Fics I wrote in April 2023
Apr. 30th, 2023 09:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amado1April 4th: Mood Indigo (Star Trek TNG) - my 17K oneshot about an entity that possesses Riker's jazz band and forces them to play Duke Ellington's famous song in order to open up the universe's hyperstrings so the entity can go back home.
April 5th: Inoperable (Gargoyles) - a 1K oneshot where a young and newly-wealthy David Xanatos "helps" a dying scientist test his nanobots, which the scientist believes can heal any wound. Spoiler: they can't.
April 6th: City of the Dead (Gargoyles) - a 3K oneshot where a young Xanatos visits Cairo in search of the fountain of youth and stumbles across Alexander the Great, alive and not-really-well.
April 7th: How much money would it take to make you spend the night in a cemetery? (Star Trek Picard) - a double drabble about Riker and Troi dealing with grief after their son's death. Part of the Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction drabble series where every fic takes its title from a Beyond Belief intro.
April 9th: And Thou No Breath At All (Legends Thrawn) - a 9K oneshot about Thrawn hunting down and killing clones/relatives of Palpatine's after the Emperor's death to ensure that no one fights him for the role of Supreme Commander. Includes Thrawn/Rukh, Thrawn/Palpatine, lots of child death, gore, and parasitic castration.
April 10th: Odysseus to Telemachus (Chapter 14) - my Thomas Riker & Kyle Riker genfic where Kyle rescues Thomas from the Cardassian labor camps. This chapter is 1,351 words long and sees Thomas testifying about the prisoner riot where an Orion girl was raped. At the end, the Orion girl commits suicide.
April 10th, Noli Me Tangere Chapter 10. 3K. In this chapter, Kyle Riker visits the Enterprise and Will acts as if his time as a sex slave was a fun vacation, telling humorous stories in Ten-Forward as if the whole thing was an adventure.
April 10th, The Fisher King (Gargoyles) - young Xanatos and Owen Burnett travel to Ireland in search of a magical cauldron from Welsh legend.
April 12th: Every Exquisite Thing (Gargoyles) - a 4K oneshot where young Xanatos seeks a canvas made of human skin which may or may not have Dorian Gray-style powers that enable anyone painted on the canvas to be forever young.
April 13th: VCR (Stranger Things) - just a short 460-word story about Jonathan Byers and his relationship with Will.
April 14th: Mother (Evil 2019) - a 1K oneshot where Sister Andrea becomes pregnant at age 76 and hears a sinister voice coming from the fetus in her womb.
April 15th: Head Like a Haunted House (Star Trek Picard) - a 500-word oneshot about Jack Crusher and the Borg Queen.
April 15h: Want (Halfway Human) - a 500-word oneshot where Tedla is approached by an old client from its sex worker days, and Val, who witnesses it, gets the strange impression that Tedla actually wants to go with this woman, despite its asexuality.
April 15th: float (Haikyuu!) - final chapter of a 20K Suga/Daichi story that follows their last few months before graduating high school and their mutual realization that neither of them are destined to be stars.
April 17th: Noli Me Tangere Chapter 11. 7K words long! In this chapter, Kyle joins Will and Donovan on an away mission where Will is injured by acidic mushroom spores. In medbay, when he's being treated, Kyle catches sight of his son's scars and realizes Will has been lying to him about what he went through.
April 18th: Odysseus to Telemachus Chapter 15. This chapter is 1,445 words and shows Kyle Riker attempting to get political asylum for Thomas. A flashback shows Thomas in the labor camp with the Bajoran "camp queen" Onu Yumelo, who used to be his friend before the full extent of her ruthlessness became apparent.
April 18th: Cat Puberty (Star Trek TNG) - a 1K oneshot where Geordi and Riker discover the original Spot is dead and conspire to replace him with a new cat. Data will never notice! Er, even though the new cat is a different color ... and species .. and sex...
April 19th: Odysseus to Telemachus Chapter 16. 2,347 words. This flashback chapter shows Thomas in the labor camp, harvesting white worms and delivering them to Yumelo, so she can feed a sick friend. The friend dies soon after and Thomas suspects Yumelo kept the worms for herself or traded them for favors from the guards.
April 20th: Odysseus to Telemachus Chapter 17. 2,141 words. The camp cop is deathly ill with pellagra and only Thomas and Yumelo will help him. Later, the Gul in charge lines select political prisoners up against the wall and shoots them; Thomas gets into a fight with the thuggish "Escape Committee" and loses badly.
April 20th: Ens Causa Sui (Gargoyles) - a 3K oneshot where a 24-year-old Xanatos is robbed, and the culprit turns out to be a teenage Fox hell-bent on making it to Paris for Jean-Paul Sartre's funeral.
April 24th: Noli Me Tangere Chapter 12, 3K. In this chapter, Deanna and Will reconnect at a dance on the holodeck and try to have sex, but Will's still impotent, either from trauma or from drug use.
April 27th: Death Letter Blues (Star Trek TNG) - a 2K Riker/Picard fic where Riker's father dies and Picard ... er... goes camping with him.
April 28th: The Old Man (T.E. Lawrence) - Chapter 9 and 10 of a 23K multichap following Lawrence's post-war manipulation of a young bodyguard, who helped him recreate his torture and rape at Deraa.
April 30th: Noli Me Tangere Chapter 13. 3K. In this chapter, Will and Donovan go on an away mission together where Donovan is impressed by Riker's easy leadership style. Later, Donovan has a nightmare of Riker dying and wanders the ship, where he finds Riker also awake, trying to track down the Romulan commander who raped him.
Total: 25 new fics or updates! Most of them are TNG or Gargoyles, with three notable exceptions -- "The Old Man", my post-Lawrence of Arabia multichap; "And Thou No Breath At All", my Thrawn oneshot; and "float", my Haikyuu! multichap. There are other exceptions, these are just the two that I like the most, lmao.
I think my most popular fic this month was either Noli Me Tangere, which gets regular comments from Riker/Troi shippers, or "Mood Indigo". "Cat Puberty" did well, but my audience there was mostly Data/Geordi shippers, and Data/Geordi shippers ime skew young and don't leave comments or engage with fics/have conversations the way other TNG fans do. Honestly, I'm not very fond of Data/Geordi -- I think it's a cute idea, but it doesn't go any deeper than just "a cute idea".
My least popular fic by order of kudos was "Mother", for the TV show "Evil", which is sitting pretty at zero kudos! XD "Evil" fics NEVER get much traction, and this one is about Sister Andrea (side character) AND was posted during the show's off-season, so I knew it was doomed. But it was fun as hell to write. I love the idea of this no-nonsense 76-year-old nun getting pregnant with a demonic fetus.
Most fucked-up fic is definitely "And Thou No Breath At All" -- it's got everything. Gore, child murder, child suicide, necrophilia, parasites, castration, dubcon/noncon, probably some stuff I'm forgetting. But (and of course I'm biased) I feel like it came out plotty, with some fun post-Empire worldbuilding, and I wish more people had read it. Fic with the most research ... it's a three-way tie between "float" (since I've never been to Japan), "The Old Man" and "Odysseus to Telemachus" -- it's for "Odysseus" that I read all those gulag texts this month, and all those torture texts a month or two back.
And if I had to pick a favorite: it's my Gargoyles oneshots! They're all part of a series, so I feel okay claiming all of them as my fave XD The writing is less beautiful than "float", less meaningful than my TNG fics or "The Old Man", but so much fun to write. I love them. They're like little Xanatos-centric episodes all centered around his search for immortality, with lots of humor and a touch of tragedy here and there -- Alexander the Great's death in the sunny streets of Cairo's City of the Dead; the doomed gay lovers of "Every Exquisite Thing", one of them eternally youthful and increasingly evil, the other getting older and uglier but always loved by the younger one; the cancer-riddled scientist of "Inoperable" essentially committing suicide, which ofc brings up Xanatos' memories of his mother, who died of cancer too.
...And there's no tragedy in "Ens Causa Sui" -- that one was just fun to write. I don't think "The Fisher King" has any tragedy either. But yeah, I love these little fics, and I think other people like them too! Xanatos tests his immortality schemes on flatworms in these fics, all of them named Bucephalus, and in Fic #2 he successfully turns Bucephalus VII immortal, so that particular flatworm becomes a recurring character, and I got some fanart for him, which was really cute. "Gargoyles" is not a high-traffic fandom, and some of these fics only have 3 kudos, but they still get lots of comments, fanart, discussion, etc.
