We should just live in cake light.

Fic: Hell to Raise (Teen Wolf, Derek/Stiles), part 2/2

2013-01-15T23:15:16Z

This is the second part of a two-part fic. Headers are in part 1.

3.

"I did what you wanted," Stiles told the backyard sky. He hadn't heard a peep from either Weles or Derek in a couple of days, and he was beginning to wonder if he'd freaked both of them out. He felt crazy, shouting alone outside in his robe and helm.

And you had a wonderful time, Weles's voice boomed in his head. I was wondering how long it would take before you'd call on me again. You know I couldn't return until you summoned me.

"It's that easy to get rid of you?"

A pause, like a sigh. I have a deal with your father.

"Yeah," Stiles said. "About that."

He chose to dismiss me. I'm bound to respect his wishes.

It was strange that a god could have so many limitations and rules binding him. But not strange: Weles and Lydia had both talked about domains and areas of influence. An infinitely powerful god was too dangerous. "What did you do to piss him off?"

I gave him a number of small tasks, and he resented those duties. I pestered him when he didn't fulfill them. He grew overwhelmed and irritated, and he told me to get out of his head. I understood: he was young then, younger than you are now. I assumed he'd call on me again when he was ready, which he has not, or that he'd continue the priestly line and have a more receptive son, which remains to be seen.

Stiles shrugged off the slight and asked the more important question. "So my mom...?"

He chose not to call upon me, Weles said. If he had, I might have been able to help him keep her in the mortal world. As it stands, I only had the power to make sure she entered my realm after she died, which I have done.

"So she's okay?"

Of course not, Weles said. She's dead. But it's peaceful here.

When Stiles tried to inquire more, his mind filled with painful static. Weles wasn't allowed to tell him more about the afterlife, and the information was being cosmically censored. Stiles tried to stop thinking about his mom, but when he got stuck on her memory, it was impossible to focus on anything else. He ended up sitting on the lawn, crying for her and for the pain in his head.

An incoming text on his phone snapped him out of it. When his mom had died, he'd learned how to suck in his grief and pretend he was fine. He'd had so much practice at that, it was automatic now.

The text was from Lydia. "I found out something important about banishing Cernunnos. Come over. Bring lunch."

He took the robe and helm up to his room, but Weles urged him to bring the bone staff along. He stopped for sandwiches – at the good deli that took forever and cost more, but he knew the look he'd get from Lydia if he showed up with Subway – and marveled at his own calm. Lydia Martin was inviting him over to her house, and he wasn't afraid of tripping over his words or his feet. He couldn't tell if Weles was directly suppressing his awkwardness, or if hooking up with Derek really had given him the confidence Weles had promised.

Lydia led him up to her enormous bedroom. The bed was covered in books, the pages marked with pink Post-It tabs, some of them held open with hair clips. None of them were in English. One of them displayed a creepy metal carving of a horned god holding a stag and a serpent. Her computer screen was full of tiled web browser windows. In spite of this abundant enthusiasm, she'd apparently dragged herself away long enough to style her hair, put on makeup, and match her shoes to her dress.

She started on her sandwich without exactly thanking him. "Oh my God, I'm so hungry. I skipped breakfast." She opened up the bread and picked the turkey and vegetables out with her fingers. "I found a medieval verse chronicle of the Gaulish gods. It's really thorough. Eleventh-century nuns had a lot of time on their hands."

Stiles sat on the floor and chomped his sandwich, glad to have something to keep his mouth and hands busy.

"It says minor gods sometimes get trapped in the human realm," Lydia explained. "They're called here, and then the caller abandons them or mistreats them and they have no way to get back on their own. She – the nun who wrote it, who the metadata says is anonymous but I think her name was Clementia – she says spells to banish gods are mere superstition, and they only work when the god thinks the spell is so foolish that the people casting it aren't worth the effort. The only way to send a god home is to call another god, powerful enough to subdue Cernunnos and carry him back to wherever it is Celtic gods go when they're not turning people into giant homicidal lizards."

"So it's that simple? We ask the Czernibóg to drag the jerk back to wherever he came from?"

Weles interrupted, I don't have access to his realm, at the same time Lydia said, "No, I don't think a Slavic god can enter the Celtic otherworld."

"Well, at least the two of you agree on that," Stiles said.

Lydia blinked at him for a moment. "Oh. Right. Say hi."

"He can hear you."

"Yeah. That's weird. Anyway. There are at least five different gods powerful enough to retrieve Cernunnos," Lydia said. "Clementia doesn't give specific instructions for calling them, because that's witchcraft, which she's not allowed to practice. But there's more in other sources. Basically, you make an offering and call the god, and if they're interested, they show up."

"If they're interested?" Stiles repeated.

"You can't summon a god, only invite it," Lydia said. "The small gods come pretty readily, but the major ones don't bother unless you're special to them for some reason or they know the cause is important. Since we haven't been worshiping Celtic gods all our lives, we're probably at a disadvantage."

She tried last night, Weles said. I can smell it.

"Of course she did," Stiles said. "I mean – of course you tried. Before you brought me here. Because like you said, you're in charge of this, you're just letting me help, so you'd only let me help if you'd tried to do it yourself and failed."

Lydia glared at him open-mouthed, momentarily speechless. It was fun to get her to that state. "I tried to call Belisama," she said. "She's a goddess of wisdom. But nothing."

"I'm not going to get anything either," Stiles said. "I'm too connected to Weles."

"I... I don't really have anyone else to ask," Lydia said.

"Then go make some other friends. I can't help."

"I have a specific god in mind," Lydia went on as if he hadn't just blown her off cruelly. "Sucellus."

Stiles felt a dart of recognition in his chest, like the name had sparked something in Weles. Or like Weles was angry with him for not showing any sympathy for Lydia. Weles was so busy hiding information from him that he couldn't be sure. "Go on," Stiles said.

"He's a forest god. He carries a hammer, which he uses to make trees grow, and the head of the hammer doubles as or transforms into a barrel for brewing, so he can give wine to the dead and calm them on their journey to the afterlife."

Stiles did not need to say out loud that this sounded a lot like Weles, because it felt like Weles was trying to tickle-torture Stiles from the inside. "Stop!" Stiles yelped. He wrapped his arms around himself and squirmed as if he could shake Weles off. To Lydia, he managed to say, "Hang on. We're close to something." Inside his head, he told Weles, "You can help or you can leave."

You can't summon Sucellus, Weles said, although his voice had changed: it was deeper and somehow fatter. I'm already here.

Stiles received the explanation all at once, as if Weles, or Sucellus, or whatever its real name was, had dumped a bucket of information into his brain. Weles and Sucellus were aspects of the same entity, the same eternal source of power. Separated by geography and time, they'd become distinct from each other – and from other versions in other parts of the world – but still connected to the basic power source and its domains: the forest, the afterlife, and chaos. Weles didn't like relinquishing control to the other aspects of himself, but he knew he had to now.

Lydia was kneeling over Stiles, shaking him. "Are you okay?"

"The Good Striker and the Czernibóg are linked," Stiles said. "I have the Good Striker on the line now. It's a nickname for – don't use his real name."

"But you're okay."

"Yeah," Stiles said. "I think."

She stepped back from him and went right back into research mode. "I thought you were tied to just the one god."

"I am," Stiles said. "They're the same god. They're just not the same person."

Surprisingly, that seemed to make sense to her. She must have been reading even stranger stories. "So will he do it? Banish Cernunnos?"

I'll retrieve the Black Stag for you, Sucellus said, but I want something in return.

"Shocking," Stiles muttered.

I don't get this close to the mortal world much anymore, Sucellus said. I miss the pleasures of my domain. I ask two things of you: first, that you drink wine in my name. Second, that you enjoy the body of your wolf lover in my presence, with his permission.

"Oh, come on," Stiles said.

"What's going on?" Lydia jumped in. "He won't do it?"

"Oh, he'll do it," Stiles said. "For a price."

"What price?"

"Sex and alcohol," Stiles said.

"We have to get you laid?" Lydia said. "We're doomed."

Stuttering and blushing, he explained the Derek situation. Lydia seemed to brim with questions, but all she said was, "Lucky you."

They raided her dad's wine cellar. The bottle Sucellus chose was older than Stiles, and Stiles didn't want to know how much it was worth. Lydia assured him that her dad wouldn't realize it was gone.

"I guess I should go do this," Stiles said, cradling the wine bottle.

"Call me if you fuck it up," Lydia said as she showed him out.

Stiles was all set to drive directly to Derek's house, but Sucellus urged him to go home and collect himself first. This should be an act of joy, not of obligation, Sucellus said, making Stiles feel all the more obligated.

Weles' staff still lay across the passenger seat of the Jeep. When Stiles picked it up to carry it back into the house, he felt a pleasant rush of energy from his hand to his brain. Thanks, Weles's high and wiry voice filled his head. I'm back where I belong. Don't let that happen again, all right? He doesn't belong here.

Stiles grabbed the bottle of wine from the back seat. "I'm going to have to, aren't I? I'll have to summon him again to banish Cernunnos."

If you fulfill his requests, he'll find a way to be present, Weles said. The Good Striker keeps his word.

Stiles tried to sneak into his house without attracting his dad's attention, but he banged the staff against the doorframe accidentally. Dad snatched the wine bottle out of his hands. He skipped the lecture on bringing alcohol into the house and went straight to, "Did you steal this?"

"Lydia gave it to me. She said her father wouldn't miss it."

Dad raised an eyebrow, and Stiles knew he wasn't getting away with shit. He explained the situation with Cernunnos and Sucellus's demands. He forgot to leave out the part where he also had to have sex, although he caught himself before the "with Derek" clause.

Calmly, Dad took away the bottle of wine and set it on the kitchen table. He got two wine glasses down from the top shelf of the cabinet and wiped the dust off their rims with a towel. Then, appearing to maintain his calm, he went into the bathroom and returned with a box of condoms. "Use protection, don't do anything you don't want to do just to be cool, make sure whoever you're with wants to do whatever you're doing, be honest, and have fun. That's your sex talk. Don't make me give you another one."

Sufficiently shamed, Stiles accepted the condoms. In his head, Weles assured him that Sucellus would not object to their use. Only fertility gods care about that.

"Sorry about the wine," Stiles said, largely because it changed the subject on both of them.

"You'll still get to drink it," Dad said. "You made an agreement, after all." He pulled a chair out from the kitchen table. "But I'd be failing you as a parent if I let you waste a 1990 Haut-Brion on your friends."

Stiles grinned. Dad just wanted the wine.

Dad rambled about needing to decant old reds and let them breathe, and he poured the contents of the bottle into an old lemonade pitcher. In the light, the wine was thick and red as blood. The analogy is already tired, Weles sneered.

After several long minutes of not talking, Dad poured wine from the pitcher into each glass. Weles helped Stiles perform the small ritual correctly. He raised his glass and said, "We drink in the name of Sucellus, the Good Striker." Stiles felt a tickling surge of fat power as he drank, but Sucellus didn't try to take over. He'd learned his place.

Weles told Stiles he didn't have much time before the ritual expired. Stiles ran upstairs to get his helm and robe: he probably wouldn't need everything, but extra protection was never a bad plan. As an extension of the same thought, he brought the condoms, too. "What if Derek's not home?" he asked Weles in the car.

Don't worry about that, Weles assured him.

Stiles showed up at Derek's door like a dork with all of Weles' sigils: robe draped over one shoulder, helm under his arm, staff in hand. At least the condoms weren't visible, rolled up in the robe. Derek let him in, although he stared dubiously. Sweat ran down Derek's arms, and an obstacle course of free weights littered the living room. "Sorry," Stiles said. "Finish. Whatever. Never mind."

"I was wondering if you were going to show up again," Derek said. "I thought I'd scared you away." Stiles could hear that surprising loneliness in his voice again, that resignation to being abandoned.

"You're pretty much the least scary thing in this town," Stiles said. "Which is strange, since you can turn into a giant wolf and also bench press your own body weight."

"That pile of magic stuff you're carrying is much scarier," Derek said.

Stiles put it all down in a heap on the kitchen counter. The condom box rolled out of the robe and onto the floor. Stiles felt the color drain from his face. "I might have... made a deal I can't back out of? And accidentally included you in it?"

"With your Polish cattle god." Derek was judging him; he deserved it.

"No, with another god. Did you know there were other gods? There are so many gods, you wouldn't believe, and all any of them seem to want is to get me in bed with you."

"So you're hooking up with me on another dare from another god." Derek folded his arms.

"More like – the god that made Jackson turn into a kanima instead of a werewolf is still running loose around town, and the Celtic god of wine and good times said he'd drag that god back to wherever gods go, but only if I got drunk and laid in his honor."

"Well, that sounds reasonable," Derek said.

"Really?"

"No."

"I'm sorry I didn't ask you first," Stiles said. "It all happened pretty fast, and you should really get a cellphone."

Derek narrowed his eyes at Stiles. He looked like he wanted to be kissed, and people didn't look at Stiles that way often. "If we do this," Derek said, "we'll eliminate the possibility of the alpha pack raising another kanima?"

"Maybe. Probably. We'll have two powerful gods on our side, at least."

"Fine," Derek said. "But next time – next time and every time after that, it's just you and me. No deals, no magic."

"That's all I want," Stiles said. "Especially the part where there are lots of next times."

Derek kissed him forcefully. You have to summon him, Weles interrupted. I, on the other hand, will shut my eyes and ears until you're done, but I'll be around if there's trouble.

"Okay, Sucellus, we're doing it," Stiles said out loud. There was a pop of energy, and a tipsy, lascivious presence filled the air.

Derek made a face. "Your powerful new god smells like a wino."

"I think he's their patron saint," Stiles said. He tried to concentrate on kissing, but Sucellus's heavy presence made him feel dirty.

Fittingly, they did it on the sofa, which was beige and lumpy and looked like it had been rescued from someone's front lawn. Stiles felt intensely and profoundly unready. He remembered the ground rules his dad had just given him for sex, and he realized he was breaking most of them. "Stop," he said. "Wait."

Derek stopped and waited.

Mentally, Stiles called on Weles. Sit tight, Weles said. Let me strike a bargain.

Stiles leaned into Derek and held him; Derek rested his head on Stiles's shoulder. Despite the weights scattered on the floor and the fact that Derek could crush Stiles with a single bicep, Stiles felt like the strong one.

Weles didn't report back directly. It was Derek who received the answer: "Did you just hear a creepy old guy say we can do what we want as long as we're naked and pretty?"

Weles' only explanation was, Wolves are the Good Striker's domain. He has a natural connection to your friend. He might be hoping to leap into Derek and gain a conduit to the human world. Since you drank the wine with your father and not with Derek, you've already put a wrench in his plans. I can hold him off, but I might be more present than you'd like.

"Keep your head together," Stiles whispered to Derek. "Don't get too lost in it."

"Don't worry," Derek said. "I feel like a circus animal."

"I'm sorry I got you into this."

Derek kissed him. "It's another kind of fight. Another thing to get through. You didn't make the world the way it is." It was reassuring that Derek saw the big picture in this, but also heartbreaking, that he saw his life as a series of terrible situations. Stiles wanted to protect him from that. Derek had suffered more than his share of misery. Stiles had begun to see the person beneath Derek's emotional scar tissue, and he didn't want that person to disappear for good.

"We don't have to do this," Stiles said. "We'll find another way to banish Cernunnos."

Derek held Stiles's face in both of his hands. His eyes flashed lupine gold. "You're saving lives," he said. "And you will not back down just because things got awkward."

"I wanted this – us – to be separate from... everything. All the bad stuff in the world. Although that was probably a stupid thing to want, since we only got together because the Czernibóg wouldn't stop badgering me."

"Nothing's ever separate," Derek said. "Once you're in the fight, you're all in." He kissed Stiles again, pressing his lips hard and long against Stiles's as if trying to shove strength into his mouth. "You're starting to convince me that doesn't always have to be tragic."

Stiles closed his eyes to shut out the world, to feel only Derek's arms and lips. Even under these ridiculous circumstances, being kissed – being desired – excited him. He'd built up the ideas of sex and romance into impossible and self-defeating goals, and now he had to kick them off their pedestal. Sucellus hadn't just made a deal; he'd demanded a sacrifice. Stiles didn't need Weles to remind him that some sacrifices were necessary, not tragic.

Stiles shifted out of Derek's embrace and took off his shirt. "He said 'naked and pretty,' right? Well, I can give him naked."

Derek followed Stiles's lead and took off his clothes. Stiles looked him over and smiled with relief: naked bodies were goofy, and hooking up wasn't serious. They didn't go any farther than they'd gone before. Kissing, grinding, hands everywhere. Stiles still had some virginity left, and he intended to save that for a private moment. He stuck to what he knew and what felt good, so good he almost forgot he was being scrutinized by a higher power. It took a while to get off because of that scrutiny, but that just meant Sucellus was getting his money's worth.

After a long moment in Derek's arms, Stiles got up to clean himself off, but Weles stopped him. Sucellus is trying to get into your wolf's head. Stay close. Physical contact is best.

Stiles took Derek by the hand and tugged him along. "Don't let go of me." He hadn't realized his own voice could sound so serious and urgent.

"You'll explain later?" Derek said.

"I'll explain about half of it now." Stiles kept his voice low, as if volume were an issue with gods. "The Czernibóg is dropping hints that the Black Stag is possessing someone. Not like my situation, where it's a two-way conversation, but slowly taking someone over. I think we need to bring the Good Striker to whoever that person is."

"Scott," Derek said without hesitation.

"You think?"

"When, in your entire life, has he cut you out?" Derek said. "It would take a supernatural force to keep him from spilling secrets to you."

A shiver of terror ran through Stiles. "We need to go now," he said. "Don't let go."

Washing up and getting dressed reminded Stiles of a three-legged race. They kept tripping over each other. In the Jeep, Derek's fingers wrapped around Stiles's wrist as Stiles shifted into gear, they found a moment to laugh at the ridiculousness of it. Especially since, without thinking, Stiles had dressed himself in full priestly attire: helm and robe, staff in the back leaning against the driver's seat. The sigils drew Weles' protection around them. He'd have to show up at Scott's door like this, but Scott's mom had seen weirder from him.

By the time they got to Scott's house, Stiles had a plausible cover story. He told Scott's mom, "Renaissance Faire. We're taking Scott with us. He has no choice."

She allowed them upstairs, not commenting on Derek's presence, much less the fact that he and Stiles were holding hands like an actual couple.

Stiles knocked on Scott's bedroom door, knowing there would be no answer. The door was locked, but Derek forced it open. Scott was sulking in bed, reading a comic book. He looked pale, like the life was being drawn out of him. Derek tightened his grip on Stiles. "There's a cold wind in here," he whispered, almost kissing Stiles's ear.

"Okay, Sucellus, do your thing," Stiles said.

The room remained cruelly still. Scott, lost in his own world, barely acknowledged them.

"Seriously?" Stiles continued. "I did what you asked me to do. You can't go back on your word just because you didn't get everything you wanted."

The whole world seemed to sigh. A warm wind, smelling of rainfall and wine, blew in from all directions, rattling the window open. Scott gasped and dropped his comic book. He opened his mouth as if to ask what was going on, but the crash of a hammer drowned him out. The sweet and heavy wind sucked itself out of the room, slamming the window behind it.

Scott stretched and yawned as if he'd been asleep for weeks. Then, he took one look at Stiles and cracked up. "What are you wearing?"

"I told your mom we were going to the Renaissance Faire," Stiles said.

"And she believed you?"

"Probably not," Stiles said. "But she let us in anyway. She knew something was wrong with you, and I'm guessing she knew it wasn't human."

"What did happen?" Scott said.

Stiles was all ready to launch into the epic tale of his summer so far, but Derek cut him off with a succinct, "You were possessed by a rogue god. The one that produced the kanima."

Scott furrowed his brow like he'd been called to the board to solve a math problem. "That makes sense, I guess," he said. "It was like – every time I tried to get up, there was this voice in my head telling me, Stay, don't do anything. So I couldn't do anything. For a month."

"Only a month?" Derek said. "Because the kanima showed up a long time before that."

"I bet it was in someone else before." As Stiles said it, Weles confirmed his hunch. "Probably Matt."

"No," Scott said with certainty. "Allison's mom. She – I felt something happen, but I didn't know what it was."

"Well, it's fixed now," Stiles said. "The Czernibóg says -"

"The what?" Scott interrupted.

"Yeah," Derek said. "You missed some stuff."

"Let's go to the backyard," Stiles said. Weles was making him itch for fresh air again, and he didn't feel like fighting it. "We'll catch you up."

On the way downstairs, Derek was still holding his hand. Scott hadn't mentioned it, although he'd almost definitely noticed. "You can let go," Stiles said.

"I don't really want to," Derek replied.

Stiles could feel Weles in his head, proud of him. Congratulations on outwitting two gods at once.

Stiles didn't think he deserved the praise. He hadn't planned on giving the wine to his dad, and Derek had done most of the work of holding on to him when he was in danger. The demand that Sucellus keep his promise had seemed like common sense. He thought heroism should be bigger than that, more dramatic.

First of all, learn to take a compliment, Weles said. Second of all, you're never going to be the kind of hero who slays evil with a mighty sword. I'm not that kind of god, and you're not that kind of person.

They were in Scott's backyard. Derek was telling Scott the story of Sucellus and Cernunnos in his usual terse and uncommunicative fashion. "You can jump in anytime," he said to Stiles.

"Sorry, I'm in my head," Stiles said. "It's crowded in there."

"Does the Polish cattle god have something to add?" Derek asked. He must have gotten to that point in the story with Scott, because Scott didn't flinch.

"Not really," Stiles said.

Surprisingly, Weles didn't mind that Stiles shut him out of the conversation. This was a private pep talk. Look what you bring out in them, and be proud of yourself, was all he added. He made it ring in Stiles's mind like it was supposed to mean something.

As with Weles' other cryptic refrains, Stiles shoved it as far back into his mind as he could and put his energy into pulling Scott back into the world. He seemed fine, as if the damage was all temporary, but Stiles didn't trust Sucellus. Derek and Scott talked about preparing for the alpha pack. They were sharing a wolf moment, and Stiles didn't want to disturb them. Instead, he kept watch over them, hushing their words so enemies couldn't overhear them. He realized, after a few minutes, that he was casting a spell.

Look what you bring out in them. Well, Derek certainly wasn't what Stiles had expected: he was a whole different person when he let his emotions slip through. Power-geek Lydia was pretty amazing. And Scott – Scott was alive, not a zombie locked in his room, and a semi-competent werewolf on most days. Maybe Stiles he did need to take credit for who they were when they were around him. Maybe it was heroic to be a really good sidekick.

Sidekick? Weles was incredulous. You're completely in charge here.

Stiles cleared his throat, taking that as a divine command. He tugged the arm that Derek still had draped around his waist. "Come on," he said. "I left something at your house."

Derek took him literally. "What did you leave?"

"You know," Stiles said. "Stuff."

Derek shot to his feet. "We should go get that. Right now." He ran at werewolf speed to the Jeep, leaving Stiles panting to catch up.

As they made out in the front seat, Weles struck up another chorus of "Fuck a Werewolf." Stiles ignored it. He was getting used to the noise.

Fic: Hell to Raise (Teen Wolf, Derek/Stiles), part 1/2

2013-01-15T23:13:09Z

Today is my twreversebang posting day! Apparently the way to get me to finish and post 12,000 words of fic is a deadline and an art prompt.

Title: Hell to Raise
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Characters/Pairings: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Lydia Martin, Sheriff Stilinski, Scott McCall, Original Male Deity
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 12,587
Warnings: Consent issues. Stiles is underage and Derek is not.
Summary: Stiles is the last in a long line of pagan priests. Of course, the god in question is a sarcastic trickster god who mostly just wants him to get laid. Of course.

Notes: Infinite thanks to turnonmyheels for the beta and to gone_shaughraun for helping me with plot.

Based on this gorgeous artwork by tipitina.

Also available on AO3.

1.

Stiles's dad had a talent for creative punishments - he had to, with a kid like Stiles who got in trouble so easily and learned his lesson so reluctantly. Stiles was usually one step ahead: if confined to his room, he screwed around on the computer; if denied internet access, he read a book or made character sheets for his online RPGs; if deprived of his phone, he masturbated without interrupting texts from Scott. But Dad had introduced a new strategy after this latest round of lying, missing curfew, and almost getting everyone killed, and Stiles hadn't figured out how to get around it. He was stuck in the attic with boxes of his mom's old stuff, forbidden to come down the stairs until he'd cataloged one full box and divided its contents into "keep" and "Goodwill" piles. When he'd asked what he should do if he had to go to the bathroom, his dad had advised him to pee out the window. Dad was not messing around.

Stiles remembered when Dad had packed these boxes. He'd stood in the doorway and watched, afraid to come closer, too little to help anyway. The remnants of his mother's life were eerie now, untouched as long as she'd been gone. He wished that they could make him cry for her, but even the things he chose to keep - her jewelry, her envelopes of photographs - left him numb. It was all so mundane.

He reached the bottom of the first box. The only thing left inside was a weird hat: a stiff leather cap with a peak in the middle and curling horns sticking out of either side. Something from a Halloween costume, probably. He put it on to prepare for his epic trek to the bathroom.

His full bladder prevented him from thinking through the strange fact that the hat fit perfectly. It gave him a snap of calm and confidence like Adderall kicking in, but he attributed that to the joy of finishing his chores and acquiring an excellent new hat. From the bathroom, he went to his bedroom with a skip in his step, ready to waste the rest of the afternoon on video games. He couldn't think of any other activity where he could combine wearing his hat and not getting his ass kicked.

As he sat down at the computer, he sensed someone standing behind him. He spun around in his desk chair. "Dad?" But there was no one in the doorway, and he still felt like there was a man behind him, watching him. "Derek?" he called out through the open window, because it would not be the first time a werewolf had lurked in a tree in his yard. The presence seemed closer, though, hovering over his shoulder. He gulped. "Mom?"

He heard a voice. No, that wasn't it. He felt a voice in his bones. It's good to be back in the world, it said. It seemed to emanate from the hat.

Stiles took the hat off. He held it in his lap, trying to decide whether to bury it in the backyard, set it on fire, or donate it to Goodwill.

Put the hat back on, the voice said, vibrating into his hands.

Stiles looked it right between the horns. "No."

Please. Just for a minute. Hear me out. I won't harm you. I can't.

Stiles held the hat out in front of him skeptically. The phrase I can't echoed and repeated, coursing through Stiles's body. It was a fundamental truth, something the hat couldn't get past: a rule that its magic was bound to.

Feeling sorry for the hat, Stiles put it back on. His body flooded with gratitude and relief. First of all, it's not a hat. It's a helm. Second of all, I'm not a helm; I'm a god, and the helm you're wearing is mine. You're also mine, in a way. You're a priest, descended from a long line of priests, which is why you can hear me. And why I can't harm you: you're the last of your line, for now, and most of the other lines have died out. The voice stopped for a moment, giving Stiles only an awareness of why it had paused: to let the information sink in. Is that enough exposition for you? The hat god was a sarcastic god. If it was telling the truth, and Stiles was its priest, this was not a surprise.

He tried to ask the voice in the helm which god it was, but he was suffused with the feeling that he was supposed to figure that out for himself. It was a game and a test. Stiles fired up Wikipedia. He found dozens of animal-horn gods - every culture had a deity to protect their livestock - and more than a few sarcasm gods. He was stuck for a while, out of clues, playing impatient solitaire while the helm sat mockingly silent on his head. He worried that his attention had slipped, and the crucial clue had fallen out of his brain.

Sarcasm. Animal horns. Protective. Helm. Long line of priests - that was the one. Any long lines that Stiles descended from were Polish or Ukrainian.

He was wearing the ridiculous ancient hat of Weles, protector of cattle, father of dragons, engine of wealth and commerce, and trickster foil to an otherwise serious pantheon of Slavic deities. Also, Lord of the Underworld, which made all this sound less like an exciting new set of mystical powers and more like he was about to be dragged into Hell.

Weles interrupted, annoyed. I'll have you know it's very nice down there. Green fields, sunshine, happy cows and frolicking sheep. Someday, you'll see it. But I need you alive for now.

Stiles didn't want to ask if that was where his mother was, but he felt a lightness in the pit of his stomach. He chose to believe it was a confirmation and a reassurance.

He dicked around on the computer for a while, reading about ancient Slavic mythology (fact), superstition (fact), and magic (fact). As usual, he soaked up any knowledge that wasn't required for school. Forgetting he was still wearing the helm, he went downstairs for a snack and ran into his father in the kitchen.

Stiles's father swore often in his presence, but Stiles had never heard him do it in Polish. He hadn't realized that his father knew how to swear in Polish. Weles promised to teach Stiles later, and the disembodied voice was confusing with another person in the room.

"I'd forgotten that was in there," Stiles's dad sighed. "Can you take it off, please, and put it upstairs so we can talk in private?"

To Stiles's surprise, Weles didn't protest against being exiled from the kitchen. Stiles would have thought a god would have bristled at being denied control, but Weles seemed relaxed about exercising power. I don't want to rule the world, Weles said into Stiles's hands as he set the helm down on the bed. I just like being in it.

Stiles went back downstairs. His father looked grim. "So I guess you've already talked to the Czernibóg."

"He said his name was -"

"If you use the name he told you, it summons him," Dad said. "Czernibóg is a nickname for when you need to discuss him in his absence. Which is most of the time."

"Because he's evil? Figures."

"The Czernibóg isn't evil. He's not good, either. What he is, is chaotic, and that's -"

"A good reason to keep his helm locked in a box for ten years?" Stiles said. "Yeah, probably. Should I just put the helm back in the attic, or should I send it to Goodwill and let someone else deal with it?"

"Too late now," Dad said. "You inherited him, and you made contact, so you'll have a hard time getting rid of him now. Just take everything he says with a grain of salt."

"Yeah. I got that pretty fast."

"He'll protect you," Dad said, uncharacteristically reverent and unnervingly wise. "Above almost all else. Don't forget that that's the scary part."

Stiles nodded, taking it in. After half a year of werewolves, kanimas, and resurrected alphas, he'd gotten good at wrapping his head around unbelievable things. He wasn't sure if he was pleased or terrified to be one of those unbelievable things.

"But if that's true, then what happened to Mom? Wouldn't he have protected her?" Sometimes Stiles knew better than to ask questions, but he usually asked them anyway.

Dad rolled his eyes like Stiles was unforgivably dense. "The Czernibóg's line is passed from father to son. You didn't find that on the internet?"

Stiles's dad was suddenly as big of a mystery as Weles. It was a mystery he didn't want to solve. Life was easier if Stiles's dad was boring and normal, completely outside of this supernatural stuff. As much as Stiles knew that was impossible, he needed to pretend for a while.

"You're not going to ask me what happened?" Dad said.

"Nope," Stiles replied, already on his way back to his room.

He called Scott, prepared to tell his best friend everything, but there was no answer. Scott had been sleeping a lot lately, depressed about Allison, freaked out about his role in werewolf politics, upset about failing his classes. But Stiles had not been the most supportive friend either, he had to admit. Scott got annoying when he was sad, and Stiles had ignored a lot of his texts lately.

Stiles set off alone into the woods to clear his head. Dad didn't ask him where he was going or try to stop him. Either Stiles had served enough of his punishment for the day, or Dad was too distracted to care. Stiles's philosophy on getting away with shit was, don't question it, just enjoy the opportunity.

As he started up the Jeep, he saw the helm sitting in the passenger seat. He hadn't meant to bring it with him, and he considered carrying it back into the house. That might have raised alarms for his dad. Also, angering a trickster god with a direct line to his brain seemed like a bad move. "Fine, but you have to stay in the car," Stiles told the helm.

He knew it was Weles leading him to the river, but that didn't bother him. His mind was clearer there than anywhere else in town, soothed by the rush of water and the smell of old rain and mild pollution. Digging in the mud with a stick or tossing stones into the eddies, he could distract his ADHD compulsions enough to really think.

Stiles parked at the edge of the woods and walked toward the river. Halfway there, he discovered that he was wearing the helm. It was a good thing there was no one else in the woods. It would be a pain to turn back and put it in the car now, and he suspected it wouldn't stay there anyway. He carried it awkwardly under his arm. Weles seemed to accept the compromise.

On the riverbank, Stiles sat cross-legged, watching the river's lazy progress, flicking bits of dirt and grass into it. The river seemed alive, like a puppy that wanted to jump into his arms. As he was imagining puppies and smiling to himself, a sphere of river water jumped out of the riverbed and into his open hand, oozing and flopping like a water balloon but not spilling. His hand stayed dry. When he mused on how weird that was, the ball of water burst, splashing him in the face.

"Magic," he said to himself. He looked accusingly at the helm. "Magic? Really? All the superpowers of Aquaman? Can I talk to fish, too?"

Ironically, Weles approved of Stiles's incredulity, rewarding him with what felt like a full-body smile. He guided Stiles away from the water and toward the bank. Out of the mud - out of nowhere, and as if formed from the mud itself - a small, red-brown frog leaped, then hopped into position about six inches away from Stiles, staring sweetly at him. Farther away along the bank, four more frogs jumped out of the mud and arranged themselves in a chorus line. Their song began as random ribbits, out of place in the daytime but otherwise unremarkable, but it soon resolved itself into the tune the frog with the top hat sang in old cartoons. Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal.

It was terrifying. Not in the same way as being paralyzed by a kanima or stalked by a werewolf, but it made Stiles shiver nonetheless. The scary part wasn't the unnatural singing, but the fact that he'd been the one to choose the tune, to give purpose and melody to their croaking.

"Okay, that's really enough creepy frogs," Stiles said, and they dispersed, returning to the mud and water from which they'd sprung. "So I guess I can do useful magic, too, when I need to?"

The answer that crawled under his skin was, You already have.

It had only been a couple of hours since Stiles had first put on the helm, but he knew better than to ask Weles what the hell that was supposed to mean.

Stiles plugged headphones into his phone so he could listen to music. He didn't expect it to drown out Weles's voice, but he hoped to force Weles to shout a little louder. Stiles lay on his back on the riverbank, watching the clouds drift and tying knots in blades of grass, wondering what he was going to do with all his power.

He didn't quite fall asleep, but he reached the point where his thoughts drifted as if carried by the current. He woke sharply with someone standing over him. Werewolf? Alpha pack? Was this the end?

It was only Lydia. "Of course you'd be here. You're everywhere."

Stiles sat up, tugging his headphones out of his ears. He tried to say something witty, but Lydia had a way of reducing his intellect. "Just communing with nature. You?"

She was dressed semi-appropriately for a walk in the woods: tight pink strappy top that embraced her breasts, skinny jeans tucked into black boots, hair tied back loosely. Stiles wanted to prefer her this way, but he was more attracted to the artificial ice queen. The more she let him get to know her as a person, the harder it was to deify her.

"I'm looking for varieties of wolfsbane," she said, "but they're hard to find when they're not in bloom."

"So you can run werewolf experiments in your secret lab?"

She glared at him, turning down the corner of her mouth: he'd gotten it a little too right. "Just doing my part to combat the forces of evil. Now that I know there are forces to combat."

"With science."

With a sigh, she said, "It's what I've got to work with."

"We could have prevented a bunch of things if someone had told you sooner," Stiles said. It bothered him that nobody else had seen that. Keeping people in the dark was stupid - Matt's death and Peter's resurrection had convinced him of that.

"Do you know how humiliating it was? To find out everyone was conspiring not to tell me, and let me think I was crazy instead?"

"I understand humiliation," Stiles said. "I'm kind of an expert, in fact."

"Yeah, you are, aren't you?" Lydia sat down in the grass, facing him, like she was ready to soak in his wisdom.

As if to prove his own point, Stiles launched into a mortifying torrent of telling her everything about Weles, starting with the helm and going straight through to the frogs.

Lydia stared at him for a few moments, saying nothing. Weles, who had managed to keep out of the conversation up to this point, filled in the silence with commentary. She's trying to figure out what this has to do with her.

"I'm not trying to get you to like me," Stiles said. "We're way past the possibility of that happening. I just thought you should be the first to know something important. To start to make up for it." In Stiles's mind, Weles threw confetti and flashed colorful lights. Stiles was glad to know Weles approved, but the seizure-inducing game show metaphor made it difficult to carry on a conversation.

"Don't keep doing me favors," Lydia said. "I might start feeling like I owe you something."

"Yeah. That'd be new."

"So stop being nice," she said. "And then I won't have to learn any valuable lessons about the power of friendship."

"No problem." He got up from the grass, assuming she was about to leave.

"I like frogs," she said.

"Frogs? Sure. Frogs. Frogs are good."

"They breathe through their skin," she continued. "And the prettiest ones are poisonous."

Stiles could feel himself on the verge of saying something stupid, but he couldn't stop himself in time. "I remember. You did that report on them in fifth grade."

"Just when I thought you weren't stalking me," Lydia said.

"I'm not. I remember because it was good. All the other girls picked cutesy things like dolphins and penguins, and you did poisonous frogs."

She beamed, but the smile faded. "I'm sorry. I don't remember what yours was."

"I was sick the day we were supposed to pick topics, and I got stuck with walruses. And then I got really interested in walruses and worked really hard on it."

"Oh, wait!" she said. "I totally remember that. You brought in that walrus-shaped rubber duckie and showed how they swim."

"Yep, that was me." He'd managed not to screw up the demonstration, and he'd gotten an A on the project. And then Jackson had stolen his walrus duckie during lunch and left it on his desk with the eyes X'ed out and "FAG" written on it in big black letters.

"So," she said. "Bring on the dancing walruses."

"I think that's beyond the scope of my powers," Stiles said.

"So go work on it and get back to me," she said.

They hung out for a few more minutes, talking mostly about fifth grade, before things got awkward and they made simultaneous quick excuses for heading home.

You'll never fuck that girl, Weles said in Stiles's head when they were back in the Jeep. Weles's language startled Stiles for a moment, even though Weles didn't seem like the type of god to resort to demure sexual euphemisms.

"Because you won't let me?" But Stiles knew the answer without divine interference: because she would never let him. "I'm working on getting over that. I'm close."

I'm going to find you someone to fuck, Weles said. Stiles started to reply that he could take care of that himself, but Weles had no patience for his bullshit. It's impossible for me to work through you like this.

"Sorry for being an awkward, loud virgin," Stiles said. "I didn't exactly choose you, either."

When Weles laughed, Stiles felt it ripple through his body like a small earthquake. This isn't about whether you've been fucked. It's that you're sad and restless about not being fucked, and that drains my power. Weles seemed to gesture through Stiles's body: a sigh and a straightening of the back. I'm an arrogant god. I need you to have enough self-confidence to sustain me.

"Good luck with that," Stiles said.

Stiles could feel Weles rifling through his brain; it was uncomfortable. Well, there's that werewolf, Weles said. The one who likes you. You could make that happen.

"I am not making any werewolves 'happen.'"

You can, and you will. You're going to fuck a werewolf. Weles repeated this the whole way home, turning it into a song that lodged in Stiles's head.

"I hate you," Stiles grumbled as he carried the helm into his house.

2.

Stiles knew it was Weles who kept drawing him into the woods, but each trip felt like it was of his own volition. Alone, he could play with magic, making shapes out of water, drawing bugs from the soil and fish to the surface of the river. Squirrels, chipmunks, and deer stopped to watch him pass and sometimes followed him. He sensed they would do his bidding, which unnerved him. He imagined himself whistling a tune and gathering all the forest creatures to help him do housework.

The only song in his heart was "Fuck a Werewolf." These third-rate superpowers weren't remotely worth the irritation. He put his ear buds in and tried to drown out the refrain, but Weles just sang louder.

He usually went out while Dad was at work, so Dad wouldn't know to ask where he'd been. But on Sunday he got an unshakeable urge to sit near the river, so he lied about going to Scott's house. When he returned, Dad was waiting in the kitchen. "Derek Hale dropped by," he called out as Stiles tried to sneak upstairs. "Does he have a problem with phones?"

"Probably," Stiles said. "What did he want?"

"All he said was, he's looking for you."

"Okay, blowing him off," Stiles said. "I've learned that's the only way to deal with cryptic messages from the supernatural."

"Speaking of that," Dad said ominously.

"You want me to stop communicating with the Polish god of being annoying? Happy to. Don't think he'll cooperate."

"No. I think you're doing the right thing, seeing this through." More and more often, Dad had been talking to Stiles like they were both reasonable adults. It caught Stiles so off guard that he wondered if Dad was being strategic, using it to force Stiles to act like a grown-up when he didn't feel like one, when he wanted to use immaturity to get away with his stupid decisions.

Stiles went into the kitchen: continuing to shout down the stairs to his dad was not a demonstration of maturity. On the table, Dad had laid out a robe made of heavy purple wool, trimmed with green and silver embroidery of animals and crescent moons. Leaning against the table was a carved staff. When Stiles tapped it, he realized it was made of bone, not wood.

"They go with the helm," Dad said. "You might as well have the full package."

Stiles rested his hand on the head of the staff without thinking; it curved into his palm as if it believed it belonged there. Allowing it to bear his weight, he felt solid and strong, immune from harm. "There's more of this? Because I'm going crazy enough as it is."

"But you're exploring it anyway," Dad said. "I wrestled with it, but I think it'll be good in the end. Just because I couldn't hack it doesn't mean you won't do a better job than me."

"So you're just handing me over? To the god of the underworld?" Stiles let go of the staff, expecting it to crash to the ground. It stood, suspended, refusing to cooperate.

"Like you said, you don't have much of a choice at this point," Dad said. "It takes a lot to shake the Czernibóg." Dad looked grim, the way he only did when he was thinking of Mom. "Remember, he's a trickster god. You can't take anything he says at face value, but you can always use it. You can always find the truth in it."

"Okay, Dad," Stiles said because it was impossible to directly acknowledge when his father was wise. He went up to his room with his helm, staff, and robe. He tossed them in a pile in the corner, hoping the Czernibóg would get the message. He sat down at his computer to play video games until he no longer felt the urge to murder an immortal god. While the game loaded, he looked out his window to make sure the squirrels hadn't hitched a ride on the back of his Jeep to do obeisance.

Instead, he saw Derek Hale. Derek had climbed a tree on the edge of the backyard. He was eating a sandwich. It was almost like Derek had a sense of humor.

Stiles opened the window. "Go home," he yelled.

Unhurriedly, Derek tucked his sandwich into a Ziploc bag, stretched his thick arms in a yawning semicircle, and leaped out of the tree. For a few seconds, Stiles thought Derek might actually leave. But he stood in the middle of the yard, lunch under his arm, face impassive and patient.

"Fine," Stiles shouted. He strolled down the stairs and through the kitchen, wasting time. Dad lowered his newspaper and raised an eyebrow.

"I'm completely out of control of my own destiny," Stiles said. "I'm learning to accept that."

He went out the back door. Derek did not appear to have moved. "I need your help," Derek said unenthusiastically.

"No," Stiles said, turning back toward the house.

"With Scott."

"Double no," Stiles said.

"The alpha pack is on its way. I need him."

"And he's nursing a broken heart and trying frantically to pass summer school algebra," Stiles said. "It doesn't matter if you need him. He needs to be left the hell alone."

"So I guess it doesn't matter how much you need him, either," Derek said. It was a smooth, quiet attack to the throat.

Stiles took his phone out of his pocket and texted Scott: Derek can't find you, so is stalking me instead. Come over and tell him to fuck off.

"There," Stiles said to Derek. "Now you can leave."

Derek stood still, as if he couldn't figure out what to do now that he'd completed his mission. He seemed vulnerable despite his formidable biceps and perpetual scowl. Derek was scared, Stiles realized. He was in charge of more than he was ready for, and his pack wasn't returning his calls. Stiles sympathized.

Stiles's brain broke into a fresh chorus of "Fuck the Werewolf." Under his breath, he directed Weles back to the fucking underworld. Didn't he have some bucolic afterlife cows to herd?

No. The souls of the dead tend to the cattle.

"Did you say something?" Derek asked, whiplashing Stiles back to the world.

"No, I – Did you need anything else? Because I have stuff to do."

"I was hoping he'd text you back if I waited a minute," Derek said.

It was as if a magical force was holding Derek there. No, the magical force of a matchmaking trickster god was holding Derek in place, and the only way to break the spell was to kiss him. Stiles hated the certainty he felt about this. He also hated that the thought had occurred to him before: driving Derek after he'd been shot, keeping him afloat in the swimming pool, lying paralyzed on top of him when the kanima took them out. It was like fate was trying to draw them together. Except, again, not "like": fate was drawing them together, and fate was a god that only Stiles could hear.

There was only one way to move forward. With the aggression and surprise of a punch to the mouth, Stiles kissed Derek. Derek didn't reel or shove Stiles away, but softened at his touch, as if he'd been expecting this. He put his arms around Stiles's waist, resting his strong hands on the small of Stiles's back. Derek's beard brushed roughly across Stiles's lips. Stiles knitted his fingers behind Derek's neck to pull him closer.

Stiles hadn't realized other people's tongues took up so much space. He hadn't expected kissing to require coordination or to sting with bites along his swollen lips. On TV, he only saw the surface of a kiss: two mouths tilting cleanly together. All the interesting action took place inside. The tip of his tongue touched Derek's, and the sensation went straight to his cock. Another human being was giving him an erection on purpose. It was spectacular.

Derek pushed Stiles back against a tree and groped up his shirt. A thought crept into Stiles's brain and killed all his momentum - not divine interruption, just a run-of-the-mill distraction. "My dad's in the kitchen," he said breathlessly. "Right on the other side of that window."

Derek pressed his lips to Stiles's, then pulled away slowly, as if they were stuck together with bubble gum. "You started it," Derek said as he released Stiles from his arms.

"And you didn't hurl me across the yard for trying," Stiles said. "I feel we're equally responsible."

"I don't know what came over me," Derek said.

"I do."

Derek narrowed his eyes skeptically.

There was no sense lying to him now. "Trickster god wants me to get laid. Long story."

"And you picked me?" Derek didn't seem angry, just perplexed. "Don't you have a thing for that girl? Lydia?"

"Wel - the Czernibóg picked you. And pestered me 'til I followed through. But I'll put up with the pestering if you don't want it to happen again."

"You don't have to do that," Derek said. "It was a good kiss."

"You – you thought so?"

"Drop by my place when you hear from Scott." It seemed to be Derek's way of saying yes.

"What's your place these days? A warm cave? The animal shelter?" The sarcasm kicked in instinctively. Stiles didn't know how to accept that Derek liked him. Or what to do with the revelation that he was a good kisser.

"I'm squatting in that unfinished condo complex on Willow Street," Derek said.

Stiles knew the one: a rain-battered "Exciting New Homes!" sign still stood at the entrance, four years after the construction vehicles had abandoned it. Dad had busted a meth lab there a while ago and said the place had electricity and running water: the developers had left in such a hurry that they hadn't closed the accounts. Derek was entering the twentieth century, with the lights and the hot showers.

"What if I don't hear from Scott?"

"Then track him down." Derek took Stiles's hand with such tenderness that Stiles expected a princely kiss. Instead, Derek let his hand drop: a deferral, a non-kiss. In a mist of wolf stealth, he was gone.

That wasn't the werewolf I meant, Weles boomed into Stiles's empty brain.

"Then why'd you whammy him into making out with me?"

I didn't "whammy" anyone. I lightened his inhibitions, but he didn't do anything against his will. Weles paused. The silence in Stiles's mind made him squirm. And neither did you. Weles let that sink in, too.

"So if he wasn't the werewolf you meant, then who did you mean?"

The girl, the one with the yellow hair. She told you she has feelings for you. She would climb on top of you without a second's hesitation. But that turns you off, doesn't it? It's that self-confidence problem again. You assume anyone who likes you must have very poor taste.

"Erica." Stiles wasn't sure whether to feel relieved or betrayed. He'd turned Erica down because he knew he'd never love her the way she loved him, and he was enough of an expert in hopeless unrequited fixations to know it wouldn't be fair.

I'm still getting to know you, Weles said. It's not always clear which direction I should lead you. Gods like me don't have the luxury of omniscience – that's the domain of the unambiguously beneficent.

"You could just let me make my own decisions," Stiles said.

Isn't that what I just did?

Stiles conceded it mentally but didn't give Weles the satisfaction of admitting it out loud. "I should find Scott. Not – not for Derek. For Scott. I mean, he's been holed up in his room long enough."

Stiles decided to walk to Scott's house; Weles liked the fresh air, and Stiles wasn't ashamed to curry favor. Along the way, his phone rang. It was Lydia, more breathlessly geeky than he'd imagined she was capable of. It was like the dam had broken on a lifetime of repression. Her comfort with him made it clear that she was indeed never going to have sex with him, but that was different from never loving him. She liked him enough to ramble about Celtic rituals and the kanima while he pretended to keep up.

"The only way to raise a kanima is to call upon Cernunnos," she was saying. "I mean, as far as I can tell. Late Latin is full of quirks, especially material from territories like Gaul and Brittany, and the sources in Old French take out certain pagan references to appease the Church. There's one book in medieval Breton, but I don't speak that yet."

That 'yet' might have been the most terrifying word Stiles had heard all day, and today he had conversed with Weles and made out with a werewolf.

Lydia probably would have talked right over him even if he'd responded. "Cernunnos was a Gaulish god of commerce, travel, and animals. Horned, like yours, and with a similar domain, but not the same personality. More of a benevolent protector."

Uptight, direct, and boring, Weles said in Stiles's head.

Stiles repeated that to Lydia, and she laughed. "And vengeful," Stiles added, an educated guess.

"That word isn't used," Lydia snapped as if he'd misidentified the designer of her shoes. "More like 'just' and 'defender of the virtuous.'"

Worshipers' code for "vengeful asshole," Weles said. It would've been nice if Lydia could hear him. Weles reminded Stiles that was what priests were for.

"It might be possible to... the word in the text is eicere, 'to exile,'" Lydia said. "Or 'banish.' With the connotation of stranding Cernunnos, of dispossessing him. But I can't find a ritual, just the possibility."

Nope, Weles jumped in before Stiles could ask him for anything. Different pantheon, different division of labor, nothing I can do.

"You're lying," Stiles said out loud.

"What? Screw you," Lydia snapped.

"No, not you," Stiles said. "The Czernibóg is afraid we'll use the same ritual to banish him, so he's trying to lie to me, but he can't."

"Oh. Screw him, then."

Stiles reached Scott's house. "I'll see what I can get out of him. You... keep having fun with your database, I guess."

"Let's get something clear," Lydia said. "You're not in charge here. I'm letting you and your invisible friend help."

"Whatever you say," Stiles said, although he knew she was right.

He hung up and rang Scott's doorbell. Scott's mom answered. "He said he doesn't want to see you," she told him. "But he's full of it lately, and he's driving me crazy. Please get him out of my house. Without breaking the law or almost getting yourselves killed, if at all possible."

Stiles went up to Scott's room. Scott opened the door, scowled, and slammed it. "What did I do?" Scott asked the door.

"Nothing," Scott said. "You didn't do anything."

"Was I... supposed to do something?"

There was a long silence, and Stiles had almost resigned himself to leaving as best-friendless as he'd come when Scott finally opened the door. Stiles went in but stopped awkwardly in the middle of the room. He'd expected a tornado of clothes and soda cans on the floor, but Scott's room was as neat as Stiles had ever seen it, as if Scott were barely living in it. "Whatever it is, I didn't mean to," Stiles said. "I've got my own stuff going on, but that's no excuse for –"

"Your own stuff? Really. You have your own stuff."

"Yeah," Stiles said. "But I shouldn't have –"

"No, that's the thing," Scott said. "You should. I was trying to let you. The world doesn't revolve around me, and I just kept thinking it was dumb to bug you when there's not, like, impending doom for once."

"I'm your best friend, though," Stiles said. "You're supposed to bug me."

"I guess."

"No, seriously. If you don't bug me, I assume you hate me," Stiles said.

Scott looked up at Stiles with puppy-eyed annoyance. It was the same expression Stiles imagined Weles shooting him when Weles harangued him about self-confidence. Scott said, "I wish we could still just hang around playing Dinosaurs Vs. Trucks and not have... stuff."

"I don't think there's anything to stop us from playing Dinosaurs Vs. Trucks," Stiles said. "Except possibly our sense of dignity."

Scott grinned wistfully for a moment before getting up and taking the dinosaurs and trucks down from his closet shelf. He kept them in the same Tupperware box he had when they'd been eight years old.

"I'll let you be dinosaurs," Stiles said.

Scott shook his head. "I like being trucks. I... think that's why we work. As friends."

"So," Stiles said. "Be trucks. But dinosaurs are going to kick your truck ass." It was an empty threat, because Dinosaurs Vs. Trucks always ended in a draw. The point of the game was to beat the shit out of toys, not to keep score. The point was, nobody had to lose, and they could play as long as they wanted, not worrying about whether they got it right. Little kids had so much more leeway to pretend there were no consequences.

Only when Stiles left did he realize he hadn't told Scott anything. In the world of Dinosaurs Vs. Trucks, there was no place for Weles or Cernunnos and definitely no place for hooking up with Derek Hale. When Scott had turned into a werewolf, he'd told Stiles immediately; when he'd fallen in love with Allison, he'd bored Stiles with impassioned odes to her smile. Stiles had never had this kind of trouble confiding in Scott, but there was suddenly so much to tell that it tangled up in his brain and couldn't find a way out of his mouth.

Stiles walked home, got in the Jeep, and drove to Derek's condo complex on the edge of town. The temporary fencing that had blocked off the development had long since been vandalized to the ground. Stiles drove up the ghostly road until he found an unpainted rectangle of asphalt that looked like it would have become guest parking. Most of the condos were in various stages of incompletion, but two four-unit blocks looked finished, down to the cheerfully painted fake shutters around the upstairs windows. Stiles marveled that Derek could choose to live here. It's often safest to do what people least expect of you, Weles said in Stiles's head.

Stiles stopped in his tracks, standing with the Jeep door open. You had something to do with keeping him safe. He managed to say it only in his mind and not out loud like a crazy person; he was getting better at that.

I protect creatures that transform, Weles said. They're my domain. And wolves - I'm a cattle god, but I'm fond of wolves. They keep balance. Sometimes the best way to protect a herd is to reduce it.

"That's not comforting," Stiles blurted out loud.

It's not meant to be, Weles replied.

Stiles was still in the parking lot, hesitant to commit to locking the car door. The more impatient he could feel Weles getting, the less enthusiastic he was. If he'd realized that the price of getting some action would be an eternal threesome with Weles, he would have vowed celibacy.

All right, Weles said. I'll let you do this on your own.

Head quiet and clear - disturbingly, distractingly so - Stiles went up to Derek's apartment. Once inside, he got business out of the way first: "Scott's fine. He needs time, but he's fine."

"We don't have time," Derek said with the earnestness of a '90s action hero.

"So go tell him that. If I have to bring a message about Scott every time I come by here, that's just stupid. If I'm here because of the kissing, at least. Which I am. If you're up for it."

"It is why you're here," Derek said. The lack of emotion almost broke Stiles's heart.

"If you're not into it, I'll go. No harm done. It's pretty much what I'm used to."

Derek put his hand on Stiles's chest. Stiles's own breath rang in his ears. He felt like he'd been hit point-blank with a stun gun. "Listen," Derek said. "I know about the magic, and I'm all right with it."

"You don't know. You can't. I barely know. And it wasn't me, exactly, it was – would you believe the ancient Polish god of livestock?"

"Yeah. That's about what I'd expect from you."

"It's the truth. If I made something up, it'd be a lot more badass."

"So you're a shaman." Derek sighed as if he'd been hoping for some less likely, more deadly alternative. "Well, better you than someone who doesn't know what's going on in this town."

"Oh. So I'm useful now." Stiles backed away. Derek was making him less and less interested in another kiss.

"This is coming out wrong," Derek said.

"You think?"

"It went differently when I played it out in my head." So Derek did have feelings. And insecurities.

"How?"

"You were less sarcastic, and I... knew what to say." Derek seemed small and nervous. "Polish cattle god? Really, that's all you've got?"

"Well, most of Eastern Europe," Stiles said. "And also the underworld, water, earth, magic, transformation, and wealth."

"That makes more sense. You have too much power for a cattle god. I mean – in the pool, keeping us afloat. That was you."

"That wasn't –" Stiles had assumed that was the result of frequently treading water as punishment at YMCA swim camp. But if there had been any time when Weles had protected him, that would have been it. "I didn't do anything, at least. But the Czernibóg might have been involved."

"Czernibóg," Derek repeated. "Oh, crap, did I just summon him?"

"No, it's a nickname. To prevent that. He told me I could have some privacy with you. Because he could make you love me, or at least want me, and I don't - I thought that'd be unfair. You know, mind control, not the greatest way to start a relationship."

"So it's just you and me," Derek said.

Stiles nodded and swallowed a big lump of anxiety. Derek kissed him.

They were less cautious this time, mouths open, tongues circling and exploring. Stiles's tongue felt like it had become the center of his body, drawing in all of Derek's warmth. He wanted to run his tongue over every inch of Derek's skin, even though in practice that would just be wet and messy. Stiles told himself to focus on kissing, to be in this moment without second-guessing it. Telling himself to focus never helped, though.

He thought about the parts of Derek he wanted to touch. Like counting sheep, easing his nerves. His imagination had gotten down to Derek's chest before he realized he could actually touch Derek instead of just thinking about it.

He started where his mind already was. Derek was wearing a black undershirt, tight enough that his nipples peaked under the ribbed cotton. And now under Stiles's fingers. The nipple hardened. Derek grabbed the back of Stiles's head with both hands and kissed him fiercely. Stiles leaned forward to catch his balance. His cock rubbed against Derek's thigh. Even through clothes, it felt amazing.

His cock was his entire life now. He needed Derek to – he didn't know what. With his mouth full of tongue, he couldn't make requests.

He ran his hand down Derek's stomach. Derek's cock, when Stiles reached it, was raging hard. Derek gasped and ground against him. Stiles pressed harder against Derek's thigh. Derek let go of Stiles's head. Stiles thought he'd done something wrong until Derek fumbled with his zipper. Stiles swatted Derek's hand away gently and took out his own relieved cock. Derek did the same, and now Stiles had a cock in his hand, someone else's cock. Derek's cock, so hard it strained against its own skin.

Stiles rose onto his toes to kiss Derek. Their cocks rubbed together on the way up. He might have seen actual stars. He wrapped his arms around Derek's waist to pull Derek into him. They ground against each other's cocks and thighs and stomachs, against any warm skin they could find.

Derek's mouth froze against Stiles's lips. His body tensed in Stiles's arms, then eased. Stiles felt better about coming now that Derek had. He rubbed up against Derek's still-hard cock until the pleasure kicked him over the edge. He bit his lip, not wanting this to end.

When it did, he was in Derek's arms, and Derek was kissing his neck softly. He bowed his head and pressed his forehead against Derek's chest. If only they could stay there permanently, like statues of themselves, everything would feel good forever.

Derek didn't ask Stiles to stay, and Stiles wanted to get home early enough to avoid a conversation with his dad about where he'd been. He kissed Derek goodbye, and the kiss kept going. It seemed to be Derek's way of begging Stiles not to leave.

Derek didn't want to be alone, Stiles realized. It was such a simple reason for him to have accepted Stiles so readily, and it made more sense than whatever opportunistic werewolf justification Stiles might have cooked up. Derek was lonely, and people he loved tended to die. Stiles was stubbornly selfless toward him, even if his heroism was often accidental. If anyone could get through Derek's defenses and convince Derek to admit to having feelings, it was Stiles, and that was a power Weles had nothing to do with.

Stiles extricated himself from Derek finally, promising to return. "Or you could lurk in my yard some more. Maybe you could hold a boom box over your head."

"I'll sit in a tree and sparkle." When Derek joked, his voice was so deep and earnest that the humor seemed to whiz by, and Stiles had to grab the tail end of it.

He went home knowing the most exciting part of his day was over, but on the drive back, it dawned on him how exciting this actually was. In one day, Stiles had gone from enormous loser to guy with secret hot older boyfriend who had touched his penis voluntarily. Stopped at a red light, he did a little dance in his seat.

Continued in part 2.

You can never do anything great in the world unless you have a chip on your shoulder.

2013-01-12T20:29:07Z

I wrote a bunch of things! And they were anonymous. And then I had to go on a major work trip while authors were being revealed. They've all been on AO3 for a while, which is where things tend to wind up these days.

Adventures in International Sexting
Gymnastics RPF
Epke Zonderland/Danell Leyva
Danell and Epke love taking pictures of themselves almost as much as they love to look at each other.

This was my assigned story for Yuletide, for a_la_grecque. She asked for Zonderland/anyone, so I took the liberty of slashing him with my own favorite elite men's gymnast. This was an absolute blast to write, and not just because my research involved looking at the naked pictures that both guys have plastered the internet with. (Seriously, when public figures are distributing semi-pornographic images of themselves, the morality arguments against RPF dissolve into the ether.) Alas, NBC has eradicated all video footage of Leyva miming the motions of Zonderland's routine as Zonderland did it at the Olympics, but it happened and I saw it.

*

The Cake Is a Lie
Revenge
Nolan Ross/Padma Lahari
Nolan doesn't need to wear pants to play this game.

I wrote this as a Yuletide pinch hit for marksykins, who apparently shares my love for Nolan and fascination with Padma. This is far fluffier and happier than I think Nolan/Padma will actually turn out, but romantic optimism is one of the chief uses of fanfic. This ended up overflowing with Portal references, right down to the title, and generally playing with Nolan's identity as a geek. It ends up not talking about his sexuality at all, which was not the choice I expected to make, but any mention dragged the story into didacticism.

*

The Mouth of a Wolf's Not the End of the World
Teen Wolf
Allison Argent/Lydia Martin, Derek Hale, Gerard Argent
Allison has always been a werewolf hunter. Derek was ten when he survived the fire that killed his family. When the Argents return to Beacon Hills to kill Derek, Allison meets Lydia, and their romance makes her want to break the cycle.

How to write a story for tw_holidays and have it almost totally ignored: 1) Write femslash. 2) Have your recipient drop out. 3) Let Derek muscle his way into a major supporting role, but never mention Stiles or Jackson. 4) Write femslash without any porn. 5) Come up with a concept that probably requires 30,000 words but only have time to write 4500. 6) Fail to alert your friends to the existence of the fic until a week after the author reveal. (I actually like this story a lot and hope that someone notices it someday.)

*

I've been working on my Best Songs of 2012 mixtape and commentary, but again with needing to put work ahead of fun. Remember when I was procrastinating my dissertation and had time for this stuff? But it all gets done eventually.

Gay Costume Awards 2012

2012-12-27T01:49:10Z

At long last, it's part three of my sixth annual figure skating costume awards. This is the original and most controversial category: the Gay Costume Awards, given to those costumes that, in whatever way, bring out the most "flamboyant" and "controversial" aspects of on-ice couture. Skaters of both sexes and in every discipline are eligible for a Gay Costume Award. This is not a commentary on the personal lives or identities of the skaters, only on how they look in their costumes. And in my world, "gay" is a compliment.

This was, unfortunately, not a particularly gay year in figure skating costumes.

Honorable Mentions

Nobunari Oda (Japan), men's short program, Skate Canada

So oversized it almost makes powder blue stretch fabric look straight.

Aliona Savchenko & Robin Szolkowy (Germany), pairs free skate, Skate Canada

If black is the ISU's official color of heterosexuality, then these costumes are a brazen act of defiance.

Daisuke Takahashi (Japan), men's free skate, NHK Trophy

Takahashi continues his pioneering work in the field of the sparkly onesie with four different colors of mesh.

Jeremy Abbott (USA), men's short program, Trophee Eric Bompard

Boy next door in bondage gear.

Yuzuru Hanyu (Japan), men's short program, Grand Prix Final

So young, and already revolutionizing the butch black pants/collared shirt combo into an homage to musical theater.

Adam Rippon (USA), men's free skate, NHK Trophy

Rippon's makeover just makes him look like he's graduated from angel-haired ingenue to ripped power gay.

Julia Lipnitskaia (Russia), ladies' short program, Cup of China

Teenage lesbian assassin in post-ironic Texas gangster B-movie.

Bronze Medal

Sergei Voronov (Russia), men's free skate, NHK Trophy

If this were a real nightclub, he wouldn't be wearing illusion mesh long underwear under that fabulous top.

Silver Medal

Brian Joubert (France), men's short program, Cup of China

Nipples covered; pants totally see-through.

Gold Medal

Tatsuki Machida (Japan), men's free skate, Cup of China and men's short program, Grand Prix Final

The former is a wearable representation of the circles of gay hell: bleached bangs, feathers, fire, rhinestones, mesh, tight crotches, and velour. The latter is a wearable cover version of the Stevie Nicks classic, "Leather and Lace."

2012 Classy Costume Awards

2012-12-20T16:59:28Z

Welcome to day two of my sixth annual figure skating costume awards! Today I honor the best in figure skating costumes: the flattering, the original, the tasteful yet memorable. Check out the tl;dr in part one for more on my self-imposed rules.

This year marks a historic occasion: for the first time, Meryl Davis and Charlie White did not make my top ten best. I am still their fan, but I am withholding awards until Charlie finds a real costume to wear in the free dance.

With no further ado (or snark), the 2012 Classy Costume Awards.

Honorable Mentions

Paige Lawrence & Rudi Swiegers (Canada), pairs free skate, Rostelecom Cup

They're skating to music from War Horse, and in a season where so many men are underdressed, I'm just glad to Swiegers go with the obvious. Lawrence looks above-and-beyond beautiful with her crochet-patterned sleeves, beaded bodice, and layers of brown over pink. You can't see it in this picture, but she has the best hair of the season, braided around her head and knotted in the back.

Maia Shibutani & Alex Shibutani, free dance, Rostelecom Cup

Here's another example of a costume that represents the program music literally but doesn't look like Halloween. The proportions of Maia's dress are surprisingly similar to an actual kimono, and yet it moves freely when she twizzles and doesn't obscure her lines. I'd prefer a slightly bolder color, but the pink is flattering. Alex looks good, too: not particularly dramatic, but the pants fit correctly and he's wearing something other than head-to-toe black. Maia wins a special award for this year's best match between tights and skin tone.

Patrick Chan (Canada), men's free skate, Skate Canada

Chan is consistently one of the best-dressed men on the ice. I'm not in love with the red piping on the vest, but its length is perfect. It just overlaps the high waist of his pants, which have an extra button to extend his line. The white shirt also uses a few clever tricks to make Chan's posture and carriage look as good as possible: the lace-up collar lengthens him through the chest and neck, and the rolled sleeves make his arm movements seem more dramatic.

Valentina Marchei (Italy), ladies' short program, Skate America

Marchei's dress looks like a clever concept in still frame, but it's magical in motion. When she picks up speed, the sleeves and skirt flutter up to reveal the layers of red and polka-dot fabric under the black, and the effect is especially stunning when she spins. Marchei is tiny and has slightly odd proportions; the wide neckline, understated bodice, and elbow-length sleeves hide her flaws and accentuate her long, expressive limbs.

Stefania Berton & Ondrej Hotarek (Italy), pairs short program, Skate Canada

You don't need to know that they're skating to "Paint It, Black" to see that these costumes tell a story. I could stand to see more creativity in Hotarek's costume, although that neckline is to die for. Berton's black tights make her dress more dramatic, and the stripes accentuate her body lines. My favorite things about Berton's dress are the beautiful sleeves, which have redeemed the entire concept of sheer fabric for me.

Christina Gao (USA), ladies' short program, Grand Prix Final

With two Grand Prix medals, this was a breakout year for Gao, and she picked a stunning dress to accomplish that in. There's a lot of detail here - appliqued flowers on one half of the bodice, ruching on the other - but the details complement each other. This action shot shows how well Gao's dress fits: most costumes bunch when skaters contort themselves in spins, but Gao's bodice stays put, and the skirt flutters out elegantly. Cool wrist details on the sleeves, too.

Tatiana Volosozhar & Maxim Trankov, pairs short program, Rostelecom Cup

I have chosen this image specifically to avoid looking at Trankov's awful fake mustache, which is literally the only problem I have with these costumes. Trankov's vest/shirt/pants combo is pretty standard, but it's fitted well, making him look like a well-dressed dude instead of a hydraulic girl-lifting tank. Volosozhar simply looks exquisite, from the halter neck drowned in strands of necklaces to the contrast between her dark eye makeup and perfect blonde chignon.

Bronze Medal

Akiko Suzuki (Japan), ladies' free skate, NHK Trophy

It's an overly literal peacock dress, but if you can't bring out the bird themes in competitive figure skating, then where can you bring them out? The color is fantastic on her, and the skirt moves beautifully: the overlapping panels of fabric are the right length and weight so they fan out delicately when she jumps and spins. The illusion mesh at her neck is virtually invisible - squint and confirm that it's there. And her eye makeup matches the dress in the best possible way.

Silver Medal

Daisuke Takahashi (Japan), men's free skate, Grand Prix Final

Like every other man in figure skating, Takahashi is wearing black, but this is interesting and creative black. The illusion mesh on his chest blends with his skin, and because the black lace continues under his shirt, it looks like a neat costume effect and not a skin condition. Also, his pants fit (and how), and he has somehow gotten the fringe on his sleeves to match his hairstyle. This is the best men's costume by a mile, beating out Takahashi's own free skate costume from earlier this season, which is also gorgeous.

Gold Medal

Kiira Korpi (Finland), ladies' short program, Rostelecom Cup

Korpi would look beautiful in almost anything, but this dress accentuates her beauty in every way. The sleeves look like a shrug over a cocktail dress, and I like how their sparkly gold color comes back at the hem of the skirt. Green is an unusual color choice that stands out strikingly on the ice, and this shade also brings out Korpi's skin and hair. The bell shape that the skirt makes when she spins is so elegant that I wonder why every other woman in figure skating still insists on showing her underpants. It takes work to make a pretty girl even prettier, and Korpi has unquestionably accomplished that for herself this year.

2012 Illusion Mesh Trainwreck Awards

2012-12-16T20:21:39Z

Welcome to the 2012 Illusion Mesh Trainwreck Awards! This is the first of three sets of awards I give annually to the best, worst, and most flamboyant figure skating costumes of the season. It's the sixth consecutive year I've given these awards, and this year, I almost forgot. Many thanks to the anon who hunted me down on Formspring and reminded me!

All three sets of awards have some basic eligibility rules. Any skater who has competed in one or more senior Grand Prix events may be considered, and only competitive costumes are eligible. That means no juniors, no exhibition or show numbers, and no "senior B" events. Skaters in all four disciplines are eligible in all three categories, and skaters can win multiple awards for different costumes. For ice dance and pairs, I consider both skaters' costumes and how they look together as well as individually.

Today, I'll be highlighting the horrors: the worst costumes of the 2012-13 season. While I'm particularly sensitive to abuses of illusion mesh (the stretchy flesh-tone fabric used for tights and inserts), I also care about how the costume fits, flatters the body, suits the program theme, and contrasts with the ice.

Honorable mentions

Elena Glebova (Estonia), ladies' singles, United States International Figure Skating Classic free skate (also worn at Trophee Eric Bompard)

Brian Joubert wants his dress back. Also his headband. Also his plague of crotch issues.

Lindsay Davis & Mark Ladwig (USA), pairs, NHK Trophy free skate

Help! My costume is melting! Both are ill-fitting and out of fashion, and her white clashes with his gray. The contours of Davis's dress make her look heavy instead of muscular, and her breasts seem to be bunched halfway down her torso.

Alena Leonova (Russia), ladies' singles, Rostelecom Cup short program

If you guessed this was for a Bollywood program, you're way ahead of common sense and common decency. Culturally insensitive bronzer aside, this green is a horrible color on her. It's also too big, so it's riding up in the middle, and her right breast is on the verge of breaking free.

Agnes Zawadzki (USA), ladies' singles, NHK Trophy short program

My problem with this actually isn't the egregious overuse of illusion mesh, although that's awful, especially since her midsection, tights, and face are all different shades of beige. It's not even that this looks like something Mao Asada wore a couple of years ago. It's that this dress looks like hastily-constructed, poorly-altered cheap fabric even though it's an intricate design.

Kaitlyn Weaver & Andrew Poje (Canada), ice dance, Skate America free dance

It's as if they challenged themselves to make one of the prettiest women in figure skating look ugly. There must be ways to do "living statue" without making the skater look like she's been spray-painted with dryer lint. On the other hand, Poje looks stripper-rifically delicious in his shiny white shirt, as if he's shown up from some other saner, lower-concept free dance.

Ksenia Makarova (Russia), ladies' singles, NHK Trophy free skate

Is there a reason her right armpit needs to be open to the wind? The top might look cool if it were an actual shirt and not cropped so high, but for a figure skating costume, it just looks underdesigned. Meanwhile, she's wearing the gauntlet from Witchblade on her right arm.

Takahito Mura (Japan), men's singles, Trophee Eric Bompard free skate

Mura's free skate at TEB was a revelation, but this bizarre, busy outfit distracted from its beauty. Not only do the patterns clash, but they make him look like a top-heavy, short-limbed representative of the Romulan Empire. Mura also serves as one of this season's many excellent arguments against putting men in velvet pants.

Bronze Medal

Mao Asada (Japan), ladies' singles, NHK Trophy short program

This year's entry into "What the hell is Mao Asada wearing, and why?" involves strips of chewed bubble gum layered over a Klingon sash. Her tights and her illusion mesh long sleeves are different colors from each other and also different from her skin tone. The sloppy ponytail makes her look like she forgot to do her hair. At least she looks happy.

Silver Medal

Madison Chock & Evan Bates (USA), ice dance, Cup of China short dance

Some costumes provoke nothing but unanswered questions. Why is Chock's entire left side fake-naked except for a purple clamshell over her breast? Why is Bates wearing a skirt, and why does it match his patterned lapels? Why is Chock's neck ruffle attempting to swallow her face? Why, if you're going to wear costumes this ridiculous, can't you go to the trouble of making them look like they belong in the same program?

Gold Medal

Tessa Virtue & Scott Moir (Canada), ice dance, Skate Canada free dance

Virtue's dress is ostentatiously hideous: the low V-neck is vulgar and flattens her chest, the crotch-level flower forces the eye where it doesn't want to go, and the single red fingernail is a big F-bomb in the direction of making these costumes relate in any way to Carmen. But Moir's quieter crime bugs me more: there's a growing trend towards male skaters performing in what looks like practice gear, and it takes away from the narrative of a program. Put on some sparkles and suck it up, boys.

Fic: The Quick and the Dead Will Find You (Teen Wolf/Vampire Diaries/Lost Girl)

2012-12-05T18:13:07Z

Here's the second fic I wrote for femslash12, a Teen Wolf/Vampire Diaries/Lost Girl crossover for turnonmyheels.

Title: The Quick and the Dead Will Find You
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries/Teen Wolf/Lost Girl
Pairing: Caroline Forbes/Lydia Martin, kind of Bo Jones/Caroline and Bo/Lydia
Rating: PG-13 for violent and sexual imagery
Word Count: about 3400
Warnings: None standard.
Summary: A succubus, a vampire, and a girl genius walk into a ~~bar~~ restaurant. Together, they fight evil. That's not the punchline.
Author's Notes: Thanks to thistle90, gone_shaughraun, and sapience14 for helping me put this together. The title is from a Ladyhawke song. I wanted to set this in Raleigh-Durham but didn't have time for research, so I hope my own backyard is an acceptable substitute.

1.

There is no way Caroline is getting into Yale. She's taking the tour because it's a stop on the road between the schools she might get into and might fit into: Rutgers, UConn, Boston University. When Damon saw her itinerary - which Caroline showed him because he is much less annoying when she just lets him know her business - he said, "Maybe you'll do Yale the third time around. When you're tired of all your knowledge being a century out of date and you know how to fake documents like a champ."

"Which you already know how to do," she said. "You could help, you know."

"You'd just flunk out," Damon assured her. "Wait a hundred years. Earn the Ivy League degree when you're good and ready."

2.

Someone is sliding newspaper clippings under Bo's door while she's asleep. She suspects they've resorted to this because she deleted their emails, as she does when they're about Fae problems in other cities. She has her hands full enough with just Vancouver. It's not her fault she's the one great Fae champion of the modern age.

Kenzi has intercepted the clippings and apparently rescued them from the garbage. "Three dead college kids in the past month," Kenzi says, somehow balancing as she paces around the living room eating a bowl of Lucky Charms with one hand and holding up a fan of articles with the other. "They're saying it's a meningitis outbreak."

"And?"

"And they were drained of life." Kenzi pauses, either for dramatic effect or to crunch marshmallows. "And they were smiling."

"Crap."

Kenzi crunches dramatically.

"Where did you say this was?"

"Connecticut," Kenzi says. She wrinkles her nose. "That sounds like a disease."

3.

Lydia is making unfair judgments about everyone else on the tour. Why shouldn't she? She knows they're all judging her, the girl with the perfect hair and designer outfit and no visible parents. They'll assume she's a poor little rich girl whose daddy will buy her a plane ticket to New England and an Ivy League acceptance letter but won't take the weekend off to escort her to Yale. And they'll be right, except she's earned that acceptance letter with her grades and extracurriculars. In fact, she's earned better. She's leaning more toward Princeton or MIT.

There's a tall, red-haired boy with bad acne whose loud dad keeps asking questions about things like food and laundry. A tired-looking Asian girl in heavy eyeliner who seems to be continually trying to ditch the tour group and sneak a cigarette. A short, freckled girl in a sweater vest who raises her hand in the middle of the guide's speeches and grows red-faced with anger until the guide calls on her, a standoff that sometimes lasts several minutes.

And a pale, stunning blonde who sticks close to her mother, staring off into the trees, as if there are a million things in the world more important than a Yale tour. Lydia daydreams about kissing her in the shade of old stone buildings, of fingering her on a bench in the quad.

She'll settle for not eating lunch alone. She makes a friend.

4.

Caroline, her mom, and her new best friend Lydia wander the streets of New Haven, vetoing every lunch option they pass. Caroline doesn't care where they go: she has a water bottle full of blood in her purse, so she's been grabbing snacks all morning. She's relieved when Mom and Lydia agree on an Indian buffet. Her ring protects her from bursting into flame, but the bright sunlight still stings her eyes.

She piles a plate with enough food to imitate the appetite of a human being and is about to dig in when a man runs out of the restroom shouting, "Somebody help! There's a guy in there - he's -"

Mom rises from her chair and assumes her small-town-sheriff stance. "I'm a police officer. Everyone stay calm. You can help by calling 911 and requesting an ambulance." Mom beckons Caroline to follow her to the bathroom. Lydia follows, too, either because she thinks she's included by default or because she's too self-absorbed to care.

"Quick, help me check for bite marks before the paramedics get here," Mom whispers as she kneels over the body.

"You really think it's werewolves?" Lydia says skeptically, shocking both Caroline and her mom into a double take.

"More likely vampires," Mom replies.

"Nope," says a woman's voice behind them. "Succubi."

5.

Bo pushes past the three women in the bathroom. She's arrived just in time to revive the victim. She blows the blue light of succubus energy into the victim's mouth, and he coughs, eyes fluttering. He won't remember much.

Bo thinks she's all right at first, but the long flight has taken a lot out of her, and the emergency act of heroism has taken the rest. When she tries to stand, her knees don't work. The women around her seem to know something about the Fae, if they're not Fae themselves, so she goes for the truth. "I need to feed."

The blonde girl hands her a water bottle full of what smells like blood. Bo hands it back. "I'm not a vampire. I'm a succubus. I feed directly off human energy. But unlike our serial killer, I know how to do it without murdering people."

"Well," the redhead says, "there's three of us here."

The blonde looks over her shoulder, startled. "I hear sirens. The paramedics are close. If you need to do something magical, we should get you somewhere less public. If you think you can make it."

"I'll be okay," Bo says.

The oldest of the three women, who seems to be the blonde girl's mother, agrees to stay with the victim and concoct a cover story. The blonde has a rental car, and the redhead has a hotel room. Bo scrapes together enough energy to walk out of the restaurant like everything is fine.

6.

The nicest hotel in New Haven isn't anything to write home about, but Caroline and Bo seem impressed. Lydia is selfishly wondering if she'll have a chance to dig into the leftover Indian food - the waiter gave it to them, wrapped up for takeout and free of charge, as they left - before she lets a leather-clad Canadian succubus superhero suck the life force out of her. But she is trying to be mature about this. These women are treating Lydia like a valuable member of the team. She wants to live up to that.

"I'm ready," Lydia tells Bo. "For whatever you need to do."

Bo walks over to Lydia, unsteady in her stiletto-heeled boots. She cups Lydia's face in her hands and says, "How old are you?"

"Eighteen."

"How old are you really?"

"What do you want," Lydia says, "a driver's license? I've had a fake since I was fourteen anyway."

"Don't press charges," Bo says before plunging her tongue into Lydia's mouth. Lydia kisses back hungrily: it's hard to say no to a hot older woman in skintight leather. But she seems more into it than Bo does.

Bo puts her hands on Lydia's shoulders and tilts her head back. "Are you immune to magic or something?"

"I don't know," Lydia says. "I did once survive a werewolf bite without turning."

Bo fingers a lock of Lydia's hair sadly. "That's too bad. I mean - it'll be good for you in the long run, being immune, just not all that useful right now."

Bo swoons. Lydia catches her but stumbles under her weight. "Quick," Lydia shouts to Caroline, who is sitting in the armchair with her phone, clearly pretending not to watch.

Lydia holds Bo's head up while Caroline slaps her awake. Bo regains woozy consciousness, and Caroline plants a hard kiss on her lips. The energy Bo draws from her glows red-gold and smells faintly metallic. Lydia watches enviously. She would kiss either of them; she would kiss both.

7.

Caroline gulps blood, trying to regain the strength Bo sapped from her. She hasn't felt this hungry since she woke up in the hospital with her first bloodlust. She's relieved she grabbed a spare blood bag when she got out of the car. Otherwise, she might not have been able to restrain herself from pouncing on Lydia and draining her.

She still wants to pounce on Lydia, in a different way. She hasn't been this horny in... ever. It must be a succubus side effect. She tells herself it'll pass if she holds it in. Repression is a strategy that's worked well for her since she became a vampire. If she doesn't let herself feel anything, she can trust herself not to do anything stupid.

Lydia and Bo are standing around the desk, eating Indian food. They look oddly domestic, and Caroline laughs.

They both stare at her in horror.

"You're covered in blood, honey," Bo says.

Caroline goes into the bathroom to wash her face and possibly cry. She stains the disk of lavender-scented hotel soap bright red. She scrubs the blood out of her skin and hair, but her cute and responsible new pink top is ruined.

She is just going to sit on the floor of this bathroom until she stops hating her life. If that's forever, well, she's immortal.

Someone knocks. Caroline ignores it. The knocking continues. "Fine," Caroline says.

It's Lydia, holding a ruffled black top that probably cost more than all of Caroline's tops combined. "You can borrow this," Lydia says, "if you promise not to get anything on it."

"I probably shouldn't promise that."

"Okay." Lydia shrugs. "We'll just tell everyone you had a massive, embarrassing nosebleed in the middle of the Yale tour."

The sexual rush of the succubus kiss rises in Caroline's chest. She is tired of holding things in. She stands up and kisses Lydia before she can think twice about it, before the moment can pass.

8.

The bathroom door is open. Bo peeks in and sees what she expects to see: two girls making out. It's her own fault, so she doesn't try to split them up.

Those girls don't need to be involved in her rogue succubus hunt. Just because they know about the Fae doesn't mean they need to be sucked into every piece of Fae business. And from what Bo can tell, they don't really know about the Fae: they've seen a few lineages, but they don't know the larger structure, the danger of getting tied up in the politics. They came here for a university tour, and that's what they should do: go to university. Be young and free, the way Bo doesn't get to be.

She leaves a note thanking them for their help, and she slinks off into the mean streets of Connecticut to track a killer.

9.

A chill runs down Lydia's spine, and it isn't Caroline's ice-cold hands. She stops kissing and peers around the doorframe. "She's gone," Lydia says.

"Bo?" Now the chill is Caroline's hands. Vampires are cold.

"I don't think she stole anything, at least."

"Really? That's where your mind goes?" Caroline is putting on the top that Lydia lent her. The blue-black fabric turns her pale skin alabaster.

"Oh. She left a note." Thanks for the food and helping out. It's a bad parallelism. Lydia sits down on the bed, not sure whether she wants to trust a woman with atrocious grammar to combat evil.

Caroline sits down next to her. "Yup, this is how it usually goes for me. If anything really important happens, I'm stuck at home. You know how I found out I was a vampire? When I turned, the months of mind control designed to prevent me from knowing what was going on wore off. And when I asked my friends why they hadn't told me about the existence of vampires, which they all knew about, they told me they hadn't wanted me to worry. Because apparently I'm too neurotic to take care of myself."

"That sounds painfully familiar," Lydia says. "My friends - well, not - okay, my friends. They lied to me for months. My boyfriend was turning into a lizard monster and a psychopathic dead werewolf was trying to take over my mind and they... told me they were doing research for an RPG."

"Like - a video game? Seriously?"

"Like I was a fragile little girl who needed to be rescued," Lydia says.

"You're not fragile," Caroline says. "You're immune to magic. In the supernatural world, that means you're made of steel."

Lydia almost has a sarcastic answer, but she decides to let the compliment sink in instead. She's never thought of herself as tough. Smart, independent, and in control, but woman of steel - she'll embrace that. "So do you want to waste all our fabulousness on this hotel room, or do you want to go hunt down a succubus?"

10.

Caroline and Lydia have one advantage over Bo: Caroline has the car keys. She's technically not insured to drive the rental car, but under the circumstances, her mom agrees that it's okay. When she explains the situation on the phone, Mom tells her to be careful but doesn't command her to stay uninvolved. By now, Mom knows better than to try to protect Caroline. She, at least, has faith in Caroline's capacity for badassery.

"We should go to the library," Lydia says.

"You want to do research?"

"No, I want to find the killer," Lydia says with queen-bee disdain.

Caroline knows she sounds that way herself, sometimes, so she doesn't take it personally. "Oh. In the library?"

"They're probably a Yale student, right? Especially since the tour guide said midterms are next week. They're studying really hard, not sleeping enough, and they can't control themselves."

Caroline feels a surge of compassion. "Maybe she doesn't know what she is. Maybe she's scared."

"Yeah. And maybe she almost killed a guy."

"Sometimes things happen," Caroline says. "Sometimes things happen, and you can't - All I'm saying is, let's find out if it was an accident. Let's not jump to conclusions."

Lydia doesn't say anything, for or against. She's silent until she spots a parking space. Caroline knows she deserves that.

11.

Bo has canvassed every drinking establishment in New Haven, from dives to swank martini bars, and she's coming up empty. When she asks the bartenders if they've seen any unusually desperate patrons trying to pick up young men, the universal response is, "Yeah, it's midterms." She might have better luck when the night-shift staff comes in, but that's a lot of time to waste for what will probably be the same irritated response.

In an Irish pub at the edge of downtown, she buys herself a beer. The bartender grunts the same useless answer when she first asks him, but when he sees she's there to drink, he returns. "Vancouver," he says, building his small talk from the passport she showed him when he asked for ID. "I went there once. Beautiful mountains."

She forces a smile. "People always say that when they visit."

He assesses her through narrowed eyes. "You some kind of private investigator?"

"Something like that," Bo says.

"If you're looking into those meningitis cases, there are some people around here who think it's drugs. Rich parents covering it up. These kids work so hard, they'll do anything to stay up a few extra hours. But the deals don't happen in the bars: too many cops, and the underage kids can't get in since they cracked down. You're better off visiting the library."

Bo looks toward the front of the bar at the sunshine streaming through the windows. "But it's such a nice day."

The bartender shrugs. "Midterms."

12.

The library is huge, a stone and glass monument to books. Lydia and Caroline split up with a plan in place: sit down next to anyone who looks especially twitchy; flirt. Lydia remembers the eerie blue glow of Bo's eyes when she drained Caroline; she'll recognize it when she sees it again.

Lydia engages in illuminating conversations about organic chemistry, multivariable calculus, and classical Roman philosophy that make her more enthusiastic about applying to Yale but give her no leads on the succubus. On her way down the stairs, she runs into Bo. "What are you doing here?" Bo hisses.

Lydia puts on a million-watt smile. "Helping."

She goes out to the library courtyard, which is full of students on benches and in the grass, hunched over their laptops. Most of them seem quietly intent, but there's one girl, with long black bangs falling into her eyes, who stands out. She keeps looking around furtively: either she's had way too much caffeine or she's terrified she'll kill again. The girl's combination of paranoia and sadness makes Lydia think of Jackson. Lydia loses composure for a moment: if she'd known the truth in time, there's so much she could have prevented.

She joins the girl, who has spread out an orange windbreaker to sit on. "Hi, I'm Lydia, and I'm a prospective student," Lydia says in her best student council welcoming committee voice.

"I really don't have time," the girl says.

"You look like you could use a break," Lydia says. If someone did this to her, she would mace them. "What are you studying?"

"Archaeologies of Empire. It's an interesting class, but there's a lot to memorize."

Lydia leans over the girl's textbook to look at pictures of ancient Mesopotamian legal tablets, brushing a suggestive hand down the girl's arm in the process. The girl whips her face toward Lydia at superhuman speed, looking ready to devour her whole. Her eyes, brown a moment ago, have turned blue. The girl opens her mouth in a wide, pained "O" that becomes more pained as nothing happens.

"I'm immune," Lydia says. "But it's all right. I know someone who can help you control this."

The girl shakes out her mane of hair, recovering. "I know how to control this. I've been controlling it since seventh grade. But there's so much pressure here, I just - When I feed, I can stay up all night."

"It's not your fault," Lydia says hollowly. She can't relate at all: she's never had to work hard at school or at anything else. Maybe that will change for her in college. She longs for the challenge.

13.

The succubus's name is Anahid. She's beautiful in the way of a girl who would rather rely on her other strengths, who hides behind her hair so people will see a smart girl, not a pretty one. If Bo had understood her own powers from childhood, she might have turned out the same way. Bo holds Anahid in her arms for a long time, letting her cry it out. "The boy from this afternoon survived," she says. "I got there in time to revive him."

Anahid's sniffles slow down.

"You know what to do," Bo says. "Take breaks. Feed often, a little at a time. It's easier to stop when you're not so hungry."

"Are you going to report me to the Morrigan?" Anahid asks.

She's Dark Fae. That hadn't occurred to Bo, although it should have been obvious. She hasn't yet broken the habit of assuming everyone is Light, and of assuming that Light is more virtuous, more principled.

"I have to report it," Bo says. "But if you rein yourself in, I don't think you'll get in much trouble. She'll be less upset about the deaths than about how badly you covered your tracks."

Anahid grins through her tears.

"Enjoy this," Bo says. "For the next four years, you get to hang out in the human world. Not everyone's so lucky."

14.

Caroline wants to spend the evening running around New Haven with Lydia, but she has an admissions interview at the University of Connecticut at 8 A.M. She goes back to Lydia's hotel to return the top she borrowed, but Lydia insists she keep it. "I have a confession to make," Caroline says.

"You're a vampire," Lydia says. "I know."

"Well, that. And also there's no way I have the grades to get into Yale."

"Actually, my first choice is MIT," Lydia says, as if all these schools were a breeze.

"You know what? I think BU just went to the top of my list," Caroline says. She laces her fingers in Lydia's. "Let's keep in touch. See what happens."

Lydia kisses her, and it's different this time, a rush of warmth to her lips, of calm and control. Of liking someone and not fearing that her feelings will ruin her life. She can do what Damon says she needs to do, what she knows she needs to do: see the world and escape the old rivalries and mythologies of Mystic Falls.

Her mom is waiting in the car. Caroline gives Lydia a last kiss goodbye and dances to the elevator. She has a long future, and for the first time in a while, she's looking forward to it.

Fic: Armor (Mass Effect, Tali/FemShep)

2012-12-04T20:49:20Z

Femslash '12 fics are up! Well, except for two slow pinch hits. We're working on that.

I wrote two fics this year, as usual. This is my first: Mass Effect for sheeana, which gave me the excuse to obsess over the details of one of the most densely worldbuilt fandoms I've ever written in. And to write Tali, who is my favorite.

Title: Armor
Fandom: Mass Effect
Pairings & Characters: Tali'Zora vas Normandy/Female Shepard, Garrus Vakarian
Rating: NC-17 for explicit sex
Word Count: about 2200
Warnings: None standard.
Summary: All of the things Tali needs to do before she can take off her environmental suit, and a few of the things she needs to do after.
Author's Notes: Thanks to thistle90 for beta reading. This is set during ME2.

*

Aliens speak metaphorically of love as a type of illness. Their hearts ache. Fire consumes their digestive tracts. Weevils of madness infest their brains.

Of these matters, quarians speak literally. To touch another person is to court infection. The desire for intimacy is more powerful than the fear of death.

Tali is preparing to be sick. She believes she is ready, but she knows the reality of illness is worse than the memory of it. She caught a fungus on the inside of her mouth once and couldn't eat for two weeks; the ice-cold protein shakes that she survived on burned going down. Another time, a respiratory virus spread to her inner ear, and she coughed herself dizzy for weeks. She fractured her ankle during a mission on the first Normandy and it swelled like the throat of a frog after surgery, a feast for bacteria until Dr. Chakwas could order more effective antibiotics from the Migrant Fleet.

These illnesses map Tali's romantic history. Her first kiss, a plague in her mouth; her first sexual experience, a blow to knock her off balance. The moment she realized she loved Commander Shepard, a fracture in what she knew of herself, an inflammation so great that her body could not contain it, an alien wound that threatened to consume her.

Perhaps Tali is too much of an engineer to be skilled at metaphor.

She was recovering from a minor bronchial infection when she discovered Shepard's feelings for her. Tali tried to prevent Shepard from hearing about her less serious ailments because Shepard has always hovered when she's heard that Tali has been suffering from the least sniffle or itch. Tali stammered her way through their conversation, but Shepard was unflappable as ever, telling Tali how overjoyed she'd been to discover that Tali had survived the first Normandy's destruction, how frightened when the Admirals had threatened to exile her, how frustrated by her own desire to reach through Tali's suit and feel the warmth of her skin.

Tali longs for that feeling, too, enough that she has persuaded Dr. Chakwas to acquire a supply of expensive, dubiously legal prophylactic antibiotics from the Fleet. The drugs cost so much of Tali's stipend that she barely has enough for food. Garrus, who has always shared meals with her, says he doesn't mind picking up the slack. He even comes back from their latest trip to Omega with a box of turian immunity-boosting tea. "It's so strong that some people develop autoimmune conditions when they use it for too long a time," Garrus says, the gleeful nuance of his voice revealing his delight in the irony of this endorsement.

"An immune system so robust that it attacks healthy tissue," Tali says. "That sounds impossibly alien."

Garrus laughs. "Don't drink it with dinner. The shopkeeper told me it tastes like old socks. I believe he meant that as an endorsement."

"Turians," Tali teases. "If it's not awful, you're not suffering enough."

Garrus digs through his sack of purchases and pulls out a bunch of reddish taproots, holding them by their greens so they dangle in Tali's face. "Real, live naga roots. They might have grown in actual soil. And they're not awful at all. Help me peel them."

Tali never tasted soil-grown food until her pilgrimage. There is a richness to plants that have tasted real water and sunlight, that were once truly alive. For a short time, after she met her first aliens, she believed that most quarians were the same way: hothouse flowers that could never bloom like other species. Since then, she's met enough complacent, dull aliens on planetary colonies to convince her that soil and sunshine affect flavor more than mental constitution.

Before Garrus eats, he mumbles a few ritual words, the remains of an ancient prayer distorted into a near-meaningless string of syllables. Before Tali eats, she swallows an antimicrobial capsule to fight the turian organisms that might be clinging to her meal and sprays an antibiotic up her nose to discourage anything that might fly in when she raises her face mask. The geth taught quarians that prevention works better than prayer.

To prevent love from destroying her, Tali researches medicines and folk remedies from across the Milky Way. She pesters Dr. Chakwas with questions. She builds an armor around her immune system and trains it to kill on sight. Shepard has taught her how to be a soldier, and she will honor that gift by cultivating an army inside herself.

She stops Shepard in a corridor of the Normandy between missions. Shepard seems exhausted: every member of the crew has some old vendetta or family obligation to resolve, and Shepard, endlessly noble, helps with every request. She tells Tali it's a way to encourage loyalty in the crew. "And to make yourself feel loyal to them," Tali adds. She hopes Shepard doesn't detect the note of jealousy in her voice. She wants Shepard to value her above the rest of the crew, even though she knows it's childish.

"We're close to finding the Reapers," Shepard says. "Closer than I've told the crew."

"But you're telling me." Tali smiles under her mask. Quarians don't communicate much through their faces, but a smile is an automatic reaction. As children, quarians learn to smile in their shoulders and wrists, in the angle of their heads, to let their whole bodies radiate joy. "Thank you, Shepard."

"I'm telling you because you and I don't have much time." Shepard lunges forward as if to kiss Tali, then pulls herself back, as if she fears contaminating Tali even through her suit. Or as if she fears that Tali will feel nothing. Quarian suits can be tuned to allow touch sensitivity, so much that the wearer can feel air and water on her skin as if naked. Aliens don't understand this even when they know it, as Shepard does: all they see is a mask.

Tali pulls Shepard into her arms, feeling Shepard's breasts press into her chest, curving her hands over Shepard's hips. She can't feel Shepard's warm breath through her mask, but she can hear its soft rhythm. "I've been taking precautions," Tali says. "I've built up my defenses sufficiently for - for whatever you would like to do."

"For whatever I would like to do?" Shepard runs her hand down Tali's sleeve and laces her fingers in Tali's. It's a human gesture of affection. They call it holding hands. Shepard's two extra fingers hang off the end of their joined fist.

As they walk to Shepard's quarters, Shepard says, "Dr. Solus helped me build an antimicrobial energy field around my bed. It's a little glitchy, but it should hold up."

"You told Dr. Solus about us? He doesn't exactly seem trustworthy."

"He has no reason to betray us," Shepard says, hinting at a certainty she's not at liberty to explain. "And he loves secret research assignments."

In Shepard's cabin, Shepard guides Tali to the bed. "I'll activate the field." She steps back, outside the field while Tali sits inside, feet dangling off the bed so she doesn't track the blankets with her boots. "Is it all right if I watch while you take your suit off? I've waited for this more than anything."

"Is all this just an elaborate plot to see a naked quarian?" Tali teases.

"You know I wouldn't break your heart like that," Shepard says.

Tali wasn't sure before, but she knows now. She takes off her helmet first, the clasps hissing as the seals break. She tugs the elastic band from her braid and shakes her hair free, letting it flow to her shoulders the way all quarians used to as a show of pride and status, now vainly imitated in the colorful cloths they attach to their helmets. She unbuckles her wrist guards so she can take off her gloves, then the locks that connect her chest piece to her abdominal plate. She fills her lungs with sweet air: the filter on her mask doesn't change its flavor, and her chest piece doesn't constrain her respiration, but breathing feels freer without them. She almost forgets to take off her boots and leggings, almost forgets that the best is yet to come.

Shepard steps through the energy field. It flashes, a dome of red light, until Shepard shuts the alarm off. Even though so much of her body is always exposed, she seems more demure about undressing than Tali. She peels off her off-duty jumpsuit like the air might melt her skin.

"Don't be afraid," Tali says, reaching out to touch Shepard's cheek, shivering at the intimacy of touch.

"I guess when everyone walks around in a full-body suit, you don't think as much about your imperfections," Shepard says.

"I don't have any other humans to compare you to," Tali says. "And I've seen your face, so I know you're beautiful."

Shepard kisses Tali so hard she almost knocks Tali onto her back. She kisses like kissing is her birthright, like she has infinite kisses to give away, like they are as cheap as empty space. Quarian literature is full of tales about the lengths people will go to for a single kiss and the prices they pay afterward. Tali puts those stories out of her mind and kisses greedily.

Tali kneads Shepard's breasts, islands of softness rising from the hard muscle and scar tissue of Shepard's chest. She has a soldier's body, broad and solid even for a human. Shepard clutches at Tali's hair, nipping her neck with sharp little teeth, grinding a little against Tali's hip. She's wet already, painting a cool streak on Tali's skin.

Tali freezes for a moment, remembering the barriers and disposable gloves she packed her pockets with, still stuffed into suit parts now disassembled and inside-out on Shepard's floor. Tali finds a legging and snaps open the pocket, awash with relief until she realizes she's only brought three-fingered gloves. Shepard picks one up and forces it on, squeezing two slim human fingers into holes meant for a single thick quarian one. She makes a "V" with her paired fingers, looks at the odd gesture, and laughs.

"I think it'll work, after all," Tali says.

"It's a reference to an old human story," Shepard explains. "From before space travel, predicting what aliens would be like."

"Were the predictions terribly inaccurate?"

"Not in the big picture. We guessed that the galaxy would be full of dangers and conflicts, but that sentient species would work together to overcome them." Shepard taps the tip of Tali's ear. "And we knew you'd have funny ears."

"You're the ones with the funny ears," Tali says. She flicks one of the big, round lobes with her tongue, then sucks harder. Shepard sighs with pleasure. Tali rolls Shepard gently onto her back and plunges her tongue into Shepard's mouth, giddy at the taste of her lips. She bows her head down to kiss between Shepherd's breasts and down her firm belly.

Human women have two lips of flesh where quarians have keratin ridges. They've evolved softness and sensitivity instead of a protective gate. Beyond those, Shepard is reassuringly like a quarian: the swollen red knot of her clitoris, the slick membrane of her vagina that yields as Tali teases her fingers inside. Shepard rides Tali's fingers, squeezing around them as if to wring all possible pleasure out of them, arching upward to press her clit against Tali's thumb. Her orgasm is a universal language of screams and shudders.

Shepard goes still, her eyes half closed, her smile far away. Tali rests her head on Shepard's chest. Shepard embraces her and rolls so they are lying on their sides, face to face. She kisses the tip of Tali's nose. "How are you feeling?" Shepard asks.

Tali realizes it's an inquiry into her health. She covers her irritation at that by saying, "Loved."

Shepard kisses Tali's lips, then her neck and breasts, so delicately that it tickles. "I'm not made of glass," Tali says.

Shepard looks up at her. "No, you're one of the toughest people I know." She rakes her fingernails down Tali's back and sucks hard on Tali's nipple. The sting makes Tali feel bright and alive. She's ready for Shepard to make her come, but she wants to wait, to immerse herself in Shepard's touch.

Shepard tests Tali's clit with a finger, and Tali's hips jerk up forcefully, beyond her control. Shepard takes a moment to adjust - the barrier and the ridges must both be more than she's used to - but when her tongue strokes Tali's clit, Tali could mistake her for an expert. Tali comes fast and roughly.

She stays in Shepard's arms for a few minutes but knows she needs to go scrub herself down and put antibiotic salve on her scratched-up back. As Tali puts her environmental suit back on, Shepard watches as intensely as when she took it off, but more gravely. It's as if, watching her disappear into the suit, Shepard feels she is losing her.

"What's wrong?" Tali says.

"It might be a suicide mission," Shepard says. "I think we can beat the Reapers, but I'm not sure we can fly out the other side."

"I think we'll do fine," Tali says. She fastens her helmet with a comforting pop of airtight suction. "I think we're tougher than we look."

Dear author, please send werepony.

2012-10-07T22:58:41Z

All of the femslash12 matches are matched and assignments are sent! And marathon day is over for another year.

Here is my Dear Author letter, before I forget.

Dear femslash12 author,

As always, I know who you are! No pressure.

I'll start with my requests and move on to more general stuff at the end.

The Good Wife (Alicia/Kalinda):
No matter what happens on the show, I am convinced that Alicia and Kalinda belong together. I am a big fan of Eli and love watching Alicia interact with her kids. Please deal delicately with their other love interests: do get them out of the way, but don't bash.

Warehouse 13 (Myka/Claudia, Claudia/Leena, Jane Lattimer/Mrs. Jinks)
I live in an imaginary world where this show is about Claudia, Steve, and Artie. I would love fic that explores Claudia's relationships with the rest of the Warehouse team, and how one relationship turning romantic/sexual affects all the others. As for Mrs. Lattimer/Mrs. Jinks, well, W13 cast all of my '90s femslash heroes as people's moms. Kate Mulgrew + Laura Innes = crackfic option.

Gymnastics RPF: Gabrielle Douglas/Jordyn Wieber, Gabrielle Douglas/McKayla Maroney, Jordyn Wieber/McKayla Maroney, Gabrielle Douglas/Aliya Mustafina, Aliya Mustafina/Ksenia Afanasieva
I love the contrasting personalities at the top of the sport and how they all interacted at the Olympics and afterward. Sexual curiosity and friendly experimentation is the vibe I see here - pining or Forever Love doesn't really strike me as in character. Athletes are very aware of their bodies, so play with that.

Teen Wolf (TV show): Allison Argent/Lydia Martin
I am protectively OTP-ish about these two. I want them to say to hell with all those angsty boys and go have an adventure of their own. Like, Lydia is the brains, Allison is the muscle, together they fight monsters.

Diablo III: Barbarian/Enchantress, Demon Hunter/Enchantress
For two weeks in late May and early June, I ate, slept, and played Diablo III. In my mind, my female player characters were all sneaking back to Tristram to snuggle with the Enchantress. Try to give the player characters more depth than they have in the game.

Some general notes:

No babies, no little kids, no pregnancy. This is very nearly a bulletproof squick.

If you want to write me some hot porn, that would be great. I am a big fan of NC-17 femslash and don't feel there is enough of it. Of course, if you don't feel comfortable, don't feel pressured. You can get a lot of mileage out of a kiss.

I prefer stories where the love/desire is requited and followed through upon. Angsty longing from afar is not really my bag.

Be kind to male friends and family. In most cases, I like those characters, and man-bashing will really put me out of a story.

I love unusual structures and stories that play with POV and tense.

Even if you don't do an AU, I often like subtle sci-fi or fantasy elements in RPF and realistic fandoms. And little moments of mundane realism in SFF fandoms.

Do not like: high school AUs, zombies, Bruce Springsteen, non-con, rigid gender roles, "five things" stories, faux-clever cameos from other fandoms, Evan Lysacek.

Do like: superhero AUs, unicorns, R.E.M., sex toys, genderplay, road trips, ambiguity, dialogue, Muppets.

But the most important thing is, I'll be incredibly excited about and grateful for whatever you write for me. Thank you so much.

Much love,
Mosca

Femslash '12 pre-poll time!

2012-08-23T02:49:46Z

We are finally getting the ball rolling on femslash12. As always, it starts with a pre-poll, where you can nominate fandoms for the list. You can do that here.

We especially need input on anime and comics fandoms.

Fic: Another Thing Coming Undone (Hunger Games Trilogy, Haymitch)

2012-08-19T19:13:35Z

Title: Another Thing Coming Undone
Fandom: Hunger Games Trilogy (books)
Pairing/Characters: Haymitch Abernathy, Finnick Odair, Effie Trinket. Sort of Haymitch/Finnick and Haymitch/OMC.
Rating: R; see content notes.
Content notes: Non-explicit underage sex, including offstage sex between teenagers and men in their twenties and thirties. Consensual kissing between a sixteen-year-old and a man in his thirties. Violence similar to that in the books. Long-term alcohol abuse, because it's Haymitch.
Summary: A queer history of Haymitch Abernathy in five sections, twenty-five Games, a revolution, and hundreds of gallons of liquor.
Word count: about 7,500.
Disclaimers: The Hunger Games trilogy is the intellectual property of Suzanne Collins. This original work of fan fiction is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License; attribution should include a link to this post. This story is a labor of love, not money, so it's protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976.
Notes: Thanks to thistle90 for beta reading and fox1013 for cheerleading. Title is from "Runaway" by The National.

1.

Nine days after Haymitch won the 50th Annual Hunger Games, the doctors were confident enough that his insides would stay inside, and they released him from the hospital. On the tenth day, someone sent a girl to his room. She had platinum bangs and breasts so round they were surreal. It seemed like she'd been instructed to laugh at everything he said. "I'm sorry," he told her. "Whoever sent you, they had the wrong idea."

She bounced uninvited into his lap and stroked his face, as if invading his personal space might change his mind. "Do you have some kind of moral objection?" the girl purred. "I've heard that about people from the outlying districts. That they're waiting for true love, or the word of God."

The arena had relieved Haymitch of any and all moral convictions, not that he'd held many to begin with. "No, you're... not really my type. And I have a sweetheart back home."

All of these statements were true. They were in the spirit of everything he'd said in interviews: don't lie, just give them the version you know they want to hear. His stylist, Tigris, had given him that advice as she'd fixed him up for television. The strategy had served him well enough to earn him a 9 rating going into the arena and a cadre of giggling fans who held up signs proclaiming themselves "Hay's Bitches" and bought him lifesaving parachutes.

And it had covered up the fact that girls, generally, weren't his type. Especially not girls like this one, brimming over the top with curves and giggles and girlishness. Before he'd been old enough to know what it meant, he'd sat along the side of the road as the miners marched by, admiring their rough hands, the sweat that ran down their muscled shoulders, the hypnotic lowness of their voices. No one had ever told him outright he wasn't supposed to see beauty in haggard, run-down miners, but it was what he saw, and he couldn't change it.

Ma had rented out the spare bedroom when he was twelve and his brother Ebben was ten. She'd told the women in town it was for the extra money, but it was a white lie: even after Pa had died of Miner's Lungs, the Abernathys had kept food on the table. Grandma had taught Ma how to make maple rum, tapping trees in the first weeks of spring, reducing the sap in huge kettles, and distilling the fermented syrup into sweet, potent spirits. In spring and summer, Ma took Haymitch and Ebben out to gather berries and crab apples from the woods, to be crushed with a wooden press and made into wine or brandy. Ma traded the liquor at the Hob for game and goat's milk, enough to keep Haymitch and Ebben strong and pink-cheeked. more so than the kids who subsisted on the miners' salaries of living fathers.

But the truth was, Ma needed a man around the house besides Haymitch. Ebben's body was growing big, but his mind had fallen behind. By his tenth birthday it was clear it would never catch up. He was prone to violent fits, to running naked through the neighborhood when he wriggled from Ma's arms as she tried to bathe or dress him. One day at the Hob, Ebben wrestled himself free of Haymitch. Ebben charged at a stall selling sweet potato cakes, stuffing two into his mouth and striking the poor girl in the face when she tried to prevent him from eating more. Haymitch watched the blood gush from the girl's nose, and he froze in place, helpless.

So Ma took in Natty Dunlop as a boarder and handyman. The Dunlops were a big family - Natty was somewhere in the middle of a brood of eight - and a cruel one, always hungry, the kids showing up to school with bruised arms and split lips. If Natty used his salary to pay rent to Ma, it didn't go to his shitbag father. With food in his belly, he became broad-chested and handsome, with steel gray eyes set deep into his face and a smile like maple rum, sweet and intoxicating, promising the ruin of anyone who tasted it.

When Haymitch had been fourteen, Natty had stood in the door of the distillery shed, all shadow, and told Haymitch, "You grew up nice, didn't you?" In that moment, Haymitch had gone from hopelessly infatuated to fully in love, and had stolen his first kiss without a second thought.

Haymitch's escort, Volumnia, and his stylist, Tigris, had cautioned him to keep all of this quiet from the public. Not all of it: Haymitch could talk about his dead father and slow-minded brother as much as he liked. But the family business of illegal spirits and the older man who'd been sharing his bed since he was barely out of school - those stories didn't fit with the image they were trying to create.

So the Capitol had sent him a girl. Before he'd won, Haymitch would have been naive enough, and resigned enough to his own death, to afford her a little kindness. Now, he had forty-seven kids' blood on his hands and the dark assurance that the Capitol would have to put up with him no matter how he behaved. He left the girl to sleep on the couch and went to bed with a bottle of bourbon that Tigris had smuggled him. He drank himself into oblivion, then unconsciousness too deep for nightmares.

The next evening, after a day of televised smiles with important people and long banquets where Haymitch couldn't touch the wine, someone sent another girl. This one was slight and brown-skinned, and instead of pawing him and giggling, she asked him admiringly about his victory at the Games. He answered her in short sentences. The arena was the last thing he wanted to think about. He'd outlasted the others because he'd seen how the Games worked, known what had been expected of him and defied it. His mentor, Mags - assigned from District Four, because no one from Twelve had ever won - had urged him and Maysilee to learn edible plants and camouflage, and they'd built those into a defensive game. When everyone else had battled for supplies at the cornucopia, they'd dashed to the highest ground and dug a burrow, a look-out point where he could see most of the rest of the arena but remain invisible to their enemies. The careers seemed to forget about them, while they stayed strong on wild onions, blackberries, and (pride swallowed) colonies of crunchy wood grubs. And thin, sweet maple syrup, after the fourth day, when some wise-ass from back home parachuted Haymitch a spile and a kettle. In the real world, it would have been too late in the season for sap. Haymitch wondered if the Gamemakers even knew that.

This second-night girl, whose name was Iphigineia Trinket, said she wanted to hear everything, all the secrets they didn't show on TV. This unnervingly clean girl whose name would never be entered for a Games draw. "The big secret?" Haymitch began. "I spent most of the day bored out of my mind. Couldn't make a sound, couldn't leave my hiding place, no work to do, not even a book to read. Maysilee and I ran out of things to say to each other after day two. The only way to win was to make terrible television. That's why they're so mad I won."

"Nobody's mad you won," Iphigineia said, leaning in, placing a hand on his knee. "People admire you. Coming from where you come from, first in your District to win. It seems like the tributes from One and Two always win, and they're so smug, it's boring. Watching them all pick each other off while you sat in your hole eating bugs - it was funny after a while."

Haymitch couldn't help but smile. "That's me. First comedy winner of the Hunger Games."

Iphigineia studied him as if he'd transformed into a talking dog, then seemed to catch herself. "I keep forgetting. You weren't watching, because you were in the Games. After the first few days, they gave you two your own theme song. This twangy, silly tune. They'd show footage of all the other tributes beating the stuffing out of each other, and then they'd cut to you, with your music, peaceful and alone. And then it started looking like you were going to win, just by not starving to death and not getting involved, and then it stopped being funny. It started looking brave."

Haymitch didn't see what was brave about it. He didn't know any other way to be. He'd never been the type to see the point in getting into it with people. It was what Ma and Grandma had always taught him: keep to yourself, and you'll get by just fine.

Iphigineia took his silence the wrong way. "You don't like me, do you?"

Haymitch shrugged. "I think you're nice enough." He did, in fact. He suspected that Volumnia had auditioned the girls more carefully this time around.

"But you're not exactly waiting for me to kiss you."

Haymitch scanned the room, hoping Tigris had smuggled him another bottle. With a little courage in his blood, maybe he could force himself to kiss her. Just enough of a kiss so they'd have one for TV. It didn't seem fair to her, though, if she saw him having to take a drink before he was willing to touch her. "I thought we were just talking," was the gentlest thing he could think of to say.

"And that's all you want to do," Iphigineia said. She didn't sound betrayed or disappointed. More like she would be surprised if he told her otherwise. "Are you a lily?"

He hated not being allowed to answer that question. He froze, unable to come up with an answer that was neither a lie nor an infraction.

"I have loads of friends who are," she said proudly. "They were hoping you were. They said they could read it all over you. All that stuff about a sweetheart back home, but no name and no pronouns."

"And what do you think?"

"I think I entered the contest that got me here. Win a romantic night with Haymitch Abernathy, victor of the fiftieth Hunger Games. And I entered it mostly expecting we would just talk." She was pleased with herself. People in the Capitol loved when they were right.

"I wouldn't mind if you spread the rumor around," Haymitch said.

They got drunk together in his bed. She told him about her life in the Capitol, the charmless box of an apartment where she grew up, the university where she was studying international history. "They censor the foreign Web," she said, "but in orientation, someone teaches you how to hack through it. The rest of the world, it's beautiful. I mean, in the videos I've seen." She drank deep from the bottle of white liquor that they'd almost polished off. "Maybe someday I'll have enough money to bribe someone for a passport. And then I'm never coming back."

He kissed her cheek, like he was kissing her goodbye, like he was wishing her a safe journey.

In the morning, Iphigineia was gone, and Volumnia was shaking Haymitch awake frantically. "There's been an emergency!" Too cowardly to tell him more, she turned the TV on instead. It was showing footage of District Twelve, of a house on fire, of his house. "His mother, Joyceline, his brother, Ebben, and a family friend, Nathaniel Dunlop, are all reported dead. We offer our deepest condolences to the victor for this terrible tragedy."

Haymitch said nothing. He didn't cry, and he didn't scream. The table was set for breakfast, and he filled his coffee cup with what was left of the previous night's liquor. The Capitol had made it clear how they played their game: he would love who they told him to, or they would kill everyone he loved. The only solution was to numb his heart and mind, to never feel anything again.

2.

Back in District Twelve, Haymitch moved with his grandmother to the Victors' Village, a ghost town encased in shrink wrap, dusty under the assumption that a victor like him would never exist. Grandma was his only remaining relative, and the living embodiment of the flaws in the Capitol's plan. She'd been out playing cards with the other old ladies when the fire caught. It had been declared an accident, of course. It's not hard to set fire to a still, especially an illegal one built from spare parts. But no one in District Twelve believed that ruling.

Grandma picked the lock on one of the vacant houses in the Victors' Village, and directed Haymitch while he built a new still. He couldn't go out tapping trees or gathering fruit anymore, so he paid the neighbor children to do it for him. In fact, he had nothing to do but sit in his fancy house and get drunk. Grandma kept him clean and fed but steered clear of him otherwise.

He made the mistake of getting a little attached to the two tributes reaped for the fifty-first Games. Both were miners' kids, dull-eyed and bone-thin, hopeless. He taught them to run for the margins, to keep quiet, to survive. The boy ignored him and got sliced in half at the cornucopia in the first five minutes. The girl tried harder, but the game makers dropped the temperature to freezing in the middle of the night, and she died of exposure. When her cannon sounded, Haymitch drank until he blacked out.

In the years after that, Haymitch mentored in a whiskey haze. He cultivated a stench and a nasty sneer so the tributes would keep their distance. Like most men in District Twelve, he was old by twenty-five.

The evening before the sixtieth annual Hunger Games began, as Haymitch sat in the living room of the District Twelve suite and steeled himself for the imminent deaths of two nice kids who didn't have a prayer, the Capitol sent him a boy. A young man, really, the same age as Haymitch, but life in the Capitol put fewer lines in a man's face, and they had surgery to take the lines right back out. His name was Amintor, and he wore his bright aquamarine hair in a stiff crown of inverted icicles. He said little, but he seemed willing, even enthusiastic, as he took off his clothes. The hair around his cock was the same aquamarine as the hair on his head.

Haymitch knew he was being trapped, or at least bribed. But it was nice to be touched. He took the sex he'd been given and refused to think about what he'd be asked to do in return.

The boy from District Twelve died on the first day of the Games, but the girl, Amirelle, had joined up with two other bright little things from the outlying districts, so Haymitch was still tuning in on the third day. Tigris sat with him, appeasing him with liquor. Tigris had gotten strange over the past few years, directing the surgeons to cut her nose down to a flat plane, filing her fingernails to knife points. The tributes had complained to Haymitch that she made them uncomfortable. But when he ordered up a case of good brandy, she joined him rather than berating him, and for that he liked her.

On the screen, the leader of Amirelle's tribe, a girl from District Eight named Cecelia, used river reeds to knit nets out of long blades of grass. Cecelia worked dexterously despite wearing a thick pair of leather gloves. In the background, a comical banjo-and-flute tune played: Haymitch's theme song. The cameras cut to a brawl between the boys from One and Four, which culminated in One bashing Four's brains to mush on a rock. The tribute from One limped toward the tribe's hideout, which Cecelia and Amirelle had camouflaged with cunningly woven fern fronds and moss. In a flash, a net seemed to leap out of the shelter. The boy shook it off casually, but the grass stuck to his skin, then began eating through it like acid. He fell to the ground, first yelling, then gasping as his allergic reaction to the poisonous grass sealed his throat. When he'd stopped moving, Cecelia crept out and tore the undamaged portion of the net away from him with a small knife, careful to touch it only with her gloves. Banjos and flutes accompanied her, along with the sound of cannons. "They're playing your song," Tigris said, raising her glass.

"Where'd she get the supplies?" Haymitch asked. He'd blacked himself out on the first night and missed some of the action.

"They scattered them this year, deep in the woods - all trash at the cornucopia, and the treasure buried under trees. Your girl ran right out to the margins and dug up a pack while she was looking for roots to eat. And then another, and another. She hooked up with those other two girls when they tried to fight her for supplies, and brokered an alliance instead. They have an arsenal squirreled away back there. But they figured out the poisonous grass, so they're using the nets. Those girls are too small and too untrained to be much good with conventional weapons. Amirelle came in with a 5 rating. That twelve-year-old from Nine came in with a 3."

"And there they are, taking down careers," Haymitch said. The cameras were still trained on the three little girls. Cecelia had wrapped a weather-proof blanket around herself, and she was weeping, muttering apologies for the life she'd taken. "Poor kid, what if she wins?"

Tigris raised her glass. "I'm sure you'll have no trouble teaching her how to drink."

The girls' alliance outlasted all the rest with a combination of defensive strategy and cleverly deployed poison. When it was just the three of them left, Amirelle and the girl from Nine went to sleep while Cecelia kept watch. After they'd drifted off, Cecelia blanketed them with the deadly nets, humming a lullaby. She'd gone around the bend. Feeling like he'd been shown a mirror, Haymitch wept.

3.

Haymitch's grandmother died the winter before the sixty-seventh Games. She fell asleep in front of the fire with a half-full mug of crab-apple brandy in her lap. Haymitch missed her but felt little grief. Death was cheap; the best a person could hope for was to go out warm and safe, smiling. He'd messed up everyone else's chances for that, but at least he'd protected her.

District Twelve's tributes were particularly hopeless that year. Both were seventeen and had thrown their lives away for the tesserae. At first, Haymitch thought they were ignoring his advice because they were stubborn, but he realized they were ready to die, almost excited for it. Sure enough, they both committed suicide by cornucopia in the first five minutes, relieving him of the burden of watching the rest of the massacre. Not that he had long to wait: the sixty-seventh Games bled themselves dry in eight hours, an insult to the sponsors. A pig-faced boy from District Two was crowned the victor, but he died of his injuries less than a day later. To appease the nation, a parade of notable past victors was assembled to tour the districts in his stead. There was no question that Haymitch, first and only District Twelve victor, anti-hero of the Quarter Quell, would be among them.

Two extra weeks of having to wake up before noon and remember to put on pants. Haymitch consoled himself by proving that his heightened tolerance to the effects of alcohol wasn't quite enough to prevent him from drinking until he passed out in the empty bathtub, fully dressed except for his pants, which he'd intentionally neglected to wear.

He expected to wake up to Tigris or Volumnia standing over him with mock outrage, but instead, a fire-haired boy was shaking him awake. "Thought they'd already sent me my whore for the year," Haymitch grumbled. He was far too hung-over for sex.

"They sent me to fetch you for the victors' banquet," the boy said.

"Tell 'em I'm sick. Tell 'em I'm dead. They'll be thrilled to be rid of me. Maybe they'll throw an extra banquet in my honor."

"If I have to go fake a smile, then so do you," the boy said. As Haymitch's vision cleared, he identified his rescuer. He was a recent victor from one of the inner districts, Finland O'Hare, something like that.

Haymitch let Finland drag him out of the tub and splash cold water on his face. He didn't even resist when Finland turned on the shower, stripped him down, and threw him under the spray. But when the boy took off his own clothes and jumped in with him, Haymitch cried out, "Now, Finland -"

"Finnick," Finnick corrected him, gently.

"You said you weren't a whore."

"No," Finnick said. "I said I was sent to fetch you. Effie told me you were an old friend, and that I might be the most effective."

"I don't know an Effie."

"She's the new District Four escort," Finnick explained. "She said she met you right after you won your Games."

"I met a lot of people then." Sometimes, Haymitch hated the way liquor had dulled his memory - not very often, but when he did, the hatred burned.

"Well, I'll have to reintroduce you at the banquet." Finnick made a bold move for the soap, and Haymitch didn't stop him. It smelled like pine trees and seawater, and now so did both of them. The hot water and Finnick's touch were scrubbing out Haymitch's foggy mind as much as his skin. They were doing a good job of clearing up Haymitch's whiskey dick, too. Before Haymitch could sort out his feelings about that, Finnick ran a soapy hand down his chest and kissed him softly.

Haymitch let the kiss go on for a few moments, and then his mind was too clear to continue. "How old are you, Finland?"

"Sixteen," Finnick said, like that was very old.

"How old do you think I am?"

Finnick paused, probably calculating in his head. "Thirty-three?"

"And how many times older than you does that make me?"

"Two point -" Finnick dropped his hands away from Haymitch's chest. "Something. I'm not that good at math."

"Close enough."

The water plastered Finnick's red curls to his face. He looked like an angel in a mural in a ballroom in the Capitol. "You wouldn't be the oldest person to fuck me."

"But surely the most repulsive."

Finnick looked him over. "Not by a mile." Before Haymitch could ask what the Capitol had done to him, Finnick added, "I've been kind of passed around since I won. People will pay a lot for a night with the heartthrob of the Hunger Games."

"I'm sorry," was all Haymitch could think of to say.

"Don't be. It's even fun sometimes." Finnick stopped for another long, intrusive, oddly flattering stare at him. "And it's not half as bad as what they did to you."

"I did this to myself."

"Neither of us believes that," Finnick said. He kissed Haymitch again. There was nothing sexual about it this time: although their lips were touching, it was more like an embrace between brothers.

Finnick guided Haymitch through shaving, teeth-brushing, and finding a wearable pair of pants. He neither asked for nor offered anything more than hygiene. Haymitch arrived at the banquet almost presentable and barely late. Finnick sat with him, and so did Cecelia, who'd kept up correspondence with him since her victory. Among the Capitol representatives, she was gracious and well-behaved, but when given the choice, she'd whisper snide commentary to Haymitch. Her strategy for life after the Games was the same as during them: she disappeared from sight and kept her claws sharp.

Midway through the salad course, a woman decked out in full Capitol ridiculousness tapped Finnick on the shoulder. "Come on. There are some people who'd like to meet you."

"I'm getting to know Haymitch Abernathy, like you encouraged me to do," Finnick replied, smooth as a dagger across the throat. "In fact, he told me he'd been hoping I'd introduce you, since he doesn't remember you at all, Effie."

Playing Finnick's game, Haymitch shook her hand with inappropriate vigor. Effie had bleached her skin to a pinkish white and sculpted her hair into a tower of lavender curls, but he recognized her serious blue eyes and narrow nose. "Good to see you again after all this time, Iphigeneia," he said. He stifled a burp: last night's whiskey and today's hors d'oeuvres were warring in his stomach, and the whiskey seemed to be winning.

"I hope you're enjoying yourself," she said with a cold, terse smile.

"I never would have expected to see you here, Iphigeneia." As Haymitch repeated her name, he watched Finnick grin vengefully. "I would have thought you'd have gotten to La Paz or Tianjin by now."

"Serving as an escort for the Games provides plenty of opportunities for travel. Most new escorts are assigned to the outlying districts, but I was lucky enough to be assigned to Four." Her tone was flat and cold. Haymitch had begun the conversation wondering what the Capitol had done to deaden her spirit, but now he suspected that their efforts had failed. Effie had painted over her soul until it was invisible, and that was how she was keeping it alive.

Haymitch tried to figure out how to hint to her that he understood, but the whiskey won the war for dominance of his stomach, and in its victory dance, hurled the remains of its conquered victims all over Effie's shoes.

He followed her to the ladies' room to help her clean herself up. At the door to the washroom, she sized him up and said, "I guess you're a lady as much as you're anything."

Effie had a bottle of cleaning spray in her handbag, and her shoes were good as new in seconds. "I'd like you to keep an eye on Finnick for me. He reminds me a bit too much of you."

"Most of the time, I hardly manage to keep an eye on myself," Haymitch said.

She scrutinized him again. He was starting to believe that her judgmental eye was a form of kindness. She said, "You're here, aren't you? With what you've been put through, I'm inclined to think someone doesn't want you to be. But you're a survivor, as you've always been."

Haymitch had stopped fearing that the Capitol was out to get him long ago. He'd assumed they'd forgotten about him and moved on to more telegenic, less self-destructive victors. But the Capitol, like Effie, never forgot anything, even when it seemed to disappear. That was what she was warning him to do: keep his memory sharp. He coded a way of letting her know he'd gotten the message. "You're a damn good survivor, too."

"I learn from the best," Effie said. She dabbed at her spotless shoes one last time. "And so should Finnick. Say you'll look after him."

"I'll do what I can," Haymitch promised, hoping that it was more than nothing.

4.

Haymitch wasn't made to live underground. Even if he hadn't won the Games, he would have earned his bread by moonshine, not by mining. The DTs would have gone so much easier if only he could breathe some fresh air. Lying in a dark concrete room, shaking and vomiting, hallucinating sword-beaked birds with Maysilee and Cecelia's faces - how again was this better for him than the perpetual balm of liquor?

People in District Thirteen liked to tell him that things were happening for his own good, and he liked shouting back that he was forty-one goddamn years old and could be as bad for himself as he wanted to be. Thirteen was all rules and conformity, all of what he resented most about the Capitol, and none of what he didn't mind. If this was the new world order, well, Haymitch had to seriously consider leaving the world. He knew he wouldn't go through with it, though. His survival instinct always kicked in when it was least convenient.

He lay on his flat, gray mattress - on his side, so he wouldn't choke on his own stomach acid - and tried not to dream. Under his pillow, he'd tucked a weapon he'd made from a toothbrush and a shaving razor, but it couldn't protect him from his imagination. The killer birds became circling dire crows, the muttations invented to eat corpses that needed to disappear without a trace. Dire crows devoured human flesh down to the bones, and then they ate the bones. They made people cease to exist.

Before Haymitch was fully awake, he found himself holding his toothbrush knife to a visitor's throat. "Haymitch. Haymitch. I don't know what that is, but put it down."

The familiar voice brought Haymitch back to his senses. "Finland! Forget it, I'm still not going to fuck you."

Finnick grinned puckishly and held up his forearm, printed with his tasks for the day. "It doesn't say anything here about sex. Only that I'm to bring your lunch and stay until you've eaten it. Or until 14:00, when I have permission to go to target practice and abandon you to your own filth."

Haymitch's stomach made a surprisingly optimistic noise. "I guess I could eat. No guaranteeing I'll keep it down."

"Wait 'til you see what it is. You might change your mind." Finnick uncovered Haymitch's tray, revealing a bowl of steaming gray stew. "Turnips and... glop. And bread."

Haymitch accepted the meal and dipped his bread into his glop. As usual, the food was bland but nourishing. Since his stomach was empty but settled, he welcomed the inoffensive mush. "District Thirteen sure is good at taking the fun out of dinner," Haymitch said. "And everything else. You sure you want to go down fighting for this?"

"I don't think there's any turning back from it now," Finnick replied. "And I think change is worthwhile. Any change. Just the possibility of something other than the way things are."

Haymitch nodded. He couldn't disagree with either point. Also, lunch had come with a mug of tea, and it seemed to contain herbs that eased his digestion and took the edge off his temper. After a week of agony, his benevolent overlords had offered relief.

But something made his body retaliate: a hidden ingredient in the tea or the stew, or a desperate plea from his system to stop cleansing it and return to the slow, comforting poison of alcohol. Haymitch's hands began to shake, and then his body, while pain seared from his gut to the tips of his fingers and toes. When the attack ebbed, he discovered that Finnick was holding him, stroking his hair and repeating that it would be all right. "At least I didn't hurl it back up this time," Haymitch joked weakly.

Finnick kissed Haymitch's forehead as if mistaking him for someone else. Haymitch wondered how many times Finnick had done this for Annie when she'd been wracked with nightmares and terror. "Don't waste your time on me," Haymitch said. "Go be with your girl."

"Annie? I'm sure she's busy in the greenhouse. She's doing fine, and when she's fine, she hates it if I smother her."

"Well, you could at least have the sense to not kiss me," Haymitch said.

Finnick didn't answer right away. "I did that, didn't I?"

"Forget it," Haymitch said. "Never happened."

Finnick brushed Haymitch's face with his knuckles so gently that it almost felt like an accident. "You won't," he said. "You'll remember every second of this, won't you? No matter what I do."

"I will as long as District Thirteen keeps me away from my whiskey." But Haymitch knew even that wasn't true. His grandmother had once told him that his memory was like a weed. No matter how many times he tried to poison it, it grew back.

Finnick kissed him again, this time on the lips, with intention.

"I'm too sick to get it up anyhow," Haymitch said, a last weak attempt to dissuade him.

"Then let yourself be kissed." Finnick didn't give Haymitch another chance to deny him. The kisses were warm like milk and sunlight, like the burn of morning liquor in Haymitch's belly. He barely kissed back, allowing Finnick's touch to ease him into comfort and sleep.

A couple of weeks later, Finnick died in a raid on the Capitol. There was footage, but Haymitch refused to watch it. Instead, he went to Annie, who was alone in her bunk like a statue of a grieving girl. Expecting nothing, Haymitch sat down next to her. She neither spoke nor moved. Haymitch had used this tactic himself plenty of times: if he ignored people long enough, they often went away. If she never acknowledged him, he'd still have some time in a quiet room where no one was watching Finnick get eaten alive on television.

"I was half hoping you'd brought a bottle of wine," Annie said after a very long time. "Even though I know that's impossible."

"No such luck."

"Finnick would be furious that no one could drink a toast to him," she explained. "It's the custom in Four. He should have been sent off into the water. And then we'd drink until we were happy again." She patted her belly. "Even the baby."

Haymitch raised an imaginary glass. "Here's to senseless deaths."

Annie pantomimed clinking glasses together and clicked her tongue to mimic the sound. They pretended to drink, pretended they could honor everyone they'd lost.

5.

After the Rebellion, Haymitch settled into what remained of his old house and immediately resumed drinking. Liquor was a sweet old lover, one he'd never meant to leave. As he rebuilt his home, he found himself drinking less than before, just enough to dull the edges of his emotions, to deepen his sleep so he could forget his nightmares in the morning. When a girl from the reconstruction team brought him a basket of fluffy white goslings, he accepted them, not expecting a lifetime commitment. But he quickly came to appreciate them: their dependability and their dependence on him, their stupid wonder at dandelions and dirt piles, their noisy insistence that he get out of bed before noon to toss grain in their direction, and later, when they'd grown up, to collect their eggs.

They distracted him from all the people he'd lost. Everyone but Katniss and Peeta, who kept an affectionate eye on him, and Effie, who was on the other side of the world. In its efforts to normalize relations with the rest of the world, Panem had made her its ambassador to Australia. She sent him long letters full of pictures - exotic animals, exotic people. The new web transmitter towers worked often enough that he even got to read them. The electricity cut out once or twice a week, but the managers of the power and data stations were transplants from Three and Five who kept things running smoothly as possible.

District Twelve was full of new blood. One of the first acts of Panem's new government had been to tear down the fences and allow travel throughout the country. With people free to live where they wanted, Twelve was soon full of immigrants from the Capitol and the core districts. Some had come to assist in reconstruction, admired the beauty of the region, and stayed. Others arrived with the intention of escaping their pasts, of putting distance between themselves and their lost families, property, and senses of security. Most didn't know the first thing about fending for themselves in the countryside, and the few surviving natives of Twelve did their best to acclimate their new neighbors. The transplants didn't quite get along with the natives, and Twelve ran a little wild with fistfights and thieves. But most people seemed to like energetic anarchy better than quiet desperation.

The immigrants did bring education and ideas, and those provided a new identity for the region. With the nuclear plant in Thirteen and the solar fields at full productivity in Five, there wasn't much need for dirty, dangerous coal anymore. On TV, Peeta cracked a joke about District Twelve: Miscellaneous, and as with most of his sound bites, it stuck. Twelve produced cheese, soap, leather, and glassware. People kept bees for honey and processed beets into sugar. The rebuilders turned the spent mines into reservoirs, and the captured water irrigated fields of rice, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and hemp.

But Haymitch made liquor. A trio of young men from District One - boys, really - had sought Haymitch out. All three had spent their childhoods in training to become tributes, and his face was familiar to them from the videos they'd watched. Unsure of what to do with them, Haymitch taught them his one practical skill and helped them build a distillery. He called them Tweetle, Deetle, and Beetle because he couldn't tell them apart, round-faced and blond as they were, but they embraced the nicknames. "They're a fresh start," Tweetle told Haymitch. "Better than being a bunch of washed-up careers who weren't going to get picked."

"I always wondered what happened to kids like you," Haymitch said.

"Some ended up working at the training center or joined the Peacekeepers. Some went to the diamond factories like everyone else without an apprenticed art. A few just became washed-up old drunks." Tweetle had a sharp wit and no tact; Haymitch found this endearing. Tweetle also had a taste for liquor, unlike the other two, who were more inclined toward mathematics and competition. Deetle and Beetle kept the business running, but Tweetle was the son that Haymitch might have fathered in another life. He came by Haymitch's house at dusk with unmarked bottles full of experimental potions. He often wound up sleeping on the loveseat in Haymitch's front room.

Katniss and Tweetle did not get along. Haymitch assumed it was a sort of sibling rivalry, but as it turned out, their disharmony was two parts personal incompatibility and three parts Katniss's mistaken conviction that Haymitch had designs on Tweetle. "Tweetle likes girls," Haymitch explained when Katniss finally admitted what her problem was. She'd brought her new baby along to visit, and the three of them sat on Haymitch's porch watching the geese mill about. He continued, "He likes them so much he's trying out every one in town before he settles on any."

"A strategy you approve of," Katniss scoffed.

"Better than stringing them along. Giving them false hope."

"Says the master of stringing people along," Katniss said.

"Who have you ever seen me string along?" He honestly had no idea who she was talking about.

"A certain neighbor of yours? Happens to drop by a lot?"

And now he knew. Achates Wong had come from the Capitol to start a goat farm a mile up the road from Haymitch's house. A few times a week, Achates Wong would knock on Haymitch's door, offering to exchange a jug of milk for some goose eggs. These visits stank of Katniss and Peeta's surveillance, so Haymitch tolerated them graciously but kept them as brief as possible. "The one you've sent to check up on me?"

Katniss fixed a steely, Seam-eyed stare on him, as if she could break him down. She fell into soft laughter before he moved a muscle. Haymitch liked her laugh; he'd heard so little of it before the Rebellion, but these days it seemed like she could barely hold it in. "We didn't send him. Not even Peeta. Encouraged him to introduce himself when he first got here, yes, but the rest was all his doing." She laughed some more while Haymitch sat dumbfounded. "Do you think you're such a run-down old mess that no one could ever like you?"

"That's about right."

"Everyone who gets to know you, learns to love you," Katniss said. "If you left your house more often, you'd have screaming fans chasing you every time you came to town. It's a gift."

Poor at taking compliments and too sober to do anything disgusting - not that he was capable of fazing Katniss - Haymitch grunted noncommittally.

"Your friend lost his husband in the Rebellion," Katniss said.

"How do you know all this stuff?"

"Oh, Peeta, he gets everyone's life story." With that, the baby began to fuss, and Katniss hurried apologies. It was getting late, after all, and Haymitch had had enough of her matchmaking efforts.

Alone in his house with a bottle of Tweetle's finest potato whiskey, Haymitch thought about fucking. Not about romance, as Katniss would have liked, but he wasn't aching for love. With the distillery boys and the growing Mellark family nearby, he was the least lonely he'd ever been. But he'd come to believe that his sex life was in the past, that he'd content himself with his right hand for whatever time he had left. He didn't know what to do with the possibility of a lover, and he hated the likelihood that he'd do what he'd always done, not just with men but with everything: hide, drinking, until the danger had passed.

He drank all night and didn't sleep. When exhaustion pulled him under, the old nightmares kicked him awake. The squish and slam of knives through flesh as he stabbed his competitors to death. Maysilee's blood running warm over his arms and chest. The chill of an ax in the gut and the relief of knowing he was going to die taking revenge on his attacker. Waking up angry to be alive. Ma, Ebben, and Natty, burning to death half a world away. Cecelia and Mags in the arena, out of reach. Finnick dragged down by muttations in the Capitol. All the reasons Haymitch didn't deserve to be alive, didn't deserve comfort or sleep, didn't deserve love.

As dawn broke, he either succumbed to exhaustion or blacked himself out. The geese honked him awake, and there was Achates Wong on his doorstep with a jug of milk. He stumbled to the door, electric with panic and feeling like he'd been clubbed in the head. "I had a rough night," Haymitch slurred. "Haven't gotten to the eggs yet. You might as well come back tomorrow."

"Nonsense," Achates said. He didn't throw Haymitch into a cold shower the way Finnick would have. He didn't scold like Katniss or sigh like Effie. Instead, he asked Haymitch to lead him out to the goose pasture, and they hunted together for new eggs in the nests. When they returned to Haymitch's house, Achates made breakfast: yesterday's bread soaked in today's milk and eggs and fried in goose fat. Achates ate without insisting that Haymitch participate. Everything was optional, a suggestion.

Haymitch accepted the food but kept his nightmares to himself. As Achates left, he managed to say, "Thanks for breakfast. Thanks for the company." And as Achates assured him it was nothing at all, Haymitch managed to kiss him.

It wasn't an epic kiss. It didn't stop time. The game makers wouldn't have known what kind of music to play in the background. It was an out-of-practice kiss, mostly nerves and teeth. But it was a kiss returned.

When it ended, Achates stood on Haymitch's front porch with his hands in his pockets, unmoving. He cleared his throat. "I've been in love with you since I was twelve," he said.

"There's some holes in my memory, but I don't think I've known you that long," Haymitch replied.

"The year you won," Achates said, as if he couldn't tell whether Haymitch was being stubborn or clueless, and hadn't figured out that he was both. "I couldn't wait to get home from school during those Games so I could see if you were still alive. I kept your picture on my school tablet until a gang of other kids found out and beat me up for it. I used to dream about getting out of there and moving to District Twelve - we didn't know how hard life was, that people were starving, just that it was as far away from the Capitol as you could go. After the Rebellion, I knew I had to get away, and all those childhood fantasies - I'm here because of you. I know that sounds awful and crazy. I wouldn't blame you for wanting to take back that kiss."

"If there's one thing I've learned," Haymitch said, "it's that I can't take anything back."

"That's -" Achates seemed at a loss as to the rest of the sentence.

"I hope you'll be back tomorrow," Haymitch finished for him. It was what they had that was new: hope. For all Haymitch knew, his liver could give out on him tonight and poison him to death before Achates's next visit. But for all he knew, he'd die toothless and ancient with this man by his side, two withered old lilies surrounded by goats and geese. No one could keep that second possibility from seeming real. What little Haymitch had left, nobody could take away. If that was freedom, he supposed he could adapt to it.

Drag cats do not fetch.

2012-07-31T21:09:13Z

I let my Dreamwidth paid account lapse. I felt bad, because I like supporting DW, but it was too expensive for how infrequently I've been using my journaling services lately. I'm on the verge of letting LJ lapse, too, after having a paid account for something like eight years. I know a lot of fandom is sad about technology marching on, but I'm really not. Mostly I'm frustrated about AO3 not working better.

But anyway! GYMNASTICS.

Disclaimer: There are no spoilers in sports, but I do talk about events that have not aired on TV in the USA yet.

Like many Americans, I have reached the point where the mere mention of NBC raises me into a frothy rage. Their evening coverage is embarrassing in its America-centrism, and the content/filler ratio is horrific. They show so little gymnastics that it's impossible to understand how the competition is going. Even when they mercifully stopped showing Team USA after the meltdown in the men's team finals, their coverage was painfully random - they showed no Ukrainians, and then surprise! Ukraine almost bronze! And this was time shifted, so they knew they needed to show Ukraine. Of course, all this has been said, but it bears further whining.

On top of that, my internet security setup means I can't watch live streams on my computer. I tried turning off all my security and reinstalling Flash, but I still get no picture. I don't even get a picture when I use a proxy service and watch the BBC. Fortunately, the live streaming app works on my phone, so I have spent the past two mornings squinting at a very small screen. The live stream coverage is actually great: the commentary is unobtrusive, and they've mostly been showing the right routines. I had not planned to devote this much of my life to watching gymnastics, but the NBC prime time coverage is so insufficient that I have accepted four more days of excessive nerdiness.

The #1 most annoying thing about the NBC prime time coverage is the incessant fucking swimming races. Swimming is boring to watch. It's more boring than golf. It's more boring than the novels of Thomas Hardy. It's almost as boring as interviews with Michael Phelps.

But it's the assumption that all viewers are non-fans that really gets to me. I'm a medium-sized gymnastics fan; I have only recently reached the point where most of the time I could tell you the name of each trick being performed. But the calling is not just lazy or occasionally mistaken - it's narrativized to the point of meaningless inaccuracy. Tim Daggett says performances were good when they were visibly bad. Everyone's backstory is customized until it becomes fiction. The worst case of the latter is the way Gabby Douglas's family is being described. When she moved to Iowa to continue her training, her mother and siblings didn't move with her; instead, she moved in with a host family, the Partons. Douglas frequently notes in interviews that she's close with the Partons and considers her host mom to be a second mother. Fluff pieces on Douglas don't mention her living situation and sometimes tie themselves in knots to pretend that the Partons don't exist. I think the real story is more heartwarming: Gabby has two families cheering for her, one black and Southern and one white and Midwestern, a giant team of people who love her and support her. That kind of fluff piece would be interesting rather than inane.

The other part of my frustration with the NBC coverage is that such over-the-top patriotism makes me embarrassed to be patriotic at all. And I like cheering for Team USA! I've learned to wear my American identity proudly when I go abroad, even if people are dicks to me because of my nationality sometimes. It's the country I'm from and the country where I live. I think it's cool when American athletes perform well. I think it's sad when they get overwhelmed and crawl into a puddle of suck (still love you, Danell Leyva!) and I jump up and down when they accidentally beat South Korea in archery and win an unexpected silver.

That archery team silver, and Marti Malloy's bronze in lightweight judo, have been my patriotism squee moments so far. Malloy's semifinal match looked like a dirty street fight and had to be tiebroken by the judges.

The inverse, where I don't care where they're from as long as they're awesome: Louis Smith's pommel horse routine, all of them, forever. The cute and enormously powerful Mexican men's synchronized platform diving team, who bet on difficulty rather than perfection and beat the boring Americans and overconfident British team. They did a quadruple tuck in synchro.

I am second-tier patriotic for Japan and was happy to see Uchimura's pommel score reconsidered, even though I felt bad for Ukraine. It did look to me like a shitty handstand, not a missed element. Also, Uchimura forever. My heart will be torn between Leyva and Uchimura tomorrow. Uchimura is unquestionably the better all-around gymnast, but Leyva has a better towel.

Crossovers I will not be writing: werewolf AU where Jonathan Horton is the alpha and, um, the US men's gymnastics team is pretty.

The ladies' team competition was pretty much nonstop squee, because the US put down the best team effort but my favorites from other teams had brilliant moments. This probably means I have no taste, but in terms of pure gymnastics, I like China the most. He Kexin on bars? I only kind of breathe.

I was thrilled to see the Canadian Underdog Squad come in fifth. Victoria Moors is a firecracker.

Ksenia Afanasyeva will continue being my favorite Russian no matter how many times she falls down on butt. I loved that Team Russia had gold glitter in their hair.

Jordyn Wieber and Viktoria Komova are both surprisingly pretty criers. I wish I didn't have to watch athletes cry, though. It feels exploitative.

The live feed barely showed Aly Raisman. It was like she didn't exist. The live feed understands my feelings. (Was that mean? Am I obligated to say nice things about Aly Raisman? Oh, patriotism.)

My love for Gabby Douglas is bigger than her smile. She is the sweetheartest of American Sweethearts, and also she has near-perfect body lines, and also she can competently work bars, and also she did the Dougie when she won Trials. There might be fanfic. Even without her, I'd love this Team USA much more than 2008's, but Douglas is the one who makes me want to cheer them on. I am unashamed to hope that she smacks down Komova in the AA and makes everyone forget about Nastia forever.

I've been picspamming Olympic gymnastics on Tumblr. It's way easier to do that there than here.

Fic: Let's Make a Deal (Teen Wolf, Derek/Stiles)

2012-07-11T23:14:39Z

I wrote a thing! Yay! Also, the juggernaut pairing has totally sucked me in, darn it.

Title: Let's Make a Deal
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Pairing: Derek/Stiles
Rating: NC-17; see content notes.
Content notes: Consensual sex between a sixteen-year-old and a twenty-three-year-old.
Summary: Derek owes Stiles for saving his life twice, and the score will never be even.
Word count: about 2,400.
Disclaimers: Teen Wolf is the intellectual property of MTV. This original work of fan fiction is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License; attribution should include a link to this post. This story is a labor of love, not money, so it's protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976.
Notes: Thanks to turnonmyheels for beta reading. This fills the "vehicular" square on my kink_bingo card.

*

The third thing Derek learned, as a child of a werewolf family, was who not to bite. His father taught him how to recognize the transformation, how to lie, and then this. If it smells funny, don't kill it and don't bite it. "How will I know if it smells funny?" Derek asked when he was a kid, seven or eight, digging holes in the backyard while his dad smoked and nominally watched him.

"You know how humans smell and werewolves smell," his father said. "If you smell anything else, keep your teeth in your mouth." Jackson's fate had proved the worth of Derek's dad's advice. He smelled like nothing.

Stiles smelled like too many temptations at once. Like Tabasco sauce and peanut butter, like teenage sweat, like lubricated Trojans. Like a neon "do not bite" sign. Derek had considered turning him as soon as he became Alpha, to keep him and Scott together, a natural pack. Derek had daydreamed about having Stiles under his command, tracing the bow of his lips, watching his long fingers turn to claws. But Stiles had smelled inhuman, illegal and unaccounted for, so Derek had obeyed his father's ghost. He'd struggled in the high school swimming pool, paralyzed for two hours with an erection, his lips an inch from Stiles's neck. The pulse of blood through Stiles's veins was too quiet for Derek to hear, especially over the thrash of water, but Derek could smell its adrenaline-spiked heat.

It frightened Derek that Stiles's smell turned him on. Desiring humans was never wise - a truth that his family had warned him of, and that Kate had driven home like a steel spike through his heart. An alpha's pack was his harem, and he shouldn't have needed to venture outside it. He'd turned Isaac, Erica, and Boyd to save them, but also because he knew what he liked. Angel curls, blonde femmes fatales, smooth brown skin. All that effort, and their cocky wolf selves weren't his type. Derek wanted awkward but socially adept, self-deprecating but strong. He wanted brilliant, the thing he knew he wasn't.

Stiles showed up everywhere, transporting bodies and distracting the cops, accidentally saving lives. He appeared at Derek's door on a Friday night with Erica passed out in the back of his Jeep and no explanation beyond, "Please help me deal with this."

Derek carried Erica over his shoulder and put her to bed on the air mattress he kept inflated in his sister's old bedroom for this kind of emergency. Erica began to come around as he covered her with a blanket. Her eyes were dilated, her lips cracked. "Sleep it off," Derek commanded. "No more drugs."

Stiles had decided to stick around in the foyer, texting whoever else was involved in this round of Teen Shifters In Peril. "Werewolves and Ecstasy don't mix," Derek announced, hoping Stiles would come up with the perfect retort.

"Shouldn't she be bouncing off the walls and telling us she loves us?" Stiles asked.

"Different body chemistry." Derek would have explained more if he'd known more.

"Oh." Stiles shifted his weight from foot to foot. He smelled like embers and pornography. "I... guess I'll go, if you know what to do from here. I gave my dad a lie to tell Erica's parents. Just get her home, I don't know, eventually." He didn't leave.

"You don't need to keep saving my pack," Derek said.

"It's not my fault you guys keep almost dying when I'm the only one around."

Derek believed that it had to be Stiles's fault somehow. He'd figure it out later, during his workout, when his head was clear. It was hard to think when other people were around, especially when they smelled like the path to damnation.

Stiles phone chirped with an incoming text. "Crap," he said as he read it. "Come with me."

"What happened?"

"I don't know," Stiles said. "No details. But you owe me."

"What about Erica?"

"Do you actually care?"

"Yes." Derek looked over his shoulder toward the open bedroom door, just beyond his line of vision. "But I do owe you."

They got in the Jeep and drove into the woods. For a minute, the only sounds were the hum of the engine and the crunch of twigs under the tires. Derek liked Stiles best when he wasn't talking. He could tell that Stiles worked harder to keep his mouth shut than to open it. Derek smelled the tension and effort on Stiles's skin, vinegar and ash, the tang of arousal that Stiles's teenage hormones kept at a relentless simmer. Derek turned on the radio as if it could drown out the scent. "Call Me Maybe," and they both laughed, the same dry chuckle at the wrongness of the song. It was frightening for them to agree on anything.

"I don't want enemies," Derek said over the squeal of pop music, taking advantage of their temporary like-mindedness. "I don't want it to be my pack against yours."

"Darn those alpha dominance instincts, huh?" Stiles sneered.

"We're all on the same side. You and I both know that. We know it better than anyone."

"You might not have noticed, but I'm not a wolf," Stiles said. "I don't need a pack."

Derek let that hang in the air so Stiles could hear how dumb it sounded.

"Come to think of it, why am I not a wolf? You bit the four other weirdest kids in Beacon Hills, but you won't sink a fang in me." It sounded like Derek's teeth weren't the body part that Stiles wanted sunk into him.

Or Derek was projecting. "You'd turn out wrong," Derek said. "I could smell it on Jackson, and I can smell it on you. I don't know what you'd turn into, but -"

"You don't want to find out?" Stiles finished the sentence better than Derek would have. "Don't worry. I don't either."

"See? We're on the same side."

"I hate that," Stiles said with an undermining smile that made them almost friends.

"So we'll work together from now on," Derek said. "We'll fight off the Argents, we'll get Jackson under control, we'll -"

"There's still no 'we,'" Stiles said, eyes on the road. "You still owe me." His phone chirped, and he pulled it from his pocket smoothly, without easing off the gas pedal. "Oh, come on," he said to the phone. "False alarm," he told Derek. "Let me find somewhere I can turn around."

"False alarm?"

"Scott." Stiles's tone summed up what the name itself didn't.

"I don't want to owe you," Derek said as Stiles screeched the Jeep into a hairpin U-turn. Derek grabbed Stiles's hand to avoid pitching forward into the dashboard. Stiles's burnt, sweet scent filled Derek's lungs. He tried to jerk his hand away, but Stiles pressed it down into the gear shift hard enough to cut off his circulation. Touching Stiles made Derek want to fuck the snide defiance out of him. The irony was, Stiles might have been sexually frustrated enough to let him - to welcome him. Sex might have been Derek's collateral, the way to even their score. If Stiles wanted it, there was no harm done.

"I'm taking you home," Stiles said.

"No," Derek said, his voice low and grim. When he spoke like this - like an alpha, like his father - people obeyed him. It was a personality trait, not a werewolf ability. He'd have it if he'd been born human. "No, you're pulling over."

"Why am I pulling over?" Stiles asked as he did it.

"Because you're losing your virginity."

Stiles made a variety of sounds, the aborted beginnings of sentences. "In my Jeep?"

"I could take you out into the woods, I guess," Derek said. "Or you could say no." He smiled, feeling his teeth sharpen to wolfish points. "But I owe you. And let's face it, I don't have that many things you want."

The proposal had sounded so fair and respectful in Derek's head, but out loud, the words made him shiver. He heard Kate in them, leaning over him as she'd unbuttoned her shirt, the afternoon she'd first seduced him. He'd wanted her because he'd been sixteen and blind. The same age as Stiles.

But Stiles was more self-aware than Derek had been. "So we have sex, and I can't tell Scott, because... Scott. Or anyone, I couldn't - well, maybe Danny, but he'd take it the wrong way. Have I mentioned that I hate you?"

"Say no," Derek offered again. This time, it came out less like a threat and more like a plea.

"There's more room in the back." Stiles cut the engine, took off his seat belt, and scrambled over the driver's seat. Stiles's awkwardness made him vulnerable, and vulnerability ignited Derek's wolf instincts. Slowly, to mask his eagerness, Derek got out of the car, pushed the passenger seat forward, and climbed into the back seat.

Stiles sat like he was waiting for a dentist appointment. Derek pressed his palm into Stiles's chest until he was lying flat. He bunched Stiles's t-shirt up under Stiles's arms. Stiles grasped for the fabric, but Derek held his hands down. Stiles's belly was soft and white, slim but not toned. A thick trail of dark hair connected his navel to the waist of his jeans, and a bright red surgical scar slashed several inches of his left side. Stiles's self-consciousness about his body made Derek want to bury it in kisses. He fought to keep his teeth in check. Stiles moaned incoherently and went placidly still.

Derek took Stiles's cock out of his jeans. There was nothing easier to please than a sixteen-year-old boy. It wouldn't matter that Derek was far from a blow job expert. He'd made one attempt, in a threesome with Kate and a stranger she'd presented to him like prey, and that hadn't ended well.

But Derek was in control this time, and Stiles was so hard that Derek couldn't imagine a way for things to go badly. Derek eased his grip on Stiles's wrists, and Stiles thrust up into his mouth. All Derek had to do was cover his teeth with his lips and remember to breathe. Breathing was difficult with Stiles's scents converging in Derek's nose and eyes. Sweat, smoke, chocolate, clean paper, gasoline, pine needles. Derek almost pitched backward, overwhelmed.

Stiles came, a bitter slam to the back of Derek's throat. Derek turned away from him, coughed, and spat emphatically out the door.

Stiles lay across the back seat with his mouth open, eyes trained blankly on the car ceiling. Derek was still holding one of Stiles's wrists loosely. He picked up Stiles's hand and played with his fingers, long and slim, the nails suspiciously clean. He held Stiles's fingertips to his nose. Leather, red licorice, and hand soap.

Stiles sat up abruptly. "Okay. Let's go." Assuming he was being abandoned in the woods, Derek got out of the car and shut the door behind him. Stiles tumbled out of the driver's side and ran frantically around the front of the car, holding his jeans up with his hands. "Where are you going?"

Lacking an answer, Derek glared down at him.

"You don't want me to - you don't want to? Because I will. I assumed that was part of it." He looked down at Derek's crotch and then bravely into his eyes. "I kind of want to."

"Kind of?"

"I'm pretty desperately curious but also sure that I'll do it wrong and then you'll hurt me?"

Derek placed his hand on Stiles's shoulder, intending to patronize him more than comfort him. "I don't need that much of an excuse to hurt you."

"And yet you... Got it." The corner of Stiles's mouth turned up, and his dimples deepened. He looked so satisfied whenever a piece of information clicked in his brain, as if understanding was the fuel that charged his battery. Not power or cunning, but the knowledge itself. Derek wondered if the Argents had ever battled an enemy like that.

"Honestly," Stiles went on, "I'd settle for touching your chest, because I'm not convinced that's real."

Derek leaned back against the Jeep and proudly took off his shirt. He stretched his arms over his head to make his pecs ripple. He'd worked hard for that muscle definition. He closed his eyes, baring his neck. He'd trained himself to fear this kind of trust, but he couldn't help longing for it.

At first, Stiles was so tentative, it tickled. Derek squirmed, growling to suppress a giggle. Stiles got bolder, though, running his nails down Derek's chest, thumbing his nipples to make his toes curl. Just touch my cock already, Derek thought, then stifled his shame as he realized he'd said it out loud.

Watching Stiles drop to his knees made Derek even harder, made his heart race. With the first stroke of Stiles's warm tongue on his cock, Derek clutched the Jeep's window frame and dug his heel into the wheel well. He didn't care if this was good, but it was, Stiles's lips hot and firm around his cock. Derek wanted to come and wanted to last. He ached. His claws came out. He came.

Derek sank back into the car door, somehow still standing. He hadn't had sex since Kate had betrayed him. He resented Stiles for being the first person he'd trusted enough to end his drought. But Derek couldn't help adoring him, too. Stiles would always be a step ahead of Derek, and Derek would always be in his debt. But this was not a curse. It was smart to place a limit on his own power. Alpha status corrupted people. Derek had watched too many family members go over the edge. He needed to keep the human part of himself strong.

Stiles cleared his throat. "By all means, take your time, but it might not be the best idea to stand around naked this close to the road."

"All the kids are doing it these days," Derek said.

Stiles cracked a smile. Derek kissed him, the newness of his mouth an adrenaline rush. Stiles stroked his cheek. "I always thought it was like - shave or don't. But I like the way it feels, so don't change anything. Okay? Don't change."

The moon might have had something to say about that. Derek decided that the moon could go screw itself. "All right," he said. He put his pants back on. "You should take me home. You have school tomorrow, and I have a beta on drugs." He got in the car before Stiles could see what his claws had done to the Jeep's paint job.

They'd almost reached the main road when Stiles noticed, "You forgot your shirt."

Derek shrugged. "They're three for ten dollars at Walgreen's."

"That's... frugal." Stiles went quiet again. His silence made Derek wonder what was wrong and how he could fix it. "I can't decide whether it counts."

"Whether what counts?"

"Whether oral counts toward virginity." Stiles seemed genuinely troubled.

"Do you feel like it does?" Derek heard the wisdom in his own voice. It perplexed him to be the authority figure. He didn't feel he'd earned his knowledge.

Color rushed to Stiles's face, writing the answer all over it. But he said, "Nah, you still owe me."

Wookiee Jesus will decide my future.

2012-06-13T18:24:30Z

1. I swear I'm not avoiding you, fandom! I'm actually doing a LOT of fandom right now. It's just that I'm... doing it all on Tumblr. I know. I'm sorry. If you want a visual representation of my brain, updated several times daily, hit up Moscarific.

2. I am on Tumblr because that's where Teen Wolf fandom is, to a large extent. The (readable) fanfic is on LJDW and AO3, but the conversation, the picspam, and the gif walls (UGH THE GIF WALLS GET OFF MY LAWN) are on Tumblr. I feel like I am the oldest person in this fandom. But it keeps introducing more attractive werewolves and interesting stories and snark and... Stiles.

2a. it fills my head up and gets louder by concave is the best fic I've read in the fandom. It's Jackson/Stiles and has been completely jossed by s2. Don't let either of those things stop you.

3. I have three favorite new summer shows, all very different:

Longmire had the best pilot I've seen in a long time; it's a modern-day Western and also a procedural, and it features Katee Sackhoff and Lou Diamond Phillips being awesome. RIYL Breaking Bad, The Mentalist, and/or well-written character-driven drama.

Bunheads is Amy Sherman Palladino's new thing, which means everyone talks like the Gilmore Girls. It's on ABC Family, so it includes a quartet of plucky teenage ballerinas, but the real stars are two Broadway veterans, Sutton Foster and Kelly Bishop, who trade bons mots like it's a revival of Mame. RIY miss Gilmore Girls, wish Smash were better, and/or wore through your cassette tape of the original cast recording of A Chorus Line.

Around the World in 80 Plates is the most creative reality show that Bravo has come up with in ages. It's the ur-reality competition show: a bunch of chefs race around the world (like The Amazing Race), competing to make the best meals (like Top Chef) while working as a team (like Hell's Kitchen), and have to vote out the weakest team member at the end (like Survivor). Meanwhile, all the contestants are simultaneously insufferable human beings (like the Real Housewives) and quirkily, compellingly talented (like Project Runway). RIYL any of the above.

4. As soon as SYTYCD finishes the audition rounds and becomes a real thing, I will have a lot of feelings. But this once a week business is reducing the intensity of my feelings. Dear FOX, bite me.

They should have sent the tap-dancing hipster surfer to Vegas.

2012-06-01T20:27:58Z

A few race-swapped and/or gender-swapped Avengers castings have been floating around the internet, many of them awesome. They inspired me to think up my own, with norabombay's help.

Archie Panjabi as Tony Stark/Iron Man

Yvette Nicole Brown as Bruce Banner/Hulk

Shay Mitchell as Steve Rogers/Captain America

Tim Kang as Natasha Romanov/Black Widow

Michelle Rodriguez as Thor

Adepero Oduye as Clint Barton/Hawkeye

Sigourney Weaver as Nick Fury

Naya Rivera as Loki

Sonja Sohn as Agent Phil Coulson

Dulé Hill as Agent Maria Hill

Taye Diggs as Pepper Potts

Cynthia Nixon as James "Rhodey" Rhodes/War Machine

Zombie boyfriend needs more stew.

2012-05-28T20:47:32Z

The Magical TV Bubble

Dear Fandom,

I live in a magical bubble.

Usually, I forget that I live in it. I watch my shows; I read my books and my webcomics; I play my video games; I occasionally catch a movie. And then someone writes about how there are no interesting/three-dimensional/realistic female or queer characters in mainstream media. And then I look around my glittery pink bubble and remember how nice it is in here.

I don't consciously set out to consume media that features characters other than straight, white, conventionally attractive, non-disabled, conventionally-masculine-acting males. It's more, if all the featured and well-developed characters are normative, I am far more likely to be bored and stop watching. I don't watch the first episode of a new show and go, "Oh, white dudes again, no season pass for you." The thought process is more like, "Nothing is hooking me about this show. I started playing with my phone during the second commercial break and never stopped. I watch enough goddamn TV as it is. No season pass for you." The correlation is not perfect: this is what happened when I tried to watch Battlestar Galactica (new) both times, despite several neat female and non-white characters. But that was, like, five years ago already, and it's literally the only time I can remember having this particular reaction to a show that wasn't all white dudes all the time.

So I live in a magical bubble where women and queers and cognitive minorities are all over my TV [1]. I will get hooked on mediocre shows because they suit my bubble. Make It or Break It is ridiculous, especially if you watch as much actual elite gymnastics as I do [2]. But it's about female athletes who act recognizably like girls and are also competitive and aggressive, and it eroticizes the male bodies of love interests while treating female perspectives as the in-show default. Alphas has a tortured and trite internal mythology and inconsistent writing. But Gary is such a great creation: a man whose Asperger's Syndrome shapes his personality and behavior, as well as his superpowers, but does not define him or reduce him to a punchline.

When a video game enters the bubble, customization is increasingly my friend. As I think I have mentioned a few times, I am a little obsessed with Diablo III right now. I realized somewhere around the end of the second act of the game that not only can you choose a non-white female character to play, but you can choose to play a game with few or no normative white dudes in the fight. You can play any character class as female; all characters are equally underdressed and eye-candyish at the beginning, and equally well-armed and badass as the game progresses. There are three options for an NPC sidekick; two are (interesting) white guys, and one is an (equally interesting) woman, the enchantress Eirena. In the third act, the three other major NPCs are two women, Leah and Adria - both kick-ass sorceresses, and Leah is good with a bow and arrow - and Tyrael, a brown-skinned fallen angel voiced by an African-American actor. The great thing about current video games is they allow people like me to play within the bubble; the less great thing is that they allow everyone else to ignore the opportunity for Witch Doctor/Eirena girlslash headcanon.

My gaming choices draw attention to how much of my bubble is a matter of selective attention. I'll fixate on queer/female/cognitive-difference aspects that people outside the bubble don't notice. Teen Wolf has a non-white leading man and two endlessly fascinating secondary female characters, but I love even more that Stiles is a canonically ADHD and sexuality-questioning sarcastic smartypants underachiever. It's one of the few times I've looked at my television and seen my sixteen-year-old self. I tell people that I watch Revenge largely for its bisexual geek sidekick, and there's always a beat before people realize I'm talking about Nolan.

Revenge is also full of interesting, distinct women, as well as female-gaze man candy and f/f hoyay, but that causes some viewers to downgrade it to soap opera. I think that's how the "no interesting women on TV" claim often begins: there's a pre-supposition that media narratives about women are either designed as or descend into domestic drama and romance. But Revenge owes far more to Batman than it does to Beverly Hills 90210. The narrative focus is mostly on scheming, ass-kicking, and Shamu Cam surveillance. You're engaging in some seriously selective fast-forwarding if you read Revenge as a show about love triangles, parties, and outfits.

A lot of my other favorite texts get dismissed from the argument for similar reasons. The Good Wife is either not genre enough or too legal procedural or the exception that proves the rule. Girls is (legitimately) too white and straight [3]. Lost Girl is apparently somehow too sex-positive. The Hunger Games gets downgraded to cheesy romance for tween girls. Four of the last six Survivor winners have been women, but that's just reality television.

What this ends up boiling down to is, people like me can list counter-examples until we're blue in the face, and the answer is always, "But I don't like that show." And it's all right not to like that show, or any show, but after a while I start to wonder. It seems to me that a lot of geeks unconsciously, secretly, and/or hypocritically prefer texts about normative people. If a text features anything but a straight white dude, it's excluded from their bubble. And that's, you know, I can be friends with people who like different shows from me. But we're definitely not going to be friends if you don't own that shit. And we're double definitely not going to be friends if you tell me that every piece of media I currently love doesn't exist.

[1] While most forms of non-normativity make me more likely to get into a show, these are the three that make the most difference for me personally because I identify as queer, ADHD, and more or less female. [back]

[2] This argument applies to the sports I follow, too. In addition to the fact that artistic gymnastics is very focused on the women's side of the sport, the two best men on the US team are Latino (John Orozco and Danell Leyva), and then there's Josh Dixon. Figure skating is full of interesting women and more and more comfortable with its gayness. The NFL is, well, the NFL, but it has tremendous ethnic and class diversity and a number of players who talk honestly about cognitive differences like dyslexia, ADHD, and traumatic brain injury.[back]

[3] But also says things about white girl privilege that most media avoids addressing. There would have been ways to make the show's first season less white and straight, but they also would have made the show less realistic. This is uncomfortable, unpleasant, and painfully reflective of my experiences with young artsy overeducated people in New York. In short, it's a paradox too big to fully address in this post.[back]

That was not a dream sequence. That was actually on ESPN.

2012-05-23T19:54:44Z

I am back from hiatus! I have accomplished my work mission and am now onto a long summer of... working more, but with less intensity and more fandom.

1. I got Diablo III for my birthday, finally got to install it today, and have been playing obsessively ever since. I stopped to post to LJ because my wrist was getting sore. I think I love it even more than Diablo II, which was my previous favorite game ever. My battletag is Mosca#1501 if you want a friend, but I don't play collaboratively and usually turn off chat; I consider the slaying of the undead to be a solitary activity. I'm playing as a female Witch Doctor and am really enjoying throwing jars of spiders and summoning packs of devil puppies.

2. Also for my birthday, I got to see Book of Mormon and Newsies, both of which fall into the category of BROADWAY HELL YES.

3. I have dusted off my Tumblr account, renamed it, and repurposed it as a general repository for stuff I like. There are still a lot of unicorns, but now there are also figure skaters, artsy nudes, and misc. geekery. It's Moscarific! now. Please do follow.

4. I am resigning myself to liking all the movies that everyone else likes. fox1013 dragged me out of the salt mines long enough to see Avengers, which happily surprised me by being the Black Widow show, and by making me ship Natasha/Bruce. Worse, I went to The Hunger Games with my in-laws and immediately went home to buy the two books I hadn't read. "I just read Catching Fire on my smartphone" is the most 2012-est sentence of them all. And, um, now I have written like 5000 words of Haymitch/Finnick. I am really sorry, fandom. I will try to embarrass us all less in the future.

5. There will probably be a Femslash '12, but callmesandy and I have not even discussed it yet, to be honest.

6. Adam Rippon and Alex Shibutani will not stop slashing themselves on Twitter. I may have been on hiatus, boys, but I can still see you.

6a. We have tickets to Skate America! Maaaaaaaaarlie.

6b. My feelings about Johnny Weir-Voronov's return to competition are too mixed to enumerate here.

7. I've been putting my fic up on AO3 since the beginning of this year, and the demographics fascinate me. Like, I've gotten relatively few comments on my Revenge fics on LJ/DW, but lots of kudos and comments on AO3. I'm assuming that's because there's not much of a centralized fandom for that show: there's a comm, but it's low traffic, and it's not the kind of fandom where people get together to squee in groups. So when people want fic, they go to an archive and search for it and go OMG NOLAN/JACK and leave me a note. But figure skating fandom is still kind of centralized, because it's oriented toward discussion and news, much more than fannish production. It has outposts on Tumblr and Twitter as well as (maybe more than) LJ, but people aren't cold searching for Charlie White/Jeremy Abbott. So to the degree that I get feedback for skating fic, it's still in my journals. In conclusion, it is a pain in the ass to post my fic in so many places, but it is necessary at this point in fandom.

8. OMG REVENGE DON'T DIE TINY.

9. SYTYCD comes back tomorrow! Teen Wolf comes back in like two weeks! Expect frequent, semi-coherent responses to both.

10. I saw Shearwater cover an R.E.M. song live. I have accomplished all the goals.

FIC: Old to Begin (skating RPF, Charlie/Jeremy)

2012-04-03T17:36:21Z

Back to the salt mines for the next month. (It's okay. We have cookies in the mines.) BUT FIRST:

Title: Old to Begin
Fandom: figure skating RPF
Pairing: Charlie White/Jeremy Abbott, past Charlie/Tanith Belbin, Meryl Davis/m
Rating: R for language and sexual content
Warnings: None standard.
Summary: Charlie's pushing 40 and a newly single dad; Jeremy's a whole new man.
Word Count: about 2,500.
Disclaimers: This is a work of fiction. The characters herein are based on real people, but the words and events are completely made up. They are not intended to be mistaken for fact, and no libel is intended. This original work of fan fiction is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License; attribution should include a link to this post.
Notes: Thanks to thistle90 for beta reading. Written for Wouldn't It Be Nice: A 2012 Worlds Commentfic Meme. Title is from a Pavement song.

*

It didn't count as a divorce because Charlie and Tanith had never gotten married. They'd meant to, but it had never seemed like a good year for a wedding. And law school had made Charlie suspicious of anything bound by a contract. And maybe they'd known in their bones that they wouldn't be forever. Sixteen years was pretty good, right? A solid commitment to push through the bad times until he'd realized bad times were all they had left. He'd moved out quietly, and neither of them had asked for much. They'd fought so hard for everything, all their lives, and now they were exhausted.

He had primary custody of their daughter. Tanith traveled so much, reporting from the sidelines of meets and championships all over the world, that she'd agreed to the arrangement mournfully but without resistance. Arya was nine. She played hockey and resented moving from Detroit to L.A. Neither Charlie nor Tanith had worked in Detroit for a long time, but they'd kept up the travel and email-commuting to hold their family together, not that they'd succeeded anyway.

It was weird to live a couple of miles away from Meryl again. She'd moved to California right after they'd retired, seduced by one of the big-money figure skating clubs to build up their ice dance program. Meryl made a great facsimile of a Russian skating coach; she could whip from smiles and hugs to a terrifying scowl in a split second. The same rink had tried to lure Charlie, too, but he'd followed through on a noble promise to himself: law school, then sports management, keeping kids with no life skills from getting sucked into bad endorsement deals. His nickname in the industry was Batman, and he hadn't even started it himself.

"We should do some shows again," Charlie told Meryl when she and her husband had him over for dinner. "For old time's sake."

"Get the old gang back together? Charlie, you really are taking this hard."

But they made plans to skate together again, and when they did, it felt natural, like they'd spent no time away. They weren't as fast as they used to be. His back was shot, and her hips were stiff. It didn't matter. The kids who'd paid to practice at the 6 AM crack-of-dawn ice dance session sat in the bleachers to watch them. Once you wore Olympic gold around your neck, you never took it off.

"Let's put on a show," Meryl said in the lobby.

It was easy to get people on board for a charity show, especially when Meryl knew all the top coaches and Charlie's firm managed most of U.S. figure skating. They brought in a healthy roster of current stars, but the best phone calls were to old friends: Alex and Maia, Alissa, Ryan. "It's going to be like the opening scene of Follies," Meryl crowed. Charlie had known her for thirty years, and he still had no idea what she was talking about sometimes.

Nobody was more excited about the show than Jeremy Abbott. He was in such high demand as a choreographer that Charlie was sure he'd send his regrets, but instead, Jeremy poured himself into the project. He was flying down from San Francisco this weekend to help with the planning. He wanted to choreography a program for Meryl and Charlie. "I kept thinking we'd get around to it," Jeremy said on the phone, "but we never got the chance."

"I guess we've got it now," Charlie said.

Charlie was circling the passenger pick-up zone at LAX when Meryl called in a fit of mommy panic. "Bianca threw up at pre-school, I have to go run and get her, I don't know how late I'm going to be, I don't want to leave her if she's not okay, so either I'll bring her to the rink or I'll get one of my skaters to sit for her, but I'll be there, tell Jer not to worry, he came all this way, and I don't want to be all, sorry, barfy kid, go back to San Francisco." Meryl's version of panic was one long, soft-spoken sentence that Charlie would never dare to interrupt. He told her to keep him posted, and that it would be fine. It had to be, because he'd taken a personal day for this, and he couldn't spare a second one.

Charlie crawled back into the airport loading zone and saw Jeremy waving frenetically. Jeremy still had that goofy, graceful energy, every movement communicating a whole story. Time had been kind to him, tracing lines and angles into his face. He'd dyed his hair blond. When Charlie complemented him on it, he raked a veiny hand through it and said, "Yeah, I was getting all these grays and I decided, it's just going to be whatever color I want it to be." It seemed like he still didn't realize how he looked to other people, that it was hard to look away from him.

Charlie explained Meryl's barfy kid situation, and Jeremy cracked up. "This was all really just a ploy to see her family," Jeremy said. "I haven't even met the baby yet."

Charlie choked back a laugh. "The baby's two and a half years old."

"I know. I can't get away. People keep hiring me."

"Tough life," Charlie said.

"You give things up." Jeremy paused, like he wasn't sure whether it was fair for him to go on. He seemed to take Charlie's silence as permission. "I can't keep a boyfriend for more than a few years. I moved all the way to San Francisco to keep the last one, and it still fell apart. I wanted that more than I wanted the career - the husband, the house, and the kids. But I guess you get what you get."

"You have time." Charlie dealt the false reassurance without believing it. It was what people kept telling him when they found out he and Tanith had broken up. Don't worry. You'll fall in love again. You're still young. As if they knew about secret pockets of time he hadn't discovered. As if falling in love solved anything.

"I don't know. I'd be pushing sixty when they graduated from high school. It's like, you hit forty, and you see all the things that just aren't part of the journey this time around." Jeremy cracked a sad smile. "I just live vicariously through other people's kids."

Forty was an arbitrary number. Charlie hoped he was hitting the crisis point a couple of years early. Otherwise, it meant things got worse.

"Well, if you want to live vicariously through Arya's hockey match later, let me know," Charlie offered. "It's her first one with her new team, and she could use the cheering section."

Jeremy didn't respond with unbridled enthusiasm, so Charlie guessed he'd be a solo hockey dad tonight.

Inevitable L.A. traffic meant they got to the rink a few minutes after the start of the afternoon ice dance session. Charlie and Meryl had been going to the early morning session, before work, which was actually more crowded, because it was the one kids went to before school. Only the skaters with hardcore talent or hardcore delusional stage parents did a 2 PM session. Or washed-up former Olympians who'd taken the day off.

Jeremy put on his skates, but he hung by the boards while Charlie warmed up. He told Charlie to improv to whatever was playing over the PA. "I like to get a sense of how a skater moves before I give them steps," Jeremy explained.

"I'm not really good at that," Charlie said. "Usually, people tell me what to do, and I do it."

Jeremy made a lopsided, uncertain face. "But I am telling you what to do." That face held a different meaning than it had when Jeremy had been an insecure kid. He was the choreographer, and he was in control. Charlie was the goofy one, for questioning him.

The PA was playing high-energy warm-up music, silly old songs, disco and '80s pop, chosen by coaches rather than skaters. Donna Summer faded into Hall and Oates, "You Make My Dreams Come True." Charlie picked up the rhythm of the song, not going for its content, just chaining turns and edges to the feel of the music. He knew he was overexerting himself, and his chest stung. But he kept moving - not because he feared Jeremy would yell at him, but because Jeremy would give up on him.

In the middle of the song, someone switched to their program music. "Con te Partirá": some cliches never went out of style. Charlie glided operatically back to the boards. Jeremy gave Charlie no feedback on his performance, although he'd been taking notes on his tablet. He only said, "Thanks, that gives me a pretty good idea," before pulling Charlie into a sloppy waltz hold and whisking him back onto the ice. Charlie'd barely had a moment to gulp water.

"Let me lead," Jeremy said. Charlie couldn't imagine another option. Skating on his own made him want to be in someone's arms - not in a sexual way, but for moral support. That was why it hadn't worked when he'd tried to skate with Tanith for fun: too much sex, not enough support. Maybe that was why they hadn't worked in general.

Jeremy's eyes locked with Charlie's as Jeremy glided him to the boards. Jeremy still had that off-kilter smile. A little attraction couldn't be a bad thing.

They were back to waltzing when Meryl caught up with them. Despite her frantic afternoon, her hair was perfect, the sick kid nowhere to be seen. Her impeccability was an unanswerable challenge to the other working parents of the world. It was that exact quality that had brought them all their medals. Imperfection wasn't something she accepted.

Meryl sprinted across the ice to them in a blur of back crossovers and stole Charlie out of Jeremy's hold. "I'm never leaving you two alone again." She approved the cheesy Hall and Oates song, and by the end of the practice session, they'd outlined a cute number for the show. They focused on the elements they could still perform confidently: footwork and turns, with easy lifts to save Charlie's back. Choreographing this new program made him bitterly nostalgic, craving the moves that his body no longer obliged.

Meryl offered to take Jeremy to his hotel after they'd finished skating, but Jeremy asked Charlie, "Didn't you invite me to stick around for your daughter's hockey game?"

"Oh. You don't have to do that."

Jeremy shrugged. "It's good for a kid to have a cheering section."

He didn't realize what he was in for. They had to pick Arya up from school, bring her home for a quick snack, gather her hockey gear, and return to the rink. Several of these steps involved mind-boggling traffic, and along with it a lot of time in the car. Their conversations kept teetering on the precipice of awkwardness, and Charlie worried that the 405 would push them over the edge.

Jeremy gave the awkwardness a shove before they'd reached the highway ramp. "I'm sorry about you and Tanith. Meryl told me a little more. I hope it's okay that I brought it up - and no, I'm realizing it isn't."

"It's fine," Charlie said. "I just don't know how to react to people feeling sorry for me."

"Me neither. I mean, I've been in a few relationships, and some of them ended angry, and some just ran their course, but it's never like - I mean, it's always starting fresh. You get to be someone new."

"I like that," Charlie said. He was playing around with the music. Thousands of songs, and nothing sat right. He knew what that meant, what that always meant: he was distracting himself. He didn't want to drag himself back into thinking about Tanith. He didn't want to refuse to be someone new.

The last time she'd kissed him, it had been mundane. It hadn't felt like a last kiss. They'd been in the car, this car, when he'd dropped her off at the airport. The last time he and Tanith had made love, he'd known it wouldn't happen again: on the couch after Arya had gone to bed, her pleading eyes, his acquiescence though his heart wasn't in it. He remembered it in retina-burned photographs. But that last kiss - he hadn't had a clue.

He was ready for another kiss. It was presumptuous to think he might get one now, and a crazy rebound impulse he'd regret. He rationalized: it wouldn't actually be a safety risk at their current five miles an hour. But the more he suppressed and ridiculed the impulse, the more intense the fantasy grew, until he was fighting off the mental image of Jeremy bent over the hood of his car in the middle of the stalled 405. Fucking him in front of the captive audience of commuters in the otherworldly California sunlight.

Now Charlie was stuck in traffic with Jeremy and an erection. His instincts told him to let it go. But with nothing to do but stare at the unmoving cars or stare at Jeremy, logic kicked in. He'd been single for six months and out of love with Tanith for years longer. He'd been doing penance for the failure of his relationship. He was allowed to make a move. And if anyone would turn him down gently, it was Jeremy.

Charlie had gotten so good at being brave for other people. But doing it for a living had made him hate the effort of being brave for himself.

Charlie cleared his throat. Jeremy sat up straight, as if he'd been caught in an untoward act. "Maybe I'm wrong about this," Charlie began, inauspiciously. "But we had a spark there, back on the ice. I think there's something between us, or there could be. If you wanted. If we wanted."

Jeremy was quiet for a long moment, until Charlie began to worry it would be an interminable car ride followed by never speaking full sentences to each other again. But Jeremy said, "Are you asking me out?"

"Ineptly. Yes."

"Can we go to Disneyland?" It was not a question that Charlie had prepared for, although he honestly had not prepared for any of the questions.

"Sure," Charlie said. "We can bring Arya. I still haven't taken her, and she keeps asking."

"Well, if you're going to bring your daughter, I have to kiss you now. Or we won't get the chance."

Charlie could barely keep his foot on the brake as Jeremy pulled him across the gear shift and into a kiss. He'd forgotten the rush of a first kiss, of these early moments when the emotions weren't sorted out yet. When kisses seemed like fresh inventions. This was the reward for old love falling apart: new love, or the possibility of it.

Charlie had not considered this: by the time a person reached forty, they'd learned how to kiss. Especially Jeremy with his string of heartbreaks, his sad history that Charlie now wanted to know and make up for. Jeremy's lips were dry but not too dry, his tongue insistent. His hands everywhere: tracing Jeremy's jaw and neck, back and chest, sticking in the tangled curls of hair that Charlie had not yet brought himself to shear off for good. Trailing down to Charlie's thigh, and Charlie remembered first that he had lived for thirty-eight years and never received a blow job in a moving vehicle, and remembered second that he was picking his daughter up from school. "Slow down," he said. "It's hard enough to kiss and drive."

Jeremy pressed his lips into Charlie's cheek before retreating. He placed Charlie's hand on top of the gear shift and held it there. "I guess we have time," Jeremy said.

"We have half our lives ahead of us." And before Charlie could interrogate that statement, or doubt it, the traffic began to clear.

Wouldn't It Be Nice: A Skating RPF Commentfic Meme

2012-03-19T18:44:42Z

I made some figure skating posts, and a bunch of people popped in to say it would be great to have some new fic in the fandom. Time for an internet party, I say!

Wouldn't It Be Nice:
A 2012 Worlds Commentfic Meme

- Prompts and fills must feature at least one skater who is competing at the 2012 World Figure Skating Championships. The list of current entries is here.

- m/m, f/f, m/f, threesomes and moresomes, and gen are all fine.

- Crossovers are welcome. At least one of the characters you request must be a Worlds competitor; the rest can be whoever you want.

- Prompts should be short: ten words or fewer. Or you can link to a picture or a tweet.

- When you leave a prompt, it should be formatted as [Name/Name, prompt of ten words or fewer]. Examples:
Takahiko Kozuka/Mao Asada, this picture
Meryl Davis/Alissa Czisny/Maia Shibutani, sci-fi rock band AU
Stephane Lambiel/Florent Amodio, adorable tiny French-speaking divas
Mervin Tran & Narumi Takahashi, this tweet
Adam Rippon/Blaine Anderson (Glee), anything

- You can leave as many prompts as you want. Leave each prompt as a separate comment.

- Anon commenting is turned on but optional. You can sign your prompts or fills if you want, or you can post them anonymously; it's all good.

- Fill a prompt by replying to the comment. If you want to make sure I notice it for the masterlist, put FILLED! in the subject line. If your fill is too long for one comment, number your parts and make each one a reply to the comment that the prompt is in.

- The meme will continue as long as people are prompting and writing. Have fun!

Fills So Far

like sugar on the tongue for prompt: "Adam Rippon/Jeremy Abbott, everyone thinks they're sickeningly cute once they finally start dating"

Untitled for prompt: "Meryl Davis/any female (but not Tanith or Tessa) - hating having to keep relationship secret"

Untitled for prompt: "Florent Amodio/various, Florent likes giving head. Men or women, he loves it."

Old to Begin by mosca, for prompt: "Jeremy Abbott/Charlie White - future!fic, been a long road home, but you're it"

Untitled for prompt: "Artur Gachinsky/Evgeni Plushenko, hero worship/seeking advice"

It's gonna be a dramallamadingdong night.

2012-03-15T04:13:07Z

1. Have you heard about Dick Button throwing a very justified public tantrum about corruption in the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame? The story broke over the weekend, but I was too deep in my figure skating history happy place to post about it before. Have you read the full text of his letter to the nominating committee chair? He is in full Bitter Old Queen With a Harvard Degree mode. I want to be Dick Button when I grow up.

Sonja Bianchetti, the nominee who was illegally removed from the ballot, is a former longtime judge and official. She was involved in the phasing out of compulsory figures and wrote a whistle-blowing book about the 2002 Olympics. I do not know much about her beyond that, but she seems awesome, and exactly the kind of person the ISU would want to keep out of a hall of fame.

1b. You know what is literally impossible to get your hands on? Detailed scoring protocols from Olympics or World Championships from the '80s. You can find final rankings and ordinals. You cannot find the score breakdown by judge for each program (i.e. who gave each 5.9 and 5.8) or each judge's placement for a given skater. You can't even find a list of standings after the compulsories or short program - like, you can't see who ranked first in figures. You can't even find this information in the outdated reference books of Olympic statistics hidden in the back of a large academic library at a university with a lot of students who major in sports-related fields. The only way to find this stuff out would be to watch videos of old events and piece it together from screen grabs and commentary. It's almost as if they did not want us to have this information.

1c. Before we leave the doldrums and go back to my skating happy place - it is sad that Pechalat/Bourzat are probably sitting out Worlds after she fell on her face and broke her nose. With them on the DL, we're probably guaranteed another North American sweep in dance. Remember when it was 2002 and a North American team had never won Worlds?

2. Okay. Back to the happy place. Naturally, after I wrote the 20 Great Skaters Who Never Won an Olympic Medal posts, it's become clear that I missed someone. So I'm giving him an honorable mention write-up here. Unfortunately, there is no embeddable video of him available, so I've only got still photos. (I did get a downloadable file from the boards and therefore have watched his skating, but I do not have permission to upload it to YouTube.)

Emmerich Danzer (Austria), men's singles; 5th in 1964, 4th in 1968

(Photo via Austria Forum)

It wasn't so much a question of "How did I forget Danzer?" as "How did I not know about Danzer?" He's way before my time, obviously, and I just assumed from his three consecutive World titles (1966-68) that he must have won an Olympic medal at some point. Instead, it turns out he was the Kurt Browning of his era. The only major competition he didn't win between 1966 and 1968 was the Olympics: he made a huge error in his compulsory figures, and a gorgeous free skate wasn't enough to dig him out of the hole. Danzer was a well-rounded skater, with an arsenal of powerful double jumps (standard at the time) including a great double axel, and a fast, low sit spin. His footwork was so intricate it was practically solo ice dance. While the Austrian figure skating program has declined since Danzer's time, his attention to detail and lightness of movement are still visible in a lot of Central European figure skaters. And long before Johnny Weir or Kim Yu-Na came along, Danzer had a hit novelty single.

3. ice_baby_09 and I think we should have a low-keyed Worlds-themed skating RPF commentfic meme again this year. Who's in?

4. In conclusion, for those of you still hanging around in the hopes of Firefly-related content, two minutes of Jewel Staite and Sean Maher having a massive giggle fit. (The YouTube user's channel has a bunch more con videos, most of them nearly as hilarious.)

Twenty Great Skaters Who Never Won Olympic Medals (part two)

2012-03-13T15:43:08Z

Welcome to the second half of my tribute to great skaters who never won an Olympic medal. Here's the first half, with skaters 20-11 and a more detailed explanation of how I chose the skaters for this list. My list is a sequel of sorts to this post on The Hairpin.

annaalamode is still a fab beta reader.

20 Great Skaters and Teams Who Never Won Olympic Medals
Part Two

10. Jennifer Nicks & John Nicks (Great Britain), pairs; 8th in 1948, 4th in 1952

Before John Nicks became one of the most venerable figure skating coaches in North America - he mentored Peggy Fleming, Babilonia & Gardner, and Sasha Cohen, and he just helped Ashley Wagner earn her first US national title - he was a legendary pairs skater. He competed with his sister, Jennifer, and in 1953, they became the only British pair ever to win a World championship. Very little footage of their skating still exists, and I can't find any information about why they missed the Olympic podium in 1952, a year when they earned medals at both Worlds and Europeans. What I can see from the above clip is that the Nicks were fluid, precise skaters with lovely body lines and impeccable unison - a classic case of sibling skaters who seemed to share a brain. It's clear from John Nicks's coaching that he emphasizes those qualities in his students as well. Sixty years after his competitive heyday, those fundamentals still matter.

9. Miki Ando (Japan), ladies' singles; 15th in 2006, 5th in 2010

I guess there's a snowball's chance in hell that Ando will come back for one more Olympics, but she talks like she's done. After last year's spectacular win at Worlds - following triumphs at Four Continents and Japanese Nationals - it looks like she's taken a page from the Jeff Buttle playbook and retired on a high note. Ando had a rough career; she bounced from coach to coach and trained in several countries, and at her lowest points, she looked miserable on the ice. As a result of her often disconnected on-ice demeanor, she's respected more for her technical prowess than for her artistry. Technically, she was extraordinary: she remains the only woman to land a quadruple jump in competition ever, and despite her tiny frame, she skated with tremendous power. But she was capable of grace and emotional connection as well, as she showed in a heart-wrenching show program to Christina Aguilera's "Hurt" that she dedicated to her late father.

8. Maria Jelinek & Otto Jelinek (Canada), pairs; 4th in 1960

This news clip, the only YouTube video I could find of the Jelineks, fails to convey their impact on the pairs discipline. What it does show is really cool, and the kind of skating move that doesn't fit into a scoring rubric: they start in a pairs spiral, and Maria holds her arabesque position while Otto does an axel and lowers her immediately into a death spiral. They also pioneered skills that have become standard in pairs, such as side-by-side double axels and rotational lifts. Born in Prague during World War II, they fled with their family to Canada after the war, and fittingly, Worlds were held in Prague the year they won gold, 1962. The Jelineks were expected to finish on the podium at the 1960 Olympics but made errors that cost them a medal. It was their only Olympic appearance - they went pro after winning their World title. But it seems like they were ready to move on to other ambitions: after touring with the Ice Capades through the 1960s, Otto became a member of Canadian Parliament and then the Minister of Sport, Health, and Education. In the latter position, he was instrumental in bringing the Olympics to Calgary in 1988.

7. Albena Denkova & Maxim Staviski (Bulgaria), ice dance; 18th in 1998, 7th in 2002, 5th in 2006

This is the fourth and final team on this list to suffer from the great splatfest of 2006, and in my opinion, the most devastating. They were at their prime in 2006 and heavy favorites for a medal until a fall in the original dance put them out of contention. At Worlds a few weeks later, Denkova and Staviski won the first of their two consecutive World titles, but it felt like a consolation prize. Their long career - they began competing together in 1992 and appeared at fourteen world championships - is marred by its tragic end. In the summer of 2007, Staviski caused a car crash while intoxicated, killing one person and putting another in a coma. Otherwise, the team might have soldiered on to a fourth Olympics. I prefer to remember them for their distinctive, intense skating style and some of the most breathtaking lifts in the history of ice dance. Trained in the Russian tradition but not beholden to it, they skated with pure body lines and deep edges but also with a rare passion. A real-life couple whose son just celebrated his first birthday, they had a terrific talent for translating their emotional connection onto the ice.

6. Susanna Rahkamo & Petri Kokko (Finland), ice dance; 6th in 1992, 4th in 1994

If you want to work old-school ice dance fans into a lather, ask them why Rahkamo and Kokko never won an Olympic medal. Within seconds, you'll have one lady in a cat sweatshirt yelling about how they were robbed because the judges never understood them, and another lady yelling with equal conviction about how what they did wasn't even really ice dance. They definitely stand out in comparison with other top ice dance teams of their era: they're technically oriented, project giddy joy rather than romantic intensity, and have the nerve to skate to The Beatles. History has vindicated Rahkamo and Kokko to a large extent. In 2008, the ISU ratified an official competitive pattern dance, the Finnstep, based on their 1994-1995 Original Dance program. They've left a less tangible legacy, too: the top ice dance teams now look a lot more like Rahkamo and Kokko than Grishuk and Platov.

5. Yuka Sato (Japan), ladies' singles; 7th in 1992, 5th in 1994

Yuka Sato was capable of beating every other great skater of her generation - but never when it counted. At 1992 Skate America, she outskated Nancy Kerrigan and Chen Lu, but time after time at Worlds and the Olympics, she made technical errors that put her scores below her potential. Finally, in 1994, with all three newly-crowned Olympic medalists sitting out Worlds, she was vindicated, beating Surya Bonaly primarily on the strength of her artistic elements. Dick Button crows about Sato's beautiful lines and extension, and as usual, Uncle Dick is right. She's an expressive skater who connects her moves effortlessly, but she also had a strong arsenal of jumps, which she integrated into her programs so they looked like another step in the dance. Sato has also emerged as one of the most successful coaches of her generation - not surprisingly, she specializes in head cases who always seem to be an error or two away from a medal.

4. Barbara Underhill & Paul Martini (Canada), pairs; 9th in 1980, 7th in 1984

Watching Underhill and Martini, what stands out is how much their skating looks like that of top pairs teams today. Sure, their tricks are easier - double jumps, a single lateral twist lift - but they made pairs look like a gasp-inducing adventure sport. Their throw double axel was so big, I needed the commentators' reassurance that it wasn't a triple. Their height difference was a shock in the early '80s but is now standard; it's what allowed them to make their skills so dramatic. They were also unusual in that they weren't an off-ice couple, at a time when a romantic relationship was practically expected for teams who weren't siblings. Instead, they became great actors, and they developed fantastic on-ice chemistry based on their platonic affection for each other. If they hadn't gone pro after winning Worlds in 1984, they may very well have snagged an Olympic medal in 1988; they won the World Professional Championships six times in the '80s and '90s. During their pro career, they innovated graceful combination lifts that made their way into younger teams' competitive repertoires. Their influence on the discipline of pairs, artistically and athletically, has made them an enduringly fun and accessible couple to watch.

3. Denise Biellmann (Switzerland), ladies' singles; 4th in 1980

Biellmann was the worst casualty of compulsory figures in the history of the sport. At her only Olympics in 1980, she placed first in the free skate, but her lackluster school figures kept her off the podium. Her legacy to figure skating is immense: she was the first woman to land a triple lutz in competition, and she's the only skater to have a spin named after her. You know, the one where the skater arches to hold her free blade over her head - that one. To this day, Biellmann is perhaps the greatest spinner in ladies' figure skating, and she competed at a time when the scoring system didn't reward it. Watching her skating now, it's clear that she was ahead of her time both artistically and technically, with impressive flexibility and creativity in her skating as well as powerful jumps. Biellmann began her career early - she first appeared at the European Championships when she was only fourteen - and she retired from competitive skating while she was still a teenager to pursue a long, successful professional career in which she seemed to get better and better.

2. Shae-Lynn Bourne & Victor Kraatz (Canada), ice dance; 10th in 1994, 4th in 1998, 4th in 2002

Bourne and Kraatz were the first North American team ever to win a World title in ice dance - in goddamned 2003. That year, they were so mind-blowingly brilliant that the judges, who really wanted to give it to the Russians, had to hand them a golden ending to their long and decorated career. They earned an incredible ten Canadian national titles and collected four World bronze medals and one World silver in addition to their win. Impressive as that track record is, many fans consider them the primary example of politics that kept extraordinary Canadian and US skaters off Olympic podiums for decades. Indeed, they finished two of their three Olympics just shy of the podium, and arguably in spite of performances superior to those who beat them. Bourne and Kraatz concentrated on the athleticism of their discipline when it was just starting to matter, and their lifts were spectacularly innovative. In particular, they required great strength and control from Kraatz, who could hydroblade while lifting Bourne. Their routines were fast and difficult, and they also brought in unusual styles and rhythms, as in their famous "Riverdance" routine. At times, they seemed to be in a class by themselves technically, to the point where the judges couldn't figure out how to score them. That's the only explanation I can think of for why this team never stood on an Olympic podium.

1. Kurt Browning (Canada), men's singles; 8th in 1988, 6th in 1992, 5th in 1994

Ask longtime skating fans about the greatest skater never to win an Olympic medal, and nine out of ten will say, "Kurt Browning." His omission from the Hairpin list was what inspired me to write this entire post, in fact. At his peak - and it was a long peak! - Browning was perhaps the most complete, well-rounded skater in the history of the sport, respected equally for his artistry and his athletic ability. He's the first person ever to land a ratified quadruple jump in international competition, and his arsenal also included one of the most powerful, centered triple axels ever. But Browning took other aspects of the sport seriously, gaining a reputation for fast, intricate footwork at a time when that element, although required, barely figured into the scoring. He also developed a unique artistic style, using music and movement to create a character on the ice. Browning proved that being a charming goofball is a form of artistry, opening up a path for many subsequent skaters. Early in Browning's career, his ambivalence toward school figures kept him out of the top tier. In 1989, the ISU reduced figures to 20% of the total score, and with the numbers in his favor, Browning won the first of his four consecutive World titles. But he choked whenever the Olympic rings hung above his head, missing his jumps and stumbling with a sheepish grin. When he went pro, it was like he'd been let out of his cage, and his professional routines are unforgettably funny but also athletic and challenging. Browning has also dedicated himself to mentoring younger skaters, and his nonjudgmental encouragement of male skaters in particular has been tremendous. He might be skating's class clown, but he's classy, too. It's a shame that he never got to stand on an Olympic podium, and it's proof that the Olympics aren't an accurate measure of a skater's accomplishments, because Browning is one of the best ever.

Who's your favorite skater to never stand on the Olympic podium? Anyone who I and The Hairpin managed to overlook?

Twenty Great Skaters Who Never Won Olympic Medals (part one)

2012-03-12T15:46:08Z

Over the past week, several people have alerted me to The 10 Greatest Figure Skaters Who Never Won an Olympic Medal, probably knowing that it would raise my hackles. I love the passion and detail that the writers went into - I won't go nearly as deep, myself - but the list has some problems. Nine out of the ten on the list represented the USA, and all of them skated in the '80s and '90s. None are ice dancers. I agree with several of the list entries, particularly Jill Trenary, Surya Bonaly, Meno & Sand, and (with the big, obvious asterisk) Tonya Harding.

So this isn't a rebuttal. It's more of a sequel, with a broader international focus and a lot more ice dance. There are skaters who competed as far back as the 1940s and as recently as last season (but who, in my estimation, are either retired for good or far enough past their prime to never see an Olympic podium). I'm not including anyone who has a fighting chance at a medal in 2014, nor any ice dancers who competed before the discipline became an Olympic sport (honorable mention shout outs to Towler/Ford and Romanova/Roman, though). I also intentionally left out the 1961 US world team, even though many of them might have continued to Olympic success had their careers not been tragically cut short.

annaalamode beta read this in exchange for getting to watch all the embeds a day early.

Since this has turned out exceptionally long, I'm dividing it into two posts.

20 Great Skaters and Teams Who Never Won Olympic Medals
Part One

20. Margarita Drobiazko & Povilas Vanagas (Lithuania), ice dance; 16th in 1992, 12th in 1994, 8th in 1998, 5th in 2002, 7th in 2006

Drobiazko and Vanagas are the only ice dance team ever to appear in five Olympic Games and the only Lithuanian skaters ever to win a World medal. The former reflects the benefits of skating for a small country, the latter the benefits of persistence and a genuine love for the sport. There were always at least a few teams better than them, and they won far more bronze than gold; their only major international win was at 1999 Skate Canada. But their longevity and enthusiasm made them a highlight of any competition they entered, and their love for each other shone in their eyes every time they completed a program. Both skaters had extraordinary flexibility and core strength that allowed them to develop unique lifts and changes of hold while looking graceful and maintaining speed. They came out of retirement to compete at the 2006 Olympics, only to fall victim to the notorious "splatfest" in the original dance, in which they, along with several other teams, tripped and fell. It was an ironically fitting end to a long career of almosts.

19. Tim Brown (USA), men's singles; 5th in 1960

Tim Brown's narrative is full of strange coincidences and tragedies. This video, the only one of him I could find on YouTube, is clearly not his best performance: he struggles with his most difficult (double!) jumps, and he split-jumps off the rink at the end, apparently to seek medical assistance. This performance would have earned him a trip to Worlds, but illness kept him at home - ironically, saving him from the plane crash that killed the entire 1961 US world team. He retired after that season, ending an impressive career that included two World silver medals (1957 and 1958) and a World bronze in 1959. He was a frequent bridesmaid at US Nationals as well, coming in second to David Jenkins four times. After his retirement, he fell into obscurity before dying of AIDS in the 1980s. But this video shows him to be an early innovator in a long line of boundary-pushing male divas on ice, an aesthetic ancestor of skaters like Toller Cranston and Daisuke Takahashi. Camel spins were a ladies' skill back then! His spread eagles are gorgeous, and that combination of four loop jumps, ending in a tough double, is awfully cool. Brown deserves far more recognition than he's received over the years.

18. JoJo Starbuck & Kenneth Shelley (USA), pairs; 13th in 1968, 4th in 1972; Shelley placed 4th in men's singles in 1972

Ken Shelley holds a distinction that makes him an overachiever even for this list: he competed at the 1972 Olympics in both pairs and men's singles, and he placed fourth in both disciplines. Shelley was also US national champion that year, but he enjoyed greater international success as a pairs skater. He was lucky to skate with Starbuck, a classic blonde ice princess so charismatic she pursued an acting career after retirement. Together, they won two World bronze medals, and they enjoyed more success as professionals than as amateurs. Unlike many of the other skaters on this list, Starbuck and Shelley weren't terribly innovative, just solid, consistent skaters with cute smiles and an admirable work ethic. But at the time, with pairs otherwise dominated by Eastern European teams, they were just the right kind of clean-cut kids to represent the USA.

17. Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon (Canada), ice dance; 12th in 2002, withdrew in 2006

Of the victims of Splatfest '06, aka the 2006 Olympics original dance, Dubreuil and Lauzon suffered the most: Dubreuil fell from a lift and was injured so severely that Lauzon had to carry her from the ice. This leaves the team with an Olympic record completely out of step with their terrific career. They never placed higher than twelfth at the Olympics, but they earned back-to-back silver medals at Worlds in 2006 and 2007, won the 2007 Four Continents Championships against a tough field, and racked up five Canadian national titles. Dubreuil and Lauzon always focused more on artistry than athleticism, which resulted in beautiful performances that often failed to bring them the scores they'd hoped for. Lauzon's fantastic extension through his legs and back, and Dubreuil's ability to convey emotion through her whole body, brought a unique elegance to their skating. They retired in 2007 after the most successful season of their career, and their "At Last" free dance was their swan song. It's one of the most romantic things ever performed on ice skates.

16. Johnny Weir (USA), men's singles; 5th in 2006, 6th in 2010

I'm going to take off my fangirl hat for the time being and evaluate Weir with the same criteria I'm using for the other skaters here: the quality of his skating and his legacy to the sport. The trouble is, in Weir's case, it's impossible to separate his off-ice persona from his impact on figure skating, because his insistence on being a personality as well as an athlete is a big part of his contribution to the sport. He's not the first to do it, certainly, but when he came onto the scene in the mid-aughts, it was pretty daring: the prior generation of men's skaters had downplayed musicality and individuality and turned their event into a chest-thumping jump-off. What Weir lacked in technical dazzle - he never landed a clean quad in competition - he made up for by executing his elements impeccably, with soft landings and great speed. He also reintroduced a balletic elegance to men's skating that is now widespread. Weir has announced a return to competitive skating for next season, but his best shot at an Olympic podium was probably in 2006. But he's in great company on this list, as a man who opened doors so other athletes could skate through them - in his case, with a fey swish of his hips and an off-color sound bite.

15. Minoru Sano (Japan), men's singles; 9th in 1976

If you didn't realize until right this second that the first Japanese skater to win a World medal did so in 1977, you'd be forgiven. At the time, Japan's figure skating program was in its infancy, and Sano can take a lot of the credit for getting it going. His top-ten finish at the Olympics and his bronze medal at Worlds the following year made him a national celebrity, a status which he used to start the first national touring ice show in Japan. While Sano was less of a trailblazer artistically or technically than many other skaters of his generation, he still reads as a more modern skater than most of his competitors, perhaps because the way he carries his upper body is now practically a trademark of Japanese figure skating. Or perhaps because skills like his series of spread eagles into a double axel and high-flying entrances into low sit spins earn more points today than they did back then. Best of all, Sano always looks like he's having a blast out there.

14. Judy Blumberg & Michael Seibert (USA), ice dance; 7th in 1980, 4th in 1984

When ice dance nerds complain about pro-Russian and anti-North American bias in the 6.0 system, Blumberg and Seibert are usually Exhibit B. (Exhibit A comes tomorrow.) For twenty years, they reigned in the court of public opinion as the greatest American ice dance team ever, ceding the distinction only when Belbin & Agosto won Olympic silver. Ice dance of their era was a different sport, much more tied to ballroom dance than it is now. Blumberg and Seibert played up the cheese and the entertainment value of their discipline while also showing versatility and intricacy in all of their moves. Their energy and precision earned them three consecutive World bronze medals from 1983 to 1985. They also dominated US ice dance, winning five consecutive national titles from 1981 to 1985. Like many of the skaters on this list, especially those from the 1970s and early 1980s, Blumberg and Seibert seem ahead of their time when I watch them now, and I have no doubt that they would have been much more successful in a scoring system that placed less emphasis on compulsory pattern dances and more emphasis on artistry, innovation, and fluidity of movement.

13. Isabelle Delobel & Olivier Schoenfelder (France), ice dance; 16th in 2002, 4th in 2006, 6th in 2010

This team is so damn cool. That's what comes across in their skating, regardless of rhythm or theme. It's not just that nobody else skated like them or chose programs or themes like they did - it's that they're like that girl you admired in high school for pulling off outfits you'd never be brave enough to wear. I picked this video, and not the FD that won them their World title in 2008, because I feel like it expresses the unique character of their skating more than any other. It's like a cross between Bonnie & Clyde and The Matrix, with twizzles. During their long career - they skated together for twenty years and were not romantically involved at any point - they succeeded in adjusting to tremendous changes in ice dance, and their innovative style was actually better suited to the code of points than to the 6.0 system they started out in. Even so, they just missed the podium in 2006 - not with a fall in the original dance, like so many other teams, but with a weak compulsory dance that set them too far behind. In 2010, they returned from a long hiatus after Delobel gave birth to a son; their performance at that Olympics was a lovely farewell to fans who had followed them for two decades.

12. Alexander Fadeyev (Soviet Union), men's singles; 7th in 1984, 4th in 1988

Before Plushenko, Yagudin, or Petrenko, there was Fadeyev. Now, he falls somewhere between underrated and forgotten, and it's a shame, because he had a tremendously successful skating career in the 1980s. He was Soviet national champion six times and European champion four times; he won Worlds in 1985. He enjoyed this success despite terrible inconsistency in his free skating and sometimes because of his pristine compulsory figures. Fadeyev was never a particularly musical skater, but his focus on figures made his edges and speed sublime. He had a great camel position and a beautiful triple flip. It's too bad the Olympic nerves always seemed to get the best of him. This video is of his near-flawless free skate from 1989 Europeans, his last major international title.

11. Maria Butyrskaya (Russia), ladies' singles; 4th in 1998, 6th in 2002

When Butyrskaya won her World title in 1999, it was a huge surprise: not because she beat Michelle Kwan, nor because she skated clean, but because she was the oldest skater ever to win a ladies' gold. She was 27, and her record still stands. More amazingly, she continued to compete for three more years, earning her third European title in 2002, a few months before her thirtieth birthday. Her amateur career spanned over a decade - an eternity among the mayflies of ladies' singles - and included six Russian national titles, five of them consecutive. Her fast, centered spins were exquisite, and she had a powerful arsenal of jumps. But what stands out for me, watching her programs for the first time in ages in order to make this list, is her uniquely aggressive presence on the ice. It's almost unladylike, except that she'll pull it back for a moment and look like a ballerina. In other words, she had a sense of her persona that can only come with experience: Butyrskaya was the ultimate late bloomer.

Tune in tomorrow for the top ten!

Fic: Genius Loci (Revenge, Nolan/Jack)

2012-03-07T00:02:51Z

This has been sitting around forever. Time to set it free!

Title: Genius Loci
Fandom: Revenge
Pairing/Characters: Nolan/Jack, The Amanda (the boat)
Rating: NC-17 for explicit sex
Warnings/enticements: None standard.
Spoilers: Takes place during "Perception."
Summary: The Amanda looks after her two drunken sailors.
Word count: about 2100.
Disclaimers: Revenge is the intellectual property of ABC, Temple Hill, and Page Fright. This original work of fan fiction is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License; attribution should include a link to this post. This story is a labor of love, not money, so it's protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976.
Notes: Thanks to fox1013 for continuing to encourage me and then beta reading.

*

Amanda's captain was sad. She could feel his moods and wondered if this was peculiar to their relationship, or if all boats had this relationship to the humans who sailed them. She swayed in the placid midsummer breeze, waiting for him, and he came early, abandoning his bar, day drinking on the deck, petting her prow and telling Amanda she was the only girl who had ever loved him back. Amanda couldn't understand how that could be true. For one thing, she wasn't a girl, except metaphorically.

Jack cried, and he talked to Amanda, to himself. He talked about an Amanda who was a girl, not a boat, but not the girl he'd named Amanda after. It all got confusing. Amanda, the boat, lost track. She could do nothing except rock him gently and bear his weight against the sea.

When he drank, he left mementos behind: empty beer cans and whiskey bottles. Amanda liked the way they clattered and clinked as they rolled up and down her deck, as if he were there.

There was another man in Amanda's life now. Not her captain, but he had the keys. He didn't claim any real ownership of her, but she was still his, in some official human way that she couldn't understand. Like Jack, he boarded Amanda to be alone. He cleaned up Jack's garbage, clucking his tongue. Amanda didn't love him the way she loved Jack, but she admired his fastidiousness and embraced his need for solitude.

He installed a wireless router below decks. It buzzed pleasantly.

Amanda's men - her captain and her whatever-he-was - were arguing on the dock as if she were not watching. "When are you going to see that you're better off?" her whatever, Nolan, was saying. "I can't believe you thought you could trust that girl."

"I loved that girl," Jack said, with the passion and earnestness that most endeared him to Amanda.

"Yes, and you'll love another girl tomorrow. Because that's how you are. Weren't you in love with Emily the other day?" Nolan was mean. Amanda admired that about him, but it was why she hoped she would never have to be solely his.

"That doesn't mean I loved her less," Jack said.

Nolan rubbed his chin. "You know, I can't find a way to disagree with that. But." He paused to let the sea air into the conversation, the yelps of gulls and the whistle of the wind over the Sound. "You could do better than Wild Turkey. Especially before noon."

Jack laughed. Amanda hadn't heard that sound in a while. Like surface ripples when it was just beginning to rain, light and ominous.

"Got any suggestions?" Jack said.

"No, but if you have half an hour, I am capable of driving myself to a liquor store."

Jack folded his arms. 'What do you want this time, Nolan?"

"I want to get drunk on my boat," Nolan said. Amanda suspected that was not all he wished to accomplish. Amanda suspected that Nolan was making sure it was clear he had other motives and that he was not going to give them away. Nolan, like Jack, was unsubtle. Amanda didn't know what she would do if she ever came into the possession of a human whose mind she could not read so easily.

After Nolan left, Jack boarded Amanda to take off his shirt and lie on her deck. She loved the warmth of his body against her cool fiberglass. He fell asleep there, between her and the sun.

When Nolan returned, he stepped too heavily on her, making her pitch to starboard, stirring up waves. Together, the men raised her anchor and sailed her out into the open water. Amanda normally enjoyed being sailed - it was what she was designed for, after all - but she knew they would be drinking and did not trust them to guide her back to the dock. She protested as well as she could, resisting tack and seeking out eddies of calm water. But ultimately, she obeyed the wind.

Nolan had two large paper sacks and a small plastic bag. He displayed their contents to Jack as if they held religious significance. "I tried to represent the spectrum. Jack Daniels, the depressed day drinking classic. Andong Soju, if you're feeling exotic. Cinnamon Schnapps, if your despair is so deep that all you want is burning pie-flavored misery. Chicken-walnut salad and bread from that deli in Amagansett, if you decide to go off your liquid diet long enough for lunch. And last but not least, if you promise not to question my motives - Johnnie Walker Blue."

Jack gasped audibly. "I... promise not to question your motives."

They dropped Amanda's anchor in a placid pool of nowhere, land in sight but distant. She let the wind and sea caress her. They opened the Johnnie Walker first, trading gulps as if it were cheap, as if it were water. Then, they were alternating the Jack Daniels and the Schnapps, until Jack brought cups up from the hold and they mixed the two together. Amanda resigned herself to never seeing the dock again, or to a humiliating police tow.

Amanda was thinking about the mortification of tugboats when she noticed that they'd put down the liquor, that something else was happening. She hoped it wouldn't involve vomiting on her deck. But they weren't drunk to the point of illness, only to the point of overdramatic honesty. "So I'm an trusting person," Jack was saying. "I thought that was a good quality. Shouldn't that be a good quality?"

"It's certainly a rare one," Nolan replied.

"So that's what I'm supposed to do?" It wasn't clear whether Jack was talking to Nolan or shouting at the wind. "Just not trust people?"

"You'll get better with practice. Start small. Try not trusting me."

"I already don't trust you," Jack said. Amanda wished she could convey to him that if he didn't trust Nolan, he shouldn't have sailed her into open water and gotten drunk with him. But this was the point being made: Jack was a trusting person, and it should have been a virtue.

"Look." Nolan came up behind Jack, curling like a cat to whisper in his ear. "Not as hard as you thought."

"Oh. That's what you brought me out here for. And got me drunk. See? Trusting." But Jack didn't move and didn't turn around.

Nolan kissed Jack's cheek sharply, as if lighting a match, and strolled away. He leaned against the mast and stared out at the sea.

First of all, I didn't bring you. You sailed yourself," Nolan said. "And second of all. I visited you because you're useless when you're like this. There are few enough good people as it is, and it's that much more difficult if you won't make yourself useful."

Jack was silent. Amanda steeled herself for a tearful drinking binge when Nolan was gone, which would be soon, because Jack would summon just enough sobriety to steer her home and kick Nolan off.

"I didn't mean to insult you," Nolan said.

"I didn't mean to be insulted." Jack smiled a little; Amanda was relieved to see him calmer. "But I've been rejected a lot lately."

"Do you... want me to not reject you?" Nolan crept closer to Jack, invading his space and concentrating their weight in so small a space that Amanda had to correct her balance.

"I don't know. Kind of. I'm thinking - I've had bad enough luck with women lately, if there's an alternative, I'll take it."

Nolan squinted at him. "So you want me to be your experiment?"

"Something like that," Jack said.

"Better than blackmail," Nolan murmured. He turned Jack's face toward his with the flick of a finger, then sat still, looking into Jack's eyes as if there were no world beyond them.

Their first few kisses were rough, as if they were finishing an old argument, but they found their stride. Amanda normally watched them protectively, affectionately, but now her motives turned toward fascination. She had seen sex before but could not claim to understand it. Both Jack and Nolan had masturbated in her hold, Jack to pictures of girls in underwear and Nolan to computer videos of men in acrobatic configurations. Less frequently, Jack had brought women aboard, most recently the girl who shared Amanda's name. Amanda understood the uses of sex, always for pleasure and sometimes for closeness between people, but she did not see why they were ashamed of it, why they hid it. She thought people should celebrate what gave them joy.

Jack and Nolan lay across the benches of her deck, bare chests pressed flat together, Jack's arms around Nolan's waist holding them there. They kissed as if it were the remedy for talking, as if taking their tongues out of each other's mouths might make them erupt in words. Nolan fumbled one-handed with Jack's belt, not incompetently but slowly, giving fair warning. He rubbed Jack's cock through his boxers, Jack swelling against the fabric, staining it with drops of precum.

"Last chance to say you're straight and back out," Nolan said.

Jack didn't reply, and his silence might have spoken consent, but Nolan didn't allow it to. He waited with his hand around Jack's cock until Jack said, "I'm not backing out."

"Then sit up."

Jack obeyed Nolan, and Nolan knelt below him on the deck. "You have a beautiful body," Nolan said as he rolled Jack's boxers down his legs. "I hope you work hard for it."

This time, Jack's silence won out against Nolan's patience. It amazed Amanda how in this position of power, hand cradling Jack's balls and mouth deep around Jack's cock, Nolan was the vulnerable one. But also the skilled one, the hotshot prodigy, bobbing his head and sucking hard until Jack came, his orgasm a thing Nolan had programmed and assembled, an accomplishment.

Self-satisfied, the sun reflecting golden off his hair, Nolan stood and walked away.

"Where are you going?" A yawn distorted Jack's words.

"Below deck to take care of myself," Nolan said with his back turned.

"You don't have to do that."

"Let me," Nolan said.

Jack came up behind him, pressing his spent cock up against Nolan's ass, running his hands over Nolan's chest. "You know I'm not the kind of guy to do that."

"Hmm," Nolan said. Knowing he was unsteady on his feet, Amanda calmed the ripples under her hull. "You know, you're lucky. Nobility makes me hard." He took Jack's hand and guided it down his lean stomach to his cock. Jack nudged Nolan's erection to pop out of the fly of his briefs. "Hot but uncomfortable," Nolan said, and he took the briefs off. He raised Jack's hand to his mouth, licked it wet, and returned it to his own cock, leading Jack in each stroke, each flick of the wrist. Jack held him close, a firm arm bracing his chest. He feathered kisses along the back of Nolan's neck. Amanda held them steady and kept them safe.

Nolan encouraged Jack, "That's good, that's good," until the words became a mantra, a guide in themselves, and he whispered it a few more times after he came, lingering in Jack's embrace.

They lay naked on Amanda's deck, the sunshine like a blanket over them. Amanda studied the salt of their skin, trying to taste the vestiges of pleasure in it.

"Just to be clear," Nolan said, lacing his fingers in Jack's, "I'm not in love with you, and I don't want to be."

"Well." Jack drew out the syllable. "Thanks for not leading me on. It's refreshing."

"I've been trying to be your friend. I'm not doing such a great job, obviously."

"You're doing fine." Jack squeezed Nolan's hand. "I mean, you got me to knock off the binge crying."

"Until the next girl breaks your heart, at least," Nolan said.

"And your dick will be right there waiting?"

"Might be." Nolan pulled his hand away and got to his feet. As he put his clothes back on, he said, "No promises."

"No promises," Jack echoed. "Words to live by."

The wind had shifted, and Amanda yielded to it, letting it pitch her back and forth. Jack dressed and set busily about pointing her home. His proud Amanda, carrying her creation back to shore, this alliance she'd build with her own sails.

Things that are not cat food: Olives. Thin Mints. Jalapeno flavor pretzel chips. My pants.

2012-03-06T01:04:19Z

Hi! It's been a while. Stuff's getting done, I'll have you know.

Still wacky obsessed with Revenge, although ABC is doing its best to never have a new episode 2 weeks in a row so I'm going through a lot of new fannish withdrawal. It has me writing actual fic, and then real life has me not posting the fic for weeks and weeks because that requires turning comment notifications on.

Corollary: if you commented on my journal in the past couple of weeks, I probably didn't see it. Sorry. I've been that kind of busy. Comments are back in my inbox now, for a few days, and then I have to go back into stealth mode.

Ashley Wagner won 4CCs! Ross Miner had the most adorable surprise bronze medal face at 4CCs! Jason Brown and Gracie Gold medaled at Junior Worlds! My patriotism is embarrassing. Can't wait for Worlds.

I'm pretty sure five people are going to defriend me for shipping Bo/Dyson. That is actually what you get for pimping me into this fandom. I plan to continue shipping them even after the events for which I am unspoiled that make the pairing less viable. He's kind of my type.

I saw Shearwater in concert and am listening to Animal Joy incessantly. If you like other music that I listen to, you will like them. Have an amazingly gorgeous and creepy video:

Shearwater - Breaking The Yearlings (OFFICIAL VIDEO) - Click here for another funny movie.

Survivor is having a surprisingly good season, considering there are two contestants named Tarzan.

As revenge for getting her to watch Survivor, thistle90 has gotten me to watch American Idol with her. If you see me writing Heejun/Phil, you know she's won.

Since the rest of you don't live with me, a meme:

I was thinking you should tell me about stories you think I should write. I mean, if you could sit me down for a day or whatever and say, "Mosca, I want you to write this story for me," what would that story be?

Walking home in Kermit footie pajamas on Christmas.

2012-01-23T01:39:20Z

Things that are making me happy:

1. Pats to the Super Bowl! Pats to the Super Bowl! Have I mentioned Pats? To the Super Bowl?

2. If you are having trouble visualizing my happy dance, consider the following. One of the songs on Just Dance 3 is "Let's Go to the Mall" by Robin Sparkles. That is how it is listed in the game. I am proud to say that I have recorded my highest score to date in the entire game on that song, despite the fact that it is hard to follow the steps when I am laughing hysterically at the lyrics.

3. synecdochic is crowdsourcing for a cool project. She's generating a list of the top 100 songs of the past 30 years, and she wants your nominations. See her guidelines and give your input here.

4. Syfy is showing Lost Girl, which means it is finally easy to get around to watching it. And I like it! I was fully expecting not to, because femslash-bait fandoms have a long history of letting me down. None of the female leads really do it for me physically, alas, but I'm digging the premise and the awesomeness of Bo.

5. Still freshly obsessed with Revenge, to the point where I am continuing to write frivolous porn into fox1013's IM window that I will eventually edit and share with the rest of you. It's like my love for early modern revenge tragedy and my love for trashy teen soaps had a very well-written baby named Nolan Ross.

6. thistle90 and I are going to figure skating Nationals! Like, Tuesday we are on a plane to San Jose! We have awesome seats. We plan to tweet until you beg us to shut up. If you'll be there, too, let me know.

7. Did I mention that the Pats are going to the Super Bowl?

We should just live in cake light.

Fic: Hell to Raise (Teen Wolf, Derek/Stiles), part 2/2

Fic: Hell to Raise (Teen Wolf, Derek/Stiles), part 1/2

You can never do anything great in the world unless you have a chip on your shoulder.

Gay Costume Awards 2012

Honorable Mentions

Bronze Medal

Silver Medal

Gold Medal

2012 Classy Costume Awards

Honorable Mentions

Bronze Medal

Silver Medal

Gold Medal

2012 Illusion Mesh Trainwreck Awards

Honorable mentions

Bronze Medal

Silver Medal

Gold Medal

Fic: The Quick and the Dead Will Find You (Teen Wolf/Vampire Diaries/Lost Girl)

Fic: Armor (Mass Effect, Tali/FemShep)

Dear author, please send werepony.

Femslash '12 pre-poll time!

Fic: Another Thing Coming Undone (Hunger Games Trilogy, Haymitch)

Drag cats do not fetch.

Fic: Let's Make a Deal (Teen Wolf, Derek/Stiles)

Wookiee Jesus will decide my future.

They should have sent the tap-dancing hipster surfer to Vegas.

Archie Panjabi as Tony Stark/Iron Man

Yvette Nicole Brown as Bruce Banner/Hulk

Shay Mitchell as Steve Rogers/Captain America

Tim Kang as Natasha Romanov/Black Widow

Michelle Rodriguez as Thor

Adepero Oduye as Clint Barton/Hawkeye

Sigourney Weaver as Nick Fury

Naya Rivera as Loki

Sonja Sohn as Agent Phil Coulson

Dulé Hill as Agent Maria Hill

Taye Diggs as Pepper Potts

Cynthia Nixon as James "Rhodey" Rhodes/War Machine

Zombie boyfriend needs more stew.

The Magical TV Bubble

That was not a dream sequence. That was actually on ESPN.

FIC: Old to Begin (skating RPF, Charlie/Jeremy)

Wouldn't It Be Nice: A Skating RPF Commentfic Meme

Wouldn't It Be Nice:A 2012 Worlds Commentfic Meme

It's gonna be a dramallamadingdong night.

Twenty Great Skaters Who Never Won Olympic Medals (part two)

20 Great Skaters and Teams Who Never Won Olympic MedalsPart Two

Twenty Great Skaters Who Never Won Olympic Medals (part one)

20 Great Skaters and Teams Who Never Won Olympic MedalsPart One

Fic: Genius Loci (Revenge, Nolan/Jack)

Things that are not cat food: Olives. Thin Mints. Jalapeno flavor pretzel chips. My pants.

Walking home in Kermit footie pajamas on Christmas.

Wouldn't It Be Nice:
A 2012 Worlds Commentfic Meme

20 Great Skaters and Teams Who Never Won Olympic Medals
Part Two

20 Great Skaters and Teams Who Never Won Olympic Medals
Part One