georgie

ao3 author - she/her - 🏳️‍🌈 https://linktr.ee/georgia_mapledale

[georgiamapledale]

New WIP!!!!

the burden of proof

5/18 Chapters

Legal drama Hollanov AU - angst with a happy ending ❤️ guys I promise please join me on this ride you will not regret it

https://archiveofourown.org/works/84637646/chapters/223319696

[georgiamapledale]

New WIP!!!!

the burden of proof

5/18 Chapters

Legal drama Hollanov AU - angst with a happy ending ❤️ guys I promise please join me on this ride you will not regret it

https://archiveofourown.org/works/84637646/chapters/223319696

[georgiamapledale]

Officially updated the chapter count: we will have 18 chapters!!!!!!!! (Unless something very crazy happens as I continue editing over the next several weeks and I feel like I need to add, rest assured though I will not be taking away lmao). To everyone joining me on my WIP journey thank you!!! Now you finally know what you’ve signed up for 😍🤪 we’re not even halfway thru this slow burn babes

[georgiamapledale]

ch. 5 - burden of proof: OUT NOW!!!

Happy new chapter Sunday!!!!

Their first kiss had taken Shane to another plane. He had left his body, and he didn’t think he ever came back. Not fully, not in the same way he had been in his body before that night. There was a distinct before and after and the dividing line was Ilya’s mouth, soft and questioning in the dark of his apartment at two in the morning, and everything on the after side of it was irrevocably different in ways Shane had spent a decade trying not to map too precisely.

Almost fourteen billion years ago, was the universe aware of what it was doing? That singular point, that was hot, dense, impossibly small, and contained everything and then didn’t, that expanded outward at a rate so violent and so total that the word expansion barely covered it. Did it know, in whatever passed for consciousness at the beginning of all things, that it was creating something that would still be growing, still be reaching outward, billions of years later? Shane had not known. He had sat on that couch with Ilya’s hand warm on his face and understood nothing of what he was beginning. He had simply been there, in the heat and the smallness of it, the singular point. He had not known it was the start of his universe.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/84637646/chapters/228051266

[georgiamapledale]

Ilya sent Shane a link to a song. Five minutes later, Shane comes barreling down the stairs in a panic. “Ilya, why came fuck did you send me this? Are you okay? Should I call Galina?”

“Da, what do you mean? Is nice love song!”

“Ilya, this is not a love song.”

Ilya stared at Shane and Shane stared back at him. Finally, Ilya threw his hands up in the air, aggravated. “God forbid I try to set mood with beautiful voice of Alicia Keys! Only to piss off my husband for some reason! It is like I married a stranger!”

“Alicia—Ilya, I think you sent me the wrong song.”

Ilya grabbed his phone from his pocket and looked at his text message.

“Ah. This song is right underneath ‘If I Ain’t Got You’, I must have clicked wrong one.”

Shane smacked himself in the face.

“So….you are not in the mood?” Ilya wiggled his eyebrows at his husband.

Shane let out a guffaw and stomped back upstairs.

[georgiamapledale]

the burden of proof - ch. 5 preview!

Shane felt it everywhere. In the heavy pulse between his ribs, in the ache beneath his skin, in the throbbing heat between his legs. Ilya hovered above him like something pulled from a dream that Shane never wanted to wake up from. Those icy blue, merciless eyes pinned him in place. Oh, they were dangerous eyes. And Shane was burning beneath them.

Burning for him.

He felt consumed by it, molten with it, and the worst part was that he never wanted it extinguished. If doing this with Ilya ruined him, then Shane thought maybe ruins could be beautiful. Maybe that is why, hundreds of years later, people from all over visited ancient ruins across the world. To see this.

Shane’s fingers slid into the hair at the nape of Ilya’s neck, trembling despite himself. He could feel the heat radiating off of every inch of Ilya’s body. Could feel the restraint in him. The strain of it.

See you Sunday for the full chapter release!!

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[georgiamapledale]

A rich plume of smoke unfurled around Ilya’s head, dissolving into the cold morning air. Beneath him, the lake glittered with a million fractured diamonds, each opalescent wavelet catching the waking sun and hurling it back toward the sky. The horizon burned amber and copper, melting upward into bruises of violet and pale blue. Along the shoreline, the willows swayed in the breeze, their leaves whispering secrets to one another that no person language could ever adequately translate. It was, by every measure, an ordinary morning. Nature would endure as it always had, swallowing scars and growing over wounds left behind by human hands. And humans, in turn, would continue speaking with the certainty of prophets and the ignorance of children, passing their truths from mouth to mouth until no one remembered where they had come from. Yet here sat Ilya, balanced on the same weather-smoothed rock, cigarette glowing between his fingers like a dying star. The news from that morning sat inside his chest like a stone dropped into a deep abyss, still sinking, still sinking. Soon he would have to hand that weight to his husband and watch it pull him under too.

[brazilianwolfbird]

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!

Let's celebrate love ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

[georgiamapledale]

At the end of the last chapter, Ilya sent Shane an email. “Impressive opening statement.” For the entire duration of the case, they have only spoken on emails with their clients cc’d. Any phone call has been to discuss the case. This email felt oddly…personal. Especially given that Ilya sent it after seeing Shane for the first time after ten years.

Shane has no idea how to respond.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[georgiamapledale]

the burden of proof - ch. 4 is posted!!

If Shane were the moon, then Ilya supposed he himself was the sun. Bound to him by forces neither of them could escape, yet doomed always to exist apart. Two celestial bodies chained to the same universe but condemned to opposite horizons. They traveled parallel paths, influenced each other constantly, invisibly, catastrophically… But they were never allowed to rise together. What cruel design was that?

https://archiveofourown.org/works/84637646/chapters/226776621

[georgiamapledale]

If you write 3 sentences on your work in progress and show me, I will write 4 sentences on my work in progress and show you

Ahh hello fellow author! Liiiiike 3 sentences about it generally?? Okay lemme see.

Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov couldn’t help but turning their law school rivalry into something more, something deeper. But when their stubbornness and egos betrayed them, their relationship collapsed under the weight of it all. Being forced into each other’s proximity for the first time a decade later, Shane and Ilya are forced to reckon with the proof of how epic their love truly was, and whether or not they can get it back. 💞

Alright I showed you mine now you show me yours!!!

[georgiamapledale]

Preview for Ch. 4 - burden of proof [full chapter drops Sunday!]

Heated Rivalry: Second Chance Romance - Attorney AU

**this has not been beta’d yet, please disregard any typos, and this is subject to be revised by the official chapter drop on Sunday**

The moon still hung high over the city when Ilya woke on Monday morning, pale and watchful beyond his window. The apartment was quiet except for the distant hum of traffic somewhere far below, but his body already thrummed with restless energy, nerves sparking beneath his skin hard enough to keep sleep from reclaiming him. He lay there for a moment staring at the ceiling, feeling the strange, nauseating awareness settle heavily into his chest.

Shane Hollander was here. In his city. Breathing the same air. Soon he would be standing close enough for Ilya to hear his voice without the interference of memory.

The thought alone made his pulse stutter irritably.

With a quiet exhale, Ilya turned his head toward the window, toward the moon suspended in the dark sky like something eternal and untouchable. Cold silver light spilled across the room, painting the edges of furniture in soft blue. He stared at it too long, and against his will, it made him think of Shane. Of course it did.

Shane had always been moonlike to him.

Gravitational. Impossible to ignore once caught inside its orbit. The kind of presence that shifted tides without ever seeming to move at all. Shane carried himself with that same vicious steadfastness, that same understated authority that made rooms unconsciously bend toward him. People circled him instinctively. Trusted him instinctively. Desired him instinctively. Even back then, in law school, Shane had possessed a kind of brilliance that drew everyone near, and he never seemed to notice.

And, God, Ilya had hated him for it. Or tried to.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[georgiamapledale]

New WIP!!!!

the burden of proof

1/? Chapters

Legal drama Hollanov AU - angst with a happy ending ❤️ guys I promise please join me on this ride you will not regret it

https://archiveofourown.org/works/84637646/chapters/223319696

[georgiamapledale]

Y’all I’ve drafted 15 chapters so far and I’m at around 66k words 😵‍💫 I think this will end up having 18 or 19 chapters total. I know only 3 chapters are out so far but this will be a journey 🙏

[georgiamapledale]

Actually taught myself how to use work skins for this fic because I realized ya know what I have done harder things in life - so I went back to chapters 1 & 2 and made the emails actually look like emails lmao. And any emails moving forward will be appropriately coded as well 😁 Not a big deal to most but it’s a big deal #tome

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[georgiamapledale]

Before Ilya, Shane’s life had always felt like a desert. It was vast, lonely, but survivable because every so often there appeared some small oasis of affection or achievement to keep him moving forward. But after him, after the moment that divided Shane’s life permanently into before and after, he no longer felt stranded in emptiness.

He felt like he was drowning. There was no longer too little, but too much.

Like he had been thrown into the middle of a black ocean without a lifeboat, forced to swallow mouthful after mouthful of saltwater while it burned against the millions of invisible cuts beneath his skin. Every day hurt. Every memory hurt. Existing hurt. And eventually the pain became so constant that it lost all sharpness and simply hardened into the texture of his life.

In those first months, Shane became obsessive in pathetic, humiliating ways he would never admit aloud. Late at night he would reopen old text threads and scroll for hours, rereading conversations until sunrise blurred against his windows. Tiny stupid things destroyed him most. Their arguments over restaurants, blurry drunk texts at two in the morning, Ilya sending him photos of dogs he saw on the street because he knew Shane secretly loved them.

Proof. All of it proof.

Proof that once, impossibly, they had been happy.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[georgiamapledale]

Chapter 3 - burden of proof

Now posted!!!

POV Shane looking over MTL super wistfully from his fancy schmancy apartment definitely NOT thinking about how he’s about to see Ilya on Monday for the trial, being all sad boi about it :(

https://archiveofourown.org/works/84637646/chapters/225521691

[georgiamapledale]

burden of proof [legal heated rivalry AU]- preview for chapter 3!!!!!!!!! (full chapter dropping sunday)

[disclaimer: this has not been beta’d yet and is subject to be edited by sunday]

The night things shifted, and there was a night, it was a Tuesday in February, second semester of second year. They had been together since seven p.m. It was past one in the morning and the library had emptied around them so gradually that Shane hadn’t noticed until the overhead lights in the far stacks had been dimmed to their overnight setting. The space around them had gone dark by degrees until it was just the two of them and the warm yellow glow of the study lamp between them, and the comfortable silence that settled over a building when it had been vacated.

Ilya had closed his laptop

The sound of it had been soft but it landed clearly in the quiet, a small definitive click. Shane looked up from his notes and found that Ilya was already looking at him. Already. With the expression that had always confounded him. The one that gave everything away and nothing away at the same time, and was waiting, with some patience, to see what you would do about it.

Shane had become aware, in the space of a single breath, of how small the table was. Of how long they had been sitting there. Of the fact that at some point in the last several hours their feet had both migrated to the center of the table’s bottom rung and were nearly touching, close enough that Shane could feel the warmth of him.

He did not move his foot. He wasn’t sure he could have.

Ilya had said, quietly, Hollander.

Just his name. The way he said it. Whole-end-er, that shape, which had always done something to Shane that he’d spent so long attributing to irritation, except this time it wasn’t quite that. This time it was something else entirely, deliberate and soft in the lamplight, and Shane had felt it somewhere beneath his sternum, a low and inconvenient frequency.

And Shane said, I know.

https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/224088546?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#comment_1204677831

First two chapters already out! See you sunday!

[georgiamapledale]

Irina’s Adagio

[Please enjoy this video of a reading of the note from Irina to Ilya from the linked fic, read over the music as I intended it to be read as I wrote the fic! Sorry some of the captions are funky, I could not for the life of me get them to cooperate!]

SUMMARY: Both now 35 years old, Shane and Ilya are married, out, and contently living their lives. One day, Shane and Ilya receive a package on their front porch. It seems that Alexei has finally taken the time to pack up some things from Ilya’s old Moscow apartment and has shipped them to Shane and Ilya. There isn’t much, but Shane and Ilya stumble across a framed photo of Irina holding baby Ilya. She is holding him so fiercely, so protectively. As Shane removes the old photo from the cracked picture frame, a letter falls out from behind the photo.

“My little sunshine…”

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85108896