raspberryhunter

I think I won not_primetime! Of my three prompts, all of three of which I was kind of desperately yearning for, I got the one (DS9 - Kira and Garak, awesomeness, thank you so much!) that was secretly the one I wanted most (I know, not supposed to have favorites, and I did want all three very much, I just wanted that one more), I wrote one (a lot of my own prompt/issues just dovetailed so nicely with the prompt I received that it would have been difficult not to), and Bujold wrote me the third one by writing Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (spoilers) (well, except for Ekaterin, but I'm so happy right now I'm not going to hold it against her too much ;) ).

Anyway, the one I wrote! This fic was harder to write than any fic I have ever written (okay, fine, this is less than a year I've been doing this, but still), even though there were so many things going for it -- I loved the prompt (soooo happy to get a prompt that acknowledged the inequality in Belle/Rumpel, and I love the Emma-Gold interactions in canon, and honesty-in-interactions is one of my Things) and had a good time thinking about it. For some reason the fic just fought me every step of the way and went through an insane number of drafts. I'm not displeased with how it turned out, although I still feel like there's something in it that has remained resistant to my trying to hammer it into shape. I think a large part of it is the tension between a) I love shipping Gold because Carlyle has chemistry with everything, including inanimate objects, and b) there really needed to be (at least) one more level of honesty in there that this fic doesn't... quite... address. Though I, uh, may be working on that. YES. IT IS INDEED AN ADDICTION. I ADMIT IT.

Title: As on a Darkling Plain
Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: PG
Characters: Emma Swan, Mr. Gold
Relationship: Emma Swan/Mr. Gold
Summary: Honesty isn't the best color on Mr. Gold; Emma's talent is finding people. Emma and Gold make a deal.

Notes: AU from "Desperate Souls"; spoilers for the first season of OUAT. Thanks to my betas Beatrice_Otter and ensconcedinya, who saved this fic from utter disaster.

jedibuttercup, thank you for a great prompt! I enjoyed writing this.

AO3 link here.

( Emma stalked into Mr. Gold's pawnshop, slamming the door behind her. )

*SGU: So I recently discovered the whole SGU show/fandom (uh, obviously), and the huge freakily amazing thing going on in that fandom is CleanWhiteRoom's fics, especially Force Over Distance. This is a master of the long-form, here. (395k!) I must append here that I'm a bit of a comma stickler, and I'm of the camp that does not accept that "alright" is a word (though I am informed that The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style says it is fine ;) ), and even though CWR and I have agreed to disagree on "alright" I am still super-recommending this fic (and this gives you an idea of how amazing it must be, because usually that kind of thing makes me stop reading the fic, and what actually happened is that I dropped everything to read 395k). In fact, even if you don't know the SGU show, I'm informed that it's still possible to read this and enjoy it. It's got it all -- a tight plot, humor, worldbuilding, awesome characters. IT EVEN HAS A TIME LOOP CHAPTER. I am also so psyched by CWR's clear love of and knowledge of the hard sciences (D-branes! YANG-MILLS THEORY. "The universe doesn't have an edge that one can travel to. It's spatially infinite." YES). There are also two other AUs in the works (EDIT 7-31-12: THIS MEANS THEY ARE WIPs. Sorry!): Ad Noctum (which I love) and Mathematique (which is a huge crossover with SG-1 and SG-A, and which I like very much but will probably like more once I watch those).

*In Once Upon a Time, there are two major things going on in that fandom on AO3:

-Fyre is writing the heck out of it. My favorite is her Home Before Midnight, which has two sequels. This was the one that started it all, I believe. It focuses on and has a deep compassion for all the characters, like OUAT itself. She's currently writing a season 1 AU WIP that is rather interesting.

-THE Rumpel/Belle-AU fic, and I say this as someone who maxed out on Rumpel/Belle quite a long time ago, is a WIP, A Bed of Thorns. It is quite possibly the only explicit fic I will ever rec, because it is that rare beast: a fic where the sex is actually there as character development. (Okay, honestly, it's a bit more indulgent than that, and I've started skipping some of the sex parts, but it's way better about it than most of the explicit stuff I read.) It is also an extremely rare beast in that it doesn't gloss over Rumpel's evil side. As an AU, this is very possible to read even if you know nothing about canon.

*I recommended this a while back on my media-rant journal before I got this one, but since I'm talking about the long form, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, alas, another WIP, but worth every chapter even if he never does finish it, is flipping fantastic. From my rec there:

What would happen if a) Harry were brought up in a loving super-rational super-academic household, and b) everyone and everything in the HP universe was, well... more-or-less reasonable? (Not necessarily sane, mind you -- just not holding the Idiot Ball.)... Harry starts out by explaining things like observer bias to various people at Hogwart, and decides to run experiments to figure out how magic works! He explains Punnett squares to Draco in the context of blood purity! The first several chapters are a little one-note like that, but I don't care because I love that note! I would have loved it had it all been riffs on that, but as it progresses it also acquires a really interesting plot, layers on layers of hints to be explained, I think maybe every character in the entire fic is now involved in at least one secret plot, and I find the relationship between Harry and Draco extremely moving (and no, not in that way; it's gen/het).

Title: Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae
Fandom: Stargate: Universe
Rating: PG
Characters: Nicholas Rush, Gloria Rush
Relationship: Nicholas Rush/Gloria Rush, Nicholas Rush/Amanda Perry
Summary: Nick Rush is no stranger to students having crushes on him. Unfortunately.
Notes: Written for sgu_destiny's Amnesty challenge - #060: now & then. RPF if you squint hard.

AO3 link here.

( Nick Rush is no stranger to students having crushes on him. Unfortunately. )

The QIP=PSPACE result was proved in 2009, so maybe a trifle late for the timing of SGU, but it was a fairly big deal in the world of quantum computational complexity. The Watrous paper can be found here. (Disclaimer: I am not a computer scientist, though I assume (from the discussion in "Human") that Rush is!)

Ha, the npt MONSTER is safely out to beta and I can relax a bit while waiting to hear back, so have some recs from rarewomen! (I know, only a month late...) I thought that there was some really nice stuff produced for rarewomen. Here are some of my favorites:

( Recs from The Secret Garden, Greek Mythology, Inception, Vorkosigan Saga )

Now, my rarewomen assignment, which was amazing. I signed up for Pride and Prejudice fic, and it took me about five minutes after getting my assignment to realize I was not at all happy about writing P&P fic, and probably never will be (I wouldn't be able to write it without doing deep historical research, and I hate deep historical research). Fortunately, killer_quean had an incredible prompt for ST:TNG which required a lot of rumination about alien thought, a lot of SF reading to see how others had done it, and at one point had me reading papers on cellular automata, and I had a total and absolute blast.

( Prompt from killer_quean: )

Title: The Queen of Air and Darkness
Fandom: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Rating: PG-13 (for themes)
Characters: Borg Queen, Deanna Troi, Guinan
Word count: 2309
Warnings: Same as for First Contact
Summary: The Queen and life; comprehension and desire.
Notes: Many thanks to sophiegrace for a wonderfully thoughtful and incisive beta!

AO3 link here.

( The Queen smiled. 'When are you most alive? Is it not in these times when you have subsumed yourself to the whole? When you and the whole are the same entity? This is what we offer, Deanna. Life.' )

Dear not-primetime writer,

Thank you for writing me a fic! I am so excited to get a fic in any of these fandoms!

( Cut for random thoughts about Once Upon a Time, Deep Space Nine, Vorkosigan Saga, and general likes/dislikes: )

[Edited 7-26-12]

Second of two fics written for Consentfest 2012.

Title: The Riddle
Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: PG
Warnings: Vague, strictly theoretical, somewhat didactic discussion of nonconsensual sex.
Spoilers: "Skin Deep"
Summary: Mr. Gold gives Rose (Belle) a riddle, and her friends discuss it.
Notes: Can be read as a standalone (but also belongs in the Being Human series (Human Again, Becoming Human, and Being Human, between "Becoming Human" and "Being Human").

I'm sorry, the women wanted to have fun with this. I do take the subject seriously, however, even if Ruby doesn't.

AO3 link here.

(  Ruby breathed, 'You think Mr. Gold has sexually transmitted diseases? And a secret wife?' 'Um, that's really not what I meant,' Mary Margaret said. )

I'm sorry. I really did try to give this fandom up, if only for a week, and failed. Ironically.

Title: Relapse
Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Same warnings as for the episode "Skin Deep."
Spoilers: "Skin Deep," "The Return"
Summary: Bae finds Storybrooke at the same time that Gold finds the man who stole his cup.

( The stranger stepped into the office just as Emma was putting on her jacket. )

Last in my series of fic (except for one small one-shot coming at the end of the month), trying to make Belle and Rumpelstiltskin's relationship a little less full of horrifying fail in regards to power disparity, the fact that in canon they never communicate, the hundreds-of-years age difference (at least Rumpel is not stalking her at high school), etc. I CANNOT HELP MYSELF. CLEARLY. And I've probably introduced just as many issues of my own, but oh well. (And now completely jossed, with "The Return" and its revelation that it's supposed to be full of horrifying fail, but whatever.)

I PROMISE, on or near April 30/May 1, three fics that aren't OUAT (and one that is, fine).

Title:Being Human
Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: PG
Warnings: Mentions of character death in Ch 3, nothing explicit
Pairing: Belle/Rumpelstiltskin; Belle/Other, Ruby/August, Emma/Regina
Comments: Third in the series beginning with "Human Again" and continued in "Becoming Human." AU for all events in "Skin Deep" and forward in the Enchanted Forest/Earth chronology. Spoilers up to, let's say, 1x18, "Stable Boy"; major spoilers for "Red-Handed." Non-compliant with "The Return," because I wrote the outline before that aired.
Summary: The curse is broken. Belle tries to figure out her life, as do the rest of the Storybrooke inhabitants.

Inspired by a review I once read of Disney's Beauty and the Beast that went something like, "If Belle were really a strong heroine, she would have patted the Beast on the head and told him to look her up once she got done with university." (Alas, I am unable to find the citation.)

AO3 link here.

( Chapter 1: Aftermaths )

( Chapter 2: Finding )

( Chapter 3: Seeking )

( Chapter 4: Beginnings )

Okay, fine. I wrote one of these like everyone else. I could not stop myself!

Title:Human Again
Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Length: 2419 words
Comments: Thanks to my beta! In this AU, the deals with Cinderella never happened (so Rumplestiltskin was never imprisoned); the deals with Snow White may still have happened, though possibly in a different form.
Summary: Belle reminds Rumplestiltskin what it is to be human; they plot to overthrow the Queen. AU for (the last half of) "Skin Deep," and for everything that comes after "Skin Deep" in the internal OUAT chronology.

( 'I don't see why we couldn't at least try it,' Belle said. )
----------------
Notes: Thanks to the people on the boards of televisionwithoutpity.com, who came up with many of the curse ideas that made their way into this fic.

I didn't think about this one too hard. This was just a nervous tic I couldn't get rid of. I just... I loved this episode, obviously, but I couldn't help wanting to fix it. To fix Belle. And Rumplestiltskin. And their relationship. And Gaston. And those poor puppets! So, er, add fanwankwanking, and here we are.