a conspiracy of cartographers

And a quick fic year in review meme! For obvious reasons this is me crouching like a gremlin over my pile of Mechanisms fic, so it's probably mostly of interest to me, but I did write a whole lot this year that I'm very happy with, so I wanted to talk about it.

( Fic year in review! )

Still yelling into the void about the Mechanisms! Still more or less on track to write one Mechs fic a month, too -- like, I last posted a complete fic in May, and here we are in July, but given that I did all 79k of this one in June and July, I think we can reasonably say that still counts as about a fic a month.

lies we tell the universe, Nastya/Toy Soldier, Jonny/Tim, Marius/Raphaella, Mechs ensemble

If there was one thing Nastya's kid brother didn't need, it was to be told that he was a god. But here he was, wrapped in dark leather with makeup lines of black lightning spiderwebbing across his face, surrounded by a massive crowd of worshipful enablers.

(Every ninety years eight gods return as young people. They are loved. They are hated. In two years, they are all dead. It's happening now. It's happening again.)

Iiiiit's a The Wicked + the Divine AU! A lot of them play D&D in horrible tunnels! I had so much fun writing it!!

Look sometimes you and your housemates start imagining ever-more-elaborate weird games that the Mechs might play given that they enjoy violence and cannot die, and then you find yourself writing several thousand words of silly nonsense about it. So, uh, here we are!

Spin the Knife, Jonny d'Ville/Mechs ensemble
As described.

(I keep trying to write Mechs fic that isn't from Jonny's POV, but it goes at a normal pace, and then I start anything from Jonny's POV and entire absurd fics just fall right out.)

Once upon a time, I listened to the Mechanisms' entire discography, then spent the next month and change writing ~39,000 words about my feelings. This is what we get on the other side of that.

moons in collision, like gravity or love, Jonny d'Ville/Mechanisms ensemble

His living heart had hurt, and the new one felt strange: he could feel the clockwork and the gears in his chest where there had once been nothing but messily squeezing muscle, and at that first tickticktick he felt the sick swooping rightness of it so strongly that every moment on either side of it went white with euphoria.

Linear memory's overrated, anyway.

Anyway uh *slaps roof of fic* you can fit so many of my feelings about being trans and having dealt with a lot of immense sadness this past year and still trying to find beauty and meaning and love in things, I guess?? ENJOY.

Happy new year! May 2021 be better (statistically: likely? eventually?? I sure hope).

Anyway, this is a drive-by Yuletide reveal post! This year I wrote Silky Story, the tag originator for The Ten Thousand Doors of January! In the summer of 1889, Ade Larson took passage on a laker from Chicago to Sault Ste Marie, and on the docks of southern Ontario she heard her first story of the sea women. Selkies! Portal fantasy! Honestly I highly recommend the book, it was one of my favorite reads of 2020.

Another Good Omens fic! I cannot be stopped, I'm just going to write thousands upon thousands of words of Aziraphale and Crowley in love, what a wonderful way to spend my summer.

Anywhere You Want to Go, Aziraphale/Crowley
Aziraphale knew Crowley liked him. He'd known it with a horrible clarity since around 1100, which was at least a thousand years after the first time he'd thought of kissing Crowley, and some eight hundred and odd before it occurred to him that the specific quality of Crowley's regard could be very dangerous for both of them, if they actually admitted their feelings aloud.

It was also two weeks since any of that had mattered at all anymore.

They go on holiday to the South Downs cottage! There are picnics! Emotionally repressed flirting! Two whole fraught wrist kisses! Enjoyyyy.

HEY I FINISHED MY TAAKO FIC, maybe that means my brain will let me do ... literally anything else?

The Best Version Possible, Kravitz/Taako, Lup & Taako, Lucretia & Taako
Even at the end of the world, I love you is a lot.

The impetus for this was, in no particular order: I love Lup so much, Taako loves Lup so much, gonna yell about that; how does a relationship progress from a kinda-date discussing the fate of an entire town over wine and vase-making to a dramatic declaration of love during a final battle without, like, any in-between parts; are Taako and Lucretia gonna ... be okay?? Anyway I loved the TAZ Balance epilogue and I felt extremely fulfilled and satisfied and then I wrote 11k words of elaboration!

Suggested listening: Umbrella; Everybody Loves Me; (Don't Fear) the Reaper; Hey Brother; Arms Outstretched; Voidfish (Plural).

Blame: filia_belialis for gently shoving TAZ at me until I cared about it, listening while I yelled at them about Taako, betaing this mess of feelings; Justin McElroy, just, frankly, how dare he.

For New Year's Eve I convened with many local friends, all of whom had drawn up D&D characters, and we chose characters at random in order to play an all-night campaign. My first character got red shirted and died in literally the first thirty seconds; my next character, a pixie barbarian named Tankerbelle, survived the night and was incredibly fun to play. Now we're making brunch, and will probably play yet more D&D!

For Yuletide this year, I wrote Exorcist fic! Batter My Heart, Marcus/Tomas. I loved writing it, and I want to write so much more Exorcist fic now. (Like, WHAT IF I WRITE THIRD SEASON, is more or less where I have landed on wanting to write more Exorcist fic, of fucking course I have.)

Happy new year, pals <333

It took me a month, but I have channeled some of my Ragnarok feelings into a fic!

Rebuild All Your Ruins, Thor/Loki
"Loki," Thor says, "why did you come back?"

(In a weird way this is the same fic as Shatter? Like, it really isn't, this is a bottle episode on a spaceship, not a Loki-is-banished-instead first movie AU, but the character trajectories are similar, just from the opposite end of Thor and Loki's arcs!! Which means that instead of talking about feelings while Loki rage-cries and threatens Thor with knives, now they talk about their feelings while drinking the Valkyrie's liquor together. ENJOY.)

Hahaha well I'm not going to hit 50k on NaNo this year but I AM going to finish up a bunch of WIPs! Today's offering:

Midwinter, Thor/Loki
All Loki has to do is say yes, go, and Thor will leave, and perhaps for some time things will be painfully awkward but they will be safe. Loki does not even have to tell Thor he doesn't want it, does not have to make himself convincing. If he can just bring himself to say it --

Tbh this fic is VERY 2012 in the sense that it is literally just fluffy teenage Asgardian banging, please enjoy this magical journey to a more innocent time.