Anybody here read the comic
Die by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans?
Anybody here have strong feelings about Ash and Sol? No? Just me? Oh well. (The one time in my life that I turn into a veritable shipper, haha... Of course it had to be in a fandom that doesn't exist.)
Started writing a longfic, my first real sustained one, about these two, plus Ash's wife Sophie, two and a half years ago. It's set in the first few days after the end of the comic and just... tries to make Ash (and Sol; and Sophie) have a bunch of deeply necessary conversations. It's not finished yet, but four chapters plus a prologue are up, total words ca. 19,400, and I am still actively working on more.
There's an official sequel to the comic coming out in mid November, so all of this is going to be extremely AU and out of character in about... three weeks, haha. (I had to make "my" Sophie up almost from whole cloth because there is so little of her in the original comic; she seems to be a main character in the new series, though, so she's going to get Official Characterisation now, which is likely to be different from mine. My Sol is also very much an extrapolation from rather limited data.)
This may be your one chance to see me get seriously shippy! -- "How to Reappear Completely", by Hmpf MacSlow I'm actually really proud of this one, not just because of the unprecedented length but also because there is so much dialogue and so much... relationship stuff, for lack of a better word, in it. I know this is the most traditional fic terrain of all, but it's not what I usually write, so it's exciting to try writing in this mode. I'm not sure I'll be able to stick the landing - writing a fic in which emotions and relationships
are the plot is a new kind of tricky for me. But I love trying to learn it, right now.
You can currently buy all four volumes of Die, plus the entirety of The Wicked & The Divine, and the entirety of Phonogram plus some other stuff, for the very low price of approximately a single TPB,
on Humble.I also wrote a little
primer about the most relevant Die plot points if you want to read the fic without having read Die. But really, read Die instead, and don't let my silly primer spoil the ending for you.
Fic sample:
I think back on the last time Sol’s mum harassed me, the morning of my birthday, before our second departure, our return.
“There’s a disconnect – between Sol and her; between Sol and everyone, really. She thinks I can get past it. I can, to a degree. She doesn’t like it.”
Sophie’s expression becomes something she doesn’t try to hide. “I used to think she was insane. I was always hoping they’d lock her up, finally. Seeing what she did to you, all those times… But when I imagine it, now – Mia, stolen from me for that long, returning like… that. – I don’t know what I would do.”
I think of Augustus. It’s no comparison: Augustus is doing well, he was doing well, aside from the war wound he’d already mostly healed from when he exiled me. The only person who has hurt my son in ways that may be irreparable is me.
“Have you explained anything to her?” Sophie asks. “Will you?”
“No.”
“Has Sol?”
“No. He thinks it would make things worse for her.”
“You said it might make things harder – for us.”
“Yeah.” I meet her eyes. “I think it does. It has.”
I sense her holding herself apart.
“Because I might not believe you,” she asks, “or because of what it would mean if I did?”