Beginning as a good old fashioned coffee shop AU, this fic has spun out into multiple complete but continuous storylines, each focusing on different characters and relationships within a modern, non-magical setting:
Act 1-3 follows Saber and Diarmuid as they fall for each other and navigate a new relationship as two people very much running away from or otherwise dealing poorly with past ones
Act 4 is a prequel following a young, grieving, very depressed Kiritsugu as he meets Maiya and Iri for the first time
Wedding Cheers is a wedding episode/movie special… except that it focuses on Maiya, always the bridesmaid never the bride, as she reckons with her past trauma, her unrequited feelings for Kiritsugu, and the immortal question “hey, Cu’s kind of hot, right?”
Pumpkin Spice Latte, a Halloween special which is the origin of a certain meme and contains some important emotional set-up for…
Act 5, which is “coffeefic does Heaven’s Feel”, following the now-grown-up F/SN kids over one very stressful Christmas week.
There are also “coffee sips” which are short stories set at various points in the timeline and jumping between various characters who don’t get “main” plotlines devoted to them… though by this point the stories aren’t short and I’m basically using these as a format to flesh out and give closure to all the side characters who haven’t had their own arc yet (plus extra, post-Act 5 closure for some who have).
Why wasn’t it online before?
Honestly, I was mostly just shy – this was initially meant to be for me and like 3 friends, and more generally, I was worried about having my messy creative practice Perceived and Known in a public space. There’s definitely some writing from this era that I’m glad exists only on my hard drive and a couple of people’s inboxes, but it seems a shame to sequester all of it away. Enshrining this fic is as much a tribute to my younger self as anything else,
Plus, at the time the general logic was “no one will take you seriously as a writer if you’ve got fanfic out there!” (if that was ever 100% true, the landscape has shifted since then) and someone had once told me very adamantly that I should never publish anything online because people would steal my ideas (I don’t remember who that was, but clearly they made an impression). Basically I had a lingering sense that I would Get In Trouble or cause Something Bad to Happen, which… well, it would be wrong to say my anxieties are gone, but they take a slightly different shape now, and I figure it’s worth moving past them to share something that can potentially bring some joy in this ridiculous and demoralising world.
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but have ultimately always chickened out!! So cheers to the person who messaged me asking where they could read it – you finally lit the fire under my butt to engineer a better way of doing this. The AO3 format may also be a much more sensible distribution system for the later, bigger Coffee Sips, but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.
Will it be any different?
I’m making some tiiiiiiny stylistic tweaks as I go, because I can’t help myself, but otherwise the text will be the same as in the big “collected edition” PDFs with all the chapters together. Even if it’s cringe or I would do it differently now!! This is an archival effort, after all.
Knock yourself out! I love those big ol’ formatted PDFs! Send me a message and I’ll email ‘em to you!
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