A Certain Slant of Light

Snowflake Challenge #6: Rec at least three fanworks that you didn’t create.

How Do You Celebrate, a post-canon fic for Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Theo Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky (but very much in an awkward, uncertain, trying to establish a relationship but also terrible at relationships kind of way).

Excellent Theo voice - it’s told in his POV and really feels like a continuation of canon - and excellent Boris voice, too. Theo and Boris goes out to eat, and the waitress mistakes them for a couple, to Theo’s horror. Afterward Boris tells him, “I’ll go back tomorrow, yes? I’ll bring a picture of you, say, remember him? Not dating me. Very heterosexual, this man. Real lady-fucker.”

Hour of Need, Brideshead Revisited, past Charles Ryder/Sebastian Flyte. At the age of 90, Charles remembers Sebastian, and grieves Sebastian’s long-ago death. (The summary is a quote from the Iliad: "He has fallen far from home, and in his hour of need my hand was not there to help him.”)

I don’t usually read tragic fanfic - generally I get my tragedy fix from published works, like Brideshead Revisited itself - but this one is really well done, understated and cathartically tragic about things long past and long beyond repair.

Ending on a lighter note! come down and kiss me fairly is a Kidnapped! fic, Alan Breck Stuart/David Balfour, “Five times Alan kissed Davie.” Excellent Davie voice, with some lovely moments of sly humor.

The final batch of Whumptober ficlets!

( 26. Abandoned. STRIKE team. )

( Alternate Prompt 1. Wake up! Miraculous Ladybug; Marinette. )

( 28. Beaten. Steve Rogers is having trouble adjusting to the 21st century. )

( Alternative prompt 9. Hiding. American Girl: Samantha. Nellie & her sisters hiding in Samantha's attic. )

( 30. Recovery. Natasha with SHIELD. )

( 31. Embrace. Anne of Green Gables; Katherine’s unrequited love for Anne. )

The third bout of Whumptober fics!

( 11. Stitches. Natasha & Clint. )

( 12. “Don’t move.” Honeytrap; Gennady & Arkady. Sexual harassment in the workplace. )

( Alternative prompt 3. Fever. Peggy & Dottie )

( 14. Tear-stained. Steve & Rumlow. )

( 15. Scars. Steve Rogers. )

I’ve been posting my daily Whumptober fills on Tumblr as I go, but I’ve decided to repost them here every five days, labeled with the prompt & fandom for your reading pleasure.

And there are still MANY prompts to be filled (see the full list here); I’m doing them more or less in order. Request a prompt if you like!

( 1. Shaky Hands. Origfic; the revolution failed. )

( Alt. Prompt 14. Touch-starved. Captain America; Steve/Buckyish although part of the whump is the fact that it’s no more than -ish. )

( 3. Delirium. Agent Carter. Peggy & Dottie. They’ve been forced to team up, and now Dottie is badly injured. )

( 4. Human shield. Captain America. Steve and the STRIKE team. )

This next ficlet, for skygiants, requires a brief introduction. The Talk of the Town is a 1942 movie starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Ronald Colman. Leopold Dilg (Grant) is a union organizer framed for arson who decides to hide out in the house of his old school crush, Nora Shelley (Arther)... only to discover that Nora has just rented the house to a judge, Michael Lightcap. Of course they all end up becoming dear friends and the fandom (all three members of it) OT3 them.

( 5. Gunpoint. The Talk of the Town; Leopold Dilg has fallen afoul of anti-union forces again. )

Chocolate Box reveals have come! I wrote one fic, Take the T-Bird Away, which is a Henry’s-eye-view on Shawn & Gus’s friendship in the show Psych. As Henry drives pell-mell across town to save Shawn & Gus from imminent-yet-ridiculous peril, he composes letters in his head to Gus’s parents just in case he needs to explain how one of Shawn’s boneheaded schemes led to Gus’s death.

As you can imagine, Henry has composed many such potential letters in his life, probably starting when Shawn & Gus were about eight.

It’s been years since I’ve watched Psych, so I rewatched some of my favorite episodes in preparation for writing the fic, and remembered just how much I enjoyed the show - nothing has quite taken its zany mystery-solving place in the years since it went off the air. I even found the show’s persistent hammering of Shawn/Juliet weirdly nostalgic, possibly because I’ve had years to grow resigned to that ship’s inevitable sailing, although the Psych ship of my heart will always be Juliet/April MacArthur, the adorable marine biologist who only appeared in one episode, “Six Feet Under the Sea,” because Psych was never that great at female characters and probably saw no point in giving Juliet a buddy, as evidenced by the fact that actually April and Juliet only have one conversation, which is mostly about Shawn.

Although there is an earlier scene where Juliet introduces April to the chief of police with the impassioned declaration that “They [the marine biologists at the aquarium] like her, and so do I. We shouldn’t be arresting her, we should be helping her!” - while April gazes at her in admiration. So I didn’t just make the ship up of whole cloth.

(I listened to the DVD commentary on this episode and apparently the two actresses got on like a house on fire, which may be why they’re so shippable despite having so little interaction in the episode.)

But I think basically I’ve just gotten better at finding shows that do have female characters who interact on a regular basis, which means that when I watch Psych I find it less frustrating that it doesn’t offer me that - because I can get it in other shows - and therefore can enjoy more of what Psych does have, which is ridiculous mysteries, best friend bickering, and general hilarity. And I think I managed to capture a bit of that in my fic.

I wrote one more fic in 2018 that I forgot to link here.

Kids These Days (1313 words)
Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe/Agent Carter
Rating: PG
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Natasha Romanov, Dottie Underwood
Summary: When young Natasha flubs a mission, her teacher Miss Underwood complains about how soft the Red Room has gotten since the good old days.

evelyn_b, if you recall we once talked about a story about Natasha’s first mission. The full story never got written, but this part did, and who doesn’t want to hear Miss Underwood complain (metaphorically speaking) about how in her day they walked to school uphill both ways through a blinding Siberian blizzard and the Red Room girls today don’t know how good they have it.

Happy New Year! I was hoping to come up with a New Year’s Resolution as good as last year’s resolution to watch at least one movie directed by a woman each month (things got a little out of hand and I watched 106), but nothing has occurred to me. I suppose you can’t expect to have a life-changing project every year.

I have resolved to burn more candles this year. This is a low-key resolution but I think nonetheless a cheerful one.

***

Oh! And I wrote a treat for Yuletide. It’s been ages since I’ve done that, but I was reading through the letters and a story just started rolling through my head, so here we are.

The Lady’s Boon (1542 words)
Fandom: The Perilous Gard
Rating: G
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Kate Sutton (I guess Kate Heron at this point), the Lady, Christopher Heron
Summary: When Kate falls very ill, the Lady appears.

The Great Tumblrpocalypse of 2018 did prompt me to finally finish up a couple of nearly-finished Captain America fics that had been sitting around my hard drive, on the grounds that I'd better get them out there before Captain America fandom scattered to the four winds; and then it occurred to me that some of Captain American fandom has in fact scattered here, at least for the moment, so maybe I should post links here too.

Haircut. In which Bucky asks Steve to cut Bucky's hair so Bucky will look more like his old self when they go to visit Bucky's sister. This was originally meant to be a Reciprocity extra and then it got abandoned and I tried to make it less blatantly Reciprocity when I was polishing it up but apparently the serial numbers are engraved on.

Angels with Dirty Faces. A pre-war fic in which Steve and Bucky go see the movie Angels with Dirty Faces (yes, I know, I was very creative with the title here). Thirties details! Hanging out with the Barnes' family! Steve being his prickly self.

And also a Tumblr ficlet about Bucky & Natasha bonding over their shared Russian pasts, here, which I feel is too short to move to AO3 as it is but I can't decide if it's worth expanding/possible to expand without turning into an epic... so I guess I'll just leave it for now.

I have written another installment of Troy and Vane's Awkward Adventures, which I have now posted over on AO3 because this has clearly become A Thing. Please enjoy Troy's Christmas at Duke's Denver!

Birds of a Feather.

evelyn_b won a fic from me in the fandomlovespuertorico auction, and one of her prompts was "Vane and Troy's Awkward Adventures."

So I've finally finished that fic! It is not very long, so I will in the long run write another auction fic, but for now - please enjoy the Awkward Adventures.

( Onward to the fic! )