Well this is gonna. Make me sob. Look what you've done Laurie

6. Apocalypse Lullaby by The Wailin' Jennys

It was a soft world, the one they'd built together. As much as it could be in times like this, anyway. They tried so hard to make it soft. There were slow mornings with tangled, sleepy limbs, chipped mugs steaming with tea, laundry hung on a cotton line in the wind.

Ren sat and watched as Etho climbed a ladder to the roof, fiddling with the antennae there. Coiled cables sloughed off the shingles, stretching alongside the house and into the basement below. The sunlight streaming through the leaves of the oak dappled the porch floor beneath him, and Ren sighed in contentment as he polished the metal of the shotgun in his hands.

The actions were far too familiar to be truly comforting - his hands should not have known the motion so well. This was a hard thing, in their soft world. There were many hard things outside their fences, and there must be something of answering hardness to meet them when they found their way inside.

hi laurie, i spent far too long scrolling through ao3 for these lmao

also bonus mumbo ones where the author just started liveblogging in the tags

The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year?

GOOD QUESTION. uh. well, this seems to largely be for things that i published this year - i'm realizing keralis gives me a lot of trouble in a wip i'm working on, for example, but you all won't see that for A WHILE. i'll give two different answers here, then.

first: i wrote a lot of grian, but largely in ficlets. writing grian in a longfic is very hard for me for some reason - hence why he gets demoted to "the world's most important character that doesn't show up" in every longfic i have with him in it, haha. (even if you count cura te ipsum, he's a background character at most.)