Since I’m probably never gonna actually write them, I’m sharing my cotrk fic ideas so everyone can stew in the concepts with me:
Rise and fall of the Bloor family as shown from the perspective of their dining table - each chapter is a meal a few years/months apart, separated by big events in the Bloor family. Looking at how just deeply unpleasant it is to be a Bloor, that all the “family” stuff is sort of just set dressing for the reality of their situation. Haunting and creepy and weird, unhappy ending. Would follow canon events/timeline as close as possible and sort of just fill in the blanks.
Post-canon, Manfred and Asa reconnect and figure out their relationship - Manfred survives and leaves the city to try and figure out what his life is going to be now that the whole Bloor family scheme has fallen through. He bounces around for a couple years and then is finally working at (insert stereotypical job here) when he runs into Asa and finds out he has landed in the same town that Asa has been living in since getting away. There’s some “are you here to kill me” on both sides, they barely start talking stuff out before deciding Absolutely Not, and Manfred sort of hopes Asa will just leave him alone forever, but Asa recognizes the change in their positions and so won’t let Manfred go. Asa has found himself a new group of endowed friends (who actually like him! for the first time in his life!) and this group has a totally different view of him than being Manfred’s Dog, so things get a bit weird when Asa drags Manfred into this group. There is a lot of tension and the group doesn’t really get Manfred, or why Asa is so attached to such a weird asshole, but one day they are all out and Asa is getting pissed at some stranger and his new friends are all nervous and uncomfortable with his aggression and then Manfred is able to recall him instantly. And the group is like oooooohhhhhh that’s it. They had only known Asa as a Man and a Beast, but now they see that (for the right person), there is also a Dog. This incident prompts Manfred and Asa to dig a little more into what happened between them and how they are going to go on.
Post-canon, Naren and Harold meet - Naren decides she wants to meet the rest of her family and make up her mind about them herself (not just listening to what Bartholomew says). Since Harold has left the city and she has no idea how to find him, she asks Charlie for help, and he asks Lyell. In my BarleyAU “canon”, Lyell tells Charlie to go to Barley, and Barley facilitates the meeting, but I also like it without Barley as a chance to also explore the dynamic between Harold and Lyell and choices made in order to move forward. Harold and Naren end up having an odd sort of relationship, not least because they are siblings that are 35+ years apart in age, but the outlook is optimistic because 1) Naren is just Like That and 2) Harold is more generally unpleasant than actively harmful nowadays. (Manfred is alive, he’s just not involved in this because I hc that he and Harold aren’t on good terms post-canon for quite a while, and really only ever reconnect if someone else brings them back together, such as Barley, Lyell, or Naren)
BarleyAU, Barley and Billy bonding (alliteration yay!) - Barley and Billy’s relationship is like actually quite relevant to my BarleyAU plot because Barley gets so protective of Billy so quickly, but there is also just lots of fun side scenes of them bonding over their love of animals that wouldn’t make the cut if I did ever write a whole BarleyAU. This would be fun and funny and very much for the animal nerds, with also some undertones of found family as that is the trajectory of Barley and Billy’s dynamic.
Post-canon, Emma as an older teen with PTSD, trying to figure out how to go forward - Set when they are in their final year at Bloor’s and Emma has been having a rough time as the years go on. She has a lot of guilt and shame over feeling like she is disappointing everyone around her by not moving on, or being upset, and generally feels like there is no one who can understand what she went through, and her distress affects her endowment in painful and embarrassing ways. She starts to fixate on the idea of closure, thinking that the reason she can’t just “stop having problems” is because Manfred (and Harold but mainly Manfred) left the city when she was 12, and she never got to actually confront him about it. Everyone is super against her seeking him out, but Lyell feels bad enough about not having helped her when he was the person who had the most in common with her situation to give in and help her find Manfred, and also to try and protect her as much as he can (again). There’s lots of ways that talking with Manfred could go, but what I’m most interested in exploring is Manfred having also been a kid at the time and how Lyell and Emma feel about that, putting Lyell in a situation where he has to start processing things himself and can’t just act like it’s all wrapped up, and Emma realizing that there really aren’t any answers to be found in Manfred, she has to find it in herself and the people who care about her.
1902AU - Setting the whole series just a century earlier and exploring how that setting affects the dynamics. Plot would follow the canon without too many huge differences probably, it would mainly just be focused on how characterization and setting interact.
