all my stars for all your within the wires fics
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director's cut ask game
let's see if i can remember enough about each of them to say something interesting. from most to least recent.
Caregiver, Caretaker
There was one photograph, which normally resided in her bedroom upstairs, that had migrated downstairs. It was a picture of one of the little ones sitting on her lap.
i played around with this for a while before i decided to keep it vague. clíodhna judges gráinne to be about eighteen in the photograph, and the toddler two or three. my first instinct was that the baby was conor, her youngest brother, but grainne was born in 1886, which would make this photograph roughly 1904. if it's 1904, it can't be conor, because he signed up to the army in 1913. no matter how lax the age checking was for army recruitment, i highly doubt they'd let a 12 year old join up.
so, either clíodhna is meaningfully off in her age estimates, or it's not conor. or it's not gráinne! i think clíodhna probably has a very poor grasp on family resemblances, understandably. anyway, i thought about being more specific and having this kid be one of the nieces or nephews, but it didn't seem like gráinne's style to have a constant reminder of a dead relative in her bedroom. in the end i just kept it vague. it's possible that even gráinne's not sure which of the kids the photograph depicts.
Portrait of a Patron, and a Cat
well, you know all about this one. i don't think there's much to say that you don't already know.
She watched Vivi linger on The Charcoal Dish, lean in to read the details of Direction of Culture. She steadied her heart in her chest with hardened will alone, knowing that she could not descend into the gallery to greet her with butterflies fluttering in her ribcage. She calmed the giddiness like she was her own mother.
i remember changing the name of the made-up claudia painting a lot. in retrospect i think it might be too bold of a title for claudia to choose, but i do like it. my thought is i think it's a painting of a classroom, maybe based on the childhood sketches claudia did, and the likes of alfra bond interpret it as a criticism of the society's cultural heritage education system (which it is, but claudia would deny).
Inheritance; High Strung; Cradle to the Grave
She was not a princess; she would not be executed like one.
i think i've said this before, but i think these three fics would be stronger as one united story rather than split into three. they all deal with essentially the same turning point for sigrid, just from slightly different angles. Inheritance is the one i'm proudest of, though. i really enjoy the stuff about princesses and how it evokes monarchy, entitlement, blood loyalty, damsels in distress, all things that sigrid rejects outright.
Context
Together there was something larger at work, and Oleta couldn’t have worked it all out by herself, but she didn’t have to. She had Hester Wells, and at great length, with great passion, she divulged the story of Roimata Mangakāhia and Claudia Atieno. She wove a narrative. She provided crucial context, and the longer she talked, the more it glimmered through the works around them.
my only hester/oleta fic so far. it's not because i don't like them, i'm just conscious of the disproportionate attention they've had in the ao3 tag. this was originally supposed to be a contribution to my No Culture series, but it spun into its own thing, partially inspired the oleta flash fic i did for our fanfic week, White Walls Make Good Canvases. i wanted to show a little bit of the tension and ambiguity in hester and oleta's relationship... and make a strange half-nostalgic association with roimata for oleta, of course.
The Language of Flowers
It was a nonsensical chant. The Society wasn’t abolishing community, it was saving it - restructuring neighbourhoods to focus on people’s needs, instead of a capitalistic suburban nightmare; funding the arts, restoring historic monuments. Michael got more irritated with every iteration of the chant, and began more forcefully to shove his way through the crowd to try and get to the flower shop.
this is an odd one. it's intended to be an exploration of queerness in the society, and it is that, but i also felt deeply like a character study for michael. i don't think michael feels a connection to any queer community, so that was difficult to try and capture. michael, being fresh out of his TNS upbringing, cannot understand why queer people would be apprehensive of the new laws, because to him it seems like an objective improvement. he is, after all, a white usamerican trans man.
The Greenstone Bracelet
Nadiya wiped her nose with the cuff of her sleeve. “I need to tell Aiden I’m sorry,” she said. She was not sorry. She didn’t care. He shouldn’t have brought up her mother. But she wanted to see someone. And this seemed like the best chance she had to negotiate - the carers liked it when you apologised without prompting. They liked to encourage conflict resolution.
nadiya my beloved, my sweetheart, my angel. as you know, this was originally a part of my season 2 theory which involved claudia and roimata having a child. the girl was taken to a society facility when claudia got arrested and grew up clinging to a vague memory of her mother, before finding her body on the beach without knowing who she is. as a standalone, it's just a story about the girl who found claudia's body. and her best-friend-slash-enemy aiden. those two were fun to write. if i was going to continue their story, i wanted to give them a hester/oleta style one-sided memory relapse as adults.
What's in a Name?
Indra was Scottish, but she was Scottish with brown skin because before the Society wiped the globe clean of borders, the British Empire invaded every corner of the world they could step foot on and forced the indigenous people to assimilate or be crushed under their boot. Was the fact that Indra thought of herself as Scottish first proof that they had succeeded? Did that make her less Scottish? Less Indian, or Hindi, or however it was she was supposed to identify when she only had a name to go by?
combined indra character study and examination of the cultural weirdness of scottishness in the new society for No Culture. the first limits the latter, because i think indra's actual grasp of decolonisation theory and liberation is extremely shaky and largely performative. that's not necessarily damning, she's just in her early twenties and a bit pretentious. but i wanted to at least touch on the disconnect between indra and her indian heritage, which i imagine would be all the more pronounced because she resented being told who and what to be by the society. she's scottish, not indian, thank you, but also she's not scottish, because scottish is not a thing any more. but it is.
A Taste of Home (Whatever That Means)
Miri didn’t care so much about the nation of Poland, its borders, its struggle for independence from the Russian Empire. But she did wonder if her grandparents were part of that struggle for independence. If her great-grandparents were among the generation of Jewish Poles forced to renounce and hide their faith by the Russians. If that would mean she should take her birthdate from the Hebrew calendar, if she should be upset by the Society’s standardisation of the Christian-centric Gregorian calendar. If her ancestors would tell her that the Society was just colonialism dressed up in “peace” as if it were a nice scarf and not a noose.
i wanted to explore the idea of miriam being jewish and not knowing it, and the cultural implications of that. obviously, the new society did not take miriam away from her family, but it did make it harder to find out about them, and standardised a culturally christian society. and this happened in a time period which parallels, in the real world, jewish children being smuggled out of nazi germany and some forcibly assimilated into christianity. plus i wanted to write something about miri and teresa being gay as fuck
Haunted Houses
Its face was made of dark grey stone, peeling white paint on all the windowframes, of which there were many, including one looking out from an attic room at the top of the house. It was nestled among sprawling, unkempt trees and shrubbery in Éire, two hundred miles at least from the little island off the coast of Cornwall that Roimata called home. But for a fleeting, gut-wrenching moment, that fact was lost on her, and she saw the Cornwall house. She could almost smell the hand-carved oak staircase and the mothball-covered rug they’d draped down it. She could almost hear the sound of a Victrola in the parlour, and guests laughing, clinking their champagne flutes. And then the trees obscured it from view again, and it was gone.
well, you know this one was just an excuse to write roimata into a resolution of season 6 and push my gas leak agenda. unlike clíodhna, roimata is not having CO/psychosis-induced hallucinations, but the part about the house reminded me so strongly of the cornwall house when clíodhna dreamt of it, i had to incorporate it somehow. this fic is mostly about grief, like a lot of ghost stories. it's always stuck with me how roimata used to pick through the ruins of bombed buildings, not painting, just immersing herself in that grief.
Old Friends and New Horizons
Flattery got her nowhere. She probably ought to know better, by now. Mama was always happy to take compliments, but they wouldn’t do you favours. “You will, someday. When you don’t need papers to cross the world, or when parents don’t have to hide their children. I believe that. Believe it with me, Sanaa. Be patient.”
the roleswap fic, and the debut of the name sanaa for the atieno-mangakāhia baby. it was fun trying to think of how sigrid would be different with a different parent, although of course we don't have a lot to work with in terms of her canonical characterisation. similarly, claudia adopted some freya-esque mannerisms
Worth Watching
the most flash of flash-fiction, i don't have strong thoughts about this one, i was really just trying to fill the prompt for the fic week
ghosts are just memories you can't silence
Amy pressed the memory down, and pressed the point of her pen hard into her paper. She wouldn’t have these ghosts haunting her forever. Someday, soon, she wouldn’t have to remember them at all.
we've talked about this one before, but this was my attempt to get inside amy's head and figure out why she's so pro-Age Ten Laws. i didn't have a strong idea of why her memories of her brother stress her out so much, but i had a vague notion that he had died in a traumatic way. i prefer the direction you took it in, though.
Homesickness
“I thought perhaps you intended to continue our argument,” she said eventually. “Argument?” she repeated. Then, thinking back, she said, “Oh, that. That was weeks ago. Why should I still be bothered about that?” Roimata glanced at her sideways, with an expression she couldn’t read. She returned her gaze to the window, and said slowly, “I hope that means the room in the attic is open to me.” “Always,” she answered.
this one was fun to write because i think it was the first time i got a grip on claudia's avoidant tendencies and the ways her actions contradict with her feelings. claudia needing her own feelings pointed out to her felt important. and also the abiding toxicity of claudia and roimata's relationship and lack of healthy communication between them. "claudia doesn't hold grudges, but others do" is a line from season 2 that has always fascinated me from roimata mangakāhia, notorious grudge holder
I fall in love just a little ol' little bit (every day with someone new)
Near the bottom of the stack, there was a photo of Roimata herself, lifting her wine glass out of the way of a pair of people who were blurry and drunk and not very good at dancing. Almost at the very edge of the frame, she could see Claudia, with her eyes full of the utmost tenderness. She was looking at Roimata.
this one's underrated imo! a roimata charcater study through the curation of her strange little photo albums. her desperate attempt to ground herself in history rather than feel unmoored from time, culture, and life. and, i think, set during a period where she was not speaking to claudia or feels a disconnect between them. i wrote this one while partially digitising family photo albums at my parents' house.
Cassette: for Freya
I love you, Mamma. I don’t forgive you, but I love you. I want you to remember that.
thematically very similar to all my other sigrid fics, but this one in the format of an eleventh tape from a different pov, like we always yearn for. not a lot to say about it.
untitled love, pencil on paper
Was friend the right word for what they were to each other? Girlfriend… She grimaced. No. That sounded so trivial. Almost juvenile. And it sounded too much like monogamy for Claudia, besides. Claudia didn’t like labels. She shouldn’t even worry about it; Claudia wouldn’t, so what was the point? They were together. Together was a good word. It was literally true, and ambiguous enough in its figurative sense. It didn’t suggest permanence or impermanence, wasn’t trivial or overcommital. Together. This is my Together, Claudia…
a personal favourite of mine. i think i made roimata and claudia slightly more of a healthy couple than they deserve, here, but the point was to capture a period of closeness and intimacy that explains roimata's intensity about considering the cornwall house her home, and claudia her significant other. being deeply in roimata's perspective, i had a lot of fun incorporating her voice into narration, with all the half-rhetorical questions she asks like on the tapes. there is something about it, looking back, that seems almost like a dream or fantasy of roimata's, and maybe that's what it is. it says something that they manage to have arguments even in fantasy.
Five Ways to Say 'I Missed You'
“What are you drawing?” Roimata mumbled. Scitch, scritch. Pause. “Don’t move.” She groaned and buried her face further into her pillow. Claudia tutted in disappointment, and then chuckled. She heard the shuffle of the bedlinens, and then felt Claudia’s arms slide around her middle, and her breath got closer, on the back of her neck. “I have to hold onto you somehow. Always coming and going. I never know when I’ll see you again.”
the predecessor to untitled love. again, i think i possibly made them too sweet, although they're still dreadful at communicating. the idea is that claudia is saying and showing roimata that she missed her in all these indirect ways that roimata is not particularly good at interpreting. then, when claudia's gone, roimata feels like there's this gulf full of things they never said.
Tuamatangi
Childishly, stupidly, Roimata’s instincts responded my mother. That imaginary soul who’d given her a name and then disappeared. Who’d never wanted to give her up, not really, she was sure, and if only the world was different would be all too happy to wait by her side before the journey to Te Pō. There was a part of her, she realised, a buried immature part of her that had kept holding onto the idea that her family had been watching over her all along, that she would meet them somehow, someday. Even if it was the day she died. She wouldn’t be separated from them forever, not really. When the time came, they would be there.
the fic that kicked off the No Culture series. i did my absolute best to research death rites and grief Māori culture, and everything i could find was so focused on family and community in a way that made me extra sad for roimata dying alone and not being found for days or weeks. i named pohau the cat after a type of fish hook, and he's the closest thing to family roimata has during her last breath - her tuamatangi. more than the grief of death, i think this story is about the loss of life that was unattainable all along.
Empty Beach
The sunset was pretty enough to paint. She had known it would be, when she set out to the beach. She did not bring her acrylics. So many beautiful sunsets. Beautiful upon beautiful, one day after the other. She had yet to see an ugly sunset. That would be something to paint indeed.
obviously, i am utterly enamoured by roimata's relationship to grief and have been for years. her loneliness and her resentment towards claudia for that loneliness was the main subject of this fic. i think there's a part of roimata for a long time that thinks of claudia as the thief of her joy, for the hurt she caused her directly and the feelings of inadequacy that she inadvertently caused in roimata. she wants the world to look ugly so that her art has permission to be ugly. or, she's sick of seeing beautiful things and thinking that claudia could capture their beauty better than she ever could.
Two Halves of a Whole
Claudia laughed gently and took her hand away from her face with the same care. “You asked me to consider what I meant, and I found that I did not know until you told me. You are what was missing from my paintings. Your words. You move with your words in a way I cannot.”
my first fic, a claumata one of course, and i don't like it so much anymore. it's much too saccharine for them, and i think it reads as monogamous, which claudia is not, even if roimata sees herself as exceptional in some way for her. some of the things claudia said in this fic i think she would never say in a million years, just think about them. but, it was somewhere to start.
bit of a whistlestop tour, since you did pick the thing i've written far and away the most fics for lmao
