Very very intrigued by the Daneel-Vasilia WIP and the kiss vignettes 👀
Aahahaha, the Daneel-Vasilia one is sooo sinister and so fucked up I'm sorry ahaha--but I do think it's totally plausible both in terms of plot elements and characterization.
Part of it definitely stems from my hurt at seeing her ill-used in canon (so many characters are, though, so I'm not offended, it's just the nature of things!), but mostly the plot (if we can call it that) comes from streaming together a few neglected elements:
Giskard's death -- Giskard being (by her opinion alone, because Giskard is not a disordered pervert like our dear Daneel, and even then maybe only on a sensitive & emotive level) her robot, and Daneel being the only person with the knowledge of Giskard's death or the meaning of it. I don't see it outside the range of Daneel's self-considered duties for him to inform her--but not strictly, of course, from his deranged sense of "consciousness" and propriety
Gaia is the product of human experimentation and tampering with people's minds which isss pretty comfortably outside the range of Daneel's permissible behaviors under the Laws... So Daneel either needs some amount of positronic rewiring himself (which is so, so scary, and makes me so queasy), or needs enough plausible deniability for himself to overcome positronic pressure from tampering, which could come from a third-party acting for him; in all likelihood, I'd say it's a combination of both, since an "inculcat[ion] of... the Laws of Robotics" (Foundation and Earth) is the starting point for a Gaian mind.
(He also needs the ability to maintain himself and manufacture other robots, which must be learned somewhere--ergo, Vasilia is his tutor!)
But basically they go on a long miserable sabbatical road trip type thing together after Daneel returns to inform her of Giskard's death and is "released" from Gladia's service. They have a really horrible, terse dynamic, and they're constantly manipulating each other and getting into each other's heads in more or less literal ways. And they wear each other's clothes and he looks just like her father's colleague and they get crazy together and make each other crazier I don't know. It's very scary. The difficult thing with this is balancing their dynamic in terms of how much they need each other/gain from each other; their dependency and mutual interest needs to be approximately equal throughout the whole thing so that they do not break each other, haha. And I do think they would come to some kind of strange understanding... eventually... or at least a toleration where not absolutely everything is so charged and sensitive.
I've also taken advantage of this to meditate a lot on Daneel's gender identity & relationship with sex (in the biological sense and in the sense of the activity), and the further elaboration of Daneel's horrible journey down objectification (of himself and others) and the use of attraction as a tool of influence. And also because I think Vasilia is a lesbian ☝️ These meditations are actually the bulk of the writing, because I always struggle with interstitial elements that like, actually move the plot, lol. It's likely if I do work on this, it'll get broken up into one-shots and probably be published outside of its internal chronological order.
Um but kiss vignettes are cute and (mostly) normal :'3 it's just me inserting a parting kiss ritual that takes on different shades for each time C/Fe meet, some pining and kind of bittersweet and kind of makes you angry at everyone but I think pleasant enough. the first one for Caves is cute--Elijah gets drunk!!--and the second one for Mirror Image is funny, I hope to finish it. It's sitting around 3k words right now--mostly the first and the last vignettes.
Thanks for asking and sorry for the looooooong answer. Bless you, Fla!! I hope your creative fount ever-flows ever-fresh and you've been having a lovely summer 🥰🥰!!!
