I! Love! You! Blog! 💓💓💓 I always get some of my favourite fics from here. At the moment, I’m searching for a fic and I’m wondering how you’re able to find them? All I remember is that it has something about Tony going off to space, then I remember him coming back, a quote along the lines of “I feel more alien than human” and giving Bruce some cool tea. If you don’t have time to find it that’s fine? I’m really curious as to how you find specific requests 😁😁
I think the fic you’re looking for is The stars are behind him (and they are ready to fight) by arabellagaleotti! I’ve never read it, but it includes a scene of Tony and Bruce drinking tea and the quote you gave. Let me know if it’s the wrong one.
As for how I find fics? Well, if I’ve read them then it’s usually pretty easy since I have a decent memory for details, but a lot of the time I can find fics even if I’ve never read them just by using the right search tools! Mostly I try to narrow down search results by any criteria given to me (characters, pairings, specific tropes, universe, etc). So for example, to find the fic you’re looking for I used the filters:
Characters: Tony Stark, Bruce Banner
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe
Search within results: “space” (this looks at the summary, notes and tags of a fic - tagging is very unpredictable so this can be very useful)
Sort by: Kudos descending (odds are the fic in question will be high on the list)
I opened around 10 fics based off those criteria, clicked “entire work,” then used the find-on-page (ctrl-f on pc) feature to look for the scenes you remembered. In this case, I searched for “Bruce”, located the tea-drinking scene, then searched “alien” and found the quote you gave in the fic I linked above.
A lot of requests are pretty easy - I’ll just plug in a couple of search criteria and it’ll be at the top of the list. Others are harder and need more time, and others I can’t find at all - whether it’s because of incorrectly-remembered details, vague memories that don’t give me anything to work with, or limited/improper tagging on the part of the author (or there’s the chance that the fic was deleted!).
…So, that’s my long, probably overly-detailed explanation of how I find fics I’ve never read before. It really just comes down to knowing how to use the powerful search tools AO3 offers! Hopefully I found the right fic for you, and hopefully this answers your question!