My remix for the Ouroboros challenge is now up at AO3! It’s a remix of anonymousComrade’s Survivor’s Guilt. I have been itching to post it for days.
Anonymous asked: A Thor genderswap.
oh shit yes now we are fucking cooking!!!!! (just— fyi, tho, anon, ‘genderswap’ is p loaded as a term and inaccurate to what it is generally taken to mean. I think people usually say ‘rule 63’ is …. easier non-gross shorthand for ‘turnin all the cis afab ladies into cis amab dudes and vice versa’?)
ANYWAY!!!!! (I feel weird about putting Thor stuff right up on here… god. yeah. anyway! did you think i would write about anybody other than loki???? I SURE HOPE NOT). ——
It’s not that Loki wants to fight, or is even that interested in battle-magics on a level other that the purely academic. But Thor is so much stronger than her, and always strengthening.
Thor will be a brave queen and a brawny one. Loki knows that she will never rule; but that is no reason to fall behind.
So she goes, grim, into the library; she comes out covered in dust older than she is and with her arms filled with all the books she can carry. She will know more than the seid. She does not care if it is what she is born to, as a woman; her own father learnt the seid, and if Loki can say she has inherited anything of her parents, she can at least lay a claim to sharing the cunning of Odin Flashing-Eye.
She will learn the battle-magics, the sharpening-spells and the sword-charms. She will spend her hours in the training yards sweating through her spear practice, and she will learn her illusions and her slide-away spells, and she will lay a chain-mail of charms over her armour until she does not need to carry a shield, until she can go into battle with a spear in her right hand and a tangle of spells in her left and a ready charm on her tongue and wreak just as much damage as Thor with her mighty hammer Mjolnir.
Loki does not dream of besting her sister: she knows her place is the shadow cast of Thor’s shining gold braids, but as the moon follows the sun and Hati always reaches where Sköll has been, she hopes at least she can equal her.
tanyart asked: the one about homestuck having a happy ending.
way to ask the impossible there, tanya. do I look like a miracle worker?? is my name max??
There’s a planet hanging down under you, a thousand miles and more under your feet. It’s huge even from this distance, and you can sort of make out some mountain ridges here and there. You can definitely spot the shapes of where the oceans, between the clouds that gyre their way across the surface.
“Definitely a windy planet, huh,” you say sort of generally to everyone. Tavros, the blue of his shirt matching yours, smiles at that, wide and happy, but Karkat snorts and shifts his weight where he’s standing, and Dave’s eyes roll under his sunglasses like he thinks you can’t see, and Jade smacks you in the shoulder.
“Any planet would look windy from this high up,” says Kanaya, every word perfectly measured and neat and tipped with the littlest little bit of perfectly polite scorn.
(She has still not entirely forgiven you for your Pesterchum prank! You will have to work on that.)
“Well, it looks very spacious too,” you allow.
“There’s something of all of us in it,” Aradia says. She leans a little bit back into—Sollux, you think?—and adds, “we had to balance it out. Like an equation!”
You can see hundreds of stars from where you are. This planet’s sun is the biggest, hanging over the shoulder of the planet, pulling the night after it like a blanket. It’s all purples and oranges and blues, and it’s… really pretty.
You voice this thought. The fifteen others with you – troll and human and all of you gods – all nod or shift a grey shoulder in agreement.
The first of the planet’s moons rolls into view, and it’s tiny and dusty-blue, and looks a lot like Earth.
byzantienne asked you:The one where Redglare becomes a Sufferer-cultist.
Oh no I’m sorry this turned into >400 words I’M SO BAD AT BREVITY. i will do better next time yass
The Signless meets his descendant in a dreambubble.
Alternatively, Signless: Fondly regard crustacean.
Gen, roughly 5k words, lots of sloppy pale nonsense, because there is no iteration of Karkat Vantas in any possible universe who is not eternally surrounded by sloppy pale nonsense (especially when he encounters a troll just as prone to self-loathing and sloppily pale feelings as himself).
I wrote half of this like two months ago and finished it yesterday/tonight. aw yee.
took a break from my project to format that ficbit i did for AR for ao3. it is now named after a line from a we were promised jetpacks song, because i am nothing if not (a) predictable and (b) unimaginative.
last time I did a prompt meme AR asked for the Signless laughing till he cries. A little belated: here you go.
769 words, well over twice what the meme called for. FUCK THE RULES I DO WHAT I WANT.
Disciple+Psionic+Dolorosa+Signless, gen.
For the 300-words-fic meme: Tanya asked for Karkat Vantas having a private smile. :V
except then i accidentally wrote more than twice the recommended number of words and barely touched the prompt, oops
Karkat + Kanaya + frogs, gen, 800ish words
bluh
so a while ago I started this fic, as a fill for a homesmut prompt? and it’s just stalled out completely and I think it’ll need a rewrite to do it justice, but I’m also really frustrated at having, like, three thousand words of fic I can’t do anything with.
so I just shoved what I had written up on my writing dump lj, and there we go, that is the end of it, I wash my hands of this mess, good night.
I WILL WRITE YOU WELL EVENTUALLY, KARKAT+SIGNLESS DREAMBUBBLE FIC. EVENTUALLY :((((
so I accidentally a Hellboy fic again :U Post- The Fury #3/Monsters #2. MAXIMUM SPOILERS. Title from Andrew Bird’s Take Courage, because I can. 1540ish words. Pretty much entirely written for my own peace of mind! (and, um, icthyosapien, can i be the biggest jerk and ask you to… not reblog this to allthingshellboy? D: I really don’t feel it’s polished enough for a wider audience than my own followers.)
Hellboy and Abe have a chat.
night’s falling, so take courage (you’re not alone)
Abe Sapien doesn’t know where he is. He remembers, with a vagueness that should disturb him, the mission in Texas: arguing with Kate and Devon; finding the girl Fenix; getting shot. Bits and pieces of the ride in the ambulance, all scattered, out of focus and order. He’s no recollection of leaving the ambulance, of getting here.
Wherever here is.
When he thinks to look around, there’s nothing to be seen; a flat, dark blandness, nothing special to draw the eye, nothing particular he’d remember from elsewhere, the abandoned school or B.P.R.D. headquarters.
Abe wonders, vaguely, if he’s dead. Dead or, perhaps, back in the tank. He wasn’t awake for any moment for his first long stay, entirely unaware of the passage of time, the changes in his body. He doesn’t know which option is preferable.
He hangs there, or stands, or sits (he is not sure which), for a long time. No clocks, no light, no heartbeat to count (is that a tick in the column for ‘dead’, or for ‘hibernating’?). At long last, though, something appears in his vision: a red spark of something, a flickering patch of light in the corner of his left eye. Abe sees excellently in the dark, good as any deep-sea creature at navigating in dim conditions, and he heads towards it unerringly.
Abe nears the bright whatever-it-is; he can make out a little more detail, from this distance. A red lump on the bottom, flickering orange on top — fire? He hadn’t thought that fire could exist here (wherever here is).
A little nearer, a little nearer, and the thing blinks into focus: it’s a heart, huge and red and still, burning without being consumed. A burning bush, and does that make Abe Moses? This void doesn’t seem the right place for a sign from any God.
A line of Poe slides its way into Abe’s mind, sure and slick as an eel after its dinner: prophet, said I, thing of evil; prophet still, if bird or devil. A lifetime spent chasing monsters has drilled into Abe to trust his instincts. And right now, his every nerve is shouting that this burning heart is important, that he mustn’t let it slide away. It’s sinking, getting closer and closer to whatever passes for a floor here, and something about its jerky unwilling movement makes Abe think it might be getting pulled more than going on its own steam.
“You shouldn’t treat another person’s heart that way,” he murmurs, before he entirely realizes what he’s saying. It’s the first noise he’s heard since he got here, wherever this is, whenever he arrived, and it startles him, goads him into motion. Abe flows forward, slicing through distance as though it’s clear water and he’s trying to beat his personal best time.
The tips of his fingers (blue-green and slick as a salmon’s back) touch the heart, cool as stone under the flames, and it— it pulls him closer, forward, down. Abe thinks, for a moment that might be as long as a heartbeat, if he could remember how long a heartbeat was, that it’s going to pull him into the ground, pull him along like a comet’s tail to wherever it’s going, before it yanks him in.
It’s red inside, red and enormous and cracked, like hard-baked soil during a drought, like the fissures and bubbles in old paint on orange-rusted iron, like Hellboy’s right arm.
Hellboy, whom Abe hasn’t seen in more years than he likes to count; Hellboy, who is…. lying on the dry cracked-marble floor, a huddle of red skin and tan overcoat, tail curled, limp, at his side.
Abe starts forward and Hellboy groans, a noise like he’s dying.
Abe Sapien sinks down next to Hellboy, touches him, light as the brush of fin against scale. He doesn’t feel a pulse, thinks of the burning heart, of whose it might be (have been).
Hellboy sits up, a slow and painful-looking process; Abe keeps out of his way. Hellboy’s covered in scrapes and bruises, more cuts and tears ripping through red skin and flesh than Abe’s ever seen before after any mission. His torso looks oddly concave, stepped-on more than anything else, and scorched after that. And there’s blood, red blood everywhere, dark and shining against the dryness of the rest of him.
“Friend,” says Abe, hushed, “How did you survive all this?”
Hellboy coughs, rattling deep in his chest, and spares a pained grimace upwards. “The long and short of it? Didn’t. You’re a clever guy, Abe, though you’d’ve guessed that by now.”
“I suppose I had hoped otherwise,” Abe says, quiet, rueful. He lets one hand rest on Hellboy’s shoulder, the least abused patch of skin he can find. “Tell me at least it was worth it?”
“No idea.” Hellboy looks grim, more emotion than Abe can make himself feel right now. “I took her out — the dragon-witch — long story, Abe — but I’ve got a feeling there’s more to it than her. She dragged me down with her; I’m going to Hell, Abe. She thought that was worth her death. She’s not the biggest bad in the picture, and I’m scared down to my toes of what power she could be bowing to.”
“Fate. The inevitable,” says Abe, dreamy. His second eyelids, the clear ones, slick shut. “The Ogdru-Jahad. Oannes, god of the unknowable depths. The apocalypse of fire and flood, and what comes after.”
“Abe?” Hellboy says, startled, worried. And: “No. Caul. Langdon Everett Caul, you’ve been dead longer than you ever were alive. You don’t have any rights to Abe Sapien’s body any more.”
“Trying to exorcise me, Apocalypse beast?” Caul asks, in Abe’s voice, with Abe’s mannerisms: the tilt of his head, the scroll of his lips. He scrapes a foot against the sandpaper ground and the rasp of it fills the hot, still air.
“One last job, favour for an old friend. You know how it goes.” Hellboy grunts, and slips a hand into a pocket: the left hand, the flesh hand. It hurts more than almost everything he’s felt before, but he manages to close his fingers around a vial of holy water, still intact. There’s a church, somewhere in the north of Romania, with a freshwater spring bubbling up in its courtyard: source of its holy water. Just about the purest Hellboy’s managed to find that isn’t direct from the Vatican.
Hellboy digs a nail into the wax seal, feels it crumble, and lobs the vial overhand at Caul. Caul doesn’t even try to dodge, and the vial beans him right in the forehead, between the two black streaks that rise from his (Abe’s) eyebrows. The vial falls to shatter on the floor, and the water splashes, drips down into Caul’s eyes.
Caul blinks, wipes it away: nothing Hellboy’s ever seen Abe do. Caul’s not used to the fishman-body and the way it deals with liquids. “Was that meant to accomplish anything?” he inquires, voice a shark’s tooth, serrated and mean.
Hellboy grins, fierce in victory. He aches, sharp and stabbing wherever it’s not the blunt hammering of bruised flesh, and knows there’s only worse to come. He leans back and stares up at the ceiling, arching cathedral-high and cracked with age.
“We’re going down to Hell, Langdon; Nimue’s making sure of that. But she’s not gunning for you or Abe in particular, and Hell won’t take anything covered in water that holy without a damn good reason. Abe’s goin’ right back up, back to the living if he tries hard enough, and there’s no way your spirit stayed strong enough these past two centuries to survive way up in the light of day, away from the spaces between. You’re done, Caul. That’s all for you.”
Caul might be making a reply, but Hellboy’s vision is going dark round the edges, black a welcome contrast to the red, red, red of this heart-cathedral. Too much exertion, too much fighting. Too much everything. He’d be glad for a rest between now and Hell.
“You were a good friend, Abe,” Hellboy murmurs. “Damn good friend. More than you knew.”
There’s a dull sound near Hellboy, a thump. He rolls his single remaining eye to the side and sees Abe kneeling there, the brightness back in his flat blue eyes.
“You realize I’ve been shot point-blank four times, right?” Abe asks, worry thick in his voice.
“Survived worse,” Hellboy manages, throat dry, rasping. “You’ll do fine.”
“Good luck, Hellboy,” says Abe, and that’s the last thing Hellboy hears for a while.
Hanging in his tank, Abe gasps; plumes of bubbles pour from his gills, and his lungs expand deeply for the first time in hours.
Complicated machines scream Abe’s survival, and in her office, Kate jumps up from her desk, eyes wide.
