Polar Province is one year old today and I will be crying about it...
So I'm sharing it around again as an excuse to get wildly emotional about the impact writing this fic has had on me. If you just want to know about the fic feel free to skip to the cut.
Since publishing this fic, so much about my confidence as a writer has changed. I'm moving. Pursuing writing in a serious way. More certain than I ever was that I can, in fact, write well enough to create things of my own. A huge part of that comes from the people who read it, who commented, who made sure I knew it was appreciated.
A fic like this is a labor of love but it is a labor nonetheless. My wrists aren't thanking me for writing it, and my heart on more than one occasion didn't thank me either, but I'm a better writer for it. When I look back I think about how close I was to not writing it, to counting myself out before I ever got started just because it really flexed my skillset beyond where I thought I could go.
I'm so grateful to the folks who hold my hand through every fic I write and assure me that I do get these characters and I do have something worth saying about them (and also attempting to convince me that I can in fact be funny... though I've yet to believe it). I'm equally grateful to the talented people who have made art inspired by this fic, or any fic I've written.
And last, of course, as is so often the case with fandom, there are friends I have today that I never would have had without this story, these characters.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
in the deafening polar province called You
Pairing: Armand/Daniel Molloy
Length: 150k
Rating: E
Summary: Daniel is sprawled out across the bed, loose-limbed and lazy, somehow filling all the open space it has to offer and leaving Armand to nestle into the gaps. His cheeks are flushed, blood pooling like it knows what comes next. Maybe it does. Armand was reading about classical conditioning the other day. About dogs who become accustomed to getting food when their handler rings a bell.
Perhaps Daniel is the dog, Armand’s teeth sharp bells reverberating in his veins. Or perhaps Armand is the dog, Daniel’s blood a song rattling in his ears. He has been a dog before. He runs his tongue along the bow of Daniel’s collarbone, gathers the salt-sweat there and imagines what it tastes like because Daniel does.
Armand remembers he loved Daniel, once, and that Daniel loved him. Or a version of them did, at least. It isn't his intention to go back to that, but it's not not his intention, either. Such is the prerogative of an immortal: to hold two contradicting desires simultaneously. If nothing else, it passes the time while he waits for this miserable interview to end.
You might like this fic if: You're looking for a vague mixture of book canon and show speculation, You like Armand POV, You enjoy flashbacks and memory fuckery, you like when character's are imperfect but also love each other
Excerpt:
Daniel wakes sometime past four in the morning. Armand has enough warning before his eyes open that he could look away. Hears the change in his breathing, the shifting of his weight, and could pretend he hasn’t spent the better part of the night with his head on his arm, watching Daniel sleep. He doesn’t bother.
“Creepy,” Daniel croaks when he sees him, clearing his throat with a cough into the closed fist of his left hand. He stretches, spine arching, neck rolling with a loud crack. Armand can’t bring himself to blink, let alone turn his head. Daniel eyes the blanket on his lap with a strange expression, picking at the fabric between thumb and finger as if it will tell him how it got there.
“Apologies,” Armand says, a dry and transparent lie. “I did not mean to frighten you.”
They both know Daniel isn’t afraid, not really. Not the way he should be. If he ever had been he would probably have been dead long before now. He rubs at his temple and Armand wants–
He stands, makes his way to the kitchen and returns to Daniel with a palm full of pills and a glass of water. Daniel doesn’t immediately reach out to take either, instead looking from them to Armand with transparent suspicion.
Armand breathes an annoyed sigh. “I’m not going to poison you, Daniel.”
“I know that,” Daniel snaps. His fingers brush Armand’s palm when he takes the pills, little shocks bringing Armand’s nerves to attention as if they have been waiting for a sign to wake. No use telling them not to bother. “Poison is too detached for you. You’d probably go for strangling or something.”
He waits for Daniel to drink, to swallow the pills, to lift the glass to take another sip, and then says, “I’d simply drain you, Daniel.”
Daniel chokes, coughs into his elbow while Armand pries the glass from his fingers to set it on the coffee table. When Daniel recovers he looks up with a scowl and a sharp, “fuck you,” and it’s almost convincing but now he smells like desire. A short journey, always. Shorter now that Daniel can remember how good it felt to get what he wanted.
“You could, if you wanted. Would that help, do you think?” Armand cocks his head to the side, curious. Hungry, too. He should have eaten but it’s nothing he has not supressed a thousand times before. “You don’t know what you want, but your body does. It always does.”
“It doesn’t know shit. It’s seventy years old,” Daniel huffs, folding arms across his chest as if they can muffle the sound of his heartbeat.
Armand sinks to his knees, crowded into the narrow space between the coffee table and Daniel’s legs, careful not to touch him. Not now, not yet. The edge of the coffee table bites into his spine. “I can smell it on you. How much you want to say yes, how badly you’d like to be close, how you wish you could taste again. Say the word and–”
“No,” Daniel chews out. A half-beat of pause, enough space to ache but not quite enough to truly wound before he adds, “I don’t think it would help.”
Heat radiates from Daniel and Armand wants to feel it. His hands press hard to his own thighs and Daniel looks at him with that sharklike curiosity, circling and circling and circling.
“You’re not fucking with me,” Daniel finally says.
“No. Why would I?”
“Because that’s pretty much all you do with people?” Daniel asks it like a question, like he’s not sure of the answer. “Fuck these memories, I can’t keep track of what I know and what–”
“It’s all what you know.” It comes out gentler than he means it to. It’s not that he wants to be harsh with Daniel, though he often is. It’s more the look Daniel gives him when he’s anything but the purely violent creature Daniel wants to imagine he is. Like he’s caught up somewhere between pain and anger and his own tucked away tenderness. Betrayal too, like Armand is trying to complicate things further.
Daniel exhales, long and loud. “Yeah. That’s the problem.”
Reaching out to Daniel’s mind is careful work, in this moment. It’s not closed to him now, less because he’s welcome there and more because Daniel is too tired to keep it shut forever. Armand feels tired just brushing up against it, feels the mess of uncertainty, the never-ending spiral in and in and in.
“Okay,” he says. “I’m not fucking with you now. In this moment. Stay there.”
This earns him a glare, “Yeah. Easy for you to say. You’re not–”
“Five hundred years of the past, Daniel. I think I know a little bit about surviving the flood of memory.”
I've seen an opinion on Tiktok (shudders) that Regulus shouldn't be soft. That the only biblically accurate version of Regulus is a BAMF, and look, I get it. It's fun to read and I love OTB where he just gets to dish out his personal brand of justice (it's my favorite jegulus fic, in fact), but is a badass Regulus biblically accurate?
Somehow, I doubt it. First, Sirius literally calls him soft. "My idiot brother, soft enough to believe them." Granted, he's an unreliable narrator through the eyes of another unreliable narrator, but we can glean from the context Regulus probably joined Voldemort to impress his parents. To show them he was the 'good son', obedient and receptive to their wishes and opinions.
Canonical Regulus was a people pleaser, simple as that. It was only after a brutal reality check that he reassessed his beliefs and grew some spine to shake his upbringing and do what was right, not what he was taught.
Second, in a lot of fics, Regulus is an abused child. The degree of the abuse varies, and tbh I don't think the Blacks were physically or magically abusive toward their children (the abuse was more likely manipulative and psychological in nature).
Which can do just as much damage as physical abuse, of course. Possibly worse because it's not visible, so it's easily overlooked.
Abused children don't usually grow up to be badasses. They grow up to be a little broken, quiet, and yes, people pleasers, (and sometimes serial killers). They also need a ton of therapy to overcome their baggage.
I get that this is fanfic, and it doesn’t need to be realistic, and it's fun to explore various scenarios and what-ifs.
But claiming that a single version of a character that directly contradicts canon is the only right one seems wild to me.
Navigating fandom since 1999. Welcome to this little corner of the multiverse.
This blog serves as a dumping ground for fandom-related things that I do try and organize as best I can – magazine articles, magazine interviews, podcasts, screenshots and other related things.
I go through cycles of hyperfixation and right now it’s -- A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms | Hammer and Anvil | Baelor and Maekar -- that’s been swirling through this fudgy brain most of the time.
I ramble about musings and head canons for my current fixations. Other times I just post something random about fandom just because I need to get this off my chest.
I am a cat mom and my baby is named Ray Fay Big Boy Baratheon or sometimes Ray Fay Fossoway. He’s an American Shorthair and he’s my rock. We've moved to two different continents, lived in three cities and has braved hot and cold climate like a champ. I know that one day he will be my biggest heartache. Let it be far, far, far off into the distant future.
I’m a sweet tooth, iced tea fiend, lover of music records, journaling, a collector of tote bags, a little witchy, good listener and reader of fiction, fan fiction.
Fandoms are my sanity and I’ve been through many. You can tell by the fandom that this is not my first rodeo, and I’ve seen how the participants have changed through the years. I salute the OGs and hopeful for the succeeding torch bearers.
A graphic here and there and another Nikita ramble...
Firstly, in honor of Ready or Not 2 releasing, I made a Willace manip:
They make quite the power couple, if I do say so myself. I won't be seeing the movie till next week, but I cannot wait and hopefully it will inspire more fic ideas for these two.
And then there's another Nikari fix-it manip:
Because they should have been the ones in that hotel room, yes?
And now for a rant now that I'm nearly done with season two.
My biggest gripe about this season (besides the lack of Nikari interaction) is absolutely the disaster they pulled with Ari's characterization. As I've mentioned before, the man is ambitious and I personally cannot blame him for getting rid of Semak, but *how* it all went down and the fall from grace afterwards really gets my blood boiling because I legitimately adore his character.
Up to "Power", it's clear that they want to escalate Ari's villainy, hence the reveal that he's in cahoots with Amanda and then him klling Semak himself, but the major problem is that in doing all this, the whip-smart intelligent chess master persona now feels like a MASK, as they made it feel more like Amanda was pulling the strings and her scheming was rubbing off on him. Ari's always been the type more suited for the long-game, so if they had given him an episode of two to establish him as the leader within Gogol/Zetrov and make him *more* sinister, his fall in "Power" would have at the very least felt earned.
Additionally, while it makes sense that as Gogol's head of security that Ari would *know* about Operation Pale Fire to get rid of the Udinovs, it was *never* established that he had a major involvement. Alex then goes and states that he was part of the plan in "Power" to make him feel more sinister.
What makes him getting fired and then going on the run from both Gogol and Division *worse* is that Amanda is so damn ungrateful to him. I was shouting at the screen multiple times. He asks her if she's okay after her encounter with Nikita and then in the motel even after he gives her the Black Box it's like she doesn't even care. Bitch. This is supposed to be an ongoing, twenty-year and counting romance. Show you fucking care 🤬 For all my ranting about how Mikita falls flat half the time there are also moments where I get why they're beloved even if it isn't my jam.
Speaking of actual satan Amanda, everything about her twisted motherly instinct towards Nikita is so creepy and toxic. And yet the ship has multiple works over on AO3? *stares into the camera like she's on The Office* I don't mean to sound petty but I'm genuinely glad I've written enough Nikari for it to be the third most-written about ship over in the category now (this isn't saying much when the fandom is basically dormant but still).
After the craziness that is "Power", we're launched into "Wrath" and some of the most powerful acting on Maggie's part, but I was really glad that things lightened up in "Shadowalker," as even Alex, who I find a bit dry at times, was *hilarious*. The found-family dynamic of Team Nikita truly is the best.
I was however rolling my eyes at the introduction of The Group and the psuedo-Ari villain they brought in. I don't mind the actor but it's pretty damn clear that the writing team felt like they needed *another* evil-doing organization with Gogol basically being no more and it annoys me on a personal level because I miss my chess master and won't see him again for a bit still.
That being said I finally got around to my rewrite of a few episodes in this season that I wanted to do, so there's a silver lining everywhere I supppose
And that's all to report for the time being. I stopped doing fandom catch-ups monthly and just decided to put thoughts out whenever I see fit, so expect random posts basically whenever I feel like it now.
