#fanfixx

[miiatortilla]

“Baz. “Have you ever done this before?” Simon. “Yes. No.” “Yes or no?” “Yes. Not like this.” Baz. “Not with a boy?” Simon. “Not when I really wanted it.

Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

[sapphicmodernity]

“aesthetic,” said hal.

or, chronicling the trials and tribulations of hal’s Week of Aesthetic(™)

(by myself and @patroquefort. we are not sorry at all.)

&&&

on the first morning, royston walked into the kitchen, bleary eyed and hopelessly under-caffeinated, only to look down in confusion at the cup on the table, which he was fairly sure wasn’t supposed to be that… sparkly. or silver. “hal,” he said. “hal, am i hallucinating, or is that glitter in my coffee.”

hal was staring intently at the screen of his phone and fiddling with something.

“why?” asked royston, blinking a few times and pinching himself to make sure it isn’t a dream.

“aesthetic,” said hal.

“what,” said royston.

“shh, twenty three people have already liked it on instagram,” said hal. royston went to make himself another cup of coffee.

&&&

the next evening royston came home to hal in the kitchen, with two halves of a coconut on the table in front of him. he was squirting something blue and gooey into one of them, something which smelled an awful lot like royston’s good shaving gel.

“is that my ultra-revitalising armani gelling solution?!” he yelped, running over to the table.* it was.

“it’s for the aesthetic,” said hal, rolling his eyes. “now can you move a bit, you’re blocking the light.”

&&&

on wednesday, hal filled the entire bath with purple water and was apparently trying very hard to get a decent shot of his legs as distorted by the ripples in the surface when royston walked in to see what he was up to. hal startled at the noise, and nearly dropped his phone into the water.

“shit!” he said.

“i’m not even going to ask,” royston replied.

“aesthetic,” said hal, nodding sadly.

&&&

the next day when royston was trying to rush off to work, hal came out of the bathroom shirtless, and wearing a startling amount of eyeliner. fuck, royston thought. he did not have enough time for this. this was unfair tactics on the part of hal’s stupid bloody ‘aesthetic.’

hal noticed royston’s distress, and smiled evilly. “aesthetic,” he said, sashaying into the bedroom.

“gah!” said royston, and ran out the door. he did not get much work done that day at all.

&&&

on friday, upon walking into his home royston was greeted by the less-than-welcome sight of a vase spilt all over the persian rug in the living room, and dead or dying roses strewn every which where.

“don’t tell me,” said royston.

“aesthetic,” they both said at the same time.

&&&

saturday was even worse. hal had somehow managed to paint one of the kitchen walls in a black and white grid pattern.

royston stared at it for a few minutes, dumbfounded. “it matches the… floor tiles?” he said. “okay.”

“aesthetic,” hal agreed.

&&&

sunday was the breaking point.

“is that broken glass in our bed?!” asked royston.

hal nodded, preoccupied with the camera on his phone. “it’s from the chandelier.”

royston went what he was sure was an extremely unflattering shade of red, and stalked off to the airing cupboard to try to find the dustpan and shovel he was sure he’d put in there at some stage.

“this has to stop,” he told hal when he got back to the bedroom, covered in cobwebs.

“okay,” said hal. “the aesthetic was a bit too much work for me anyway.” he frowned, then rapidly brightened. “but tuesday’s post is up to ten thousand notes now.”

“good,” said royston, and threw the brush down on the bed. “i don’t know what a note is, but please clean this up.”

(&&&

“why is this ficlet written in all lower case?” asked royston.

“aesthetic,” said morgan and sofie.)

*does armani even do shaving gel? does it ultra revitalise anything? we know nothing about men’s cosmetics. it probably isn’t important.

[sapphicmodernity]

r/s OR [insert hp f/f ship of your choice] for the fic meme <3

i know this is from like, ages and ages ago, but tumblr decided to try to eat it somewhere between my saving it as a draft and it actually appearing in my drafts folder and only spat it back out again very recently? i don’t know. anyway it’s done now, and today is apparently Fic Day at sapphicmodernity dot tumblr dot com, so. 

this is r/s bc i currently have a severe case of tunnel vision for this fucking ship atm:

1. angst

June arrives, and brings with it pale early summer evenings outside, the whole world bathed in hazy golden light and Remus can barely stand it: the warmth of the air feels like hot ash in his lungs, the bright poison of overly vivid sense memory and creeping loss, feelings made sharper somehow by the shift in season.

2. au

Harry comes to live with them that summer, out in Wales in a cottage under the dull, baleful light that is all the sun that manages to seep down through the omnipresent cloud cover can manage.  

3. crack!fic plot

The elephant in the room this time was, quite literally, an elephant, standing in what would have been the corner of their bedroom had it not also managed to knock away a substantial part of the wall.

4. crossover

The new slayer is a tall redhead, who develops a bad grudge against James almost as instantly as he becomes besotted with her; Sirius for his part decides he hates her nearly as quickly– the bruising he sustains to the shoulder shortly after making her acquaintance does not help matters in the slightest– and Remus– who thinks Lily is probably alright, even if he’s only met her once, for a few minutes while waiting for James and Sirius outside the cemetery– mostly stays out of it, confining himself to stroking Sirius’s hair and making soothing sounds whenever he whines about the permanent harm he thinks has probably been done to his right arm, the inevitable loss of his best friend to (un)holy matrimony, as well as the great and terrible unsightliness of red hair and freckles and the damage the sight does him personally, this last on top of the friend-theft and pushing into eminently bruise-causing gravestones.

5. first time

‘Shirt?’ Remus asks, gesturing off? with his hands fluttering awkwardly around the hem of Sirius’s tshirt, and Sirius nods, pulling off the offending item of clothing in a way which suggests a certain degree of carelessness, ungraceful confidence that Remus can’t help but find quite hopelessly compelling.

6. fluff

It starts to rain almost as soon as they get onto the beach, so Remus and Sirius spend most of the morning huddled with the motorbike under a stumpy little tree at the end by the cliff. 

7. humour

‘You’ve got jam on your nose,’ Sirius tells Remus at breakfast the next morning, and leans over to lick it off.

8. hurt/comfort

‘Just– don’t bloody do it again,’ Remus says as he dabs at the cut on Sirius’s forehead, ‘alright? It was a ridiculous, reckless idea and I just– I was worried, Pads, then you come home fucking bleeding.’ 

9. smut

‘Ow,’ says Sirius, ‘ouch, that’s my ribs, your elbow is all– ah, much better– are you– ah– fuck, Remus–’

10. ust

It isn’t fair, Sirius thinks, that one person is allowed to make proper revision schedules and sensible-ness so attractive, so that even his plans to make the most perfunctory, last minute attempts to study something before he’s tossed into the jaws of the NEWTs and left to suffer (and there’s a question– do newts even have jaws? he thinks it’s probably a terrible failing in his magical education, and probably also quite unfair, that despite the eyes of a newt featuring in the curriculum quite extensively, they have all been left in the dark as to the state of any of the other, presumably many, parts of the newt) have been scuppered by the fact that he seems to have become constitutionally incapable of concentrating on anything but Remus– his hands, long fingers, the ink smudges on the sides of his palms, bitten lip, the lock of hair curled just above his collar– whenever Remus is within more-or-less seeing distance of him, or, often, even when he isn’t.

[sapphicmodernity]

This fic is (unsurprisingly) about Remus and Sirius trying to do a bit of a shop at the supermarket.

(remus/sirius, pg, no warnings)

[sapphicmodernity]

for the multipurpose writing prompts: #23 + Remus! <3

so this has taken me ages and it’s turned out quite differently to how i’d imagined it, but i think there are some good bits and at least it’s done, so here you go, i hope you enjoy!! 

23: forgetting why it mattered 

There had been, in the morning, a cup of tea left cold on the windowsill in Sirius’s favourite mug, dark blue enamel and the lone remainder of a set of four James’s mum had given them as a housewarming present just after he and Sirius had moved into the flat.

Remus thinks about it a lot, the mug, the sill, the imperfection of all their lives in the breakdown and the odd loose ends never quite perfectly trimmed, but only in off-moments and the quiet, and places where it feels as if the fabric of the space will tolerate his particular brand of what isn’t quite melodrama, calming colour paired with thoughts that don’t quite follow. 

Sometimes it’s like: before the act of betraying everyone who you ostensibly love and who loves you, you really ought finish off your tea, and make sure to do the washing up, just because no one really wants to deal with that after nothing is the same anymore and obviously you still care about that, somewhere, please, and that kind of useless untidiness is not very much in line with what a tragedy ought to look like, didn’t you know? 

Or: when you realise just after you’ve settled down with a nice cuppa that you’re running late for a rendezvous with the most powerful dark wizard of the past century, just run off for your meeting and leave it all there because evil can’t wait the extra five minutes it would take for you to finish it off and maybe even rinse it out in the sink, but really, did you have to, and why were you even trying to drink tea at a time like that, and why does it even matter, anyway?  

Maybe you leave it all messy on purpose, as a blindingly stupid, and tiny, and very oddly painful reminder of the person who everyone had once thought you were, and if you could please do make sure to throw in various of your dirty clothes all over the bedroom floor, it’d be lovely, just for good measure and since there’s no use doing things by halves now is there? 

Sirius had also left the debris of his morning routine strewn all over the bathroom, and his side of the bed unmade, and it is this that Remus finds it easiest to hate him for at first, perversely and somewhat paradoxically, as if he is wishing that Sirius’s crimes are limited to within the sphere of the merely irritating and domestic and therefore to within the scope of normal relationship breakdowns and everyday interpersonal disaster, because he doesn’t know if people are built to absorb shocks like these, are maybe only emotionally earthquake-proofed to the extent that buildings are supposed to be, so that whatever happens they are still standing but just standing is all they are fit for. Cracked plasterboard insides and ceiling-sprung leaks; splintered rafters and overturned furniture; just this side of unlivable until pulled down or very extensively repaired, but it’s harder to work out how to go about rebuilding a person. 

So he thinks about the small things, and cleans the bathroom on the Monday. On the Tuesday he finds a box out the back of the supermarket carpark and puts in it everything he can’t bear to throw out on the Wednesday. He does the washing up on Thursday, when he’s thinking about eating again and when it starts to smell rotten, and on Friday he spends the whole day almost hiding in a corner of the public library, but goes home anyway to try to charm black hair and dog fur off the sofa, to spray the whole house with terrible Muggle air freshener and sneeze his way through the evening in front of something on the telly that he doesn’t really watch. 

On Saturday, to commemorate the passing of an entire week, he tips the cup of tea down the drain and scours out the ring of mould that has formed inside, then very carefully places it at the back of the cupboard, behind the Christmas novelty mugs that he mostly keeps around because they’ve twice the volume of the usual sort and it’s helpful, sometimes, to have an enormous and very loudly coloured reindeer themed mug to warm in between your hands.

Afterwards the flat is clean, or as close to it as he can manage, and the rent is paid six months in advance and he can’t afford a new place anyway, so he stays, living through rooms filled with worn sheets and once, you-me-us laughter, ghost echoes and remembered blame.

&&&

Now he goes to sleep every night, wakes up in the morning with the sunrise and hurts, pressed dull down into the pit of his stomach and out to the tips of his fingers, winter-blunted and cold in the air. There is a job, five days a week, and two days left for his own, to be quiet and as strange as he pleases, to fold himself up small and grit his teeth at the icy drafts that whistle through his flat. 

Saturday finds him sitting in the patch of hopeful almost-sunlight at his living room window and watching the street below, letting the kettle on the stove scream itself into hysteria in the next room till he thinks it’s in danger of catching fire or melting off the handle again, and he pulls himself upright to see about the cup of tea he’d meant to be making for himself. Sunday he lies in the bath, watching his pruned pale fingertips until the water runs cold and he starts to shiver. 

One weekend he apparates to the north of France, and spends the afternoon standing on a rainswept beach in Brittany, ragged cliffs to his back and slate grey-green water, yellow-foam waves ahead of him, stretching out maybe back to England, or to Iceland or the North Pole. 

He doesn’t really have any way of knowing; his sense of direction has never been a strong point, but he thinks about how the sea stretches its uneven ripples right across the skin of the world in all its wholeness, and about how here he is, stood on a beach at 183cm of flesh and bone and blood, which is a miracle in and of itself maybe of no less magnitude than the ocean. Here in the salt spray, for the first time in months, he almost feels as if he can breathe cleanly again. 

&&&

A year later he drops the dark blue enameled mug trying to get it out of the back of the cupboard and it breaks, decorating the plain timber floorboards with fine dust and neat shards of porcelain, shocking the cat he’s somehow accidentally adopted from its sleeping place on one of the kitchen chairs. 

Remus flinches at the noise but no further, and collects up all the pieces to put them in the bin, sits down in front of the news to wonder why Mrs Potter had given them such delicate mugs, or maybe it was Lily, and why was that one all the way at the back of the cupboard anyway?

[sapphicmodernity]

title: landslide pairing: america chavez/kate bishop rating: t+  warnings: none wordcount: 3,607

Kate and America: three seasons on two coasts, a return and a separation and another return, colours, cooking lessons, stars, kissing, and by the end it all adds up to some kind of love story.

[sapphicmodernity]

Anastasia almost certainly looks a little better than just fetching--she looks beautiful, at the very least. Stunning, maybe, gorgeous. Striking, though that particular descriptor is usually reserved for Antoinette. 

anastasia and antoinette show off their dresses for the school ball-- to each other, mostly. 

this is a thought I had a three in the morning and then I actually wrote it? I think it's alright.

(rating: g, wordcount: 1,318)

[sublimetreetraveler]

And sometimes you held somebody’s hand just to prove that you were still alive, and that another human being was there to testify to that fact.

Magicath (Fangirl)