”

“Yes, here.  And here,” she said, passing over a small heap of padded mailers sealed into plastic zip-topped bags, “Are the envelopes the diamonds came in.”

“Well, you do have the right instincts.  Not much to see here, though… the letter and the last three packages had their labels off the same printer.  The first four were from another.  It stretches credulity to think that there are separate groups doing this so we’ll assume for the moment it was simply a matter of replacing an outdated device.  The mailers can be bought anywhere.  Various London postmarks… thumbprint on this one, Miss Morstan, may I see your right hand please?  Thank you.  Your thumbprint. I’ll put them under the microscope later but I doubt there’ll be that much to learn.”

“And you’ve no idea at all who may have sent these?  No… admirers, things like that?” John asked.

She laughed at that.  “Generally, when men are interested in me they go more for things like asking me to dinner rather than anonymously sending me a million dollars in gems over the course of seven years.  I’m not that unapproachable.”  I rolled my eyes at their stale flirtation, although I don’t believe either of them noticed it.

“But…” she continued, more hesitantly, “Mr. Holmes, do you think that there’s any possibility that these are from my father?”

John was glaring at me, and so instead of saying “Of course not.  He’s been dead for ten years,” replied “I’m afraid it’s very unlikely.”

“I see,” Mary replied, quietly.  She drew a deep breath and continued, “Well, regardless, I had planned to go… unless you can give me a real reason not to.  If whoever it is wants to hurt me it seems like they’ve chosen a really baroque way of going about it.  I mean, they already know where I live so it’s not like there’s much point in avoiding them. And I’m getting sick of this mystery.”

“There are, however, a few points of interest in it.  As you are allowed to bring two friends and John is already planning on accompanying you, I believe I shall join him.”

She darted her gaze back and forth between us, smiling, “Really?  You will?  Both of you?  Oh, thank you, thank you so much! This whole saga has just been so shady and I didn’t know anyone who’d be any help with this kind of thing.  It’s such a weight off my mind. Thank you.”

She was gushing, and her voice had inevitably pitched up again.  I responded calmly with, “Yes, well.  Can you be here by five thirty on Saturday?  And leave us your contact information.”

“Of course!”

And, writing an email address and a phone number on a sheet of scrap paper, she disappeared in a whirl of gratitude.

John rose to escort her to the door.  I remained seated, and began texting.

“That, he said, picking up his carrier bags and taking them into the kitchen, “Was a very attractive woman.”

“Hadn’t noticed.”

“Really.  I knew you were a human adding machine but I never thought you were actually dead.  Sherlock, it’s an objective fact!  She’s got a beautiful smile.”

“Very short.”

“Oh, come on.  She’s an inch or two shorter than I am.”

While this statement would not actually exclude “short” from consideration, I simply raised my eyebrows and replied, “Women have developed this remarkable technology called shoes which they use when they wish to increase their height, John.  She’s no more than five feet tall.”

“Yes, well, shortness is not a handicap, Sherlock.  And she’s clever.”

“She’s adequate.”

“And brave.  She was going to walk by herself into a threatening situation just because she wanted to find out the truth.”

“So are you.  So am I, for that matter.  I fail to see why it’s so much more meritorious when it’s her doing it.”

“I’m a combat-trained military reservist, and you are England’s only consulting detective.  It’s our job.  She’s a very small maths teacher.”

I set down the mobile and glared at him, “Mary Morstan, John, is in no need of your protection.  This affair of the diamonds is a mere personal intrigue.  She’ll meet with the woman and resolve it without the benefit of your attention.”

He paused from putting the potatoes in the bin and inquired, “It’s a woman sending the diamonds?  You’re sure?”

In general, I don’t admit which of my deductions I’m certain of and which are (very good) guesses.  Maintaining a reputation as infallible isn’t a trivial exercise.  But John had repeatedly earned the truth from me, and so I said, “No, I’m not.  I’m reasonably confident, given the font choice, the computer used, and the wording, that it’s a woman, and a rather melodramatic one.  But there’s more – uncertainty in these things than I would like.”

John chuckled.  “I should take a picture of you right now and call it ‘Sherlock Holmes admitting he might be wrong’.  They’d love to have it down at the Yard.  So why take the case if you don’t think there’s any mystery?”

“Oh, there is one, just not the “why is someone sending me expensive gemstones” one she came in with.  Can you log on to the GRO database and look something up for me?  My email address and password will get you in.”

“Sure,” he said, walking back into the sitting room and picking up his laptop, “What?”

“Deaths.  Start by looking for “Sholto” in late April, early May of 2005.  If that doesn’t bring up anything, look for ex-military, older, in London, same time frame.”

“Right.  What are you going to do?”

I held up my mobile.  “I’ve done it.  I’ve sent a text to brother Mycroft.”

“Why?”

“Watson, when a man leaves a high rank role in the army to become a low-end functionary in the diplomatic service, what does that suggest?”

“Er, PTSD?”

“No. It suggests spy.  I want to find out exactly what Thomas Morstan did for a living.”  

A week after that, Mary Morstan arrived punctually back at Baker Street. She’d replaced the dowdy suit with trousers and a blue blouse cut low in the front, left off her glasses, and undone her severe bun to let her hair hang over her shoulders.  She had chosen flat shoes this time, which was a relief, as it showed the target of all this display was John rather than me.

Six hours after that, I saw that the display had been successful.  I had to physically restrain John from going to her as she was handcuffed and loaded into a black maria for the murder of Barbara Sholto.  As typical of Americans, she was explaining loudly and slowly to the arresting officer that there had been a terrible misunderstanding, clearly expecting this to rectify the situation.  

“John, look,” I said, sotto voce, as I pinned him to the wall of the alley, “If you go over there you’ll only be arrested too.  Athelney Jones has already picked up the entire domestic staff and Theresa Sholto and would be only too happy to increase his bag.  The man’s an idiot, even by the standards of the metropolitan police.  We’ll text Lestrade to let him know, and the worst she’ll have is a few uncomfortable hours, but we need to be on our way if we’re going to actually catch the killer which is the only thing that will do her any good.”

Even that early, I suspected that Mary would not be as swiftly forgotten as the rest of the girlfriends.

Three days later, Mary was a free woman again.   The lost crown jewels of the Russian Tsars, of which she had been offered a one-third share, were scattered along six miles of the bottom of the Thames.  She had accepted this development with equanimity.  As she said to John, “Even if they hadn’t been lost, it’s not like I was expecting to keep them.  I’m sure there’s still some Romanovs somewhere who’d like to have them back.  The whole time Teresa was telling me the story of how she got them I kept thinking “Yeah, this kind of stuff doesn’t happen in real life.””

I heard, while they were falling in love, enough of “The Things Mary Says” to gag a cat.  I heard about Mary’s feelings on politics, the arts, and current events.  I heard about Mary’s emotional turmoil on the discovery that her father was an intelligence agent who had taken the pay of so many competing nations and organizations that even now nobody could say who he had really worked for.  And that was apart from his being a jewel thief.  I heard enough recitations of her personal charm, intelligence, and integrity to gag a dog.

  Not being enamored of her, I was able to observe her far more clearly.  I saw that she omitted to mention during the investigation that she was already in receipt of seven perfectly-matched flawless three carat blue-white diamonds, pulled from a coronet made for some forgotten Tsarina.  I saw no reason to bring it up to anyone, if she had overcome her scruples about receiving stolen property.  I would rather the money have gone to John than to anyone else, and it was clear by that point that it would.

Over the next months, Mary incorporated herself into John’s life, and thus, into mine.  I grew accustomed to the scent of her cosmetics in the flat’s shared w.c. (she was a disgustingly early riser and had usually gone before I woke up), and the sounds of their post-sex conversation from the upstairs bedroom (they kept the actual lovemaking quiet, out of politeness, but the after-chat was quite distinct).  I drew the line, however, at allowing her to tidy the place.  She didn’t understand the system and would have made a hash of it.

Ultimately, just over six months after the day she rang the bell at Baker Street, I found myself ordering a round of tequila shots at the bar of the White Lion and slipping chloral hydrate into three of them.  Earlier, Mary had balanced on tiptoe to kiss my cheek and whisper in my ear “Can you please try not to let them get him too drunk?”  I carried the round back to the table where a flushed and grinning but not yet weaving Watson listened as a dozen of his Army and medical school friends speculated on whether Mary would qualify him as “Four-Continents Watson” or if the actual location of the coitus mattered more than the origin of the lady in question.  I passed the shot glasses around, judging that the administration of three Mickey Finns to three particular members of the party would bring the night to a graceful but early end in about an hour.

I judged, as usual, correctly.  After decanting the three dazed ringleaders into a cab, the party broke up, and John and I made it back to Baker Street with only slightly more difficulty than usual. The stairs did give him some trouble, but ultimately I was able to successfully deposit him on the couch.  I shook two aspirin from the bottle and handed them to him along with a glass of water.  He took both uncomplainingly.

“Sherlock?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks.  For whatever you did back there.  I’d hate to be a mess tomorrow.”

“I looked up the duties of the best man and apparently making sure the groom is present and presentable are tops on the list.”

“And you even agreed to wear a tie!”  This non sequitur amused him, and he chuckled at his own joke for a moment, before sobering (comparatively), and staring around the flat.  “I’m going to miss all this.”

“No, you won’t,” I predicted, climbing the stairs to fetch the blankets off his bed.  

“I will!” he insisted, “I’m happy, really happy, about Mary.  She’s wonnerful.  But I’ll miss this life.  And you.”

“It’s not as though I’ll be dead.  You’ll be ten minutes away.  I’ll be sure to call you whenever I need my cases blogged.”

“I love you, mate, you know that?  Even though you are- just such a prick.”

I smiled and pitched the blankets at his head.  “I do.  Tosser.  Now go to sleep.  You have a busy day ahead of you.”

He was out and snoring, wearing everything but his shoes, five minutes later.  I refilled his water glass and left it on the end table.

At noon the next day I (wearing not only a tie but my entire morning suit) stood at John’s left shoulder and watched Mary Morstan walk down the aisle.  I doubt she saw me: her eyes were fixed on John, who was sober, alert, and in full dress uniform, as requested.  The expression of love and joy on her face obliged me to concede that, at the moment, she was in fact a very attractive woman.  

I don’t think I could have given him up to anyone who loved him even a bit less.

At the reception I gave a speech which everyone said was very interesting, and drank one and a half glasses of inferior Prosecco.  I watched them cut the cake, noting that the new Mrs. Watson was far more comfortable with John’s ceremonial saber than he was.  She’d lost the callosities of the dedicated fencer, but the skill remained.  Then, as Molly Hooper was prowling around with an eye towards dancing and my actual duties were complete, I slipped out of the hall and walked back to Baker Street.

I stopped in at the chemists and bought a packet of cigarettes, then let myself into the flat.  There was a peculiar sensory illusion that it was larger and emptier than normal: nonsense, of course.  John was routinely absent when I was there.  The fact that the absence would now be permanent didn’t alter the actual physical size of the place.

There was always work, and heedless of my dress clothes, I went to it.  Three months later, I “died.”  And three years after that, I returned to a London which seemed larger and emptier than I recalled.  Sensory illusion again.  The softer emotions have a very negative impact upon accurate observation, and the world in general doesn’t change at all when a single person drops out of it. On an individual level, though, a single death can rip the bottom out of everything.  Such was the case with Mary Watson, who I encountered on a bright August day in Park Lane.  She’d lost a stone in weight, which was significant at her height, and was wearing an oversized camel-colored cardigan which I recognized with a pang as being one of Watson’s.  She had, in general, the appearance of a child’s toy where the stuffing had been pulled out.  I approached her, unseen, as her attention was on Ronald Adair’s flat.   When she lost her composure and fled, I hesitated.  Then I followed.  There were two reasons for this.  The first, as always, was John.  I couldn’t envision a situation where he would not have come to the aid of a crying woman.  In the particular case of Mary, he’d have sprinted to it.

As for the second, well…  On the occasion of the case of Neville St. Claire, John had said to me that, “People in trouble come to my wife like birds to a light-house.”

And I truly had nowhere else to go.   Chapter 3: The Death of Ronald Adair (Mary)

In general, I am not a fainter, and I didn’t faint then.  But a grey mist swirled in front of my eyes, and when it subsided I noticed I had dropped the cigarette onto the well-clipped Hyde Park grass.  I picked it up with numb, nerveless fingers.  With my other hand I reached out to Sherlock and pushed on the flesh of his bicep.  He was reassuringly solid.

“So I haven’t gone mad.”

“No.”

“Not dead, then?”

“Yes.”

I took a drag from the Silk Cut and asked, “Does anyone else know besides me?”

“Mycroft.”

“Of course.”

“And Molly Hooper.”

“That bitch!” I exclaimed, before I could stop myself.  I wouldn’t quite have called Molly a friend.  We didn’t see much of one another, but her quiet competence had gotten me through the hellscape of the funeral.  I found it startlingly painful to believe that she had been concealing a secret like this- especially from John.

Sherlock quirked an eyebrow at me and said, “You’re harsher on her than on Mycroft?”

“There is nothing that I would put past one of the Holmes boys.”

He sighed, and drew on his own cigarette.  The sun dipped below the treetops and set us into shadows.

“Sherlock,” I asked, eventually, “What do you want?”

“I need a gun.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ.  Of course you do.”

“Mary, please-“ and he hesitated.  He and I had never been more than “friendly”, and he certainly had never been inclined to ask any favors of me.  

“You’re still in trouble, aren’t you?” I accused.

He hesitated again.

“Yes.”

“Right,” I said, brushing off my pants and rising, “We’ll talk.  Baker Street, or our place?  My place.”

“Baker Street is being watched.”

“Can we take a cab?”

“Probably.”

It was actually very impressive, how he collapsed his face into that of the Cockney souvenir hawker.  He even seemed to lose several inches in height.  The stage lost an excellent actor when he decided to go into detective work.

We walked in silence back to Park Lane, and took a cab (after he’d dismissed the first one that tried to stop).  He sat next to me in silence, until a horrible thought overtook me, and I said, “Oh, God, has anyone told you?  About-“

“Your… bereavement?  Yes.  I was… very sorry to hear of it.”

It was a relief.  It had already happened several times: some colleague or acquaintance who I hadn’t seen in a while would, in the course of ordinary chit-chat, drop, “Oh, and how’s John doing?” into the conversation.  And then I would have to watch their faces change from polite disinterest to horror and pity as I gave them the news.  I would say it was the worst thing I had to do, but I had developed an entire new suite of worst things in recent months and was somewhat spoiled for choice.

We didn’t speak any further until I let us into the flat.

“Have a seat.  I’ll just go get it.”

John, given that he was occasionally prone to physically violent nightmares, had always kept the Sig Sauer semi-automatic securely locked away in a box in the master bedroom closet.  I retrieved it, and returned to the living room.  Sherlock had installed himself in his old favorite spot on the sofa, and Arthur had climbed onto the arm next to him.  They were watching each other with matching expressions of flat-eyed distaste.

“I don’t know where the key is,” I said, passing the box over.

“It’s fine,” he replied.  And indeed, he materialized a lockpick from somewhere and opened it within ten seconds.

He’d removed his auburn wig, although he still had on an excellent shade of lipstick for his complexion: a glossy transparent berry-stain.  It was almost the only color on his face.  Whatever he’d been up to, it was doing no favors for his health.  I wouldn’t have thought he could have gotten thinner or paler, barring his contracting tuberculosis or vampirism.  And yet, he had managed.  At some point, he’d cut his hair off close to the scalp, and it was faintly peppered with grey.  Sherlock was a year or two younger than I, but at the moment I could see what he would be like as an old man.

“You know that thing’s illegal, right?” I said.

“It’s not something that’s a real concern just at the moment,” he returned, calmly.

“It should probably be cleaned.  It’s not been touched since… well, I’m not sure of the last time John cleaned it.”

“It will be fine.  They’re very simple instruments and Watson was always over-cautious.  I didn’t clean my old one for years and it never had any problems.”

“That’s because John would secretly do it for you every few months.”

One of the small pleasures in life that everyone should get to experience at least once is to watch Sherlock Holmes’ face when he is informed that one of the normals has gotten something past him.  I had to suppress a flicker of a smile at how thunderous he looked.

“Look,” I said, “Give it here and I’ll do it.  The cleaning kit’s on the top shelf above the stove in the kitchen, if you’ll reach it down for me.”

I could hear him rummaging around in the cabinet as I released the clip, disconnected the slide, and popped out the spring.  I laid everything down on the coffee table and accepted the kit when he returned and gave it to me.  When I sighted down the barrel, I could see ample dust, and a fair bit of corrosion from the soggy English atmosphere.  It only made sense, really.  When Sherlock had died, John had lost any professional reason to carry a gun, and gained a strong personal reason to lock it away and leave it to rust.  Dipping the cleaning swab into the wide-mouthed jar of solvent, I began passing it through the barrel.

“’In a self-defense situation, there will be many things you can’t control. The condition of your weapon is not one of them,’” I quoted.

“Did Watson say that?”

“No, though he’d have agreed with the sentiment.  That was my stepfather.  He was the one who taught me about shooting.”

Sherlock blinked at me.  “I didn’t know you had a stepfather.”

“Like everyone else, I do actually have an objective existence apart from the parts you find interesting, Sherlock.”

I sounded bitter, but I didn’t care.  I had been the one to put John back together after Sherlock’s quote-unquote death, and having him sitting calmly on my sofa irked.

“I only meant,” he replied, “That he wasn’t at your wedding.”

“He has congestive heart failure and travel is very difficult for him!” I snapped,

“Sherlock, why the hell did you do this?”

“Well, I had in fact been exposed as a fraud and-“

“Bullshit.  You have been more or less cleared for two years and I’m sure your brother told you that.  D.I. Lestrade had to demonstrate that you weren’t, in general, a criminal, because he wanted to keep his job. Fifty people, including me, by the by, came forward to tell stories of how you had solved cases that you couldn’t possibly have faked.  The only real mystery remaining is this whole affair with Richard Brook, and frankly the best person to justify that would have been you.”

He scrubbed his hands through the bristles of his hair.  “There was more.”

“So tell me.”

Sherlock sighed, and stared off into the space over my left shoulder.  “When the head of an organization is removed, the organization generally remains.  John Kennedy is shot, the United States persists.  The death of Jim Moriarty left a thriving multinational criminal organization with a vacancy at the top for which there were numerous keen candidates.  I have spent the last three years attempting to take advantage of this situation and dismantle its operations entirely.”

Something about the cold way he said “dismantle” made me think I really didn’t want to hear much about this process.  I asked, “And you couldn’t have done that in your own persona?”

“No.  Because- Moriarty was in many ways a remarkable man.”

The tone of this statement was pure admiration, and I rubbed my forehead where I could feel the old familiar “Sherlock” headache coming on. “How’s that?” I asked.

“I don’t want to say he founded a cult of personality, but in his immediate circle were several men who genuinely did admire him and support him in his goals, as opposed to the ordinary hangers-on who simply were in it for the profit.”

“So, his friends.”

“What?”

I sighed.  “Never mind.  Continue.”

[garden-of-succulents]

2017.5 fanworks roundup

The weasels of doubt that chew on my brain: Ugh, you haven't written or posted ANYTHING since you posted that fic exchange in December. You've just sat around and not produced anything, like a big lazy lump. Me: Uh..... let's fact-check that one.

So in the spirit of my 2016 roundup, here's my 2017.5 roundup! Compiled mostly by reading back in my Stuff I Wrote tag. Reminder that I have a blanket open fanworks policy: Feel free to add to, remix, theorize about, or create art, audio, fic, or anything else for my fanworks!

Stuff I Consider Finished: Aroace Parse/Swoops. Jack Zimmermann and Stan Rogers. The secret to Ransom's parents' marriage. Tater, George, and image management. Jack is a rolemodel for fuckups everywhere. Fic of fic: Parse/Swoops/Jack/Bitty/Tater. Chowder calls Bitty his personal chef on social media. Tater can talk himself out of traffic tickets. Bitty moves back to Georgia in his late 30s. Tater and Ransom looking after each other through injuries and med school. Sadass teenage Pimms paragraph. Mashbits pregame naps. Jack and chewy stim toys. Ford trying to keep Whiskey from traumatizing Tango. Zimbits next-gen dream writeup. Anglo Canadian stuff I want Ransom to do. Ransom and Holster being cool with Bitty's gayness. Dex learning about privilege. A Mashbits AU people took amazing places. Kent coping with music. Nurseylardo snuggling. Zimbits "Enchanted" AU. Where does Holster get off on bugging Ransom about "selling out"?. Pimms in a Pimbits universe: Locker room sex (AO3). A theory about why Bad Bob makes that weird face in Jack's baby pictures. I forgot who "Adam" was. George billeting Tater as a rookie. Peak Jack Zimmermann. Poly Ransom/Holster/March. Zimbits pace bunny AU. Ransom learning about Nursey/Tater. Nursey/Tater. Jack doesn't love history, he only loves hockey. Reblog if you’re mentally ill, a trauma survivor, or had a shitty childhood, and you think fanworks about Kent Parson are valuable and worth making.. The frog Jack develops a crush on is Justin Oluransi. What I want out of Ranskov. Poly Ford/Lardo/Shitty. What kind of antagonist I think Parse will be. Jack's fans learn he likes pie. Jack the edgy Canadian history major. Jack gets a picture of Canadian soldiers playing hockey. AU where Bitty's from Alberta like me. Notes towards a police AU. Kent Parson with ADHD and dyslexia. Jack gets a history article published. Jack begged the Sorting Hat not to put him in Hufflepuff. Kent listening to Welcome to Night Vale music during games. Fact-based thoughts on Jack's alcoholism. Patater is OMGCP fandom’s Draco/Neville. Jack as Bitty's nonathletic French tutor. Parse gives Holster relationship advice re: Ransom. Jack goes skiing the year after his overdose. Tater handles Parse taking some news VERY badly (AO3). Follow up thought on the complexity of being a Parse fan. Fannish Minor Character Obsession Draft Candidates for 2017. Jack Zimmermann is a paper snowflake ho. The Rimroller™. A Jack/Chowder AU. The Zimmermenn. Hall/Murray OTP 4eva. Jack gets a dog. Why Dex looks up to Ransom and Nursey looks up to Holster. Post-apocalyptic Parse/Ransom AU and Part Two. Ransom wants Tater to deadlift him. Patater World Juniors soulmate AU. Bitty writes academic papers about Beyonce. Bitty using Jack’s computer when it’s set to Canadian Multilingual Standard. I think Holster played Juniors in Waterloo, Ontario, not Iowa. Kent and self-injury.Kent's role in bakery AUs. Does Bitty have PTSD?

Stuff I am Done With Right Now But Wish Had Gone Further: the seed of Jack and Ford's friendship. Suzanne and Alicia AU idea. Ford and Bitty watching football. Tater goes to a kegster to romance Ransom (Part Two) (AO3).

The Coach Bittle/Bad Bob AU: Rich knows who Bob is. Bob finds out Rich is a CFL player. Jack who grew up with openly queer retired pro athletes for dads. Jack meeting Kent.

Stuff I Would Like to Come Back to Later: A Ranskov retelling of Yuri on Ice. Bitatomann Bodyswap AU (Part Two). The Gay Island story (more). The Stanley Cup age regression story. A Ransom-on-the-Falconers Ranskov AU. Kent visits Tater's gay moms in Moscow. TATER'S GAY MOMS Y'ALL.

Gay hockey moms (AO3): 1997: George and Suzanne meet again. 1992, 1994, 1997: Suzanne bakes her way into George’s heart. Suzanne confesses her love . Telling Bitty's Moomaw about their relationship. 2002 Olympics: George and Suzanne talk strategy for being gay as they plan to move to the South. How Bitty’s life would have changed in an openly gay family in Georgia. Suzanne Bittle is a cool gay mom. George and Suzanne's weddings. 2013: Bitty tells his moms about his first couple days at Samwell. 2013: Bitty and Jack meet each other’s families at Parents’ Weekend and have a clash of worldviews. 2013: Bitty explains to Shitty how growing up surrounded by pro hockey players has affected his perspective on the sport. George evaluates Jack as a player.

Princess Robinson: Carrie Robinson interviewing Bitty as a babysitter. Bitty and Holsom babysitting Princess.

Andy Scarlatti: The Flemish Giant of puck bunnies. Andy coaching little kids. An easter egg for fans of the TV show Flashpoint. Andy during playoffs. Kent and Andy having sex in 2011. Thoughts on marriage and children. Kent and Andy hooking up when she lives in Minneapolis. A femslash idea between the Falcs and Aces twitter staff. Dealing with Kent's bad days. About Kent and Andy hooking up in 2011. Further thoughts on relationships that take a long time to come to fruition. The All-Star Game Story: The dinner party. Kent wakes up. Andy goes down to breakfast. Andy and Bitty talk. Kent and Andy have a quiet moment. Kent and Jack talk.

Luis and Maida (the original Garden of Succulents): Maida's online life. How Kent met Maida and Luis. Maida's career with wild birds. Kent, Luis and Maida run away together after locker cleanout. Maida and Luis interacting with Andy.

Climb Aboard the Minivan Express (Zimbits Single Dads AU) (AO3): How Bitty ended up with the frogs. Jack being Chowder's hockey coach. Jack babysits so Bitty can go out on a date.

Love Drought (the Bittypoots AU) (AO3): Jack wants to punch Poots in the face. Bitty gets stood up and goes to a gay bar. Jack talks to Kent and Alexei about Bittypoots.

Meta: Conflicting access needs and safe vs safer spaces. Brief position statement on Jack's orientation. Thoughts on being a fandom writer with mental disorders that keep you from writing. The first racism apology. The second racism apology. Thoughts about Shitty abominableobriens added cool thoughts to. Thoughts on queerness and skin hunger. Me and puns. Me and BPD (AO3). If you want to talk to me about racism. More about writing BPD. Facts about Borderline Personality Disorder. A representation callout that went really well. Thoughts about class. Good idea/bad idea: Getting people to write fic you want. Not all relationships in a polycule need to be equal and equivalent.

[multsicorn]

Fic Meme! 1, 13, 36, and 44, please?

thank yoU!

1. What was the first fandom you got involved in?

My normal answer to this question is Glee.  (but you know that, I think.)  It’s the first fandom I posted fic or meta in with my name attached.  (And for all of tumblr’s shortcomings, this was in large part because tumblr lowered the entry barrier, too.)

But the *first* fandom I got involved in, for real?  No names, was Merlin back in 2008-09, on the second anon meme that fandom had.  (I was SO SAD when that meme’s atmosphere changed, then it died; I never went on to the third ‘mean’ meme.)  I posted a few tiny fics there, even, and I stayed up till late at night, arguing about I can’t even remember what, for the most part.  … but it was also a pale shadow of everything I do in fandom now, cause I still had my old livejournal that I shared with all my college friends, and for god knows what fucking reason, I didn’t just make a second one for fandom, so, I tried to keep everything I did there ~secret.

And the first fandom I wrote fic for that I shared with only my sister, and ship warred with my best friend over in middle school at lunch, if *that* counts as involved ;), with no strangers or internet, was Tortall.

13. Any NoTPs?

Still anything involving Sebastian, I guess ;).  (… I feel like the tables turned SO MUCH, having fallen for the ‘divisive and lots of fandom has his name bl'ed for good reasons’ one-could-argue-abusive character in my latest canon, @me, why.)

And incest in general, by default - I will ship some sibling incest ships in specific circumstances - basically, either the 'we never knew we were and/or didn’t grow up as siblings’ that for most people is typified by Luke/Leia but for me is many takes on Arthur/Morgan, or the 'we’re both fucked up to hell and it’s us against the world’ of e.g. Simon/River - but, so, most sibling pairs I don’t want to see as fucked up enough for the incest to make sense to me.  so e.g. Schuylercest would’ve been a NoTP in Hamilton, if there was ever much of it around anyway.

I’m thinking and I really really don’t have any NoTP’s in Check, Please! fandom.  Tons of pairings I generally don’t care much about - but will check out if I like the author or rec enough - and, I mean, I mostly don’t buy breaking zimbits up.  So endgame Jack or Bitty with someone else (and not in a poly scenario)…  I’ll give it a chance?  But I’m not sure anyone’s convinced me yet.

36. What’s your favourite genre to write?

Am I actually capable of writing more than genre, um.  The 'very little actually happens but people have lots of feelings and furthermore probably nothing is resolved genre,’ aka I guess once in a while I might? manage to write something else.

(also, NOT PORN, omg, I’m always finding myself writing porn and just feeling like I’m … bad… at the porn aspect, but I can’t always just skip over it for Characterization Reasons; likewise NOT HUMOR, I can’t make a joke for the life of me; and definitely NOT FLUFF lol… maybe angst?  by default?  but usually kinda ambiguous and lowkey angst.  If that is a genre.)

44. What ship do you feel needs more attention?

ALL OF THE SHIPS I WANT TO READ…. lol, I am kidding.  But I don’t know!  I feel like all my favorite ships - parse/oc, (particularly parswoops @des-zimbits’ OCs and not actual characters, that is NOT ACTUALLY AN ANSWER MULTS geez.  It is my instinct, though.  (And I don’t have a real answer.)

[winters-on-the-wing]

so apparently all the maida characters are white...

not anymore!

here is how they are described in maida's little school, and the changes i would make because all white people is boring.

Maida -> 

- With her skin of an alabaster transparency, her eyes of a gray running-brook clearness, and her hair of a pale rippled gold, Maida was, strictly speaking, the most beautiful of the girls.

Dicky -> 

- Some traces of Dicky’s long illness remained on him. He was thinner than any of the rest, and there lingered in his face a faint look of strain. He was a brownhaired boy; with a skin formerly like wax; now a warm ivory cinders; now a warm umber. His eyes, of an Irish gray, were still faintly shadowed; his look was still a little too sensitive and quick.

Arthur -> 

- A big, muscular lad, his black hair always shaggily tossed, his black eyes always intent, Arthur was not handsome like Harold or striking like Tyma. But having once noticed him, you continued to look at him. He had a quiet air of independence, of aloofness.

Laura -> 

- Her big blue eyes showed a gleam of triumph as she cited this imposing fact. Laura had kept her summer’s burn longer than any of them; and her slender figure had rounded. Her pink cheeks turned her blue eyes to blue flowers. Her hair, recently bobbed, had grown out in close little brown curls. She was prettier now than she had ever been.

Harold -> 

- Harold was stocky and strong looking— white-skinned, brown-haired.

- Harold’s eyes were the thin azure of a summer sky, made paler by light lashes and brows. 

Rosie -> 

- Rosie was the most picturesque. Rosie’s hair, eyes, brows and lashes were shining jet; cheeks and lips cardinal coral; her flesh, now that her tan had gone, gleaming snow forever tanned, a sunkissed ochre. But it was not alone that Rosie was beautifully colored and shaped—she was full of life. And that life—a changing current— made the light in her eyes blaze, die down, flicker and blaze again; it illuminated the roses in her cheeks as though there were a perpetual flame behind them.

Tyma -> 

- Tyma was as slender as a young sapling, but he looked as though he might have a sapling’s toughness and elasticity. His hair was a dense cap of a smooth, purple-black metal; his skin, almost metallic too, a fine deep tan.

- (eyes) Tyma’s were the deepest cerulean of a heavy sea, made bluer by thick black brows and lashes.

Silva -> 

- Silva was, as certainly, the most interesting. She was slimmer than any of the other girls and as graceful as a reed blown by the breeze. Her flesh, a creamy tawny, but thick as a lily petal, showed a faint tinge of amber. Her hair, heavy without curl but fluid as molten metal, showed a deeper touch of amber. And her long eyes, luminous without sparkle, but velvety, as a pansy-heart, showed the deepest possible infusion of amber. Those eyes were a little plaintive in look; and in spite of her happiness at being taken out of the poverty and neglect of gypsy orphanage into the Little House, Silva’s air was often sad.

Billy -> 

- The tangle of thick curls seemed to race off his brow in order to join a mop on top which made of his head a jungle of glittering gold. Under that thatch, his blue eyes alternately gleamed and glistened.

[winters-on-the-wing]

buffalo westabrook spoils the hell out of the big six when their birthdays come around.

of course, we already knew this with maida. when it's her birthday, he gets her beautiful pets and every book and toy she could want. but maybe now that maida is a bit older, buffalo starts getting her lovely decorations and other things for her little shop. maybe he gets her a wonderfully antique cash register, and a telephone for the shop. maybe he gets her a darling little truck with which she can do deliveries.

for laura and harold, buffalo doesn't bother spoiling them with toys or books because those don't interest them. instead, he spoils them with hobbies. he gets laura the best ballet shoes money can buy, and he gets harold all sorts of games, and a real antique chess set with timers on both sides. he always expects them to show him how they're improving, and they are more than happy to impress him.

buffalo knows that arthur is a practical boy, so he gets arthur a shimmering, beautifully new set of carving tools for his woodworking projects, and he also gets arthur a sturdy pair of leather gloves, so that his hands do not get scratched or splintered. arthur feels awkward accepting presents from buffalo, but he does anyway after some gentle convincing.

dicky is a little bit harder for buffalo to figure out. he's just such a gracious child who would be thankful for anything. but when buffalo finds that dicky loves to explore, he finds the avenue to making him perfectly happy on his birthday. buffalo gets dicky a pair of binoculars, a compass, and a journal. so that dicky can go on all sorts of adventures and write about them. dicky is delighted that buffalo believes him capable of going on adventures by himself after years of being treated like he was fragile.

and for rosie, buffalo cannot help but go all out. she's just such an unspoiled child with such a zest for life. she reminds him of maida. so he has a treehouse built for rosie, the most splendid tree house with a tire swing and a pen for all of her stray animal friends to live. the tree house is a safe place for rosie to stay when she feels the need to run away, and buffalo gave her a lock and key of her very own, so that she gets to decide exactly who can come in.

[winters-on-the-wing]

thinking again about maida’s little shop

maida doesn’t have a mother, and neither does arthur.

rosie has a mother, but it is strongly hinted that she has abusive tendencies.

laura and harold have a mother, but she’s snobby and clearly cares more about appearances than reality.

is dicky the only one with a good mother situation? 😂

dicky “my mom is the best” dore

and it’s even funnier because annie dore is granny flynn’s daughter

so it’s dicky “my mom is the best” dore and annie “my mom is the best” dore. if delia turns out to be a good mother years and years later when she’s grown up, then the cycle will continue!

[winters-on-the-wing]

so apparently, rosie is canonically white, with "gleaming snow" colored skin??

yeah i don't care she's dark skinned and filipino HAHA

[winters-on-the-wing]

i made moodboards for the maida characters :D

i tried to include their hobbies!

maida loves to read, dicky loves to make paper crafts, arthur loves woodworking, laura loves to dance, and rosie loves to make candy and rescue animals!

and inez sort of eyeballs it, so my headcanon ages for them are as follows: arthur is the oldest at thirteen, laura is freshly thirteen, maida is twelve, and dicky and rosie are both eleven! it's probably slightly different in the books, but i'm just going to play around with it until i'm 100% sure of ages!

i might make moodboards for the rest of the big six/eight later!

[winters-on-the-wing]

where to read the maida series

hello! do you want to read the maida series by inez haynes irwin, the series that i constantly talk about, but cannot find it in your local library because it is such an old and obscure book series?

well you're in luck! the first four books in their entirety are on google for free! project gutenberg and internet archive, so it can be trusted.

maida's little shop (book 1) -> https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17530/17530-h/17530-h.htm

maida's little house (book 2) -> https://www.gutenberg.org/files/69188/69188-h/69188-h.htm

maida's little school (book 3) -> https://archive.org/details/bwb_O8-BQS-137/page/n13/mode/2up

maida's little island (book 4) -> https://archive.org/details/maidaslittleisla0000inez/page/n5/mode/2up (note: you have to get an account and check this book out!)

[winters-on-the-wing]

random headcanons i have for the big six

(some of these are not backed by canon i just added them cuz i think they’re interesting)

- maida and dicky’s disabilities never truly go away. they grow healthier as they’re more able to play, but they both will always have a bit of a limp. they both are a bit weaker than everybody else and there’s no magical cure for it.

- rosie’s mother is abusive, but in that way where she is utterly unpredictable. she’s kind and gentle one second, and then screaming and throwing things the next. rosie tries to keep it under wraps, and her father is absent when it comes to this.

- arthur and maida both never want to marry, and neither does rosie. arthur and rosie eventually marry as friends, only marrying for the social benefits. maida never marries, and she lives forever with her father, taking care of him when he grows older.

- laura and harold both struggle with perfectionistic tendencies that their parents pushed onto them.

- laura wants to be a ballerina, and as she grows older, she works very hard to achieve it.

- harold, arthur, and dicky induct rosie as an honorable man, and rosie, maida, and laura induct arthur as an honorary woman.

- arthur is outwardly very masculine, but secretly, he doesn’t have that same destructive fire in him that he sees in other men.

- arthur longs to be an explorer and a poet. somebody who travels far and wide and writes poetry about his adventures. dicky longs to accompany him, and arthur agrees that they will be a team. like brothers.

- laura is secretly insecure because she feels that she is not as pretty as maida and rosie. this was partly why she acted so cruelly to them before knowing them well.

- all of the big six except for maida have a lot of trouble accepting charity from buffalo. they usually reject it politely.

- all the big six are happiest when they are together and surrounded by no one else. they are all kindred spirits and they work together to try and give each other the world. they are platonic soulmates!

[winters-on-the-wing]

🦢-annie's little intro-🦢

hey, fellas! welcome to my blog! here are some fun facts about me. if you like the same things as me, i would love to be friends! :)

🌅 my name is annie!

🌅 my pronouns are he/she/him/her, and when people ask my gender, i just say that i am a lesbian (i hate gender labels).

🌅 i am filipino-american, and very proud of my heritage!

🌅 i am nineteen years old, and i am in college studying to be an actor and a choreographer in the theatre industry!

🌅 my main fandoms are maida's little shop (a fandom of which i think i am the only member LOL), anne of green gables/anne with an e, the secret garden, sofia the first, dance moms, and animal crossing!

🌅 fandoms i am trying to get into are pokemon (i only really play the games and don't know any lore), the marauders (my best friend really wants me to get into it, and i am trying my best to get caught up on the lore LOL), and stardew valley (i am only on spring 1 of the gameplay, i fear).

🌅 i have been a prominent member of the sanders sides fandom for a really long time, but i am separating myself from that now because thomas has been pissing me off lately, and the show's quality is deteriorating. also, a fandom with no girl characters is so boring, bro.

🌅 my main thing is writing, though i am more of an ideas guy than an actual writer. i think writing is actually rather boring. i also like to draw, but not seriously. you will catch me drawing stick figures of my au concepts. edits are fun to make, but again, i don't take them too seriously. i mostly just float around and come up with ideas for stuff that nobody cares about. it is very fun!

🌅 please do not interact with me if you are younger than fourteen (i might sound like a boomer but i think young kids being on social media is extremely dangerous and i'm not gonna perpetuate it), if you voted for/endorsed donald trump, if you positively discuss eating disorders or endorse eating disorders (i am in recovery from a very intense ed), or if you ever plan on flirting with me (this sounds like such a pick-me thing to say, but trust me, it has happened numerous times and it is so cringe).

🌅 i am firmly anti-censorship and you will never find me using a censored spelling of a word. i will use content warnings for basic things like blood and heavy themes, but if you ask me to censor things like food or something dumb like that, i will say no. minding personal triggers isn't my responsibility - it's yours. and i will not contribute to the mass censorship that the world of social media is pushing because all it does is create more fear and eggshells to walk on. sorry if that seems mean, but i will always prioritize knowledge over caution.

i hope you all like my blog! always feel free to send me a message or an ask if you want to. bye!

best wishes,

annie 🌟