Multifandom Comment!fic rec (OUaT, BtVS, AtS, Spn)
I've taken to writing comment fics as of late (for comment_fic ), because they're quick and simple and they're fun. It's nice to be able to just write and post, definite feeling of accomplishing something. Here's a quick rec of the fics I've written so far.
Monster Love Story
Once Upon a Time, any/any, not everybody gets a happy ending.
Ruby would have married Peter. She would have married him and loved him and grown old with him and raised kids with him, but now she won’t get to. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked out, maybe she would have fought with him and maybe they would have broken each others hearts, but now she’ll never get to find out.
She thinks about Peter on her first date with Dr. Whale, or Victor, as he tells her to call him. Victor is safe because he’s a monster like her, because he killed his brother and she killed her lover and that makes them the same. When he kisses her goodnight, Ruby remembers kissing Peter.
Ruby and Victor date for a year. Neither one of them is happy in Storybrook, but they both pretend, because the lives waiting for them back in their homes are darker and sadder and bloodier. This world is not a happy place, and it is not a place for monsters, but they make do. Ruby tells herself that Storybrook is a better place, now that she has Victor, but it has been a year, and she still remembers Peter’s green eyes when Victor looks at her.
They date for a year, and then Victor proposes. Ruby says yes, throws her arms around him and cries, but for every happy tear there is another that she cries for Peter. She still dreams, some nights, of Peter, and what it would be like to see him again. But Peter is dead and she is the one who killed him, so Ruby kisses Victor on the lips and tells him that’s she’s incredibly happy and she makes herself believe it.
Victor is not a bad man. He can be arrogant and selfish, but he is kind and funny and he is a doctor because he wants to save lives. And, compared to some of their neighbors, Victor is practically a saint. Still, everybody think Frankenstein and think of monsters. It’s funny, because Frankenstein was only ever a scientist, but people still fear Victor. They fear her too, because Ruby is a monster. She is the only monster in their house, because she has teeth and fur and claws, because she killed the man she loved. Maybe that makes her Frankenstein’s monster.
They are married for three years, and every day Ruby wakes up and thinks that she has made a mistake, a giant, devastating mistake like a black hole. She is not unhappy, but she is not in love, and she still thinks of Peter as she falls asleep. She doesn’t think she’s in love with Peter’s memory, she thinks she’s just clinging to it because she misses being in love, but she knows that she’s not in love with Victor. Sometimes, Ruby wonders if monsters like her ever get to fall in love.
Remembering Peter’s torn up, bloody remains, she thinks that a happy ending seems pretty unlikely.
Homeless
BtVS, any, a world in which Buffy had stayed dead.
When Oz came back to Sunnydale, it was a different town. The few people who remained, dressed in brown and grey as if pretending to be ghosts, slipped from doorway to doorway in a hurry, as if scared to be outside. The guitar shop and used book store were boarded up like a ghost town storefront, and the sidewalk was starting to erode into disrepair. The air felt heavy on his skin, thick and cold like wet clothes, weighing down each step he took up the sidewalk to the familiar home on Revello Drive.
Buffy’s house was dark, just like the rest of the town, and Oz was certain that nothing was the way he had left it. Birds didn’t fly here anymore, and no children played in the park, and he didn’t think he wanted to know why. Beneath his feet, the ground felt sickly and diseased, so different from Tibet, like something evil had wormed its way out of the Hellmouth and woven itself around every rock and tree root.
When he finally knocked on the door, the banging of his fist sharp and bellowing in the silence of this shadow town, Buffy didn’t answer the door. It was Willow, with coal black eyes and ebony hair, wearing a calm, hollow smile.
“Welcome home, Oz,” Willow said, staring right at him with her empty black eyes. She was an arm’s length away, closer than she’d been in years, but Oz thought that she was farther away from him than she’d ever been. Willow smelled more like the heady crackling ozone of magic than she did human, her Willow-scent, which he still remembered as easily as he remembered the smell of mint, almost completely overwhelmed. Behind her, he could see Spike sprawled across an arm chair and the demon girl, Anya or Annie or something like that, seated on a couch and peering at him without much interest at all.
“Willow,” Oz breathed, still dazed by the pervading feeling of wrong that seeped through Sunnydale like fog. “Is Buffy here?”
“Not anymore. We’re all that’s left, now.”
Oz blinked at her in confusion and she led him inside, welcoming him into the last safe house in Sunnydale, into a den of monsters just like him, all still wearing their old human faces. Buffy was dead, Sunnydale was very nearly lost, and the woman he still loved was now a blackened, hollowed out shell, eaten away by the magic she’d given herself to.
For two years now, Oz’s every thought and every action had been with the intent of returning home. Now, he had finally come back to Sunnydale, and he felt more homeless than ever.
Never Let You Go
any, any, it’s over, let it go
He can’t let go of Buffy. She has moved on, but Spike still clings to sharp memories of her, unwilling to let her go.
It would be easier to forget about her if he didn’t see her every day, but Spike can’t bring himself to walk away from Sunnydale. He loves her, craves her, is deeply obsessed with her. He wants her (her love, her heart, her blood) with a fierce burning, a crazed, dangerous need.
He thinks about Buffy, all the time. It’s as if her image had been tattooed to his eyelids, her laugh recorded in his mind, the smell or her skin and her blood seared into his nose. He still has every inch of her flesh memorized, can remember every freckle and blemish and scar. If Buffy were to die again, he would be able, from memory alone, to fashion a memorial in her likeness a thousand times over, so that the rest of the earth could remember her as he still would. He doesn’t believe he could ever forget a thing about her.
Buffy doesn’t want anything to do with him, thinks him beneath her. Just like Cecily, who he’d never truly known, and Drusilla, who he’d loved with a savage madness, Buffy had grown tired of him, grown disgusted with herself. Cecily had been like the first faint star of evening and Dru had shone like the moon, but Buffy is the sun, and she smiles so brightly sometimes he thinks it will burn him alive. For Buffy, he would gladly burn.
Buffy doesn’t love him, will never love him, so she says. She doesn’t know what she wants anymore, still cold and broken and aching for heaven, but she knows she doesn’t want him. Spike needs to escape her, find a corner of the world where even her light can’t shine. He can’t comprehend a world without Buffy, but he’ll have to learn one. She doesn’t love him. And he could burn from wanting her.
Maybe if he ran away, buried himself so deep in ancient earth where the sun is only an imagining, he could forget her. Maybe, but Spike doesn’t think he could ever let her go.
Dying Young
any, any, She's not a smoker, but occasionally she smokes.
Bela only rarely smokes. People say that it's calming, but Bela can hardly ever afford to be calm. Bela is level headed, she is cool and collected, she has complete self-control, but she has no time for calm. She's living on borrowed time, only three more years of it, and she doesn't want to waste any more moments than she must.
Calm isn't anywhere near as wonderful as the feeling of rushing, gasping adrenaline, speeding her heart and moving her heavy limbs. Calm isn't the rush of a job or the thrill of nearly getting caught, isn't the feeling of an artifact tucked into a bag in her belt, isn't the glow of success that accompanies every heart-pounding second of a heist gone right. Bela loves the heart-in-your-mouth feeling of theft, thinks that living in constant peril, always on the verge of dying fast, is the only way to live. Bela craves the danger; it makes her feel alive, untouchable. With just short of 1,000 days, Bela has far better things to do with her time than sit back with a cigarette and relax.
Sometimes, though, when she's pretending to be someone she's not, in disguise for a job or because some days she doesn't want to remember what she's done, when she wants to indulge herself and pretend she'll live forever, Bela lights up. She's already dying young, a cigarette or two couldn't possibly have time to kill her first. She doesn't love the heavy feeling of smoke in her throat and she doesn't have much use for nicotine or forced calm, but a cigarette is something to hold on to. And sometimes, Bela is so busy flying towards hell, going so very fast that it's as if a hellhound were on her tail, that she needs something to hold on to, before hell swallows her whole.
Songs About Regret
Angel: the Series, Lorne, He'd like to say that he doesn't regret shooting Lindsey...But then again, he hadn't foreseen being haunted for all eternity by a singing ghost. At least he isn't off-key.
Lorne had spent a lifetime successfully evading his past. He still didn’t like to think about Pylea, didn’t even like to remember that he had ever lived in a world without music. This dimension that he had made his home was a terrible place, as violent and cruel as his homeland, but it was softened and tempered by music. He didn’t regret running away to this world.
Lorne didn’t believe in regret. The future was more his thing, and it was so much brighter than anything in the past could hope to be. He could read futures and see destinies the way Fred read books, and, while not all futures were happy and easy, every destiny was always moving forward, reaching to eternity instead of dwelling in the past. There was no changing the past, so there was no point in wishing for it.
Lorne was just a music man. He wasn’t a warrior or a Champion, but he did what he thought was right. And, when Angel said it was his job to kill Lindsey, it felt right. Lorne hated pulling the trigger, hating becoming the killer Pylea had taught him to be, but he didn’t regret it. In times of war, good men died, and Lorne knew that Lindsey was far from being a good man. So, Lorne didn’t hold on to his guilt, he moved on. Lorne was all about moving forward.
But then Lindsey didn’t move on, and haunted Lorne instead. He was like the second shadow Lorne never wanted, a not-quite-physical manifestation of the regret he had never wanted to feel. Lorne ignored Lindsey the best he could, listening to strangers sing him quiet, nervous songs and telling them what the future held for them. Lorne’s days were always filled with music, with his vintage record player and the sound of his own tenor and the voices of all of the scared, lonely people who feared their tomorrows. He learned to forget Lindsey a little more each day, pushing him into the dead silence between songs and reducing him to hang in the edges of each melody Lorne heard.
But then, every so often, Lindsey would sing. Lindsey had a beautiful voice, smooth and low and full, and his song choices were always perfection, but when Lindsey sang, for the first time in a long time, Lorne regretted the things he had done.
Because, when Lindsey sang, Lorne couldn’t see any future at all.
Monster Love Story
Once Upon a Time, any/any, not everybody gets a happy ending.
Ruby would have married Peter. She would have married him and loved him and grown old with him and raised kids with him, but now she won’t get to. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked out, maybe she would have fought with him and maybe they would have broken each others hearts, but now she’ll never get to find out.
She thinks about Peter on her first date with Dr. Whale, or Victor, as he tells her to call him. Victor is safe because he’s a monster like her, because he killed his brother and she killed her lover and that makes them the same. When he kisses her goodnight, Ruby remembers kissing Peter.
Ruby and Victor date for a year. Neither one of them is happy in Storybrook, but they both pretend, because the lives waiting for them back in their homes are darker and sadder and bloodier. This world is not a happy place, and it is not a place for monsters, but they make do. Ruby tells herself that Storybrook is a better place, now that she has Victor, but it has been a year, and she still remembers Peter’s green eyes when Victor looks at her.
They date for a year, and then Victor proposes. Ruby says yes, throws her arms around him and cries, but for every happy tear there is another that she cries for Peter. She still dreams, some nights, of Peter, and what it would be like to see him again. But Peter is dead and she is the one who killed him, so Ruby kisses Victor on the lips and tells him that’s she’s incredibly happy and she makes herself believe it.
Victor is not a bad man. He can be arrogant and selfish, but he is kind and funny and he is a doctor because he wants to save lives. And, compared to some of their neighbors, Victor is practically a saint. Still, everybody think Frankenstein and think of monsters. It’s funny, because Frankenstein was only ever a scientist, but people still fear Victor. They fear her too, because Ruby is a monster. She is the only monster in their house, because she has teeth and fur and claws, because she killed the man she loved. Maybe that makes her Frankenstein’s monster.
They are married for three years, and every day Ruby wakes up and thinks that she has made a mistake, a giant, devastating mistake like a black hole. She is not unhappy, but she is not in love, and she still thinks of Peter as she falls asleep. She doesn’t think she’s in love with Peter’s memory, she thinks she’s just clinging to it because she misses being in love, but she knows that she’s not in love with Victor. Sometimes, Ruby wonders if monsters like her ever get to fall in love.
Remembering Peter’s torn up, bloody remains, she thinks that a happy ending seems pretty unlikely.
Homeless
BtVS, any, a world in which Buffy had stayed dead.
When Oz came back to Sunnydale, it was a different town. The few people who remained, dressed in brown and grey as if pretending to be ghosts, slipped from doorway to doorway in a hurry, as if scared to be outside. The guitar shop and used book store were boarded up like a ghost town storefront, and the sidewalk was starting to erode into disrepair. The air felt heavy on his skin, thick and cold like wet clothes, weighing down each step he took up the sidewalk to the familiar home on Revello Drive.
Buffy’s house was dark, just like the rest of the town, and Oz was certain that nothing was the way he had left it. Birds didn’t fly here anymore, and no children played in the park, and he didn’t think he wanted to know why. Beneath his feet, the ground felt sickly and diseased, so different from Tibet, like something evil had wormed its way out of the Hellmouth and woven itself around every rock and tree root.
When he finally knocked on the door, the banging of his fist sharp and bellowing in the silence of this shadow town, Buffy didn’t answer the door. It was Willow, with coal black eyes and ebony hair, wearing a calm, hollow smile.
“Welcome home, Oz,” Willow said, staring right at him with her empty black eyes. She was an arm’s length away, closer than she’d been in years, but Oz thought that she was farther away from him than she’d ever been. Willow smelled more like the heady crackling ozone of magic than she did human, her Willow-scent, which he still remembered as easily as he remembered the smell of mint, almost completely overwhelmed. Behind her, he could see Spike sprawled across an arm chair and the demon girl, Anya or Annie or something like that, seated on a couch and peering at him without much interest at all.
“Willow,” Oz breathed, still dazed by the pervading feeling of wrong that seeped through Sunnydale like fog. “Is Buffy here?”
“Not anymore. We’re all that’s left, now.”
Oz blinked at her in confusion and she led him inside, welcoming him into the last safe house in Sunnydale, into a den of monsters just like him, all still wearing their old human faces. Buffy was dead, Sunnydale was very nearly lost, and the woman he still loved was now a blackened, hollowed out shell, eaten away by the magic she’d given herself to.
For two years now, Oz’s every thought and every action had been with the intent of returning home. Now, he had finally come back to Sunnydale, and he felt more homeless than ever.
Never Let You Go
any, any, it’s over, let it go
He can’t let go of Buffy. She has moved on, but Spike still clings to sharp memories of her, unwilling to let her go.
It would be easier to forget about her if he didn’t see her every day, but Spike can’t bring himself to walk away from Sunnydale. He loves her, craves her, is deeply obsessed with her. He wants her (her love, her heart, her blood) with a fierce burning, a crazed, dangerous need.
He thinks about Buffy, all the time. It’s as if her image had been tattooed to his eyelids, her laugh recorded in his mind, the smell or her skin and her blood seared into his nose. He still has every inch of her flesh memorized, can remember every freckle and blemish and scar. If Buffy were to die again, he would be able, from memory alone, to fashion a memorial in her likeness a thousand times over, so that the rest of the earth could remember her as he still would. He doesn’t believe he could ever forget a thing about her.
Buffy doesn’t want anything to do with him, thinks him beneath her. Just like Cecily, who he’d never truly known, and Drusilla, who he’d loved with a savage madness, Buffy had grown tired of him, grown disgusted with herself. Cecily had been like the first faint star of evening and Dru had shone like the moon, but Buffy is the sun, and she smiles so brightly sometimes he thinks it will burn him alive. For Buffy, he would gladly burn.
Buffy doesn’t love him, will never love him, so she says. She doesn’t know what she wants anymore, still cold and broken and aching for heaven, but she knows she doesn’t want him. Spike needs to escape her, find a corner of the world where even her light can’t shine. He can’t comprehend a world without Buffy, but he’ll have to learn one. She doesn’t love him. And he could burn from wanting her.
Maybe if he ran away, buried himself so deep in ancient earth where the sun is only an imagining, he could forget her. Maybe, but Spike doesn’t think he could ever let her go.
Dying Young
any, any, She's not a smoker, but occasionally she smokes.
Bela only rarely smokes. People say that it's calming, but Bela can hardly ever afford to be calm. Bela is level headed, she is cool and collected, she has complete self-control, but she has no time for calm. She's living on borrowed time, only three more years of it, and she doesn't want to waste any more moments than she must.
Calm isn't anywhere near as wonderful as the feeling of rushing, gasping adrenaline, speeding her heart and moving her heavy limbs. Calm isn't the rush of a job or the thrill of nearly getting caught, isn't the feeling of an artifact tucked into a bag in her belt, isn't the glow of success that accompanies every heart-pounding second of a heist gone right. Bela loves the heart-in-your-mouth feeling of theft, thinks that living in constant peril, always on the verge of dying fast, is the only way to live. Bela craves the danger; it makes her feel alive, untouchable. With just short of 1,000 days, Bela has far better things to do with her time than sit back with a cigarette and relax.
Sometimes, though, when she's pretending to be someone she's not, in disguise for a job or because some days she doesn't want to remember what she's done, when she wants to indulge herself and pretend she'll live forever, Bela lights up. She's already dying young, a cigarette or two couldn't possibly have time to kill her first. She doesn't love the heavy feeling of smoke in her throat and she doesn't have much use for nicotine or forced calm, but a cigarette is something to hold on to. And sometimes, Bela is so busy flying towards hell, going so very fast that it's as if a hellhound were on her tail, that she needs something to hold on to, before hell swallows her whole.
Songs About Regret
Angel: the Series, Lorne, He'd like to say that he doesn't regret shooting Lindsey...But then again, he hadn't foreseen being haunted for all eternity by a singing ghost. At least he isn't off-key.
Lorne had spent a lifetime successfully evading his past. He still didn’t like to think about Pylea, didn’t even like to remember that he had ever lived in a world without music. This dimension that he had made his home was a terrible place, as violent and cruel as his homeland, but it was softened and tempered by music. He didn’t regret running away to this world.
Lorne didn’t believe in regret. The future was more his thing, and it was so much brighter than anything in the past could hope to be. He could read futures and see destinies the way Fred read books, and, while not all futures were happy and easy, every destiny was always moving forward, reaching to eternity instead of dwelling in the past. There was no changing the past, so there was no point in wishing for it.
Lorne was just a music man. He wasn’t a warrior or a Champion, but he did what he thought was right. And, when Angel said it was his job to kill Lindsey, it felt right. Lorne hated pulling the trigger, hating becoming the killer Pylea had taught him to be, but he didn’t regret it. In times of war, good men died, and Lorne knew that Lindsey was far from being a good man. So, Lorne didn’t hold on to his guilt, he moved on. Lorne was all about moving forward.
But then Lindsey didn’t move on, and haunted Lorne instead. He was like the second shadow Lorne never wanted, a not-quite-physical manifestation of the regret he had never wanted to feel. Lorne ignored Lindsey the best he could, listening to strangers sing him quiet, nervous songs and telling them what the future held for them. Lorne’s days were always filled with music, with his vintage record player and the sound of his own tenor and the voices of all of the scared, lonely people who feared their tomorrows. He learned to forget Lindsey a little more each day, pushing him into the dead silence between songs and reducing him to hang in the edges of each melody Lorne heard.
But then, every so often, Lindsey would sing. Lindsey had a beautiful voice, smooth and low and full, and his song choices were always perfection, but when Lindsey sang, for the first time in a long time, Lorne regretted the things he had done.
Because, when Lindsey sang, Lorne couldn’t see any future at all.