#reclamations

[bardic-inspo]

All of my Fallout 4 writing in one place.

MacCready x F!SoSu Slow Burn Friends to Lovers | Chapters 29/43

Canon divergence/reinterpretation | Eventual explicit smut (achieved!) | More hurt & even more comfort

[READ ON AO3]

Fic Summary:

“Six months, huh? How much fast talking did you do to get here?” “Enough to keep me alive.” “Really? Cause you don’t act like that’s your goal half the time. Hell, you throw yourself at everything like you’re jumping off a cliff.”

Sole survivor Natasha Sokolova is burning through friends faster than she can make them. Robert Joseph MacCready needs all the caps he can get. Problem is, the smooth-talking woman with a pistol and a job offer turns out to be more trouble than he’s counting on. They’re a match made in hell, but their little partnership might be the only thing that can see them through it.

Deacon x MacCready x F!SoSu OT3 Series

Short fics & One-Shots set post-Institute | Domesticity | Smut | Hurt/Comfort

[READ ON AO3]

Series Summary:

After the Institute, MacCready and Natasha find a place to land. They find Deacon. And Deacon finds his way home. In which a couple becomes a throuple and learns to brave the trials and triumphs of life in a post-Institute wasteland together. Occurs within the same ficverse as Bring the Gasoline. Can be read as standalone oneshots, or as a sequel to that fic.

Series Fics Listed Individually Below the Cut

No Rest for the Wicked - Rated T, Pre-OT3

“So, let me get this straight,” Deacon asks him. “You’re begging me to sleep with your girlfriend?”

Missing Pieces - Rated T, Pre-OT3

Six months after defeating the Institute, Deacon finally took Natasha and MacCready up on their offer to stay at their new homestead. MacCready wants to catch up. Deacon would rather skip the middle. Natasha orchestrates a plan for a more harmonious household.

We Never Go Anywhere Nice - Rated T, Pre-OT3

Deacon, Natasha, and MacCready investigate a lead in a case of several missing ghouls and find themselves spending the night in a house hiding secrets in plain sight.

In the Name of Love - Rated M, Established OT3

Deacon, MacCready, and Natasha have been together for a few months. This isn’t the first time they’ve done this. An unexpected bedroom mishap leads to some teasing and reflection.

Follow Suit - Rated E, Established OT3

What starts as a game of cards turns into Deacon, MacCready, and Natasha showing more than just their hands.

Warm Bodies - Rated E, Established OT3

One close encounter leads to another.

Rest Easy - Rated G, Established OT3

Deacon dozes off. MacCready and Natasha have some fun.

Feline Feelings - Rated G, Established OT3

Natasha makes a new friend who isn’t so friendly to the rest of her household. A series of short vignettes featuring a new, furry addition to the MacCready-Sokolova residence.

Hungry Hearts - Rated T, Vignettes Over Time

A primer in finding your way to your lovers’ hearts through their stomachs. Or, kitchen table polyamory. Or, a collection of short vignettes featuring Deacon, MacCready, and Natasha making love, happiness, and food.

Safe Haven - Rated T, Established OT3, Post Duncan Arrival

Deacon, MacCready, and Natasha prepare their homestead for an incoming blizzard. The storm stirs up bad memories gifted to Nat courtesy of Vault-Tec. Her family helps her cope with and conquer some of the side effects of cryostasis.

Worried Sick - Rated T, Established OT3, Post Duncan Arrival

One minute, Duncan was playing out in the fields behind their house. And the next... MacCready struggles to cope as an old fear resurfaces.

Recollections - Rated M, Vignettes Over Time

Deacon remembers moments along the road that led him home to Natasha and MacCready. Or, Deacon’s retrospection on a handful of moments from Bring the Gasoline after falling for the best shot in the Commonwealth and the woman out of time. Or, a sample/appetizer-sized taste of my favorite OT3.

Misc:

Center of the Universe - Rated T, Toothrotting New Year's Fluff feat. someone else's SoSu

MacCready might have his holidays mixed up; gift-giving is a Christmas thing. But he’s got one last present for his partner in crime before the year is out.

Character/Ship Tags:

Natasha Sokolova

Mactasha

Spicy OT3

Reclamations

Bring the Gasoline

Credits:

Font

Molotov Emoji

[azurafanclubpresident]

This is a reclamations fan page first and foremost! 🌹⚔️🕷️

[sea-critter]

found in a squat in an abandoned housing development, 2023

[bixels]

I'm not explaining why re-imagining characters as POC is not the same as white-washing, here of all places should fucking understand.

[theythemmer]

r we phuckin w the phaltar

[coquelicoq]

it's about...longevity? stability? it's about natsume believing he'll be somewhere long enough to plant flowers and see them bloom. it's about him taking touko seriously when she asks him to tell her what flowers he wants to plant. it's about making something with his own hands, building a future with the fujiwaras. it's about him repairing a rundown home for someone else, restoring it because it's beloved to them, because it's the home of someone they love. it's about him seeing touko's joy and thinking about the youkai saying we'd like to look upon her happy face forever. it's about the box garden making him think of the fujiwaras' garden and his parents' garden, about the flowers being both the memory of flowers that bloomed there before, and the flowers that he and the youkai planted earlier that day. it's about him waking up in both worlds with sensei. it's about touko finding the petal in his hair. it's about him feeling how he falls short and the youkai saying, but you have such gentle hands...

[longreads]

“Building a sandcastle has no stakes: if it turns out poorly, you can smooth it into a clean slate. Perhaps I knew, even then, that sand is not simply material, but the embodiment of limitless possibility, the very substance of dreams.”

In today's new Longreads essay, "Remembered Coast," Zining Mok writes about sand, the sea, and reclamation. It's a gorgeous story in which she excavates layers of history—in Singapore and in her own family.

Read “Remembered Coast” on Longreads.

[fishing-lesbian-catgirl]

The Reclamation Algorithm tutorial - Play now my lord!

[geopsych]

I liked the way plants are working on reclaiming this country road.

[kusuri2013]

Jupiter

[borrelia]

anyway shoutout to lgbt people who are NOT queer and they are NOT dykes and NOT faggots. being uncomfortable with a slur does not separate you from your identity and place in the community. kind of the point of slurs is making people uncomfortable. would be weird to assume they don't.

[bardic-inspo]

1, 14, and 50 for the fic writer asks!!!

Thank you lovely!! 💜

[Fic Writer Asks]

1. What fic of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read any of your work? (In other words, what do you think is the best introduction to your fics?)

Right now, Midnight Chimes is my only BG3 fic (hoping to change that very soon!) But honestly, its not a bad intro to my writing. It's an Astarion x Cursed Tav fic where the actual slow burn is between my Tav (Naomi) and the unfolding reveal of her curse/circumstances. Tav gets her own subplot, and the focus is on her/Astarion's subplots and less on the main BG3 plot (although that's sure there, too). It deals with a lot of themes I like exploring in my other work (grief, recovery, survival) with a more foreboding/haunted vibe that I've always wanted to toy with but haven't really in the past. Here's the summary/link:

[AO3 LINK]

For Fallout fic, I would say No Rest for the Wicked. It's technically set post-game, but doesn't really spoil the game itself. Featuring pining for old friends that aren't (yet) lovers, the seeds of a future OT3 (Deacon x MacCready x F! SoSu), domesticity, and the ache of just deep set emotional wounds that aren't healed yet. Angsty but hopeful, which is par for the course in most of my Fallout writing. Summary below.

[AO3 LINK]

Deacon gets it, he thinks. MacCready and Natasha are in love with each other. A kind of crazy, end-of-the-world, burn down bridges sort of in love with each other. And they’d be fine enough on their own without him. Right? “So, let me get this straight,” Deacon asks him. “You’re begging me to sleep with your girlfriend?”

14. Are there any tropes you would only read if written by a trusted friend or writer?

I would read absolutely anything by @electricshoebox. Riss does not miss and I would follow her into the abyss (heh, rhymes). Her writing is cozy to me like a nice warm blanket even when it's like. Angsty and heartwrenching. I just wanna wrap up in it and when I do, all is good.

Honestly, there's not much I wouldn't try at least once, even if it's only out of morbid curiosity. I might never go back to it again, but hey, now I know.

50. Answer any question of your choice, or talk about anything you want to talk about!

Oh no, I have no idea what to talk about here! Haha. Um.

How about the fic that got me through the pandemic: @electricshoebox's beautiful Enemies to Lovers Slow Burn (featuring Deacon and MacCready from Fallout 4): A Line in the Sand. I don't have adequate words for how amazing this fic is, so I'm just going to drop the AO3 summary/link below, but you'll probably see me absolutely wailing (not always coherently) in Riss' comments if you take a gander down there. I'll never be normal about it ever.

[READ ON AO3]

[syscest]

hi im assuming the us vs them post is about a specific term, which one would that be?

so the sysmed out-group term being referenced in the joke post was (as the reblogs guessed) "endogenic", and I'll lay our thoughts out straight just once to avoid being potentially taken the wrong way

I've got two angles here, existential theological linguistic bullshit, and harm-reduction. stay with me here because even if you're not on board with the first thing you'll want to see the second.

so "traumagenic vs endogenic" is a false dichotomy, and I don't just mean "there's a secret third thing", I mean both classifications are fundamentally not real.

personally? we haven't the foggiest idea why we're a system. but the thing is, I don't think anybody else does either - I think it's genuinely impossible to know why your own consciousness is behind your own eyes and controlling your own body, why you *experience* existing in first-person at all. Like shit, lots of singlets believe it's because a soul has been created or introduced to their flesh, and a bunch of others think that's a load of crap and the chemicals just *do this* on their own. Singlets get this unalienable right to believe whatever the hell they want about why they're experiencing being themselves all the damn time, and I refuse to believe that systems are uniquely special in a way that singlets are not such that anyone can fucking flawlessly divine the cause of our consciousness all of a sudden. These are existential-tier questions and to deny their impossible complexity and the right to self-belief over them is, in my eyes, to deny systems something many singlets feel is part of what makes them human.

You can believe all sorts of stuff about the nature of your own systemhood just like how you can believe all sorts of stuff about the nature of your own existence - that doesn't make you definitively right, it's just a meaningful mechanism through which you understand your own experiences that other people should respect - it's like any faith, go figure.

Frustratingly, these words - traumagenic, endogenic - they're not talking about belief, they're objective buckets actively being used for exclusion. So every time we use the term "traumagenic systems", in saying "systems that objectively exist because of trauma" we are saying, loudly, "it is possible to know why a system exists". and frankly? no the fuck it isn't.

Anyway that's airy bullshit and reflects very idealised interactions so - practical, realist opinions, and harm reduction:

Saying "I'm pro-endo" is a net good, though I think "I support all systems" is probably marginally better because it doesn't perpetuate categories pushed by sysmeds for exclusionary reasons as being essential to defining systemhood - as we joked about.

Contrastingly, self-declaring "traumagenic" or "endogenic" in a bio is a net bad. Saying "I'm a traumagenic system" also says "Hello sysmeds, I believe in your dichotomy and I'm one of the good ones" (great way to get sysmed followers), and that factor doesn't go away if you go on to say that you support all systems - you've already thrown away your opportunity to shield more vulnerable systems from harassment through making who sysmeds need to target more obscure.

In fact, regardless of whether your bio says to sysmeds "I am a target" or "I'm not a target", by saying it explicitly, you're pressuring other, more vulnerable systems to similarly self-declare. It's like cis people putting pronouns in their bio to shield trans people from harassment through obscurity and embarrassment, but in reverse - if you shut up about it, and *just* call yourself a plural system, even if you do believe in their categorisations, you stop the propogation of the self-labelling and exclusionists are forced to make themselves look like idiots because most of their harassment would have to be done at random. It's basically herd immunity - nobody talks, everybody walks.

anyway yeah there's context for future, though honestly the section in plural respect is a lot more succinct lmao

[headlesssamurai]

[sassydefendorflower]

Nothing makes me as feral as the realization that one of Roy's worst moments was burning the tattoo off Riza's back (considering he didn't even manage to burn all of it off), while Riza probably considers that to be the kindest thing Roy has ever done for her.

Her screams of pain and despair and agony haunting Roy just as much as the screams of those he killed, while Riza remembers her own tears fondly because they meant she was finally free of the physical burden of carrying that secret.

Riza asking to be mutilated and Roy doing it TO HER being the biggest gift he could have given her - and yet he will never forgive himself for marring her skin.

He has only ever burned, killed innocents, and learned to torture. He cannot understand that him doing the same to Riza - to his Lieutenant - was a blessing. Mercy. A show of goodwill.

But I think Riza understands. And I think, just as she considered putting an end to him out on the battlefield in Ishval, she takes comfort in him feeling guilty for something she asked him to do. Because it is a sign that he can feel guilty for what he has done - and it is payback for the guilt she suffered after giving him the secret to flame alchemy and him then using it for the slaughter of hundreds.

She can only ever remember that pain fondly - and he can only ever swallow down his guilt.

And I think a small, dark part of Riza likes that.

[bunnyrot439]

Some Trans/Enby/Gender-Nonconforming affirmations for all the edgy, & spooky types out there! This was originally transphobic retohric, but allot of us in the community found it metal as fuck.

So it's ours now. :3

I might make this a print that people can purchase for their home. Idk, we'll see.