#distracteddream

Thank you for the ask! <3

Don't lie to me is set right after s2e1, and I just really wanted some sweet h/c and to write about Loki's time slipping. I started this so long ago and I hadn't even looked at it until I was going through all my WIPs, and re-reading what I have I really want to jump back into it.

Snippet time:

“How painful was it? Slipping through time?” “Mobius, we’re past it, it’s over — I’m fine—” “Just answer the question. And don’t lie to me.” Loki opens and shuts his mouth, his usual chorus of I’m fine and I can handle it dying in the back of his throat. Mobius has done so much for them — risking life and limb, and skin. Mobius has taken his chances, again and again, with Loki, saving them more than once. Loki owes Mobius so much. They can start with a little honesty. “It was one of the most painful things I ever experienced.” “Worse than the pruning?” Loki pauses, trying to choose their words carefully. Was there anything worse than being rapidly disassembled and then reassembled? Was there a difference between getting pruned and having your entire body break apart and snap back together in a matter of moments?  “Different. Still awful, but,” Loki draws a shuddering breath, “different.” “Oh, Loki,” Mobius says softly. He reaches out but quickly stops himself, stuttering in his movements. “Can I — can I hug you?” Loki feels their heart clench at the mere consideration. Mobius just stares at Loki, nothing but concern bleeding through his gaze. Loki shuts their eyes as they begin to sting. They nod and lean in, silently pleading for Mobius to catch them, hold them close, keep them together.  Mobius doesn’t hesitate, scooting closer to gather the god before him in his arms.  Loki presses forward, hiding their face in the crook of Mobius’ neck. They feel arms wrap around them, careful not to be too rough. Mobius holds them as if they were something fragile, but precious — not broken. Something to be cared for. Loki’s muscles still ache, a dull throbbing coursing through their entire body. They couldn’t believe they survived being disassembled and promptly reassembled — being ripped apart and scattered through time and space.  And the time slipping felt as though they were being stretched in a million directions, only to rubber band back, snapping them into place. Loki could feel their bones cracking in and out of place, their muscles expanding and twisting in inconceivable ways.  Loki doesn’t think they’ll ever forget what that feels like. “I got you, Loki,” Mobius says, voice as soft as his hold but just as secure. A promise.

Alligator tears is simply an idea for now, and it's not dacryphilia?? but it does have to do with Mobius' being obsessed with how beautifully pathetic Loki looks when he's crying and how he longs to swoop in and stop those tears. 🤭 (it was also first inspired by the song alligator tears by beyonce lol)

I don't have much written for it, but here's this:

To see it on a screen was something else, and to have the actual thing sitting at his feet like this, well, Mobius would have never considered himself so lucky. But here he is, with Loki looking up at him with wide, wet eyes, trembling against his legs, miserable and hopeless, begging for a morsel of tenderness. It claws at Mobius’ sensibilities and dissolves his self preservation. A scheme or not, he’s seen enough of Loki to know that there is always more than meets the eye. After watching Loki scramble and fight for acceptance, affection, for a kind of warmth that could be tailor made for him, here comes Mobius, ready to take the god into his arms and offer him what so many have refused him for so long. Mobius hears a whimper as Loki presses his face into his knee, and then a choked off sob, and he can’t take it anymore. “Hey, c’mon now,” Mobius says softly. He reaches out to run his fingers through Loki’s dark curls, pulling the god’s attention back to him, deciding to play into it. When Loki looks back up at him with tear tracks down his face, Mobius just tuts and moves his hand down to wipe at Loki’s face with his thumb.

ooh interesting interesting. I actually did this one not too long ago but I can do it again, with a different set of fics this time. these are pretty much all pulled from my Author's Favorites series on AO3

our love would live a half-life on the surface (MDZS/CQL)

Possibly I'd rate this one as the most fucked up xuexiao I've written; definitely it's the most fucked up ostensible fix-it fic. and like! I did fix it! sort of! some things anyway!

It was really fun to write because of how deeply it's set in Xue Yang's POV, and the fun of trying to convey what's going on outside of his blinkered and undeniably skewed understanding of the world. I also had a lot of fun balancing between the genuinely fucked up nature of what Xue Yang is doing throughout this fic and his genuine desire to make things better and just completely failing to understand how to go about doing that.

“Why’s it matter?” Xue Yang snapped. “It doesn’t. Or it doesn’t need to. So you killed some people. So what? I get you’re upset about it right now - obviously - but it’s not like you need to be. They weren’t anyone important.” “Everyone is important,” Xiao Xingchen said. “Bullshit,” Xue Yang said firmly. “Most people aren’t. Why do they matter so much to you anyway? It’s not like you knew them. Most of them,” he amended, before Xiao Xingchen could bring up fucking Zichen. “So just - forget about it.” Xiao Xingchen made a faint sound at the back of his throat. “Is there anything human in you at all,” he said, and Xue Yang sank his teeth into his cheek, the taste of blood spreading across his tongue. He yanked the bandage the rest of the way off. “Probably not,” he said hoarsely, and started cleaning the blood off Xiao Xingchen’s face where it’d gotten smeared all over his cheeks and around his eyes. Gently. He didn’t want to actually hurt him.

what little girls are made of (MCU)

I went back and forth on a few different MCU fics but decided on this one because it gets a little less love than a lot of them and I'm deeply fond of it. I love Natasha dearly and one of the things I love about her is the potential for how weird she can be. And also I'm always on a campaign to give her more female friends.

“Is that how you usually make friends?” she asked. Natasha cocked her head to the side like she was thinking. “I made one of them by pretending to be someone else so she’d hire me,” she said. “That’s different.” It sounded like a joke. Sharon suspected it was also serious. “Then there’s Maria – I was a hundred-ten pounds of pissed off at the world when I met her. The other ones…one I met through an alien invasion and one was trying to kill me. Then there’s Wilson – I did knock on his door first.” Sharon stared at her. Romanoff smiled, a little – still sharp but maybe a little brittle. “I don’t really do usual, Agent Carter.”

Ground Zero (MDZS/CQL)

I wrote this one in an afternoon and I'm happy enough with it that I've never written another version, which is kind of saying something. I'll often circle around pivotal events in a characters' life and write a few different versions of them, and the finger-crushening is so central to Xue Yang's story that I might've done the same, but I ended up satisfied enough with this version to pretty much leave it alone as my Definitive Account (more or less).

I think what I was trying to convey here on a visceral level was the horror and the pain of that experience, which I think sometimes gets minimized into "just lost a finger." And the surrounding circumstances that shape and define Xue Yang's understanding of the world going forward because of it.

“What’s one more dead beggar?” A sigh. “If I cut off the hand there’s good odds he’ll bleed to death. If I don’t there’s good odds it’ll go foul and he’ll die in a week. What do you want?” Don’t take my hand, he thought dazedly. Don’t. Please don’t. “Start with the finger,” said the other voice. “Then we’ll see.” “Fine, fine.” Xue Yang could feel his breathing coming faster. He opened his eyes just long enough to see the man weighing a butcher’s knife, then slammed them closed again, heart pounding in his stomach. He screamed when the man touched what was left of his little finger, pulling it away from the others. Thrashed, reflexively, trying to get away. “Hold still, you little cur,” the man said harshly, and the knife went through easy like it’d gone easy into Xiao Hu when the bodyguard had stabbed him for cutting a gentry purse. Honestly, he barely even felt the cut itself.

The Sad Heart of Ruth (A Song of Ice and Fire)

An old fic but I'm still happy with it! Which isn't always the case. Throwback to a fandom I haven't written for in years but a relationship I still have a lot of feelings about. A serious outlier, in terms of my ships, but one I'm inexplicably fond of nonetheless.

And yeah, me writing about grief again. I'm always writing about grief.

It was small things she remembered. The warmth he radiated when they lay in bed together. The way his forehead crinkled when he was thinking hard about something. The strange, shy, hesitant (naïve) joy she’d felt on their wedding day. The way he’d cried into her shoulder when he’d heard of his brother’s deaths. “The King in the North is dead,” the Blackfish said, his face like carved stone. “Oh,” she said.

The Season of Grace Coming Out of the Void (Black Jewels Trilogy)

Another throwback to an old fandom that's kind of an eternal fandom in some ways; I'm very proud of this brief snippet of an AU. I think it came out well and (surprisingly) concise for what it is; it could've gotten very elaborate but I think it's stronger as the short piece that I left it.

He’d had them back a week when Daemon turned up in his study halfway through the night and announced casually, “If you do anything to Lucivar, I’ll kill you.” Saetan set down his pen and looked at his namesake. He expected to see anger, or suspicion. He found nothing. Just blank gold eyes looking placidly back at him. A shiver crawled down his spine. Saetan nodded once. “Understood,” he said. Daemon ghosted back out the door. Saetan stared after him, and wondered if he was supposed to be happy that his boys were talking to each other.

Today's adventurer spotlight is @distracteddream!

Today's contributor spotlight features @distracteddream!

"DistractedDream (@DistracteDream) has more ideas than time to write! When not writing, she's usually thinking about what to write next."

Hi, my dear. I’ve been thinking about this ask since you’ve sent it. Artificial and I... have had a complicated relationship the past couple months, both because of personal and creative reasons. I just made some big changes to the outline and I think I’ll be happy with them (I feel unblocked writing the story, which is a good first sign). But... it’s a big risk, in the end, and we’ll see how it goes. I hope by the time they’re relevant, I’ll have convinced the readers as well.

The universe is just... so big in my head. I almost always have to cut paragraphs or sections of lore exposition out of the chapters, because I want to shoehorn it in, but it doesn’t really serve any purpose in moving the story forward. FFXV translates very well to a sci-fi/cyberpunk universe.

What I’m most excited about right now? Ignis coming clean about all the secrets he’s hiding. I’m pretty sure a lot of readers have guessed right now, or have speculation, but to actually have it out there and get to explore Gladio (and possibly other chocobro’s) reactions to it... super motivating.

A bit of trivia about all the Artificial bros:Gladio: has visited all planets in Starsystem Eos (if you count quick drop off missions with the Kingsglaive Spec Ops)Noctis: was once engaged to be married, prior to the missionIgnis: has been a feature of the Lucis Caelum household since he was 12, an Operative since he was 16Prompto: ... Prompto will be explaining a lot about himself soon, but all of his tattoos have sentimental meaning

I still don’t understand the appeal of Jou/Kaiba. It’s not a ‘I want to defeat you because you are a worthy adversary and that would prove my skills’ sort of thing, it’s a ‘I literally have no respect for you as a human being and repeatedly compare you to an animal’ thing. Rivalry ships have to start with them on relatively equal ground with some respect for each other, and I just don’t see that with those two, especially with Kaiba to Jou. I understand they have similar backstories, but they came out of them very different people. Jou deserves better than being with someone who repeatedly called him worthless and an animal.

I HATE TITLES. I usually ask Serenity to give me a title if I don’t rely on song lyrics.

GJH YEAH WHY DO WE EVEN GOTTA GIVE EM TITLES??? I’M NOT NAMING MY FICS SHIT ANYMORE!!! THEY AIN’T GETTIN NO NAMES TF

I always feel whatever title I give doesn’t tell enough about the story, you know? Like there’s so much that goes into the story and you’re telling me I have to find like just a handful of words to convey that???? Illegal. I’ve only ever published ONE thing that didn’t come from song lyrics or the movie the fic’s based off of it’s hard dude it’s too damn h a r d to be original