#decades project

[bookishandbossy]

Code Name Jeanne

Let’s go to the 1940′s with some mildly angsty rebelcaptain spies in occupied France, shall we? (I feel like I have to state up front that there’s a happy ending.)

Jyn Erso lives by a few simple rules. She takes the most dangerous missions her superior at the SOE is willing to give her. She never speaks of what her life was like before the war. She always works alone. And at the SOE, filled with people whose pasts may be checkered but who are willing to do just about anything to defeat the Axis, she fits right in. They understand each other, her and these people who she knows only by code names and messages left in dead letter drops, who she meets in fleeting seconds in cafes and country roads, who sneak her information and explosives and equipment. She's been running a spy network out of occupied France for almost two and a half years and she's lasted longer than most but she's well aware that all it would take for her to vanish into a Gestapo cell is trusting the wrong person. So she works alone and the list of people who know her real identity is breathtakingly short. Everyone who knows her know this. So when the SOE sends her Captain Cassian Andor in the late winter of 1944, she eyes him like he's a bomb.

Read the rest on AO3!

[onyx-archer]

The AbbiOlli Twentieth Century Decades Project “Masterpost”

All Art was done by @pennwrenn / @wrennpenn

Abigail McKinley and Olivia Elwynn belong to me / @onyx-archer

Once again, I just wanna give a huge thank you to Jill for doing this! It was money well spent, and I look forward to working with you again! Perhaps sooner than you think too ;)

Please, if you are following me and haven’t already done so, go follow both of Jill’s blogs, and commission her! She’s quick, and very affordable! Her going rates are $10 (+$3 for each additional character), and $20 (+6 for each additional character)! You can find her commission info here: ♫

Also, check out her Patreon if you like what she’s making, and want to support her without commissioning her! Every dollar counts, so go show her your support: ♫

Though this took about 10 months over all, that was more due to my financial commitments towards other things than her ability to get stuff done! I look forward to showing you all what the aforementioned “other financial commitments” are, which you will hopefully see before the end of the Summer, fingers crossed!

[bookishandbossy]

A Practical Proposal

Many moons ago I said I was going to write a series of historical AUs with different pairings for each decade of the 20th century and now maybe I’m actually doing it? So here’s Edwardian marriage of convenience FS...

Leo Fitz proposed to Jemma Simmons a few years into the new century. They were sitting next to a potted plant at a ball, angled in such a way as to be virtually invisible from most vantage points, and rather glumly regarding the plate of substandard petit-fours and cups of weak punch they had managed to pilfer from the refreshment table. After nearly ten years, they had perfected their ball routine. She was rapidly approaching spinsterdom and best known for sitting through the weddings of all four of her younger sisters with a smile that truly seemed genuine. He was a third son who had had the misfortune to neither go into the army or the clergy and had instead made a tidy fortune in trade substantial enough to lease a town home but not nearly appealing enough to attract any eligible debutantes. Both of them were intimately acquainted with the sidelines and so it had been the most natural thing in the world for them to throw their lot in with each other.

“Considering how very much on the shelf I am, you would think that I could leave off wearing quite so many ruffles,” Jemma said, tugging unhappily at the three layers of cream ruffles edging the bottom of her dress. She had caught one on the carriage door on purpose on the way here but unfortunately, her mother had commandeered a lady's maid to fix it immediately. She had thought a torn ruffle would be enough to get her out of at least three dances with gentlemen who owed her brothers-in-law a favor. (It was all terribly well intentioned and somehow that made it worse.)

“I think you look nice,” Fitz said loyally around a mouthful of petit-four.

“The ruffles aren't ideal,” he added when she cast a skeptical look his way. “But they're not terrible. Could be worse—it could have been feathers, like that time at the Xavier ball.”

They both shivered in remembered horror.

“One more season ought to do it, do you think? For me to retire from all of this,” she explained, waving one hand in a motion that encompassed her unfortunate ruffles, her empty dance card, and the plant fronds currently threatening to undo her coiffure. “Of course, I'll have to ask my father for an allowance and he'll be dreadfully stingy and I'll likely be banished to some drafty country manor where I'll have to make friends with cows but it must be better than sitting here trussed up like a prize goose hearing people be sympathetic about my plight. Why is it that men always get to be confirmed bachelors and set up comfortable establishments while women are shunted off to the countryside to be companions to the most convenient elderly relative?”

“ You're welcome to co-opt my comfortable establishment any time. Although I'm not sure my parlor could fit any more suffragist banners.” He paused a moment, considering. “My drawing room, however, certainly could.”

Jemma sighed. “I know and I do appreciate it. I just...I'm not sure whether to look forward to settling firmly into spinsterhood or to dread it. I don't know if I would have liked marriage but it might have nice to have had someone else to face all of this with.”

“Then marry me.”

Read the rest on AO3!

[bookishandbossy]

Flappers and Philosophers

The 1920′s Dair installment of my decades project, featuring some lavish parties, aspiring writer Dan Humphrey’s inability to stop putting versions of Blair Waldorf in his stories, and Blair discovering she doesn’t always mind it.

He first sees Blair Waldorf at a party he's not invited to. It's the kind of party people just turn up at, drinking someone else's champagne and eating someone else's food and getting horribly drunk and diving into someone else's pool. Dan hears about the party from Nate Archibald, who is actually invited because Nate is the kind of person who gets invited everywhere, and he goes because he's stuck on page three of his novel and he could use some inspiration. So he wanders through room after room of someone's mansion, taking notes on the massive swimming pool and gilded columns and library of unread books, and tries to come up with a metaphor that doesn't feel completely tired.

She's draped across a chaise longue wearing an impossible construction of silver beads and lace, looking beautiful and bored. She opens her eyes when he comes within six feet of her, flicks her gaze up and down him, and then shuts her eyes again.

“You really need to fire your tailor,” she says. “That suit is terrible.”

Dan doesn't even have a tailor.

Read the rest on AO3!

[bookishandbossy]

Spotlights and Stardust

The decades project continues with a 1930′s Classic Hollywood Daisy/Bobbi AU! 

Daisy Johnson is an all-American girl, from a little town in the Midwest where neighbors help each other out and her mother makes jam from the berries that grow in their garden each year. She loves Steve Rogers pictures and vanilla milkshakes and she used to sew all her own clothes. She's never been kissed and she blushes at so much as the suggestion of going steady with a boy. Daisy Johnson is something that Shield Pictures made up.

The Daisy is real enough but the studio gave her the last name along with the rest of her invented biography, as they made her pose cuddling puppies and making meatloaf and perching winsomely on porch swings. And technically, she did grow up in a place where neighbors help each other out, only it was San Francisco's Chinatown and not the town that the publicity department invented. Her mother never made jam but she made the best soup dumplings Daisy has ever tasted. And Steve Rogers is just fine but she watched the last Natasha Romanoff movie three times and she'll take chocolate over vanilla any day and—she could go on and on. But the point is she's not always entirely sure where she starts and the studio ends.

Read the rest on AO3!

[bookishandbossy]

Perhaps some day the sun will shine again

Part two of my decades project is here! Angsty slow-burn World War I AU Dramione.

Hermione Granger was a year and a half into her war the first time that she saw the face of someone she had known staring up at her from a hospital bed. Neville Longbottom, who had spent hours kneeling in the rich soil of his garden and gone on expeditions collecting botanical samples before the war, had lost most of his leg in the trenches.  He had smiled upon seeing her, despite the grimace that crossed his face when she changed the dressings on his leg.  Later on in his convalescence, she had taken him out for long walks in the garden when the weather was good.  They had talked determinedly of everything but the war and when he had finally left, bound for his grandmother's home in Devon, she had silently thanked whatever powers she could think of that he had come through it.  She hadn't known anyone that had died then.

A year later, Ron's brother Fred had died during the Battle of the Somme.  Little Colin Creevey too, who had taken photographs of all of them in those hazy golden days before the war, with his massive camera that had emitted alarming puffs of white smoke.  Remus Lupin, who had spent long evenings drinking brandy and telling stories at Grimmauld Place with Harry's godfather Sirius and whose wife had just given birth to their first child a few months before. And a week later Lavender Brown, who she had been at school with, caught in shelling while driving an ambulance in France. After a while, she had begun to almost hope to see a familiar face being carried on a stretcher up the steps of Hogwarts Castle and into the great stone halls that had been requisitioned and turned into an infirmary, far removed from the horrors of the Western Front.

She had never hoped to see Draco Malfoy.

It was Ginny who told her that he had been sent to Hogwarts to recuperate.  “His wounds weren't that bad,” Ginny told her, attacking her sandwich with gusto during the half hour the VADs had been set for their lunch break. “At least not according to Nurse McGonagall.  But the men under his command died at Passchendaele and he hasn't been right since.  The army wanted to send him to an asylum but his mother pulled some strings so he'd be sent here instead.”

Hermione wasn't surprised.  The Draco Malfoys of the world had always had strings pulled for them.

She managed to avoid the ward that he was on for three whole days, through a combination of pure luck, detours during the course of the day that conveniently took her to the opposite side of the castle, and a willingness to trade shifts with the other VADs.  Because Draco Malfoy had sneered at her and mocked her and declared her not good enough with every word and look he sent her way.  Because she had been furious at him for years for it and just the sound of his name was enough to set the old anger simmering up inside her again. Because she suspected that all her fury might slip away if she saw him lying there pale in a hospital bed and she wasn't sure what she would do then.

On the fourth day after Malfoy arrived in the hospital, she heard him screaming in the middle of the night.

Read the rest on AO3!

[bookishandbossy]

guess who has finally returned to writing her ridiculously self-indulgent decades project, after finally finishing her exchange fics? (though i signed up to do a literati fest, because I am weak and desperately want to try writing Jess and Rory.) anyway, one Edwardian AOS AU is coming to an AO3 near you, hopefully sooner rather than later.

[bookishandbossy]

FIRST, and THE END.

First–Mr. Phillip Coulson (supremebureaucrat, former secret agent, legally dead) had been asked to puttogether a team.

The end (this is invented because I haven’t written the ending to this one yet–just started it, in fact): “Agent May? Set our course for Australia.”