professional pete girl

well i am supporting the knicks because my friend Aavni told me i had to and i am nothing if not loyal to my friends’ sports propaganda, and tbf socialites being set in new york means the knicks chaos probably does deserve at least a background mention somewhere. i feel like percy would get far too emotionally involved and everyone else would have to suffer through it

that said, it is world cup season right now so the only sport currently occupying my brain is football (soccer for the americans, because apparently you all saw a sport played mostly with feet and decided that name was already taken)

if i post this and it doesn’t get exactly 70,002 hits i’m holding you accountable anon

but no genuinely thank you lmao. i wasn’t sure anyone else would be into this very specific disease of an idea, but surely there is an audience for toxic semi-doomed yuri, fucking your dad’s coworker, keeping a boyfriend around because he’s useful for the heterosexual image management, and cheating on him with a hot older woman from work who looks like she sleeps under her desk and wears men’s suits in a way that makes everyone involved feel a bit unwell.

okay so yes the genderbend lawlight fic is real and unfortunately i have made it extremely difficult for myself lmao.

the basic set-up is an AU with no Death Note, no Kira etc. Light is working in the police/legal world, kind of Casey Novak inspired in the sense that she’s young and brilliant and very put-together and already good enough at her job that everyone knows it but still very aware that she’s a woman in rooms full of older men who are waiting for her to either prove she’s exceptional or prove she’s overreaching. So she’s at the police station a lot, Soichiro is there, Matsuda is there being painfully Matsuda, Aizawa is there having blood pressure issues, etc.

L is still L, but in this AU she’s not just randomly brought in when a case gets difficult. She’s part of the NPA in this very specialist consultant role, so she’s not the chief and she’s not technically running everything in the normal way, but she has this weird unique power because everyone knows she’s brilliant and impossible and occasionally the only person in the room who can see what’s actually happening. She’s also older than Light and already an established colleague of Light’s dad, which makes the whole thing so much worse in the best possible way because Light is very much aware that this woman is not some random mysterious rival she can compartmentalise neatly

Also it’s not just me going “what if lawlight but lesbians.” I mean. It is that. Obviously. But it’s also not just that because the second you take away Kira and the Death Note, their whole dynamic changes anyway. Even if they were still men in this AU, it would already be different because canon lawlight is so built around Light being the thing L is hunting. The suspicion, the surveillance, the murder chess, the fact they’re both performing at each other constantly. If there’s no Kira then you have to find a different engine for that obsession.

and then making them women changes it again, especially Light, because canon Light’s whole thing is that he is perfect. Perfect son, perfect student, perfect face to show the world, polite and handsome and clever and respectable in this very clean socially approved way. But if Light is a woman, that performance has a completely different rulebook. She can’t just be brilliant and polished, she has to be beautiful in the correct way, feminine in the correct way, ambitious in the correct way. She has to know exactly when to smile, when to soften, when to let someone think they’ve underestimated her and when to punish them for it. Too pretty and she’s vain, too clever and she’s arrogant, too charming and she’s flirting, too cold and she’s a bitch.

So she’s still doing the Light Yagami perfection thing, but with the extra nightmare layer of being a woman who knows everyone is reading her face, clothes, hair, voice, body language, all of it. And because she’s Light, she’s like okay cool, I will simply become terrifyingly good at this.

Misa is also still there, but as Light’s boyfriend. He’s still a model/actor and very beautiful and dramatic and Misa about everything, and Light is basically the final boss of 'I hate my boyfriend' except it also works perfectly for her because having this very public, very pretty boyfriend helps preserve the image she’s built of herself as this perfect straight girl with the perfect life. Like yes, she finds him deeply irritating, but he’s also useful, and Light Yagami would absolutely stay in a relationship partly because it looks right.

L is hard for a different reason because L’s weirdness also changes when she’s a woman. Male L gets away with being strange because he’s a genius and everyone sort of files it under eccentric detective behaviour. Female L being blunt and unsettling and not remotely interested in being pleasant has a different social weight to it. She’s still rude and brilliant and sleep-deprived and impossible but people react differently to a woman who refuses to do any of the little performances that make women easier to tolerate.

and then, because apparently I enjoy giving myself problems, Light and L do start secretly hooking up. So you get this extremely messy thing where they’re having this affair and then going into work like normal, except Light’s literal father is there, and Light knows she’s sleeping with his colleague, and she’s also hiding the fact that she’s a lesbian, and the case and the affair start bleeding into each other in a way that’s very normal and healthy and definitely not going to ruin anyone’s life.

so yeah, the inspo is very Casey Novak/Olivia Benson procedural women being insanely competent in horrible rooms, plus Jennifer’s Body for the whole toxic girlhood/what if looking at another girl too hard ruined your life of it all. The general vibe is toxic lesbian psychological warfare with a murder investigation happening somewhere in the background and everyone pretending this is about the case.

hiiii thank you so much, first of all i’m so glad you like Hauntings and Wantings because that one is also one of my favourites i’ve written <3

and this isn’t a dumb question at all! with the Death Note fic i would definitely say the tags are accurate and it is pretty dark. the dead dove tag is there for a reason, mostly because the whole premise of the fic is Light dealing very badly with the aftermath of rape and all the trauma/shame/control issues that come with that, especially because he is unfortunately still Light Yagami about all of it.

in terms of explicitness, there isn’t a full on-page rape scene. the fic starts after the assault, when Light comes back to HQ, and there are flashbacks/fragments of memory rather than one fully written scene of it happening. but the aftermath is still pretty intense in places. there’s discussion of the assault, physical injury, blood, panic attacks, nightmares, trauma responses, suicidal thoughts/ideation, and Light generally spiralling in a way that gets quite heavy (also a whole other murder case subplot)

there are also some pretty toxic relationship dynamics, because it is lawlight and i fear that comes with the territory, but i am trying very hard to keep the romance/slowburn side from overriding the actual weight of what happened to him. it’s not meant to be 'rape as a plot device to make them kiss' or anything like that, it’s very much a trauma aftermath fic first.

i just wanted to say that i absolutely love your work and that your are my favorite author. like, ever.

Socialites is the best fanfic i ever read in my whole entire life. and it was the first time I cried reading one. soooo. (i literally sent voice messages to my friends crying). i re-read this fic COUNTLESS times. it's how much i love it.

and like i just wanted to say thank you for sharing such incredible writing with the world and i appreciate all the love and thought you put into everything you write.

genuinely, thank you so much <3

oh this is so lovely thank you so much <3

the voice messages to your friends is killing me a bit ngl like the idea of Socialites causing an actual spoken breakdown somewhere is very funny and also incredibly sweet

I’m really glad it means that much to you, that fic has taken up so nice of my brain for so long, so it’s always really lovely to know people are still rereading it and getting something from it.

I just wanted to pop in here and say how much I loved ur solangelo figure skating au bc I rarely have brainrot over a oneshot it’s usually for longer fics but I’ve been thinking abt this oneshot for like 2 days nowwwwwwwww it’s amazinggggggg

and also did you know this years Winter Olympics is in ITALY??????? Omg imagine solangelo in this au competing in Nico’s home country the possibilities aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-

Real live footage of me and my friend going crazy btw

ILY STELLA THANK U FOR BIRTHING INCREDIBLE PEICES OF WRITTING <33 HAPPY NEW YEAR BTW HAPPY 2026 REMMEBER TO SLEEP AND DONT OVERWORK URSELF TOO MUCH :)

hi hi hi this is such a sweet message and i’m so sorry i’m replying to it approximately three hundred years late

i’m so glad you liked the figure skating au, thank you <3 you and your friend having full conversations about it is so funny and genuinely very lovely

also yes, the Italy Olympics thing was VERY dangerous information to give me because Nico taking Will around Italy in that au is such an obvious little brainworm. like unfortunately that is exactly the kind of thing i would become annoying about.

ahhh thank you, that’s really sweet of you to ask.

i fear replying to this batch of asks is exposing how often i delete things because i’ve looked at them too hard and started hating them, but yeah that is basically what happened with A Silence Between Heartbeats.

i still really love the idea of it but when i went back to reread it i felt like the pacing was off and that i’d maybe tried to do too much at once. the scene with Nico, the whole camp, and all the gods still haunts me a bit because half the chapter was basically every single person in the room getting a reaction beat to every line of dialogue and it made everything feel really dense and clunky to me.

group scenes are already something i have to wrestle with in fics like Socialites when there are about eleven people in a room, so putting the entire Greek pantheon in the infirmary was perhaps an ambitious choice lmao. i also felt like there was some pretty flimsy plot armour going on in places and once i started seeing all the things i’d want to fix it became a bit overwhelming.

there areloads of things i loved about it though, i loved the slightly Hunger Games inspired vibe it was going to have, even though that hadn’t really happened yet in the published chapters, with Will and Nico’s trials being broadcast on Hephaestus TV. i loved Aphrodite’s role in the council of the gods scene and her standing up for Nico, and i just love Aphrodite/Cabin 10 in general. i have many thoughts about them and about how they were handled in canon which is only slightly relevant to this answer but here we are.

(i also have a very self-indulgent Will-centric camp fic that starts when he joins camp at ten, with canon characters like Lee and Michael and many, many OCs, mostly from Apollo, Aphrodite and Ares cabins. one of my goals with that fic is basically rewriting the way Aphrodite cabin works in the series because apparently i cannot leave Cabin 10 alone.)

i do hope i’ll come back to A Silence Between Heartbeats one day in a more streamlined version because there’s still so much about the concept that i like. i just knew it wasn’t something i was going to be able to properly work on for a long time and the longer it stayed up the more stressed i got whenever people asked about it because i was like ah. yes. i have absolutely bitten off more than i can chew here.

I’m also in the midst of mid-winter rage/despair/the-gods-have-abandoned-us-and-spring-will-never-come, so I could just be imagining it.

you’re not imagining it! i did go back and fiddle with some older stuff.

it wasn’t a huge rewrite or anything, mostly me trying to fix pacing and smooth out bits that were annoying me. i went in thinking i was going to cut loads because i know i tend to ramble then somehow only managed to cut maybe under 1k words because apparently my version of editing is also adding more detail. very helpful of me.

with the bruises series especially, those fics were written ages before i ever posted them. i’d got back into pjo/solangelo but i wasn’t fully caught up on anything past hoo yet, so i held off posting because i didn’t want to barge back into the fandom and immediately realise i’d missed some massive canon detail from toa or something that could be relevant. that’s also partly why i still write so many aus tbh because canon timelines make my head hurt especially post-hoo.

so by the time some of those fics actually went up, they’d already been sitting around for ages, and i do think i’m a better writer now than i was when i first drafted them. i get really bad writer blindness where if i’ve stared at something long enough i’m like yeah, this is fine, and then i come back months later and immediately see twelve things i want to fix.