I was tagged by the lovely @conundrumoftime for this! Thanks very much, Cat!
Rules: When you get this, reply with your favourite five fics that you've written and pass on to others.
I'm going to tag @ladytharen, @dwarveslikeshinythings, @rain-sleet-snow, and @anghraine! No pressure though.
This did remind me that I have an author's favorites list on AO3 that needed updating, but you know!!! Generally speaking, I do have shifting favorites. In any case, picking five is simultaneously pretty difficult and I feel like there are some standbys. Have I done a list like this before? Maybe! All quotes pulled from the fics are NOT part of their summaries this time, they are just parts that I love. <3
blessed - (Lord of the Rings, G, Éomer & Éowyn, 3.5k words)
AKA, my fic featuring genderqueer / genderfluid!Éowyn and nervous new king Éomer talking about both the past and the future. I love writing late night conversations between characters even now, a decade+ after writing this one. There is a lot in here that is still very close to my heart.
“Do you remember our first few weeks living here, after Aldburg?” Éowyn said, and that brought a grim smile to Éomer’s face. Those first few weeks after Aldburg had been after both their parents had died. Of course he remembered. "You slept on the floor beside my bed each night because we both had nightmares."
“Théodred would come in and take me back to my room, but I always came back,” Éomer said. Éowyn had been seven years old to his eleven and they both were haunted by the images of their father broken and bloody, their mother hollow and cold. And Edoras was larger than Aldburg, full of kind strangers, but strangers nonetheless. The floor had been hard against his back and sleep hadn’t come easily, but at least they had been together whenever either of them woke up crying and reaching for familiarity.
Éomer had been too proud to explain to Théodred that keeping Éowyn close had been just as much for his own sake as for hers. He had been so afraid of waking up to find that he had lost everyone—father, mother, and sister. Sixteen long years had passed since that time and he was still battling that fear.
“I dreamt of the Pelennor tonight,” he admitted, peering across the hall to avoid meeting Éowyn’s eyes. “I saw you fall.”
Éowyn’s hand slipped from his grasp. “You know that I am sorry to have caused you pain,” she said after a long moment, the stiff set of her body visible out of the corner of his eye. “But I will not apologize for riding out.”
2. out of storms comes strength for tomorrow - (The Hobbit, G, KĂli/Tauriel, Legolas Greenleaf & Tauriel, Tauriel & Thranduil, but really Tauriel-centric, 7.5k words)
This fic is about grief and about growing from loss, and also more than a little bit of me reacting to the final Hobbit film and rejecting a decent amount of the characterizations of Legolas, Tauriel, and Thranduil. Tauriel especially, baby, they can never make me hate you. I still think it would make WAY more sense for Legolas to stay in Mirkwood and for Tauriel to travel to Eriador. Also boo, I did NOT enjoy the love triangle, Legolas and Tauriel are siblings to me!!!
“Can you tell me why?” Legolas asked as he watched her gather up her belongings in her quarters and sort what to take and what to leave behind. His shoulders curved inward, his hands open and empty in his lap. “Why can’t you find peace here among our own people?”
That was not the question he wanted to ask her, she knew. He was searching for a fault in himself for her departure, though there was no logic in that line of thought. The head could not comfort the heart, not completely. She had tasted that guilt, same as he, when their mothers had sailed. Why am I not enough for you to stay?
She sat down next to him on the edge of her bed, close enough that their sides pressed together, shoulders to shoes. “I love you,” she said, the words easy as they always had been. There had never been a moment she had not known the truth of her feelings for him. And though he had heard it tens of thousands of times before, she understood the importance of hearing it aloud. “But this is something I must do for myself.”
She paused, and he curled his arm beneath hers to gently touch her wrist. The calluses on his fingertips were as familiar to her as her own. He said nothing, only waited for her to speak.
“I wish I could crack open my heart and show it to you,” she finally said. “I don’t know if I have the words to make you understand. I need—movement. I carry KĂli with me, my memories of him so clear, and that will never change, but I need to be in a different place now. There is no rest for me here.”
3. cast some light & you'll be all right - (Rogue One, E, Rebelcaptain aka Jyn Erso/Cassian Andor, 4.5k words)
Sometimes I still think about the haze in which I wrote this, I remember feeling possessed by the fic in the best way. I'm very glad it is my most popular fic and that the legacy of the Cassian Andor: Cunnilingus Addict tag lives on!
“In all the times you’ve fucked me,” he says, each word an effort, but he trusts the hope he can feel in his fingertips. “It’s always been fast and rough—”
“I’ve never gotten complaints before,” Jyn snaps, hackles raised, but Cassian clenches his jaw for a second and doesn’t rise to the bait.
“I’d just like to try something different,” he says, like it’s simple, what he wants. It sounds simple at the bottom line—he wants Jyn—but he wants her with all her prickliness and fire and the secret, soft underbelly she sometimes lets him see. “I’d like to kiss you for awhile.” It’s a start.
4. grant a name to a buried flame - (Silmarillion & Rings of Power, T, Galadriel/Celeborn/Halbrand, 3k words)
This is part of my Uncorrupted Mairon AU (shared with @rain-sleet-snow) where Mairon is convinced by Ossë to NOT commit to being Melkor's servant, and so he sticks around Aman, falls in love with Artanis, marries her during the Darkening, and then Mairon & Artanis eventually marry Celeborn of Doriath, who gives them both their new names of Halbrand and Galadriel, respectively. I loved writing about Celeborn having a mortifying crush that he slowly realizes is reciprocated.
“Lady crowned with a garland of bright radiance,” she says. “Was it all about my hair?”
Celeborn looks away into the water and then grasps the back of his neck, letting a few drops slide under his collar, certain that steam rises from how hot he burns. But she’s asking him to explain, and he’s thought about the name for so long, and—she accepted it, apparently.
He sits back on his heels and decides to risk honesty. “No, not completely. Of course your hair is very beautiful, but—please pardon me, lady, your happiness at the Mereth Aderthad struck me. You and Lord Mairon both glowed with it.”
“It’s a name of love, then,” Mairon says, and Celeborn darts a quick glance at his face because there’s a strange note in his voice—but searching reveals no jealousy or anger that Celeborn can read.
“Yes,” Celeborn admits, knowing that it shows his heart entire and just how long they’ve been held in it.
5. in the core of everything drums a beat - (Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, M, glacially slowburn Senua/ThĂłrgestr, 18.5k+ words, WIP)
My current WIP!!!! Listen, I could talk about this one for hours and I'm sure everyone who is following me knows plenty about it, even if they're not familiar with the source material. So I'll just leave a quote for it.
“I was blind before I met you,” he says, dragging the words through the still-healing tears inside him. “I blinded myself to what my father was and to what I was doing in his name. I made so many mistakes, and there is no way to undo them. But now I don’t…” A laugh snags in the stitches and scabs holding him together, twisting into a low groan.
Senua stays motionless, and that is a kindness he is grateful for, her waiting and bearing witness to this purging of his tangled thoughts.
“I feel as if I am shattered steel that must be made whole again. But I don’t know what I should be fashioned into now that I am free of my father, and yet so wounded by him. I fear what my own hand will wield. I fear—”
Another set of memories: the heavy iron grasp of his father’s hand on his shoulder. One voice twisted into a chain around his neck, each link different shades of emotion coloring the same phrase: Thórgestr, my boy. Affection, disgust, rage, grief.
Thórgestr’s stomach lurches. The echoes are clawing inside him. He has to swallow hard before he shakes off his father’s ghost.
