Fanbinding: Old Gods, New Tricks by BootsnBlossoms & Kryptaria
Bind #43
Old Gods, New Tricks by @bootsnblossoms & @kryptaria
Date Completed: 12/27/2025
Size: Quarto. 217 pages, 34,631 words
Summary: As MI6's senior quartermaster, Q is accustomed to dealing with all manner of oddities. But an agent who won't stay dead, a bomb in his office, and bad tea all combine to make for a stressful day. The muggers on the way home only make matters worse.
And that's before the owl shows up.
I typeset this fic towards the end of summer and didn’t get around to binding it until now, which actually worked well since the story has a winter setting. Centaur for the bodyfont, WoodGods for the titles, and an owl dingbat for some minimal decoration.
Pretty standard bind overall. Cover papers are some paste paper I made this summer and I had to cut the endpapers twice because apparently I can’t measure.
“You’re my doctor.”
“Wonderful. At least I’ll never be unemployed.”
Sherlock and John (chp. 5)
On Feathers and Bacon Sandwiches by Kryptaria (AO3)
Sherlock – Teen/Mature – Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
#Alternate Universe #Demon!John #But not dark #Fluffy!demon #Asexual Sherlock #Wing!fic #ducks
No one has ever stayed with Sherlock longer than a month. At least, no human. Fortunately, John Watson isn’t about to let the little things - like biohazardous experiments and the constant threat of danger - get in the way of his friendship with a very special, very brilliant man like Sherlock Holmes.
Note: This is a restricted story and requires an AO3 account in order to read
Whether Steve is adorably tiny or intimidatingly large, Bucky will love him no matter what. Below are my Top 5 Favorite stories where only Steve is a werewolf:
“Werewolf? There Wolf” (T, 65k) by leveragehunters
After the car accident that cost him his arm and the endless rehabilitation that got him his shiny metal Stark Industries replacement, Bucky's happy for a break from people. The house in the forest is peaceful, town's a fair distance away, and he's got no neighbours...except maybe a blue-eyed wolf and possibly a naked guy named Steve.
(PS: Steve is the wolf.)
+ Modern AU. A 5 part series of Steve and Bucky’s little pack of two. Fluff, crack, kidnappings, cryptozoologists, and whole lot of love.
-☆-
“Health Code Violation” (T, 14k) by Kryptaria
It's opening day at Kafe Biblioteka and day one of the worst blizzard to hit D.C. in a century. But ten years in the army taught Bucky to deal with anything life threw at him, including zero customers.
Nope. Make that one customer.
+ Modern AU. Steve goes to Bucky for a safe place for himself and his armful of kittens. A bit of Coffeeshop, Only One Bed, Mutual Pining, and Snowed In goodness
-☆-
“Safe Haven” (E, 12k) by DyslexicSquirrel and Kalika_999
It’s hard out there for a lone wolf.
Steve has been on his own for years, since being banished from his pack, constantly on the move. He was resigned to a life alone.
Until the unexpected swam into his life.
Steve never thought he would meet his mate. He definitely didn’t think his mate would be anything other than a wolf. One thing he’s always known, though, is that life is full of surprises.
+ Modern AU. Steve finds his mate, a pack, and a place where he belongs. Featuring Mer Bucky and his underwater blowjobs
-☆-
“Tales of a Teenage Werewolf” (T, 1k) by toli-a (togina)
Would it have been so difficult, Steve wondered, to send out a few pamphlets - "So You're a Werewolf!" or maybe, "Becoming a Slavering Beast for Dummies" - to help the unsuspecting human you'd bitten on the last full moon? At least then he might know why he kept ending up in the Barneses' yard.
+ Modern AU. Steve keeps showing up naked at Bucky’s house; it’s less of a big deal than expected
-☆-
“Oh CapWolf, What A Big...” (E, 5k) by Defiler_Wyrm and velvetjinx
Steve and Bucky have been together a few months now, but Steve keeps disappearing for three days out of the month. Bucky gets curious, and follows him. But what he finds is much, much more than he'd ever bargained for, and he discovers some things about himself that he never knew before.
+ Post WS. Full-shift sex? You got it!
-☆-
-☆- And a freebie! -☆-
“Wolfsbane” (E, 1k) by the_genderman
In a “monsters and cryptids are real and live among us” AU, Steve’s a werewolf, Bucky’s a dragon, and neither of them know this about the other. Some itchiness ensues.
+ Modern AU. Dinner and a hookup doesn’t go quite as planned when you have silver-threaded sheets and an extensive coin collection
-☆-
*More werewolf fics in the Werewolf Bucky and Both are Werewolves, Peter Parker, and Vampires list
How Kryptaria (RN: Kara Braden) gaslit and emotionally abused me for years. And apparently still is.
I’m finally telling me story. For anyone who was in the 00Q fandom, or found some of her stories in other fandoms (Johnlock, Stucky, etc), I suggest you read this.
Please note, it’s long, but I’m done staying silent. Also, there are points where I’ve linked things out in regards to recent incidents. So keep an eye out.
You know. Many many moons ago I decided that I wasn’t gonna get into online fights because it’s a waste of my time, my day, my life. But every once in a while, something happens, and I think, yeah… Time to go to the mattresses.
Kryptaria and I used to be co-writers, and when it ended, it ended badly. And at the time, if people asked, I’d tell them what happened, and I told my friends, but I kept the bulk of the bullshit offline because I figured it was nobody’s business. Now I’m making it its business.
Last week I logged onto AO3, only to see that all my fics co-written with her were locked down to the outside world, without my permission. I was not asked if it would be okay to do this, I was not even informed she was going to do it. Radio silence until I found it myself. And I can’t seem to undo it, so I send her an admittedly very angry email telling her to undo it or I was going to send her a C&D (cease and desist). Would that seem over the top to the outside person? Maybe. But I had a very specific reason for doing that way, and if I wanted to get her attention, that was the way to do it.
She never replied. Instead, she went onto Tumblr and had the (not surprising) audacity to call me unhinged and play the fucking victim. To act like I came out of nowhere, and omg woe is me, what do I do about this person who I couldn’t be bothered to inform I was making changes to our stories without consent and is rightfully angry.
Just more radio silence. At least until yesterday when I open up my inbox to find out she deleted everything we ever co-wrote together.
And I do mean EVERYTHING.
All of my hard work on those stories, the successes of them, the wonderful comments, all of it, GONE.
Without my approval, without my consent, and without my knowledge. And there’s no way to undo it.
So now I’m done. I’m fucking done staying silent. It’s time those of you who know of her know the real story.
Kara was, hands down, one of the most emotionally abusive people I have ever been friends with. Things had to go her way, or you got punished for it. Then you got gaslit for calling her out on it. Here’s some highlights:
We would come up with a fic idea, but I maybe I couldn’t work on it for a few days, so she would ‘take the fic away from me’ and start writing it on her own. It was my own fault because she had to get the ideas in her head down, and because I couldn’t be available, I now no longer got to write it. She would say the story had actually been her idea, so she was allowed to do this. That said, she’d send them to me to read over for her. And like the good, pathetic little dog that I was, I did, every time.
I was given shit - ad nauseam - for having a life outside of writing with her. Anytime I made plans, I ended up in a state of perpetual stress for not being available. I would get messages all throughout whatever I was doing, asking when I would be home so we could write. I was ‘teased’, I was cajoled, I was guilt-tripped (she needed me because she couldn’t write our stories without me and I should just go home and write), I was outright talked down to, and I was even given the silent treatment at times.
I was an equal cowriter right up until our friendship ended. Then she was the WRITER, and I was someone who just contributed a tiny bit with one character. Forget about the world building I did, the research I did, the fact that, no, not every one of those plot bunnies was her, or the fact that that one character’ made up half the damn story. No no, I wasn’t the writer on them, SHE was. (BTW, she has said this about every single person she’s co-written with.)
One fic in particular, More Than Human, had originally been more my idea Then we each did the world building for our characters’ affliction. I came up with all the concepts for the vampires, her for the werewolves. I also wrote some of the b characters in the fic. But according to her, I was only ever a small part of one character. Ever.
I was a baby writer when she and I started. I had a lot of stuff I was learning, and while she had been helpful at times, she constantly used it against me. I wasn’t allowed to write things independently for our fics without her approval (and I don’t just mean because we were co-writing), and I was constantly made to feel inferior to her. On more than several occasions she dismissed my thoughts and ideas because she’d done professional writing and ‘knew better than I did’. I wasn’t allowed to have independent ideas on how to write.
I got in trouble several times for making changes to my own writing in our fics without getting her approval first. And by that, I mean, so I think a dialogue tag would work better as I’m going thru and editing, and I would change it, and then I would get snapped at for making changes she didn’t first notate for me to change.
When she did a beta pass on our work, I wasn’t allowed to resolve any of the comments she made for me, not until she had approved what I’d done. I got snapped at ALL the time for resolving comments because she had to go back and find them and if she didn’t like what I’d changed, she would have to put the comment back and make me change it again. In fact, when I started resolving them on purpose because it was pissing me off that I was being treated like a five-year-old, that was the beginning of the end of our writing together and our friendship.
When I beta read her solo stuff, I got lectured for leaving style edit notes. I mean, I too ask my beta readers not to leave style edit notes unless what I wrote is convoluted, but I don’t get mad at them for it. She got mad at me. All. The. Time.
She and I got into some seriously epic fights when we were writing, and almost every single one of them started because she wanted to do something in our fic and I disagreed with her, or vice versa. Every time I didn’t immediately side with her ideas, a fight would start. I simply wasn’t allowed to disagree with her. Honestly, I can probably name every time she would disagree with me and I managed to convince her my idea was the better choice. Because they were that few and far between.
She talked shit about her previous co-writer, incessantly. Blamed them for their friendship ending (because said co-writer was never available for her, and refused to make time for her, forget the fact that life just fucking happens sometimes), would constantly say what a shitty writer they were, going into detail about all the things they did wrong, etc. etc. Enough so that I believed it. I was friends with that person too, and we weren’t during my time with Kara. Because she’d poisoned me to them. And from what I understand, she did the same thing to me with her next co-writer.
She talked shit about all writers, basically. Her favorite thing to say was that other writers who posted without proper editing to get their stories perfect, didn’t care about being a writer because they took no pride in their work. And that poisoned me too.
After our friendship ended, she removed me from everything out of google drive that we cowrote but hadn’t been published. In her mind, because they hadn’t been published, it didn’t matter if my words were in those documents too, she could do whatever she wanted with them. And she did.
Side note: I found out yesterday that I wasn’t the only ex co-writer she did this to. Whole fics were deleted out of drive folders, fics where a chunk of our words were lost to the wind and we had no say. MY words were taken away from me. Apparently those words belong to her if they weren’t published. Hell our words belong to her even when they were.
Finally, our friendship ended, not because I was ‘out of proportion’ with my responses, but because I’d started standing up to her and she didn’t like it. THAT was how they were out of proportion to her.
But here’s the actual story. A few months before it imploded, she and I were fighting a lot over a story we wrote and finished, but she refused to publish because SHE didn’t like it, didn’t matter what I thought. So instead she started writing something with a mutual friend of ours (see where this is going?). Suddenly, she didn’t have time to write with me because she was too busy writing with them. But she still wanted me to beta the fic (and I did, because pathetic).
But then they finish, and she STILL wants to write with them and not me. There’s no room for two co writers and I’ve officially been shoved aside. I tried writing solo, but she would talk down about my work. Nothing overly harsh, they just didn’t ‘move her’ or ‘speak to her’. Basically, my writing was banal without her help. And to someone who’s been trained to only rely on her opinion, you can imagine what that did to my self-esteem (it would be almost a year of painful trying before I started finding my confidence in my voice again).
Then comes the catalyst. She and her new writer decide they want to scrub the story she dumped me for and publish it for real. And then she has the brilliant idea to come to me because she wants me to do the marketing for her.
She wants me to promote the story she dumped me for.
It was so crass and heartless, and I was beyond floored. And I told her so. She did admit she could see why it was rude to ask, but at this point, I didn’t feel like talking to her. I was home visiting family, and I didn’t have the emotional energy to hash it out another issue, so I waited till I got back home, only to find out she’d decided that since I hadn’t spoken to her while I was home (because I was rightfully mad, but also, family) that meant I’d dropped her as a friend. Because I didn’t come crawling back immediately, we weren’t friends anymore, and I was the one doing the ending. Even though I wasn’t, and it led to a fight where I finally tried to address a lot of this stuff while also trying to get her to understand that I hadn’t actually dropped her.
So what does she do? After years of friendship, of talking every day, of being in each other’s back pockets, she ended our friendship by simply unfollowing me on Tumblr, while we were in the middle of how I hadn’t actually dropped her as a friend.
She didn’t tell me to my face that she was done, she didn’t address it first, she just did it, and I found out because Tumblr was open on my computer at the time, and I saw my follower count drop by one while we were arguing. When I asked, that was when she said she just decided it wasn’t worth it to her anymore. It was one of the most heartless things I’ve ever had done to me.
Here’s the final thing you need to know: I’m not an isolated incident. She has done this to Every. Single. Cowriter. She ever had (save one, who saw the patterns early).
And so it’s clear, I’ve already talked to them about the fact that I’m doing this, and you know what? Not one of them told me not to or refuted any point I talked about with them.
So yeah. I’m not isolated. I’m not perfect, but I’m also neither crazy nor the problem.
Let me end this by saying, I’m not trying to air my dirty laundry, but finally speaking up about the abuse I endured for years, and I guess I’m still enduring. Five years after it all ended, and she is still finding ways to punish me for standing up to her. And frankly, people tend to only talk about abusive relationships, not abusive friendships. Those exist too and we should be able to talk about them as well.
Abuse comes in a lot of forms, but when it’s based in a friendship, we don’t always see the signs because we don’t think of friendships as abusive. We aren’t tethered to one friendship, so how would we end up in one where we’re being manipulated and abused? It’s easy. And it took me a long time to first realize what had happened to me, even longer to not immediately suspect any writer friend I had of trying to demeane me, and finally, a LOT of fucking therapy. I still have moments of doubt, but I’ve been saved in a lot of ways by people who’ve supported my work and my life.
Anyway, that’s what I have to say. I won’t be taking questions, and anon is turned off (has been for a long time). You wanna pass judgement on me? Go ahead. I really don’t give a flying fuck anymore.
PS: If Kara tries to delete the posts I linked, you can find screenshots of the posts here:
kryptaria replied to your post: Gotta love living in a city where this is a 20...
That’s beautiful!
Yeah! I hadn’t discovered this piece of nature before, I always turned around just before it started XD But now I can handle longer walks and am so happy!
