a few general yj98 fics from 2025-2026 that I either read a while ago or found while searching for my bart allen recs! all of these are short & worth a read & I've ranged them here from angst -> humor.
two passing, sinking ships by ommlett @ommlett. 3k, T, gen.
summary: greta hayes and anita fite haven't really talked since… the whole… everything. neither really wants to. a roadblock named snapper carr gets in the way.
my notes: I swear I had been looking for something exactly like this for AGES. I thought I was crazy imagining all of the beef that greta & anita would have but this captures it PERFECTLY & really just. go read it. please por favor
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Mutual Acquaintance by Programmable_Boy @endollvors. 1.4k, G, gen.
summary: you know when a friend comes out, but not to you, and it turns into a who's on first sketch?
my notes: transfem lonnie always wins!! plus I love cissie flying off the handle at the smallest thing it's very in character & I like how this interaction slots into yj98 canon
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what is in a name? (besides a bunch of letters and syllables, that is) by birdlord5000 @birdlord5000. 4.6k, G, gen.
summary: "forget whatever we were originally gonna do tonight," cassie said, dropping several plastic bags loaded with thai food and a 12-pack of beer onto the kitchen counter. "I'm recruiting you all to help me find a new hero name."
my notes: love the names chosen, love the characters' banter, all members of the yj98 cast here incl anita & greta & cissie so I'm happy
for @gnomewithalaptop who submitted a request last YEAR omg so sorry & @cashmerecorey who was also looking for bart fics. these are all bart allen centric fics I enjoyed that have been released this year so far! since it was requested they stay gen, I've put mostly genfics, but a couple shipfics really stood out to me so they go under the cut!
The Unicorn Tree by Earthshine @radioactive-earthshine. 1.6k, G.
summary: bart allen clings to something he left behind and never got experience and hopes his niece and nephew never look back longing like he did.
my notes: a bittersweet retrospective of childhood. I really enjoy the "older" bart look here, because it's not as common throughout bart fic & he matures here without losing the core of his character.
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670,616,629 mi/h by neptunesenceladus @neptunesenceladus. 600, G.
summary: it's summer and bart is homesick for somewhere that was barely home.
my notes: very short but very well done, I think this is an excellent little character study of bart's melancholy & sense of displacement in the 21st century.
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And normalcy's boring / I'm over with that by dickweed7 @dickweed7. 4k, G.
summary: bart makes the young justice team an official tiktok account.
my notes: while the summary is really silly, & it's tagged crackfic, there are some genuinely really sweet moments that highlight the characters' personalities very well -- definitely more broadly yj98 than specifically bart (though it's his POV!), but well worth a read.
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Not Choosing is Also a Choice by Programmable_Boy @endollvors. 3.5k, G.
summary: iris is a little late rescuing bart from earthgov's labs.
my notes: definitely more about iris than bart but I think bart's characterization here is excellent for the AU that this takes place in -- a lot of fics don't explore that sharper, meaner edge of bart's that here I think really take up page space & culminate in that really fascinating ending to this piece.
⇘ click for shipfics ⇘
Summer Nights (Under the Fireworks) by flashbrainrot @flashbrainrot. 2.7k, G.
summary: bart was screaming into his pillow when his phone rang. kon. kon, probably the only great part of moving to kansas.
my notes: adorable! adorable & really, really good. I like how interwoven these two characters' comic stories are in this fic, & how natural this feels. kon's anxious need to blend in combined with bart's carelessness about standing out is exactly what makes these two work as their civilian selves.
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Sunshine in the Rearview Mirror by SleepySpeedster @sleepyspeedster. 21.4k, T.
summary: set three years after the conclusion of impulse, it's summer in manchester, alabama once again. preston lindsay, now eighteen years old and enjoying his last summer before college begins, finds himself once again reminiscing on the past and on bart allen. three years and there's been no word from his best friend. but one day he reappears and neither preston or bart are the same again.
my notes: definitely cheating since the reason it was updated this year & not in 2023 is on a technicality... but it's worth reccing. preston POV bartpreston & a nice long fic that feels like a trip down impulse 95 memory lane.
if you liked any of these fics, be sure to leave a kudos & a comment on 'em!
This Going Nowhere Fast short is an excerpt from Anti-Sith Roadtrip, the as yet unfinished sequel to Cold Calling the Jedi Order, found here
Fox would like it to be stated for the record that he did not like math. He has seen the Cadets that like math, the ones that get excited about astronav classes and flimsiwork filing. He has, purely incidentally and along with what he was actually there for, liberated those exact cadets from various storage rooms and closets on Kamino after hours. This did not mean, however, that Fox was not very good at math. He intends, and succeeds, in being good at everything, except for beating Cody at hand to hand, but math was easy for him in a way that most things weren’t, bleeding into tactics and sharpshooting, and right now apparently, whatever it was that Jedi got up to.
He tugged at the collar of the spacer's shirt to adjust how it lay over his blacks and stepped further into the mess area. The Sex Jedi, Vos, had unpacked the raggedy duffel bag he’d been carrying when he arrived onto the deactivated darjek table. It was a mess of Flimsiwork, Datapads, fueling slips, loose flimsi in varying conditions, including a few that looked as if they’d been submerged in water and then ironed flat again, and an actual nerfhide bound ledger labeled in Huttese. Vos didn’t acknowledge him but Fox knew he knew Fox was there. Sure, Fox had been nearly silent when he’d arrived and Vos hadn’t looked up from his inspection of a datapad that seemed to have violet blood crusted into all its seams and ports, but their emotions when Master Siri’s friend Quinlan had been revealed to be named Master Vos, had apparently been loud, whatever “loud” meant when it came to Force osik, so the sensing thing was corroborated.
Fox circled the table, inspecting the haphazard piles without touching them. It looked mostly like logistics, sorted by date, approximately, and then by goods and communications.There was a separate pile of weird nickknacks and random flimsi at Vos’ elbow that Fox knew better than to try and disturb, but he knew flimiswork, and he knew the best way to find out what the Sex Jedi was actually up to when he wasn’t telling clones he talked sentients off for money was to help. He was pretty sure that Vos shot him an amused glance through the dreads obscuring his face when sat down and started to gather up a particularly precarious stack of mixed datapads to read through, but he didn’t object, and that was basically permission.
Half an hour of work later, with Fox unravelling the basic details of what looked like a gun smuggling operation, and Vos making a few little gasping noises as he worked through his pile of odds and ends and either put them away or passed them to Fox for him to smugly file with the rest, Vos made a noise of interest and his attention flicked to the door. A few seconds later Fox caught the sound of footsteps, and fixed his posture from where he’d started to relax after nearly a month being told they didn’t need to be at attention, at the same moment, Vos slouched into a nearly horizontal position on the bench. Even as he ruthlessly prevented his amusement from leaking into the angle of his head and shoulders, Fox hoped desperately that his Jedi osik was picking up his appreciation for Vos’ participation. In the next moment, Wolffe rounded the corner, still looking absurd in the natborn clothes he’d stolen from Ferus instead of wearing anything that fit. He froze in the doorway, taking in the scene.
For all Wolffe was a di’kut, he was not, actually, stupid. The expression on his face, a mix of quickly stifled curiosity and alarm, proved that he’d accurately assessed the situation as unprecedented and volatile, though the latter probably only because Fox would take measures if Wolffe ruined this for him. Fox lifted the flimsi refueling receipt and smoothly and precisely placed it with the associated records that it was blatantly contradicting. Without Fox even needing to acknowledge him, Wolffe made an abrupt about face, and immediately exited through the exact same door he’d entered. As he left, the bottom of his still too tight shirt rode up enough to expose a sliver of skin at the small of his back.
With the five minutes that had bought them while Wolffe gathered reinforcements, Fox relaxed enough to glance over at Vos and made eye contact for the first time, almost startlingly easily considering the comical slouch that Vos had affected. Vos flashed him a wide grin and the pile of obviously suspect paperwork Fox had been assembling while Vos did Force Osik with his collection of garbage lifted from the table and into Vos’ easy reach. Fox watched its trajectory until it had settled into Vos’ outstretched hand before returning to his ramrod straight posture and starting to read his next datapad while he waited for Wolffe to return with Ponds, and maybe Cody, if they thought this was a situation that needed to be “handled,” not that Fox would allow it to be.
The next ten minutes of reconnaissance went about as Fox expected. There were only two entrances to the room, and both he and Vos could see them from where they were sitting, thanks to an inconspicuously angled scrap of polished metal from one of Vos’ piles. The jury was still out on whether Vos needed to be able to see the slightly warped shapes of Ponds and Wolffe skulking around behind them to know what they were up to, but Fox appreciated it. He ignored them to maintain his overly formal posture, because, even if they weren’t undetected, they were at least silent, and also Fox knew it was freaking them out.
Eventually, Bly arrived, wrapped up in Jedi robes and looking only slightly less stupid than Wolffe, and made the mistake of questioning the situation out loud.
“Uh, Fox?” Bly asked, tangling his fingers in the hems of his sleeves and sounding close to panic. Fox decided to reward his initiative with a smoothly mechanical turn of his head and stared blankly into Bly’s eyes.
“Yes.” He answered, without any inflection and had to suppress his meanest grin as Bly blanched. Ponds took advantage of this "distraction" in order to steal the most recent pile of flimsi that Fox had organized, and if they didn’t go back exactly how they’d started, Fox was going to fill his bucket with natborn seasonings while he slept.
“Are you doing accounting?” Wolffe blurted as he read over Pond’s shoulder. At this, Vos sat up, taking his feet off the table and propping his chin on his elbows as he looked past Fox to where the three of them were gathered around Fox’s proof that the gun runners were also being scammed.
“The Jedi are a monastic order, money means little to them.” He said, in the most deadpan serious tone they had heard from him in the whole time he’d been on the ship, which was how Fox knew he was kriffing with them.
Includes: Rape/NonCon elements, Gore, Vampire Turning, Vomiting, and Panic Attacks
“You’re right,” He said, in a transatlantic accent that he staunchly refused to believe was real. “You are important.” The hand on his shoulder clenched down with more force than mundane strength could account for and he made an aborted shout that echoed around all the concrete as his shoulder threatened to leave its socket. The four of them piled into the small elevator that smelled of cigarette smoke. The edge of the rail dug into his thigh where he’d been pressed into the corner. Charles leaned back against the wall next to him and continued, “Just think how much they’d care if you were taken from them.” The bell dinged and the doors shook a moment before sliding open to reveal a beige hallway. He lost strength in his legs as his situation sank in. The thralls had to carry him to the apartment door.
He died.
He was well aware that something was wrong by the time the car came into view. It was perfectly ordinary, was the thing. Not a rental and not a classic, not a junker work car. It had the unpleasant sheen of a car you don’t notice at all. Most people he’d seen get hustled into entirely unmemorable cars by new thralls were never seen again. Well, alive. Someone had put an instant photo of Lucky with his organs all on the outside on a bulletin board in the main hallway of the local Elysium and it had taken a couple of days for it to be taken down. He didn’t struggle, because making any kind of fuss was a good way of getting killed for doing that instead of whatever they had originally abducted him for. Instead he asked questions like he was a fucking idiot. He focused on the leader of this little project, Mister tall, white, and dramatic. His double breasted suit the only thing about this situation that drew the eye. He was young, not young like he was young, where his patrons forgot that he wasn’t alive during the great depression and then didn’t expect anything from him but to fix their 40 year old computers. But young like he kept getting in trouble for hunting on Anarch territory because he thought he deserved to be able to. He bit back the grunt of pain as his head hit the roof of the car he was being shoved into and he wondered if this was like that. If Charles was “taking initiative” again. He kept up idle chatter about his current projects while they drove and hoped it was sinking in. The Prince needs me, I’m important, people know me, if I’m broken so will you be. He made sure it was wrapped in comments about the quality of the thread and the number of bobbins and the deadlines he had to hit so he could pretend not to be threatening a Kindred. Ghouls who put on airs ended up dead far more often than they ended up embraced. He refused to let himself believe he was important enough not to end up the former.
The car stopped in front of a mid-sized apartment complex and pulled into an underground parking garage. He couldn’t stop himself from bracing his feet on the floor and pressing himself into the seats as the car tipped down the too steep ramp into the maze of yellow light and concrete pillars. He hadn’t felt like he was about to be murdered in a while. He wondered if mortal terror was the only thing that would age him anymore. There was something undefinably different about the older ghouls, and the idea that they’d had more near death experiences was as good a theory as any other.
The car pulled into a parking space and his stomach lurched. He finished his story about the restoration work he’d done on the collar of the Prince’s shirt and how honored he was that she’d be wearing it to the next big Elysium before the door opened to an expressionless face and he was forced to acknowledge that they’d arrived. They walked through the empty garage in silence. Charles pressed the elevator call button with the back of his knuckle and draped an arm over his shoulder.
“You’re right,” He said, in a transatlantic accent that he staunchly refused to believe was real. “You are important.” The hand on his shoulder clenched down with more force than mundane strength could account for and he made an aborted shout that echoed around all the concrete as his shoulder threatened to leave its socket. The four of them piled into the small elevator that smelled of cigarette smoke. The edge of the rail dug into his thigh where he’d been pressed into the corner. Charles leaned back against the wall next to him and continued, “Just think how much they’d care if you were taken from them.” The bell dinged and the doors shook a moment before sliding open to reveal a beige hallway. He lost strength in his legs as his situation sank in. The thralls had to carry him to the apartment door.
He died.
He wasn’t expecting it when he woke up with a spasm, tied to a chair. It was not the first time. Notable was the fact that no one else was there. Kindred never tended to wait for hostages to wake up, pretending instead to be too busy with business or pleasure. But there was no pale faced thrall peeking out at him from the shadows, too still as a consequence of the command to Watch. There wasn’t a ghoul either, reading a grimoire like a waiting room magazine. He craned his aching neck around to look at the room, still expecting to find somebody there. He strained his ears to listen for the creaking of someone unseen walking on warped floors and froze when he heard voices outside. He had a vague sense he shouldn’t have been able to, even if he couldn’t make out every word. They were talking about him. Well, about “Augustus” they’d told him he would be Augustus now while they were killing him. He closed his eyes to listen.
“You killed him, you Fucked us all.”
“We f- he’s not right! We need to destroy it!”
“And then what, jackass? He wasn’t lying about all his friends in high places.”
He heard their footsteps as they paced around the, the apartment? He remembered an apartment. Their voices were too low for him to make out the words any more and let the muffled sounds of an argument wash over him as he slouched in the chair. He ignored the uncomfortable way it dug into his upper arms. He heard only his own heartbeat and was surprised to do so. He had thought he remembered dying. He looked down at his shirt, at the dried blood that adhered it to his chest. That at least, wasn’t a dream. They’d killed him.
He thought back over the events he remembered, it had seemed like an embrace. Charles had drank deeper than anyone had before. So deeply he’d thrown off that peace the kiss always brought and started to struggle again. Not strong enough, kine were never really strong enough to escape, weaker still when losing liters of blood. He could barely see when the open wound had been thrust in his face, couldn’t think at all.
He drank too deeply then as well, thirsty for the blood that would save him. Then he’d, he’d. He couldn’t have died. Even though he could remember doing it. The seizure and the coldness that had gripped his heart. He felt different, but not different enough. His heart was still beating. He was still hungry, not just for blood, but for real food. He seemed a bit too alive to have turned. He heard a thud, muffled through the walls, and then the sound of an outer door slamming. He stared at the closed door in front of him, at the sliver of a glow coming in under it from the hallway. He heard the hum of the elevator in the hall and then nothing happened for a while. An hour passed and he grew very tired all at once. He made himself stay awake as he watched and waited, but no one ever came. It stayed quiet. Eventually, it felt safe enough for him to move.
His shoulders clicked in their sockets as he tried to shift his arms, and he twisted uncomfortably to swing them around the back of the chair. There was half of an idea in his head that he could reach the knots in the ropes wrapped above and below his knees, holding him against the seat. Before he could test his theory, the chair tipped over, and broke as it landed. His face hurt where he’d hit the floor and he wheezed against the cheap fake wood as the impact drove the breath from his lungs. He kept his ear against the laminate, waited for the sound of someone coming. His back arched and his shoes scuffed against the floor as he stretched to detangle himself from the remains of the chair.
After several minutes of uncomfortable contortions, he managed to get his legs free. His hands were bound at his wrists, he couldn’t get them over or under him to untie. He had a friction burn on his knuckles by the time he was done trying. It hurt more than it should have, if he was dead, and less, if he was alive. He felt like a thought experiment in quantum mechanics. He braced his back against a wall to stand, and started toward the door. He had to go up on his toes to align his hands with the knob. It opened without protest and he stared into the hallway, the soft grey light calling attention to the unevenness of the plaster on the walls. He kept listening for someone to come even after all the noise he’d made, but there was only dead silence. He leaned too far forward to be comfortable as he walked, precarious with his hands still bound behind him.
The kitchenette was ill equipped. He’d been hosted and “hosted” by kindred enough to tell it had the hallmarks of a place furnished by people who’d forgotten what eating was like, but it had a knife block, one of those novelty ones that looked like a person. He twisted the rope against his wrists while he considered his options. He decided on a bread knife and it only took him three or so tries to actually get it into his hands. He ended up sitting on the counter as he sawed through the rope. It caught his skin occasionally and the smell of his own blood hit his nostrils, fresh like the blood on his shirt wasn’t. He rolled his shoulders and looked at his hands after. He found them unmarred. Small smears of blood, less than a paper cut’s worth were on his hands, but there was no wound attached to them. The skin of his knuckles was healthy and whole. He sighed and rubbed at the unmarred flesh. He marked another point in the invisible tally he was keeping on whether he was alive or dead.
He turned the corner and found a corpse, its throat slit, decapitated. It was little more than bones in a double breasted suit, the skin that hadn’t turned to dust stretched and warped over his skull. The blood on the walls was still wet, there was a puddle underneath the body. The contrast distracted him from his revulsion, from the way the blood still smelled enticing, the way it was by the smell he recognized the remains of what used to be Charles, not his clothes. He crouched in the stillness of the apartment over the body and stared. He stared for a while, watching the carpet get brown and crusty around the edges of the bloody puddle.
The light in the room got brighter, and a strange sensation on his skin startled him out of his trance. He felt weak and tired, hungover all of a sudden. He looked over at the window, he’d missed something important. Early morning sunlight streamed in through the slats on the blinds. He stood up out of the sunbeam and felt better immediately. He started to laugh as he stood over the dead body, manic and loud. Hysterical.
The revulsion came back full force. He swallowed, took a step back from the body of his, Sire? He needed to leave. He had to get out of here. He’d made it to the front door and put his hand on the knob before he remembered that his shirt was covered in blood, still. He swore and started toward the door on the other side of the kitchen. Laid out on the bed in the quiet, conservatively furnished bedroom was a casual gray suit, and a pile of legal papers. Augustus was 26 years old. He had a degree in costume design and middling credit. His suit fit perfectly.
He tucked the folder full of documents and his bloody clothes into a garbage bag and stepped out onto the sunny street. The sick feeling returned immediately. His stomach flipped as he walked to the nearest subway entrance. He felt like crying, felt like laughing again, he wanted to scream, he was so angry. He stared at the ground, switched trains, and listened to his heartbeat in his ears as the car rattled along its tracks. He walked up the stairs to his building. His apartment looked the same as always. He drew the blinds and sat on the couch. He gave up the fight against his exhaustion and stared at the water stain on the ceiling until he lost consciousness.
He woke up in the evening, to the sensation of his heart starting to beat again, and he knew without looking that the sun was down. He gasped in his first breath of air since that morning and jolted. He rubbed his chest over the shirt of his expensive new suit as if it would calm his racing heart. The only thing that happened was that he noticed that, while it was warming, his skin was barely above room temperature. He knew he probably needed to tell someone about this. If only because there was a weird dead body in a downtown apartment covered in his fingerprints.
He waited three days before he told anyone. He haunted his own apartment.
On the first night back, he made himself a cup of strong, sweet coffee and drank it with some prepackaged cookies he found in his pantry. He knew before eating them that it wasn’t what he was hungry for, but they still tasted exactly as they should have. He smiled from the minute he swallowed his first mouthful until his body rejected it a little over an hour later. He kneeled on the floor in front of his toilet and stared at the contents of his stomach for a while, trying to convince himself he had a stomach bug. The red tinge of the water in his toilet bowl wouldn’t let him. His breath hitched in his chest as he tried not to cry. He bit his lip and held his breath before flushing and watched the water circle until it was completely still. He released the breath he’d been holding and resolutely did not consider how long he’d held it.
He got off the tile and turned around in the tiny space to grab the cleaning supplies from under the sink. There was a drop of blood scented coffee on the rim of the seat and he couldn’t bear to look at it. By the time he realized the smell of blood was mostly coming from the crumbling layer of the stuff on his shoulder, there were bleach stains on the knees of his Augustus’ tailored slacks and the grout between his tiles was cleaner than it had been before he rented the apartment. He got in the shower and stared at the red tinged water as it washed down the drain. He pulled himself out of the shower when the water went cold and dripped trails across his nice clean floors on his way to his closet. The sun was coming up and he was getting tired. He pulled on some baggy pajamas and curled up to sleep on the couch again instead of going to his bed.
He woke up the next evening and made it all the way through cooking himself eggs for “breakfast” before he remembered. He stared at the plate accusingly for several long minutes before putting a dash of hot sauce on it and digging in. Those ended up in his toilet as well, redder than the sriracha should have made it. He spent the rest of the night cleaning and reorganizing all the clothes in his apartment, eventually giving up on both the suit and the jeans and tank top he’d brought home with him.
The building’s laundry room was deserted, which made sense, given the hour. He sat next to his laundry basket on the table across from the washers and watched his clothes spin in the dim basement lighting. Eventually, he ran out of clothes. He’d folded all his laundry, hung up his delicates on their rack to dry, and had a sizable pile in a box for donation. It didn’t distract him enough from the fact that he’d seen a neighbor on his way back upstairs and spent some time imagining him bleeding.
The third night he didn’t bother trying to eat, even if he was hungry. He knew it wouldn’t– it wasn’t– He got to work on his commissions instead. He cleaned the clutter off his desk. His “vacation” had made him fall behind. He really did have work he needed to do for the Prince, like he’d told Charles. He sorted his threads and tried not to dwell on which in the gradient of reds he was putting away matched the shade the wet splatter of Charles’ blood on the walls made in the early morning sunlight. His fingers lingered on the trailing end of thread anyway, he worried it between his fingers and watched the color play against his skin. His gums ached. He got to work, sinking into the not quite mindless haze of lacemaking. There wasn’t enough room in his brain past the dance of spindles across his hands, managing tension, pinning, counting, following the pattern to the more complex filigree. He wasn’t thinking about anything at all. He wasn’t. The sun rose again, he was starving.
When he couldn’t hide from it any more, he did what he should have done when he woke up in that empty little room and used his shaking hands to dig a burner phone out of his closet and call Kendra. He took a shuddering breath as the call connected.
“Hello?” Eir voice was sharp at the interruption.
“Ken-” He rasped, before he had to stop, his voice cracking over the first word he’d spoken in four days, since before he– since Before.
“Cousin?” Ey asked, after a pause and his breath hitched. Ken wasn’t really his cousin, but when they’d been introduced, ey’d winked and told him they were going to be family, that they’d be in the same lineage. It had been the first thing that made him really believe he’d be Embraced one day, and not just kept in a holding pattern until the local Prince got bored. They weren’t cousins, not yet, not anymore. Charles had, he’d–
He knew his breath was coming too fast, fast enough to make his chest ache, but he wasn’t dizzy. The hand that wasn’t holding the phone against his cheek hard enough to hurt came up to scratch at the front of his shirt, searching for rope bonds that weren’t there. Distantly, he could hear himself wheezing, Kendra’s increasingly forceful calls of his name.“Kendra,” He said again, managing the entire word this time, even if it still came out uneven, an octave too low. He blinked and something wet hit his fingers where they clenched around the burner phone. “I think,” Weight on his shoulders and teeth in his neck, rough, tearing. A hand in his hair, painful and rough as it raked through his curls in a parody of affection. A voice calling him Augustus, talking absently about how useful he’ll be. “I think I died.”
It’s that time again, the fourth ever iteration of a proud yearly tradition I made up as an excuse to be a little bit annoying, April First Honesty Hour is here!🎉
All day today, I, your humble jester, will be posting discussions of and behind the scenes commentary for the fanfic I’ve posted over the last year. Here’s my chance for slightly shameless self promotion, and yours to find out more about any of my recent artistic offerings you particularly enjoyed.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
3.5k, G Rating, Iris West&Bart Allen, Iris West&Wally West, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, POV Iris West, Iris West Needs a Hug, Bart Allen Needs A Hug, Touch-Starved Bart Allen, Villain Bart Allen, ok only sorta, Self Defeatingly Anxious Iris West
Iris is a little late rescuing Bart from EarthGov's labs. By the time she tracks him down, he's 19, his aging's been stabilized, and they've started training him into a soldier. When she gets him back to the 20th century, she doesn't need to bring him to Wally to be fixed, and is too afraid to try stay with him herself. That could destroy the future she knows. He'll be fine, won't he?
Iris is a historian. She only ever knows about the past. She can’t predict the future of the 30th century. She doesn’t know how to figure out what’s wrong with Bart, or how to save him, or even how to find where EarthGov squirrelled him away. It takes months, and when she does, she looks through the observation window and, seeing a tall thin figure with its head encased in a VR helmet, thinks even that was too long. The computer says the stranger is her grandson, the records say he won’t be for much longer. The uncertainty that had dogged her from the moment she realized Bart was missing vanishes in an instant. Now that she’s uncovered President Thawne’s plan for him. She can’t do anything but save him.
In an ideal world this fic would be more elaborate. In my heart of hearts it’s like, 40k and goes into what Bart’s side of the being abandoned, feral and half trained, half loyal to a government that won’t exist for a full Millennium, is like. How exactly, he ends up a villain the subject of a national manhunt. I don’t have the investment in the idea that would take. Instead, we have this lovely little walled garden. This Guided Tour of whatever is wrong with 90s Iris’ brain.
And, listen, I haven’t read a lot of 90s Iris, almost certainly less than I should have to write this fic, especially considering my beta hasn’t read any(I kept sending new drafts until they cared), but there’s something really interesting wrong with her.
That said, I tried hard to make sure her perspective was understandable. She’s not evil, or doing this to Bart on purpose, but she is, due to her neuroses, fumbling Every Aspect of this interaction.
Contradiction and grief and anxiety, Woman who should be dead, Historian from the future who lives in the past, her mind seeking and obsessing over whenever she isn’t. Scouring history for Wally from the 30th century, and tying herself in knots over the sanctity of the future she knows from the 20th.
She’s built out of trauma and hypocrisy and bad decisions. She loves Bart, but not enough to raise him herself. At least that’s the way it feels for anyone outside her head. It’s impossible for her interfere with the past unless it has to do with Wally, with making sure Wally is safe.
Iris does love Bart, and care for him. But she’s just not equipped to understand his needs, or mindset, or like his real age.
Iris doesn’t see him as he is, her brain, like with the now and then that does and don’t matter, that is and isn’t happening. Bart is both her innocent three year old grandson she saw last year, and an independent adult. She can only interact in extremes. The gray areas are shaded away into black and white, complete isolation from 20th century society and saving Wally’s life. Rescuing Bart to the past because he needs to be saved, and abandoning him there because he can take care of himself.
The way she suppresses her fear responses to the violence in him, against him, the ways he was being trained to use it, in favor of imagining the baby he was before she failed to protect him and reminding herself that she has nothing to fear from her grandson. The way externalizing her own fears leads to her accidentally poisoning Bart against receiving the help she wants him to get. The way that he eventually obeys every order she gives him.
That’s the deal with her not wanting to go see Wally. She’s saying “I” and meaning “I” but she’s not differentiating enough between her “Unnatural” existence in this timeline and his. Bart was Born in the 30th century, and this is his first time in the 20th, how could he have a greater claim to his existence.
It’s Iris’ many problems vs. Boy who will always, always try and solve a problem by himself before getting help.
Of course he gives up. Of course he goes it alone. Stranger in a Strange Land and escalating and spiraling and snowballing until he’s ruined. He doesn't understand the necessity of secret identities, so everyone knows he's Bart. He's got that Autism Rage and also several very bad fascist future habits and no Max. He'd be on the Superboy '94 pipeline but also he Does Not Care if people like him. He’s not famous or popular of profitable. There’s no motive for anyone to care to manage him.
I tried hard also, to write a half trained, militarized Bart, without just making him Thad, and I like to think I succeeded. The standing still but still moving constantly. Discipline but not procedure, respect. He hurts himself on the bush’s thorns and doesn’t acknowledge it in any way. Real regular upbringing that Bart had there.
One of my favorite implications in this fic, and one that I think also illustrates the way that Iris’ perception of Bart is in conflict with his reality, is when Bart describes the magic defining features of Real Life vs. VR and mentions “flowers that smell and real pain”
Iris picks up on the fact that it’s concerning, maybe even the inherently flat and sensory depriving experience of VR not rendering anything unnecessary, but I don’t think she’s capable of fully comprehending the existence of, perhaps, Fake Pain.
Fake pain is way worse actually, because they make it last as long as regular people. It hurts worse for longer. And maybe they made him work through it.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
1.5k, T Rating, Amber Sweet, Character Study, Pre-Canon, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Unreliable Narrator, Marni Wallace is Amber Sweet's Mother, Child Neglect, Zydrate (Repo!),Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex
A year by year chronology of Amber Sweet's life after Marni decides she doesn't want to be Amber's Mama anymore.
Amber Largo is 8 years old when Daddy finds out that Marni is pregnant again and gets all cold. He doesn't spend any time at all with her or Pavi or Luigi anymore and Amber tries to convince herself that it's a good thing. She misses Daddy, but she knows why he stopped looking at her. Amber’s taller now and people who don't know any better keep saying she has her mother's eyes, her mother's hair, her mother's cheeks, and it's not nearly as much of a compliment to be like Mama anymore. Mama left.
Yes, I did name this after the Good Charlotte song. There was even a different title that I discarded in favor of it, but I was simply too tempted. Rip, Familial Resemblance. You woulda had the double meaning of the Marni-Shilo-Amber parallels and the Largo Siblings reflecting Rotti’s flaws.
First off, the really fun thing about the Largo siblings is that all this is canon compliant, for all Canon cares Rotti might as well have reproduced via Budding, or some kind of ominous glowing cloning vat.
One of the things I tried to push here is that Amber feels really betrayed by Marni leaving, and the way she reacts to that mirrors and foils Shilo’s isolation. Amber’s Neglect and relative freedom vs. Shilo’s Codependent control. Seeking familiarity and resemblance to the mother she lost vs. attempting to erase all traces of the mother who abandoned her.
Amber’s Everything is Permitted vs. Shilo’s Everything is Prohibited
Fight!
Rotti neglects his role as a father to them until one of them does something that he can exert stereotypical patriarchal power over. Taking them into his office and berating them for their failures from a position of power. Viewing his neglect as permissive and then blaming them for the outcomes his actions led them inevitably toward. He says his children were a bust, but his only argument that he was a good father is that he Said Nothing, and provided money.
It really is so important that none of the Largo kids think there’s anything wrong with them. The cost of developing your understanding of the world through your experiences moving through it. They were Raised at GeneCo. They perceive the hypocrisy of Rotti getting mad at Luigi for killing people while Hiring the man who killed Marni, or of him mandating that Mag always have the most current eyes on the market while berating Amber for having too much surgery, or of Pavi having sex where he shouldn’t when Pavi has been doing this exact thing for as long as they can remember. They recognize that it’s unfair, but come down firmly on the side of everything they’re doing being Fine, actually, instead of Rotti and other people around them doing and getting away with things that aren’t.
This was based on an idea my sibling came up with that I then got a little insane about. But Marni being Amber’s Bio Mom has implications and I failed to stop thinking about them.
In fact I thought about them so hard I came up with a whole pile of accessory headcanons that are going under a cut, because usually when I write fanfic about musicals they’re intended for children, and I’m not talking about characters getting Groomed.
But like, Pavi got groomed. One of his most famous lines is that him saying that he’s fuckable like it’s his most major achievement and then immediately adding that his siblings should do incest. He buys and wears Ambers face at the end of the film. He’s got weasels under the hood.
Actually, I think all the Largo siblings have a history of sexual assault, not that anyone but Luigi would consider what happened to him a rape.
For Luigi, a punishment for being “mouthy”
For Pavi a “reward” for being good
For Amber an “expected” part of being a girl
Here’s the situation, I’m not going to explain a full timeline because the way of making any charts at all lies madness. That said I think the Largos are all Half Siblings. It makes the birth timeline make sense. Eight year gaps between kids is odd for one woman, but not if Rotti is pulling Henry the VIII shit.
Ok ok, So, I’ve decided that Luigi’s mom dies of organ failure. It’s Thematic to GeneCo’s whole deal, but early enough in the timeline to be feasible. It’s not Abrupt, but everyone would probably have preferred it if it was. She’s diagnosed when Luigi’s five but it’s a slow decline, she refuses GeneCo organs, either because the technology is new enough to still be unreliable, or for personal reasons. Rotti takes this as an insult, a betrayal, he made this company.
Maybe he starts up with Pavi’s mom before Luigi’s goes. The math on everything the Death, Marriage, Birth, for Pavi’s mom is technically all in the right order but the timing is too tight to be anything but what it is. Pavi’s mom having been, at that point, Already a loyal customer. The infidelity that started the relationship creeping doubt in the back of the whole marriage for both of them. It also sets up some in built resentment amongst peers and employees who remember the Late Mrs. Largo.
Honestly, I think it’d be funny if Pavi’s mom just got divorced, normal style, when Pavi’s 6, not that it ends well. Rotti divorces her, and he takes everything including custody, the only thing left of value is her designer organs, all what someone of her standing would be expected to have. Afterwards, a while’s passed and she’s not exactly getting back up on her feet. There’s maintenance for her artificial parts or just getting something new like always, and all of a sudden she realizes that she’s been a trophy wife for almost a decade and has nowhere near enough income to pay this off like Rotti would’ve before.
She gets Repossessed when Pavi’s 11, something she’d supported because it was never supposed to happen to someone like her. Rotti’s hand in her death but no blood on his hands, like usual.
Rotti’s most major complaint with the Nathan/Marni situation was that they were happy without him. His second wife’s downward spiral is just comeuppance. He’d be gleeful about it. It’d warn Marni about his character in a way that he’d never consciously realize.
Explaining Luigi is weird because he’s the self described “smartest” but also yells and hits and kills anyone who annoys him, so his emotional regulation is for shit. He’s not doing school shooter shit Or stone cold calculating psychopath. His repeated emphasis on being put in charge and left in charge etc and the “Don’t take shit from no one” also implies an authority thing.
The idea is, that he get a lot of corporate training way too young and then that dropped off basically entirely without warning, half because Rotti sucks and half because Rotti realized his expectations were too harsh and it was too much for a child to learn, not enough to admit to wrongdoing but enough to not repeat this particular mistake with any of his other children, further isolating Luigi from his siblings.
I don’t think Pavi’s mother liked Luigi very much. Luigi’s mom dies of organ failure, early enough that if she’d tried, she could have been Mom, instead of a near stranger who insisted on being called Mother. I don’t think it was abusive, she wasn’t pulling Cinderella shit, there’s no big dramatic, abusive I’m going to supplant your place in the family thing. She just had a husband, and a son, and wasn’t very interested in Luigi. He was clearly and obviously not a priority to someone who was supposed to be his new mom in a way that made him feel bad.
Instead, he spent most of his time with Rotti, both of them away from the new baby, and getting trained in the basics of what GeneCo is now that he’s 9 and old enough to be interesting, an heir more than a son. There’s no one cajoling Rotti into treating him a child like Pavi gets, with his Mom.
Luigi in an office filled with furniture too big for him, lonely and angry and aware of the differences between them. Perfect Pavi who smiles sweetly and Didn’t die like Luigi’s real mom when his heart gave out and him, who Rotti had handed a pile of repossession reports at 9 and had needed to use a dictionary to figure out what “pursuit instigated blunt force impact to cranial posterior (pavement) minimal damage to C2-C4 cervical merchandise, all other repossessed without incident, peri-mortem” meant.
Pavi gets sick, organ failure, the thing that killed Luigi’s mom, but won’t kill Pavi, and suddenly all his responsibilities and power are taken away. He’s 18 and instead of the respect he was promised for years, his transition into “adulthood” is marked with nothing but loss, only the expectation that he should be able to handle everything without any support. He’s really mad all the time, basically allowed to do whatever, and thinks he should because he spent something like five years being treated like an incompetent junior executive instead of a tweenager.
He feels like he got disinherited and wants to prove himself but every action he takes further affirms his unsuitability. Vicious cycle.
Angry, because the amount of work he does and respect he receives is inconsistent. Stupid, if he doesn’t understand, but too young to have any opinion listened too. Emphasis on being Tough. Never has that anger curbed because it's "useful." He looks at people and knows they are worth Less than him. He’s been worked too hard as the First Son and developed a complex about only being A Largo kid instead of The when Pavi came around, especially with his own mother gone for long enough he can barely remember her.
All of a sudden he’s not the only expected Heir, because stupid Pavi who doesn’t read the paperwork, and would throw up like Luigi used to if he did, is charismatic. People like him more and he doesn’t have to stab anyone to get his way. His so called new "mother" leaves anyway and she doesn't take Pavi with her because Rotti hoards things that belong to him. Marni comes along much more quickly, but Luigi knows better than to get attached. Besides, he's almost an adult, and being treated like one nearly all the time now. Luigi don't take shit from no one.
Ok, Pavi’s Heart Failure. It’s here for themes. Did you know I love themes? It’s the resentment. And Luigi sorta knowing that he wasn’t Happy getting trained to be Heir but he definitely knows he’s not happy with Pavi(child, unaware of this) being the reason it was taken away from him because of Pavi’s heart failure. Or first heart failure, if you play with the artificial organs Don’t Grow With You headcanon. It’s also an excuse to have him hang around GeneCo a lot.
A lot of kids with bad organs end up with hand me downs, even with the chance it’s been Repossessed because it’s not Feasible to get new ones every time. Either that or those are just, like, real organs. Either way really dire. It’s not important. What’s important is the metaphor, of a kid having yearly open heart surgeries. Get your chest cracked open kid. Put hands in there. Touch things that Shouldn’t be touched.
Pavi Largo being 10, maybe, and having an organ actually fail. Something that he needs GeneCo to replace, and of course he gets it, immediately, the best on the market. The first time someone slices open his belly and puts their hands inside him. The scar hasn’t finished fading when the second time comes around, though this is less literal.
He’s 12, maybe 13 and has a crush on a Gentern, because that’s common for 13 year old boys. One of them decides to take him up on it, because he’s a Largo, and lonely, and so eager to please. She gives him what he asked for and when she makes him into a thing, he thanks her for it, though he shouldn’t. She leaves, eventually, but it happens again, again, and Pavi gets so good at pleasing. Eventually, he grows up, bigger, but still in the same shape as when he wasn’t. He and the Genterns still think each other are pretty, and he’s still bent so perfectly into a pleasing shape even if the people who shaped him are long gone.
This time, when the Genterns like him back there’s something strange in their agreement, in the way they say his last name, the way they don’t know the steps of the dance he’s been taught, but they’re the same age now, at least. They leave quickly, but then they always leave quickly. Still there are New Genterns. By then, Pavi is older, the heir to GeneCo, and he’s notorious for liking the Genterns. The Genterns like him back, they say so, always, when he asks. 10 out of 9 choose Dashing Pavi, who leaves them dripping.
The flesh mask thing could also be worse, more upsetting. The idea of him being sexually active, hitting puberty, getting acne for the first time, and starting to wear other faces over his own to hide the situation, almost certainly exacerbating the acne. He’s already doing smiling mask shit. I can be something else for you. Love, joy, thousand degree knife.
As an Adult, Pavi is having a lot of sex that everyone is saying yes to, whether or not they mean it. It’s about his experiences and environment completely eroding his understanding of both his own and others’ consent to meaninglessness. :)
Marni arrives, for our rule of threes, half wife, half hostage. Here with Mag, with Nathan, and she’s nice, but not influential enough to change what the Largo family is, at this point. Sixteen year old Luigi who’s already too angry and unwilling to submit to the so called authority of the second person who’s tried to be his new mother. 8 year old Pavi who’s uninterested in having a new Mom when his old one still visits, sometimes, sorta. A type of distance settled before circumstances changed, and with loss and illness and malicious influence, slips through the cracks in favor of Amber Largo, who’s just a baby and needs Marni most.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
13k, G Rating, Dawn&Bog King, Marianne/Bog King, Pre-Relationship, Alternate Universe- Canon Divergence, Love Potion/Spell, Bog Gets Love Dusted, Unrequited Love, Friendship, Struggling to Navigate the Boundaries of Chemically Induced Unrequited Infatuation, Self-Esteem Issues, The Looming Implications of what Sunny and Roland were Planning, Sugar Plum’s Awful Wizard Ethics, Jukebox Musical, One Single Cuss Word, Because Marianne Deserves it
Kidnapping a princess of the Fairy Kingdom to force their cooperation would have been a great idea if Bog hadn’t been hit with the very same Love Potion he’d been trying to find on his way out. It worked on Him, of course, there’s nothing wrong with Princess Dawn, she’s, she's wonderful.
Dawn had never been kidnapped before. Well, someone had tried, when she was 8, but Marianne had bit him and refused to spit the fingers out afterwards. They hadn’t even made it out of view of the castle. Her point was, that even in her limited experience, she was pretty sure this wasn’t how kidnappings were supposed to work. She curled her fists into the skirt of her party dress and stretched her neck to peek through the bars of her cell for the fifth time in as many minutes. The Bog King hadn’t moved since the last time she checked, still unconscious on the floor of the cell adjacent to her. The blood sheeted down the side of his head had dried, at least.
I always struggle to write about my longer fics. It’s 13k, I’ve said all I have to say, I’m sure.
The inception for this fic was my genuine shock at the discovery that the concept hadn’t been done before. Trust me, I want looking. Yeah there’s fics where Bog gets hit with the Love Potion. But not any where it’s just for Dawn. It’s not even because I’m shipping them, I don’t, first of all, I think this might be the most aromantic thing I’ve ever written, and second, I think ButterflyBog is what the youths are calling “hetgem” these days.
Bog getting hit with the Love potion for Dawn forces him into a similarly unrequited relationship as That Fateful Day, but changes circumstances and perspectives enough to accomplish all the same emotional goals Dawn being in love with Bog does.
Force him to experience being unloveable through the experience of Dawn being a really good sport about the whole thing, actually. He’s deeply deeply in love with her and the self loathing is so so bad because He’s Sorry and he Knows he’s unlovable. And Dawn is like, well that’s a lot of negative self talk, Boggy.
It also allows for a lot more depth and agency for Dawn. She has a shallow understanding of love, and now experiences being loved without the additional compatibility of having anything in common. It turns out she can’t just decide to love anyone she looks at and going through the motions isn’t accomplishing anything.
Dawn fucks up some, but I got to have her spend a lot of this fic stepping up and doing stuff that usually Marianne would take care of for her, and unpacking things that she believes about love, about it being always good, about how scary it would be if Bog was romantic pushy like Roland is to Marianne, about Sugar Plum, about what the Love Potion actually does to a person, about what Sunny was planning to do to her.
Meanwhile, Bog’s in a psychological horror scenario, actively aware that he’s being forced to feel things he wouldn’t have before, that they have no chance of being reciprocated even if he’d felt this way by choice, and that there’s no escape from it. Good news! And the reason this went from a concept to a Work in Progress, I know a song that fits those themes perfectly, and I’ve had this exact interpretation of it locked and loaded in my brain for over a year.
That’s right! It’s I Think I Love You, 1970, by The Partridge Family and it’s a little bit evil. From there, I did what all writers for jukebox musicals do, and built the fic from the songs out, our two other showcases being Heart of Glass, 1978, by Blondie, and Just, 1995, by Radiohead, because I’m too classy to use Creep.
Songs that are canon to this universe but didn’t show up because I didn’t want to write about the people they were attached to are Roland trying to manipulate Marianne by singing Lay All Your Love On Me, 1980, by ABBA, and Sunny attempting to serenade Dawn with To Be With You, 1991, by Mr. Big.
Not wanting to be obligated to writing more than the 13k I had already done is why this is posted as a 1/1 oneshot instead of separating the POVs into three chapters. There’s a finality to it. I’m setting boundaries. I don’t want Roland to be here. Don’t wanna have to write him.
Here’s some other fun behind the scenes facts, Stuff spends this entire fic deliberately setting Thang up to take falls, and it was really fun to write. Girl.
I hate that Sunny and Dawn end up together at the end of the movie in canon, and I think it fucks the themes. You Can't Force Someone To Love You! The movie says, Bog Plot, Roland Plot, Imp Plot, Dawn.
Dawn thinks about Sunny a lot in her inner monologue, but despite frequent opportunity, never mentions him aloud because she’s not ready to actually confront the highly conflicting emotions his involvement with the scheme have caused.
Dawn is explicitly designed to be a character foil to Marianne, especially in how she interacts with Bog. She loves riddles. Her and Bog moving clumsily together as she tries to lead him through unfamiliar steps, versus Him and Marianne’s fight being described as a dance.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
1.5k, T Rating, Peter Quill/Rocket Raccoon, Peter Quill&Rocket Racoon, Kink Discovery, Pet Play, Sub Peter Quill
“If anyone’s the pet here,” Rocket said, as his paw fisted in Peter’s hair and hauled his head back with cybernetic strength, claws scratching painful lines against his scalp. Peter found himself struggling to breathe and staring at the stained ceiling with an ache in his neck at the rough handling. He shivered at the sensation as Rocket rested too much of his weight on Peter while he leaned forward to finish speaking to Mr. Tall Rude and Muscly, his gravelly voice coming out right next to Peter’s ear. “It’s sure as hell not me.”
This is another fic I wrote on accident during vacation. You make a joke, and then you think about it too much, and then you’ve written 1500 words and it’s not a joke anymore.
Anyway, Rocket indulging Quill in his weird sex thing and then immediately becoming weirdly engaged with the position of power is something that can be so personal.
The thing is that I do honestly think Quill is genuinely so touch starved that he would take well to getting pets, and Rocket would take a vindictive glee in being the one doing the petting.
They’d both have a trauma informed approach to any pet play, (Experimentation, Ravagers) but in different ways, and Peter Quill is absolutely the dealing with it by Jacking Off about it kind of guy.
Rocket’s experience in being treated like an animal was a loss of control, and being in control of someone else could be genuinely very healing for him. It’s blatantly a power thing. Being in charge instead of being scared and then angry to drown out the fear. Having power over someone who’s larger than him, the same way everyone is larger than him. Being an authority instead of a joke or a mascot. It’s helping work through some shit. Good for him.
Quill’s obviously manifested as neglect, look at the everything about him. Peter not having to prove himself or make himself useful, but being taken good care of anyway? Being protected without being derided for it? Getting attention he doesn’t have to demand with his every action? It would melt his brain a little.
Get treated soft for the first time since you were literally 8, man.
Of the options, even if it wouldn’t clearly also do something for Rocket, he’s the only person in the Guardians who could thread that needle.
Crucially, Rocket could segregate the Treating Quill like he’s dumb(play) and Quill my competent coworker, because they share a specialization. Rocket finds Quill obnoxious and does insist that he’s better than him at piloting, but he’s also well aware that Peter is genuinely good at things that require skill and doesn’t just luck into it.
Personally, even if Gamora understood the appeal of the fantasy, I don’t trust her to do that. Especially not in a situation where Quill puts himself in a vulnerable position that is only an exaggerated reinforcement of their regular relationship dynamic. The bleed through into their regular relationship would be so real. It wouldn’t even necessarily be through complete fault of her own, because Quill does intentionally sabotage any attempt to uncover emotional vulnerability and Gamora is also, easily and unquestionably, better at all the things she and Quill have in common. We watched this fuck up her relationship with her sister. I don’t think she’d know how not to do it again.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
1k, G Rating, Albino!Match, Legally Blind Match, Internalized Dehumanization
Match does not have clearance for or access to his development files. This makes sense. It would be tactically disadvantageous for the informational resources to develop another Project Match to be stored with the physical material. He does not know what design goals or compromises lead to the decision to remove melanin from his design. The effects of Albinism on visual acuity are well documented.
This was finished, and in my documents for a while before I posted it, because I was working on a couple fics at the same time and didn’t want to seperate out Walk Home from the rest of the Anarky Pit by one single fic.
Ok so you know how Match’s Original design had white skin and hair? Well, I thought too much about 70s rock virtuoso Edgar Winter. Albinism has health consequences, more than just the increased sunlight absorption that The Agenda was probably going for when they took away all my boy’s melanin. It causes crazy Vision problems, actually, because the cones in your eye need pigment to properly function. It also, like with the skin, makes you super sensitive to light, because there’s no natural protection in there anymore.
Match’s whole psychology is really interesting, for the whole “I have no free will” thing he has going on. That said, I think he could lie to them. I think he could convince himself that his mastery over the TTK keeps him functional, and also he doesn’t need to report the vision problems, because again. Albinism always has consequences regarding visual acuity. They have to know.
Anyway this fic is mostly just me playing with really upsetting implications, like Match knowing that if he self reported he’d be killed, the way that not reacting or being accommodated for hastens the degradation of his eyes, the way that all of his information is kept from him, the internalized dehumanization of calling himself “raw materials,” the agoraphobia when he’s finally released from entirely enclosed environments and can’t use his TTK to feel everything around him, the way that he’s punished for acting like a person. I also really liked contrasting him with Superboy, because they’re narrative foils. Really fun times.
The title of this fic, Shadowless Noon is a reference to an astrological phenomenon that happens around the equator, where, for about an hour on certain summer days, the sun is positioned directly overhead and casts absolutely no shadows. In Hawai’i it’s called Lāhainā Noon, and it looks like a video game rendering error. Really uncanny. Very cool. I’m using it to illustrate the unrelenting brightness of Hawai’i on his eyes, which don’t work, and hurt him. :)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Hey, Lonnie Machin fic, again.
2.6k, T Rating, Near Drowning, Blood and Injury, Blood Loss, Hypothermia, Dissociation, Crying, Self Surgery, Doing Your Own Stitches for Emotionally Potent Self Sufficiency Reasons
After the second time Lonnie Machin falls from a height into water.
Still, Lonnie jumped on purpose. He’s prepared for this, and he hits the water feet first. That’s an improvement over last time, and he doesn’t panic. His mouth is closed, so the water only goes up his nose instead of down his throat and he doesn’t panic. He has a breath and he’s trained since last time so that this wouldn’t happen again. He isn’t going into this expecting to die. He’s going to live. He’s not going to drown in the Potomac river, not if he survived Gotham Harbor.
I’m going to be honest, this isn’t one of my better Anarky works. It just kinda escaped me after a month where I where I thought I was normal again, and then I thought too much about Lonnie drowning.
This is the second time he almost dies in water. He spends his entire inner monologue talking about the Houdini tricks he learned so that Gotham Harbor Wouldn’t Happen to him Again and like, what am I supposed to do, not whump him a little? I’m not that strong.
I wanted him to be less confident. Less put together. Less able to push through what should be hard limits. I wanted the trauma of almost drowning for the second time in a similar situation to have an effect. I wanted all this to bring up bad memories.
This didn’t come out exactly as I’d hoped, I wanted to push the isolation a bit more, that he doesn’t know anyone in DC, that he doesn’t have anyone to rely on. That he can’t even pay Legs to help him, that Legs was in Gotham, that Legs is probably dead. That he’s still a kid. That even an adult can’t do everything themselves. It got kinda messy. He Walked Home. He had to take Steps. He had a dozen Deep gashes across his entire torso. They gaped when he moved.
What I did succeed in, was making him disassociate himself out of a panic attack, experience the cognitive effects of blood loss and mild hypothermia, and finally write my favorite trope ever, “Doing your own stitches for emotionally potent self sufficiency reasons”
People Get Stupid when they're cold, even smart people. They also get stupid while tired, and while suffering from blood loss. Triple threat from our boy genius Lonnie. That’s why, when I had him get out of the shower, having alleviated one of his three status conditions, he was now capable of Recognizing that he was fucked up, but not fix it.
Also cameo appearance of another beloved trope, stress cleaning in horror.
Guy still actively bleeding: I'm going to have to clean up that blood later.
Early August: I attend a comic convention and come out with a lot of comics, $25 of which are comics I picked up from the dollar bins based on a reading list for a character don’t know much about, but I’d been seeing fanart of on tumblr, because I wanted to check out the source material.
Late August: I read them, they’re good. 👍
September 7th: I find out someone is organizing a Fandom Event for him. It’s sounds kinda fun, I’ve never done that before.
September 9th: I start writing my first fic before the Prompts list even comes out.
September 15th: Prompts list comes out.
Every Single Day Between September 15th and October 23rd:
November 3rd to 9th: Yay! It’s Lonnie Week 🥰
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Lonnie Machin Week Day 7: Gender
1.3k, G Rating, Team Arrow Lonnie, Misunderstandings, Implied/referenced Transphobia, Cissie King-Jones&Lonnie Machin, Lonnie Machin&Tim Drake, Bart Allen&Cissie King-Jones
You know when a friend comes out, but not to you, and it turns into a Who's on First sketch?
“Damn,” Cissie says, and gives into the exhaustion dragging her head and shoulders down toward the tabletop. “This is going to cause problems for Arson.” She mumbles into her arms.
“Who?” Robin asks from his place at the computer, his ridiculous typing speed slowing just enough that she knows he’s paying attention.
Trans girl Lonnie, my beloved. She also doesn’t technically appear in this fic. Don’t worry tho, it’s about her.
Here’s the backstory I was implying. Remember back in Shadow of the Bat 41, when Lonnie faked her death? Well what if instead of moving into an apartment complex and trying to become a Wizard, she trans’d her gender, and moved in with Green Arrow, they have a rapport, they blew up that factory together.
Ollie would love Lonnie in the arrowfam because she’s straightedge. Unfortunately, Mia Speedy is still probably the favorite daughter, because Arson is not learning archery. She’s pretty sure that everyone else has it covered. She’s been into bombs lately. It works out for her.
This whole fic came out of the concept of Arson and Arrowette being repeatedly mistaken for each other, and they Really do not even look alike. It happens enough times that they get in touch, and suddenly we have the perfect storm for Tim to find out, badly, that his first crush transitioned.
The ensuing miscommunication is based on an actual situation I was in where I was commissioned by a friend to bring a notebook back to someone I didn’t know that well and who was mostly closeted to the school. The friend refused to call him anything but his new name, which I did not know, or to provide any other additional clarification as to his situation or identity. Needless to say, the Who’s on First sketch of it all was only funny in hindsight.
Tim is trying real hard to complete this puzzle with only half the pieces, because “I think my crush might have faked her death and moved to Star City” is a pretty big jump even for the DC universe, and falling in nearly every pitfall in his attempts to get information without outing or deadnaming Lonnie. And of course Lonnie didn’t change her name so all this effort was useless. Tim’s great at saying the wrong thing. It’s been part of his character since the beginning.
Cissie, meanwhile, is big mad, and has no context for why Tim would be so interested in Arson and asking pointed questions about her past (Gotham Drama stays local) except for the obvious one, which she is, understandably, touchy about. Ough Cissie King-Jones’ “Ralph phase” I’ll never forget you.
That said, I don’t think this conversation would’ve gone the way it had if Cissie’s emotions weren’t riding so high. I set this during Cissie quitting Young Justice and tried to emphasize the way that grief and the *waves hand* everything else, was causing her to latch hard onto righteous anger instead of having to feel anything or worse, nothing else.
Tim also nearly dies at Bart’s hands for a completely unrelated misunderstanding about Tim trying to replace Cissie before Cissie even manages to leave the team in the middle there. This is because Bart and Cissie are actual besties.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Lonnie Machin Week Day 6: Disabled Lonnie
1.2k. T Rating, Ableism, Torture, Neglect, Ulysses H. Armstrong&Lonnie Machin
You know, The General kept Lonnie in that coma for a while, and he probably didn't treat him that well.
The worst part, in a long line of worst parts, was that all this wasn’t about him. Ulysses manipulated him, shot him, poisoned him, imprisoned him in his own body, made him completely dependent on him, and it was all a mere byproduct of his vendetta against Robin. The thing was, that Lonnie knows Robin. He met Robin when he was 13 years old. Robin saved his life, and was nicer to him afterwards than Lonnie expected, even as he arrested him.
This is another Lonnie week fic that I came up with the concept for early on, and then didn’t start writing until much later. This time because I wasn’t that confident in my ability to write it well. Also, because I don’t care about The General, also that.
The thing is that this is about a very specific kind of abuse and neglect, that happens to bed bound and disabled people. Being kept by someone who has full power over your body and you’re know what they’re doing but can’t Do anything about it. They can demand your compliance because without their “help” you can’t breathe or move or eat and they’re aware of that. They’ll take it away. You’ll rot to death here. And at the end of it all, this cruelty isn’t even necessarily about you.
The neglect is a huge part of it but the control. Ulysses decides whether he eats, breaths, sees, speaks. Ulysses decides if he’s Clean, or healthy. He uses him as entertainment and turns him off when he’s done. Ough.
Lonnie during this whole fic is the AM hate speech, but there’s also the isolation happening. There’s the social dependency, along with the physical one. His abuser is the only person he can talk to, and he is completely at the mercy of Ulysses’ moods. That’s still not enough to escape the consequences of the position he’s been placed in, simply because The General doesn’t care enough to keep Lonnie healthy in the state that he put him in.
The catheter bag is essential to the vibe, I think. I originally had this kinda instinctive aversion to putting it in the text despite knowing that Lonnie would need one, considering the state he was in, but I think it’s important to the vibe. Especially as something value neutral that is nevertheless a source of humiliation because of how he’s treated by Ulysses for needing it. Having it neglected could easily kill him.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Lonnie Machin Week Day 5: Reluctant Allies
2.5k, T Rating, Blood and Injury, non-graphic description of a dead body, Lonnie Machin&Harvey Bullock
What could possibly make Cataclysm worse? Being handcuffed to a cop, probably.
Harvey Bullock does not, on principle, regret arresting Anarky. He’s a pain in the ass and usually more trouble than he’s worth. Case in point, the arrest he was disrupting before the sky fell in. He might, might regret arresting Anarky immediately after what he’s realizing is the greatest disaster Gotham has ever faced, natural or otherwise, which is saying something.
This is the second Lonnie Week fic I worked on and I think it mostly came out ok. There’s stuff I don’t like about it. The Weird Dynamic between Lonnie and Bullock is not one of them. Neither of them is doing great seeing the other as a real person and it’s having a really negative effect on their disaster teamwork.
Bullock repeatedly blames Lonnie for them being handcuffed together despite being the one who put the handcuffs on. He also regularly, despite calling him kid all the time, forgets that the person he’s handcuffed to is a teenager. It makes him unfair and abrasive. This is partially why I pushed the baby face Lonnie agenda in this fic. He’s got Soft Cheeks Harvey! You said all that shit to a child!
Lonnie just hates cops, and he tends to take everything Bullock says and does in the least charitable way. You know, like that time Harvey was muttering under his breath the lie he would tell the other cops if he murdered Lonnie in cold blood for the crime of being annoying. ACAB :)
Two things were locked into this AU from the very beginning and those were, Harvey Bullock’s wrist being extremely messed up from the handcuffs, and Harvey having to coach Lonnie through seeing his first real life dead body.
Bullock is not actually prepared to coach a teenager through seeing their first real life dead body, and he doesn’t do great here. In his, admittedly mediocre, defense, Harvey is Crime Squad in Gotham. He’s not actually calibrated for a teenaged sorta civilian who grew up in middle class suburban Gotham. Most children he meets, he meets on the job and he’s going to have to be very honest, those children are usually more jaded than him.
Those Robins all had dead bodies in their formative memories. It’s never been an issue before.
I waffled a little on Lonnie having acne around his hairline. Because it shows up in media so infrequently without the set of values and characteristics that gets ascribed to the Type of Character Who Has Acne. I’m glad that I did end up going for it because Lonnie wears a sweaty metal mask all day, and has bangs, and is 16.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Lonnie Machin Week Day 4: Case Fic (allegedly)
1k, G Rating, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning
Lonnie’s parents are missing, presumed dead Missing. He knows, logically, that their survival isn’t likely. He knows the death toll of the earthquake. He knows the casualties only climbed higher in the days and weeks afterwards. He knows what their house looked like that night. He can’t believe it though. He’s not stupid, even Anarky’s most condescending detractors know better than to call him that. Lonnie doesn’t think they’re alive. He just, they’re not dead. His parents can’t be dead, so they aren’t. Believing it doesn’t help him sleep better. It doesn’t keep him from having nightmares where he finds their bodies in the wreckage of his childhood home, unblinking and covered in flies, but he functions.
This was one of the first ideas I came up with, but ended up being the last Lonnie Week fic I wrote. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I don’t have the patience to write a case fic and I’m not going to pretend this doesn’t push the prompt to its limits. Lonnie is investigating a mystery for sure, but it’s one that’s obviously solved, he just can’t get closure.
It’s him working through that Grief really badly. It’s him looking for answers that don’t exist, it’s him being a teenager who just lost his parents. It’s the fact that being smart doesn’t get him out of this. There’s no logic, or research, that he can use to get his parents back.
My favorite piece of imagery in this fic is the CRT monitor with their Drivers’ License photos burned in. I had the thought and then could not stop having it.
This fic is, I think, canon compliant to Anarky ‘99 and incidentally this is the only justification I can accept for the Joker Arc. It’s grief. It’s insurmountable grief. It’s the end point of a child’s unceasing 6 month long digital search for his parents in a situation where he could never have the a body or a funeral. He’s a teenager, he wants his Parents.
I think he should be weird and sad and delusional. I think he should flip back and forth between denial and anger at his parents deaths, at Batman’s exile keeping him from closure. I think he should be able to rationalize both the logical reasons everything happened and rationalize why none of it should have. He doesn’t know that they died. He couldn’t check. He couldn’t tell for sure. But BATMAN made him leave— But The Government bombed the bridges— But his Parents don’t know he’s alive to look for him, to announce their survival.
If he could just Go Back it would— He could— There’s thousands of people in No Man’s Land. There’s thousands more unidentified corpses. Even if he doesn’t find his. He has a duty, doesn’t he? To the citizens abandoned by the self serving government he always knew would betray its people.
It’s that time again, the fourth ever iteration of a proud yearly tradition I made up as an excuse to be a little bit annoying, April First Honesty Hour is here!🎉
All day today, I, your humble jester, will be posting discussions of and behind the scenes commentary for the fanfic I’ve posted over the last year. Here’s my chance for slightly shameless self promotion, and yours to find out more about any of my recent artistic offerings you particularly enjoyed.
