I'm a queer guy in my 40s: AFAB non-binary, bi+/pansexual, polyamorous, and kinky. I use he/him and xe/xim pronouns. I'm also geeky, white, and not religious. I use tumblr to follow people I find interesting. I don't post WIP stories, but what I've finished is over on AO3 under V_Haley.
Rules: Send me an emoji in an ask, and I'll write 3-5 sentences and/or paragraphs from that WIP for each emoji! No limits to the amount or kind of emojis you can request.
👑 Goose Girl Boy Steve (transmasc Steve / Steddie)
🐺 Werewolf Steve (Nancy / Jonathan / Steve)
🎵 Lay of the Ashes (Rising Free) - sequel to "Sing if You're Glad to be Gay" (Steddie)
🧪 003 / escaped lab kid Steve (steddie)
🧚♀️ A Fairy's Tale (Jeff/Steve) - childhood friends to reconciled lovers
🚗 Joyride or Die WIP - sequel to the Road and the Sky (steddissy)
🎲 Roll your dice what I work on
Also the Stranger Things Writers Discord is currently in the middle of 20 hours of sprints for AO3's downtime. Even though our beloved archive has returned to us, sprints are ongoing if folks care to join us!
A snippet of Joyride or Die:
She had Eddie drop her off two blocks away from Mary's. Party gossip would have filled her best friend in that she left with Steve. When Chrissy came back this late, Mary would assume things happened—especially since it was Steve Harrington and everyone new his rep—but she'd cover for that the same way Chrissy had covered for her plenty of times. She'd slip into Mary's house, change into PJs, and the night would be nothing but a hoarded memory.
Chrissy didn't account for rumors.
She'd left Jason at parties before, but usually after he'd gotten obnoxiously drunk. She'd never left any of those parties with infamous party boy Steve Harrington, whose year of flirting with monogamy had blown up in a public fight and an equally public drink being thrown in his face. Or Nancy's face. Everyone knew that a drink had been thrown, anyway. Just like everyone knew his girlfriend had left with Jonathan Byers, the guy she'd cheated on him with last year. Everyone knew Steve had left with Chrissy Cunningham, even if the timeline was a little fuzzy on when who left with whom.
But he must have fucked Chrissy to get back at Nancy. Nancy must have fucked Jonathan to get back at Steve.
Chrissy didn't even have a chance to give Jason the "it's not you, it's me" speech because he called her a cheating bitch in homeroom, and she was single by first period. It's what she'd wanted, but it stung, especially with the truth of it. She had cheated, technically, even if she'd meant to break it off with Jason when she'd done it. But it wasn't a secret. He knew and he was telling the school and no one believed that she'd tried to drop Steve off and hit a deer, even with Steve showing up with white gauze wrapping his arm to corroborate her. It didn't matter what time she'd come home: it only mattered that she left with Steve.
Half of her friends weren't speaking to her. It was a rough morning.
I am very excited to maybe one day read your next story. ✨Marc Delacroix✨ is my favourite character. Sadly there are so few fics about him yet. :(
He's such a wonderful character, it's a shame that no one has written about him :((
The fic is going decently well -- I ran into a bit of a snag where I wrote the first two chapters of Shane Marc having his kidnapping revelation with Hayden and Jackie, and then I realized I was jumping through hoops to get him back to Ilya...and was like, hm, maybe I should just have him...have this revelation at the cottage. So now I'm rewriting a bunch, but I think the fic is stronger for it :)
As a thank you for the kind message, here's the first scene of the fic! Feat. Yuna Hollander being Sad and Professional
Yuna Hollander will look back on this moment later—her first time meeting her son in 25 years—with a mixture of fondness and spine-crushing guilt. This is not the moment it should have been. This is a series of perfectly composed photographs with engineered-to-look-natural smiles plastered on their faces. Here, Marc Delacroix handing over a gift basket of signed Metros merch for the Project Home Charity Auction. Here, Marc Delacroix shaking her hand. Here, Yuna sandwiched between him and Hayden Pike, all of them grinning at the camera.
She doesn’t even grin as hard as she wants to. Part of her is giddy as a schoolgirl at the fact that she’s here, in the Bell Centre, meeting the man who singlehandedly led her favorite team to two Stanley Cups. But right now she’s not Yuna Hollander, hockey fan. She’s Yuna Hollander, charity director of an anti-human-trafficking organization, and that Yuna Hollander does not get to smile big enough to make her cheeks hurt. That Yuna Hollander has to be perfectly calm, and composed, and sympathetic at all times.
It’s her best chance. She figured that out a long time ago. If she’s not too angry, or too wild with grief, or God forbid too happy, then she sticks in people’s minds. Shane sticks in people’s minds. They stay the perfect tragedy, and maybe someone will remember them at just the right moment, and then maybe she will get her son back.
It hasn’t worked so far. But that doesn’t mean that she can stop trying. She could forgive herself, she thinks, if she died without knowing what happened to Shane. She could not forgive herself if she died knowing she could’ve done more.
Marc Delacroix is nice. That’s her first impression of him. He’s a polite young man who gives her the same sad smile that most people give her, and tells her how important her work is, and privately offers her rinkside tickets of her own to match the two nestled in the gift basket.
“My husband and I have season tickets,” she says. “But thank you for the offer.”
“Oh, we have a real fan!” Hayden Pike says, slinging an arm over Delacroix’s shoulders. “That’s a nice change of pace. Most of the time the charity orgs barely recognize me, and only know DC from his Tim’s ads. You looking forward to watching us stomp Boston tomorrow?”
“Of course,” Yuna says, relaxing a little. The camera crews have retreated, having gotten all the promotional material they need for both Project Home and the Metros’ Instagrams. She can be herself, maybe, if only for a moment. “That new rookie of theirs is awful, I’ve been watching their second line crumble with delight.”
“Rozanov sees potential in him, I’ve heard,” Delacroix says, relaxing alongside her. Some of the sadness trickles out of his smile. Hockey-Fan Yuna is easier to talk to than Missing-Child Yuna. She’s known that for a long time, too. She knows that Shane is a wall between her and the world. “We’ll see if it’s warranted.”
“Let’s get you some signed jerseys, at least,” Pike says. “We have a ton of extras laying around, you have no idea—”
In the end, she does accept the gift of two signed jerseys, wondering if she’ll have to disclose them in Project Home’s year-end financial report. She’ll wonder the same thing six months from now, huddled around a campfire with her husband and her son, watching the Delacroix jersey burn.
People will ask her about this day. They’ll ask her if she had known, shaking Delacroix’s hand. If she had felt some deep, enduring connection, something that the years and miles hadn’t stolen from them.
“I thought that he was a very kind young man,” she’ll say diplomatically. “And that his parents must be very proud of him.”
Of course I didn’t know, she’ll want to scream. They wouldn’t have been able to publish a single photo from that day, if I’d have known. It’d be like publishing a photo of a trainwreck, showing the dead bodies piled up on the tracks. My heart would’ve been a pile of blood on the ground. He would’ve had to hold me upright to keep me from collapsing.
Of course she doesn’t know. She feels nothing but excitement, chatting hockey with Marc Delacroix. It isn’t surprising, really. She’s always been a terrible mother.
one of my friends in a discord server was talking about how they were nervous about their first scheduled acupuncture appointment. another friend offered to do a tarot reading for them. sent this picture.
Everyone: omg Hollander leash your dog, Ilya is barking at opponent hockey players again
Shane Enabler Hollander: ok so Ilyusha this player has had zero assists in the entire season, he got drafted last, and finally - and this is crucial - he once scored a goal in his own team's net
Ilya Heart Eyes Rozanov: thank you my ShaneWiki this is valuable data, off I go
Following an afternoon of sex and tuna melts, Shane goes searching for the explicit rules of what being 'friends with benefits' entails. In his humble opinion, they're nailing it.
Once friendship is on the table, Shane reconsiders the usefulness and immutability of the public rivalry narrative. Surely the NHL can make just as much money from a bromance as it can from a rivalry?
A missed call from J.J., a dinner at All-Stars, and an ill-considered mad dash to the airport send Shane's season in a very different direction to the disciplined three-peat he'd been planning back in October.
—
"This rivalry thing: it was everyone else who said we hated each other off the ice. There’s no rule that says we have to keep doing that forever.” Shane stared outside, past the blinding billboards and down at the streets below. “It was nice. Hanging out, last time.”
He knew what it looked like when Rozanov shut down, when he closed himself off and pushed the world away. He’d finish the conversation abruptly, curt, clipped, and retreat. So Shane knew he’d won when Rozanov finally answered with: “Are we six years old, Hollander? Asking if I want to play in sandpit with you?"
Read on Ao3 here.
•POV Shane Hollander •Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence •A Tuna-Melt Remix •Bromance •Denial of Feelings •Explicit Sexual Content •Friends with Benefits •Getting Together •Ilya Rozanov Makes Tuna Melts •Internalized Homophobia •Public Relations •Self-Denial •Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov Situationship •Situationships -The Situationship to Friends-With-Benefits to Boyfriends Pipeline
Hey so that was a great date, yeah, but I don't think it's going to work out. Nono you didn't do anything wrong, and I have indeed had a crush on you since we started high school, it's just... well, I didn't want to bring it up at the time but we kinda got sucked into a portal fantasy midway through. We saved the kingdom over and over, relying on our knowledge of and trust in each other every time, throwing ourselves into the firing line to protect each other and using each others' conviction as a rock. We got married and lived a happy life together until the portal sucked us back mid-battle and you gave up all your memories of our journey in order to save my life right when we ended up back in the coffee shop. Yeah that was when I got a bit weird and went to the bathroom.
Anyway I thought we could push on and make the date work but I have all of these memories of secrets that this you never chose to share, decisions that this you never made, and intimacies that this you never experienced. And it's kind of screwing with the vibe yeah. Also on the date it was really, blatantly clear that you're sixteen whereas I have memories of ruling a fantasy kingdom for thirty years so like... that's a problem all on its own. Anyway this you just feels more like a daughter to me. A daughter with the woman I gave my heart and soul to over and over and received like in return, only to lose her forever on the journey home. On the plus side I can definitely help you with your math homework now.
"hey toast you stayed up past midnight because you were working on the fic and not because you were procrastinating by making a hideous pattern for a joke cross stitch" have you never met a writer before
i actually can’t think how about the discussion wrt bigotry in the nhl was lead by a group of white players + shane hollander and while the white players were lamenting on how difficult hockey culture was to navigate shane’s white partner was looking at him thinking ‘hockey had never made shane sad a day in his life’ and ‘[ilya] was more aware of hockey’s flaws than shane was’ like. even if i ignore the literal mammoth in the room about how the single person of colour present at the table is ignorant to systemic bigotry while the white players are enlightened and determined to make positive change. in what universe is sidney-crosby-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off completely unaware of hockey’s dark side? grown adults were talking about breaking sid’s arms and screaming in his face at games. he couldn’t wear his gear into the rink from fear of violence from parents. his own parents sent him to a school in another country because they feared for his safety. you’re telling me japanese canadian shane hollander just. what. floated through life blissfully oblivious until his white partner got to explain to him how the world actually works. give me a fucking break
dumb questions the Boston Raiders would (want to) ask Ilya about gay (sex) if they knew about Hollanov
Does it still count for the playoffs sex ban if it's with a dude? You know, like the poophole loophole. No I'm not asking for me! Wait that's not why you picked a man right?
Can I bring my girlfriend when we go to Boston Pride? Or is that not allowed?
Do you guys just get to leave the toilet seat up at home?
Are men better at sucking dicks?
Wait so were you lying about liking Dunkin too because I thought gay people prefer Starbucks?
Aren't you sad you'll never be able to do to it raw? And the follow-ups: doesn't it make your dick smell like ass? Wait but you never have to worry about getting pregnant that's awesome bro.
Are you going to make me vote now?
How can you tell you're like actually into dudes? Because like I can look at a dude and go “yeah he's hot” but I don't want to bang him
Aww man you must miss pizza. Because of the gluten. I thought gay people can't have it?
If you got married who would be the groom?
If you could suck your own dick, do you think you'd be more turned on by having your dick sucked or by doing the sucking?
Does this mean they'll let us in the gay clubs now? Because we've got a gay.
So who nags you to put your socks in the hamper? Dude you guys must have socks everywhere.
Did you just bang all those chicks so people wouldn't think you're gay? Because I think you might have overdone it bro.
Is that why Hollander randomly started dressing well? Because he turned gay?
Who sends you the flags? Have you got yours yet?
How the fuck did you know he was gay before you hit on him? Or have you just been trying to pull half the league and Hollander's the only one that took the bait. Wait did you hit on Scott Hunter?
(drunk and emotional) please don't have Hollander’s babies until after you've retired. We need your body for hockey
I just can't get my head around what you guys do together. Like do you just hang out doing dude shit and then fuck? Like do you play Xbox and then suck each other off? Because that sounds awesome.
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