Charlie to Mexico, Shibutanis to Paris, Ryan to Vegas. Sounds about right.
Still working my way through Worlds. Basically, I have seen no free skates yet. It's all kind of demoralizing outside of ice dance, and I have a lot of papers to grade.
So in the meantime: there's a meme going around to the tune of, "The 20 Stories of Mine You Should Read." I sort of feel like an outside curator would be better at telling you which of my fics are good, but it's fun to go back over my body of work and figure out which ones really define me as a writer. My complete fic list is here, and honestly, you should read the ones that sound good to you.
X. Camp As a Row of Little Pink Tents
Firefly - Mal/Jayne
I wrote this for Serenity Santa, back when Firefly fandom was huge enough to merit a holiday fanworks exchange with several dozen participants. My recipient was a total stranger, but one of her LJ interests was "pretty boys in eyeliner." As this is also an interest of mine, I went completely overboard, imagining the biggest gay and trans festival in the 'verse. With Mal and Jayne in drag, falling in love and acting like a couple of bona fide criminals.
They put their things away and each sat down on their beds. Jayne bounced on the edge of his for a spell. "So," he said, when it was clear Mal wasn't giving any orders just then. "Wanna drink till them queens start looking pretty?"
It sounded better than hiding in their tent. They went walking through the tent area towards the stalls and the ballrooms. Most of the men there looked an awful lot like they did: men who did hard work with their hands and backs, who weren't at all accustomed to fussy shoes and trailing skirts. As usual, the rich folk were stored somewhere fancier. But Mal was happiest among his own kind. If these glittering songbirds could be said to be in any way the same kind as Mal.
X. Do Right, But Not Right Now
Gossip Girl - Dan Humphrey/Chuck Bass
Gossip Girl will explore every opposite-sex pairing it can, but it made clear in season 2 that even when a same-sex dalliance was pretty much inevitable, it would do its best to end-run the possibility. So this fic is a canon fix: Dan gets his bad-boy experimentation on, and Chuck flirts with upstanding behavior. I meant this to read like a New Yorker short story, and I'm pretty sure it works on that level, too.
"What I mean is, I know why you're here. You're here because I am the only person, the only person, which is ridiculous but nonetheless, who can get you off other than Blair Waldorf, to your knowledge and the knowledge of anyone else in the greater St. Jude's community, and saying you need me might be putting to fine a point on it, but I... there are services that only Blair and I can provide, and I'm guessing she, she isn't exactly returning your phone calls." Dan pauses for oxygen. "Also, I want my shoes back."
"I gave your shoes to the homeless."
"So the rest is -"
"Accurate." Chuck pushes Dan back onto the bed, and that is all he needs to do to make Dan ragingly, mortifyingly hard. Chuck slides up Dan's body, right into first base, and kissing Chuck is so disturbingly hot that Dan's worried he's going to come in his pants.
X. From the Hip
Firefly - Mal/Simon
Another Serenity Santa fic from another year. Mal/Simon that deals with the ways in which Simon is secretly a badass. I like what I did with River in this fic, too. The whole thing verges on pretentious, and I don't like how mean I am to Kaylee, but I think I redeem myself. I hope I do.
"And don't be a boob again," said River. "I have to hear when you think you're consoling yourself, you *think* but you're all mixed up in lonely and self-flagellation, beating down and harder and even when your hand's over your mouth I have to *hear*." She jumped down from the exam bed. "So don't be sa gua like usual."
He blamed her that night when he stood outside Mal's bunk, poised to knock but, well, being a boob. He almost hoped River had a bad night, because if her head was together, he'd be in for it when he came back. It was hard to look at her when he failed like this. She embodied the only brave thing he'd ever done.
X. The Girl in the High Castle
Angel the Series - Fred gen
Some stories, you look back at, and you can't believe you wrote them, that they came from your hand and your mind. It's a simple, high-concept premise: what if Wesley became Illyria and Fred survived? The answer to that question got bigger and bigger, and the result is a radically different, morally ambiguous, rather horrifying conclusion to the show.
There are no words for memories that seem tangible and ready though they're fabricated, and definitely no words for memories that feel like rusted dreams but must be true. If she called her implanted memories the centrifugal ones, imaginary forces that you can feel anyway, she'd just have to dilute....
It's what a scientist does: replaces myth with reproducible reality. She had to be the one to break that box.
X. Got to Let It Show
American Idol RPF - Adam Lambert/Kris Allen
I wrote this for a holiday fic exchange. My recipient gave me three prompts, two of which were AUs I couldn't do anything with, and the third of which was something like, "Kris comes out and Adam is awesome." How do you tell a story like that, one that's been told a million times in fanfic, and dozens of times in this fandom alone? Cut it up, deconstruct, let the readers fill in the blanks, and end up with something that's almost a prose poem.
Everyone should get a standing ovation when they come out. It should be federal law. Obama should have stuck it in the hate crimes amendment.
"Congrats," Adam texts, forgetting that the talk show was taped in advance and Kris won't get the message during the commercial break. He follows it up quickly with, "You look hot in that shirt."
X. How to Fall in Love Completely and Never Be Found
The Good Wife - Alicia/Kalinda
Another case of a fic exchange giving me license and motivation to follow through on a story I knew I wanted to tell. After I posted this, there was a lot of discussion in the comments about how I convinced people of how well this pairing fits into canon - not only because of Kalinda's canon bisexuality, but because there's something about the two of them that seems to fit together. One of the many things that interests me about this show is the erosion of Alicia's saintliness and her education in moral compromises. I feel like I explored that here and told a good story as well.
Alicia expected Kalinda to be distant and disappointed, but she was chatty and silly, insisting they eat dinner in their underwear, telling stories about irrelevant, embarrassing things she'd witnessed on stakeouts. Elderly neighbors dancing the polka naked, a couple recording their own fetish porn, a man systematically eating an entire birthday cake - chocolate, white buttercream frosting, blue flowers - by himself. "The problem with my job," Kalinda said, turning pad thai noodles around on her plastic fork, "is I will always know more about you than you do about me. So I'm trying to give you a little. A little more."
X. Imaginary Husbands of the African Savanna
Sports Night - Dana and Sally
For a female-character gen ficathon, the first of many meditations on the relationship between women and sports. People frequently try to parse my personal life from my stories, but I always feel like they look into the wrong ones. I was at the end of a relationship when I wrote this, and I was just getting into figure skating fandom, and you can so totally tell.
"Are you saying I should break up with Joe Crede?"
"Far be it from me to give you advice on how to conduct your meaningless gestures," Sally said.
X. The Next Communist Revolution
figure skating RPF - Tanith Belbin/Brooke Castile, Tanith/Johnny Weir, Ben Agosto/Charlie White, Meryl Davis/Alissa Czisny, etc.
This feels like a self-indulgent entry, because this is a fic with no audience: there's Johnny Weir fucking a girl, there's gratuitous crossovering with the Buffverse, there's explicit paranoid dubcon f/f sex. See, I started writing sex pollen skating fic, and it occurred to me that being under the influence of sex pollen wouldn't be hot, it would be terrifying, and then when you finally got the pollen under control you'd have to live with the trauma and the consequences. So this is the sex pollen trope as horror movie, with women kicking ass and finding a solution almost as unnerving as the problem because the solution is permanent.
"Well, I haven't checked on every single one," Meryl said. "But there was a threesome in the hospitality room, and I saw a couple of guys from the hotel staff getting it on in the parking lot. So it's probably most of them."
"Why are you being calm about this?" Tanith said. "Stop being calm."
Meryl shrugged. "I figured they'd get over it."
"I -- I don't think it's safe to assume that," Tanith said.
Meryl paused, mouthing Tanith's words: I don't think it's safe. "Then what are we supposed to do?"
X. No Easy Way Down
Farscape - John Crichton/Aeryn Sun
Kind of the hottest thing I've ever written. Kind of the saddest thing I've ever written. Someone on the Fuh-Q boards was annoyed with how human all the sex was in fandoms like Farscape and Star Trek, and I was less vocally annoyed with the seriousness of so much Farscape fic. So basically this is a rant in porn form, but you would never notice if I didn't tell you that.
He stopped not because she had come down from her orgasm, but because he was nearly convinced that his hand would get tired before she slowed down. He sat at the edge of the bed, flexing and cracking his knuckles. "Just making sure nothing's broken," he said.
"That was your hand?"
"What did you think it was?"
"I don't know," she said. "I thought... you might be prehensile or something."
X. No More Than Reason
figure skating RPF - Johnny Weir/Ben Agosto, Tanith Belbin
My Johnny/Ben phase produced a lot of fic I'm proud of. This one, which started out as a riff on Much Ado About Nothing and ended up not even resembling Shakespeare, is my favorite. Like a lot of the stories I've stayed proud of, it starts high-concept: all the men's skaters competing to seduce an impossible straight ice dancer. Who wants to be seduced and therefore plays his own games. And then Tanith gets involved and things really go crazy. Okay, maybe it still resembles Shakespeare.
"And oh, it's a little swan," Ben says, picking it up and patting it between its wings. "So I can carry you with me wherever I go."
"Until you forget and squash me in your back pocket," Johnny says.
"I could never do that," Ben says. "This is art. Seriously. Anyone can buy a guy flowers, but this is a one-of-a-kind Weir original. Do you realize how much I could get for this on eBay?"
"You're going to sell my swan to the highest bidder?" Johnny says.
"No way," Ben says. "I'm going to treasure it always." He comes over to Johnny and looks, for a moment, like he has a kiss to give, but he restrains himself.
X. Nobody Wants to Uncover
Veronica Mars - Weevil/Logan, Veronica
I wrote this as a gift for mimesere, when VMars was one of the only fandoms we had in common and we felt like we were the only Weevil/Logan 'shippers around. It seems to have struck a chord with a lot of readers, perhaps more than anything else I've written. Once I came up with the gimmick - structuring it according to the Common Application's essay questions - this fic pretty much wrote itself.
Logan drove all the way to Mission Viejo to bail Weevil out, bitching the whole time about how he knew that Weevil had only called him because Logan was the only person he knew with enough money to get a Mexican out of jail. But he paid, and he did something else, because Weevil's charges got dropped and Alberto's picking up trash on the freeway. Some fucking revolution. Weevil's seen enough of capitalism to know you've got to work it from the inside: you've got to get down on your knees and get it to fall in love with you, so it doesn't know you're taking it for a ride.
X. Parallel Evolution
Star Trek: DS9 - Garak/Bashir, Jadzia/Worf, Leeta/Rom
If you want to do right by an author, read their most recent work. This is brand new and in my oldest fandom. It's an extended riff on a commentfic prompt for alien sex. Since it's my latest, I'm proud of it, and I hate it. I hope it's good enough that it would still be on this list in a year's time, but it's impossible to tell what will hold up.
They have escaped. They are home again. The abnormal logic of captivity replaced by everyday rules. It won't happen again, and Julian doesn't mourn that, although he can taste the memory, tart and sweet like oranges.
He's patching up Jadzia and Worf. They've celebrated his homecoming the way they celebrate days ending in "y," although apparently with even more enthusiasm than usual. Julian jokes about the familiarity of the procedure. Even Worf laughs.
X. Ponderosa Showmance
Survivor Gabon RPF - Marcus Lehman/Charlie Herschel
I can't remember what came first - the Undermistletoe "fandom cliches" prompt, or the burning need to slash the tender bromance between two guys who were literally alone on a deserted island together. Okay, it was more of a campground, and there were CBS employees all over the place, but still. I'm proud of this one because it works as a commentary on Survivor but also as a story about individuals.
Charlie, it turns out, went to Penn and is a lawyer at some hardcore firm in New York. He sucks at video games and kicks Marcus's ass at running. Charlie says he thought Marcus was a triathlete, and Marcus tells Charlie to go fuck himself, and Charlie says, "Okay, but I'd rather fuck you," and the camera guy in the golf cart alongside them asks them to please stop swearing because he needs some footage of them running to post on the internet.
X. The Power and the Other Thing
Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel the Series - Willow/Tara, Willow/Glory, Lilah
This 15,000-word mini-epic came out of the most challenging ficathon request I have ever received: I had to figure out how to write Willow/Glory, and the recipient wanted sex. My solution is decidedly non-con, balanced with a romantic Willow/Tara plot. But all of that is secondary to the main concept: Wolfram and Hart resurrecting the Wishverse's vampire Willow as a human, because there's no Buffy to defeat Glory. I got to come up with Wishverse versions of AtS's entire main cast, and I'm still proud of the thought and detail I put into imagining them.
If Glorificus had a weakness, it was that she seemed to be bound to this dimension. But that was also a liability: attempts to banish her back to her home dimension had failed.
"Invincibly powerful," Willow said. "Damn it." She was going to die again, and it wasn't going to be long until she did.
What do you do if you don't have long to live? You call the girl who gave you her phone number, get her to invite you to her weird student apartment that smells like patchouli and cat. The cat belonged to Tara's roommate, she said, but the patchouli was hers. Tara had a few spells marked in the book she'd been reading: "I didn't think-- didn't think you'd call, but I, um, I was optimistic anyway."
X. The Power of Myth
Gilmore Girls - Rory Gilmore/Paris Geller
Futurefic that has now been jossed, not by the show itself, but by actual reality. Gilmore Girls was tough and fun to write for the same reasons: it has a distinctive house style that's difficult for a fan writer to live up to. I feel like I at least evoked that style in this story, and that I succeeded in blurring the line between the Gilmoreverse and reality.
"Wait," Paris says. "If I lose you to this party, I'll never find you again."
"Oh, you will too," Rory says. "You'll follow me all over the Eastern Seaboard, whether you mean to or not." She looks out at the crowd, then back at Paris. "God, sometimes I really am my mom. Except, I mean, she took twenty years and I've only taken ten, so maybe I'm doing a little bit better." She squeezes Paris's hand tighter and steps forward, like she is trying to lure Paris into a minuet.
X. Sold You Back Your Outrage
figure skating RPF - Ben Agosto gen
A lot of skating fandom wasn't around in 2007, or isn't American and therefore wasn't watching US Nationals live. This fic is how it felt to watch the men's event, but it's not just a reaction piece, or a didactic reflection on the role of the straight ally. I'm proud of what I did with it creatively, and how it holds up as a story, not just as a historical artifact.
He'd skipped the men's free on purpose, gone out to a sports bar with Charlie White and Ben Okolski for a celebratory dinner. One of the TVs at the bar had gone to the ESPN2 skating coverage, and he'd tried to avoid watching, but it'd been hard to take his eyes off. He'd missed Evan's quad-triple, had to have Charlie tell him about it after the fact. The thing he did see, the thing burned in his eyes now as he drove to the state park, was Johnny Weir crying into his coach's shoulder, crying and crying and the assholes at ESPN had just kept showing it and showing it. "All right," Ben had said. "You motherfuckers made the faggot cry, you can cut to commercial."
X. Still Around the Morning After
ER - Kerry Weaver/Susan Lewis, Mark Greene, John Carter
When I lived in Japan, I did a massive ER rewatch from the beginning, because the local video rental had the complete collection. Meanwhile, in the new episodes, Kerry Weaver was coming out, and there was a femslash explosion. I jumped on the bandwagon by... writing my own crackpairing. 20,000 words of it. It blows my mind that this story is almost 10 years old, and my views of romance have hardly shifted at all. I still think I deal with Greene's death way better than the show did. Nonetheless, I was soooo fresh out of creative writing school when I wrote this.
"So, I heard you're sleeping with the Wicked Witch of the ER," Carter said, cornering Susan by the board.
She almost dropped the chart she was carrying. "Who calls her that?"
"Everyone but you."
"That's awful."
"It's one of the clues."
"Clues?"
"Clues that you're sleeping with Weaver." Carter scrawled something on the board, in the wrong color, taking up two columns.
"Get a life, Carter."
X. Sugar
figure skating RPF - Brian Joubert/Johnny Weir, Brian/Tanith Belbin, sorta Ben Agosto/Charlie White, sorta Johnny/Meryl Davis
I don't remember where this came from or how I accomplished it. It ends up making Brian look great, and I'm not sure I approve of that. I feel like people in skating fandom keep asking me what this is about, and I get all blank in the face, because it's definitely about stuff, but it circles around and around its ideas without coming to a definition. Which I think is why it works. Also, I don't know what was in the water, but I think I really hit it with the sex here.
"Maybe we should do this more often," Brian says in French. He might be hoping that Johnny won't understand him.
"Et peut-être pas," Johnny says, wiping himself off.
Brian doesn't answer. Johnny's been a little meaner than he meant to be. Even if Brian was expecting to be rejected, Johnny's terse finality can't have been easy to hear. Johnny sits on the end of the bed, trying not to get Pocky crumbs everywhere. Brian gets up and finds his ice cream. A miracle of food science, it hasn't melted yet, although a trickle of vanilla runs down his arm when he bites into it. He closes his eyes and smiles orgasmically, licking his lips.
X. That Teenage Feeling
Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Harry Potter - Rupert Giles/Remus Lupin
It took me almost a year to write this fic. I got it in my head that this crossover needed to exist, but for all kinds of reasons, it was difficult to execute. I don't know why I set it in Chicago; I think I was homesick. In my mind, Remus Lupin is played by Justin Kirk and is rakishly sexy.
Chicago, as it turned out, was a city devoid of tea. There were plenty of places to buy a cup of coffee or a Polish sausage sagging with condiments. Remus spotted a Starbucks and grew hopeful, and Giles had to explain that what he would find there would bear only the barest resemblance to tea. At that moment, Giles was certain that Remus was a wizard: the name and the mustache had made him suspicious, but the total ignorance of Starbucks removed all doubt. In particular, Remus was a sort of insulated and isolated wizard almost unique to Europe. Most likely, he worked for the Ministry of Magic and referred to non-wizards as Muggles. And his kind had worse names for those who, like Giles, chose to blend in with the rest of humanity, to practice magic in secret and in moderation, with words instead of with wands.
X. Tonight You're Gonna Go Down in Flames
figure skating RPF - Johnny Weir/Ryan Bradley, Tanith Belbin/Charlie White, Evan Bates, Meryl Davis
In the height of the post-Vancouver skating fandom boom, there was lilpinktassel, a challenge to slash Johnny Weir with anyone you wanted. My BOFQ response to this was to write the Johnny/Ryan fic that I felt fandom deserved. It turned out epic. It's 18,000 words of two people being terrible to each other because they can't deal with their feelings for each other. Yeah, my views on romance haven't changed much since 2002.
And despite being both nearly naked, they're friends again, frightened and frustrated teenagers, lost in some hotel room in some city. "Did you sleep with someone who wasn't nice to you?" Ryan says.
Johnny crawls back on his hands toward the headboard. "Why? Did you think I was going to sit on my dick and wait around for you?"
"I hope you didn't. That'd be uncomfortable."
"So you're not jealous?"
"I didn't even think this was going to happen twice," Ryan says.
"Well. Good." But Johnny looks let down, put out, shelved away.
"Do you want me to be jealous? Because I can be jealous." Ryan puts on his best flamenco-tango jilted-lover face. "I can't believe you fucked someone else after our... night of no-strings friend sex." He swings a fake slap past Johnny's cheek. "And he wasn't even nice. How dare you." He's almost laughing, but he holds it in.
So in the meantime: there's a meme going around to the tune of, "The 20 Stories of Mine You Should Read." I sort of feel like an outside curator would be better at telling you which of my fics are good, but it's fun to go back over my body of work and figure out which ones really define me as a writer. My complete fic list is here, and honestly, you should read the ones that sound good to you.
X. Camp As a Row of Little Pink Tents
Firefly - Mal/Jayne
I wrote this for Serenity Santa, back when Firefly fandom was huge enough to merit a holiday fanworks exchange with several dozen participants. My recipient was a total stranger, but one of her LJ interests was "pretty boys in eyeliner." As this is also an interest of mine, I went completely overboard, imagining the biggest gay and trans festival in the 'verse. With Mal and Jayne in drag, falling in love and acting like a couple of bona fide criminals.
They put their things away and each sat down on their beds. Jayne bounced on the edge of his for a spell. "So," he said, when it was clear Mal wasn't giving any orders just then. "Wanna drink till them queens start looking pretty?"
It sounded better than hiding in their tent. They went walking through the tent area towards the stalls and the ballrooms. Most of the men there looked an awful lot like they did: men who did hard work with their hands and backs, who weren't at all accustomed to fussy shoes and trailing skirts. As usual, the rich folk were stored somewhere fancier. But Mal was happiest among his own kind. If these glittering songbirds could be said to be in any way the same kind as Mal.
X. Do Right, But Not Right Now
Gossip Girl - Dan Humphrey/Chuck Bass
Gossip Girl will explore every opposite-sex pairing it can, but it made clear in season 2 that even when a same-sex dalliance was pretty much inevitable, it would do its best to end-run the possibility. So this fic is a canon fix: Dan gets his bad-boy experimentation on, and Chuck flirts with upstanding behavior. I meant this to read like a New Yorker short story, and I'm pretty sure it works on that level, too.
"What I mean is, I know why you're here. You're here because I am the only person, the only person, which is ridiculous but nonetheless, who can get you off other than Blair Waldorf, to your knowledge and the knowledge of anyone else in the greater St. Jude's community, and saying you need me might be putting to fine a point on it, but I... there are services that only Blair and I can provide, and I'm guessing she, she isn't exactly returning your phone calls." Dan pauses for oxygen. "Also, I want my shoes back."
"I gave your shoes to the homeless."
"So the rest is -"
"Accurate." Chuck pushes Dan back onto the bed, and that is all he needs to do to make Dan ragingly, mortifyingly hard. Chuck slides up Dan's body, right into first base, and kissing Chuck is so disturbingly hot that Dan's worried he's going to come in his pants.
X. From the Hip
Firefly - Mal/Simon
Another Serenity Santa fic from another year. Mal/Simon that deals with the ways in which Simon is secretly a badass. I like what I did with River in this fic, too. The whole thing verges on pretentious, and I don't like how mean I am to Kaylee, but I think I redeem myself. I hope I do.
"And don't be a boob again," said River. "I have to hear when you think you're consoling yourself, you *think* but you're all mixed up in lonely and self-flagellation, beating down and harder and even when your hand's over your mouth I have to *hear*." She jumped down from the exam bed. "So don't be sa gua like usual."
He blamed her that night when he stood outside Mal's bunk, poised to knock but, well, being a boob. He almost hoped River had a bad night, because if her head was together, he'd be in for it when he came back. It was hard to look at her when he failed like this. She embodied the only brave thing he'd ever done.
X. The Girl in the High Castle
Angel the Series - Fred gen
Some stories, you look back at, and you can't believe you wrote them, that they came from your hand and your mind. It's a simple, high-concept premise: what if Wesley became Illyria and Fred survived? The answer to that question got bigger and bigger, and the result is a radically different, morally ambiguous, rather horrifying conclusion to the show.
There are no words for memories that seem tangible and ready though they're fabricated, and definitely no words for memories that feel like rusted dreams but must be true. If she called her implanted memories the centrifugal ones, imaginary forces that you can feel anyway, she'd just have to dilute....
It's what a scientist does: replaces myth with reproducible reality. She had to be the one to break that box.
X. Got to Let It Show
American Idol RPF - Adam Lambert/Kris Allen
I wrote this for a holiday fic exchange. My recipient gave me three prompts, two of which were AUs I couldn't do anything with, and the third of which was something like, "Kris comes out and Adam is awesome." How do you tell a story like that, one that's been told a million times in fanfic, and dozens of times in this fandom alone? Cut it up, deconstruct, let the readers fill in the blanks, and end up with something that's almost a prose poem.
Everyone should get a standing ovation when they come out. It should be federal law. Obama should have stuck it in the hate crimes amendment.
"Congrats," Adam texts, forgetting that the talk show was taped in advance and Kris won't get the message during the commercial break. He follows it up quickly with, "You look hot in that shirt."
X. How to Fall in Love Completely and Never Be Found
The Good Wife - Alicia/Kalinda
Another case of a fic exchange giving me license and motivation to follow through on a story I knew I wanted to tell. After I posted this, there was a lot of discussion in the comments about how I convinced people of how well this pairing fits into canon - not only because of Kalinda's canon bisexuality, but because there's something about the two of them that seems to fit together. One of the many things that interests me about this show is the erosion of Alicia's saintliness and her education in moral compromises. I feel like I explored that here and told a good story as well.
Alicia expected Kalinda to be distant and disappointed, but she was chatty and silly, insisting they eat dinner in their underwear, telling stories about irrelevant, embarrassing things she'd witnessed on stakeouts. Elderly neighbors dancing the polka naked, a couple recording their own fetish porn, a man systematically eating an entire birthday cake - chocolate, white buttercream frosting, blue flowers - by himself. "The problem with my job," Kalinda said, turning pad thai noodles around on her plastic fork, "is I will always know more about you than you do about me. So I'm trying to give you a little. A little more."
X. Imaginary Husbands of the African Savanna
Sports Night - Dana and Sally
For a female-character gen ficathon, the first of many meditations on the relationship between women and sports. People frequently try to parse my personal life from my stories, but I always feel like they look into the wrong ones. I was at the end of a relationship when I wrote this, and I was just getting into figure skating fandom, and you can so totally tell.
"Are you saying I should break up with Joe Crede?"
"Far be it from me to give you advice on how to conduct your meaningless gestures," Sally said.
X. The Next Communist Revolution
figure skating RPF - Tanith Belbin/Brooke Castile, Tanith/Johnny Weir, Ben Agosto/Charlie White, Meryl Davis/Alissa Czisny, etc.
This feels like a self-indulgent entry, because this is a fic with no audience: there's Johnny Weir fucking a girl, there's gratuitous crossovering with the Buffverse, there's explicit paranoid dubcon f/f sex. See, I started writing sex pollen skating fic, and it occurred to me that being under the influence of sex pollen wouldn't be hot, it would be terrifying, and then when you finally got the pollen under control you'd have to live with the trauma and the consequences. So this is the sex pollen trope as horror movie, with women kicking ass and finding a solution almost as unnerving as the problem because the solution is permanent.
"Well, I haven't checked on every single one," Meryl said. "But there was a threesome in the hospitality room, and I saw a couple of guys from the hotel staff getting it on in the parking lot. So it's probably most of them."
"Why are you being calm about this?" Tanith said. "Stop being calm."
Meryl shrugged. "I figured they'd get over it."
"I -- I don't think it's safe to assume that," Tanith said.
Meryl paused, mouthing Tanith's words: I don't think it's safe. "Then what are we supposed to do?"
X. No Easy Way Down
Farscape - John Crichton/Aeryn Sun
Kind of the hottest thing I've ever written. Kind of the saddest thing I've ever written. Someone on the Fuh-Q boards was annoyed with how human all the sex was in fandoms like Farscape and Star Trek, and I was less vocally annoyed with the seriousness of so much Farscape fic. So basically this is a rant in porn form, but you would never notice if I didn't tell you that.
He stopped not because she had come down from her orgasm, but because he was nearly convinced that his hand would get tired before she slowed down. He sat at the edge of the bed, flexing and cracking his knuckles. "Just making sure nothing's broken," he said.
"That was your hand?"
"What did you think it was?"
"I don't know," she said. "I thought... you might be prehensile or something."
X. No More Than Reason
figure skating RPF - Johnny Weir/Ben Agosto, Tanith Belbin
My Johnny/Ben phase produced a lot of fic I'm proud of. This one, which started out as a riff on Much Ado About Nothing and ended up not even resembling Shakespeare, is my favorite. Like a lot of the stories I've stayed proud of, it starts high-concept: all the men's skaters competing to seduce an impossible straight ice dancer. Who wants to be seduced and therefore plays his own games. And then Tanith gets involved and things really go crazy. Okay, maybe it still resembles Shakespeare.
"And oh, it's a little swan," Ben says, picking it up and patting it between its wings. "So I can carry you with me wherever I go."
"Until you forget and squash me in your back pocket," Johnny says.
"I could never do that," Ben says. "This is art. Seriously. Anyone can buy a guy flowers, but this is a one-of-a-kind Weir original. Do you realize how much I could get for this on eBay?"
"You're going to sell my swan to the highest bidder?" Johnny says.
"No way," Ben says. "I'm going to treasure it always." He comes over to Johnny and looks, for a moment, like he has a kiss to give, but he restrains himself.
X. Nobody Wants to Uncover
Veronica Mars - Weevil/Logan, Veronica
I wrote this as a gift for mimesere, when VMars was one of the only fandoms we had in common and we felt like we were the only Weevil/Logan 'shippers around. It seems to have struck a chord with a lot of readers, perhaps more than anything else I've written. Once I came up with the gimmick - structuring it according to the Common Application's essay questions - this fic pretty much wrote itself.
Logan drove all the way to Mission Viejo to bail Weevil out, bitching the whole time about how he knew that Weevil had only called him because Logan was the only person he knew with enough money to get a Mexican out of jail. But he paid, and he did something else, because Weevil's charges got dropped and Alberto's picking up trash on the freeway. Some fucking revolution. Weevil's seen enough of capitalism to know you've got to work it from the inside: you've got to get down on your knees and get it to fall in love with you, so it doesn't know you're taking it for a ride.
X. Parallel Evolution
Star Trek: DS9 - Garak/Bashir, Jadzia/Worf, Leeta/Rom
If you want to do right by an author, read their most recent work. This is brand new and in my oldest fandom. It's an extended riff on a commentfic prompt for alien sex. Since it's my latest, I'm proud of it, and I hate it. I hope it's good enough that it would still be on this list in a year's time, but it's impossible to tell what will hold up.
They have escaped. They are home again. The abnormal logic of captivity replaced by everyday rules. It won't happen again, and Julian doesn't mourn that, although he can taste the memory, tart and sweet like oranges.
He's patching up Jadzia and Worf. They've celebrated his homecoming the way they celebrate days ending in "y," although apparently with even more enthusiasm than usual. Julian jokes about the familiarity of the procedure. Even Worf laughs.
X. Ponderosa Showmance
Survivor Gabon RPF - Marcus Lehman/Charlie Herschel
I can't remember what came first - the Undermistletoe "fandom cliches" prompt, or the burning need to slash the tender bromance between two guys who were literally alone on a deserted island together. Okay, it was more of a campground, and there were CBS employees all over the place, but still. I'm proud of this one because it works as a commentary on Survivor but also as a story about individuals.
Charlie, it turns out, went to Penn and is a lawyer at some hardcore firm in New York. He sucks at video games and kicks Marcus's ass at running. Charlie says he thought Marcus was a triathlete, and Marcus tells Charlie to go fuck himself, and Charlie says, "Okay, but I'd rather fuck you," and the camera guy in the golf cart alongside them asks them to please stop swearing because he needs some footage of them running to post on the internet.
X. The Power and the Other Thing
Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel the Series - Willow/Tara, Willow/Glory, Lilah
This 15,000-word mini-epic came out of the most challenging ficathon request I have ever received: I had to figure out how to write Willow/Glory, and the recipient wanted sex. My solution is decidedly non-con, balanced with a romantic Willow/Tara plot. But all of that is secondary to the main concept: Wolfram and Hart resurrecting the Wishverse's vampire Willow as a human, because there's no Buffy to defeat Glory. I got to come up with Wishverse versions of AtS's entire main cast, and I'm still proud of the thought and detail I put into imagining them.
If Glorificus had a weakness, it was that she seemed to be bound to this dimension. But that was also a liability: attempts to banish her back to her home dimension had failed.
"Invincibly powerful," Willow said. "Damn it." She was going to die again, and it wasn't going to be long until she did.
What do you do if you don't have long to live? You call the girl who gave you her phone number, get her to invite you to her weird student apartment that smells like patchouli and cat. The cat belonged to Tara's roommate, she said, but the patchouli was hers. Tara had a few spells marked in the book she'd been reading: "I didn't think-- didn't think you'd call, but I, um, I was optimistic anyway."
X. The Power of Myth
Gilmore Girls - Rory Gilmore/Paris Geller
Futurefic that has now been jossed, not by the show itself, but by actual reality. Gilmore Girls was tough and fun to write for the same reasons: it has a distinctive house style that's difficult for a fan writer to live up to. I feel like I at least evoked that style in this story, and that I succeeded in blurring the line between the Gilmoreverse and reality.
"Wait," Paris says. "If I lose you to this party, I'll never find you again."
"Oh, you will too," Rory says. "You'll follow me all over the Eastern Seaboard, whether you mean to or not." She looks out at the crowd, then back at Paris. "God, sometimes I really am my mom. Except, I mean, she took twenty years and I've only taken ten, so maybe I'm doing a little bit better." She squeezes Paris's hand tighter and steps forward, like she is trying to lure Paris into a minuet.
X. Sold You Back Your Outrage
figure skating RPF - Ben Agosto gen
A lot of skating fandom wasn't around in 2007, or isn't American and therefore wasn't watching US Nationals live. This fic is how it felt to watch the men's event, but it's not just a reaction piece, or a didactic reflection on the role of the straight ally. I'm proud of what I did with it creatively, and how it holds up as a story, not just as a historical artifact.
He'd skipped the men's free on purpose, gone out to a sports bar with Charlie White and Ben Okolski for a celebratory dinner. One of the TVs at the bar had gone to the ESPN2 skating coverage, and he'd tried to avoid watching, but it'd been hard to take his eyes off. He'd missed Evan's quad-triple, had to have Charlie tell him about it after the fact. The thing he did see, the thing burned in his eyes now as he drove to the state park, was Johnny Weir crying into his coach's shoulder, crying and crying and the assholes at ESPN had just kept showing it and showing it. "All right," Ben had said. "You motherfuckers made the faggot cry, you can cut to commercial."
X. Still Around the Morning After
ER - Kerry Weaver/Susan Lewis, Mark Greene, John Carter
When I lived in Japan, I did a massive ER rewatch from the beginning, because the local video rental had the complete collection. Meanwhile, in the new episodes, Kerry Weaver was coming out, and there was a femslash explosion. I jumped on the bandwagon by... writing my own crackpairing. 20,000 words of it. It blows my mind that this story is almost 10 years old, and my views of romance have hardly shifted at all. I still think I deal with Greene's death way better than the show did. Nonetheless, I was soooo fresh out of creative writing school when I wrote this.
"So, I heard you're sleeping with the Wicked Witch of the ER," Carter said, cornering Susan by the board.
She almost dropped the chart she was carrying. "Who calls her that?"
"Everyone but you."
"That's awful."
"It's one of the clues."
"Clues?"
"Clues that you're sleeping with Weaver." Carter scrawled something on the board, in the wrong color, taking up two columns.
"Get a life, Carter."
X. Sugar
figure skating RPF - Brian Joubert/Johnny Weir, Brian/Tanith Belbin, sorta Ben Agosto/Charlie White, sorta Johnny/Meryl Davis
I don't remember where this came from or how I accomplished it. It ends up making Brian look great, and I'm not sure I approve of that. I feel like people in skating fandom keep asking me what this is about, and I get all blank in the face, because it's definitely about stuff, but it circles around and around its ideas without coming to a definition. Which I think is why it works. Also, I don't know what was in the water, but I think I really hit it with the sex here.
"Maybe we should do this more often," Brian says in French. He might be hoping that Johnny won't understand him.
"Et peut-être pas," Johnny says, wiping himself off.
Brian doesn't answer. Johnny's been a little meaner than he meant to be. Even if Brian was expecting to be rejected, Johnny's terse finality can't have been easy to hear. Johnny sits on the end of the bed, trying not to get Pocky crumbs everywhere. Brian gets up and finds his ice cream. A miracle of food science, it hasn't melted yet, although a trickle of vanilla runs down his arm when he bites into it. He closes his eyes and smiles orgasmically, licking his lips.
X. That Teenage Feeling
Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Harry Potter - Rupert Giles/Remus Lupin
It took me almost a year to write this fic. I got it in my head that this crossover needed to exist, but for all kinds of reasons, it was difficult to execute. I don't know why I set it in Chicago; I think I was homesick. In my mind, Remus Lupin is played by Justin Kirk and is rakishly sexy.
Chicago, as it turned out, was a city devoid of tea. There were plenty of places to buy a cup of coffee or a Polish sausage sagging with condiments. Remus spotted a Starbucks and grew hopeful, and Giles had to explain that what he would find there would bear only the barest resemblance to tea. At that moment, Giles was certain that Remus was a wizard: the name and the mustache had made him suspicious, but the total ignorance of Starbucks removed all doubt. In particular, Remus was a sort of insulated and isolated wizard almost unique to Europe. Most likely, he worked for the Ministry of Magic and referred to non-wizards as Muggles. And his kind had worse names for those who, like Giles, chose to blend in with the rest of humanity, to practice magic in secret and in moderation, with words instead of with wands.
X. Tonight You're Gonna Go Down in Flames
figure skating RPF - Johnny Weir/Ryan Bradley, Tanith Belbin/Charlie White, Evan Bates, Meryl Davis
In the height of the post-Vancouver skating fandom boom, there was lilpinktassel, a challenge to slash Johnny Weir with anyone you wanted. My BOFQ response to this was to write the Johnny/Ryan fic that I felt fandom deserved. It turned out epic. It's 18,000 words of two people being terrible to each other because they can't deal with their feelings for each other. Yeah, my views on romance haven't changed much since 2002.
And despite being both nearly naked, they're friends again, frightened and frustrated teenagers, lost in some hotel room in some city. "Did you sleep with someone who wasn't nice to you?" Ryan says.
Johnny crawls back on his hands toward the headboard. "Why? Did you think I was going to sit on my dick and wait around for you?"
"I hope you didn't. That'd be uncomfortable."
"So you're not jealous?"
"I didn't even think this was going to happen twice," Ryan says.
"Well. Good." But Johnny looks let down, put out, shelved away.
"Do you want me to be jealous? Because I can be jealous." Ryan puts on his best flamenco-tango jilted-lover face. "I can't believe you fucked someone else after our... night of no-strings friend sex." He swings a fake slap past Johnny's cheek. "And he wasn't even nice. How dare you." He's almost laughing, but he holds it in.