#tfw your prompt fill ends up being a 3K au

[cityandking]

hang time

The mission is a blue-eyed man dressed in gold, and the Asset cannot understand why he knows him. [enikö & sorrel, ensemble. 3k. avengers au.]

a winter soldier au based on the prompt a relieved hug from @darlingicarus who also drew this inspirational art and also to whom sabine incidentally belongs. sorrel belongs to @clericofchaos; vola belongs to @noswearwolves and nenny belongs to @heeyrebecca.

hang time (n). –– the period of time a self-launched object stays in the air before it begins to fall

.

For a moment he is weightless, and then his body remembers to roll and the world spins for a moment and he lands upright, hand braced against the asphalt, staring up at the Target who look down at him and says,

“Nikö?”

It echoes in the space between him, just enough to catch him off guard, just enough that he stops to take stock of the target. He rises slowly, staring at the mark, who stares back at him with mouth slightly open and hair in disarray, red welt across one cheek, and his eyes open wide and––

Blue eyes staring, horrified, and the sensation of plummeting, and––

“Who the fuck is that?” he asks, words too loud in contrast to the ringing silence inside his head. The target stares back at him, wordless.

It takes him a moment too long to process the snapshot of–– of what he does not know (memory) and so it takes him a moment too long to raise his firearm again, and in that moment of confusion one of the Target’s associates skids into the fray. She ducks his wild shot and slips beneath his guard, laying into him with a series of lightning-quick blows that jolt him out of any shredding uncertainty and back to the mission at hand.

Later, though, later, while they work on the dented plating of his arm, he stares up at The Man In The Suit and tastes the edge of understanding like blood in his mouth.

“The man on the bridge,” he says slowly. “I knew him.”

The Man In The Suit sits in front of him, mouth a firm line, and holds him by the chin to stare him in the eye. Whatever he is looking for he must find it, because he sighs and releases his face.

“Wipe him,” he orders, rubbing his hand against his jacket as though he has dirtied it. “Start again.”

The last thing the Asset sees as the helmet lowers and the blinding blue static of the wipe slices through his mind is The Man In The Suit closing the heavy metal door behind him as he leaves. Then there is electricity, and burning blue, and nothing.

.

According to the mission briefing the Target is a captain, decorated war hero and spec ops team leader gone rogue from a classified government agency. The mission is find-and-neutralize, with extreme prejudice. Known associates include a defector KGB agent known for a mutative anger management problem, a fence working in the private sector and an assassin with multiple kills to her name and no confirmed prior allegiances but multiple rumors. A standard DNC mission.  

Except he keeps returning to the Target. The image in the brief is a postage square of a photograph, the Target staring at something to the side, and though the image is black and white he cannot shake the certainty that, were it in color, the Target’s eyes would be blue.

“You ready for this?” asks Strike One, who is also designated Field Handler. The Asset nods once, silent. He is always ready. It is what he is designed for.

Strike One shakes his head and laughs. The Asset watches impassively, and restrains himself from flinching when Strike One claps a hand on his flesh and blood shoulder. The blades of the chopper whir above them as they approach the dropsite.

“Anworth’s not gonna know what hit him.”

Anworth, who is––

The man on the bridge, I––

Who is––

Blue eyes and the sensation of falling––

Who is––

“Targets at three o’clock,” calls the pilot over the headset, and the Asset pulls up the mask.

Acquired.

“Ready for drop,” he orders the team, and checks the knife in his belt and the other one in his boot and accepts the chute Strike One passes him without another word.

Far below them three figures race for the relative shelter of a half-finished building at the construction site where they have gone to ground. The Target is a spot of gold bracketed by green and red. He shrugs on the chute.

“Go,” he orders, and falls like a stone from the sky, and the Strike team follows him down.

.

It is not the clean fight he would like. Strike gets tangled with the associates, and the Asset is left to pursue the Target to the penultimate floor alone. That is not the trouble; the trouble is that the Target keeps speaking to him as though attempting to reason with an entity, and the Asset does not understand why.

So he retreats to what he knows best, and decides that permanently silencing the Target will also end the inane questioning.

This proves easier said than done.

He feels the pop in his knuckles as he catches the lip of the shield instead of the target’s face. Dislocated: second and third proximal phalanx, lunate. Nonoptimal for attack. He switches to the other arm instead. Servos whir in the elbow joint––misaligned; he feels the grating like an itch at the back of his skull––but not enough to impair movement. The target’s head snaps around at the force of the blow.

The Asset pulls the arm back to strike again, but something stills him, something he cannot put a name to. Even as the hand clenches and unclenches in the air––the metal one; the other falls limply at his side, fingers half curled, a throbbing pain welling around his hand––he is unable to strike again until the target’s head turns back in his direction.

“Nikö,” the target says. It is the same word he used previously. The Asset does not understand why the target uses it. It denotes no one. “It’s me.”

“I do not know you,” he replies. This is forbidden––he is not to speak with the target; the order was made exceedingly clear during the initial briefing––but something deeper than the orders insist he speak.

He does not understand that either. It leaves a sour taste in his mouth, and he wishes it would not. The fight would go more easily without it, and the without needless hesitation, and without the way the target stares at him as though the Asset is responding incorrectly to his actions.

The Asset has a singular action to take, and that is to neutralize the Target. The rest means nothing.

The Target stares again now, shield angled poorly to deflect, and he clenches his (broken; the pain centers him again) hand and drives him back, a one-two-one punch as he slips through the fallen defense. The target skids back beneath the force of the augmented blow; the servos in his elbow grind again, set his teeth on edge.

He raises the shield before the asset delivers the final blow, and the impact jars through to his shoulder, and he crouches, panting, and resists the urge to shake out his arm. He misses the familiarity of a knife in his palm, but he lost his over the side of the scaffolding in the opening salvo of this fight. That was many long minutes ago now; it has dragged on longer than intended.

They will be displeased when they learn it has taken him so long to dispatch the target.

As the thought comes to him, and with it a wave of fear that almost washes away the confusion, the structure shakes around them. Each of them loses their footing; the target stumbles backwards as he ducks to the left, narrowly avoiding a metal beam that topples from above. The floor beneath cracks, a deafening boom as the concrete fractures. He launches himself forward as the ground underfoot vanishes, taking a portion of the building down with it in a cloud of dirt and dust.

The Target struggles upright among the dust and dirt. Below there is the sound of crashing, and the whole of the building shakes.

“Nikö,” he says, panting. There is blood across his uniform, and blood at the corner of his mouth, and blood on the ground beneath them. “You know me.”

“I do not.” He pushes himself forward and strikes out at the Target, who is slow to block; the Asset’s fist connects soundly with the Target’s jaw and his head snaps back. His blue eyes land on him again.

“You do,” he insists, and the Asset strikes him again. He takes the blow, and the Asset falls back, panting. The Target––Anworth––stares at him. Blue eyes. Falling.

“I’m not going to fight you,” Anworth says, and his shield falls from his grip, disappears between the cracks in the concrete into the dust and rubble below. “You’re my friend.”

The Asset stares at him a moment longer, something unfamiliar welling in his chest, tight and hot and angry, and he pushes himself forward with a wordless shout. Anworth folds beneath him, falls prone half hanging over the endless drop between them and the river that runs alongside the construction site. He strikes again, and again, and––

Anworth stares up at him, one eye swollen shut. The Asset hesitates.

“Go on,” Anworth says. “Finish it. I’m not going to fight you, Enikö.”

He pulls his hand back further, broken fingers of his hand curled into the uniform Anworth wears, sun splashed across his chest, and he cannot–– he cannot––

The building rumbles again, and another steel beam crashes down next to them, and the floor cracks, and he just manages to grab hold of a strut as the whole thing tips riverwards, and Anworth slides from beneath him and falls.

He holds a heartbeat–– two––

Blue eyes, horrified, and the sensation of––

And plummets after him.

.

The red one tracks him down him.

Amaretti, Sabine; previous work for the Russians, Americans, Chinese, and at least half a dozen other organizations. Current affiliations: unknown. Known associate of Anworth, Sorrel. The Target.

And there she is, sitting in his kitchen, legs kicked up on the table. His wrist is still splinted, though mostly healed. The arm grates with every motion; it is getting worse and he does not know what to do about it. He thinks of the half dozen firearms hidden around the barebones apartment and the sack stuffed behind the fridge for moments such as these when he needs to leave without warning.

“It’s alright,” she tells him as he freezes in the door. “I’m not here to fight.”

He does not move. “What are you here for?”

“We talked,” she says. “The doc figures she can help you out. And Anworth won’t say it but he’s obviously worried about you. Been stressing for weeks. Nenny hasn’t said anything about it yet, but she’s pretty social. She’ll come around. I’m the welcoming committee.”

He hesitates. “I don’t understand.”

She stands, and he shifts back into a defensive crouch. She waves him away and taps twice on a piece of paper folded up on the table.

“Whenever you’re ready, we can help you out.”

“I do not need help.”

“Yeah,” she snorts. “That’s what I said too.”

She brushes past him on the way out, and he gives her as wide a berth as he can but she makes no move towards him. Still, it takes him a long minute to enter the apartment after that, and he spends three hours meticulously going over each and every failsafe he has implemented to find out how she got in. He spends the night staring up at the ceiling, waiting for the sound of his alarms to activate.

Three days pass like this, he holed up waiting for the slightest hint that someone has come for him, before he believes her. Whenever you’re ready.

He is unsure what to do with that. He resolves to do nothing at all.

.

His hand heals, and his mind gets… clearer is not the word for it. Holding onto anything is like trying to capture smoke, but the images that drift past become more solid. He remembers places and people he cannot name, only knows they are memories from previous jobs worked. He remembers The Man In The Suit, and the conditioning. He remembers Anworth.

The curiosity wins out, eventually. And he is tired of stealing everything from the shadows, of living like a rat in a hole. He unfolds Amaretti’s scrap of paper. He finds the address.

Darkmaw answers the door. One lens of her glasses is matte black; she peers out at him from the other. She is not nearly as green now as he recalls. He does not trust that one bit.

“Great,” she says, voice utterly devoid of inflection. “He’ll be pleased.”

He takes a breath. It takes him two tries to get the words out. “She said you could… help.”

Her expression flickers for a fraction of a second. She opens the door wider. “You coming in or what?”

He hesitates, but his decision was made up when he knocked. He crosses the threshold.

She closes the door behind him but does not bolt it, and that is more of a comfort than he cares to admit.

.

She pokes and prods him over, muttering all the while, and in the end informs him she can’t make any promises but she’ll do what she can. He accepts it with a nod. It is... well, it is more than he thought to find, and certainly more than he thought to find here. It is not all that long ago that he was meant to kill them.

Darkmaw leaves him alone in the lab shortly after without another word, and he lingers as long as he can stand among the needles and equipment before the walls become too high and the ceiling too heavy and he must leave.

He walks nearly directly into the Target. Anworth.

Sorrel.

That much he has remembered these past weeks. The name echoes through his memories. It means something important, he knows, but that understanding slips away each time he grabs for it until he is so desperate for any sort of clarity he could shout. It still evades him.

Anworth freezes in the middle of the hallway like a struck animal, eyes wide. Even shocked still like this, he looms, too big for his own frame. For a moment, neither speaks.

“Enikö,” he says finally, voice a little strangled. The name still does not mean… Well, whatever it is supposed to mean. But he recalls it, which is more than he could say two months ago. It will have to be enough for now. “What are–– Why are you––”

“I was invited,” he says.

“Invited?” he echoes. And then, a moment later, he sighs, fingers pressed against his forehead. “Sabine.”

“If it is a problem––” He has only the barest understanding of what he has done, a glimmer of remembrance following years of blankness, but from what he can piece together... Well, he would not be surprised if Anworth–– Sorrel did not wish to see him around. He is surprised any of them would willingly have him here, after all he has done.

“No! No, it’s no problem.” Anworth shifts back a little, as though he realizes he is standing over him. He takes a breath. “Do you, um. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes.” Anworth is still staring down at him, though, his eyes a little too wide, a little too hopeful, so he swallows again and adds, “You are Sorrel.”

“Do you know who I am... to you?”

“You knew me before. You were my... friend.” Friend is inadequate, he thinks, but the memories he manages to catch leave him with only the imprints of things that may-have-been, and he still as trouble separating the fact from the conditioning, the truth from the falsehood. There is the sense of soft eyes, and warm hands, and a protection that is so alien it nearly turns his stomach. He wets his lips. “You helped me.”

“We helped each other,” Sorrel corrects too quickly, voice a little too thick. Emotional, a part of him denotes, close to tears. Open to manipulation. It would only take a little pressure to––

He silences that voice as best he can. Darkmaw tells him it will get better, that the memories will sort themselves out with time.

He would like to believe she is correct.

“Yes,” he agrees, because he cannot think to say anything else, and because he wishes it to be true.

“I–– I’d like to help you now. If that���s alright.”

It takes him a moment to find his voice. “It is.”

“Good,” Anworth says. “Good, that’s. Good.”

Anworth steps forward suddenly, and he tenses, hand falling to the knife at his belt, but the larger man only wraps his arms around his shoulders, and it takes him a moment to realize that this is a hug.

Still. His heart beats adrenaline-quick in his chest and it takes him some time to relax into it.

“Sorry,” Anworth says, voice thick and damp again, and something unpleasant twists in his gut. “I never should have left you there.”

He cannot recall where there is, but in the moment that does not seem to matter. He brings one hesitant hand up to pat Anworth’s back.

“It’s alright,” he replies, uncertain. “I am here now.”

That seems to be the right thing to say; Anworth takes in a shuddering breath and steps back. There are tears down his cheeks. The twisting in his gut redoubles.

“If there’s anything you need–– Er, money, or… or weapons, or––”

“A glass of water would be nice,” he says, and Anworth nods so quickly he must get dizzy. Something else settles in his gut at that, not the twisting. Something softer. He does not know the name for this feeling either.

“Water, yeah. Okay. Um, kitchen is this way. And obviously you’ve seen the lab already…”

Anworth leads him on a haphazard tour of the building, and slowly but surely he begins to believe it when they say they want to help.

.

“Well of course he’s staying,” Nenny says when the others have returned. Amaretti toasts him briefly with her glass of water. Darkmaw folds her arm. “Was that even a question? We’re not just going to leave him out in the cold.”

“It’s summer,” Amaretti injects unhelpfully.

“Shouldn’t we ask him?” Darkmaw asks, jerking her chin in his direction. Anworth turns to him, with his––

wide blue eyes––

expression hopeful and asks: “Are you–– Do you want to stay?”

And the Asset–– Enikö says, “Yes.”

[mittensmorgul]

I recently read a fic on ao3 and it was funny and great and then I thought of a few major changes that would make it even more hilarious. Problem is, I don't know the etiquette here. Should I just go ahead and write my own version? Add a link to the original story and credit it as inspiration? It was based on a prompt so the idea isn't exclusively the author's I suppose. Anyway I'll only be borrowing the start scenario (which is the prompt) and there will be no other similarities. Please help

Hello there. I’m gonna start what I expect will be kind of a long essay by saying there is an awful lot to unpack here… Starting with the fact that there is a chasm of difference between taking inspiration from a prompt fill fic and imagining an entirely different scenario, and starting that from a mentality of “I can do better than you.” The first is at the root of all of human creativity. We all bounce off one another and take inspiration from each other, and the entire history of human storytelling is essentially one long conversation. But the second part of this historically leads to fisticuffs. No, really. Google “famous literary feuds” for all the reasons why.

It’s not so much a difference in practical terms, but in your approach and understanding here.

So this is why I saw this ask in my inbox late last night and decided I needed to go to sleep rather than trying to answer you right away. But now I have coffee, so let’s give this a try. :P

I’d start by asking what the source of the prompt was. Was it a tumblr post? A prompt from a prompt list? Even one of those “pick a pairing and a prompt and I’ll write a short ficlet” posts? If so, you’re probably free to use the prompt by going back to the original fic prompt list. People publish those as jumping off points to write fic, and they actively WANT people to use them this way.

If the prompt, however, was given to a specific author by someone, you might want to at least ask that author if it would be okay for you to write something of your own based on the prompt. And at least try not to frame it as “I can write something better than you did” when you ask. That’s just rude and demoralizing for the author who’s already published a fic for that prompt, you know?

I get fic ideas all the time from random places, but there’s a different etiquette for each of them.

Sometimes a random tumblr post will give me an idea, and I’ll go talk to the OP privately, both because it’s FUN to talk about someone’s wild headcanon with them, and because you’re approaching the person who had the initial idea with courtesy and in the spirit of collaboration, rather than from this place of “stealing their idea.” The first builds good fandom feelings, while the second tends to do the opposite. I have a couple of experiences here that will hopefully illustrate the difference.

A few years back, when Lizbob was running the Great Meta Scavenger Hunt during s12, it led to the creation of the Great Fic Writer Scavenger Hunt. The theory behind it was that any number of authors could take the same fic prompt based on a single trope paired with a single distinctive character trait and the results would all be entirely unique stories. The intent was to prove that just because an idea had been written before, it becomes a new story when written by someone else, you know? And it was TRUE.

http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/tagged/the-great-fic-writer-scavenger-hunt/chrono

We had DOZENS of authors participate, and despite all writing “the same story” every week, NONE of the resulting stories were even remotely the same.

On the other hand, I posted an insomnia-inspired headcanon a few months ago, and within five minutes after posting it, my insomnia brain– with an assist from a more rational point of view thanks to lizbob– had taken that little notion and spun it out into long fic in my head. I went back to my original post to laugh at myself in a reblog, announcing that I was gonna write long fic of the thing and for people to stay tuned for more, but other folks had already reblogged the original with comments to the effect of, “Someone should write this fic!” The worst thing was that other authors were tagged into it. As if my highly specific headcanon was suddenly communal property. Because the implication behind it– whether it was the truth or not– felt like “I like this headcanon, but have decided that I don’t want the OP to actually write this story because I like XYZ author’s writing better.”

And I know that was not the intent of the folks who added those comments to my post, but as someone who actively writes fic for this fandom, it felt like a slap in the face.

Now if those same people had replied, “OP please write more of this!” or “What a cool idea!” or even if they’d come to me privately and said, “Hey this is a cool idea, do you mind if I use it to write a longer fic?” I would’ve been HAPPY about it.

Can you see the difference here, anon?

The result was a rather frustrating back and forth where I was told that because I posted the idea in public it was effectively free real estate for anyone else to squat on. I mean, isn’t that what we’re all doing with the source material we base all our fan creations on anyway? We don’t ask the Supernatural writers for permission to use their characters, their settings, their intellectual property to create our own stories and art, right?

But the difference here is apparently too subtle for some folks to grasp. The Supernatural writers aren’t part of our fandom community. And the culture within fandom operates on different rules. Fandom creators are not source creators, and yes we all collectively “steal” from the same source, but it sort of defies the underlying premise that fandom creators as a whole are operating on the same level to suggest that “stealing” from another fandom creator is the same thing.

From my understanding, the entire point of fandom creators doing what they do is to build a community together around the thing we all love. There is a way to do that in good faith, through collaboration and the free sharing of ideas and creations.

I hope this makes sense.

The result of all of that was that I set aside another project I’d been wanting to write and instead began spite writing my own headcanon post. It was like pulling teeth at first, because there was so much Bad Fandom Feeling attached to the concept that the words just didn’t want to come. It’s FINALLY flowing now, though (after several months of the aforementioned teeth-pulling), and is nearing 18k words. I’m hoping it’ll be done and ready to post by the end of March, so I can FINALLY go back to writing the thing I’d originally wanted to work on before this nonsense blew up.

I’ve also unfortunately been one of the authors tagged in on someone else’s headcanon post in the past. I know the folks who do this think it’s flattering, and they’re just excited about an idea and want to read more of it, but the correct etiquette is ALWAYS to approach the OP in PRIVATE before taking their idea and writing it yourself, or pointing another author in the direction of the post and suggesting they write it for you.

I can guarantee you that 99 times out of 100, the OP will actually be flattered you enjoyed their idea so much you want to read more of it if you frame it from a place of appreciation and excitement, rather than from a place of selfish entitlement or superiority.

I’ve talked about this before, but this is how I have always approached fic writing. I got my first idea for a long fic from the Valentine’s Day Collab fic that Winjennster ran back in 2015. I told her I had an idea based on her prompt that I wanted to write as a much longer fic than would fit into the 3k limit for the collab, and she told me to go forth and be fruitful with my words. Actually, I think her exact words were more like “HELL YES! YOU DO THAT!” or something, but the spirit was the same. :P

The next fic I wrote (Project Beyonce) was inspired by a series of tumblr crack posts about “what sort of tumblr blogs would each member of TFW run?” And I reblogged them with commentary about how this would make a hilarious fic, because they were that sort of “conversational thread” of crack headcanons where that sort of addition was more than welcome. Not to mention I was already on friendly terms with the other participants in the thread, so it wasn’t strange for me to zoom in out of the blue and announce I was writing fic inspired by those posts. Even though my fic was set in an AU, and the only commonality was the fact that Dean and Cas were on tumblr. Nothing else about my fic was even remotely similar to the canon crack headcanons from those posts, and I don’t think that anyone involved in the original threads was upset that I’d written fic based on Dean being Cas’s favorite tumblr anon…

My first DCBB (Revenge of the Subtext) was inspired by a crack post made by @nicelimabean. One single sentence about Jensen and Jared walking into a con dressed like Sam and Dean and covered in dirt and blood, and suddenly I had 80k of fic running through my head. I sat there and stared at her post for like five minutes and then went immediately to the chat bubbles to ask– nay, beg– to use her post as a fic prompt for the DCBB. We talked it over for a good long while, both of us growing more excited as the ideas spun out, and long story short, not only did I make a wonderful fandom friend, she ended up beta reading for me and being an ongoing source of encouragement and support in fandom. We even met in person at a con (!) and spent the weekend cackling about how everything felt like a reference to RotS (since at the time we were the only two people on the planet who’d read the fic or even knew what it was about, because DCBB rules of secrecy).

Since then, I’ve gotten ideas for fic from tumblr (and always asked the OP for permission to write their idea– like for fic such as Plotbunny which was based on the combination of ideas from @bluestar86 on a WONDERFUL way to confirm Dean’s bisexuality in canon and Lizbob’s long desire for an Easter Bunny episode, combined with the fact that Easter fell on April Fool’s Day last year… to ideas for The Terminal Job based on chats with @truebluecas about an airport AU WHICH I AM SO SORRY STROB I STILL HAVE IT ON MY LIST TO WRITE AND I SWEAR I WILL WRITE IT EVENTUALLY D:

I’ve also had the reverse happen, where someone read one of my fics and was inspired to write their own fic based on Revenge of the Subtext. They approached me in private with the idea and asked for my blessing to write it. Honestly, I was FLOORED that anyone would be inspired by my words like that, and eagerly encouraged them to write their idea. I’ve also had people give me fic ideas in comments on AO3, in chats both on tumblr and Discord, which turned into longer conversations and eventually more fic (or at the very least to ideas on my To Be Written list). But I always ALWAYS ask permission from the other person or people before writing their ideas. And I have NEVER been told that I was not permitted. People are usually PLEASED that their ideas are deemed worthy by another writer, you know? It’s exciting!

This also goes for art inspired by fic, but in a slightly different way. If someone (anyone!) was inspired to draw something based on something I wrote, I will UNIVERSALLY BE THRILLED that my words inspired someone’s creativity in a different medium. But the key here is it’s a different medium. Nobody ever has to ask permission to art my fic. But that’s not the same as wanting to rewrite my fic into a different story, you know?

Not to mention, collaborating and asking permission and sharing the enthusiasm for an idea or a story like this with others has the potential to boost ALL of your creations. You could build resentment in fandom from other creators, or you can all lift each other up. Starting from the standpoint of communal excitement can result in mutual promotion of each other’s works, you know? Do you want a built-in cheerleader for your work, to build connections in fandom that will eventually support ALL of your works? Then your approach to sharing ideas this way is the key that could potentially unlock that door, or conversely lock it behind you. Your choice, really.

Wait, what was I talking about again? OH right. The whole entire point of fandom. We’re all of us in this same boat, sailing the seas of our chosen Source Material together. You can use your creative abilities for Good, to build communities up, or you can be That Asshole who tries to build themselves up while effectively shading or demoralizing other fandom creators in the process.

So what I’m saying here isn’t necessarily about your desire to write something based on someone else’s idea, but more about the approach you take to it. It costs zero dollars to be polite about it and approach it from a direction of good will and joy in creating for the thing we all love together, you know?