heyhey! how about 3, 23, 28? hope you have a wonderful new year!
3. What's something NEW that you tried in a fic?
smut! i don't tend to write smut very often, but my laerryn/patia piece for the crit role wildflowers event demanded that smut be the focus and the point. what is smut but a juicy character study anyway, right? it was very fun; i may write more with those two in 2026.
23. If you had to choose one, what was THE most satisfying writing moment of your year?
it hasn't been published yet! i've been pretty patchy in my writing for the last 2 or 3 years bc life has been Hard, and so i've developed a tendency to write something all at once or not at all. a lot of ideas that i love and WIPs i've already posted are stuck in limbo, but i've been working on a polytrix fic for about two months that i've been able to keep coming back to even after i let it sit for a few weeks. it's really nice to know i can still do that, that it's just a muscle i haven't flexed and i can coax it back to life someday.
but also, if i have to pick a line:
“I don’t know,” Rio shrugs. “I think I just miss your mom. Sometimes it feels like being mad.”
i like that one because it came easy
28. If this were an awards show, who would you thank?
oh man, everyone whose fics i've read over the last year bc those have really been keeping me together (of course you included!!) anyone i've thrown ideas at over discord, especially @xactodreams and @banrions. anyone i've played d&d with over the year!!! i am comprised of little more than fanfic and TTRPGs these days (i choose to believe it stands for They're Therapy Role Playing Games), and more often than not, writing plots for my silly space campaign makes me connect dots in fic, for which i am eternally grateful.
hi there! Hope you’re well. I was wondering if you’ve read any avatrice fics recently you’d recommend—ppl who love Chanel have good taste imho :)
hey! so sorry i left this unanswered for so long; i got inspired to create a setting for a d&d campaign and that urge only just let go of me long enough to focus on other things :) i hope you're still around to read this answer!
in general, i highly rec anything that jtl07 and littledata have written; those are two authors where i will drop just about anything i'm doing to read whatever they post. also a poke around my warrior nun bookmarks is an implicit recommendation :)
as for specific fics: jtl07's invisible ava fic is a recent fave, as is the lighthouse au by snowandwolves. (i'm actually rather obsessed with that one, and have gone back and reread it a few times already).
current WIPs that i am v intrigued by are:
dynamic soaring and other life lessons from seabirds by AnonymousViolets: pacific northwest AU, ava is a scientist in town and beatrice is also there. the descriptions are lush and immersive and the pacing is perfection
i found rivers by LongWindedAnswer: ava is a travel photographer, beatrice is an agoraphobic author. again, absolutely wonderful and vibrant descriptions, and the depth to the relationship between ava & JC, contrasted with ava and beatrice's connection, while not giving one more importance than the other?? to. die. for.
where the river bends by ItchyOuchyZ and Sabrepunk: call the midwife au, takes some of my favorite CTM canon moments and intersperses them seamlessly with our fave nun squad. plus this is just an excellent character study of both beatrice and ava, though the beatrice bits are particularly off the charts
Is the bear book you're thinking of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?"
no, although i do love that one and i see the resemblance! the one i'm thinking of has two bears walking in the snow, a big one and a little one, but i don't think it's the "little bear" series illustrated by maurice sendak
it might just be called big bear, little bear? the art style is a little more realistic and also kinda watercolor-y, if i'm remembering correctly
damie + “please just hold my hand, that person’s basically undressing me with their eyes.”
trope prompts
//
It’s not that Jamie doesn’t want to be at this school function, it’s just that—
No, that’s a lie. She definitely doesn’t want to be here, and wouldn’t if she weren’t part of the staff. Wouldn’t be here if Dani hadn’t tricked her, really, because Jamie’s usually pretty good about saying no even at work.
“Rebecca’s back from traveling,” Dani had tried, and Jamie said no because who knows how long that’ll last.
“Owen said he’s gonna ask Hannah out,” she’d tried next, and Jamie had actually laughed in her face.
“Someone is actually going to have to physically force those two together,” she’d replied, and Dani’s eyes lit up, prompting her with a quirk of an eyebrow.
In no world does Jamie want to be that person.
Dani had sighed. “Free booze,” she’d grumbled, desperate. Jamie had rolled her eyes and opened the door to her well-stocked liquor cabinet.
Dani had pursed her lips together and turned her face away, almost quick enough for Jamie to miss the grin she was failing to suppress.
If Jamie weren’t constantly on the lookout for that smile, she might have succeeded.
Dani had sighed again, raked a hand through her fluffy, perfect hair, and flopped back on the couch.
“Okay, fine,” she huffed. “You win, don’t come, we’ll hang out over the weekend and I’ll just tell you all about how lonely I was at the party—my first party without Eddie, which everyone will probably be asking me about and I’ll have to field awkward questions all night—”
Jamie scoffed. “And you think I’m going to magically make them not be awkward?”
“No,” Dani answered, a little too quickly. “I think you’d glare at them so hard they wouldn’t even ask me in the first place.”
“I think I’ve just been insulted!”
“No,” Dani laughed, “you just have that whole—” She scrunched her eyebrows together and set her shoulders, curled her lip upwards into an unmistakable hint of a sneer. Her voice, when she spoke, was half an octave lower and at least six countries away from Jamie’s accent. “—’Don’t fuck wiv’ me’ vibe going on,” she finished.
Jamie had taken a few long moments to blink away the urge to kiss her.
“You’ve gotten worse,” she’d finally said. “Almost a year and a half working together and you’ve gotten worse.”
“Come to the party and you can spend the whole time teaching me.”
“Dani.”
“Jamie.”
Her eyes weren’t wide anymore; they’d shrunk back to being shy and vulnerable, the stormy kind of blue that Jamie didn’t ever see unless they were alone. Jamie had spent the better part of a year not acknowledging her feelings for Dani, and she was good at it. Not always good enough to escape Hannah’s shrewd gaze, but enough to where it was a genuine friendship, and she only felt the roar of devotion flare up in the quietest, most private of moments.
Jamie was excellent at controlling her emotions. She’d spent an entire lifetime honing that skill, protecting herself from the surprisingly large amount of people who seemed destined to hurt her.
Jamie had nothing on Dani Clayton.
Dani could suppress any negative feeling until it almost ceased to exist; she had an incredible way of just...willing things not to happen. It had taken months for her to reveal the cracks in her relationship with Eddie, and even then Jamie sat by and watched, completely blown away, by how quickly and how sincerely Dani put the mask back up around people who only wanted to see silk and porcelain. The crazy thing about it was that Dani meant it; Dani gave all of her attention to everyone who asked for it. She didn’t have an insincere bone in her body.
But, god—Jamie’s life had been shit before, and still nothing made her sadder than watching Dani perform.
If all it took for her not to do that was one party, well, she could table the rest of it for later.
She’d picked up her phone and opened up the group chat they had with Hannah, Owen, and Rebecca.
“Right,” she’d groaned, “guess we’ve gotta coordinate who’s driving because the only way I’m getting through this is if I’m very, very drunk.”
.
And so Jamie finds herself at the not-yet-Christmas, ambiguously-winter end-of-semester party, sticking to Rebecca like a leech while she regales groups of coworkers with the same six stories of her very impulsive, wildly successful trip around the world. Dani, meanwhile, hasn’t been answering any awkward questions, from what Jamie’s heard, and is instead relaxed and popular as she chats with all of their friends.
Jamie almost turned around ten minutes in, once it became clear what the tone of the night would be. But there was no sense in bailing when she was already there and hadn’t driven herself, and—
Who would be there for Dani to look at, every twenty minutes or so, just for reassurance or to check in or whatever kind of comfort she might be seeking. (Jamie doesn’t know for sure what it is. She knows what she hopes it is. But that’s something else for the ‘later’ bag.)
She stays. Jamie stays and drinks and laughs and eventually gets sucked into the party of it all, which is why she’s five minutes into her best story of youthful shenanigans that didn’t end in a visit from the cops, and absolutely doesn’t notice the anxious blonde rushing at her from across the room.
“Hold my hand, hold my hand, hold my hand,” Dani urges, arm outstretched as she speeds closer. She hits Jamie’s elbow when she gets close enough and finally manages to wrestle Jamie’s hand into an iron grip.
Jamie, sufficiently interrupted, stops talking and looks down. “What’s going on here, then?”
Dani takes a deep breath and plasters on the worst attempt at a smile Jamie’s ever seen, which is still pretty good by most peoples’ standards. “Remember all those awkward questions I thought I’d get about Eddie?” she says through clenched teeth.
“Yep.”
“Thought they’d be full of pity, not flirting.”
Jamie’s head shoots up, trying to pick out the offenders, but Dani slaps her elbow again.
“Don’t look!” she hisses. “We have to make this convincing.”
“Make what convincing?” Jamie narrows her eyes and takes a long sip of her drink. “You’re pulling me into some kind of scheme, Poppins, and I know I’ve told you what happened the last time somebody did that…”
Dani laughs, high and fluttery and nervous in the back of her throat. “Please just hold my hand,” she implores. “Nathan is basically undressing me with his eyes but I think you can scare him off if he sees us together.”
“Nathan?” Jamie starts to scan the room again, a little less obviously this time. “Nathan Ford, the school’s sluttiest social studies teacher?”
“Mhm.”
“The same Nathan Ford who’s walking over right now?”
“What!” Dani straightens up, rigid and spooked like a deer in the road. “I can’t believe—I was so careful; is he stalking me?”
The anxiety is short-lived and replaced very quickly with anger once Jamie can no longer hold in her laughter.
“You,” Dani says, prying Jamie’s drink from her other hand, “tricked me.”
“You tricked me first,” Jamie winks.
“I don’t even think he’s in here anymore.”
Jamie shrugs. “Probably not.”
“You made me think I was in so much trouble…”
“You’re always safe with me, Poppins.”
Dani finishes the drink.
.
The funny thing is, neither of them lets go.
Nathan Ford isn’t the only slutty teacher and it doesn’t take Jamie long to get a glimpse of what Dani’s been dealing with, the men—single and married—who look at her just a little too long, a little too presumptuously. Dani, of course, handles it with grace and charm, and Jamie thinks that maybe she didn’t need her grumpy buffer after all.
She holds tight anyway, just in case.
It’s a dangerous thing to do, parade a fake relationship in front of all of their coworkers, but it doesn’t feel wrong or forced. They’re going on a break soon, Jamie rationalizes. School is going on a two-week break and everyone is drunk and no one is going to remember the scandal of the fourth grade teacher clinging all night to the newest member of the art department. If they do...well, everything can be laughed off or pushed down or forgotten eventually.
So they cling and they talk and Jamie expertly lets every too-interested man know, with absolute certainty, that their efforts should be directed elsewhere. She tickles her fingers against Dani’s, throws in a few isn’t that right, love’s every once in a while, rubs a hand on her back when the moment feels right. And Dani—
Dani invades her space—presses their shoulders together, scratches at the inside of Jamie’s wrist, wipes a stray bit of liquor from the side of her mouth after an untidy sip. Jamie feels all of this and lets it wash over her, lets it sink under her skin and warm her body until she feels like she could start a fire with her hands.
The night winds down and people filter out and eventually there isn’t anyone left to fool. But Dani’s hand is still in hers and Jamie is more than happy to be slow and soft with her. She stays, for the tenth and fifteenth and hundredth time.
It’s just the five of them left, eventually, and they migrate to the bar when the party room in the back seems too large for such a small group. They situate themselves on stools in the corner, and the conversation flows without a hitch. It always has with this group—Owen, Hannah, and Rebecca first, then Dani, then Jamie. She’d tell them all how much it really means to know them if anyone got enough drink in her.
Until then, she’ll scoff at group texts and drag her feet to parties and settle into the fact that they all know it’s for show anyway.
She props her head on her hand and listens, quickly approaching the sleepy part of drinking. She tries not to watch Dani too much while they all talk but it’s difficult—Dani is noticeable at a distance and absolutely striking up close. The curl of her lips as she smiles, the way they overtake her entire face if she means it enough (and she usually does); the laughter that pours out of her and directly into the hearts of anyone lucky enough to be listening; the way her ears look bigger when she hooks her hair behind them, how she only does that when she’s in very comfortable company.
After about thirty minutes, Jamie gets up to retrieve their coats before she does something stupid, like playfully tug at Dani’s earlobe or reach in to straighten the collar on her shirt.
She returns shortly, holding her leather jacket and Dani’s very puffy winter coat, and sits down without a word, content to wait for a natural break in the conversation. She folds the coats over her lap and fiddles with a coaster on the counter.
Dani absently reaches back to still her fingers after about a minute. A simple gesture—resting her hand atop Jamie’s, perhaps swiping her thumb across the back of her hand. Nothing like the displays they’d been putting on earlier. So unlike them, in fact, that Jamie doesn’t notice it at all.
Owen, Hannah, and Rebecca can’t take their eyes off it.
“So, what, were you waiting to tell me until I got back?”
Jamie nurses the dregs of her beer. “Tell you what?”
“This, what is this!” Rebecca exclaims, fluttering her fingers in the direction of Jamie and Dani’s still-clasped hands. “I go gallivanting around the world for an entire year and neither of you mention that you’ve shacked up?”
Jamie and Dani look at their hands, look at each other, and start speaking at the same time.
“We’re not dating, it was just a stupid thing for tonight—”
“Jamie’s doing me a favor since Eddie’s gone and men are creepy—”
“Right, sure.” Rebecca squints and fixes both of them with a sly glance. “It’s just for tonight, to ward off creepy men, which is why you’re still doing it since there are so many of them around now.”
“Must have just gotten used to it,” Dani offers weakly.
“Of course, which is why you still haven’t let go.”
Jamie lets go and tries not to telegraph how much she misses the weight of Dani’s hand.
“You’re definitely not dating,” Rebecca continues, “which is why Jamie got up and got her coat and Dani’s, and left the rest of us hanging.”
Dani looks down and finally notices the coat in Jamie’s lap. “You got my coat?” she asks, furrowing her brow.
“Yeah,” Jamie shrugs. “Seemed like you were ready to go.”
“Yeah, but I was—I was still talking.”
Jamie waves a hand. “You were telling the piano lesson story; you always tell that when you want the night to wind down.”
“No, I—” Dani frowns and retrieves her purse from where it’s hooked around the stool; she rummages through it frantically, her movements loose and messy. “How did you get my coat check ticket?”
“Took that from ya ages ago, Poppins,” Jamie answers. “You were so nervous you were gonna rub the number right off it, and then we’d both be shit outta luck.”
Jamie watches as the expression on Dani’s face morphs, unfurls from stern, puzzled ridges and relaxes into fondness, into twinkling eyes and soft cheeks, a mischievous affection that floors Jamie every time she sees it. Every time, she wonders how many people have been lucky enough to have been on the receiving end of this look, and hopes that the answer is ‘very few’.
“We should, um, probably go,” Dani whispers.
Jamie smiles. “We all drove here together,” she reminds Dani, just as quietly.
Dani slumps back. She reaches for her coat but instead of grabbing it, simply rests her hand on top, like she’s waiting.
Jamie breathes deeply and avoids looking at Rebecca.
“Owen, mate,” she says, daring him to tease her, “maybe you could drop off Dani and me first.”
what shows/media are currently capturing your attention?
batwoman batwoman batwoman!
i'm v behind on all my d&d shows and they aren't holding my attention as much these days, so once i catch up on batwoman I'm gonna need something else to be obsessed with. my list is SO long of things to watch but I'm not particularly drawn to any one thing
12. Who are five (or more) people you want to hug right now?
hmmmm i'm not a huge hugger but this pandemic has made me realize that i crave human contact on some level, haha. probably morgie even though i see her often enough. and then i guess just, like, any tumblr friend who wants to hug me! you included :)
16. Want any tattoos? What of?
so many! a critical role-themed sleeve, a few calvin & hobbes panels on my calf, probably a little prince one somewhere
