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Nabbed from a number of people, at this point:
The Top 5 Meme: Ask me my top five fannish anything and I'll tell you. (Or top 5 things about me as a writer, my writing, specific fics written or unwritten, introductory sorts of things, etc.)
The Top 5 Meme: Ask me my top five fannish anything and I'll tell you. (Or top 5 things about me as a writer, my writing, specific fics written or unwritten, introductory sorts of things, etc.)
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1) Death Knell. Pretty much in its entirety, but especially the moment where she finds the crashed UAV and just immediately goes to work on it. (And the moment at the very end, where she just needs to rest for a moment. Classic Sam understatement. ...I also have it in my head that Sam did not make it back to the 'gate on her own power after that, though it probably took Jack five minutes or so to realize that she'd completely passed out and to go "Aw, crap.")
2) The conversation between Sam and Jack at the beginning of Nemesis, because every time I hear it, I can hear a couple of lines that I swear were written in but cut:
This illusion is so persistent that every time I read the transcript or watch the episode, I'm surprised that those lines don't exist.
3) The beginning of Enemies.
4) Nightwalkers. Twice. "Let's get some lunch."
5) The conversation in Learning Curve where she's talking with Merrin about how satisfying it is to discover a solution to a problem that's been eluding her, rather than being given the answer outright.
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Since you said "someday", I'm going to interpret this as referring to fics that I'm not currently in the process of writing out to completion – either because I haven't started them, or because I don't know how the heck I'd complete them. Going by those rules, I have a decent collection – and a lot of bits and bobs written down for many of them, because how I remember my braintics is generally to sketch out whatever scenes first jump out at me. So!
1) White Collar, currently untitled: a post-anklet fic where Neal is working as a paid FBI consultant, and Mozzie calls in a favor from him, that being to convince Peter to get one of Mozzie's proteges out of jail and working for the FBI on Neal's old deal. Said protege turns out to be a teenage inner-city black girl who's serving out what seems like an excessive sentence for some sort of Anonymous/LulzSec/WikiLeaks/I-haven't-actually-come-up-with-her-backstory-yet hack, who's frighteningly intelligent but also more cynical than Mozzie himself. She's also the anti-Neal in a lot of ways; this snappish, chain-smoking kid who wears hoodies and ratty jeans and gets into fights a lot, with an impressive collection of chips on her shoulder and a tendency to not be at all surprised that the pretty white boy in the expensive suits who doesn't speak in black vernacular can walk up to almost anyone and get them to like him and trust him.
Needless to say, Peter and Neal quickly realize they don't really know how to handle this one. And Neal gets to see how it feels keeping a contrary, criminal-minded young thing out of trouble on a daily basis.
2) Stargate SG-1, "With Quick Steps Over The Grass": the fic which may be too ambitious for its own good, in which not only do we learn why everyone in the galaxy speaks English, but our intrepid band of heros also gets stranded somewhere where the dominant culture recognizes five genders. And bases a lot of the mechanics of their society on that classification of genders, and its accompanying hierarchy, and goes ahead and just assigns genders to the team without paying much attention to what any of them actually identify as. So they're all stuck in a place where suddenly people who have never before had to worry about gender-based violence suddenly have to worry about it, and people who have never experienced gender dissonance are experiencing it, and there's all this external perception on how the team should work and interact which is not the way in which it actually does. Which is tremendous fun for me as a writer to play with, and no fun at all for the characters.
3) Massively multifandom, "Damaged People": Hoo, boy. ...okay, so, many years ago, I wrote a tiny little short story for
...as may quickly become apparent, I have problems with scope creep.
Still, even though it's a chaotic mess of canons and many years' work and the occasional gigantic unexamined moral implication, I do want to finish it. One day. When I'm less afraid that it will eat me.
4) White Collar, currently untitled, I refer to it as "misverse" sometimes: the one where, after Misfire, I follow the AU through to the end of the Adler arc. And then just go whole-hog with situational AU (as opposed to universal AU, like making all the characters vampires or pirates or something and start throwing in made-up new crime families and the like so I can have someone calling our heroes on the sketchiness of dealing in Nazi plunder. But that's only part of why I like playing with the idea; it's also a canvas on which I can poke at a bunch of metaphors (there's a fox-and-hound one that I'm particularly happy with, as well as a Neal-as-Achilles thing regarding the anklet that I'm too happy about). And I can play around in a universe where Neal doesn't so much skate by with no consequences for his actions and more is in a constant scramble to stay one step ahead of them. And I get to poke a lot more at psychological and post-traumatic effects which Neal really should be dealing with, considering things like how he got thrown down when a plane with his beloved on it explode right behind him, and then in the next season finale got staggered by an explosion, tried to run in to save another (differently) precious thing and did get thrown around by a backdraft, and then got a simulated execution from Adler right on top of that. Even for Neal, that has to widen some cracks.
It's basically that fic which rewrites great swathes of season two and pretty much all of season three, and mostly exists for me to poke Neal with sticks and break things. And to wonder why I can't write one-shots any more without them growing to gargantuan proportions and ravaging coastal cities.
5) White Collar, currently untitled: a universal, not so much situational, AU, which is going to take some explaining.
Okay. For several years, I played in an RP called Beyond the Rift. BTR's universe had a Rift in time and space running through it, which cased a lot of bizarre supernatural stuff to occur – people falling through from other universes, people falling out of the universe into different timelines only to reappear months later and sometimes years older, monsters, natural disasters, Biblical plagues, etc. Most of this was centered in Chicago, though; places without active Rift openings tended to be a lot quieter.
Except that all across the world, there were supernatural people – vampires, werewolves, elementals, etc. Normal people with normal lives, just... with superpowers added in. ...and then there were angels and demons.
Angels and demons in Riftverse weren't celestial people, they were just humans with specific genetic lineages which interacted with the Rift to give them a set of angelic/demonic features, like superhuman strength/speed/lifespan, and the ability to manifest wings. The tradeoff came with the fact that they got Callings: specific powers, and difficult-to-resist compulsions to use them in specific ways. So you'd have the Archanges and Rakshasa demons, who had epic martial prowess and the compulsion to use it to kill each other. Or Poludnica demons, who were able to cause sickness in other people (which would also rebound on them) and found it hard not to do so. Or Angels of Death, who could identify people who were going to die in the next week or so, and were compelled to follow them and take the pain of their death onto themselves.
Or guardian angels, who involuntarily imprint on someone – their ward – and, from that moment onward, are compelled to protect them, can feel viscerally when they're in trouble, in pain (physical or emotional) or in danger, can generally track them down wherever they've gone off to, and – should their wards be placed in physical danger – can easily outclass all the other angels in terms of sheer, hyperfocused scary in the pursuit of getting to them and getting them safe.
Which is why my brain decided that the most fun thing it could possibly do was to turn the White Collar universe into the BTR universe and stick Peter as Neal's guardian angel.
The White Collar Riftverse has a few of the classic Rift edges softened, though; no Sunnydale Syndrome (so mundane humans know that there are angels and demons and elementals and shapeshifters and such running around), and the assumed hierarchies between all the different species is fading-but-not-yet-gone (in the same way that, say, racism and sexism are fading but very much not yet gone), and there's been a lot of research into psychological and pharmaceutical methods of reigning in the compulsion to use angelic and demonic Callings and allow angels and demons to live more normal lives. And a lot of legal issues surrounding culpability and responsibility when Callings get involved. So I can say that after throwing Neal in jail for bond forgery, Peter just kinda quietly went to see a doctor and got prescribed something to take every day which would leave a niggling little preoccupation in the back of his head re: Neal, but nothing he couldn't work with and be rational about. And as a result, only Peter and Elizabeth and later Hughes (when they strike up the anklet deal) know that Peter even has a ward or who that ward is, which makes for all sorts of lovely "What. WHAT. No." on Neal's part when he does work it out. And occasional fun when Peter gets kidnapped and the jackass responsible decides to confiscate the medicine to unbalance him.
...and that was probably more answer than you were bargaining for.
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It really is. And it's such a fun canvas for all sorts of quandaries about autonomy and responsibility, which are issues they have in spades anyway.
And terrifying Neal is always good fun.
And oh, misverse, misverse, misverse. On the one hand, it has some of the things I've been most happy to scribble out. On the other, wow, I may have bitten off more than I can chew with that one. I write in this extremely non-linear, "Oh, I have a line that would sound good here – and now I'm fascinated by this scene over here – and wait, if I do this, I can put in thematic brackets at the beginning and the end – and hey, I can add one more thematic reference in this scene in the middle" way, so half the time I discover that I have beginning bits and end bits that I'd love to weave together, but that there's an implied story of 60k words between them and whoa how is that going to get there.
But then I get to do things like this:
...and I the chaos all seems worthwhile again.
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And yeah, I tend to jump around when I'm writing, too, though I've gotten more linear over the years -- I used to write like a gazelle on crack, but now I'm at least capable of starting at the beginning and proceeding sensibly to the end.
I've got several long stories in my head, but I don't really have TIME for a really long story right now ... so I know what you mean. Most of them tend to go off in various depressing directions, too, which I guess is another reason why I haven't written them, because they'd most likely be 50K words of Peter and Neal not getting along. So I'm writing short h/c floof instead. :D
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On the plus side, I guess, usually they are getting all the good bits.
[I've got several long stories in my head, but I don't really have TIME for a really long story right now ... so I know what you mean.]
Yyyeah. I'm in the middle of a long, frustrating job search at the moment, so at times it seems like I have nothing but time, but I can definitely empathize. The last major project I finished took me five or six years, though that wasn't straight work – I did a lot of putting it down and then coming back for rematches. I'm hoping none of my current projects will take that long, but I also know myself. >_>
But, you know, short h/c floof, also very good. :P And eminently more finishable.
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And it works on so many different levels - with the anklet, and being extremely good at what he does, and also not at all inclined to take orders except when he feels like it ...
And I get to poke a lot more at psychological and post-traumatic effects which Neal really should be dealing with, considering things like how he got thrown down when a plane with his beloved on it explode right behind him, and then in the next season finale got staggered by an explosion, tried to run in to save another (differently) precious thing and did get thrown around by a backdraft, and then got a simulated execution from Adler right on top of that. Even for Neal, that has to widen some cracks.
OMG YES. That really should have been explored, more. And I'd love to see what you do with it.
... I have this whole "Five Alternate Endings for S2" epic thing I keep meaning to write, which is turning into more Six or Seven Alternate Endings, basically rewriting that final confrontation with Adler in different ways and how that affects things.
Some of which are short (the one where Neal is killed in the explosion, the one where Alex gets away with the treasure) and some of which are, um, probably going to each be kind of epic length. What if Peter didn't shoot Adler, and Adler went on trial? (My guess - there's no evidence tying him to Kate's death, and he's well-connected enough to get by with some fairly light slap on the wrist for the Ponzi scheme, and how does Neal deal with that? Or fail to deal, more likely?) What if Peter shot one of Adler's minions instead, and Adler went on trial? What if Diana or someone else shot Adler? What if Adler walked in on Mozzie sneaking into the warehouse and took Mozzie hostage to force Neal to help him escape with the treasure?
And then I have at least two different AUs where Neal shoots Adler. Because I also like to break things.
And I love the guardian angel idea - there's so much potential to play around with, there.
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Yess. And there's this one... very odd person, actually an OC I imported from a different project, who Neal ends up working with at one point, who expands out the metaphor like so, as they're caught somewhere near the edge of Neal's radius, phoneless, and being pursued by bad guys:
Which throws Neal's brain for a loop or two. And then he talks about this with Mozzie, who is super not impressed with that chain of reasoning:
And basically, extended metaphors are too much fun.
[... I have this whole "Five Alternate Endings for S2" epic thing I keep meaning to write, which is turning into more Six or Seven Alternate Endings, basically rewriting that final confrontation with Adler in different ways and how that affects things.]
Oh, nice. And it was just such a... weird episode, too, with so many ways that things could have changed. (I kinda want to know what would have happened if Peter had refused to get in the car, for example.) And such a clusterfuck at the warehouse, too.
The fun thing with misverse is that a lot of the seeds for the warehouse scene getting jarred onto another track entirely do actually flow out from Misfire. Like, Peter isn't back to fieldwork yet; Diana is still Neal's handler. And Diana doesn't have the sort of relationship with him that leads to her showing up at his apartment at odd hours, so she's never seen the painting whose scrap flies out of the warehouse. Instead it gets to be Neal who sees it and recognizes it, and in the state he's in, that's not a reassuring recognition:
But when he tries to grab it, Diana notices, and talks him into handing it over; he has to, it's evidence, and it's not like there's a big surplus of evidence that will have survived the fire. Which means that when Neal gets the card and the key, afterwards, and goes to the warehouse to see the treasure, a couple things are different:
1) He knows it's Mozzie's handiwork, because not only would Mozzie have access to that painting, but Mozzie is the only person in the world who Neal can think of who'd not only steal the treasure but then turn around and share it with him, and
2) His first reaction to that isn't glee, it's an overwhelming sense of Oh, CRAP.
And then, of course, there's the fact that Diana didn't kill Adler, and possibly as a result of that, possibly as a result of the FBI investigation or other things, the secret of the treasure leaks out into the criminal underworld a lot faster than it did in canon, and then everything just completely goes to shit.
[the one where Neal is killed in the explosion]
Oh, man. Every time I rewatch that scene, I have to wonder if Mozzie considered that people would be showing up, looking for it. Because that was pretty damn close, and I wonder if some kind of remote surveillance and detonation system would have been too big a risk and too much of a time investment to set up. And it's hard to tell whether Mozzie wanted someone (Adler) to be there to see it go up in flames for dramatic effect, or whether he just set a timer and trusted that no way would anyone have luck improbable enough to be right there when it blew, or what.
[And then I have at least two different AUs where Neal shoots Adler. Because I also like to break things.]
Breaking things is one of the finest parts of writing fanfic. ^`_´^
[And I love the guardian angel idea - there's so much potential to play around with, there.]
I am loving it perhaps more than I should.
One of the big thematic elements of the Rift was this overwhelming sense of choicelessness, being forced to make the best out of a bad set of options, and dealing with this overarching supernatural landscape which can seem implacable, capricious, or downright cruel, which has a habit of saddling people with things they're not entirely equipped to deal with.
And, like, the nature of the guardian-ward bond, if it's not being drowned out by prescription drugs, means that Peter has access to observe a lot of parts of Neal's psyche which Neal really doesn't want him seeing, and that Peter can't actually get too far away from him (like, being in different cities would likely be physically painful), Peter can't think rationally if Neal's in danger, and if something were to happen and, say, Neal were to die, the best-case scenario for Peter in that would be being flung into a catatonic state for an unknown amount of time. It's a really rotten deal for both of them, and neither of them want it, but Peter taking tetrasalvadine is the absolute limit of what they can do about it. The only way to break a bond is if the guardian or the ward dies.
(Which leads to an amusing conversation with Mozzie about how some vampires will take money to turn you, but how buying your way into vampiredom is the equivalent to selling your soul to the Mob, only worse, and how Neal has negative desire to become a vampire, so no, that's not an option.)
And then, of course, if it were to become general knowledge, the entire criminal underworld would probably shut Neal out, because there's an FBI agent who can track him down wherever he is, given enough notice to start cutting down on the tetra dosage. And on Peter's end, for one thing, if he's not on tetra, there'd be no way he could be in a direct supervisory role over Neal or involved in any case concerning him, and the perception that he is, perhaps, a little soft on criminals would get a lot of additional fuel. They both get handed the capacity to seriously screw up each others' lives, which is one of the reasons Peter didn't tell Neal about the bond when it first set in – Neal was heading to trial for bond forgery, the Guardian-Ward bond wasn't relevant so long as Peter was on tetrasalvadine, due to the byzantine nature of law surrounding angels and angelic Callings, and Peter did not want to hand him any ammunition that he could use in any way against him. And then he just never brought it up, through all the time Neal was in prison, and after they struck the deal with the anklet. And Neal gets really, really pissed about this, because all this time, at any time, Peter could have chosen to ease back on the drugs and just casually peek into his hindbrain and Neal would have had no say in this nor any power, legal or pragmatic, to stop this, and the fact that Peter didn't do this still doesn't cancel out the fact that he could have and still could and Neal didn't even know.
So when Neal first discovers this and confronts Peter about it, it devolves pretty quickly into a lot of bitter sniping before they come back around to the unspoken equilibrium that is "Peter will continue taking tetrasalvadine and they'll both try not to think about it too much." And it's not until some time has passed and they've both had a chance to cool down from the sniping a little that they can sit down and talk about how they can work around this and use it, if necessary.
It's great, because despite the romcoms-and-riftcoms thing (and there's a whole 'nother section about how ), the guardian-ward bond is not a warm and fuzzy thing. It can become one, with the right people, but... there's no requirement that a guardian and ward have to like each other, or work together well. The guardian just has to protect the ward; that's the requirement. And there's no protection for the guardian against the ward turning around and exploiting the hell out of that bond, and the only real limits on a guardian's behavior are that it's painful for them when their ward is in physical or emotional distress. Peter probably could have just thrown Neal in prison and not gone on tetra so long as he was scrupulous about not leaving the city; so long as Neal didn't get shanked or have a nervous breakdown, the bond considers itself fulfilled.
The Rift is fun because it breaks everything.
...</rambledanse>