I have set myself a challenge to claw my way back from chronic illness-induced writer's block: Springsteen x The Pitt. 1 fic of minimum 1k words/day, each based on a Springsteen tchune, for the next two weeks. Ships will vary but will be mostly Rabbot based.
If this makes you feel any type of excitement, please feel free to scream loudly at me to keep me going <3
Tougher Than The Rest - Rabbot, T, 1,253 words
I'm On Fire - Rabbot, M, 3,054 words
Candy's Room - Rabbot, M, 1,034 words
Born To Run / Racing In The Street - Rabbot, T, 2,730 words
Cover Me - Rabbot, E, 1,577 words
Thunder Road - Rabbot, T, 1,723 words
My City of Ruins - (Huckle)Rabbot, T, 2,135 words
Soul Driver - Rabbot, E, 1865 words
Rosalita - HuckleRabbot, M, 1,773 words
Human Touch - Rabbot, G, 1,865 words
Better Days / Hungry Heart - Rabbot, G, 1,597 words
Okay. I was on my beloved AO3 and I saw something that made me do a double take. So, now I really want to know…
What is your AO3 user ID?
I’m an OG user 5 digits or less
Six figures baby!
I’m in the millions…
Remaining time: 3 days 6 hours
I’m so curious to see how long people have been on AO3! I know some people have been on there since beta/invite only, but I would love to see what the number is on tumblr!
Jess had always been the smart one in their marriage. Hell, she’d been the smart one before their marriage. She’d taken pity on Jack’s pathetic self, coming in morning after morning to the diner where she worked, buying breakfasts his bank account couldn’t technically afford only to sit and stare at her and saying stupid things like, “Boy, howdy, yesirree,” when she asked him if his hash browns were good before flushing bright red.
One morning Jess had refilled his coffee and said, sounding more amused than Jack probably figured he’d deserved, “My shift ends at noon. You’re going to meet me outside then and we’ll go for a walk in the park, okay?”
“Okay,” Jack had said, smiling so hard his cheeks hurt with it, and he thought maybe he’d fully fallen for her there and then, sitting at the counter in a run-down diner in a town both of them longed to get away from. She’d been his first serious girlfriend, and she’d been the one to ask him out. Jack had never had an issue with that, rolled his eyes at the guys who gave him shit for it, because had they seen Jess? Had they heard her laugh, or listened to her talk about her plans for opening her own place? Point of fucking pride that she’d asked him.
But she’d asked him, and Jack’s romantic history since her wasn’t what you’d call extensive, and now here he was at 50 faced with a dilemma: he wanted to ask Robby out, and he didn’t have the first clue how to do it. He knew that the dating world had changed sharply over the last 20 years. There were apps, and rules about what emojis had secret double meanings, and whole new sexualities were now a thing.
And while Jack liked to think he wasn’t totally out of touch—he spent too many hours of each week in the company of Parker Ellis and John Shen for that to be true—he’d been out of commission for most of this century, and that definitely wasn’t true for Robby. (Last week, Jack had been standing in line in the cafeteria behind two NICU nurses while one told the other that she’d had a three-day fling with Dr. Robinavitch from the ED a couple of years ago and that the beard rash had been worth it.)
What if Jack asked Robby out and what he said was the equivalent of turning around to someone in 2000 and asking if they wanted to go steady at the sock hop?
What if Jack asked Robby out, and midway through he started talking about bees again, for some godforsaken reason?
“Let’s say hypothetically,” Jack said while he and Parker were charting at neighbouring computers, “and this isn’t about me, really—“
“Who are you trying to convince here?” Parker said.
“Hypothetically,” Jack said, “if someone was thinking about asking another person out, and they didn’t know the likely success rate but they were trying to be optimistic about it, even if they didn’t know whether they should be optimistic because of, uh, factors”—did Robby even go for guys? Jack didn’t know. Jack barely even knew that he went for guys—“like in that kind of scenario—“
“Is there a question in here somewhere?”
“Asking someone out in 2026,” Jack said, shifting awkwardly in his computer chair. “Like… how?”
"This job does like to surprise me," Parker said with a soft sigh. "Okay. Hypothetically? You're overthinking this. I don't know who this is about, and I do not want to know, but I still know that you're overthinking this. Keep it classic, keep it simple, give them options and an out. Gestures tend to backfire, but if you really need to do one, same parameters apply. Classic, simple, stick to things you know they like."
"Okay," Jack said nodding slowly. Parameters were things he could work within; structure he liked. Classic, okay; simple, he could do; and sure, why not try for a gesture, because didn't Robby deserve someone making a gesture for his sake?
It took him another couple of days to decide what to do, but once Jack figured it out—again standing in line in the cafeteria, this time behind Robby and Dana, while Robby pointed at the sad, dry little hockey pucks that were being audaciously sold as Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies, $2.75 and saying how much he missed the brown butter ones his grandmother used to make—Jack was locked the fuck in.
(He got his practical advice from Parker, but his up-to-date slang from Chen.)
Jack called up his sister and said, "Yes, Stacey, I know it seems unusual for me to ask you how to make brown butter chocolate chip cookies from scratch at 7:45am on a Wednesday morning, I know I don't bake, but have you considered that it's super important for my future happiness? Yes, I did try looking on the internet but do you know how many recipes out there are just really shittily written?"
His big sister was a fucking saint, that's what she was, because she only mocked him a little while she talked him through what ingredients he'd need and then gave him extremely precise directions that included the importance of doing test batches. "These things always take some trial and error when you're trying to figure out a new set-up," Stacey said, and Jack's first couple of batches were indeed kind of iffy. One was too dense, one was weirdly lumpy, but then he figured out the best ingredients ratio and mixing time, and after that it was just a matter of working out the ideal diameter and whether he wanted it to be heart-shaped or not (maybe he shouldn't play his hand too soon, he decided) and the best serving options.
But by Friday night, he pulled out of his oven what he was pretty sure was the platonic ideal of Robby Cookies: size, mouthfeel, proportion of chocolate chips to dough, the works. He sent Stacey a photo of him giving a thumbs up in front of a tray of cooling cookies with the caption Batch 9B is a hit.
You're lucky you're cute, Stacey wrote back.
Recipe nailed down, Jack invited Robby over to watch the game the next afternoon. He showered, he shaved with unusual care, he put on the nice green sweater his niece had given him for his birthday. He lit the fire in the living room because there was a definite cold snap in the air, and when Robby showed up he made a little noise of surprise as he looked around the room and at Jack's sweater and said, "Getting festive early, Abbot."
"Start as you mean to go on or whatever," Jack said, and even he didn't know what that meant because he was fucking amped. "Uh, snacks. You want snacks? I got snacks."
"Sure," Robby said, sounding amused as he followed Jack into the kitchen, "a snack's fine," but then the noise that he let out when he bit into the cookie Jack gave him sounded anything but amused—it sounded obscene. It wasn't just a noise, it was a groan. Michael Robinavitch had groaned because of something that Jack had baked, and if maybe that wasn't the biggest achievement of Jack's life, it was definitely up there. "Fuck, you made these yourself? These are really good."
And then there came the point where Jack could really have derailed everything, because he looked at Robby—at Robby's mouth, which he'd just used to moan right there in Jack's kitchen—and said, somewhat desperately, "Wanna bang?", before realising what he'd just said aloud and putting his head in his hands.
There was a long silence.
"Did you just," Robby said, eventually, carefully, "give me a cookie and then proposition me?"
"I was going to ask you out," Jack said weakly. "On a date."
"But you said 'Wanna bang' instead?"
Jack nodded, and when there was more silence he risked looking over at Robby to see that he was eating the rest of the cookie with a thoughtful look on his face. "There brown sugar in these?"
Jack nodded again.
"Did you learn how to make brown sugar chocolate chip cookies just because you knew I liked them?"
Jack nodded a third time, felt his cheeks heat.
"The cookies are really fucking good," Robby said, swiping a stray crumb from his lower lip. "But you should know you'd have had me just from a 'wanna bang.'"
Jack's jaw dropped. "You're kidding."
"Nope," Robby said, and grinned at Jack and leaned toward him and kissed him and okay, okay, Jack thought as his eyes drifted closed, as he clutched at Robby's hips—okay, so Jack wasn't the smart one this time around, either, but did it matter when success tasted this sweet?
guys. Guys please you're allowed to say big boy words. please we cannot keep just rolling with the sanitization of every space on the internet ok. you're allowed to say suicide. you're allowed to say porn. they're not bad words, they're just words.
also by ''censoring'' the words with silly spellings you're actually making it much harder for people to filter out. please just say Sex you don't have to call it woohoo like it's the fucking sims. i promise the Word Police aren't going to arrest you
I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture.
All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line?
The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy?
Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess.
I want the fat left it.
I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence.
Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."
