An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
This is the Pinch Hit I took on for the Bowspam Valentine’s Heartstruck Event! (hosted by @bowspam , which was quite lovely!!)
There weren’t that many tags they asked for that I felt confident writing, but they also asked for Manhunt setting, and, well, I had several thoughts and ideas for just that. I knew it would be that, I just had to figure out what idea would work best for this.
(On top of that, I had the busiest week as I was writing it, what with Karneval around the corner and me making my own costume for it, and my friend’s birthday being on the day of the deadline, and a DND session, but I managed surprisingly well. It was easy to write, once I got the idea down, I just sabotaged myself with anxiety.)
I have several ideas I eventually want to do for the Manhunt setting, and even for this particular one, but I struggled with pinning one down.
One idea was a smut fic, with Tommy as a Bee Hybrid (more Bee than human), Manhunt Dream, where, essentially, Tommy lost his hive, encounters Dream and watches him a bit during a manhunt, and Dream is incredibly competent and strong and fast and durable, just checking all of Tommy’s boxes for a new Queen. So he captures Dream in wax and tries to breed him, feeding him royal jelly which acts as an aphrodisiac.
But I didn’t feel confident that I would be able to make the deadline with it, so it was scrapped to be done some other time.
This fic, as I wrote it, also underwent several drafts, which is new for me, since it’s usually ‘first draft is final draft’ for me. The first draft focused too much on the actual manhunt and action of it and not on the characters’ thoughts and feelings, and then the second one focused too much on the thoughts and feelings, funnily enough. It was in the middle of the third draft, when I was struggling finding Tommy’s voice for his dialogue when I had the revelation ‘what if... they *don’t* talk?’
So I ended up experimenting a bit with that notion, and I found myself really liking what it was becoming. I also added another layer of challenge onto this for me, because apparently, I’m not enough of a masochist yet, and I challenged myself to stay below 2k for this. That meant that every word, every sentence, really had to count to convey what I want it to convey. That must have been the most difficult thing for me to do, ever since, you know me, I usually can’t shut up. But honestly, I think that only benefitted the fic and I might do something like that in the future again.
The theme I stuck to for this fic are the eyes and portals. Eyes are the window to the soul, after all, and you can convey a lot with them. (Also the inspo for the title.) Portals then, for change, which has so many nuanced meanings in my head that I’m not sure I can fully explain?
I loved writing this, and I may come back to it because I’m really interested what will happen next, because Dream held onto Tommy as they fell through the portal.