#this comic is set postcanon where hes still not doing well enough to leave the house. he cant wait to get the hell out of there

[boiledegghole]

bad times on good days

EMOTIONAL SUPPORT GOOSE TO THE RESCUE!!!!!!! NO FEELINGS BUDDIES LEFT BEHIND

[souridealist]

Slightly belated Yuletide roundup!

WHAT I WROTE:

I had five works in the collection this year, which is a personal best by far: Imperial Radch, the video game Black Closet, "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)", and two for Ursula Vernon's Digger.

Imperial Radch: A Good Friend to Have: Uran and Athoek Station, G, 800 words, no archive warnings apply. A post-canon flashfic about evolving terms of address.

“Why do you still call us Radchaii?” Uran asked, leaning back against the wall. He ran his gloves against the welded seam of the wall next to him, like he was stroking a companion animal or a very close friend. Station couldn’t feel the gesture, either through the wall or through Uran’s hands, but it could see. “It’s been months.”

Brandy: All the Great Wide Sea: Brandy-centric, featuring Brandy/her unnamed lover. G, 600 words, no archive warnings. A short fic about Brandy considering new options.

It wasn’t only men who piled into the bar with a purse full of silver and a head full of tales, either. You got the occasional woman coming along, as tattoo-mottled and shaggy-haired as the men, in ragged trousers and oft-patched shirts. One quiet night Brandy wound up pouring sweet red wine for a woman with three brass rings punched through one ear and the five-thousand-mile swallow tattooed on the back of her hand.

Black Closet: Raise Bid to 31 Pieces of Silver: Rowan/Elsa, T, 1.5K, no archive warnings. A traitorous Rowan turns in an intentionally failed assignment and begins to suspect that Elsa knows her secret.

“You know,” Elsa said. “Mallory’s a good girl, and she can blend in with a crowd all right, but I’ve never had trouble noticing when she comes into a room. She draws the eye.” Mallory was pretty enough, Rowan thought. Bright hair. “But you…” Elsa said, pushing back her chair. “You’re so quiet, when you want to be. It’s a gift.”

Digger: Comparative Theology: Murai, Jhalm, Digger, and Shadowchild. G, 3k, no archive warnings. Four scenes exploring each character's relationship with the divine.

. Later in life, Jhalm revisited the temple and learned of the great wars of attrition that Teshia’s priests fought over the herb beds: the Invasive Plant Debates, the Three Or Possibly Four Basil Varietals, and the Mint Idiot, who planted mint in the ground to run riot over the temple. But as a child he’d always found the gardens peaceful, and he’d loved taking home the sacred packages each worshiper was given, leaves from Teshia’s garden dried over the sacred Hearthflame. He used to press the twists of burlap to his nose and inhale something both delicious and sacred. Once one of the priests caught him at it: Cassandra of the straight gray braids and straight-pressed robes. Jhalm jumped, squeaking, and shoved the herbs into his bag.

Digger: Anything That Talks: Murai and Jhalm, G, 2k, no archive warnings.Jhalm's patrol of the Veiled meets another, more ordinary demon, and Murai and Jhalm have a conversation about authority, the past, and how to be good.

“I eat what I will,” it said, slithering forward. Murai could just see the roots of the trees in its coils. She doubted the little stand of elms would last for very long after this. “I eat the shadows of great and small, of weak and of mighty. Yours, impertinent creature – ah, yours is fascinating, strange and dark and deep. So hard-edged, in such a bright light. You will be…” It moved forward, again – between the flanking arms of the Veiled. “Delicious.”

“I see,” Murai said, stepping easily back. “Captain Jhalm, I believe we should kill this creature, if you will give the order.”

WHAT I RECEIVED:

The Touching of Lips by Prinzenhasserin. Queen's Thief, "Five times Costis wanted to kiss Kamet and one time he did." This is a delightful story about five people making Costis think about how much he wants to kiss Kamet; each scene is a beautifully drawn, distinct sketch, and the payoff is delightful. I wanted Costis/Kamet so badly after Thick as Thieves, and this was lovely to receive.

Antelope Dreams by ambyr. Summer in Orcus, "When she was eleven, Summer thought she was very nearly an adult. At seventeen, she's starting to understand how much she has to learn." This is a glorious postcanon fic about growing up, and living with the legacy of Orcus, and being a well-behaved Good Kid (tm) with a crush on a Bad Kid (tm), and Summer remembering the antelope woman and realizing she's a queer furry. It's perfectly in-tone and beautiful.

AUTHORIAL CHATTERING ON WHAT I WROTE:

Yes, I shall continue to do this. Yes, with all five of them. But under a cut!

A Good Friend to Have: This one was a really interesting experience, because I originally wrote it using she/her pronouns for Uran, since canon does. It wasn't unti coming back to it later that I remembered that Uran is briefly identified as male in Delsig, and that if I was leaving the 'Citizen' honorific as Radchaai, I was 'translating' out of Delsig. And thus shoud use he/him pronouns. I really love the series's use of 'she' as a neutral pronoun, and everything that choice creates, and I was pretty hesitant to step away from it -- but it's also a very central conceit of the story that Uran isn't hearing Radchaai the way a native speaker would hear it. Which means Uran needs to use he/him. Going through and changing that was the most annoyingly fiddly editing task I have ever fucking undertaken, but also... really damn interesting to do! The pronouns were all I changed, and it still shifted my mental image of Uran's body language and physical presence a lot.

This was also published with what was originally its working title, which I don't think I've ever done before; occasionally the right title has come to me by the time I have to save the word document (almost always when the fic is written in one sitting), but this wasn't meant to be final and then I realized I liked it better than anything I could come up with. It's a direct quote from canon: Breq's comment when Uran mentions talking to Station in the second book.

All the Great Wide Sea: The prose is so purple here. I had so much fun writing it. It's a short, open-ended fic written all in a hurry because I thought the collection closed a day sooner than it did, and I basically just threw women sailors, running off to sea to join your man, and Age of Sail tavern imagery together with gleeful abandon. The 'being metamours with the ocean' theme isn't explored as thoroughly as I'd like, but... I couldn't resist adding the tag because I amuse myself too much. I'd never written fic for a song fandom before, even though the existence of it is one of my favorite things about Yuletide before; I'm glad I finally did.

Raise Bid to 31 Pieces of Silver: This title is... a thing. I refused to let mysef name it 'Silver and Hemp,' because this is not a religious fic and for fuck's sake come up with a better reference for a fic about treachery, but, well. I could not, in fact, come up with a better reference. But I did manage to at least include the idea of being tempted out of treachery, and I like the implicit cynicism of the bid thing. Because, you know: Machiavellian secret-police teenagers.

This was a great prompt, and I made a beeline straight for a traitor!Rowan/Elsa worldstate, because that is my favorite route hands down. This is also the first time in I don't know how long that I've used jealousy as a shippy plot device! I don't usually like it, and I don't find it cute in any way; but this isn't meant to be a cute fic, and part of what I love about this fandom is that it's an all-female cast where everyone gets to have a lot of rough edges.

Oh, and I also got to play around with incorporating game mechanics into the story! I fucking love trying to de-abstract game mechanics in a way that doesn't contradict what you actually see. As if you couldn't tell from me regularly sneaking that shit into Dragon Age fic.

Comparative Theology: This was actually my second attempt at my main assignment! I wanted to do a post-canon adventure that involved everyone meeting up while Digger tried to get home, and then everyone having to share anecdotes from their past (since my recipient mentioned liking fic about 'how people get to where they are'), but I just. Could not make it work. I'd had the idea of writing a set of thematically-linked vignettes in the back of my head as a backup, and the idea of linking them specifically by theology clicked just as the deadline started to really intensely loom. And thus! It's a pretty baggage-heavy theme to use, and I did worry about that -- especially in a gift fic -- but, well. The tagline is "A wombat. A dead god. A very peculiar epic." I figured I was probably safe. And one of my favorite things about the comic is what it does with the relationship between the human (or... worshiper of various species) and the divine.

I drew on a bunch of Ursula Vernon's print work as well as the actual comic (though I still got a lot of my own particular High Drama all over the prose, trying to capture the tone of things like the Saltlace sequence in words. The line about the Mint Idiot is in there entirely because I was like 'this voice is drifting way too far back towards just me. QUICK, ADD SOME PLANTS.' The Baba Yaga line is a direct reference to Summer in Orcus too.

I may eventually try and salvage what I had of my original attempt. I hewed closer to canon tones, I think, and I had some good fucking Jabberworck dialogue.

Anything That Talks: This one is secretly my baby. I was surprised to find myself really interested in Jhalm on later read-throughs, because I wasn't the first time; but it turned out I wanted to poke at him. And I really wanted to poke at Murai's decision to be his leash, and at what that might look like, and how she would choose to do it. Twisty power dymanics! The power actually lying with the person with less outward authority! Using one's own weakness as a source of strength! Very rigid people needing to bend or die, and what that costs! MY SHIT. (And I didn't actually realize that last was, in fact, something I keep revisiting until this moment, but hm. This sure is the third fic on that theme I've posted since November.)

Something I absolutely did not do intentionally during this fic and then noticed in the editing: I don't reference color anywhere in this fic other than 'cold white-glowing eyes.' Perils of writing for a black-and-white comic! (I didn't do that in either 'Comparative Theology' or my false start; fic isn't canon, text isn't a comic, and you've got to use the medium you're working with. But I left it alone for this one; I liked it.)