fiercelydreamed

Explanatory notes: ( No, that is really not its name. )

Why is this story (probably) abandoned? ( A couple reasons. )

What's the excerpt? ( This is from the middle of the 7,000 words I'd written, picking up directly after Castiel's slapped with the baseball bat of mortality (metaphorically speaking) in the middle of a job. )

Excerpt:

In the car, Dean thumbs the buttons of his cell phone and cranes his neck around as he throws the car into reverse. The passenger seat jostles and tilts under Castiel as they retreat off the grooved dirt road and make a hard turn to the south. Sam's taken the back, an aberration from their usual custom. Castiel can't determine if it's a gesture of consideration, or if Sam's trying to keep him in his line of sight.

"Rufus," Dean says. "Listen, we've got kind of a thing happening -- uh, I'm not real sure, but we were in the middle of a job and now we've gotta bail. Indiana -- there's a pissed-off pioneer mixing it up with the Culver Military Academy. Think some stupid kid must've raided a grave or something -- who knows, probably some kinda hazing ritual. Chamber of Commerce has the old graveyards on the historic register. I'm calling in that favor. What? Yeah, sure, whatever." He thumbs the phone off again and shoves it back into his pocket with an eye-roll. "Jackass. See if I come running to stop him from committing mass murder next time."

( Gee, Bobby, I dunno. I hear there's an apocalypse coming, might be good if when it gets here, our pet angel's not declawed.  )

 

Some time last summer, shaenie and I hit a point where we started writing nearly anything we could think of, just to get ourselves writing again. One of the sandboxes we jumped into was Star Trek XI/Reboot, where shaenie came up with the ingredients for a fairly epic bodyswap fic, half from Kirk's POV, half from Uhura's. We both got sucked into other projects in the interim, so the early scenes have been sitting untouched in googledocs for the last few months. I felt the urge to post one of them here, for my entertainment and hopefully yours, and she gave me the go-ahead. We may or may not finish it eventually -- it's built on some damn cool scaffolding, but boy howdy would it be long -- but it's us, so who knows.


(Totally arbitrary) title: First Impressions; or, You: 1; This Guy: 0. [excerpt]
Details: STXI/Reboot/whatever we're calling it, Nyota-POV. Contains references to Spock/Uhura but is basically gen for this scene. ~4,300 words.
Summary: Nyota at bat.
Notes: ( are spoilery for the set-up of the story, though not for the plot, so I'll put them behind the cut. )


( Nyota kicks one leg over to rest on the other knee and beams at the viewscreen. She's starting to see why Jim likes this part so much. 'Aw, that's so sweet of you,' she says. 'And here nobody'd called me great since last night.' )

So tropes and I are the phone for reasons that don't bear explaining, and we're suddenly plotting an AU in which Rodney McKay is a professional break-up artist. You know, for those times when it's agony trying to craft the perfect "it's not you, it's me" or "I really valued our time together, but I think it's time we go our separate ways" or "I've filed a restraining order and I want my shit back, you skeezy asshole" -- it's times like those that you really wish you could just contract the whole thing out to a professional. He ghostwrites your break-up email, closes your joint accounts, files the legal paperwork, whatever it takes. And your ex never knows it wasn't you.

So Simon Wallace hires Rodney to break up with Elizabeth Weir, because he doesn't want to eat Athosian food: "It does not sound fan-tastic." This, of course, is not the reason Rodney gives. (Rule #12: the more spurious-sounding the explanation, however truthful, the more back-and-forth correspondence will be required. Clients don't like it when you go over-budget.) So Rodney sends her an elegant break-up letter, firm but oozing integrity, in Simon's impeccably forged left-handed script. And Elizabeth almost buys it, but buried in the middle of paragraph thirteen is a small but decidedly paranthetical joke. And if there's one thing Simon never had, it was a sense of humor.

She goes digging through Simon's personal accounts -- because one of the perks of working for the SGC is you can get an order to hack anything -- and finds a sizeable payment made to Forensic Services, LLC. One emailed work order to the SGC IT department gets her the sole proprieter's name -- Meredith Rodney Ingram McKay, Canadian citizen, Colorado DL 801792635 -- and the address of his business/residence.

It's a slow afternoon. She goes by in person.

The next morning, Elizabeth takes a personal day -- her staff know better than to ever ask -- but at 9 am sharp there's a really pissed-off Canadian guy yelling at the staff sergeant on door duty that he wants to see Dr. Weir right now, no he will not wait, yes he knows this is a secure facility -- though secure is a relative term, those keycard readers are woefully inadequate -- but she should have thought about that before she came to his home. It was a business transaction, that was all: just because she is incapable of separating her personal and professional lives doesn't mean that everyone else suffers from the stunting of emotional intelligence--

The staff sergeant, in a blind panic, dials the first number he can think of, because he remembers John Sheppard bought him a beer that one time and besides, everyone says the guy has the emotional range of drywall. Having no idea what to say and next to no chance of being audible over Rodney's voluminous protestations, the sergeant waits desperately for the click of John picking up and then wordlessly hits "speaker."

tropes: "Oh my god. This is the greatest thing ever written."

John spends about two and a half minutes listening to Rodney, hears the staff sergeant trying to placate him in half-sentences, figures out where they are and decides to amble upward to see what's going on. This takes a few minutes.

fiercelydreamed: "Then what?"
tropes: "Well, it's love at first sight, of course."


***


This concludes our first exciting installment of The Break-Up Artist. Because some things are better in summary than they are in real life. Tune in irregularly as our feature possibly continues. Or not. Whatever.

( Dinner isn't as bad as Jo's expecting. )


[All installments archived here.]

( It's like her acknowledgment of the situation is all they've been waiting for. 'God,' Rodney mutters, pushing up out of his chair, 'finally--' )

[All installments archived here.]

( 'Those are men's clothes,' Ronon says after she steps out from behind the curtain. )

[All installments archived here.]

There was a whole big disclaimer that was going to precede this, with musing on my current weird combination of creative productivity and selective writer's block, but my friend just showed up to take a walk with me. Look for this post to be edited later with relevant information, but for now, what you need to know is: I had this idea months ago, I came home and just suddenly started writing it, I don't know the plot, I don't know where it's going, but tell me if you find it interesting and I'll keep posting it in chunks as I try to figure that out.

( This doesn't even have a title yet, so for now I'm just going to call it 'Switch.' )

[Edited 1/19/2008.]

[All installments archived here.]

The following are all older pieces housed at my primary journal; the links will take you straight to them. It doesn't make a lot of sense for me to repost everything (and that's a lot of work), so they're all catalogued here. I've put in a brief summary of each, but you'll need to go to the actual posts for full headers and warnings. ETA: for preventative reasons, all fannish content at that journal is now friendslocked. If there's something archived here that you want to read and can't get to, leave a comment and I will either filter you in or repost it (unlocked) here.


Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One of my favorite objects of geekery, but not a universe I play in much, and I think I'm unlikely to revisit it in my fiction.

Split. Technically, the first piece of fanfiction I ever wrote (barring a short story that served as a physics exam, but that's an entirely different story). R, Season 7, Willow and ... others, very slightly off, and entirely creepy.


Lotrips and RPF. "Lotrips" stands (loosely) for Lord of the Rings Real Person Slash (aka, fiction involving the cast of the Lord of the Rings doing things that are entirely unrelated to their actual relationships and sexual preferences); RPF for Real Person Fiction. My true gateway drug, mostly because it was the first place I encountered mind-alteringly good amateur writers. I should note that I have no personal investment in the people featured in these stories, but I liked the strange sandbox other writers created for them, and the Lotrips fandom was the first place I ever found where anyone wanted to read what I had to write. I probably won't write more in it, other than West (see below), but you never can tell for sure.

Fatalis. Second story ever, and while it's got its definite flaws, I'm still kind of in love with it. PG-13, Billy/Dom, a lot of surfing, and my love of writing in the second person. ETA: now reposted here, with a link to its newer sequel.

Calibrate. Third story, extremely graphic, and yet not (for me, anyway) quite about the sex at all. NC-17, Cate/Billy/Dom, only not in the way you're thinking right now, and not for anybody who's totally weirded out by D/s. I repeat that I neither know nor really care what any of these people are actually like. Toys in the sandbox, for my purposes.

Extended Footage. For the sparcck's hilarious slash-the-slasher challenge, though I'm not quite sure I can actually lay claim to a slash. PG-13 if you really must, shaenie (my Lotrips dealer) and Billy, sort of, and this is probably only funny if you know who she is.

Industrial Melanism. A drabble, in haiku-inflected wordcount (50/70/50). Probably the bitchin'-est thing I ever wrote in Lotrips. Rating not necessary.

Feral. 100 words. Keira Knightly. This is as tight as my writing gets. Rating not necessary.


Harry Potter. Because let's face it, as fairly fantastic as The Half-Blood Prince was, JK Rowling will never have time in seven books to give this world all the exploration it deserves. One of the best-equipped sandboxes available, and I'm coming to the conclusion that just hooking the characters up with each other is a waste of time compared to playing with the world itself. It's entirely possible I'll write more of this, but expect it to be plotty, twisted, and not ever mostly about the sex.

Thaw. This took me for-fucking-ever to write; see humorous partial explanation here. NC-17 in a moderately innocent way, Remus/Sirius (come on, it's not like they aren't blatantly having sex anyway) in their last year at Hogwarts, unapologetic porn where the character-driven plotty foreplay is condensed into actual foreplay. No one says anything horrifically embarrassing, no one has vaginas.

To the Dead [1/5]. The start of something I really hope I'll someday finish. PG-13 for reasons entirely about the creep factor and unrelated to sex, various characters (but mostly a canon Draco Malfoy), takes place after the Second War. The rebuilding isn't kind to any of them.


West. shaenie, its creator, calls it a Lotrips AU, but I maintain that we just borrowed a lot of their actors and then cast the majority of them wildly against type. Really, this has nothing to do with The Lord of the Rings or the people in it; it's a very dark western, set generally around 1880. Nothing here ends well. I write Billy Boyd. The following links are the completed chapters he appears in thus far; as the story lines interweave, you'll eventually want to read other characters' chapters if you like this enough to want to really get what's going on (the cut-off for reading them without that context is probably 1876).

Lessons. 1867.
Questions. 1872.
Practical Application. 1872.
Discoveries. 1873.
Parting Ways. 1874.
Balances. 1876.
Revelations. 1879.