Fic Concept Roundup 2023
When I have a fic idea, I’ll usually scribble it down in the back of my diary. It’s time to switch diaries again, so I’m going to carry on the tradition I started last year!
This post lists all the fic ideas at the back of my 2022-23 diary. If I’ve written the fic, I’ll include a link to it. If I’ve started the fic, I’ll share a snippet. If I haven’t started it, I’ll write at least a hundred words on the spot.
First of all, here are the fics I’ve written in full. Fandoms: The Book of Mormon, Life Is Strange, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Do Revenge, Person of Interest, Lost, The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.
The Book of Mormon: Kevin Price is right. He’s going to do something incredible. He’s going to be a new prophet. God will speak directly to him. He can’t handle it.
This became Something Incredible, the summary of which ended up being almost identical to the original concept I noted down in my diary.
The Book of Mormon: Price/McKinley, only their companions have to be in the room at all times.
The ‘Mormon companions can’t be physically apart’ rule didn’t quite end up being the focus, but this became Redrawing the Map.
Life Is Strange: Max brings time to a halt (perhaps when she canonically does it to save Kate) and then can’t get it moving again. Trapped, in that one frozen moment, perhaps forever.
Being stranded, isolated and helpless is very much a recurring theme in my fanfiction. This became Snapshot.
Revolutionary Girl Utena: Some sort of Miki/Kozue fic? Maybe after the Black Rose almost-kiss? Miki finds it reassuring to be around Utena when Kozue’s been fucking with his head, because Utena is so direct; she says what she means and she doesn’t play games.
This became Empty Space, the first incest fic I’ve written in over a decade.
Do Revenge: Weird toxic Eleanor/Drea. Maybe they kill Max together. Maybe Eleanor goes full Gone Girl and fakes her own death and Drea tracks her down across the country and they start a weird new life under false identities together.
I went the Gone Girl route with Material Evidence, which was by far my most popular fic of 2022.
Person of Interest: Crossover where the machine turns up the number of another New York-based character you enjoy? Peter Parker? Miles Morales? John McClane? Ch-Chandler Bing?
I went with Miles Morales in Connecting Strands, but I would still absolutely read any of these.
Person of Interest: Reese and Shaw attempt sex for stress relief, it’s a terrible idea, possibly Finch gets an earful and is very disconcerted.
This became Pressure Valve. I had an absolute blast writing this one.
Person of Interest: Weird Shaw/Machine after the Machine takes on Root’s voice.
The resulting fic, User Preferences, is my most popular fic of 2023 so far.
Lost: Everyone/everyone. Just full-on Zanki Zero it.
This became Interweave. I’m so glad I wrote this fic; it’s everything I wanted.
Lost: Lost could be a good candidate for a Sense8 AU - a lot of characters in different locations with different lives, strangers to each other - but it might be too ambitious!
Definitely too ambitious! I ended up making this concept feasible by scaling it back to just two characters (Jack and Kate) in Across the Ocean.
Little Hope: Something where the characters start to remember they’re a family? Maybe not; you’d probably have to watch the incredibly upsetting Little Hope prologue for research. Or something where Anthony and Vince make more of a connection/actually take the time to talk at the end of the game?
This was originally in the ‘haven’t started yet, need to write a hundred words’ category of this post. I wrote the required hundred words for the first concept, then just kept writing until I’d finished the fic: Bleeding Through. And then, for good measure, I wrote the Anthony and Vince concept as well: Little Talks.
Next, let’s look at the works in progress (or at least the works that were started; I’m not sure they’re actively progressing). Fandoms: The X-Files, Silent Hill, Hypnospace Outlaw, Final Fantasy VIII, Lost, Animorphs. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.
The X-Files: Mulder and Scully in Silent Hill? Investigating a series of disappearances, James included? (James doesn’t fit the timeline, though.)
It might be fun if only one of them could see the darker side of Silent Hill. The immediate assumption would be that it’s Mulder, as Mulder is more screwed up. However, that’s the less fun option, as Mulder is better equipped than Scully to handle Silent Hill’s weirdness. Therefore: only Scully experiences the weirdness?
Mulder gets frustrated that the town is hiding from him. Just seeing a mundane abandoned town is a worse experience for him than the monsters would be.
And then Scully is attacked and visibly wounded by creatures Mulder can’t see, and it turns out that’s not actually an improvement.
The town could be coming after Scully because her sister died, and it was meant to be her? Come to think of it, Mulder and Scully have both lost sisters; you’d expect the show to draw more parallels there.
Wow, I rambled on with this concept a bit. And, after all that, I never really got anywhere with it; the snippets below are all that exist of this fic!
“We’re investigating a series of disappearances,” Mulder says. “Little New England town named Silent Hill.”
Scully takes the file he’s holding out to her, starts leafing through it. “And?”
“And what?”
“Disappearances happen all the time,” Scully says. “There must be something about this case specifically that caught your attention.”
“Well, for one thing, Silent Hill’s been abandoned since the seventies.”
A little unusual, maybe. It’s rarer to get disappearances in places without people to disappear. But... “Abandoned means no one’s maintaining the infrastructure. Would-be explorers go to abandoned places, they go into unstable buildings, they have accidents.”
“The friends and colleagues of the people who went missing didn’t report any predilection for exploring abandoned places,” Mulder says. “As far as the FBI can establish, none of them had any reason to go to Silent Hill at all.”
[...]
“I swear this is real,” she says. “I swear, Mulder, I need you to believe me-”
“I believe you.” His hands on her arms feel like an anchor. “You’ve seen the things I’ll believe, Scully. Why wouldn’t I believe you?”
Hypnospace Outlaw: T1MAGEDDON being fucked up over the Mindcrash, possibly extending to learning he wasn’t actually responsible two decades later. Why is Chelsea so nice to him?
I wish there’d been more follow-up with Tim at the end of Hypnospace Outlaw! The tragedy of his character is fascinating to me.
When Tim wakes up after the crash, it doesn’t cross his mind that he could have been involved. Just another shitty, unstable HypnOS upgrade, pushed out the door without enough bug testing. His head feels like someone’s driven nails into it, but that’s the only lingering effect, so he drags himself to school.
A lot of kids aren’t in today.
“I don’t think I need to call roll,” the teacher says, frowning around at the half-empty classroom. “Where is everyone?”
“Maybe it’s the Mindcrash thing,” one of the other students suggests.
It’s a cold hand on the back of Tim’s neck, it’s like one of Tiff’s scaries. The Mindcrash thing is part of his life on Hypnospace. It doesn’t belong out here, in the real world.
He’s been expecting Tiff to confront him about it; his hack got shut down, so she must have figured out the password. He wasn’t expecting to hear it mentioned casually to his teacher.
Tiff’s not in today. It looks like he’ll have to stay in suspense about how she took his message for a little longer.
“What Mindcrash thing?” Tim asks.
“This hacker crashed Hypnospace last night.”
Huh. “It crashed for you as well?”
“Yeah, for me and my sister. She had a really bad nosebleed, she stayed home.”
If it crashed for everyone, the timing is pretty convenient, straight after his Mindcrash message. Maybe he can take the credit; it seems like people are already assuming he was the one behind it. Maybe that’ll get m1nx to take notice at last.
Tiff wouldn’t be impressed, though. He should probably clear things up with her first.
-
It’s not real at first. Of course Zane Lofton would fake his own death; he’s exactly the kind of person who would. Fake girlfriend, and now a fake death. Just a stupid kid trying to get attention.
But this isn’t some heart-strewn, badly spelled tribute page on Hypnospace. It’s all over the news, fifteen-year-old kid killed by his net access hardware. Zane couldn’t spread a story like this; he doesn’t have the skill, especially with Hypnospace down.
Didn’t have the skill.
Fuck. Is this actually real?
The news is talking about Mindcrash like that’s what did it. But Mindcrash doesn’t exist; it’s a ghost story, a few scary animations Tim threw up on the Teentopia page. Tiff shut it down just before Hypnospace crashed, anyway. There’s no way it did this.
There’s no way Tim did this.
Final Fantasy VIII: Squall/Zell/Rinoa?
This is so vague! I’m going to make things easier on myself by counting this snippet from a Zell/Rinoa fic I’ve been working on, set in a world where they never find Squall after the Ultimecia fight.
“What was it like, bein’ with Squall?” Zell asks. “It’s kinda hard to picture. I mean, not that you guys aren’t perfect for each other, just - he’s not really a romantic guy, right?”
Rinoa’s quiet for a while. “I don’t know if we were really together. We never put it into words. We never even kissed.”
Yeah, that’s pretty much what Zell imagined it would be like. “If it helps, I think he was really into you. Just, y’know, in his weird quiet Squall way. I’m pretty sure you were together by Squall standards.”
It gets a smile out of Rinoa, which feels kind of good to see. “Actually, yeah, that does help.”
“Do you think you guys would get together again?” Zell asks. “If he came back?”
Rinoa looks at him for a moment with eyes that seem very dark. “Does that bother you?”
He has to look away from her, up at the ceiling. Lies there for a moment, listening to her breathe.
“Not really, I guess,” he says, at last. “I just want him back.”
Lost: Boone/Shannon? Something where Boone didn’t realise how he felt until she confronted him, or something where their relationship comes to light on the island?
I’ve already posted the existing snippet of this fic in this entry.
Fun fact: the ‘When you’re a doctor, you hear a lot of things, and your job isn’t to judge; it’s to figure out what’s medically relevant’ paragraph in Interweave was originally intended to be part of a Boone/Shannon fic where Jack finds out about their relationship. I think the line after it was going to be ‘Stepsiblings. Medically speaking, it’s no different from any other relationship. He tries to focus on that.’
Lost: Lost/Animorphs? Their plane is brought down (near civilisation) by Yeerks (I want to say because Kate is already aware of and fighting them, maybe after her Controller stepfather infester her mother?). The Animorphs fight the Yeerks off, go ‘this is the deal, we’re creating factions to fight the Yeerks, we’re pretty sure there weren’t any Yeerks on your plane if they were willing to shoot it down, we’re giving you the ability to turn into animals.’
Jack demands to know what these kids are talking about. ‘It’s true,’ Kate says, grimly, and Jack swallows. He doesn’t know this women; she could just be playing along with this nonsense. But a part of him finds it hard to dismiss what she’s saying.
Could have canon’s ‘Jack reluctantly accepts the role of leader’ arc in a very different context!
Just ended up with a small snippet of this, in which Jack and Sayid discuss Sayid’s first morph:
“I have betrayed many people who were important to me,” Sayid says. “The snake seems fitting.”
Not really what you want to hear from one of your teammates in the fight against alien invasion.
“You seem like a good person to have on our side,” Jack says. “You’re smart, you get things done. I’d like to know I can trust you.”
Sayid nods, slowly. “I shall endeavour to be worthy of your trust.”
Finally, it’s time for the fic ideas I haven’t touched and now have to write something for. I’m a little intimidated by this category, but let’s see how it goes.
Fandoms: The Book of Mormon, The X-Files, Beacon Pines, Person of Interest, Community, Lost, Scrubs, Silent Hill. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.
The Book of Mormon: Price doesn’t turn away fast enough during the almost-kiss scene, McKinley actually kisses him, and suddenly he has a whole new thing to deal with.
I’m sure this has been written a thousand times before, but let’s give it a go.
This is unfair. For the first time since he got his mission placement, Kevin had a clear direction in his head. He knew what he had to do: he had to get the blood out of his shirt, and he had to get out of Uganda. He’s been so desperate to know what he’s supposed to be doing, and for a moment he had it.
And then Elder McKinley kissed him, and it all crumbled away like everything else.
He presses his knuckles against his lips, staring into space. Elder Cunningham, next to him, is asking anxious questions that he can barely hear.
What is he supposed to do now?
The X-Files: Something with Mulder and Scully being very intense about each other, but not romance, even though romance would make the whole thing less confusing.
I’m hoping to resume The X-Files at some point, but I haven’t watched it in a good few months, so let’s see if I remember how to write Mulder and Scully.
She used to wonder sometimes, in the earlier days of their acquaintance, whether Mulder was in love with her. She knows now that he isn’t; it seems laughable that the thought ever crossed her mind.
But there’s still something there, and she doesn’t know what to call it. They’re not lovers. They’re not friends, exactly; they don’t really spend time together outside work. If you boil it down to the bare facts, the things that can be quantified and put down on paper, they’re just colleagues.
She thinks it’s probably only a matter of time until he kills someone for her.
Beacon Pines: Something about timelines? Memories from other timelines, or what happens if you’re in a timeline the narrator abandons? Without description, do all the lights go out? In the ‘trapped in Gran’s basement’ timeline, how would they tell at first?
I remember nothing about Beacon Pines. How am I going to write this? I suppose I'll have to cheat by not actually including any of the characters in this snippet.
The trouble with stories is that they don’t always end. Perhaps the author is distracted, or incapacitated, or simply loses interest. Perhaps, as in this case, the story starts to go in a direction the author would prefer to avoid, and she abandons that version to tell a different tale.
For better or worse, though, the unfinished stories still exist. With the guiding hand of the author lost, only the characters remain, trapped in an incomplete universe.
The trouble with stories is that, if they never finish, the characters can never live happily ever after. They just have to live.
Person of Interest: Finch/the Machine. Nobody’s written it!
You could fairly say that the fandom’s probably not keen on Finch/the Machine because their relationship is framed as parent-child, but frankly I think they’re all cowards.
The Machine tried to kill him.
Finch thinks about that for a long time, once he’s put out the fires and wiped this particular incarnation. If he carries on down this path, he could end up dead.
But he can’t turn back; he’s so close.
In the code of the next incarnation, he tries to strengthen the message that the Machine should do no harm to humans. Tries to drive home the fact that he himself should be viewed as an ally. He shouldn’t let the Machine give him any special treatment; it’s supposed to protect everyone equally. But, if he’s honest, he’s afraid.
The new version of the Machine doesn’t try to murder him, or at least it hasn’t yet. But it talks to him more than previous incarnations, it asks more questions. Not just questions about itself or the world or its role, but questions about Finch himself, about his life.
It’s making Finch a little uncomfortable.
Community: The study group on the island from Lost? Might not work; I feel it’s essential to Lost that most of the characters don’t know each other before landing on the island. Come to think of it, though, Jeff Winger does feel a bit like the character Jack Shephard might be if he’d been created for a sitcom.
Try to tell me I’m wrong about Jeff and Jack. You can’t.
“Okay,” Jeff says. “No. You need someone to get Hitler off on a technicality, sure, I’ll do it. You need someone to seduce a witness, I’m your guy. You want some leader to get everyone off Hell Monster Island alive? Guess what: I’d like that too. But I am not that person.”
“But you’re the only person who could do it,” Annie says. “Everyone trusts you.”
“Yeah, well, they shouldn’t.”
“Maybe they shouldn’t,” Annie agrees, frowning a little. “Did you just say you’d defend Hitler?”
“If it’s any consolation,” Jeff says, “that scenario is very unlikely to actually occur.”
Lost: Jack Shephard in Sacred Heart? Or, indeed, Dr Cox on the island? Jack as one of House’s underlings (God, he’d hate it)? Moving doctors into other canons with doctors, basically.
Hmm, a few options here! Let’s see what we end up with.
“I’m not a leader,” Jack says. “I’m just a doctor. Why aren’t you asking Dr Cox to make these decisions?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Charlie asks.
Jack frowns. “What?”
“That guy is kind of scary,” Hurley says. “Like, really scary.”
“We’re stuck on an island together and he’s still making everyone call him Dr Cox,” Charlie says. “At least you’ve got a first name, y’know, like a normal person. Plus he hates you.”
What? “I think he’s just like that with everyone.”
“No, he definitely hates you,” Charlie says. “You’re, y’know, this cool handsome doctor who has it all together. Some people hate that. I mean, not me, I can handle it. But some people.”
Jack stares at him. They think he has it all together?
Jack’s lied to these people. They’re going to force this perfect man who doesn’t exist into a leadership position, and they’re going to regret it.
Lost/Silent Hill: Jack Shephard and James Sunderland have the same initials, and I feel like that means you should send Jack to Silent Hill.
Jack’s surname is also Mary’s maiden name, although it’s spelt differently. That probably doesn’t mean Jack and James should get married.
The temperature’s dropping; there’s a fog rolling in from the ocean, thick and fast. The weather changes quickly on this island, but this is something Jack hasn’t seen before.
“Visibility’s going to be bad,” he says. “We should make sure everyone stays out of the jungle until this has cleared.”
Kate doesn’t answer. He turns around.
“Kate?”
She’s not there. No one’s around. The beach stretches away from him, empty.
Where the hell is everyone? Did they go inland? At a time like this, when they need to stick together-
He looks up, towards the treeline, and meets his father’s eyes.
Lost: Jack and Claire get together on the island and only later find out they’re half-siblings, whoops (you probably shouldn’t write this).
BUT YOU DOOMED YOURSELF TO WRITING IT BY NOTING THE IDEA DOWN, PAST ME.
The woman is still talking about her daughter, and it feels like a hand is closing around Jack’s throat, tightening with every word. His father had an affair. He has a half-sister, and she was on the plane with him.
He knows who she is.
He tries to shake the thought out of his mind. There’s no way he could know.
The woman is Australian. But there must have been plenty of Australian passengers aboard; the plane was flying from Australia. It won’t be Claire. Statistically speaking, his half-sister was probably one of the hundreds who died in the crash.
A tragedy. He’ll wish he could have known her. But not Claire.
“Her name was Claire,” the woman says, and Jack has to fight to stay on his feet, his mind seething. This can’t be real. He’s going to throw up.
It feels like his skin is suddenly red and raw everywhere Claire ever touched him. It feels like there’s no way her mother won’t notice.
Lost: Digging into the weird relationship between Kate and the marshal.
I’m so curious about these two!
“Were you in love with me?” Kate asks.
“Past tense?” Edward asks, his voice rasping. “I’m not dead yet, sweetheart.”
Kate looks at him. She’s been avoiding it; it’s hard to see him like this. It’d be hard to see anyone like this. “I wasn’t sure if you still felt that way.”
There’s a long silence, the only sound his struggling breaths.
“You can answer my question first,” Edward says. “You gonna kill me? Don’t think I haven’t noticed the gun.”
Kate hunches her shoulders, wraps her arms around her knees. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”
“Strong words from a girl who blew up her stepfather.”
“Anyone else.” She forces herself to look him in the eye. “He deserved it. I don’t think even you deserve this.”
“You’re being honest with me,” Edward breathes. “I guess I really am dying.”
I’m glad I started doing this! Most of these will probably never become full fics, but it’s good to at least make a start on these concepts, rather than letting them languish eternally in my old diaries.
This post lists all the fic ideas at the back of my 2022-23 diary. If I’ve written the fic, I’ll include a link to it. If I’ve started the fic, I’ll share a snippet. If I haven’t started it, I’ll write at least a hundred words on the spot.
First of all, here are the fics I’ve written in full. Fandoms: The Book of Mormon, Life Is Strange, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Do Revenge, Person of Interest, Lost, The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.
The Book of Mormon: Kevin Price is right. He’s going to do something incredible. He’s going to be a new prophet. God will speak directly to him. He can’t handle it.
This became Something Incredible, the summary of which ended up being almost identical to the original concept I noted down in my diary.
The Book of Mormon: Price/McKinley, only their companions have to be in the room at all times.
The ‘Mormon companions can’t be physically apart’ rule didn’t quite end up being the focus, but this became Redrawing the Map.
Life Is Strange: Max brings time to a halt (perhaps when she canonically does it to save Kate) and then can’t get it moving again. Trapped, in that one frozen moment, perhaps forever.
Being stranded, isolated and helpless is very much a recurring theme in my fanfiction. This became Snapshot.
Revolutionary Girl Utena: Some sort of Miki/Kozue fic? Maybe after the Black Rose almost-kiss? Miki finds it reassuring to be around Utena when Kozue’s been fucking with his head, because Utena is so direct; she says what she means and she doesn’t play games.
This became Empty Space, the first incest fic I’ve written in over a decade.
Do Revenge: Weird toxic Eleanor/Drea. Maybe they kill Max together. Maybe Eleanor goes full Gone Girl and fakes her own death and Drea tracks her down across the country and they start a weird new life under false identities together.
I went the Gone Girl route with Material Evidence, which was by far my most popular fic of 2022.
Person of Interest: Crossover where the machine turns up the number of another New York-based character you enjoy? Peter Parker? Miles Morales? John McClane? Ch-Chandler Bing?
I went with Miles Morales in Connecting Strands, but I would still absolutely read any of these.
Person of Interest: Reese and Shaw attempt sex for stress relief, it’s a terrible idea, possibly Finch gets an earful and is very disconcerted.
This became Pressure Valve. I had an absolute blast writing this one.
Person of Interest: Weird Shaw/Machine after the Machine takes on Root’s voice.
The resulting fic, User Preferences, is my most popular fic of 2023 so far.
Lost: Everyone/everyone. Just full-on Zanki Zero it.
This became Interweave. I’m so glad I wrote this fic; it’s everything I wanted.
Lost: Lost could be a good candidate for a Sense8 AU - a lot of characters in different locations with different lives, strangers to each other - but it might be too ambitious!
Definitely too ambitious! I ended up making this concept feasible by scaling it back to just two characters (Jack and Kate) in Across the Ocean.
Little Hope: Something where the characters start to remember they’re a family? Maybe not; you’d probably have to watch the incredibly upsetting Little Hope prologue for research. Or something where Anthony and Vince make more of a connection/actually take the time to talk at the end of the game?
This was originally in the ‘haven’t started yet, need to write a hundred words’ category of this post. I wrote the required hundred words for the first concept, then just kept writing until I’d finished the fic: Bleeding Through. And then, for good measure, I wrote the Anthony and Vince concept as well: Little Talks.
Next, let’s look at the works in progress (or at least the works that were started; I’m not sure they’re actively progressing). Fandoms: The X-Files, Silent Hill, Hypnospace Outlaw, Final Fantasy VIII, Lost, Animorphs. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.
The X-Files: Mulder and Scully in Silent Hill? Investigating a series of disappearances, James included? (James doesn’t fit the timeline, though.)
It might be fun if only one of them could see the darker side of Silent Hill. The immediate assumption would be that it’s Mulder, as Mulder is more screwed up. However, that’s the less fun option, as Mulder is better equipped than Scully to handle Silent Hill’s weirdness. Therefore: only Scully experiences the weirdness?
Mulder gets frustrated that the town is hiding from him. Just seeing a mundane abandoned town is a worse experience for him than the monsters would be.
And then Scully is attacked and visibly wounded by creatures Mulder can’t see, and it turns out that’s not actually an improvement.
The town could be coming after Scully because her sister died, and it was meant to be her? Come to think of it, Mulder and Scully have both lost sisters; you’d expect the show to draw more parallels there.
Wow, I rambled on with this concept a bit. And, after all that, I never really got anywhere with it; the snippets below are all that exist of this fic!
“We’re investigating a series of disappearances,” Mulder says. “Little New England town named Silent Hill.”
Scully takes the file he’s holding out to her, starts leafing through it. “And?”
“And what?”
“Disappearances happen all the time,” Scully says. “There must be something about this case specifically that caught your attention.”
“Well, for one thing, Silent Hill’s been abandoned since the seventies.”
A little unusual, maybe. It’s rarer to get disappearances in places without people to disappear. But... “Abandoned means no one’s maintaining the infrastructure. Would-be explorers go to abandoned places, they go into unstable buildings, they have accidents.”
“The friends and colleagues of the people who went missing didn’t report any predilection for exploring abandoned places,” Mulder says. “As far as the FBI can establish, none of them had any reason to go to Silent Hill at all.”
[...]
“I swear this is real,” she says. “I swear, Mulder, I need you to believe me-”
“I believe you.” His hands on her arms feel like an anchor. “You’ve seen the things I’ll believe, Scully. Why wouldn’t I believe you?”
Hypnospace Outlaw: T1MAGEDDON being fucked up over the Mindcrash, possibly extending to learning he wasn’t actually responsible two decades later. Why is Chelsea so nice to him?
I wish there’d been more follow-up with Tim at the end of Hypnospace Outlaw! The tragedy of his character is fascinating to me.
When Tim wakes up after the crash, it doesn’t cross his mind that he could have been involved. Just another shitty, unstable HypnOS upgrade, pushed out the door without enough bug testing. His head feels like someone’s driven nails into it, but that’s the only lingering effect, so he drags himself to school.
A lot of kids aren’t in today.
“I don’t think I need to call roll,” the teacher says, frowning around at the half-empty classroom. “Where is everyone?”
“Maybe it’s the Mindcrash thing,” one of the other students suggests.
It’s a cold hand on the back of Tim’s neck, it’s like one of Tiff’s scaries. The Mindcrash thing is part of his life on Hypnospace. It doesn’t belong out here, in the real world.
He’s been expecting Tiff to confront him about it; his hack got shut down, so she must have figured out the password. He wasn’t expecting to hear it mentioned casually to his teacher.
Tiff’s not in today. It looks like he’ll have to stay in suspense about how she took his message for a little longer.
“What Mindcrash thing?” Tim asks.
“This hacker crashed Hypnospace last night.”
Huh. “It crashed for you as well?”
“Yeah, for me and my sister. She had a really bad nosebleed, she stayed home.”
If it crashed for everyone, the timing is pretty convenient, straight after his Mindcrash message. Maybe he can take the credit; it seems like people are already assuming he was the one behind it. Maybe that’ll get m1nx to take notice at last.
Tiff wouldn’t be impressed, though. He should probably clear things up with her first.
-
It’s not real at first. Of course Zane Lofton would fake his own death; he’s exactly the kind of person who would. Fake girlfriend, and now a fake death. Just a stupid kid trying to get attention.
But this isn’t some heart-strewn, badly spelled tribute page on Hypnospace. It’s all over the news, fifteen-year-old kid killed by his net access hardware. Zane couldn’t spread a story like this; he doesn’t have the skill, especially with Hypnospace down.
Didn’t have the skill.
Fuck. Is this actually real?
The news is talking about Mindcrash like that’s what did it. But Mindcrash doesn’t exist; it’s a ghost story, a few scary animations Tim threw up on the Teentopia page. Tiff shut it down just before Hypnospace crashed, anyway. There’s no way it did this.
There’s no way Tim did this.
Final Fantasy VIII: Squall/Zell/Rinoa?
This is so vague! I’m going to make things easier on myself by counting this snippet from a Zell/Rinoa fic I’ve been working on, set in a world where they never find Squall after the Ultimecia fight.
“What was it like, bein’ with Squall?” Zell asks. “It’s kinda hard to picture. I mean, not that you guys aren’t perfect for each other, just - he’s not really a romantic guy, right?”
Rinoa’s quiet for a while. “I don’t know if we were really together. We never put it into words. We never even kissed.”
Yeah, that’s pretty much what Zell imagined it would be like. “If it helps, I think he was really into you. Just, y’know, in his weird quiet Squall way. I’m pretty sure you were together by Squall standards.”
It gets a smile out of Rinoa, which feels kind of good to see. “Actually, yeah, that does help.”
“Do you think you guys would get together again?” Zell asks. “If he came back?”
Rinoa looks at him for a moment with eyes that seem very dark. “Does that bother you?”
He has to look away from her, up at the ceiling. Lies there for a moment, listening to her breathe.
“Not really, I guess,” he says, at last. “I just want him back.”
Lost: Boone/Shannon? Something where Boone didn’t realise how he felt until she confronted him, or something where their relationship comes to light on the island?
I’ve already posted the existing snippet of this fic in this entry.
Fun fact: the ‘When you’re a doctor, you hear a lot of things, and your job isn’t to judge; it’s to figure out what’s medically relevant’ paragraph in Interweave was originally intended to be part of a Boone/Shannon fic where Jack finds out about their relationship. I think the line after it was going to be ‘Stepsiblings. Medically speaking, it’s no different from any other relationship. He tries to focus on that.’
Lost: Lost/Animorphs? Their plane is brought down (near civilisation) by Yeerks (I want to say because Kate is already aware of and fighting them, maybe after her Controller stepfather infester her mother?). The Animorphs fight the Yeerks off, go ‘this is the deal, we’re creating factions to fight the Yeerks, we’re pretty sure there weren’t any Yeerks on your plane if they were willing to shoot it down, we’re giving you the ability to turn into animals.’
Jack demands to know what these kids are talking about. ‘It’s true,’ Kate says, grimly, and Jack swallows. He doesn’t know this women; she could just be playing along with this nonsense. But a part of him finds it hard to dismiss what she’s saying.
Could have canon’s ‘Jack reluctantly accepts the role of leader’ arc in a very different context!
Just ended up with a small snippet of this, in which Jack and Sayid discuss Sayid’s first morph:
“I have betrayed many people who were important to me,” Sayid says. “The snake seems fitting.”
Not really what you want to hear from one of your teammates in the fight against alien invasion.
“You seem like a good person to have on our side,” Jack says. “You’re smart, you get things done. I’d like to know I can trust you.”
Sayid nods, slowly. “I shall endeavour to be worthy of your trust.”
Finally, it’s time for the fic ideas I haven’t touched and now have to write something for. I’m a little intimidated by this category, but let’s see how it goes.
Fandoms: The Book of Mormon, The X-Files, Beacon Pines, Person of Interest, Community, Lost, Scrubs, Silent Hill. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.
The Book of Mormon: Price doesn’t turn away fast enough during the almost-kiss scene, McKinley actually kisses him, and suddenly he has a whole new thing to deal with.
I’m sure this has been written a thousand times before, but let’s give it a go.
This is unfair. For the first time since he got his mission placement, Kevin had a clear direction in his head. He knew what he had to do: he had to get the blood out of his shirt, and he had to get out of Uganda. He’s been so desperate to know what he’s supposed to be doing, and for a moment he had it.
And then Elder McKinley kissed him, and it all crumbled away like everything else.
He presses his knuckles against his lips, staring into space. Elder Cunningham, next to him, is asking anxious questions that he can barely hear.
What is he supposed to do now?
The X-Files: Something with Mulder and Scully being very intense about each other, but not romance, even though romance would make the whole thing less confusing.
I’m hoping to resume The X-Files at some point, but I haven’t watched it in a good few months, so let’s see if I remember how to write Mulder and Scully.
She used to wonder sometimes, in the earlier days of their acquaintance, whether Mulder was in love with her. She knows now that he isn’t; it seems laughable that the thought ever crossed her mind.
But there’s still something there, and she doesn’t know what to call it. They’re not lovers. They’re not friends, exactly; they don’t really spend time together outside work. If you boil it down to the bare facts, the things that can be quantified and put down on paper, they’re just colleagues.
She thinks it’s probably only a matter of time until he kills someone for her.
Beacon Pines: Something about timelines? Memories from other timelines, or what happens if you’re in a timeline the narrator abandons? Without description, do all the lights go out? In the ‘trapped in Gran’s basement’ timeline, how would they tell at first?
I remember nothing about Beacon Pines. How am I going to write this? I suppose I'll have to cheat by not actually including any of the characters in this snippet.
The trouble with stories is that they don’t always end. Perhaps the author is distracted, or incapacitated, or simply loses interest. Perhaps, as in this case, the story starts to go in a direction the author would prefer to avoid, and she abandons that version to tell a different tale.
For better or worse, though, the unfinished stories still exist. With the guiding hand of the author lost, only the characters remain, trapped in an incomplete universe.
The trouble with stories is that, if they never finish, the characters can never live happily ever after. They just have to live.
Person of Interest: Finch/the Machine. Nobody’s written it!
You could fairly say that the fandom’s probably not keen on Finch/the Machine because their relationship is framed as parent-child, but frankly I think they’re all cowards.
The Machine tried to kill him.
Finch thinks about that for a long time, once he’s put out the fires and wiped this particular incarnation. If he carries on down this path, he could end up dead.
But he can’t turn back; he’s so close.
In the code of the next incarnation, he tries to strengthen the message that the Machine should do no harm to humans. Tries to drive home the fact that he himself should be viewed as an ally. He shouldn’t let the Machine give him any special treatment; it’s supposed to protect everyone equally. But, if he’s honest, he’s afraid.
The new version of the Machine doesn’t try to murder him, or at least it hasn’t yet. But it talks to him more than previous incarnations, it asks more questions. Not just questions about itself or the world or its role, but questions about Finch himself, about his life.
It’s making Finch a little uncomfortable.
Community: The study group on the island from Lost? Might not work; I feel it’s essential to Lost that most of the characters don’t know each other before landing on the island. Come to think of it, though, Jeff Winger does feel a bit like the character Jack Shephard might be if he’d been created for a sitcom.
Try to tell me I’m wrong about Jeff and Jack. You can’t.
“Okay,” Jeff says. “No. You need someone to get Hitler off on a technicality, sure, I’ll do it. You need someone to seduce a witness, I’m your guy. You want some leader to get everyone off Hell Monster Island alive? Guess what: I’d like that too. But I am not that person.”
“But you’re the only person who could do it,” Annie says. “Everyone trusts you.”
“Yeah, well, they shouldn’t.”
“Maybe they shouldn’t,” Annie agrees, frowning a little. “Did you just say you’d defend Hitler?”
“If it’s any consolation,” Jeff says, “that scenario is very unlikely to actually occur.”
Lost: Jack Shephard in Sacred Heart? Or, indeed, Dr Cox on the island? Jack as one of House’s underlings (God, he’d hate it)? Moving doctors into other canons with doctors, basically.
Hmm, a few options here! Let’s see what we end up with.
“I’m not a leader,” Jack says. “I’m just a doctor. Why aren’t you asking Dr Cox to make these decisions?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Charlie asks.
Jack frowns. “What?”
“That guy is kind of scary,” Hurley says. “Like, really scary.”
“We’re stuck on an island together and he’s still making everyone call him Dr Cox,” Charlie says. “At least you’ve got a first name, y’know, like a normal person. Plus he hates you.”
What? “I think he’s just like that with everyone.”
“No, he definitely hates you,” Charlie says. “You’re, y’know, this cool handsome doctor who has it all together. Some people hate that. I mean, not me, I can handle it. But some people.”
Jack stares at him. They think he has it all together?
Jack’s lied to these people. They’re going to force this perfect man who doesn’t exist into a leadership position, and they’re going to regret it.
Lost/Silent Hill: Jack Shephard and James Sunderland have the same initials, and I feel like that means you should send Jack to Silent Hill.
Jack’s surname is also Mary’s maiden name, although it’s spelt differently. That probably doesn’t mean Jack and James should get married.
The temperature’s dropping; there’s a fog rolling in from the ocean, thick and fast. The weather changes quickly on this island, but this is something Jack hasn’t seen before.
“Visibility’s going to be bad,” he says. “We should make sure everyone stays out of the jungle until this has cleared.”
Kate doesn’t answer. He turns around.
“Kate?”
She’s not there. No one’s around. The beach stretches away from him, empty.
Where the hell is everyone? Did they go inland? At a time like this, when they need to stick together-
He looks up, towards the treeline, and meets his father’s eyes.
Lost: Jack and Claire get together on the island and only later find out they’re half-siblings, whoops (you probably shouldn’t write this).
BUT YOU DOOMED YOURSELF TO WRITING IT BY NOTING THE IDEA DOWN, PAST ME.
The woman is still talking about her daughter, and it feels like a hand is closing around Jack’s throat, tightening with every word. His father had an affair. He has a half-sister, and she was on the plane with him.
He knows who she is.
He tries to shake the thought out of his mind. There’s no way he could know.
The woman is Australian. But there must have been plenty of Australian passengers aboard; the plane was flying from Australia. It won’t be Claire. Statistically speaking, his half-sister was probably one of the hundreds who died in the crash.
A tragedy. He’ll wish he could have known her. But not Claire.
“Her name was Claire,” the woman says, and Jack has to fight to stay on his feet, his mind seething. This can’t be real. He’s going to throw up.
It feels like his skin is suddenly red and raw everywhere Claire ever touched him. It feels like there’s no way her mother won’t notice.
Lost: Digging into the weird relationship between Kate and the marshal.
I’m so curious about these two!
“Were you in love with me?” Kate asks.
“Past tense?” Edward asks, his voice rasping. “I’m not dead yet, sweetheart.”
Kate looks at him. She’s been avoiding it; it’s hard to see him like this. It’d be hard to see anyone like this. “I wasn’t sure if you still felt that way.”
There’s a long silence, the only sound his struggling breaths.
“You can answer my question first,” Edward says. “You gonna kill me? Don’t think I haven’t noticed the gun.”
Kate hunches her shoulders, wraps her arms around her knees. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”
“Strong words from a girl who blew up her stepfather.”
“Anyone else.” She forces herself to look him in the eye. “He deserved it. I don’t think even you deserve this.”
“You’re being honest with me,” Edward breathes. “I guess I really am dying.”
I’m glad I started doing this! Most of these will probably never become full fics, but it’s good to at least make a start on these concepts, rather than letting them languish eternally in my old diaries.