2018 Is Over Now?: A Fic Roundup
Buffyverse
well tell her that I miss our little talks
So Hurry Up and Lose Me, Hurry Up and Find Me (Again)
Here We Are, Trapped (But Is It a Trap If I'm With You?)
To All Our Histories Which Haven't Yet Happened
MCU
But A Walking Shadow
Out of the Frying Pan
Hand in Hand, Side by Side
to walk to where you are sleeping
To The Neighborhood
Oh, But Aren't You Already My Darling?
By Those Who Show Up
Stitch Together
In Spirit of the Season
Childhood Friends
Veronica Mars
not just about being new (it’s about a change)
1. Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted?:
Still not predicting, but probably around the predictable amount? I've gotten a little longer, I think, but I'm writing fewer stories overall, and I've really fallen into a few specific fandom categories - haven't added a new one in a while.
2. What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?:
Dick/OC. Dick/anyone was a surprise. I'm generally frustrated and uninterested in Dick, so taking him on as a main character when typically he's been a side role in my fic at best, is unexpected. I was just really drawn to the prompt.
3. What’s your own favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest?
I'm really proud of To The Neighborhood. I like the POV, I think the character flowed well, it has a particular tone throughout, and everything is built using small details without info dumps. And I'm always a big fan of domesticity too - sweet, settled life is always a joy for me to write!
4. Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
It's weird to say at this point, but I think I've been playing around with AUs a little too much. Here We Are, Trapped (But Is It a Trap If I'm With You?) and Hand in Hand, Side by Side are really prime examples of this: they aren't just timeline changes or ways of placing the characters in similar roles in non supernatural settings, they are way, way big and entire AUs. I really like them conceptually - ya girl loves a good (or not good!) romcom - but they are really quite out of the ordinary. I guess I learned that I kinda don't care - I wrote it because I liked it, and I had fun with it!
5. Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year?
Nah. I finished my Woman Borne sequel, and I'm probably just going to resign my work on my too ambitious Chase/Cameron fic, so I'm good.
6. From my past year of writing, what was…
Story Most Underappreciated by the Universe:
But A Walking Shadow. I'm not afraid to say how sad I am about this. I'm really, intensely proud of this story: the writing is good, the characters are good, it's lengthy (for me), it's chapter fic, it's part of a universe I've already worked on, there's action instead of just Emotional Talking - it felt like I did everything right, and it still didn't make a difference.
Most Fun:
Hand in Hand, Side by Side - I like Steve/Peggy and a Virtue/Moir AU for them was a blast to write.
Most Disappointing:
By Those Who Show Up is a little too liberal wonky - too much political talk, not quite enough emotional buildup. To All Our Histories Which Haven't Yet Happened is also a little exhausting and repetitive in concept and would have probably been better if there were more substance between the little stories, but I really like the title, so that helps it out.
Most Sexy:
Steve and Peggy end up in a bed and kiss there in Oh, But Aren't You Already My Darling? so ha ha ha, that is extremely sexy!
Hardest to Write:
They kinda ended up in either the "it took four days from beginning to final edit" category, or the "I'm afraid I might just be writing this for the next several years" one this time around. I took a lot of care with But A Walking Shadow, and I stopped writing Childhood Friends for a while to work on other stuff and there was a point where I couldn't make In Spirit of the Season not incredibly depressing and a piece of character assassination, but most of my Buffy fics were like this (well tell her that I miss our little talks was the exception - that's why it's listed as posted like three weeks before the rest of them).
Most Unintentionally Telling:
As I was writing In Spirit of the Season, I literally said aloud, "I think I might have something weird going on internally with motherhood."
Choice Lines:
From But A Walking Shadow:
The force of her fingers, the directness of her gaze: for a moment he fears that she is about to kiss his mouth with the desperate confidence he’d felt before he’d boarded Schmidt’s plane. But instead, she leans up and presses her lips beneath his ear. He shivers; he always does, there, and she knows that.
He just can’t think of the noise and the flames, the collapse, when his mind and heart and guts weigh so human inside him.
The anger is worn and so tired inside of him.
"I don’t want to kill you,” says the man, pushing the words out. The soldier's arm, built to last, built to kill, shakes at the thought that he will die gasping. “And I don’t want to die. And I can’t bring you to meet my family like this.” His frame trembles. His eyes are magnified, wide as the stars.
There is such future and fragility in yet.
He remembers the way she fit in two hands the first time he held her, how she sometimes trips downstairs and curls up sleepily in his lap when he comes back from a run early in the morning. He loves her so much. Finally, he hugs her. “Have a good day, sweetheart,” he says, and lets her go.
From to walk to where you are sleeping:
“Enough is enough,” she tells herself most mornings, when she wakes up gritty-eyed and already teary from dreaming. “Enough is enough,” when she wants to tell Steve about her day, when she spots hair like his from the corner of her eye, when she has another lonely cup of tea at her table, when she wants just a bit of his optimism to drive her onward. “It was two years out of more than twenty, it is time to be done with mourning, enough is enough.”
And then one night she opens her eyes into the darkness of her bedroom and tells herself, “Enough.”
He is here, he is here: what fragile and disturbing joy.
She watched so many good people die - not just Steve, not just her brother, but the boys who came from her home village, and the sweet air force pilot she’d kissed on the New Year of 1940, and the lady who’d sold ice cream through the Blitz and been suffocated by an improperly constructed Anderson shelter - and perhaps she doesn’t have to turn her grief out of doors and lock herself up.
From To The Neighborhood:
For a moment, she regrets not having one of those emergency call buttons that her daughter Joan (Dr. Oglethorpe hasn’t been allowed to call her Joanie in years) recommends when she makes her monthly call from Columbus, or at least a cellular phone.
From Oh, But Aren't You Already My Darling?:
Steve rests his hands on her wrists, so gentle, and she wants to cry. “Peg,” he says quietly, “can you maybe track me down a pair of pants? I know my legs aren’t really working yet, but I’ve had enough of showing off in a hospital gown for one lifetime.”
From By Those Who Show Up:
“Hell yeah,” says Bucky. “I was over there ten years and only lost an arm. Six months of doing this with you and I’ve basically lost my life.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I’m thinning up top, Steve, I swear to God.”
From well tell her that I miss our little talks:
(Note to self: start organizing things on the kitchen calendar. Note to self: get a kitchen calendar.)
There's basically cartoony whistling sound, like her optimism is Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff.
She hugged a pillow against her chest. She’d sign him up for a couple of community college mailing lists; maybe sitting in the back of some dense philosophy class would remind him why college wasn’t for everyone, or at least distract him.
Her luck: he’d get all nerdy enthusi-Angel and just double down on the college fun talk.
She really missed him.
“Anyway,” she recalled herself. “I’m thinking maybe going all in on the spick and span could have something to do with you turning the dial up to Angel on the Broodometer.”
"....You’re allowed to think that you’re worth more than him, even if he was the one with the pulse.”
From So Hurry Up and Lose Me, Hurry Up and Find Me (Again):
Also, Angel has to be worried about being ‘busted, and not just in the Dust way.
How glad she is for him, knowing what he’s been through, knowing for herself how frightening it is to dangle unsupported and exhaust yourself hoping for a loving hand.
When Willow is like this, firm steps and a commanding voice, closed eyes as she puts a hand on the last sorcerer's shoulder, it’s hard for Buffy to hold in her mind Willow shy and sweet at sixteen. But then Will nods to Buffy, and without a thought, Buffy fells the robed woman. They’ve both changed. Neither of them will ever be sixteen again.
From Here We Are, Trapped (But Is It a Trap If I'm With You?):
“No. I’m counting on you to do the right thing for everyone, even if it might happen to include you.”
From To All Our Histories Which Haven't Yet Happened:
“He was younger than I am now, and older than you would want to be.”
From Childhood Friends:
Peggy, who had spent the afternoon she received the letter holding the hand of a boy - and he had been a boy - as he screamed and screamed toward death, had delayed replying, as she had not been able to summon a response to such grievances for nearly a week.
That she had spent her childhood at this very house with her dresses in a hopeless muddle and her knees insistently grass-stained, and that Steve had recently seen her in both a wrinkled nurse’s uniform after a night shift and indifferent mourning crepe below a tear-stained face, made her only more determined to put her best foot forward in this encounter.
...and Peggy concentrated on the feeling of his hand in hers, on the heat of him through his jacket, and felt despair and grave hope.
But her husband, who remembered a similar expression on his own mother’s face when he had professed his intention to marry Amanda, upon hearing whose surname even Charles II would have replied “Whom?” pulled her toward himself once more and said only, “Let them dance.”