It's all fun and Games Until Somebody Falls in Love. (Carousel - Melanie Martinez) for the fic title ask game!
Ooooo that's a good one, thank you!
I think I would write something with Dally and Two-bit. Like, it starts off by being Tim/Dally and then Two-bit and Dally keep hanging out and causing trouble and Tim sees nothing wrong with that until all of a sudden Dally and Two-bit are suddenly really attached to each other. Like, Dally is equal bits loyal and devoted to Tim AND Two-bit.
It would probably switch POVs a lot so that we could see the descent from different views.
Or I would write something with Curly/Ponyboy and Angela/Ponyboy. This little idea wormed itself into my mind about the twins fighting over Ponyboy / settling to share Ponyboy to some degree (there would be no incest). I think it would be a dynamic fun to poke around with, as controversial as it could appear.
Ohhhhhhhhhhh, I could use this for a Tracker fic I was pitching to @itsjustdg on discord the other day.
Colter gets an unusual request. A group of boy scouts and their adult pack leaders go into the White Mountains without being properly prepared, and go missing. The reward is put together by the moms of the kids on the "adventure" who think their husbands are a bunch of dumbasses, and they want to pay Colter to just go rescue the kids and leave the adults to consider their poor decision making skills.
Colter does find them, and damn, the moms weren't kidding. Nobody is properly prepared, except for one kid who is like "My sister and her friend basically live out here, so I knew what to bring." So Colter tries to get the whole troup back to civilization, but it is a literal and figurative uphill battle because the adults are INSISTING they don't need his help and he's just trying to be a gloryhound, and their wives were so judgy, etc, even though Colter is like "I truly do not care about your issues, I just don't want 13 children to die in the woods because of bad choices and pride", one of the guys finally gets pissed at Colter, and either punches or pushes him when he's not expecting it - like a shove in the back when he's turning around - and they actually manage to do some damage. Now the kids are ALSO like "GREAT. NOW WE REALLY ARE GOING TO DIE!" but Colter, despite whatever injury he gets, manages to talk the kids through some basic survival things, like starting a fire, emergency field first aide, etc.
Still debating if feral sister and her friend show up the next day to be like "yoooo, you did even worse than we thought - you guys suck at this" and then actually manage to help Colter and the kids back out of the woods, or have some of the adults wisen up and start behaving like actual adults. (HA! I guess that would make it fantasy, eh)
“Here you are,” said Harry, placing a piping hot mug of tea down on the kitchen table across from Malfoy. Malfoy. Of all the people who had to blow into his cottage out here in the middle of nowhere, it had to be Draco sodding Malfoy. Harry truly had the worst luck sometimes.
“Cheers,” said Malfoy, grey eyes boring into Harry’s as he raised said mug. Harry reciprocated with his own.
Malfoy took a sip of the tea before making a face, and then caught sight of Harry’s judgemental stare and quickly coughed and looked away.
“Not to your taste?” challenged Harry, arching his eyebrows.
“Not Grey Lady?” wondered Malfoy, before examining the label dangling from the tea bag. “Earl Grey? Must be some Muggle brew.”
“Well, I didn’t realise the Pureblood Tea Patrol was popping by to pay me a visit,” replied Harry waspishly.
Malfoy’s cheeks turned a faint shade of pink. “It’s just until the storm has passed. Why you chose to live somewhere where the storms can regularly affect one’s magic is… utterly beyond me.”
“All the easier to avoid magical intruders.” Harry shrugged.
Malfoy’s mouth flattened briefly, before he sighed and took another sip of his tea. Harry leaned back in his own seat, savouring the rest of his decidedly Muggle English Breakfast.
“How long has it been since you and… girl Weasley…” Malfoy’s voice trailed off hopelessly.
Harry snorted. “Her name’s Ginny. And it fell apart not that long after the War, actually.” She couldn’t bear to be with someone who sidelined her, and he couldn’t handle the way she kept wanting to burrow into things he’d rather leave well alone. The War was over. No need to dwell.
“Oh,” was all Malfoy said. “My condolences?”
Harry snorted again, getting up to grab the copper kettle off the hob to refill his mug. “What about you and… what’s-her-face Greengrass?”
“Asta?” corrected Malfoy. “In France. The Riviera’s more salubrious for her health, allegedly.”
“Oh.” Harry wasn’t quite sure how to feel about all this—about catching up with Draco sodding Malfoy at his own kitchen table. Like they were nothing more than distant acquaintances trading pleasantries, rather than the nemeses they’d been back in Hogwarts days.
They fell into a semi-silence, broken only by Malfoy mashing at his tea bag with the spoon. “Could use some more milk and sugar,” he remarked.
“Just ran out of milk this morning,” said Harry, as he set down the sugar bowl in front of his old nemesis. He then went to refill the kettle and popped it back on the hob.
Malfoy stirred in a heaping spoonful of sugar. Harry had remembered him liking the sweets his parents used to send him at Hogwarts. Typical.
“So you and… Asta,” he said, resuming his seat. “Going well? Or…” his eyes narrowed at the way Malfoy seemed to hunch a bit at his wife’s name. “Trouble in paradise, I’m guessing.”
“Perceptive, Potter,” drawled Malfoy, no longer looking him in the eye. “But it’s hardly any of your business whether or not my wife and I are ‘having trouble’.”
“You asked after me and Gin; I thought it was only fair,” Harry shot back.
Malfoy’s mouth crinkled again. “Would I be here in the arse-end of Merlin-knows-where with you if Asta and I were incandescently happy together?”
“Yes, what brought you up here, anyway? I mean, to be blown off-course on a broom in such a storm—”
“Mysteries wants to know why those storms are affecting people’s magic,” said Malfoy shortly, just as the kettle began to whistle. “And I intend to get to the bottom of it.”
(drop a title in my ask and get a bit of the fic i’d write for that title!)
This is just embarrassing at this point (draft #6)?? 🌹🙏
OKAY, so to explain how stupid this WIP, I have started and stopped writing this story 16 times in 2024 alone. As in I have fully written the entire thing, and then started over again upon completion because something about it wasn't right. That's pretty normal for me, no one is surprised, what is stupid about it is that it is a crack AU I came up with for The Last of Us that I never meant to actually start writing.
The premise is pretty simple if extremely self indulgent, an AU where Joel, Tommy and Tess are children in the apocolypse, crossing the country trying to find the Miller brothers family, coming across Bill along the way and ending up in Jackson in the end.
The crack concept comes in because I like universe hopping shenanigans, and I particularly like canon meeting AU shenanigans, so it's actually two WIPs in a trenchcoat. The actual serious WIP about three kids trying to survive the apocolypse on their own when all authority is failing them at every turn and then the "wouldn't it be funny if 16 year old Ellie met 16 year old raised in the apocalypse feral whiny teenager Joel" WIP. The fact I have started over 16 times when it was just supposed to be a daydream is the embarrassing part. Here's an expert from the serious portion of the WIP just for fun though! TW for gore.
Joel shot his dad when he was thirteen. They were three years into the end of the world, and half way to Boston.
Joel didn't even think about it. He woke up to screaming on the other side of their little camp ground; their dad on top of tiny seven year old Tommy, thrashing and screaming and gnashing his teeth with viscous bloody drool dripping from his mouth, his lip bitten clean off, veins of fungus creeping up his arms where a pussed up, swollen bite mark practically glowed in the dim light on night. Joel didn't even think about it.
He picked up his dads shotgun, loaded it just like he'd been taught too, and pulled the trigger. Tommy screamed, then he cried, face splattered with the insides of their dads brains. Joel thought about that a lot.
Okay, I think this is a fic about Sheppard finding out that Lorne and Ronon are in a relationship. They're pretty careful about it, but Sheppard gets an inkling after Doppelganger, when someone makes an offhand comment about Ronon having nightmares and then Lorne having them, and there's a little bit of a significant look, and Sheppard is like 'huh'.
And then there are a few other things. And finally, he's like, "Hey, McKay. Do you think Ronon's, uh. Hooking up with anyone?" He's careful not to name Lorne specifically, because, well, technically he can't know.
And McKay just shakes his head with incredulity, because frankly, this has been science gossip for weeks, and McKay never figured he'd get the gossip before Sheppard, you know? So he says, "Yep," and then keeps working on whatever (maybe he and Sheppard were on a little science jaunt to a space gate, but then they got stuck for some reason, and he's up to his armpits in jumper guts trying to solve the problem before the run out of air, thank you very much), and there's this kind of long silence.
Sighing, he pulls himself out of the entrails of the jumper and sits up, and Sheppard is sitting there with look that probably can only be called 'poleaxed' and McKay just snorts and says, "Well boom goes the dynamite in your head Sheppard," and then adds, "pass me [some tech tool or another]" and then snaps his fingers when Sheppard doesn't do so immediately.
And Sheppard does it, though he definitely feels like something has gone off in his head, and wow, there's just something new everyday, right?
I think it's...an Aiden Ford-centric fic? Like, post Lost Boys/The Hive, Aiden is out there in the Pegasus Galaxy. He can't go back to Atlantis. The team he put together is gone. He's still chasing the enzyme, but he also isn't, he has moments when he thinks about Sheppard and the team, and Atlantis, and he's constantly torn between 'if I get it right next time, I can go back to Atlantis' and knowing that it'll never work, and he needs to walk away, find some quiet corner, and hunker down.
So maybe he finds that quiet corner, some village on a tiny planet where they welcome another set of hands, another labourer, and he's got skills they could use, and he's mostly quiet, except for the times when he disappears for days on end and comes back a little wilder. But they can overlook that, because he works hard. And everyone needs another hard worker.
And Aiden tells himself that he can pretend - he can pretend to be normal, to be just another guy who helps in the fields, and who helps with hunting, and who has learned how to thatch a roof, and who will nod when someone asks him to help in an emergency. He'll do it all, and he'll pretend, for as long as he can, until the constant itching under his skin, and at the back of his head, gets to be too much.
Fic titles ask game - Not Orpheus, Not Eurydice and And She Was (I’m copying these titles from memory so they may be wrong - hopefully you get what I mean).
Thank you for the ask, @azure-firecracker. I have had kind of an embarrassing amount of fun doing this.
The first one I answered right here already, and while I am tempted to answer again, I won’t lol.
And She Was was a fic for an exchange prompt, jealousy themed, set before the revival. I won’t go too far into the plot details because I know that’s ahead of where you are watching, but it’s from the POV of Scully in the 2010s, mature Scully. She is having some self doubts and introspection related to jealousy, and she is talking to a therapist. (That’s very vague lol.)
At one point Scully is working out at the gym, and I was trying to imagine what kind of music mature Scully would listen to on her phone when she was doing cardio. Maybe projecting from my own experience, I thought maybe music from her college days. For one, that would probably be a time she could think back on without all the Mulder strings attached lol.
So I looked up college radio hits from the right years and saw the Talking Heads. The song And She Was seemed like its lyrics fit perfectly: it’s referring to the past tense (like her partnership with Mulder), it’s got a strong female survivor imagery, it alludes to possible mistakes she may have made. Seemed like the right song and a natural title.
Thank you so much for the ask, @nimlurks! This was an exchange fic, a prompt that requested post-Beyond the Sea and specifically them talking about their daddy issues. I knew I wanted to make it about their relationships with their fathers, but I also wanted it to be about their partnership in that early period, something canon compliant (a.k.a. no dramatic feeling reveals or RST). I think I thought this was hard, lol And I needed some outside inspiration. So I combed poetry databases for poems about fathers, which is how I landed on the poem The Hospital Window by James Dickey. In that poem, the speaker's father is very sick in the hospital, and he's coming to terms with his father's impending death as he looks up at his father's room's window from the street. It's a beautiful poem. The line I borrowed comes from this stanza:
Still feeling my father ascend,
I start to cross the firm street,
My shoulder blades shining with all
The glass the huge building can raise.
Now I must turn round and face it,
And know his one pane from the others.
Anyway, I liked it. And it brought up the idea of trying to come to terms with your parent's mortality--this person who looms larger than life in your own story--while also sort of establishing that you still have your own place on the ground, in the living world, that you have to figure out. Which is kind of what is supposed to be happening in the fic with Scully (and even Mulder).
