rhodochrosite | Recent Entries

answers are generally indexed in chronological order per subheading, my views may have shifted quite significantly over time so please take older responses (as in, literally anything prior to 2021) and anything relating to mbti or synastry with a grain of salt, and feel free to send me an ask if there's anything you'd like me to discuss further!!

last updated: 16/08/23

( ✨ )

SKINCARE

not a lot of change, vast majority of these are products I've already reviewed. holy grails marked with *:

AM routine

wash face with water
*ma:nyo galac niacin 2.0 essence – beloved holy grail which I have been religiously using for more than five years.
dr satin caviar ghk-cu skin recovery essence gel – I ran out of moisturiser halfway through my taiwan trip and couldn't find either dr g clear soothing cream or clinique moisture surge anywhere so i went into watsons intending to get the naturie hatomugi on mich's rec and then got aggressively sold on this one by a staff member instead so I was like sure peggle i won't say no to a buy 1 get 1 deal. this is a VERY light and watery gel, so light that it's more of an essence than a moisturiser really and probably not moisturising enough on its own for the current state of my skin (quite dry) but it's fine for a summer day moisturiser under sunscreen. definitely won't be enough for winter but i'll switch back to clinique moisture surge by then.
beauty of joseon relief sun rice probiotics sunscreen – gifted to me and it's fine, no white cast and light nongreasy finish and doesn't pill under makeup and feels hydrating. I do prefer the skin1004 hyalucica sunscreen though I have bought the round lab birch juice sunscreen to try next.
if I'm not going to work I will use a tinted sunscreen instead:
- skin1004 madagascar centella tone brightening tone-up sunscreen – this is genuinely awful like there is just no way to use this to make it not pill. I have tried waiting half an hour after moisturiser to let it dry down and that does not help at all. the formula is thick and unpleasant to apply. it always makes me so sad when skin1004 products don't work for me because I love so much of their work but this is definitely an anti-rec. but I refuse to waste product so I will finish the tube if it's the last thing I do.
- aestura derma UV 365 red calming tone-up sunscreen – this is a much nicer formula than the skin1004 in the sense that it actually stays on the skin and the brightening/skintone evening effect is quite good.

PM routine

*skin1004 madagascar centella cleansing oil – just the best oil cleanser ever.
etude house soonjung whip cleanser – it's no peach & lily power cleansing gel but it's also not $70. does the job of second cleanser fine.
institut esthederm osmoclean hydra-replenishing fresh lotion – rec from an olive young staff member who took one look at me and typed into papago Are you very red and sensitive? 😭 my skin was genuinely in the trenches when I was in korea, I had some kind of butterfly rash/uv allergic reaction and half convinced myself that I had lupus so I was desperately trying to find something super hydrating and gentle and soothing to fix my skin barrier. kind of dubious about whether this is actually doing anything because it's pretty much just water in its viscosity so i am unsure how effective the hydration really is but I have a massive bottle and it doesn't seem to be harming me.
*dear klairs supple preparation unscented toner – I just keep coming back to her, every time I think I don't need her and I drop her from my routine my skin gets noticeably worse.
differin – purchased otc when I was in la with mich since it's prescription-only here (although I think adalpalene has recently become otc here too) and it's extremely effective but I have to be soooo careful about applying only a tiny tiny amount especially in winter or it is like a hydrogen bomb on my skin barrier.
*skin1004 madagascar centella ampoule – if I could only have one serum ever it would be this one I do intend to repurchase until the end of time.
dr satin caviar ghk-cu skin recovery essence gel
isntree hyaluronic acid water sleeping mask – I usually layer this over the dr satin at night because otherwise the dr satin is not moisturising enough.

MAKEUP

daily work makeup routine:

kissme heroine make prime liquid eyeliner rich keep (mocha greige) – this was a rec from mich, it looked sooo good and precise on her I had to try it for myself and although I've only had it for a week or so I think I like it more than the regular heroine make eyeliner which has previously been my holy grail. i like using lighter shades for a more subtle look at work but a lot of grey/brown eyeliners are so unpigmented that they straight up disappear but this eyeliner hits the right balance of visible v understated. staying power is fine as well, she holds up through the work day and a 5k run (haven't tested it with a 10k yet), and the tip is very fine so good for drawing thin wings as I prefer.
jung saem mool essential skin nuder cushion (light) - I thought I would never love a cushion more than I loved the clio mesh but she has been supplanted although I still think the mesh application is nicer than the jsm's traditional sponge cushion. basically since my skin has gotten a lot drier after I started using differin and I haven't fully figured out the right skincare to handle it yet, the clio mesh was starting to pill really badly on me, so I picked up the jsm at olive young in seoul on pea's rec. it applies so beautifully, very light and skinlike satiny finish, still looks fresh after a 10k run. love her very much, will repurchase.
the saem cover perfection tip concealer (clear beige) – the formula is fine and doesn't lift my base but the shade I got is too light so it's really annoying to use for spot concealing. I have a tiny bit left of a maybelline concealer I've been using for like 5 years that I tend to reach for instead because the shade match is better.
kissme heavy rotation colouring eyebrow (natural brown) – just picked up the first brow mascara I saw at donki i'm not really fussy about brows. I think the brush on the wand is too thick and gives too much pigment payoff for my liking but also I think it might be because I seriously need to thin my brows out. might go lighter or switch to clear gel when this one runs out.
judydoll double under eyeliner (#N01) – recently started getting into aegyosal makeup and this definitely makes it a lot more convenient, the shadow end is a good greyish contouring shade but the highlight end is a little too bright for me, I swipe it very very lightly under my eyes and then blend it out with a small brush or a fingernail if I'm lazy. I still do undereye glitter at the centre of my eyes, usually the glitter from the espoir real eye palette or sometimes one of the silver glitters from my cheeryep palette.
I have a bunch of blushes that I rotate through – the blush shade in my espoir palette, a light pink Innisfree blush which I think may be coming up on 7 or 8 years old, a dark pink shimmery judydoll blush which I think I have reviewed previously, and more recently acquired:
- fwee pudding pot blush (like) – got this after pea pointed it out at tokyu hands and I fell prey to the hype. my first non-powder blush and I still don't know if I like it tbh. I find it kind of a hassle to apply compared to powder blushes which are quick and easy… I always end up using too little out of fear of pigment and then it doesn't even look like anything. but it is a really interesting texture and the colour is pretty, quite a vibrant cool toned pink. the blendability kinda mid, I have to work quickly to make sure it diffuses out properly and I feel like I shouldn't need to work this hard but im not sure if it's just a cream(? jelly? non-newtonian fluid?) blush thing. anyway I think it looks so luminous when blended out with very pale pink powder blush but I think it would look even better with lavender or blue blush so I might investigate that.
- girlcult emotion blush (invisible rosy) – ok so I did buy this for the packaging because I think girlcult products are gorgeousss but I love how this looks on me, I've never tried a red/maroon blush before since I usually go for pink blushes but this looks like actual blood under the skin (like in the sense of a natural flush). the formula is like the fwee blush but I find it easier to work with maybe because it is a little bit more natural in finish so it looks less pigmented and also because it's in a compact rather than a pot so there's more surface area for the brush. really good for if I'm going for a less girly look.
clio prism highlighter duo (lavender voyage) – nose bridge, nose tip, cupid's bow, under the tails of my eyebrows, and I would do inner eye corner if I hadn't developed eczema there after crying so much over fuckass abu dhabi 2025.
canmake marshmallow finish powder (matte light ocher) – i don't love this tbh but I think it's because I started using it at a time where my skin was getting drier so I don't really need the coverage of a pressed powder anymore and it tends to separate a bit by the end of the day. I use this on my forehead and nose corners or just to set concealer. probably won't repurchase but the packaging is pretty if a bit flimsy.
pramy setting spray (matte) – i've just finished a bottle and i really liked this. was doing like 3-4 layers when I was in seoul for tds4 in july and my makeup did not melt off my face even when it felt like my skin was melting off my face. but also I think the products I use are quite budgeproof generally. the mist was quite fine which I liked (urban decay setting spray pissed me off bc it would spray out huge droplets) and there was no offputting smell also unlike the ud setting spray.
I also rotate through a bunch of lip products. recently acquired:
- amuse jelly lip tint (seoul girl) – once again a tokyo 2024 purchase. basically I saw the Recommended By Wonyoung sticker, blacked out momentarily, and came to with another lip tint in my duty free package. i do regret not getting one of the Japan exclusive shades but I didn't realise they were Japan exclusive until we already left donki ): seoul girl looks a lot pinker than I usually go for lip tints (I had a similar shade of etude house dear darling water tint and I do not think it looked good on me) but the shade is actually so nice and not as scarily vibrant as it looks in the bottle. and the formula is really lovely! it has better lasting power / less patchiness than the romand dewy tint and etude house dear darling tint, and I like the viscosity better than the judydoll. the jellylike glossiness is also really nice and works as advertised. I think this is actually my favourite lip tint formula I've ever tried, thank you wonyo <3
- girlcult unreal high shine lip glaze chameleon (dementor) – this is a very dark and gothic red, usually I will just apply a tiny bit to the centre of my lips and diffuse it out so it looks less scary to me. pretty much my only non-pink/mauve lip product. it has a very thin and watery consistency like the judydoll tint I had before but I find it a little bit drying. I will usually top it with a gloss because I don't use enough for it to have any kind of finish but I do really like it for occasions where pink does not feel like the move. beautiful packaging also, as with all girlcult products.
- aou dewy bar (fig) – bought on a whim at hemeko and I don't love the formula, you have to have extremely moisturised and line-free lips for it to apply well and the colour is a bit too shiny and vibrant like they weren't kidding about the dewy but I think it makes me look a bit like a clown. the bullet itself is also very soft so it's easy to over-apply.
- alternative stereo lip potion balmy rose (soft mauve) – I wanted a mlbb product and this is pretty much the exact same colour as my lips to the point where maybe it is a bit redundant but I like the cream-like formula a lot. it's not matte but it's not glossy either, like it really is giving Normal Lips. good for when I can't decide what colour I want to do.
- flortte sea pearl lipstick (shell pink) – this is like the better version of the aou lip balm it does everything the aou does but better and the packaging is prettier too. hydrating on the lips, glossy finish without being too shiny, applies well over slightly drier lips, colour not too bright. I like to throw this one in my bag for touch-ups regardless of which lip product I started the day with because it does pigment + gloss at the same time in a bullet format which is easier to reapply than a tint.

other makeup I wanted to discuss:

cheeryep 16 colour eyeshadow palette (fleeting life) – I bought this because I was struggling to do concert appropriate makeup with my neutral and pink/mauve palettes and wanted something more striking. I love the colour story on this even though it is intimidatingly intense. the shades are really pigmented and the formula is lovely but I will need to do more experimentation to figure out how to put together a look that is not decaying zombie adjacent.
entropy tulle gloss (robe) – it's just sooooo pretty. I don't think the mauve colour really shows up on me but I love the sparkle, the formula is not annoyingly sticky and it has decent staying power like the glitter does last through a bit of eating and drinking.
nuse reju lip gloss (dazzle grape) – the actual gloss is nice, though it's not pigmented enough to really add any colour to bare lips so I tend to use it on top of a lip tint or as a touch-up throughout the day. unfortunately the formula seems to both separate and dry out very quickly so you either get some kind of clear oily liquid or a dried lump when you first squeeze the tube which is very wasteful and annoying.
unleashia healthy green cushion (#21) – almost forgot I tested this out. application was so annoying because the cushionless gimmick meant no palette space to tap off excess product and the foundation also dispensed really unevenly, and it would separate on my forehead by the end of the day. did not like it at all.

FRAGRANCE

some notable acquisitions:

j-scent hojicha (coconut, peanut, laver / jasmine, mint, wintergreen / iris, cedarwood, vanilla, clover) – got this in tokyo as well but I had been looking for a tea scent for a while (have been dithering over acqua di parma osmanthus for 2 years) and the roasted note in hojicha is so interesting and unusual. the projection is super intimate and the longevity is low, but it's a rollerball application so that’s to be expected. I think this pulls slightly savoury on me which makes me kombucha girl a bit but I like to layer it with a vanilla gourmand to sweeten it back up. wish I'd gotten the ramune as well, such a fun scent!
byredo rose of no man's land (turkish rose, pink pepper / turkish rose, raspberry blossom / papyrus, amber) – rollerball gifted to me, a very standard and unthreatening rose scent which is not something I would typically buy for myself but I like layering this under kenzo flower in the air so it doesn't disappear instantly.
royal water angel wings (lemon, peach / orchid, freesia, lily, rose, violet, hyacinth / musk, sandalwood, amber) – I don't even know how to describe how this smells, it's clean and cool but in a sweet way that doesn't immediately pull floral or fruity or soapy, almost aquatic to me but not like an ocean or swimming pool it's like how fantasy books describe mountain spring water as fresh and sweet. if I concentrate I can identify the peach and white floral notes but it is really not like anything I've ever smelled before. longevity is great as well. really love this one.
setsuna dancing in the moonlight (vanilla, caramel cake / marshmallow, ice cream / sugared musk, white chocolate) – this is an indie australian perfumery and I'm always happy to support local small businesses but I really wish I liked this more! on paper this looked exactly up my alley since I was looking for a new supersweet night occasion appropriate gourmand, so I blind bought the sample size. I've seen the scent described as sticky date pudding and I think that is fairly accurate in the bottle but on me it just smells like traditional chinese medicine. like it's not giving dessert, it's giving qi replenishment. really strong, projection and longevity is amazing from just one spray but I don't necessarily want to smell like herbal jujube soup yk.
phlur heavy cream (lemon sugar, marshmallow, orange / jasmine blossom, coconut cream, ambrettolide / vanilla mousse, salted caramel, whipped cream) – birthday gift from pea and I loveeee it, perfect light vanilla caramel gourmand with a refreshing citrusy note that stops it from being too cloying for everyday use. i don't typically like lemon notes in vanilla gourmands because why is there sour in my dessert scent but I think it works well here because the scent is so airy and balanced and it interacts with my skin chemi really well. this is my Going For A Walk / grocery shopping scent, like it's just super easy to wear.
p-seven honyun black tea (bergamot, mandarin, pepper, nutmeg / lavender, carnation, orange blossom, iris, black tea / cedarwood, guaiac wood, oakmoss, vetiver, musk, tonka bean) / ruby black tea (honey, cane sugar / cinnamon, jasmine, oolong tea / cedarwood) / vintage black tea (bergamot, sage, fir / brown sugar, vanilla, assam black tea / healingwood, amber, musk) – bought the discovery set at a niche perfume shop in taiwan recced to me by pea. all three of these are very lovely office safe tea scents, good blend of vivid black tea notes with an appropriate amount of sweetness. ruby black tea is probably my favourite out of the three I love that honey top note.
voyager criollo (dark chocolate, coffee, plum / raspberry, jasmine / patchouli, tonka bean, honey) – also bought in taiwan. was not expecting to love it as much as I did especially because patchouli is usually a bit offputting to me, but it smells like a delicious cherry ripe on me in the best way possible. I had been wanting a night gourmand scent since the setsuna wasn't really working for me and this is giving sophisticated and mysterious and scorpio in a way that makes me feel a bit like I'm cosplaying a girl who is much cooler than me but I do believe in fake it till you make it. starting to think that honey is a note I need to be looking out for more. I had actually been intending to pick up d'annam mooncake from the delicious sounding notes but every sweet note disappeared on my skin and it just smelled like straight up salt and eggyolk which was very sad, and i didn't really love anything else i smelled from d'annam.
janua mine wish (pear, freesia, bergamot / jasmine, grapefruit, pear blossom / cedar, amber, satin musk, cotton candy) – decant generously gifted to me by pea, the fairy floss pear i ate delicioussss this gets me so many compliments at work. perfect sweet fruity floral for summer, nothing groundbreaking but doesn't need to be because it's very good at being what it is.
giorgio armani my way (orange blossom, bergamot / tuberose, jasmine / vanilla, white musk, cedar) – got a free sample of this last week when I was shopping for running gear and was shocked by how much I like it even though I should not be surprised since I generally love department store designer frags because they're always bubblegum candy sweet. I think the orange blossom note is what makes it more interesting to me than other similar generic designer perfumes?

so I neglected to recap 13 months of reading in which I actually did not read that much but I did start reading sports bios/autobios for various canon review purposes late last year, which was probably the first time I have read nonfiction for leisure since I was like eight years old. here is a quick review post, not including the books that i read by ctrl f'ing to "vettel" "seb" etc. tennis and f1 below:

( You are only as good as your wins. )

highlight reel of quotes from unstoppable: the ultimate biography of max verstappen - mark hughes.

MAX INTERIORITY STUDIES

Introduction
Talk to him today and there’s no apparent damage; he’s relaxed and sociable, with a ready smile. The most special part of his personality, the most critical part, is that he is not cowed by anything. He fears no one and reputations mean nothing to him and never have. He’s straight-talking and on track he’s always the dominant one in any tango. But there’s been zero rebellion. Not as far as anyone knows. Just wide-eyed, straightforward, matter-of-fact openness, very characteristically Dutch in that way, taking forward the life and career Jos helped to shape.
//
Sensitive enough to engender a good atmosphere around him but not particularly reflective, Max doesn’t give the impression of devoting much time to contemplation. So the deep psychological questions about his childhood relationship with his father just wouldn’t resonate.
//
He’s a nice guy, a caring guy, a reasonable guy, but not one seemingly troubled by things beyond his immediate orbit. There is always this pull towards equilibrium. Not in the car, obviously.
//
But he is defined within the terms of the sport, and is not the sort of character who will transcend it in the way Lewis Hamilton has or Ayrton Senna did. He’s too straightforward for that, too uninterested in the world outside of racing. Because it’s a world in which he’s never lived. But within the bubble in which he has spent his entire existence, very few in history have ever flown so high.

Chapter 1: Monaco
Two things about Max Verstappen: his competitive zeal is extraordinarily intense, even by the standards of an F1 driver, and he tends to be binary in his assessment of situations—black or white, not grey.

Chapter 2: Father and Son
That Max is every bit as tough as Jos, however, is beyond question, and his aggression can flare, Jos-like, when provoked, both in the car and out. He has better control of his temper than his dad ever did, though. He can usually decouple the instinct from the action.

Chapter 3: The Making of a Champion
It is easy to see how, having reached the pinnacle of the real-life sport, Max found a new obsession where he could strive for excellence, assimilate afresh the requirements needed to dominate. This gives us perhaps more clarity on just where the urge to race in the first place came from. It wasn’t from Jos. There was no rebellion from Max against Jos’ dictates because it was Max who was pushing for it and Max who always wanted more. Max soaked up the knowledge and skill like a sponge as fast as Jos could pour it in, until he had surpassed his father.

i reckon a bit of a nature/nurture chicken-egg situation here tbh

//
‘Some people probably cannot deal with that kind of behaviour,’ said Max in 2021, ‘but I needed it. I was that type of character, probably, who needed this kind of treatment.’

macks……………………………………………. me in hell: Where is jos verstappen

//
When he’s racing, Max is entirely devoted to the task at hand. When he’s not, he relaxes.
//
He races because that’s what he does, that’s pretty much all of him… Just as reaching the goal of F1 was almost a routine matter; just as winning a grand prix on his debut with Red Bull was too.

Chapter 4: Disrupting the Hierarchy
[Max’s] recovery drive to victory is a beautiful demonstration of how he can decouple, in an instant, his natural ‘elegant’ driving style from the competitive necessities of the moment when overtaking sometimes demands a more brutal approach. Some of his out-brakes of rivals are far from elegant, but still require incredibly finely-honed skills to be made to work. It’s not only his super-precise sense of where the last possible braking point is (which is very different to the best braking point in terms of the ultimate lap time), but also the subsequent control which invariably rescues the wild moments his manoeuvres have given him. So he can drive with all the flamboyance and apparent wildness in the world when he needs to, but the default is the elegance which enables him to extract the ultimate lap time from a kart or car. And even at 12 years old—and almost certainly from well before then—he can effortlessly, unthinkingly, switch between the two at will.
//
Max clearly had that sublimely sensitive feel almost from the start, incredibly attuned to the messages the car and tyres were giving him in a way that few have ever matched. He didn’t know as much about the technicalities of karts as Jos and never sought to.

Chapter 5: Man and Machine
Max intuitively understands the dynamics and how to make the car go faster, even if not always the technical reasons behind that.

Chapter 7: From Rookie to Record Breaker
But Max had never been overly concerned with others defining for him the realms of the possible.

Chapter 8: Tensions Running High
But when attack and verve were the order of the day, [Max] was truly formidable.

Chapter 9: Heroes and Villains
That’s how it is with Max. Things happen, then it’s in the past. There’s little or no reflection. It’s a quality which takes the poison out of potentially vitriolic situations as he doesn’t seem to hold grudges. Winning is all there is and everything else is subservient to that.

Chapter 13: Irritations vs Rewards
Late in the race, he asked Lambiase what the fastest lap time had been. ‘We’re not concerned about that,’ replied the engineer. ‘Yeah, but I am,’ said Max.
//
As the marketing-led direction of the sport ramps up, it seems Max increasingly struggles to shut off that inbuilt Verstappen impulse to dismiss what he sees as stupid and irrelevant, and it eats into the energy reserves that keep him doing F1. There was a revealing moment in the official press conference that preceded the Miami Grand Prix weekend, after Max was asked a particularly vacuous question, when a look of irritated exasperation flashed across his face, before he then composed himself to give a suitably bland answer. These giveaway micro-expressions seem all of a piece with his growing disenchantment with the sport he has come to dominate. How big those reserves are and how much they are replenished by the rewards are racing are something only he could know—and even he probably doesn’t.

RED BULL’S GOLDEN CHILD SOLDIER

Chapter 1: Monaco
The events of Monaco 2022 are quite illuminating in this regard. They tell us about the complex, delicate relationship between Red Bull and Max and how even though they rely on each other totally for their combined success, in some respects it’s still not a full marriage. They have been partners for many years and enjoyed good times. But there’s still a distance—and it’s put in place by the Verstappens. It’s about control.
//
Verstappen is central to Red Bull: it all revolves around him at an operational and support level, he’s very happy in that role and that brings its own spiralling benefits… But even now that Max and Red Bull were contractually aligned for the foreseeable, it still wasn’t the Ferrari/Schumacher love-in where the joins were almost invisible and not a raised eyebrow of public criticism ever crossed Schumacher’s face. It wasn’t even the slightly less serene but still very close relationship of Mercedes and Hamilton.
//
It just works, [Horner] says. ‘Max feels very comfortable in the environment. There is a belief and a passion and a shared philosophy of how we go racing and I think he enjoys that. He is very loyal and protective of the team.’
//
Red Bull, much more than any corporate automotive team, can wear a little bit of controversy quite comfortably. The Verstappens fit into this ethos well—it’s even possible that Max derives some performance from it. This boy was always going to go racing if he wanted to and had the talent. It’s led to a certain free-spiritedness in his approach, answering only to himself.
//
Perhaps more than any driver on the grid, maybe even more than Fernando Alonso, Verstappen is racing on his own terms. Red Bull’s only intolerance—and it’s a severe one—is lack of performance, which is not something Max has ever had to worry about. He oozes performance, it’s locked into his own DNA, allowing him to be supremely relaxed in doing what he does—which only adds to the performance.

Chapter 7: From Rookie to Record Breaker
It’s tempting to imagine Max awakened the spirit of the rebellious young Marko. The Verstappens were the beneficiaries of his enthusiastic crusade, probably way more than they had anticipated. It made Max’s position far stronger than it would have been at, say, Mercedes or Ferrari. He was much more than just another driver in the Red Bull programme. He was Marko’s pet project.
//
‘He motivates everyone in the team,’ Xevi Pujolar told De Telegraaf. ‘Everyone sees his talent. But also his way of racing. Max is an attacker and that is something that captivates your mind.’
//
Christian Horner: ‘Max can be very demanding and very sharp when emotions are running high. He’s a thoroughbred, very strong-willed, and there’s many an engineer who will wilt under that pressure because Max’s expectation is incredibly high. GP is able to handle that and they each can give as good as they get, so much so that sometimes you forget which is the driver and which is the engineer.’

Chapter 10: All that was Needed was the Car
‘Max is a very difficult teammate,’ says Christian Horner, ‘because it must be soul destroying that you are looking at a piece of data and he’s three quarters of a second up the road and you are thinking how the hell has he done that? And it’s not just at one race, it’s at every race. Yet he doesn’t demand number one status, he doesn’t have anything in his contract that stipulates he has to have all the best bits, the newest bits, the developments; he is very fair in that respect, but the team will always gravitate around the driver that has the best chance at the end of the day.’

Chapter 12: Unbeatable
‘Can we do this for many, many, years?’ were Max’s words to his Red Bull teammates as he rode the high of his slow-down victory lap in Abu Dhabi 2021.

DRAGON & PHOENIX

sure i'm just visually doing ctrl-f to leclerc but why else am i reading sports nonfiction if not to improve my yaoi scholarship.

Chapter 4: Disrupting the Hierarchy
Both were disqualified, Max for deliberately forcing Leclerc off the track in retaliation for earlier contact when Leclerc had relieved Max of the lead. Leclerc’s disqualification was for driving Max off the track after the end of the race in a fit of pique.

“a fit of pique” is soooooo cute

Chapter 5: Man and Machine
Frits van Amersfoort: ‘An average race driver, normally gets better where he was always good, but forgets where he was weak. And it was the opposite for Max. He knew where he was weak and what he had to work on, and that’s the talent, that’s something you can’t teach. Charles [Leclerc] was exactly the same; from day one they knew what to do.’
//
Atze Kerkhof: ‘With a textbook driving style—aggressive on the brake and very smooth coming off, turning at the right time, you can get within five-tenths [over a lap]. But that last five-tenths is dancing on a very thin line, balancing the car and stepping away from the textbook braking style—it’s still there in the basics but it needs to be adjusted intermittently in millimetres to have a positive effect on the balance. And that’s what [Max] and Charles Leclerc can do better than others.’

Chapter 10: All that was Needed was the Car
Max’s old karting adversary Charles Leclerc, now at Ferrari, was setting the tracks alight, especially in qualifying.
//
At Silverstone, the Verstappen-Leclerc dice continued where it had left off in Austria, albeit only for third position this time as Mercedes dominated. Their wheel-to-wheel dice had the crowd cheering wildly and this time it was Leclerc who emerged on top.

Chapter 12: Unbeatable
The Mercedes, driven by Verstappen’s 2021 rival Lewis Hamilton and Hamilton’s new teammate George Russell, were badly afflicted and would no longer be Red Bull’s main competitors. That turned out to be the Ferrari driven by Verstappen’s old karting rival Charles Leclerc.
//
Max’s on-track problem was now Leclerc, who in Bahrain qualified on pole, 0.1 seconds faster, and proceeded to lead the race, with Max in chase… After the first pit stops, Leclerc calmly repelled Max’s three out-braking moves on the Ferrari.
//
In Saudi Arabia, Max at his tenacious best won a brilliant race-long dice with Leclerc…
//
What was noticeable about his thrillingly close dices with Leclerc in both Bahrain and Saudi was that there were none of the ruthless, zero-compromise moves he'd so often used against Hamilton. He denied there was any difference, but others saw it.

WHO ELSE SMILEDDDDD... max races charles more respectfully than he races other people it's trueeee

THE TWO BULLS IN THE RED BULL LOGO IN QUESTION

Chapter 1: Monaco
Team boss Christian Horner is a skilled operator and understands the delicate dynamic well. His first experience of walking that line came in Red Bull’s first era of title success with Sebastian Vettel who didn’t always react well to any challenge from teammate Mark Webber.
//
‘[Max] can be very sharp and cutting,’ says Horner, ‘when emotions are running high and a lot of engineers would wilt under that strain. He is demanding. The fuse is a little shorter than it was with Seb.’

Chapter 7: From Rookie to Record Breaker
Horner: ‘It’s a quite different relationship to that between Rocky and Seb. Rocky really got into the mind management of how to get Sebastian in the right mental frame whether it was writing things on his balaclava, naming his car, all these little things. It’s a lot less touchy-feely with Max and GP. They are just brutally honest with each other, no holds barred, and in that respect, I think it’s a very pure, very honest, relationship.’

Chapter 10: All that was Needed was the Car
Horner: ‘Sebastian was a very deep-thinking person that needed to feel very secure; he was studious in his attention to detail. That’s where he got his security and confidence from. Max in many respects is much more binary, more straightforward. You bolt him in, you know you’re going to get 110 per cent. You know if he feels he isn’t getting 110 per cent back that pisses him off and he is going to voice it. But that is it. He doesn’t carry it out of the car. But then, he is not going to be the guy that is going to be in a debrief for two and a half hours. He is very specific about what he needs from the car in order to go quicker, he has a very good feel for what he does need, for where the limitations are, but he is not going to take 25 minutes talking about a formation lap and the clutch-biting points and temperatures and so on that Sebastian would do even before he got to the debrief. Max is just very focused on this is what I need to go faster, give me that and I will sort the rest out.’

Chapter 11: Long Live the King
Waiting for him by his motorhome was Sebastian Vettel, who said he just wanted to check that Max was okay. It meant a lot.

GOAT4GOAT

Chapter 3: The Making of a Champion
[Max is] the ultimate insider. When Lewis Hamilton, maybe the ultimate outsider, made his F1 debut in Australia 2007, as he climbed from the car he caught his father’s eye and they celebrated. ‘We’ve done it! We’ve bloody done it!’ they said as they hugged and laughed, having pulled off something that had seemed so extraordinarily remote when they started, so impossible. It’s not a scene which would probably have much resonated with the Verstappens. Max is a way less complex character than rival Hamilton. But then he’s bound to be. He’s had a way less complex set of circumstances to grow up in and a far more certain path to achieving his ambitions.

Chapter 4: Disrupting the Hierarchy
Giancarlo Tinini: ‘Also, he has the same competitive instinct as another of our old drivers, Lewis Hamilton, someone who had to be first in everything, even if it was going down the stairs or drinking a hot chocolate!’

Chapter 5: Man and Machine
Jenson Button: ‘Lewis [Hamilton] can drive with pretty much any balance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He can seem to be struggling but when the moment comes he can just pull the big lap out of the bag regardless of the balance. But Max does seem to be at his absolute fastest with a very unstable car. I think he can get even more from such a car than Lewis. but maybe Lewis’ spread is wider, I don’t know. It’s very close.’

Chapter 6: Fast Track to Formula 3
Tony Shaw: ‘But [Lewis] just took the thing by the scruff of the neck in a very limited around of time. He didn’t mess around, Lewis. He just went hell-for-leather straightaway. Whereas the test with Max, it felt a lot calmer… What they had in common as young teenagers is that they were both bloody quick and totally unfazed to be in a racing car.’

Chapter 7: From Rookie to Record Breaker
[Max] was asked there [at Austin] if he considered Lewis Hamilton—on the verge of sealing his third world championship—the best driver in F1 and replied, ‘I don’t know. Give me his car and I will tell you.’

Chapter 8: Tensions Running High
As they started for the third time, Max was immediately stalking his prey Rosberg…

re Brazil 2016, didn’t want to create a whole new section for 336 but enjoyed how this was phrased lol

//
Ahead now was Hamilton, who was displaying much the same virtuosity as Max but in a faster car.
//
‘I could have closed that door, obviously,’ said Hamilton to Max in the cool-down room before the podium celebrations.

‘But you were fighting for a championship,’ Max finished off.

‘Yeah, I didn’t want to risk it,’ said Hamilton.

That conversation summarised the basic dynamics of the race but the bold way Verstappen had made his move clearly registered with Hamilton, as he referred to it a week later after winning the Japanese Grand Prix with Max right on his tail…. It sounded for all the world like Max had got into his head.

Chapter 9: Heroes and Villains
Verstappen had pricked [Lewis’] attention in Malaysia the previous year and the tension was only building. Max was surely fully aware of the significance of how he chose to race Hamilton.
//
It was a brilliant win by Ricciardo but perhaps more significantly, an extraordinary little vignette of the pride of the pack and the young challenger whose thrusting energy had been de-railed by a cynical slap down. Was Hamilton surprised that Max had tried there? ‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘I’ve not ever seen anyone pass anyone there, certainly not a top driver. I’m surprised he tried it.’ Leaving unsaid that Lewis himself had invited it.
//
Verstappen refused to surrender and the wheel-to-wheel dive lasted for the next few corners until Hamilton used the run-off on the exit of Turn 18, effectively surrendering rather than risk contact and a non-finish.

‘I thought you gave me a lot of room,’ said an amused Verstappen later. ‘Yeah,’ said Hamilton, ‘I never know with you. I didn’t want a coming together…’
//
Hamilton seemed to be offering advice, saying, ‘Yeah, but he had nothing to lose. You did.’ It was an expression of the different stages they were at in their careers, Hamilton talking from the perspective of someone who’d been annealed by years of success and was able to take a strategic view, Max still with it all to do and bursting with unfulfilled ambition.

But Max’s charging, uncompromising style continued to make Hamilton wary of him on track.
//
Chapter 10: All that was Needed was the Car
‘I braked into Turn 1 and all of a sudden Max is alongside me. If you’ve seen races before, I always leave Max a lot of space—it’s the smartest thing you can do. But there wasn’t a lot of space for me to give him…’

Max was still clearly very much in Hamilton’s head. Whenever he was around, Hamilton was not racing naturally.

Chapter 11: Long Live the King
The principle of entropy always prevails, though, as the energy dissipates and the names made by success are coaxed away by rivals; a steady erosion of the advantage over the team in the ascendant, in this case Red Bull. If we’re lucky, there will be a season or two of overlap where the titans go at it; if we’re really lucky, the generational shift of the teams will play out between the king and the pretender in the cockpits. So it was in 2021…
//
It was a season which cast the two combatants in elemental roles, accentuating the contrasts in their make-up. Hamilton is more emotionally driven, has worked hard through his racing life to put a lid on the cauldron and to direct his feelings. His competitive self—the intimidating warrior—is quite separate from his persona outside the car, which is a sometimes vulnerable, questing one, wrestling with the big questions. Then there’s the showman within him, the guy who will crowd-surf at Silverstone or do smoking burnouts on his motorbike in the car park for the fans at Monza, the fashionista, the musician. He’s all these things and more. The social justice and race equality campaigner, the LA scene face who mixes in Hollywood circles, and still, sometimes, in off-guard moments, the boy from the Stevenage council.

In Hamilton, you can sense the immense pride at having achieved against the odds. There’s a keen antenna for criticism, which he’s had to work hard at concealing. When the pride is pricked, he’ll fire back with steely conviction, the underlying intensity of his self-belief seeming to ooze from his being. There’s also a need for recognition, though, for external validation. This is someone who still carries the scars of having forced his way into a sport that looked unattainable for reasons of both finance and race, and who hasn’t forgotten what it felt like to be fearful that it could all be taken away.

For Max – someone who was injected direct into the veins of F1 – it's much simpler. He's a lighter, sunnier, less complex personality. Neither criticism nor praise appears to make the slightest impression. He really isn't interested in validation and has what appears to be almost a disdain for his success, like it has always been, for him, his destiny. It isn't so much carried with arrogance as just matter-of-fact realism, hardly something even worth pondering. There are just the realities of what he is facing at any given race weekend.
//
Although Verstappen and Hamilton are near-neighbours in Monaco, the chances of them hanging out are close to zero, not because of any animosity—they are neither of them poisonous characters—but simply because their wavelengths do not resonate in either frequency or amplitude. The only time that happens is on the track.
//
In 2021, Hamilton and Verstappen were the two greatest racing drivers on the planet. One of them had been around long enough for that reality to be converted into career numbers and had almost forgotten what it was like to lose, even though he knew it would come one day. The other had been stared of that winning feeling for too long, had been waiting years for this opportunity of racing where he knew he belonged—at the very front, all the time, fearless and ready to battle all-comers, but especially the man with all the titles and plaudits.
//
The bigger point had been made at the first corner by Verstappen: he would continue to race in the same merciless way he’d always done, and Hamilton would have to tailor his approach accordingly. Hamilton, who had several times over the previous three years admitted that he didn’t really know how to handle Verstappen’s aggressive style wheel-to-wheel and would instead just give him room, had evidently realised that was a policy he could no longer afford.
//
It was an unsettling thing for Hamilton: the spotlight was now on how he, with the pride of being multiple world champion, was going to handle this seemingly unstoppable force. It was all part of the Max effect.
//
Verstappen raced that corner exactly as he’s always raced. What was different was Hamilton’s refusal to accept that.
//
On being asked if he thought he made Hamilton nervous, [Max] replied, ‘He would never admit that. At least I’m not afraid of him. Yeah, I think I’ll make him nervous if he sees me in his mirrors. He’s a different driver than me, less aggressive. He doesn’t know how to race like I do.’

Chapter 12: Unbeatable
Giedo van der Garde: ‘I think now Lewis has a lot of respect for Max and Max now has more respect for Lewis. When they are together there is a bit of a tension, the energy between them is sometimes too high and I think that is why they crash.’
//
‘It wouldn’t have mattered anything for my race, because we were just way too slow. But it’s just a shame, I thought we could race quite well together, but clearly the intention was not there to race.’

‘You know how it is with Max,’ countered Hamilton. Clearly, their uncompromising attitude towards each other when their cars were competitive was still there, one year on.

highlight reel of quotes from changeover - giri nathan. this will not be my last post about this book.

JANNIK SINNER

Chapter 3: Boot and Rally
Mostly, though, he worked. Cvjetkovic remembered Sinner as a child with an unusual capacity for work, and an unusual gift for simplifying that work. A technical detail that might take others six months to learn, he would handle in a week.
//
Everyone noticed the same thing about Sinner’s tennis then as they do now: the sound produced when he makes contact with the ball. I have listened to it up close. Depending on his effort level and the acoustics of the court, it has sounded to me like a firearm, a vehicle backfiring, or a hydraulic press. I can understand why that talent scout thought Sinner was a construction site.
//
To track a fast-approaching sphere, intuit its trajectory, and start a swing at just the right moment to strike it cleanly—this is known as timing. Sinner has perfect timing the way a singer might have perfect pitch. The impact of strings on ball is devastating and pure.
//
Sinner came to Turin a sphere of heat and light, the home favorite, lustily cheered by Italian crowds.

Chapter 4: Dancing in the Pressure Storm
Standing on the court afterward, he said with a coy smile that he wouldn’t be disclosing his tactics, because he hoped to play his elder again and again. He was that rare young player who genuinely craved more encounters with Novak Djokovic, like a sheep that had developed a taste for wolf.
//
And yet here was Sinner, a sedate counterexample. A new, clearer picture of the Italian began to unfurl. Someone who came late to tennis, was never cornered into it, was at little risk of burnout compared to his peers, and instead maintained a gluttonous appetite for improvement. Even with the trophy sitting in front of his face, he was talking about next steps. “It’s a great moment for me and my team,” he said. “But in the other way, we also know that we have to improve if we want to have another chance to hold a big trophy again.” Tennis was no longer the sport for gentlemen who liked a cigarette during changeovers; it belonged to single-minded ascetics.
//
This evolved Sinner was one of the tour’s most balanced players, in every sense of that word: on both forehand and backhand, serve and return, defense and offense. And yet, according to a certain reductive but pervasive fan perspective, the scoreboard was clear: one major title versus two major titles. Get to work, kid.

Of course, nobody was more amenable to that imperative than Jannik himself.

Chapter 5: Smiling Through the Swarm
This should have ended the point. The ball was too far away from Sinner. But he ate up all that distance with hunched, loping strides, looking like a highly task-oriented antelope, and he did not merely put a racquet on the ball but somehow punched a proper backhand down-the-line, abruptly taking control of the point.

Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus

When I asked Berrettini what had changed most in Sinner since they had last played, since his vault to the top of the tour, he pointed to his softer touch with the racquet and his ability to “read the moments” in the match and detect when to deviate from the script. “I think he missed three balls in the whole match,” he said. “It didn’t give me that oxygen that sometimes you need.” Often Djokovic’s game was described with similarly stark images of oxygen deprivation. They both could suffocate an opponent by hitting ball after ball deep in the court.

Chapter 11: Damage Control
But in the second set, no matter how gingerly Sinner walked between points, once the ball was in play he was floating all over the court, smooth and wraithlike, whipping his racquet to a blur.
//
The art of winning a title like the Cincinnati Open was consistency, conserving energy on the good days, salvaging the bad days. Hazy serendipity had to be converted into a solid routine. The genius had to be repeatable.

That repeatability may be the central feature of Sinner’s tennis, and perhaps even of his spirit. In Cincinnati, as he’d acclimated himself to the surface, weather, tennis ball, and other particularities, he refined that capacity. Day by day he homed in on the pulse of the hard court itself, and once he’d locked into that beat, no one in the world could hang with his tennis. He made every moment uncannily like the last one, the next shot just as pure as the one last struck.

Chapter 12: Digestion and Indigestion
“But, no, I’m always quite relaxed. I’m someone who forgets quite fast something.” The gist: I don’t think about him at all.
//
Sinner’s best tennis feels both languid and violent; it can be difficult to connect the cause with the effect. In between shots his lank frame looks almost floppy, and as he skids and scrambles and makes his little adjustment steps around the court, you wonder if those feet will give out from underneath him. But right when the ball is approaching, all that ambient floppiness is aligned into one sublimely synchronized chain, from foot to hip to wrist, as he readies his full-body slingshot groundstrokes. A compact backswing, a snap, and the ball is gone. The visual is loose and jangly, but the sound is like someone hucking a billiard ball against a garage door. Real power in tennis comes from relaxation and timing, rather than pure muscular output. Sinner’s what you’d get if you made a whole tennis player out of that axiom.
//
Judging from that performance, it would be difficult to argue that anyone else on the planet was better at the simple, terrible task of placing a tennis ball heavy and deep into the opposing court, over and over.
//
Fritz had a chance to serve for the third set, but Sinner foreclosed on the comeback attempt. He moved through the endgame with a finality reminiscent of Djokovic, as if he’d done this a dozen times and would do it a dozen more.
//
After winning in straight sets, Sinner threw his hands in the air and left them there, in keeping with his low-impact style of celebration. Nothing frenzied, no loss of control—just a young man taking in the cold, clean air at the top of a mountain.

Chapter 13: Changeover
Not all players need that communal aspect. Jannik Sinner, for example, had a different orientation at a similarly tender age. His second skiing coach, Klaus Happacher, said that once Jannik really began to take the sport seriously, he requested that he leave his group lesson and train solo with the coach so he could better focus. Some people see more clearly where friendship and the pursuit of excellence diverge.

CARLOS ALCARAZ

Chapter 2: Cabeza, Corazón y Cojones
If you hadn’t paid attention all along, you might have been surprised to discover that the harbinger of tennis doom looked like such a cheerful adolescent doofus. But that was the feeling of early-career Carlos. So visibly happy to be there, so transparently living out a fantasy—a happiness that could infect any viewer, and a happiness that he channeled into his improvisational and blitzing style of tennis.
//
Imagine any discernible tennis skill. It doesn’t matter if you have the local jargon for it (“pace,” “footwork”) or just a general impression (“hits ball comically hard,” “runs around well”). You could look at Alcaraz and see that skill perfected.
//
Imagine the goalie on a foosball table, so explosive and responsive. Just that one little dude, gliding along a horizontal, ready to be spun at a furious pace with a light twist of a wrist. In his baseline exchanges Alcaraz stood on top of the line, never ceding more than an inch, waiting to meet the ball with lethal force, smooth in his movement but full of coiled rage. Then he reset instantly and did it again, melding caffeinated teen dynamism with a multi-major-winner’s point construction. There was a fluid, unrelenting quality to his play that I did not usually ascribe to animate objects, or anything that needs time to recover from physical exertion.
//
That’s the thing about Alcaraz—there are so many possible versions of him that in best-of-five, an opponent will eventually have to beat several. It was baffling how many distinct parts of tennis he had mastered, how they cohered into this figure of ruin. My initial mistake was trying to fit him into my general schema for understanding tennis players: as human beings whose technical and physical specs grant some gifts and take others off the table. Big servers tend to be too ungainly to return nimbly. The lightest and fastest players often lack punch. The slow-surface specialists panic when the ball bounces faster. But none of these trade-offs seemed to apply to Carlitos. He could simply have it all ways. This was why he evoked a sense of impossibility more than any other player in recent memory, because he combined so many traits that don’t belong together into a single psychedelic point.
//
That broad, sharky smile was a dark omen for the rest of the tour. If he was enjoying himself, his tennis was probably unplayable.

Chapter 4: Dancing in the Pressure Storm
This match epitomized the Alcaraz puzzle. His losses can look worse than the losses of other top players. He can be capable of stupefying ingenuity while playing against the best opponents, even in the most tense moments of a match. He can also, in more pedestrian moments, play squirrelly and confused tennis. He might get fixated on ideas that amuse him but do not win him points; he might start peacocking prematurely.

Chapter 5: Smiling Through the Swarm
It was Alcaraz’s dynamic range, his command of both delicacy and brutality, that drove opponents into hopeless guessing games. In one rally, as Zverev struck three consecutive kill shots he expected to end the rally, and Alcaraz pulled off three increasingly preposterous retrievals, the kid started smiling.
//
The point captured Alcaraz’s blend of sloppiness and imagination. He gets himself into a bind, then works his way out of it, via some diabolical logic that no other player could follow.

Chapter 6: Triage Ward
He spent the days leading up to the tournament on the practice courts, with his right forearm mummified in tape, bunting his forehands gingerly, an adverb that typically would not come within a mile of the tennis of Carlos Alcaraz.
//
Perhaps it was reasonable to wonder if his body would survive his own violent and beautiful playing style.

Chapter 7: Joy in Suffering
With Alcaraz, you get the sense that if there were no crowd, there would be no point to all this. His trade is tennis, but it is also spectacle. He never looks happier than when working a stadium into a froth of awe and glee. His tennis alone does most of the work for the fans, but he likes to embellish his genius with small gestures. A finger pointed up to his ear, beckoning the crowd to roar, while the ball he’s struck for a winner is still bouncing past his hapless opponent. A bright sharky smile, like a child who has committed a naughty deed but knows he can charm his way out of punishment. A silent raised fist. A cocksure nod. A single bellowed “vamos,” his mouth open wide enough to eat the tennis ball. A nonverbal howl, the carotid artery pulsing like a garden hose on the side of his neck. Or his favorite: eyes narrowed and teeth fully bared—not a grin, more like a big cat reminding you of its fangs.

None of this seems affected. It is all expressive and improvised, just like his play. Sinner has said that he admires this aspect of his rival, his ability to enrapture the masses. As I’ve noted, the Italian’s own forays into crowd work are humbler: a fist pump, a compact nod, an ashen gaze into the middle distance.
//
It isn’t incuriosity, just a case of tacit bodily wisdom winning over explicit analytical fact. To tear around the court and hit balls at the speed Alcaraz does seems to require an uncluttered mind. Getting wrapped up in the minutiae of equipment or injury could only lead to overthinking, to the gestation of doubts. Alcaraz knew as much as he needed to know and would not be weighed down by a grain of superfluous information. In that, he was like so many other intuitive high performers: It was better to feel than to know.
//
“You have to find the joy in suffering,” said Alcaraz as he was interviewed on court minutes later. It was a perfect and subconscious homage to Rafa Nadal, who over his career spoke volumes about the masochism of tennis, his worldview still evidently looming over his tournament.
//
Harder to understand is how Alcaraz responds to pressure. For him, pressure seems clarifying. It forces him to stop temporizing. He stops surveying his various options on court and commits to the lucid, slashing style that made his name. It’s as if pressure snaps a lens into focus, revealing his own identity.
//
Alcaraz threw up the standard hand of apology, the usual etiquette when a player wins a point after his ball strikes the net cord—and then, when Zverev looked away, he cunningly curled his apology hand into a fist pump. No time for guilt. Some luck, sure, but also a glorious jolt of improvisation, the type of shot that explained why I’d overheard some French fans describe him as “pétillant”—sparkling, fizzy, like wine.
//
He concentrated his brilliance into a few critical doses and timed their delivery perfectly. That was enough. Carlos Alcaraz was capable of transcendence, but he was now also capable of winning a major title while far from transcendent, defeating many of his best contemporaries along the way.

Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
Alcaraz is an alarmingly efficient mechanism for turning matches into useful muscle memory and actionable wisdom, I thought at the time.
//
But even then, as Alcaraz lifted the golden cup, he was just 46 hours and 15 minutes into his grass-court career. He was flying on sheer feel and animal instincts. True prodigy gets to skip the trial-and-error phase.
//
And then he came clean: “And I put in videos of myself last year. I’m not gonna lie,” he laughed. “To see what I did, and how I did it.” From him, it wasn’t arrogant, just sensible. Tennis’s most brilliant pupil had decided he didn’t need a syllabus anymore; he had become his own assigned reading.
//
He banged big first serves and followed them with unanswerable drop shots, condensing into two shots the force-finesse mix that was his stamp on the modern game.
//
He’d been watching videos of himself. Why go elsewhere for knowledge? Plato once theorized that people have immortal souls, full of knowledge accrued from past lives, so learning is actually just rediscovering that forgotten knowledge buried inside. Perhaps this has only ever been true of Carlos Alcaraz. How quickly we’d arrived at the juncture where there was so little for him to learn from other people’s examples, where he was writing the future of the sport by himself, expanding its possibilities with every half-volley and high-pressure triumph. He was eating at the big table already, and ravenously.

Chapter 10: Hoard of Gold
Alcaraz was the rare elite athlete who seemed to optimize his own pleasure at every moment on court. Sinner, too, spoke often about how treating tennis as a hobby was critical to his glacial cool in decisive moments, but the pleasure was less discernible on his face. With Alcaraz it was unmissable in that joyous, vacuous grin, making every passerby’s day. Here, as always, he looked adept at having fun.
//
To watch Carlitos pick up a new skill was one of tennis’s most reliable pleasures. Every coach he’d ever had was astonished by his capacity to integrate new information into his play.
//
“It’s going to be the best moment of my life, probably,” he said, referring to a high-pressure contest against a man who had spent the duration of Alcaraz’s conscious life siphoning his opponents’ joy with his tennis.
//
Carlitos learns so fast that it generates unintentional humor, best seen in his post-Wimbledon remarks. “I am totally different player than French Open. I grew up a lot since that moment,” he said, sincerely, about a match played five weeks before. He undergoes emotional and professional transformation in a span of time when most people his age might only fill a laundry hamper.

Chapter 11: Damage Control
But Carlitos is the consummate good boy. For an hour afterward I remained in shock, as if I’d witnessed some kind of natural disaster at a remove. My colleague Patrick Redford, watching at home, said it was like watching a puppy smoke a cigarette. With his four smashes, Alcaraz shattered an enduring image of professional happiness. As a kid, he’d had quite a temper, and while he’d managed it well enough to win four majors, perhaps he hadn’t exorcised it completely.

Chapter 12: Digestion and Indigestion
At an evening match, where the fans slurped down several of those under the bright stadium lights, the party ambiance intensified. It was an apt setting for Alcaraz, who was more or less a nightclub in the form of a tennis player.

Chapter 13: Changeover
He was the star pupil conjoined to the class clown.
//
Alcaraz had tried to sneak forward when there was no advantage to press—but instead of panicking, he simply created the advantage out of whole cloth, with an audacious volley from no-man’s-land. Then he kept creeping forward to the net. His talent overrode his error in judgment; the gambit paid off.
//
Here was another instance of him responding to scoreboard duress with his bravest tennis, living and dying by his reflexes and gut intuitions. Nobody was better when cornered.
//
He was a player for whom every single shot was physically possible, and when he lost, he tended to frame failure in emotional rather than physical terms. He might be a hunter always in search of a good feeling, capable of peerless play when he found it, but liable to sulk when he lost it.

SINCARAZ

Chapter 3: Boot and Rally
Sometimes it seems that the trick of playing Alcaraz is to strip him of opportunities to remember how original he is. Sinner, somehow recovered from his trials, managed to pin Alcaraz to the back of the court, as a butterfly to a corkboard. He used his power to deprive Alcaraz of his usual creative resources: wide angles, ample time on the ball, openings for a drop shot.

Chapter 5: Smiling Through the Swarm
Soon there were six points in a row that felt like a single hallucination, more vicious and vivid than the tennis we’d seen in the Big Three era. Alcaraz sprang a trap with a drop shot to lure Sinner in, hoping to hit a passing shot right by him, but Sinner, with his whole body still facing the back of the court, blocked a no-look volley into open space. I detected a new swagger in him—there he was, punishing another drop shot by slashing a slice hard crosscourt—as though Alcaraz were infecting him with his own way of life. Anyone who’d been watching tennis recently could tell they were doing something well beyond the usual patterns of the sport. They were inventing a new grammar all their own. Balls were struck hard at discombobulated elbow angles, immediate return winners were lashed off of big serves, sudden solutions were lobbed back at difficult questions. It was a matchup with no neutral shots, no peace talks. Attack or be attacked.
//
On court Alcaraz was asked about “how special a friend” Sinner is to him. “He means a lot to me,” he responded. “I always say that first thing is you have to be a good person, and athlete comes after that. And I think Jannik is the same.” The sun began to set over the mountains, in cotton-candy hues of pink and blue.

the cut to beautiful romantic sunset is insane work it's giving charamu reunion in mobile suit gundam zeta ep 14

Chapter 6: Triage Ward
Recall that, mere minutes after the Indian Wells win, the sweat still damp on Carlitos’s brow, an interviewer stood on court and asked him about “how much Jannik means to you.” The question wasn’t completely unprompted—they had hung out during the rain delay that interrupted the match—but the almost romantic intensity of the phrasing made me laugh out loud in the moment. Imagine that you are friends with a colleague, but firmly in the water-cooler-buddy tier of acquaintance. A couple of inside jokes, some shared workplace gripes to fill any lulls in conversation. But then imagine that you are periodically interviewed, for the entertainment of hundreds of thousands of fans, about how much that colleague means to you. I mean, he’s pretty nice, I guess?

rip my beloved sincoworkaraz dynamic 2019-2025

There’s a paradox in the friend-rival. On the one hand, it’s hard to be close with someone with whom you are locked in zero-sum competition for all the prizes you most lust after in your career; on the other hand, there is no one else in the world who knows the pressures and predicaments at the top of the game, no one else who could relate as easily to the contours of your strange life.

Chapter 7: Joy in Suffering
When Alcaraz plays badly, he can look uncentered and full of bad ideas. When Sinner plays badly, he looks like a machine just slightly miscalibrated, erring but with the right intent.
//
The tennis seemed to come out of nowhere. Writing about a match like this is attempting to impose a legible narrative on what is, effectively, two people trying to devise increasingly sophisticated ways of murdering one another for four hours. They were experiencing all kinds of small-scale spiritual and physical ups and downs, some of which would later make it into their comments after the match, and some of which will remain forever unknown, hard to articulate even for them, certainly in a second or third language. Often the real tennis match—its problem-solving, its private pains, its triage—resists after-the-fact comprehension.

Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
At this stage of their careers, Alcaraz was more prone to burning out psychologically, and Sinner physically.

Chapter 10: Hoard of Gold
Old archetypes were often applied to new superstars, and in those formulations, Alcaraz was most often seen as the love child of Federer and Nadal, blending the former’s extempore all-court play with the latter’s brawn and vigor. Sinner, meanwhile, was the one seen as a power-injected, neo-Djokovic.

Chapter 11: Damage Control
Djokovic was still recovering from his Olympic bliss and would not play the role of the chaperone at the teen dance making room for the Holy Spirit between the youthful duo.
//
Some gifted but lesser players seemed to have this reaction to Alcaraz. He invited them into stimulating, inventive exchanges that reminded them of their own capabilities. Sinner, on the other hand, might just remind them of how far they were from the mountaintop.

Chapter 13: Changeover
Every time Sinner and Alcaraz saw an opportunity to attack, they seized it. Gone were the cagey, slow-burning rallies of Djokovic versus Nadal, each man hunting for a momentary lapse in stamina or focus. For the new kids, the game plan was to attack first, attack second. There was little taste for playing in a safe, error-reduction mode, the kind that Djokovic mastered in tiebreaks. Instead, Sinner said in an interview with Sky Sports that his tiebreak philosophy was to consider all the various attacks he’d tried over the course of the set and commit to those he felt had worked best. Sinner and Alcaraz were pioneering an era of “point-and-shoot” tennis, as Clarke put it, evoking the visual grammar of a first-person-shooter video game. If the ball was there to be hit, it would be hit—and hard.
//

Between these rivals, I could see each one mapping out the other’s tendencies, and then figuring out how to exploit the map the other had made. Specifically, in that second set, I came to appreciate a new wrinkle in the Alcaraz attack. He would rear back to hit a forehand, switch his grip as if to massage a drop shot—any savvy opponent would see that grip change and start shifting his weight to run forward—only to drive a slice deep through the court instead. He used this trick in two mesmerizing rallies, and each time it startled Sinner, perhaps the most balanced player I’ve ever seen. Both times he lost his footing and the point. With this mischief, Alcaraz had grafted another limb onto the decision tree in Sinner’s mind. The next time he moved his racquet that way, Sinner would remember what had happened before and wonder whether he should sprint ahead or stay put. To burden your opponent with additional uncertainty is to win the mind war.
//
The absolute best tennis induces laughter in audiences. This rivalry induced laughter even in the participants.
//
They both played true to their reputations. Sinner maintained a cruising altitude from start to finish, a level of tennis thousands of miles above most opponents, but not this one. Alcaraz’s level dipped and bobbed, but ultimately surpassed his rival’s in critical moments.
//
One was mercurial; the other methodical. One was a master of compartmentalization; the other seemed to feel everything all at once. Together they had made the sport anew.
//
Each has something the other lacks and would like to infuse into his own game. Alcaraz praises Sinner for his capacity to play every point at “9/10 or 10/10” intensity; the unspoken addendum is that he himself can fluctuate between 2/10 and 12/10. Sinner needs to find more comfort in the unscripted moments of feel and daring that are Alcaraz’s native habitat; there is more to tennis than the routine.
//
But the future will surely be defined by these two, interlocked in a joyful and absorbing struggle. They’ll get bigger and stronger; they’ll get smarter; they’ll get hurt; they’ll hurt each other. They could become genuine friends. They could drift apart.

BIG 3

Chapter 1: Empire
In the beginning, there was Roger Federer.
//
Perhaps the most poignant way to understand the Big Three was to see the optimism steadily squeezed out of their contemporaries, as if by a juicer, a cup filled to the brim with hopes and dreams.
//
Broadly speaking, these valiant victims of the Big Three moved through recognizable phases of career grief. First in this sequence was Persistence; all it would take was some dedicated training, some tactical adjustments, perhaps a few more twists of good fortune, and an important match may well swing his way in the future. After said match definitively did not swing in his favor, nor the one after, nor the one after that, the player might admit to Cluelessness. At this phase, they would have no particular intuition about what they could have done to win, and would feel altogether lost on the court. There could be bright flashes of Anger or Despair en route, but in time, the player arrived at Resignation. Perhaps this was the reality of playing tennis in this era, as stark and immovable as the face of a cliff, and there was nothing else to be done. At the end of this path was Enlightenment, a lovely ego death. To play a game for a living, to travel the world, to be alive at all, was a privilege—what’s that about a major?—no, he was content to sniff the freshly cut grass, kick the clay out of his shoes, and feel gratitude.
//
[Djokovic's] thinking was sophisticated in some ways and regressive in others, a prominent example of what might be termed “jock epistemology,” where elite athletes accumulate some useful beliefs for good reasons, some useful beliefs for bad reasons, and some bad beliefs for bad reasons.

Chapter 3: Boot and Rally
Then came the gatekeeper. It was an axiom in men’s tennis: If you do well enough in a meaningful tournament, there will come a time when you line up across the net from Novak Djokovic.

Chapter 4: Dancing in the Pressure Storm
When Djokovic is playing a best-of-five match, there’s often a luxurious lack of urgency to the affair. So what if he starts flat-footed? He is inevitability personified. He knows, as he gradually gets the blood pumping and the synovial fluids flowing, that he has a dozen higher gears of tennis at his disposal, and he’ll activate them as needed. He knows that his top gear can be matched by only a handful of people in the history of the sport. One of them was retired and probably eating fondue (Roger Federer), and another was busy rehabbing his hip (Rafael Nadal), and the youngest had just been upset the day before (Carlos Alcaraz).

Chapter 7: Joy in Suffering
And over the last two decades of the men’s tournament, one player has been its chief deity. Rafael Nadal has a higher success rate winning matches at Roland-Garros than I do at tying my own shoes. Heading into the 2024 tournament, he had won 112 of his 115 matches there. It is not merely one of the great feats in tennis, but one of the most consistent performances in any competitive human endeavor. Being that good at something must make it difficult to stop, as Nadal’s body now seemed to be urging him to do.
//
And yet Nadal has always played strange games with hope.
//
The old rites were all intact, even if the old tennis wasn’t.
//
On this court Nadal used to rigorously delete his opponents. A No. 1–ranked tennis player historically wins about 55 percent of points in a season; that much of an edge equates to a dominant performance. In his prime, Nadal had on several occasions won nearly 70 percent of the points in his matches at Roland-Garros. In his prime, it sometimes appeared he was landing eight haymakers in a row on an insensate corpse.
//
Then, while serving for the set, Nadal fell into a 0-40 hole he could not crawl out of. Watching him hit his signature shots, I started to see a ghostly overlay of the 2013 Nadal projected over the present-day reality. The 2024 down-the-line forehand pass that bonked into the middle of the net post would have instead arced savagely outside Zverev’s reach before dipping back into the corner of the court, following that infamous “banana” curve. It was possible to see the thrilling, crackling outlines of what Nadal once was, and occasionally the ghost and the present slid into serene alignment, before falling out of sync again. A slow and rickety recovery step, a belabored backhand falling a few feet before the service line, and the illusion dissipated.
//
Three years before, Musetti had taken a two-sets-to-none lead, only for Djokovic to leave the court, change his clothes, and wrest back control of the match, with the crushing inevitability of a bear trap. Musetti retired from that match while getting blown out 4-0 in the fifth set. He said he wasn’t actually injured but had simply realized “there was no chance that I could win a point.”

Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
[Djokovic] summons some of his best ball when playing from a place of spite; he is most magnetic and authentic when playing the heel, too.

Chapter 10: Hoard of Gold
My internal terminology for the best Djokovic-Nadal matchups is Wide Tennis. It takes two—and really, only these two—to produce Wide Tennis. When playing lesser opponents, its full parameters cannot be glimpsed. Nadal can spend most of a match perched near the center of the baseline, imposing his entire will on each ball, cracking one crosscourt forehand, then putting the next into the cavernous opening left behind. Djokovic can spend most of a match sitting directly on top of the baseline, taking the ball early, batting it to opposite corners until the end of time. When together, however, they are both hell-bent on hijacking the other from their seat of comfort. The result is a version of tennis that is as visually striking as it is physically baffling. The legal area of play for singles is fringed by two strips known as the doubles alley, which extend the court wider for two-on-two play. But Nadal and Djokovic sprint behind, through, and even beyond these alleys in their singles matches. They travel out to remote locales, then recover back to the center of the court just in time to begin their next far-flung foray. Thus their tennis took on different dimensions. It looked distorted, as if reality’s projectionist had made an error with the aspect ratio.
//
Each man hybridizes offense and defense in a way that commands constant vigilance from the other. Each ball is struck with a reasonable expectation that the next ball will be coming back over the net, perhaps even harder and more angled. Both men intimately understand how difficult it is to hit the ball somewhere that would bother the other. Watching this version of tennis is like reading a text stripped of punctuation marks. Where you’d expect a point to reach its natural conclusion, it simply refuses, instead flowing out into a sequence of shots and sprints and shots and sprints that leaves no room for breath or error.
//
There was a ragged yearning in Djokovic’s body language, but a crystalline refinement in his actual strokes.

OTHER ATP HOPEFULS

Chapter 5: Smiling Through the Swarm
I felt somewhat sad as this man [Auger-Aliassime], who had at one time been considered the future of the sport, was devoured by the actual, undeniable future of the sport.

Chapter 8: Meddy in the Middle
[Medvedev's] personality, too, has left casual fans convinced that he is some enemy of the game. Perhaps they are reading too much into the expansive plain of his forehead, those cunning beady eyes, the physiognomy of a supervillain plotting to take down the power grid.
//
And in the middle of this fretful moment—scrapping with the greats, wondering if he would ever be loved, announcing his disillusionment—he was dealt another devastating fate. Enter the biggest prodigy in decades, seven years Medvedev’s junior, permanently a-grin, and instantly beloved.
//
One boy wonder was a healthy challenge; two of them muddled the future. Long ago, Medvedev had declared that his dreams were dead. Now he observed that tennis no longer held any joy. What was this melancholic Russian novel of a career? He had timed his birth poorly. He should have planned that out better.

TENNIS

Chapter 2: Cabeza, Corazón y Cojones
Tennis is a terminally nostalgic sport, always trying to make sense of its future by using its past.

Chapter 6: Triage Ward
In this way the court takes a record of the tennis played on it. A divot over here where someone took a hard fall after a diving volley. A smear over there where a player slid to retrieve a drop shot. A small comma behind the baseline traced by the back foot while a player served. In the right light, the clay itself looks like soft velour and the footprints look like places it has been thumbed against the grain.

Chapter 7: Joy in Suffering

The crowd is the third participant in every tennis match. It can bend the outcome, like the sun or the wind. If players are shown love by the crowd, they can tap into new reservoirs of confidence. If they are shown scorn—and they happen to be named Novak Djokovic—they can also tap into new reservoirs of confidence.
//
Tennis had gotten brawnier over the decades, but its competitors were still pressed into that display of genteel civility, just seconds after they’d spent four hours wired to kill.

Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
Unlike hard court, which sits inert, or clay, which is groomed and restored between matches, the grass cannot be reset. Wimbledon is a story of degradation.
//
Tennis is unambiguous that way. No loss can be blamed on a teammate or coach or external force. You are only as good as your wins.

Chapter 13: Changeover
Level is separable from the player; it can be commented on at a remove, as if a player were holding their own tennis out at arm’s length, putting it up to the light to study it more closely. Level is an instantaneous snapshot of where a player stands—their accuracy, ferocity, ingenuity at a given point of time. It is the result of their training, but also their jet lag, their love life, their legal proceedings, their last meal.

compilation of narrative parallels between jannik sinner & oscar piastri. quotes pulled from changeover - giri nathan & oscar piastri: the rookie - andrew van leeuwen.

also re/reading these books side by side was seriously hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby mr nathan are you interested in motorsports...

( my crossover machineshipping... )

STATS

total number of completed stories: 6 (▲1)

ace attorney [1]
formula 1 rpf [4]
prince of tennis [1]

total wordcount: 31,850

most used tags: Ambiguous Relationships [2] (really should be [3] but i left it off you’ll know it at once because it was a bit too overtly romantic to justify the tag use), Alternate Universe - Always a Different Gender or Sex [2], Background Canon-Typical 2010s Grid Sluttery [2]. spiritually, it was Rivals With Benefits [5, possibly 6 if you count the mialana] but i only actually used that tag once although i did also use Rivals With Benefits Without Benefits and Academic Rivals to Lovers. huge year for rivalshipping for me.

most used rating: e [6] i cannot explain how this happened.

most tagged character: sebastian vettel [2] & charles leclerc [2] & max verstappen [2] omg first year since 2021 that it hasn’t been renjun…

FIC MASTERLIST & COMMENTARY

an indispensable suggestion from afar | ace attorney, mia fey/lana skye

Lana had fully twisted around in her seat to face Mia. Her face shone with intent. This wasn’t the violence of a switchblade; Mia revised her initial impression. It was the incisive examination of a scalpel, a curiosity that cored through flesh in its search for answers. She saw it in the mirror, sometimes.

notes:

writing 10k for a 300 word minimum exchange everyone point and laugh… i really just could not shut the fuck uppppp i was too excited about getting to write lawyers finally lol. i think i did more reading for this fic than my actual legal ethics and jurisprudence classes i was locked the fuck in studying up on kantian ethics and californian law. obviously i am no expert in moral philosophy so i have no idea how correct the depiction in this fic ended up being and i also can’t tell if it was giving infodump snoozefest. hopefully it was fun and yuriful and not didactic to read about.
pea came up with the idea of basing this around the trolley problem and having mia and lana take opposite stances on the solution, so i do owe her everything!! i think it’s really important that lana strongly supports sacrificing the few to save the many in principle but ultimately in sl9 her love for ema outweighs all other moral considerations, whereas mia doesn’t believe in sacrificing anyone but feels extremely guilty that it means she doesn’t prioritise maya over everyone else. it was a really fun ideological clash to write about, i genuinely loved these stupid philosophical arguments because i’m really pretentious at heart.
pretty much every conversation mialana have about the various judges they mention is based on real conversations i’ve had with my coworkers. one thing law nerds love to do is psychoanalyse judge haptics and proxemics much like an rpfujo except maybe half a step less parasocial because there is a fair amount of direct or indirect interaction lawyers have with judges.
working title was morality / mortality, borrowed from kamm, but i wanted it to be more hopeful in the end, so i went with a quote from gadamer in conversation: reflections and commentary - gadamer & dutt which was in my own uni jurisprudence class readings:
- DUTT: ... The neo-conservatives announce the end of socialistic utopian thinking. With the collapse of socialistic dictatorships in the east such thinking is said to be no longer in favor. Must one accept this view, or may one hold fast to your writings from the seventies, according to which for our praxis utopia remains an indispensable "suggestiveness from afar"?
- GADAMER: Yes I certainly do believe this, and I believe it will continue to be valid in the future...
and similarly thematically relevant:
- GADAMER: Yes, I am very skeptical of every kind of pessimism. I find in all pessimism a certain lack of sincerity.
- DUTT: Why?
- GADAMER: Because no one can live without hope.
but also the utopia conversation in the last scene borrows about as much from alice in borderland as from gadamer.
lana is associated with: labwork, the military, scientific inquiry, observable phenomena. contrast with mia’s association with ghosts and the supernatural identity fuckery of channelling.
silly pun names: phillip owen soffi = phil o. soffi = philosophy, ino saint = innocent, o’kaigh = okay, dowtt = doubt, watskryme = what’s crime, chattabocks = chatterbox, tanjent = tangent, killian d’agye = kil d’agye = killed a guy, marnie sayver = money saver.
i am really happy with how this fic turned out i think in the long run it will probably be one of my best of all time.

best lines:
Couched in those terms a pleasant apparition of nostalgia arose. She allowed it to pass directly through her, disembodied, so that it did not sour into homesickness.

connecting law to medium work, which mia does repeatedly through the fic even though she has ostensibly given up medium work for the law.

Things she had observed about Lana Skye: Lana was one of about four other people in the class who actually did the readings, and out of those four the only one who did not put their hand up solely for the opportunity to listen to the sound of their own voice. Whenever she spoke it was to add something substantive and insightful to the discussion, even if the substance was heinous and the insights fundamentally incorrect.

some of the first lines i wrote in the fic i think it’s so funny of mia to respect lana academically but absolutely disrespect the actual content of lana’s academia.

Sometimes the sheer scope of what she didn’t know threatened to overwhelm her. But: Gregory Edgeworth shimmering over her mother’s face like light seen from underwater. Maya in the sun by the sea, agreeing to shoulder the weight of their world. Mia could face anything.

stylistically this is how i want to write always but i am not managing it most of the time because i say too much. but this is the goal.

When everything was over, when the truth had come to light, when she was no longer gambling with her family’s lives in the path of a legacy two millennia heavy—then she would tell Lana everything. She’d tell Lana how much she’d wanted to tell her everything. How much she would have treasured hearing anything Lana had to say.

kurain is another trolley. and also i think it’s so romantic that mia specifically wants lana to know that she wanted to tell her everything because she always wants to know what lana thinks.

The echelons of law school Mia intended to shoulder-charge her way through ran on gossip, sourced from someone’s cousin’s friend’s sister who was a clerk in the Supreme Court or a family friend of the Chief Justice or dating a court reporter, so nepotistically insular that Mia was immediately annoyed by the tastelessness of the blatant cliquery even as she triaged familiarity with those subjects as a key social priority; she knew she would need allies, contacts, networks, to do what she came here to do. At least in Kurain they were upfront about the precedence of bloodline, no limp pretence at meritocracy.

But Mia listened to her classmates and committed the recurring names to memory. Flashy tax litigator Marnie Sayver had been appointed to the Court of Appeal and the public announcement was imminent; opinions varied as to the wisdom of the Governor’s decision. Byrne Faraday had brought his daughter to Justice Gavelle’s latest chambers party; opinions concurred that she was a charming little girl. The precocious von Karma scion was preparing to make her prosecutorial debut in Germany; opinions were nervously reserved just in case Manfred von Karma was lurking bogeyman-style around some shadowy corner.

She’d heard Franziska von Karma was the same age as Maya. All Mia could imagine was Maya alone in the summoning chamber, swathed in ceremonial white, their mother’s headpiece slipping down her forehead. What Mia had laid down to come here, what she had left to Maya to bear. Two decades of preparation shed like a robe. She wanted to shield Maya from it as long as she could but it was, after all, her own actions that had crowned Maya with that cold weight, Maya’s future taken as consideration for a chance to exhume the truth. Her own hands tying Maya to the tracks. Mia rarely prayed anymore but sometimes she still found herself interlacing her fingers and shutting her eyes. Oh, mother. Please let me be right. Please let me have chosen the right thing to do, so I have not turned Maya into a living mausoleum for nothing.

forgive the longass excerpt but this whole section is my favourite part of the fic i think i did a good job with the prose here. mia sacrificing maya for her pursuit of justice is really fucking her up because of her competing moral responsibility to her sister and even though maya has given mia permission to do it which according to lana would make it acceptable in the kantian sense because maya’s agency is being respected mia is still understandably really conflicted. in a lot of ways this whole fic is about the insulated circle of university academic discussion and how it intersects or doesn’t intersect with what happens in the real world / the gap between intent and act.

Part of Mia’s training regimen back in Kurain had involved meditating behind a waterfall, which was meant to improve her resilience and focus in the face of great adversity or maybe just keep her too hypothermically miserable to muster up the energy to complain. That great icy deluge of water, all its shattering, lethal force, separated from her only by the span of a hand. Sitting on the smooth granite slab that had borne the weight of hundreds of damp and shivering Fey women before her she had felt the sting of the sheer concentrated cold radiating out from the torrent more acutely than the spray that misted over the parts of her skin her robes left exposed. You did not escape the deadly thing simply by moving aside.

really like this section too especially in context in the middle of dialogue. the point is that the trolley problem isn’t even a binary kill one save many / let many die save one because so many other consequences flow out from the decision including for the lever puller.

Lana flinched but stayed silent. With some difficulty, Mia pinpointed the feeling sloshing through her ribs as envy.

“It’s not a criticism,” Mia said softly.

“You’re a sister, too,” Lana said. “You know.”

again very important to me that mia envies lana’s ability to prioritise her sister above all else because mia thinks that’s what she should do as well, but she can’t because of who she is as a person.

They had gotten through their customary post-Soffi library study session and the rest of the evening into the night without talking about the fight, but it hung so near over Mia’s head, unresolved and maybe unresolvable, she almost felt it kissing her brow with the coldness of metal. She didn’t have to drag it out again. But Mia could not resist speaking. The advocate’s curse: it was impossible to let a sleeping witness lie.

callback to previous section about maya taking on the kurain ceremonial headdress. also yeah one thing about mialana they are talking about something or other no matter what because they really rate each other even if they disagree. it’s like… if they drove for competing teams but had really clean and enjoyable wheel to wheel battles… Just Like

see the static from a mile away | formula 1 rpf, mark webber/sebastian vettel (r63)

Somehow, without his permission, Mark’s body has walked itself closer to Sebastian, as if magnetised. She has to tip her head back to look at him, baring her throat. It’s not such a bad view.

notes:

i think this is the worst thing i’ve ever written, in the value judgment sense. I’m Sorry Women. i genuinely got kind of upset during the writing process because mark pov required me to be so mean and uncharitable about seb i was getting really defensive over seb mistreatment and erasure like girl the words are being typed by your own hands. you ever accidentally become a hater for your ship in the course of writing fic for your ship lol.
but i do think this is my rb era markseb manifesto even though it just looks like toxic evil hetslop pwp because it is ultimately about mark being so paranoid and insecure and resentful and delusional and complexed about seb and on 500 levels of cognitive dissonance and self-justification. like he’s enacting all this violence and humiliation and force on seb in an attempt to exert power and control over her but seb baited him into it on purpose so really even when mark ostensibly has the upper hand seb is still winning, which mark is also cognisant of but purposefully refusing to confront every time he comes up against it. unfortunately for mark seb wants everything he could possibly do to her.
mark feels entitled to victory and red bull’s favour by virtue of his seniority and having put in the years of effort only for all of what he thinks he has surely earned to be stolen from under his nose. it’s the classic hardworking veteran vs upstart prodigy rookie storyline except mark is of course ignoring all the hard work that seb puts in too. and also the fact that seb has never done anything wrong ever. and also the fact that SKILL ISSUE. and in the end my driver took home 4 wdcs in a row and mark never even got a runner-up. what was i saying?
it is r63 into het because i was really trying to make this as evil as possible. also mark’s sense of entitlement and the violence that he wants to do to seb because of his wounded pride and his dismissal of seb’s abilities and her right to be in the position she is becomes even more awful bc of the specifically gendered element of older man vs younger woman which the fic doesn’t directly look at because mark isn’t overtly thinking about it but It Is There and very much informing his attitude towards seb. iiii think it’s fun and hot, a little bit of misogyny as a treat.
seb and nico being girls (who did not work it out on the remix) is soooo important to me btw they should always be the same, my beautiful two sides of the same coin blonde (loosely defined) german divas. whether seb actually did anything with nico or if she’s just winding mark up is up to the reader which is why i only tagged jenson/seb since there is objective evidence that it happened. although i did also then write the sico prequel so it did happen to me.
i don’t think this fic succeeds at doing much else other than being evil but at the very least it exorcised the markseb demons from my mind (temporarily??) like there was a solid month where i genuinely could not think about anything else i was getting so distracted at work it was so bad for me. anyway it cracks me up that markseb immediately started liking each other so much and undivorcing the moment they stopped being teammates but this also caused me to lose all interest in them, i only want markseb at max toxicity and antipathy in their teammates of dark era, i get my real true love fix from 3316.
title from ohmami - chase atlantic, my kings of feminism card declined music.

best lines:
“I am thinking,” Sebastian repeats, more loudly, “that you are angry at me because you are out of the title fight, but really if you are angry at anyone it should be yourself, or maybe Felipe for the Monza DNF, though if you were not so far down the grid you wouldn’t have been fighting him for P6 anyway. But you couldn’t even beat Jenson today. And I was already one hundred and seventeen points ahead of you after Monza. What makes you think you were fighting against me?”

i could hear this in seb’s voice in my mind so i think i did a pretty good job with the german esl diction and the (justifiably! seb’s 2011 season was incredible!) cocky attitude.

For a moment that post-race paralytic fury overwhelms him so completely he forgets how to breathe. He could hit her. He can almost see it like a cooldown room replay: the snap of her head to the side, the shock in her eyes, her hand moving to shield her reddening cheek, too slow for once. His palm prickles with the phantom sensation of it, sweet as clean air.

my favourite section of the fic 🙂‍↕️ markseb crazy size & strength difference meaning that even a light tap or push from mark has seb stumbling and losing balance → mark should slap seb around it would be hot and also satisfying for both of them.

She’s not interesting to look at. He can’t stop looking anyway.

i love writing extremely unreliable narrators… mark wants to devalue seb sooo bad but the objective reality is that seb is a very good driver who is performing better than him and he is in fact psychologically fixated on her. Mark’s Sebastian Complex!

Mark has wanted her since he looked at her slumped and cradling her neck in her hand and glowing with exhilaration in the passenger seat of his car on the way to the airport and thought, well, she’s probably never gonna make it to F1, that’s a shame. Mark wants her even when he wants to cave her skull in. // He shifts his grip on her throat so his palm curves around the side instead. Gently now. A cradle for a sore and unready neck. Maybe that had been the last time he’d really been in the driver’s seat, when it comes to Sebastian.

one of my fave bits of markseb lore i had to get it in here plus the whole thing about seb’s neck being too weak when test driving back then worked so well with the choking kink parts of this fic. it’s telling also that mark can’t help but have these flashes of gentleness towards seb in between the violent sexual fantasies/acts, i think he genuinely did like seb but the bitterness and paranoia and toxic competitiveness made everything go sour and once the cause of that was removed he went back to liking seb.

He has the sense of snuffing a candle out, the stinging flare of heat just before the nothingness.

this is literally top3 lines i wrote this year. and like brother YOU’RE the one who is about to be nothing.

cruel with my intention | formula 1 rpf, sebastian vettel (r63)/nico rosberg (r63)

Sebastian keeps looking at her. Intent and relentless as a knife. Under the dimly strobing lights all of her shines silver.

“Here,” Sebastian says. Her fingers at Nico’s jaw suddenly gentle. “I will show you what it’s like, with him. Close your eyes.”

notes:

two drunk girls making out at the club for the male gaze panopticon is unfortunately one of my favourite brands of yuri. i wanted to write toxic and evil companion yuri sico fic to my markseb fic about sico competing over a man, or really several men. prissy superfeminine ice princess nico and tomboy demon baby seb having coreografia de britney spears (lol) rivalry sex i would like to see it… not that i really even ended up writing very much of it.
the yuri is a trojan horse for the het which is a smaller trojan horse for the yuri. basically i am intending to alienate all possible audiences. but i think all of that is really just a red herring for what this fic is really about which is how nico wants to win sooo badly she would ruin literally every other aspect of her life to make it happen. and she does <3
i did intend for it to be a lot more about lewis than it ended up being but i think that’s kind of what sico are like… you think it’s about lewis and it obviously quite fundamentally is but also it isn’t. but it is but it isn’t.
i think early 2010s / pre silver war nico is sooooo especially cutely transparently insecure and emotive <this video> is never too far from my mind, the way nico’s face visibly falls when he thinks his dad said something uncomplimentary about him like omg youuuu are so desperate for external validation it’s unreal. the seeds of mid 2010s absolute nightmare menhera gf nico are in there but not yet sprouted and it’s seb who is the terrorist demon baby for now. obviously beyond the scope of this fic but i really am so obsessed with how seb and nico trade narrative roles over time with lewis as the fulcrum and i would really like to write 2015/16 trenches sebcedes for real eventually! there is a little bit of dramatic irony terror at the end because it’s true that it’s seb’s reign now but nico’s time is coming in a couple more years and seb will never reach these heights again and nico is going to take SO much vindictive delight in every moment of seb’s downfall, darkest day of seb’s career putting it in the wall at his legendary home race which he has never won etc, but at the same time when nico is trying to psych out her ex mid-divorce it’s still seb she turns to for assistance and cooperation, and it’s seb who defends nico’s right to the title because she saw and understood the work nico put in to get it.
like i think sico being two sides of the same coin, sometimes i think you might hate me sometimes i think i might hate you maybe you just wanna be me, is so narratively special and important! i love nico’s inferiority complex about golden girl seb and i love seb bullying nico in the way that a child stomps on ants and i love the looming shadow of schumi and the offscreen locus of lewis. the image i have is of seb who is unapologetically herself in all of her cockiness and greed and ego being this very pure existence, the freudian id so to speak, not actually malicious and actually quite nice even, whereas nico who is constantly trying (and failing) to repress how badly she is gagging for Literally Everything that she wants ends up worse off because she cares about how she looks from the outside and stops herself from going after the things she wants and then doesn’t get them and is bitter and spiteful and mean about it, of course culminating in her ultimate pyrrhic victory of world championship at the cost of true love. which is to be fair a trolley problem that seb has not ever had to face. but also i think that even if seb had won the championship in 2017 or 2018 against lewis things between them would not have gone like they did for brocedes they would have made it out fine, the love would not have died. being teammates has ruined more soulmates than all the volcanoes lmao.
at this stage in the timeline obviously sewis aren’t really that close yet, they’re just friendly coworkerivals with benefits and they won’t fall in love until many years later, so nico genuinely doesn’t even have anything to be concerned about. in my mind her feelings for lewis are reciprocated but lewis probably hasn’t realised it yet unlike the way that nico is agonisingly pining and by the time lewis does it will be too late for them. lowkey like omg girl just sleep with him already you’re already both separately hooking up with all the same people. but of course what nico feels about lewis is too closely-held and huge and awful for her to do that. which is, as usual, nico’s loss.
title from reprogram - kilo kish, which is a song that is kind of way too beautiful for this fic but it has this simultaneous icy artifice and glassy confessional fragility that registers as so nico to me. probably i should have saved it for a serious brocedes fic but we are here now.

best lines:
And she prefers, in principle, to be where she’s wanted. The practice is trickier. The principle presupposes the want.

i think this is very nico… pr princess desperate enough for external validation to subject herself to various mortifying ordeals… and ofc the extreme emotional masochism displayed in the post silver war era by constantly putting herself in situations where she has to face The Concept Of Lewis. girl you are lowkey doing it to yourself.

Finally Nico manages to wrench her hand free of Sebastian’s grasp, or Sebastian lets go, or both at the same time, equal and opposite. She clutches her hand to her chest and stares, speechless and furious at herself for it.

two opposing forces that cancel each other out… two sides of the same coin… nico always being on the back foot around seb despite all her attempts at diplomacy and image management <3

“Sure,” Nico says, and then she must suffer some kind of horrific aneurysm in the part of her brain responsible for oral motor skills because she finds herself blurting out, “Is Lewis—”

Sebastian pulls back. Her mouth is shiny with spit and Nico’s smeared lipgloss. “You want Lewis to see?”

“No,” Nico says. Her heart has become a gravel trap, pulse skidding and slowing and spinning out. “No, of course not. It’s—we’re just friends. Why would I—no.”

ya romance emotion. And Lewis Was There!
i really like the combination of nico’s miserable crush that she has been circling around for years vs seb’s tactless directness. i like the gravel trap metaphor also, i am always feeling like i’m doing too much or being too cliche when i do racing related figurative language but i think this one was good.

Her head swims, oxygen deprivation, heatstroke, symptom of something that might kill her. She’s raced through worse.

associating seb with unpleasant/deadly things but that’s also part of racing.

Lewis’s hand on the nape of her neck. Sebastian’s hand on the championship trophy. Nico’s hand on the nape of Sebastian’s neck, the skin there smooth and warm like metal that’s soaked up the sun. What that shining ridged silver might feel like against her palm. Sebastian knows, Lewis knows. Nico will know.

obv linking seb/lewis/nico/the wdc trophy together, nico’s conflation of seb and lewis and victory is all about Things She Wants. it’s narratively important that nico ultimately feels unsatisfied/unhappy when she gets off with seb not just because it’s oops all bottoms but also because it’s foreshadowing how she’ll feel about lewis and how she’ll feel about the championship too.

“Seb,” Nico says, not entirely sure what she means to follow it up with. Five languages worth of words and she’s still at a loss. She is always floundering for grip, for pace, around Sebastian. The knowledge does not make it any easier to bear.

nico… oh nico… my glasshearted ojousama trying so hard to do mind games but not being able to pull them off… trying to launch psychological attacks on seb only for seb to nuke her right back twice as hard and with half the effort because seb doesn’t have any image maintenance reasons to hold back like nico does. and nico knows this and keeps trying anyway. that’s what seb really means when she says you are always trying because seb knows this also.
my favourite brand of sico is nico trying to gain some upper hand over seb and seb effortlessly turning the tables and nico being at a loss as to how to respond. And Lewis Was There.

you’ll know it at once | formula 1 rpf, max verstappen/charles leclerc

The scent hits Max like a bullet. So sweet and heavy it is a violence. It dislocates him completely; it’s like he’s looking at Charles from somewhere slightly to the left of himself.

notes:

i started this like 5 days before mich’s birthday thinking i’d probably be gifting it belatedly with apologies and then locked in so hard over the weekend i was done 2 days early and then i just had to sit there with the draft not saying anything which was agonisingggg. as with the rest of my f1 output i do not know what came over me lmao sometimes the omegaverse devil speaks into my ear. i’ve written secret omega trope before and i was intending to fully self-plagiarise and do Extremely Resolved Sexual Tension But Extremely Unresolved Emotional Tension 2.0 but i literally unironically believe in 3316 real true love too much. it is actually so bad. yes i took the government propaganda yaoibait everyone point and laugh. all mich’s fault btw. this fic is so horrifically sappy i am never going to be able to reread it without looking through my fingers like i’m watching a horror movie. but i could not have done it without the power of friendship so in the end Thank You Mich, i do love and care mich so much i gave up the bit i had planned for my sports pseud debut and posted f1 instead of tennis rpf first.
ssfwl is the most capital-L Love song that i know so i couldn’t think of a more appropriate title source. working title was you knew you were breakable from <one-act play in which no knives are used - dalton day> which is also a top5 most romantic poems of all time to me but a bit more terror and a bit less sparkly shoujo screentones than the fic ended up being so i had to switch it out. i cannot emphasise enough how much i did not intend for this fic to be so gayass_song.mp3, it just happened somehow. as if it’s my fault 3316 is just so inherently romantic?? yes i’m delusional. but so are they.
i did continuously forget i was writing omegaverse instead of normal sex and had to go back and add more omegaverse trope indicia like slick / glowing eyes (literally love this trope btw its so funny) etc i guess i mostly just wanted to microdose biologically enforced d/s. i just feel like it’s so embarrassing to do worldbuilding in pwps lmao so you can really see where i gave up explaining anything. it was most important to me to 1) make brocedes da bus driver 2) mention 2x oscar podium for the hOPium of it all 3) make my ge0rge and p1astri stances clear although let me clarify also that it’s 3381 in that order, max is my superseme.
what happened in 2016 was of course nico deciding that omega pheromones are fair game when it comes to psychological warfare techniques and weaponising the fuckkk out of strategically timed heats and “forgetting” to use scent blockers to mess with lewis (haven’t decided on his dynamic so i’m leaving it open LOL) which did take some delicate tactical balancing to execute without affecting his own driving and this created a paddock / cooldown room environment so toxic and chaotic as naturally lewis was not the only person affected by nico’s biological terrorism so the fia were like ok so this can absolutely never happen again. seb was having the time of his life though, brocedes divorce only toxic to miserable people he was having a fucking ball.
i have also just remembered i was going to microdose misogyny as well but i forgot to actually do it. in my mind mating meant that the alpha can force the omega to obey them which is why max refused to do it even though he obviously wouldn’t ever actually order charles to submit in a racing context because competing against charles is his passion. but it’s ok they are both too reckless to hold off forever so i think they get mated during #charles1stwdc celebration sex and it’s fine things are exactly the same as they were before except they can do biologically enforced d/s too for fun. yay for true love!
on review i should have put more praise kink in but i also forgot i was doing that. dude i forgot literally everything like the way the sheer thought of 3316 romance instantly mindwipes me. i definitely also should have picked a specific season/race for spatiotemporal grounding other than vaguely european but i couldn’t decide on which one so i picked nothing.
it’s not really a standout line but i did want to point out max cushioning the back of charles’s head with his hand so he doesn’t hit his head on the tile even in the middle of fairly rough and mindless sexpollened sex. this is the sex version of max racing charles more respectfully than he races other people.
wanted also to point out that charles went to red bull when he was instinctively seeking the closest possible safety, obviously because he could subconsciously sense that max would be there as well, because they are perfect soulmates and the universe will conspire to bring them together trusttt. they don’t know that yet but i do.
max biting charles’ wrist is ofc intended to be mating bond lite but also charles biting max first is important for equality and fairness and balance reasons, which i think is sooo vital to endgame ships even when there is a clearly defined and unassailable 1/0 dynamic. there must be equilibrium in order for things to last forever and mark my fucking words 3316 will last forever. in case it wasn’t clear they’re meant to be touching each other’s pulse points at the end so would be able to tell that their heartbeats are synced up even though they aren’t mated again because they are perfect soulmates <3
all in all i really like this fic despite the horrible sappiness i think i represented my views, which are horribly sappy, accurately and it gives me heartfluttering romance feelings even though i am the one who wrote it and usually that would prevent me from having any positive feelings about the fic. just goes to show how much i like 3316 damn they really got me with this one.

best lines:
He can see now that Charles isn’t actually still at all. He is trembling, minutely, with the effort of holding himself in place. An engine primed and ready to leap forward. Any moment the lights will go out.

like i said before i am scared that doing racing metaphors in f1 fic is coming off a bit florals for spring? groundbreaking… but i think this is a nice image and conveys the massive effort of restraint teetering on loss of control.

Adrenaline breaks over Max’s head like a cold plunge.

i liked this line. trying to get a bit more creative with the language i reach for.

The thing with him and Charles is all context. Track limits, the four corners of the paddock. A decade and change of adjacency, shared podiums, peripheral vision, the best and brightest and most beautiful part of his life, and absolutely nothing outside of that. It’s just that they don’t have much in common, except for the only thing that matters. He hadn’t always been looking out for Charles, necessarily, but at some point Charles had become so integral to his conceptualisation of what it meant to race that it turned axiomatic. A race necessitates someone to race against. And there’s nobody Max can imagine racing against more vividly than Charles.

whenever i got stuck i just started typing out my 3316 meta thoughts into the gdoc which is why there’s random chunks of navelgazing studded throughout the fic but this really is my 3316 thesis… extreme situational closeness and imaginary fated rivalry is the most romantic thing in the universe?

“I’m not going to knot you in a fucking bathroom,” Max says. “My PT will kill me, and your PT will kill you and then also kill me a second time.”

i thought this was funny :)

Max has no doubts that Charles has the capability for it, the same way he has no doubts about his own. He expects it from Charles: you will match me. However far I go, you will be there to fight me for it.

anyone else die and blow up over max saying very matter of factly that he always expected charles would make it to f1 if max himself did.

The imprint of the tiles against his cheek looks almost like balaclava marks.

everything is sex except sex which is racing… or everything is racing except racing which is sex.

It’s how he looks on a podium, radiant in his contentment, something serene under the elation like the world is only settling into the shape it should always have been.

thinking specifically of how relieved charles looked on the podium at monaco and monza which genuinely moved me almost to tears i’m ngl. but i literally think it’s trueeeee that charles belongs on the podium and if he isn’t on there it’s the universe(/FERRARI) that is wrong.
this whole paragraph in general i really like even though it’s so sappy the rest of it should not be in this section. but well 3316 real true love my final message goodbye.

set that crown on the ground | prince of tennis, kirihara akaya/echizen ryoma

Kirihara glances back down at his phone screen. On the opposite side to Kirihara, the only other name on the drawsheet that matters: R. ECHIZEN.

notes:

wrote this in like 1.5 crazed sessions and then nearly died waiting for fiab reveals which kept getting delayed for a full month or something omfg like… keep fucking my girl bro i don’t even care anymore. it is really unfortunate that it’s taken me 3829382992 years to write giftfic for ciel and it should have been dreampuri but… well…. world’s flakiest writer and friend that’s me… did laugh that ciel and i ended up both gifting boysboysboys kiriryom of light to each other. really grateful to ciel for having prompts that finally gave me the right impetus to write for kiriryom.
lots of futurevision seeding here, i was pulling from some extremely old wips and rotations including kiriryom brazil arc fic. relevantly: marui is an idol, yukimura sanada tezuka are pro players, shiraishi is studying medicine, tokugawa is ryoma’s unnamed coach. ryoma has a fila sponsorship naturally, kirihara is signed to nike like 90% of the rest of the tour.
i think what makes kiriryom special amongst all their other rivalries is that they are weirdly able to ground/humanise each other despite generally being huge freaks unlike eg ryoma’s young gods fated rivalry with kinchan. like they can pull the Just Boys out of each other when they need it the most / when they’re feeling alienated from their tennis. which is a function of their shared history in general but also junior selectionals and hero/villain narrative framing roleswap panel sequence my beloveds. kirihara is of course wired to love anything that kills him but i think he is highly intuitive and would Get It when ryoma is going through some shit.
a lot of character development has taken place offscreen and i am not sure if that was coming across appropriately or if they just seemed ooc but i think it is a natural progression from kirihara’s shinteni onwards therapisation and world of light that he would be able to learn control and restraint even if it takes him more effort than a normal person and is an unnatural state of being to him.
still, so nice to be writing for real tennis again! very comforting and familiar waters to me. nice to not be second guessing every characterisation and dialogue choice since i’ve done such comprehensive tennis studies already lol.
anyway i really need kiriryom and sincaraz on the atp tour together… my rookie ace prodigy rival shippings <3 sinnerkiri would make me smile… kirihara famously likes a guy with religious motifs after all.

best lines:
Sinner blew him out of Indian Wells last year in a straight-sets second-round crashout so awful that one break down in the second set his vision had briefly gone red and staticky, in the way it hadn’t since he’d met Shiraishi.

“awful” maybe one of my words of the year. jannik cameo sooo self-indulgent here but i think the comparison to yukimura and ryoma is justified!! i’ve been on that jannik~yukimura parallels grind… biblical themes (aesthetic only), unkillable guy who is killed anyway by one specific guy, polite society media trained spokesperson offcourt terminator killbot oncourt, delicate victorian maiden constitution, hiatus from sport due to unavoidable external factors, playstyle that prioritises brutality and efficiency over flashiness, europeanocity.

Tennis settles him too. It always does, or at least it does now, the old uncontrollable fury bridled and wrestled into a definite shape. A weapon is only useful if it does what it’s told. Another thing he’s learned. What has Echizen learned, since they last met on the court?

precursor to re/discovering tenimuho together? the weapon in question is tennis techniques, but also kirihara himself.

Tennis does not always love him as much as he loves tennis. Kirihara’s used to that; things rarely do. Echizen, probably, is not.

my favourite lines i wrote all year! i know ciel loves ryom having a torture labyrinth struggle era so i was alluding to it here. and i think kirihara would have a fair bit of sympathy for it as guy whose entire life has been torture labyrinth struggle era.

It’s what he imagines Muga no Kyoichi must have felt like; he doesn’t have any memory of the state. It passed through him and left no trace. He’d ask Echizen, if he thought Echizen had an answer.

orgasm==muga made me laugh a bit but i do describe them in quite similar ways so the comparison insisted on itself really. this is meant to be a bit wistful though in the sense that kirihara is on the outside of the magic, only intersecting briefly with it via muga which he isn’t conscious for, and possibly permanently locked out of tenimuho for the same reason that yukimura is. like it’s fine because kirihara can win and deserve to win without tenimuho, which is what yukimura proved to him. i really like postcanon fic that is heavy on nostalgia/wistfulness so that was kind of an underlying tone i was trying to hit despite the various jokes and banter.

two’s a crowd | formula 1 rpf, max verstappen/oscar piastri/charles leclerc

What is anyone supposed to say in this kind of situation? Hi. Our mutual coworker-slash-rival sent me here. I'm pretty sure he wants me to have sex with you. Hope that's okay.

notes:

ok so yes i technically finished and posted this in 2026 but i am backdating it into 2025 soon because i don’t think i want it on my 2026 slate 😭 I WISH THIS WAS BETTER THAN IT IS. one day i will accept that i am simply not built to write sex comedy but i am going to keep trying probably. i think the difference between this and you’ll know it at once is laughable and not in a good way. i’m sorry ellen i will show a better image to you in the future 🙏
the way this fic came about is that i spent weeks complaining about really wanting to write more porn but not having any ideas for what to write and then charles was at the fia gala even though ferrari didn’t win shit in f1 and then max who was supposed to be there was not. and obviously oscar was there. also the 2024 gala had beautiful images of 3316 using oscar as a messenger pigeon between them which was priming me for 338116. previously i made a joke about max being like i’m gonna go do le mans oscar can you keep my wife company (although i mean charles would probably also be doing le mans as part of max’s genetically engineered frankenstein supersoldier driver 331416 dream team lineup) so i saw the opportunity for max to lob cute new boytoy at charles in his absence. also the thought of max doing engineer roleplay for 8116 made me laugh. and nothing is more motivating to me than jokes.
the dynamics i had in mind (obv with Rivalry and Competition as bedrock): 81->16 oscar down atrocious silly spaghetti dropping middleschooler crush, 33<-81 cargijinka4cargijinka mentorhero worship want him want to be him crush, 3316 IN LOVE WITH EACH OTHERRRR but haven’t talked about it so they just have a lot of sex instead. in my mind they started hooking up on race weekends in 2023 “casually” and now they’re established in every way except actually but they have a job (racing each other) so they don’t really care about that rn. and they both like oscar :) rookie prodigy sandwiched between veterans And They Were All Competitionpilled Race Freaks. in this fic it’s mostly 3316 whacking each other with the baseball bat that is oscar (they’re having fun) but as oscar gains experience he will be more active. though of course the order will always be 338116.
key oscar traits i tried to highlight: extremely fast rate of learning / the I Get It Now of it all, sarcasm to cover up nerves and or preemptively steel himself against rejection, “He always thought everyone was his mate, and he'd get bullied, bullied off the road”, undying perseverance, car. i know every 81 fan and their dog has complained about the media iceman branding because it’s so laughably untrue like just because my close personal friend oscar piastri has dry humour and a bit of pr training and a #contemplative resting face doesn’t mean he has no feelings or doesn’t care?! i think it’s fairly obvious that oscar in fact has a lot of feelings and is actually even quite expressive it’s just a bit more subtle on him and also i think he has defense mechanisms up on top of being less outwardly emotive and good at keeping his calm. oscar get behind meeeee.
did touch a few of my landmines but it was jokes so it was okay probably… still feel conflicted about the c*ck chair joke cause i kind of really dislike the word as a stable societyist but you know in the end max is handling the situation and i have nothing to worry about.
is this a safe space to say that i really do not understand the appeal of nipple play like i thought i would challenge myself to write it for the sake of diversity in my explicit fic but i still don’t get it and i don’t think it ended up sexy anyway because i just wanted it to be over so i could move onto the parts of the sex that were actually hot. i’m just going to stick to breathplay going forward i hope nobody has any problems with reading vanilla sex with mild choking pwp #94835794389438435 from me i’m the most one trick pony of all time.
i have noticed with my past few pwps that i keep doing like explicitnesspadding by referencing sex that the characters could be having but are not currently having because i don’t want to write it. this fic also suffers from this problem. i will probably keep doing it.
working title was run it all from my 2025 mvp song money on the dash - elley duhe which has been working double shifts on my running playlist and my writing playlist, my two most listened to playlists of the year although my brocedes playlist put in a decent last minute challenge, but then when i was doing irl sprints with mich in a cafe that was playing normal ed sheeran acoustic guitar ballad cafe music suddenly hotel room service came on and it really was like a divine sign that ellen was in the room with us. and it feels much better to have a jokes title for this fic. was tossing up between meet me at the and two’s a crowd and ultimately went with the latter but i do kind of like the effect of the unfinished title.

best lines:
Charles is genuinely so beautiful it induces an agonised and abstractly despairing breathlessness in Oscar every time he allows himself to really look at Charles, a bit like being lightly stabbed in the lung by a snapped rib; Oscar would know. // The perforated-lung feeling intensifies.

i think this captures the feeling of having a horrible and extremely embarrassing crush.

“The Garmin clashed with the suit so I didn’t bring it with me,” Oscar says. “Sorry. No way for me to show you the data.”

i wanted to make a garmin joke soooo bad. apparently oscar uses a “whoop” but it just doesn’t flow the same like wtf is a whoop… mich suggested to change it back to garmin so i did. i actually don’t even have a garmin myself i just use my phone to track my run stats but all my coworkers who are serious about running have garmins so this is my attempt at rectifying the fomo.

“It is of course good to win, but better when it is a challenge. Why else do we go racing? I mean, I might as well do laps by myself.”

i could hear this in max’s voice in my head so i think i got his speech patterns right :)

Shining and monumental in Oscar’s field of vision.

again… oscar your crush on charles!

“Ha! He does that,” Max says. “He’ll push you, so just push back until he stops.”

this line makes me smile. i may be biased.

The grand slam at your home race, Qatar before it all went to shit, my Turn 9 overtake on Lando in Abu Dhabi, what did you think, how am I doing, is this how it felt for you.

i really like this line so much and i couldn’t tell you why because it isn’t even that good. but every time i started feeling like i was unfixably flopping i would just scroll down to this line and reread it and feel better enough about my abilities to keep going.

It’s not a question. Max speaks like he’s willing the world into the form he wants it to take and the world has no choice but to comply. And Oscar is all formless want, ache up to his teeth, desperate for direction, tuned to the exact frequency of Max’s voice with shattering gratitude.

oscar your crush on max… it’s really cute to me how much he loves talking to max about racing. when you are both car freaks <3

“I think probably that was Zone 2 cardio the whole time. Maybe I will log it on Strava.”

stole the zone 2 cardio joke from a beloved (& garmin wearing, ofc) coworker but the strava joke is my own and it does make me laugh.

REFLECTIONS

looking back, did you expect to write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected?
more than i expected even though it wasn’t even that much, mostly because f1 unlocked jobless levels of writing motivation and productivity in me in late q4 except i do have a job so that wasn’t good.

what pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
um…………………………. well here is the exact chain of events that led to the position i am in right now:

SOMETIME BETWEEN 2004-2006: arbitrarily i decide that ferrari is my favourite car brand because it is a nice assortment of letters to look at and say.
JULY 2021: youtube algo shows me a video about rookie rising star jannik sinner being the future of men’s tennis so i semi-arbitrarily decide he will be my nextgen pick to keep an eye on in the post-federer era.
SOMETIME IN 2021 OR 2022: during a call with dia she tells me that if i ever got into f1 i would probably onepick charles leclerc because i am a known enjoyer of fate and doom narratives. i immediately forget his name but i do remember his Il Predestinato epithet due to being known enjoyer of fate and doom narratives.
AUGUST 2025: twitter fyp shows me a tweet about jannik sinner and carlos alcaraz allegedly wearing the same jacket and as an average boyfriend jacket enjoyer [i was unaware they are both sponsored by nike so it probably wasn't even actually boyfriend jacket]. i decide to investigate and spend my birtheve night clicking into every tweet in a yaoi moments compilation thread made by an italian fujo to highlight the captions and google translate them individually. i engage in 5374958394843 pages of heated debate with myself over order and regretfully conclude that it is probably governed by match outcomes and/or atp ranking even though it pains me as a switch/reverse hater.
SEPTEMBER 2025: i wake up at 4am on a work day to watch jannik sinner lose the us open. twitter fyp shows me a tweet about formula 1 driver charles leclerc seeing a fox on the track. notable fox-associated individuals who i watch with interest famously include jannik sinner, amuro tooru and huang renjun. i find out that charles leclerc drives for ferrari. i find out that jannik sinner is a tifoso whose onepick is charles leclerc. i re-find out that Il Predestinato is charles leclerc. i make unwise jokes about being susceptible to signs and symbols and cults and hype moments and aura. i make even more unwise decisions to watch the baku race so i have something to tide me over until the next sincaraz tournament which carlos alcaraz ends up pulling out of anyway. i obviously understand instantly that charles leclerc is the 0 of all time and enquire about any relevant 1s in his vicinity and mich confirms that there is indeed driver number 1 himself in close narrative proximity. i continue to make unwise decisions. i ignore mich’s warnings about taking this tifosi shit too seriously. i get my nails painted rosso corsa. i write nearly 20k in a month. i buy a 1:43 scale model of the sf24 for my work desk. i go off the deep end about 3316 to extents not seen since sanayuki 2020. i experience misery to extents not seen since i literally don’t even remember when. i don’t have another good day for the rest of the year except for the brief euphoria of mcl double dsq at vegas. etc etc…

i really really like 3316 if that isn’t clear lmao i am extremely not immune to NothingWhereThereShouldBeSomething ships based on mutual delusion and historical revisionism, as you may know. real true rivalrymarriage love btw like instant ship of all time status. i wish i had any sense of emotional object permanence so i could powerscale 3316 against my other All Time ships (jmrn, compromise, serenade, snyk/ykak, akam, clato, etc) accurately but i will have to wait until the honeymoon period is over to compare. i am assuming i will become less hysterical and stupid about 3316 at some point this year.

did you take any writing risks this year? what did you learn from them?
i guess i wrote a lot of porn including tropes i don’t usually do (r63 into het, a/b/o, phone sex). as usual i don’t think i really learned anything, although i was joking with pea that i’m training my ability to write linear action. don’t know if i improved in that though.

best story of the year?
an indispensable suggestion from afar, which is also the only non pwp fic i wrote this year so kind of an automatic winner as it has actual substance. but i do also think it has some of my best writing and imagery and extended metaphors and #meaningful #themes in it. i’m still really proud of it and i think i executed the things i set out to do well.

favourite story of the year?
it’s you’ll know it at once purely because 3316 is my favourite ship of the year. i think out of my f1 output this year cruel with my intention was my best objectively but i am so unbelievably biased i love my fucking shippppppp. i really cannot emphasise enough how much 3316 makes me smile and giggle and kick my feet and feel like i’m dying so much that it doesn’t even matter what i actually wrote just the idea of having made My Ship Real is enough, it’s unfortunately really that serious for me.

most popular story of the year?
the stats on you’ll know it at once scared me i think it hit 100 kudos after one day despite being archive locked and it’s now sitting just over 300 even though it is substanceless omegaverse pwp. this was especially shocking to me because the other f1 fics i had previously written were for 2010s grid ships so obviously a smaller readership but i had not looked at the 3316 tag before posting mine so i had no idea what kind of numbers 3316 fics pull. 3316 readers have been very generous to me but perhaps should be more discerning. like i will write a good 3316 fic that has something meaningful to say i promise it will just take me some time…

most fun story to write:
honestly i had a pretty fun time writing everything this year! maybe see the static from a mile away was the most fun because it is the most evil. i also think it is the first time i have posted explicit het which feels like about time since i am such a staunch het rights activist. other than that well yes you’ll know it at once is up again because myshiprealtonins kind of the most powerful force in the universe.

hardest story to write:
probably two’s a crowd because i was writing it mostly on my phone while travelling and it kept getting longer like i thought it was only going to be 2-3k and then it ended up over 7k. i think anything over around the 5k mark is too unwieldy to manage on a phone because i write so unstructuredly/nonlinearly that it’s too much scrolling up and down to find the part that i want to work on or to move sections around. like i really struggled to conceptualise how much i had left because i couldn’t see the whole doc easily. also omg words just would not work for me like it really felt like i suddenly forgot how to string sentences together, everything was coming out looking like ai generated slop. it was genuinely shocking to me how bad my performance was like not even in the usual catastrophising i am an untalented hack who should retire way it was like, i know i can write better than this!! what’s going on!! but i think the thing that was going on was motion sickness from being on that damn phone on the mrt.

favourite opening lines:
from two’s a crowd:

The Tashkent Hyatt lobby is done up in glossy beige neutrals so shiny under the lights they could rival the championship trophy Oscar isn’t holding.

not a very strong showing from me this year in opening lines ngl, but when is it ever…

favourite closing lines:
from cruel with my intention:

Sebastian hums. “You will be up on the podium with me next year, yeah?” she says. She touches Nico’s cheek, the tip of Nico’s bare shoulder, Nico’s elbow. She leans in. Against Nico’s mouth: “But I’ll still be faster.”

Nico says, “You don’t even know how fast I could be.”

going through my ending lines over the year it’s looking like i’m obsessed with a vaguely ominous and dramatically ironic line of dialogue to close a fic. girl let’s try for some more variety in 2026 <3

favourite tag used:
tie between Schrodinger’s Rivalry and Background Canon-Typical 2010s Grid Sluttery. i love a silly jokes tag i do think i’m doing a pretty good job coming up with fun f1 tags.

goals for 2026:
i’d like to write something around the 20k mark again, i am thinking about doing a 3316 time loop au because i’ve always wanted to write a Someone Else’s Time Loop fic and also ever since i said max’s lotus eater dream is 1 million km long wheel to wheel battle with charles i have just really thought that… but anyway i would need to decide what race to loop and why so let me relax i will cook later. i definitely want to write a lot of 3316 in general <3 and i want to also write sewis/sebcedes because they are soooo important to me but i fear i might just be genuinely too fucked up about sewis to confront it in fic form, and also i don’t think i have anything to add to the impressive body of literature that is already out there. i would like to write brocedes but again i doubt i have anything useful or interesting to say. so it’s looking like i’m just gonna be 3316 sex merchant which is fine too. if anyone has any ideas for what kind of sex they could be having can you let me know please i’m out of ideas again.

i never got around to doing my 2024 wrap-up post so i didn’t have any goals for 2025 oops… well i didn’t finish dreampuri that’s probably about all anyone needs to know lmao.

CURRENT WIPS

divine; seamless | tennis rpf, jannik/carlos

The moments they drew close: only the walk towards the net at the end of a match, the momentary contact of a handshake or embrace, Carlos's face in his neck, Carlos's hand on his shoulder, the coin-face counterparts of victory and defeat flipping over and over in the air forever.

bro i fucked up my timing on this one so bad, it’s meant to be my usual #nothinghappens vague tension shipfic set circa cincy/uso but i took too long detouring through car yaoi and in the meantime sincaraz stopped having ambiguous distance and started being super effusively solicitous about each other on main so now i’m straight out of the meta. i am going to observe how they are acting in the korea exho and ao and recalibrate… i really do want to write for sincaraz i love them dearly just need to lock in.

no new friends | formula 1/tennis rpf, oscar/jannik

Jannik tilts his head. "Thank you," he says, slowly, the ghost of a question mark in his intonation. "It's not something I hear. From one person, maybe. My tennis, it is not so lovely.” He says it matter-of-factly, as unapologetic as the rest of him.

“But you love it?”

“Of course,” Jannik says. “It is my tennis, no?”

“Yeah,” Oscar says. “Yeah, I get that.”

i need to rework this so it’s set in abu dhabi 2025 but literally my narrative parallels ship<3 when you are pr trained orange themed rising star prodigies always fighting the machine/iceman/unemotional allegations and also have an older retired pro australian mentor figure<3 i think it’s so funny that oscar’s onepick is jannik and jannik’s onepick is charles. again a #nothinghappens fic and shouldn’t be too long i just need to like stop being distracted by 3316 long enough to think it through.

you must have been very far | formula 1 rpf, all/charles (max/charles endgame)

Lewis is not the first world champion teammate Charles has had, but Sebastian was never so far away. The difference, Charles knows, is that he has come to partner Lewis too late. He is neither teammate nor rival in any sense other than literal. The part of Lewis that he can reach is only a peripheral flash of a person Charles will never entirely see, already half-apotheosised into something greater than the dream they share. A man calcifying into artwork, a cordoned-off room in a red museum.

been calling this one cursefic in my mind, basically i’m plagiarising my qcyn2 fic about kxe being cursed and trying to break the curse with true love’s kiss which she has to goldilocks test her way through her fellow contestants to figure out. it’s that but for charles so i can feel like i too am contributing to the development of this year’s car while making him kiss a bunch of his coworkers. this is my main priority wip rn, i would like to get it done before the start of the season but if i think of more sex that 3316 could be having i might get sidetracked by that who could say.

getting off the subject | sakamoto days, nagumo/osaragi(/shishiba)

She moves directly towards him as if she’s excising the space in front of her rather than walking. Without so much as a hello she crawls onto his lap, heedless of the way her skirts crumple between their bodies. She’s warm but not febrile, a cocked-hammer tension of purpose. The scent of iron clings to her skin like a signature perfume. She’s definitely going to get the blood splatter of whichever miserable sucker recently found themselves on the business end of her circular saw all over his nice leather upholstery. He definitely should have hung out at an Order safehouse today.

very silly post-assassination adrenalin rush coworkers with benefits naguosa sex where both of them clearly like shishiba more than each other. i don’t know if i like sakadays enough to make the effort of finishing this although it is fairly progressed so it sure would be a shame if it all went to waste…

hold me down for one night | nct dream, jaemin/renjun

They do this dance every time; Renjun could recite the dialogue himself. The usual magnanimity masquerade from Jaemin, or less generously an abdication of responsibility. “You're the champion,” Renjun says. He could still smash the bottle in his hands, just for the sake of making something happen. The glass, the foam, the shatter of adrenaline. “It's your decision.”

Apparently in no hurry to get started, Jaemin sits down on the edge of the bed and says, “You drove well today.”

ostensibly jmrn f1 au winner’s room fic except all i’ve managed to make them do is discuss team lineups so it’s really just room. this is my other main priority wip though, i definitely should have finished this in 2025 to keep my streak of posting dream fic every year since 2018 </3 but i will do my best to resurrect the streak in 2026.

BONUS ROUND: SUPERLATIVES

ship of the year: max verstappen/charles leclerc
- m/m of the year: other than 3316, jannik sinner/carlos alcaraz
- m/f of the year: nagumo/osaragi (with shishiba/osaragi premise)
- f/f of the year: elena rybakina/emma raducanu
- polyshipping of the year: lewis hamilton/sebastian vettel/nico rosberg
1 of the year: max verstappen
0 of the year: sebastian vettel (sorry charles 2026 will be your year)
oshi of the year: charles leclerc
song of the year: reprogram - kilo kish (2025 release) / 3 strikes - terror jr (first listen in 2025)
album of the year: purity ring - purity ring. but addison - addison rae was veryyyyyy close.
movie/tv/anime of the year: medalist…? i guess. i mean i liked it but its only competition was like, the f1 movie. i don’t watch anything.
book of the year: changeover - giri nathan
game of the year: can i be honest it is the otter's treasure minigame in the aliexpress app. since i didn't start playing king's lynn farm until 2026.
concert of the year: tds4 in seoul
sports event of the year: ~~mclaren double dsq~~ jannik sinner and elena rybakina atp & wta finals champions
run of the year: hoka half marathon
perfume of the year: criollo - voyager
treat of the year: hojicha kakigori from kaiji
word of the year: vivid

it has been a while! i have: gone to work, run two half marathons, seen dream twice, gone to work, started a masters degree, gone to work, gotten into sports rpf, and gone to work. rapidfire proof of life wippost of everything i’ve recently worked on under the cut:

( literally 3 kinds of tennis in here )

watched gqx twice in the last week. i liked it (⬅️ extreme understatement). don't have time to get into the specifics but here are my predictions for the anime, in order from most to least likely. we will see how much of my bingo card i can cross off by the end. heavy spoilers below, obviously.

( from the other side )

wow it has been a while... here's one last bookpost before the end of the year. spoilers for priory of the orange tree - samantha shannon, immortal longings - chloe gong, the radiant emperor duology - shelley parker-chan, murtagh - christopher paolini, fire & blood - george r r martin, eragon & eldest - christopher paolini.

currently reading: brisingr – christopher paolini, sword catcher – cassandra clare, a game of thrones – george r r martin

to read: exordia – seth dickinson, inheritance – christopher paolini, a song to drown rivers - ann liang, queen of nothing – holly black, long live evil - sarah rees brennan

( There was no such thing as a connection with only one end. There was no such thing as love, alone. )

been doing a lot of staring blankly at walls to cope with the eofy work horrors lately which hasn't given me a lot of spare time or energy to do basically anything else let alone read but here's a couple of reviews from may I think. spoilers for the cruel prince and the wicked king – holly black; sound the gong – joan he:

( why did they have to make a you when there was already a me? )

literacy kinda fell off for me again ngl, I'm trying to get back into reading but work and college have me deep in the trenches ):

I did read dungeon meshi (2/10 To Me Personally I think it's objectively a beautiful thoughtful funny and well-crafted story that I wouldn't hesitate to rec to people who don't have pathetic guy haterism like I do but it has basically zero appeal to me in terms of characters/thematic conceits/dynamix and I came out of it really only caring about a tinhet so blasphemous I literally could not find anyone else posting about it no matter what I termsearched) and reread dorohedoro (10/10 still one of my all time manga and the jokes/terror story everrr even though my delicate constitution struggles to withstand the extreme gore) by reading dunmesh until I got bored and then switching to dorohedoro until I got too landmined and then switching back to dunmesh and so on. they're actually pretty similar in terms of their focus on food and death but dorohedoro has the cool slayers and crazy dynamix I need to live 😔

top of my tbr list: sofia samatar's new novella, sound the gong (strike the zither sequel) when it comes out at the end of the month, alecto the ninth if it comes out this year(/ever), and i will ofc be tuning in to hateread rfk's new book. kinda considering rereading asoiaf since it's been more than a decade since i first read and i do have the books in my house but I also don't really have capacity to read anything more taxing than a romcom sooooo.

this post contains spoilers for: foul heart huntsman – chloe gong, the truly devious trilogy – maureen johnson, i hope this doesn't find you – ann liang.

( He’s my enemy. My equal. My point of comparison. He’s the one I’m constantly trying to outrun, to outsmart, to impress. He’s the ever-moving target in my peripheral vision, the person I’ve mapped all my plans around, the start and finish line and everything in between. All my dreams and nightmares are about him and only him. )

STATS

total number of completed stories: 4 (=)
pyrophane [3] (▲1):

nct dream [2] (=)
aespa [1] (▲1)

sulfate [0] (▼2)

rhodochrosite [1] (▲1):

prince of tennis [1] (=)

total wordcount: 50,197

ao3: 44,522
dw: 5,675

most used tag: alternate universe - superheroes/superpowers [2], ambiguous relationships [2]
most used rating: had exactly one for each of g / t / m / e
most tagged character: huang renjun [2] (although he cameo'd in the other 2 fics too so he really was my Guy Of The Year once again)

FIC MASTERLIST & COMMENTARY

to perfectly perform in reverse | prince of tennis, yagyuu/niou

Yukimura is unreadable to Niou because she is so fundamentally different she might as well be an entirely alien being; Niou has accepted that she will never be able to place herself in Yukimura’s shoes and thus Yukimura will forever remain miles out of reach. Yagyuu occupies the precise opposite extreme in terms of distance from Niou and yet she is just as unreadable. The gap between an object and its reflection in a mirror is no less a gap for its asymptotic approach to zero. We’ve been together for a really long time, Renjun had said, but hadn’t Rikkai, too? Invincible Rikkai, infinite immutable Rikkai, and none of that had helped them to know the difference.

notes:

the most ridiculously self-indulgent thing i wrote all year and maybe ever, like this is up there with the oikawa/hana yugioh au i wrote back in the haikyuu days but idc i had soooo much fun. why SHOULDN'T i put dream into a tennis fic it's myyyyy fic. i loved setting dream free in a room full of absolute megafreaks and i loved writing jaemin's creacherisms from an outsider pov who nonetheless is smart enough to see the deliberateness underneath. and i loved making renjun a yukimura stan #YUKIRENJ_REAL
this is the 82 sequel to a nyotayuri 3b futurefic i wrote in 2020 about marui and niou reuniting just before kirihara and an's wedding. and there's literally nothing i love better than writing tense ambiguous highranker femslash that cracks open at the end to reveal a crazy and desperate depth of feeling. niou suits my writing preoccupations pretty well after all, i think i complained about having trouble with niou pov in 2021 but this fic came out so seamlessly... it may be simply a parade of headcanon-fuelled highranker interactions but at the very least it made me smile and i represented my views accurately. niou who cares so deeply under the nonchalant attitude and runs away from things she loves because it's easier than facing the idea of staying with them...
in my future visions 82's path comes to a crossroads at the kirian wedding, i love my ship too much to entertain the possibility that they simply part ways again so i haven't thought too much about that option but i do think they either enter World Of Light where they rekindle their connection except in a genuine and sustainable not-too-toxic way this time premised on them being different people who acknowledge that they are different people and move into long-term endgame territory, or World Of Dark where they hurtle headfirst back into their old bad habits and folie a deux their way into mutual destruction (which is also endgame! in a way), or even worse only niou's doom because imo yagyuu has always been the one getting more out of the 82 identity switch/overlap thing. obviously i don't think toxicity or power imbalance is any barrier to true love and in fact could even be a prerequisite, but endgameness is about stability and i think the iteration in 82 can't keep going indefinitely into the future. anyway this fic is the World Of Light route, because i am ultimately a romantic optimist and i want my ship to win. so it's yagyuu making the overtures to niou this time and niou picking up on the ways in which they are not alike And That Is Ok.
overall i think this is a solid fic with a good jokes/terror balance and some really nice moments of prose and i enjoyed writing it a lot... the standout parts to me are yanagi / renjun / yukimura. i wasn't sure how to end it though so the ending is a bit abrupt but it's passable i guess. the real point was the cameos anyway.

best lines:
“Higa’s old captain. I remember,” Niou says. Marui’s one-time triple-crossing doubles partner turned penpal, of course she remembers Kiteretsu. Of course she remembers the deal Marui cut lengthways across Kite, Marui’s integrity mortgaged away for Yukimura’s future. She wonders, again, if Kite knows. If Jackal knows. If this is a secret Marui has shared only with Niou, because Niou is the only other person in the world who understands what it means to slice out some vital part of yourself, knowingly and willingly, for the sake of a very specific type of love.

it's probably obvious i am so obsessed with 3byuki in the context of marui's conscious betrayal of her own (and yukimura's!) ethics in order to save yukimura + how niou would have done the same for yukimura, although it wouldn't register as a betrayal to anyone other than herself because she's been so good at concealing the fact that she does actually also have a sense of ethics... this is drawing a parallel to niou's attitude towards the 82 switch, which i read as niou getting in over her head in that yagyuu is basically The Killer which means niou has to match that despite any discomfort she has about yagyuu's lack of ethics.

Idols are easy for her to mimic because they are by definition larger than life; Niou could probably do someone like Psycho Pinkette right off the bat without any further preparation. Marui always shone in the spotlight, soaked it up until she was radiating light herself and then it was nothing for Niou to skim off a little bit of that brightness to coat herself in, Marui’s candy colour scheme, Marui’s sunny catchphrases, Marui’s smile. Niou’s an entertainer, too, but she’s a magician, not an idol. Marui’s trick is herself. Niou’s trick is everything but herself.

really i just wanted to use pinkette in a fic, ironically unironically yk. also i love a dichotomy and i'm happy with the one i set up here - the way the spotlight is on different things for marui and niou.

“Kabaji not at court today?” Niou says.

“She’s on Juri duty,” Oshitari drawls; seems she’s still physically unable to speak in anything other than a drawl.

made myself laugh so much with this one ngl best joke i pulled off all year... shoutout to 2020 me deciding to make nyota jirou's name juri and creating theee perfect joke setup 3 years later.

She wishes she’d gone with Marui to meet more of the people who took her place, all of Rikkai’s places, this new context Marui’s transplanted herself into. But what remains of the old context? She’d dislocated herself from it, time and time again. It isn’t over, it didn’t end, Niou knows it too. Better than Marui, even. The process of severance is a fresh and unhealing wound.

i think these are nice lines :) i used them for the cut tag text.

The expression on Yukimura’s face is inscrutable. Niou remembers the brittle flash of fury in Marui’s eyes back at her hotel room when she’d said, aren’t you tired of letting Seika-chan down? and all Niou could think about was being fourteen and standing alone on the court in a body that was not her own, nauseous to the borrowed marrow with exhaustion, Fuji’s open eyes across the net exactly the same shade of sizzling blue as the cloudless sky overhead and with all that attendant inevitability. For a moment Niou is struck by the inexplicable terror that Yukimura might actually start crying, which would mean Niou would have to kill herself on the spot, even if just to deprive Sanada of the opportunity to snap Niou’s neck with her giant cleaver hands first; Niou figures Marui is too far away to beat Sanada to the punch. To the… manual guillotine.

probably obvious my other obsession is niou vs fuji at nats finals and the idea that niou pushed herself so far even though it was harder for her than anyone else due to delicate constitution + added illusion energy consumption 2x combo to deal with, all for YUKIMURA, and then it amounted to nothing because she lost and rikkai lost, and then it turned out that yukimura wanted her to lose anyway, and [yukiniou essay ver 4833894 redacted for length]
but i think this is a nice balance of jokes and terror just in this one paragraph.

Unfazed, Yagyuu continues. “But you are the one who holds onto the past most tightly, I think. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have kept track of us, all this time.”

The unasked question coalesces as clearly as if Yagyuu had spoken it aloud; Niou could easily substitute her own voice, or her voice as Yagyuu. She could still run. She is very aware that Yagyuu has left her this escape route on purpose, courtesy or test or both. But she’s out of breath from the lap around the grounds, already. She does not think she could do another.

“I had to leave,” Niou says, “because if I didn’t leave, then I would be staying. Obviously.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with staying.”

“It’s just not what I do.”

Yagyuu says, “Then let me do it for you.”

i think everything about the 82 part of this fic is sooooooo romantic but especially this exchange... the unasked question being why niou left if she still cared so much about them, yagyuu chivalrously offering to take on the burden for her but like in a way that's showing niou it's possible and that there's a genuine future there, the contrast between 82 switch vs niou illusioning marui in the prequel fic or jaemin earlier in the fic, niou being literally tired from physically running and also tired from emotionally running... real true being the same person but actually not being the same person at all LOVE.

soul weighed down by gravity | nct dream, haechan/renjun, jaemin/renjun

And yet. The entirety of space and the force of the blast had sent that helmet sailing right into Renjun’s hands. Surely it was some kind of serendipity.

notes:

i already did a lengthy dvd commentary <here> including my fave lines but basically i again had a fucking ball in this bitch. probably i had too much fun in 2023. this was an extremely ambitious and experimental project but i think i pulled it off and i'm glad i tested my abilities and i still like the final product... i did reread it recently (having forgotten everything about it) and kind of understood nothing but the vibes were good and this is a strong contender for my personal #1 fave fic of my own, perhaps finally unseating longtime rank holder rtfbt...

two-hour vacation | nct dream, mark/renjun

That’s when Mark understands the intent of the gesture: not to harm, after all. Only to search for a sign of life.

notes:

im gonna be honest this fic nearly killed me and it's kind of making me redevelop trenchitis thinking back on the writing process... i actually started a dvd commentary for it and then got too harrowed on reflection to keep going. like first of all the fact that i had to set an alarm for 2am so i could make sure i claimed the prompt i wanted. and then the way i wrote 6k in like the first week before all my inspiration died for the rest of the writing period right up until literally 2 weeks before the due date. AND THEN I DECIDED TO READ THE ENTIRETY OF ORV. i make such smart and wise decisions. i was staying up every night to write in that last week and also writing in court in order to get it done 😭 and yes that was including the porn scene as i always leave those until last, although it ended up being the fastest i've ever written a porn scene since it usually takes me a couple months. and then i still needed an extension after all that. probably the most stressed i've ever been about a deadline and this is including the time i was writing a sex scene to finish my yuletide assignment on my phone with the screen brightness turned down to minimum while sitting next to my parents on a plane on xmas eve.
but i do feel a great sense of accomplishment for managing to finish in the end, i don't think i'm thattt happy with the end result although on more recent reread it's not as terrible as i remember thinking it was when i posted it, but i am ultimately glad i pushed through with it. i'm already kind of historically revising my own memories to be like well it probably wasn't even that bad... i should do that again sometime... but i am seriously not built for longfic LOL.
for some reason i was severely in the characterisation struggle mines in this fic even though it's literally dream but i think it's just that mark is one of the hardest povs i've ever tried writing, i really don't do well with earnest types. what's a fire moon idk her. i did want to challenge myself but i think i pushed it too far lmfaoo four years after i vowed never to write mark pov again bc i struggled so hard in fractionation i decided to try again on the grounds of How Bad Could It Really Have Been and the answer is . so bad. but i lived bitch.
having to come up with new hero/villain aliases instead of using the ones from my other superpower au fics in order to not deanon myself was so hard lmao but i like the names i landed on for everyone except markren(hyuck who will always be full sun) better so in future superpower aus i'll probably combine the sets for maximum verse confusion.
speaking of deanoning it's so funny to me that my epigraph usage gave me away sorry for being unable to resist the siren call of pretentious poetry excerpt opener... i thought using emojis for scene breaks instead of my usual 7 empty lines would be enough to sow doubt 😔
time stopped at 5:27 because may 27 is the halfway point between renjun's birthday and mark's birthday btw. also renjun's friend who taught him how to use his powers is jun <3

best lines:
At first he thinks it must be Wraith, here to finish off the job. A pale smudge that might be a hand comes towards his neck. But the killing blow never lands. The figure only stays kneeling over him, backlit and glowing, fingers resting on his pulse point so lightly Mark can’t even feel the contact. That’s when he understands the intent of the gesture: not to harm, after all. Only to search for a sign of life.

Finally Mark’s vision begins to resolve, fragment by fragment. The eyes first, shockingly bright. Then the mouth, full and soft and unsteady. The rest of the face swims into focus, hovering over him like a small moon.

“Get up,” the hallucination says. The first sound Mark’s heard since he fell. Voice like the chime of a tuning fork, cleaving through the miasma. Clear and true. “This isn’t how it ends.”

something warm on Mark’s cheek. Hard to tell the pressure or shape of the contact beyond that: fingertips, maybe, or tears. Don’t cry, Mark wants to say, but his tongue is a dead unstirring weight. I’ve never wanted to make you cry.

longass section but actually started writing this part before i'd even claimed the prompt because i liked the prompt so much and i thought it was so fun not directly naming renjun even though mark (and the audience) knows it's renjun. i like the effect!

“If you’re sure…” Mark casts around for something polite to say since he’s involuntarily appropriated Renjun’s bed in a display of disgracefully unguestlike behaviour his mother would be horrified to hear about, and comes up with, “I mean, it’s a really… nice bed.”

“It was a recommendation from Wraith.” Renjun pauses. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that since you’re the one on the bed. But it’s true that it’s a nice bed. He knows a lot about… beds. Furniture.”

“Cool. I didn’t know that Wraith’s hobby was, um, homewares.”

made myself laugh with this conversation, jaemin giving renjun advice on bed choice is one of the funniest jmrn moments to me and i think of it fondly and often. i was originally setting up for a pre-get together bedsharing scene but i couldn't figure out how to do it lol.

This isn’t how it happened. Mark knows it isn’t. The whole thing was over in less than a minute, explosive burst of violence and then he was sun-blind and bleeding out on the ground. But he’s had a bit of firsthand experience with time taking up more time than it should lately and it’s like the moment might never end, Wraith with his hand plunged into Mark’s chest, the roiling orange light, the altitudinal wind that doesn’t seem to touch them at all. The total obliterating coldness radiating out from the centre of Mark’s heart.

obligatory dream scene... one of the first parts i wrote and it really made me be like damn why's the markmin hitting harder than the markren rn. fellas is it gay to stab your rival with your hand i mean part of your body is literally inside another man's body 🤔

“When I found you it was like fate.” Hardly more than a whisper. “I stopped time as soon as I arrived, but for a moment I was so scared I might have still been too late.” A flicker over Renjun’s face, too quickly gone for Mark to tell what the expression had been. “But then you got up.”

This isn’t how it ends, Renjun had said, the only living thing in a still and dead world. That harpoon of a voice and Mark had grasped the line with its fishhook lodged under his ribs in the empty space Jaemin’s fingers had left. Hauled himself hand over hand back to shore. This isn’t how it ends, and how could Mark not believe him?

“Of course I did,” Mark says. “I heard your voice.”

soooo romantic to me!! writing this part made me feel exactly like how markren makes me feel so i hope that came through.

you don't wanna be at peace with me | aespa, winter/ningning/karina

“I thought you were dead,” Jimin says. Her voice is a punched-out airless scrap of itself. She sways lightly in place. The look on her face could be terror or hope.

Yizhuo meets a girl who is and is not a ghost.

notes:

this was the first time i'd done yuletide in a few years (i used to be an annual participant until i fell into full-time kpop mainism) and i feel so lucky to have matched with a recip who was up for just about anything and expressed a preference for aespa's mv lore as you know i fucking love superpowers. i'm really happy with the one i came up with for ningning, which is just an extension of her canonical hacker powers in the sense that emotion-reading/mind-reading is basically hacking into humans... although now that i think about it maybe i should've given her mind control powers. but it meant i could do a lot of fun synaesthesia stuff with other people's emotions manifesting mainly as tastes to her and i liked coming up with flavour associations. original winter was an armamenter per canon hence karina saying she never misses, which included her shielding abilities, but winter soldier winter also has lie detection/teleportation/other stuff beyond the scope of this fic.
i repurposed an old wip which was a sequel to waiting for you to move on (hence giselle's mention of renjun dissolving his partnership with jaemin and becoming partners with haechan instead) but i took most of the parts with dream in them out and then wrote like 11k more.... originally i meant for this fic to be 3k 😭 accidentally doing 4x planned wordcount problem. this can only be the fault of the perfect visuals of DRAMA.
i had everything except for the actual emotional resolution of the winrina + Ethics Of Supervillainy storylines done by the deadline but i was furiously grinding out the scene where karina shows ningning her memories of winter during cafe writing date with mich in la on her laptop and editing on the plane to singapore... basically shoutout to mich for once again saving my ass lmao.
i was really struggling with character voicing for a while, i watched a bunch of aespa content for canon review but the problem is that my only other rpf fandom is dream who i've known for 6 years and i just felt so uncertain about my grasp on aespa in comparison. but i think and hope i did my girls justice... it was very hard to make winter recognisably herself when she's mostly just her hollowed-out stage persona in this fic and she's being seen from essentially an outsider pov since ningning never knew her as minjeong, but i tried to give little hints at winter's personality starting to show through as the fic progresses. towards the end i was also starting to get worried about not having any overarching motif/extended metaphor other than the sisterhood of the travelling snowflake necklace but it worked out as usual 🙏 genuinely i do not know what i'm writing until i'm writing it.
i seriously love writing superheroes/supervillains as a parallel to idolhood lmao, i love the bureaucracy of heroism/villainy being conducted through institutions and agencies and the networks of coworkers and rival-equivalent-of-coworkers and the public vs private divide of having a hero/villain persona and a civilian persona. i've been refining the concept over quite a few fics and i think the iteration here is the one i'm happiest with so far. i think i ended the year on a high note so i'm pretty pleased with my performance overall.

best lines:
Then, just as abruptly as she’d raised it, Winter lowers the gun. Stows it back on her utility belt. A light wind picks up around them, tangles in the ends of Winter’s hair, sends fitful flurries of leaves skittering across the courtyard and into the fountain. The whisper of dead things rasping against dead things.

Yizhuo watches her watch Jimin. All three of them empty-handed. Around them the smell of decay stirred up by the wind, afterimage of aliveness.

i had such a vivid image in my mind of this scene and i was really careful about word choice when constructing it and i think i achieved the effect that i was aiming for so i'm happy with this part.

One or both of them jostles the table and the metal table number stand keels over like a body that’s had its throat slit; Aeri scream-gasps and harpoons a hand out to right it.

i love bringing random violent imagery into mundane actions in general but i think it really works as a characterisation enhancer here too.

“I’ve never even seen Frankenstein,” Yizhuo confesses. “Or read it. I think it was a book?”

“Yeah, neither have I.” Aeri purses her lips contemplatively. “Maybe if I ever took a job that involved graverobbing… that’s pretty gross, though. I probably wouldn’t. Why would someone hire me to rob a grave, anyway? My fees aren’t cheap and that kind of grunt work is so low-level it’s—I mean, it's underground. Like the graves I won't be robbing. What were we talking about?”

i was mainlining the skulduggery pleasant series when i was writing this part and the whole frankenstein convo is sooo skulpleas inspired lol. i think it's funny!

Jimin flings one final desperate glance like a net out towards Winter, a last-ditch trawl. “Why didn’t you kill me.” Her voice fissures down the middle.

Winter doesn’t respond. Just looks at Jimin, even and inflectionless. The empty basin of her face gives nothing away.

The hand on Winter’s wrist falls back to Jimin’s side. Her defeat blooms on Yizhuo’s tongue, a stinging mouthful of saltwater. Yizhuo swallows it down like tears. All around them, on the far edge of perception, the sound of the sea.

i like the cadence of this section! and i chose the imagery carefully: net/trawl - callback to ningning trying to sense winter in the courtyard scene + ties in with shipping dock setting. empty basin - another callback to courtyard scene + identification of winter with the empty fountain ie a vessel for something dead. defeat tasting like tears - self-explanatory. distant sound of the sea - ties in with defeat=saltwater=tears + ningning's ever-sharpening senses + the way she can always perceive nature with her physical senses (sound of the wind, coolness/brightness of the rain, sound of the ocean), which is also the only way she can perceive winter and goes back to the natural/unnatural conflict that is winter's existence.

Yizhuo puts her free hand to Winter’s chest, just off-centre. Almost where the bullet had embedded itself into Jimin; her own shoulder twinges as though in belated visceral sympathy. Winter cups her hand back over Yizhuo’s on the compress. Life gifted, twicefold. First in warning. Now, perhaps, in overture.

“Until death do us part,” Yizhuo says, solemn as an undisturbed grave. Her side aches, the strain of flesh and gristle knitting itself back together. Heat like a nuclear reaction scalding her hand even through the layers of fabric; Winter must feel it too. Her pulse under Winter’s hand. Winter’s pulse under her hand.

most romantic declaration of rivalry i've ever written probably, not even for the jokes marriage vow slash graverobbing callback but because they're touching each other's pulses. life in each other's hands literally!! And The Ghost Of Karina's Presence Was There Too, And Even Giselle If You Think About It, I Love You Aespa.

Such a neat and compact movement, as if she’s only moving back and forth on a preset track, and yet by her side her palm is stained dark with Yizhuo’s blood. Afterimage of aliveness. The vivid proof of rescue. Her life in Winter’s hands, given back to her freely.

winter's personality (as in, quality of being A Person) breaking through... also there's nothing more satisfying than doing a bunch of phrase callbacks to bring things full circle :') afterimage of aliveness from the courtyard scene but now for something that continues to be alive + vivid proof of rescue vs karina's vivid proof of care.

Winter regards her with the deceptive unreadability of a one-way mirror.

the one-way mirror motif occurred to me at the very end of writing but i'm sooo happy with it and the connotations of expression vs performance vs truth it conjures up. isn't that what being an idol is all about!

Winter’s fingers had been shockingly warm where they kissed Yizhuo's palm. How counterintuitive, that heat. It lingers like Winter doesn’t.

came up with these ending lines very early on and then later went back and made sure i was always referring to karina's hands as cold for the thematic contrasts of it all. also i love a negative comparison.

DREAMWIDTH MASTERLIST

[fic] to perfectly perform in reverse
[commentary] soul weighed down by gravity
books i read in 2023 q1
book i read in 2023 q2
posting about company time on company time - judgment quote roundup
more recent skincare buys
no longer quarterly books i read may-aug 2023
[wip amnesty] an indispensable suggestion from afar - alice in borderland kuzuryu/mira wippost
books i read aug-sep 2023
even more beauty product reviews
books i read oct 2023
why is it called final fantasy when they keep making new ones though - ff7 fmv compilation

REFLECTIONS

looking back, did you expect to write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected?
honestly way more, i cleared 50k again this year!! unfortunately that 50k still did not include dreampuri. fortunately that 50k included aespafic finally!!

what pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
none, everything i wrote this year was exactly what i thought i would write lmfao all i know is superpowers, and pickshipping, and enemies, and people getting shoulder injuries and/or blown up, and ending on some observation about heartbeats which i didn't realise i was doing so much until i started writing up this retrospective lol.

did you take any writing risks this year? what did you learn from them?
maybe signing up for fests/exchanges with hard deadlines was a bit of a risk given my work schedules but it paid off, so the moral of the story is that sunk cost fallacy really works on me and externally-enforced deadlines are the only way i can guarantee finishing anything. the other risk was just soul weighed down by gravity in general i think, i've never tried to do so much complicated shit in a fic before but i think it worked. however i don't think i learned anything from that and i don't think i would be able to replicate it. sometimes you just get possessed.

best story of the year?
soul weighed down by gravity 🔥🔥🔥 maybe my best story of all time?

most fun story to write
also soul weighed down by gravity i just could not stop writing it. i really enjoyed writing to perfectly perform in reverse as well but i actually wrote most of it in 2022 so i don't think it counts.

hardest story to write
two-hour vacation, my god was i in the mines... as i said in the commentary section mark pov is really not a natural fit with my writing style at all and i was kind of bumbling around and periodically yelling MARK MY FUCKING WORDS!!! also it got so much longer than i wanted it to be which only added to my despair.

favourite opening lines:
from soul weighed down by gravity:

Miraculously, the helmet itself had remained totally intact without so much as a chip in the light red paint, but the faceplate had cracked right down the middle, fissure so clean it looked intentional. Only a coincidence of design. Renjun pressed a thumb to the edge of the broken polycarbonate and the fabric of his glove snagged. If he had been barehanded it would have broken the skin.

these came to me almost instantly it was like a miracle... i think it helped that this was actually the ending of the fic chronologically so it was like writing an ending which i always love doing.

favourite ending lines
ok honestly also the ending of soul weighed down by gravity but in the interests of having some variety i did really like the ending of you don't wanna be at peace with me:

Seconds until Jimin arrives, a supernova brightness Yizhuo could see even with her eyes shut. That roiling heart almost brilliant enough to taste now, a promise of acidic sweetness under her tongue like a strawberry. Until then, only until then, Yizhuo is alone. Winter’s fingers had been shockingly warm where they kissed Yizhuo's palm. How counterintuitive, that heat. It lingers like Winter doesn’t.

i pulled these out in the commentary section already but i really like these lines! kind of an unsatisfying/ambiguous conclusion but that is also basically my brand sooo...

writing goals
2023 goals:

finish dreampuri ❌ HELP GIRL...
write more akam ❌ sorry to my otp... i did pick away at some wips during the year but all my available time was being spent on 1) my coworkers 2) dream, in that order.
refine my style ✔️(?) i think i've gotten better at more consistently hitting the right balance of comedy and seriousness without compromising my prose style.
i did achieve my 2022 goal of writing aespa fic though! just one year late.

2024 goals:

finish dreampuri REAL NOT CLICKBAIT!!!
clear out current wip rotation before starting any new wips. although i'm kind of already failing step 1 of this because i've been vaguely rotating a few ideas in my mind (undercover as vip x bodyguard au although i don't know which ship i would do i've just been really into the idea lately, jisung-centric sungren sequel to future metropolis heart which i have like 5 lines written for in my notes app except they're somehow all about dongren and jmrn, ningning/lexie liu idolverse pwp set at the miumiu holiday event in a canon divergence au where ningning became a miumiu girl instead of a versace girl).
join another fest or exchange - maybe ggjukebox this year? i'm not familiar with sza's discography but i'll investigate to see if any of her songs work with my ningxie brainworms... i kind of want to get back in the ficmix mines too i miss remixing.

CURRENT WIPS

any way we are | nct dream, jaemin/renjun, 12.8k/15k

He lingers over his grip tape, keeping the tension perfectly even with each pass around the handle, lining up the overlaps in precise parallel diagonals. He drags a thumb over the ridges, sharp with the definition of newness. Not yet worn smooth by his palm. So many more hours of work, and then once he’s done with this one he’ll have to start the process all over again. By the time he finishes the task and looks back up, the room is empty.
//
“Huh?” Jeno glances up. “Oh, the logbook entries. Me and Renjun have been editing your self-evals after you do them so they actually have some useful data.”

All the 3s Jaemin circled have been mercilessly crossed out and the 0 in each row circled instead. Jaemin feels this is a little unwarranted.

“How cute,” Jaemin says. “I didn’t know you were watching me like that.” Jeno gives him a look. “I didn’t know Renjun was watching me like that,” Jaemin amends.

“Renjun is monitoring you. Kind of like how a national security agency monitors a flight risk,” Jeno says. “He thinks you’re going to leave.”

have a double excerpt to make up for my glacial progress, i'm literally running out of things to wippost from this omg if i don't finish this damn fic in 2024...

burned your bridges | detective conan, akai/amuro, 0.8k/3k

“Hello, Rye,” Bourbon says. He tilts his head and smiles, a closed-mouth expression that still communicates the baring of teeth. His gloved hands, ostentatiously white, rest folded over the gun in his lap with an exaggeratedly telegraphed casualness. “Long time no see. Though it’s FBI Special Agent Akai Shuichi now, isn’t it?”

“Bourbon,” Akai greets. “Here to kill me?"

“We’ll see,” Bourbon says. “You know, it was a little too easy to break in. Anyone could have done it. Put a bullet through your head you before you even noticed the trap.” Smugly: “You let your guard down.”

Since Bourbon is clearly here for a reason there probably isn’t any danger in turning his back. Akai heads over to the kitchenette, opens the cupboard over the never-used stove and takes out a couple of glasses. "Want a drink?"

this is specifically akai/bourbon fic set after akai's cover is blown and he leaves the black org but before canon starts, which is one of my favourite akam eras. i meant for it to be my virgo season project but i ended up spending all of virgo season recovering from two-hour vacation 😢 maybe 2024 virgo season. anyway it's bad coping mechanisms hatesex pwp in which bourbon goes to akai for comfort/masochistic self-punishment/who fucking knows what his feelings or reasons are certainly not bourbon after killing someone, the problem is that i decided to make it akai pov and i have zero grasp on akai's interiority so i have no idea how to write this.

sleepwalker | nct dream, jisung/chenle, 3.5k/5k

Beyond the doorframe there was only white. Snowstorm void that would envelop him as soon as he stepped outside. The wind was all he could hear. Under his hand the doorknob felt like ice. He wanted to twist his head back, check to see if Chenle was still looking at him, if there would be the same flash of understanding that passed between them on the stage. Something to reassure him that Chenle would be there on the other side in the moment when he reached out.

finally writing idolverse again after 5000000 years i swear i am a canon compliant main it's just ncity that brings out the au writer in me for some reason... this is a jichen lotus eater machine fic in which jisung wakes up in a world where he and chenle are an established couple and then the world gradually starts unravelling. combines three things i'm extremely passionate about: 1) lotus eater machine my #1 trope of all time 2) dreams 3) past tense, so i think this shouldn't be too difficult to finish. famous last words.

clear eye, see bright | nct dream, jaemin/renjun, 2k/10k

"How are Minion One and Minion Two?"

"I wish you wouldn’t call them that," Renjun says, "but they’re good. It’s just this new customer we have who’s kind of a problem."

Yizhuo’s voice hardens to steel. "Problem as in, Karina and Alexandra should pay them a visit?"

"No, no, not that kind of problem. Problem as in, we keep having to buy out pretty much the entire flower market to keep up with his orders.” Renjun hesitates. “Also problem as in, Full Sun can never find out about this if I want a single moment of peace for the rest of my life.”

"Oh," Yizhuo says knowingly. "A handsome young man problem. A rich handsome young man problem."

this may be one of the stupidest things i've ever written lmao it was inspired by a cc i answered some time ago but the premise is that renjun is a florist and jaemin is a ceo who keeps coming into the store to place huge orders and generally be a nuisance except renjun is also a superhero and take a wild guess as to who the supervillain who keeps causing trouble while renjun's on duty is. i think i will try to prioritise finishing this one over the summer since it's a pretty cruisy and unserious project that doesn't require too much thought.

through the smoke we saw the flame | the hunger games, snow/clemensia/livia, 3.1k/5k

“We’re not what?” Livia sets her glass down on the grazing table and puts a hand to Clemensia’s elbow, leaning forward into her space again. She smells like roses. In the tastefully dim light her eyes look more grey than blue. “Come on, Clemmie. I’m a Cardew. You’re a Dovecote. We get to have everything—why shouldn’t we? It’s practically our birthright.”

“What about Coryo?” Clemensia can barely flatten the tremor out of her voice.

“I hardly think Coryo would mind.”

“I mind.”

Livia scoffs. “When did you get so boring?” But she snatches her glass back up and whirls away into the glittering crowd.

Barely thirty seconds later Coriolanus appears. He hands Clemensia a glass of wine and slings an arm over her shoulders, easy and familiar. She accepts the wine. She allows the arm to rest there for the span of three breaths. Then she shrugs it off and turns to face him. If he’s upset by the dismissal it doesn’t show in a single relaxed line of his posture.

He looks devastating, in the sense of capacity for destruction. The sapphires at his cuffs gleam the same deep blue as Livia’s dress. As Clemensia's earrings.

“Look at that,” he says. He raises his glass to her. “We match.”

got insanely repossessed by my old thg stannery after watching tbosas and then feeling extremely indignant on my girl clemensia's behalf over her storyline getting cut and then getting smad about how snow liked her too much to politically marry her even though they were perfect slayer classmates dynamic the world and then the world's most toxic triangulation was born in my mind. the vision of toxic yuri summer fling that came to me... livia agreeing to marry snow not just for the status boost but also to hurt/win over clemensia who she knew liked snow... livia liking clemensia but liking power more... clemensia having terrible taste in people and generally going tf through it... snow being snow... i don't think i'll finish this but it was fun trying to exorcise it from my system lmao, i was on edge dodging infidelity landmines because the premise is essentially clemensia's crushes getting together and then separately trying to seduce her and/or fuck around with her while ostensibly dating each other. thank god none of them have heard of polyamory because they would truly be the worst throuple ever conceptualised.

++ a couple of secret projects hanging over from last year that hopefully i will also be able to finish.

this is not a post about final fantasy in general, this is very specifically a compilation post of ff7 fmvs i have recently enjoyed(?) as a guy who has never played a single second of any final fantasy in my life (although my question still stands). i have read about a million words of ff7 yaoi though! all over a couple weeks back in october! i don't know what came over me either. and then i watched advent children and understood nothing <3 i don't know who half the cast is and i couldn't tell you anything about the plot except for the parts that involve cloud getting impaled by huge swords, but one thing about me is that i love elite military academies and superpowers and fucked up enemies and people dying when killed and people not dying when killed and DOOM. so i will now proceed to make bold assertions about ship dynamics in a canon i don't actually know while reviewing another set of moving images.

( who else up never being a memory )

in this month's issue of solo book club report: untethered sky, a marvellous light, a restless truth, divine rivals, skulduggery pleasant books #1-#6. not in this month's issue of solo book club report: the no joke approximately 1 million words of ff7 fic i decided to read for reasons unknown to even myself (i have never interacted with ff7 in my life).

currently reading: this is how you lose the time war, the secret history, the archive undying, kingdom of the wicked, she who became the sun. YES all at the same time NO I am not making progress in any of them.

( I loved her with the gravity of a stone sinking into a pool. )

recently purchased skincare makeup and perfume products roundup:

( almost no misses )

welcome back to my solo book club. spoilers for this time it’s real, six crimson cranes, jade city and strike the zither:

( First lesson a strategist learns is to keep their enemies close, and there’s no greater enemy than a rival. )

another few months another books roundup drafted in outlook on company time, literacy win... this ended up quite long i think because i had so many opinions about things these books could have done better but honestly overall not a bad crop this time. spoilers for violet made of thorns, daughter of the moon goddess, fourth wing, and omniscient reader's viewpoint:

( a hand of someone who had been writing stories for a very long time )

quick round of skincare product reviews 👇

( some good some bad )

all i read is judgments nowadays so i thought i would round up some recent rhetorical highlights i have seen on caselaw:

( unrelated but i just had a chocolate cupcake at work it was pretty good )

yes i am aware we are not even halfway through q2 but i do not really foresee myself reading anything else over the next 2 months or so, i'm in an illiteracy mood again. not really sure what has been happening to my spare time as I haven’t been reading but I also haven’t been watching anything other than magical girl lyrical nanoha over the past couple days or cultivating any hobbies so I guess I must have just spent all that time staring at walls or something.

anyway i only read one (1) book but it was good and i liked it so i wanted to post about it now:

( het high school au akam i love youuuu )

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