#commentfic

I do! This week, Emily and V talk commentfic and comment memes back in the LJ days because the "Let's Get Gay Married!" Commentfic Meme started this week in fandom history as a celebration of marriage equality passing into law in New York state. Plus, a rundown on what commentfic and comment memes were like since they've mostly gone the way of the dinosaur -- largely extinct -- and they were a magical time in fannish collaboration. Did you participate in commentfic or comment memes? And how did you celebrate marriage equality?

this one is exactly 250 words of p*rn lmao going under a cut!

It’s raining, and Pierre had to do something with his brothers this weekend so he’s not at the race, and Charles had great speed but he still came P2 to stupid Max, of all people. He throws his helmet on the ground when he gets out of his kart, and his dad puts a hand on his shoulder.

“It’s important to be a good sport,” he says. He picks Charles’s helmet up off the ground and hands it to him. “You should say congratulations, before the prize-giving.”

“Max never says congratulations,” Charles mutters, but he goes anyway.

Max is standing next to his kart. His dad is talking to him. Charles waits until he stops talking and then he says, arms crossed, “Congratulationsonagreatwin.”

“Thanks,” Max says, and then, glancing from Charles to his dad, “I messed up the apex of turn 2, the last lap. You could have overtaken me if you didn’t lock up.”

“I already knew that,” Charles says.

“See?” Max’s dad says to Max. His hand is on Max’s shoulder. His fingers are thick.

“My dad is getting us pizza,” Charles says, suddenly. “Pierre’s not here so there’s extra if you want.”

“Oh,” Max says. He looks unsure. “I probably can’t. I have to help put the kart away.” His dad nods.

“Okay,” Daniel says. “I got it.”

“Got what,” Max asks, not looking away from the tv screen. He’s down a goal with 5 minutes left to go, plus stoppage time. “Fuck!” he says. Bad pass. “Idiot.”

“Got a name,” Daniel says. “Dale.”

“No,” Max says. Corner kick. He sets up for it.

“Come on,” Daniel says. “It’s so good.”

Max feels hands on his shoulders, digging in gently. A massage. He shrugs them off. “I’m trying to focus.”

“Maxy,” Daniel says. “You told me I could pick.”

“And I already regret my decision,” Max says.

Daniel’s hands return, carding through his hair this time. Max lets them stay. He takes the corner kick and heads it beautifully, perfectly into the goal.

“Fuck! Yes, boys!”

“So that’s a yes,” Daniel says.

“No,” Max says. He pauses the game and tips his head back. Above him, Daniel is grinning down, bright and topsy-turvy.

Daniel leans down and kisses Max, their mouths fitting together the wrong way. When he pulls away, Max is dizzy for a brief moment. He reaches up for Daniel’s face, an anchor.

“We are not naming our child Dale,” he says. “You get to pick, but I of course get to veto, you said.”

“Fine,” Daniel says. He puts his hand over Max’s and turns his head, kisses Max’s palm. “We can name him Trey. It means ‘Three,’ in American.”

“Here,” Derek says, and heaves himself sideways, closer to her, before throwing an arm up and over her head.  She can feel his elbow, bent and resting against the top of her head, pressing down on her scalp.

“Did you seriously just try to throw your arm around my shoulders and fail?” she asks.

“I am trying,” Derek says, with a biting dignity that is not helped by the fact that Casey is wearing the crook of his elbow like a ten pound party hat, “to help you warm up.”

“Sure,” she agrees.  Her butt slips a couple inches down the hood of the car from the downward pressure on her head.

“Well, lift your head up then,” he snaps, like she’s the dumb one in this whole awkward scenario.  Casey ignores him, but in struggling to reverse her perilous slide down the slippery metal of the hood of the car, Derek’s arm ends up underneath her neck anyway.

It’s… not comfortable.  In order to keep her head leaned back against the windshield, Casey’s has to tilt her back back like the top of a Pez dispenser, with Derek’s forearm like a doorstop at the base of her skull.

Alexis was six when it happened for the first time.  Her parents had bought her a pony for her birthday, the actual thing she’d actually asked for, and the sheer joy she’d felt had washed outward from her like a wave, sprouting into a field of miniature, wild violets that flew out around her, tangled into the Rose’s meticulously pruned and clipped yard, and totally ruining their gardener’s whole week.

The type of flowers Alexis grew varied: negative emotions spread outward from her with thorns, and positive ones delicate buds and petals shaped like teacups.  Sometimes a single, understated flower would bloom underneath her finger.  Sometimes plants tangled up where she stepped, vines crawling up underneath her feet, tipped with small, white pea-blossoms.  When she was angry, she wrapped herself in brambles like Sleeping Beauty locked within a cursed castle.

She had learned to control it.  Strong emotion triggered it; she learned to channel those feelings elsewhere.  Impatience made it easier to fight off the wash of real, debilitating emotion, and reacting with words seemed to keep the magic from building up inside of her.  It had worked well enough.

And then they’d moved to Schitt’s Creek, their entire lives stripped away from them in an instant, and the motel had bloomed gloomy night flowers and sharp, pointed roses for weeks.

“It’s making things difficult for me,” Stevie had pointed out.  “The random flowers, you know.  Growing.  In a motel.  Where they're not supposed to grow.  You know.”

Alexis had taken to sunbathing after that, on a battered plastic lawn chain out in the middle of the seldom-mowed field back behind the motel, where the flowers she grew tangled unnoticed into the wildflowers that already dotted the area.

Things got better.  She met Ted, she hooked up with Ted, she dated Ted, she broke up with Ted: the usual.  She argued with David, she hugged David, she realized, sometimes, that she loved David, as totally weird as that was.  She started to talk to her mom sometimes; her dad paid attention to her for the first time in her life.  Life went on, and the flowers she grew became softer and less barbed, and she started to think of Schitt’s Creek as perhaps the first real home she’d ever had in her life.

And then she met Ted again, the second time around, and violets rushed with a complicated joy out from beneath her feet in a dizzying rainbow of purples, as Ted had laughed and moved his feet to not crush any of the blooms, and Alexis stared at him, dazed.

---

“Snow daaaaaaay!” Jester screamed, and launched a snowball at Veth’s head.

Caduceus chuckled.  “So we’re doing this, are we?” he asked, and sat down in the snow to pray to the Wild Mother.

Veth flicked a finger to slow the descent of the snowball, batted it off-course, then whipped out her crossbow, rigged to throw powder snowballs.  “Oh, you know we’re doing this,” she said, and clicked the safety off to aim at Yasha.

Yasha dodged, then slammed her wings out to fly over to Beau, who snatched a snowball out of midair and threw it straight back at Veth.  Fjord clapped his hands and a large cube of frozen snow dumped over the whole group, drowning all the action in a large mound of powder that stunned everybody into sudden stillness.

Caleb shook the snow off his coat and scarf, and conjured up fire to burn an area around him clear, while Jester wrinkled her nose up and changed into a polka-dotted polar bear.

Beau and Yasha threw snowballs, Jester batted the snow about in her huge bear paws, and Veth shot a few more rounds off until finally, ritual complete, Caduceus stood up again and every single person was hit with a divine snowball straight from above.

---

“Hey, Angie?” Will whispered, close to her ear.

“Yes?”

“Do you think we’ve hidden too well?”

It was a valid question.  She hadn’t heard a peep from either Sophie or Graham since both she and Will had awkwardly ended up in the same place after hide and seek panic had led them both to be crammed underneath Will’s bed, shoulder-to-shoulder, staring up the slats holding up Will’s super expensive mattress.

(His mattress looking amazing to sleep on, like it would almost certainly cure the weird knots that Angie carried around in her shoulders from picking Graham up all the time.  Angie had spent a silent but substantial amount of time they’d been stuck under here trying to figure out how to ask Will if she could crash in his bed sometimes.  But in, like, a platonic way.)

“Probably,” Angie said, and rolled herself as much as she could in the limited space.  She ended up partially on her side, facing Will in the dim light.  “Do you think they’re even still looking for us?”

“I give it a 50-50 chance.”

Will shuffled himself around a bit to face her as well.  His shoulders were broader than her, so it was a tighter fit.

And whoa buddy, it just got a whole lot warmer in here - Will’s face was close to her own, and she could feel his breath on her skin as he shifted about, and suddenly Angie’s whole body was a terrifying mess of a lot of things she should definitely not be feeling.  Shit.  Shit shit shit!

Angie’s breath caught and held, and she froze, staring awkwardly at Will.

“Uh.  Angie.  Are you okay?” Will whispered.

Breath, D’Amato.  “No.  Yes.  Yup!  Nope.  I’m fine!”

She could see Will frowning in the darkness.  “What are you -”

“Nooooope, not doing this!” Angie said, and rolled herself right out of that hormonal, sexual-tension-laden trap, out from underneath Will’s seductively amazing bed and back into the harsh daylight and the reality of Angie’s actual, real, sad single parent life.

“GOT YOU,” Graham yelped above her head, pointing down.  “I told you, Sophie!”